I drive back home. In reverse now, I pass the Java Jive and the Black Cat and the Sureshot, the Allegro and the Tully’s and the Pete’s and the Starbucks, Starbucks, Starbucks. Next to me, a man in a Fat Boys Plumbing truck sips from the tiny lip of a white lid, and two girls with multicolored hair cross the street to get in line at Cool Beans. Tattoos snake up their arms and wind around their necks. In this city, colored hair and multiple tattoos are as commonplace as middle-aged women in turtlenecks. A golf sweater would be an act of rebellion here.
Something is rattling in my car, in old Blue Beast, and I roll my window down at the stoplight to see if I can hear where the sound is coming from. I get the car-trouble-panic feeling, where every noise elicits internal calculations of credit-card balances. Once, I worried all the way across the bridge from Seattle to Bellevue, an hour-long ride, because of a rattling Tic Tac box. You spend time as a single mother, and money disasters haunt you. The sound of breath mints can mean you’re about to go under.
All I need now is for something to go wrong with the damn car.
“Come on, Blue,” I plead. Old Blue has been with me a good long time, and I’ve likely taken it for granted.
I try my favorite radio denial trick. I haven’t used that one in a while. But I can still hear the noise, even over the music, and I also quickly realize that the thumping sunny beat isn’t an option, nor is a nasal-y announcer talking about a jewelry sale and the way you can prove your love for her with a diamond engagement ring. I shut it off. Those things don’t belong in the world I’m now in.
The noise seems to only get worse when I accelerate. I make it home. Nothing falls out of the car on the way, so maybe we’re okay for a while. I park on the gravel strip in front of the dock, a few cars away from Ian’s. That car has an attitude now, rigid and withholding. I need some privacy for the call I’m about to make, so I stay put. I fish my phone out of my purse.
I can tell right away that the message has changed. Right after You have reached the office of Dr. Shana Berg, she’s supposed to say, If this is an emergency, please dial 911 … But now it’s different. You have reached the office of Dr. Shana Berg. I will be out of the office …
A long weekend? Gone until Tuesday. She offers the number of her colleague, Dr. Hank Helprin, but I don’t want Hank Helprin, even if his name has help in it, which ordinarily I might have seen as a good sign. Shana Berg knew me at my worst, and right now I need someone who knows me.
I am angry with myself for being too much of a coward to speak with her earlier. But I am also relieved. I’ll admit that. I’m not the best at facing facts, but, then again, who is? It seems like every one of us spends a good part of our time here on earth doing what we can to avoid the truth.
I flip fast through the day’s mail, insanely hoping for a letter from Ian. There are coupons for a new Thai restaurant, the electric bill, a QFC flyer, nothing. I look for the millionth time at our bank and credit-card balances. No activity. There have been no calls about the flyers. I write a few apologetic emails to my handful of design clients; I haven’t worked, obviously, in days, and now those urgent matters will have to wait—the blue border versus the green, the change of fonts from Baskerville to Book Antiqua. I return another call from Ian’s sister, Olivia, and one from my father, who’s been phoning daily. I talk to Detective Jackson, who only tells me once more that they’re doing what they can. They’ve checked airline flight lists and patient admitting sheets; they’ve kept his alert status active across our state and other states. Our next step is for you folks to do an interview on the local news, he says.
I tell him that I’ll discuss it with Bethy and Kristen, but I don’t do this. When news of our affair broke out among Ian’s friends in that suburban neighborhood, it was, for Ian, one of the most painful parts of the whole mess. People talking about him. People judging him. That prick Neal Jacobs had called him an asshole under his breath at curriculum night—Neal, who had slept around on business trips; he’d told Ian that himself. But Neal hadn’t fallen in love. He hadn’t left. Mary’s friends Charlene and Candy wouldn’t speak to Ian, either, and he was the only parent not invited to the Stroms’ home when they were taking photos before Bethy’s prom. This wounded him. I didn’t get the whole pre-prom gathering at the house of whoever-had-the-best-backyard, anyway. They served food at those things. Prom—all the dances—had become a precursor to some future out-of-control wedding, with the makeup artists and hair salons and limos. I didn’t think it was such a hot idea to encourage kids to believe they led movie-star lives, even for a night. That job they’d get after college—a limo ride would cost them a month’s groceries, and it was unfair to imply otherwise. Still, Ian had been so hurt.
