The Daylight Marriage (4 page)

Chapter 5

H
annah was late bringing Ethan to school. Sarah, one of the teaching assistants, waited alone for him by the red double doors. She ushered Ethan inside and glanced back to wave at Hannah, who was standing against her car at the curb. Sarah had blond hair cut in a matronly style and wore a blondish sweater and loose tan pants. She was pretty and pleasant. Hannah waved back at Sarah and thought to ask her whether she needed any help today, but in less than a moment the two had disappeared inside.

The sun shone fiercely and the sky was cloudless, the sidewalk black, newly paved. Not one other person could be seen. Children everywhere were in school. Hannah looked at her watch—she had two and a half hours before she was due at work. She rushed up the concrete stairs and inside the school to catch up with Sarah and Ethan.

“Forget something?” Sarah asked.

“I've got some time before I have to be at work. Do you guys need any help this morning with snack or recess?” Ethan looked at his feet.

“Thanks, but I think we're all set.” Sarah enunciated and spoke a half beat too slowly, in the way that women who worked with small children did. “We have a full day planned. We're making volcanoes. Papier-mâché.”

“Oh. Good, that sounds fun.”

Sarah smiled. “Messy fun.”

Hannah's face prickled with heat. “Then I'll go enjoy this time to myself and leave you guys to it.” She started back down the hallway.

The other week, after volunteering in Ethan's class, she had seen a kindergartner seated against the wall outside a classroom, his arms around his knees. The boy had an older brother in Ethan's grade, and Hannah had heard that the father had just left their family. “You all right?” Hannah had asked, and he shrugged, his tangled black hair nearly covering his face.

Hannah glanced around. “You want some company? Are you in time-out or something?”

He was silent, but he revealed enough of his face for Hannah to see that he was crying.

“I could sit with—”

“Go away.”

“Okay,” Hannah said. She buttoned up her coat and hurried off, and when she had reached the front doors of the school, she called Lovell at work and told him about the boy.

“Just let it be,” he said.

“I guess. You don't think I should tell the teacher what's going on in their house? She might not know yet. You should have seen this kid. He looked awful. He's so little.”

“I don't know. I guess you could tell her.”

She heard him begin to type, and said, “Forget it.”

“He'll be fine,” Lovell said vacantly.

“I was thinking about Tunis the other day,” she said. Just the mention of the place where they had gone for their honeymoon always drew him back.

“Yeah?”

“Do you remember that woman singing? And her husband, that doctor, called her a cow or something like that? And that creepy basement! God, that was scary.”

“Given our situation, I wasn't paying much attention.”

“And then sleeping in that Bedouin tent in the desert.”

“Ah. That was much better.”

“Our nomad? What was his name?”

“Dhia? Daly? I don't remember.”

“He wasn't hard on the eyes,” she said.

“He obviously felt the same way about you. Let me tell you, it was a real joy to share the tent with you both.”

She laughed. “Oh, come on. He was off helping the other tourists most of the time. And he slept outside on the sand, remember?”

“I've got work to do,” Lovell said. It was a guillotine to the conversation. “Listen. That kid at school? He's not your problem.”

She realized that she had shut her eyes, and she opened them now. “I guess not.”

“I'll see you later?”

“Yeah, fine.”

The hallway had been empty. On a cork board to her right had hung a row of messily painted apples with children's names. The boy would be all right, she had repeated to herself. Someone else, a teacher or an older kid or someone, would walk past and help him.

Now, as she left the school, she told herself she would drive back home, of course. Today would be a good day. It would be a good day.

Everyone had encouraged her to immerse herself more in work. Lovell, Sophie, Leah—each had a career. This was the answer. Turn your gaze outward. Busy yourself. A month or so ago, she had breezily suggested to Lovell that she open her own flower store, and he loved the idea: “Do it! Why not?” Sophie and Leah had similar reactions. This was just what they wanted for her. Her children were old enough now. Plenty of mothers with younger children had gone back to work full-time. So today she would begin. Once she got home, she would call their bank to make an appointment to discuss loans, look through the local paper for commercial rentals in town, arrange meetings with some area potters, research obtaining a license to import, check the latest regulations for organically grown flowers. She would have to make a list of all the steps to be taken—the business plan, the statement of purpose, her résumé, the bank loans, the rentals and phone calls—and of course there was the question of square footage and how large a store she would want.

