A Song in the Daylight (54 page)

“I’m taking a few days off work while I figure it out. I’ll drive you. Maggie said she will come and help us. I’m sure your mom will come back any minute. But you’re going to have to help me, Em. I haven’t done this. I don’t know when or how or where. And please—don’t expect me to remember. Because I won’t. Just write it down on a piece of paper. Stick it into my hand. Tape it to my car keys. Do whatever it takes.”

“When are you going to go back to work?”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“But, Dad…don’t you need to get paid?”

He almost smiled. “Maybe they’ll pay me anyway. I’ve been working so hard.”

“Don’t use up all your vacation time,” Emily said wisely, like a miniature Larissa. “We want to go to Lillypond.”

It’s remarkable what happens when your heart is no longer attached to anything else in your body. Things you never thought you could say, you say. Things you never thought you could hear, you hear. Things you never thought you could do, you do. As if you’re walking through a darkened museum of
a silent demonstration of someone else’s ancient life, and in the back of your mind, you’re always thinking, in one minute, I’ll be outside in the sun, and out of this black morass, and I can’t wait for that. Thank God this isn’t my life. That’s how Jared felt as he got up and kissed Emily good night and shut her door.

He called in sick on Tuesday, saying he had to deal with a personal matter. Just today? the CEO, Larry Fredoso, asked him.

Jared wanted to say till September. But he didn’t. “Let me have this week, Larry,” he asked. “Okay? A very serious personal matter. Then we’ll talk again.”

How
could
he go into work? He couldn’t even face the mirror to shave. In any case, Michelangelo needed to get to school by 8:10. Jared didn’t even know where the school was. He had to look up the address on Mapquest.

“Mom doesn’t drop me off here, Dad,” said Michelangelo, peering out the Lexus window. “She parks the car on the road up here, then walks me down.”

“She doesn’t just let you out of the car?”

“No, Dad.” The boy sighed.

So Jared parked the car up on the hill and walked Michelangelo down to the school. “Not these doors, Dad.”

“But all the kids are going through those doors.”

“Those are the kindergarteners. Sheesh. What grade am I in?”

And Jared didn’t know. “First?”

“Dad! Second.”

“Of course. I knew that. Sorry, bud. You’re my little buddy. I can’t believe you’re in second grade already.”

“Only for one more month, and then I’m in third.”

“Wow.” He brought him to the correct doors. Michelangelo waited. Jared looked at his son. “What?”

“Mom always kisses me.”

“Oh.” Jared bent down and kissed his son’s curly head. “Bye. Have a good day.”

“You, too.” Michelangelo waved without turning around. “Don’t forget to come get me at 2:40 sharp.”

“I won’t.”

“Don’t be late.”

“I won’t.”

And afterward? He couldn’t go back to his empty home. Couldn’t face the house, couldn’t face work.

He drove to Kavanagh’s office in Madison. He passed by the Stop&Shop, remembered the sushi, became physically distressed, drove trembling through the little town, past the college on the left, forked to the right onto Park Avenue and pulled once again into the empty parking lot of a small white house before St. Elizabeth College. The doctor wasn’t in. Jared opened his windows, and sat waiting.

From the parking lot he could see the road and the passing cars; they hypnotized him, the cars one after another, motorcycles, buses, zooming past, thirty, twenty, forty-five miles an hour, it was a Tuesday morning, windy, rustling green, almost June, and the road was provincial, yet busy, and so he sat and thought about nothing, and everything. The Ferris wheel at the local fair, where he let Larissa and Michelangelo ride by themselves while he stood at the bottom and waved each time they swerved past, and the flan Ernestina brought to his house that Larissa left for him because she knew how much he liked flan, and the color of the Jaguar in his garage, like the color of her hair, subdued and elegant, flashy in an understated way. Like her. Busboys clanging their dishes at the Summit Diner, dropping his grilled cheese sandwich last time he needed to have the inspection on his truck and he went and waited, thinking ahead to the evening, to dinner. It had been warm, and the summer was coming, and the birds were loud. Almost like now.

Were straitjackets always white? Did they pin your arms behind your back so you didn’t hurt yourself—and them? Did
you spend 28 days in the sterile bin, or did you stay there until someone else other than you decided you could leave? And who decided? And who decided if you should be committed in the first place?

