He's Gone (19 page)

“You okay?” Abby says to me. “Pickles make you teary?”

“I’m so grateful for you guys.” It overwhelms me then, the gratitude.

“It’s just grilled cheese. It’s not …” Abby searches around for the right word, and then delivers it with a nasally French accent. “Boeuf bourguig-
non
.”

“Crêpe de Paree,” my mother says with her own French accent, though she sounds like an angry German soldier. She rolls the
r
heartily, so that
crêpe
becomes
crap
.

“Pour me a glass,” Abby says.

It feels good out there, a rest, and so we sit on the deck long after the sun goes down. Abby fetches us sweaters from the hall closet. The lake turns the deep gray of a ship’s hull.

As we’re sitting there, I remember something. I’ve never told anyone this. I’d sort of let myself forget it, actually. But when Ian and I were moving to the houseboat, we had a fight. We were going through a storage unit he rented when he first moved out of Mary’s place and into that furnished apartment. Two years into our new marriage, we were finally moving to a place that was our own, and it was time to deal with all that old stuff. The storage facility was creepy—one of those warehouses with pulled-down metal doors along cold cement hallways, where it smelled like rancid paint and dead people’s belongings. It was a
mausoleum for objects, or maybe some kind of object purgatory—the place between the hell of the dumps and the good old life back in Grandma’s living room.

We stood in that small, dim cubicle and sorted through boxes. This, get rid of it. That, keep. There was so much that I had never been a part of. There were a lot of old wedding gifts that Mary had foisted off on him in some effort to burden his conscience. Champagne flutes. Silver trays. The boxes of butterflies and the collecting equipment had been stored in there then, too, and so had all that crap from Paul Hartley Keller’s garage, the fondue pot and the carving knife and such. The wooden cabinet that Ian’s grandfather made was there then; it was heading to our new dining room.

I didn’t know how to help sort—there were books with inscriptions from old girlfriends and an ugly painting of an Indian woman kneeling beside a creek, which had been in his and Mary’s bedroom. There were boxes of photos and children’s crafts made for Daddy and old college textbooks. I could see Ian’s mood deteriorating. He had started out ready to tackle the task and was quickly slipping into defeat. Who wants to look at the past laid out like that? Who wants to touch every yearbook and that first box of personalized business cards and all those discarded items of marital joint property, from the chip-and-dip dish to the silver wedding goblets? Seen together, it doesn’t add up to much. Especially when a good lot of it was now called a mistake.

If you don’t know what to do with it, just leave it!
he’d snapped.

Be nice!
I’d said.
I’m trying to
help
you here
.

Do you think this is easy? Show some sensitivity. Look at all this stuff! I’m throwing half my life away
.

Right then I was sick to death of his criticisms and outbursts of self-pity, I really was. After all of the fighting with ex-spouses
and the mediations and the attorney bills and custody evaluations and apartments and waiting and divorce and remarriage, after all of that, we were finally moving into a new place that was free of the past. And right then, too, I suddenly felt as if I could leave him. I could. Even after all of that. Or
especially
after all of that.

I looked around that cold place. He came with an awful lot of stuff.

Don’t do it on my account, please
.

He was holding a lamp in the shape of a cowboy boot, something he’d had in his childhood bedroom.
I can’t believe you just said that
.

I wanted to say more. No, I wanted to take that eerie, cold freight elevator out of that place where I didn’t belong. I wanted to get away from the weight of him. But I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I picked up what looked like the bust of someone. Some fired-clay bust—a crude attempt to replicate what must have been Paul Hartley Keller.

Oh, my God!
I laughed.
What’s this?
I could barely lift the damn thing. Mary was happy to get rid of
that
, I was sure.
Is this your father?

No
. Ian’s jaw tightened. I’d offended him. Great.

It looks just like him
. At least, it had Paul Hartley Keller’s high forehead and recessed chin, done in amateurish clay pinches.

It’s
me.

I looked at it. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It slipped right out.
You? Oh, my God, this is disturbing. Where’d you get it? This would give me bad dreams
.

It was a
gift.
Mary commissioned it for me as a surprise. When I first bought the company. She had some idea of it going in the lobby
.

