4

“What’s this?”

Abby unzips her backpack. She hands over a package wrapped in cellophane. “Banana bread.” Another package. “Cookies. Oh, and cinnamon rolls. The frozen kind. I didn’t make them.”

“Oh, honey.”

“Baking helplessness.”

I look at her shiny dark hair (the exact color of Mark’s) and her lovely brown eyes and all those baked goods, and I realize for the millionth time what a good person she is. No matter how many mistakes I’ve made as a mother, this daughter of mine has managed to be a fine, fine person.

“Don’t you have class?”

“Like I can go to class? You look like shit. I’ll make us some coffee.”

I watch my Abby, who now lives on her own with two friends in a tiny apartment near the university. During her first year in her own place, I’d get these great calls asking how to make that stroganoff I cooked, or that chicken teriyaki, or if you could bake a pie in a cake pan, or what to do if you needed butter for a recipe but didn’t have butter. Years ago, we’d spend hours making gingerbread men with frosting pants and sprinkle hair. But now here she is, making her way around my kitchen like the grown woman she’s become. I have a wrong thought then. I could face anything except losing her. I could even lose Ian but never my child. I remember the shift that occurred after Abby was born—there’d been the great big before, where dying grandparents and natural disasters on the news were sad but mostly distant concerns. But then I became a mother, and when that happens, you cross a line that makes all loss a crushing, personal matter.

The coffee pot burbles. Pollux’s nose is up, sniffing madly at the baked bounty on the counter, which I have no desire to eat. I’m waiting. Waiting to sleep, waiting to eat, even. Abby pours two cups. “I hope it’s not too strong.”

“Never,” I say.

“I talked to Grandma.” Abby sets her fingers around her cup. “She said the police guy came yesterday.”

“I called the station again already this morning. I left a few messages. I don’t know what to do.”

“Are we supposed to be making flyers? Lost Software Exec? Reward? We should call the media or something. We can organize a search. We can’t just sit here. I’m worried sick about him.” This is Abby. She’s the kind of person who gets in and makes things happen, which she’s done from the time she was four, supervising the preschool girls in a game of restaurant while wearing her little red stretch pants and 101 Dalmatians sweatshirt.

“TV? Oh, honey, I don’t know. If we got other people involved … What if we had him on all channels, and he left? You know, willingly.”

“You really think that he would do that? He wouldn’t do that, Mom. After all that crap with his kids, when things are finally settling down for you guys? Wait. What do Bethy and Kristen say about this? Do they have any idea where he is?”

“Kristen said she’ll make some calls. Bethy …” I shake my head. “ ‘Maybe he finally got smart.’ ”

“She’s such a bitch.”

“I don’t think they were too worried until last night, when I told them I called the police.”

Abby’s forehead wrinkles in concern. “Mom, I don’t know how to ask this … but was he depressed or anything? I mean, sometimes he can get kind of down. Grandma thought he might be, you know, upset enough to—”

“She reads Psychology Today and thinks she can diagnose people. Ian, his religion … Suicide’s not an option. I don’t think it’s an option. He loves his work, he loves—”

“You.”

Abby and I look at each other. In my head, I play the scene again. We are in the car. Ian’s face is grim in the light of the passing streetlamps. We’d had words, but it is more than that. It goes deeper. I could make a hundred guesses—I wasn’t friendly enough, my laugh was too loud, I stumbled after drinking that wine, I glared at the woman with her hand on his sleeve. Ian likes things to go right. He likes the towels folded a certain way; he likes the car vacuumed a certain way; he likes an email to be written a certain way. He doesn’t like errors of balance or manners or grammar. He never makes mistakes, I swear. Never a misstep. It can get exhausting, trying to measure up. You start to feel as if you’re on a perpetual job interview.

After that party, I was tired. This, I do remember. I got into bed. I didn’t think about Ian, because I was sick of thinking about Ian. There were the cool sheets, sleep.

“You guys are happy, right?” Abby asks. “It seems like it.”

“Of course!” But this sounds wrong. It’s too cheerful under the circumstances. It’s obviously what you say to a daughter so she won’t worry. I’m not sure what it even means, happy. We had done so much to find our happiness. We had worked so hard and struggled so much to get to it. Happy could be like anything else you worked too hard to get—an expensive vacation, say, that you saved for, and gave up other things for, and dreamed of, in some location that you flew long and difficult distances to reach. After hours of jet lag and waiting in dirty airports, you could find yourself on the shiny, disappointing shore, exhausted and sick from foreign water, wondering how you possibly got so far from home.

I go through it again. The party, the drive home, the grim face. The cool sheets. The bliss of rest.

