He's Gone

by Deb Caletti

  At the end of the dock, in the parking lot finally, I unlock my car door. I set the notepads on the seat beside me. The package is almost another passenger; it seems as weighty.

  I am trying to hurry. If I don’t get out of here soon, I may change my mind. I turn the key. Please, I beg. The terrible humming sound starts, and I put my car in reverse.

  And that is when there is a horrendous clunk. I put the damn thing in neutral and in reverse again, and again, and again, but the old Blue Beast will not move. Blue is finished. No matter how much I want this, I am not going backward.

  I put my head in my hands. I want to cry, but there’s no time for that. I need to solve this problem, quick. I will go inside and ask to use my mother’s car. It’s terrible, yes, to return there after that particular leaving, but I have no choice.

  Nothing is easy, I think, not even this. I am sure it’s the worst kind of bad luck, some cruel trick of timing. What are the odds that the car dies now? Yet this is how it goes, one thing happens and then another, a piece follows a piece, things continue to break, as fate conspires, insisting on telling its own story, which (hopefully, finally) you are able to hear.

  I get out. I am holding the bag in my arms like a baby, like my own child. And that’s when someone begins to shout. A single shout at first, old Joseph Grayson, and he is screaming. He is yelling, Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! He’s shrieking. He’s having a heart attack, I think. That’s my first thought, anyway. He is screaming like a girl who’s seen a snake. No, worse. Way worse.

  There’s some kind of commotion going on. A door opening and slamming, and now my mother screams. My mother? I know that voice. Dear God, what? They are being attacked; are they being attacked?

  No. Because now comes the thud, thud, thud of shoes running on the hard dock. And Pollux is barking and barking, and Abby is calling my name. She is running down the dock. She has her goofy Toucan Sam shirt on and a pair of cotton plaid shorts and her hair is wild, and she is shouting to me. Old Joseph Grayson is just behind her. Him, with his bushy gray beard and long hair in a ponytail and that tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirt he perpetually wears. My mother—she’s trying to run, too. She’s back there, running as best as she can.

  I am still clutching that bag when Abby reaches me.

  “Mom!” She is crying.

  And there is old Joseph Grayson, out of breath. He is holding that stupid electric boat. And he is holding one wet and expensive Italian shoe.

  19

  After the divers arrive to release Ian’s body from where he’s been tangled in the anchor rope of the New View, after the autopsy and the funeral, I stop dreaming of Kerry Park. Instead, I dream the simple, horrible story of that night, told by the singular rope markings on one of his legs and by the screwdriver found on the murky lake floor just below him. He is trying to fix that damn cleat, the drifting boat. It is late, and his mind is so burdened, and he is more than a little drunk. He reaches for the line and loses his footing; he slips, one small misstep, into the lake. One leg is free and one leg is bound, but more critically, he is caught, and he struggles, but the struggle is too much for him. I dream of him underwater, and, most of all, I dream of trying to rescue him.

  I toss and turn with a new set of questions. How can it be that no one heard him that night? Hadn’t there been a splash, a cry for help? Had the party boat that Maggie Long heard masked the noise? Would I have heard him if I hadn’t taken those pills? I do some midnight reading on my returned laptop. I find out that drowning doesn’t look the way most people suspect. There is very little splashing or waving and no yelling or calls of any kind. Drowning is quiet and undramatic. Sufferers are unable to yell, using the little air they have left to breathe. People can watch an individual drown—neighbors, friends, loved ones can look right at it with their own eyes—and not even know it’s happening.

  He had to rescue himself but couldn’t. I had to rescue myself but never did.

  Months later, my mother is still angry with the police. She has called me from her house. I can hear the television. There is a scraping sound, too, as if she is buttering toast.

  “I don’t understand why they didn’t bring a diver out in the first place.” We’ve had this discussion a million times by now.

  “There was no reason to think he drowned. There was a ladder right there, inches from him.”

  “Still! Accidents happen. A foot gets caught … It was late, he’d been drinking …”

  “Mom. What did they tell us? There’ve only been two drownings in that lake in twelve years.”

