He's Gone (8 page)

“Don’t you have class?”

“Like I can go to class? You look like shit. I’ll make us some coffee.”

I watch my Abby, who now lives on her own with two friends in a tiny apartment near the university. During her first year in her own place, I’d get these great calls asking how to make that stroganoff I cooked, or that chicken teriyaki, or if you could bake a pie in a cake pan, or what to do if you needed butter for a recipe but didn’t have butter. Years ago, we’d spend hours making gingerbread
men with frosting pants and sprinkle hair. But now here she is, making her way around my kitchen like the grown woman she’s become. I have a wrong thought then. I could face anything except losing her. I could even lose Ian but never my child. I remember the shift that occurred after Abby was born—there’d been the great big before, where dying grandparents and natural disasters on the news were sad but mostly distant concerns. But then I became a mother, and when that happens, you cross a line that makes all loss a crushing, personal matter.

The coffee pot burbles. Pollux’s nose is up, sniffing madly at the baked bounty on the counter, which I have no desire to eat. I’m waiting. Waiting to sleep, waiting to eat, even. Abby pours two cups. “I hope it’s not too strong.”

“Never,” I say.

“I talked to Grandma.” Abby sets her fingers around her cup. “She said the police guy came yesterday.”

“I called the station again already this morning. I left a few messages. I don’t know what to
do
.”

“Are we supposed to be making flyers?
Lost Software Exec
?
Reward
? We should call the media or something. We can organize a search. We can’t just sit here. I’m worried sick about him.” This is Abby. She’s the kind of person who gets in and makes things happen, which she’s done from the time she was four, supervising the preschool girls in a game of restaurant while wearing her little red stretch pants and
101 Dalmatians
sweatshirt.

“TV? Oh, honey, I don’t know. If we got other people involved … What if we had him on all channels, and he
left
? You know,
willingly
.”

“You really think that he would do that? He wouldn’t do that, Mom. After all that crap with his kids, when things are finally settling down for you guys? Wait. What do Bethy and Kristen say about this? Do they have any idea where he is?”

“Kristen said she’ll make some calls. Bethy …” I shake my head. “ ‘Maybe he finally got smart.’ ”

“She’s such a bitch.”

“I don’t think they were too worried until last night, when I told them I called the police.”

Abby’s forehead wrinkles in concern. “Mom, I don’t know how to ask this … but was he depressed or anything? I mean, sometimes he can get kind of down. Grandma thought he might be, you know, upset enough to—”

“She reads
Psychology Today
and thinks she can diagnose people. Ian, his religion … Suicide’s not an option. I don’t think it’s an option. He loves his work, he loves—”

“You.”

Abby and I look at each other. In my head, I play the scene again. We are in the car. Ian’s face is grim in the light of the passing streetlamps. We’d had words, but it is more than that. It goes deeper. I could make a hundred guesses—I wasn’t friendly enough, my laugh was too loud, I stumbled after drinking that wine, I glared at the woman with her hand on his sleeve. Ian likes things to go right. He likes the towels folded a certain way; he likes the car vacuumed a certain way; he likes an email to be written a certain way. He doesn’t like errors of balance or manners or grammar. He never makes mistakes, I swear. Never a misstep. It can get exhausting, trying to measure up. You start to feel as if you’re on a perpetual job interview.

After that party, I was tired. This, I do remember. I got into bed. I didn’t think about Ian, because I was sick of thinking about Ian. There were the cool sheets, sleep.

“You guys are happy, right?” Abby asks. “It seems like it.”

“Of course!” But this sounds wrong. It’s too cheerful under the circumstances. It’s obviously what you say to a daughter so she won’t worry. I’m not sure what it even means,
happy
. We had
done so much to find our happiness. We had worked so hard and struggled so much to get
to
it.
Happy
could be like anything else you worked too hard to get—an expensive vacation, say, that you saved for, and gave up other things for, and dreamed of, in some location that you flew long and difficult distances to reach. After hours of jet lag and waiting in dirty airports, you could find yourself on the shiny, disappointing shore, exhausted and sick from foreign water, wondering how you possibly got so far from home.