There were more weekend parties at their house, the baseball team’s end-of-season bash, the neighborhood gang 4th of July, someone’s birthday. Mary must have just finished tossing paper napkins and washing glasses before she began planning for the next get-together. It was distraction, I guess, the way some people keep the TV on all the time so they don’t have to hear their own thoughts. When we were with them, it was obvious how the lines between the couples were drawn—Mark and Mary, with all they had in common; Ian and me, with all we did. Mark and Mary were physical people, who wanted to drink and laugh and spend. Ian and I loved books and music and quiet places. He’d take me into their living room and show me his old albums. He had his father’s Tony Bennett, and he had the Cars and Leo Sayer (which we thought was pretty hilarious, Leo with his big afro). He had Patty Griffin and Emmylou Harris and the Clash. He’d play me songs he loved that I loved, too, while Mary and Mark drank more beers and margaritas and Bloody Marys and joked with the crowd in the other room.

My friends are asking where you came from, Ian said to me as John Prine played. Toby and Renee, especially. Toby and Renee were longtime buddies of the Kellers. They’d all lived in the same neighborhood in the Silicon Valley before moving to the Northwest. Renee thinks you’re too flirtatious. I think she’s jealous because you’re beautiful. I heard the compliment—beautiful. I’d never thought of myself that way, with my straight brown hair and all my “too”s—too skinny, too tall, too big of a nose—but I was so happy he saw me that way. I felt beautiful when I was with him. But I also heard the criticism there. And the next time I saw Renee, I watched myself. I kept my energy turned down a notch. It’s one of those things you think about later that makes you cringe. God, why’d I do that? But I wanted her to like me, if he wanted her to like me. I wanted that life. I wanted a life with him. A life where the hose was rolled up, and things were in their place, and the remote control had its own little holder. Where I was beautiful, sure, but, much more important than that, where order implied safety and calm.

And, the funny thing was, Mark wanted that life, too. He was there at that house and at those parties because he wanted that motorcycle and a boat like Ian’s in the garage. He wanted the perfectly landscaped yard. But he couldn’t ever get there himself, by himself. He worked in sales, on commission, and he fought with bosses and quit jobs and bought expensive leather jackets he couldn’t afford, and money was another way I felt unsafe. Mary, too, ran up credit cards, never had a job, and didn’t really know where their wealth came from. Ian worked crazy hours, building his company. Two A.M., three A.M.—more hiding, maybe, but that Visa bill had gone through the roof again, and someone had to pay it. Ian knew where every penny was. He had IRAs and CDs and ETFs. He had every financial product with an acronym that existed. He was shoring up against the next financial disaster or shopping trip, stuffing money into iron-vault mattresses.

I balanced our checkbook to the penny, as well, and when Mark felt too depressed to work, to sell, when he stayed home and slept late and roiled about the unfairness of people’s treatment of him, I would freeze large quantities of cheap food in case the worst came, the way old people who grew up during the Depression hoard canned vegetables.

Ian offered us tickets to a concert, and we all went together. Two other couples, too. Some country singer, I can’t remember. I don’t like country music, and neither does Ian. The twangy pop kind, anyway. Mark and Mary did. They loved it. It was a way that Ian and I could be near each other, even if we didn’t admit it yet. Seats away, still near, amid ten thousand screaming people.

Wait. Clint Black. That’s who it was. Black hat, black outfit.

We all went out for drinks later. Mary was working on her third margarita, telling some story that was making everyone laugh. And then I drove down the ramp, and I didn’t see the sign—bam! Nearly took the top half off the car!

Lisa, married to Gene, screeched with laughter.

Take it to Auto One, Gene said to Ian. They do a great job. Lisa bashed the Subaru, and it doesn’t have a scratch on it now.

I didn’t bash it! The idiot ran a stoplight!

Pretty hilarious, when you didn’t have to work your ass off to buy the thing, Ian said. He wasn’t joking. His face looked suddenly tight.

Fine, I’ll get a job and pay for it myself!

You’re careless. That’s the problem. He was being cruel, but she didn’t seem bothered. She kept laughing and drinking her margarita. I felt a pang of guilt. His cruelty was there, I was sure, because of me. Because their marriage was ending.

I’ll do pennants, she laughed. She waved an imaginary flag. She was a little tipsy.

Penance? Ian corrected.

Hey, I love a good penance, Gene joked. I like my penance every night, baby.

Ian met my eyes over the table and held them. I would never be careless with something he bought. It was easy to see how things would be very different with us. I respected him and how hard he worked.

