by Deb Caletti
“If so, he’s a bastard.”
“That’s fair. More than fair.”
“You know what I thought today? What if we never know? What if things just go on and on like this, and we never find out where he is or what happened to him?”
“We will.”
“But what if we don’t? Can you imagine living with questions like this? Forever questions? Wondering for the rest of your life?”
“You gotta hang on here. Ian is logical, isn’t he? Methodical. There will be a reason.”
Yes, but Ian held to that reason and the “right ways” of doing things, he clutched that restraint and that logic and that perfection, because, just on the other side of all that, sitting so, so close, was irrationality and anarchy and every hideous thing let free. On the shadow side of perfection is fear of uncontrollable rage, but I don’t tell this to Nathan. I know this because I’ve seen it. Once. I saw it in that very same park, during a picnic gone wrong.
Your history, dear God, it follows you. It’s under your skin and in your cells and it flows through your blood, and so you can’t escape it. You grew up hiding from the storms under your own roof, and so you look for lightning to live with, even to marry. Your second-grade self is told by your arrogant father that you’re no good, and so to you no one else is, either. Of course, the two of you, he and you, you rescue each other. You dodge the big shadows and cling to each other, two lost souls, as night falls on that lifeboat.
How could Ian not collect butterflies, same as his father?
“There are lots of possibilities, Nathan. Reasons behind the reason, even.”
“And then there are just plain accidents,” Nathan says.
But I don’t believe that Ian has had an accident, and I doubt Nathan does, either. Something’s happened, something bad, and I am becoming surer of it. I am so angry, for one thing. I want to rip those shirts off their hangers and tear them with my teeth. All this anger means something.
Dr. Shana Berg had said it all those years ago. You must be furious. Her office was in a house on Capitol Hill in the city. It was an old Seattle foursquare, with crown moldings and high ceilings. The waiting room had stiff chairs and outdated magazines, but I liked the musty smell in there. It was a good kind of musty. It made me feel as if people had lived there for years, weathering the good and bad of life. Dr. Berg appeared in the waiting room and called my name, adding a question mark to the end of it. It was a good place for a question mark, all right. I rose, and she shook my hand in a way that was both kind and efficient. Things were going to get handled, the handshake promised. Well, I had a lot of hope. She had gray hair cut bluntly and a warm face with wrinkles, which I decided were signs of wisdom. I needed wisdom. Poor thing, she probably went home and burned her meat loaf like everyone else, but I required more from her than that.
Mark and I had been separated for a solid year by then. I had filed for divorce shortly after he moved out. Filed—it sounds so orderly. As if you place a finished marriage in its own efficient folder and shut the drawer. The truth was, Mark had gone nuts, and there’s nothing orderly about nuts. He was fighting for custody of Abby. He vowed to keep fighting for as long as it took. He had fired his attorney and had become his own, and you know the saying about people who do that. He’d made it clear: He would not lose. This had become the ultimate sporting event, and he was wearing his cleats, and he would break every rule as long as it meant winning. He was running up enormous debt on our credit cards. He was making ominous nonverbal threats. He sat outside the house with his car running. He climbed in an open window to make himself a sandwich with my groceries. The sliced turkey was missing, and so was the journal I kept by my bed.
After Ian’s email, we had begun to meet in secret again. The hands and mouths and desire—it was a place to disappear into and aim toward. When I looked into his eyes, I forgot my loss. I forgot my terror, even. There was a future here, not just this turbulent and painful past–present.
Several months later, Ian left Mary and moved into Motel 6. I visited him there that first night. It was like a hospital room, without the calming assurances of sterility. The walls were white, the floor was hard linoleum, but there was a hair in the bathtub, and the soap had been used. It was a thin surfboard sliver on the sink. I remember that. The room was too hot and the thermostat was complicated. There was no television, and the bed was hard; there was no comfort anywhere, aside from one white towel hanging from the bar in the bathroom. Of course, the mission was doomed. The place was prison cell more than hospital, come to think of it, which I guess was what he felt he deserved. The wrongness of leaving his children and the lure of the leather couches he’d bought with his own money sent him back within two days. He wanted to be a good father and a good man. He wanted to live a life more true to himself. He didn’t think he could have both of those things without paying dearly. He was right. I understood his terrible conflict. I couldn’t have left Mark if it meant leaving Abby. Even in my situation, I could never have done that.
I told Dr. Shana Berg my whole story as she listened, her hands folded carefully in her lap. I looked to see if there was a wedding ring on the telltale finger, but there wasn’t. Her hands were bare and they seemed strong. They were the kind of hands that would be able to grow things and chop an onion and start a fire in a fireplace. That’s right—there was a fireplace in her office, too. I almost forgot. A brick one that maybe didn’t work any longer, but it added a warmth to the room, anyway, even unlit. A hearth.
I spilled it all—my fear and worry, Ian’s indecision. I spoke of Abby. I spoke of exhaustion and defeat and financial panic. I spoke of sleeplessness and longing and of the helplessness I felt being stuck in one place for so long. But Dr. Shana Berg kept talking about anger.
