by Deb Caletti
The place has only a few cars in the lot. Pollux waits in the Blue Beast. I know what a stupid idea this is the minute the bell chimes my arrival. He’s not here. In those bright lights and that pumping music, I feel my own desperation.
“Welcome to Fifth Street Gym! My name is Elizabeth! May I assist you with a membership today?” Elizabeth’s hair is up in a perky blond ponytail, but her eyes are tired under the fluorescent lighting, and her self-tanner is the unfortunate shade of a split apricot. I ask about Ian. Apparently, confidentiality isn’t an issue here. Don’t expect privacy if you’re a member of the Fifth Street Gym. She flips through a file of cards with one small, muscled arm. I have to spell his name twice.
“He hasn’t been in since December. The membership’s expired. Would you care to renew? We’ve got family plans.” I shake my head. I thank her. The bell cheerily ding-dongs my exit. All at once, I am scared. In the car, Pollux’s eyes catch the light of the streetlamp and glow in that sci-fi way dog eyes do. His sweet, chocolaty gaze turns into two beams of spooky green lasers.
“Nothing,” I tell him.
I drive back home. I slam the keys down on the counter, storm to our bedroom. I take inventory. Wallet—gone. Phone—gone. Keys—gone. Laptop—still in its case tucked beside the dresser. Would he leave without that? Of course, he has more than one—he has access to a whole building full of computers. I fling open the closet. I search through the hangers of shirts, looking for something, who knows what. Shoes. Is his luggage missing? I go to the hall closet and find both of our suitcases still sitting side by side, a patient, well-behaved pair.
That padded envelope. I’d completely forgotten about it. It occurs to me that it might hold some sort of an answer. I’m sure of it now. It’s addressed to him, not to me, but inside is the reason for Ian’s absence. It has to be. I go to the kitchen. The lights of the city sparkle on the other side of the water. My coffee cup from the morning is still there in the sink. The house is very quiet, and all I can hear is the laughter of some people on a boat far off on the lake. Pollux sits by his bowl patiently. What time is it? Past time for his dinner.
“I’m sorry, boy,” I say. I feed him. I eye that envelope. I sit down on the kitchen chair, exhausted. Years and years exhausted. Exhausted in the way you are when your whole life suddenly catches up to you, from that humiliating oral report on the Industrial Revolution back in the sixth grade all the way to the long, terrible divorce, with every flu and disappointment in between. I am sure that envelope holds the end of the story somehow. I am almost relieved.
It is possible that he’s finally left me.
I listen to Pollux happily crunching his dinner. He takes a big, sloppy drink of water and then sits by my chair. He looks up at me, waiting. His kind, warm eyes tell me to get on with it. I am glad for his company. I rip open the padded envelope.
No letter. Nothing but a small object, stuck in the bottom corner. I turn the envelope upside down and shake it. The bit of gold falls onto the floor, and Pollux gets up and gives it a sniff.
A cuff link. Ian’s cuff link? Ian doesn’t even wear cuff links. Could he wear cuff links without me knowing it? He has that big belt buckle with the bull on it, and I’d never in a million years pictured him wearing that, right? That was a present from his brother-in-law, though. I think it was his brother-in-law. It seems crucial to remember. The sheer amount of things I don’t know opens up before me: his first memory, where he gets his car fixed, his mother’s maiden name.
This was what he had lost last night, I realize now. It had to be. The sight of it makes me sick.
I go back to our bedroom. If he’d worn those cuff links last night, the other one would likely be in the tray of our dresser drawer, where he keeps his various treasures—an old class ring, a tie clip of his father’s, one of his daughters’ baby teeth. He would have set it there after getting undressed for bed. I fling open the drawer. The same old things lay in that tray. There is no cuff link. I reach my hand down into the socks and underwear, feeling beneath them. I don’t know what I’m expecting to find—a telltale receipt, a letter, a secret. My fingertips hit the edge of something, paper, and I lift it out. It’s a photograph. Just a photo of him with his daughters when they were small. He is stretched out on the floor with his shirt off. Bethy is sitting on his chest as if he’s the furniture, and Kristen, just a baby, is tucked in the crook of his arm. He looks so happy.
