The Daylight Marriage (5 page)

He thought back to the last time he had seen Hannah, that morning, his idiotic hope that she would find her way back to him, that some element in that sunny, clear morning—the newness of fall, the sheer ordinariness of the day—would restore the equilibrium between them. He had hardly stopped to say good-bye to her or gauge whether she might still be upset. Anyway, he had been late for work. But the real reason, of course: he had not wanted to slide back into another ugly confrontation.

The first speed bump. When was that first jolt between them? It must have been so many years ago—maybe too long ago to be retrievable at this point.

He did remember the sense of suddenly approaching a country, some distant dreamland that he had always wanted to visit but had never been allowed to. And he grew closer and closer and finally landed, and at first he was high just being there, the strangeness and wonder of that alone, being so close to such beauty and heat and light and sweet air. He was not himself there—he was giddy and intoxicated—and his euphoria had been just what she had wanted and needed. They filled each other. They had no sense of themselves as separate entities anymore, other than as bodies who desired and were desired.

One night, he sat in her kitchen and she played Górecki for him and he watched as she sliced a nectarine for a pitcher of white sangria. Wearing only an old tank top, underwear, and an apron, she unfurled yet another story about Doug. “He actually made me chase him down a street and then locked me out of his apartment like it was some kind of game. Isn't that weird? Isn't that just warped?” She set a sliver of nectarine in her mouth.

“It's weird and warped.”

She stopped chewing for a moment, and her eyes seemed to lose focus. “It keeps coming back to me, the fact that he's gone and that it's all over. I didn't know I could feel this awful in my body about a person. My heart actually hurts. My spleen hurts. I swear. And my lungs and my spine. My throat.”

He wanted to comfort her but also to rid her of this pain. To cure this and any other hardship that she did and would ever have to endure. He wanted to be the one who had done this for her. He rose and went to her. He lifted her hair and kissed the nape of her neck, the top of her bare right shoulder.

This soul sickness flared up when he least expected it. But it may have become the thing against which they existed, unbeknownst to him, the thing against which they had to mobilize.

Of course time and the shelf life of desire soon interfered. One day there was a pinch in his chest, barely detectable, when she gibed him for calling a movie a “film.” A ping when she suggested that he get rid of his old Chuck Taylors and pick up a pair of “big-boy shoes.”

Soon after, a late-night dinner party at Sophie's apartment, the second time he had met Sophie but his first introduction to their big but close group of friends, all couples. A photojournalist, a jewelry maker, a teacher in the Bronx, a hospice nurse. Each worked at something unique and noble. All had left academia by now and were thriving. They sat around the long table crowded with nearly empty plates and pots with crusted paella at the bottom, the remainders of eggplant and beet salads, bottles of
crianza
and
reserva.
The photojournalist, a handsome biracial guy with hair to his stomach, turned to Lovell and said, “So, Lovell, was it? You're still in school? Hannah said you're into weather?”

“Actually, climate patterns and storms. Hurricanes mostly. I'm working toward my PhD in atmospheric sciences. At MIT.”

“Like I said.” The guy half smiled. “Hey, you have a favorite storm? One that gets you off when you even think about it?”

He may have been mocking him, but Lovell did not care. It was theoretically an interesting question. “Lately I've been reading up on the Gulf Coast. Coastal Florida, Louisiana, New Orleans. The location of the Mississippi and the warm waters of the Gulf make it a target. Hurricane Betsy, back in 'sixty-five, just clobbered the coast. They called it Billion Dollar Betsy—it was the first hurricane to cause a billion dollars' worth of damage. It was so bad they took the name Betsy off the list of rotating names for storms. What makes it interesting is that it was really erratic and intense and no one could predict when it would hit, so nobody was prepared. In my department, a group of us are going to try to develop better predictive models, completely new ways to quickly compile the data as it's coming in from other countries.”

“This isn't lecture hall,” Hannah groaned, reaching for a joint that was, Lovell now saw, traveling around the room.

Sophie's boyfriend added, laughing, “Isn't Hurricane Betsy's some strip club down in Hyannis?”

Chapter 7

N
ine days after Hannah's disappearance, Duncan called to tell Lovell that her wallet had been found on Carson. “No cash or credit cards, but her license was there,” the detective said. “We've got a team on their way. I'd go ahead and cancel her credit cards.”

