The Daylight Marriage

by Heidi Pitlor

  She could, if nothing else, go for a drive. Maybe Carson Beach for a quick walk. She had not been in so long—since she had gotten engaged to Doug. Was that the last time? She had been molecularly a different person, giddy and hopeful. “I have the craziest idea,” he had said. “Let’s get married.”

  “What?” she said. They were twenty-one. “We’re too young.”

  “You want to wait until we’re too old?”

  She nearly jumped up and yelled to the heavens, but she knew better. “Where’s my ring?”

  He glanced around and reached for a string of dried seaweed on the sand. “I’ll make you one,” he said, trying to twist the thing into a circle, but the seaweed was too dry and broke in half. Finally he knelt down on the sand and leaned his head against her legs, not saying a thing. He reached for her hand and set the piece of seaweed in her palm.

  Was this even a bona fide proposal? “Doug?”

  He looked up at her with those goddamned eyes that turned her to soup. His reckless impulsivity, his sudden chivalry with pretty girls, his tendency to forget bills—he would outgrow all of that. Everyone did at some point.

  “Let’s do it,” she said.

  Chapter 11

  When Lovell returned Bob Duncan’s call, the man spoke somberly. “You should have told us you were leaving the state.”

  “‘Leaving the state?’”

  “When are you coming back?”

  Lovell explained that he would return the next afternoon. “As soon as my plane lands, as soon as I can, I’ll get in my car and drive directly to the station. Can you tell me what’s going on there?”

  “To be honest, I’d rather talk to you in person.” The man sneezed into the phone, and Lovell jolted.

  “I’m sorry,” Lovell said before he hung up. “I’m sorry I didn’t let you know where I was.”

  “It was a strange decision,” Duncan said. “At any rate, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  The traffic on the drive to the airport in San Francisco, the wait at the gate, the delay before the plane took off, the flight itself, the wait to get off the plane while the other passengers reached for their overhead baggage and zipped up their jackets and cleaned off their seats and wriggled their way down the narrow aisle—everything moved with infuriating sluggishness in front of him.

  On the drive out of Boston, he thought of one of their earliest arguments, the morning after a party at her parents’ house on the Vineyard. He had sneaked into her bedroom before the sun rose. He watched her as she slept tucked into herself, her rosy mouth open as she breathed. The bed was positioned alongside a bay window that looked out over the Atlantic, glittering with the waning moonlight. After she woke, she sat up in bed and gave him a kiss on his arm. She began to discuss her family’s behavior the previous night: her mother’s tendency to subtly compete with her sister; her name-dropping cousin who worked in a Manhattan law firm; her sister’s resentment of their father, who showed no interest in Leah’s academic successes. Lovell tried to hide a yawn and began to gently wrestle Hannah back to bed, but she resisted. “Did you notice any of that?” she asked. “Not really,” he admitted. “Doesn’t it interest you at all?” she said.

  Lovell, his hand around her naked thigh, finally said, “I don’t know. I guess all families are weird. Oh, and you should have prepared me for your father’s boat, which, by the way, is really a yacht. You could fund a nation with that thing.”

  She pulled away. “You can’t stand this, just sitting here and talking. You are happier screwing or just sitting across from me, silent, than actually engaging in any conversation.” She may have had a point; he loved little more than lounging on his couch with her, both of them lost in a book or a movie. “Sue me for just loving to be with you,” he finally said. And what could she say to that?

  A thought landed on him like a tentative moth: maybe they should never have gotten married.

  But then another thought: Tunisia. It stood behind them like a lighthouse in a forest. Nothing like what a honeymoon should be. No starry-eyed murmurings while lying in bed together. No marathon sessions of lovemaking, just a moment of rescue, or near heroism, and the grateful look on her face, the belief that they had absolutely done the right thing in coming together.

  The parking lot at the police station was almost full, and Lovell sped past the other cars, drumming the heel of his palm against the steering wheel. He finally found a spot on the street adjacent to the station and hurried inside.