I’d be furious, she said.
I don’t know if I’m furious so much as terrified, I said.
You’ve got a bully that you’re trying to pacify and a guy who can’t make up his mind that you’re trying to pacify. I’d be pissed.
Anger doesn’t feel very fair. That’d hardly be nice. I got everyone here. It’s my own fault.
Nice can be a place to hide.
Well, she was probably right. It’s all I’ve known. Since the first grade, when Mrs. Franklin sat me next to Michael Mulls, the bully, to “be a good influence.”
How tiring, Dr. Shana Berg said.
Isn’t that what we learn? Don’t talk back, be seen and not heard, don’t ask for that candy bar in the store?
You probably wanted to pull out Michael Mulls’s chair right before he sat down.
I laughed. I loved the idea of it, even after all those years. Can you imagine? I said. What a thrilling thought. I never could have done it.
Why not?
It would have been wrong. I was always trying to be good.
Good. She let the word sit there in the room.
Such a simple word. I shook my head. It’s supposed to be so clear, too. Good, bad, right, wrong.
Good has been complicated for you.
Well, look. I was always so nice, and now I’ve got this scarlet A on my chest.
Nice is often just powerlessness with a smile.
I quit seeing Dr. Shana Berg after Ian moved out for the last time, a few months after his first attempt. I got too busy. I was taking on as much work as I could, and I was trying to build a life with Ian. I started canceling appointments. It seemed like a waste of time. It wasn’t cheap, either. I didn’t like the direction she and I were going, anyway.
Oh, boy, that must have made you so mad, she said, after Ian went out to dinner with Mary. Even after he left home, he was still doing stuff like that. You probably want to tell him where he can shove it.
She was the only one I was getting mad at. Dr. Shana Berg, she just kept kicking the opossum who was playing dead. But that opossum was playing dead because it was a survival mechanism, built into the DNA from the time opossums first walked our fiery earth and useful every damn day since.
And then there’s the darkness itself. In darkness, every line sunk down deep can be reeled in. Every vulnerability, every black thought—they surface. There are the noises, too, the ones you never hear in the day, some squeak that might be a footstep, a disturbing hum from an otherwise silent appliance; there is the ticking clock and your own loud heartbeat. Your sweater over that chair is an ominous, bulky form. Your coat on a hook is a stranger in your bedroom. Ghosts never show themselves in the daylight. Nightmares don’t come during an afternoon nap.
Sleep might mean that dream. His hands would be on my wrists, pinned above my head like a butterfly’s wings on a foam board. The best way to kill one, he told me once, is to press its thorax between your thumb and forefinger. It takes a lot of practice to apply the right pressure. Not too much or too little; enough to stun it without damaging its body.
I curl up on our continent, pull the covers up. I could wrap myself in white sheets and be transformed in sleep. But, no, the wind is still pitching our house, enough that the door swings and then clicks closed. A banging starts. That damn boat has come loose again. I remember that sound from the morning he went missing. It’s the sound between before and after. I’d been happy then. Or, at least, I’d been innocent.
I get up. Damn it!
Pollux rouses and his eyes blink, confused at these unexpected nocturnal events. I open the back door. The wind knocks over the card my friend Anna Jane sent, which Abby had propped on the kitchen counter. It’s cold out there. I’m wearing only a T-shirt and a pair of underwear, and goose bumps crawl over my skin. I kneel on the dock. It occurs to me—kneeling and praying. Maybe that’s what I should be doing every single night. Getting down on my knees.
I look around. I try to figure out what’s going on. A cleat is a little loose, that’s the problem. I can see that now. It’s jiggly, and the rope frees itself as the cleat rotates. I tighten it with my fingernail. That’ll work for now. I’ll have to screw it down properly in the morning.
I reach out for the rope, and I secure it to the cleat as best as I can. The New View is tight against the dock now. It’s so dark out there, and the lake is choppy in the whistling wind. All the lights of the houseboats on the dock are off. I feel uneasy. It’s unsettling, it really is, the way this home of ours is surrounded by water.
11
Mary was the one who had the balls enough to finally make Ian choose between us. That’s why he moved out for the last time. You know, good for her. I was oddly proud of her. I wish I had been the one to be strong like that.
Ian brought me to a small lakefront park near our neighborhood to tell me. There we were, in a park in public during the daytime, where anyone might see us. It seemed so open. It felt strange to not hide.
We don’t have to hide anymore, he said, reading my mind. He held my hands. He looked deeply into my eyes. I’ve decided.
I wasn’t sure what my response was supposed to be. Excited? Respectfully somber? Mary must have been devastated, and I’m not a person who rejoices in my own victory. In any competition, I always feel bad for the loser. Watching sporting events on television, even a cooking-show contest—I am sad for the defeated team, or the one in second place, pushed behind the winner at the end of the season as the confetti falls from the ceiling. Those poor women with their failed cupcakes, even. They did their best. I once won a spelling bee in sixth grade, and I shared my candy with Allison Leffler, who got the silver ribbon.