Lovell dropped the briefcase he was holding on the kitchen floor. “Will do.” He tried to make sense of it. She had lost her bracelet. Someone had taken her money. Someone had robbed her? But she was safe—she had to be, because the alternative? There was no alternative. Of course she was safe. Maybe she took the money and credit cards herself, left her license, decided to, what, assume another identity? He had a hard time picturing it. Still, there had to be some reason behind all of this.

Lovell decided to call Sophie. She was the last person Hannah had spoken to from home on the morning of her disappearance, according to the record on their phone.

A few days before Hannah had disappeared, there was talk of meeting up with Sophie and her husband that weekend, a barbed joke about Lovell being weirdly awkward in her presence. He could not help that Sophie intimidated him. “You have a crush on her,” Hannah had said. “Yes, that's exactly it. I've always had a thing for your old college roommate,” he tried, but she turned up her nose, maybe thinking,
You would never have a chance with her.

Crush
—the word itself was embarrassing and juvenile. He would have called it something else. He had, he admitted, experienced a sort of longing in Sophie's presence. After all, she was an attractive French woman, this working mother who drank grappa with abandon and went rock climbing and could speak eloquently about everything from affirmative action to national health. But he had never fantasized about her. He had never harbored hope or delusions that anything would ever happen between them.

Lovell had not talked to her since just after Hannah's disappearance, when she had come to the house with a yellow box of petits fours, a tiny candy butterfly perched on each. When Sophie answered now, he stumbled over his words. “I wondered if you would mind—I have a couple questions about a couple things. It's nothing terrible, I mean, it's all been terrible, of course.” He apologized. He was only proving Hannah's theory.

“How are the children?”

“They're all right. They're doing the best they can. Some days are tougher than others, of course. I'm trying to be a good dad for them,” Lovell said. He waited for her to ask about him. “At any rate, I did have a question for you. And maybe you already told the detectives . . . ?”

“Yes?”

“How did Hannah sound to you when you talked to her on the phone that morning?”

“The detective did ask me this.”

“Well, did she—” he began, “did she tell you that we had an argument the night before?”

“She asked me about my work, if I'm remembering correctly. She asked me exactly what I was working on right then.”

“Things have been strained,” he admitted. “We've been having a tough time for a while.”

“She did tell me about your fight,” Sophie said.

“She did?” He wondered why this surprised him. “I'd been doing what I could to make it better. I think we both were. But she had forgotten to pay a bill.” Of course this was the wrong approach. He would never convince Sophie of his logic. “I was hoping we might try counseling.” What did he really hope to gain from her? Sympathy? An ally?

She did not respond.

“Hannah adores you,” he said, maybe to gain whatever small amount of favor he could.

“And I adore her. If it makes you feel any better, she knew that you were trying to work on the marriage. She thought that you were—you are a good and decent person.”

The words stung him. She might have at least said “husband” or even “man.” “Her wallet was just found on the same beach where her bracelet turned up. That beach in South Boston.”

“Oh. I guess that's good? Any news is better than no news?”

“She didn't tell you she was going there, did she?” Of course she did not. He assumed that the police would have informed him if she did.

“No, but I'm not surprised she went. We sometimes went when we were at BU. You know that beach had meaning for her.”

“Meaning?”

“It was where Doug proposed.”

“It was?” Lovell's face drained. Had he never asked Hannah about the proposal itself? Long ago, he had asked plenty of questions about Doug—whether they still spoke, whether he'd ever gotten reengaged or married, the sort of questions, Lovell now thought, that a jealous boyfriend might ask. “I should let you go,” he said.

“Yes, my daughter just came in,” Sophie said. “Please call me if you or the kids need anything. Even just a visit.”

He hung up and ran his hands through his hair. Doug Bowen had proposed at Carson Beach. Hannah had decided to drive there for whatever reason. Maybe Doug had been in Boston that day. Did he still live in Massachusetts? Lovell did not think Hannah had spoken to Doug in years, but he could not be sure.

On his computer, Lovell found a Doug Bowen living in Santa Cruz, now the manager of Shadow Noize, a small, independent record label that specialized in young rap artists in the area. It did not appear that Doug had returned to Boston since college, at least to live. He had a son, if not a wife, and a bulldog named Rex, who was shown seated on a small throne, wearing black sunglasses studded with jewels. Lovell shook his head as he scrolled down the screen.

Long ago, Hannah had shown Lovell some photographs of her and Doug standing by his surfboard on a beach, two beautiful kids clearly in love. He was tall and fit, broad through the shoulders, his chest hairless. He had fierce hazel eyes and shiny black hair, a mustache that drooped down beside his lips.

