He's Gone

by Deb Caletti

  Later, it’s like a wake at my house. On a normal weekday, Ian would be arriving home any minute. I’d have cleared my work crap from the kitchen table and set it for two as dinner cooked. A pasta dish, stir-fry. I’d light a candle for us, and I’d put on makeup. But instead of Ian and me eating dinner and watching some show we liked, people are arriving at my door as if he’s already dead. Abby has been calling everyone, and my father is here, my mother, too, and my oldest friend in the world, Anna Jane. Bethy and Kristen are in the kitchen, sobbing onto the shoulders of their friends, and Ian’s sister, Olivia, asks questions of me as if she’s a prosecuting attorney. Of course, she sounds that way every Thanksgiving. It’s how she is. My father is on the phone, talking to I don’t know who. Hospitals, morgues, police departments of other counties. He’s working from a list he found on the Internet. I hear my mother say, Why are you doing that right now? Sometimes you just need to be here, but he ignores her. We don’t need you to be the hero, she says, and then looks at Anna Jane and rolls her eyes.

  I’m grateful for what he’s doing, though. It’s motion, and I can witness some sort of progress. He, Nathan, and Ian’s friend Simon Ash have also gone door-to-door on our dock, talking to people, asking if they’ve seen Ian or heard anything. They drove up and down our streets and the streets near Ian’s work. They returned looking exhausted, but Simon promised to do the same thing in Ian’s old neighborhood the next day. Olivia suggests calling airlines. Simon tells her that they won’t give out information unless there’s a subpoena. They argue this point. Simon is a contract lawyer and Olivia is an elementary school teacher, so he seems to win. She purses her lips and turns away.

  Abby has taken one of our wedding photos and cropped me out, making flyers with Ian’s face on them. Underneath, it says: Have you seen this man? She gives a handful to everyone to post. Paula, Ian’s secretary, takes a copy and promises to print more at the office. She’ll hand them out to everyone there, and she’ll assign various employees to various jobs, such as questioning various store owners in various locations. Someone has made a color-coded map. Bethy’s boyfriend, Adam, is walking around and talking on his phone, plugging one ear with his forefinger to hear better. My sister calls and insists on taking the next flight out, reluctantly changing her mind after I beg her not to. I am worried that all these well-meaning people are working so hard when Ian might be gone because he wants to be gone. I tell my sister that I don’t need her yet but might need her later. Later—what that might entail, I have no idea.

  In spite of this onslaught of help, I am desperately hoping they’ll all leave soon. I can’t wait properly with all of these people and emotions and relationships in the room. Most of all, I want to sit and rock and listen for him to come home.

  Finally, everyone does leave, everyone except Abby, who has packed a bag and moved into our back bedroom. No one has ever slept there before. The bed is Abby’s from our old house. Boxes from our move are still stacked in there, the tape lifted once and then patted back down. It’s all the stuff you look at and don’t know what to do with now that it doesn’t fit into your new life.

  Abby cleans up the mess from the impromptu vigil. She picks up the cans of soda the girls left on the deck rails, empties the overflowing garbage, and gathers the Subway wrappers from the sandwiches that Anna Jane brought because we still had to eat. Then Abby hunts through the canvas duffel she’s brought. She takes out a paper bag with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in it.

  “I got this on the way over. It seemed necessary. I don’t even know what this stuff is.” She removes the cap, sniffs. “Holy crap. That just burned a fire through my nasal passages.” She pours us each a large glass.

  “Honey, that’s way too much.” Abby isn’t a drinker. She tries to pour some of it back through the narrow neck of the bottle, but most of it spills on the counter. It’ll probably take the varnish right off the wood trim. Ian won’t be pleased.

  We each have a few swallows, which is followed by an array of gasping and sputtering and coughing. “It is nice and relaxing,” Abby says after a while. We sit in silence, until the alcohol catches up to us.

  “I’ve got to go to bed,” Abby says.

  “Okay, sugar.”

  “Is it okay to ditch you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Double hugs,” she says, and leans down to give me two.

  “Double hugs,” I say.

