A Song in the Daylight (2009)

by Paullina Simons

  “Nothing in the bulletins?”

  “Hundreds of things. Just no information about a fortysome-thing brown-haired woman.”

  “With blonde highlights.” Jared hung up despondently.

  Why was being at home waiting like this so unbearable? Why couldn’t he do something with the kids? Maybe throw a baseball to Asher. But Asher just pitched a loss in his playoff game. Last thing he wanted was to see a baseball. Maybe go to the park? To Canoe Lake? Maybe pack up, take everyone to Lillypond? No, that was impossible. What if she came back? What if there was some news?

  Came back from where?

  What kind of news?

  He called Kavanagh a third time. “I will pass on your message, sir. She will call you back at her earliest convenience.”

  “This is an emergency,” Jared said, his hands unsteady, his voice cracking. “A real emergency. Please.”

  Another hour passed in despair.

  Emily went over Alyssa’s house. Asher went over James’s house, taking his guitar. Michelangelo sat with Jared at the island, pretending to look at the news in the paper. “Daddy, so what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know, bud. What do you want to do?”

  “We can go play catch. Or you can take me on the swings. Or we can play go fish. I love that game. Wanna play? Or I have some awesome black Model Magic clay. It really is like magic. And it’s black.” Michelangelo grinned. “We can sculpt a vampire for Halloween.”

  After a full minute of thinking, Jared said, “Halloween is five months away.”

  “Never too early to get started on the decorations,” said Michelangelo. “That’s what you always say, Dad.”

  “I’m not always right, bud.”

  Jared watched his son mold the soft and pliable black clay into something resembling a head, with arms growing out of it. To do a cape, or white fangs, or blood rolling down the chin, that wasn’t possible. The vampire looked like a bird. A nightingale.

  The phone rang. Jared dived for it. It was Ezra. “We’re coming. We’re bringing dinner.”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know.”

  “It’s not a question. We’ll be there in a half-hour.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Three.”

  “Three!” What was happening? Why did time stop moving? Why was it that usually he couldn’t get time to stand still, couldn’t slow it down a millisecond, to sit at night, to dine with friends, to prolong his climax, to read the paper, one extra day on the Miami beach, and now it stopped moving? Not just slowed down. Stopped. “It can’t be three,” Jared said numbly. It had been three on Sunday all day.

  Bo and Jonny came over too, brought snacks, drinks, paper towels, paper plates. They brought milk, bread, cereal. Maggie took Michelangelo to town for ice cream, and to Bryant Park. Asher came in, then quickly went back out went to play miniature golf. Emily came home and baked some store-bought brownies she found in the cabinet.

  The phone rang. It was Cobb. “Just wanted to confirm—you said you didn’t find anything missing? Credit cards? License? Other ID? Money?”

  “She never carried any money,” said Jared, his temples throbbing. Maybe sleep is what he needed.

  “Sorry, I know it’s rough. It’s Memorial Day weekend, everyone’s away.”

  Yes, Jared thought, pressing OFF on the phone. Everyone is away.

  Jared didn’t know how he got through Memorial Monday. Because Ezra and Maggie and Bo and Jonny didn’t leave him alone for a moment, that’s how. They brought food, games for the kids, bats, gloves, Frisbees, balloons, tried to make it as normal as possible, put music on to drown out the noise in Jared’s head, took care of everything. Ezra barbecued, though Ezra didn’t know how to barbecue. They fed Jared, though he didn’t eat, and they fed his kids, who were all, except for Michelangelo, walking around as if they were shell-shocked. Asher had withdrawn nearly completely. He was silently looking into his food, silently drinking. Even Riot was sleeping on the deck by Jared’s feet instead of playing with the kids.

  “You’re going to have to talk to them, Jared,” Ezra said. “You’re going to have to say something.” They were sitting outside on the patio while the kids were in the hammock deep in the backyard.

  “Say what? What can I possibly say? I don’t know anything!” He stood up, his legs unsteady.