I go through it again. The party, the drive home, the grim face. The cool sheets. The bliss of rest.

There were more weekend parties at their house, the baseball team’s end-of-season bash, the neighborhood gang 4th of July, someone’s birthday. Mary must have just finished tossing paper napkins and washing glasses before she began planning for the next get-together. It was distraction, I guess, the way some people keep the TV on all the time so they don’t have to hear their own thoughts. When we were with them, it was obvious how the lines between the couples were drawn—Mark and Mary, with all they had in common; Ian and me, with all we did. Mark and Mary were physical people, who wanted to drink and laugh and spend. Ian and I loved books and music and quiet places. He’d take me into their living room and show me his old albums. He had his father’s Tony Bennett, and he had the Cars and Leo Sayer (which we thought was pretty hilarious, Leo with his big afro). He had Patty Griffin and Emmylou Harris and the Clash. He’d play me songs he loved that I loved, too, while Mary and Mark drank more beers and margaritas and Bloody Marys and joked with the crowd in the other room.

My friends are asking where you came from
, Ian said to me as
John Prine played.
Toby and Renee, especially
. Toby and Renee were longtime buddies of the Kellers. They’d all lived in the same neighborhood in the Silicon Valley before moving to the Northwest.
Renee thinks you’re too flirtatious. I think she’s jealous because you’re beautiful
. I heard the compliment—
beautiful
. I’d never thought of myself that way, with my straight brown hair and all my “too”s—too skinny, too tall, too big of a nose—but I was so happy he saw me that way. I felt beautiful when I was with him. But I also heard the criticism there. And the next time I saw Renee, I watched myself. I kept my energy turned down a notch. It’s one of those things you think about later that makes you cringe. God, why’d I do that? But I wanted her to like me, if he wanted her to like me. I wanted that life. I wanted a life with him. A life where the hose was rolled up, and things were in their place, and the remote control had its own little holder. Where I was beautiful, sure, but, much more important than that, where order implied safety and calm.

And, the funny thing was, Mark wanted that life, too. He was there at that house and at those parties because he wanted that motorcycle and a boat like Ian’s in the garage. He wanted the perfectly landscaped yard. But he couldn’t ever get there himself, by himself. He worked in sales, on commission, and he fought with bosses and quit jobs and bought expensive leather jackets he couldn’t afford, and money was another way I felt unsafe. Mary, too, ran up credit cards, never had a job, and didn’t really know where their wealth came from. Ian worked crazy hours, building his company. Two
A.M
., three
A.M
.—more hiding, maybe, but that Visa bill had gone through the roof again, and someone had to pay it. Ian knew where every penny was. He had IRAs and CDs and ETFs. He had every financial product with an acronym that existed. He was shoring up against the next financial disaster or shopping trip, stuffing money into iron-vault mattresses.

I balanced our checkbook to the penny, as well, and when Mark felt too depressed to work, to sell, when he stayed home and slept late and roiled about the unfairness of people’s treatment of him, I would freeze large quantities of cheap food in case the worst came, the way old people who grew up during the Depression hoard canned vegetables.

Ian offered us tickets to a concert, and we all went together. Two other couples, too. Some country singer, I can’t remember. I don’t like country music, and neither does Ian. The twangy pop kind, anyway. Mark and Mary did. They loved it. It was a way that Ian and I could be near each other, even if we didn’t admit it yet. Seats away, still near, amid ten thousand screaming people.

Wait. Clint Black. That’s who it was. Black hat, black outfit.

We all went out for drinks later. Mary was working on her third margarita, telling some story that was making everyone laugh.
And then I drove down the ramp, and I didn’t see the sign—bam! Nearly took the top half off the car!

Lisa, married to Gene, screeched with laughter.

Take it to Auto One
, Gene said to Ian.
They do a great job. Lisa bashed the Subaru, and it doesn’t have a scratch on it now
.

I didn’t bash it! The idiot ran a stoplight!

Pretty hilarious, when you didn’t have to work your ass off to buy the thing
, Ian said. He wasn’t joking. His face looked suddenly tight.

Fine, I’ll get a job and pay for it myself!