She let her forehead fall onto the steering wheel. She had gotten a job delivering flowers just out of college on a whim. It had been the first job she had gotten on her own, not in her father's office, not assisting her mother at the agency. In the end, it had been a default career.

Mostly it was women who received flowers, girlfriends on Valentine's Day and anniversaries, mothers on Mother's Day, women who chatted with this twenty-two-year-old and asked whether it was safe for her to be knocking on strange doors. “I have a bodyguard in the van,” she half joked with them. Sometimes she did share her route with a father of three who had recently emigrated from Haiti.

It was a surprise so many years ago to open the metal door of an apartment in Brighton and see that the strange, old-fashioned name belonged to a guy about her age. “This must be from my mother. I just graduated,” he said as he took the wrapped flowers from her. Another man, smaller, with strawberry-blond hair, passed behind him. An overweight yellow lab lay on its side on a couch, two legs in the air. It could have been Hannah's own dog, Marmalade, waiting for someone to scratch her belly. The apartment was narrow and messy and she saw a hump of laundry in the middle of the hallway behind him. She smelled sweaty sneakers and lemon room deodorizer.

“These are irises. ‘Butterfly Wings,'” Hannah said. “Your mother has good taste.”

“Someone at the store must have helped her.” He took in her face. She glanced down at the bent metal threshold, then looked back up at him and saw that his eyes were the oddest color. Brown but also gold, or a hint of green maybe. He was tall, unusually tall. He reminded her of some big, friendly kid that had just woken. She had no sense that this would be the person she would marry.

A week later she delivered a bouquet of roses to him, this time from his cousin, and the following week a basket of carnations and only then did she suspect anything. He did not deny it. “I was hoping—I mean, I thought I might see you again,” he managed when she questioned him, and she smiled and said, “There are less expensive ways of getting in touch with me. The number for Fanciful Flowers is right here.” She pulled a business card from an envelope attached to the plastic wrap.

Lovell invited her to dinner and she accepted. She needed a distraction after Doug. She returned to Lovell's apartment for his homemade chili and corn-bread muffins a few nights later, simple, boyish food that he seemed to think impressed her. But he did not flirt or puff himself up in the ways that so many others did with banter or feigned disinterest. Even now, so many years later, men at the bank or grocery store or in restaurants lowered their voices when they spoke to her. They punned, they joked, they rushed to pick up her fallen purse or napkin.

Over dinner, Lovell described his studies of tornadoes. The previous summer he had driven with a friend to Alberta just after “an F4” tore through Edmonton to help with cleanup and disaster relief, and he even played a small part in developing the province's emergency public warning system. He was earnest and polite and attentive; he asked about Boston University, her family, her childhood on Martha's Vineyard. She decided that she had never met anyone with this combination of innocence and intelligence. “I have ice cream too,” he said after clearing the wobbly card table he and his roommate used as a dining table in the kitchen. “Neapolitan—I wasn't sure which kind you liked.”

He told her about his graduate program at MIT in earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences. “But part of me just wants to go on the road and storm-chase next semester and defer. Of course my adviser is totally against this.”

She wanted to know what a tornado looked like up close, and why tornadoes and not hurricanes?

“Good question,” he said. “Well, I've got this theory that hurricanes might be like these barometers of climate change. If you look closely at sea temperatures and whatnot, you see these patterns.”

She said, “Tell me more,” and he replied, “Glad to.”

At the end of the night, he walked her to his door and said, “Can we do this again?”

“This?”

“Dinner, talk—or whatever you'd want to do.”

“Sure, I'd like that.” She waited for him to close his eyes and lean down and in toward her face. But he only said, “Do you want to borrow a coat? It's cold out tonight.”

