The Daylight Marriage (7 page)

“I don't know,” Lovell said as he lowered himself into the booth. He edged past a rip on the seat where white fluff burst from the vinyl. “Thanks for agreeing to meet.”

“No need to thank me.”

Lovell reminded Doug that it had been twenty days, three weeks, since Hannah had disappeared. “Unbelievable.”

“I bet.”

For some reason he said, “People recognize me from the news.”

“I'm sure it's totally fucked with your mind.” Doug began to flick at his eyebrow ring.

Lovell tried not to watch. He kept his eyes on the chipped laminate tabletop and thought about the best way to respond.

“I've been lucky,” Doug said. “Never had to deal with anything like that.”

“Well, you do—you did know her.”

Doug laughed. “I stand corrected. You have kids? They OK?”

Lovell wondered how much—or how little—Doug already knew from the news or mutual friends. Or from Hannah herself? “We have a son and a daughter. Ethan and Janine.”

“Nice. I have a boy, five. D. J., Doug Junior. Not my idea, mind you, his name. I wanted strong and easy, maybe Max or Nick.” The waitress returned to bring coffee and water and take their orders, and when she left, he continued. “I never got married.” At last he dropped his finger from his eyebrow.

“I'm sure you know that I met Hannah just after you two, after you—”

“I was glad she found someone to take care of her.” Doug squinted at Lovell. “I didn't deserve her. I loved her, I really did. We were wild about each other, but I sure didn't deserve her.”

“Well, it's history, I guess. Water under the bridge.” Lovell was thankful for clichés. This was no time for a heartfelt connection. The transfer of information—that was all he needed.

“What's it been, seventeen years now since me and her? We're getting to be old men, brother.”

Lovell tried to sound casual. “You ever, you know, see her over the years?”

“I been out here for fifteen years now.”

Why would this person be honest? What would he have to gain? “I mean, OK, I'll be specific. You weren't in Boston on that day. You didn't see her the day she went missing?”

Doug's pale eyes widened. “I haven't seen Hannah Munroe since the time she nearly took out my tooth with the engagement ring that I got her.”

His use of her maiden name, the near laugh as he spoke. Lovell's temperature spiked. “Your proposal, I mean, on the beach. You have to know that's where her wallet and a bracelet were found.”

Doug took a long swig of his orange juice and smacked his lips. “No shit. Really?” He ran his hands gently over his bald head as if it were a baby. “That's right. Carson, was it?”

Lovell reached for his coffee. He had of course hoped to manufacture a reason for Hannah to drive to Carson that day—a reason other than himself. Someone to help shoulder the blame. “Something like this can really make you crazy.”

Doug nodded.

The waitress came back with their plates of food, and it occurred to Lovell that a quick coffee somewhere might have been a better idea. A towering club sandwich sat before him, a heap of curly fries to the side.

“So,” Doug said, reaching for his avocado wrap, “you like LA?”

“I didn't get to see much of it,” Lovell replied. He tried to chat lightly about his work and the conference. He told him about the intensity seminar and the crowd that it had drawn. “This power index that I've been working on is kind of a big deal—” Lovell said. As he went on, he took in Doug's aging but boyish face and gray-gold eyes. Doug popped a bite into his mouth and half smiled at Lovell—an impish, disarming smile. What would it be like to have such a smile? To be charming without having to say a thing? Lovell told him about his column at
Weather.
“I probably get ten letters a week about it. Too many to answer, really.” Doug nodded as he listened, interjecting “Nice” or “Good for you.” He was, of course, just humoring him.

Lovell took a few bites of his sandwich, skipped his lukewarm coffee, and waited for Doug to finish his wrap. When he finally did, he reached into his back pocket for his torn leather wallet and slid a faded credit card from one of its pockets. “My treat. Least I can do, right?” Doug said. He stood and reached out a tattooed hand and said, “I gotta talk to her for a sec,” gesturing toward the waitress. “So I'm gonna say good-bye.” He again looped an arm around Lovell's back and folded him into his chest. “Keep on keeping on, OK? You do what you have to do. And if you ever need anything from me, you've got my info.”

Lovell eased away. “Sure, all right. Thanks.” He strode to the door and let it bang shut behind him.

He walked at a brisk clip across the lot and back toward the motel, just a few minutes away, trying to convince himself that coming here had not been an enormous waste of time.

