The Daylight Marriage (9 page)

Chapter 14

T
his beach had been the site of so much bad behavior back in college. Why had they come here? Southie was always in the news then, not that she had paid much attention, but she and Doug had been aware of the lingering unrest after the riots and Whitey Bulger and the bodies that kept turning up. Carson was close to BU, sure, but there were plenty of other places they could have gone. Was it the danger itself that drew them? Danger was a sort of drug when she was in college. They were still infallible, not yet responsible for all that much. She had first tried coke here, huddled around a bonfire with Doug and a handful of other guys. She had skinny-dipped with Doug here, made love in this water, which was filthy then. When she told friends where they had gone and what they had done, the look in their eyes was worth it. “Do you have a death wish?” Sophie asked her once.

Hannah now saw an elderly couple walking their dog on the beach. Two women with white-blond hair stood at the water's edge and watched her lift one foot over the curb and step onto the path that led to the sand. She hugged herself against a bitter breeze. Down a ways, a man sat cross-legged with his chin to his chest. He had his eyes on her too.

Summer was gone. She would probably not step foot on a beach for at least another eight or nine months.

The women walked along the sand. Hannah glanced at her watch. She had to get going. She had to drive the half hour to work; if she left now, she might still be on time.

And if not, well, the girls at the store would easily forgive her. She should have drunk in their respect, their compliments about her new shirt or haircut, her lip gloss. “Can you teach my mom a few things?” Marcy had asked Hannah the other week.

But such words were so often lost on Hannah, and on a bad day they could make her stomach churn, the men in stores who stole glances at her and tentatively asked her the time or where the post office was, the moms at the kids' schools who fawned over Ethan's assist during a soccer game or Janine's viola playing at a school concert or Hannah's handbag or scarf or sunglasses. Hannah was no better, no smarter or kinder than anyone else. She was not unusually interesting or amusing. She was attractive and it got her things that she did not deserve.

Please,
Hannah might have said to Marcy or the men or one of those moms.
Please stop.

Please don't stop.
Because without these words, this attention and empty praise, what was there?

Chapter 15

J
anine tapped a text into the new cell phone that Lovell had just bought for her to share with Ethan. She had not touched her cereal. Five weeks had passed since Hannah had disappeared. Five weeks and one day.

“I'm going next door after school,” Janine said without looking up. “I'm having dinner with the guys.”

“Again?” Lovell said. “Is Penelope there?”

“No, although she was there last night. She and Jeff and I played the Princess and the Frog. I was the frog and they were two princesses. It was the cutest thing. She had on this pink-and-purple totally frilly dress that she had brought and they were talking in French and I was
dying.
Stephen took pictures. I kept thinking about how unfair it is that in a lot of places, gay people can't get married and have families. I mean, what the fuck, what kind of messed-up world is this?”

She had spent nearly every evening that week at the neighbors' house, every evening except one, a few days ago, when the five of them had gone out for pizza. Jeff had not stopped complaining about everything from the greasy pizza crust to the loud group of old men behind them to the sweat stains on the cook's T-shirt, which made Janine explode laughing once she saw the shirt for herself. “Ignore Jeff,” Stephen told Lovell. “He forgets that he too is
imparfait.
” Lovell was more than a little surprised when both Stephen and Jeff let him pick up the bill.

“Why do you have to go there so much?” he asked Janine now. “What if news about Mom comes in?”

“Then walk next door and tell me.”

“We miss you here.” It might not have sounded genuine, but it was. “Jeff can be a little negative, don't you think?”

Her face changed. “Hey, did I tell you that they are thinking of having a baby?”

“Oh?”

“I might offer to help.” She slipped the cell phone into her pocket.

“You mean as a babysitter?”

“Something like that,” she said, dropping her eyes as she headed out to her bus stop.

An alarm went off inside Lovell. She could not have meant what he was now thinking. Could she? No. She had just turned fifteen. He was losing it.

