The Daylight Marriage (3 page)

“Language,” said Ethan.

Lovell finally stood and pressed the power button below the screen. “Who wants to play Uno?” he asked weakly.

IN THE MORNING,
Susan Sperck had gone, but a couple of news vans were now parked along the street across from his house. Thankfully, it was a Saturday, and Janine and Ethan could stay home. They had all shared his bed last night and none of them had gotten much rest, so Lovell let the kids sleep in and went downstairs to call Duncan. “Any updates on the case?”

“Nothing to tell.”

“A reporter came by last night,” Lovell said. “And now some more are parked on our street.”

“I haven't talked to any of them. But I guess I'm not all that surprised. Some bored cop with a big mouth. You know. And the prettier the lady, the wider the coverage.”

Lovell winced.

“I'll talk to the guys.”

“I'd appreciate it.” He glanced out his living room window as two more news vans pulled up behind the others. “And if you wouldn't mind giving me a heads-up next time you talk to my kids, I'd appreciate that as well. They're pretty freaked out right now.” Lovell added, “We all are.”

“I'll do what I can,” Duncan said. “Oh, and Lovell, if I were you, I wouldn't talk to any more reporters. Just ignore them, if you can. Pretend they're not there.”

Are you kidding?
Lovell nearly said. How easy it must be to dole out glib advice at times like these.

The phone rang throughout the day: Hannah's parents and sister, each with rapid-fire questions about when he had last seen her and orders to check this place and that (“Of course I checked the shop”) and suggestions for others that he might not have considered; her closest friends; a few of his coworkers who had seen the news. His mother called and asked him whether he might be forgetting some place where Hannah liked to go. “Why does everyone say that? It's not as if you're going to suddenly jog my memory by making me feel like an idiot.”

“
Lovell.
”

Janine sat across the room, eyeing him.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “This isn't easy.”

“How are the kids doing?” his mother tried. “Are people really asking you why you don't know more?”

“Mom.” No one in his immediate family—his mother, father, or brother—was particularly sensitive. They were all academics, such logical people, tortoises whose shells shut away their hearts—feeble from such infrequent use—deep within them and allowed only their heads, their brains, out in the wide, strange world to make sense of it all. Anyway, his mother knew nothing of the state of his marriage other than the little friction that she had witnessed herself, from what he could remember—just a few hushed arguments that she would never have registered.

“I'm headed out to Costco,” she said after a moment. “You want me to bring you toilet paper or anything?”

“I have no idea,” he said automatically. “I'm not the one who inventories that stuff.”

“I'll just get you some. You can never have too much.”

Everyone who had heard that Hannah disappeared called that day, it seemed, but Detective Duncan. There had to have been ten vans outside his house by the time the sun began to set, maybe more.

Lovell went for a bottle of Grey Goose. He stood in the front hallway, watching a circle of people chat beside his mailbox. Susan Sperck appeared at the side of the group, a cell phone to her ear. Someone next to her nodded toward the front door, and Lovell moved back before any of the reporters could see him.

Chapter 3

H
annah woke alone in her son's bed. Lovell had made coffee. She could almost taste it—hazelnut, her favorite—as she pulled Ethan's comforter around her shoulders, but as she rose further toward consciousness, she remembered all that had happened last night. Was making coffee enough of an apology? After all that he had done and almost done—his aimless rage, the embarrassing violence like a rotten smell throughout the room—and all that he had said, which was worse than his physical bluster, all that he had verbalized to try to make her smaller, just this piddling thing, hardly worth a listen, her empty days, her lazy disregard for bills and cars and recycling. He was stunted, too male, too myopic to comprehend that the piddling things were in fact those bills and cars and recycling, not her. Or had she given so much of her life to those eviscerating tasks and gotten to be, herself, just as eviscerating? The line of thinking was old and tired. There was nothing new about women despising their drudgery. There was nothing new about women wanting more. On and on she went like this. Coffee. It was a kid dropping his eyes and mouthing, “Sorry,” to the ground. Lovell was impossible. Being married to him had become impossible, and this sensation bled into the rest of her life and made her feel as if she had become someone else, someone she hardly knew and did not like.

She heard Ethan in the hallway and Janine in the shower and Beethoven on that iPod and speaker she carried from room to room. Hannah worried for her daughter, the world the way it was, boys, girls, friends, love, sex, heartbreak, all of it. Hannah wondered whether her daughter had enough people in her life—enough friends. She gravitated toward young children—she was a sought-after babysitter in the neighborhood—or adults instead of kids her own age. She was her father's daughter; friendships with her peers came a distant third, in Janine's case, after homework and viola. Being likable was not a priority for her.

It was Thursday. Hannah had to work at the flower shop later that morning, and Ethan's orthodontist appointment was in the afternoon. She stretched and unwound the sheet from her body.

Janine stood alone in the kitchen at the counter, her back hunched. It drove Hannah crazy, the girl's consistently bad posture. Janine wore her black army pants and a green button-down cardigan draped over an old white T-shirt. Clothes did not interest her. Maybe it was in fact her height: not much fit her.

