He's Gone (6 page)

We went over to Ian and Mary’s house. Abby came, too. They lived in the part of our neighborhood where the houses got bigger, where the garages went from two- to three-car. Abby joined the rest of the kids playing kickball in the cul-de-sac. Inside, their home was a showcase of electronics and furnishings and food and expensive beers. Their boat was parked in the garage; a motorcycle, too. Mary was sitting up on the kitchen counter, swinging her legs. She wore a low-cut blouse that showed off her cleavage. She took a pinch of Mark’s shirt, pulled him slightly toward her, and told him how great he looked.

“Ian never wears dress shirts,” she said. “I love a man in a dress shirt.”

I left Mark in the kitchen with Mary and Charlene and so and so and so and so. Mark was loving it there. You should have seen how happy he was. Ian gestured for me to follow him outside. A couple of neighbor men stood on the patio with their beers. Another woman played with her small toddler on the lawn, blowing bubbles with a plastic wand dripping soap. Usually, she’d have been the one I talked to—the quiet person. The one off to the side, fleeing all the show and all the false lilts in conversation, pretending her child needed her when she needed her child. I’d
been guilty of that trick, acting as if the baby needed to be changed or fed or put down for a nap just so I’d have a few minutes away from the in-laws or other strangers. Ian lifted the lid of the barbecue, and a big gust of smoke billowed out. There were platters of meat—beef and chicken and even pork chops. I had never seen so much food in all my life.

“So, what do you think?” Ian said.

“It’s a lovely home,” I said. I wasn’t sure how I actually felt about it. The grass was laid out in a large, orderly rectangle, and the walls inside the house were white, and it felt like something important was missing—color, heartbeat. It was that same feeling you get when you talk to someone and they’re saying all the right words but there’s an echoey lack of the right emotion.

“Not about that. About
this
.”

“This.” I wasn’t sure what he meant. I’d never played this game before. It seemed too soon to admit the energy between us. And, oh, the energy. I felt it right there. I almost saw it, as real as the hot orange of those coals.

“This party.”

I could hear the doorbell ring inside the house, the rise of new voices, laughter. “It’s a great party.”

He stabbed a thick piece of meat, turned it, as the grease sizzled and kicked up a new torrent of smoke. “You’re saying the right words, but …”

I smiled. I wasn’t used to being seen like that, seen
through
. “I don’t do these things too often.”

“Thank God,” he said. “I knew I liked you for some reason.”

The new couple opened the sliding glass door to join us outside. “Shut the door!” Mary called. “The smoke!”

It was true; my eyes were watering. I was in over my head, trading one place I didn’t belong for another place I didn’t belong,
but I didn’t know that yet. Then the wind shifted, and it carried the ashy clouds over the neighbors’ fence.

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” Ian said.

I think I was furious at my parents for their failed marriage, but I hadn’t been married yet myself. Fury is easy until you’re in someone else’s shoes. I didn’t understand how complicated a marriage was. I didn’t understand my parents as adult people, how their own histories could sit upon them and press and press. Personal histories, generations of marital dynamics creating marital dynamics. That, and all those pages and pages of fine print and hidden clauses and expectations between two people, ways you are bound to a person when you might desperately need to be free. For me, as a married woman, it was fine print and a small child and a frightening man and economic fears (how, how, how, would I take care of Abby?), all of which had me backed up against a high wall. I was afraid to leave. Inside my body, I felt the race against time as if I were in my own thriller movie, where the ceiling was inching down, ready to annihilate me. When I thought about my life, my heart thumped hard, as if I were being chased. I had become so small that I could almost see my own self, one inch high, standing in the palm of my own hand, waving my tiny arms, screaming for my own miniature help. I was getting smaller and smaller and the walls were coming in and something had to be done.

