The Assessor-Recorder’s Office for San Francisco County is located in City Hall, smack in the middle of the city. Its website, examined from my car, lists options for phoned-in records searches, but only with a five-day waiting period after a query is made over the line. Fuck it if I’m waiting for that. In-person response time is listed as twenty minutes after payment, and that sounds good to me. There are other sites that say I can search records online for a fee, but I have neither the patience nor the trust that such ‘public service’ sites ever really provide what you’re looking for. Besides, more time holed away with my laptop doesn’t fit with the keep-moving-or-go-insane strategy I know is a necessity right now. A drive into central San Francisco seems like a good solution. Out, but nowhere near work or home. A densely packed metropolis where there’s absolutely no likelihood of running into anyone I don’t want to see.
I check out of my Calistoga hotel with a few signatures and the handing over of a few more folds of bills from my wallet. Is it wrong that I’m keen enough on staying hidden from David that I impulsively paid for my room in cash? Do I really think he’s going to try tracking me through the credit card? Part of me suspects there’s nothing positive about my character to be gleaned from the fact this seemed like such an obvious thing to do – that I so easily drifted into subterfuge. Or that I thought David aggressive enough to need such thoughtful deceiving.
It isn’t ‘aggressive’ for a husband to want to know where his wife’s gone, I scold myself, or to use whatever means he’s got to try to find her if she disappears. I’ve never before felt so aware of how hair-thin the line is that stands between loving and obsessive.
I make the hour and forty-minute drive south along Highway 101 as far as the Golden Gate and the little post-bridge district of Cow Hollow, when I decide to switch to public transportation. Finding parking there isn’t exactly a treat, but it’s a damned site better than trying to find a free spot anywhere downtown. I eventually slide my car into a free space along the straight stretch of Lombard Street, then walk a few blocks to the nearest bus stop. A few dollars lighter and I’m on the 47 line, heading down Van Ness to my destination.
The journey is unremarkable, save for one fact that I only become fully cognisant of there on the bus. A thought, or rather a realization, so foreign that it actually startles me.
I don’t have a headache.
They’re so customary, and they’ve been usual for so long, that I can’t think of the last day I didn’t feel one grabbing at the sides of my face. Every day, until today. And today seems like the most unlikely of days not to have a headache.
I chide myself. Feeling good, rather than poorly, shouldn’t be upsetting me. I sense I’m as close to paranoid as a sane person can get, suspicious of the fact that, for once, I feel physically well in the middle of the day.
No, not well. That’s the wrong way to put it. I’m not feeling my customary pain, but I can’t help but feel that what’s replaced it is far worse. In the place of that familiar agony, a deep hole, buried within me, is showing its shape. A forgetting, sucking pieces of myself into it, leaving only empty space behind.
Less than half an hour after entering the overcrowded bus, I exit through its central doors and make my way the last few yards along bustling Van Ness Street towards the looming edifice of San Francisco City Hall. It’s an awe-inspiring building, built in Beaux-Arts style after its predecessor had been destroyed in the great 1906 earthquake, looking like a cross between a French palace and the US Capitol – though its gilded dome rises even taller than the glistening white version in Washington.
I’d been here once before, to go through the formalities of registering my marriage to David. I’d been overwhelmed by the building, and the moment.
The memory is no longer drenched in sweetness, but at least it confirms I’ve come to the right place. This time I’m here for what is going to be the worst discovery of my life. I desperately don’t want to find it, but I’m as certain as I’ve ever been of anything that I will.
I locate the appropriate door and enter. It’s a matter of minutes before I’m at the front desk of the Assessor-Recorder’s Office, tucked into room 180 of the massive complex.
‘I need to look up a marriage record,’ I announce to the twenty-something clerk behind the counter. She’s clearly trying to look older than her years, using a loosely knitted jumper and bunned-up hairstyle to effect a moderately maternal appearance. She’s wearing make-up my mother would have approved of, if my mother had ever approved of anything, light and not too showy.
She nods at me. ‘Good morning. I’ll be happy to help you with that.’ Her voice is as rehearsed as her gestures. ‘Do you happen to have an index reference number for the record you want?’
I shake my head, stopping before the motion becomes too energetic. ‘I don’t, I’m afraid. I was hoping I could look it up through the family names.’
‘Can do that for you, sure.’ There is a bit of tapping on the young lady’s keyboard. Finally, she peers up at me. ‘Could I have the last names of both parties in the marriage?’
‘Howell,’ I answer. ‘The husband’s first name is David, and the wife’s is Amber.’ My voice trembles. The Howells.
‘And the date the marriage was registered?’
‘Just over two years ago, in this building, July the seventeenth.’ The date comes off my lips automatically. I’d sat out on one of the granite benches in the corridor, back on that day, while David went into the office to take care of the paperwork. I was as happy as I’d ever been, dreaming of everything ahead of us.
More typing. The woman focuses on her screen. At last she looks back up, dropping her wrists to the surface of her desk. I grab a sheet of scratch paper from a pile on the counter and take hold of a plastic pen shackled to a metal chain.
