The Daylight Marriage

by Heidi Pitlor

  She began to chew the edge of her thumbnail.

  “Tell me why you really came here today.”

  She took a seat on the sand and draped her hands over her knees. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

  The grandfather and the boy had finished their sand castle.

  She would go home now. After the dentist, she would pull the car into her driveway and herd the kids inside. Dinner, homework, Lovell’s always-overdue return home, and later on she would follow him as he lumbered upstairs and into their bedroom, and she would change into an old T-shirt, and by the time she took her place on the left half of the mattress, his breathing would have slowed and the snoring would start up, quietly at first, and there she would find herself, alone, waiting for sleep to come as she did each night. She would look up through the window at this overcast sky, this same sky that she sat beneath now, and she would wonder what might have happened if she had stayed just a few more minutes on that beach.

  Chapter 27

  The next day, Hannah’s sister and parents, as well as Lovell’s mother, came to the house again. Joanne set out a tub of chocolate rugelach and a small barrel of pistachios from Costco. Hannah’s mother unwrapped a wedge of cheddar and placed it beside a fan of paper-thin crackers that she had arranged across a plate. “I brought something for Ethan,” she said, pulling a copy of The Two Towers from her purse.

  They took turns searching the surrounding towns for Janine, waiting by the phone, and trying to make small talk. Ethan came and went nervously from his bedroom. Lovell thought to do an Internet search for James Trobec and those women. He thought to do a search for Detective Ronson and try to find out what other cases he had handled and how they had gotten solved, but Lovell stopped himself before turning on his computer. It would be better to avoid any information with the potential to be emotionally destabilizing right now. First he had to find Janine.

  Lovell noted that no one touched any of the food, and finally he walked the plate and the tub of rugelach around to each of them. “We’ve got to eat,” he said sadly to Donovan.

  Late in the afternoon, the Munroes left, and shortly after, so did Lovell’s mother, telling him to be in touch and contact them as soon as he heard anything. On the way, she squeezed his arm out so tightly that he flinched.

  THAT EVENING, LOVELL sat by himself in the kitchen, a plow groaning down the street outside. It was a relief, if a small relief, to finally be alone. He no longer had to tiptoe around, aware of his every word and expression in the face of Hannah’s family. He could breathe. He could panic.

  He understood that all day he had kept control of a small burn inside him. But it had grown and spread despite his best efforts. It had filled his whole body and was impossible to contain any longer. Goddamn Janine for doing this to him. Did she ever give one thought to how her disappearance might affect him? Men were always the ones criticized for lacking empathy. What a fucking joke that was. He had allowed Janine to shave her head, if that was what made her feel better about everything; he had driven the kids, week after week, to a therapist a good forty-five minutes away; he had let Janine pal around with a couple of grown men instead of insisting that she make some friends her own age; hell, he had listened calmly while she announced her asinine idea to carry their child. Plenty of fathers—and mothers—would not have been a fraction as accepting or supportive as he had been.

  Her viola lay next to her bow on the floor in the corner of the room, the black case nowhere to be seen. It had cost him over $1,400, and here it sat, tossed onto the floor like an old notebook. He had wanted to buy a used viola, but of course Hannah would not have it. Those secondhand instruments that they had seen in the store were “scratched and ugly and completely lacking artistry, you know?” she had said. “They all look like they came flying out of the same machine.”

  He reached down and picked up Janine’s hand-carved viola. He held it before him by the slim wooden neck. He tightened his grip around the strings and fingerboard. You think you know hardship? You think you know devastation and loss and total emotional abandonment—and hatred—you think you really know that? he could say to them. He could snap this thing in half without even trying. He could show her what true misery really looked like.

  He had thrown that perfume bottle on the bathroom floor and then he had crushed it again and again because he could no longer stand the image of Hannah’s disgusted face in the other room, the unbearable noise that her loathing drilled into his head. She could not even stand to look at him. When was the last time she had even looked at him? He had pounded his fist into one wall and another and smashed his foot into the door and the toilet and cabinet. He kicked the wall and smashed his fist into the door. He wanted it gone, her disgust, the sight of her back to him, the picture of her with Doug, her endless disappointment, Sophie, the fucking flower store, Leah, Lydia, the estate on the Vineyard, all of it gone. He marched back into the bedroom, and she accused him of being patronizing when he was really nothing but a “loser,” and he went toward her and kicked the bed frame and reached forward to punch her.

  The memory came to him from nowhere.

  Janine flashed by in the hallway, and he had gone to shut the door so she would not have to see any more, and then he had returned to Hannah, his fingers hot by his side. She held her arms tight around herself and made herself small. He slammed a fist against the heel of his other hand. She stared up at him, stunned.

  But he stopped himself. He had never hit her before. He had never hit anyone, and this person about to lift a fist to his wife, this man raging—this animal—was not him.

  Lovell had dropped his arm, and at last, for the briefest moment before they resumed hurling terrible words at each other, there had been quiet inside him.

  The bottle of perfume had not fallen on its own. He had come within one millimeter of destroying her. The plow outside continued to groan. A dog barked. Janine was out in that world somewhere.

