by Deb Caletti
Of course, having company in that boat does not alter the fact that you’re lost at sea.
I told my first lie, my first real lie, to Mark. Ian and I planned to meet one night at his office. It would be our first time alone. God, I was so nervous. I told Mark I was going out to dinner with two old high school friends. I didn’t feel good about the lie. First of all, he could find out, and, Jesus, what that might mean … But it was more than a fear of repercussions. He had made himself popcorn that night. He and Abby were going to watch a movie while I was gone. No matter how much harm had been done over the years, that popcorn made me feel terrible. The way he settled the bowl on the coffee table, a beer nearby. That little pile of napkins. Napkins could break your heart; who knew.
When I got in the car, though, when I started to drive and was finally away from that house and that neighborhood—I felt free. God, it was thrilling. It was mine. It was night and I love driving at night, and I remembered how much I loved it. Something was happening during that drive. I was old and getting younger. I didn’t realize I’d felt so old until then. The city lights, the radio, the driving away—I felt like I was the self I’d lost long ago. The someone I’d been before meeting Mark, before my life turned down that hard road. I remembered who I used to be and maybe still was. I felt light like that, as if I was sixteen and Journey was playing on the radio and the future was wide open and I had all the time in the world.
I’d forgotten all about that feeling. It came back to me as I drove. I turned the radio on and I felt filled with joy. Lifted and filled, and I loved the city and the streetlamps and the car lights in the rearview mirror and every single soul still working in those high, lit, skyscraper offices. I wished each of them the very best.
I thought it was about Ian, but it wasn’t. I know that now. It was about returning. Setting the clock back to that place where you’d turned but should never have turned. It was about undoing the damage and filling the holes and repairing the broken pieces. In a way it was like watching a film in reverse. Mark’s hands flew away from my body back to his own sides, and I walked backward out of the church where we were married, becoming the girl I once had been.
It was early summer. The night air smelled like heat and grass and darkness. Ian stood waiting outside the BetterWorks building, his arms folded. I walked up to him, and he greeted me as if we were having a business appointment. Someone might have been working late behind those tall glass windows, watching.
He had his head down, and I followed him. We waited at the elevators, where he swiped his pass. I took in all the perfect lines and the clean wood and the neatly exposed beams. It was an impressive place. We walked into a hall of closed doors, with windows looking into offices piled with papers and computers. He unlocked his own door. His office did not have windows that looked out on the hallway like the others did. Instead, there were huge panes of glass inside, and the extraordinary city in front of us, the buildings rising up, the Space Needle, the lights reflecting on the water of the lake.
“Wow,” I said.
He didn’t say anything; he only let the door swing shut behind us. He grabbed my arms and spun me toward him, and we kissed and it shook me so hard—how much I wanted it, him. I didn’t know I could want like that. I had imagined him kissing me, but here he was now, up close. Here was his breath, his tongue, his hands gripping my shoulders and then my hair.
He pulled away. The lights of the room were off, but I could see his mouth, shiny from the kiss. He stared at me, looked into my eyes, far, far in. I believed he saw things there that no one else had. Maybe I didn’t even know those things were there.
“Jesus,” he said.
“I know.”
“There are all these new places,” he said.
“There are.”
He sat down in his desk chair, one of those high-tech sorts with metal and black mesh. He did something that I now know was not Ian-like at all. He spun a full circle, a chair lap of disbelief and even happiness. He exhaled, the way a man does when he can’t believe his good luck.
He reached out his arm, and I took his hand. He pulled me into his lap, and that stupid chair tilted and we flung backward and hit the desk, and it was not the way it would have happened in the movies. Our chins knocked together. We laughed.
“Good move, Keller,” he said. “Smooth operator.”
“I should tell you I can’t dance,” I said. “Or dribble a basketball. I’m entirely uncoordinated.”
“Obviously, I really like uncoordinated,” he said.
