Really, why would Desiree Harris pick this particular place? This is where you go to meet a woman whose husband has disappeared? A husband you may have been involved with? The bar of the Sorrento Hotel—it’s a meeting place for lovers. You sneak there for drinks in the rich, lavish, candlelit room downstairs; you sink into a plush couch or a wingback chair and sip drinks and feed each other smoked salmon with your fingertips. The Sorrento Hotel bar is a hidden, seductive den, where the waiters make themselves respectfully scarce. Sometimes there is a well-dressed man sitting at the piano. He plays dreamy, pensive pieces, but he, too, is politely preoccupied, immersed in the keys or else looking up at some faraway image in his own mind, his eyes closed. Ian and I had met there, in our early days. We even sat on the very couch where I am sitting right now. Feeling safely unseen, I’d draped my leg over his, and we’d breathed each other’s breath, and love was enough reason for anything. It was the reason. It was planetary orbits and cells dividing and sunsets in God colors.
Now, though, I just watch the door. I keep my eyes on it, waiting for her arrival (still imagining her in that dress) or for Nathan’s. He’d insisted that he come, too. He didn’t feel that I should meet Desiree Harris alone. What did he think I would do? Wrap my hands around her throat in the Sorrento Hotel parking lot? Stab her with an appetizer fork? All I want are answers, and I want them now. Why is she so nervous to meet with me, anyway? That’s what I want to know. Most people would do anything to help a woman whose husband was missing. Most people would not pick a dimly lit, let’s-finish-this-upstairs hotel bar to meet in, either. But maybe that’s what you did when you were the type of person who flashed your breasts around like you were offering a roll from the breadbasket.
Had she and Ian met here, too? There’s a question.
This is taking entirely too long. Who would be late to a meeting like this? Jesus. I reach inside the zippered pocket of my purse and feel around. Yes, it’s still there, that cuff link. I order a glass of wine. And then I call the waiter back and switch to something stronger. I remember the brown fire that Abby had brought over that night after Ian disappeared. Maybe it’ll scorch my throat so that every word I want to say will be charred away to harmless ash. I don’t trust myself. Inside, I’m blazing. The answer to all this, the reason for all this pain and fear and unknowing—I’m sure it’s going to walk in that door at any moment.
A man in a light spring suit arrives. He has newsman hair and a shiny, wholesome, Christian face. A woman follows behind him, looking over her shoulder. She wears a tiny knit dress and has a straw purse. Meeting secretly, probably. I never noticed things like this before. Even in high school, I was the sort of person who didn’t realize that pot was being sold in the upper parking lot. I lived in a different, more innocent world than anyone else. I kind of liked it there. The first time I saw a bong, I thought it was a fancy decanter for vinegar and oil.
My whiskey arrives. I swirl the ice expertly, the way Paul Hartley Keller might, the way Ian might. I take a swallow and try not to shiver and sputter. How do people drink this stuff? And now I need to go to the bathroom. It’s an amusing trick my body plays with me, ha-ha, one of its personal favorites. Whenever I can’t easily leave a place—the doors of the theater have just shut, for example, or I am jammed in the airplane window seat next to two sleeping businessmen, or I am waiting to meet the skittish possible lover of my husband—I am sure to have to go. Badly. I begin to worry. It becomes an impossible problem: The place is filling up, and if I get up now my spot will surely be taken. Will I miss her if I make a quick trip? She might leave if she doesn’t see me. Of course, I could leave my coat on the seat. I could ask the waiter to keep watch. I am busy with these highly complex mental calculations that are all part of this particular syndrome when I feel a tap on my shoulder.
“Mrs. Keller?”
It is Desiree Harris, and I don’t even recognize her. She wears a somber blue skirt with a short-sleeved white blouse. It is buttoned. She has flat black shoes, the kind you wear if you’re planning to walk a long distance. Those shoes surprise me. They’re practical. They might even have insoles she put in herself. Nobody finds Dr. Scholl sexy, likely not even Mrs. Scholl. Seductive and practical are never friends. They never even say hello to each other. They each make fun behind the other’s back.
“Desiree.” I stand up. And then, dear God, what is wrong with me? I offer my hand! I smile politely! Why did I smile politely? I am instantly furious at myself. It’s the furnace repairman again but worse. Way worse! I can hear Ian’s voice in my head.