  I try to sleep, I do. I even undress and lie down. The house is quiet and dark now. I listen to the crickets outside and to some far-off airplane. It’s too hot in here. Someone has turned the heat up way past where we keep it. I can’t stay in the same sheets Ian and I have recently been in together. Maybe some people would find that comforting, but I don’t. It’s a bed of mixed emotions. Beds often are, even in the best of circumstances. I get up. In the living room, Pollux lifts his chin from his pillow and watches me, decides it’s not worth the effort to follow. He tucks his chin back down again. He’s been up way past his bedtime, too, with all those people around. I open the sliding door to the deck and sit down in one of the Adirondack chairs. I pull my robe around me. My phone is in my pocket in case Ian calls.

  If you have taken off somewhere, I am going to be so fucking mad at you, I tell Ian, wherever he is. The moon is large and white (he’s under it, too, somewhere) and the water out there shimmers with light. I can smell the deep murkiness of the lake. The dock groans and creaks and sways a little—soft, lulling rhythms. The New View sloshes and bumps against the dock.

  The party, the drive home, the grim face.

  I try and try to remember.

  The cool sheets. The bliss of rest.

  I take my phone from my pocket. Her name and number are still on my list of contacts. I dial.

  You have reached the office of Dr. Shana Berg. If this is an emergency, please dial 911 …

  I listen to her voice, wait to leave a message, but there’s a beep on my phone. It’s the double ring of another call coming in. It’s midnight. It’s him, of course it is. Who else? He’s heard about the commotion here tonight, and he’s feeling bad that he’s worried all those people. I feel sick with fear and relief. I feel joy, and fear and sickness, but, thank God, whatever it is, now I’ll know. I punch the button on the phone and wait to hear Ian’s voice.

  “Dani?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Nathan.”

  “Nathan?”

  “I’m sorry to call so late. I really am. So many people were there tonight … I wanted to talk to you, but …”

  “What, Nathan? What? Do you know something? You know something.”

  He is quiet. For a moment I think we’ve lost the connection. “Nathan?”

  “I think maybe we should meet.”

  When I was a child in the suburbs of Seattle during the 1970s, we lived next door to Mr. and Mrs. Harris, who were quiet and kept to themselves, even on Halloween, when they turned their porch light off. They were the only ones who did that, the one dark house on that street. One summer, I was sure that Mr. Harris had done in Mrs. Harris and their small dog, Trixie. I hadn’t seen Mrs. Harris’s large, floral-clad rear end bent over in the garden for a number of days, and I hadn’t seen Trixie flinging her small body against our shared fence whenever we let our cat out. But Mr. Harris kept coming home from work every night at six P.M., same as ever. It seemed possible that Mr. Harris had buried Mrs. Harris right under one of those flat, cement squares of their back patio, because he was a funeral director and because school was out and I was bored. For a long while, it was my understanding that this was where they put all the bodies from O’Dooley’s Funeral Home: beneath their patio, under the Harrises’ barbecue and Mrs. Harris’s tomato plants, the very place where Mrs. Harris sunned herself on a tippy, webbed chaise longue, slathering on the Sea & Ski and drinking Tab out of the can.

  I spied on Mr. Harris for a few days and took notes in a spiral pad I’d decorated with a cool STP sticker. He washed his car. He hauled out hi
s garbage cans. He turned on their sprinkler and forgot to turn it off until late at night, when the lawn was soaked. I watched too much Dragnet with my father, too much Adam-12. I read Two-Minute Mysteries and Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew, and funeral directors seemed likely capable of anything.

  Mrs. Harris and Trixie returned, though, after apparently spending several weeks at the local Travelodge. I heard my mother tell my friend Becky’s mom that Mr. Harris had gotten involved with someone he worked with at O’Dooley’s. This was extraordinarily creepy. Thrillingly so. I couldn’t imagine how Mrs. Harris could let Mr. Harris touch her after a day at work, let alone fathom an O’Dooley’s couple. I was ten, and the funeral home was in a large, chalky mansion in town, and I pictured Mr. Harris and some woman with pancake makeup doing it in a red velvet casket.