His room reeked of cigarette smoke and rot, some kind of mold or something. He hadn't noticed it so much earlier. He heard a woman hacking in the next room, a man somewhere talking, and the buzz of a radio or TV. He took a seat on a heavy wooden chair in the corner just as the phone rang. It was his mother, saying that he should come home as soon as he could. “That detective called. He said he had no idea that you were in LA. He needs you to go down to the station and he wouldn't tell me why.”

Chapter 10

O
nce back from Ethan's school, Hannah headed to the kitchen and scrubbed the breakfast dishes. She wandered upstairs and into her bedroom, where she drew the shades and tidied the bed and fluffed the pillows in an effort to make the room feel less like a war zone. She stepped into the bathroom. It smelled of perfume still, the perfume that Sophie had brought her from Paris and that Lovell had now gone and trashed. At least he had thought to clean it up. At least the bathroom would smell like Coco for another day or so. Then she would stop and notice that the scent had faded and rem
ember that she could not afford to buy any more. She couldn't stand to be in this room any longer. She couldn't stand this rage.

She closed the door behind her and walked down the hallway to neaten up the kids' bedrooms. She sat on Ethan's bed and smoothed his soccer-ball quilt around her. She set his koala beside his pillow. On his first day of preschool, she had inhaled those few hours to herself. It had seemed like a decade since she'd had a moment alone. She had stretched out on an Adirondack chair in the backyard and noticed the clouds as if for the first time, gauzy like spun sugar low in the sky. She had flipped through a magazine and breathed in each perfume ad—pungent musk, lilac and lavender, black cherry—and then had called Sophie to say hello. Having nothing to report had been a luxury.

She walked downstairs to the kitchen now. She picked up the phone and dialed Sophie's number at work. “I thought I'd just call to say hi like I used to,” Hannah said.

“Oh. Is everything all right?”

“Sure. What are you doing right now?”

“Specs for a print ad,” she said. She was single-handedly overseeing ad campaigns for Blue Cross and Blue Shield and for the Gap. “Are you really OK?”

“Absolutely. Let's get together soon.”

“We have plans, all of us, for this weekend, no?” Sophie asked.

Hannah had meant that just the two of them should go somewhere they might have gone before having kids—see an old movie at the Brattle or wander around a used-book store. “I guess so. I forgot.”

“We'll think of something fabulous.”

“We will,” Hannah said. “We got into it again last night, me and Lovell.” She considered telling Sophie that she thought Lovell had a crush on her.

“Oh?”

“You have to work. I should let you go.”

“I'll call you on my way home later. I'll call you as soon as I leave the office. You'll tell me then?”

“Sure,” Hannah said.

But what would be the point of rehashing it all? What would that change? This was her life, this was her marriage. No one had forced her into it.

Lovell had stunned her by proposing on her father's boat with her parents looking on. He had never mentioned marriage before. She could not exactly say no. Nor did she want to.

Later, when he suggested a short engagement, maybe a wedding on the Vineyard, nothing elaborate, just a meaningful gathering of their favorite people, Hannah had agreed. Too much time and she might change her mind. She was ready to be married. She wanted to be done with all the heartbreak that happened when you weren't married.

“We don't really talk anymore,” she had said to Lovell about two weeks ago. God, she had become a broken record with him.

“Sure we do.”

“Not really.”

He looked over at her from his laptop, the comforter tented over his legs.

“OK,” he said. “So, I've got this idea to write up these scenarios, these stories about people and how we harm the climate without realizing it.”

“Yeah?”

“I could write a monthly column for the magazine. I'd trace one atom as it travels. The atom would be like the—I don't know—the protagonist or antagonist, depending on what happens, and in each column, I'd set out this different scenario.”

She wondered how such a thing as an atom—anything other than a person, really—could be made a compelling protagonist. But she knew better than to question his approach to his work. The few times she had, he had gently shut her down. What did she know about the movement of atoms or the physics of climate change?

“I could write about forest growth or I could set it in different countries—China, all the pollution. And I'd show people exactly how the gas that they buy or their TV or whatever—I'd show exactly what impact these things have on the earth. How one molecule of carbon actually moves and where it goes once it's emitted, what happens to it and everything around it. It's not hurricanes, it's not what ME has me doing, but that's the point. Try something different, maybe for the layperson rather than just the people who already know this stuff. I think I'll put some feelers out. I can e-mail my editor, see what he thinks about it.” He finally turned back to his computer. “I have so much work to finish tonight.”

Talk,
she nearly said.
Not
a
talk. I did not ask for that.

