A Song in the Daylight (2009)

by Paullina Simons

  Dear Larissa,

  I’m out of options. I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I’m asking you for this. Please. Please, I beg you. Could you ask Jared to lend Lorenzo and me the money for his bail? We will spend our whole lives paying you back, but please, could you ask your Jared to send me the money so I could free my Lorenzo?

  Ask him to help us. Beg him to help my unborn child.

  The Tasaday, Larissa! Mindanao! Leaving my baby, running away, getting Father Emilio to vouch to the government for Lorenzo when I know I’m asking him to vouch for a man who plans to run out on that fifty grand and never be seen again. What’s going to happen to me?

  Larissa, I was wondering if I can come stay with you? Maybe you could send us a plane ticket and me and the baby can come and stay with you for a little while? Can you do that? I’ll be safe with you and I’m not safe here.

  I’m so scared. All these years I thought I was wild and free, and it turns out I’m neither.

  I can’t imagine running out on Lorenzo. It’s like leaving him to be torn apart by wolves. To stand trial for something he did not do on purpose, to go to prison! How can I abandon him? He needs me.

  I won’t be able to leave my baby. But I can’t leave Lorenzo either.

  Oh my God, Larissa. What do I do?

  Please write me. I need you, I haven’t heard from you in ages. I’d call you, but I have no money. I was kicked out of my house. We hadn’t paid the rent in six months. My baby is a week overdue. Even she doesn’t want to be born into this loony bin world. Father Emilio feeds me these days. I eat with the nuns. I live with the nuns. Where would I be without the intercession of His daughters?

  For a second after reading it, Jared was filled with a crazy hope that Larissa took the money to pay for Che’s boyfriend’s bail. How absurd that was. The cash back program began long before Che needed a large sum of money.

  Before he could clean up, it was 2:40. And at 3:30 Emily called from the high school asking to be picked up with a bathing suit and towel in hand and be driven to the Swim Club in Chatham. Michelangelo wanted to go, too. Jared sat mutely by the side of the pool while Michelangelo doggy-paddled in the deep end, every five seconds yelling, daddy look, daddy look. Asher called when Jared was still poolside and asked to be picked up with his amp and guitar.

  He took the wet kids and the dry kids to an air-conditioned diner, while at home, the things on the floor remained. Jared didn’t know what to do with the bits of paper, old receipts, with Che’s letters. Where is the place of organization in your house where you might file for future use letters from the best friend of your wife who has evaporated like morning fog? No good place in anyone’s house for something like this. Filed under: things that must not ever be thought of again.

  Also these: like satanic daily rites of ceremonial disembowelments, Jared on a daily basis was assaulted with the hari-kari reminders of his current condition. This is the passageway to hell, and it doesn’t end, despite what Dr. Kavanagh professes. She is wrong; this is the dank narrow hallway of your present life.

  Rite 1: he went in to Dr. Young’s in town to fix his glasses that got loose, and Young’s wife, also a doctor, said to him, “How does Larissa like her new glasses?”

  “What new glasses?” asked Jared. He thought everyone in town had heard the news about him. Clearly not everyone. Didn’t anyone maliciously gossip anymore, so he wouldn’t have Larissa’s name just pulled out of a small-talk hat like that?

  “Oh, her new Prada reading glasses. She said one pair was not enough, she was always leaving them by the bedside. So she got herself another pair to carry in her purse.”

  “She did. Of course. I must’ve forgotten. Refresh my memory. When was this?”

  The female Dr. Young checked her records. “In April. They were deep gold. Very attractive. Come on. You must’ve seen them on her face?”

  “I have. They’re quite nice.” His hands grabbed the glass counter. “Are we done with the repair?”

  “Yes, almost.”

  This was never going to end. Dr. Young chuckled. “Larissa told me you’d never notice. She said she could have a diamond encrusted tiara on her head and you’d say, did you do something different to your hair?”

  “That’s me,” mouthed Jared. “Not very observant.” He reached out his trembling hand. “Can I have my glasses now? I’m in a hurry.”