And I understood his deep need to be responsible, financially and otherwise. I was the same way. I’d started doing my own graphic-design work part-time after Abby was in school, brochures mostly, travel brochures and new products displayed in three panels. I was teaching myself how to create websites. I had a handful of clients—two tour companies, a husband-and-wife team who sold personal-care products, and a mom who delivered homemade baby food to the “choosiest parents.” (I believe we used those exact words.) I spent the school hours in front of my computer, looking at images of cobalt waters and white sand and sensual bottles of eco-friendly shampoo. For days I rearranged photos of vegetables. I would try to put the pieces together in a way that was whole and desirable and enticing. I aimed to please. Well, I sure did.

Sometime after that concert, Ian began calling me in the afternoon. I would be there at my desk and the phone would ring and my heart would quicken. He would call for some made-up reason—an invitation, a news article about a music performer we liked. The cobalt waters and white-sand beach would sit in front of me for too long, and my tuna sandwich (tuna, mayo, potato chips laid inside, white bread, perfection) would find itself uncommonly ignored.

The voice on the other end, the talk, real talk, talk between two people—not talk that was effortful, a counseling session, anger avoidance, careful stepping around land mines, all the things talk was with Mark—it was a new world. I didn’t know that’s what talk was like. I had met Mark when I was nineteen, and I guess after all those years he had exhausted me. I never knew I was signing up for some battle, but I finally knew that he had won. It wasn’t just the anger that had done me in, the moments when he would thrash and rage and a fist would go through a door right next to my face—it was the daily tending of an emotional person. The violent outbursts (his hands on me, his feet kicking) would come once or twice a year, more sometimes, but the mood reading, the way I was a perpetual ranger at a perpetual weather station watching for ominous signs, that was a constant, and that’s what defeated me. Our marriage wasn’t all rage, of course. Of course we had our good times. Of course there were things I loved about him. I patched that door he’d punched the hole through, though. I hid the damage. I used spackling paste and a flat-edged tool I found in the garage. I painted over it, but you could still see the rough edges where his fist had gone in. I wore long sleeves sometimes, too.

With Ian, when we talked—I got something back, and this seemed like a revelation. I learned things about his work. I learned about his life. I learned about what he wanted and didn’t have, and what he had and didn’t want. He was calm. He was kind. His life seemed so … controlled. But I also spoke. I didn’t know there was a door you could open to a whole land of yourself. Or maybe I suspected it but finally saw it was true. There were all these ideas I had, dreams, all this energy.

Do you know what Mark told me once? I just remembered this. He told me that he didn’t want to hear about my day when he came home. He needed me to listen to him. What I can’t believe now is that I must have gotten in bed with him that night, after he said that.

Still, what Ian and I did was the coward’s way out. I know this. I know it now, and I knew it then, although I justified it. Adultery often happens, I am sure, because you are on the sinking ship, and you need to leap but can’t leap. You are too spineless, maybe, to leap. The water is too dark and choppy and the sea is too large. Saving your own life, even, isn’t enough reason to jump—no, you need the hands at your back, pushing, the hands of something as unavoidable and inevitable and imperative as love. It’s got to be something that big, you know, to get you to jump. That life raft down there is too small, and the unknowns are so immense, and you know where the kitchen is on the ship; you know where your own bed is, and the sinking is so slow, anyway, that you’ve gotten used to it. You really don’t want to hurt a person, either; that’s the irony. Even if he’s someone who has screamed in your face and struck you. Especially not if her only real crime is running up the credit cards and drinking a lot and occasionally ignoring the kids. The compelling forces of capital letter LOVE and another person in that life raft so that you’re not alone—they make the leap possible.

Of course, having company in that boat does not alter the fact that you’re lost at sea.

I told my first lie, my first real lie, to Mark. Ian and I planned to meet one night at his office. It would be our first time alone. God, I was so nervous. I told Mark I was going out to dinner with two old high school friends. I didn’t feel good about the lie. First of all, he could find out, and, Jesus, what that might mean … But it was more than a fear of repercussions. He had made himself popcorn that night. He and Abby were going to watch a movie while I was gone. No matter how much harm had been done over the years, that popcorn made me feel terrible. The way he settled the bowl on the coffee table, a beer nearby. That little pile of napkins. Napkins could break your heart; who knew.

When I got in the car, though, when I started to drive and was finally away from that house and that neighborhood—I felt free. God, it was thrilling. It was mine. It was night and I love driving at night, and I remembered how much I loved it. Something was happening during that drive. I was old and getting younger. I didn’t realize I’d felt so old until then. The city lights, the radio, the driving away—I felt like I was the self I’d lost long ago. The someone I’d been before meeting Mark, before my life turned down that hard road. I remembered who I used to be and maybe still was. I felt light like that, as if I was sixteen and Journey was playing on the radio and the future was wide open and I had all the time in the world.

