He's Gone

by Deb Caletti

  We closed in around our secret and grew something that was just ours, selfishly and totally ours, and there aren’t many things like that in a life, things that are just yours. Of course, the moment you let it out into the world it’s not yours anymore, and, of course, you want it out in the world. I wanted to go to restaurants, to movies. We both did. After more than a year of sneaking around, fourteen months from the day we met, I was tired of lying. I was tired of negotiating the parking brake. We were all over each other once, my shirt nearly off, when there was a tap at the car window. It was a policeman, patrolling the park. We had to hand over our licenses as I clutched my top to my chest. We both felt like guilty teenagers, only worse—there were different last names and addresses on those licenses, and there were those wedding rings, and we were too old to be caught in a car. The guy probably went back to the station and told everyone and had a good laugh. Ian hated to be laughed at. I didn’t mind. His ego had been battered enough that the touch of a fingertip caused a bruise, and mine had been battered enough that it didn’t even know when it was being pummeled.

  During that time, I have to admit, there was something thrilling about turning my back on Mark every night in bed. He was right beside me, but I left him and went to this place in my head—it felt like an actual place—where I could relive that day’s conversation with Ian, the loving words, or a touch, or a long gaze, or talk of the future. I could feel Mark shifting around in bed, but I shut him out. It was powerfully punishing. He sensed my retreat and went either stony or desperate. He used to twine a lock of my hair around and around his finger to help him sleep, like a child with the corner of a blanket, but when he did that then, I’d pull away. My hair was my own. I didn’t want to be used for comfort anymore. People who kick dogs—they pet them, too.

  I let Mark find out. I suppose it’s what an employer with any heart does before a round of layoffs—he drops hints of cutbacks and profit losses before delivering the pink slip. There were those shoulders turned away from him, first of all, and long stares out windows. Finally, an email left where he could see it.

  I left an angry man by having an affair. As Dr. Shana Berg said, it wasn’t a very good plan, but it was a plan.

  You snip a thread, and … Wait. I’m remembering my first communion, when I was eight. My father grew up Catholic, and, therefore, so did we. At least, we check-marked the regular boxes—baptism, first communion. I was dressed like a little bride. White dress, white veil, white shoes and stockings. It’s one of those things (like Christmas trees, neckties, camping) that make the human race particularly hard to fathom. My father had the car running and my mother was yelling that we were late, when I noticed a fuzzy nub on my thick tights. I made a quick cut with my kiddie scissors, and as soon as I got into my father’s baby-blue Chevrolet Impala, the unraveling had begun. One small clip and so much damage can be done. The tights were in shreds by the time we reached the church. My mother noticed as we walked up the path; she let out a shriek that turned the head of Father Dominique, in his white robes with the gold trim. My stockings kept unraveling and unraveling until they were ribbons of disgrace, drooping across my leg as I received the white wafer on my tongue in front of that crowd. My mother was furious. We ate cookies and drank punch at a party afterward, as the run slithered down into my shoe. No one thought to just take the shameful things off.

  A single snip is what I’m saying.

  Of course, things got broken after Mark found out about Ian and me. The first thing was the tile countertop in our kitchen, as he slammed his fist into it again and again. Things get broken, and no matter how well they were put back together, you knew where the crack in that tile was.

  A quick look at Ian’s documents and his email tells me there are no immediate answers on his laptop. There are no suicide notes on his desktop or flight itineraries in his mailbox. There is no email from another woman left where I can see it. Delving further will take hours, and I’m too depleted for that.

  “I can’t,” I say. “Tomorrow.”

  “We need fooood,” Abby whines. She used to get like this whenever we went school-clothes shopping. I’d buy her an Orange Julius to bribe another half hour out of her.

  “I can run out and get us teriyaki,” my mother says.

  I groan. Nothing sounds good.

  “You’ve got to eat,” Abby says. “The ass of your jeans is getting baggy. Eggs?” I rub my eyes. Decisions about food can sometimes feel mammoth and complex. Should we have Italian or Mexican? Should we land the troops on the beach or attack the enemy by air? I feel this way on an ordinary day.