  That Monday night he went into Emily’s room. He couldn’t have a conversation with his sons, but Emily was a girl; he was hoping she’d go easy on him.

  “Em, things have been upside down around here,” he began, perching on her bed.

  “You don’t say.” She half-turned from him; then, thinking better of it, sat up, hugging her knees. She wouldn’t look at him.

  “Look, I wish I could tell you what’s happening. I’m sorry I’m so clueless.”

  “Don’t be sorry, Dad. Your cluelessness is one of the things we love about you.”

  “The police are looking for your mom.”

  “But we don’t want them to find her, right?” She looked at him hopefully. “Because that would mean that something really bad happened to her.”

  “You’re right, Em,” said Jared. “We don’t want the police to find her. I’m hoping that Mom just went away to be by herself for a while.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It was Emily who reached out and patted him on the shoulder. “It’ll be okay, Dad,” she said. “Everything will be fine.”

  Jared swallowed. Cleared his throat. Wished for a glass of water. Wished for a lot of things. They sat for a few minutes in heavy silence. “In the meantime, we’ve got to hunker down.”

  “No kidding. But, Dad, what are we going to do? I don’t mean…mean, actually what are we going to do? We’ve got stuff every day till the end of school. Who’s going to drive us?”

  “I’m taking a few days off work while I figure it out. I’ll drive you. Maggie said she will come and help us. I’m sure your mom will come back any minute. But you’re going to have to help me, Em. I haven’t done this. I don’t know when or how or where. And please—don’t expect me to remember. Because I won’t. Just write it down on a piece of paper. Stick it into my hand. Tape it to my car keys. Do whatever it takes.”

  “When are you going to go back to work?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll see.”

  “But, Dad…don’t you need to get paid?”

  He almost smiled. “Maybe they’ll pay me anyway. I’ve been working so hard.”

  “Don’t use up all your vacation time,” Emily said wisely, like a miniature Larissa. “We want to go to Lillypond.”

  It’s remarkable what happens when your heart is no longer attached to anything else in your body. Things you never thought you could say, you say. Things you never thought you could hear, you hear. Things you never thought you could do, you do. As if you’re walking through a darkened museum of a silent demonstration of someone else’s ancient life, and in the back of your mind, you’re always thinking, in one minute, I’ll be outside in the sun, and out of this black morass, and I can’t wait for that. Thank God this isn’t my life. That’s how Jared felt as he got up and kissed Emily good night and shut her door.

  He called in sick on Tuesday, saying he had to deal with a personal matter. Just today? the CEO, Larry Fredoso, asked him.

  Jared wanted to say till September. But he didn’t. “Let me have this week, Larry,” he asked. “Okay? A very serious personal matter. Then we’ll talk again.”

  How could he go into work? He couldn’t even face the mirror to shave. In any case, Michelangelo needed to get to school by 8:10. Jared didn’t even know where the school was. He had to look up the address on Mapquest.

  “Mom doesn’t drop me off here, Dad,” said Michelangelo, peering out the Lexus window. “She parks the car on the road up here, then walks me down.”

  “She doesn’t just let you out of the car?”

  “No, Dad.” The boy sighed.

  So Jared pa
rked the car up on the hill and walked Michelangelo down to the school. “Not these doors, Dad.”

  “But all the kids are going through those doors.”

  “Those are the kindergarteners. Sheesh. What grade am I in?”

  And Jared didn’t know. “First?”

  “Dad! Second.”

  “Of course. I knew that. Sorry, bud. You’re my little buddy. I can’t believe you’re in second grade already.”

  “Only for one more month, and then I’m in third.”

  “Wow.” He brought him to the correct doors. Michelangelo waited. Jared looked at his son. “What?”

  “Mom always kisses me.”

  “Oh.” Jared bent down and kissed his son’s curly head. “Bye. Have a good day.”

  “You, too.” Michelangelo waved without turning around. “Don’t forget to come get me at 2:40 sharp.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Don’t be late.”

  “I won’t.”

