Clouded Vision (2 page)

Two

Wendell

‘So, what are you telling me, that there’s been nothing, nothing at all?’ Wendell Garfield said into the phone. ‘I thought, I really thought someone … Well, if you hear anything, anything at
all
, please, please call me. I’m desperate for any kind of news.’

He replaced the receiver in its cradle. He had decided, when he got up that morning, that he would call the police first thing. He would ask whether the news conference that he and his daughter had done yesterday had produced any useful tip offs.

The officer he’d just spoken to was not the one in charge of the investigation, but he claimed to know what was happening. There had been only about half a dozen calls to the special hotline that the police had set up. None of them had been considered useful.

Garfield decided to make himself some tea, thinking it would help calm him. He hadn’t slept more than a few minutes overnight. He was trying to work out just how much sleep he’d had since Thursday, when this had all started. It was no more than five, six hours maybe. Melissa had probably had a little more than that, if only because the pregnancy made her so tired.

Garfield hadn’t wanted his daughter to be part of the press conference. He’d told the police he wasn’t sure she could handle the stress. She was seven months’ pregnant, and her mother was missing. Now they wanted her to be on the six o’clock news?

‘I don’t want to put her through that,’ he’d told the police.

Yet it was Melissa herself who insisted she appear alongside her father. ‘We’ll do it together, Dad,’ she told him. ‘Everyone needs to know we want Mom to be found and that we want her to come home.’

With some reluctance, he agreed, but only if he did all the talking. As it turned out, once the lights were on and the cameras were in their faces, Melissa went to pieces. She managed only to splutter, ‘Mommy, please come back to us,’ before she dissolved into tears and put her face into her father’s chest. Even he wasn’t able to say very much, just that they loved Ellie very much and wanted her to come home.

Then he made his appeal to anyone out there who might know anything to do with his wife’s disappearance. Please, tell us what’s happened. Send Ellie home to us.

And then he lost it, too.

He could hear murmurs among some of the news people, phrases like ‘good stuff’ and ‘perfect’ and ‘awesome’.

What disgusting human beings, Garfield thought.

He took Melissa home with him and tried to get her to eat something. ‘It’s going to be OK,’ he told her. ‘Everything’s going to be OK. We’ll get through this.’

She sat there at the kitchen table, her head nearly on the table. ‘Oh, Daddy …’

‘Trust me,’ he said.

She stayed overnight, but around six o’clock in the morning said she wanted to go back to her apartment across town. Garfield wasn’t so sure that was a good idea, but Melissa said she could handle it. She wasn’t going to stay there. She’d still come back later on and stay overnight in the room she used to live in. All the same, she needed some time by herself, to think. Melissa shared the apartment with her friend Olivia, but Olivia was away right now, visiting her parents in Denver.

Garfield was awake at six – he’d never been asleep – and said he would drive his daughter back to her place.

He parked in front of the apartment, which was actually the top floor of an old house with a separate entrance.

Garfield said, ‘Are you sure you’re going to be OK? Do you want me to wait?’

Melissa said, no.

Even though she was only nineteen, Melissa had been living away from home for three years. She was the first to admit she’d been a difficult teenager from the beginning. She drank, used drugs and slept around. She ignored the limits her parents attempted to set for her.

When she was sixteen, Ellie and Wendell decided they could take no more. They gave her a stark choice. She must live by the rules of their house, or get out.

She chose to get out.

Melissa found a place to live with Olivia. She dropped out of school and got a job as a waitress at Denny’s. It turned out that getting kicked out of her parents’ house was the best thing that had ever happened to her. It forced her to get her act together. She didn’t have anyone else to take care of her, so she had to take care of herself.

She started to become responsible. Whoever would have guessed?

Ellie and Wendell were quietly optimistic. Once Melissa got her head screwed on, they thought, she could go back and finish school. If she did well enough, she might even have a chance of going to college, Ellie mused one evening. Maybe she’d even think about becoming a vet. She reminded Wendell of how, when their daughter was little, she had said one day she’d love to work with animals and—

‘For God’s sake, Ellie, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Wendell said.

