The Daylight Marriage

by Heidi Pitlor

  “It seems that she might have gone to South Boston,” he said. He attempted to project concern but calm—he certainly did not want to appear nervous or, worse, disingenuous. “Would you mind if I asked your viewers for help? Maybe they could call the police if any of them saw her?”

  “Of course,” Maya said. “Why don’t you go inside and get a picture of her? We can run it with the number of the PD in town. Does that sound good?”

  He nodded, relieved, and turned toward the house. A moment later he came back with a photo of Hannah wearing hot-pink gardening gloves, kneeling in front of her sunflowers in the backyard.

  “So you want to look right into the lens like you’re talking to a friend,” she said, and although he balked at the idea of gazing directly into the eyes of all those viewers, of allowing his own eyes to be seen up close, he walked in front of the camera and moved to where he was directed to stand. “My wife, Hannah Hall, went missing last Thursday morning, October fourth,” he began. He explained that she was last seen on Carson Beach in South Boston, that her bracelet had been found. “If anyone, if any of you, has seen this woman,” he said as he held up the framed photo, “please contact the number of the police below.”

  Maya nodded, waiting for him to say more.

  “And,” he went on, trying to focus directly on the center of the lens now, “if you’re watching this, Hannah, we miss you. Please come home.”

  Maya dropped the microphone and asked the cameraman, “You got that?” He nodded, and she added, “If you could get in tighter—” Her voice a degree kinder, she held the microphone forward again and asked, “Lovell, what sort of woman is Hannah? What sort of mother and wife is she? Can you give us more of a sense of her?”

  He scanned the houses behind the reporter and saw a woman jogging past with her black terrier. He thought about his kids. He thought about Hannah’s face the moment after he had kicked the bed frame. He considered the holes in his alibi, which these reporters may well have seen by now. “You couldn’t ask for a better woman,” he began. “Or a better mom or wife.”

  “Can you tell us more? What are her hobbies? What does she like to do with the kids?”

  The details spilled out: she had recently made each child a ceramic vase on her friend’s pottery wheel and brought home rose or lavender buds every week from the shop. “She flies with her father to his hometown in the south of Ireland every year. She is a talented cook and a longtime Red Sox fan. She studied English, poetry, in college,” he said, trying to ignore an image of her sulking and glaring at him from their bed that last night. These pretty details, this flattering portrait, felt like a lie. It was a lie. He hoped that the tension throughout his body was not apparent in his face. “We first met when she delivered flowers to my apartment—irises from my mother when I graduated from college.”

  “That’s lovely,” Maya said. “Thank you. Such good stuff.” She flashed a look at her cameraman. He nodded once and hefted the camera from his shoulder. Maya stood for a moment, watching Lovell start to make his way toward his front door. She called to him as he reached his front stoop.

  His heart beat in his neck. “Yes?”

  “You take good care, all right? Be kind to yourself. Get some rest.”

  over the next couple of days, more news vans arrived and parked across the street. Lovell agreed to another interview with Maya Gupta, this time to talk about the kids and his job, Hannah’s work, and more of Hannah’s life. While the cameraman readied for the shoot, Maya whispered to Lovell, “You might want to go put on something a little more formal, something nicer than that sweatshirt. You need to look sympathetic, here, like you’re taking this seriously.” His face hot, Lovell walked back inside to find a button-down shirt and tie.

  When a few more reporters arrived, he handed over shoe boxes with photographs and home videos of Hannah that he had gathered. As he stood talking to a group of newspaper reporters, he looked out and saw Susan Sperck jockeying for position behind them. “Got a minute for me?” she asked when their eyes met, and he had no choice but to nod.

  She summoned her cameraman, and once they were ready, once the camera was rolling, she introduced him and reminded the viewers who he was. “I thought we could talk a little today about your marriage, Lovell.”

  He blinked over at the camera. “All right.”

  “Can you tell me how you met? How you first pursued Hannah?”

