He's Gone

by Deb Caletti

  Mark would wish him harm.

  Mary.

  His children, even.

  Nathan, though it seems unlikely.

  I don’t want to say it or even think it. But, looking at it objectively, I suppose you could add me to that list. I suppose you could.

  Of course, Ian is his own worst enemy.

  Monarch, I type, and the magic doors open again.

  10

  I can hear the rain on the roof; I can hear it on some plastic tarp old Joe Grayson uses to cover his firewood. I can hear it on the lid of our barbecue. This is how it is in Seattle, even in the spring. Moody, always. The raindrops jump on the surface of the lake, a raindrop ballet on a water stage, and the houseboat tilts in the wind. The rings and ropes of the New View clang against its mast. Outside, it is a palette of grays again. Here, you get to thinking that summer will never come. Living in Seattle is like living with a depressed person, one who might all at once cheer, one who might suddenly rage.

  The file is named Dani. I open it with a sick heart. This will be the letter; I know it. A goodbye, regrets, the name of a city where one could begin a new life, or maybe a plan involving pills and a mountain road.

  I read until I realize the words are familiar. I’ve read this letter before. Years ago.

  Dani –

  I know we agreed not to write or speak, but did you hear that Raising Cain has a new album out? Okay, that’s the worst excuse ever for writing. But I miss you so much. There have been so many things I’ve wanted to tell you, from this great new brand of coffee I tried to the news that Nathan and I are moving products to three new countries. I can’t believe you don’t know these things, and I can only wonder what I don’t know about you. I’ve driven past your house late at night and have seen Mark’s car gone. Is he putting it in the garage now, or …??? Are you okay? My imagination is going wild.

  I am struggling. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The counseling is awful—understandably it’s all about her rage and my betrayal, but the reasons behind the “affair” have been lost. My head, my screaming conscience, wants to feel for Mary what I should feel. But everything I say and do is a lie, except for what I do with my children. We even took a family trip to Disneyland, happiest place on earth, and Mary held my hand and I rode with the children on the rides and I felt like a ghost. Everyone tells me that the only way I can have my family and friends is if I have Mary, too. I feel blackmailed. I’m dying in this place.

  There are other letters, too. So many others. He’s kept them all, and they are organized carefully, lovingly even. His letters to me are there, and so are mine to him. My heart squeezes; I feel my chest collapse in grief. It’s all there. Our history.

  Ian –

  First things first! The name of that coffee! How could you have held back on information like that for even a day?

  It’s another kind of rain I’m hearing now. Rain on the roof of that house I’d shared with Mark. The gutters are clogged with leaves, and water is whooshing out the drain spouts. I am in the spare room where we keep the computer. Abby’s aquarium is in there, too, and it burbles and bubbles, more water, but the water is murky and the thing needs cleaning. I see Ian’s email in my in-box. I haven’t heard from him in over six months. My heart fills with a love and an optimism that feels perilous.

  There is so much to say, and so much not to say. I hadn’t been to Disneyland with Mark and Abby. No. Mark had moved out the day after Thanksgiving, six weeks after Ian and I stopped seeing each other. The just-washed gravy boat was still on the counter from the dinner I had made the day before. After he left, everything in the house made me unbearably sad. That gravy boat. The toaster, the kitchen table, the coffeepot. My grief extended to every single item—a butter knife in the sink. Most especially, the artwork Abby did the year before, which hung above her bed. Looking at it, my body cracked open, and my insides, my heart, spilled out onto the floor. Those suns, you know, drawn in Magic Marker above blue houses with green lawns.

  In December, I met with an attorney. It wasn’t what I had ever envisioned for my life, but it was my life, which is as good a definition of surreal as any. Those were my shoes down there, walking on the plush carpet of the attorney’s office. I wrote a check that nearly depleted what I had left in my checking account, because two brochures and one set of business cards and three websites cannot keep a family afloat. I tore off that check with shaking hands and I handed it over, and it was all surreal—the check, the person who was my lawyer now, me. That woman writing the check seemed in no way capable of managing what was happening. She might not make it back to her car in the parking lot, first of all.