Chapter 6

O
n Monday, Lovell let the kids decide whether to attend school for the first time since Hannah's disappearance. Both said they wanted to go back—he guessed that a sense of normalcy and routine was important for them right now. “But if you hear anything at all about Mom, can you come get me?” Janine asked.

“Me too?” Ethan added.

“Of course,” Lovell answered.

A while later, he herded Janine out the door and watched as she stepped inside the bus. She half turned to wave good-bye to him, brushing her hair from her face, and then off she went to the other kids and teachers and her school. Maybe he would in fact have to go to their schools later today. What if he had to walk inside the front office and tell the secretary . . . that what?

He wandered back to the house to get Ethan breakfast—a bowl of Cheerios—and help him pack up for school. “What else do you need? What does Mom do in the morning?”

“Can I just have some milk? And a napkin? And a spoon?”

“Of course,” Lovell said.

“Chocolate,” Ethan commanded when Lovell handed him a glass of plain milk.

“This is better for you. You drink chocolate milk?”

“So?”

“Fine, fine.” Hannah had always been a little lax about things like this. Lovell looked through the cabinet. Ripped clothing or unbrushed hair made her crazy, but, what, seventeen grams of sugar in one serving of Ovaltine, according to the label on the can, was apparently no problem.

“She gives me one squirt of whipped cream on top.”

“No. Really? We even have whipped cream?”

“It's the only way I can drink it.”

Lovell sighed and headed back to the refrigerator.

The two did not say much more as they downed their cereal and went to find Ethan's schoolbooks and jacket. “Are you going to get dressed?” Ethan asked him as they headed for the front door.

Lovell was still in his pajama pants and bathrobe. “I wasn't planning on it. I'm not going to my office today.”

“I'll just walk myself to the bus stop.”

“If you want,” Lovell said, wondering when Ethan had begun to notice what anyone else was wearing.

Lovell went to open the front door. It dawned on him that he would be alone in this house today. Not one of them would be there with him. Lovell bent down and hugged Ethan before saying good-bye. “You're my best Ethan,” he whispered, a silly thing he had been saying for years.

“Bye, Dad,” Ethan said, and he trudged forward, his gray sweatpants bunching and pooling above his sneakers.

Lovell caught sight of a news van parked across the street again. He wondered when it had come, and why. An idea landed on him: What if he actually offered himself up to whatever reporter might be sitting inside this van, watching for him? Didn't the husband or wife in these cases usually do that? Make a plea for their spouse to return?

After the bus came and disappeared with Ethan down the street, Lovell thought more about his idea. A guy now standing outside the van adjusted what looked to be a light meter. He lifted his head and caught Lovell's eye, then leaned around the back of the van perhaps to call for someone else.

Lovell walked back inside the now empty house. He had to do this. He had to do whatever he could to help get her back. He went to the bathroom to comb his hair and check his teeth. He looked over at Hannah's bottle of lemongrass hand cream on the sink. The bathroom in her parents' brownstone where she had lived when they met had been this exotic laboratory when he first saw it, all the tall glass bottles and clay or ceramic pots of lavender and melon and cucumber and jasmine creams lining the windowsill and the sink and the side of the tub. He remembered secretly unscrewing and smelling a few. He had even tasted the huckleberry mask, though he had spat it out once his mouth registered the bitter alcohol tang.

Duncan had warned him against speaking to the press, but this would be a way to control the message right now. He tried to ignore his rapid pulse at the thought of this task that faced him.

He stepped outside, and Maya Gupta, a youngish reporter from Channel 6, was on him. “Lovell Hall!” She turned and motioned to her cameraman a few yards away. “Would you mind saying a few things?” Her round face was open and curious. She kept a respectful distance from him.

“Glad to do it,” he said.

“What do you know at this point about where your wife might have gone?”

“I hardly know anything,” he answered.

She asked him the sort of questions that Susan Sperck had, although with less venom, about what he knew and what the police knew.

