A Song in the Daylight (2009)

by Paullina Simons

  Except…

  And it was only because he started to think about it, painstakingly raking over the grains of the days, the chaff of memory. Sometimes she really did seem more than just a little distracted. But he was a fine one to talk, so stressed out about crises at work, about diminishing returns, unpaid dividends, capitalization, amortization, that he himself could barely see what was on TV unless it was a ballgame. When they sat and watched a movie, her eyes were open, she was looking at the screen, sitting close, eating popcorn, but once, a few months ago, she told Ezra she’d never seen Zoolander, when they had all watched it together a few Saturday nights earlier and laughed their asses off, even her. They had teased her about it and she had sheepishly laughed.

  But this was Jared projecting! Grasping at straws. Doug told him Kate always fell asleep during movies. Was that a sign of treason? A wife who didn’t open her eyes at the TV? A wife who didn’t laugh at Seinfeld?

  The money remained in their account. All her clothes were in her closet. Though how could he tell? She could have taken two pairs of jeans, a skirt, five shirts, ten, five bras, ten. He wouldn’t know. It was almost summer, the winter stuff had been packed away. Her spring jackets hung in the hall closet. The suitcases were down in the basement. Her makeup and perfume were on her dressing table. Her reading glasses! She didn’t go anywhere overnight without her Versace reading glasses, and they were still by the bedside. He checked.

  Tara said Larissa had been carrying some kind of bag. But that could’ve been anything. Tara said she had been walking as if to something. She waved with the hand that wasn’t holding the bag. Waved like how, Jared had asked. Waved like she was saying goodbye?

  “Yes,” said Tara. “But, Jared, she actually was waving goodbye. And I waved goodbye to her.”

  When was the last time Jared saw her? Friday morning. He’d been running late, they’d gone to bed late, woke up late; there was a direct relationship. As a result, he’d been barely able to kiss the kids, kiss her, grab the mug of coffee she made him, say, “G’day, fellas. Be good for your mom,” and speed out the door. She waved (goodbye?) to him, too. She said, “Have a nice day, honey. Drive safe.” Perhaps she didn’t always say drive safe. Perhaps she never said it. But he had been in a hurry. She had been engaged in the world around her. She wasn’t distracted. She was getting milk for Michelangelo, and she smiled at him from behind the island. Her smile had been…

  Again, it was only now. At the time, he thought nothing of it. Now he was animating her smile, personifying it with attributes it hadn’t had at the time. Now it seemed to him that she glistened as she smiled, that her eyes had been wet, that she gazed at him longer than usual, smiled at him and studied him, as if what? As if she had known she wasn’t going to see him again?

  This was absurd! He had asked Michelangelo earlier. He was such a sensitive boy. Did Mommy seem different Friday morning?

  “Different how?”

  “I dunno. You tell me. Did she seem in any way different?”

  “Nah,” he said. “She seemed exactly the same. She hugged me for five minutes.”

  “She did?”

  “Uh-huh. I was like, Mom, let go, I have to go learn something.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing. Said she loved me.”

  “Was that unusual?”

  “No, Dad,” Michelangelo said slowly. “Mom says she loves me all the time.”

  “Of course she does, son. And do you know why she says it?”

  “Because she loves me?” he said happily, skipping away.

  She hugged Michelangelo for five minutes. Her eyes looked wet when she waved goodbye to Jared, and smiled. She didn’t remember Zoolander. She lost weight. She stopped shopping. The evidence was in, ladies and gentlemen! Clearly this woman was contemplating the unthinkable! The unimaginable.

  Did he even sleep? Jared didn’t know. It was the second night he hadn’t gone to his bedroom. He showered in the kid’s bathroom, put on Asher’s deodorant, hadn’t shaved since Friday morning and was sporting a formidable gray stubble that made him look older and tired, as reported by Michelangelo, who was the first one up, climbing onto Jared’s chest, turning on the T V, rubbing Jared’s rough cheeks and saying, “Dad, did you fall asleep in front of the TV again?”

