Here is the great irony (or just deserts): You find your soul mate, you go through hell to be together, and then your soul mate becomes riddled with distrust. If I was dishonorable enough to do what I did with Ian, I was dishonorable enough to do what I did to him; that’s what he thought. His paranoia was the secret lover of his guilt. They were bound together by betrayal and circumstance. But the suspicion wasn’t there only because of our history, was it? I was becoming more and more clear about that. It was there because Paul Hartley Keller had gutted Ian’s self-certainty. He’d done it sure and clean as you gut a pumpkin with the edge of a spoon, and now Ian was sure he could never truly be the sort of person who could have what he most wanted. Every day he set out to find proof of that.
We were in bed one morning, legs entwined, sheets tangled. Abby was with Mark, and so it had been two days of making love and eating in bed and making love again. We hadn’t yet reached that point with each other where sex became tired, where your bloated stomach after a too rich dinner took precedence over passion. I was still competing, maybe, and maybe so was he. His first wife, my first husband—you let thoughts in like that or you didn’t, and if you did, everyone was game: your first high school boyfriend, that girl he loved in college, his mouth on other mouths, your hands on other asses. If it got spoken between you (and, in our situation, how could it not?), jealousy might grow to need its own room in your house. It would make demands for its favorite meal, but the sex would be good. The sex would be great. You didn’t dare let up, because comfort might mean defeat. Well, we were making up for a lot of time of not feeling alive, too.
My head rested on Ian’s chest. It was one of those times I felt close to him (confident about my victory?), relaxed, and at peace. We could lie in bed too long, though. We could go from rested and snug to restless and irritated. You had to know when to get up and make coffee and step outside. If you passed that point, it felt too hot, and your lower back complained, and you needed a shower, and someone would say something that could be taken the wrong way. Too long and you could be headed for one of those lengthy discussions that never get anywhere.
Do you know what a sphragis is? He murmured this into my hair.
Something Catholic, right? He knew about all that stuff. He knew all the intricate jargon, the underground pathways of that particular dungeon. He understood transubstantiation, stations of the cross, mortal versus venial sins. In spite of the catechism classes I took when I was eight, all I basically knew was that Baby Jesus was born in a manger on Christmas. I was even hazy about the whole Easter thing, to tell you the truth—the rock, the cave, the there-not-there. Definitely hazy about the palm branches and about the ashes on the forehead. I looked like that after I cleaned out the fireplace.
Catholic, yeah. But that’s not what I mean.
No. I don’t know, then.
It’s a plug that some butterflies create.
I hate that word, plug. It’s one of the ugliest words.
Other animals make one, too, but butterflies can take it further.
From where my head lay, I could hear his heart beating in there. The sound of a heart always disturbed me. If you were aware of its beat, you were aware of its ability to stop beating.
What kind of plug?
Male butterflies—they make the sphragis out of their secretions. It’s like a glue that shuts the female’s genitals. Some male butterflies cover her entire abdomen with it. An iron chastity belt.
I sat up. I didn’t like where this was going. Kind of disturbing, if you ask me.
It’s nature. It’s natural. It’s what he does to protect what’s his.
She has to wear that thing around?
Yeah. It’s pretty heavy, too. It makes it hard for her to move.
God.
It’s meant to last a lifetime.
We’d stayed too long in bed, that was for sure. I got up. I needed air. I reached for my robe. That’s horrible, I said.
I was wishing I had one for you.
I thought carefully about how to respond. Over the past few months, after each little comment—about my clothes, or other men, or after the lengthy questioning that came after the times I’d seen Mark—I’d tried various strategies to ward off the jabs and the interrogations. I tried reassurance and humor and flat-out anger. Still, his insecurity sat there, stubborn and immovable. No, actually it didn’t sit there. It came my way with its fangs bared. A person’s insecurity is a creature of the night, out for blood, and for the same vampire reasons: to avoid their own demise.
I decided to say nothing. I headed for the door. I was in the hall when I heard him.