  He was a pitiable, angry boy. He had been a terrible, hateful husband, a mediocre father.

  Chapter 28

  At nine the next morning, the doorbell rang. Two policeman stood behind Janine in the blinding sunlight.

  Lovell brought his hands to his mouth.

  “She was sleeping on the Boston Common.”

  “She was?”

  Janine stood there on the front stoop in her ratty gray sweatshirt and jeans, her face chapped, a small bruise next to her eye. Her hairline was irritated and pink. Her hands were covered in dirt. A line of icicles glistened from the side of the front porch’s overhang. She had slept outside in this brutal winter weather—he did not want to imagine what might have happened to her. Lovell reached for her. “Thank you,” he said to the men. “Do you need anything from me?”

  They shook their heads and turned to go.

  She stepped inside, walked down the front hall, and scanned the living room, taking in Ethan on the couch. She only shook her head and trudged upstairs.

  Lovell hurried up the stairs after her and pounded on her bedroom door.

  “I don’t want to talk,” she called.

  “You don’t have a choice, my dear,” he said. He pounded harder. The walls shook. “Open up this goddamned door, Janine.”

  “No.”

  “I swear, I will go get a hammer and I will knock this thing down if you don’t.”

  “Stop it, Dad. Just please cut it out,” she yelled. He thought he heard her begin to cry.

  “Janine, I mean it.” He pounded again on the door. He had to take her to the hospital and get her checked for frostbite and God knew what else. His heart beat in his throat. “You have to open this door.”

  “I’m scared,” she yelled back. “OK? I’m fucking scared of you right now.”

  He blinked fast.

  “Go away, all right?”

  He stood there, with no sense of what to do or say. Of course she was scared. “Sweetie,” he tried.

  “What? What the hell do you want?”


  “OK. All right. No more pounding.” He tucked his hands around his sides. He waited there, but she said nothing. “You’ve been gone for two days. We need to talk. It’s me here. It’s just Dad.” He thought he sounded better now. “I want to make sure that you’re all right.”

  “No more yelling? No hitting anything?”

  “No more,” he promised.

  Finally she pushed open the door and let him in. She walked toward the opposite corner of the room and he lowered himself onto her green beanbag chair. “Can you please tell me where exactly you’ve been?”

  “Those cops just told you.”

  “I mean why you went to Boston and what the hell you were doing there and why—why you slept overnight in a goddamned park?”

  “Stop being so mad. You said you’d try. You look like you’re about to do something to me.” Her voice had grown faint.

  “I’m not,” he said. He sighed. He let his body sink down into the beanbag chair. Hannah had once told him to use his words. “Instead of storming off, instead of throwing a book, why don’t you use your goddamned words, Lovell?” This had only made him significantly more angry. He looked at Janine, pacing back and forth beside her music stand. He noticed a small rash above her ear. He said, “Someday I hope your daughter runs away and you feel a fraction of what I feel right now.”

  “Do you want to know more or not?”

  “Yes. Keep going.”

  “Don’t be mad.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You will. You are.”

  He felt his forehead tense. He clenched his jaw. “I am doing the best I can.”

  “Fine. The other morning I was going to come home, but—” She lay down on her stomach across her bed, facing him. “Stephen and Jeff are moving to Montreal,” she said, as if this explained everything. She swiped her hand across her nose.

  “Oh?”

  “I did it. You know, I offered to, you know, help them.”

  He swallowed hard. Stephen might have told him about this part when Lovell went next door looking for her.

  “And they said no. They didn’t even take me seriously for one minute.”

  “Janine. Sweetie.” He nearly laughed with relief. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because it was fucking embarrassing, Dad. Could you be any thicker?”

  “It was embarrassing to be turned down by two gay men?”

  She began to weep.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Do you—” he began, “do you want to tell me what happened?”

  “Some old friend of theirs up in Montreal is going to carry the baby for them. She’s already pregnant. And now Jeff got a job up there and they’re going to sell their house because she wants to be a part of the baby’s life, and I guess they’re totally fine with that, even though I told them it was a fucking horrible idea. What if she changes her mind and wants to keep the baby—because she doesn’t have any other kids, you know?”

  Lovell tried to take it all in. “Maybe you can visit them up there?”

  “It won’t be the same. And I got an e-mail that said I didn’t make regionals. I’m going to quit viola.”

  He carefully set his hands on his knees. In five years, she would no longer be a teenager, and maybe, hopefully, these histrionics would subside. It was not soon enough. “I’m not sure what you want me to say right now.”

  “Definitely not that.”

  “Can you tell me why you went to Boston?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You mind expounding on that one?”

  “If you stop sounding like a dick.”

  He inhaled through his nose. He had no choice but to step carefully here if he wanted her to keep talking. “Deal.”

  “I was gonna take the train to Boston, but then it already left when I got to the station, so I just kept walking and then I went to Leland.”

  “Elementary?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I just felt like it. I stayed there for a while and watched the kids at recess and the teachers and everyone. I kept thinking about when I went there and I started viola and was in that school play—you remember, I had to play a rat in The Pied Piper?”