I’d forgotten all about that feeling. It came back to me as I drove. I turned the radio on and I felt filled with joy. Lifted and filled, and I loved the city and the streetlamps and the car lights in the rearview mirror and every single soul still working in those high, lit, skyscraper offices. I wished each of them the very best.

I thought it was about Ian, but it wasn’t. I know that now. It was about returning. Setting the clock back to that place where you’d turned but should never have turned. It was about undoing the damage and filling the holes and repairing the broken pieces. In a way it was like watching a film in reverse. Mark’s hands flew away from my body back to his own sides, and I walked backward out of the church where we were married, becoming the girl I once had been.

It was early summer. The night air smelled like heat and grass and darkness. Ian stood waiting outside the BetterWorks building, his arms folded. I walked up to him, and he greeted me as if we were having a business appointment. Someone might have been working late behind those tall glass windows, watching.

He had his head down, and I followed him. We waited at the elevators, where he swiped his pass. I took in all the perfect lines and the clean wood and the neatly exposed beams. It was an impressive place. We walked into a hall of closed doors, with windows looking into offices piled with papers and computers. He unlocked his own door. His office did not have windows that looked out on the hallway like the others did. Instead, there were huge panes of glass inside, and the extraordinary city in front of us, the buildings rising up, the Space Needle, the lights reflecting on the water of the lake.

“Wow,” I said.

He didn’t say anything; he only let the door swing shut behind us. He grabbed my arms and spun me toward him, and we kissed and it shook me so hard—how much I wanted it, him. I didn’t know I could want like that. I had imagined him kissing me, but here he was now, up close. Here was his breath, his tongue, his hands gripping my shoulders and then my hair.

He pulled away. The lights of the room were off, but I could see his mouth, shiny from the kiss. He stared at me, looked into my eyes, far, far in. I believed he saw things there that no one else had. Maybe I didn’t even know those things were there.

“Jesus,” he said.

“I know.”

“There are all these new places,” he said.

“There are.”

He sat down in his desk chair, one of those high-tech sorts with metal and black mesh. He did something that I now know was not Ian-like at all. He spun a full circle, a chair lap of disbelief and even happiness. He exhaled, the way a man does when he can’t believe his good luck.

He reached out his arm, and I took his hand. He pulled me into his lap, and that stupid chair tilted and we flung backward and hit the desk, and it was not the way it would have happened in the movies. Our chins knocked together. We laughed.

“Good move, Keller,” he said. “Smooth operator.”

“I should tell you I can’t dance,” I said. “Or dribble a basketball. I’m entirely uncoordinated.”

“Obviously, I really like uncoordinated,” he said.

Oh, I felt sixteen. I felt the giddiness of falling in love, and my real life and past history—a popcorn bowl, a child, my stormy husband and difficult in-laws—were all momentarily gone. We were there in that first thrill you get around anything potent. I suppose it’s the same place in which alcoholics find themselves when they fall headfirst for that warm buzz, or what a gambler feels when the bells ring and the horses are let out of the gate and they are running, flying. It’s all yours, yours, yours. What it all means, what it really means, is too far away to be real; you’re just willingly going down. It’s such a heady time, before all the consequences. Certainly you’re not even aware of the lonely, destructive nights ahead when your knees feel so deliciously weak. Take me, you want to say. Not to him, but to life. You are at the very center, at the beating heart of possibility.

He pushed me up off his lap. I had driven over the bridge to meet him, lied in order to give that night to him, dressed carefully, waited, and anticipated. And we were there all of an hour. He set me back on my feet. He looked me deeply in the eyes again and he said, “I can’t do this, Dani.

“I can’t do this,” he repeated, and then he kissed me again, or I kissed him, and we thrashed and tore and parted. A kiss only, but, dear God.

I got back in my car, and he stood there at the doorway to his building again, arms behind his back, watching me drive off. I was in so far over my head that I was already drowning. I just didn’t know it yet.

I only thought, I’ve been saved.

When Abby goes home, I get my car keys. Maybe it’s stupid (it feels like it is), but I leave another note for Ian. I can’t stand being in the houseboat anymore. I check my phone for messages, and then I check it several more times to make sure I haven’t turned the ringer off accidentally. I want to make sure I hear him if he calls.

“Be a good guard dog, okay?” I say to Pollux. He isn’t really a guard dog. He hides in the other room whenever he sees the vacuum cleaner.