Don’t worry, Dani, he said. The females keep finding ways out of it.
Good, I called back to him.
They just keep evolving, he said.
Here is another great irony: You find your soul mate, you go through hell to be together, and then you soul mate pecks away at you with his criticism. Your laugh is so loud. You’re inconsiderate, unplugging my razor without plugging it in again. Your breasts look small in that. You know, Mary never would have cheated. If I were more perfect, I’d be worth all the trouble he went through to get me, that’s what the criticism said to me. He felt a disparity in what we’d given up to be together. If I were more beautiful and more giving, I could make up for the deficit in his column.
But, like the suspicion, the criticism wasn’t there only because of our history, was it? I was also becoming more and more clear about that.
Ian hadn’t always hunted for ways to condemn me, not at all. Not at all. But I’d said that about Mark, too. The thought—the similarities between the two of them—it made me uneasy. They were different men, I told myself. Very different. The truth, though? Well. You can kill a butterfly using different methods. You can use force, grasping the thorax between your fingers and pinching hard. Or you can hold down the wings with the slight, sharp tip of a pin until the heart stops.
We’d like to tow his car to the station evidence-impound garage for further analysis.…
I am having difficulty breathing.
We can get a warrant, of course, if you have any objections.
I cradle the phone in my lap. I am underwater. I need to get my head above the surface so I can breathe.
“You need to get a lawyer, Dani,” my mother says. “I don’t want to hear any more about it. You don’t have a choice.” She’s pacing the kitchen. She looks like hell. She’s aged ten years in the last week, or maybe I just never noticed the ways the years have caught up with all of us.
“I don’t need a lawyer. Let them take the car.”
“Dani. Danielle! This is getting out of control. We’re way over our heads. This is crazy!”
“Let them take the car.”
“Getting a lawyer—it’s not admitting some kind of guilt. We need some help! We need to know how to protect ourselves!” Abby is practically begging. She looks like hell, too. She’s wearing one of her tongue-in-cheek sweatshirts. This one has Queen Frosting from CANDYLAND on it. The dissonance is disturbing.
“I’ll call Nathan,” I say. “He’ll know what to do.”
“Nathan’s not a lawyer,” Abby says. She and my mother exchange glances.
“I’ll call your father,” my mother says.
“Grampy is not a lawyer,” Abby says.
“He knows how to reach that guy …” My mother waves her hand around.
“How many times are we going to have this exact same discussion?” Abby says.
It’s true. We are repeating ourselves. I have to do something.
“Let me handle this.” I attempt to look decisive and in control. I leave them sitting there, and I stride upstairs to our office. In my panic, frustration, fear, fury—take your pick—I accidentally slam the door, rattling those butterflies hanging on the wall. Too late, I remember that we don’t have a computer in there anymore. We’ve got Abby’s laptop and my own phone, but likely I’d only get those frustrating online white pages anyway. We’ve got that old phone book I’d used to look up Kitty’s number, but that’s back in the cupboard under the kitchen phone. I retrace my steps to retrieve it, and nothing about this looks decisive or in control. Erratic and desperate, maybe. Panicked and chaotic, for sure.
“Frank Lazario,” my mother says. “I’ll never forget him. Call him.”
I cart the phone book back to the office, and I open its fat, sloppy pages. The number might be unlisted. That’s certainly possible.
No. There it is.
I dial. I keep my voice low. And then I shower. I want to look good. Funny how that still matters. I do my hair, and I choose my clothes carefully. I keep a nervous eye on the clock until finally it’s time to leave.
I emerge from my room, purse over my shoulder.
“Thank God, he can see you today?” my mother asks. “Busy man like that, too. I’m so relieved. Did you mention your father’s name? That probably got you right in.”
“He doesn’t have the great power you think he does.”
“You haven’t even met him yet.”
I mean my father, but I don’t bother to correct her. Even after all these years, she’s still—ha—wedded to the idea that he has some magical abilities that she no longer has access to. I weigh my options. To tell, or not to tell? Someone should know where I’m going. I don’t know why, it just seems someone should know my whereabouts.
