by Lisa Unger
Detective Crowe was my shadow. He was kind enough to offer his silence as he followed me from room to room, but I could feel his energy—anxious, agitated by the million questions buzzing around his brain. Grit and bits of glass crunched beneath my feet as I made my way, lifting a photo of my sister, touching a spot of red nail polish someone had poured on the bathroom countertop. It had taken on the shape of a heart.
Finally, in the small office off our bedroom where I did most of my writing, I sank into the chair in front of my desk and stared at the large blank monitor. It was huge, like a wall. When I wrote, my words were giant, swimming in a bright white sea. It helped me to see them so large, as though they had more meaning, the power to keep my attention, my focus if it threatened to wander. The dark screen seemed like a hole I could fall into.
I had all my files backed up and stored at Jacks office; I wasn’t worried about lost work. That was the least of my worries, and it would be hours yet before I started thinking about personal files, journals, calendars, account numbers, e-mail correspondence. Just two days before I had been sitting in this chair, Googling myself on the Internet, answering fan e-mail, visiting the Web sites of other authors—doing everything but what I should have been doing, working on my pages. I was annoyed at myself then, frustrated by my lack of focus and productivity. Today it seemed like a state of bliss. I’d have paid any sum to be back there.
“Mrs. Raine, did your husband have a history of violence or mental illness?”
I swiveled around to see that a petite woman had followed us into the room, stood behind and to the left of Detective Crowe.
“My partner, Detective Jesamyn Breslow,” he said with a nod.
“No,” I answered her, surprised by the question. “You think my husband did this?”
She cocked her head at me. There was a pixyish look to her, the features of her face small and perfect—a lovely upturned nose and perfect valentine of a mouth, almond-shaped eyes. She was bright, electric, as if she might glow with the force of her own coiled energy if we turned off the lights. She had short, clean fingernails, wore her hair in a neat bob. Her clothes were good quality but I could see a shine to her black blazer from too many trips to the dry cleaner. Her microfiber wedges were a bit worn at the toe. The two cops seemed striking opposites: She was a saver, he was a spender. He was cool, slow, dark; she was white hot, action first, regrets later. And yet she seemed more centered, more mature.
“There’s so much rage evidenced here,” she said. “The way personal things have been destroyed, photographs defaced.”
“The kind of rage only a husband could manage for his wife?” I asked. Detective Breslow shrugged. I saw her eyes dart; she was thinking of something in her own life, went internal for a minute.
“Or vice versa,” Detective Crowe chimed in. I remembered his true confessions from the night before, the wife who left him, his bitterness.
“There is no one cooler than Marcus,” I found myself saying. My tone was harsh, even hostile. They both noticed it, exchanged a look. “He rarely raises his voice. Anger makes him silent—colder, harder. He’d never do anything like this. He wouldn’t have it in him. A waste of energy, not fuel-efficient.”
I said too much, realized it too late. Looking at both of them standing there, it dawned on me that I’d made a mistake giving them permission to access and search my apartment. I’d only been thinking of Marcus as a victim, someone who needed help. I had nothing to hide. It never occurred to me that he might.
Isabel, he’d say, drawing out my name into a gentle, paternal reprimand. Very foolish. These people aren’t here to help you. They’re here to help themselves.
“Mrs. Raine,” said Detective Breslow. Her tone was tactful, respectful, but just ever so slightly condescending. “If you know anything about what’s going on here, now would be the time to tell us.”
“My brother-in-law gave him money,” I said. “A lot of money they don’t have.”
Detective Crowe nodded. “Did you know anything about that? I mean before he disappeared.”
Disappear: to get lost without warning or explanation, to become invisible, cease to exist. It’s a common word; you’d use it for anything. My sunglasses disappeared. The hope of a sudden reappearance is connoted in that word. The way Detective Crowe used it, it sounded final, like a verdict.
“Erik just told me. My sister doesn’t even know.” I wasn’t really talking to them; I was thinking aloud, still in that stunned place where my inner world and outer world were confused with each other.