You asked the guy how long he’d been in furnace repair. No one’s in furnace repair. It’s not like being in real estate, or in financial planning. He’s a furnace repairman! You’ve elevated the entire profession with one preposition!
“I didn’t recognize you. I was waiting over there—” She gestures toward one of the neighboring couches, already filled by the Christian newsman and another guy. I was wrong about him and the woman in the dress. The men’s knees are touching, and their eyes are furtive. “We only met that once, and your hair was up.… Nathan said he was coming?” She looks at her watch.
“You can sit down,” I say. I’ve recovered the proper tone. Authoritative, pissed. We aren’t having a tea party here.
She chooses the wingback chair to my left, sets her purse beside her. The leather of that bag collapses as if exhausted. “Hope this is okay.” She spins a finger in the air in reference to the room. “I live nearby. My car battery was dead, so I had to walk.”
“It’s fine.”
“I’m so sorry about what’s happened—”
“What has happened?”
She tilts her head as if she hasn’t heard correctly. “Ian? Disappearing?”
“I assume you know something about that.” I swirl my ice cubes meanly.
“Me? I don’t know anything about that.”
Her voice is so earnest that I can’t help myself. I look at her face, really look. It’s tired, too, I can see. It’s the kind of face that belongs to someone who has been unlucky in love; maybe she has a child at home. I realize I don’t know a thing about Desiree Harris. It worries me. I’ve been a fool, perhaps. Dear God, maybe there is no answer to be found here. What if there is no answer to be found here? My anger begins to dissolve; panic is waiting to replace it. Because what then? What if I’m wrong about Desiree Harris? And then it happens. She looks down at her hands. She’s lying. I see the lie hurry past and dart from view.
I reach into my purse. I have the split-second fear that my fingers won’t touch that circle of gold, that I won’t find anything there. But it is there. Thankfully it is. It’s real. I need it to be real, because if not this story, then … Please, let it be this story. Let him be back at her place right now. I hold the cuff link in my palm. It looks as guilty as a packet of cocaine or an empty condom wrapper. “Did you give him these?”
Desiree Harris puts a hand to her chest. Her left hand. She wears a ring on her middle finger, as many single women do. Is this to accentuate the fact that the ring finger is bare? Maybe that’s the point, I don’t know. “Oh, my God, no. No, I didn’t give him that.”
“You’ve obviously seen it before.”
“Someone’s gotten the wrong idea.”
“You mean me?”
“I mean whoever saw me. Someone saw me, right? I was afraid of this. I was just trying to do a favor …”
“You brought this to our house.” I know that. Somehow, I do.
“I did bring that to your house. I found it on the grass, after you two left. The party? I decided to drop it off. And then when I heard he had gone missing, I felt weird about what I’d done. The timing. Not leaving a note …”
“And why would you feel weird?”
“Because I could have just given it to him on Monday.”
The waiter hovers nearby, asking without asking if she needs anything, but Desiree shakes her head. What is taking Nathan so long? Someone else should be hearing this. It’s not adding up, in my opinion.
Now the man is at the piano. He’s settling in, adjusting his sheet music. Desiree Harris leans toward me. She reaches out her hand. I think she’s going to touch my arm, but her hand simply hangs there in the space between us. I’m glad she doesn’t touch me. Her eyes are pleading. “I was curious. You know? That’s the only thing I did wrong, I swear. To wonder. To look. I wanted to see where he lived. Where you lived.” She waits for my understanding, but I give her nothing back. She tries again. “You just seem so …”
The man begins to play. The glassy notes fill in around the conversational murmurs and the soft clatter of utensils. I have no patience for this. “What?”
“Lucky.”
The word shocks me. No, what shocks me is the way I suddenly get this. I understand this, too well. I see it for what it is, for what it does and doesn’t mean, and it feels like a blow. What Desiree is saying, well, I’m not the only one who has ever wanted someone else’s life. Desiree—her roots need touching up, and her lips are self-consciously lined with pencil, and even in the sparkly candlelight I can see that tired purse. It looks like a purse that works hard, trudging along from errand to errand, sitting in grocery carts and hanging off her shoulder as she waits in line at Marshalls. It’s a bit beat up. A pen has leaked ink in the bottom corner, leaving a dark splotch.
“You didn’t give him this? As a gift?” I look down at that stupid cuff link. My voice sounds far away.
“No, of course not. Why would you think I did?”
