by Heidi Pitlor
Most of the women she had met here were nice enough. They seemed to want to be her friend—they eagerly approached her at school events and music classes, they invited her to moms’ nights out and various in-home parties where kitchenware or makeup was being sold, but in the end they seemed to Hannah more like coworkers than friends. She certainly never lit up when with them the way she did with Sophie or the others. She’d had a small gaggle of close friends from her high school and BU, these affable, generous, funny women. Most of them lived elsewhere now; only Sophie was still in Massachusetts. A few times Hannah had suggested trips to visit the others in San Francisco or even London, but Lovell reminded her that they could never afford the flights, not if they expected to pay their mortgage and save for the kids to go to college.
He turned back to his house, the stained, angled modern that held three solar panels across its slanted roof. Yellow plastic rain barrels sat under drain spouts and dribbled water onto the mulch beneath. In this neighborhood of pristine Cape Cods and Victorians, each set squarely on an identical plot of plush green grass, their house sometimes looked to him as if it had been dropped here by mistake.
LATER THAT EVENING, the three of them and his mother, who had come with dinner, sat over a game of Scrabble. Joanne Hall, a lanky woman with a cap of coarse gray hair, set down tiles that spelled quantum. So far, she had spelled subset, zeta, and zero. She was a theoretical mathematician at MIT.
“You’re kicking ass, Grandma,” Janine said.
Joanne shrugged with false modesty.
“Mom,” Lovell whispered to her. “Can’t you let one of them win right now?”
“Why?”
“Do I have to explain it?”
She reached for the box of Entenmann’s brownies that she had brought for dessert and set it beside them. “I told your father I’d check in with him around now,” she said to Lovell, and she went off to the living room to make the call.
“Do you miss Mom?” Ethan asked him, as if they had just been discussing Hannah. “Are you worried about her?”
“Yes. Eth, of course I do,” Lovell said.
“You don’t talk about it,” Janine said.
“Do I have to?”
“No, you don’t have to, Dad,” she said.
“You guys miss her right now,” Lovell said.
Ethan nodded. Janine watched her father.
Lovell added, “She never liked Scrabble. She was more of a card game person.”
“We know,” Janine said.
“She slept in my bed with me on her last night,” Ethan said.
Lovell had not really broached with them the daunting subject of that night. He held his hands tight together in his lap and began: “I wish that night had been different. You guys have to know this. You can love someone and be angry at them. Grown-ups fight sometimes. Married people argue. They just do.” There was conviction in his voice. He had to at least try to maintain this stance, both for them and for himself: No marriage is easy. All couples go through difficult times. “She’ll come back soon. Someone will find her. She’ll be totally and completely fine.”
Janine did not take her eyes off him. She studied him as he reached for the felt bag of letters, as he pulled out three and set them in the little plastic holder and said, “Janine, your turn.”
She picked up a brownie. “I’m going to sit out this round,” she said at last.
Chapter 5
Hannah was late bringing Ethan to school. Sarah, one of the teaching assistants, waited alone for him by the red double doors. She ushered Ethan inside and glanced back to wave at Hannah, who was standing against her car at the curb. Sarah had blond hair cut in a matronly style and wore a blondish sweater and loose tan pants. She was pretty and pleasant. Hannah waved back at Sarah and thought to ask her whether she needed any help today, but in less than a moment the two had disappeared inside.
The sun shone fiercely and the sky was cloudless, the sidewalk black, newly paved. Not one other person could be seen. Children everywhere were in school. Hannah looked at her watch—she had two and a half hours before she was due at work. She rushed up the concrete stairs and inside the school to catch up with Sarah and Ethan.
“Forget something?” Sarah asked.
“I’ve got some time before I have to be at work. Do you guys need any help this morning with snack or recess?” Ethan looked at his feet.
“Thanks, but I think we’re all set.” Sarah enunciated and spoke a half beat too slowly, in the way that women who worked with small children did. “We have a full day planned. We’re making volcanoes. Papier-mâché.”
“Oh. Good, that sounds fun.”
Sarah smiled. “Messy fun.”
Hannah’s face prickled with heat. “Then I’ll go enjoy this time to myself and leave you guys to it.” She started back down the hallway.
The other week, after volunteering in Ethan’s class, she had seen a kindergartner seated against the wall outside a classroom, his arms around his knees. The boy had an older brother in Ethan’s grade, and Hannah had heard that the father had just left their family. “You all right?” Hannah had asked, and he shrugged, his tangled black hair nearly covering his face.
Hannah glanced around. “You want some company? Are you in time-out or something?”
He was silent, but he revealed enough of his face for Hannah to see that he was crying.
“I could sit with—”
“Go away.”
“Okay,” Hannah said. She buttoned up her coat and hurried off, and when she had reached the front doors of the school, she called Lovell at work and told him about the boy.
“Just let it be,” he said.
“I guess. You don’t think I should tell the teacher what’s going on in their house? She might not know yet. You should have seen this kid. He looked awful. He’s so little.”