“Mrs. Raine, have you checked your bank accounts?”
The question sliced me, its edge so sharp it didn’t hurt at first. Then I felt the slow, radiating throb of dread. I moved closer to the monitor, hands poised over the keyboard, but then I stopped myself. The computer, of course, was gone. The dark screen was connected to nothing. I turned back to him.
“I have been with Marcus for six years, married for five,” I said. “What you’re implying with all your questions. It’s just not possible.”
“What do you think I’m implying?” Detective Crowe asked. He’d taken that stance again, the spreading of the legs, the folding of the arms. Detective Breslow lowered her eyes, then turned and left the room. They had a routine, roles they played. I could see that already.
“I’m asking the questions I need to ask,” he went on when I didn’t answer him. “If your answers are painting a disturbing picture, you need to think about that, Mrs. Raine.”
I looked away from him again and this time caught sight of my reflection in the monitor. I saw a woman who’d been badly beaten and looked the part. Behind me loomed Detective Crowe, a deep, worried frown etched on his face, as if he couldn’t quite figure me out. I wasn’t acting like he thought a woman in my position should act. He wanted me to be a victim, I think, weeping and afraid. He didn’t know me very well.
“I don’t know what you want from me—my husband is missing. My home—my head—in pieces.” Outside I heard the wail of a distant siren, the thunder of a garbage truck. “If you think I have something to do with all of this, you need to arrest me and let me call a lawyer. Otherwise, you have to give me a minute to think.”
“Okay,” he said, lifting a palm, his frown softening. “I hear you. But hear me. We often know more than we think we do. Something like this happens and it seems to come out of nowhere. But it never does. When something is not right in our life, we know, even if we choose not to see it.”
There was the lightest strain of piano music coming from the apartment above me. It seemed ghostly, almost eerie. Chopin. Marcus always hated Chopin—“Anemic, unsatisfying, depressing as hell,” he would say.
“Philosopher cop,” I said now.
That shade of a smile again, the lightest upturning of the corners of his mouth, as though everything he saw secretly amused him. But no, it wasn’t awful like that. I think he was just someone who saw the humor, the divine joke of it all. He’d rather laugh than cry. Anyway, he was right.
MY MOTHER REMARRIED more quickly than was seemly. “He’s not even cold in the ground,” I heard her sister whisper at the small wedding in our backyard. It was less than a year after my father’s death that my mother dressed in tasteful champagne-colored chiffon and married a man my sister and I had met only twice. There was a tiered cake with flowers, tea sandwiches, some kind of punch. Frowning faces broke into tight smiles when my mother and her groom approached. My sister was as grim and silent as she had been at my father’s funeral. My mother was, as ever, lovely with her strawberry-blond hair and alabaster skin; she was appropriate, not giddy, I wouldn’t say happy. She looked relieved more than anything. And I stood on the edges of it all, watching faces, absorbing swatches of conversations, listening to the nuances of tone.
Over a roast chicken, she’d told us a few months earlier.
“I’ll be marrying Fred. He’s a good man. He’ll provide for us, give us some stability.” She said it as if he was someone we
knew, as if it was news we should have been expecting. We’d met him once when he came to pick her up for an evening. And once he’d had dinner at our house. Margie’s such a sensible woman. She always knows what to do. That’s what my father always said about her.
The news landed like a fist on the table, something inside me rattled hard. Neither Linda nor I said a word at first. We both stared at my mother and I remember her looking back and forth at each of our faces, almost defiant. My eyes drifted down to her lean, veined hands and saw that the wedding ring she’d always worn was gone. There was no mark on her finger. I wondered when she’d stopped wearing it. She cleared her throat in the silence, took a small bite of mashed potatoes, a swallow of water. My sister’s face was the same stoic mask it had been since the morning she found my father. I’d yet to see her shed a tear.
