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Authors: Katia Lief

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BOOK: Next Time You See Me
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Halfway down our block, I saw that there was something on our front stoop: a rectangular box. As I got closer it became clear that it was a delivery from a florist—Mac had been receiving a steady stream of condolences all week, numerous cards as well as two bouquets and a flowering plant. I parked the stroller (with Ben still asleep) on the sidewalk and climbed the stoop to see who this one was from. Sitting on the top step, I placed the box on my knees and opened it.

A dozen lavender dahlias were nestled in white tissue paper. An unsigned note card read:
I will be waiting.

I knew they were from Mac, a romantic gesture and a confirmation, if cryptic, of our dinner plans. He wasn’t much of a poet but his note was one of the sweetest things I’d ever read.

First I called my mother and told her we were on for babysitting that evening.

Then I called Mac and reached his voice mail. “I got the dahlias. They’re beautiful. I’m glad you decided to go—see you at seven at the restaurant.”

This was even better: Now we would celebrate two nights in a row.

M
arried couples seldom sweat the details, especially when you have children; you communicate in a kind of relay, passing information back and forth in broad strokes. It hadn’t concerned me that I never heard back after leaving my message on Mac’s voice mail. I knew him: knew that he checked messages frequently; and he was not someone who failed to show up when expected.

It didn’t worry me that I was the first to arrive at the Union Square Café in Manhattan. In fact, I was five minutes early and thought nothing of it. The maître d’ led me past the bar to a small square table in the central part of the restaurant, which was packed, bubbling with conversation.

I ordered a glass of wine and resisted the bread basket until Mac arrived. I wanted him to see how pretty the table looked: the white linen tablecloth, the tiny yellow orchid in a small glass vase, the offering of artisanal breads. Behind our table was a framed still life of fruit done in watercolors, and as it happened the pale green dress I was wearing matched a trio of pears in the painting. It was all too perfect. Here we were—or would soon be—sharing two hours of culinary bliss in a beautiful, if temporary, bubble. When he arrived I was going to set some ground rules: no talking about anything serious or important, including his parents’ murders, including Danny.

I waited, slowly sipping my wine. When it seemed Mac was running late, I checked my voice mail—nothing. I tried his cell and left a message letting him know I was at the restaurant.

At seven-thirty I read the menu. And then I called my mother to find out if Mac had phoned the house. He hadn’t.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “He’s preoccupied. He lost track of time.”

She was right, of course. The shock from a violent loss of loved ones didn’t go away for a long time; it skewed your thinking on many levels. Basic things you took for granted, like measurements of time, evaporated. The only thing you were really aware of was a burning ache at your core.

At seven forty-five I picked at a piece of bread. Checked for messages again. Nothing.

By eight-thirty I had left Mac four messages, drunk two glasses of wine, and grown too embarrassed to face eating dinner alone at a fancy restaurant. Because they couldn’t possibly know the circumstances of our lives, to my neighboring diners and the hovering waitstaff I looked like a woman stood up on a date. I wasn’t brave enough to ignore the growing feeling of humiliation and so, finally, I paid for my wine, apologized to the waiter—who pretended it was all in a day’s work; in thanks for his graciousness I left him an outsized tip—and unsteadily made my way through the packed restaurant and bar and onto the sidewalk where reality was waiting.

Why had I even thought he could come out tonight? It had been delusional of me. I had been unfair to even suggest it.

On my way to the subway on Sixth Avenue, I called Mac twice.

“I’m heading home now. See you later. I love you.”

And the second call, in afterthought: “Don’t worry about this, okay? It doesn’t matter.
I love you
.”

By the time I got home at twenty past nine I was more tired than intoxicated. And I was hungry. I changed from my dress into a nightgown, then peeked at Ben asleep in his room, curled on his side, breathing heavily. Mom sat with me in the kitchen while I ate some leftover pasta. Normally when she babysat at night Mac would walk her home; she lived seven blocks away and was uncomfortable alone in the city in the dark, having lived in the suburbs her entire life until recently.

“He’ll be home soon,” she assured me not once, not twice, but three times.

But after two hours, he still wasn’t home, and he still wasn’t answering his phone.

“Could he be with Detective Staples?” Mom asked.

“Good idea.” I tried Billy but he hadn’t heard from Mac at all today.

“He could be at his sister’s,” Mom suggested.

So I called Rosie, too, but she said she hadn’t spoken with him since their early morning phone conversation.

Finally, at midnight, still no Mac. I put Mom to bed in the spare room next to Ben’s, and went to my room to get ready for bed . . . and wait. Worry would never let me sleep, not until I heard his key in the door, his footsteps, the weight of his body in bed next to me.

And then, before I knew it, it was morning. I had lain there all night, drifting in the shallow space between sleep and wakefulness, until the first grains of sunlight infiltrated the room, vanquishing the darkness, replacing night with day. Mac’s side of the bed was untouched. And still, despite the plain fact that he had not come home at all last night, I wondered if somehow he would make it before Ben’s wakeup cry. He was a devoted father, and missing the family’s routines would bother him.

Ben cried. I waited a minute, wondering if Mac was somewhere else in the house, if he would go to Ben. Waited another minute, and another, as Ben’s cries escalated.

“Shall I get him?” my mother called.

“That’s okay. I’m up.”

Ben was standing in his crib, holding on to the bars so tightly his knuckles were almost white, tears streaming down his little face.

“I’m sorry, baby.” I kissed his wet doughy cheek. “Shh, Mommy’s here, it’s all right, it’s all right.”