When he first met her, she was the hippest chick on campus. She wore her hair long and brown, she wore no makeup but very short dresses and her legs stretched abundantly like flamingo pins, she was natural, yet complex, the sight of her made him want to quote Byron in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon.
She walks in beauty, like the night, of cloudless climes and starry skies
.

She draped over student union sofas drinking ceaseless cups of black coffee as she presided over the Footlight Players. Her face gleaming, she was tyranny with a smile. She told them what to do, how to play it, what to say, and they did it, they said it. They followed her blindly, listened to her agape. Whenever she was indoors she was always barefoot, she said she liked to feel the ground under her feet, and he wondered how she kept her soles clean, but when they started dating and he asked her about it, she stared at him squarely and said, “I wash them. How do you keep
your
soles clean?”

“I wear socks,” he said.

He pulls into a gas station, and pulls out a gun. With heavy gasps he robs the till and runs and then is chased the rest of his days by the toothless man who exacts revenge in the form of paranoid, drug-fueled terror.

Was that a movie? A nightmare? Was that his life?

Was this his life?

Now he counted cars that flew by, none of them stopping here. Was Larissa in one of those cars? Not in her own, but in another car?

Another’s car?

Everyone is the star of his own life. But she was the star of everyone’s life.

She was easy on the heart, on the eyes. She was the hitchhiker with the contagious laugh. She got into the car of his life and rode with him, and just as suddenly got out, flashing her breasts and her whites and was gone.

Was she the side show?

Was he the side show?

Memories like acid.

Ten o’clock, eleven.

At noon, a large gray Mercedes pulled in and a wizened bird of a woman got out. By the time Jared slowly scrambled out of his truck he felt he was not the same person who had opened the windows three hours earlier.

Warily she looked at him heading over to her in the parking lot. “Can I help you?”

“I don’t know,” Jared said. “I’ve been calling you non-stop since Saturday. I said it was an emergency.”

“I’m terribly sorry, I was away on a few days’ vacation. Is everything all right?” She frowned at him. “Who are you?”

“I’m Larissa’s husband,” Jared said, watching her face intensely. It was almost poker-like. Except for the three quick blinks, a zeroing in on him, a honing in, a sharpening of the wrinkled features, a breath before she spoke.

“What’s happened?”

“She’s vanished,” said Jared. “She didn’t pick up our youngest child from school on Friday. She wasn’t there in the afternoon. She hasn’t been home since.”

Kavanagh was still clutching her purse. She slammed her car door. “Did she leave a note?”

“What kind of note?” said Jared. “She could be lying dead in a ditch after a brain hemorrhage. What kind of note do you leave for that?”

Jared hoped that she took pity, because after a brief
pitying
glance at his wretched face, she said, “Come with me. Come inside.”

“Do you know where she is?” Jared said in the parking lot. “I don’t want to come inside, because I’m afraid you’re taking me inside to tell me to sit down, and I don’t want to sit down.”

“You’re very perceptive as to my motives,” said Kavanagh. Was it Jared’s twisted imagination or did she place just a little too much unnecessary emphasis on the
my
in that sentence? “My next patient is not till one. I thought we could talk for a few minutes.”

“Why can’t you just tell me where she is?”

“I don’t know where she is, Mr. Stark.”

“Then why would I want to come inside?”

“You wouldn’t,” she said, nodding slightly. “But it’s hot, and I’m not as young as I used to be. I’m sixty-seven, and not much of a fan for standing in the heat. I get easily winded, easily exhausted, and I have a full day today. I want to be fresh. By all means, don’t come in. I hope the rest of your day will be better. I’m sorry about Larissa.”

She started to walk toward the door of her office building. Jared followed her. “You don’t think she is dead? Why don’t you think so?”

“Mr. Stark,” said a no-nonsense Kavanagh, her gravel voice hardening, “either come inside with me so we can talk, or have a good day. But don’t engage me when I’ve asked you not to engage me.”

Reluctantly he followed her inside, and she walked straight, without turning around, almost as if she knew he would.