I stare down into my glass. I know why I thought she gave it to him. Something happened that night that I did remember but didn’t want to. He’d wanted to go back and look for that cuff link. Badly. It had meant a great deal to him. It was important. When we were finally, finally in the car after that dreaded party, he told me he needed to go back. Needed. I had assumed that need was related to love. What is more imperative than love? What drives us more toward need?
Ian, really? Please! I’ve got to get out of here. I want to go home!
I’ll only be a minute. I’m sorry if this night has been such a torture.
I’m tired, is all. I slipped my shoes off, set them on the floor mat. What do you have to do?
I lost something.
What? Your wallet?
No.
What?
Never mind!
Your phone?
Just let me look, would you?
He was seething. He got out of the car, slammed the door. He headed for that Kerry Park grass. It was one of those interactions that could make you furious—the held-back information, the something hinted at but not revealed, the refusal to hand over what had been dangled in front of you. Yes, fury rose up in me. I opened my door. I strode over to him. The woman in the red dress, and now this.
Ian!
Stop it.
What are you doing? What have you lost that’s such a big secret?
Never mind, I said! Jesus. How much did you drink tonight?
Less than you, I’m sure.
Look at you. You can barely walk.
He was right. I was stumbling on that lawn. I can’t see, that’s why! It’s too dark out here. You won’t find anything, anyway!
Not if I don’t look, I won’t.
What is so important? Jesus, Ian!
Not everything about me is your business.
Ian! Damn you!
No shoes, wet grass, mud. I grabbed his arm. I felt it between us then, the possibility of rage. I had felt it one other time. I knew what could happen.
He knew, too. He shook off my arm. He stepped back.
What is wrong with you?
The fury crackled there between us. We faced off. He weighed his options. Finally: This is ridiculous, he said. Fuck it!
He did not look for whatever it was he’d lost, after all. He returned to the car instead. But he was pissed about it. Pissed at me. He drove home with that face, that stone-chiseled jaw. We drove in silence. You marry the person you love, and you marry their shadow self, too.
With Desiree now, I try again. It sounds crazy, but I am actually hoping. Please, please, please, let it be so. “The two of you—you had some sort of relationship?”
“No, not at all.”
“You don’t know where he is?”
“No, of course not.”
“Flirtation?” I saw it with my own eyes that night.
“Friendliness. He was friendly. He joked. I joked back. He always mentioned his wife. You. Always. I saw you at the party. I don’t know …”
I am silent.
“I mean nothing to him,” she says.
I feel unwell. My head is beginning to swim. Desiree is still trying to explain. She has no idea that I likely understand this better than she does herself.
“Have you ever walked down a street at night and looked into some window?” Desiree says. “Maybe you see a person in there, in a beautiful room? It’s so intriguing, and you don’t even know why exactly. You just want to know more. Maybe you wish you were inside. Maybe you wish that room were yours. That’s all. That’s all it was.”
I shouldn’t have drunk that stuff. It is swirling bitterly in my stomach, and something else is happening: My chest is caving in again. I can barely get my breath. I try to suck in air, but there is no air.
“Are you okay?” Desiree gets up, heads toward me, and that’s when that damn purse takes the opportunity to rebel from its life of drudgery, or perhaps it’s merely an attempt at handbag suicide. It leaps from its spot, clatters down toward the tiny glass table, causing my drink to slide across its surface and fall to the other side. Everything is falling, crashing down from high ledges. The ice cubes lay there on the carpet; the liquid drips off the side of the table and soaks a dark spot into the rug. The waiter appears immediately—I’d been wrong before if I thought they were off somewhere minding their own business. He has napkins. It’s like that day at the Essential Baking Company with Nathan and the spilled coffee but worse, much worse. The waiter and Desiree are blotting things, but the napkins aren’t up to the job, and now there is Nathan himself, finally, taking my elbow, asking if everything is all right. The napkins are sopping wet with brown liquid, dripping everywhere, and Desiree’s purse contents are spread out for all to see—a bottle of hand sanitizer, a tampon, a pink tube of mascara with the label worn off.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” Nathan says. He looks at me and at Desiree and the mess around us as if he doesn’t know what to think.
“We’re done here,” I say. I grab my own purse and I leave them there. I get the hell out of that place. He flirts; it doesn’t mean anything. He always talks about his wife. Always. Desiree Harris is just a woman.
