He's Gone

by Deb Caletti

  Ian was getting smaller, too, he told me. In his own way, a different way from mine, but, still, he was. Barbecuing and fixing drinks at all those neighborhood parties he didn’t care about, turning steaks and handing over a cool glass of tinkling ice and vodka, making empty conversation. He was disappearing in that life, he said. He tried to tell Mary this in every way he could, for years, but after a few weeks of promised change, she’d be back to the drinking and the socializing and the spending. His daughters would have new outfits and glittery new eye shadow and new pink phones, but they would be failing in school. He went to work to make more money for the new sofa and the slipcovers and the display of holiday lights, becoming more and more lonely with each receipt and each shopping bag holding the fruits of his labors. That’s what he felt he was worth—the new towels and the car stereo and the manicures and the My Little Ponies. He was stuff, not a man. A provider, whoever that is.

  It was clear that I needed to get out of my marriage. It was dangerous and defeating, and no one would question that. But for Ian, the decision was murkier, because he was stuck in the impossible labyrinth of that doomed quest—to find the magic place where marriage is happiness. Logically, he knew this was unfair to Mary. I knew it was unfair to her, too. Two different people and the thing they created between them, a botched and imperfect thing, carrying the weight of spilled gravy and relatives and swimming lessons and car repairs—it wasn’t fair to look at her and say, This is the life I have. This is all. It wasn’t fair to her to be disappointed beyond reason. Not fair, but that’s the way it was. This was what they’d built. They were so familiar to each other that they’d become strangers. She doesn’t know who I am, he’d say. I’ve tried everything I know to get her to hear and to see, but she’s happy. She loves her life. He would also say, If we met now, I wouldn’t even be attracted to her. I wouldn’t respect her.

  My marriage had the raised hand and the cowering on the kitchen floor as Mark’s shoe struck my rib cage, but Ian had water-torture love—the small, everyday drips of disillusionment and loneliness. Both things can wreck the soul, I think. Violence, yes. That surely destroys love. But bathroom hand towels with embossed satin shells that you weren’t supposed to use—maybe those could, too.

  The screen door screeched open and closed again at that party, and more people tumbled out, carrying wine coolers and bags of chips. Introductions were made. There was talk about a hair salon and about the unfair treatment twelve-year-old Jason got from Mrs. Bryan when Gared had actually been the one to provoke him. There was some discussion about Gared’s mother. Gared’s single mother—no wonder he was out of control. And the men discussed a lube job on Rob’s BMW. The freaking doctor telling Neal at his exam that he had high cholesterol. He was supposed to have a goddamn special diet! I could die tomorrow, Neal said. I’m not eating broccoli three times a day. And then Jason himself came running through the party, snatching the neatly coiled garden hose and reaching for the valve, as Jason’s father yelled at him to stop and Jason’s mother said Mary must have given him M&M’s before dinner.

  Those marriages fell like burning trees, one after the other, after Ian and I got together. First, though, there was all the gossip and the nasty barbs as we fled that place, as if we’d set fire to it all, everything, each of their houses. But then, later, their houses did catch fire, and their marriages burned up. And how could they not, in that dry, barren place? A marriage can be choked by dust and desperation, destroyed by a last, thoughtless lit match. How could people not lose each other there? It was so lonely in that place. I’ve said it before, but it was.

  You ever taste that Red Rock Ale?

  I’m not gonna weed and feed my yard this year. All the work, and it still looks like crap after two weeks of hot weather.

  You gotta water every day. Buy a sprinkler system, you cheap bastard.

  I actually called Lindsay’s mother and told her she’d better tell Lindsay that we won’t tolerate bullying toward Jasmine.

  Ian caught my eyes and held them. Inside the kitchen, Mary fixed the collar on Mark’s shirt.

  It was possible that I could rescue Ian and that he could rescue me.

  That was the start. And as I stand outside with my mother, watching that police car retreat down the street, I think: Maybe this is the end. The feelings I’m having—they aren’t exactly unfamiliar. I remember a similar dread from our courtship, from the times I wouldn’t hear from him for days. I’d feel scared and sick but angry, too. Yes, angry. I’ll admit that.

  But now we’re married. We have our own bed with soft sheets and sweet memories. On Sundays, we lie there together, our toes entwined. A picture flashes:

  Do your “Secret Asian Man.” He pretends not to know the lyrics of lots of songs. He thinks this is hilarious. The covers are a tangled mess. We are both revved on coffee.