Melissa used to come over for dinner. Some of these get-togethers went better than others. One night, Melissa would tell them about how she was getting her life back on track. Her parents would nod and try to be encouraging. Yet on another night, Ellie, keen to see her daughter get her life back on track, would start pushing.

She’d tell her daughter it was time –
now
–to stop being ‘nothing more than a waitress’. Melissa should go back to school and make something of herself. Did Melissa have any idea just how embarrassing it was for her mother, an employee of the board of education, to have a daughter who was a dropout? Melissa hadn’t even finished her final year at school. How long was she expected to wait before seeing her daughter get on a path where she would amount to something?

Then they’d start fighting and Melissa would storm out. Before she did so, she would ask out loud how she’d managed to live in this house for so long without blowing her brains out.

It always took a few days for the dust to settle.

Ellie and Wendell still kept their fingers crossed that Melissa was growing up. She held on to her waitressing job. She was saving some money, even if not a lot. It was only about twenty-five dollars a week, but it was something. Then one day, when talking to her mother on the phone, Melissa happened to mention that she’d looked at a college website to see what grades you needed to enrol in the course to become a vet.

Ellie was beside herself with joy when she told Wendell the news.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she asked. ‘She’s growing up, that’s what she’s doing. She’s growing up and thinking about the future.’

What neither Ellie or Wendell had counted on was that the immediate future would include a baby.

Melissa was already three months’ pregnant when she broke the news to her parents. They did not, to say the least, take it well, but Wendell tried to find the silver lining. Maybe this meant Melissa would get married. She’d be a very young mother, but at least it would mean she had a man in her life, a man who could look after her. Wouldn’t that take some of the pressure off Ellie and him?

Then they found out about the man. It soon became clear that the only thing that might be worse than Melissa having this baby with no father on the scene would be having this baby
with
the father on the scene.

His name was Lester Cody. He was thirty years old and a regular customer at Denny’s. He’d never hung on to a job longer than three months, and none of them had ever paid a penny more than the minimum wage. He always ended up injured. He hurt his back, damaged his shoulder or sprained his ankle. Yet luckily, no matter how badly he might have gotten hurt, he could still play his Nintendo Wii. He lived in his parents’ basement and still had Spider-Man posters on his bedroom wall. His favourite hat was adorned with a plastic dog turd.

Ellie cried for the better part of a week before she was able to accept the situation. Her daughter was really going to have this child, she was not going to marry Lester Cody, and Ellie was going to become a grandmother.

This baby’s coming, she realised. There’s not a damn thing I can do about it. So, she took up her knitting again.

Sometimes, it was all more than Wendell Garfield could stand. There was tension between his wife and daughter, and Ellie wanted to have constant debates with him about what their girl was going to do with her life. Now, there was all this new talk about the baby. How would Melissa manage? Would she need to move back home? Would the man who got her pregnant step up to the plate and accept some responsibility?

The discussions never stopped.

Wendell Garfield wondered if all this had driven him into the arms of Laci Harmon. Perhaps it would have happened anyway.

Three

Wendell

Wendell and Laci both worked at the Home Depot hardware store, him primarily in plumbing, and her over in home lighting fixtures. They’d had coffee breaks together, talking about their families, the joys and – mostly – heartaches of raising kids. She had two boys aged fifteen and seventeen who did nothing but fight with one another. Laci confessed once, only half jokingly, that she wished they’d have one final free-for-all battle and kill each other.

Wendell laughed. He said he knew exactly how she felt.

He always found reasons to stroll through the lighting section.

Laci often seemed to be passing through the plumbing supplies aisle.

It started with friendly teasing, then comments with double meanings. When Laci wandered by, she’d narrow her eyes and say she needed help with her plumbing. When Garfield was over in light fixtures, he’d bump into Laci on purpose and say he wondered if she could help him keep his light switch in the up position.

It was all in fun.

One day Wendell had been asked to assemble, for display purposes, a vinyl-sided garden shed. He was inside the nearly finished structure, tightening up some bolts to make sure the thing wouldn’t blow down in the wind. Suddenly Laci Harmon stepped inside, slid the door shut behind her, and placed his right hand on her left breast.