She’s just a woman, and she does not have the answers I need.
Please, I say to whoever might be listening. Please, no.
My stomach churns. I am sick with fear. Because I can feel my fingernails in his skin. Even right then I can feel them digging in.
As they say, the ink was barely dry on Ian’s divorce papers when we got married. It had been nearly four years since we met at that baseball game. He didn’t want an actual wedding, not without his daughters there, and so we went to the courthouse in the city. I wore a cream-colored dress, and he brought me a bouquet of white roses as a surprise. Ian’s old friend, Simon Ash, and his wife, Theresa, stood up for us. It was the first time I’d met them. My family wasn’t there—Abby wasn’t—and it bothered me. But I kept my mouth shut. These were more red flags that I ignored. Maybe they should make those flags in another color.
I didn’t know then what I know now, that emotional rescue is, at the heart of it, a lack of respect. If you’re the one being rescued, it’s a lack of self-respect. If you’re the one rescuing—lack of respect for the other person. You’re demonstrating your belief in your own weakness or in theirs. It’s insulting.
Not that I was with him only because he was rescuing me. I loved him. Oh, I did. My heart ached with it. I didn’t see him clearly, not at all, but I loved him. His eyes got teary, too, when he said his vows. Forever, he said. You could believe a day like that could bring a whole new start. He’d been short-tempered and critical since his divorce, but who wouldn’t be? His daughters wouldn’t speak to him. His father had died. I was the equivalent of having all your eggs in one basket. I was the basket. No wonder he started imagining that men were interested in me when they weren’t. No wonder he accused me of flirting. Toby and Renee noticed this about you from the beginning, he’d say. I’ve never been a flirt. In high school, I blushed when boys talked to me. Ian was just experiencing temporary insanity. In no time, he’d go back to being the man I fell in love with. His behavior made some sense, if you thought about it. The security of marriage would cure him. Oh, the arrogance in the idea that your love can cure. Good luck with that.
The whole mess—we were clichés, all of us. First, Mark and me. We played out the typical woman-leaves-husband story. In this sordid tale, she tries to leave and he attempts to destroy her for it. During the divorce, he keeps being the asshole he was in the marriage and devises lengthy, expensive legal maneuvers, while she keeps being the victim she was in the marriage and falls apart. There is a separation agreement, a parenting plan, one restraining order, one divorce decree, and a partridge in a pear tree. He gets an apartment and schemes revenge, and she stays in the family home and leans too much on the children for emotional support, ensuring their need for later therapy. He dates bimbos, joins a gym, gets a fresh new look (hair, tattoo), and throws himself into new, weird, short-lived interests (astrology, singles bars, religion). She reads self-help books and tries to be more assertive and marries the first post-husband man she sleeps with. He buys the children expensive gifts he can’t afford but doesn’t show up for birthdays or school events as promised; she struggles with money, gets a puppy, and sews Halloween costumes involving hundreds of sequins, which still does nothing to alleviate her guilt. He disappoints; she hovers. The children (or child, in our case) trudge back and forth and eat two Thanksgiving dinners in one day and vow never to marry unless it is for forever.
And Ian and Mary performed the man-leaves-wife drama. Here, he cheats and hides it, and she finds out but pretends not to know until he finally confesses, after which she tries to meet him at the door in a trench coat with nothing on underneath. He halfheartedly “tries to make his marriage work” while she goes to Nordstrom, maxes out their credit cards, and then sees an attorney secretly after a session of “couples counseling.” In this version, he gets an apartment and marries the first woman he sleeps with, and she reads self-help books and joins a gym, gets a fresh look (hair, tattoo), and finds new, weird, short-lived interests (yoga, online dating, religion). Their children rally around her and don’t speak to him, even on Thanksgiving, and vow not to marry unless it’s for forever.