  “I’ll handle it,” Abby says.

  My mother is already rooting around in my fridge, which is irritating me. A fridge is as private as your purse, or else I am hungry, hungry enough to be rattled by anything. We all hear it: My stomach growls like a creaking door.

  “I hope an alien doesn’t burst out of your chest,” Abby says.

  My mother finds what she wants. “Help is on the way,” she says, holding up a bottle of red wine. Ian makes fun of the fact that I like my red wine cold.

  It’s a wine crime, I replied once. Arrest me.

  Don’t let Nathan see that, Ian had said. Nathan is a wine connoisseur. He has one of those mini-cellars in his town house. The wine choice is always up to him when we have dinner together, but he’s not a snob about it.

  He wouldn’t care. He never even swirls his glass.

  I’d care.

  Next time, I’m really gonna go crazy and drink red with fish. Twenty-five years to life.

  Hilarious.

  I hope you’re a tree stump in your next life. Joking was one way to deal with his criticisms. There were other ways. Distraction, anger. You try everything.

  Thanks.

  Tree stumps don’t worry about what people think of them. It’d be very freeing.

  Pour me a glass, smart-ass, he’d said.

  “Pour me a glass,” I say to my mother.

  She holds three wineglass stems in her hand expertly, tucks the bottle under her arm like a well-trained sommelier. It’s rather impressive, actually. “Let’s get some air.”

  Mom tries to open the sliding door with her foot. “Let me get that,” I say. It’s beautiful out on the lake. Spring air is mingling sweetly with hopeful, dusk light. The evening smells so good, I could drink it from a great big cup. The edges of the waves are silvery-white and bittersweet. The New View sloshes merrily against the side of the dock. Abby clatters pans in the kitchen. Pollux rediscovers his youth and bounds with great speed out the open door.

  Mom settles in a deck chair, pops the cork. It sounds wrongly celebratory. She pours me a glass. I gratefully sit in the lounge chair beside her and sip my wine. It’s a cheap bottle bought from Pete’s—I’m not a connoisseur. I buy bottles because they’re on sale and I like the label.

  “Monarch.” My mother leans back and smiles. She is still pleased with herself.

  My mind works the knot, endlessly so, but I’m not getting anywhere. “He wouldn’t have committed suicide,” I say. I’ve said this a hundred times by now. I stare out at the lake, at a large sailboat, the Lucky Lady, which swoops past. The captain waves at us, and his windbreaker flaps cheerfully. He has no idea we’re discussing a person taking his own life.

  “I wondered that at first. But Ian thinks too highly of himself to do that.” My mother’s cheeks are already red after only two sips of wine.

  “You know it’s not a high opinion. You know it’s hiding—”

  “Oh, God, please. Don’t say it. ‘Self-hatred.’ ‘Low self-esteem.’ I think we used the same excuse for Mark.”

  I stare at her, shocked. Hurt. She flutters her hand, implying that she means no harm. It stings, though. Well, the truth does. “You keep confusing the one who’s saving you with the one who’s drowning you.”

  “I don’t think now’s the time for relationship advice,” I say.

  “Now’s exactly the time.”

  My che
st is burning; I can feel red cinders under my skin, the buried fire of anger. I don’t want to fight with her. Best to stay on her good side, anyway—when she’s mad, watch out. “I was saying, I don’t think he would have committed suicide. It’s against his deepest beliefs. His religion …”

  Back in the day, Ian’s mother went to a school taught by Jesuits. Her room at the care facility still has a gory, sad-eyed Jesus on a cross above the doorway. The lessons of Ian’s childhood are there in bottomless, sunken grooves, even if he doesn’t go to church. The concept of sin is real to him. He’s shocked me more than once, talking about Adam’s rib or “the flood.” I always want to laugh, but he’s serious. I had some naïve belief that we were all sort of past that stuff. He went to graduate school, you know? I mean, he’s a logical person. He’s studied math and science. But, to Ian, logic and religion are sold separately.