“I’m not seeing Frank Lazario, Mom.”
“Don’t tell me you called that lawyer from your divorce. Don’t you remember? They had her yacht in the Sunday home section of The Seattle Times. No wonder that bill was big enough to bury you. You paid for those oak captain’s chairs.”
“Ma, I’m going to see Mary.” And then, in answer to her stunned face, I walk out the door and shut it hard.
The sun is out, and it’s one of those hot spring days that appear out of nowhere. Spring is fickle; spring cannot make up its temperamental mind. It is no day for long pants. I see that now, too late. The heat has gathered in the car, and the seat is warm on the back of my legs. My tendency toward self-sabotage is increasingly revealing itself—I back out of my parking spot and notice a small pool of brown liquid that the car has left behind. That, and now the engine (I guess it’s the engine; what do I know about this stuff?) clunks when I shift into drive. The humming and buzzing have also gotten worse. With my window rolled down for a little cool air, I hear it loudly. I’m going to have to drive over the bridge in this precarious condition. Please, Blue, I pray. Please don’t stop on 520. I’ve always felt terrible for those poor people, the ones whose cars give up right on that two-lane stretch over Lake Washington, causing backups for miles. What betrayal, and what a mess; I’d feel awful if it were me. But now it’s not the inconvenience I’d cause other people that I’m worrying about. No, I’d take that problem anytime over the trouble I’m in.
I wonder if Detective Jackson has found that letter yet. Is that why he wants Ian’s car?
I can’t afford any holdups. I need to get to Mary’s as quickly as possible. The walls are closing in on me; I feel it happening. The computers, the car … Mary might have information about where Ian is, and, dear God, I need information. She wouldn’t keep things from her frantic daughters, would she? Yet who can say what confidences people keep for their own reasons. Someone knows what happened. Someone knows where Ian is. Someone has to know. In my heart, I feel Adam is right. People don’t just disappear.
I steer with one hand and, with the other, I punch button number one on my phone. I imagine a police car pulling me over for cellphone use. I feel a bit hysterical at the idea of it—it would be one of those arrests you see on television, where they pull over a guy who’s speeding and find a dead body in his trunk. Bad driving in the wake of my husband’s disappearance would speak to my guilt, even if the only rules I’d broken before were minor traffic laws and major marital ones. I stole a library book once. I was too embarrassed to check it out. It was about battered women in the suburbs. Previously, I’d always believed that librarians would be the kind of people I’d love to have as friends. They were smart, open, and well-read. Understanding, definitely. But the folks behind counters can know more about you than you’re comfortable with. Librarians, receptionists in doctors’ offices, the ladies who work at Rite Aid. The people behind counters know your secrets.
You’ve reached Ian Keller. Please leave a message …
We’ve become adversaries, that voice and I. It’s infuriating, the way he doesn’t answer. We’re matching wits. One of us will do the other in first, and it’s going to happen soon. There are pigments in a caterpillar’s blood that allows it to understand days and hours and minutes. It knows when the light is dimming and the days are growing shorter. It knows when it’s time to hurry and find a safe place in which to protect itself.
Where are you? Goddamn it, Ian! Speak to me!
Not everything about me is your business.
He isn’t dead. I am trying to remain adamant about that. I keep coming back to the same question. I would know it if he were dead, wouldn’t I? I would feel it; people say they do. I’m supposed to be sure, damn it. Mary will be sure.
He can’t be dead! He isn’t. But fear may be clouding my sense of certainty. That’s what it does, right? Fear stands in front of the truth like an armed guard.
Except that my armed guard—he’s becoming unreliable. He’s put down his weapon over the last few days, gone off to have a smoke. Truth (was it truth?) is trying to sneak past. Truth is insistent, persistent. There’ve been these disturbing gaps in my memory, but images are forcing their way in, images that twist and tangle with logic. Those damn pills, that wine. My feet were muddy, but I had been on that wet grass. In the dream, though, my bare feet are on the ground. My hands are shoving against his chest.