Oh, I felt sixteen. I felt the giddiness of falling in love, and my real life and past history—a popcorn bowl, a child, my stormy husband and difficult in-laws—were all momentarily gone. We were there in that first thrill you get around anything potent. I suppose it’s the same place in which alcoholics find themselves when they fall headfirst for that warm buzz, or what a gambler feels when the bells ring and the horses are let out of the gate and they are running, flying. It’s all yours, yours, yours. What it all means, what it really means, is too far away to be real; you’re just willingly going down. It’s such a heady time, before all the consequences. Certainly you’re not even aware of the lonely, destructive nights ahead when your knees feel so deliciously weak. Take me, you want to say. Not to him, but to life. You are at the very center, at the beating heart of possibility.
He pushed me up off his lap. I had driven over the bridge to meet him, lied in order to give that night to him, dressed carefully, waited, and anticipated. And we were there all of an hour. He set me back on my feet. He looked me deeply in the eyes again and he said, “I can’t do this, Dani.
“I can’t do this,” he repeated, and then he kissed me again, or I kissed him, and we thrashed and tore and parted. A kiss only, but, dear God.
I got back in my car, and he stood there at the doorway to his building again, arms behind his back, watching me drive off. I was in so far over my head that I was already drowning. I just didn’t know it yet.
I only thought, I’ve been saved.
When Abby goes home, I get my car keys. Maybe it’s stupid (it feels like it is), but I leave another note for Ian. I can’t stand being in the houseboat anymore. I check my phone for messages, and then I check it several more times to make sure I haven’t turned the ringer off accidentally. I want to make sure I hear him if he calls.
“Be a good guard dog, okay?” I say to Pollux. He isn’t really a guard dog. He hides in the other room whenever he sees the vacuum cleaner.
The day is moving forward around me. I see a bread truck delivering dinner rolls to Pete’s Market. An Argosy tour boat (Ian calls it the Agony) is taking a new group of tourists around the lake. For the millionth time, I hear the voice over the microphone telling everyone within hearing distance that Lake Union is an actual airport runway, with an average of ten seaplane landings a day.… I had gotten my period that morning. My husband is missing, and my body is moving through the month, regardless. He could be dead while I’m hunting in the bathroom cupboard for the box of tampons. I remember to get the mail. My car tabs are due. I will have to get an emissions test.
It occurs to me then that Ian might be truly gone, gone forever, for whatever reason. It hits me: I might be completely on my own now. Alone with emissions tests and taxes and electrical repairs and bills. My God, the world seems huge when you think of yourself against it, all the things you have to stand there and handle. Child-rearing and illness and carburetors. Family fights and auto accidents and health insurance. My relationship with alone has always been a love–hate one. I’ve always loved daily alone, when it’s you and a book or you and the dog or you and just you, when you’re blissfully released from the burden of someone else’s mood. When no one needs you, when no one expects anything of you, when there are no demands of you … It’s such a relief. But life alone? Somewhere along the line, I guess I’ve gotten the idea that the world is a dangerous place and that, in it, I’m a small child in a dark and threatening forest.
These are not things you go around admitting. Especially when you think of yourself as a strong person, which I do. I hate to say this, but even as an adult woman, I’ve felt the need for protection. Not only in empty parking garages, either. It’s possible I’ve felt this way since I was a child. Here’s the irony (or destiny—take your pick): The places where I’ve sought protection have been rickety and dangerous, and I don’t know entirely why. Alone in the forest, I had first chosen a feral, hungry dog to shield me, and then I’d selected a companion with two broken legs and an empty canteen. Faced with my own freedom, I’ve gotten trapped behind glass, same as Ian’s butterflies.
The hugeness of alone, the panic of it, gathers up my insides and squeezes. After all I’d done to avoid it, maybe it had come to find me anyway. Oh, the cruelty of it. But this is how it goes, isn’t it, with the Big Life Lessons? You can run but you can’t hide?
