by Heidi Pitlor
“It was where Doug proposed.”
“It was?” Lovell’s face drained. Had he never asked Hannah about the proposal itself? Long ago, he had asked plenty of questions about Doug—whether they still spoke, whether he’d ever gotten reengaged or married, the sort of questions, Lovell now thought, that a jealous boyfriend might ask. “I should let you go,” he said.
“Yes, my daughter just came in,” Sophie said. “Please call me if you or the kids need anything. Even just a visit.”
He hung up and ran his hands through his hair. Doug Bowen had proposed at Carson Beach. Hannah had decided to drive there for whatever reason. Maybe Doug had been in Boston that day. Did he still live in Massachusetts? Lovell did not think Hannah had spoken to Doug in years, but he could not be sure.
On his computer, Lovell found a Doug Bowen living in Santa Cruz, now the manager of Shadow Noize, a small, independent record label that specialized in young rap artists in the area. It did not appear that Doug had returned to Boston since college, at least to live. He had a son, if not a wife, and a bulldog named Rex, who was shown seated on a small throne, wearing black sunglasses studded with jewels. Lovell shook his head as he scrolled down the screen.
Long ago, Hannah had shown Lovell some photographs of her and Doug standing by his surfboard on a beach, two beautiful kids clearly in love. He was tall and fit, broad through the shoulders, his chest hairless. He had fierce hazel eyes and shiny black hair, a mustache that drooped down beside his lips.
In one shot, they stood holding a surfboard between them, each with one hand, Hannah in a mustard-yellow bikini and floppy woven hat, sun-kissed and laughing, as if in an ad for beer or condoms. In the other, she had her tongue stuck in his ear as he presented his middle finger to the camera. “Charming,” Lovell had said when he saw it. She had giggled and set the photos aside.
Doug was recognizable, at least somewhat, in the pictures of him online. He was still handsome, if ridiculous-looking at his age with a shaved head and thick-framed hipster glasses, his graying goatee, a small silver barbell through his right eyebrow. In another photo, he stood beside a young black rapper who smiled a mouthful of gold teeth.
THAT NIGHT, LOVELL told the kids about the wallet while they sat over dinner at McDonald’s in the next town.
“What does it mean?” Ethan asked.
“I’m not sure,” Lovell said.
“She got robbed,” Janine said. “It’s obvious.”
“We don’t know that,” Lovell said. “This isn’t some crime show or whodunit novel. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my work, it’s that the truth is more complicated than it usually looks. All kinds of factors can come into play. Predicting something doesn’t mean just jumping to the most obvious conclusion. It’s always more nuanced than that.”
“What the hell else would have happened?” Janine asked. “What, you think she just threw away her money and credit cards or something?”
“I wasn’t saying that.” Although maybe he was.
“Then what were you saying?” Ethan asked, chewing his straw. Their food had sat unwrapped and untouched on its plastic tray since they had brought it to the table.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to say anymore.” He sighed, overcome. Here they sat in a booth at McDonald’s, speculating about what had happened to Tu.
“She was sad and she drove into Boston and then her bracelet fell off and she got robbed and now we have no fucking idea where she is. That’s what you’re supposed to think, Dad.”
An older couple seated side by side at the next table stared at them. They did nothing to hide the fact that they were eavesdropping. Both had gray curls that framed their faces. The man had round, thick glasses.
“Keep it down,” Lovell finally said.
“I’m not yelling.”
“Then watch your mouth.”
Janine rolled her eyes.
“Why was she sad?” Ethan asked.
Lovell folded a napkin and set it on the tray. “She just was. How was school for you guys today?”
“She was sad because Dad got really pissed at her because he wanted her to earn more money but she didn’t know how,” Janine said. She finally went for her McNuggets and yanked the lid off the container of sweet and sour. She dunked a fried oval into the hot-pink sauce.