  Rite 2: after the optometrist, he called the gynecologist. He was going through all the medical professionals. Why stop at just the shrink and the eye doctor? There was a script on the insurance bill for something he didn’t recognize, he told the receptionist. What was that? Larissa asked him to call in the prescription for her and he couldn’t tell what Norethindrone was.

  “Norethindrone? You mean the birth control pill?”

  He slumped over the phone, over his desk. “Of course,” he said in a muffled voice. “The birth control pill.” It all makes perfect sense. “She says she lost the prescription. Our local drugstore doesn’t have it. How long was it for?”

  “The last prescription?”

  The last prescription? Implying there were others before it.

  “We gave it to her for twelve months. Does she want the doctor to call it in again? Because she lost it once already. We had to call it in a second time to a CVS in Madison. She told us she changed drugstores. Maybe it’s still there?”

  “Yes, let me check with…I’ll call you right back.”

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  But he’d already hung up, and remained flattened at his desk until Doug came in and said, “What are you doing? We’re late for the three o’clock on insurance derivatives. You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Jared said, fork-lifting himself into a standing position. “I have to leave early. Emily has another recital at five.”

  “Larissa can’t drive her?”

  “Not today.” He tossed his laptop into his briefcase, the newspaper into the trash.

  Rite 3: Jared called Finney again, called to find out if there was any news. No, Finney said. I’d call you right away if we found something. Trust me. You’d be the first one we’d call.

  “Nothing on her license? She hasn’t surrendered it? Hasn’t been stopped for a moving violation on it?”

  “No,” Finney said. “Nothing like that. She did report her license missing and was issued a new one, but it happened well before her disappearance—”

  “Wait, wait,” said Jared, rubbing his eyes, standing at the kitchen door, looking out on the yard where his two older children sat chatting on the red swings. “What do you mean, issued a new one. Why?”

  “I don’t know why. She reported it missing is all I know.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “Um, the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles.”

  “When was this?” He couldn’t look at his kids anymore. He closed his eyes.

  “Late April.”

  “She reported it missing in late April?”

  “April 28, to be exact.”

  April 28. A full month before she left.

  “And then?”

  “And then? She said it was lost,” explained Finney. “And they issued her a new one.”

  “Why would she do that? Report it lost?”

  “Maybe because she lost it?”

  “Detective, you know she hasn’t lost it. I told you it was in her purse.”

  “You sure?”

  “Am I sure? Yes! Right in her purse, in her wallet, where it always is. Next to her insurance card, her credit cards.”

  “Huh.”

  “I showed it to you.”

  “Sorry about that. I misremembered. I thought we couldn’t find it. So many details. So why would she report it lost, then?”

  “Detective, you’re asking me?” Jared shook his head. “Did you check the new license? Check if there’s anything on it?”

  “We checked. There’s nothing. She hasn’t been stopped, hasn’t surrendered it.”

  “W
ell…I guess you might as well check her passport,” Jared said lifelessly. “Perhaps she reported that lost also.” His forehead was against the screen door. “And was issued a new one.”

  Evisceration Rite 4: she did. April 20. And she was.

  He laid out the daggers of Larissa’s vanishing on Kavanagh’s table, like a prayer feast for the faithless departed.

  “Is this what you call her coming back any time soon? Forty thousand dollars taken from our account? A new license. A new passport! He is gone, she is gone. I’m asking you - does this seem to you like a person who planned to be back in a flash? Someone who’s thinking it over? Someone who’s left the back door ajar so she can slip in, unnoticed, like nothing was ever amiss? Why aren’t you saying anything? Why?”

  But the reason Kavanagh wasn’t saying anything was because he wasn’t in front of her. He didn’t go and see her. He couldn’t. All the answers were on his desk at work, where he went to hide when there was nowhere else. He didn’t want to have the conversation with Kavanagh, he didn’t want to see her pitying gaze, he could barely stomach Ezra’s, to whom he told nothing beyond the bare bones of a hidden affair and a running-off like a dry-bank stream.