Ian would be destroyed if I put his personal business on the news. I know it’s crazy, but I still care what he would want. Even if he’s sipping a margarita somewhere (the drink keeps changing in my mind—margarita, piña colada, tequila sunrise—all tropical, usually involving an umbrella), I care. And, one more thing, if I’m being honest? The shame has always belonged to us both.
I call my sister. One of her kids is practicing the recorder in the background. I hear the notes. C. C. C. A. A. A.
“Stephanie,” she says. “It’s driving me nuts.”
“You should have heard Abby her first year playing violin. Just put on your headphones.”
“But then I won’t hear if one of them is burning down the house.”
I laugh. She can always make me laugh, even now. “Thanks for your message, Ames,” I tell her. “You forgot to hang up, though. I heard you walking around, gravel crunching, and then I think you dropped me into your purse. It sounded like a construction site in there.”
“Thank God that’s all you heard. Have you changed your mind yet about me coming out? It doesn’t feel right for me not to be there. I want to! If you keep saying no, I’m going to come anyway.”
“I might need you later.”
“Stop saying that. You’ve got to have faith that he’s alive and that there’s a reasonable explanation for all this. I’m coming out there.”
“You’re here for me just fine from there, sweetie. Really.”
“I feel like I’m not doing anything.”
“You are.” She is. Just hearing her voice helps.
We’re interrupted. It’s Justin, and he’s whining. “In a minute!” she says to him. She kind of snaps actually. Even good mothers snap every now and then.
“It’s okay, Ames. I’ll let you go. I promise I’ll call if anything changes.”
“He’s got a new magic kit. He wants to show me the disappearing coin. Remember the disappearing coin?”
I do. “Yeah.”
“Remember magic shops? With the joke toys? The plastic barf? The fake gum? You loved those. You always bought them with your birthday money.”
“The snake in the peanut can was my favorite.”
“Believe me, I know.”
“You always bought bad perfume from Mom’s Avon catalog.”
“I loved bad perfume! Jovan Musk Oil? Charlie?” She pauses. “It’s going to be okay, Dani-Dee.”
When she says it, I believe it. I have a moment of inexplicable, soaring hope. Maybe it’s the feeling that comes when you’re around your own people, even briefly. Or maybe it’s just the stupid memory of old magic tricks, that coin resting in its green plastic case. It hadn’t really disappeared. Of course it hadn’t. It was right there all along.
I try to rest. Abby is over at her place, catching up with her life and getting more clothes. I need a break from Ian’s gone-ness. I can hear Mattie and Louise joking around with Maggie Long on the dock. I lie down and put the pillow over my head. It seems wrong for them to be laughing when their neighbor is missing. When you’re grieving, you think everyone should be grieving, too. People at the beach, or some couple celebrating an anniversary, or a soccer team getting cherry Slurpees at 7-Eleven—they should all be ashamed of themselves.
Pollux is curled up in his little donut shape beside me. He’s snoring like an old man. He started snoring in his advancing age, and I know he can’t help it, but, God. There’s some other noise, too—a high-pitched buzzing, with the annoying rise and fall normally associated with the whine of mosquitoes and chain saws. It is old Joe Grayson with that damn remote-control boat. You’d think the novelty would have worn off by now. This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Here’s how old hippies end up. Playing too enthusiastically with the Christmas-morning toys of ten-year-old boys.
I give up and get up. Pollux dutifully rouses but regretfully so.
“You can stay there,” I tell him. “I never said you had to follow me everywhere.”
One look into those melted-chocolate eyes and I regret my tone. I rub his silky head. “I’m sorry, Poll. Want a treat?”
We both have a piece of one of Abby’s oatmeal cookies. I chew and swallow cheerlessly. The food sticks in my throat. Even swallowing requires some sort of deliberate attention I don’t have. The problem is, there are words jogging endless loops in my head, like some fitness freak running off the calories of a carrot stick. He flirts; it doesn’t mean anything. He flirts; it doesn’t mean anything.
