And Then You Were Gone

by R. J. Jacobs

  The female cop wanted to know if there had been any inappropriate contact between Paolo and me the night before.

  I couldn’t begin to answer that.

  I described him again. I went through the details of the trip, when we’d arrived, what we’d planned. The way they talked about him made him seem less than real. Someone I’d dreamed up, my imaginary boyfriend. My description of him sounded distorted to me when she read it back. I hated her without knowing why.

  An air conditioner began to hum. I searched the landscape for it, aware of my longing to be back indoors, to be clean and safe again. It seemed like a week had passed since Paolo and I had left my apartment—departing our own private, curtained world. What happened should not have, I told myself. We should never have left that protected, warm space.

  Eventually, the female officer sat beside me on a bench outside the front office. I smelled coconut oil. The morning haze had cleared and the pine branches shifted lazily, perfectly. I was grateful at least to be away from the water. Her dolphin necklace had reappeared, and she tucked her pale hair behind her ears.

  “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “We’ve established command,” she said. It sounded both like a line from a movie and something that I wanted to hear—a good sign. “The marine unit’s been called and will run searches of the coastline. We’ve got aviation support that’ll be flying over shortly. The captain is looking into a K-9 search by this afternoon.”

  “Good,” I said. I tested my latest cup of coffee again, but it was still too hot.

  “Right now the best thing for you to do is go home and get some rest.”

  “Go?” I thought. No part of me wanted to leave. “I’m fine to stay here,” I said.

  Again she spoke with the patience of an elementary school administrator, somehow calming and infuriating at the same time. “It’s best to let the search team work independently.” She assured me they would be in touch immediately and that she had her phone with her “at all times.”

  “So, I’ll drive his Jeep home?” I wondered aloud as my hands slapped my thighs—half exasperated, half in a trance. Picturing myself driving it seemed completely wrong, but what else was there to do?

  She shook her head. “They’ll want to go over it again.”

  When I began to protest, Dolphin Necklace looked at me sternly for the first time, as if to say she knew I wasn’t thinking clearly.

  And maybe I wasn’t.

  How could I be?

  “People come in and out of our lives,” she said, “and there’s no explaining it. This is a confusing time, I know.”

  I could tell she thought he’d left me, that I didn’t understand, that she was trying to be kind. I tried taking a deep breath, but it got stuck halfway in. She was going to break the possibility to me gently.

  “Let’s see …” She looked up and away, counting, as if the clouds kept track of her life’s facts. “Five years ago? Yes. Five. Down in Florida. I went to a house. A family, two kids.” She lowered her voice to make the point that the stakes were higher under those circumstances. Higher than it just being me. She snapped her fingers suddenly. “Father disappeared, like that. We looked everywhere, assumed he had drowned, considered maybe he’d been killed. Or kidnapped, though that never happens anymore. Who knows? He had run some pot, and something went wrong. No one knew. Two years went by, and he turned up. Got pulled over, simple as that. Living about fifty miles away, booked for driving on a suspended. He’d remarried, started again. Called himself by a different name. No trauma, no nothing. I was there when his wife went to see him. He couldn’t explain why he’d done it. He just had to live a different life, was what he said.”

  She put her hand over mine for a moment, then let it float off. I nodded to convey my understanding.

  “But he didn’t just leave me,” I said. “I’m sure of that.”

  She seemed to try not to sigh but did.

  FOUR

  My mom, who looked like a slightly smaller, more sensibly dressed version of me, came out to drive me home. I’m not sure I’d ever been so happy to see someone. When I heard her voice, saw her rushing toward me through the parking lot, tears erupted. Beneath the librarian glasses I teased her about, she was crying, too. I held on to her tight, and she let me.

  At the dock, Dolphin Necklace explained that I could go, that they’d be in touch, that I’d likely be interviewed again in Nashville. “You’ll be hearing from us,” she said, glancing at Mom, whose lips clamped together.

  Right then, I had the sense that I should have asked what exactly she meant, but exhaustion won out, and I didn’t. All I asked was, “What can I do?”—though I knew the answer.

  The answer was wait.

  Do nothing.

  Tolerate powerlessness.

  Dolphin Necklace put both her hands around mine as she handed me a card with her name and contact information.

  Mom walked me to her car. We pulled away.

  When she’d shown up at the marina, it was like some part of Mom knew the drill. Buried within her kindness was a shred of resignation that I was too tired, too crushed, to address. Helpless to convince her that I wasn’t cursed.

  In my early twenties, Mom had saved me from myself. Soccer, my teammates, and her.

  With her teaching middle school and Dad never spoken of, there was no possible way we could’ve afforded Vanderbilt tuition if it hadn’t been for soccer. Being on scholarship at a prestigious school tortured me perfectly—almost daily: my fears of not belonging were confirmed. The notion I’d ever fit anywhere seemed an impossible fantasy. And part of me just knew, not so deep down, that I was essentially white trash, a pretender among the privileged.

  Not that I was treated badly. I wasn’t. What I faced was inside me. I’d been told a hundred times college would be the best time in my life. That was depressing.

  Then, the mania started.

  I knew it immediately. I’d pictured my grandmother wading out into that rippling water.

