He's Gone (11 page)

My husband is gone
.

“God,” I say. “Ian.” I can hardly believe it. I just … It’s impossible.

“That stuff we drank probably didn’t help. My head feels full of fluff.” She rubs her eyes. “I can make you some breakfast. Pancakes?”

“We’ve got forty pounds of baked stuff. Banana bread …” That fact also comes rushing back.

“Cinnamon rolls, oatmeal–raisin cookies …” She counts on her fingers. “I need coffee.”

Pollux trots in at the sound of voices. He puts his paws up on the side of the bed, looks at me hard.

“Okay, I know,” I tell him.

I put on my robe. I grab my phone, which I’d placed next to my pillow the night before. Nathan Benjamin, that’s right. My stomach flips in dread. I’ll be meeting him that afternoon.

I don’t know why I do it, but after I get up, after I let Pollux out, I go to Ian’s closet. I run my hand across the row of colored dress shirts. I choose one and put my face to it, sniffing deeply. I don’t do it because I’m longing for the lost, missed scent of him. No. I know it’s crazy. But I’m wondering if I just might find the lingering smell of perfume.

After that first time I lied to Mark, Ian and I began to meet regularly. Oh, those were intoxicating days. I was elevated by love. I felt connected to all people and things, struck by our common humanity and the beauty of it. I’d see the moms and dads at Target buying stuff to play Easter Bunny, and it would feel so damn sweet. I’d go to the garden department of some store and I’d take it all in, the abundance of flowers, the fat bags of bark, us folks with our endlessly optimistic desire to grow things. I noticed the big and small all around me—the lovely curve of orange peels, the bittersweet tenderness of twilight. I wanted to be a better person, certainly better than the one I was being then.

Sometimes I would go to Ian. I’d drive to Seattle during the day, thirty minutes each way, for a half hour of being together in his car somewhere, away from the eyes of anyone he might know. Or he would come to me. We’d meet on his way home from work, at one of the wooded trailheads that surrounded our neighborhood, or at a park in the next town over, a dank, dark, and eerie place seldom used because it was dank, dark, and eerie. I usually got there before he did, checking my makeup in the visor mirror while I waited, sucking on mints, playing music especially chosen to evoke the feelings I most wanted to have then. I’d watch and watch for his car (a silver Audi, in those days), and then there it would come, oh, God, and he would park, and I could see through the windows that his jawline was somber and almost resigned until he leaned over the passenger seat to unlock the door and let me in.

It’s been days. It’s been too, too long
, he would say, and that’s exactly how it felt no matter how much time had passed. Eons. Slow, loud ticking clocks of days until our meetings, where the time would go so fast, you might become sure that some cruel, punishing time warp truly did exist. How could the very same minutes go so slow and then so fast? Scientific mystery. His car
was one of the few corners of his world I was allowed into, and I claimed it—
my
seat beside him. It sounds pathetic and insignificant, meeting in his car, but it was also oddly wonderful. The car was contained and protected from intrusion and from the complications and hazards of real life. A space small enough to be perfect. These were moments of time in a private, enclosed domain that belonged to only him and me. He would put a CD in, one of our favorites, and then he would lean in and we would kiss and kiss some more until my lips got numb. It was the sort of passion that could never fade, you were sure, that could never be lost among laundry and bills and the needs of children.

Just kissing, though. Always just that at first. See, it wasn’t an affair that was all about sex. (
Affair
—what a trivial word. It sounds like a party with frilly dresses.) No, it was the much more dangerous kind of relationship, the marriage-breaking kind about meeting your soul mate.

What if this is nothing more than lust?
he asked once. He asked a version of that question many more times still. And I would answer. I would give all the reasons, making an argument. I fought for it. The sinking ship was going under, under, under, and I was in the lifeboat and I was struggling to get him in there with me. I was grasping his hand and pulling more than my weight to haul him over the round rubber side of that small, perilous craft. He had swum there himself, though. He had pursued me. I shouldn’t forget that. I couldn’t have lifted him in without his desire to get in. Still. I had argued on our behalf.