At Janine's age, Hannah had already been tall too, taller than the other girls in her class. Her mother had always said, “You could easily do commercials—print
or
TV. Soon you'll be able to do runway. Say the word and I'll call some old contacts,” and Hannah's friends always told her, “I wish I was that tall. Do you know how lucky you are?” Janine called commercials the “tools of a sexist corporate culture,” thanks to a new media literacy class at her school. Hannah's response was, “Well, yes. Doesn't everyone already know that?”

Janine slouched at the table and glanced over at her. “You OK, Mom?”

“I'm fine.” Hannah shuddered to think of her listening to Lovell crash around last night like a big, dumb bear caught inside the house. “You look nice today,” Hannah tried. Everyone wanted to hear that, didn't they?

Janine shrugged and reached for a mug of coffee on the table.

“You shouldn't drink coffee,” Hannah said. “You're too young.”

“It'll stunt my growth, right? I'd be fine with that.”

“Tall can be pretty. You are pretty, you know,” Hannah tried. She looked around the pantry for a box of bran flakes and brought the cereal and a bowl to the table. Janine pulled a strand of long, limp hair toward her mouth. She had this new habit of chewing the hair that hung beside her face, and the ends had gotten matted and wet. Hannah said, “Sweetie, don't suck on your hair.”

Janine reached for her coffee. Her body was lanky but at the same time chubby, stretched here and compressed there. She had not taken well to adolescence. Then again, who did? Well, Hannah herself, of course. But maybe to be happy at fourteen was to be happy too soon, to use up something that was, in the end, finite.

At least Ethan had a few more years before the hormones flooded in. Of course these years would pass in a moment. His ninth birthday was approaching, and she wanted to do something that he would always remember before he too turned sullen and sulky—decorate the house like a spaceship, ask all his friends to dress as aliens or something. Lovell had laughed at the idea. “Seems a little much.”

Hannah stepped behind Janine and kissed the top of her damp head. “Being tall is a good thing. Someday you'll see.” She continued, “Coffee isn't good for you.”

“You drink it,” Janine said. She opened the social studies textbook beside her place mat.

Lovell blazed into the kitchen and accidentally knocked a banana off the counter. He leaned down to peck Hannah good-bye. He said he was late for a meeting. The kitchen was never clean; he always dropped things and left messes throughout the house. She watched him searching for his keys, but looked away before he could see her. What if he had gone ahead and hit her last night? But then he would have become someone else, someone at least formidable, a significant threat. A legitimate problem. She no longer loved him. She may never have loved him.

She poured cereal into a bowl and asked Janine, “Are you going to the library later to work on that civil rights paper?”

Janine turned a page.

“Hello?”

“I'll go after school.”

“What time should I pick you up?”

Janine stared at the words before her.

“What time?”

“Shit. I don't know, four?”

“
Language. Four o'clock on the front steps. Don't be late—Ethan has the orthodontist at four thirty.” Hannah dug her spoon into the bowl and tried to finish the cereal before the flakes wilted in the milk.

Janine left her mug on the table and slid her books into her backpack. She twisted her hair into a frayed ponytail. “Bye,” she said, and she ran outside to her bus stop. Hannah looked over at the mug she had left, the brown droplets halfway down the side.

Ethan remained upstairs in his room. “Eth. You ready?” she called up to him. “We need to go.” She waited for an answer. “Eth, come on, let's get going,” she said, but so what if he missed a day of school? So what if he lounged around the house? What if they all abandoned their duties and did what they wanted today—watched TV, ate sugary cereal, read comic books? Ethan would ride his unicycle around the driveway. Janine would practice viola. Lovell would set up his computer and maps all over the kitchen table. Or he would putter around the house or up on the roof, tending to the solar panels. And Hannah? If she could do anything she wanted today, anything at all? She didn't know. She had no idea.

On the counter was a folder of old photos her mother had given her yesterday, pictures of Hannah as a child that had not made it into an album. She opened the folder and flipped through them. There was her first-grade picture, another of her steering her father's boat. She stopped at a shot of her sitting in her father's office chair behind his big mahogany desk, her hair in yellow plastic barrettes with little chicks. She didn't remember this one. She did remember the few times that she went to that office overlooking the ferry dock, Mrs. Corcoran, the pudgy, kindly secretary who let Hannah try on her red bifocals, the other men flashing by, oblivious, leaving only the whiff of cigarettes. And the objects of the place: her father's glass paperweight with the tiny sailboat inside; his envelope opener, that bronze dagger; the supply closet, the wondrous supply closet that held boxes of shiny clips and erasers and highlighters that Mrs. Corcoran allowed her to play with in the waiting area. A five- or six-year-old Hannah smiled back at her with all the hope and imagination in the world. It took her breath away. Hannah slipped the folder into her purse. She did not want to see that picture for a while.

Ethan was before her, his jacket zipped to his chin, his backpack hanging from his shoulders.

“Good job,” she said. “You're all set.”

He nodded and she gathered him in her arms. He smelled of grape toothpaste and bubble-gum shampoo, and blessedly he let her hold him for a long moment. She grabbed a granola bar for him and ushered him out the front door.