  “Can you believe it?”

  Michelangelo kissed him, patted his chest, climbed off, nuzzled close. “I can believe it because you’re a weirdo.”

  Jared slept the broken shallow sleep of the anguished as his seven-year-old watched four repeats of Full House.

  At ten on Sunday morning he called the detectives. After they came by, Jared spent an hour with them going over every detail he could think of for their missing persons report. They pretended not to study him as they took down the information. Except they couldn’t help it; they both stared when Cobb asked him, “You sure there was no trouble in your marriage?”

  “No,” said Jared, in a defeated voice because she wasn’t home. “Nothing beyond the usual.”

  “What’s usual?”

  “I don’t know. Occasional short tempers. Bad moods. Nothing serious. No yelling.” Except for that one strange night in February when for an evening he thought Larissa was losing her grip on reality, on sanity. But that passed, it was just an aberration. And it was nearly four months ago! She didn’t go back to the city for the hair color, even when he tried to insist; she dismissed it, was no longer interested. Jared stopped speaking, worn out.

  They continued to stare at him.

  The husband is always the suspect, Cobb told him. Always. That’s who we look to first.

  “How can I be the suspect?” Jared scoffed. “I was the one who reported her missing.”

  Husband always reports her missing. He is always distraught. He always goes on the evening news and pleads for his wife’s safe return. He is always the one searching, calling us incessantly, boisterously lamenting her absence.

  “Is that what I am? Boisterous? Calling you incessantly?”

  You are searching.

  “Are they usually found?”

  Yes. The detectives said nothing after that, as if the silence was the meaningful part.

  “Alive?”

  No.

  “Ah.” Jared waited, thought it out. “Is the husband usually the culprit?”

  Nearly always, Mr. Stark.

  After that Jared fell silent. To find her, that would be good. Alive, even better. To prove them wrong, a corollary benefit. But that wasn’t the question swirling around in his head. It was more vague, laced with torture and ambiguity and terror for his days ahead, like night covering the rest of his life.

  “What if…what if…” How to say it? How to ask.

  What if she is not found? Finney asked for him.

  “Thank you. Yes.”

  What’s your question, Mr. Stark?

  “What happens then? In the past, what’s happened if months have gone by and the wife has not been found? Has that ever happened?”

  They thought about it. Twice, Finney said.

  “And?”

  The husband called off the search.

  “The husband called off the search?”

  That’s right.

  Funny, that. Because Jared couldn’t imagine doing that. And now he couldn’t even if he wanted to. How could he? That’s what the husband always did.

  “Were those two women eventually found?”

  Yes. Again with the laden silence.

  “Alive?”

  No.

  Jared tried hard not to take a deep breath before he asked. “Culprit?”

  “Who do you think, Mr. Stark?”

  He heard that last part loud and clear. It was he who was responsible for Larissa’s disappearance.

  At eleven in the morning, Emily came downstairs, still in her nightgown. “Is Mom back yet?”

  “No.” Jared didn’t know what else to say. “Mommy might have gone to visit her friend Che,” he added, struggling to
say something that might sound like the truth. “She may have gone to the Philippines. But Che has no phone, so we’re waiting to hear.”

  “Mom left for the Philippines without saying goodbye?” The child cut right through to the truth of things. The incredulous tone reflected the absurdity of that, the incongruity of it. “Dad, that’s ridiculous.”

  “I know.”

  “So why are the police here again?”

  “They came to check on things. See how we’re making out. Tell me, on Friday morning when you saw Mom, did she seem out of sorts with you?”

  “Not at all. We were running late. She shoved us out the door at 8:10. She yelled something that sounded suspiciously like I love you. We couldn’t believe it.”

  “Didn’t answer her?”

