by Heidi Pitlor
She met his eyes and moved down his front walk toward him.
“What is this?” he said.
She was shorter in person than he might have thought. Stout and pink-faced, her fine tan hair cut in a severe bob, she lifted the microphone up and beside her head. The man who carried the cumbersome black camera scrambled to catch up with her.
Lovell stepped outside.
“Lovell Hall?” she said into her microphone. She introduced herself briefly. “What do you think happened to your wife?” She held the top of the microphone toward him. The man behind her hefted the camera onto his shoulder and began to film.
Had Bob Duncan or someone else at the police station told her about Hannah? “Hold on,” Lovell finally said. He closed the door behind him before the kids could see or hear any more and turned back to her. “I wish I knew.”
“What have the police told you?”
“I don’t think—I mean, I probably shouldn’t—” he said. “What do you know?”
The cameraman shifted on his feet.
“Where were you when she went missing?” Susan Sperck continued.
“What?” he managed.
“Can you tell me where you were that day?”
“I don’t believe I am required to tell you that,” he said. He added, “But I was at work. At my office in Cambridge. You can call the police if you’d like to confirm it.”
“We’ll do that. Do the police have any leads?”
“I don’t know—I mean, not that I know of.”
“Well, what do you know?”
The kids would be wondering where he was. For all he knew, they were standing in the front hallway, watching this through the window beside the door. “I have to get back to my family,” he finally said. “The police can answer any other questions. Good night.”
He moved back inside and closed the door behind him, thoroughly rattled, trying to understand exactly what had just happened and what this entailed. If only he could know that Hannah was at least, if nothing else, safe.
Janine appeared at the other end of the hallway, peering past him to see what was outside.
“It was someone from Channel Six,” he said slowly.
“What did they want?”
“Oh, just, well, they somehow heard about Mom and just wanted to make sure we were doing OK,” he said. “No big deal.”
“Were you actually on TV?”
“They did ask me a couple questions.”
“How did they know about this? Did something happen to Mom? What the fuck, Dad?”
He took a few steps toward her. “News reporters try to turn everything into a story. Their showing up here doesn’t mean a thing. Listen, Mom will be fine. She’ll come back soon.”
“I really hope so,” she said. She drew a lock of her hair through and out the side of her mouth. “You didn’t tell me if you were on TV.”
“They interviewed me, but who knows if they’ll actually air it. I didn’t really have much to say. I’m sure they’ll see that there’s no real news story here and dump the two minutes of footage they got of me.”
She appeared to consider and accept what he had said. “So what do we do now?”
He thought a moment. “Get ready for bed?”
“It’s only eight thirty.”
“What about your homework?” Most evenings he spent at the kitchen table behind his computer or talking on the phone to researchers in Perth or Hong Kong, where the time difference made it impossible to speak during his workday. Apparently he had only had a vague sense of his children’s typical nights.
“Tomorrow is Saturday,” she said.
“All right,” he said, gesturing for Ethan, nearby on his beanbag, to join him. “Let’s see if there’s a movie on TV.” He flicked around, trying to find something that would appeal to their different ages and tastes, something calming or funny, but since it was October, all he could find were horror movies. “Perfect,” Lovell said as, on the screen, Anthony Hopkins sucked the air through his teeth. Lovell poked the “off” button on the remote again and again, but the batteries must have died. “Jesus Christ.”
“Language,” said Ethan.
Lovell finally stood and pressed the power button below the screen. “Who wants to play Uno?” he asked weakly.
IN THE MORNING, Susan Sperck had gone, but a couple of news vans were now parked along the street across from his house. Thankfully, it was a Saturday, and Janine and Ethan could stay home. They had all shared his bed last night and none of them had gotten much rest, so Lovell let the kids sleep in and went downstairs to call Duncan. “Any updates on the case?”
“Nothing to tell.”
“A reporter came by last night,” Lovell said. “And now some more are parked on our street.”