I’m glad you didn’t put it there! It’d scare people
.

You know, Dani …

People would scream when they walked past it
. I was cracking myself up. Really, the thing was hideous. It looked exactly like Ian’s father.

You know, I can see how you’d make Mark so mad
.

I stopped laughing then. I looked at him in that dim cell and he looked ugly to me, as ugly as that pinched-clay bust. I set it down. I didn’t say anything more. I shoved my anger far down, where even I wouldn’t be able to see it.

But how many things stay buried, really? Not memories, not anger, not pieces of shipwrecks, floating to the surface and landing on a beach somewhere years later.

That bust ended up in the trunk of my car, along with boxes of his old straight-A report cards and more stuff Mary didn’t want from their closet, including a hand vac that had been a birthday gift to her that she was still pissed about. We left the job half done; we’d gotten a late start, and our attitudes had worsened, and so that stuff rode around in my trunk for a good week afterward. That night, we went to Kerry Park with a blanket and a bottle of wine. We actually had a nice time. It was only the third night in our new houseboat.

It was time to forgive and forget, but I didn’t forget. When Ian went to work the next day, I opened my trunk. I hauled out that bust, and it took some doing, too. Jesus, that thing weighed a ton. I lugged it down the dock, and I had to set it down once or twice when it got too heavy.

I can see how you’d make Mark so mad
. It was a vicious, vicious thing to say. He had no idea the kind of terror you felt when someone’s fist was in your face.

It was much harder to accomplish than I thought it would be. I really had to work at it, and I was sweating. I set that goddamn thing on the edge of the dock. And then I shoved.

It took longer for it to sink than you’d imagine. I watched as
that Paul/Ian face slowly, slowly, dropped down into the murky water.

God, it was satisfying. I felt joyful. My heart did a little victory dance. But then I immediately started to worry. Ian never asked me about it. I don’t think he even realized it was gone. Still, I envisioned chunks of it floating up for him to see. I worried about it for days. My anger itself was a crime, I was sure.

“Things are biting me.” Abby swats at her ankles. “Let’s go in.” Her cheeks are red from wine, too. It’s a genetic trait. Three swallows of wine by any of the women in our family, and we’re all as rosy and flushed as fat men moving pianos.

I’m glad we’re heading in. Now that I remember that statue under the water, right beneath us, I feel uneasy being out there.

We bring the dishes in. There’s the pleasant clatter of china and silverware in an evening hour, a sound that usually means all is well. Abby is sponging off the counter, and my mother’s hunting for where she put her car keys. She looks in her purse and coat pockets and in the dish by the phone, where we always put ours. She picks up the cuff link, which I’d set there. She holds it aloft, as if she’s found a pearl in the oyster, or maybe the crucial evidence at a homicide scene.

“Dani! Did you ever tell the detective about this?”

I shake my head. “I forgot all about it.”

She narrows her eyes at me. She’s given that same look to teenagers lingering too long in our street, and to ill-behaved children in stores, and to men ogling my sixteen-year-old self when I was wearing my tube top and shorts.

“There’s been a lot on my mind,” I remind her.

“Where’d you get it?” Abby takes it from my mother. She holds it in her palm and shakes it as if she’s playing Yahtzee.

“Someone dropped it by here. They must have thought it was Ian’s.”

“Doubt that. It’s kinda Vegas. He’s got better taste.”

“That’s what I said,” my mother pipes in. “Not Mr. Classy’s type.”

Abby returns the cuff link to the bowl. “God, Grandma. Ian’s
missing
. Be nice. He could be hurt somewhere. He could be … I mean, no clothes are gone that we know of. His cards haven’t been used.… I don’t even want to say it.” Her voice catches. I put my arm around her shoulders. I pull her close. I agree with her about my mother’s words. There should be reverence for what is lost, no matter how it has become so.

“Well, I never understood that, why people talk nicer about someone when they’re gone. Why? Their bad luck makes them a better person? You’re an asshole alive, you’re still an asshole dead. Personally, I think it’s just covering your bases. In case God’s still nearby listening in, we’d better be nice or he might throw some of the same bad juju our way.” She’s looking in her jacket pocket again for her keys, then finds them in her purse, the first place she looked.