  During that time, I talked to Mark every night on the phone. My mother disapproved of this. She didn’t understand that I needed to keep the tiger happy with bits of meat; a whip and a chair would not be enough. It wasn’t only his anger I had to control, I knew. I also had to balance his despair with demonstrations of my own sadness; I had to build his broken self-esteem and sense of victory with a show of my own failings. I could lead us all where we needed to go without disaster, I thought, managing his moods as I had for so many years before. This felt manipulative and imperative. We saw him every few days, too. He would come to the door and we would have a few minutes of awkward conversation while Abby got her shoes. I would watch their backs retreat down the walkway, and I’d be filled with guilt and mourning at what he no longer had. He’d taken stuff from me, but I took things from him, too. I saw it every time they walked away together.

  Mark came over for Christmas that year, our first one as a separated couple. I guess that’s what you do when you’re figuring out how to be apart. He came for a few hours. It was just the three of us, and Abby was hyper and silly, becoming the court jester so that everyone smiled and no one got their head chopped off. There was a hunt for batteries for Abby’s new pink camera. Empty boxes and wrappers were strewn all over the floor. Mark acted like the father that he was and showed Abby how to use her camera. Then he put the new DVD into the machine so that she could settle down and watch it, and he took my hand and led me to the bathroom and raised my skirt and lifted me onto the sink and made love to me insistently, quickly. I let him, because it was easier that way, but when it was over, it didn’t feel easier. I felt sick. I wanted him gone. I wanted him away. He kissed Abby goodbye and then left shortly afterward, and I locked the door behind him. I locked all the doors, I shut the blinds, shut my mind. Every image that came to mind was a wrong one.

  The rain was falling, and the aquarium was burbling, and I was typing. No, I was carefully choosing words.

  First things first! The name of that coffee! How could you have held back on information like that for even a day? I will definitely have to check out that new album, after I visit the divorce attorney, alas.

  I am glad to hear from you. A thousand things to say, but mostly … I miss you, too.

  Oh, the pain and terror of those months, which Ian would never know about. It was all unspoken in those lines. The fear, fear, and more fear, of Mark’s anger and economics and the future—they all hid behind the lightness of my words. The weight of that fear would send him running, so I never shared it. I loved that man. I wanted him back. But I was hiding so much, I was. I was hiding my own need, most of all.

  In that aquarium behind me, there was a tiny Disney figurine that Abby had gotten from who knows where, I don’t remember. Maybe it had been on a birthday cake. It was Ariel, the red-haired mermaid, sitting on a rock. We had fastened her next to the stone castle and plastic plants. She had given up her voice to live among men. I had done the same.

  Of course, Ian and I started back up again after those emails.

  My heart is in your teeth, he would say to me. My heart is in yours, I would say back. It was a lyric from one of the songs he’d first played for me. I don’t even know which song anymore. It was a pact between us. It meant: Be gentle.

  I look and look everywhere on that laptop. I read letters
and documents and find the websites he visited. He’s obviously in the market for another pair of Italian shoes. He has three pictures of a city in Spain: Andalusia. There is the website of a Mediterranean restaurant in Seattle. He has recently opened several medical pages about thyroid conditions. I look and look, but there is nothing there. Nothing but us.

  That night, sitting in the dark, I dial those familiar numbers again. The houseboat tips and rocks in the wind, and something—a leaf, a branch—ticks against the glass of my window, startling me. I listen to Ian’s voice, which calmly suggests once more that I leave a message. I beg that voice to tell me something, but it only speaks those usual, guarded words. We are both there in that same night; he is somewhere out there. I only hope he is alive. I can hear the New View bump and squeak against the floats. The chains that anchor the houseboat to the dock creak and groan. It can be unnerving to live in a floating house. I sometimes fear that I will go to sleep one night and, without my knowing it, the house will come unhinged. The restraints will slip; the house will have a mind of its own. Who knows what might happen then.