He’s hurt, he’s been killed, he’s run off. He’s hurt, he’s been killed, he’s run off. What do you think happened to your husband, Mrs. Keller?
“Come on, Blue,” I say to the Beast, and turn the key. I drive the route Ian takes to work. Maybe he decided to walk there on Sunday morning. He could have twisted his ankle; he could be unconscious, lying deep in the ravine near Kerry Park, the one adjacent to BetterWorks. There was that narrow bit of grass, the place the party had spilled onto on Saturday night, the place we had sometimes picnicked. There had been good and bad times there, times when we’d brought a blanket and white bags from Kidd Valley stuffed with burgers and onion rings, when we’d eat and kiss and people-watch. But there was that day, too, when he brought the butterfly net. We got out of the car, and I was carrying the bottle of wine and the paper cups I’d brought, and then he opened the trunk. I cringed when I saw the net there. I had the briefest, unkind image of him prancing across the grass with it in the air, like some child on a Victorian postcard. I never would have said anything, ever, but he could sense criticism before the thought even finished forming in my head. Ian’s an accomplished, sexy, smart man, but his ego is fragile as a bird’s wing. Paul Hartley Keller saw to that. What? Ian had said that day, the word a challenge. I swear, I hadn’t even blinked, hadn’t changed my facial expression one bit, but Ian had picked up on the tiniest shift in my approval. Nothing, Ian, I said, but it was already too late, and the afternoon was ruined.
The edge of the park drops right off down a steep hill. It’s what makes the view of the city so fine there: the height. The park’s an added benefit to the staff at BetterWorks. They can go there to eat lunch or take a walk.
Now, though, there’s only an empty van in the parking lot, a beat-up green machine with a Seattle-worthy bumper sticker reading CAPTAIN COMPOST. The park itself is also nearly empty, except for a mother with two small girls wearing the city’s regulation attire for hip children of hip parents—part expensive hemp EcoWear, part dress-up box. In Seattle, there’s always some kid in a feather boa or a tutu and cowboy boots, which demonstrates how supportive the parent is of the child’s self-expression. It gets irritating. You wouldn’t believe how many little girls have tutus and cowboy boots. This particular woman is delivering a loud, singsongy lecture about friendship, so I’ll know what a good mother she is. It would probably surprise her that I don’t care whether she recycles or eats organic or teaches her children about diversity. It would probably disappoint her that I don’t even notice her for more than a moment and that I don’t have the energy to admire her. I’m looking for my husband, who might be lying dead in the tangle of blackberry bushes on that bank.
I walk the path, which winds along the bluff. It would seem crazy, calling out his name. I do it anyway. I step down from the muddy ledge and try to see if anything is there except brambles and ferns and huckleberry plants.
“Ian?” I call. It probably looks like I’ve lost my dog. The slope is slick and angled. The ground in this city never fully dries out until July. Thorns stick onto my sleeve, and I have to pull myself free. This is futile, I know, a frantic act. Still, I will Ian to be there, unconscious after hitting his head. I might see his shirt. A bit of his jacket.
Of course, his cellphone is missing, too. This little fact is hard to ignore. He has it with him, undoubtedly. He could likely call if he needed help. No story I can come up with makes the details fit. None. This is crazy, and now my arms are scratched from blackberry thorns—
“Mrs. Keller?”
Shit! I startle. I am so shocked at the sudden sound of my own name that my foot slides, and I end up on one knee as if I am pleading with Detective Vince Jackson.
He calls down to me. “Do you need a hand?”
I am struggling upright. “I’m fine.”
“What are you doing here?” He is wearing those stupid, intimidating sunglasses that seem to be a required fashion accessory for men in blue. He looks huge standing up there.
“I thought … I should go looking. Maybe he’d walked here, fallen …”
“I think you should go home, Mrs. Keller,” he says.