She still had time before work. She could go food shopping, though there was enough in the refrigerator to last the next several days. She could fold the kids' laundry and get the car washed and return some library books. She had enough time for a nap, but then she would have to summon the energy to extricate herself from the warm bed.

Or she could do something else. She could do something that she had never done—drive to a part of town where she had never been, pretend to be someone that she was not. A lifetime ago, she and Doug used to close their eyes and set one fingertip on a map of Massachusetts, some town, ideally a place where they had never been. They would gather the map and her keys and, on the way, choose identities for each other. Once, at a beachside diner in Revere, she and Doug pretended to be a movie star and an army sergeant visiting from Texas.

She could, if nothing else, go for a drive. Maybe Carson Beach for a quick walk. She had not been in so long—since she had gotten engaged to Doug. Was that the last time? She had been molecularly a different person, giddy and hopeful. “I have the craziest idea,” he had said. “Let's get married.”

“What?” she said. They were twenty-one. “We're too young.”

“You want to wait until we're too old?”

She nearly jumped up and yelled to the heavens, but she knew better. “Where's my ring?”

He glanced around and reached for a string of dried seaweed on the sand. “I'll make you one,” he said, trying to twist the thing into a circle, but the seaweed was too dry and broke in half. Finally he knelt down on the sand and leaned his head against her legs, not saying a thing. He reached for her hand and set the piece of seaweed in her palm.

Was this even a bona fide proposal? “Doug?”

He looked up at her with those goddamned eyes that turned her to soup. His reckless impulsivity, his sudden chivalry with pretty girls, his tendency to forget bills—he would outgrow all of that. Everyone did at some point.

“Let's do it,” she said.

Chapter 11

W
hen Lovell returned Bob Duncan's call, the man spoke somberly. “You should have told us you were leaving the state.”

“‘Leaving the state?'”

“When are you coming back?”

Lovell explained that he would return the next afternoon. “As soon as my plane lands, as soon as I can, I'll get in my car and drive directly to the station. Can you tell me what's going on there?”

“To be honest, I'd rather talk to you in person.” The man sneezed into the phone, and Lovell jolted.

“I'm sorry,” Lovell said before he hung up. “I'm sorry I didn't let you know where I was.”

“It was a strange decision,” Duncan said. “At any rate, I'll see you tomorrow.”

The traffic on the drive to the airport in San Francisco, the wait at the gate, the delay before the plane took off, the flight itself, the wait to get off the plane while the other passengers reached for their overhead baggage and zipped up their jackets and cleaned off their seats and wriggled their way down the narrow aisle—everything moved with infuriating sluggishness in front of him.

On the drive out of Boston, he thought of one of their earliest arguments, the morning after a party at her parents' house on the Vineyard. He had sneaked into her bedroom before the sun rose. He watched her as she slept tucked into herself, her rosy mouth open as she breathed. The bed was positioned alongside a bay window that looked out over the Atlantic, glittering with the waning moonlight. After she woke, she sat up in bed and gave him a kiss on his arm. She began to discuss her family's behavior the previous night: her mother's tendency to subtly compete with her sister; her name-dropping cousin who worked in a Manhattan law firm; her sister's resentment of their father, who showed no interest in Leah's academic successes. Lovell tried to hide a yawn and began to gently wrestle Hannah back to bed, but she resisted. “Did you notice any of that?” she asked. “Not really,” he admitted. “Doesn't it interest you at all?” she said.

Lovell, his hand around her naked thigh, finally said, “I don't know. I guess all families are weird. Oh, and you should have prepared me for your father's
boat,
which, by the way, is really a yacht. You could fund a nation with that thing.”

She pulled away. “You can't stand this, just sitting here and talking. You are happier screwing or just sitting across from me, silent, than actually engaging in any conversation.” She may have had a point; he loved little more than lounging on his couch with her, both of them lost in a book or a movie. “Sue me for just loving to
be
with you,” he finally said. And what could she say to that?

A thought landed on him like a tentative moth: maybe they should never have gotten married.

But then another thought: Tunisia. It stood behind them like a lighthouse in a forest. Nothing like what a honeymoon should be. No starry-eyed murmurings while lying in bed together. No marathon sessions of lovemaking, just a moment of rescue, or near heroism, and the grateful look on her face, the belief that they had absolutely done the right thing in coming together.

The parking lot at the police station was almost full, and Lovell sped past the other cars, drumming the heel of his palm against the steering wheel. He finally found a spot on the street adjacent to the station and hurried inside.

Bob Duncan's office door was closed, so Lovell knocked. As he waited, he began to wonder why he had been so anxious to get here. What news—what good news—could there be at this point?