You’re the one I should have always been with
, he would say, after my logic had softened his and brought him back to me.
I see a lifetime in your eyes
, he said once, too, a line I would have made fun of if I had heard it on TV but that choked me up in real life. He meant it. There were small acts of electrifying teenage romance, too: He would twirl my hair around his finger; he would
look long and deep into my eyes. I can feel his round, hard shoulders and the buttons of his shirt under my fingers as I write this. I can feel my own heartbeat. More music, more kissing, his hand at the back of my neck, pulling me to him with want. The damn parking brake.

And then a utility truck would arrive. Or something. Some guy on his lunch break, taking a sandwich out of a brown bag and looking our way with a lurid grin. The dream would shatter, and the trees of that park would suddenly loom, and the clock would be noticed with alarm. Ian would take a pinch of his shirt and sniff.
You didn’t wear perfume, did you? Not even hand lotion?
I would shove away the thought
—How did I get
here
?

He would kiss me goodbye. I would leave his car. He would roll down his window. He would mouth
You
.

I would sit inside my own car for a long while, old Blue Beast, holding on to that thing that was mine and mine alone for as long as I could. This is a confession
—another
confession. Every irritant and questionable comment from him got suppressed in support of those victorious moments of
freedom
. I guess you don’t turn away a rescuer in hopes of a better one. You’re thankful. I’m guessing that when a prisoner is let out, even the penitentiary parking lot looks beautiful.

Because, soon enough, I would be pulling into my own driveway, going inside, taking some hamburger from the freezer. I would be the audience as Abby practiced her oral report on primates, both of us turning our heads toward the door as Mark walked in, both of us pausing to read his face for signs of what the evening would bring. I would feel relief if his eyes were smiling and relaxed and if he came in joking, tossing his keys on the counter. Maybe that would mean a bike ride later, a roughhouse game with him and Abby. But if his eyes were hard, if he thought the world had done him wrong while he’d been out, it meant
stepping carefully. Either way, after Abby was in bed, I’d go up to our room and disappear into a book. Blessed books—they’re a place to be alone, and no one else can come in. I put up my book barrier because I didn’t want him to touch me. You came to hate sex with someone who betrayed you with violence. You’d do anything to avoid it. His mouth felt all wrong by then anyway.

As I sat in that car, though, during the suspended time that came between meeting Ian and heading home, I was filled with the elation of a changed future. I was a butterfly, with the weight of two rose petals, yet with the power to fly thousands of miles.

While I’m on the way to meet Nathan Benjamin, I phone Detective Jackson. I leave a message for him. I want to call and call and call, but I hold back. This will make me seem unstable, I think. But maybe I’m supposed to call more often than I do. I don’t know what the protocol is here.

I look around for Nathan at the Essential Baking Company, one of those chic, organic Seattle cafés, which I have to admit I usually love. Artisan bread, beautiful pastries behind glass—I’m always in favor of butter and sugar. Today, though, even five jillion glorious fat calories seem criminal. I am aware of some jazzy music playing in the background, and of greasy fingerprints on the glass case, and of the bright smiles of the girls in aprons. The latte machine grinds loudly and, all at once, being in public feels wrong.

Nathan rises from his chair and comes toward me. He takes my arm and puts one hand on my back, the way you help an old woman cross a street. His jacket is wet. There are little drops on the shoulders. It’s been raining, and I haven’t even noticed.

“I didn’t know—I ordered. I didn’t think you’d want to—” He’s waving his hands in lieu of words. On the table are two
chubby white cups with latte hearts formed in foam on the top, along with dishes of croissants and carrot cake. When someone dies, people bring casseroles. When someone vanishes, baked goods multiply. Who knew?