“I don’t know. I guess you could tell her.”
She heard him begin to type, and said, “Forget it.”
“He’ll be fine,” Lovell said vacantly.
“I was thinking about Tunis the other day,” she said. Just the mention of the place where they had gone for their honeymoon always drew him back.
“Yeah?”
“Do you remember that woman singing? And her husband, that doctor, called her a cow or something like that? And that creepy basement! God, that was scary.”
“Given our situation, I wasn’t paying much attention.”
“And then sleeping in that Bedouin tent in the desert.”
“Ah. That was much better.”
“Our nomad? What was his name?”
“Dhia? Daly? I don’t remember.”
“He wasn’t hard on the eyes,” she said.
“He obviously felt the same way about you. Let me tell you, it was a real joy to share the tent with you both.”
She laughed. “Oh, come on. He was off helping the other tourists most of the time. And he slept outside on the sand, remember?”
“I’ve got work to do,” Lovell said. It was a guillotine to the conversation. “Listen. That kid at school? He’s not your problem.”
She realized that she had shut her eyes, and she opened them now. “I guess not.”
“I’ll see you later?”
“Yeah, fine.”
The hallway had been empty. On a cork board to her right had hung a row of messily painted apples with children’s names. The boy would be all right, she had repeated to herself. Someone else, a teacher or an older kid or someone, would walk past and help him.
Now, as she left the school, she told herself she would drive back home, of course. Today would be a good day. It would be a good day.
Everyone had encouraged her to immerse herself more in work. Lovell, Sophie, Leah—each had a career. This was the answer. Turn your gaze outward. Busy yourself. A month or so ago, she had breezily suggested to Lovell that she open her own flower store, and he loved the idea: “Do it! Why not?” Sophie and Leah had similar reactions. This was just w
hat they wanted for her. Her children were old enough now. Plenty of mothers with younger children had gone back to work full-time. So today she would begin. Once she got home, she would call their bank to make an appointment to discuss loans, look through the local paper for commercial rentals in town, arrange meetings with some area potters, research obtaining a license to import, check the latest regulations for organically grown flowers. She would have to make a list of all the steps to be taken—the business plan, the statement of purpose, her résumé, the bank loans, the rentals and phone calls—and of course there was the question of square footage and how large a store she would want.
She let her forehead fall onto the steering wheel. She had gotten a job delivering flowers just out of college on a whim. It had been the first job she had gotten on her own, not in her father’s office, not assisting her mother at the agency. In the end, it had been a default career.
Mostly it was women who received flowers, girlfriends on Valentine’s Day and anniversaries, mothers on Mother’s Day, women who chatted with this twenty-two-year-old and asked whether it was safe for her to be knocking on strange doors. “I have a bodyguard in the van,” she half joked with them. Sometimes she did share her route with a father of three who had recently emigrated from Haiti.
It was a surprise so many years ago to open the metal door of an apartment in Brighton and see that the strange, old-fashioned name belonged to a guy about her age. “This must be from my mother. I just graduated,” he said as he took the wrapped flowers from her. Another man, smaller, with strawberry-blond hair, passed behind him. An overweight yellow lab lay on its side on a couch, two legs in the air. It could have been Hannah’s own dog, Marmalade, waiting for someone to scratch her belly. The apartment was narrow and messy and she saw a hump of laundry in the middle of the hallway behind him. She smelled sweaty sneakers and lemon room deodorizer.
“These are irises. ‘Butterfly Wings,’” Hannah said. “Your mother has good taste.”
“Someone at the store must have helped her.” He took in her face. She glanced down at the bent metal threshold, then looked back up at him and saw that his eyes were the oddest color. Brown but also gold, or a hint of green maybe. He was tall, unusually tall. He reminded her of some big, friendly kid that had just woken. She had no sense that this would be the person she would marry.
A week later she delivered a bouquet of roses to him, this time from his cousin, and the following week a basket of carnations and only then did she suspect anything. He did not deny it. “I was hoping—I mean, I thought I might see you again,” he managed when she questioned him, and she smiled and said, “There are less expensive ways of getting in touch with me. The number for Fanciful Flowers is right here.” She pulled a business card from an envelope attached to the plastic wrap.
Lovell invited her to dinner and she accepted. She needed a distraction after Doug. She returned to Lovell’s apartment for his homemade chili and corn-bread muffins a few nights later, simple, boyish food that he seemed to think impressed her. But he did not flirt or puff himself up in the ways that so many others did with banter or feigned disinterest. Even now, so many years later, men at the bank or grocery store or in restaurants lowered their voices when they spoke to her. They punned, they joked, they rushed to pick up her fallen purse or napkin.
Over dinner, Lovell described his studies of tornadoes. The previous summer he had driven with a friend to Alberta just after “an F4” tore through Edmonton to help with cleanup and disaster relief, and he even played a small part in developing the province’s emergency public warning system. He was earnest and polite and attentive; he asked about Boston University, her family, her childhood on Martha’s Vineyard. She decided that she had never met anyone with this combination of innocence and intelligence. “I have ice cream too,” he said after clearing the wobbly card table he and his roommate used as a dining table in the kitchen. “Neapolitan—I wasn’t sure which kind you liked.”