Ethan sat across the table, lost in
The Hobbit,
probably unaware of the absence or presence of any of them. These Tolkien books had been the only ones to hold his attention over the past year. Hannah would have wanted to see this, her son sitting and reading a book, Janine next door with some friends, no matter their age or attitudes. Hannah had worried that Janine focused too much on her studies and her viola. She had so few friends—one or two with whom she discussed homework, but no one else. She never got calls from other girls. She skipped the school dances and class outings. Regardless of how many times Lovell tried to reassure Hannah and remind her that many parents wished their children studied or practiced more, she remained unconvinced.

“Maybe it's her age. Teenagehood is hard,” he tried once.

“She's always been uninterested in the other kids.” Hannah eyed him, insinuating something.

Well, yes, he too did not have all that many friends, but he had his colleagues. He stayed in loose contact with his college roommate, as well as a couple of other guys from MIT. But Lovell had her, after all, and the kids, and his parents.

SIX WEEKS AFTER
Hannah went missing, Detective Duncan called to tell Lovell that an arm bone—a humerus—had been found on Carson. “We can't ID it yet. It's at the lab now. Testing could take a couple months.”

Lovell swallowed his breath. “You can't ID it.”

“Not yet. Lovell, the case was transferred to Boston Homicide this morning. But it's just a formality. They're better equipped for this sort of thing.”

“Oh? Oh.”

“The bone? I should probably tell you that it was a woman's. But that's all we know. It could easily be someone else.”

It was as if this man kept holding a torch to Lovell's face, retracting it, then pushing it closer.

“Hello?”

“I'm here,” Lovell said slowly. “It's really going to take a couple months to get a match?”

“The testing is slow. The labs are backlogged.” Duncan went on to explain that the Suffolk County DA's office would assign him a victim witness advocate to give him any more news when it came in and to help him understand it all. “She—or he—will be the next one to call.”

More was said over the phone and then nothing and it was time to hang up. The dial tone droned, and then came an abrupt ringing and the brusque schoolmarm's command, “If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and dial again.”

Lovell reached up to the counter and set the receiver back in its cradle.

Ethan, his dark hair fluffed at the crown of his head, sat at the table drawing a robot, oblivious. Lovell watched him for a moment. He was a beautiful kid. He would be a handsome man someday. Ethan turned to him. “Dad? Who called?”

“No one,” Lovell said. The words came as if from a recording inside him: “It was a friend of your mom's.”

“OK.” Ethan returned to the table and began to sketch a square on the robot's chest, a door or a control panel.

The din of people and cars and reporters outside the house swelled. The blue lights of a police cruiser flashed against the side of the white refrigerator, on and off, on and off. They had come back. The reporters already knew—hell, they had probably found out before he had.

Chapter 16

H
annah was alone on the beach now except for that man sitting down the way. He got up and began walking toward her. Handsome, he was handsome, and blood sped at the center of her chest.

“You're cold,” he said as he approached, and she nodded. She turned toward her car. “You want to wear my sweatshirt?” he called after her. He offered her a dark blue sweatshirt with “University of Massachusetts” silk-screened across the front. It was a strange gesture, a commitment if she had taken him up on it. He looked too old to be in college. He might have been in his mid- to late thirties. Thirty-seven?

“No, thanks,” she said. “I should go.” Maybe Mrs. Keller would come into the shop today and entertain them with stories of her two sisters who had just gotten jobs at the Franklin Park Zoo, or maybe one of the girls at the store had gone on a date. Maybe something unexpected would happen.

“I should get going too,” he said. “I'm already late for work.” He kept his eyes on hers.

“What do you do?” she asked in order to end the silence.

“University,” he said, wagging the sweatshirt in his hands, and she understood that he was a graduate student or a professor.

They walked together toward the parking lot. She wondered which car was his—the beat-up Volkswagen, the Chevy? He turned to glance at her face every few seconds, and she became aware that she was being assessed. She was used to this, but now it was not an unpleasant sensation. She half smiled at him.

“Could you give me a ride?” he asked.

“Where?” The train was nearby, she was sure.

He smiled. “UMass?”

“Of course.” But she would be too late for work. Then again, she might be late even without this detour. She could tell the girls she hadn't gotten the latest schedule.

