He's Gone (7 page)

“
Identifying marks
. God.”

“I know, sweetie.”

“He’s gone.” It strikes me, a blow to the chest. A dark smack of fear, the biggest and most terrible feeling of all:
gone
.

“Ian’s not high risk. That’s what the man said. He’s not high risk for disappearing.”

“I don’t even understand what that means.”

“Alzheimer’s, mentally unwell. In danger. That’s why he asked about health issues Ian might have, right? That’s why the
Unless you think a crime has been committed …
”

This seems comforting. There’s a procedure for these things. If they aren’t alarmed, I can be less alarmed. It’s like that trick I do when there’s turbulence on the airplane. If the flight attendants are still serving drinks and collecting garbage, there’s nothing to worry about. If they’re chatting to one another and laughing, the bumps and lurches that terrify me are things they’ve seen a hundred times before.

I remember all those nights, too, when I worried about Abby when she was late coming home and still an inexperienced driver. She’d known I would worry, though, and she’d always found a way to eventually contact me. Ian knows I’d worry, too. This leads to an equation in my mind, a calculation with a sickening
result. There are only two possibilities: Either he can’t contact me or he doesn’t want to.

“That detective looked around here like I had him hidden somewhere.” I twist my wedding ring.

“That’s his job,” my mother says.

Mind if I look around?
Detective Vince Jackson had asked.
Of course not
, I had said, and then he walked around the houseboat with his eyes scanning. He looked in our bedroom. He asked me if anything was missing.
Ian
was the obvious answer, but, no, nothing. Nothing else. Ian and the jeans and black shirt he’d worn to the party. The soft leather shoes. His phone, his wallet, his keys.

You came home, he got undressed for bed?

I couldn’t remember exactly. Can’t. I’ve tried and tried. I was so tired. I was groggy, and I headed for bed, and I assume we did what we always do. He might have stayed up to read or sit and watch the lights on the lake. He might have climbed into bed after I was already asleep. I could have been asleep before he even came out of the bathroom.

Detective Vince Jackson raised his eyebrows. He wrote things down. He asked me when my last clear memory of my husband was. In the car, driving home, I said. I was being too honest. But that was the truth. I didn’t have a clear picture of Ian walking inside the house, taking off his clothes, coming to bed. I had images of myself dropping my heels at the door, climbing thankfully between the sheets, dismissing him and the whole uncomfortable night. It was the kind of thing that happened regularly, the way you don’t even remember the drive to the store. The way your head is full of your own thoughts after a bad night.
That stupid dress; that woman at the party; Nathan, he’s a kind man; an altercation; Ian’s grim face behind the wheel; forget it all until tomorrow
. The cool sheets, the bliss of sleep.

What’s this?

Vince Jackson had popped his head into Ian’s study. His eyes went immediately to the board, where the last butterfly had been pinned. It was still there, collecting dust. It wasn’t the way to pay homage to something beautiful, as Ian always claimed. It had been pinned and forgotten.

His hobby
, I said. I wanted to say,
It was the way he stayed connected to his father
, but it seemed like too much information. Ian would be embarrassed by that, by his own need for the love of the great Paul Hartley Keller. Definitely he wouldn’t want such a thing to be revealed to this man, this Vince Jackson, a tough, impenetrable male, who didn’t look as if he’d ever questioned his place in the world. Ian’s father need—it was the kind of hole you saw and wanted to heal for someone you loved. After trying that routine twice and failing, with Mark, with Ian, I knew something else, too: It’s human nature to want to help and soothe and save with your love, but it’s also arrogant.

It’s a strange hobby
, my mother remarked to the detective. I couldn’t believe she said that. I was getting the creeping feeling that Detective Vince Jackson suspected me of something here; I could feel the mistrust in the way he moved his thick shoulders through the doorways of my home, looking at carpets and window frames and the comforter I’d picked out at Bed Bath & Beyond. My mother must have felt it, too.
If something is off here, that something was Ian
, she seemed to say.