I get myself back up the hill. I have a round splotch of mud on my knee. “I’m sorry,” I say. I don’t know what I’m apologizing for. My throat closes up, and I can feel the tears start. I’m scared. For Ian, for my future. Even Detective Vince Jackson scares me.
“Try to stay calm. We’re doing our job,” he says. It’s a very policeman thing to say. I notice that he is wearing a wedding ring. He’ll go home after work and his wife will be there, wherever his home is. I picture a colonial-style house, a kitchen with a wallpaper border. He’ll have something solid for dinner, like roast. Roast, a memory: I knew I would eventually leave Mark after making it one night. This was before I’d even met Ian. I had cooked a small prime rib, overcooked it, and Mark had gotten angry. Furious. I was sure that there was something else bothering him. No one could get that angry about a roast. I’d been sure like that a hundred times before. But he was mad about the roast. He was, and when I finally realized that, I knew that something important had shifted in my thinking. It was an overcooked-roast epiphany. You had violence, and then you had the ludicrousness of it.
“It’s hard to stay calm,” I say. “This is just so awful.”
“Go home. Let us know if you hear anything.”
I get in my car. My hands are shaking. All of me is shaking so badly. The worst thing is, I can feel that detective watching me.
I don’t go home after all. I’m right there next to BetterWorks, and so I drive into their lot and park in Ian’s spot. Abby’s right, we should be doing something, only I don’t know what. I can’t wait for the phone to ring anymore, that’s for sure.
I want to go in. I want to talk to everyone there to see if they know anything. I want to search through Ian’s office, look at his papers, read the files on his computer. I want to find some telltale message or receipt. I wonder if Detective Vince Jackson is still around, eyeing my every move.
I’ve seen Ian come out of that building so many times. We always met there in those early days, holing up in his office after hours, breathing each other in and leaping apart when the cleaning woman came to dump the garbage. Ah. But we’ve spent so much time there in our ordinary life, too, during our not-quite-three years of marriage, after our scandalous days were over. When we lived at my old house, I’d drive over the bridge and meet Ian here after work so we could walk to Costa’s for dinner, and after we moved to the houseboat last year, I came even more often. He would meet me in the lobby, or I’d wait by my car until he appeared with his laptop bag slung over his shoulder, his collar undone, and a huge smile on his face. We’d kiss. I’d smell that cologne of his. I love that smell. That smell is him to me.
Fingertips tap on my car window. Oh, God, no! Shit, shit, shit! I picture Detective Vince Jackson’s big, guarded face again, staring in at me. It’s not a crime, is it, to long for Ian? To be there, where he’s most likely to show up? He didn’t just disappear. He’s somewhere.
But it isn’t Detective Vince Jackson who�
�s tapping at my car window. It’s Nathan Benjamin.
“Dani?” His voice is muffled through the glass. His two first names make him seem friendly, as I’ve said, but so does his great hair—longish loose curls—and his warm eyes. He has nice-person hands, too. They aren’t lean and manicured; they’re guy hands, with uneven nails. Even though Nathan is very good looking, he is somehow regular and approachable. He still wears a wristwatch, the kind with the sun and moon rotating in small dials.
I roll down my window. I put my hand to my heart. “You scared me.”
“I’m so sorry. That’s the last thing you need right now.”
“This is horrific,” I say.
“The police were here a minute ago. A detective. He was asking questions.”
“I saw him. Did you hear what you just said? ‘The police were here.’ This isn’t real.”
“Do you want to come in?” he asks. “Come sit in my office? I can get you something to eat? Drink? Some company? Do you just want to be nearby?”
“I think I’ll get going.” The idea of playing detective is rapidly losing its appeal. I’m not sure I can face those people in there.
“All right.” He sets his hand on the ledge of the window. He pats it.
“We’ll talk,” I say.
“We’ll talk,” he agrees.
I leave him standing there in the empty spot next to Ian’s parking place. Two nights ago, right there on that lawn, it was spring, and there was music, and there were waiters passing drinks.