  No laughing. He waggles his finger. Of course, laughing is the point.

  Come on! I’m not laughing with you, I’m laughing at you!

  In that case. He hops on his knees. He gets the air guitar going, and he’s wearing that hot stage number, his blue boxers. Beware of pretty faces that you find. A pretty face can hide an evil mind! he sings, shimmying around until the big payoff. Sec-ret Asian man! he hollers, wiggling his ass, giving it all he’s got. I sock him with a pillow for the audience participation part of the program.

  Things are different now, I try to tell myself, but my whole body is shaking, unconvinced. Some weird alien tremor has begun, and I can’t stop it. The car turns the corner and is gone. What’s just happened doesn’t seem real, but it is real. A police car means it’s real. My mother puts her arm around me. “I just want to know that he’s okay,” I say. “Just that. Just that one thing.”

  My chest feels caved in, as if it has fallen in on itself, and I can barely breathe, it hurts so bad. His absence is immense, dark and immense, because once the logical likelihoods are gone, it means that anything else is possible. Anything and everything. He could be anywhere, with anyone. He could be in some foreign country; he could be hurt somewhere; he could be dead; someone could have killed him; he could be driving in some convertible down some road with a new identity in his pocket.

  He wouldn’t take off without telling his kids, I had told the officer who arrived that morning. Detective Vince Jackson had a beefy head and inky-black hair (dyed, likely) and chubby cigar fingers. But is this true? Ian’s children had rejected him after we got together. For a long while, they refused to see him if he was with me, and Kristen had instructed him not to come to her graduation. His idea of himself as a good father had been destroyed. You can run, can’t you, if there isn’t anything much to leave behind?

  “Come on,” my mother says. She pulls me to her. She has her old flannel shirt on and her jeans. She’d been working in the yard. So she says. Spying on the neighbors’ chain-saw artist, more likely. She smells like fresh dirt and Jean Naté.

  We walk back up the dock. Maggie pokes her head out the door. “Dani?”

  “He’s still gone,” I say.

  “Oh, no.” She holds her hand to her heart. She and my mother lock eyes. They exchange unspoken information that I don’t want to witness. “If I can help at all …”

  The day drags on. I can’t do anything. I can’t work, of course, or get the mail or make necessary phone calls, whatever those might be. I can’t eat or sit still. Pollux is nervous. He doesn’t like high emotions. He gets upset at tears and arguments. He looks worried; his forehead is crinkled and his eyes are concerned. I stand and stare out the large glass windows of the houseboat. The sun is going down. Again. Pollux is as close as he can get. I feel him leaning against my legs.

  “Do you have anything to help you sleep?” my mother asks.

  “No.”

  “Maybe I can—”

  “I need to hear the phone. I hate that kind of stuff, anyway.” I hate the way it makes me feel—the thickness in my limbs, the heavy fuzz in my head. The way it confuses my thoughts and blu
rs my memory.

  “You need to sleep. I’m planning to stay.”

  “No.”

  “I’m staying.”

  “Really. I want to be alone.”

  My mother shakes her head. She washes her hands at the sink, for lack of anything more useful to do. She dries them on the kitchen towel that hangs from the rail of the stove. The kitchen towel has a row of cherries on it. My husband is missing. I don’t know how to reconcile these two facts.

  “That hairbrush. His toothbrush. In those Ziploc bags,” I say.

  “They have to do that. You heard him. Did you hear all the agencies that’ll be notified? MUPU, NCMA? Some clearinghouse …”

  “Clearinghouse? How is that supposed to do anything?” All I can think of is Ed McMahon and the giant check. Or a large room with hundreds of files with thousands of names. “This is crazy!”

  “They have to determine if Ian’s even missing, Dani. He might not be. All they’re doing is covering the basics right now. That’s what the detective said. They’ll open an investigation when they have reason to think he hasn’t disappeared of his own free will.”

  “I couldn’t even answer the questions. I don’t even know how much he weighs.”

  “You were close enough, Dani. Come on.”

  “Identifying marks. God.”

  “I know, sweetie.”

  “He’s gone.” It strikes me, a blow to the chest. A dark smack of fear, the biggest and most terrible feeling of all: gone.