In one shot, they stood holding a surfboard between them, each with one hand, Hannah in a mustard-yellow bikini and floppy woven hat, sun-kissed and laughing, as if in an ad for beer or condoms. In the other, she had her tongue stuck in his ear as he presented his middle finger to the camera. “Charming,” Lovell had said when he saw it. She had giggled and set the photos aside.

Doug was recognizable, at least somewhat, in the pictures of him online. He was still handsome, if ridiculous-looking at his age with a shaved head and thick-framed hipster glasses, his graying goatee, a small silver barbell through his right eyebrow. In another photo, he stood beside a young black rapper who smiled a mouthful of gold teeth.

THAT NIGHT, LOVELL
told the kids about the wallet while they sat over dinner at McDonald's in the next town.

“What does it mean?” Ethan asked.

“I'm not sure,” Lovell said.

“She got robbed,” Janine said. “It's obvious.”

“We don't know that,” Lovell said. “This isn't some crime show or whodunit novel. If there's one thing I've learned from my work, it's that the truth is more complicated than it usually looks. All kinds of factors can come into play. Predicting something doesn't mean just jumping to the most obvious conclusion. It's always more nuanced than that.”

“What the hell else would have happened?” Janine asked. “What, you think she just threw away her money and credit cards or something?”

“I wasn't saying that.” Although maybe he was.

“Then what were you saying?” Ethan asked, chewing his straw. Their food had sat unwrapped and untouched on its plastic tray since they had brought it to the table.

“I don't know. I don't know what to say anymore.” He sighed, overcome. Here they sat in a booth at McDonald's, speculating about what had happened to Tu.

“She was sad and she drove into Boston and then her bracelet fell off and she got robbed and now we have no fucking idea where she is. That's what you're supposed to think, Dad.”

An older couple seated side by side at the next table stared at them. They did nothing to hide the fact that they were eavesdropping. Both had gray curls that framed their faces. The man had round, thick glasses.

“Keep it down,” Lovell finally said.

“I'm not yelling.”

“Then watch your mouth.”

Janine rolled her eyes.

“Why was she sad?” Ethan asked.

Lovell folded a napkin and set it on the tray. “She just was. How was school for you guys today?”

“She was sad because Dad got really pissed at her because he wanted her to earn more money but she didn't know how,” Janine said. She finally went for her McNuggets and yanked the lid off the container of sweet and sour. She dunked a fried oval into the hot-pink sauce.

Maybe it was, in fact, that simple. Maybe in the end, the differences between him and Hannah had stemmed only from economics. He himself had had to work his way through high school and college and had amassed more student loans than he might ever be able to repay, even with his grants and scholarships. He was used to the relentless grind of paying for life. He'd not had the twenty-some years with hardly any restrictions. He and Hannah had such different lives before they met each other. They were thoroughly different people. Had she ever had to work for anything before he met her?

Of course Lovell himself had reaped the benefits of her funding. He had enjoyed three or four years of constant dining out and shopping binges and theater and vacations to the Caribbean and Switzerland, and Tunisia for their honeymoon, hypnotizing, otherworldly Tunis.

Their first night they'd sat on the roof of their hotel overlooking the souk. They sipped sugary mint tea as the call to prayer filled the city. They watched two men haggle over a piece of silk and tried to predict each other's future and the future of everyone they could think of—Lovell's parents, his brother, Hannah's sister, Sophie, her parents, even Doug, despite Lovell's obvious discomfort with that subject matter on their honeymoon.

Lovell decided to just take his and Ethan's burgers and fries home for later, and the three soon got up to leave. The couple at the next table turned their heads to watch them pass.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Janine said as they approached a boy holding He-Man toys and smashing them together. “Skeletor? Beast Man? Look at those saggy loincloths. What kind of violent sicko guy decided to force these on little kids?”

“Keep walking,” Lovell said. The couple could still hear them.

“I liked He-Man,” Ethan said. “It was the secret identity of this prince, and Teela, a princess, she thought he was a total wimp and that she had to do all the work because she didn't know that he was actually He-Man.”

“Sounds like you and Mom,” Janine said.

“Move it,” Lovell snapped.

“Take it easy,” Janine said.

The couple took it all in. The man adjusted his glasses.

“Now, please. Let's go,” Lovell said.