I’ve always managed to think of Ian’s flirting as an embarrassing trait that only I noticed, akin to spotting your spouse’s dandruff. If I brushed it off, no one else would see it, either. But It doesn’t mean anything says that Nathan (and other people, no doubt) is aware of it, too. It’s how he is. Am I a cliché? You can’t trust a cheater? I understand the few facts I have. Apparently, none of Ian’s clothes are missing, but you can get clothes. No money has been taken from our accounts, no credit cards used, but Ian might have stashed money for months. He could have fallen dead, but where, when? He’d been with me. Our history—it still seems like the obvious answer.
He’s innocent, though, until proven guilty, right? Well, then, I deserve proof. At least I’m entitled to that.
I unzip his laptop bag. I reach down into the pockets, feeling for something, anything. I open the top and turn on the machine as if I have a right to it. Of course, I’ve tried this before. Once again, though, there’s that white empty rectangle, blinking unwearyingly, waiting for the secret word that will let me in.
I know you, I say to it.
He’d be stretched out on a webbed deck chair with her next to him, staring out at that stunning cliff-edge promontory that overlooks the Bahia de Cabo San Lucas. He would be smoothing tanning lotion over the cliff edges of her shoulder blades, sharing words about the cliff edges of their relationship. They’d both be drowsy from sex and sun and piña coladas. The drink is piña coladas this time, because that’s what we drank then. He’d be tan already after six days away from home (he’s always tanned quickly). He wouldn’t have shaved in that time and so he’d have stubble, and he’d look so sexy it would be hard for her to resist reaching over and grabbing the bulge under his red swimsuit, or the moons of his ass, if he was lying facedown. He’d have those sunglasses on. Are they missing? (Is the swimsuit?) Those glasses are his favorites—expensive—and he looks great in them.
Their room would be cool, a retreat from the hot sun, and that resort is beautiful, with the winding trails along the water lit at night, the palm trees lit, too, with white lights circling their trunks. The food—real guacamole and shredded pork in handmade tortillas—is fresh and satisfying. He’d pay. He’d scan the bill for error, as she looked at her folded hands set against the bright pattern of her sundress. Something about this careful accounting would make her feel as if she shouldn’t have ordered dessert.
They would walk the festive street after dinner. The town—it’s not her kind of place. No, it would be. He’d be looking for an improvement of some kind. She wouldn’t mind the bar scene there, the constant party. She’d be more like Mary in that way. She would only laugh when she saw the women dancing and kissing each other. She wouldn’t need to analyze it. She wouldn’t lean over and say that it seemed done for show.
Her hair would be swooped up, and he would take her hand and pull her to him and kiss her bare neck. They would head back to the hotel in their rental car, but he wouldn’t run over the rabbit that had been sprinting—not fast enough—across the midnight-dark road. He would not weep with guilt over it. The night would not turn bad as they walked the beach in front of the hotel. He would not look out onto the sea and say, If I were a good man, I’d be here with my wife right now.
They would not go back to their room with a distance between them, cactus prickles along her guilty spine, the room too hot and then too cold. He would not turn to her in the night to make love, and she would not try to be tender where he was sunburned on his shoulders.
They would only swim in the sea, and he would lift her, weightless, so that she could wrap her legs around him. They would kiss with saltwater lips and brush sand from their legs. They would admire each other’s lean bodies, and the sun and swimming and sex would make them ravenous. Night again, they would marvel at the glowing phosphorescence on the beach and at the way nature made the best magic. Gracias, they would say to everyone. Inside, the only feeling they would have would be gracias.
“BethyKristen,” my mother says. She’s breathing down my neck.
“Tried that,” I say. “Like a hundred times. We started with that two hours ago.” I sound like an eye-rolling adolescent on TV, but I’m exhausted. I’ve run the gamut of emotions today, and my ill temper is all that’s left.
“Your name?” Abby says. She’s leaning over my other shoulder.
“Come on, folks. We’ve tried that a million times, too.” I type it in again anyway. Nothing.
“One, two, three, four,” my mother says.
“He would never choose something that obvious.”