After Ian and I wed, we morphed into yet another tired and overused contemporary family story. We were the “blended family.” There are usually two versions of this, too, I’ve found. In version one, the kids don’t accept the new partner, and in version two, they do. In our first scenario, the children blame the new wife for every change they see in their father, from a too-fashionable style of sunglasses to a never-before-seen assertiveness. The new wife gets chilly hugs and the-way-Mom-does-it-better stories, as the daughters (usually daughters) act like mini-wives, scheming to rid the house of the intruder who is monopolizing Daddy’s time, money, and affection. They give sentimental gifts involving old photographs, ruffle his hair in ways that seem disconcertingly seductive, and deliver information back to Mom that requires her to phone Daddy immediately after their weekend with her “concern.” Daddy (he’s always “Daddy”) alternatingly plunges into grief or walks around unaware, little bluebirds of Daddy love tweeting around his oblivious head. If during one visit they don’t step on the backs of the new wife’s metaphorical shoes or don’t pull the metaphorical chair out from under her, he’s sure that all the bad feelings are now in the past. He magically forgets everything that came before; it’s a clean slate in his mind. He’s performed some misplaced act of contrition on their behalf, sure of their goodness. Next time, they will step on the backs of her shoes and pull the chair out from under her. This is the stuff of fairy tales.
In scenario two, the children are fond of the stepparent but must hide those feelings from the real parent as if they are potentially world-endingly nuclear. Which, of course, they are.
Yet, in spite of the clichés, there are the snapshot moments where the pain of it belongs to no one but you. The banality shatters, and what is suddenly, horribly there is all yours. Like watching war on television, or some earthquake, any tragedy—it’s just another war or earthquake or tragedy, until you see that dead arm with a watch on it or a child’s shoe sitting among the rubble.
Example: That second Christmas Eve after our separation, Abby was celebrating with Mark and his family at his parents’ home, and Ian was still with Mary and their children at his. I should have at least made other plans, but I stupidly hadn’t foreseen the danger. I wasn’t alone but ALONE, me and that cheap, scrawny tree I’d bought at Safeway because it was all I could afford and all I could wrestle onto the top of old Blue Beast. The weeping and aching that came that night were so old and so far in that nothing felt worth that kind of agony. Even with fists in walls and heels in ribs, leaving Mark felt like a mistake.
Example: Bethy and Kristen finally agreed to see Ian after we’d been married for several months. They met him for one hour, over lunch, at a Greek café near his work. Mary had dropped them off, and she waited in her car to pick them up. He’d hoped it was a first step, a new beginning. Maybe they would look at him and remember that he was their dad and not some villain. But they’d come to deliver news. Kristen’s middle school graduation was coming up, and they thought it best that he didn’t come. It would make their mother too uncomfortable. That night, he sat up alone in the dark again. I brought him a blanket and a pillow. It was obvious he would be sleeping on the couch. His voice was miserable but angry, too. He glared at me from across the room. I am missing so much of their lives, he’d said.
Example: Abby likes Ian. We’d take her and her friends to dinner, and we watched movies and went on hikes. He practiced with her for her driving test. They have a good relationship. After we married, we lived in my old house for almost two years until Abby finished high school. She made waffles and watched TV on our couch, just as she always had, and the same stuffed toys were on her bed: Ginger-Man (an orange-brown bear), Bibby, her old monkey. But she never came into our bedroom to tell me something she’d forgotten or to ask if I knew where her headband was. She avoided our room. There was, after all, a different man beside me in our bed, and it was Ian there with his bare shoulders above the sheets, not her father. Or we’d be watching a movie downstairs, and Ian would fart. Abby would leave that room then, making an excuse about homework or calling a friend. We both felt this—the uneasiness of it, the awkwardness, the wrongness. There are intimacies that belong only within a family. A real family. Her discomfort and mine, it told me there were ways he would always be a stranger to us.
Love—well, of course I loved him, but there were things I didn’t see, and things I didn’t understand or know yet. In the chaos and rush of rescue, one cannot slow down for long enough to see clearly and understand. Love—long-lasting love—requires more information. It requires time. When you’re drowning, though, there is no time. You are blinded by the waves over your head and the panic of trying to breathe. When you’ve turned love into survival, the outstretched hand is what matters most.
The noise in my car is getting louder, but I can’t think about that now. I feel like someone’s chasing me, and I keep watching my rearview mirror to determine if it’s true. I must get home as fast as possible. I need to hurry. As soon as I am home … What? I don’t know. I just need to get there and lock the door behind me.
It’s late when I arrive. One of those flyers has blown off a telephone pole, and Ian stares up at me from the gravel parking strip. I pick it up and crumple it. I shove it deep into my pocket. Most of the houseboats are dark, except for Kevin and Jennie’s—they’re probably up with their baby. Maggie and Jack’s bedroom window flickers with television light. I think I hear footsteps behind me on the dock, but when I look over my shoulder, I see no one.