  Bob Duncan’s office door was closed, so Lovell knocked. As he waited, he began to wonder why he had been so anxious to get here. What news—what good news—could there be at this point?

  Duncan pulled open the door and led him into the office. “I’ll get right to it. The guys found fingernail marks on a pier at Carson.”

  “Fingernail marks? Do you know they’re even hers?” This was Hannah they were talking about. Tu. This was his wife.

  “I want you to think back hard now and make sure there’s nothing you might have forgotten to tell me. No store she once went to near Carson, no old friend who’d just moved there. Anything at all you can think of that might help us here?” he asked. “Oh, and we got the match this morning. So yes, the fingernail marks were hers.”

  “But—oh.” Lovell took a seat. She could have been trying to etch her initials into the pier. It was just the sort of thing she would do.

  “You can’t think of anything?” Duncan said, incredulous. “Why do you think she went all the way into Boston when she had to go to work that morning?”

  “Could she have been carjacked or kidnapped or something?”

  “We don’t know yet. We haven’t found her car. But she did make that phone call to the girl at the flower store. The call was traced to Boston. The girl said Hannah didn’t sound strange or anything, that she was convincing when she said that your daughter was home sick. My guess is that Hannah drove in and that no one took her to Boston.”

  “Ok.”

  “But if there was some reason for her to go there, if there’s even the smallest thing you can think of—and it might seem like nothing to you—we need anything we can get at this point. Somewhere she meant to be going, someone who might have seen her.”

  “I don’t have a clue about why she would have gone there specifically,” Lovell said. He assumed that by now Duncan knew about Doug Bowen and his proposal on Carson Beach. Lovell considered the possibility that Duncan already knew about the fight the evening before, that Janine or someone else, maybe Sophie, had told him. And that the man was testing him right now. Duncan had wanted to get him here in person, to give him the news about the fingernail marks so that he could see the reaction on Lovell’s face. Lovell had no choice but to tell him everything. His stomach lurched as he began.

  “OK, hold on,” Duncan said. “Have you told anyone else about this yet?”

  “No,” Lovell said. “I should have. I knew it wouldn’t look good, that it, I mean, it might be taken a certain way, but now that all this is happening, I guess I figured she’d be back now and that it wouldn’t matter so much. I could take a lie-detector test.”

  “They’re nightmares in court. Judges don’t like them. But wait—slow down. Let me ask you some things. Did you threaten her?” Duncan asked. “Did it get physical?”

  “I didn’t hit her or anything.”

  “OK. Any reason she would have felt unsafe?”

  “Well, infinitely pissed off at me. It wasn’t my best night,” he said. “But I don’t think, I mean, probably not unsafe.” Maybe Duncan had not, in fact, known.

  “You ever hit her? You ever push her around or anything else like that? Get a little too rough?”

  “No,” Lovell said, relieved to be able to answer this question clearly.

  “She ever disappear before?”

  “Once, just for the night,” Lovell explained, but he told the detective that she had returned early the next morning.

  And finally: “You think she was depressed?�
��

  “Possibly.”

  “All right. These are standard questions that I have to ask.” The detective cleared his throat. “Could she have been suicidal?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Lovell said. “I mean, I guess I can’t say for sure. She wasn’t happy.”

  “Did she ever talk about hurting herself?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sometimes she took Sominex to help her sleep. A year ago, she couldn’t sleep for weeks, and one night she took maybe four or five.”

  “You’d need to take more than that to do any harm.”

  “That last night she was miserable.” Lovell wrapped one hand around his other. “But I think she just, that she couldn’t, you know, stand me.”

  “All right,” Duncan said.

  “All right?”

  That was it? The detective began walking him toward the door. “I’ll be in touch when I hear anything more.”

  Lovell wanted to ask the man what he thought now. What was his opinion of Lovell now? Had he gained anything from being honest? Even if it was a little too late in the game? Duncan just said good-bye, took a step back into his office, and closed his door.