My heart lurches. I would have put that photo in a frame, set it right up on our bedside table so he could look at it every day. I would have done that gladly. But he had hidden it for his own reasons. He had hidden it, the way you hide precious things that you don’t want stolen from you. Then again, for a very long time, he had hidden me, too.
I remember. His mother’s maiden name is Charles, all right? Okay? Fine.
I check my phone for messages again. I dial Ian over and over. It’s late, but I call people from our address book—Ian’s sister, Olivia; his old friend Simon Ash. I phone Ian’s college friend Leon Green, who has a place in the mountains where he and Ian went to ski once or twice. I try to sound casual. By the way. Olivia’s concern ratchets up rapidly. Simon Ash assures me that Ian probably needed a little time to himself, no big deal, and then starts telling me about his new job. I call the retirement home where Mrs. Keller, Ian’s mother, lives. I don’t want to scare her, so I talk to the night nurse, who tells me that Mrs. Keller’s only visitor in months has been Georgia Smith, her sister. She comes every day to play cards. She tells me that Mrs. Keller has recently been having trouble “voiding.” I hate the word voiding, but this is no time for petty annoyances. I promise to let Ian know.
I call the motel Ian stayed in when he first left Mary. I call the furnished apartments he also stayed in when he left her for the last time.
I call my mother.
“It’s a bear,” she says, as soon as she picks up the phone. “It’s not a totem pole. It’s a bear holding a fish, like he’s just caught it. Dear God, I think he’s going to have a chain-sawed fishing hat. The old coot just quit for the night.”
“Ian’s been gone all day.”
“Lucky you.” She’s never hidden her feelings about him. Not since the first day they met. The minute Ian took her soft, much-lived hand in his cool, manicured one, I saw her dislike. I guess I saw his feelings of superiority, too. She works at the bank and loves Target and feels slightly ill at ease in fancy restaurants, and he doesn’t. Ian would never admit that he thinks he’s better than my parents. He sees himself as the ultimate nice guy. But there’s polite-nice and proper-nice and follow-the-rules nice and don’t-say-it-out-loud-but-show-your-feelings-anyway nice. Of course, after Mark’s anger, which spilled its contents like a moving truck that had flipped over on the freeway, I welcomed polite, proper, follow-the-rules containment. Ian isn’t one of us, but his rigid sense of responsibility has always felt like safety to me.
“I’m really worried.” My voice cracks. Tears have snuck up on me, which tears tend to do. I’m not a crier. The possibility of weeping sits in my throat, waiting for its chance. “He’s not answering his phone. His car is still here.”
She is silent. She is silent for what seems like a long while. “That’s strange,” she says finally.
My fear—it too often needs a person to second it, as if it’s merely a suggestion on the table until someone else agrees it’s a good idea. Fear doesn’t always seem real to me. Mark would be standing over my body, his face changing into something dark, and I couldn’t quite believe it was happening. It seemed too overly dramatic to be true. I’ve never been very good at listening to my inner voice. It’s been one of my biggest faults, and it’s gotten me into my worst troubles. My inner voice speaks too softly, or maybe it’s connected to some wire that was wrongly bent years ago, same as my old stereo speakers, which never worked at the same time. But now, at my mother’s words, fear takes its rightful place. It shoves forward, becomes a rioting crowd of panic, toppling all my fragile reaso
ning and flimsy stories of the day. “Something’s wrong. Something’s really wrong.”
“Do you want me to come over?”
“No. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. Should I call the police?”
“He’s only been gone a day, Dani. You had a fight, didn’t you?”
“Not fight exactly.”
“Oh, hell—”
“Don’t say he’ll turn up. It’s not like he’s a lost cuff link …” I’m feeling a little crazy.
“Wait until morning. If he’s not there, then call.”
“Something’s wrong,” I say.
“Maybe you should call now.”
“What if I call 911 and he’s in a hotel somewhere? He’ll be so mad.”