Our own porch light is on, but it’s obvious that Abby has already gone to bed. I open the front door. I try to be quiet about it. Pollux, my dear dog pal, my forever friend, little sugar boy, he sleepily trots up to greet me. I drop my purse by the door, that meaningless cuff link still inside.
Bed, sleep—how I crave it, even if that dream is there waiting for me. Fine, come. Let me look. I’m running out of options, aren’t I? It’s time to face the facts, no matter what they are.
“Dani.”
The voice and the figure startle me. I let out a little scream. I put my hand to my heart.
“Dani, it’s only me.”
“Jesus, Ma,” I say. “What’re you doing here?”
“How can I not be here? You went to the police station today, baby kid. You met that woman. A girl needs her mother.”
I can see a couple of my quilts on the couch. A pillow. A mug. Abby has set her up comfortably. “You’re staying over?”
“Yes, I’m staying over. Well? Does she know where he is? That Desiree woman?”
My mother looks small in the dark. Without her boots on, she’s shorter than I remember. It’s age, I realize. She’s shrunk. Who would have thought it was possible? She’d always been so commanding.
“Nothing,” I say. “It was a dead end.”
“Your father called. He said he put some missing-person ads in the classifieds. Who reads the classifieds anymore?”
“He’s trying to help.”
She grasps my arm. “Dani,” she whispers intently.
“What, Ma?”
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
“Tell me, then.”
“I went to a psychic.”
I groan. “I can’t do this now, Ma. I can’t.” Dear God, she loves that stuff. Any hint of the mystical, and she’s in with both feet, wallet in hand. She’s had every kind of brief spiritual fling over the years, with Reiki and past lives and even with an ancient spokesman from beyond. What was his name? Something Indian. An old woman channeled his voice, which must have been a ton of laughs. My mother still has a crystal hanging from her rearview mirror, and it glints dangerously on sunny days. In my opinion, it’s more likely to cause an accident than provide good energy. A few years ago she told me my aura was yellow, but I’m sure it was just her cataracts.
“You need to listen.”
“I’m so tired. I’ve never been more tired in my life.”
Her grip tightens. Her hand is a claw on my wrist. “It was that place over on Eighty-fifth, have you seen it? I’ve always been curious about it. They have that sign with the big painted eye? FORTUNES TOLD.”
“Ma, it’s above an espresso place. I don’t see how you can commune with the spirits above the noise of grinding coffee beans.”
“She doesn’t commune with the spirits. She reads tea leaves.”
“Perfect. Regular or decaf? I hope it’s one of those teas that promise a new mental state. Calm or Refresh or Awake. Have a cup of tea, gain a new outlook, and tell your future.”
“Don’t make fun. You don’t know.”
I’m losing patience. “Ma, please. Can’t we discuss this tomorrow?”
“It can’t wait. She told me that I was keeping a secret. That it’s not healthy. I need to say it before it gives me a heart attack.”
“Your heart is fine. Your doctor told you that three weeks ago. The heart of a fifty-year-old.”
“All night, I’ve felt these flutters.”
“Caffeine, Ma. Anxiety. I’m going to bed.” I pull away, but there’s that grip again.
“Wait.”
“Ma, please.”
“I have been keeping a secret.”
“What?”
“I have.”
I sit down at the edge of my couch, on top of my quilt. I rub my eyes, making dark circles of mascara, but so what. “All right, okay. You know, so you don’t have a coronary tonight.”
She sits down, too. She takes my hands. Her eyes are piercing. They glow keen and urgent in that dark room. “What?” I say. “I’m adopted. My father is not really my father. That milkman we had back in California—”
“This is serious.”
“Fine. Go ahead.” I don’t want to hear it. I am suddenly nervous. The thought in my head, the one that’s screaming loudest, is: What has she done?
“I saw them,” she says.
It isn’t what I’m expecting. Something in my rib cage falls. My heart accelerates. Maybe I’ll have the coronary tonight. “Them?”
“I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want you to be hurt, and then once I didn’t tell, it became harder to tell. I couldn’t tell after I didn’t tell! But now it might be important. She might know something. I saw them the day before he went missing.”
“Mary. I saw Ian and Mary. Together. I’d been walking around Target, looking for birthday gift ideas for Stephanie—what do you get a sixteen-year-old? I was in there for hours.”