It was a Thursday. That night, when Ellie was doing the weekly grocery shopping, Garfield slipped away from home and met Laci at a Day’s Inn hotel. They had been finding ways to get together once or twice a week since then, always in places that were nicer than a vinyl-sided garden shed, although not always by much. One of these places was Laci’s Dodge minivan, for example. Garfield longed for these moments away from home, away from the endless stresses that Ellie and Melissa provided.

*

He’d only just put down the phone from speaking with the police when it rang again.

‘Hello?’

‘Oh, Wen, I just had to get in touch.’

‘Laci, this isn’t a good time.’

‘But I can’t stop thinking about you, about what you must be going through,’ she said. She wasn’t whispering, which told Garfield that she was alone in her house.

‘Where are your husband and the boys?’ he asked her.

‘They’re out. It’s just me here,’ Laci said. ‘Wendell, you have to talk to me.’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Have they found out anything? Do the police know what happened? I saw the press conference. I watched it at six o’clock, and I watched it again at eleven. It was very moving. You were very good, if you know what I mean. You held it together really well. I think, if anyone knew anything, if they knew anything at all, they’d call the hotline if they saw your appeal.’

‘I was just speaking to the police,’ Garfield said. ‘They haven’t received any good tips.’

‘I feel … I feel so … It’s hard to explain,’ Laci said. ‘I feel guilty in a way, you know? Because of what we’ve been doing, behind her back.’

‘Those things don’t have anything to do with each other.’

‘I know that, but I keep thinking, what if someone finds out? What if someone finds out what’s going on between us? They might think it has something to do with what’s happened to Ellie. And if, God forbid, something has actually happened to Ellie, then how is it going to look if—’

‘Laci, please, don’t go there,’ he said. ‘Maybe she just decided to go away for a while, to clear her head.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘I don’t know what to think, but I suppose it’s a possibility. I mean, they haven’t found her car or anything. If something had happened to her around here, you’d think they’d have at least found her car. We’re into the third day now.’

‘So you think she just decided to drive away? To Florida or something?’

‘Laci, I don’t know,
OK
? I have no idea whatsoever.’

His tone stopped Laci for a second. ‘You don’t have to get angry with me.’

‘I’m going through a lot right now. I’m just trying to keep it together.’

‘How’s Melissa coping?’

‘Not so well.’

‘What about the man who got her pregnant? Is he still in the picture? Can he be there for Melissa at a time like this?’

‘She hasn’t heard from him. Honestly, I don’t think it would make things any easier for us if he was around.’

‘I was just— Oh my God, I just thought of something,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘The police aren’t tapping your phone, are they? They’re not listening in?’

He felt a chill run down his spine. Could they be? He could kick himself. It hadn’t even occurred to him until she mentioned it. He’d been doing such a good job, being the distraught husband. He hadn’t thought there was any reason for the police to be bugging his phone. Sure, he knew the cops would probably be looking at him sooner or later, but he didn’t believe he’d given any sign that he was in any way responsible for his wife’s disappearance.

‘I mean, if they hear us, and know we’ve been seeing each other, then—’

‘Hang up, Laci,’ he said.

‘—then they might think that you had something to do with it, you know, so that you could spend your life with me and—’

He slammed down the phone. If the police had been listening, the damage had been done. They’d know he’d been having an affair. They’d know he and Laci had been seeing each other for weeks now.

It was not good, not good at all.

Wendell was totally rattled. He tried to calm himself and tell himself he was going to get through this. He just needed to keep his wits about him. Even if the police found out he’d been sleeping with Laci, it didn’t have to mean he’d had anything to do with this business about his wife.

They hadn’t found a body or her car.

And he was as sure as he could be that they never would.

‘Pull yourself together,’ he told himself.

The doorbell rang.

Hell
, he thought. The cops really were listening to his phone. Now they wanted to question him about Laci, about whether he killed his wife to be with another woman.

He took a couple of deep breaths, composed himself, and strode through the living room to the front door. He pulled the curtain back first, to see who it was.

It was not the police. It was a woman, with green parrot earrings.