I reach for my purse on the seat beside me. I glance at the purse, the road, the purse, the road. The last thing I need is to get into some accident. I feel around inside the zippered pocket. That cuff link. He’d wanted so badly to go back and find it. Why? It was a gift. It had to be. You don’t care that much about something you bought at Macy’s.
Wait. Where is it? The pocket is empty. I search around in there, beginning to panic. My hand makes contact with my wallet, my hairbrush, a folded compact whose mirror came unglued long ago. A package of mint gum, a folded grocery list. The purse, the road—oh, shit! I slam on my brakes. My fender is a mere inch from the stopped car in front of me. The driver’s eyes glare from the rearview mirror. I send profuse mental apologies. The cars have slowed down. We are sitting in traffic now, and I’m going to be late.
A pen, its separated cap, a lipstick—where, where, where? My fingers find some loose change covered in a layer of something sticky. Ah, okay. The smooth jade and gold of that cuff link. Relief. The cuff link is a key in every definition of the word: a clue, but also an object that unlocks a door and sets you free. Someone gave him that cuff link, and that someone was important enough for him to disappear for. It’s the last theory I’ve got. If not that, then something else happened. Something horrible. I can’t think about that.
I switch my gaze; now the game is clock-traffic. I hate being late. I get crazy anxious when I’m late, even in my regular life. It’s that profound sense of responsibility again. Or, wait. Maybe it’s not that at all. Maybe I’m just too much of a coward to face another person’s anger. This suddenly occurs to me. It’s a revelation, right there on the 520 bridge. All this time, I’ve both faulted and congratulated my ultra-responsible self. But she hasn’t been as accountable and organized and respectful as I liked to think, has she? She’s only been afraid.
Hurry, I plead with the cars. I am dying of heat, beginning to sweat badly. She will see the sweat marks. I roll up my window and try the air conditioner, which hasn’t worked well since old Blue was a baby. We inch along, and then, without explanation for the holdup, the traffic loosens and we’re moving again. Finally, I’m over the bridge and heading toward the mountain foothills. Even though I’d been out this direction to meet Bethy and Kristen not two days before, this is different. This time I have to drive in to my old neighborhood, past the street where my former house is. Past the swimming pool, and the park where Abby played baseball. Past the elementary school where Abby went. There is a memory on every corner. We rode our bikes there; we had a Mother’s Day picnic there. We have a picture of Abby in her plaid skirt in front of that JFK ELEMENTARY sign; she’s holding her Princess Jasmine backpack on the first day of kindergarten.
I feel a distinct pull when I arrive at my former street. I want to turn and settle into that driveway. I want to unpack some groceries, head up to my old bedroom, and get my cozy clothes on. There’d been the comfort of routine and familiarity in that place, home. But the sick heaviness in my stomach is conveying mixed feelings; it reminds me of the bad memories, too—the raised fists, the anger, the devastation of divorce, and that fax machine by the burbling aquarium, all long gone. Someone else lives there now. Who knows what’s in the corner where the aquarium was. Still, the rosebushes out front are ones I planted. I put the bulbs into that ground. Those are my flowers that come up year after year, even though I’m not there anymore.
I don’t turn. There’s no time for sentimental forays. Besides, it would be too painful to see the house, or to happen upon an old neighbor who still lives there, whose life hasn’t changed like mine has. I go on, toward Mary’s house. Ian and Mary’s house. It looks different. The trees have grown. After living in the city, it seems like the lawns here have gotten wider, the road, too. But these houses are showing their age. The paint colors and the tall, arched brick entryways are almost from another era, when every garage had room for three cars and every bathroom had two sinks. The enormous faux-cement pots from Costco are faded. The tan trim of the windows looks dated.
It’s the same driveway, though. So many things change and don’t change. Mark had driven up this curve of cement with me as his wife in the passenger seat, a much younger Abby in the back. It had been filled with cars for that party. A badminton net had been stuck in the grass. But today there is only a sprinkler attached to a garden hose set in the center of the lawn. On this warm day, the hose might burn a snake shape into the lawn. Ian would have hated that. I know that about him now, but I never would have guessed it about him the day we first pulled up that drive.