  “Christians are so mean,” my mother says.

  “Remember when I shredded my tights at my first communion?”

  “You had first communion?”

  “You sewed the dress.”

  “Don’t remember.”

  “I was a little bride.”

  “I should never have let your father talk me into that.”

  Pollux is sniffing around the edges of the dock, intent on some canine investigation. He’s perilously close to the edge. My mother has her eye on him, too, the way she probably watched us as toddlers near the neighbors’ swimming pool. “He won’t fall in …”

  “No. He hates the water.”

  “He looks like he’s going to fall in.”

  “He’s a very capable dog.”

  “He barks when the doorbell rings on TV,” she says.

  “Don’t say that so loud. You’re a champion dog,” I say to him. “A prizewinner.”

  Now Abby opens the door with her foot. “Gourmet meal for three.”

  I jump up. “Let me help …”

  “Damn, that looks good,” my mother says.

  “Hey, I’m a grilled-cheese maestro, what can I say.”

  “Dill pickles, too.” I feel the momentary delight of a perfect meal—grilled cheese, potato chips, sliced dill pickles. In the grimness of these days, I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but there it is. Brief moments of goodness are shockingly persistent. You’re in the dark, darker, darkest, and yet there’s a dog sitting beside you, on his best behavior for a dropped crust, and there’s an industrious line of ducks paddling past, and there’s a grilled-cheese maestro. Life insists.

  “You okay?” Abby says to me. “Pickles make you teary?”

  “I’m so grateful for you guys.” It overwhelms me then, the gratitude.

  “It’s just grilled cheese. It’s not …” Abby searches around for the right word, and then delivers it with a nasally French accent. “Boeuf bourguig-non.”

  “Crêpe de Paree,” my mother says with her own French accent, though she sounds like an angry German soldier. She rolls the r heartily, so that crêpe becomes crap.

  “Pour me a glass,” Abby says.

  It feels good out there, a rest, and so we sit on the deck long after the sun goes down. Abby fetches us sweaters from the hall closet. The lake turns the deep gray of a ship’s hull.

  As we’re sitting there, I remember something. I’ve never told anyone this. I’d sort of let myself forget it, actually. But when Ian and I were moving to the houseboat, we had a fight. We were going through a storage unit he rented when he first moved out of Mary’s place and into that furnished apartment. Two years into our new marriage, we were finally moving to a place that was our own, and it was time to deal with all that old stuff. The storage facility was creepy—one of those warehouses with pulled-down metal doors along cold cement hallways, where it smelled like rancid paint and dead people’s belongings. It was a mausoleum for objects, or maybe some kind of object purgatory—the place between the hell of the dumps and the good old life back in Grandma’s living room.

  We stood in that small, dim cubicle and sorted through boxes. This, get rid of it. That, keep. There was so much that I had never been a part of. There were a lot of old wedding gifts that Mary had foisted off on him in some effort to burden his conscience. Champagne flutes. Silver trays. The boxes of butterflies and the collecting equipment had been stored in there then, too, and so had all that crap from Paul Hartley Keller’s garage, the fondue pot and the carving knife and such. The wooden cabinet that Ian’s grandfather made was there then; it was heading to our new dining room.

  I didn’t know how to help sort—there were books with inscriptions from old girlfriends and an ugly painting of an Indian woman kneeling beside a creek, which had been in his and Mary’s bedroom. There were boxes of photos and children’s crafts made for Daddy and old college textbooks. I could see Ian’s mood deteriorating. He had started out ready to tackle the task and was quickly slipping into defeat. Who wants to look at the past laid out like that? Who wants to touch every yearbook and that first box of personalized business cards and all those discarded items of marital joint property, from the chip-and-dip dish to the silver wedding goblets? Seen together, it doesn’t add up to much. Especially when a good lot of it was now called a mistake.

  If you don’t know what to do with it, just leave it! he’d snapped.