  I end the call. You could want so much from a phone, and still it sits there in your palm, being its cool little technological self.

  I sit in bed with my legs crossed, as the house is rocked by waves. That statue I had dropped into the water, the one I still think of as Paul Hartley Keller—it’s down there somewhere, staring up from the murky depths, tangled in seaweed, perhaps, likely covered now in slippery brown algae. The image disturbs me. I feel agitated. I get up, look out into the night, and then I pick up my phone again. I step around the creaky parts of the floor. I don’t want Abby to hear me. She’s been so great—the least she deserves is a good rest.

  “Hello?”

  His voice is sleepy. I’ve woken him. “Nathan?”

  “Dani? Have you heard something?”

  “The police are parked on my street. I saw them here tonight.”

  “You sound scared.”

  “They’re watching my house.”

  “They’re probably watching underage kids buy beer at Pete’s.”

  “I don’t know. It looks like him. Detective Jackson.” I’m silent. The silence and the darkness and the whispering feel confessional. I look at the lights across the lake, the pointed tip of the Space Needle, the yellow-white-lit windows of the cityscape.

  “Those guys all look alike.”

  “He’s been gone a week.”

  “I know.”

  “It feels different now that it’s been a week.”

  “To me, too.”

  “Maybe he went to Spain,” I say.

  “Spain?”

  “I saw these pictures on his laptop. A city in Spain. Andalusia.”

  “Oh, Dani …” He sighs.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know if you remember. You probably don’t. I went there a couple of years ago. I’m sure I sent him some photos.”

  I can’t imagine Ian there, anyway. Not really.

  “His Spanish is terrible,” I say.

  “He’d be all freaked out about drinking the water.”

  “You’re right.” I remember his long fingers plucking bits of lettuce from his plate when we went to San José Del Cabo. He can be prissy about disease—germs, a coughing person in close quarters. He thinks he has every ailment in those articles: Ten Signs of a Heart Attack. The Twelve Most Undiagnosed Killer Diseases. Of course, I’m not any different. I get a bad headache and I’m sure I have a brain tumor. My back pain means some sort of cancer. This is probably what happens to people who think too much about pleasing others. You stay on high alert; you do what you can to avoid being left, because rejection could come from any direction. Even your own body might decide to call it quits.

  “Spain, no,” Nathan says. “He’d be more like … Cape Cod.”

  “Cape Cod?”

  “No, no. I’m not suggesting anything. I just mean, not there. Not Spain. He’d think … dirt and grime and bad traffic.”

  I don’t respond. I listen for stirring, Abby waking … I want her to be able to sleep, yes, but, truthfully, I feel bad about this phone call. Ian himself would disapprove. Calling a man late at night? It’s not exactly appropriate, even if we’re discussing him. But the house is still. No one’s caught me doing anything wrong.

  “I went to see Bethy and Kristen today, and when I was leaving, I thought I saw him. This man had his back turned to me, he was unlocking a car door, and I could have sworn for a minute it was Ian. His same body frame …”

  “I saw his haircut in Starbucks. I saw his coat in the bank,” Nathan says. “I even called out his name, and this guy turns around and he’s, like, ten years older with a goatee.”

  “Ian tried to wear a goatee for a while.”

  “I remember that.”

  “I think goatees look evil.”

  “Some facial hair is definitely malicious. Those little mustaches.”

  “The Hitler ones.”

  “Right. And even those bushy mustaches on big guys in camouflage jackets.”

  “The walrus ones.”

  “Yeah.”

  There is more silence. I hear him breathing. It reminds me of the hours Ian and I used to spend on the phone together, being in the same place when we couldn’t be in the same place. When he lived in his apartment, we once watched West Side Story together over our phones after the kids went to bed.

  “There was a woman at the party,” I say to Nathan.