The day is moving forward around me. I see a bread truck delivering dinner rolls to Pete’s Market. An Argosy tour boat (Ian calls it the Agony) is taking a new group of tourists around the lake. For the millionth time, I hear the voice over the microphone telling everyone within hearing distance that Lake Union is an actual airport runway, with an average of ten seaplane landings a day.… I had gotten my period that morning. My husband is missing, and my body is moving through the month, regardless. He could be dead while I’m hunting in the bathroom cupboard for the box of tampons. I remember to get the mail. My car tabs are due. I will have to get an emissions test.

It occurs to me then that Ian might be truly gone, gone forever, for whatever reason. It hits me: I might be completely on my own now. Alone with emissions tests and taxes and electrical repairs and bills. My God, the world seems huge when you think of yourself against it, all the things you have to stand there and handle. Child-rearing and illness and carburetors. Family fights and auto accidents and health insurance. My relationship with alone has always been a love–hate one. I’ve always loved daily alone, when it’s you and a book or you and the dog or you and just you, when you’re blissfully released from the burden of someone else’s mood. When no one needs you, when no one expects anything of you, when there are no demands of you … It’s such a relief. But life alone? Somewhere along the line, I guess I’ve gotten the idea that the world is a dangerous place and that, in it, I’m a small child in a dark and threatening forest. These are not things you go around admitting. Especially when you think of yourself as a strong person, which I do. I hate to say this, but even as an adult woman, I’ve felt the need for protection. Not only in empty parking garages, either. It’s possible I’ve felt this way since I was a child. Here’s the irony (or destiny—take your pick): The places where I’ve sought protection have been rickety and dangerous, and I don’t know entirely why. Alone in the forest, I had first chosen a feral, hungry dog to shield me, and then I’d selected a companion with two broken legs and an empty canteen. Faced with my own freedom, I’ve gotten trapped behind glass, same as Ian’s butterflies.

The hugeness of alone, the panic of it, gathers up my insides and squeezes. After all I’d done to avoid it, maybe it had come to find me anyway. Oh, the cruelty of it. But this is how it goes, isn’t it, with the Big Life Lessons? You can run but you can’t hide?

He’s hurt, he’s been killed, he’s run off. He’s hurt, he’s been killed, he’s run off. What do you think happened to your husband, Mrs. Keller?

“Come on, Blue,” I say to the Beast, and turn the key. I drive the route Ian takes to work. Maybe he decided to walk there on Sunday morning. He could have twisted his ankle; he could be unconscious, lying deep in the ravine near Kerry Park, the one adjacent to BetterWorks. There was that narrow bit of grass, the place the party had spilled onto on Saturday night, the place we had sometimes picnicked. There had been good and bad times there, times when we’d brought a blanket and white bags from Kidd Valley stuffed with burgers and onion rings, when we’d eat and kiss and people-watch. But there was that day, too, when he brought the butterfly net. We got out of the car, and I was carrying the bottle of wine and the paper cups I’d brought, and then he opened the trunk. I cringed when I saw the net there. I had the briefest, unkind image of him prancing across the grass with it in the air, like some child on a Victorian postcard. I never would have said anything, ever, but he could sense criticism before the thought even finished forming in my head. Ian’s an accomplished, sexy, smart man, but his ego is fragile as a bird’s wing. Paul Hartley Keller saw to that. What? Ian had said that day, the word a challenge. I swear, I hadn’t even blinked, hadn’t changed my facial expression one bit, but Ian had picked up on the tiniest shift in my approval. Nothing, Ian, I said, but it was already too late, and the afternoon was ruined.

The edge of the park drops right off down a steep hill. It’s what makes the view of the city so fine there: the height. The park’s an added benefit to the staff at BetterWorks. They can go there to eat lunch or take a walk.

Now, though, there’s only an empty van in the parking lot, a beat-up green machine with a Seattle-worthy bumper sticker reading CAPTAIN COMPOST. The park itself is also nearly empty, except for a mother with two small girls wearing the city’s regulation attire for hip children of hip parents—part expensive hemp EcoWear, part dress-up box. In Seattle, there’s always some kid in a feather boa or a tutu and cowboy boots, which demonstrates how supportive the parent is of the child’s self-expression. It gets irritating. You wouldn’t believe how many little girls have tutus and cowboy boots. This particular woman is delivering a loud, singsongy lecture about friendship, so I’ll know what a good mother she is. It would probably surprise her that I don’t care whether she recycles or eats organic or teaches her children about diversity. It would probably disappoint her that I don’t even notice her for more than a moment and that I don’t have the energy to admire her. I’m looking for my husband, who might be lying dead in the tangle of blackberry bushes on that bank.