  Be nice! I’d said. I’m trying to help you here.

  Do you think this is easy? Show some sensitivity. Look at all this stuff! I’m throwing half my life away.

  Right then I was sick to death of his criticisms and outbursts of self-pity, I really was. After all of the fighting with ex-spouses and the mediations and the attorney bills and custody evaluations and apartments and waiting and divorce and remarriage, after all of that, we were finally moving into a new place that was free of the past. And right then, too, I suddenly felt as if I could leave him. I could. Even after all of that. Or especially after all of that.

  I looked around that cold place. He came with an awful lot of stuff.

  Don’t do it on my account, please.

  He was holding a lamp in the shape of a cowboy boot, something he’d had in his childhood bedroom. I can’t believe you just said that.

  I wanted to say more. No, I wanted to take that eerie, cold freight elevator out of that place where I didn’t belong. I wanted to get away from the weight of him. But I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I picked up what looked like the bust of someone. Some fired-clay bust—a crude attempt to replicate what must have been Paul Hartley Keller.

  Oh, my God! I laughed. What’s this? I could barely lift the damn thing. Mary was happy to get rid of that, I was sure. Is this your father?

  No. Ian’s jaw tightened. I’d offended him. Great.

  It looks just like him. At least, it had Paul Hartley Keller’s high forehead and recessed chin, done in amateurish clay pinches.

  It’s me.

  I looked at it. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It slipped right out. You? Oh, my God, this is disturbing. Where’d you get it? This would give me bad dreams.

  It was a gift. Mary commissioned it for me as a surprise. When I first bought the company. She had some idea of it going in the lobby.

  I’m glad you didn’t put it there! It’d scare people.

  You know, Dani …

  People would scream when they walked past it. I was cracking myself up. Really, the thing was hideous. It looked exactly like Ian’s father.

  You know, I can see how you’d make Mark so mad.

  I stopped laughing then. I looked at him in that dim cell and he looked ugly to me, as ugly as that pinched-clay bust. I set it down. I didn’t say anything more. I shoved my anger far down, where even I wouldn’t be able to see it.

  But how many things stay buried, really? Not memories, not anger, not pieces of shipwrecks, floating to the surface and landing on a beach somewhere years later.

  That bust ended up in the trunk of my car, along with boxes of his old straight-A report cards and more stuff Mary didn’t want from their closet, includ
ing a hand vac that had been a birthday gift to her that she was still pissed about. We left the job half done; we’d gotten a late start, and our attitudes had worsened, and so that stuff rode around in my trunk for a good week afterward. That night, we went to Kerry Park with a blanket and a bottle of wine. We actually had a nice time. It was only the third night in our new houseboat.

  It was time to forgive and forget, but I didn’t forget. When Ian went to work the next day, I opened my trunk. I hauled out that bust, and it took some doing, too. Jesus, that thing weighed a ton. I lugged it down the dock, and I had to set it down once or twice when it got too heavy.

  I can see how you’d make Mark so mad. It was a vicious, vicious thing to say. He had no idea the kind of terror you felt when someone’s fist was in your face.

  It was much harder to accomplish than I thought it would be. I really had to work at it, and I was sweating. I set that goddamn thing on the edge of the dock. And then I shoved.

  It took longer for it to sink than you’d imagine. I watched as that Paul/Ian face slowly, slowly, dropped down into the murky water.

  God, it was satisfying. I felt joyful. My heart did a little victory dance. But then I immediately started to worry. Ian never asked me about it. I don’t think he even realized it was gone. Still, I envisioned chunks of it floating up for him to see. I worried about it for days. My anger itself was a crime, I was sure.

  “Things are biting me.” Abby swats at her ankles. “Let’s go in.” Her cheeks are red from wine, too. It’s a genetic trait. Three swallows of wine by any of the women in our family, and we’re all as rosy and flushed as fat men moving pianos.

  I’m glad we’re heading in. Now that I remember that statue under the water, right beneath us, I feel uneasy being out there.