Ian was getting smaller, too, he told me. In his own way, a different way from mine, but, still, he was. Barbecuing and fixing drinks at all those neighborhood parties he didn’t care about, turning steaks and handing over a cool glass of tinkling ice and vodka, making empty conversation. He was disappearing in that
life, he said. He tried to tell Mary this in every way he could, for
years
, but after a few weeks of promised change, she’d be back to the drinking and the socializing and the spending. His daughters would have new outfits and glittery new eye shadow and new pink phones, but they would be failing in school. He went to work to make more money for the new sofa and the slipcovers and the display of holiday lights, becoming more and more lonely with each receipt and each shopping bag holding the fruits of his labors. That’s what he felt he was worth—the new towels and the car stereo and the manicures and the My Little Ponies. He was stuff, not a man. A provider, whoever that is.

It was clear that I needed to get out of my marriage. It was dangerous and defeating, and no one would question that. But for Ian, the decision was murkier, because he was stuck in the impossible labyrinth of that doomed quest—to find the magic place where marriage is happiness. Logically, he knew this was unfair to Mary. I knew it was unfair to her, too. Two different people and the thing they created between them, a botched and imperfect thing, carrying the weight of spilled gravy and relatives and swimming lessons and car repairs—it wasn’t fair to look at
her
and say,
This is the life I have. This is all
. It wasn’t fair to her to be disappointed beyond reason. Not fair, but that’s the way it was. This was what they’d built. They were so familiar to each other that they’d become strangers.
She doesn’t know who I am
, he’d say.
I’ve tried everything I know to get her to
hear
and to
see,
but
she’s
happy. She loves her life
. He would also say,
If we met now, I wouldn’t even be attracted to her. I wouldn’t
respect
her
.

My marriage had the raised hand and the cowering on the kitchen floor as Mark’s shoe struck my rib cage, but Ian had water-torture love—the small, everyday drips of disillusionment and loneliness. Both things can wreck the soul, I think. Violence,
yes. That surely destroys love. But bathroom hand towels with embossed satin shells that you weren’t supposed to use—maybe those could, too.

The screen door screeched open and closed again at that party, and more people tumbled out, carrying wine coolers and bags of chips. Introductions were made. There was talk about a hair salon and about the unfair treatment twelve-year-old Jason got from Mrs. Bryan when
Gared
had actually been the one to provoke him. There was some discussion about Gared’s mother. Gared’s
single
mother—no wonder he was out of control. And the men discussed a lube job on Rob’s BMW. The freaking doctor telling Neal at his exam that he had high cholesterol. He was supposed to have a goddamn special diet!
I could die tomorrow
, Neal said.
I’m not eating broccoli three times a day
. And then Jason himself came running through the party, snatching the neatly coiled garden hose and reaching for the valve, as Jason’s father yelled at him to stop and Jason’s mother said Mary must have given him M&M’s before dinner.

Those marriages fell like burning trees, one after the other, after Ian and I got together. First, though, there was all the gossip and the nasty barbs as we fled that place, as if we’d set fire to it all, everything, each of their houses. But then, later, their houses
did
catch fire, and their marriages burned up. And how could they not, in that dry, barren place? A marriage can be choked by dust and desperation, destroyed by a last, thoughtless lit match. How could people not lose each other there? It was so lonely in that place. I’ve said it before, but it was.

You ever taste that Red Rock Ale?

I’m not gonna weed and feed my yard this year. All the work, and it still looks like crap after two weeks of hot weather
.

You gotta water every day. Buy a sprinkler system, you cheap bastard
.

I actually called Lindsay’s mother and told her she’d better tell Lindsay that we won’t tolerate bullying toward Jasmine
.

Ian caught my eyes and held them. Inside the kitchen, Mary fixed the collar on Mark’s shirt.

It was possible that I could rescue Ian and that he could rescue me.

That was the start. And as I stand outside with my mother, watching that police car retreat down the street, I think:
Maybe this is the end
. The feelings I’m having—they aren’t exactly unfamiliar. I remember a similar dread from our courtship, from the times I wouldn’t hear from him for days. I’d feel scared and sick but angry, too. Yes, angry. I’ll admit that.

But now we’re married. We have our own bed with soft sheets and sweet memories. On Sundays, we lie there together, our toes entwined. A picture flashes:

Do your “Secret Asian Man.”
He pretends not to know the lyrics of lots of songs. He thinks this is hilarious. The covers are a tangled mess. We are both revved on coffee.