“Twenty-six, fourteen, five, twelve.” Abby elbows my mother. I can hear the barely stifled laugh that’s about to erupt from her. My mother snorts out her nose. She can’t hold back, begins chuckling.
“You guys,” I say.
Abby swats Mom. “Stop that, Grandma.”
“You’re the one.” She gives Abby a little shove back. For God’s sake, they’re two kids in the back of the car. “Try six, seventeen, two, five hundred.”
Abby snorts out her nose now. This has been going on for too long, hours, and now they’re sliding into fatigued hilarity, where an exhale from a cushion could become fart-like high comedy.
“Just try some random word,” Abby suggests. I rub my temples.
“Like boner,” my mother says.
They both crack up. “Grandma!”
“We’re done here,” I say. This isn’t exactly funny. This is beyond inappropriate.
“You can’t give up,” Abby says. “Maybe it’s a combination of words.”
“Like priest boner.” Mom’s shoulders are going up and down in suppressed hysterics.
“Clown boner,” Abby says. They both bust up. My mother’s eyes are watering, she’s laughing so hard.
“God,” she says.
“Try that one,” Abby says. More hysterical laughing.
“Fine. We’re done. Jesus, people.”
“Monarch,” my mother says, out of nowhere.
I type. Tip, tip, tip. And, oh, dear God, the enchanted doors part. They do. It’s a miracle. The password screen disappears. I can’t believe it, I really can’t. Small icons of possibilities show themselves.
“I got it!” my mother yells. “I got it!” She starts jumping up and down, and Abby is jumping with her, and they are hugging and squealing as if my mother just won the Chrysler LeBaron on The Price Is Right.
Well, of course you shift loyalties when you’re being unfaithful. Of course you do. I’ve always felt that a heart is meant to be given to only one person at a time. And, too, when it moves on, it moves on for good. Hearts are pretty decisive, unlike heads. The loyalty shift—it showed itself in trivialities. When I got a new client or worried over my mammogram results, it was Ian, not Mark, I wanted to tell. When Ian was stressed about making a product deadline, he talked it over with me, not Mary. If I saw some funny or sad thing—a toddler making a crafty escape from his stroller, an odd couple with especially tall hair, a rickety old lady crossing a busy street—I shared it with Ian. Ian got it into his head that he wanted this newer, faster motorcycle, something Mary would never approve of, and I encouraged it. I was go-for-it. I was let’s-do-it. I wouldn’t have wanted Mark to have a motorcycle, to tell you the truth. As the other woman, though, you’re the one who’s supposed to open the windows to a bigger world. That’s your promise. A bigger world with more sex, or something like that.
We closed in around our secret and grew something that was just ours, selfishly and totally ours, and there aren’t many things like that in a life, things that are just yours. Of course, the moment you let it out into the world it’s not yours anymore, and, of course, you want it out in the world. I wanted to go to restaurants, to movies. We both did. After more than a year of sneaking around, fourteen months from the day we met, I was tired of lying. I was tired of negotiating the parking brake. We were all over each other once, my shirt nearly off, when there was a tap at the car window. It was a policeman, patrolling the park. We had to hand over our licenses as I clutched my top to my chest. We both felt like guilty teenagers, only worse—there were different last names and addresses on those licenses, and there were those wedding rings, and we were too old to be caught in a car. The guy probably went back to the station and told everyone and had a good laugh. Ian hated to be laughed at. I didn’t mind. His ego had been battered enough that the touch of a fingertip caused a bruise, and mine had been battered enough that it didn’t even know when it was being pummeled.
During that time, I have to admit, there was something thrilling about turning my back on Mark every night in bed. He was right beside me, but I left him and went to this place in my head—it felt like an actual place—where I could relive that day’s conversation with Ian, the loving words, or a touch, or a long gaze, or talk of the future. I could feel Mark shifting around in bed, but I shut him out. It was powerfully punishing. He sensed my retreat and went either stony or desperate. He used to twine a lock of my hair around and around his finger to help him sleep, like a child with the corner of a blanket, but when he did that then, I’d pull away. My hair was my own. I didn’t want to be used for comfort anymore. People who kick dogs—they pet them, too.