  “Ian’s not high risk. That’s what the man said. He’s not high risk for disappearing.”

  “I don’t even understand what that means.”

  “Alzheimer’s, mentally unwell. In danger. That’s why he asked about health issues Ian might have, right? That’s why the Unless you think a crime has been committed …”

  This seems comforting. There’s a procedure for these things. If they aren’t alarmed, I can be less alarmed. It’s like that trick I do when there’s turbulence on the airplane. If the flight attendants are still serving drinks and collecting garbage, there’s nothing to worry about. If they’re chatting to one another and laughing, the bumps and lurches that terrify me are things they’ve seen a hundred times before.

  I remember all those nights, too, when I worried about Abby when she was late coming home and still an inexperienced driver. She’d known I would worry, though, and she’d always found a way to eventually contact me. Ian knows I’d worry, too. This leads to an equation in my mind, a calculation with a sickening result. There are only two possibilities: Either he can’t contact me or he doesn’t want to.

  “That detective looked around here like I had him hidden somewhere.” I twist my wedding ring.

  “That’s his job,” my mother says.

  Mind if I look around? Detective Vince Jackson had asked. Of course not, I had said, and then he walked around the houseboat with his eyes scanning. He looked in our bedroom. He asked me if anything was missing. Ian was the obvious answer, but, no, nothing. Nothing else. Ian and the jeans and black shirt he’d worn to the party. The soft leather shoes. His phone, his wallet, his keys.

  You came home, he got undressed for bed?

  I couldn’t remember exactly. Can’t. I’ve tried and tried. I was so tired. I was groggy, and I headed for bed, and I assume we did what we always do. He might have stayed up to read or sit and watch the lights on the lake. He might have climbed into bed after I was already asleep. I could have been asleep before he even came out of the bathroom.

  Detective Vince Jackson raised his eyebrows. He wrote things down. He asked me when my last clear memory of my husband was. In the car, driving home, I said. I was being too honest. But that was the truth. I didn’t have a clear picture of Ian walking inside the house, taking off his clothes, coming to bed. I had images of myself dropping my heels at the door, climbing thankfully between the sheets, dismissing him and the whole uncomfortable night. It was the kind of thing that happened regularly, the way you don’t even remember the drive to the store. The way your head is full of your own thoughts after a bad night. That stupid dress; that woman at the party; Nathan, he’s a kind man; an altercation; Ian’s grim face behind the wheel; forget it all until tomorrow. The cool sheets, the bliss of sleep.

  What’s this?

  Vince Jackson had popped his head into Ian’s study. His eyes went immediately to the board, where the last butterfly had been pinned. It was still there, collecting dust. It wasn’t the way to pay homage to something beautiful, as Ian always claimed. It had been pinned and forgotten.

  His hobby, I said. I wanted to say, It was the way he stayed connected to his father, but it seemed like too much information. Ian would be embarrassed by that, by his own need for the love of the great Paul Hartley Keller. Definitely he wouldn’t want such a thing to be revealed to this man, this Vince Jackson, a tough, impenetrable male, who didn’t look as if he’d ever questioned his place in the world. Ian’s father need—it was the kind of hole you saw and wanted to heal for someone you loved. After trying that routine twice and failing, with Mark, with Ian, I knew something else, too: It’s human nature to want to help and soothe and save with your love, but it’s also arrogant.

  It’s a strange hobby, my mother remarked to the detective. I couldn’t believe she said that. I was getting the creeping feeling that Detective Vince Jackson suspected me of something here; I could feel the mistrust in the way he moved his thick shoulders through the doorways of my home, looking at carpets and window frames and the comforter I’d picked out at Bed Bath & Beyond. My mother must have felt it, too. If something is off here, that something was Ian, she seemed to say.

  His suspicion made me feel guilty. Admittedly, guilt can be my default setting. After a social gathering, I’m often left with a vague sense of wrongdoing that I try to pinpoint the source of. Had I laughed insensitively or slighted someone unintentionally? And I always feel accused in Nordstrom. The saleswomen look at my jeans and inexpensive haircut and I’m sure they’re thinking I’m about to slip a pair of earrings into my purse. I feel guilty when I eat white bread and when I don’t recycle. The therapist I saw during my divorce, Dr. Shana Berg—I loved her—once told me that I was in desperate need of rebellion. The idea of it sounded wonderful, like riding in a convertible on an open road, with a scarf flowing behind you.