I turn my engine off. My phone is in my lap, and so I return it to my purse. I notice ink on my fingers. There was that pen without a cap, and I’d marked myself with several frenzied lines of blue.
The door has a big gold knocker in the shape of a family crest. It looks intimidating, as door knockers generally do. Using it would be a particular kind of bold move, a statement, versus the polite, less-intrusive song of the doorbell. I ring the bell. I hear a dog go crazy, barking, running toward the door full speed. I hear toenails sliding on wood. I didn’t know Mary got a dog. Yes, there he is. I can see his fluffy white face appearing and disappearing in the glass of the side window as he jumps up and down. He’s letting me know he has things handled in this place.
“Shush, shush, shush,” I hear Mary say, and the door opens.
Mary. She looks different than I remembered. Her face is plain; she’d grown prettier in my imagination over the years. She’s gained weight. The boobs that had been a focus of so much attention don’t seem sexual anymore, only heavy and ancillary. She wears a violet velour jogging suit and a pair of jeweled sandals. I’m not the only one who is mismatched with the weather.
We’d never spoken after their divorce. Not once. And yet she and I have a relationship that’s as full and complex as the one I have with Ian. She’s been in my head and in his over the years, and she’s hovered over our relationship, steadfast and vengeful, a devoted ghost. But here she is, a regular woman in the flesh, too, with flashing eyes and with her dog under one arm now.
“So annoying.” I think she means me, until she squeezes the dog closer to her. She steps aside to let me in. “It’s cooler in here,” she said. “We’ve added air-conditioning.”
“You got a dog, too.” It’s an inane comment on my part, yet the dog surprises me. We haven’t spoken in years, but I know so much about her. I know that she looked at a million swatches before she had her couch reupholstered and that her mother had gall bladder surgery last year. I know that she was a virgin when she married Ian and that she’s afraid of deep water.
“Ken says he curses the day I brought her home. Sophie,” she croons. “Be a good, quiet girl.” She sets the dog on the floor. Sophie jumps up and sniffs my pant legs intently, getting to know Pollux in his absence. They’ve never met, but I’m sure she knows plenty about him now. “He says he doesn’t even like dogs, but he treats her like his little baby.”
Ken. The mention of him so soon—I wonder what it means. Honestly, in all my imaginings, I haven’t given Ken that much thought. He’s Mary’s longtime boyfriend, but they’ve never married. He’d be easily shoved aside, I’ve always assumed, if Ian chose to come home. Ian is the lost prize; Ken is someone to go to the movies with.
Mary brushes white dog hair from her velvety top. “Look at this,” she says. “What a mess.” I follow her past the formal living room, which looks somber and unused—beige carpet, beige brocade couch, beige brocade chairs; a new crystal chandelier that Ian would despise for its drippy excess. Ian and I sat on the floor in that room long ago, listening to his music as the party went on outside. Oh, I don’t belong here. It’s the house of my rival, and now, inside, all her private details are available to me. They feel embarrassing. Stepping over the threshold seems as wrong as looking in her underwear drawer.
Mary makes her way through the kitchen and into the adjoining family room. She’s rearranged the furniture and has painted the room a new color, an unsettling deep olive. That’s another thing you do after divorce: You paint. You rearrange the bookshelves or get new ones. You hope Bermuda Pink in the bedroom or Courtyard Green in the bath will cover over the history there. Fresh paint can smell like a fresh start, and he’d have never agreed to Bermuda Pink, so it’s all you, powerful you, the master of your home and your destiny. I did it myself. Haystack Yellow in our bedroom.