No laughing
. He waggles his finger. Of course, laughing is the point.

Come on! I’m not laughing with you, I’m laughing at you!

In that case
. He hops on his knees. He gets the air guitar going, and he’s wearing that hot stage number, his blue boxers.
Beware of pretty faces that you find. A pretty face can hide an evil mind!
he sings, shimmying around until the big payoff.
Sec-ret Asian man!
he hollers, wiggling his ass, giving it all he’s got. I sock him with a pillow for the audience participation part of the program.

Things are different now, I try to tell myself, but my whole
body is shaking, unconvinced. Some weird alien tremor has begun, and I can’t stop it. The car turns the corner and is gone. What’s just happened doesn’t seem real, but it is real. A police car means it’s real. My mother puts her arm around me. “I just want to know that he’s okay,” I say. “Just that. Just that one thing.”

My chest feels caved in, as if it has fallen in on itself, and I can barely breathe, it hurts so bad. His absence is immense, dark and immense, because once the logical likelihoods are gone, it means that anything else is possible. Anything and everything. He could be anywhere, with anyone. He could be in some foreign country; he could be hurt somewhere; he could be dead; someone could have killed him; he could be driving in some convertible down some road with a new identity in his pocket.

He wouldn’t take off without telling his kids
, I had told the officer who arrived that morning. Detective Vince Jackson had a beefy head and inky-black hair (dyed, likely) and chubby cigar fingers. But is this true? Ian’s children had rejected him after we got together. For a long while, they refused to see him if he was with me, and Kristen had instructed him not to come to her graduation. His idea of himself as a good father had been destroyed. You can run, can’t you, if there isn’t anything much to leave behind?

“Come on,” my mother says. She pulls me to her. She has her old flannel shirt on and her jeans. She’d been working in the yard. So she says. Spying on the neighbors’ chain-saw artist, more likely. She smells like fresh dirt and Jean Naté.

We walk back up the dock. Maggie pokes her head out the door. “Dani?”

“He’s still gone,” I say.

“Oh, no.” She holds her hand to her heart. She and my mother
lock eyes. They exchange unspoken information that I don’t want to witness. “If I can help at all …”

The day drags on. I can’t do anything. I can’t work, of course, or get the mail or make necessary phone calls, whatever those might be. I can’t eat or sit still. Pollux is nervous. He doesn’t like high emotions. He gets upset at tears and arguments. He looks worried; his forehead is crinkled and his eyes are concerned. I stand and stare out the large glass windows of the houseboat. The sun is going down. Again. Pollux is as close as he can get. I feel him leaning against my legs.

“Do you have anything to help you sleep?” my mother asks.

“No.”

“Maybe I can—”

“I need to hear the phone. I hate that kind of stuff, anyway.” I hate the way it makes me feel—the thickness in my limbs, the heavy fuzz in my head. The way it confuses my thoughts and blurs my memory.

“You need to sleep. I’m planning to stay.”

“No.”

“I’m staying.”

“Really. I want to be alone.”

My mother shakes her head. She washes her hands at the sink, for lack of anything more useful to do. She dries them on the kitchen towel that hangs from the rail of the stove. The kitchen towel has a row of cherries on it. My husband is missing. I don’t know how to reconcile these two facts.

“That hairbrush. His toothbrush. In those Ziploc bags,” I say.

“They have to do that. You heard him. Did you hear all the agencies that’ll be notified? MUPU, NCMA? Some clearinghouse …”

“Clearinghouse? How is that supposed to do anything?” All I can think of is Ed McMahon and the giant check. Or a large
room with hundreds of files with thousands of names. “This is crazy!”

“They have to determine if Ian’s even missing, Dani. He might not be. All they’re doing is covering the basics right now. That’s what the detective said. They’ll open an investigation when they have reason to think he hasn’t disappeared of his own free will.”

“I couldn’t even answer the questions. I don’t even know how much he weighs.”

“You were close enough, Dani. Come on.”