  “I remember painting whiskers on your face.” He was not always an absent father. It had been only a few years since he’d begun to work evenings and weekends. He and Hannah had sat in the front row of Leland’s cafetorium and snapped pictures of their daughter, the rat, marching in a line of other rats across the small stage. He had memorized her one line in the play, in case she got stage fright or forgot it. He sat at attention, ready to whisper up to her if she needed the help.

  “And Mom made my costume, I think—that one out of those brown footie pajamas?”

  Lovell nodded.

  “Anyway, then I just walked around town and thought about stuff. I went to the library and read for a while. I read some Emily Dickinson poems. I went to Mom’s store. It looks exactly the same.”

  “Does it?” he said, his heart dropping. “Weren’t you cold?”

  “Freezing.”

  “So why didn’t you just come home?”

  “Well, then I caught another train into Boston.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought about going to Carson. I’ve never been there—we’ve never even been to South Boston, have we? But then on the train I got kind of freaked out by the whole idea, so I got out at Copley and I met a couple of kids who live at a shelter and they snuck me in and let me sleep there so I wasn’t outside. But I had to be out early the next morning so no one would find out. I walked around there and Chinatown for a while. Whenever I got too cold, I went inside a store. I couldn’t remember where anything was in Boston—I thought about trying to find Symphony Hall or the library. I went to the T to look at the map, but some freak started whispering to me and saying shit about his son, so I just left and went back outside and walked around more. And that night, I tried to find those kids again, but I couldn’t, so I went in and out of the stores again and then I went back to the Common and then I guess I just fell asleep on a bench. And then these two cops are poking me and asking me all these questions.

  “You don’t need to give me a lecture about why this was all a dumb idea, Dad. I can see that you want to.”

  “Fair enough.” He looked over at her bloodshot eyes, the charcoal smudge just below one eyebrow. “How did you get that bruise?”

  “What bruise?”

  He drew a deep breath. “Can I sit next to you?”

  “No.”

  “I thought I might fall apart,” he said. “When I realized that I didn’t know where you went. I really felt it—everything inside me going haywire. My heart and my lungs and my stomach. I felt like every part of me might just explode.” As he said it, he understood how true it had been. He may never have said anything like this before. It felt strange but good, a little like trying on someone else’s clothes and seeing that they fit. “I could not handle it if you had been gone for one more minute. You might have come home and found that your dad was just a pile of organs on the floor.”

  “You’re so fucking weird.” She half smiled.

  He looked over at her again. “You’ll make other friends after Stephen and Jeff move.” Hannah would know what to say right now. More importantly, she would know what not to say. “And if you want to try another instrument, that’s fine.”

  “This is not about viola. Shit.”

  He waited for her to elaborate. She lifted the small pillow over her face. After a moment, she said, “I have so much homework to send in to school tomorrow. I’m going to be up all night.”

  “Can I help?”

  “No. It’s English.”

  “I speak English, you know.” Don’t you know, he nearly said, don’t you know that if I could, I would force those two men to stay next door—at least until you were ready for them to go?

  Chapter 29

  A few nights after Janine had returned, Lovell found his banjo
at the top of the metal shelving unit in the basement. He set out a folding wooden chair, rested his feet on an old recycling bin, and ran his fingers over a few strings.

  He had never been all that good. But the metal strings against his fingers and that plinky sound had always activated some part of his brain that he probably otherwise never used. His mother had bought him a Gold Tone Cripple Creek when he started college, despite his father’s pressing him to stay with the piano. He took banjo lessons from a woman in Somerville for a while, but a couple of years later, when he moved into the apartment in Brighton with Paul, he sold the instrument as well as his mountain bike for rent money.

  Hannah had never heard him play and had asked him about it every so often over the years. “Why not go buy a cheap one somewhere? I think it might be fun for you,” she had said.

  “Maybe,” he had always said, but he never did.

  A few years back, she bought him one for his birthday and insisted he play a song for her and the kids that same evening after dinner. They watched him strum and pick and fiddle with the tuning pegs, embarrassed as he tried in vain to remember those chords. Nothing came back to him. Not one chord or technique, not one position. “Come on,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just try any song.” He finally managed a sorry version of “Skip to My Lou” before setting down the banjo. “Some other time,” he said.

  The boiler moaned. The room was unbearably hot, its windows bolted shut now for years. It was a mess down here. A corner of the carpet was rotted and black, possibly moldy, and there were a couple of huge boxes of broken tools that had to be fixed or just thrown away. Garbage bags stuffed with clothes that the kids had outgrown sat nearby. In another corner of the basement sat several boxes of Hannah’s belongings, one full of her antique perfume bottles packed in newspaper, another with old photo albums.

  He set the banjo back on the shelf and began to scrub caked dirt from the concrete floor, stack the shovels and ice scrapers, untangle and wind hoses. He worked until he felt a stinging between his shoulder blades. He headed upstairs and, after a tall glass of water, returned downstairs to vacuum the moldy carpet. He sliced into it with a knife, cutting away the black, rotted spots and stuffing them into garbage bags. He made a pile of rusted and broken tools to be thrown away.