“It seems that she might have gone to South Boston,” he said. He attempted to project concern but calm—he certainly did not want to appear nervous or, worse, disingenuous. “Would you mind if I asked your viewers for help? Maybe they could call the police if any of them saw her?”

“Of course,” Maya said. “Why don't you go inside and get a picture of her? We can run it with the number of the PD in town. Does that sound good?”

He nodded, relieved, and turned toward the house. A moment later he came back with a photo of Hannah wearing hot-pink gardening gloves, kneeling in front of her sunflowers in the backyard.

“So you want to look right into the lens like you're talking to a friend,” she said, and although he balked at the idea of gazing directly into the eyes of all those viewers, of allowing his own eyes to be seen up close, he walked in front of the camera and moved to where he was directed to stand. “My wife, Hannah Hall, went missing last Thursday morning, October fourth,” he began. He explained that she was last seen on Carson Beach in South Boston, that her bracelet had been found. “If anyone, if any of you, has seen this woman,” he said as he held up the framed photo, “please contact the number of the police below.”

Maya nodded, waiting for him to say more.

“And,” he went on, trying to focus directly on the center of the lens now, “if you're watching this, Hannah, we miss you. Please come home.”

Maya dropped the microphone and asked the cameraman, “You got that?” He nodded, and she added, “If you could get in tighter—” Her voice a degree kinder, she held the microphone forward again and asked, “Lovell, what sort of woman is Hannah? What sort of mother and wife is she? Can you give us more of a sense of her?”

He scanned the houses behind the reporter and saw a woman jogging past with her black terrier. He thought about his kids. He thought about Hannah's face the moment after he had kicked the bed frame. He considered the holes in his alibi, which these reporters may well have seen by now. “You couldn't ask for a better woman,” he began. “Or a better mom or wife.”

“Can you tell us more? What are her hobbies? What does she like to do with the kids?”

The details spilled out: she had recently made each child a ceramic vase on her friend's pottery wheel and brought home rose or lavender buds every week from the shop. “She flies with her father to his hometown in the south of Ireland every year. She is a talented cook and a longtime Red Sox fan. She studied English, poetry, in college,” he said, trying to ignore an image of her sulking and glaring at him from their bed that last night. These pretty details, this flattering portrait, felt like a lie. It was a lie. He hoped that the tension throughout his body was not apparent in his face. “We first met when she delivered flowers to my apartment—irises from my mother when I graduated from college.”

“That's lovely,” Maya said. “Thank you. Such good stuff.” She flashed a look at her cameraman. He nodded once and hefted the camera from his shoulder. Maya stood for a moment, watching Lovell start to make his way toward his front door. She called to him as he reached his front stoop.

His heart beat in his neck. “Yes?”

“You take good care, all right? Be kind to yourself. Get some rest.”

over the next
couple of days, more news vans arrived and parked across the street. Lovell agreed to another interview with Maya Gupta, this time to talk about the kids and his job, Hannah's work, and more of Hannah's life. While the cameraman readied for the shoot, Maya whispered to Lovell, “You might want to go put on something a little more formal, something nicer than that sweatshirt. You need to look sympathetic, here, like you're taking this seriously.” His face hot, Lovell walked back inside to find a button-down shirt and tie.

When a few more reporters arrived, he handed over shoe boxes with photographs and home videos of Hannah that he had gathered. As he stood talking to a group of newspaper reporters, he looked out and saw Susan Sperck jockeying for position behind them. “Got a minute for me?” she asked when their eyes met, and he had no choice but to nod.

She summoned her cameraman, and once they were ready, once the camera was rolling, she introduced him and reminded the viewers who he was. “I thought we could talk a little today about your marriage, Lovell.”

He blinked over at the camera. “All right.”

“Can you tell me how you met? How you first pursued Hannah?”

He had already told Maya about those irises, but that was for a different station. “She used to deliver flowers, and one time she showed up at my door. I had a hard time forming any words when I first saw her.”