Maybe it was, in fact, that simple. Maybe in the end, the differences between him and Hannah had stemmed only from economics. He himself had had to work his way through high school and college and had amassed more student loans than he might ever be able to repay, even with his grants and scholarships. He was used to the relentless grind of paying for life. He’d not had the twenty-some years with hardly any restrictions. He and Hannah had such different lives before they met each other. They were thoroughly different people. Had she ever had to work for anything before he met her?
Of course Lovell himself had reaped the benefits of her funding. He had enjoyed three or four years of constant dining out and shopping binges and theater and vacations to the Caribbean and Switzerland, and Tunisia for their honeymoon, hypnotizing, otherworldly Tunis.
Their first night they’d sat on the roof of their hotel overlooking the souk. They sipped sugary mint tea as the call to prayer filled the city. They watched two men haggle over a piece of silk and tried to predict each other’s future and the future of everyone they could think of—Lovell’s parents, his brother, Hannah’s sister, Sophie, her parents, even Doug, despite Lovell’s obvious discomfort with that subject matter on their honeymoon.
Lovell decided to just take his and Ethan’s burgers and fries home for later, and the three soon got up to leave. The couple at the next table turned their heads to watch them pass.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Janine said as they approached a boy holding He-Man toys and smashing them together. “Skeletor? Beast Man? Look at those saggy loincloths. What kind of violent sicko guy decided to force these on little kids?”
“Keep walking,” Lovell said. The couple could still hear them.
“I liked He-Man,” Ethan said. “It was the secret identity of this prince, and Teela, a princess, she thought he was a total wimp and that she had to do all the work because she didn’t know that he was actually He-Man.”
“Sounds like you and Mom,” Janine said.
“Move it,” Lovell snapped.
“Take it easy,” Janine said.
The couple took it all in. The man adjusted his glasses.
“Now, please. Let’s go,” Lovell said.
Chapter 8
It occurred to Hannah that Lovell must have been her first male friend who did not immediately try for more. When she told him this a month or so later, after one too many martinis at the Oak Bar, he replied, “Oh.” He appeared relieved but then confused. “Should I apologize for not making a move?”
She smiled. “Not at all.”
They began to meet at a greenhouse on Beacon Street, where sprays hissed with warm steam. Tropical plants stretched from each corner and hung from the low ceiling. A small café with just three tables was nestled in the corner. Lovell brought homework and she books of poetry, and they read and talked over tomato and mozzarella panini and cups of cappuccino. She told him about her father, originally from Ireland, a sailboat manufacturer who could be at once boisterous and aloof, her mother who had modeled as a child and had recently retired as an agent for child models. Lovell listened to everything with genuine interest. He asked to hear more about the sailboats and her mother, those child models. What was that like for a kid? Did you ever want to do that yourself? He looked relieved when she shook her head. Hannah eventually told him about her engagement to Doug Bowen, their summers at his parents’ house at the beach outside Santa Cruz, their road trips up to Victoria and camping in Glacier, their plans to live in San Francisco after graduation and have four kids and work for Doug’s uncle, who ran a liberal independent press in Oakland—and how naive she had been in the end. She told him that Doug had been seen a
t a Del Fuegos show with his hand down some girl’s leather shorts and later in the ladies’ room with some other girl who had a dog collar around her neck. Other friends came forward to Hannah with other stories, and Doug hardly tried to deny any of what he had done. “I’m so sorry, Han. I really am. But I guess it’s better that you find out now than after we’re married, right?” She twisted off her engagement ring and pitched it at his face.
Lovell said, “If I ever meet him, I’ll pummel his ass. Seriously, I’ll flatten him if you want.”
“You get in a lot of fights?”
“Not really,” he said. “I guess I’ve never even thrown a punch. Maybe I could inflict pain in some other way. Do you know anything about voodoo?” He appeared to be only partly joking.