  Mrs. Harris was alive and well, but her marriage was dead, and even though I didn’t realize it then, the mystery was likely deeper than I ever could have imagined. Human nature deep. I’ve said it before, but in marriage there are things you don’t know about your partner. Always. The real thoughts in his head as he drifts off to sleep with his shoulders turned away from you—you can’t even guess. But you want to believe you do know. That a person is knowable. You need this belief. It’s a necessary denial. How can you go about everyday life otherwise? How could you ever water the tomato plants and unfold your chaise longue and enjoy a summer afternoon if you knew there were things buried under the cement patio of your very own yard?

  “When can I see you?” I say to Nathan Benjamin.

  5

  “Mom? Mom!”

  I rise through the shadow layers of sleep, untangling nightmare images from waking ones. When I open my eyes, I’m almost surprised to find myself in my own bed. Abby is there in her pajamas with the dancing dogs on them, the ones my mother made her for Christmas. Her face has the sweet plainness of no makeup, framed by shoved-up, bedraggled hair. But she also has that look she gets, a mix of worry and concentration. I first saw it when we made the papier-mâché horse for her third-grade report on Misty of Chincoteague.

  “Are you okay? Jesus, you scared me.”

  “A bad dream …”

  “You were crying out.”

  “I don’t know. It’s already gone. I don’t even remember.”

  The abrupt yank into wakefulness is confusing, until my real life efficiently barges in and takes over duty again. I hate that disorienting moment in the morning, I’ve always hated it—that brief empty in-between before you remember your life’s plotline. The blankness is the perfect setup for a nasty surprise, and I’m not fond of surprises. It can go either way, of course. Sometimes what returns to you upon waking is good news. That’s right, I’ve fallen in love! Or, Oh, yeah! Today my new boots are coming in the mail! But, other times, what reappears is the knowledge that your child is sick or that the kitchen flooded the day before. The bad stuff forgotten in sleep comes rushing back, and it’s new all over again. Every single time, it’s a split second of fresh pain or joy or thrill or doom.

  My husband is gone.

  “God,” I say. “Ian.” I can hardly believe it. I just … It’s impossible.

  “That stuff we drank probably didn’t help. My head feels full of fluff.” She rubs her eyes. “I can make you some breakfast. Pancakes?”

  “We’ve got forty pounds of baked stuff. Banana bread …” That fact also comes rushing back.

  “Cinnamon rolls, oatmeal–raisin cookies …” She counts on her fingers. “I need coffee.”

  Pollux trots in at the sound of voices. He puts his paws up on the side of the bed, looks at me hard.

  “Okay, I know,” I tell him.

  I put on my robe. I grab my phone, which I’d placed next to my pillow the night before. Nathan Benjamin, that’s right. My stomach flips in dread. I’ll be meeting him that afternoon.

  I don’t know why I do it, but after I get up, after I let Pollux out, I go to Ian’s closet. I run my hand across the row of colored dress shirts. I choose one and put my face to it, sniffing deeply. I don’t do it because I’m longing for the lost, missed scent of him. No. I know it’s crazy. But I’m wondering if I just might find the lingering smell of perfume.

  After that first time I lied to Mark, Ian and I began to meet regularly. Oh, those were intoxicating days. I was elevated by love. I felt connected to all people and things, struck by our common humanity and the beauty of it. I’d see the moms and dads at Target buying stuff to play Easter Bunny, and it would feel so damn sweet. I’d go to the garden department of some store and I’d take it all in, the abundance of flowers, the fat bags of bark, us folks with our endlessly optimistic desire to grow things. I noticed the big and small all around me—the lovely curve of orange peels, the bittersweet tenderness of twilight. I wanted to be a better person, certainly better than the one I was being then.

  Sometimes I would go to Ian. I’d drive to Seattle during the day, thirty minutes each way, for a half hour of being together in his car somewhere, away from the eyes of anyone he might know. Or he would come to me. We’d meet on his way home from work, at one of the wooded trailheads that surrounded our neighborhood, or at a park in the next town over, a dank, dark, and eerie place seldom used because it was dank, dark, and eerie. I usually got there before he did, checking my makeup in the visor mirror while I waited, sucking on mints, playing music especially chosen to evoke the feelings I most wanted to have then. I’d watch and watch for his car (a silver Audi, in those days), and then there it would come, oh, God, and he would park, and I could see through the windows that his jawline was somber and almost resigned until he leaned over the passenger seat to unlock the door and let me in.