He told her about his graduate program at MIT in earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences. “But part of me just wants to go on the road and storm-chase next semester and defer. Of course my adviser is totally against this.”
She wanted to know what a tornado looked like up close, and why tornadoes and not hurricanes?
“Good question,” he said. “Well, I’ve got this theory that hurricanes might be like these barometers of climate change. If you look closely at sea temperatures and whatnot, you see these patterns.”
She said, “Tell me more,” and he replied, “Glad to.”
At the end of the night, he walked her to his door and said, “Can we do this again?”
“This?”
“Dinner, talk—or whatever you’d want to do.”
“Sure, I’d like that.” She waited for him to close his eyes and lean down and in toward her face. But he only said, “Do you want to borrow a coat? It’s cold out tonight.”
Chapter 6
On Monday, Lovell let the kids decide whether to attend school for the first time since Hannah’s disappearance. Both said they wanted to go back—he guessed that a sense of normalcy and routine was important for them right now. “But if you hear anything at all about Mom, can you come get me?” Janine asked.
“Me too?” Ethan added.
“Of course,” Lovell answered.
A while later, he herded Janine out the door and watched as she stepped inside the bus. She half turned to wave good-bye to him, brushing her hair from her face, and then off she went to the other kids and teachers and her school. Maybe he would in fact have to go to their schools later today. What if he had to walk inside the front office and tell the secretary . . . that what?
He wandered back to the house to get Ethan breakfast—a bowl of Cheerios—and help him pack up for school. “What else do you need? What does Mom do in the morning?”
“Can I just have some milk? And a napkin? And a spoon?”
“Of course,” Lovell said.
“Chocolate,” Ethan commanded when Lovell handed him a glass of plain milk.
“This is better for you. You drink chocolate milk?”
“So?”
“Fine, fine.” Hannah had always been a little lax about things like this. Lovell looked through the cabinet. Ripped clothing or unbrushed hair made her crazy, but, what, seventeen grams of sugar in one serving of Ovaltine, according to the label on the can, was apparently no problem.
“She gives me one squirt of whipped cream on top.”
“No. Really? We even have whipped cream?”
“It’s the only way I can drink it.”
Lovell sighed and headed back to the refrigerator.
The two did not say much more as they downed their cereal and went to find Ethan’s schoolbooks and jacket. “Are you going to get dressed?” Ethan asked him as they headed for the front door.
Lovell was still in his pajama pants and bathrobe. “I wasn’t planning on it. I’m not going to my office today.”
“I’ll just walk myself to the bus stop.”
“If you want,” Lovell said, wondering when Ethan had begun to notice what anyone else was wearing.
Lovell went to open the front door. It dawned on him that he would be alone in this house today. Not one of them would be there with him. Lovell bent down and hugged Ethan before saying good-bye. “You’re my best Ethan,” he whispered, a silly thing he had been saying for years.
“Bye, Dad,” Ethan said, and he trudged forward, his gray sweatpants bunching and pooling above his sneakers.
Lovell caught sight of a news van parked across the street again. He wondered when it had come, and why. An idea landed on him: What if he actually offered himself up to whatever reporter might be sitting inside this van, watching for him? Didn’t the husband or wife in these cases usually do that? Make a plea for their spouse to return?
After the bus came and disappeared with Ethan down the street, Lovell thought more about his idea. A guy now standing outside the van adjusted wha
t looked to be a light meter. He lifted his head and caught Lovell’s eye, then leaned around the back of the van perhaps to call for someone else.
Lovell walked back inside the now empty house. He had to do this. He had to do whatever he could to help get her back. He went to the bathroom to comb his hair and check his teeth. He looked over at Hannah’s bottle of lemongrass hand cream on the sink. The bathroom in her parents’ brownstone where she had lived when they met had been this exotic laboratory when he first saw it, all the tall glass bottles and clay or ceramic pots of lavender and melon and cucumber and jasmine creams lining the windowsill and the sink and the side of the tub. He remembered secretly unscrewing and smelling a few. He had even tasted the huckleberry mask, though he had spat it out once his mouth registered the bitter alcohol tang.
Duncan had warned him against speaking to the press, but this would be a way to control the message right now. He tried to ignore his rapid pulse at the thought of this task that faced him.
He stepped outside, and Maya Gupta, a youngish reporter from Channel 6, was on him. “Lovell Hall!” She turned and motioned to her cameraman a few yards away. “Would you mind saying a few things?” Her round face was open and curious. She kept a respectful distance from him.
“Glad to do it,” he said.
“What do you know at this point about where your wife might have gone?”
“I hardly know anything,” he answered.
She asked him the sort of questions that Susan Sperck had, although with less venom, about what he knew and what the police knew.