I let Mark find out. I suppose it’s what an employer with any heart does before a round of layoffs—he drops hints of cutbacks and profit losses before delivering the pink slip. There were those shoulders turned away from him, first of all, and long stares out windows. Finally, an email left where he could see it.
I left an angry man by having an affair. As Dr. Shana Berg said, it wasn’t a very good plan, but it was a plan.
You snip a thread, and … Wait. I’m remembering my first communion, when I was eight. My father grew up Catholic, and, therefore, so did we. At least, we check-marked the regular boxes—baptism, first communion. I was dressed like a little bride. White dress, white veil, white shoes and stockings. It’s one of those things (like Christmas trees, neckties, camping) that make the human race particularly hard to fathom. My father had the car running and my mother was yelling that we were late, when I noticed a fuzzy nub on my thick tights. I made a quick cut with my kiddie scissors, and as soon as I got into my father’s baby-blue Chevrolet Impala, the unraveling had begun. One small clip and so much damage can be done. The tights were in shreds by the time we reached the church. My mother noticed as we walked up the path; she let out a shriek that turned the head of Father Dominique, in his white robes with the gold trim. My stockings kept unraveling and unraveling until they were ribbons of disgrace, drooping across my leg as I received the white wafer on my tongue in front of that crowd. My mother was furious. We ate cookies and drank punch at a party afterward, as the run slithered down into my shoe. No one thought to just take the shameful things off.
A single snip is what I’m saying.
Of course, things got broken after Mark found out about Ian and me. The first thing was the tile countertop in our kitchen, as he slammed his fist into it again and again. Things get broken, and no matter how well they were put back together, you knew where the crack in that tile was.
A quick look at Ian’s documents and his email tells me there are no immediate answers on his laptop. There are no suicide notes on his desktop or flight itineraries in his mailbox. There is no email from another woman left where I can see it. Delving further will take hours, and I’m too depleted for that.
“I can’t,” I say. “Tomorrow.”
“We need fooood,” Abby whines. She used to get like this whenever we went school-clothes shopping. I’d buy her an Orange Julius to bribe another half hour out of her.
“I can run out and get us teriyaki,” my mother says.
I groan. Nothing sounds good.
“You’ve got to eat,” Abby says. “The ass of your jeans is getting baggy. Eggs?” I rub my eyes. Decisions about food can sometimes feel mammoth and complex. Should we have Italian or Mexican? Should we land the troops on the beach or attack the enemy by air? I feel this way on an ordinary day.
“I’ll handle it,” Abby says.
My mother is already rooting around in my fridge, which is irritating me. A fridge is as private as your purse, or else I am hungry, hungry enough to be rattled by anything. We all hear it: My stomach growls like a creaking door.
“I hope an alien doesn’t burst out of your chest,” Abby says.
My mother finds what she wants. “Help is on the way,” she says, holding up a bottle of red wine. Ian makes fun of the fact that I like my red wine cold.
It’s a wine crime, I replied once. Arrest me.
Don’t let Nathan see that, Ian had said. Nathan is a wine connoisseur. He has one of those mini-cellars in his town house. The wine choice is always up to him when we have dinner together, but he’s not a snob about it.
He wouldn’t care. He never even swirls his glass.
I’d care.
Next time, I’m really gonna go crazy and drink red with fish. Twenty-five years to life.
Hilarious.
I hope you’re a tree stump in your next life. Joking was one way to deal with his criticisms. There were other ways. Distraction, anger. You try everything.
Thanks.
Tree stumps don’t worry about what people think of them. It’d be very freeing.
Pour me a glass, smart-ass, he’d said.
“Pour me a glass,” I say to my mother.
She holds three wineglass stems in her hand expertly, tucks the bottle under her arm like a well-trained sommelier. It’s rather impressive, actually. “Let’s get some air.”
Mom tries to open the sliding door with her foot. “Let me get that,” I say. It’s beautiful out on the lake. Spring air is mingling sweetly with hopeful, dusk light. The evening smells so good, I could drink it from a great big cup. The edges of the waves are silvery-white and bittersweet. The New View sloshes merrily against the side of the dock. Abby clatters pans in the kitchen. Pollux rediscovers his youth and bounds with great speed out the open door.