“He’s probably impervious to voodoo.” She sighed. Doug was at once impervious and wide open to nearly everything in the world. His wonder, his infallibility and childlike mischief, whether in their poetry seminar or her dorm room, or on the T late at night or the Esplanade at sunrise, his insisting on reading from Howl while standing on a table before the students, his giving her a piggyback ride while singing “Sugar Magnolia” along the bank of the Charles—all of it was irresistible and all of it was now gone.
She and Doug used to walk by this greenhouse regularly. His apartment was a block from it, and she once suggested they stop in for a mocha. “I’ve got a better idea,” he said, sliding his arm through hers and leading her past the café and toward his place. He whispered, “Come catch me,” and moved ahead of her, walking fast and then running to his apartment building, where he let the door close behind him. She raced after him, but the building was locked and he had disappeared inside. When she rang his apartment, he did not answer. “Asshole,” she said to herself, laughing. She buzzed a few other apartments until a weary-sounding woman answered. Hannah said, “I’m so sorry, but I’m here to see a friend and it seems that their buzzer might be broken.” The sound of the lock releasing, the four floors of dim, creaking stairs, the pounding on Doug’s door until he opened it wearing nothing but a pair of Scooby-Doo boxers, a container of ice cream in one hand. “Hannah Banana Munroe!” he said. “What brings you to this neighborhood?”
“You’re an idiot,” she said.
“A cute idiot.”
“A cute jerk. Some poor woman in your building who sounded like she was sleeping had to buzz me in.”
He shrugged and looked at her. “You’ve got something in your hair.” He reached forward and pulled off a leaf. “You know what? I think I might love you. No, I know I do.”
It was so unlike him to say this. Everything else fell away.
HANNAH THOUGHT OFTEN now about her time with Lovell in the greenhouse, the comfort of sitting across from a person with whom you could be and say anything at all. The relief of talking to a grown-up instead of a child. She was so grateful for Lovell Hall. She could come back to life now. He was a gift to her, a real ally. Those afternoons may have been their most romantic, when they were friends, before they even kissed, long before they spoke the word “love.”
As she started up the car outside Ethan’s school, she decided that Lovell was a decent enough person—imperfect, of course, prone to preoccupation, occasionally less than empathetic, socially clumsy. He only wanted his wife to love him.
But he nearly went at her last night. He had come close, closer than he ever had before. She had seen it, the itch just beneath his skin. A part of her could hardly blame him. She had brushed it away and made light of it in her mind later, but in the moment, she had shrunk from him, she remembered. She had been panic-stricken. And to think how safe and comfortable she had felt with him once upon a time in that greenhouse.
Chapter 9
Lovell had been planning to attend a conference in Los Angeles since long before Hannah’s disappearance, but now that it approached, he figured he should bow out. Over the phone, his mother said, “You should go, even if it’s just for a day or two. You’ve been prepping for that intensity seminar for how long?”
“All year. And last year too.” The seminar would have been what he hoped was his most persuasive statement yet that as global warming intensified, so did dangerous storms. A correlation between power dissipation and sea surface temperatures was at best difficult to prove. Deterministic factors (greenhouse gases, changing natural climate cycles) and stochastic factors—chance—made weather events almost always appear random. Still, it was not so difficult to prove the probability of increased hurricane intensity in the coming years at least, owing to a spike in available energy from higher tropical SSTs. Of course the goal was to convince people that global warming had X effect on the earth—that if humans didn’t commit to reducing greenhouse gases by X percent today, X cities would be destroyed, X houses would be torn apart, X people killed. Lovell had developed a new power index that could—within a reasonable margin of error—become the first tool to help quantify these things. There were few highs for him like the high of making what was assumed to be unknowable and impossible to predict considerably less so.
“You have your cell phone,” his mother said. “Give the detective our number and we’ll call you the minute we hear anything. You can’t put your career in jeopardy, Lovell.”
He protested—he would be across the country. “It’s too far. It wouldn’t be right. This would be the definition of leaving you and the kids in the lurch.” Hannah too, wherever she was.
“Go. You have to.”