  What was in her was in me, too.

  Was I crazy? Maybe.

  Next to me in the car, Mom looked ahead. I folded my arms, the car’s air conditioner a chill on my skin.

  I was hollow.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked, after a while. The police had told her enough on the phone that she didn’t have to pepper me with questions, and I was grateful. I wasn’t sure I could talk anyway.

  “Really no chance that’s happening,” I mumbled.

  She drove to my apartment, waited while I showered. I took two more Ativan and climbed into bed. I didn’t care how it looked. A person can only take so much reality at once, and I needed to be away from the world for a while. Not the healthiest coping skill—fine—but it was what happened.

  I tried to keep up a ticker of self-appraisal to ground myself, to stabilize. My name is Emily Firestone. I’m a child psychologist. I have friends, colleagues. My bipolar disorder has been regulated for years. My name is Emily Firestone. I won’t lose my mind.

  * * *

  The next day was Sunday. I called work to say I couldn’t come in the following day. I paused before I left the message. Was I calling in sick? That wasn’t quite right. I certainly wasn’t on vacation. Was there a code for my boyfriend disappeared?

  I couldn’t bear thinking of the word dead, but the word was all I could think about. Paolo had been so devoted to his lab that it was almost impossible to imagine him not there, pouring over data in the seemingly endless quest to develop an H1-N24 vaccine. But not being able to visualize him not there was pure disbelief, I knew. Denial.

  I called Allie. I couldn’t believe she answered. People don’t usually answer the phone now. Calling is an imposition. Everyone texts. Besides, she had recently been married. I was sure she had other things on her mind. When she picked up, I could picture her thick, dark hair framing her green eyes. She was the best kind of friend and the worst kind, for exactly the same reason: she was perfectly put together. In college,
she had remembered everything on team trips and could be counted on to have brought extra sunscreen or tape that even the trainers had forgotten. As a teammate, she was always on time, or early.

  Her voice was quick as a hummingbird but soft as honey, paced in a way that, probably insecurely, I associated with being wealthy.

  Later I would regret it, but right then, I told her everything. She listened like she always did.

  “Well, I’m obviously not a cop, but I do work at the precinct, so I’ll keep my ear to the ground, okay?”

  An hour after we hung up, she called back.

  She sounded apologetic. “You said they might want to ask you a few questions? They do. A detective named Andre Mason is going to call you. Emily, I’m so sorry. It’ll be quick, I’m sure. They can come to you, probably, if you want—”

  “No, no,” I insisted. I wasn’t thinking. I was out of my mind, frenetically pacing my kitchen with directionless eagerness. “I haven’t been to your office in a while.” How long? I thought back to her being with me the night I met Paolo, then later us parting ways at the bar.

  “Text me when you get to the parking lot,” she said. She was full of sympathetic urgency. “I’ll come out and walk in with you.”

  Her offer surprised me, but I agreed. I guessed she understood the near-universal discomfort of about walking into a police station. I wondered if she’d considered what happened on top of the parking structure thirteen years earlier, my being taken to the hospital in the back of a police car. I thought of the cold handcuffs against my hot skin, then pushed the memory from my mind.

  “Great,” I agreed hurriedly. “Thanks, Allie.”

  “Great,” she echoed, sounding relieved.

  Detective Mason called almost immediately after I hung up with Allie, his voice like a bass guitar. We went through the business of picking a time when I’d arrive the following morning.

  * * *

  My stomach wanted it to be over quickly. At the lake, the police had told me this time might come, but I hadn’t guessed how I would feel. It felt like a mixture of nothing matters and get away from me. People don’t generally go to police stations because they’re thrilled with life, I reminded myself. Instinctively, I glanced up at the tiny scar on my wrist from where the handcuffs had been tightened just a bit too firmly that night on the parking deck. Then I swished my wrist so that my watch covered it.

  Because I’d always wanted a red convertible, I’d bought one I couldn’t afford the year before. I drove it uncharacteristically slowly to the police precinct, occasionally checking the clock on the dash. The toe of my shoe pressed on the gas a bit and the engine hummed as I slid past a van going under the speed limit. I’d been pulled over three times in that year alone—enough that I’d come to rethink the wisdom of my purchase.

  It was true, I hated to admit to myself; I was still somewhat impulsive.

  I found a parking spot, texted Allie, and started toward the front door. I’d been to the station only once before, but it looked exactly the same. Same pressure-washed concrete steps that smelled somehow like both bleach and cigarettes, same Helvetica lettering over the door spelling out POLICE, as if to display the function of the place as plainly as possible. Same weird energy around the building. I pictured the dark cloud that hung over the Addams Family’s house. The vibe was like that. The hallway was scratched as if with giant fingernails on either side. Like a monster had made them, I thought—like the Hulk. Fluorescent light from the lobby spilled out through the double glass doors. My bones felt heavy; my mind was still spinning. Would they call about Paolo? Had they found him? His body? God.

  No, I couldn’t think. That was part of the problem.