Mom settles in a deck chair, pops the cork. It sounds wrongly celebratory. She pours me a glass. I gratefully sit in the lounge chair beside her and sip my wine. It’s a cheap bottle bought from Pete’s—I’m not a connoisseur. I buy bottles because they’re on sale and I like the label.
“Monarch.” My mother leans back and smiles. She is still pleased with herself.
My mind works the knot, endlessly so, but I’m not getting anywhere. “He wouldn’t have committed suicide,” I say. I’ve said this a hundred times by now. I stare out at the lake, at a large sailboat, the Lucky Lady, which swoops past. The captain waves at us, and his windbreaker flaps cheerfully. He has no idea we’re discussing a person taking his own life.
“I wondered that at first. But Ian thinks too highly of himself to do that.” My mother’s cheeks are already red after only two sips of wine.
“You know it’s not a high opinion. You know it’s hiding—”
“Oh, God, please. Don’t say it. ‘Self-hatred.’ ‘Low self-esteem.’ I think we used the same excuse for Mark.”
I stare at her, shocked. Hurt. She flutters her hand, implying that she means no harm. It stings, though. Well, the truth does. “You keep confusing the one who’s saving you with the one who’s drowning you.”
“I don’t think now’s the time for relationship advice,” I say.
“Now’s exactly the time.”
My chest is burning; I can feel red cinders under my skin, the buried fire of anger. I don’t want to fight with her. Best to stay on her good side, anyway—when she’s mad, watch out. “I was saying, I don’t think he would have committed suicide. It’s against his deepest beliefs. His religion …”
Back in the day, Ian’s mother went to a school taught by Jesuits. Her room at the care facility still has a gory, sad-eyed Jesus on a cross above the doorway. The lessons of Ian’s childhood are there in bottomless, sunken grooves, even if he doesn’t go to church. The concept of sin is real to him. He’s shocked me more than once, talking about Adam’s rib or “the flood.” I always want to laugh, but he’s serious. I had some naïve belief that we were all sort of past that stuff. He went to graduate school, you know? I mean, he’s a logical person. He’s studied math and science. But, to Ian, logic and religion are sold separately.
“Christians are so mean,” my mother says.
“Remember when I shredded my tights at my first communion?”
“You had first communion?”
“You sewed the dress.”
“Don’t remember.”
“I was a little bride.”
“I should never have let your father talk me into that.”
Pollux is sniffing around the edges of the dock, intent on some canine investigation. He’s perilously close to the edge. My mother has her eye on him, too, the way she probably watched us as toddlers near the neighbors’ swimming pool. “He won’t fall in …”
“No. He hates the water.”
“He looks like he’s going to fall in.”
“He’s a very capable dog.”
“He barks when the doorbell rings on TV,” she says.
“Don’t say that so loud. You’re a champion dog,” I say to him. “A prizewinner.”
Now Abby opens the door with her foot. “Gourmet meal for three.”
I jump up. “Let me help …”
“Damn, that looks good,” my mother says.
“Hey, I’m a grilled-cheese maestro, what can I say.”
“Dill pickles, too.” I feel the momentary delight of a perfect meal—grilled cheese, potato chips, sliced dill pickles. In the grimness of these days, I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but there it is. Brief moments of goodness are shockingly persistent. You’re in the dark, darker, darkest, and yet there’s a dog sitting beside you, on his best behavior for a dropped crust, and there’s an industrious line of ducks paddling past, and there’s a grilled-cheese maestro. Life insists.
“You okay?” Abby says to me. “Pickles make you teary?”
“I’m so grateful for you guys.” It overwhelms me then, the gratitude.
“It’s just grilled cheese. It’s not …” Abby searches around for the right word, and then delivers it with a nasally French accent. “Boeuf bourguig-non.”
“Crêpe de Paree,” my mother says with her own French accent, though she sounds like an angry German soldier. She rolls the r heartily, so that crêpe becomes crap.
“Pour me a glass,” Abby says.