It’s my last gesture of hope that this could still go right. But, of course, it was never going to.
‘I’m afraid there’s no file in the registry for those names,’ the clerk announces impassively.
The words thunder through me as fiercely as if she’d yelled them. Though for a moment my lips stay silent, my physical reaction is immediate. My skin goes cold and my pulse starts to become audible in my ears; yet I can’t think of anything to say. That isn’t possible. Of course there’s a record! But then, of course there’s not a record. You knew he was lying. You just needed the proof!
‘I think … maybe …’ I finally stutter, ‘maybe you typed the last name wrong.’ I have to try every possibility. ‘It’s Howell, H-O-W-E-L-L.’ I can’t think of any variation on spellings for my own first name or David’s, so I don’t add them.
The clerk looks back to her screen, but her head is shaking even before her eyes come to a stop. ‘That’s the spelling I used,’ she confirms. ‘And the date was July seventeenth, correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sorry,’ she says back. ‘There’s nothing here. You’re absolutely sure of that date? It couldn’t perhaps have been another?’
Of course I’m sure of the fucking date! I want to scream at this young woman, grab at the bun at the back of her head and swing her around by the hair until she starts talking sense. Of course I know the date of my marriage. Don’t tell me there isn’t a file!
‘Maybe it’s not in your electronic records?’ I quietly ask, holding back tears and screams, grasping for solutions. ‘Not everything’s been digitized, right? Maybe you have it in a filing cabinet out back?’
‘If a marriage has taken place in San Francisco County since we established this office in 1915, it’s in these files, ma’am,’ she answers. There’s a glimmer of pride in her eyes. ‘So unless you’re searching for a record from somewhere else, I’m afraid this database is exhaustive.’
The marriage had taken place in the tree-covered Presidio, in a little chapel connected to the old Officers’ Club that dated back to the site’s life as a naval base, before being turned into a city conservation district. It’s there in my mind, vivid and beautiful. A whitewashed wooden structure on a hillside, as Californian as it comes. A moment only for us, hidden away from the world in a quiet corner of a park tucked into the centre of a city.
Hidden away.
I glare back at the woman. A thought has just occurred to me. I don’t know about government databases and registries, but I know enough about looking things up on the Internet to recognize that sometimes things just don’t get cross-referenced in every file as they should.
‘Can you look up records by birth certificate in that same system?’
The clerk lifts a brow slightly. This is more quizzing than she usually gets. ‘Sure, it’s possible. Give me just a second.’ Typing, keystrokes coming out in rapid bursts. ‘Okay, I’m ready. What name would you like to search?’
‘Look up the husband,’ I answer. ‘Howell, David. Middle name Joseph.’
She nods. ‘His date of birth?’
The detail comes to my lips automatically. ‘November fourteenth, nineteen—’
But then my words stop in my throat. I’m unexpectedly mute.
I can’t remember the year of David’s birth.
The black hole in my mind is suddenly, spontaneously back, and it’s grown into a cavern. What I am feeling is so far beyond fear, beyond panic, that I simply don’t know how to react. It’s one thing to be confronted with the fact that you’re being lied to, but when you can’t remember something yourself … when your own thoughts are leaving you, hiding from you …
The woman is peering at me, waiting, but I can’t complete the year.
‘Nineteen …’ I stutter aloud again, hoping impulse will do the trick, but no clarity comes – muscle memory holding nothing over the stunning absence in my recall. I look to the clerk, imploring, but she’s obviously in no position to help me.
Then, a memory that can. David is four years older than I am. By quick math that makes him forty-two. I quickly subtract from today’s date and give the clerk the year.
‘Do you happen to know his place of birth?’
‘La Jolla, outside San Diego,’ I answer. California born and bred, David has always said. That memory is still vivid.
‘One day we’ll visit La Jolla together, hon,’ he whispers in my ear, a campfire crackling in front of our toes. ‘There’s a little cabin, tucked into a nice grove of trees that sits just above the beach, where we used to play as children. You’ll love it. Like a postcard. Everything down there’s so gorgeous. It’ll make me happy to share it with you.’
To date, we’ve never gone.
The clerk is typing again, but rather than focus on her actions I’m trying to squash the frog in my throat and force my pulse out of its sprint. Neither act of will is working.
Finally, she looks up.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t have a file for that name.’
Everything collapses. Inside, all around me. This was my last hope. I now know it’s all been a lie. Our life. Our family. Everything.
‘You don’t have a record of his marriage, then,’ I start, simply for emphasis.
‘No, I’m sorry, ma’am, you misunderstand.’
I blink as she utters the words. My eyelids scrape their way back upwards.
‘It’s not that I don’t have a marriage record for him,’ she continues, ‘I don’t have any record for him at all.’
I can’t react.
‘No marriage licence, no divorces,’ she continues. And then, ‘No birth certificate, no register of death.’ She looks into my uncomprehending eyes. ‘We only keep in-state records, of course, so he’s probably from out of state. But at least from the perspective of the state of California, and according to these files, David Joseph Howell doesn’t exist at all.’