  Lovell made his way outside and back to his car. The kids were at home, waiting for him. Apparently, Janine had protested his staying away an extra night, which was understandable.

  There was no good reason to tell them about the fingernail marks. It was the sort of news that implied more than it told, and it would upset them. It would scare them. Janine’s mind would rush to horrible places. If they read about it in the newspaper or saw it on TV, then he would talk it over with them. He would remind them that they didn’t have the full picture yet, that they should hold out hope until they had every piece of information they could get. They owed Hannah this much.

  As he drove home, he thought more about this latest news. She was angry at him; she was angry at herself. She sat there on the beach, raging at him and, without even noticing that she was doing so, scratching deep marks into the wood. It was not all that far fetched. The things he had said to her that night. She must have been livid.

  Chapter 12

  Hannah grabbed her purse and locked the door behind her. Autumn pollen caked the windshield of the car. She turned on the wipers and the wiper fluid. She backed her car out toward the street and narrowly missed the milk truck. The driver blasted her horn and gave Hannah the finger. Shaken, Hannah inched down the street, her foot on the brake as she approached the stop sign at the corner of the Sullivans’ property and then the overgrown willow that spilled toward the street and brushed her windshield as she passed. She stopped beneath the tree and watched the wipers scrape the thick dust back and forth in a choppy rhythm and ensnarl one of the wispy branches, tearing it from the tree. She shifted to park, switched off the wipers, stepped out of the car, and yanked at the branch now braided around the torn rubber blade. She removed the blade from its rusted frame and picked at the gnarled stem that wove taut around it. She glanced over at the weeping willow, a mass of downward movement. It was a gorgeous tree. She wound the branch into a loose reel and set it on her backseat. Maybe she could replant part of it later in her backyard.

  She drove toward town, past the Victorians with their broad porches and window boxes (“Mums, mums, and more mums,” she often complained), the rhododendrons bunched in front, the brick library, a group of preschoolers clutching a red rope and toddling down the sidewalk as they did each day. They looked at their feet, the sky, the cars—these sweet, jittery little people. She rarely, if ever, saw preschoolers or toddlers anymore. She counted the years since Ethan had been a toddler: five, almost six. Hannah had married and had her children, and this time now was shaped only by the maintenance of those things that had come before.

  Ten years ago, when she and Lovell had been visiting her parents, she had surprised him with cross-country skiing on the beach during a blizzard. She had filled a thermos with bourbon. She had blindfolded him—and he protested and squirmed. He could hardly sit still during the short drive to Lambert’s Cove. “I’ve never liked surprises,” he griped, and she said, “Who doesn’t like surprises?” She refused to take off his blindfold until she had walked him up the snowy dune and onto the untouched beach, now a rumpled expanse of white. When she finally loosened the knot of the bandanna behind his head, he blinked at all that was around them, and said, “What is this?”

  She gestured beside them to the skis and poles that she had dragged along.

  “No. It’s minus twenty degrees, and these winds are blowing vertically.” The surf spat up onto the snow.

  “Jesus, live a little,” she said.

  “All right, all right.” He pulled the zipper on his winter jacket up to his chin. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You can be such an old man.” What had once been comforting had become restrictive, his unwavering logic and good sense. She tried to articulate this to him, to talk above the din of the wind and waves, her boots dug into a bowl of snow, to define this shrinking air inside her as a problem for both of them, but the shrillness and banality of her own loud words rang in her ears: I want more. I want. I want. Maybe she should no longer expect spontaneity. Was it unseemly at her age, a woman with a child and a husband and a home in a nice suburb, to try to get her husband drunk on Jim Beam and fuck him by the ocean in the middle of winter? “I sound like a shrew,” she said at last.