It feels good out there, a rest, and so we sit on the deck long after the sun goes down. Abby fetches us sweaters from the hall closet. The lake turns the deep gray of a ship’s hull.
As we’re sitting there, I remember something. I’ve never told anyone this. I’d sort of let myself forget it, actually. But when Ian and I were moving to the houseboat, we had a fight. We were going through a storage unit he rented when he first moved out of Mary’s place and into that furnished apartment. Two years into our new marriage, we were finally moving to a place that was our own, and it was time to deal with all that old stuff. The storage facility was creepy—one of those warehouses with pulled-down metal doors along cold cement hallways, where it smelled like rancid paint and dead people’s belongings. It was a mausoleum for objects, or maybe some kind of object purgatory—the place between the hell of the dumps and the good old life back in Grandma’s living room.
We stood in that small, dim cubicle and sorted through boxes. This, get rid of it. That, keep. There was so much that I had never been a part of. There were a lot of old wedding gifts that Mary had foisted off on him in some effort to burden his conscience. Champagne flutes. Silver trays. The boxes of butterflies and the collecting equipment had been stored in there then, too, and so had all that crap from Paul Hartley Keller’s garage, the fondue pot and the carving knife and such. The wooden cabinet that Ian’s grandfather made was there then; it was heading to our new dining room.
I didn’t know how to help sort—there were books with inscriptions from old girlfriends and an ugly painting of an Indian woman kneeling beside a creek, which had been in his and Mary’s bedroom. There were boxes of photos and children’s crafts made for Daddy and old college textbooks. I could see Ian’s mood deteriorating. He had started out ready to tackle the task and was quickly slipping into defeat. Who wants to look at the past laid out like that? Who wants to touch every yearbook and that first box of personalized business cards and all those discarded items of marital joint property, from the chip-and-dip dish to the silver wedding goblets? Seen together, it doesn’t add up to much. Especially when a good lot of it was now called a mistake.
If you don’t know what to do with it, just leave it! he’d snapped.
Be nice! I’d said. I’m trying to help you here.
Do you think this is easy? Show some sensitivity. Look at all this stuff! I’m throwing half my life away.
Right then I was sick to death of his criticisms and outbursts of self-pity, I really was. After all of the fighting with ex-spouses and the mediations and the attorney bills and custody evaluations and apartments and waiting and divorce and remarriage, after all of that, we were finally moving into a new place that was free of the past. And right then, too, I suddenly felt as if I could leave him. I could. Even after all of that. Or especially after all of that.
I looked around that cold place. He came with an awful lot of stuff.
Don’t do it on my account, please.
He was holding a lamp in the shape of a cowboy boot, something he’d had in his childhood bedroom. I can’t believe you just said that.
I wanted to say more. No, I wanted to take that eerie, cold freight elevator out of that place where I didn’t belong. I wanted to get away from the weight of him. But I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I picked up what looked like the bust of someone. Some fired-clay bust—a crude attempt to replicate what must have been Paul Hartley Keller.
Oh, my God! I laughed. What’s this? I could barely lift the damn thing. Mary was happy to get rid of that, I was sure. Is this your father?
No. Ian’s jaw tightened. I’d offended him. Great.
It looks just like him. At least, it had Paul Hartley Keller’s high forehead and recessed chin, done in amateurish clay pinches.
It’s me.
I looked at it. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It slipped right out. You? Oh, my God, this is disturbing. Where’d you get it? This would give me bad dreams.
It was a gift. Mary commissioned it for me as a surprise. When I first bought the company. She had some idea of it going in the lobby.
I’m glad you didn’t put it there! It’d scare people.
You know, Dani …
People would scream when they walked past it. I was cracking myself up. Really, the thing was hideous. It looked exactly like Ian’s father.
You know, I can see how you’d make Mark so mad.
I stopped laughing then. I looked at him in that dim cell and he looked ugly to me, as ugly as that pinched-clay bust. I set it down. I didn’t say anything more. I shoved my anger far down, where even I wouldn’t be able to see it.
But how many things stay buried, really? Not memories, not anger, not pieces of shipwrecks, floating to the surface and landing on a beach somewhere years later.