Mary gestures to the large leather couch that bends into an L-shape. It’s huge enough for any Super Bowl party. The television in front of me is the size of a billboard. Why is everything so large in the suburbs? On the coffee table, there’s the television guide that came in the Sunday paper, and a box of cheese crackers. The box of cheese crackers is so big, it could feed a tribal village. There’s a hairy dog bed in the corner of the room, several dog toys strewn about, and on the side table, an enormous picture of Bethy in her senior year. Her face glows and she looks upward as if pondering her bright future. Someone made pancakes this morning. The smell of them lingers, and I can see the handle of the pan sticking up from the sink.
I try to imagine Ian here. Even though I have memories of him in this room, I can’t for the life of me see him here now.
I sit, but Mary remains standing. She folds her arms in front of her. The niceties of weather and dogs are gone. I’m trapped in the plush leather folds of that couch. I might need help getting out. For years she’s likely wished to have me cornered. I’m sure she’d love to give me a piece of her mind, and I wouldn’t blame her if she did. I’m not afraid, though. More, the purple velour and the Super Bowl couch make me feel a sadness I can’t name, and the jeweled sandals hit me with a guilt I always knew I had but never comprehended the depths of. I wait. I wish for and dread what she might say. It’s coming—information about Ian that even Bethy and Kristen don’t have.
But Mary only stands there with the angry folded arms and glaring eyes of a vice principal dealing with a disrespectful ninth-grader.
“Mary …” Where to go from here?
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I thought you might know something,” I venture. It’s weak. Pathetic. I am hating that weakness more and more.
“Well, I don’t. This sounds like a personal problem between you and him.”
I weigh this. Would she keep his secrets? Certainly she’d want me to suffer as she had. Why would she tell me if she knew where he was? “He’s been gone over a week, Mary. I’m worried sick. I’m trying everything, everyone.… I think we might need to go public.”
She shrugs. “Do what you want. Maybe he just needs time to think.”
Standing over me like that, she seems huge. In my head, she’s always towered over both of us. “Has he …” I can’t say it. Has he talked to you? Come to you for friendship, or more?
Her laugh is scornful. “You think I know something you don’t? Is that what this is about? Because I don’t know him anymore. I don’t know what’s in his head! I haven’t known for years. Ever since he started up with you. And, in case you haven’t figured this out yet, he’s your problem now.”
“I deserve that.”
“You deserve at least that.”
I want to apologize. I’ve wanted to apologize for years. But it’s not the time. The purple velour and the folded arms and the blazing eyes tell me it’ll likely never be the time.
“I was under the impression that you soul mates would never even have marital problems like us regular people.”
“Mary …” It was a mistake to come. She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t know one damn thing about where he is, either.
She marches across the room. She places her palms flat on the kitchen counter, faces me down. “You’re not exactly the person I want to have in my home.”
My home—the pronoun sets a fence around the word. My home, my marriage, my husband, my child—the verbal equivalents of those medieval villages set on high rock pinnacles. They kept invaders out that way. “I’m sure I’m not.”
“Hardly the person.”
“I wouldn’t have come unless I had to.”
She shrugs again, rolls her eyes dramatically. So? I should never have come, never, never, never. The wrongness landslides. I can’t picture him here, not at all. I try to imagine him standing beside her, putting his arms around her, the two of them entwined in bed together, and I can’t see it. They were mismatched, terribly. It is so clear. Another great irony: You find your soul mate, you go through hell to be together, and then, every day afterward, you doubt it’ll last.
She doesn’t even know me, he’d said so long ago. She doesn’t know who I am. It’s not my house. It’s not even my life.
The dried-flower arrangement in a large basket on the kitchen table, the tall faux-gold candlesticks meant to look like they’d come from an Italian villa—it isn’t his life. Not then, and certainly not anymore.
“What is it you want from me? What else?”
I have to know this, anyway. “My mother. She said she saw the two of you in that restaurant. The day before he went missing.”
Mary is back in the family room again. She is smiling, nodding her head, pleased. It’s the kind of bitter pleasure you get when you realize you’ve been right all along. “He didn’t tell you about it himself.” She sits down in the matching leather lounge chair across from me. She stares at me with her blue eyes. Pretty blue eyes, I notice. Lovely, really. Ian said that he had fallen in love with her because he’d been especially lonely at that time in his life. She was social and vibrant, Catholic like his mother, a virgin. But he might have fallen in love with those eyes, too.