I walk the path, which winds along the bluff. It would seem crazy, calling out his name. I do it anyway. I step down from the muddy ledge and try to see if anything is there except brambles and ferns and huckleberry plants.

“Ian?” I call. It probably looks like I’ve lost my dog. The slope is slick and angled. The ground in this city never fully dries out until July. Thorns stick onto my sleeve, and I have to pull myself free. This is futile, I know, a frantic act. Still, I will Ian to be there, unconscious after hitting his head. I might see his shirt. A bit of his jacket.

Of course, his cellphone is missing, too. This little fact is hard to ignore. He has it with him, undoubtedly. He could likely call if he needed help. No story I can come up with makes the details fit. None. This is crazy, and now my arms are scratched from blackberry thorns—

“Mrs. Keller?”

Shit! I startle. I am so shocked at the sudden sound of my own name that my foot slides, and I end up on one knee as if I am pleading with Detective Vince Jackson.

He calls down to me. “Do you need a hand?”

I am struggling upright. “I’m fine.”

“What are you doing here?” He is wearing those stupid, intimidating sunglasses that seem to be a required fashion accessory for men in blue. He looks huge standing up there.

“I thought … I should go looking. Maybe he’d walked here, fallen …”

“I think you should go home, Mrs. Keller,” he says.

I get myself back up the hill. I have a round splotch of mud on my knee. “I’m sorry,” I say. I don’t know what I’m apologizing for. My throat closes up, and I can feel the tears start. I’m scared. For Ian, for my future. Even Detective Vince Jackson scares me.

“Try to stay calm. We’re doing our job,” he says. It’s a very policeman thing to say. I notice that he is wearing a wedding ring. He’ll go home after work and his wife will be there, wherever his home is. I picture a colonial-style house, a kitchen with a wallpaper border. He’ll have something solid for dinner, like roast. Roast, a memory: I knew I would eventually leave Mark after making it one night. This was before I’d even met Ian. I had cooked a small prime rib, overcooked it, and Mark had gotten angry. Furious. I was sure that there was something else bothering him. No one could get that angry about a roast. I’d been sure like that a hundred times before. But he was mad about the roast. He was, and when I finally realized that, I knew that something important had shifted in my thinking. It was an overcooked-roast epiphany. You had violence, and then you had the ludicrousness of it.

“It’s hard to stay calm,” I say. “This is just so awful.”

“Go home. Let us know if you hear anything.”

I get in my car. My hands are shaking. All of me is shaking so badly. The worst thing is, I can feel that detective watching me.

I don’t go home after all. I’m right there next to BetterWorks, and so I drive into their lot and park in Ian’s spot. Abby’s right, we should be doing something, only I don’t know what. I can’t wait for the phone to ring anymore, that’s for sure.

I want to go in. I want to talk to everyone there to see if they know anything. I want to search through Ian’s office, look at his papers, read the files on his computer. I want to find some telltale message or receipt. I wonder if Detective Vince Jackson is still around, eyeing my every move.

I’ve seen Ian come out of that building so many times. We always met there in those early days, holing up in his office after hours, breathing each other in and leaping apart when the cleaning woman came to dump the garbage. Ah. But we’ve spent so much time there in our ordinary life, too, during our not-quite-three years of marriage, after our scandalous days were over. When we lived at my old house, I’d drive over the bridge and meet Ian here after work so we could walk to Costa’s for dinner, and after we moved to the houseboat last year, I came even more often. He would meet me in the lobby, or I’d wait by my car until he appeared with his laptop bag slung over his shoulder, his collar undone, and a huge smile on his face. We’d kiss. I’d smell that cologne of his. I love that smell. That smell is him to me.

Fingertips tap on my car window. Oh, God, no! Shit, shit, shit! I picture Detective Vince Jackson’s big, guarded face again, staring in at me. It’s not a crime, is it, to long for Ian? To be there, where he’s most likely to show up? He didn’t just disappear. He’s somewhere.

But it isn’t Detective Vince Jackson who’s tapping at my car window. It’s Nathan Benjamin.

“Dani?” His voice is muffled through the glass. His two first names make him seem friendly, as I’ve said, but so does his great hair—longish loose curls—and his warm eyes. He has nice-person hands, too. They aren’t lean and manicured; they’re guy hands, with uneven nails. Even though Nathan is very good looking, he is somehow regular and approachable. He still wears a wristwatch, the kind with the sun and moon rotating in small dials.

I roll down my window. I put my hand to my heart. “You scared me.”

“I’m so sorry. That’s the last thing you need right now.”

“This is horrific,” I say.

“The police were here a minute ago. A detective. He was asking questions.”

“I saw him. Did you hear what you just said? ‘The police were here.’ This isn’t real.”