That bust ended up in the trunk of my car, along with boxes of his old straight-A report cards and more stuff Mary didn’t want from their closet, including a hand vac that had been a birthday gift to her that she was still pissed about. We left the job half done; we’d gotten a late start, and our attitudes had worsened, and so that stuff rode around in my trunk for a good week afterward. That night, we went to Kerry Park with a blanket and a bottle of wine. We actually had a nice time. It was only the third night in our new houseboat.
It was time to forgive and forget, but I didn’t forget. When Ian went to work the next day, I opened my trunk. I hauled out that bust, and it took some doing, too. Jesus, that thing weighed a ton. I lugged it down the dock, and I had to set it down once or twice when it got too heavy.
I can see how you’d make Mark so mad. It was a vicious, vicious thing to say. He had no idea the kind of terror you felt when someone’s fist was in your face.
It was much harder to accomplish than I thought it would be. I really had to work at it, and I was sweating. I set that goddamn thing on the edge of the dock. And then I shoved.
It took longer for it to sink than you’d imagine. I watched as that Paul/Ian face slowly, slowly, dropped down into the murky water.
God, it was satisfying. I felt joyful. My heart did a little victory dance. But then I immediately started to worry. Ian never asked me about it. I don’t think he even realized it was gone. Still, I envisioned chunks of it floating up for him to see. I worried about it for days. My anger itself was a crime, I was sure.
“Things are biting me.” Abby swats at her ankles. “Let’s go in.” Her cheeks are red from wine, too. It’s a genetic trait. Three swallows of wine by any of the women in our family, and we’re all as rosy and flushed as fat men moving pianos.
I’m glad we’re heading in. Now that I remember that statue under the water, right beneath us, I feel uneasy being out there.
We bring the dishes in. There’s the pleasant clatter of china and silverware in an evening hour, a sound that usually means all is well. Abby is sponging off the counter, and my mother’s hunting for where she put her car keys. She looks in her purse and coat pockets and in the dish by the phone, where we always put ours. She picks up the cuff link, which I’d set there. She holds it aloft, as if she’s found a pearl in the oyster, or maybe the crucial evidence at a homicide scene.
“Dani! Did you ever tell the detective about this?”
I shake my head. “I forgot all about it.”
She narrows her eyes at me. She’s given that same look to teenagers lingering too long in our street, and to ill-behaved children in stores, and to men ogling my sixteen-year-old self when I was wearing my tube top and shorts.
“There’s been a lot on my mind,” I remind her.
“Where’d you get it?” Abby takes it from my mother. She holds it in her palm and shakes it as if she’s playing Yahtzee.
“Someone dropped it by here. They must have thought it was Ian’s.”
“Doubt that. It’s kinda Vegas. He’s got better taste.”
“That’s what I said,” my mother pipes in. “Not Mr. Classy’s type.”
Abby returns the cuff link to the bowl. “God, Grandma. Ian’s missing. Be nice. He could be hurt somewhere. He could be … I mean, no clothes are gone that we know of. His cards haven’t been used.… I don’t even want to say it.” Her voice catches. I put my arm around her shoulders. I pull her close. I agree with her about my mother’s words. There should be reverence for what is lost, no matter how it has become so.
“Well, I never understood that, why people talk nicer about someone when they’re gone. Why? Their bad luck makes them a better person? You’re an asshole alive, you’re still an asshole dead. Personally, I think it’s just covering your bases. In case God’s still nearby listening in, we’d better be nice or he might throw some of the same bad juju our way.” She’s looking in her jacket pocket again for her keys, then finds them in her purse, the first place she looked.
“I don’t know why we do it,” Abby says. “I just know it feels bad when you talk like that. I care about him. I care about him a lot.”
I look at my little, now-grown Abby. She’s so strong. I’d have never talked to my mother like that. Abby always says what she needs to say, without fear of consequences. She’d never be someone who would lose her voice while looking for rescue.
Maybe we all try to give our parents what they most ask for, what they most value but don’t have, whatever that is—perfection, compliance, success, strength. The liquidy caterpillar evolves into adulthood in that chrysalis. It becomes something new. For better or worse, it emerges.