  “Three now. You could have been arrested!”

  “It wasn’t clear what happened that night, not at all. Not even to me. Especially not to me.”

  “Bethy was gunning for you.”

  We haven’t spoken since the funeral, his children and I. Sometimes I wish I had that sweater back.

  My mother is crunching, eating in my ear. It sounds like dinosaurs walking the earth. “I shudder to think what would have happened, I do, if that old fool had not lost his boat under your dock.”

  “I think he’s your type, Ma.”

  “Oh, yeah, baby. Lately it occurs to me, What a long … strange trip it’s been,” she wails. She goes in for a solo guitar riff.

  “I’m assuming that’s the Grateful Dead.” My mother knows her hippie music.

  “You would be right.”

  “Summer of Love.”

  “Dani?” There is no more scraping or chewing now.

  “Hmm?”

  “I’m sorry I was such a bitch about him.”

  Ian, she means. Not old, stoned Joseph Grayson, who is innocent in all this. “You were trying to tell me something important.”

  “I get carried away.”

  “Yeah, you do.”

  “They still should have checked the lake.”

  I don’t blame the police for not suspecting that Ian had drowned, but I don’t tell her this. I wouldn’t have thought he fell in that lake in a million years. A misstep like that—it’d be so human.

  Ian never made mistakes. Except for the ones that destroyed him.

  I have decided to stay in the houseboat. I am alone for the first time in my life, although this sounds unfair to Pollux. He lives there with me, old pal that he is. I met Mark when I was nineteen years old, as I’ve said. And then there was Ian.

  At first I thought I’d have to move. How could I live there, thinking about him under the water like that all that time? He’d been right there, with that other cuff link still affixed to his shirtsleeve. And with—don’t think it don’t think it don’t think it—that bust of him I had thrown into the lake. I hadn’t even known he was there. I hadn’t felt it. It seemed like a failure of my love for him. One of many failures.

  But then I remembered Ian saying, I never want to live anywhere else. I could die here and be happy. Maybe it sounds strange, but that’s weirdly comforting. I never got to say goodbye, and this is the last place he was and the rightest place for me to grieve him, grieve us. I could run from here, but there are things I need to look hard at—my own guilt, but, maybe even more, the places where I’ve been merely human, too.

  And I want to remember, I want to keep hold of the good parts, the love, yes, within the complicated whole. Those road trips we took, with the music playing and the windows rolled down. Those heady days before the hard ones, and the hard ones when we struggled toward each other. Those times, God, passionate times, when a look into each other’s eyes felt like a long drink of summer.

  I found a box in his closet yesterday, tucked way, way up high. I opened the lid and was shocked to see that the box had a leaf in it on a bed of cotton batting. It was a large maple leaf, nearly disintegrating. I didn’t understand at first, and then it came to me—a day in the fall when we’d met at the university campus. I gave him that leaf before we said goodbye. He loved me as best as he could, that’s what that leaf said. And I loved him as best as I could. But, oh, how we can sink and drown, we with our unforgivin
g selves.

  I see Abby often, of course. My sister came for a three-day weekend. And I see Anna Jane and my mother and my father. I have gone to dinner at Maggie and Jack’s and at Mattie and Louise’s. I see Dr. Shana Berg. My poor ignored clients have stuck with me as I’ve slowly returned to work. I hear from Nathan, as well, but I keep him at arm’s length. Good-hearted Nathan, who holds my eyes a little too long and brings me food—he looks too much like he wants to save me. I stay pretty close to home right now. It’s snug, a cocoon, the setting for the necessary drawing inward that comes before transformation. It’s Poll and me. During Ian’s disappearance, I was sure that someone had to know what happened, and it turns out that someone likely did. I can imagine him that night, his black nose pressed against the glass, his worried eyes. My dear, velvety Pollux, patron saint of sailors, witness to all human faults and lapses. Witness to bad singing aloud and naked dashes to the bathroom, white lies and deadly errors. My very short, fine friend. A good dog.