“Wait until morning, then.”
She’s no help.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come over?”
“I’m sure.”
We hang up. I open the front door and look out again, like an abandoned child. I walk down the dock for the hundredth time that day. I am barefoot. The night is cool. Pollux runs ahead and pees on the nice flower box at the end of the dock. The wind has picked up, and the lake water is slanting toward the shore. The rings of sailboat lines clank and clatter, and the dock groans with its own weariness.
I shove through the dock gates that lead to the street and look at the long line of parked cars. Someone’s cat rushes out from underneath one, and then he slinks past, looking for late-night trouble. Ian’s car shines under the streetlight, black and gleaming as a grand piano. I set my hand on its hood. I peer cautiously into the backseat, as if I might see a crouched figure there. It’s empty, except for a file folder and the UW Husky sweatshirt he wears on the weekends. The metal of the hood is cold.
I hurry back to the house, get the spare key to his car. I unlock the Jaguar’s back door. I open that folder. What am I expecting, some note? Horrible last words? But the folder is empty.
I lean against his car, under that streetlight. Please, I say, to whoever might be listening.
The clanging sailboats and the wind in the trees and the groaning dock and that wide, wide night sky say only one thing back. He’s gone, they say. He’s gone, the darkness and the empty street say, too.
3
I should mention that when I was eleven, my father had an affair that broke up my parents’ marriage. I was almost the same age as Abby was when Ian came into our lives. My sister and I were left to pick up the fragmented pieces of my mother’s heart, which was no small task. Remember that old Brady Bunch episode when Greg and Marcia break Mrs. Brady’s favorite vase and try to glue it together again? Marcia fills it with water, but the water spurts out in a hundred places, a fountain of tiny holes. That was my sister and me, minus the canned laughter, trying to put something back together that could never be put back together. The job was too big for us, anyway. There was water everywhere.
I don’t think I will ever forget the sound of my mother sobbing on the bed that was now hers alone—the thought makes my stomach ache even now. It didn’t feel safe in that house. It was scary. I remember the helplessness and, yeah, if I’m honest, the desire to flee. I wanted someone to rescue us then, too (specifically, my father), but no one ever did. Needless to say, I ended up with strong feelings about adultery. Well, everyone has strong feelings about adultery. But that sobbing and that helplessness—it amped up my beliefs into something close to fervor. The concept was black and white to me. I would never do that. Never.
And, of course, Ian’s father was an outrageous flirt and a ladies’ man. Paul hadn’t exactly been discreet, either, when he cheated on his devoutly Catholic wife. For Ian, well, think of it: mother protection vying with father identification … Oh, psychologists could go to town on this one. They’d make a bundle on us. The point is, Ian and I—we’d both come from a legacy of divorce and treachery, from a homeland where the emotional terrain was steep enough that you craved someone to throw you a line. We were each the least likely and most likely to end up where we did; a solid argument could be built either way. How much does history make your life choices inevitable? That’s what I want to know. Maybe we don’t truly have the option of free will. Maybe we’re only following some old family recipe that has been handed down for years, written in spidery, ancient handwriting and splotched with past ingredients.
He called me one afternoon, after that baseball game. He used some excuse—inviting Mark and me to one of their famed barbecues. I learned later that we were the first people he’d ever invited on his own, because Mary determined who their friends were. I’m not being unkind here; that’s just the way it was. Mark was thrilled. We’d made it into the suburban in-crowd, and he was as giddy as Jackie Zavier, my best friend in junior high, after we’d been asked to Scott Maynard’s Halloween party.
Ian called me from his office. Abby was at school and Mark was at work, and I think Ian and I both knew that the phone call disguised as an invitation was somehow illicit. It was one of those conversations where there’s a whole other conversation going on, unsung notes on an unseen staff strung between you, felt if not actually heard. I hung up, and my heart was beating hard. We’d already begun something. I didn’t like myself for it, but the truth was, when Mark came home that night, I felt a sense of secret power that I hadn’t felt in a long while, ever since he’d raised a hand and struck me for the first time. That power felt good. I didn’t want to hurt Mark, I really didn’t—even his rage could feel childlike, a tantrum, something you could pity. For a long time I told myself that he hurt me because he was hurt, but I was tired of being the dog he came home and kicked. That dog was digging a tunnel under the chain-link fence and smiling privately.