  He had already told Maya about those irises, but that was for a different station. “She used to deliver flowers, and one time she showed up at my door. I had a hard time forming any words when I first saw her.”

  She laughed warmly. “I can only imagine.” She went on to ask whether Hannah was his first girlfriend, how long they had dated, what he supposed had drawn her to him.

  He had good reason to ask how these silly and vaguely offensive questions were relevant to anything, but he held back. “Yes, I guess she was my first real girlfriend. We were together for a year before we got married.”

  “Where did you propose, Lovell?”

  While attempting to appear wistful, he described that morning in Donovan Munroe’s boat, her parents only feet away, the striated cliffs of Gay Head in the distance.

  The rest of the interview went on in this way. Lovell mustered whatever patience he could. “And what did she say? Do you remember her words? How long was the engagement?” Oh God! When did you decide to do this? We haven’t even talked about it. But, I think, I guess I should say yes! “And Hannah? Did she want to wait?” Only a few months. We didn’t see the point in waiting.

  Susan’s subtext barely lurked beneath the surface: whatever had Hannah seen in this particular man?

  LOVELL CONSIDERED TAKING the kids somewhere else until the reporters went away, but he could not seem to wrestle this thought into any real plan. Where would they even go? He continued to stay tethered to the phone, always waiting for news that did not come, seizing up every time the phone did ring. He had given up trying to seem calm and rational in front of his kids. A full week had now passed since Hannah had gone.

  On TV, her life played before them. The producers had by now edited the material into extended “in depth” stories that they ran, one with a quiet Chopin nocturne in the background. This piece had the effect of assuring that Hannah’s fate would be tragic and newsworthy. The usual family photos were shown next: Hannah on snowshoes; Hannah dancing at their wedding; Hannah holding a greenish pumpkin the size of a soccer ball, Ethan by her side. Ethan, with his light eyes. Lovell stood at the corner of the living room, taking note of how they appeared on-screen, he stumbling over his scripted-sounding words, disheveled and pale in his neutral-colored tie, white button-down shirt, and tan corduroy sport jacket, an outfit that might have too obviously communicated innocence. Hannah, impossibly beautiful in those liquid fabrics, coral or lilac silk shirts or angora sweaters, with black yoga pants and a plain silver necklace, her hair in a high bun or tossed over one shoulder. She could have been a dancer, a professional ballerina. He might have been a computer geek who had stumbled into someone else’s life.

  An expert came on and presented a host of alarming scenarios: a carjacking in a nearby town, kidnapping, identity change, suicide.

  “Turn it off,” Lovell said. “I shouldn’t have let you watch any of this. Come on. Now. I’ll let you know about any updates I hear.” He yanked the plug from the outlet and hauled the heavy TV upstairs to his bedroom. His face sweaty with exertion, he leaned down and placed the thing in the corner of his room.

  Janine stood in the doorway, watching him. “I’m going next door,” she said.

  “To Stephen and Jeff’s?” She had spent the past few afternoons with the new neighbors, a young gay couple. Lovell had met them only in passing. She had proudly reported back to them that Jeff was a cellist with the Boston Symphony—and had offered to help her with Beethoven—and Stephen an art teacher at a private high school in Cambridge. Jeff, the “funny one,” had grown up in Montreal, and Step
hen, the “quieter one,” was raised in a suburb of Paris. Apparently they watched Bruins games and made their own sushi and had lots of friends over all the time. Their lives, Lovell assumed, could not have differed more from her own.

  “No, to play with King and Mrs. Mekenner.”

  “Very funny. How about you stay here?”

  “Why?”

  He blinked at her. “Why not?”

  “I told them I’d be there by now. Jeff’s little niece Penelope is there and I told them I’d watch her while he made dinner. She’s three. Stephen has a work meeting tonight.”

  “Penelope, huh?” he said. Janine’s love of small children made him unaccountably grateful. “Listen, I’m sorry you had to see that guy on TV. They’re full of it, these so-called experts. They don’t know their heads from their asses.”