“No. He didn’t tell me.”
“Well, isn’t that rich.”
I trace the threads on the leg of my jeans with my fingernail. Up, down, in a small square of the tight, intricate weave. The regret and the guilt and the anger all merge into shame.
“Wait,” she says.
I look up. The dog has curled up on her bed, and now she watches the proceedings as if they’re a salacious but slightly tedious episode of some real-life courtroom trial on television. Mary had loved those shows, I remember. It was one of Ian’s complaints, the way she spent her days. He judged. He still judges.
“I get it now. I get why you’re here. You don’t just think I have information. You think I’m the reason he left.” She is laughing. “Ian! Come downstairs!” she calls. “Let’s break the news to her!” Her voice rises with sarcasm. She tosses her head in disgust. On her bed, Sophie scratches vigorously with one small hind leg. “This is too much, you know that? We met because I asked to meet. I didn’t want him to hear it from the girls. It seemed only right that it should come from me. You two didn’t give me that courtesy.”
She holds up her left hand to show me the ring.
“Ken and I are getting married.”
I’m shocked. This is a complete surprise. Somehow I thought we’d sit in our triangle for the rest of our lives—Mary wanting Ian, me wanting Ian, Ian in some state of perpetual indecision no matter what roof he was under. I thought the story would go on forever.
“I wanted to tell him personally. Don’t you think that’s the respectful thing to do? We were married for seventeen years. We have children.”
“Yes.”
“Ken is a good man.”
“I’m glad.” I mean that. I am glad. But had this contributed to Ian’s disappearance? Maybe he’d been destroyed by the news. First Nathan’s offer, and then Mary’s terrible announcement? I’d always had the feeling that Ian thought of Mary as his backup plan. She was there in his old house, patiently waiting for the moment when he’d had enough. She’d open the door and welcome him home with his favorite meal on the table.
She answers the question I haven’t asked. “He wasn’t bothered in the least. I don’t know what I was expecting—maybe a slight show of emotion? It was like sitting with a stranger, and I’ve known him since I was eighteen. He seemed relieved. For so many years, in the beginning, anyway, he’d acted so jealous, he couldn’t stand it if anyone even looked in my direction, and now he couldn’t care less. I’m getting married and, big deal, so what.”
Jealous? Mary at those parties, playing with Mark’s tie, flirting with Neal and the other men—Ian hadn’t appeared to be bothered at all. He hadn’t even flinched. It never occurred to me that he’d been jealous with her, too. It had never even crossed my mind.
“He said he was happy for me. And you know what? I think he was.”
I hear the rumble of a garage door going up. “That’s Ken now,” she says. “He comes home every day at lunch to see me.”
Ken barrels through the garage door, carrying bags. “Sweetie pie!” he calls. “I’m home!” He’s a big man, with hair combed over his head and a stomach that presses out like a basketball against his buttoned shirt. I know things about him, too, even though we’ve never met, things dropped into the conversation by Bethy or Kristen. He has season tickets to the Husky games. His own son has a drug problem. He loves hot wings and blue cheese dressing. He once thought he was having a coronary and went to the emergency room, only to find out that it was an anxiety attack.
I saw a picture of him once. He was on a boat with Bethy, on a trip they’d taken to Lake Chelan. His bathing suit has a blue Hawaiian print.
He takes the six-pack of beer from the bag and sets it down on the kitchen table before he notices me. Ian bought that kitchen table. And those bar stools. And that Sub Zero refrigerator.
“Ah! Hello there! Three for lunch?” Ken says jovially. Mary was right. Sophie is jumping on Ken like he’s a soldier returning home unharmed from the war, and he picks her up and nuzzles her. The joy-filled reunion is a mutual affair.
“This is Ian’s wife,” Mary says.