His suspicion made me feel guilty. Admittedly, guilt can be my default setting. After a social gathering, I’m often left with a vague sense of wrongdoing that I try to pinpoint the source of. Had I laughed insensitively or slighted someone unintentionally? And I always feel accused in Nordstrom. The saleswomen look at my jeans and inexpensive haircut and I’m sure they’re thinking I’m about to slip a pair of earrings into my purse. I feel
guilty when I eat white bread and when I don’t recycle. The therapist I saw during my divorce, Dr. Shana Berg—I loved her—once told me that I was in desperate need of rebellion. The idea of it sounded wonderful, like riding in a convertible on an open road, with a scarf flowing behind you.

Detective Vince Jackson stood outside on the front deck. The lake was busy with its usual merry parade of tour boats and water taxis. The sun was out, and the water sparkled wrongly. I heard a happy shout, someone making a joke, laughter. Two guys on paddleboards rowed past, as Detective Vince Jackson stepped onto our sailboat and looked around for my vanished husband. He made his way down below, to the cabin. I heard him open and close the bench lids. He climbed the ladder back up.
The New View?

Even the boat’s name was some sort of accusation.
It means
 … I struggled.
The way we were going to do things differently
.

Differently?

We’d been married before. And both of us had divorced parents
. I was talking too much. It made me look like I was nervous. I
was
nervous. That man’s big hands and blue uniform and the way he wrote things down made me nervous. His hips were packed with heavy equipment—a radio, a gun. The radio kept spitting out loud bits of crackly conversations and codes. I wondered how he knew when to listen and when to ignore it. He was standing in front of my lounge chair, where I sunned myself and drank lemonade and read.
We wanted to have commitment in our lives
, I said.

I followed Detective Vince Jackson’s eyes out over the lake. I read the question there before he asked it. The lake—it didn’t seem possible.
If he’d fallen … You hear everything around here
, I said.
A splash, a call for help …

Can he swim?

He was on the swim team in high school. And there’s a ladder right there
. I pointed to the edge of the dock. That’s why every dock has one; if you fall in, there’s a quick way to get out.

How much did he have to drink that night?

A glass or two? I don’t know. I wasn’t with him the whole time. He drove home.… He seemed fine
.

How much did you have to drink?

The same. Two, maybe?

He ever run off before? Take a few days? A little breather, a camping trip to commune with nature?

Not exactly
.

He looked up from his notebook. I could feel my mother’s shocked eyes on me. Well, you don’t tell your mother everything.

He didn’t come home one night, if that even counts. We were just married. Had an argument. He came right back
.

Coulda done the same thing?

We never had an argument like that again
.

He continued to watch my face but asked nothing more.
I’d contact everyone you know. Ask around. He’s probably cooling his jets over something you didn’t even know you did. I’d like a list of everyone in his life we should talk to if we need
.

Okay, good. No problem
.

Now my mother was being too helpful. She’d rushed inside and was already rummaging around in my kitchen drawers for a notepad and pen. She was shoving around all the unused coupons and take-out menus, not even looking in the right place.
Here
, I had said, retrieving the pad by the phone. Detective Vince Jackson stayed outside and talked to someone on his radio.

I wrote down names. Nathan. Paula, Ian’s secretary. His family. My mother was piping in every two seconds with more ideas.
I wished she would stop. My brain was going a million miles an hour, and yet it also felt stalled and broken.

Bethy and Kristen Keller
, I wrote. And, in parentheses,
daughters
.

Don’t forget Mary
, my mother said, as Detective Vince Jackson slid open the door and came inside.

Mary?
he asked.

His ex-wife
, I said.

Detective Vince Jackson sat down in the kitchen chair across from me. He sighed.
Mrs. Keller
, he said.
What do you think happened to your husband?