Chapter 4

O
n Sunday morning, while the kids were still asleep, Lovell went to make coffee. He took note of the sprinkle of grounds that had remained beside the coffee maker since Hannah's disappearance four mornings ago. She preferred flavored; he, “regular leaded,” as he called it. Making her favorite coffee that morning must have done nothing for her, in the end.

He still half expected, half hoped, that he would hear the sound of the front door opening and Hannah calling,
Hello? Anyone home?
Her arms full of gifts or flowers to convey a change of heart, maybe contrition, she would say that she had just needed some time and space apart from him in order to really think things over and come to the decision that she did not—of course she did not—want to leave them.

He turned on the coffee maker and waited, hands laced around the back of his neck, for the sound of the gurgling water to fill the silence in the kitchen. Once it did, he walked outside to get the newspaper, shielding his face from the reporters, but when he looked, he saw that the TV crews had packed up their equipment and gone home. He reminded himself that there had been no news about the case for two days now. Curled leaves blew in little horizontal tornadoes down the street. The sidewalks were empty.

He moved toward the front lawn to pick up some fallen branches from a recent storm and saw a young couple pass by on the sidewalk. They averted their eyes at first, but the woman peered back over at him. He had no idea how to behave, how to look, or what, if anything, to say when people watched him this way. Yesterday, Karen Mekenner had inched past his house in her silver Volvo, eyeing him as he took out the trash.

Moving here from their overpriced, cramped Brookline studio had been a reasonable idea so many years ago. The price was low, the town quaint and pretty. In the summers, they could bike to Walden Pond or go apple picking in Stow.

They, or Hannah really, “could not have anticipated the obliterating quiet, the aloofness but at the same time awkwardness of so many of the people here, the deep homogeneity and stunning averageness,” as she once put it in an e-mail to him on a particularly low day. Lovell had not been around enough over the years for these things to really bother him. “The ruddy-faced men in finance, the athletic stay-at-home moms, the fucking Boy Scouts, the golden retrievers, the gas-guzzling minivans, the holiday-themed flags near the front door for any and every holiday.” She had gone on writing in this manner, as if for some phantom reader who did not in fact live in the same town. “Time must have stopped moving forward here in this suburb. It seems like the civil rights movement and sexual revolution never reached this place.”

Most of the women she had met here were nice enough. They seemed to want to be her friend—they eagerly approached her at school events and music classes, they invited her to moms' nights out and various in-home parties where kitchenware or makeup was being sold, but in the end they seemed to Hannah more like coworkers than friends. She certainly never lit up when with them the way she did with Sophie or the others. She'd had a small gaggle of close friends from her high school and BU, these affable, generous, funny women. Most of them lived elsewhere now; only Sophie was still in Massachusetts. A few times Hannah had suggested trips to visit the others in San Francisco or even London, but Lovell reminded her that they could never afford the flights, not if they expected to pay their mortgage and save for the kids to go to college.

He turned back to his house, the stained, angled modern that held three solar panels across its slanted roof. Yellow plastic rain barrels sat under drain spouts and dribbled water onto the mulch beneath. In this neighborhood of pristine Cape Cods and Victorians, each set squarely on an identical plot of plush green grass, their house sometimes looked to him as if it had been dropped here by mistake.

LATER THAT EVENING,
the three of them and his mother, who had come with dinner, sat over a game of Scrabble. Joanne Hall, a lanky woman with a cap of coarse gray hair, set down tiles that spelled quantum. So far, she had spelled subset, zeta, and zero. She was a theoretical mathematician at MIT.

“You're kicking ass, Grandma,” Janine said.

Joanne shrugged with false modesty.

“Mom,” Lovell whispered to her. “Can't you let one of them win right now?”

“Why?”

“Do I have to explain it?”

She reached for the box of Entenmann's brownies that she had brought for dessert and set it beside them. “I told your father I'd check in with him around now,” she said to Lovell, and she went off to the living room to make the call.

“Do you miss Mom?” Ethan asked him, as if they had just been discussing Hannah. “Are you worried about her?”

“Yes. Eth, of course I do,” Lovell said.

“You don't talk about it,” Janine said.

“Do I have to?”

“No, you don't
have
to, Dad,” she said.

“
You
guys miss her right now,” Lovell said.

Ethan nodded. Janine watched her father.

Lovell added, “She never liked Scrabble. She was more of a card game person.”

“We know,” Janine said.

“She slept in my bed with me on her last night,” Ethan said.

Lovell had not really broached with them the daunting subject of that night. He held his hands tight together in his lap and began: “I wish that night had been different. You guys have to know this. You can love someone and be angry at them. Grown-ups fight sometimes. Married people argue. They just do.” There was conviction in his voice. He had to at least try to maintain this stance, both for them and for himself:
No marriage is easy.
All couples go through difficult times. “She'll come back soon. Someone will find her. She'll be totally and completely fine.”

Janine did not take her eyes off him. She studied him as he reached for the felt bag of letters, as he pulled out three and set them in the little plastic holder and said, “Janine, your turn.”

She picked up a brownie. “I'm going to sit out this round,” she said at last.