“I haven’t talked to any of them. But I guess I’m not all that surprised. Some bored cop with a big mouth. You know. And the prettier the lady, the wider the coverage.”
Lovell winced.
“I’ll talk to the guys.”
“I’d appreciate it.” He glanced out his living room window as two more news vans pulled up behind the others. “And if you wouldn’t mind giving me a heads-up next time you talk to my kids, I’d appreciate that as well. They’re pretty freaked out right now.” Lovell added, “We all are.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Duncan said. “Oh, and Lovell, if I were you, I wouldn’t talk to any more reporters. Just ignore them, if you can. Pretend they’re not there.”
Are you kidding? Lovell nearly said. How easy it must be to dole out glib advice at times like these.
The phone rang throughout the day: Hannah’s parents and sister, each with rapid-fire questions about when he had last seen her and orders to check this place and that (“Of course I checked the shop”) and suggestions for others that he might not have considered; her closest friends; a few of his coworkers who had seen the news. His mother called and asked him whether he might be forgetting some place where Hannah liked to go. “Why does everyone say that? It’s not as if you’re going to suddenly jog my memory by making me feel like an idiot.”
“Lovell.”
Janine sat across the room, eyeing him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This isn’t easy.”
“How are the kids doing?” his mother tried. “Are people really asking you why you don’t know more?”
“Mom.” No one in his immediate family—his mother, father, or brother—was particularly sensitive. They were all academics, such logical people, tortoises whose shells shut away their hearts—feeble from such infrequent use—deep within them and allowed only their heads, their brains, out in the wide, strange world to make sense of it all. Anyway, his mother knew nothing of the state of his marriage other than the little friction that she had witnessed herself, from what he could remember—just a few hushed arguments that she would never have registered.
“I’m headed out to Costco,” she said after a moment. “You want me to bring you toilet paper or anything?”
“I have no idea,” he said automatically. “I’m not the one who inventories that stuff.”
“I’ll just get you some. You can never have too much.”
Everyone who had heard that Hannah disappeared called that day, it seemed, but Detective Duncan. There had to have been ten vans outside his house by the time the sun began to set, maybe more.
Lovell went for a bottle of Grey Goose. He stood in the front hallway, watching a circle of people chat beside his mailbox. Susan Sperck appeared at the side of the group, a cell phone to her ear. Someone next to her nodded toward the front door, and Lovell moved back before any of the reporters could see him.
Chapter 3
Hannah woke alone in her son’s bed. Lovell had made coffee. She could almost taste it—hazelnut, her favorite—as she pulled Ethan’s comforter around her shoulders, but as she rose further toward consciousness, she remembered all that had happened last night. Was making coffee enough of an apology? After all that he had
done and almost done—his aimless rage, the embarrassing violence like a rotten smell throughout the room—and all that he had said, which was worse than his physical bluster, all that he had verbalized to try to make her smaller, just this piddling thing, hardly worth a listen, her empty days, her lazy disregard for bills and cars and recycling. He was stunted, too male, too myopic to comprehend that the piddling things were in fact those bills and cars and recycling, not her. Or had she given so much of her life to those eviscerating tasks and gotten to be, herself, just as eviscerating? The line of thinking was old and tired. There was nothing new about women despising their drudgery. There was nothing new about women wanting more. On and on she went like this. Coffee. It was a kid dropping his eyes and mouthing, “Sorry,” to the ground. Lovell was impossible. Being married to him had become impossible, and this sensation bled into the rest of her life and made her feel as if she had become someone else, someone she hardly knew and did not like.
She heard Ethan in the hallway and Janine in the shower and Beethoven on that iPod and speaker she carried from room to room. Hannah worried for her daughter, the world the way it was, boys, girls, friends, love, sex, heartbreak, all of it. Hannah wondered whether her daughter had enough people in her life—enough friends. She gravitated toward young children—she was a sought-after babysitter in the neighborhood—or adults instead of kids her own age. She was her father’s daughter; friendships with her peers came a distant third, in Janine’s case, after homework and viola. Being likable was not a priority for her.