“Do you want to come in?” he asks. “Come sit in my office? I can get you something to eat? Drink? Some company? Do you just want to be nearby?”

“I think I’ll get going.” The idea of playing detective is rapidly losing its appeal. I’m not sure I can face those people in there.

“All right.” He sets his hand on the ledge of the window. He pats it.

“We’ll talk,” I say.

“We’ll talk,” he agrees.

I leave him standing there in the empty spot next to Ian’s parking place. Two nights ago, right there on that lawn, it was spring, and there was music, and there were waiters passing drinks.

Later, it’s like a wake at my house. On a normal weekday, Ian would be arriving home any minute. I’d have cleared my work crap from the kitchen table and set it for two as dinner cooked. A pasta dish, stir-fry. I’d light a candle for us, and I’d put on makeup. But instead of Ian and me eating dinner and watching some show we liked, people are arriving at my door as if he’s already dead. Abby has been calling everyone, and my father is here, my mother, too, and my oldest friend in the world, Anna Jane. Bethy and Kristen are in the kitchen, sobbing onto the shoulders of their friends, and Ian’s sister, Olivia, asks questions of me as if she’s a prosecuting attorney. Of course, she sounds that way every Thanksgiving. It’s how she is. My father is on the phone, talking to I don’t know who. Hospitals, morgues, police departments of other counties. He’s working from a list he found on the Internet. I hear my mother say, Why are you doing that right now? Sometimes you just need to be here, but he ignores her. We don’t need you to be the hero, she says, and then looks at Anna Jane and rolls her eyes.

I’m grateful for what he’s doing, though. It’s motion, and I can witness some sort of progress. He, Nathan, and Ian’s friend Simon Ash have also gone door-to-door on our dock, talking to people, asking if they’ve seen Ian or heard anything. They drove up and down our streets and the streets near Ian’s work. They returned looking exhausted, but Simon promised to do the same thing in Ian’s old neighborhood the next day. Olivia suggests calling airlines. Simon tells her that they won’t give out information unless there’s a subpoena. They argue this point. Simon is a contract lawyer and Olivia is an elementary school teacher, so he seems to win. She purses her lips and turns away.

Abby has taken one of our wedding photos and cropped me out, making flyers with Ian’s face on them. Underneath, it says: Have you seen this man? She gives a handful to everyone to post. Paula, Ian’s secretary, takes a copy and promises to print more at the office. She’ll hand them out to everyone there, and she’ll assign various employees to various jobs, such as questioning various store owners in various locations. Someone has made a color-coded map. Bethy’s boyfriend, Adam, is walking around and talking on his phone, plugging one ear with his forefinger to hear better. My sister calls and insists on taking the next flight out, reluctantly changing her mind after I beg her not to. I am worried that all these well-meaning people are working so hard when Ian might be gone because he wants to be gone. I tell my sister that I don’t need her yet but might need her later. Later—what that might entail, I have no idea.

In spite of this onslaught of help, I am desperately hoping they’ll all leave soon. I can’t wait properly with all of these people and emotions and relationships in the room. Most of all, I want to sit and rock and listen for him to come home.

Finally, everyone does leave, everyone except Abby, who has packed a bag and moved into our back bedroom. No one has ever slept there before. The bed is Abby’s from our old house. Boxes from our move are still stacked in there, the tape lifted once and then patted back down. It’s all the stuff you look at and don’t know what to do with now that it doesn’t fit into your new life.

Abby cleans up the mess from the impromptu vigil. She picks up the cans of soda the girls left on the deck rails, empties the overflowing garbage, and gathers the Subway wrappers from the sandwiches that Anna Jane brought because we still had to eat. Then Abby hunts through the canvas duffel she’s brought. She takes out a paper bag with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in it.

“I got this on the way over. It seemed necessary. I don’t even know what this stuff is.” She removes the cap, sniffs. “Holy crap. That just burned a fire through my nasal passages.” She pours us each a large glass.

“Honey, that’s way too much.” Abby isn’t a drinker. She tries to pour some of it back through the narrow neck of the bottle, but most of it spills on the counter. It’ll probably take the varnish right off the wood trim. Ian won’t be pleased.

We each have a few swallows, which is followed by an array of gasping and sputtering and coughing. “It is nice and relaxing,” Abby says after a while. We sit in silence, until the alcohol catches up to us.

“I’ve got to go to bed,” Abby says.

“Okay, sugar.”

“Is it okay to ditch you?”

“Of course.”

“Double hugs,” she says, and leans down to give me two.

“Double hugs,” I say.