“You saw Ian and Mary in Target?”
“No, I was starving after I was in Target that long, and I went over to that bakery, you know, over by the car place. The one with the good butter cookies? They make sandwiches now. First, it was only a bakery, but now they do lunch. Aunt something? I can’t think of what it’s called.”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
“Aunt … Aunt what?”
“Never mind! Just tell me.”
“It’s going to drive me crazy. Starts with a B.”
“Auntie Bee’s, Mom. That’s the name. Auntie Bee’s.”
“Right! That’s it. I knew it was Aunt. I ordered my sandwich, and I’m waiting for them to wrap it up, and I see them. Ian and Mary. Well, obviously I know him, but I recognize her from that time we saw her at your old grocery store, remember? She got in line right behind you. It was supposed to be intimidating.”
“I remember.”
Mary.
Here it is. After all this time, after it seemed like the past was receding and the girls were at least coming to our house, his new life still can’t compare to his old one. How could it? I believe that, I’ve believed it for a long time. His criticisms of me are all the evidence I need. I’m glad there’s an answer here, but I’m sick, too, sick with hurt and regret. He’s with Mary. They wouldn’t keep such a thing from their children, though, would they? They wouldn’t let their daughters worry. But this—it’s another possibility now; there are more questions to be asked, and with that comes relief. I think, Thank God.
“Her hand was over his, Dani. They were sitting at a table together, and I saw it. I can’t tell you how furious I was. I said a loud ahem! and he looked up.”
“He never told me this. He never mentioned it. Are you sure he saw you?”
“Oh, I’m sure, all right. He took his hand back. Snatched it back, the prick. I got my sandwich, and I told the cashier, I said, ‘Once a cheat, always a cheat.’ Loud enough for them to hear. I was so damn mad, Dani.”
“He didn’t tell me.”
“Well, no wonder. Of course he didn’t mention it! I slammed out of there so hard, the bells bashed against the glass door. I’ve never been so angry. I had my keys in my hand.…” She purses her lips together tight. She shakes her head, reliving her fury.
“What are you saying?”
“Well, maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but I did. He deserved it.” She mimes slicing the air with something pinched between her fingers.
“Don’t tell me.”
She slices the air again. “Mr. Perfect’s perfect car.”
“No.” I am hoping for a denial, but she only folds her arms and raises her eyebrows in challenge. “You keyed his car? Oh, Mom, tell me you didn’t key his car.”
“He’s lucky I didn’t do worse, the bastard.”
I moan. “Oh, Mom … Oh, God. You shouldn’t have done that.” There’s a scratch on his car. It wasn’t there when we saw him last.
“No? Wait until Abby is treated like that by some asshole. Mark was bad enough—”
“Mom.”
“Mark, now, he should have had his balls cut off.”
“I can’t believe you keyed his car.”
“I couldn’t stand looking at that thing. Sitting in the lot all shiny and just so, without even a fucking crumb in it. Everything so flawless on the outside, exactly like him. But inside? Ugly. One ugly motherfucker. I’m sorry, Dani, but the way he talks to you? And then there he is with her?”
I’m silent. Her bravado is quickly disappearing with my disapproval, I can tell. She looks down at her hands. Pollux puts his paws up on my knees, and I gently push him back down.
“Oh, Mom,” I say finally.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have done it.”
This is my mother in two minutes of one hellish evening, her whole self and her entire history laid bare. She had essentially raised herself under the roof of an aunt who didn’t give a shit about her, dropped there by a mother who didn’t give a shit, either. Abandonment and the self-sufficiency she’d had the guts to muster had left my mother with a don’t-mess-with-me toughness that would occasionally burn fierce and frightening. It was a monumental display but a trick of the eye. There was no fire, not really—only a child waving a plastic flashlight in her own dark night.
“Probably not,” I say.
“I’d do anything for you, you know that.” She takes my hand. I feel her small, complicated self doing its best to be there for me, and my throat tightens with tears. We make messes, but mostly we’re just trying to do the best we can with what we’ve got.
“I do know that, Ma.”
“You’re my girl.”
Now here is Abby, leaning in the doorway. Her hair is smushed up and coming out of its ponytail. She’s never liked to miss out. Even when she was a little bean sprout, she’d try and try to keep her eyes open long past bedtime, just in case. “Hey, is this where the party is?”
