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I’d just pulled out of the parking lot when my phone rang. It was Detective Tight-Ass. Although using hand-held devices while driving was still legal, I didn’t like being on the phone while I was driving. Without thinking, I asked if it was urgent. She gave me a mouthful and instantly I felt shame which then turned to rage. Sometimes I missed the old land-line phone receivers you could slam down onto their cradles or throw across the room. They were such a great outlet for anger; the force of banging them or slinging them gave me such a feeling of satisfaction. Once cell phones came into use, pressing or stabbing the damn power button didn’t use up any pent-up anger, and I quickly learned that smashing a cell phone was expensive, time-consuming to replace, and sometimes disastrous.
Without a phone to fling, I had no outlet for my fury when I hung up with Detective Golders. I shoved the car into drive and pulled out from the Seabird complex, fuming. Damn that woman for being so good at making me feel bad. She made it sound as if I were in the wrong for not dragging Ella’s past out of her, but I’d always figured that the only thing worse than having your parents murdered would be to have to talk about it. Consequently, when Ella asked me to drop the subject and not bring it up again, I complied. I couldn’t help thinking that cop was just being nosy—after all, she’d completely dismissed my theory that Ella’s disappearance could be connected to the murders.
I turned left onto the main road, and almost lost control of the car when a long, loud blast of a car horn alerted me to the fact I’d almost driven into an oncoming car. I hadn’t even noticed it approaching. My heart thumped furiously even after the car overtook me at the first opportunity, and my hands shook on the steering wheel. I hoped Norm could help me calm down, but after seeing his text, I wasn’t so sure.
At the traffic light, I glanced down at my phone and looked again at the row of crying face emojis he’d sent with the phrase how did you know? What did he mean by that? Had Ella confided in him and he was wondering how I’d figured it out so quickly? I was anxious to get there as quickly as possible and I bumped and lurched over the brick cobblestones of his street in my hurry to arrive. When I got to his bungalow, recently painted in shades of turquoise and gray, I didn’t attempt to do any kind of parking job, just ground the car to a halt and jumped out.
Norm had obviously been standing by the door waiting. He practically tripped over himself as he loped toward me down the fern-lined path. He was dressed immaculately in pressed, pale chino pants and a yellow golf shirt, but he looked terrible. His face, always thin, looked pale and haggard, the skin around his jowls hanging loosely, as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. Because of his height and thin frame, he always looked lanky, but now he looked old and gaunt as well. He’d aged ten years since the last time I’d seen him, which was only the previous week.
“I can’t believe it,” he wailed, as he came up and stooped down to fling his arms around me. “It can’t be happening.”
“You—you heard about Ella?”
He pushed me away from him and with a quick glance, looked me up and down. I wasn’t sure whether he’d taken in my own distraught appearance.
His brows knit together. “I’m talking about Larry.” We looked at each other, our expressions of puzzlement mirroring each other until he burst out, “He’s gone.”
I stared at him. “Larry’s disappeared?”
Norm shook his head. “He may as well have, although I know perfectly well where he is.”
“Then you’re ahead of me,” I said. “What’s going on?”
As we turned and headed inside the house, Norm told me that only hours earlier, he’d come home from the gym to find Larry loading suitcases into his Toyota Highlander.
“He’d obviously been planning it for a while. How else could he have packed his whole life away in less than two hours?” I was about to respond but Norm gave me no chance as he steamrolled ahead. “‘I’m leaving you,’ Larry says, just like that. No lead-up. No, how do you feel about us? No, let’s go to counseling. It’s not as if we haven’t been near the brink before, but we’ve been doing so fabulously since we moved to Gulfport. It was our best decision ever.” He strode into the hallway of their house, while I trotted behind trying to keep up. “Twenty-two years together and he just walks out? Don’t I deserve more than that?” By then we were in the living room where Norm collapsed into the closest armchair, a modern wingback teal thing I’d always found a little over the top.
“Had you talked about splitting up?”
“That’s what I’m telling you—we’ve been so happy ever since we got here. And I don’t think he was faking it. After twenty-two years I know when things are feeling rocky, and there were absolutely no indications.”
“Why did he leave then?”
“He didn’t give a reason. Can you believe it?”
“What do you mean? He just said, ‘I’m going’ and went?”
“Yes! Well, I suppose there was sort-of a reason. He said he was going back to New York.”
“But you guys moved here from Washington, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “Larry was living in New York when the two of us met. His ex still lives there, as far as I know.”
“After all this time, he went back to his ex?”
Norm shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. He barely said anything. Just that he was leaving and would give me a forwarding address once he had one. Then he took the last of his suitcases, marched to the car and took off.”
“Did you call him on his mobile?”
“He’s obviously switched it off. It went straight to voice-mail.”