“I really have no choice, girls,” she went on when we said nothing. She smoothed out the napkin on her lap. “Your father has left us with nothing, and I’m afraid I’m without skills or experience. With what I could earn, we wouldn’t be able to keep this house. And I think we’ve lost enough.”
My sister pushed food around her plate and I remember the fork suddenly seemed very heavy in my hand. There was no sound but the clinking of silverware and the ticking of the large grandfather clock my father had loved. I looked over at the chair where he would have sat. He was the clown, my mother the straight man. He’d be cracking jokes, she reprimanding him with a smile, and sometimes a blush. He’d ask us about our days and really listen to our answers. My mother liked us to be dressed at dinner; there was no lounging in jeans, or eating in front of the television. We sat and ate together “like a nice family.” To say I missed my father would be like saying I was thirsty when all the water in the world had drained, leaving rivers and oceans dry, beds cracking in the heat of the sun. My mother saw me looking at his chair; something passed quicksilver across the features of her face, a flash of something angry or sad.
“There were a lot of things I didn’t know about your father,” she said then. “Someday when you’re older, you’ll better understand.”
“What things?” I said, finding my voice. The words sounded surprisingly sharp, loud and startling, like a hard and sudden rap on the door. How did I know I wasn’t supposed to talk, to ask ugly questions? No one had ever said as much to me. But my question was an uninvited guest in the room, greeted with stiff politeness, clearly unwelcome.
My mother closed her lavender-shadowed lids, then opened them slowly. It was something she did to show us she was summoning her patience. She gave me the lids, our father would say.
“It’s not important now, Isabel.”
“I want to know what you’re talking about,” I said firmly. “What didn’t you know?”
She shook her head, released a long breath, as if she regretted starting the conversation and now lacked the will to go on. Looking back, I realize she was very young to be a widow with two daughters, just two years older than I was the day Marcus disappeared. She’d married at nineteen, been pregnant by twenty. She was thirty-five when my father killed himself.
“I’m sorry, girls. I shouldn’t have said that,” she said, sounding weak and tired. “Really, the only thing you need to know is that he loved you both. Very, very much. You were everything to him.”
She reached for our hands. I let her take mine. Linda snatched her hand away.
“Did you even love him?” my sister asked. All the color had drained from her face. My mother looked down at the table, tapped her outstretched hand on the wood, seemed to consider her answer.
“Marriage is not just about love. Only little girls believe that.” She didn’t say it unkindly. Her voice was thick, unlike her.
“He killed himself because he knew you didn’t love him anymore,” my sister said simply with a prim shake of her head. There was a frayed edge to her voice; her hands quavered. I felt anxiety building in my chest; it was expanding, threatening to bust me open wide.
“That’s not true, Linda,” my mother whispered, tears springing to her eyes. “It’s just not true.”
“Yes, it is,” she said, strangely bright, her eyes wide. “And everybody knows it.”
My mother dropped her head to her arm and started to sob right there in front of us. My mother, who was a study in self-control—never speaking too loudly, never laughing too hard. Her makeup was always done; her clothes were always perfect. To see her sink like a rag doll and weep was shocking. I put my hand on her back and felt her heaving, touched the silk of her hair. I remember how golden it looked against the green cotton of her shirt. She was so real in that moment, so soft and full of life, so overcome by grief. It was terrifying and at the same time exhilarating. She was solid, was tied to the world by her pain. She couldn’t just drift away and be gone like him.
“You silly, selfish bitch,” Linda said. Rising from the table, she looked down at our mother, who released a deep sob at her words. Linda’s features glowed with a dark victory, a grimace of disgust and condescension pulled at her mouth. She was a sliver of a girl, thin and narrow as a pencil, but that night she was a titan in her rage and her sadness. Just months before, she’d loved Duran Duran and set the VCR to tape episodes of The Young and the Restless while we were at school. She’d slept with the same blanket she’d had since she was a baby. She’d giggled at all my stupid jokes and stories. That girl was gone, just her brittle shell remained. Then she left us there. I listened to her walk up the stairs, her pace measured and unhurried, and slam the door to our bedroom hard.