  “I can’t hear you. You’re whispering.”

  “There was a woman at the party.”

  “Okay …”

  “Red dress.”

  “I’m not good at this. I never remember what people are wearing. I don’t even remember what I was wearing that night.”

  “She was talking to Ian.”

  “Dani, there were, like, two hundred people there.”

  “Out on the lawn, at the park. After all the speeches, when the party was winding down? Some people were still dancing, but mostly everyone had started to drift outside—Why are you avoiding me on this? You know exactly who I mean.”

  “I’m thinking. You were wearing black.”

  I smile a little in that darkness. Nathan is sweet. “Blond? Long hair. Big … How else to say … Big boobs. Really big.”

  “Oh, right. Desiree Harris.”

  “Men—you definitely remember the boobs.”

  He chuckles, guilty. “Um, she was kinda advertising.”

  “Kinda?”

  “She’s in marketing.”

  “How fitting.”

  “She’s new. Hasn’t really proven herself, not in my opinion.”

  “He had his hand … you know, on the back of her dress.” I hold my hand up in the dark, replicating the move.

  “I could see why you were pissed, okay? But it was just Ian being Ian.”

  “You did know who I was talking about.”

  “It wasn’t anything.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “You’re totally barking up the wrong tree. I’m telling you. And Desiree? No.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s not his type.”

  I don’t want to argue with him, but he’s wrong. The exposed breasts, that showiness that spoke of parties and drinking and liking a good time—it was Mary all over again. Even if these were precisely the things Ian claimed he’d grown weary of, you could miss your old life. Even if you wanted that divorce, there were parts of a person and parts of your past that inspired an illogical yearning. “She caught him by his cuff. You know, grabbed his wrist.”

  I could see why you were pissed …

  All at once, I remember it. I see it. I shut my eyes, and it’s there. Black sky, starry night, the music drifting toward the lawn, the back strap of my heels digging into my skin. I should have worn them around the house beforehand to break them in. I was looking for Ian—I wanted to go home. I had spent the last twenty minutes stuck in conversation with a mi
ddle-aged couple who were raving about their trip to Fiji. They had told me about the locals and the food and the place they stayed, and I had heard the expression Like Hawaii used to be so many times that I lost count. The wine (three glasses, three and a half) and those Vicodins (two, yes, I had taken two, not one, I admit it) were swarming uneasily in my head, and I had responded to the couple with a thickness in my mouth that I didn’t trust.

  My calves ached from standing. My energy for small talk had been used up, and the dessert table had only lemon tarts left. Where was Ian?

  Wait. I could hear his laugh. People chatted in small groups on the lawn, and some car engines were starting up as folks headed home. There he was. And, oh, look. Perfect. There she was, too, in that red dress, and he was moving her toward the building, his hand guiding her. She made some joke and caught his sleeve, and I couldn’t read his face.

  I felt a rise of anger. Bitterness clawed through the comfy blur I’d arranged for myself. It really pissed me off, it did. I had put up with all his ridiculous comments and monitoring, the ways he was sure some man might see up my skirt or take my friendliness as flirtation, and now this. He guarded me like the prize jewel in his personal museum, and yet I’d never given him reason to doubt my fidelity, never. He was the one. He was. His insecurity—it meant you tolerated his criticism and his ego. Well, I was done tolerating.

  I could see why you were pissed. The grass, my muddy feet. His grim face.

  “I think I should talk to her,” I say to Nathan. I’m thinking about that cuff link.

  “Dani, you know, this is crazy. I understand that you want to pursue every avenue, but he loves you. I’m sure there’s an explanation, yeah, but not that one. I mean, I think it’s time we face the possibility … He might … Something might have happened—”

  “Don’t say it, Nathan.” Dead. He’s dead. Don’t think it, don’t think it, don’t think it.

  “Okay, I understand. I get that. And he could’ve only checked out for a while. That could be. He’s punishing us. Believe me, I can see it.”