Norm was quiet and I considered what he’d just told me. Larry always struck me as the more solid one of the pair, a down-to-earth type. If anyone would have flounced off, I’d have expected it to be Norm, although he’d have returned within a few hours, his arms filled with flowers for Larry and his heart filled with remorse. Larry’s leaving was completely out of character.
“I expect he’ll be back soon. Maybe he’s just blowing off steam.”
“No. This is serious. He told me he emailed his resignation to his boss.”
That was crazy. What kind of employee did that? Once Larry got to New York, he’d need a job reference and leaving with no notice would hardly be the way to get one. I’d never paid much attention to what kind of work Larry did, but now I wondered how his leaving would affect Norm financially. It didn’t seem to be the right time to ask.
Norm pulled himself out of the chair.
“Where are my manners?” he asked, as if he were Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind and his husband had just left to join the civil war. “What can I get you to drink?”
I was tempted to ask for a strong whisky, but I was still feeling queasy from the night before. I wasn’t meant to drink any alcohol with my medication and after last night’s vodka I’d had more than enough for now. It occurred to me that I might not have remembered to take my meds this morning since I was pretty distraught. I settled on an iced tea and while Norm went to the kitchen to get it, I wandered around the living room. A series of photographs placed on the closed lid of the mahogany baby grand showed Norm and Larry on happy travels all over the world—arms around each other’s waists at the rim of the Grand Canyon, smiling atop the Eiffel Tower, toasting each other at a gala with champagne, strolling on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean.
It made no sense that a perfectly happy spouse would up and leave. There had to be something Norm wasn’t admitting to.
Oh my god, that’s what Detective Golders thinks. She thought I had something to hide the same way I’d thought it about Norm, and Norm would probably think it about me and Ella.
“Here you go, darling.” Norm had reappeared and handed me a tall glass, ice chunks clinking together as he thrust it toward me. He appeared a little calmer than he had a few moments ago. “I’m a horrible host. You said something about Ella, and I didn’t even ask what you meant.” He sat down, this time perching on the edge of the teal armchair and leaning forward.
I wanted to tell him, but suddenly I wondered how it would sound. I was devastated, but Ella and I had been together only a fraction of the time he and Larry had. Compared to their twenty-two years, did I have any right to feel the way I did? Was it another of those situations where I was over-reacting? I hadn’t thought so, but what if he had the same reaction I’d had when he first told me about Larry? Maybe he would tell me that Ella was just blowing off steam, that she’d be back in a day or two. After all, Norm was one of the few people who knew she and I had been undergoing some stress lately. He’d told me it was normal and that I shouldn’t make anything of it. Perhaps he’d just been trying to reassure me, and underneath he was wondering how much longer Ella would put up with it. Whatever his reaction was going to be, I wasn’t sure I was ready for it. Norm was emotionally fragile and there was no telling how he would react. Under normal circumstances he might have sympathized, but maybe he couldn’t, not right now.
I realized all of a sudden that my own reaction to him hadn’t exactly been empathetic.
“Oh my god Norm, I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine how you must be feeling. I’ll tell you about Ella later. Tell me what I can do to help.”
He burst into tears. “I’m such a mess,” he spluttered between sobs. He extracted a large handkerchief from his pants pocket and made loud explosive noises as he blew into it. “There is one thing you could do,” he said.
“Tell me.” I leaned forward and held his hand.
“I can’t sleep here by myself. Will you stay here tonight?”
A feeling of dread doused me like the ice-bucket challenge. I’d meant it when I’d offered to help, but not this. I had to be home tonight. What if Ella came back and I wasn’t there? Staying here was the last thing I wanted to do.
“I—I...” I couldn’t think what to say. “I have to go home—”
“Oh, thank you! Of course you do. You don’t have anything with you. But I’m so glad you’re coming back. In fact, I’m going to go into the kitchen right this moment and put the finishing touches to the dinner I was planning for me and Larry.” His lower lip trembled.
I began to protest, but he was already pulling me to my feet.
“Take your time. I have everything marinating in the fridge already, so whenever you get back, I’ll put it in the oven.” His eyes welled up, but he brushed the tears away. “You’re a true friend, Breezy. I know Ella won’t give you a hard time about staying over. She’s not the type and anyway, you two aren’t at the place in your relationship where you can’t be apart, even though you are rather adorable little lovebirds. Oh God,” he gasped, and his eyes filled with tears. “Twenty-two years and I don’t think we’ve been apart a day in the last twenty of them. You have no idea what that’s like. How could you have? Tell Ella she can come join you here. Or maybe she should just enjoy the pre-marital freedom.”
I should have told him then about Ella, but I couldn’t see how to do it in any manner that was tactful. I didn’t want it to sound like some weird kind of one-upmanship and I didn’t want him minimizing how much it mattered to me.
As I left, I wondered how I was going to get through the evening, allowing the world to center around him, when I needed it to center around me.
Around Ella, I mean.