by Deb Caletti
“Yes.”
“Ken is a good man.”
“I’m glad.” I mean that. I am glad. But had this contributed to Ian’s disappearance? Maybe he’d been destroyed by the news. First Nathan’s offer, and then Mary’s terrible announcement? I’d always had the feeling that Ian thought of Mary as his backup plan. She was there in his old house, patiently waiting for the moment when he’d had enough. She’d open the door and welcome him home with his favorite meal on the table.
She answers the question I haven’t asked. “He wasn’t bothered in the least. I don’t know what I was expecting—maybe a slight show of emotion? It was like sitting with a stranger, and I’ve known him since I was eighteen. He seemed relieved. For so many years, in the beginning, anyway, he’d acted so jealous, he couldn’t stand it if anyone even looked in my direction, and now he couldn’t care less. I’m getting married and, big deal, so what.”
Jealous? Mary at those parties, playing with Mark’s tie, flirting with Neal and the other men—Ian hadn’t appeared to be bothered at all. He hadn’t even flinched. It never occurred to me that he’d been jealous with her, too. It had never even crossed my mind.
“He said he was happy for me. And you know what? I think he was.”
I hear the rumble of a garage door going up. “That’s Ken now,” she says. “He comes home every day at lunch to see me.”
Ken barrels through the garage door, carrying bags. “Sweetie pie!” he calls. “I’m home!” He’s a big man, with hair combed over his head and a stomach that presses out like a basketball against his buttoned shirt. I know things about him, too, even though we’ve never met, things dropped into the conversation by Bethy or Kristen. He has season tickets to the Husky games. His own son has a drug problem. He loves hot wings and blue cheese dressing. He once thought he was having a coronary and went to the emergency room, only to find out that it was an anxiety attack.
I saw a picture of him once. He was on a boat with Bethy, on a trip they’d taken to Lake Chelan. His bathing suit has a blue Hawaiian print.
He takes the six-pack of beer from the bag and sets it down on the kitchen table before he notices me. Ian bought that kitchen table. And those bar stools. And that Sub Zero refrigerator.
“Ah! Hello there! Three for lunch?” Ken says jovially. Mary was right. Sophie is jumping on Ken like he’s a soldier returning home unharmed from the war, and he picks her up and nuzzles her. The joy-filled reunion is a mutual affair.
“This is Ian’s wife,” Mary says.
Ken freezes dramatically, for effect. He’s acting out the stage direction that says, Ken freezes in his tracks. He sets Sophie back down; she continues to jump around, wondering where the love has gone. “Well, damn. I need one of these, then.” You can tell by the hard, round ball of his stomach that any excuse will do. How lucky that I’ve provided such a solid one. He twists the cap of one of the beers, takes a swig. “Damn.”
“I had to tell her that we don’t have Ian hidden in the bedroom.”
“For the record, that guy’s not going near our bedroom. If he’s not dead in a ditch somewhere, then he’s a sick bastard to let his daughters worry like this.”
In my head, the teams are changing fast. Ian is still mine to defend. “We don’t know what’s happened. Anything could’ve—”
Mary interrupts me. “ ‘Anything’? I don’t believe ‘anything.’ He wouldn’t have had some accident. That would involve making a mistake, and Ian doesn’t make mistakes, in his view.” She takes one of the beers and hands it to Ken. He twists off the cap for her and hands it back. “All I know is, they’re going to have a lot of questions for the person who saw him last.”
I know what she’s implying. They’ve all obviously had their little powwows. I’m done here, in this place that’s no longer Ian’s. I get up. I reach for my purse.
“I hope he comes back, really I do. For my daughters’ sake. But I have to tell you something.” She points her finger at me in case I’m confused about who’s being addressed. “You’ve looked at me with pity? Don’t. You did me a favor. Here’s one reason, right here.” I think she means Ken. I’m expecting her to wrap her arms around his big tight belly, but instead she flicks the handle of that pan in the sink. “I can keep this pan in this sink for however long I like and it’s not saying anything about the kind of person I am. See this?” She plucks her shirt again. “He hated me in purple.”