  “Language, Dad.”

  “Just try to forget what he said.”

  “If possible.”

  He watched her turn and leave and he drew a hand across his damp forehead. He stood there alone in his bedroom and glanced at the phone on a side table. He cracked each knuckle on his left hand.

  He thought back to the last time he had seen Hannah, that morning, his idiotic hope that she would find her way back to him, that some element in that sunny, clear morning—the newness of fall, the sheer ordinariness of the day—would restore the equilibrium between them. He had hardly stopped to say good-bye to her or gauge whether she might still be upset. Anyway, he had been late for work. But the real reason, of course: he had not wanted to slide back into another ugly confrontation.

  The first speed bump. When was that first jolt between them? It must have been so many years ago—maybe too long ago to be retrievable at this point.

  He did remember the sense of suddenly approaching a country, some distant dreamland that he had always wanted to visit but had never been allowed to. And he grew closer and closer and finally landed, and at first he was high just being there, the strangeness and wonder of that alone, being so close to such beauty and heat and light and sweet air. He was not himself there—he was giddy and intoxicated—and his euphoria had been just what she had wanted and needed. They filled each other. They had no sense of themselves as separate entities anymore, other than as bodies who desired and were desired.

  One night, he sat in her kitchen and she played Górecki for him and he watched as she sliced a nectarine for a pitcher of white sangria. Wearing only an old tank top, underwear, and an apron, she unfurled yet another story about Doug. “He actually made me chase him down a street and then locked me out of his apartment like it was some kind of game. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t that just warped?” She set a sliver of nectarine in her mouth.

  “It’s weird and warped.”

  She stopped chewing for a moment, and her eyes seemed to lose focus. “It keeps coming back to me, the fact that he’s gone and that it’s all over. I didn’t know I could feel this awful in my body about a person. My heart actually hurts. My spleen hurts. I swear. And my lungs and my spine. My throat.”

  He wanted to comfort her but also to rid her of this pain. To cure this and any other hardship that she did and would ever have to endure. He wanted to be the one who had done this for her. He rose and went to her. He lifted her hair and kissed the nape of her neck, the top of her bare right shoulder.

  This soul sickness flared up when he least expected it. But it may have become the thing against which they existed, unbeknownst to him, the thing against which they had to mobilize.

  Of course time and the shelf life of desire soon interfered. One day there was a pinch in his chest, barely detectable, when she gibed him for calling a movie a “film.” A ping when she suggested that he get rid of his old Chuck Taylors and pick up a pair of “big-boy shoes.”

  Soon after, a late-night dinner party at Sophie’s apartment, the second time he had met Sophie but his first introduction to their big but close group of friends, all couples. A photojournalist, a jewelry maker, a teacher in the Bronx, a hospice nurse. Each worked at something unique and noble. All had left academia by now and were thriving. They sat around the long table crowded with nearly empty plates and pots with crusted paella at the bottom, the remainders of eggplant and beet salads, bottles of crianza and reserva. The photojournalist, a handsome biracial guy with hair to his stomach, turned to Lovell and said, “So, Lovell, was it? You’re still in school? Hannah said you’re into weather?”

  “Actually, climate patterns and storms. Hurricanes mostly. I’m working toward my PhD in atmospheric sciences. At MIT.”

  “Like I said.” The guy half smiled. “Hey, you have a favorite storm? One that gets you off when you even think about it?”

  He may have been mocking him, but Lovell did not care. It was theoretically an interesting question. “Lately I’ve been reading up on the Gulf Coast. Coastal Florida, Louisiana, New Orleans. The location of the Mississippi and the warm waters of the Gulf make it a target. Hurricane Betsy, back in ’sixty-five, just clobbered the coast. They called it Billion Dollar Betsy—it was the first hurricane to cause a billion dollars’ worth of damage. It was so bad they took the name Betsy off the list of rotating names for storms. What makes it interesting is that it was really erratic and intense and no one could predict when it would hit, so nobody was prepared. In my department, a group of us are going to try to develop better predictive models, completely new ways to quickly compile the data as it’s coming in from other countries.”