In the end he changed his flight by a day so that he would be gone for only two, typed up for his mother a list of where the kids needed to be and when, and set out to call Detective Duncan. Lovell stood before the phone and considered what he was about to say: that he had chosen to leave his children and his missing wife—whose wallet had just been found, who was either walking around in Southie with no money or ID or . . . or he did not want to think of what else—in favor of his work. He set the receiver down without making the call.
HE WATCHED THE country pass beneath him on the plane: Buffalo, Cleveland, the browned mosaic of land in Iowa, while the tiny icon of an airplane inched across the screen on the back of the seat before him. The man seated next to him listened to music turned up loud in his headphones, Duke Ellington, Lovell thought—Blues in Orbit, was it? One of his father’s favorites. He had played it the first time Lovell brought Hannah home to meet them. “Jazz orchestra,” Jim Hall had declared as he went to find a certain Ellington CD, “is the only m-music that can help me unwind. There are proven c-c-correlations between a love of jazz and intelligence, a level of sophistication, that sort of thing. Did you know that Lovell used to be able to play parts of this on the p-piano when he was a kid? He was so good at the piano—I never understood when he started on the b-b-banjo later.” Lovell had shrugged, embarrassed by his stuttering, usually reticent father’s attempts to impress Hannah. As Jim went on, Lovell was suddenly aware of the empty walls, the bare floor, the total lack of warmth or personality around them; his parents’ matching plaid love seats, which had been scratched and torn by Walter, their hairless cat; the way they nattered on angrily about the condo board in their building; Hannah’s hidden smile when his mother set a bowl of pea soup with an obscenely large ham hock at the center before her.
Soon after, he would wheel their suitcases onto a ferry and watch seagulls dip toward them beside the boat; he would for the first time step foot on Martha’s Vineyard and take note of the wash of light reflected nearly everywhere from the ocean, the bustling, happy towns, the number of bicyclists riding alongside the cars; he would walk down a brick path lined with wildflowers toward her parents’ seaside home, trying not to gawk at the vaulted wood-beam ceilings, the wall of glass that overlooked crowded Edgartown Harbor from the living room, the person—a cook? a servant?—who set plates of buttered lobster tail and pomegranate crab salad in front of them for lunch.
The man beside Lovell turned up the volume. Yes, it was Ellington.
Later, Hannah a
dmitted that she had never much liked jazz. “It makes me physically uncomfortable,” she said, and he had chided her for summarily dismissing a genre of music. “Pardon me for having an opinion,” she had said. Before then, she had been the one to judge him.
THE CONFERENCE CENTER, a drafty hall bright with fluorescent lighting, smelled of insect repellent and glue. A hum of beeps and static and chatter filled the place. Lovell met up with colleagues who attended each year, and as always, they tried not to broach what they were about to discuss in detail for the next several days, but inevitably their talk about their kids and houses—as well as tentative questions about how he was holding up in the face of Hannah’s disappearance—drifted to time constants and interglacials, the record heat that year, the snowfall in South Africa.
He headed across the hall to a talk about El Niño. Thirty or so people were getting settled in their seats, thirty researchers, thirty people concerned about recent anomalies in the central equatorial Pacific, where the waters ran warmer.
In the seminar room, the lights dimmed and a map of the equatorial Pacific appeared on the large white screen at the front. The presenter began to speak, and he flicked to the next map, air-flow patterns over the western Pacific, a beautiful swirl of pressure, temperature and rainfall rendered in a blotted rainbow of colors, and the next, the Atlantic, much smaller and so less capable of oscillation.
Lovell thought of Hannah’s going to Carson Beach. If Lovell pictured it—if he tried to imagine that morning through her eyes, if he imagined her replaying the things that he had said to her, if he thought about her watching the kids head off for school and her facing the empty house for those few hours before she was due at the flower store, if he tried to inhabit what her thoughts might have been—then a drive to this place from her past was not implausible.
The presentation turned to the thermocline, the precise place where warm surface water met cooler, deeper water, and the changing interplay between the two.