“Purple brings out your eyes,” Ken, ever the ass kisser, says.
Mary ignores him. “Freedom,” she says.
I’m silent. I think it for the millionth time, I do: I admire her courage.
“I’ll show you out.”
I can hear Ken in the kitchen, crooning lovey-dog talk to Sophie. I’ve forgotten something. I reach into my purse. “I’m sorry. But …” I hold the cuff link in my palm. It’s a question.
“He still has those?” she asks.
“From you?”
“From me? I hope I have better taste than that. They were from his father. Given on Ian’s eighteenth birthday. Paul had a pair just like them. Congratulations, you’re a man like me. What, is he wearing them now? He never wore them when the guy was alive.”
His father—this was why they were so important?
“The great Paul Hartley Keller,” Mary says.
Mary opens the door for me. We look at each other for a moment. She glances down at my hands. One holds the cuff link, and the other has the frantic lines of ink from my uncapped pen. There’s so much to say. I want to pour out my regrets and apologies for the pain I’ve caused her. I open my mouth to speak, but she gets there before me.
“All this time, I thought you were so powerful,” she says.
She closes the door on me and my unfinished business. Through the porch window, I see her figure disappear into the kitchen to join Ken and Sophie. Some things are too big for naïve, tidy apologies.
And then, as I hunt for my keys and get in my car, I think of something I haven’t thought about in years. That time when we went for drinks after that concert, Mark and me and Ian and Mary and those other two couples. Mary had been laughing and telling that story about how she’d damaged their car. You’re careless, Ian had said to her, and I’d felt embarrassed for her, and guilty. It was cruel of him.
I had thought it was who he was inside an unhappy marriage. But it was who he was, period.
I remember something Dr. Shana Berg once told me, that a person generally brings their same self wherever they go. They bring that self to their coworkers and neighbors and to the man who works at the bank and to the guy in front of them who is still sitting at the light when it turns green. They bring that self to every girlfriend and every pet and every wife.
I unlock my car door and toss my purse to the passenger seat. It still has that damn cuff link inside. All at once, I am overwhelmed with sorrow—for Mary, for me, for our children. But maybe most of all for Ian himself. Maybe there was nowhere, no home, this one or ours, where he could be at peace.
I am overwhelmed with sorrow, but I am also something else. Something terrifying.
I am out of options.
15
Old Blue is droning and clunking. The poor baby is critically ill. I feel the dire urgency to get home. Beyond urgency—it’s a clawing, scratching imperative. It’s thunderous buffalo hooves charging over barren land, a rabbit fleeing from a cougar.
It’s the heat. Or else I’m having a heart attack. What are the signs? I’ve read them over and over again in women’s magazines. Shortness of breath? Something about pain down the arm, sharp pain, and, yes, I’ve got that, too. Pain down the arm, pain down both arms, pain radiating from my heart like a sunburst. My palms are sweating. The coffee I drank that morning tumbles and lurches in my stomach.
There’s barely any traffic on the bridge, and so I drive as fast as my car allows. Blue Beast seems to be shivering, but I press down on the accelerator, passing a careful driver going the speed limit. The driver is a woma
n with swooped-up hair and glasses, and she shoots me a look of disapproval. She probably hates people who talk in the library, too, but so do I. People who drive like this—the teen boys who whip wildly around cars, making narrow cutoffs, the ones you see only a vehicle ahead of you at the stop sign at the overpass turnoff—got my mental lectures, too. See? I’d say to them. Lotta good that did you, and you could have killed someone. I’d have given them the look she gave me. She and I—we’re about the same age. Whatever she’s doing—heading home, going to work, seeing a friend in the city—it’s not what I am doing, driving while having a heart attack, fighting some urge to turn fast into the wall of the tunnel I’m passing through. Right now I would choose her life over mine. Door number two, whatever’s behind it. I’d take her hated job or her lawsuit or the little bump she’d found in her breast that’s worrying her.