You’re careless. That’s the problem
. He was being cruel, but she didn’t seem bothered. She kept laughing and drinking her margarita. I felt a pang of guilt. His cruelty was there, I was sure, because of me. Because their marriage was ending.

I’ll do pennants
, she laughed. She waved an imaginary flag. She was a little tipsy.

Penance?
Ian corrected.

Hey, I love a good penance
, Gene joked.
I like my penance every night, baby
.

Ian met my eyes over the table and held them. I would never be careless with something he bought. It was easy to see how things would be very different with us. I respected him and how hard he worked.

And I understood his deep need to be responsible, financially and otherwise. I was the same way. I’d started doing my own graphic-design work part-time after Abby was in school, brochures mostly, travel brochures and new products displayed in three panels. I was teaching myself how to create websites. I had a handful of clients—two tour companies, a husband-and-wife team who sold personal-care products, and a mom who delivered homemade baby food to the “choosiest parents.” (I believe we used those exact words.) I spent the school hours in front of my computer, looking at images of cobalt waters and white sand and sensual bottles of eco-friendly shampoo. For days I rearranged photos of vegetables. I would try to put the pieces together in a way that was whole and desirable and enticing. I aimed to please. Well, I sure did.

Sometime after that concert, Ian began calling me in the afternoon. I would be there at my desk and the phone would ring and my heart would quicken. He would call for some made-up reason—an invitation, a news article about a music performer we liked. The cobalt waters and white-sand beach would sit in front of me for too long, and my tuna sandwich (tuna, mayo, potato chips laid inside, white bread, perfection) would find itself uncommonly ignored.

The voice on the other end, the talk, real talk, talk between two people—not talk that was effortful, a counseling session, anger avoidance, careful stepping around land mines, all the things talk was with Mark—it was a new world. I didn’t know that’s what talk was like. I had met Mark when I was nineteen, and I guess after all those years he had exhausted me. I never knew I was signing up for some battle, but I finally knew that he had won. It wasn’t just the anger that had done me in, the moments when he would thrash and rage and a fist would go through a door right next to my face—it was the daily tending of an emotional person. The violent outbursts (his hands on me, his feet kicking) would come once or twice a year, more sometimes, but the mood reading, the way I was a perpetual ranger at a perpetual weather station watching for ominous signs, that was a constant, and that’s what defeated me. Our marriage wasn’t all rage, of course. Of course we had our good times. Of course there were things I loved about him. I patched that door he’d punched the hole through, though. I hid the damage. I used spackling paste and a flat-edged tool I found in the garage. I painted over it, but you could still see the rough edges where his fist had gone in. I wore long sleeves sometimes, too.

With Ian, when we talked—I got something back, and this seemed like a revelation. I learned things about his work. I learned about his life. I learned about what he wanted and didn’t have, and what he had and didn’t want. He was calm. He was kind. His life seemed so … controlled. But I also spoke. I didn’t know there was a door you could open to a whole land of yourself. Or maybe I suspected it but finally saw it was true. There were all these ideas I had, dreams, all this
energy
.

Do you know what Mark told me once? I just remembered this. He told me that he didn’t want to hear about my day when he came home. He needed
me
to listen to
him
. What I can’t believe
now is that I must have gotten in bed with him that night, after he said that.

Still, what Ian and I did was the coward’s way out. I know this. I know it now, and I knew it then, although I justified it. Adultery often happens, I am sure, because you are on the sinking ship, and you need to leap but can’t leap. You are too spineless, maybe, to leap. The water is too dark and choppy and the sea is too large. Saving your own life, even, isn’t enough reason to jump—no, you need the hands at your back, pushing, the hands of something as unavoidable and inevitable and imperative as love. It’s got to be something that big, you know, to get you to jump. That life raft down there is too small, and the unknowns are so immense, and you know where the kitchen is on the ship; you know where your own bed is, and the sinking is so slow, anyway, that you’ve gotten used to it. You really don’t want to hurt a person, either; that’s the irony. Even if he’s someone who has screamed in your face and struck you. Especially not if her only real crime is running up the credit cards and drinking a lot and occasionally ignoring the kids. The compelling forces of capital letter LOVE and another person in that life raft so that you’re not alone—they make the leap possible.