  And afterward? He couldn’t go back to his empty home. Couldn’t face the house, couldn’t face work.

  He drove to Kavanagh’s office in Madison. He passed by the Stop&Shop, remembered the sushi, became physically distressed, drove trembling through the little town, past the college on the left, forked to the right onto Park Avenue and pulled once again into the empty parking lot of a small white house before St. Elizabeth College. The doctor wasn’t in. Jared opened his windows, and sat waiting.

  From the parking lot he could see the road and the passing cars; they hypnotized him, the cars one after another, motorcycles, buses, zooming past, thirty, twenty, forty-five miles an hour, it was a Tuesday morning, windy, rustling green, almost June, and the road was provincial, yet busy, and so he sat and thought about nothing, and everything. The Ferris wheel at the local fair, where he let Larissa and Michelangelo ride by themselves while he stood at the bottom and waved each time they swerved past, and the flan Ernestina brought to his house that Larissa left for him because she knew how much he liked flan, and the color of the Jaguar in his garage, like the color of her hair, subdued and elegant, flashy in an understated way. Like her. Busboys clanging their dishes at the Summit Diner, dropping his grilled cheese sandwich last time he needed to have the inspection on his truck and he went and waited, thinking ahead to the evening, to dinner. It had been warm, and the summer was coming, and the birds were loud. Almost like now.

  Were straitjackets always white? Did they pin your arms behind your back so you didn’t hurt yourself—and them? Did you spend 28 days in the sterile bin, or did you stay there until someone else other than you decided you could leave? And who decided? And who decided if you should be committed in the first place?

  When he first met her, she was the hippest chick on campus. She wore her hair long and brown, she wore no makeup but very short dresses and her legs stretched abundantly like flamingo pins, she was natural, yet complex, the sight of her made him want to quote Byron in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. She walks in beauty, like the night, of cloudless climes and starry skies.

  She draped over student union sofas drinking ceaseless cups of black coffee as she presided over the Footlight Players. Her face gleaming, she was tyranny with a smile. She told them what to do, how to play it, what to say, and they did it, they said it. They followed her blindly, listened to her agape. Whenever she was indoors she was always barefoot, she said she liked to feel the ground under her feet, and he wondered how she kept her soles clean, but when they started dating and he asked her about it, she stared at him squarely and said, “I wash them. How do you keep your soles clean?”

  “I wear socks,” he said.

  He pulls into a gas station, and pulls out a gun. With heavy gasps he robs the till and runs and then is chased the rest of his days by the toothless man who exacts revenge in the form of paranoid, drug-fueled terror.

  Was that a movie? A nightmare? Was that his life?

  Was this his life?

  Now he counted cars that flew by, none of them stopping here. Was Larissa in one of those cars? Not in her own, but in another car?

  Another’s car?

  Everyone is the star of his own life. But she was the star of everyone’s life.

  She was easy on the heart, on the eyes. She was the hitchhiker with the contagious laugh. She got into the car of his life and rode with him, and just as suddenly got out, flashing her breasts and her whites and was gone.

  Was she the side show?

  Was he the side show?

  Memories like acid.

  Ten o’clock, eleven.

  At noon, a large gray Mercedes pulled in and a wizened bird of a woman got out. By the time Jared slowly scrambled out of his truck he felt he was not the same person who had opened the windows three hours earlier.

  Warily she looked at him heading over to her in the parking lot. “Can I help you?”

  “I don’t know,” Jared said. “I’ve been calling you non-stop since Saturday. I said it was an emergency.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, I was away on a few days’ vacation. Is everything all right?” She frowned at him. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Larissa’s husband,” Jared said, watching her face intensely. It was almost poker-like. Except for the three quick blinks, a zeroing in on him, a honing in, a sharpening of the wrinkled features, a breath before she spoke.

  “What’s happened?”

  “She’s vanished,” said Jared. “She didn’t pick up our youngest child from school on Friday. She wasn’t there in the afternoon. She hasn’t been home since.”