I should drive to the nearest emergency room, I think. I’d ditch my car in front and run in and they would put me in a blue cotton gown that tied in the back and smelled like bleach, and they’d cover me with a heated blanket that smelled like bleach, too, that certain hospital bleach, the smell I remembered from Abby being born. The automatic doors I’d walk through would shut and no one could get in to find me. Stern nurses and doctors wearing scrubs and those shower caps for shoes would make sure to keep everyone out of my room. I want a needle in my arm. The cool sheets, the bliss of rest.
Dani, Danielle! You’re fine. You’re fine! You’re okay. My inner … who? Mother, God, nurse? She tries to sound soothing. This falling-apart stuff is no good. It won’t help anything. Get it together, she says.
I don’t know what I’ve done, I confess to her. I think I’ve done something horrible.
That cogent thought, the first admitted one, brings everything rushing up—remorse and Mary and grief and Ian and fear—and I make it through that tunnel and pull off to the side of the road. It occurs to me that people often get hit when they get out of their cars on the freeway to change a tire or investigate an accident. I picture the impact, my body flying, but there are few cars, and this is not what threatens me most.
I heave. I throw up only the morning coffee and fear. The body doesn’t know what to do with terror. This is all it can do, and it is certainly not enough.
The Blue Beast makes it home. It sighs with relief when I finally put it into park in its gravel spot. Oh, it is so weary. But I don’t sigh with relief. The terror, which is some sort of hunched beast in a dark coat inside my own body, gets down on its haunches. Alarm shoves it aside, sleek and fast, like one of those thin, skeletal dogs I don’t like, with the tightly stretched skin and the heads that look like skulls found in a desert. The alarm is there because I see a tow truck on our street. Ian’s car is hovering midair, set on a red sci-fi Transformer arm—a comical look under other circumstances, one that brings to mind mechanical creatures invading innocent cities. Ian would die seeing it manhandled like that. It seems unnatural, the way its vulnerable underside is exposed. The sight of it is devastating. The fact of the matter is this: Any image of Ian on a beach somewhere is shattered right now as that car is being readied to be taken away.
My mother is standing on the street, watching it, and the guy who checks groceries at Pete’s is watching her, because she’s yelling. One hand is on her hip, and the other is waving around. She’s wearing an innocent little pair of capris and a white T-shirt, and she looks pretty stylish considering that she’s losing her mind.
I’m in no shape to do damage control, but she leaves me no choice. Her face is red. “I don’t know what you people are doing! Nothing happened to him in that fucking car! Try actually looking for the man, how about that, you goddamn useless idiots!”
She has a mouth and she knows how to use it, I think inanely, but I am praying she’ll shut it. She can only do more and more harm. I run toward her.
“Stop that!” I say. The man operating the tow truck ignores her. I don’t understand the procedure here. Is he a cop, too, or is he a tow-truck guy who has a police-department gig on the side? How does it work exactly?
“Dani.” My mother is out of breath. Her eyes look wild. Maybe she’s the one having the heart attack. Maybe the psychic was right after all.
“Stop that,” I snap at her. “Stop yelling! This will do no good.”
“Other people were here before, taking pictures of the car. Looking through it. Putting stuff in plastic bags. Then this guy came …”
Other people—she doesn’t say police.
“What do they think?” she says, but we both know. We know what we’re afraid of.
The tow-truck driver gets out now. He leaves the door open. He heads toward us. He’s bald, and he has glasses, large ones that were in style in the 1980s. He has the start of a gray beard, or else he just hasn’t shaved. His shirt is blue, the kind prisoners wear. The word denim escapes me. He carries a clipboard over to where we stand.
“Don’t sign anything,” my mother says.
These are the things she knows. Don’t sign anything you haven’t read. Get a receipt. Don’t give out your credit-card number over the phone. Better yet, don’t use a credit card unless it’s for emergencies. Credit is a fast road to ruin.
I sign where he indicates. He looks at me. I know what he’s thinking. He’s gauging my capacity for wrongdoing. He’s staring at my face, wondering what I’ve done and how I’ve done it.
But I might be mistaken about that. “You have …”: he says. He raises his hand to his own cheek, brushing something off. I put my hand to my cheek, where he’s indicated. Vomit.
“You people,” my mother sneers.
“Stop,” I say. “He’s only doing his job.”