  “No.” Emily paused. “She hugged me before she shoved me out the door. Actually hugged me. Arms and everything. Kissed me on the cheek. I said, Mom, don’t be so strange. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “She tried to kiss me, too,” said Asher, strolling into the kitchen. “But I wouldn’t let her. It’s just not done, Mom, I told her. Mothers don’t kiss their fourteen-year-old sons. Don’t you know anything?”

  “Then we ran off,” said Emily.

  “Yes,” confirmed Asher. “We were late.”

  They glanced at him, three little pauses by the island. They looked hungry but didn’t want to ask about the Sunday brunch Larissa always made. Jared poured cereal out of the box. Under duress, he agreed to toast a bagel for Emily, who was sick of cereal. As it turned out, they didn’t have any bagels. Jared drove to get bagels at Bagels4U. Everything about Summit felt wrong to him this morning, as if…as if every road and every store hid the clue of what had happened to Larissa, except he didn’t know which road, which store, and was forced instead to wander the streets like a bum until he somehow fell into it, lucked into it.

  While he was waiting for the bagels, he remembered the psychiatrist! Larissa had been going to the woman since February. Surely, she would know! She’d know something. Reanimated, vivified, Jared flew home to call her, dropping the bag of warm bagels on the island, except the children wouldn’t let him drop bread on the island as if they were ducklings by the pond. He had to toast the bagels, peanut butter them, jelly them, and only then could he pick up the phone—and only then did he realize he had no idea what the doctor’s name was. Oh, Larissa had told him, but it was in one ear, out the other. But there were insurance and co-payment bills. Her name must be somewhere.

  With black coffee in hand, the first bit of sustenance he had had since yesterday, Jared painstakingly went through Larissa’s medical records back to January. There were two bills from visits to Larissa’s ob-gyn, one for pupil dilation from the optometrist, and a stack of bills from the psychiatrist. Joan Kavanagh. He didn’t care that it was Sunday. He dialed her number—and got her answering service.

  “Is this an emergency?”

  “Yes,” said Jared. “Yes, it most certainly is.” He left his own number, and then sat by the phone for fifteen minutes, for thirty, waiting for the callback. After 41 minutes, he called back.

  “I passed on the message,” the operator said.

  “Did you say it was an emergency?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I guess a psychiatric emergency works on a different schedule than a medical one, huh?” Jared said. “Because forty-one minutes—”

  “I’ll pass on your second message, sir,” said the operator.

  So he sat.

  He had to come out of his office to look in on the kids. It was a Memorial weekend Sunday, warm and sunny. Asher, who hadn’t even asked for the sleepover he had been planning for weeks, had gone for a bike ride to his friend’s house. Emily was playing ball with Riot and Michelangelo. Jared went back to his office. Maggie called, Ezra called, Bo called, Jonny called, Larissa’s mother called, Evelyn called. The worst conversation was the accidental one with Larissa’s mother.

  “Is she feeling all right?” asked Barbara.

  Jared didn’t want to lie, but he also didn’t want to talk about it. Why did he pick up the damn phone? “Barbara,” he said, “I’m sorry, but the other line is calling, very important phone call.”

  “On Sunday, a very important phone call?”

  “Yes, I’ll—don’t worry, we’ll—I’ll—”

  The doctor still hadn’t called. Forty more minutes. He went to the kitchen, looked inside the fridge. Kavanagh was a doctor; perhaps she was at her country estate. No one worked on Memorial Day. She was away. She could be out of the country. Jared went through Larissa’s purse while he waited. He went through her wallet, pulled out all the recent receipts, looked through them. No supermarket receipts, no drug store receipts. On Thursday there was a receipt for filling up the gas tank. Fifteen gallons of juice. No reason to fill up the car if you were leaving it in the drive the next morning and footpedaling down the highway. He found a receipt for sushi at Stop&Shop. Sushi? Yet this is what the receipt said. Stop&Shop in Madison. Sushi.

  Larissa hated sushi. Never ate it. Now she was buying sushi at a supermarket in Madison, not even in Summit?

  Zoolander, sushi, kissing the kids on Friday, “drive safe.” What did it amount to? A hill of beans?