  It’s been days. It’s been too, too long, he would say, and that’s exactly how it felt no matter how much time had passed. Eons. Slow, loud ticking clocks of days until our meetings, where the time would go so fast, you might become sure that some cruel, punishing time warp truly did exist. How could the very same minutes go so slow and then so fast? Scientific mystery. His car was one of the few corners of his world I was allowed into, and I claimed it—my seat beside him. It sounds pathetic and insignificant, meeting in his car, but it was also oddly wonderful. The car was contained and protected from intrusion and from the complications and hazards of real life. A space small enough to be perfect. These were moments of time in a private, enclosed domain that belonged to only him and me. He would put a CD in, one of our favorites, and then he would lean in and we would kiss and kiss some more until my lips got numb. It was the sort of passion that could never fade, you were sure, that could never be lost among laundry and bills and the needs of children.

  Just kissing, though. Always just that at first. See, it wasn’t an affair that was all about sex. (Affair—what a trivial word. It sounds like a party with frilly dresses.) No, it was the much more dangerous kind of relationship, the marriage-breaking kind about meeting your soul mate.

  What if this is nothing more than lust? he asked once. He asked a version of that question many more times still. And I would answer. I would give all the reasons, making an argument. I fought for it. The sinking ship was going under, under, under, and I was in the lifeboat and I was struggling to get him in there with me. I was grasping his hand and pulling more than my weight to haul him over the round rubber side of that small, perilous craft. He had swum there himself, though. He had pursued me. I shouldn’t forget that. I couldn’t have lifted him in without his desire to get in. Still. I had argued on our behalf.

  You’re the one I should have always been with, he would say, after my logic had softened his and brought him back to me. I see a lifetime in your eyes, he said once, too, a line I would have made fun of if I had heard it on TV but that choked me up in real life. He meant it. There were small acts of electrifying teenage romance, too: He would twirl my hair around his finger; he would look long and deep into my eyes. I can feel his round, hard shoulders and the buttons of his shirt under my fingers as I write this. I can
feel my own heartbeat. More music, more kissing, his hand at the back of my neck, pulling me to him with want. The damn parking brake.

  And then a utility truck would arrive. Or something. Some guy on his lunch break, taking a sandwich out of a brown bag and looking our way with a lurid grin. The dream would shatter, and the trees of that park would suddenly loom, and the clock would be noticed with alarm. Ian would take a pinch of his shirt and sniff. You didn’t wear perfume, did you? Not even hand lotion? I would shove away the thought—How did I get here?

  He would kiss me goodbye. I would leave his car. He would roll down his window. He would mouth You.

  I would sit inside my own car for a long while, old Blue Beast, holding on to that thing that was mine and mine alone for as long as I could. This is a confession—another confession. Every irritant and questionable comment from him got suppressed in support of those victorious moments of freedom. I guess you don’t turn away a rescuer in hopes of a better one. You’re thankful. I’m guessing that when a prisoner is let out, even the penitentiary parking lot looks beautiful.

  Because, soon enough, I would be pulling into my own driveway, going inside, taking some hamburger from the freezer. I would be the audience as Abby practiced her oral report on primates, both of us turning our heads toward the door as Mark walked in, both of us pausing to read his face for signs of what the evening would bring. I would feel relief if his eyes were smiling and relaxed and if he came in joking, tossing his keys on the counter. Maybe that would mean a bike ride later, a roughhouse game with him and Abby. But if his eyes were hard, if he thought the world had done him wrong while he’d been out, it meant stepping carefully. Either way, after Abby was in bed, I’d go up to our room and disappear into a book. Blessed books—they’re a place to be alone, and no one else can come in. I put up my book barrier because I didn’t want him to touch me. You came to hate sex with someone who betrayed you with violence. You’d do anything to avoid it. His mouth felt all wrong by then anyway.