He smiles. He actually smiles. He tucks his clipboard under his arm. “All righty.”
“Thank you,” I say. Dear, dear God, why did I say that? Why, why, why? It’s a habit, a terrible habit. Here it is again, what I’ve done for years, madly flinging politeness and compliments at people, the way you throw steaks to a lion. When I’ve been in danger, I’ve done it, and when I haven’t been in danger, I’ve done it, too, because how can we ever be sure which is which? Yes, a person generally brings their same self to any circumstance, to tow-truck drivers and furnace repairmen, to snarling, vicious dogs who do not see the innocence of your pizza box. To husbands.
The car disappears down the street on that truck. It’s like I’m watching Ian leave. My heart is squeezing and squeezing. I miss him so much I want to fall on my knees. My heart is cracking open. I want to cry out to him to come back. To please, please come back.
He’s not coming back. Maybe I do know this after all. Goodbye, I say to him in my head. I say it tenderly. I try to tell him with that one word how sorry I am.
My mother is already inside the houseboat, and she’s on the phone.
“I’ll hold,” I hear her say.
She looks at me and then away, staring out at the lake instead. Pollux tries to be positive, giving a small leap, but then he smells the betrayal on my pant legs. Some other dog. He sniffs madly, as if searching my phone for my lover’s number. I caught Ian looking at my phone once. No, here’s the truth: more than once.
I give Pollux a treat to make it up to him. These are the normal things that I still must do, and this continues to astonish me. How can it be so? Give the dog a treat, change my clothes, pee. They are the odd things that don’t belong here right now. I hear Abby on the phone, too. I try to listen in but can’t hear much of anything. I put my old sundress on now, and clothing relief washes over me. Ah, it’s one of the best feelings, clothing relief, when stockings, or too tight jeans, or a shirt that’s new but somehow not you after all, are finally stripped off.
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t have any idea, and I’m not sure I’m in my own body. The panic has turned to numb horror, and I’m moving underwater and trying to breathe underwater. I can hear Abby in the living room. “Thank you very much,” she says. “We would appreciate that. Yes. I�
�ll send you one right now.”
My mother also finishes her call. “Thank you. We’ll see you then.” We are all so polite and grateful and full of fear.
Abby joins us in the kitchen. My mother is speaking only to her. “He’s in trial now and all day tomorrow, but his secretary promised he’ll get in touch first thing in the morning.”
“Okay.” Abby nods, as if agreeing to a plan. “They’re putting it on the news tonight. KING and KIRO. I’ve got to send them a picture in the next half hour to make the deadline.”
She looks through her phone, punching and scrolling with adept thumbs. “This is good.” She shows the phone to my mother, who nods. Then she shows it to me—a photo of Ian that she took—and I also nod. We’ve all agreed, it seems, on this course of action. Or, rather, they’ve agreed, and I am going along like a timid and newly hired junior partner. The photo was taken a few months ago, when Ian and I and Abby and Jon, a boy she’d been seeing, went out for the day on the New View. It doesn’t look that much like Ian; or, rather, it’s a version of Ian you don’t see too often. His hair is messed from the wind, and he’s wearing a gray sweatshirt. You can tell he’s on a boat. You can see the bow behind him and the blue of the water, and he looks like an outdoorsman, which he isn’t, not really. He’s smiling. He looks relaxed. He looks happy.
I almost step in it, the small puddle in the kitchen. No one has thought to take Pollux out. This is what happens when you don’t pay attention. I get the paper towels.
“Oh, great, Poll. Super,” Abby says.
“Don’t,” I tell her. It isn’t fair—we are the ones who’ve been careless.
Pollux sees the roll of paper towels and lowers his head. His eyes are sad.
“It’s okay,” I say to him. “You didn’t mean to.” I throw away the soggy paper and squirt the floor with Windex. I wash my hands. I go to him and speak into his sweet black neck. “It’s not your fault,” I whisper.
But he has had enough of his own shame and of my forgiveness. I think he’s sick of that whole game. He escapes from my hug and settles down by the glass door, groaning like an old man. He puts his chin on his paws. He stares out at the New View and the now choppy waves, and he sighs through his nose.