  In this cocoon there is work to be done. Old structures are remade. I think, I write, I read. I try to make peace with myself. I try to remember the simple but difficult truth that we mostly do the best we can with what we have. What a feat that is, too, to do the best we can, given that we’ve got to drag our histories along with us, like one of those big old Samsonite suitcases from the time before luggage had wheels.

  Alone—oh, the angst and the joys of it; who knew? I’m free. I stretch out my legs and eat cookies off paper towels in bed. But, also, I must brave some ancient story that the night is too dark for me to handle. I believed that story for a long time. Believing a new one takes courage. You rip off the sphragis, and the body is bare and vulnerable underneath.

  So I will build my own protective layer, made from experience and hard-won awareness. I have promised myself this. I will change, slowly, over months and years. And when I emerge, I will stay away from the hungry beaks of birds and the talons of owls. I will not fear long voyages over water. If I become tired or terrified and the promise of rescue arrives—a boat, a net, an outstretched hand—I will turn my back to it. I will turn my back to it and rise and fly, my tissue-paper wings evolving in midair, becoming strong as the wings of a pterodactyl, soaring now over that hill, and the next, and the next.

  To the six cherished people who most understand what this book in particular means to me: Evie Caletti, Paul Caletti, Sue Rath, Sam Bannon, Nick Bannon, and Ben Camardi.

  Thank you for being there from the very beginning.

  Acknowledgments

  Heartfelt appreciation to my new publishing family at Random House, most especially Shauna Summers. How grateful I am for your inspired thinking, as well as your talent and generosity. Thank you, too, to Jennifer Hershey, Jane Von Mehren, Gina Wachtel, Marietta Anastassatos, Nancy Delia, Virginia Norey, Leigh Marchant, and Angela Polidoro, for all that you’ve done for both me and for this book. I am a lucky woman to have my work in your hands.

  Gratitude, as well, to all of my old family at S&S, who also made this book possible. Your spirit of goodwill in this endeavor to bridge two worlds makes me love you even more than I already did. Hugs to you, Jen Klonsky. Ben Camardi, and all of The Harold Matson Company, thank you for your unparalleled partnership of fifteen years.

  Mom, Dad, Jan, Sue, Mitch, Ty, Hunter, and my dear friend Renata Moran—love you, family. Sam and Nick, my joy and heart, every book belongs to you. And to my sweet beloved, John Yurich—thanks for being both my husband and my one true love.

  PHOTO: © JASON TEEPLES

  DEB CALETTI is the author of nine highly acclaimed young-adult novels, including The Nature of Jade, Stay, and Honey, Baby, Sweetheart, a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN USA Award. She lives with her family in Seattle.

  A Conversation with Deb Caletti

  Random House Reader’s Circle: You’ve written many popular teen novels, but He’s Gone is your first novel for adults. What was the inspiration for your adult debut? Did you have the idea long before you began writing it? And how was the writing process different?

  Deb Caletti: You never know how—or when—the idea for a book will appear. This one came right when I needed it, shortly after we’d begun discussing the possibility of me writing an adult novel. The inspiration arrived in much the same way that He’s Gone begins. I was lying in bed, trying to determine if my husband was home or not. I was doing that thing you do, where you listen for the sound of footsteps, or the toaster lever being pushed down, or coffee being made. And then, rather handily and helpfully, came the thought: What if you woke up one morning and found that your husband had vanished? The idea of writing the book as a confession came quickly afterward, as did the decision to explore the subjects of guilt and marriage, wrongdoing, and the way those old, treacherous voices from childhood can continue to haunt us. I began work on the book as soon as I could, just after finishing The Story of Us. Sometimes you have an idea that makes you feel like a kid on Halloween night. Can we just skip dinner, so we can go? I wanted to go. I couldn’t wait to start this one.