Ken freezes dramatically, for effect. He’s acting out the stage direction that says, Ken freezes in his tracks. He sets Sophie back down; she continues to jump around, wondering where the love has gone. “Well, damn. I need one of these, then.” You can tell by the hard, round ball of his stomach that any excuse will do. How lucky that I’ve provided such a solid one. He twists the cap of one of the beers, takes a swig. “Damn.”
“I had to tell her that we don’t have Ian hidden in the bedroom.”
“For the record, that guy’s not going near our bedroom. If he’s not dead in a ditch somewhere, then he’s a sick bastard to let his daughters worry like this.”
In my head, the teams are changing fast. Ian is still mine to defend. “We don’t know what’s happened. Anything could’ve—”
Mary interrupts me. “ ‘Anything’? I don’t believe ‘anything.’ He wouldn’t have had some accident. That would involve making a mistake, and Ian doesn’t make mistakes, in his view.” She takes one of the beers and hands it to Ken. He twists off the cap for her and hands it back. “All I know is, they’re going to have a lot of questions for the person who saw him last.”
I know what she’s implying. They’ve all obviously had their little powwows. I’m done here, in this place that’s no longer Ian’s. I get up. I reach for my purse.
“I hope he comes back, really I do. For my daughters’ sake. But I have to tell you something.” She points her finger at me in case I’m confused about who’s being addressed. “You’ve looked at me with pity? Don’t. You did me a favor. Here’s one reason, right here.” I think she means Ken. I’m expecting her to wrap her arms around his big tight belly, but instead she flicks the handle of that pan in the sink. “I can keep this pan in this sink for however long I like and it’s not saying anything about the kind of person I am. See this?” She plucks her shirt again. “He hated me in purple.”
“Purple brings out your eyes,” Ken, ever the ass kisser, says.
Mary ignores him. “Freedom,” she says.
I’m silent. I think it for the millionth time, I do: I admire her courage.
“I’ll show you out.”
I can hear Ken in the kitchen, crooning lovey-dog talk to Sophie. I’ve forgotten something. I reach into my purse. “I’m sorry. But …” I hold the cuff link in my palm. It’s a question.
“He still has those?” she asks.
“From you?”
“From me? I hope I have better taste than that. They were from his father. Given on Ian’s eighteenth birthday. Paul had a pair just like them. Congratulations, you’re a man like me. What, is he wearing them now? He never wore them when the guy was alive.”
His father—this was why they were so important?
“The great Paul Hartley Keller,” Mary says.
Mary opens the door for me. We look at each other for a moment. She glances down at my hands. One holds the cuff link, and the other has the frantic lines of ink from my uncapped pen. There’s so much to say. I want to pour out my regrets and apologies for the pain I’ve caused her. I open my mouth to speak, but she gets there before me.
“All this time, I thought you were so powerful,” she says.
She closes the door on me and my unfinished business. Through the porch window, I see her figure disappear into the kitchen to join Ken and Sophie. Some things are too big for naïve, tidy apologies.
And then, as I hunt for my keys and get in my car, I think of something I haven’t thought about in years. That time when we went for drinks after that concert, Mark and me and Ian and Mary and those other two couples. Mary had been laughing and telling that story about how she’d damaged their car. You’re careless, Ian had said to her, and I’d felt embarrassed for her, and guilty. It was cruel of him.
I had thought it was who he was inside an unhappy marriage. But it was who he was, period.
I remember something Dr. Shana Berg once told me, that a person generally brings their same self wherever they go. They bring that self to their coworkers and neighbors and to the man who works at the bank and to the guy in front of them who is still sitting at the light when it turns green. They bring that self to every girlfriend and every pet and every wife.
I unlock my car door and toss my purse to the passenger seat. It still has that damn cuff link inside. All at once, I am overwhelmed with sorrow—for Mary, for me, for our children. But maybe most of all for Ian himself. Maybe there was nowhere, no home, this one or ours, where he could be at peace.
I am overwhelmed with sorrow, but I am also something else. Something terrifying.
I am out of options.