  He pressed his mouth against her ear so that he would be heard. “Sometimes I can’t tell whether you are arguing with me or with yourself.” He tried to rekindle her mood. “Come on, let’s just do this.” They got their boots and skis on, their scarves wound tight. They glided a length of the beach, up and down the gradual slopes. She maintained a wide lead at first, but then he caught up and they skied side by side for a while. “This is nice,” he called to her.

  When the beach grew narrower, she motioned for them to stop and she collapsed through a crunchy layer of snow. She lifted the thermos of liquor from her backpack and poured him a shot. She watched him pinch his eyes shut as he made himself down the bourbon in two pained gulps. She poured another small cupful, and they sat on the beach, huddled together in the icy air, and kissed gently for a moment, he apologetically, she dutifully. “I’m glad you got me out here,” he tried, and she nodded, if nothing else appreciative of his lie.

  She was meant to exude calmness and control and, more than anything, stasis. She was meant to react to everyone else in a predictable way, never to provoke, never to incite. Women pretended that everything had changed over the years. Hannah thought of her mother. Did she ever have these sorts of thoughts? Lydia Munroe had little tolerance for self-questioning and indecision. She had set up the life she had wanted, and that was that. She had a clear image of the women she expected her daughters to become: emotionally strong, sufficiently pious, attractive women who were self-possessed and in control of every aspect of their days. Each night she timed the girls when they brushed their teeth (five minutes according to an egg timer kept on a shelf above the toilet) and took baths (no less than thirty minutes). “She was this walking contradiction in her silk paisley shift with her hair in a neat bun on top of her head,” Hannah told Lovell soon after their engagement. They had met Leah for dinner in Chinatown and sat in a booth over green tea and Yu Shiang shrimp. “She’d hold court from the head of the kitchen table. Remember?” she asked Leah. “She’d wave her paperback copy of The Feminine Mystique in one hand and a Virginia Slim in the other. And then she went to church each Sunday.” Rennie, the housekeeper, cooked dinner most nights, but Lydia always chose the menu.

  Lydia demonstrated to the girls the privileges that came from stealthily but firmly maintaining household control. She taught them to simultaneously project fragility and strength, accessibility and mystery. She showed them how to walk a runway: head up, shoulders back, hands planted on hips. She taught them the various voices that a girl must use: the restaurant voice (“gentle but au
dible”); the department store and bank voice (“similar to your restaurant voice, but with more presence”); and the dreaded voice to be used in the presence of boys (“Quiet, with a hint of bewilderment. But at the same time, assurance—assurance is everything. Assurance, mystery, even danger”). Hannah and Leah had snickered across the booth from each other at this last word.

  When Hannah was seven or eight, Lydia coaxed her to drop a live lobster into an iron pot full of boiling water, despite her abject refusal. “Boys love a girl with some savagery, but not too much. Never too much,” she said. “Now, come on. It’s your father’s birthday and he is waiting for his dinner.”

  Leah set down her tea. “Dad, on the other hand, is the most harmless, obedient man you’ll meet,” she said, reaching for more rice.

  “He’s got his opinions,” Hannah said.

  “Maybe. Still, Mom thought that the woman always had to wear the pants. I guess she was ahead of her time in some ways.”

  “Well, she worried for us,” Hannah said. “She still does.” She turned to Lovell. “I think she is secretly terrified that the bottom will fall out. Don’t forget that her own mother had two husbands leave her. Mom’s got this secret fear that if you don’t control your life, if you don’t control your man, he will eventually destroy you.”

  Leah said, “We love to analyze our mother.”

  “Ah,” he said. He moved his eyes from one face to the other, probably confused by this family that was so different from his own.

  Hannah drove on past the stark white church, the small ranch houses farther apart, the trees that split the sunlight, those trees that made the town seem rural and tucked in. Insular. The other week, she had half-jokingly suggested to Lovell that they pick up and move to Boston or even New York, or why not another country, and he had said, “Sure, the kids would love that—leaving their schools and all their friends. Mass Environmental too, right?”