I sat rubbing my mother’s back. “It’s okay, Mom. Don’t worry.” It was all I could think to say.
“I did love him, Isabel,” my mother whispered. “I truly did. It just wasn’t enough for him.”
And, even at ten, when I didn’t understand the power of things like love and money and secrets between husbands and wives, I knew it was true. My father was a ghost who walked among us. He was a sweet, kind man, who always had a smile, who always said the right thing, who always gave the most extravagant gifts, who never failed to hug or stroke. But even as a child I sensed that he held the largest part of himself inside, that he was too far away to ever touch. He was like a bright-red helium balloon always just about to loft away—until he did.
BUT I WASN’T like my mother, turning away from signs, closing shadowed eyes against the things I didn’t want to see or know. I couldn’t be that. I’m the seer. The observer. Life is a liquid that sinks into my skin; I metabolize all the ingredients. I ask the questions, hear the answers, extrapolate meaning from the rhythm and nuance of language and tone. In our arguments, it used to come down to words. Marcus, not a native speaker, would throw up his hands, walk away, so angry that I could get hung up on the semantics, the connotations of the words he used, ignoring, he claimed, his true meaning, the argument itself. But words are all we have, their essence the only passage into our centers, the only way we can make people feel what we feel
“You use language like a weapon, like a sword, Isabel,” he said one time. “Am I your opponent? Will you cut me because I can’t wield it as well as you?”
“And you use it like a blunt-force instrument—imprecise, clumsy, banging, banging, banging to get your point across. You’d use a jackhammer for needlework.”
“WHAT ABOUT THE affair you mentioned?” Detective Crowe charging into my reverie, bringing me back to present tense. I don’t know how much time had passed since he last spoke.
“What about it?”
I heard him sigh, as though I was being obtuse in order to exasperate him. “How did you find out about it? Did you know her name, where she lived?”
“I just knew,” I told him. “I felt it. Then there was a text message. I asked him to end it; he said he would. I never knew anything about her.”
He tugged at the cuff of his shirt, straightening the line that was exposed beyond his jacket, frowning.
“You don’t seem like the type not to ask questions.”
Maybe I was more like my mother than I wanted to admit, about some things, anyway. But it was different. I didn’t want to know anything about Marc’s lover at the time, didn’t want any fodder for my imagination to spin. Without it, I could just cast her as a bit player, someone who glided across the stage barely noticed. Any detail might have started me weaving her into something bigger, more important than I wanted her to be.
“He met her in Philadelphia. That’s all I know.”
“And even that might have been a lie.”
I shrugged, gave an assenting nod.
“That’s what really got me, you know? About my wife? I think I could have gotten over the cheating part. It was all the lying, all the sneaking around that really irked me. You can almost understand infidelity, right? The whole lust thing—it’s there. But it’s the logistics that make it really ugly, unforgivable. You thought she was spending time with her mother, but she was with her boyfriend. It turns your stomach.”
I didn’t answer because I knew what he was doing. He was trying to make me angry, relate to me and get me talking, commiserating. I’d watched enough television to know this. I’d start talking and some “clue” would pop out of my mouth, or I’d say something I hadn’t intended to, give away something that I knew. Maybe even admit that I’d killed my husband, dumped his body in the East River, killed his colleagues and trashed his business and the home we shared.
“But you forgave him, huh? Stayed with him?”
“Yes.” Was it really true? Had I ever forgiven him?
“Why?” He almost spat the question. What he really wanted to ask was “How?”
I regarded him. Another natty outfit—brown wool slacks, with a dark brown leather belt and shoes, cream button-down, dark coat, black hair gelled back, the debut of purposeful stubble. His intelligence, his competence, was a thin veneer over a deep immaturity. He was a boy, a child, though it looked as though forty was right around the corner. He still believed in fairy tales.