Nathan sits down, knocking over his propped-up umbrella. He shrugs off his jacket, but I keep mine on. I want its good tangerine-ness around me. That coat had seemed like such a wonderful secret splurge when I bought it (a tangerine coat!), and we are still allies many wearings later. There are reassuring things in its pockets, too. There’s a ticket stub to an “opposites attract” wedding movie Abby and I saw together and an open pack of cinnamon gum. I’ll take all the comfort I can get as I wait for Nathan to tell me what I know is coming.

“Not the quietest.” Nathan’s eyes are apologetic. His watch has stopped at 10:15.

“Maybe I don’t want to hear what you have to tell me.”

“What are you thinking?” He reads my face. “Oh, hell. Dani, no. Not that—” Poor Nathan. All of this has rendered him incapable of finishing sentences.

“You have something to say.” I imagine Ian away from this rain, on a beach towel in some sunny place.

“Not what you’re thinking!”

“No? That’s not why we’re here?”

“God, no.” He shakes his head, but I see it, I am sure. The flash of a lie, the brief sidestep of eye contact that means deception.

“I’d rather just know. I can’t take this not knowing.”

“That’s not it at all. Something else … Something else entirely. Ian and I … I didn’t want you to hear this from someone else and think … I don’t know what you might think. Or what anyone might think.”

I put my hands around that warm cup. I wait.

“What I need to say … Well, Ian and I had a meeting the morning of the party. A conference of sorts. Did you know? Because, that night, you were acting like you always did toward me. I thought,
Maybe he didn’t tell her
.”

“He didn’t tell me.”

He pauses. I see how hard this is for him. “Dani, I offered to buy him out.”

“What?”

“I wanted to dissolve our partnership. I offered to buy him out.”

“You did? Why?” I’m shocked, as shocked as Nathan had guessed I would be. Ian had told me nothing about this. When he came home to pick me up for the party, it was all about that stupid dress, the right heels. God, I can only guess how Ian would have reacted to an offer like that. It would have seemed like a betrayal to him. His radar for disloyalty was overactive to the point of paranoia anyway.

“Ian … How do I say this? He’s difficult. His exacting need for perfection … Goddamn, it’s a great thing. I’m not saying that’s not a great trait to have, especially in this business. But I gotta say, it’s making me crazy. It gets me down. Every little … 
mistake
. I sound like a pussy here.”

“No, I know.”

“I’m sure you
do
know. He and I were colleagues before, right? But I didn’t have that much interaction with him day-to-day, year-to-year like this. A few weeks ago, I sent him this email about a shipping-date issue that could affect our entire year’s profit, and he responded by correcting my grammar.
Which
, not
that
, you know? He’s done that kind of shit before, but I was pissed. The proverbial last straw. I was
furious
. Goddamn, I’ve
never been so angry. I ran a red light and almost got myself killed. I made a decision right then. I love the guy, I do, but I don’t want to go on working with him. Life’s too short.”

He shakes his head apologetically. I want to tell him that I understand completely, but this seems wrong with Ian missing. A blond woman with a large purse and two shopping bags knocks into our table, causing my foamy heart to spill over onto the table. Nathan jumps up, grabs some napkins, and begins soaking up the liquid, which is spreading quickly toward the table’s edge. I can hear the woman loudly placing a complicated coffee order. No one needs a cup of coffee like that, unless you’re out to prove you can get exactly what you want. Nathan ditches the soaking napkins into a trash can.

“Don’t you hate assholes?” Nathan says.

“I do.”

“Maybe you get to a certain age and it hits you. You’re so damn sick of being nice and polite.”

“I know.”

“A lot of good it does.”

He’s right. He’s so right. Where
does
it get you? You tell yourself you’re trying to be a good person, but there’s more to it, isn’t there?
Nice
is akin to not walking under ladders or stepping on cracks. It’s a superstitious hedging of bets. A part of you thinks your good behavior will ward off evil. Well, apparently that’s not true. “You get fed up, I guess.”