Images appeared; the options presented themselves. It was crazy, but the one that screamed the loudest (and that maybe—how awful to say—I feared the most right then) had nothing to do with murder or an accident. I could see him straddling the seat of his old riding lawn mower, an expensive one, of course. There he’d be, turning the key, and the engine would start, and so would the engines of all the other riding lawn mowers on that street. He would lay his regrets to rest as the machine made its clean stripes into the grass and as the neighbor men made their clean stripes into their own lawns. Up and back he would go, and Neal would go, and Rob, and Mark, as the
New View
bobbed in now ridiculous, falsely optimistic waters. Because you can never entirely flee disappointment, can you? We have it, too; the bare foot meeting dog barf, the spilled coffee grounds, the discouraging daily stuff that could feel like a life metaphor. Of course, those men don’t even live in that neighborhood anymore. Mark lives in a condo on the Eastside, and Neal took off to Israel or somewhere, and Rob and his wife divorced and I have no idea where they ended up. Still, when Detective Jackson asked me that question, I saw them all out there on their Sunday morning
lawns, one riding north and then south again, the other riding south and then north, as their wives sipped orange juice and vodka.

I don’t know
, I had finally answered.
I just don’t. I just hope he’s okay
.

We all do, ma’am
.

I love him
, I said.

Love is complicated.

I handed over the pictures the detective asked for, the ones I had nearest—a recent PR photo for the new BetterWorks website, which I’d kept on the nightstand by our bed. Ian looks so handsome in it, in that dark shirt set against the white backdrop, with his strong cheekbones and his black hair and those bright blue eyes against the tan he had then. Oh, the chemistry between us. I handed over our wedding photo, too, the two of us on the courthouse steps, me smiling up at him. Ian has one hand raised, like he’s waving to potential voters. I gave the detective another photo, as well. The one I’d found in Ian’s dresser drawer. The one of him with Bethy and Kristen, the one hidden under the rolled-up socks.

Good lookin’ family
, Detective Vince Jackson had said, but his voice was clipped and businesslike.

Now, though, the detective is gone, and my mother is watering my windowsill cactus. Sure, it needs it—it looks like a cucumber left too long in the produce drawer—but still. “Please, Ma,” I say. “Go? I’ve got to call Abby. She’s worried sick. She’s called me six times. I’ll try to sleep, I promise.”

“Dani—”

“There’s nothing we can do but wait. That’s the thing.
Nothing
.”

My mother sighs. Then she collects her purse, her jacket. “My
keys …” She looks around. She’s forgotten where she set them. There they are, by the kitchen phone. “What’s this?” She holds it up.

The cuff link. I’d forgotten all about it. “Someone dropped it off yesterday. Ian must have lost it at the party.”

“Not really his type.”

She’s right. It’s a small circle of gold with a jade center. Ian isn’t much for jewelry, even when I wear it. He’d bought enough of it for Mary. She’d go to the store and pick out what she wanted before every occasion. One thing you learn in a marriage, though—there are always things you don’t know about your partner. Always.

“Well, you should tell the police about it. You never know what’s important.”

My mother kisses my cheek. We say goodbye at the door. I call Abby back. I call Ian’s daughters. I call my sister. I call my father. I do my best to get through these calls, because I don’t feel like talking to anyone. I feel only like keeping vigil. All I want to do is wait for Ian to come back. And so when the phone calls are over, that’s what I do. I sit on that deck outside and I watch the red night-lights of the boats and I stay still and hope, until the evening gets cool and the water gets dark and darker still.

I think about that list of names. Who I’ve left off. Mark. Should I have written him down? The woman at the party, too, the one talking to Ian on the grass of Kerry Park. The one in the red dress, who had her hand on Ian’s sleeve. I’d forgotten her. But, then again, I don’t even know her name.

4

“What’s this?”

Abby unzips her backpack. She hands over a package wrapped in cellophane. “Banana bread.” Another package. “Cookies. Oh, and cinnamon rolls. The frozen kind. I didn’t make them.”

“Oh, honey.”

“Baking helplessness.”

I look at her shiny dark hair (the exact color of Mark’s) and her lovely brown eyes and all those baked goods, and I realize for the millionth time what a good person she is. No matter how many mistakes I’ve made as a mother, this daughter of mine has managed to be a fine, fine person.