She laughed warmly. “I can only imagine.” She went on to ask whether Hannah was his first girlfriend, how long they had dated, what he supposed had drawn her to him.

He had good reason to ask how these silly and vaguely offensive questions were relevant to anything, but he held back. “Yes, I guess she was my first real girlfriend. We were together for a year before we got married.”

“Where did you propose, Lovell?”

While attempting to appear wistful, he described that morning in Donovan Munroe's boat, her parents only feet away, the striated cliffs of Gay Head in the distance.

The rest of the interview went on in this way. Lovell mustered whatever patience he could. “And what did she say? Do you remember her words? How long was the engagement?”
Oh God! When did you decide to do this? We haven't even talked about it. But, I think, I guess I should say yes!
“And Hannah? Did she want to wait?”
Only a few months. We
didn't see the point in waiting
.

Susan's subtext barely lurked beneath the surface: whatever had Hannah seen in this particular man?

LOVELL CONSIDERED TAKING
the kids somewhere else until the reporters went away, but he could not seem to wrestle this thought into any real plan. Where would they even go? He continued to stay tethered to the phone, always waiting for news that did not come, seizing up every time the phone did ring. He had given up trying to seem calm and rational in front of his kids. A full week had now passed since Hannah had gone.

On TV, her life played before them. The producers had by now edited the material into extended “in depth” stories that they ran, one with a quiet Chopin nocturne in the background. This piece had the effect of assuring that Hannah's fate would be tragic and newsworthy. The usual family photos were shown next: Hannah on snowshoes; Hannah dancing at their wedding; Hannah holding a greenish pumpkin the size of a soccer ball, Ethan by her side. Ethan, with his light eyes. Lovell stood at the corner of the living room, taking note of how they appeared on-screen, he stumbling over his scripted-sounding words, disheveled and pale in his neutral-colored tie, white button-down shirt, and tan corduroy sport jacket, an outfit that might have too obviously communicated innocence. Hannah, impossibly beautiful in those liquid fabrics, coral or lilac silk shirts or angora sweaters, with black yoga pants and a plain silver necklace, her hair in a high bun or tossed over one shoulder. She could have been a dancer, a professional ballerina. He might have been a computer geek who had stumbled into someone else's life.

An expert came on and presented a host of alarming scenarios: a carjacking in a nearby town, kidnapping, identity change, suicide.

“Turn it off,” Lovell said. “I shouldn't have let you watch any of this. Come on. Now. I'll let you know about any updates I hear.” He yanked the plug from the outlet and hauled the heavy TV upstairs to his bedroom. His face sweaty with exertion, he leaned down and placed the thing in the corner of his room.

Janine stood in the doorway, watching him. “I'm going next door,” she said.

“To Stephen and Jeff's?” She had spent the past few afternoons with the new neighbors, a young gay couple. Lovell had met them only in passing. She had proudly reported back to them that Jeff was a cellist with the Boston Symphony—and had offered to help her with Beethoven—and Stephen an art teacher at a private high school in Cambridge. Jeff, the “funny one,” had grown up in Montreal, and Stephen, the “quieter one,” was raised in a suburb of Paris. Apparently they watched Bruins games and made their own sushi and had lots of friends over all the time. Their lives, Lovell assumed, could not have differed more from her own.

“No, to play with King and Mrs. Mekenner.”

“Very funny. How about you stay here?”

“Why?”

He blinked at her. “Why not?”

“I told them I'd be there by now. Jeff's little niece Penelope is there and I told them I'd watch her while he made dinner. She's three. Stephen has a work meeting tonight.”

“Penelope, huh?” he said. Janine's love of small children made him unaccountably grateful. “Listen, I'm sorry you had to see that guy on TV. They're full of it, these so-called experts. They don't know their heads from their asses.”

“Language, Dad.”

“Just try to forget what he said.”

“If possible.”

He watched her turn and leave and he drew a hand across his damp forehead. He stood there alone in his bedroom and glanced at the phone on a side table. He cracked each knuckle on his left hand.