Ian, too—this was thrilling and long-awaited news, but he looked exhausted. His eyes were tired, dead. We were both exhausted. We’d had one passionate and adulterous year and another one and a half years of mutual, hellish marital collapse. It did not seem like we were at the start of something great, more like we were in the middle of an impossible, arduous race that might never end. There were no rainbows on the horizon for us to skip toward.
We walked back to the car. I was still glancing over my shoulder, expecting to see Neal or Rob or Jason’s mother, all of whom might stone Ian and me if they saw us together. There was a baseball practice going on nearby, the little team in their red striped shirts and important socks, and you could hear the metal ping of ball against bat, the cheers of support—Go! Go! Go!—for the red-striped runner. That baseball game where we’d met seemed like a lifetime ago.
Ian’s decision to leave changed everything with Mary, of course. Gone was the hand-holding and talk of change and sex every night and even the hairstyle that looked like mine. He was going to pay. People play nice until they know it’s really over. It makes you realize how much of a relationship can be a strategy to get your needs met.
Mary was thunderous once more as the marriage crashed down, cataclysmic, as Mark continued to propel my attorney’s bills into stratospheric figures. The person you want to leave is the one you’ll have to divorce. Now, there’s a piece of advice; remember that. It was Shakespearean. It was ordinary. Dr. Shana Berg shrugged her shoulders. In long-standing marriages, ninety percent of the divorces involve infidelity. No one likes to leave alone. But no one likes being left even more. So it goes.
So it goes? I had said. The world was crashing and burning.
Remember when you were pregnant and it felt like no one had ever been pregnant before?
I nodded.
These things happen.
This was not the way we should have done it. That’s one thing I know.
She bobbed her tea bag in her cup. It wasn’t the best plan, but it was a plan.
“We’d like to go over your story one more time,” Detective Jackson says on the other end of the phone.
“I don’t understand.”
My mother and Abby and my dear friend Anna Jane watch me anxiously. What? my mother mouths at me. Anna Jane begins picking up breakfast plates. When nervous, she always gets busy. When her own mother was ill, she was the one who interviewed doctors and picked up prescriptions. This morning, she’d arrived at the houseboat with coffee cake. My sister had sent a box of homemade chocolate crinkles, with their cracked desert landscape of powdered sugar. Oh, the women in my life, we feed our misery.
“We’d like you to come in.”
“I’ll do anything you need, but I don’t understand.…”
“Some people have some concerns.”
“I’m sure you mean Bethy and Kristen. We have a history, Detective. They don’t exactly love me. They see me as the reason their father left their mother.”
My own mother lets out an angry huff, and Abby covers her face with her hands.
“They have some concerns about the state of your relationship with Mr. Keller.”
“They’ve always had concerns about the state of our relationship.”
“We can discuss that when you come in.”
“Fine.” I hear the edge in my voice and regret it.
“Oh, and we’d like you to bring in your personal computers. His and yours. This is voluntary, of course. It may give us some helpful information.” He sounds cheerful, as if we’re exchanging recipes. “We’re not charging you with anything.”
“Oh, my God, I hope not.”
I hang up. I put a hand over my mouth, in shock. I think I migh
t be sick.
Anna Jane moves away from the dishwasher, sets her arm around my shoulders.
“They want me to come in. They want the computers.”
My mother slams her hand down on the table, causing the remaining dishes to jump. “Goddamn it. I am so goddamn mad. What are these fucking idiots doing? What a fucking waste of time. It’s those girls, isn’t it? And their mother. You want to look anywhere, it should be there.”
Anna Jane’s voice is soft. “I think you need an attorney.”
“Oh, God,” Abby groans.
“I don’t need an attorney.”
Pollux feels the anxiety in the room. He begins to whine and trot around.
“Bruce had a drunk-driving offense.” Bruce was Anna Jane’s brother.
“You never told me.”
“He was so embarrassed. Anyway, they used this guy …”
“Your father’s divorce attorney, he was a real tough bastard,” my mother says. “Frank Lazario. I’ll never forget his name. Scary to even look at. Probably Mafioso. He had one of those alcoholic noses.…”
“Grandma, the guy’s probably dead by now.”
We’re all silent. No one has anything else to offer. This is the extent of our experience with lawyers. “I’m not getting an attorney. They can look at the computers all they want. I have nothing to hide. They’re not charging me with anything.”
I sound so brave and sure. I think of Detective Jackson outside at night, watching my street.
“They’re just doing their job,” Abby says.
“That’s right. Let them have what they need. Maybe they’ll find something on his laptop that we didn’t find. This is good. This is okay.”
“That mother. That’s who they should be talking to,” my mother says. “If I were her, I’d want to kill him.”
Anna Jane catches my eye. We have a silent, mutual recognition of my mother’s insensitivity. “Hey,” she says, as if she’s suddenly had a brilliant idea. “If you need a lawyer, you could always call Mark.”