  Detective Vince Jackson stood outside on the front deck. The lake was busy with its usual merry parade of tour boats and water taxis. The sun was out, and the water sparkled wrongly. I heard a happy shout, someone making a joke, laughter. Two guys on paddleboards rowed past, as Detective Vince Jackson stepped onto our sailboat and looked around for my vanished husband. He made his way down below, to the cabin. I heard him open and close the bench lids. He climbed the ladder back up. The New View?

  Even the boat’s name was some sort of accusation. It means … I struggled. The way we were going to do things differently.

  Differently?

  We’d been married before. And both of us had divorced parents. I was talking too much. It made me look like I was nervous. I was nervous. That man’s big hands and blue uniform and the way he wrote things down made me nervous. His hips were packed with heavy equipment—a radio, a gun. The radio kept spitting out loud bits of crackly conversations and codes. I wondered how he knew when to listen and when to ignore it. He was standing in front of my lounge chair, where I sunned myself and drank lemonade and read. We wanted to have commitment in our lives, I said.

  I followed Detective Vince Jackson’s eyes out over the lake. I read the question there before he asked it. The lake—it didn’t seem possible. If he’d fallen … You hear everything around here, I said. A splash, a call for help …

  Can he swim?

  He was on the swim team in high school. And there’s a ladder right there. I pointed to the edge of the dock. That’s why every dock has one; if you fall in, there’s a quick way to get out.

  How much did he have to drink that night?

  A glass
or two? I don’t know. I wasn’t with him the whole time. He drove home.… He seemed fine.

  How much did you have to drink?

  The same. Two, maybe?

  He ever run off before? Take a few days? A little breather, a camping trip to commune with nature?

  Not exactly.

  He looked up from his notebook. I could feel my mother’s shocked eyes on me. Well, you don’t tell your mother everything.

  He didn’t come home one night, if that even counts. We were just married. Had an argument. He came right back.

  Coulda done the same thing?

  We never had an argument like that again.

  He continued to watch my face but asked nothing more. I’d contact everyone you know. Ask around. He’s probably cooling his jets over something you didn’t even know you did. I’d like a list of everyone in his life we should talk to if we need.

  Okay, good. No problem.

  Now my mother was being too helpful. She’d rushed inside and was already rummaging around in my kitchen drawers for a notepad and pen. She was shoving around all the unused coupons and take-out menus, not even looking in the right place. Here, I had said, retrieving the pad by the phone. Detective Vince Jackson stayed outside and talked to someone on his radio.

  I wrote down names. Nathan. Paula, Ian’s secretary. His family. My mother was piping in every two seconds with more ideas. I wished she would stop. My brain was going a million miles an hour, and yet it also felt stalled and broken.

  Bethy and Kristen Keller, I wrote. And, in parentheses, daughters.

  Don’t forget Mary, my mother said, as Detective Vince Jackson slid open the door and came inside.

  Mary? he asked.

  His ex-wife, I said.

  Detective Vince Jackson sat down in the kitchen chair across from me. He sighed. Mrs. Keller, he said. What do you think happened to your husband?

  Images appeared; the options presented themselves. It was crazy, but the one that screamed the loudest (and that maybe—how awful to say—I feared the most right then) had nothing to do with murder or an accident. I could see him straddling the seat of his old riding lawn mower, an expensive one, of course. There he’d be, turning the key, and the engine would start, and so would the engines of all the other riding lawn mowers on that street. He would lay his regrets to rest as the machine made its clean stripes into the grass and as the neighbor men made their clean stripes into their own lawns. Up and back he would go, and Neal would go, and Rob, and Mark, as the New View bobbed in now ridiculous, falsely optimistic waters. Because you can never entirely flee disappointment, can you? We have it, too; the bare foot meeting dog barf, the spilled coffee grounds, the discouraging daily stuff that could feel like a life metaphor. Of course, those men don’t even live in that neighborhood anymore. Mark lives in a condo on the Eastside, and Neal took off to Israel or somewhere, and Rob and his wife divorced and I have no idea where they ended up. Still, when Detective Jackson asked me that question, I saw them all out there on their Sunday morning lawns, one riding north and then south again, the other riding south and then north, as their wives sipped orange juice and vodka.