  “This isn’t lecture hall,” Hannah groaned, reaching for a joint that was, Lovell now saw, traveling around the room.

  Sophie’s boyfriend added, laughing, “Isn’t Hurricane Betsy’s some strip club down in Hyannis?”

  Chapter 7

  Nine days after Hannah’s disappearance, Duncan called to tell Lovell that her wallet had been found on Carson. “No cash or credit cards, but her license was there,” the detective said. “We’ve got a team on their way. I’d go ahead and cancel her credit cards.”

  Lovell dropped the briefcase he was holding on the kitchen floor. “Will do.” He tried to make sense of it. She had lost her bracelet. Someone had taken her money. Someone had robbed her? But she was safe—she had to be, because the alternative? There was no alternative. Of course she was safe. Maybe she took the money and credit cards herself, left her license, decided to, what, assume another identity? He had a hard time picturing it. Still, there had to be some reason behind all of this.

  Lovell decided to call Sophie. She was the last person Hannah had spoken to from home on the morning of her disappearance, according to the record on their phone.

  A few days before Hannah had disappeared, there was talk of meeting up with Sophie and her husband that weekend, a barbed joke about Lovell being weirdly awkward in her presence. He could not help that Sophie intimidated him. “You have a crush on her,” Hannah had said. “Yes, that’s exactly it. I’ve always had a thing for your old college roommate,” he tried, but she turned up her nose, maybe thinking, You would never have a chance with her.

  Crush—the word itself was embarrassing and juvenile. He would have called it something else. He had, he admitted, experienced a sort of longing in Sophie’s presence. After all, she was an attractive French woman, this working mother who drank grappa with abandon and went rock climbing and could speak eloquently about everything from affirmative action to national health. But he had never fantasized about her. He had never harbored hope or delusions that anything would ever happen between them.

  Lovell had not talked to her since just after Hannah’s disappearance, when she had come to the house with a yellow box of petits fours, a tiny candy butterfly perched on each. When Sophie answered now, he stumbled over his words. “I wondered if you would mind—I have a couple questions about a couple things. It’s nothing terrible, I mean, it’s all been terrible, of course.” He apologized. He was only proving Hannah’s theory.

  “How are the children?”

  “They’re all right. They’re d
oing the best they can. Some days are tougher than others, of course. I’m trying to be a good dad for them,” Lovell said. He waited for her to ask about him. “At any rate, I did have a question for you. And maybe you already told the detectives . . . ?”

  “Yes?”

  “How did Hannah sound to you when you talked to her on the phone that morning?”

  “The detective did ask me this.”

  “Well, did she—” he began, “did she tell you that we had an argument the night before?”

  “She asked me about my work, if I’m remembering correctly. She asked me exactly what I was working on right then.”

  “Things have been strained,” he admitted. “We’ve been having a tough time for a while.”

  “She did tell me about your fight,” Sophie said.

  “She did?” He wondered why this surprised him. “I’d been doing what I could to make it better. I think we both were. But she had forgotten to pay a bill.” Of course this was the wrong approach. He would never convince Sophie of his logic. “I was hoping we might try counseling.” What did he really hope to gain from her? Sympathy? An ally?

  She did not respond.

  “Hannah adores you,” he said, maybe to gain whatever small amount of favor he could.

  “And I adore her. If it makes you feel any better, she knew that you were trying to work on the marriage. She thought that you were—you are a good and decent person.”

  The words stung him. She might have at least said “husband” or even “man.” “Her wallet was just found on the same beach where her bracelet turned up. That beach in South Boston.”

  “Oh. I guess that’s good? Any news is better than no news?”

  “She didn’t tell you she was going there, did she?” Of course she did not. He assumed that the police would have informed him if she did.

  “No, but I’m not surprised she went. We sometimes went when we were at BU. You know that beach had meaning for her.”

  “Meaning?”