We went over to Ian and Mary’s house. Abby came, too. They lived in the part of our neighborhood where the houses got bigger, where the garages went from two- to three-car. Abby joined the rest of the kids playing kickball in the cul-de-sac. Inside, their home was a showcase of electronics and furnishings and food and expensive beers. Their boat was parked in the garage; a motorcycle, too. Mary was sitting up on the kitchen counter, swinging her legs. She wore a low-cut blouse that showed off her cleavage. She took a pinch of Mark’s shirt, pulled him slightly toward her, and told him how great he looked.
“Ian never wears dress shirts,” she said. “I love a man in a dress shirt.”
I left Mark in the kitchen with Mary and Charlene and so and so and so and so. Mark was loving it there. You should have seen how happy he was. Ian gestured for me to follow him outside. A couple of neighbor men stood on the patio with their beers. Another woman played with her small toddler on the lawn, blowing bubbles with a plastic wand dripping soap. Usually, she’d have been the one I talked to—the quiet person. The one off to the side, fleeing all the show and all the false lilts in conversation, pretending her child needed her when she needed her child. I’d been guilty of that trick, acting as if the baby needed to be changed or fed or put down for a nap just so I’d have a few minutes away from the in-laws or other strangers. Ian lifted the lid of the barbecue, and a big gust of smoke billowed out. There were platters of meat—beef and chicken and even pork chops. I had never seen so much food in all my life.
“So, what do you think?” Ian said.
“It’s a lovely home,” I said. I wasn’t sure how I actually felt about it. The grass was laid out in a large, orderly rectangle, and the walls inside the house were white, and it felt like something important was missing—color, heartbeat. It was that same feeling you get when you talk to someone and they’re saying all the right words but there’s an echoey lack of the right emotion.
“Not about that. About this.”
“This.” I wasn’t sure what he meant. I’d never played this game before. It seemed too soon to admit the energy between us. And, oh, the energy. I felt it right there. I almost saw it, as real as the hot orange of those coals.
“This party.”
I could hear the doorbell ring inside the house, the rise of n
ew voices, laughter. “It’s a great party.”
He stabbed a thick piece of meat, turned it, as the grease sizzled and kicked up a new torrent of smoke. “You’re saying the right words, but …”
I smiled. I wasn’t used to being seen like that, seen through. “I don’t do these things too often.”
“Thank God,” he said. “I knew I liked you for some reason.”
The new couple opened the sliding glass door to join us outside. “Shut the door!” Mary called. “The smoke!”
It was true; my eyes were watering. I was in over my head, trading one place I didn’t belong for another place I didn’t belong, but I didn’t know that yet. Then the wind shifted, and it carried the ashy clouds over the neighbors’ fence.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” Ian said.
I think I was furious at my parents for their failed marriage, but I hadn’t been married yet myself. Fury is easy until you’re in someone else’s shoes. I didn’t understand how complicated a marriage was. I didn’t understand my parents as adult people, how their own histories could sit upon them and press and press. Personal histories, generations of marital dynamics creating marital dynamics. That, and all those pages and pages of fine print and hidden clauses and expectations between two people, ways you are bound to a person when you might desperately need to be free. For me, as a married woman, it was fine print and a small child and a frightening man and economic fears (how, how, how, would I take care of Abby?), all of which had me backed up against a high wall. I was afraid to leave. Inside my body, I felt the race against time as if I were in my own thriller movie, where the ceiling was inching down, ready to annihilate me. When I thought about my life, my heart thumped hard, as if I were being chased. I had become so small that I could almost see my own self, one inch high, standing in the palm of my own hand, waving my tiny arms, screaming for my own miniature help. I was getting smaller and smaller and the walls were coming in and something had to be done.