It was Thursday. Hannah had to work at the flower shop later that morning, and Ethan’s orthodontist appointment was in the afternoon. She stretched and unwound the sheet from her body.
Janine stood alone in the kitchen at the counter, her back hunched. It drove Hannah crazy, the girl’s consistently bad posture. Janine wore her black army pants and a green button-down cardigan draped over an old white T-shirt. Clothes did not interest her. Maybe it was in fact her height: not much fit her.
At Janine’s age, Hannah had already been tall too, taller than the other girls in her class. Her mother had always said, “You could easily do commercials—print or TV. Soon you’ll be able to do runway. Say the word and I’ll call some old contacts,” and Hannah’s friends always told her, “I wish I was that tall. Do you know how lucky you are?” Janine called commercials the “tools of a sexist corporate culture,” thanks to a new media literacy class at her school. Hannah’s response was, “Well, yes. Doesn’t everyone already know that?”
Janine slouched at the table and glanced over at her. “You OK, Mom?”
“I’m fine.” Hannah shuddered to think of her listening to Lovell crash around last night like a big, dumb bear caught inside the house. “You look nice today,” Hannah tried. Everyone wanted to hear that, didn’t they?
Janine shrugged and reached for a mug of coffee on the table.
“You shouldn’t drink coffee,” Hannah said. “You’re too young.”
“It’ll stunt my growth, right? I’d be fine with that.”
“Tall can be pretty. You are pretty, you know,” Hannah tried. She looked around the pantry for a box of bran flakes and brought the cereal and a bowl to the table. Janine pulled a strand of long, limp hair toward her mouth. She had this new habit of chewing the hair that hung beside her face, and the ends had gotten matted and wet. Hannah said, “Sweetie, don’t suck on your hair.”
Janine reached for her coffee. Her body was lanky but at the same time chubby, stretched here and compressed there. She had not taken well to adolescence. Then again, who did? Well, Hannah herself, of course. But maybe to be happy at fourteen was to be happy too soon, to use up something that was, in the end, finite.
At least Ethan had a few more years before the hormones flooded in. Of course these years would pass in a moment. His ninth birthday was approaching, and she wanted to do something that he would always remember before he too turned sullen and sulky—decorate the house like a spaceship, ask all his friends to dress as aliens or something. Lovell had laughed at the idea. “Seems a little much.”
Hannah stepped behind Janine and kissed the top of her damp head. “Being tall is a good thing. Someday you’ll see.” She continued, “Coffee isn’t good for you.”
“You drink it,” Janine said. She opened the social studies textbook beside her place mat.
Lovell blazed into the kitchen and accidentally knocked a banana off the counter. He leaned down to peck Hannah good-bye. He said he was late for a meeting. The kitchen was never clean; he always dropped things and left messes throughout the house. She watched him searching for his keys, but looked away before he could see her. What if he had gone ahead and hit her last night? But then he would have become someone else, someone at least formidable, a significant threat. A legitimate problem. She no longer loved him. She may never have loved him.
She poured cereal into a bowl and asked Janine, “Are you going to the library later to work on that civil rights paper?”
Janine turned a page.
“Hello?”
“I’ll go after school.”
“What time should I pick you up?”
Janine stared at the words before her.
“What time?”
“Shit. I don’t know, four?”
“Language. Four o’clock on the front steps. Don’t be late—Ethan has the orthodontist at four thirty.” Hannah dug her spoon into the bowl and tried to finish the cereal before the flakes wilted in the milk.
Janine left her mug on the table and slid her books into her backpack. She twisted her hair into a frayed ponytail. “Bye,” she said, and she ran outside to her bus stop. Hannah looked over at the mug she had left, the brown droplets halfway down the side.