  “She’ll be back,” said Ezra, said Maggie, said Bo and Jonny, and Tara, and Evelyn by phone from afar, all the way from Hoboken. Evelyn, sick at home with home-schooled kids, knew Larissa would be coming back. Perhaps if Evelyn had all the information: that Larissa, unlike Hansel and Gretel, left behind nothing that could be traced back to her, she would’ve come to a different conclusion. No one had that information but Jared. And he was growing skeletal with it.

  3

  Lillypond

  Eventually the children began to notice their mother remained conspicuously not home. The less said of it, the better, Jared felt, and clearly his children felt the same way, for they said less and less of it.

  Michelangelo asked at first.

  One night Jared overheard Emily in his bedroom saying to him, “Don’t keep bringing up Mommy all the time.”

  “I don’t bring her up all the time. I bring her up a little bit.”

  “Well, don’t. Dad is waiting for her to come back and he gets upset.”

  “Why does he get upset?”

  Emily was stumped for a second. Jared stood in the hall. “Why? Because he wants her to come back, and she’s not back yet and this upsets him.”

  “I want her to come back, too.”

  “We all do.”

  “I miss her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is Asher going to have a graduation party?”

  “I don’t think so. Don’t bring it up.”

  “But he wants a party.”

  “No, he doesn’t. Haven’t you noticed? Ash is so sad. We have to try to cheer him up.”

  “Like with a party?”

  “Stop that. This isn’t a good time for parties.”

  “Are we still gonna go to Lillypond when school ends?”

  “I think so. Dad said.”

  “Yeah.”

  And that was the end of that.

  School ended.

  When school ended, Jared had no plan for Michelangelo, and he behaved like a man whose life didn’t stop on the railroad tracks on a Friday in late May, a man who was without a babysitter, a man who didn’t have cleaning help. He behaved like a man whose wife was still home. Like a man who still had Maggie come in the afternoons, though Maggie hadn’t been able to help him much in the last few weeks, and he wished he could remember why, but he was so absorbed in the labor of his own suffering that when she began saying she couldn’t come, he stopped listening. He suspected it had something to do with the exacerbation of her renal condition. Over a week ago someone had mentioned “transplant.” But again, when Jared heard it, in front of “transplant” he put the word heart not the word kidney. He wasn’t thinking of Maggie.

  So on the first Monday of summer vacation, he showered and shaved and dressed and came downstairs to find Emily watching TV with Michelangelo. “I’ll see you later, guys,” he called out to them, taking his briefcase. “Be good. Call if you need anything.”

  “Dad!” Emily shot up from the couch, still in her pajamas. “Where are you going?”

  “Where am I going? To work, Em.”

  “Why are you going to work?”

  “Because if I don’t go to work, we can’t pay our rent, or buy food, and the TV will get turned off and you won’t be able to watch Sponge Bob.”

  “But who’s going to take care of us?”

  “Em, you’re fifteen. You’re not a kid anymore. You can take care of yourself.”

  “But Michelangelo is not fifteen! He can’t take care of himself.”

  “He’s got his sister and brother with him.”

  “Dad! That’s not fair! Asher and I are going to the Swim Club.”

  “No, I’m going to band practice,” said Asher, who’d just woken up and come downstairs. “Can someone drive me? I can’t carry my amp on the back of the bike.”

  Jared stood in the hall, having almost been out the door, and looked at his three children, the sleepy head of a neutral, everything-inside Asher, the wild-eyed expression of everything-outside Emily, and Michelangelo, in Sponge Bob oblivion. Jared had been walking out of his house his entire adult life, every morning, Monday through Friday, in Hoboken when he was a teacher, and here in Summit when he was a chief financial officer. For twenty years, he walked out his door, got into his car, and drove to work, and never once had it occurred to him to think of how the children were going to be taken care of.

  Because they always were.

  “Emily,” he said quietly.