  Kavanagh was still clutching her purse. She slammed her car door. “Did she leave a note?”

  “What kind of note?” said Jared. “She could be lying dead in a ditch after a brain hemorrhage. What kind of note do you leave for that?”

  Jared hoped that she took pity, because after a brief pitying glance at his wretched face, she said, “Come with me. Come inside.”

  “Do you know where she is?” Jared said in the parking lot. “I don’t want to come inside, because I’m afraid you’re taking me inside to tell me to sit down, and I don’t want to sit down.”

  “You’re very perceptive as to my motives,” said Kavanagh. Was it Jared’s twisted imagination or did she place just a little too much unnecessary emphasis on the my in that sentence? “My next patient is not till one. I thought we could talk for a few minutes.”

  “Why can’t you just tell me where she is?”

  “I don’t know where she is, Mr. Stark.”

  “Then why would I want to come inside?”

  “You wouldn’t,” she said, nodding slightly. “But it’s hot, and I’m not as young as I used to be. I’m sixty-seven, and not much of a fan for standing in the heat. I get easily winded, easily exhausted, and I have a full day today. I want to be fresh. By all means, don’t come in. I hope the rest of your day will be better. I’m sorry about Larissa.”

  She started to walk toward the door of her office building. Jared followed her. “You don’t think she is dead? Why don’t you think so?”

  “Mr. Stark,” said a no-nonsense Kavanagh, her gravel voice hardening, “either come inside with me so we can talk, or have a good day. But don’t engage me when I’ve asked you not to engage me.”

  Reluctantly he followed her inside, and she walked straight, without turning around, almost as if she knew he would.

  The office hadn’t been aired in days. It was stuffy, musty. The central air had been turned down to a minimum. Already shallowly breathing, Jared felt like he was suffocating. Actually suffocating. His chest was tight. He asked Kavanagh to open the windows. She started to protest about the AC, but then saw him gasping and relented. He stuck his head outside, to gulp the air.

  “What’s happened?” he asked dully, straightening up.

  She put down her purse, took off her light gray jacket, cleaned her gray-rimmed glasses, tiny like the rest of her, and sat down, scrunching up into a small hard pretzel. She said nothing.

>   “What, you can’t talk to me?”

  “No, I can.”

  “Is this about some doctor-client privilege?”

  Kavanagh smirked. “A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, Mr. Stark,” she said. “No, this isn’t about some doctor-client privilege. First of all, this isn’t a court of law and you are not the Feds. I assume and presume a crime has not been committed, but even if it was and you were and a crime had been, there is no doctor-client privilege in the United States. Marital privacy, yes. But no doctor-client privilege exists for my legal protection, or for Larissa’s.”

  “So why are you reluctant to speak to me then?”

  “I’m not reluctant,” she said. And nothing else!

  “Do you think she is dead?”

  “Anything is possible,” said Kavanagh. “But I don’t think she is, no.”

  “So where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is there anything you can tell me? Besides I don’t know?”

  “Is there anything you can tell me?”

  “I don’t know anything! I came home Friday, and she was gone!”

  “What did she take with her?”

  “Nothing. Not a thing. Not even her car, not her purse. Nothing.”

  “Money?”

  “No, no money. She didn’t carry cash on her, and no unusual amounts of cash left our account in the last few days, few weeks.” Jared held on to the narrow windowsill, shallow of breath. “You’re asking about the money because you think she was planning to go?” he asked weakly. “But she took nothing with her!” He didn’t—or couldn’t—ask the follow-up question. Why would she go? Why would she want to?

  Why did Jared, with his limited perception, his bewildered mind and exhausted body still feel that this expressionless woman knew things she didn’t want to tell him?

  “She’s been coming to you for months. She never told me why she needed to come. She just said she needed to talk to someone, and I accepted it without argument, without too much worry. She said she wanted her head clear. There was a day in February when she seemed to have trouble coping with things. She said she felt anxiety, sometimes got depressed. It seemed normal.”