He smiled again.
Yes,
she saw him thinking,
yes.
She was pretty.

But he was a stranger and this was Southie, and she said, “Sorry, I can't. I'm late for work too.”

“Huh,” he said. He lifted his arms and slipped on his sweatshirt. “All right, no worries. I'll take the T.”

She thought that UMass had to be only a few T stops away. He watched her hug her purse to her side and drop her eyes. She must have reeked of uptight suburbia. She had become the sort of person who was actually nervous in a city, the sort that she had once mocked—she had become a sort, period, and it had been so long since she had surprised even herself. “Well, why not? Come on.” She went to unlock the passenger door and walked around the back of the car. She got in the driver's seat and he pulled his sweatshirt sleeves down over his fingers to warm himself. “What's your job?” he asked.

“I work in a flower shop.”

He said, “You work with dead things? Things that have been cut from their roots and stuck in vases so people can look at them for the last week of their lives.”

She laughed. “I've never thought of it that way. What's
your
job?”

“I teach.”

“What subject?”

“Guess.”

“I don't know,” she said. “This way?” she asked, gesturing to the left when she had reached the edge of the lot, and he nodded.

He did not look like any professor that she ever had. Cars idled in a line of traffic perpendicular to them. Someone leaned on a horn, and she rose nearly a foot in her seat. Driving in Boston was the worst. Why had she even come here? She glanced at him and then back at the traffic. He was lean, at least leaner than Lovell, his face more defined and objectively more attractive. What a terrible thought to have. He looked more like a surfer than a professor—maybe he taught something like art. “Art? Or music?”

“Bingo.”

“No. Really?”

“Music theory,” he said, and she smiled, oddly proud.

“You play an instrument?”

“Sure.”

“You're one of these people who plays them all.”

He nodded. “Guilty.” He curled his sleeve further inside his hand like a mitten and pressed the “on” button on the CD player, and Janine's Beethoven began. He turned the volume nearly all the way up, and the steering wheel pulsed in her hands. “It should be loud. You should be able to feel the notes in your veins.”

“Maybe. I guess I'm tired of this CD. It's my daughter's. She plays it constantly.”

“How old is she?”

“Fourteen.”

“And she's nothing like you.”

“Not really. Hey, I can barely hear you,” she said, and she turned down the music.

“What
is
your daughter like?”

Hannah did not want to talk about that. “Do you love your job?” she asked him.

He directed her around a small rotary and onto another road. “Sometimes.”

“What don't you like about it?”

“Oh, I don't know. The bureaucratic bullshit. The students don't always listen to me. They stare right through me like I'm this inanimate object—a plant or a chair.” He tapped his shoe against the dash. “What's your name?” he asked, and she said, “Hannah. And you?”

“James. Jamie.”

“You don't look like a James,” she said.

“What about Jamie?”

She shrugged, and he said, “What's your husband's name?”

“Lovell,” she said. Was this a betrayal? It felt like a small one.

“Do you call him Love?”

“Yes.”

“Because you love him or because the word is a part of his name?”

Some membrane between them was missing, one that typically separated her from other people. “That's not your business,” she said.

“You're right,” he said. “You're pretty, you know.”

Her face filled with heat. “Let's get you to work,” she said.

He leaned over to eject the CD and found a station playing jazz, some moony song, a single piano and then trumpets and trombones whining, the deep morass of a tuba. Nothing she would typically listen to. Lovell's father adored the stuff. She glanced at the clock and thought that the girls at the shop would have called her at home by now—they did not have her cell phone number. Without traffic, she would be only a half hour late. She would drop him off and then get right on the Pike and call them from her cell, drive directly to work.

“You look like your name,” he said.

“In what way?”

“I like it. Hannah, means ‘grace,' right? I have a cousin Hannah. She's a nurse for kids with cancer in Seattle. She's something else.”

They had reached the campus, and to their right, empty wooden benches overlooked the water. A buoy drifted near the shore and a seagull pecked at it, then lifted into the air. A couple of men in waders were pulling a boat to shore, probably for the winter.

“All right,” she said. “I guess this should be good-bye.”