Duncan pulled open the door and led him into the office. “I'll get right to it. The guys found fingernail marks on a pier at Carson.”

“Fingernail marks? Do you know they're even hers?” This was Hannah they were talking about. Tu. This was his wife.

“I want you to think back hard now and make sure there's nothing you might have forgotten to tell me. No store she once went to near Carson, no old friend who'd just moved there. Anything at all you can think of that might help us here?” he asked. “Oh, and we got the match this morning. So yes, the fingernail marks were hers.”

“But—oh.” Lovell took a seat. She could have been trying to etch her initials into the pier. It was just the sort of thing she would do.

“You can't think of anything?” Duncan said, incredulous. “Why do you think she went all the way into Boston when she had to go to work that morning?”

“Could she have been carjacked or kidnapped or something?”

“We don't know yet. We haven't found her car. But she did make that phone call to the girl at the flower store. The call was traced to Boston. The girl said Hannah didn't sound strange or anything, that she was convincing when she said that your daughter was home sick. My guess is that Hannah drove in and that no one took her to Boston.”

“Ok.”

“But if there was some reason for her to go there, if there's even the smallest thing you can think of—and it might seem like nothing to you—we need anything we can get at this point. Somewhere she meant to be going, someone who might have seen her.”

“I don't have a clue about why she would have gone there specifically,” Lovell said. He assumed that by now Duncan knew about Doug Bowen and his proposal on Carson Beach. Lovell considered the possibility that Duncan already knew about the fight the evening before, that Janine or someone else, maybe Sophie, had told him. And that the man was testing him right now. Duncan had wanted to get him here in person, to give him the news about the fingernail marks so that he could see the reaction on Lovell's face. Lovell had no choice but to tell him everything. His stomach lurched as he began.

“OK, hold on,” Duncan said. “Have you told anyone else about this yet?”

“No,” Lovell said. “I should have. I knew it wouldn't look good, that it, I mean, it might be taken a certain way, but now that all this is happening, I guess I figured she'd be back now and that it wouldn't matter so much. I could take a lie-detector test.”

“They're nightmares in court. Judges don't like them. But wait—slow down. Let me ask you some things. Did you threaten her?” Duncan asked. “Did it get physical?”

“I didn't hit her or anything.”

“OK. Any reason she would have felt unsafe?”

“Well, infinitely pissed off at me. It wasn't my best night,” he said. “But I don't think, I mean, probably not
unsafe.
” Maybe Duncan had not, in fact, known.

“You ever hit her? You ever push her around or anything else like that? Get a little too rough?”

“No,” Lovell said, relieved to be able to answer this question clearly.

“She ever disappear before?”

“Once, just for the night,” Lovell explained, but he told the detective that she had returned early the next morning.

And finally: “You think she was depressed?”

“Possibly.”

“All right. These are standard questions that I have to ask.” The detective cleared his throat. “Could she have been suicidal?”

“No, I don't think so,” Lovell said. “I mean, I guess I can't say for sure. She wasn't happy.”

“Did she ever talk about hurting herself?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Sometimes she took Sominex to help her sleep. A year ago, she couldn't sleep for weeks, and one night she took maybe four or five.”

“You'd need to take more than that to do any harm.”

“That last night she was miserable.” Lovell wrapped one hand around his other. “But I think she just, that she couldn't, you know, stand
me.
”

“All right,” Duncan said.

“All right?”

That was it? The detective began walking him toward the door. “I'll be in touch when I hear anything more.”

Lovell wanted to ask the man what he thought now. What was his opinion of Lovell now? Had he gained anything from being honest? Even if it was a little too late in the game? Duncan just said good-bye, took a step back into his office, and closed his door.

Lovell made his way outside and back to his car. The kids were at home, waiting for him. Apparently, Janine had protested his staying away an extra night, which was understandable.

There was no good reason to tell them about the fingernail marks. It was the sort of news that implied more than it told, and it would upset them. It would scare them. Janine's mind would rush to horrible places. If they read about it in the newspaper or saw it on TV, then he would talk it over with them. He would remind them that they didn't have the full picture yet, that they should hold out hope until they had every piece of information they could get. They owed Hannah this much.

As he drove home, he thought more about this latest news. She was angry at him; she was angry at herself. She sat there on the beach, raging at him and, without even noticing that she was doing so, scratching deep marks into the wood. It was not all that far fetched. The things he had said to her that night. She must have been livid.