  It had been nearly a year since I’d seen Allie in person. She stood beside the entrance in a loose yellow sweater, hands folded at her waist, and looked like a flower growing out from between the cracks of broken pavement. Behind thin, wire-framed glasses, her eyes brimmed with sympathy that might have cut me if I hadn’t been numbed by overstimulation and the neurological blanket of sleep medication. After everything that had happened, what harm was a little pity?

  She put her arms around me quickly, then steered me toward the doors, hand on the middle of my back. I could have guessed I looked shredded, but when I caught a reflection of myself in the glass of Allie’s door, I was a zombie. Hair unwashed and pulled back, eyes hollow, staring back at me. My face held its summer tan, but I looked simultaneously pale, like I’d faded. I wondered if I should start wearing makeup. Maybe, I thought. I’d start when I had my shit together again.

  “No one’s with you?” she asked.

  “No?”

  I started sweating without fully knowing why.

  I must have looked bewildered, because she added quickly, “It’s fine. There’s nothing to worry about. He won’t even keep you long.”

  In the English language, there may be no phrase as uncertain, as anxiety-provoking, as There’s nothing to worry about.

  The chairs in Allie’s office were covered with stacks of paper. No way either of us was sitting. She glanced at the clock situated in her crowded bookcase. Her phone rang, but she ignored it. “I hate to think that you have to sit through something like this after everything.”

  Her dark eyebrows were furrowed. I knew that look; it was her expression when we’d gotten hopelessly behind in a game. When there was no way to win. She used to put her hands on her hips, too, but in her office she stood beside her desk and unfolded her arms. To keep from falling over, I leaned against the wall.

  Outside her office, a man in a stained T-shirt, ripples in his huge, muscular back, was resisting as he was led away. His hands were behind him, his shoulder brushing heavily against Allie’s door frame, then scraping the drywall.

  And I’d thought DHS was rough. We were both a long way from the leafy, manicured, bubble-like Vanderbilt campus. “Just a regular morning at the office?”

  “Sorry. Let me get you some coffee,” she offered. I didn’t object, and before I could say anything, a small cup was in my hands. “Careful, it’s very hot.”

  I tried not to wince as it scalded my lips.

  “This whole thing won’t take very long,” she assured me, looking over my shoulder into the hallway.

  I needed to back up for a second. “Am I missing something here? Why would this take very long?”

  Her head cocked a bit, expression softened. “It just won’t.” Then she circled back to that phrase again. “There’s really nothing to worry about.”

  I knew she was being kind.

  What remained of my stomach started to drop.

  “Well, that’s good,” I said, not too dryly, because I knew already, without her saying so, that I was in trouble deeper than I’d understood a minute before.

  Paolo’s words flashed back to me: You think you can do anything. He’d been right. Note to self: Confidence makes you not think. Makes you show up places unprepared.

  She squeezed my forearm. “How are you?”

  I felt for her, understood her confusion. Certainly there were plenty of times in my office when I’d struggled to find what to say. Mostly, I think it’s nice to know that someone wants to be comforting; I think that’s better than finding the perfect words.

  I didn’t have time to answer. There was a shadow at the door, then three quick knocks.

  Allie looked up. “Hi, Andre.”

  “Hi.” Curt, sharp. His eyes cut over to me, but not right away. They stayed on Allie for a second, and hers stayed on him.

  They knew each other, I realized, more than just professionally. Feelings in a room are as plain as the weather. But whatever burned between them had dimmed, probably ending when her relationship with her husband had turned serious—two, two and a half years before. They’d talked about this very moment, this exchange. Her hands were on her hips, resolved.

  Dark skin, tall, the posture of a former athlete. A shaved-in part on the left side of his scalp. From under his collar poked a t
attoo of a rose, some indelible remnant of a previous life. And right above the rose was a tiny piece of tissue with a central maroon dot.

  He’d been in a hurry earlier.

  He didn’t wear a ring. His eyes flicked from Allie to me. Just then, I noticed that he smelled like some terrible cologne.

  “Emily Firestone?” he asked.

  “That’s me,” I said.

  “I’m Detective Mason.”

  He nodded to Allie, then pointed down the hall. “Right this way.”

  As I passed through her door, Allie patted my shoulder. I tried to ignore the concern in her eyes as she looked away.

  FIVE

  The lines around Mason’s eyes told me he was about forty years old. He wore an oversized triathlete watch, the kind our team trainers used to wear—mini-computers, basically, designed to record and organize multiple sets of data simultaneously. He had a way of smiling a measure too quickly that made me instantly suspicious. He pointed to a room on his left, closed the door when we were inside, and it was suddenly quiet. Just the spaceship buzz of overhead lights. He gestured toward a chair. I pulled it out, sat, knitted my hands together on a table that looked like it had come from a high school cafeteria. The room smelled like a photocopier even though there wasn’t one in there. Or maybe like dust. My head felt medication-dull, but the coffee Allie had given me was helping. I downed the rest of the cup.

  “Ms. Firestone.” Mason glanced down at the paper he was holding. “Sorry, Doctor Firestone. Thanks for coming down this morning.” He seemed to have been in a rush to get into the room but now was taking his time, observing me. He spoke slowly, like a host on kids’ television. He’d learned that hurrying scared people, I guessed.