I try to sleep, I do. I even undress and lie down. The house is quiet and dark now. I listen to the crickets outside and to some far-off airplane. It’s too hot in here. Someone has turned the heat up way past where we keep it. I can’t stay in the same sheets Ian and I have recently been in together. Maybe some people would find that comforting, but I don’t. It’s a bed of mixed emotions. Beds often are, even in the best of circumstances. I get up. In the living room, Pollux lifts his chin from his pillow and watches me, decides it’s not worth the effort to follow. He tucks his chin back down again. He’s been up way past his bedtime, too, with all those people around. I open the sliding door to the deck and sit down in one of the Adirondack chairs. I pull my robe around me. My phone is in my pocket in case Ian calls.

If you have taken off somewhere, I am going to be so fucking mad at you, I tell Ian, wherever he is. The moon is large and white (he’s under it, too, somewhere) and the water out there shimmers with light. I can smell the deep murkiness of the lake. The dock groans and creaks and sways a little—soft, lulling rhythms. The New View sloshes and bumps against the dock.

The party, the drive home, the grim face.

I try and try to remember.

The cool sheets. The bliss of rest.

I take my phone from my pocket. Her name and number are still on my list of contacts. I dial.

You have reached the office of Dr. Shana Berg. If this is an emergency, please dial 911 …

I listen to her voice, wait to leave a message, but there’s a beep on my phone. It’s the double ring of another call coming in. It’s midnight. It’s him, of course it is. Who else? He’s heard about the commotion here tonight, and he’s feeling bad that he’s worried all those people. I feel sick with fear and relief. I feel joy, and fear and sickness, but, thank God, whatever it is, now I’ll know. I punch the button on the phone and wait to hear Ian’s voice.

“Dani?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Nathan.”

“Nathan?”

“I’m sorry to call so late. I really am. So many people were there tonight … I wanted to talk to you, but …”

“What, Nathan? What? Do you know something? You know something.”

He is quiet. For a moment I think we’ve lost the connection. “Nathan?”

“I think maybe we should meet.”

When I was a child in the suburbs of Seattle during the 1970s, we lived next door to Mr. and Mrs. Harris, who were quiet and kept to themselves, even on Halloween, when they turned their porch light off. They were the only ones who did that, the one dark house on that street. One summer, I was sure that Mr. Harris had done in Mrs. Harris and their small dog, Trixie. I hadn’t seen Mrs. Harris’s large, floral-clad rear end bent over in the garden for a number of days, and I hadn’t seen Trixie flinging her small body against our shared fence whenever we let our cat out. But Mr. Harris kept coming home from work every night at six P.M., same as ever. It seemed possible that Mr. Harris had buried Mrs. Harris right under one of those flat, cement squares of their back patio, because he was a funeral director and because school was out and I was bored. For a long while, it was my understanding that this was where they put all the bodies from O’Dooley’s Funeral Home: beneath their patio, under the Harrises’ barbecue and Mrs. Harris’s tomato plants, the very place where Mrs. Harris sunned herself on a tippy, webbed chaise longue, slathering on the Sea & Ski and drinking Tab out of the can.

I spied on Mr. Harris for a few days and took notes in a spiral pad I’d decorated with a cool STP sticker. He washed his car. He hauled out his garbage cans. He turned on their sprinkler and forgot to turn it off until late at night, when the lawn was soaked. I watched too much Dragnet with my father, too much Adam-12. I read Two-Minute Mysteries and Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew, and funeral directors seemed likely capable of anything.

Mrs. Harris and Trixie returned, though, after apparently spending several weeks at the local Travelodge. I heard my mother tell my friend Becky’s mom that Mr. Harris had gotten involved with someone he worked with at O’Dooley’s. This was extraordinarily creepy. Thrillingly so. I couldn’t imagine how Mrs. Harris could let Mr. Harris touch her after a day at work, let alone fathom an O’Dooley’s couple. I was ten, and the funeral home was in a large, chalky mansion in town, and I pictured Mr. Harris and some woman with pancake makeup doing it in a red velvet casket.

Mrs. Harris was alive and well, but her marriage was dead, and even though I didn’t realize it then, the mystery was likely deeper than I ever could have imagined. Human nature deep. I’ve said it before, but in marriage there are things you don’t know about your partner. Always. The real thoughts in his head as he drifts off to sleep with his shoulders turned away from you—you can’t even guess. But you want to believe you do know. That a person is knowable. You need this belief. It’s a necessary denial. How can you go about everyday life otherwise? How could you ever water the tomato plants and unfold your chaise longue and enjoy a summer afternoon if you knew there were things buried under the cement patio of your very own yard?

“When can I see you?” I say to Nathan Benjamin.