Ethan remained upstairs in his room. “Eth. You ready?” she called up to him. “We need to go.” She waited for an answer. “Eth, come on, let’s get going,” she said, but so what if he missed a day of school? So what if he lounged around the house? What if they all abandoned their duties and did what they wanted today—watched TV, ate sugary cereal, read comic books? Ethan would ride his unicycle around the driveway. Janine would practice viola. Lovell would set up his computer and maps all over the kitchen table. Or he would putter around the house or up on the roof, tending to the solar panels. And Hannah? If she could do anything she wanted today, anything at all? She didn’t know. She had no idea.
On the counter was a folder of old photos her mother had given her yesterday, pictures of Hannah as a child that had not made it into an album. She opened the folder and flipped through them. There was her first-grade picture, another of her steering her father’s boat. She stopped at a shot of her sitting in her father’s office chair behind his big mahogany desk, her hair in yellow plastic barrettes with little chicks. She didn’t remember this one. She did remember the few times that she went to that office overlooking the ferry dock, Mrs. Corcoran, the pudgy, kindly secretary who let Hannah try on her red bifocals, the other men flashing by, oblivious, leaving only the whiff of cigarettes. And the objects of the place: her father’s glass paperweight with the tiny sailboat inside; his envelope opener, that bronze dagger; the supply closet, the wondrous supply closet that held boxes of shiny clips and erasers and highlighters that Mrs. Corcoran allowed her to play with in the waiting area. A five- or six-year-old Hannah smiled back at her with all the hope and imagination in the world. It took her breath away. Hannah slipped the folder into her purse. She did not want to see that picture for a while.
Ethan was before her, his jacket zipped to his chin, his backpack hanging from his shoulders.
“Good job,” she said. “You’re all set.”
He nodded and she gathered him in her arms. He smelled of grape toothpaste and bubble-gum shampoo, and blessedly he let her hold him for a long moment. She grabbed a granola bar for him and ushered him out the front door.
Chapter 4
On Sunday morning, while the kids were still asleep, Lovell went to make cof
fee. He took note of the sprinkle of grounds that had remained beside the coffee maker since Hannah’s disappearance four mornings ago. She preferred flavored; he, “regular leaded,” as he called it. Making her favorite coffee that morning must have done nothing for her, in the end.
He still half expected, half hoped, that he would hear the sound of the front door opening and Hannah calling, Hello? Anyone home? Her arms full of gifts or flowers to convey a change of heart, maybe contrition, she would say that she had just needed some time and space apart from him in order to really think things over and come to the decision that she did not—of course she did not—want to leave them.
He turned on the coffee maker and waited, hands laced around the back of his neck, for the sound of the gurgling water to fill the silence in the kitchen. Once it did, he walked outside to get the newspaper, shielding his face from the reporters, but when he looked, he saw that the TV crews had packed up their equipment and gone home. He reminded himself that there had been no news about the case for two days now. Curled leaves blew in little horizontal tornadoes down the street. The sidewalks were empty.
He moved toward the front lawn to pick up some fallen branches from a recent storm and saw a young couple pass by on the sidewalk. They averted their eyes at first, but the woman peered back over at him. He had no idea how to behave, how to look, or what, if anything, to say when people watched him this way. Yesterday, Karen Mekenner had inched past his house in her silver Volvo, eyeing him as he took out the trash.
Moving here from their overpriced, cramped Brookline studio had been a reasonable idea so many years ago. The price was low, the town quaint and pretty. In the summers, they could bike to Walden Pond or go apple picking in Stow.
They, or Hannah really, “could not have anticipated the obliterating quiet, the aloofness but at the same time awkwardness of so many of the people here, the deep homogeneity and stunning averageness,” as she once put it in an e-mail to him on a particularly low day. Lovell had not been around enough over the years for these things to really bother him. “The ruddy-faced men in finance, the athletic stay-at-home moms, the fucking Boy Scouts, the golden retrievers, the gas-guzzling minivans, the holiday-themed flags near the front door for any and every holiday.” She had gone on writing in this manner, as if for some phantom reader who did not in fact live in the same town. “Time must have stopped moving forward here in this suburb. It seems like the civil rights movement and sexual revolution never reached this place.”