“I don’t know why we do it,” Abby says. “I just know it feels bad when you talk like that. I care about him. I care about him a lot.”

I look at my little, now-grown Abby. She’s so strong. I’d have never talked to my mother like that. Abby always says what she needs to say, without fear of consequences. She’d never be someone who would lose her voice while looking for rescue.

Maybe we all try to give our parents what they most ask for, what they most value but don’t have, whatever that is—perfection, compliance, success, strength. The liquidy caterpillar evolves into adulthood in that chrysalis. It becomes something new. For better or worse, it emerges.

9

My sheets are a tangled mess from the bad dreams, and half of them are on the floor. They look like they’ve had a rough night. When I sort out my bed, I can still see the faint marks of mud on them. I took off my shoes after the party; I know I did. I remember that. My feet were killing me. There’s an explanation. Still, that dream replays again and again.… His hand on my mouth. His grip on my wrists. Dreams tell you important things, don’t they? They tell the truth? I am desperate for my sleeping mind to say
something
to me, to convey some information about his whereabouts. After all, there are people who have dreams like that. My college roommate, Fiona, had a dream about hurricanes the night before one hit in her own hometown, and she dreamed of boys falling out of windows before a brokenhearted student jumped from the balcony of a fraternity house. I want to have a dream that shows me where Ian is—in some woman’s car, driven off a cliff; living in an orange stone house in San José del Cabo; in a Motel 6 the next town over; anything. I’ll take whatever I get as long as it’s an image handed over to me in deep slumber by some sympathetic higher power. But the psychic airwaves have remained mute.

I keep having that same nightmare, and it’s beginning to haunt me. It’s shaking my sense of myself. When I wake up after that dream, I worry that I have experienced my own metamorphosis, that I have become something horrible. The repetition is making this feel true. It’s probably only fear speaking.
It isn’t information, Dani, you idiot
, I tell myself,
just your worst ugly doubts let loose, your subconscious unraveling its darkness. Knock it off
. But it’s not that easy. A dream can be meaningless, but a dream can feel so real.

Here it is: The contents of my heart are what leave me uneasy.

Of course, our dreams were real, too, Ian’s and mine. The dreams for our future. They were meaningless perhaps, or at least misguided, but they were real to us. After Mark found out about our affair, though, Mary found out, as well, and then everything went crazy. Visions of
happily ever after
have a hard time weathering
crazy
. Mary threw Ian’s clothes out onto the lawn (bit of a cliché, that), and she once turned into a madwoman, driving her big black Explorer toward Abby and me as we walked down the sidewalk, veering away at the last moment. It was another wonderful memory to paste into Abby’s baby book. Mothering regret number four hundred seventy-five. Your dreams always take some direct hits.

The tribe, the Greek chorus, whatever, chimed in, too. Anyone who’d been to your wedding, or
any
wedding, or who was in a marriage and deeply needed to feel the strength of the institution just then (most likely because they were feeling its
vulnerability
just then): they needed to be heard. They needed to shake your shoulders and look you in the eyes and tell you how wrong you were to do what you did and how foolish you were to do what you were planning. They do these things because they
think they know what’s best, when they can never know the universe that lies between you and your spouse in that bed, the speeding comets and stars burning up, the black holes. They shake your shoulders because your marriage is marriage in general and it’s capable of tumbling in a gust or even a breeze. One failed marriage seems threatening to all of them. The butterfly effect. One butterfly flaps its wings and it can supposedly cause a hurricane weeks or months or years later.

Two mothers from school, women I didn’t even know, called me up to ask me to rethink my relationship with Ian. That’s a polite way to put it. And then, Ian’s old friends Toby and Renee phoned Ian and asked him to go for a ride. They drove him back to their house, where several other friends sat in a circle in their living room, waiting for him. They attempted to bring their wayward one back to them, as if he’d turned to a life of heroin or had joined a religious cult. Which was the cult, really? That neighborhood with all its mirror-image houses and identical people—well, an argument could be made, is all I’m saying.