  But she wasn’t here! She wasn’t here…

  Jared held her suede patchwork purse in his lap, sitting behind his desk. It was remarkable how little there was inside it in terms of purchases. Rather, in terms of receipts. The purse was clean, the wallet clean. But Jared was an investment banker. He had been watching receipts for bigger fish than Larissa. He knew that one way or another, following the trail of money would lead him somewhere.

  He went online to check the purchases on their American Express account. Other than gas, there was little else. He clicked to see which gas station she used, what time she gassed up. It was at the Exxon station on River Road, once a week, around 8:50 a.m. Like clockwork. He went back seven months. Once a week, at the same gas station. Which wasn’t the station closest to home, the one they always used, where she filled up her Escalade on the weekends. He checked the day of the week. It was Mondays. He went on Google Maps to see the station’s location. It was on the way to Madison. He checked the location of Stop&Shop. Madison. And the shrink was also in Madison.

  He sat, he waited. He thought. He threw on his jacket, took Larissa’s Jag, drove to Exxon. The man who came up to his window was smiling at him with a friendly familiarity that vanished when he saw it was not a woman driving the Jag. “Can I help you?” he said.

  “This car belongs to my wife,” said Jared, taking out her photo. “You know her?”

  The man didn’t have to glance at the picture. “I know her well. She comes here all the time. You need gas?”

  “Not today, I’m all set,” said Jared. “Does she come in this car, or the other one?”

  “I’ve only seen this one.”

  “So how long has she been coming here?”

  “Oh, a long time. I don’t know.”

  “How long would you guess?”

  “I don’t know, I told you. Maybe a year. Maybe more. Sorry, another customer behind you. Do you mind?”

  Jared didn’t mind. Slowly he pulled into a parking spot and sat rubbing his stubble.

  What was it? His heart, his fear was getting in the way of his reason. Was there a connection between the missing wife and the unheard of sushi from a supermarket, the fuel from a gas station they never used?

  He sat for ten minutes, his hands on the wheel. Then he drove to Madison, to Dr. Kavanagh’s office.

  She wasn’t there on a Sunday, of course. Much of what he was doing felt like an exercise in futility. But what other option did he have? Cobb said the FBI might have to get involved. He said it as if Jared should be afraid of it, but all Jared could think of was, when? Why not get involved now, immediately? Immediately was Sunday afternoon on a sunshiny day in May. And his kids alone in the house while he stood outside an empty doctor’s
parking lot ringing the bell. That was immediately.

  As he drove back, he tried to visualize Larissa. Was she hurt? Damaged? Was she gone, as in gone, gone? Did it feel to him like she’d had a stroke and fell where she was walking and never got up? No. It didn’t feel like that. What it felt like was more incomprehensible than a freak aneurysm, but also more frightening. Because what it felt like was not chance, but design.

  What was Che’s address? Jared wished he knew it by heart. But he didn’t know much by heart, except the details of his investment funds, mortgage rates, differential dividends. All the information he carried in his head was on a strictly need-to-know basis. In any case, Larissa’s passport was in the drawer! Che lived in the Philippines. And why would Larissa fly to the Philippines and not tell him, not even leave him a note? Hi, hon, I won’t be long. I’ll be back for Asher’s graduation from middle school.

  He had to put Che out of his mind. Larissa couldn’t fly to the Philippines without her passport. That’s all there was to it.

  Then where was she?

  What day was it when he got back from Kavanagh’s parking lot? Oh God. It was still only Sunday.

  He called Cobb. “We have no new information,” the officer said. “It’s only been two hours since we saw you.”

  “Since we filed the report, maybe,” said Jared. “But she’s been gone since Friday morning. Have we checked the hospitals? The police blotters? Any reports of a woman who’s hit her head?”

  “I haven’t checked all the police blotters myself personally,” said Cobb. “But we checked the bulletins from the precincts in the Tri-State area. This includes Connecticut.”