  “Don’t say my name in that way!” she cried. “Don’t make me feel like I’m being unreasonable!”

  “Em,” he said, gripping his briefcase tighter, the knot in his tie constricting his throat, keeping him from breathing. “You have to help me out. I know it’s tough…” he paused. Paused or stopped? Loosening his tie, he thought only of himself, of the emptiness, of the wish for hunger. Everything was once so good. The kids were growing up beautifully. Things were becoming easier. They lived well. Saved money. Spent money. After the kids headed to college, Jared and Larissa planned on traveling. She had already started saving the brochures for their unrealized dreams. They read books, newspapers, talked about life present and past. Everything seemed just as it should be. “I’ll pay you for babysitting,” Jared said to Emily, “until I figure something else out. Just…look, take the boy with you. Take him to the Swim Club.”

  “I’m not taking him to the Swim Club!”

  Jared turned to Asher.

  “I’m not taking him to band practice!”

  “Why don’t you take him to work, Dad? Take him with you.”

  The straps of the briefcase in the hand felt as if they swelled in his hinged and frantic fingers.

  “I will figure something out,” he repeated slowly. “But for now, the two of you, stop this nonsense and help out your dad, will you?”

  Emily and Asher grimly relented and Jared left for work. But he had not thought things through.

  The thing he was in the middle of, the current nightmare, it wasn’t even his nightmare! It was real in someone else’s life. It wasn’t real. Wasn’t real.

  He called Larissa’s mother. “Barbara, I’m sorry, but I need your help,” he said, defeated.

  “Thank God,” she said immediately. “You want me to come and stay with the kids?”

  “God, yes, please. I’ll hire someone. I’m just…” Not ready. He didn’t want to tell her this.

  “I’ll come. I’ll finish up here and jump in the car.”

  “Oh, and…” He didn’t quite know how to say it. “Barbara, can you bring some clothes with you? I’d hate for you to drive back and forth to Piermont. We have a guest room. Stay with us for a few days.”

  There was silence on the phone. “Truly, the world is being turned upside down,” said Barbara.

  Jared
called Ernestina and rehired her. She gave him Thursday afternoons.

  Afterward Jared sat at a corporate meeting about the new challenge of acquiring clients in an Internet world, and didn’t hear a word, thankful only that he wasn’t chairing it.

  Barbara brought a suitcase. The children, who never had their grandmother stay with them at the house, were overjoyed. And she seemed strangely pleased also, almost as if she had planned it. Only Jared stood incongruously near his back door, feeling simultaneously grateful and revolted.

  The days lumbered by, but then a week later he forgot to make the call at the end of trading to reinvest in a multibillion-dollar account for a multi-billion-dollar subsidiary fund. By the time he remembered, it was too late, the Dow had closed and the price rose over what he was allowed to pay. The weekend came and went, and on Monday, Larry Fredoso met with him darkly in the large conference room and asked him to explain, and Jared had no answers. He was counting on Larry’s goodwill, wondering, but only superficially, how long the goodwill would last. If he lost his job because of incompetence, what would they all do then?

  Out of options, Jared told Larry the truth. Jared didn’t tell him the whole truth, nasty, devastating, cruel—the kid was twenty! And she planned to run with him for a year. But he told him almost everything else. Things he couldn’t tell Ezra and Finney, he told his boss. Fredoso listened and said only, “Holy fuck,” and nothing else for a few minutes, and then added, “Holy fuck,” another three or four dozen times and then fell quiet. After five minutes, Jared got up and left.

  An hour later Fredoso came into Jared’s office and closed the door. “I am useless in personal situations,” he said, “my third wife has been calling me an asshole for seven years. What I meant to say before but clearly didn’t was, whatever you need, you do. I’ll help you. We can help. What can we do? Do you want to move closer to work? We’ll find you a house in Newark, a nice one.”

  “I would, Larry, but no. I can’t move. The kids will…” The kids. Yes, them.

  “You need help. Who’s taking care of them when you’re here?”