She pads over in her socks, reminding me of those plastic-footed pajamas she used to love when she was a toddler. Tonight, all of us are both young and old. Maybe everyone is both of these things all the time. It’s our biggest challenge, perhaps, being both. “If this is where we do female bonding, aren’t we supposed to put on an Aretha Franklin song? That’s what they do in the movies,” Abby says.
“Urethra Franklin,” my mother says, and Abby snorts.
“Just come here,” I say to Abby.
She shoves onto the couch with us. “Double hugs.”
I put my arms around them both, give two squeezes as the request requires. “You people,” I say, and oh, damn, my voice begins to wobble. In spite of everything, the reason I’m overcome right now is that I am so thankful for them. What is a life without your people? I pull the two of them close. One smells of Jean Naté and the other of apple shampoo. What would you do without your best ones?
“Grateful.” This is all that squeaks out. I hate to cry, but tears roll down my nose. I am a mess, and I’m making wet splotches on my mother’s robe, my daughter’s sweatshirt.
“Oh, Mom,” Abby says.
We stay in our huddle until my mother takes a Kleenex out of her robe pocket and blows her nose. “I hate to cry,” she says. I know that, of course. Abby hates to cry, too.
“Some party this is,” Abby says. Her own eyes are wet.
“R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” my mother gives a lame try.
“Sing it, Grammy,” Abby says.
Cherished ones, I think.
That night, I am afraid in my very own bedroom. You’re supposed to feel safe in your own room, your own house, knowing that the danger is out there, outside, somewhere-elsewhere in the dark. Of course, I’d been afraid in my own room before. Under my own roof. As a small child, I used to think that robbers were in the house, hiding in the closet or down the hall, blocking my way to the bathroom. When I was a married woman, the bad guys were inside, too. Here’s a funny but not funny thing that happened once. One night, Mark stayed up late to watch TV. When he came to our room to go to bed, I awoke from the depths of a dream and managed to scrabble together only these facts: dark, man figure, my room. I bolted to a sitting position, terrified. Who are you and what are you doing here? I’d said in alarmed half-sleep. When we recounted it in the morning, he wasn’t amused. Not at all. Sometimes your dreams speak more truth than you’d like to admit.
I was right to be afraid, wasn’t I, about what might happen to me? With Mark, and now. I lay awake, thinking about that scratch on the car. That key, dug into metal. I try to envision it: a white line, a thin scar. As the night goes on, it becomes wider in my imagination. A gash. A deep, screaming wound.
I need to see it. What I need to see, actually, is how it will look to Detective Jackson.
I get out of bed. My mother is asleep on the couch (the fluff of her hair is visible from where I stand), and so I step carefully, avoiding the creaks on the floor, same as I used to do when I was a teenager coming in past curfew. I knew just where those creaks were then, and I do now, too.
Pollux meets my eyes but stays in his crescent-roll shape on his bed, bless him. I turn the doorknob slowly, slowly, slowly. The final, opening click sounds as loud to me as a gunshot.
The night smells like deep lake water and damp earth. I love the smell of night; even right now I still love it. I walk as softly as I can down the dock. There are so many people not to wake. I can hear the low moan, the shivery cry, of a cat about to fight.
Ian’s car is solitary and still under the streetlight. I check up and down the road, but the street is quiet. Everything is shut up tight for sleep, cars and houses and Pete’s Market. If anyone sees me, they might misinterpret the way I bend down and peer at the driver’s side door, the way I run my fingertips along the thin white thread.
Of course Ian would have noticed it that day when he got back to the car, and of course he did not mention it, for his own reasons. He would have opened my door for me that evening, and I would have gotten in, and I would have gone to that party with my usual cluelessness. We will have to provide an explanation for this, though. The explanation will lead to other questions. Because, yes, there is damage here. I could never do this, could I? Drag a jagged key against a smooth, perfect surface? This is the sort of anger I’ve always been afraid of.
But I understand that anger, the desire for it, the desire to succumb to it. I, too, have wanted to gouge and scrape. I had felt the urge that night with my own fingertips on his skin, as he stood on that grass and glared. Not everything about me is your business. Oh, I could have dug my nails farther in and made my own thin scar on his flawless skin.
It is the sort of anger I have always been afraid of, yes. But it is in me, too. Ian is and isn’t Paul Hartley Keller. And I am and am not Isabel Eleanor Ross.