The office hadn’t been aired in days. It was stuffy, musty. The central air had been turned down to a minimum. Already shallowly breathing, Jared felt like he was suffocating.
Actually
suffocating. His chest was tight. He asked Kavanagh to open the windows. She started to protest about the AC, but then saw him gasping and relented. He stuck his head outside, to gulp the air.

“What’s happened?” he asked dully, straightening up.

She put down her purse, took off her light gray jacket, cleaned her gray-rimmed glasses, tiny like the rest of her, and sat down, scrunching up into a small hard pretzel. She said nothing.

“What, you can’t talk to me?”

“No, I can.”

“Is this about some doctor-client privilege?”

Kavanagh smirked. “A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, Mr. Stark,” she said. “No, this isn’t about some doctor-client privilege. First of all, this isn’t a court of law and you are not the Feds. I assume and presume a crime has not been committed, but even if it was and you were and a crime had been, there is no doctor-client privilege in the United States. Marital privacy, yes. But no doctor-client privilege exists for my legal protection, or for Larissa’s.”

“So why are you reluctant to speak to me then?”

“I’m not reluctant,” she said. And nothing else!

“Do you think she is dead?”

“Anything is possible,” said Kavanagh. “But I don’t think she is, no.”

“So where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is there
anything
you can tell me? Besides I don’t know?”

“Is there anything you can tell
me
?”

“I don’t know anything! I came home Friday, and she was gone!”

“What did she take with her?”

“Nothing. Not a thing. Not even her car, not her purse. Nothing.”

“Money?”

“No, no money. She didn’t carry cash on her, and no unusual amounts of cash left our account in the last few days, few weeks.” Jared held on to the narrow windowsill, shallow of breath. “You’re asking about the money because you think she
was planning to go?” he asked weakly. “But she took nothing with her!” He didn’t—or couldn’t—ask the follow-up question.
Why would she go? Why would she want to?

Why did Jared, with his limited perception, his bewildered mind and exhausted body still feel that this expressionless woman knew things she didn’t want to tell him?

“She’s been coming to you for months. She never told me why she needed to come. She just said she needed to talk to someone, and I accepted it without argument, without too much worry. She said she wanted her head clear. There was a day in February when she seemed to have trouble coping with things. She said she felt anxiety, sometimes got depressed. It seemed normal.”

“
Did
she seem normal, Mr. Stark?”

Jared intertwined his fingers in a knotted twist. “Doctor, I beg you, don’t analyze me in hindsight. Don’t get me to discover what I clearly have not discovered. Just tell me what I need to know. I can’t play these games. Can’t and don’t want to. I just want to know what’s happened in my life. Friday at four o’clock it was one way, and one hour later it was another. What’s happened?”

“Only in your perception, Mr. Stark,” said Kavanagh, “has the change been that sudden. I assure you, your wife’s miseries have been continuing for some time.”

“What miseries?” he cried.

Kavanagh said nothing.

“You don’t want to tell me?”

“I don’t,” she admitted.

“But she’s vanished!”

“I can see,” Kavanagh said, fighting for her words, “that this is deeply upsetting to you and—”

“Please—don’t euphemize what I’m feeling,” Jared said. “Don’t cover up my agony with your psychospeak. Just tell me. What? Was she suicidal? Was she having an affair?”

“Yes,” said Kavanagh. Like a slap.

It was almost as if he had been expecting it. When the blood rushes away from the heart and the lungs, it’s easy to remain sanguine, because you’ve got no life to react with.

“She was?”

“She was.”

“Is that what this is all about?”

“I suspect that since she’s not in your home, it might be.”

“So she, without saying anything to me or to the children, just up and left without so much as taking her purse?”

“That gives me hope that perhaps she hasn’t gone far,” said Kavanagh.

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What, she spoke to you about it, but never gave you any details?”

“It was some man she had met.”

“Met where?”

“Perhaps on her daily errands?”

“What man, what errands?” Jared was still by the window, grasping the sill with his bloodless hands. “This isn’t what happens,” he whispered. “This is
not
what happens. There’s a confession. A revelation. The spouse begs forgiveness. The husband is loathe to give it. There may be a separation, followed by counseling. There are reparations, a period of mutual gloom, a blackness in the house. Everything seems pointless. They decide whether it’s worth staying together. Many times they decide it is. They try to work it out. What has happened here that is so far from that truth?”