  The writing process wasn’t all that different from my other books. My previous nine young adult novels are full length and fairly complex and character driven, and my readers are already a mixed bag of ages, falling generally in the older teens to adult range. There is always a teen protagonist, but my books also feature adult characters of varying ages—mothers and daughters both struggling with screwed-up love lives, for example, or generations of women with something to say about relationships, family, and identity. I tend to try to push the boundaries of YA, offering more thought-provoking material than readers of that age might be used to, along with a slower, more literary pace. So writing a book for adults wasn’t a great leap. The only real difference I found was that the boundaries I always try to push didn’t exist anymore. There were no more fences for me to stay in or out of. It was very freeing. I found that, for me, writing within those boundaries is actually in many ways more challenging.

  RHRC: He’s Gone takes place in Seattle, where you also live. Do you feel that your life in the city inspired or influenced the novel? If so, how?

  D.C.: Setting has always played a huge part in my books, and I have no doubt that’s because I live in such an evocative place. I like to approach setting as if it were character, with a character’s traits and quirks and moods. Seattle—and the San Juan Islands, and the towns of the mountain foothills that I’ve previously written about—all have so much character, it’s hard to cross a street without seeing something to include in a book. We are bombarded with setting here, which is a lucky thing for a writer, I think. It offers itself. He’s Gone primarily takes place in a particularly eccentric and picturesque part of our city—the houseboat community around Lake Union, where I once lived part-time. It seemed an especially fitting setting for the book. First, there is water everywhere, and these characters are, well, literally drowning in guilt. But even more than that, the houseboats and their docks are a little off kilter. Yes, they’re charming and shingled and dripping with gorgeous flowers. Ducks paddle by, and so do friendly kayakers. Sailboats swoop out to the lake on a glorious day. But, too, the houses and boats are rocking and clanging. The old piers sway and creak. On a rainy day, it’s a little spooky. On any day, it’s all slightly deranged.

  RHRC: Though the story begins when Ian vanishes, he feels like a fully evolved character by the time we reach the ending. Can you tell us a bit about the challenges of fleshing out a character who is mostly “offscreen”?

  D.C.: I like the idea of this, the “off screen” character. I also have one in my book The Story of Us. That character, Janssen Tucker, is totally absent until he appears for his one line at the very end of the book. The idea appeals to me because there are a lot of “offscreen” people in our own lives. You can come to know your partner’s ex or their deceased parent in a very real way, even if you’ve never met them. You can come to have very strong feelings about them, an understanding of them, a full picture,
just from what you hear. In writing, the challenge to make a character come alive even when he’s not on the scene is met in the same ways it happens in real life. You hear stories about the person. Your partner tells you about his ex, but so does his best friend, and so does his mother. Maybe you see a photo or hear a rumor. Maybe you hear a voice on an answering machine.

  Ian, in He’s Gone, needed to be much closer to the reader than Janssen Tucker did in The Story of Us. Aside from Dani, Ian is the most important character in the book. It’s crucial to feel him right there, even though he’s missing—to feel the press of his control, to even feel his breath on her face during that picnic. He needs to be so well known that we understand both his complicated emotions and the bind those emotions have put Dani in. Dani’s own flashbacks serve this purpose (we actually “see” Ian during those times), but Nathan’s accounts of their relationship flesh out Ian’s character, as do Isabel’s and Abby’s. What we see of his relationship with his children and Mary and especially his father hopefully fill Ian in further. What I also felt helped bring Ian close were the times that Dani heard him speak in her head. That’s about as close in as you can bring someone.

  RHRC: Dani has a compelling narrative voice, and it’s easy to take her version of the truth for reality. Ultimately, though, we find out that she’s not a reliable narrator. What made you decide to go this route?

  D.C.: I went this route because we are all unreliable narrators, not just in the way we tell our stories to others, but how we tell them to ourselves. Maybe especially how we tell them to ourselves. All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we’re liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that. Facing the truth is a messy business. You’ve got denial, and pride, and the fact that understanding takes time; you’ve got perspective (or lack of it) and the pesky fact that we can only face the truth we can stand to face at any given moment. I didn’t see Dani as being willfully deceitful in the way she tells her story. I saw her as struggling with a hard truth that she hadn’t even entirely admitted to herself yet. It’s one of the toughest human being jobs, I think, being utterly and completely honest with yourself.