O
n weekdays the plaza at Metrotech bustled with corporate workers, but this morning, a Saturday, it was almost deserted. Other than me, there was an older couple resting on a bench and a homeless man picking through an overflowing garbage can, occasionally putting something into his mouth. Since becoming a mother, I no longer turned away from the derelict and down-and-out; instead, their invisibility had taken form and substance and now the mere sight of one filled me with an aching reminder that a woman had given birth to him or her. The man eating garbage in the plaza on this quiet morning had been someone’s baby, someone’s child, and somehow during the journey of his life he had become lost. I handed him a five-dollar bill on my way past and made a point of making eye contact before continuing on.

Out of the plaza, I crossed the street to the entrance of the Eighty-fourth Precinct. I hadn’t wanted to do this on the phone, with my mother in the house, because her nervousness made me nervous. Coming right out and saying, “Mac is missing,” might make it true before Billy Staples, a seasoned cop, would have the chance to reel off all the statistics about how usually people who didn’t come home weren’t missing so much as AWOL for some other, understandable reason that had not yet made itself apparent.

I found Billy in the second-floor detectives unit, feet up on his desk, tapping his iPhone with both thumbs. Half of a greasy-looking egg-on-bagel sat on a crinkled piece of wax paper.

“How old is that sandwich?” I pulled a chair from a neighboring desk, straightened it beside Billy’s, and sat down.

“Karin!”

He sat up swiftly, like a child caught goofing off though it was quiet in the unit. Assumedly all the action had taken place last night, and being Saturday even more would be expected tonight—this was the standard lull between the storms. A single perp sat listlessly in a holding cell against the far wall; the others would have already been processed and moved to the Brooklyn House of Detention, known as the House, for safekeeping.

“Still haven’t heard from him?”

“I’m so worried.”

He set his iPhone down amid a mess of paperwork, and I saw that he had been playing a Sudoku game. “Yeah,” he said, “I don’t like it, either.”

I was almost disappointed that Billy wasn’t going to try to talk me out of feeling alarmed, but why would he? I knew the drill. And he knew as well as I did that disappearing without a word was not like Mac.

“I called his sister, his brother, his friends,” I said. “No one’s heard from him since yesterday morning. He didn’t tell anyone anything about going somewhere that wasn’t home.”

“Did you try his ex-wife? They were married a long time.” Billy kept his expression bland in the way you did when you knew something you said might not go over well. “You never know.”

“I don’t have her number in my phone.”

He turned to his computer and looked it up. “You want to call or should I?”

I read the number off his screen and dialed my phone. Val answered after five rings, sounding groggy.

“Val, it’s Karin Schaeffer. Sorry I woke you.” I heard something rustling on her end of the phone and the sound of something falling. “I can call back.”

“No, it’s fine. My glasses fell. Give me a minute.” The phone clunked when she set it down and a few moments later she was back on the line. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry to call so early on a weekend—”

“No problem. What’s up?”

“Mac . . . is he there?”

“No. Why?”

“Did you hear from him yesterday at all?”

“I haven’t spoken to him since the funeral.” She paused again. “He’s depressed, isn’t he?”

“To say the least. Is that what you meant about ‘the dark side’?”

“It gobbles him up, but just for a couple days at the most. It’s like he digests it and lets it out. It’s scary when it happens, Karin, but he always gets over it.”

“Why didn’t I know this?”

“I didn’t see it until we were married five years. I’m sorry.”

“No. Really. It’s okay.” But I felt like such a fool, having to be counseled by my husband’s former wife about his emotional habits.

“Did you call his friend Stan? They used to spend a lot of time together.”

“The sculptor with the shack—”

“—behind his house. Yes. Do you have his number?”

I wrote down Stan’s phone number, feeling a ray of hope.

“Thanks, Val. I appreciate it.”

“Anytime. You heard about Danny?”

“Not since Mac was home yesterday morning.”

“Oh boy. Not that you’ll be surprised, but he was arrested in Westchester last night. The old grapevine lit up and called me.”

“Did they find Aileen’s ring?” My stomach turned, asking that.

“The police aren’t saying. But they must have, or why arrest him?”

“If they haven’t said they found it, I wouldn’t assume anything.”

Val had been married to a cop for nearly two decades; she knew I was right.

“Poor Danny,” she said.

“I can’t believe I didn’t hear about this. I guess I’ve had my head in the sand. I—”

“You were waiting for Mac. I understand.”

I could tell by the weight of her tone that she did understand, and that it made her sad.

“Mac was always protective of Danny,” she said. “This probably upset him a lot. Did you call that detective from Bronxville?”

“I didn’t think of it, but I will. Thanks.”

“Call me and let me know how Mac is when he turns up, okay?” Her tone was tentative, as if she didn’t know whether this was a reasonable request between generations of spouses.

“I will.” And I would. Why not? The more I encountered Val, the more I liked her, and she and Mac had loved each other once.

As soon as the call was over, I phoned Stan. He sounded happy enough to hear from “Mac’s new wife” but hadn’t seen or heard from him since the funeral, either.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to meet you the other day,” Stan said.

“Another time.”

The awkwardness was so thick you could have sliced off a chunk. I had phoned someone I didn’t know looking for my husband—what were the chances a marriage that required
that
would last long enough for another opportunity to meet?

I ended the call and told Billy about Danny. He immediately picked up his desk phone and dialed Pawtusky’s number from the card he had lying on his desk, which he must have gotten at the funeral.

I listened to Billy’s end of the brief conversation with the Bronxville detective, just as I had listened to Mac’s yesterday. He hung up, shaking his head. “He’s stuck on Danny, just doesn’t buy the boat thing. And they did
not
find your mother-in-law’s ring at Danny’s or anywhere else. But the main thing: He hasn’t heard from or seen Mac.”

BOOK: Next Time You See Me
11.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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