And Then You Were Gone

by R. J. Jacobs

  The police, Allie, even Mom seemed to accept the idea that he’d died. They were investigating a death; I was investigating a disappearance. I knew I might look crazy, but if their work could help mine, I decided, so be it.

  When my phone chimed, I jumped to answer. Detective Mason asked if I was in a place where I could talk, and if I was sitting down.

  I stood.

  “I have some news. They found a deck shoe, size ten, gray, like you’d described Mr. Fererra wearing, in the water grate in the dam. They can tell it had only been in the water a few days.”

  I waited, unsure what to make of this new information.

  “This sort of evidence … is consistent with a drowning. It happens when someone falls over unexpectedly. I’m sorry, I thought you should know.”

  “So they’re focusing on that area? What are you saying?”

  In the pause, I could hear a faint sigh. “Emily, they’re covering the lake as best they can. As I said before … debris can end up anywhere along the shore because of the variance in currents out there. But they don’t have the resources for night and day search teams.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said, staring toward the closet where my shoes were. “I’m going out there.”

  Across the room, Mom’s head turned.

  “I’m going to ask you not to do that,” Mason said calmly. When I began to interrupt, he continued, “It’s more likely you’d destroy something useful than find anything they missed.”

  The lake was more than an hour away. Outside, dusk had begun to fall. I pictured myself sloshing through brush, the cone of my flashlight bobbing over branches. My chest sank as I thanked him and ended the call.

  One thing about going through things as a therapist—you have flashes back to what your patients tried to tell you, ways they tried to explain their pain. They all come back to you. You understand something you could never have comprehended before. A new place opens up inside you. And even if it can’t be filled, it can contain an understanding of someone else’s suffering, even in retrospect.

  I finally called Marty. I was on my tiny porch, sipping bitter coffee I’d let turn cold, while crickets buzzed the way they do on late summer mornings.

  He listened well. He’d practically taught me how to listen. I could picture his expression—exasperated on my behalf. Even still, I sounded numb to myself, exhausted. I’d made a note to myself to not tell the story again for a while.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “Yeah. I don’t know what to do.”

  “What could you do? Are you working? Are you able to?”

  “I’ve been in the office, but I canceled most of my appointments. I don’t actually have that much leave. I took it all already. My wisdom teeth came out in February.”

  His mouth clicked. “Ah, okay. Well, I’m here.” And I knew he meant it.

  “Thanks, Marty.” Some people give you more than you could ever give back.

  * * *

  In the shower, I stepped back from the spray, wrapping my arms around my chest. Around me, steam began to cloud. I imagined the sensation of dropping those three or so feet. The water on my nose and lips brought forward the feeling of horror of what falling overboard might have been like—the rush of lake water, and for me, a flood of helplessness. But had that happened? Even if Paolo somehow had had more to drink than I remembered and had fallen in, surely breaking the water’s surface would have woken him. Surely some muscle memory for swimming would have kicked in—the instinct to survive would have propelled him upward.

  And surely I would have heard something, I thought—a splash, a struggle.

  But I’d heard nothing. Remembered nothing. Only the silence of dreamless sleep.

  None of it made sense. And looking past the fury of my own confusion, I could imagine, easily, that from Detective Mason’s point of view, Emily Firestone might seem very suspicious.

  Paolo was the one who was gone, but somehow I was the one who’d turned into a ghost. I let this happen, I thought sometimes. I allowed it. One night I’d dreamt the world ran out of air. Anyone still alive gasped for what little remained. Then the world ran out of light.

  Then I woke up.

  A horrible stab of vindication twisted inside me. The lake, the great sucking blackness, had taken Paolo. I’d been right to fear it all along, and no one had listened.

  Getting up the stairs was a feat. Showering was an accomplishment. Makeup was out of the question. So was work. I called in for another week, never went in.

  There had been life before my love for him, but it was strange to rediscover it. The relics, the objects that had outlasted him, made me feel naive. In my freezer, I found food I’d bought months earlier. Half packages of it—veggie burgers, two still in their frozen home. I held the cold cardboard in my hands and tried remembering the frame of mind I’d been in when I’d bought them at the supermarket. I’d hoped they would be healthy for us to eat.

  A return to thinking that way was unimaginable. His absence made life feel like a house without a floor. At night, a dry wind whipped against the windows, shaking them like someone was trying to come inside. And if someone did, I realized, I wouldn’t have found any energy to fight.

  I slept beneath a blanket of pills. Some over-the-counter, some I knew I shouldn’t take but did. My dreams were hallucinatory: waves that lifted like a giant jawbone; me lost in a museum, somehow both a child and a woman at the same time. I dreamt the sun turned into the moon, then rose so high and bright that it rained a mercury-colored light over everything.

  Thursday morning I went downstairs, and the stern, steady voice of a local news anchor filled the kitchen. Mom’s eyes were fixed to the screen, her hand absently weaving a spoon through her coffee.

  I rubbed a crumb of sleep from the corner of my eye. “What’s this?” I asked.

  She stared silently, eyes narrowed with disbelief.

  “Mom?”

  “I’m sorry. This is horrifying,” she answered, whispering the last word. “Are you okay this morning?” She turned, touched my arm, but I was already looking past her shoulder.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  She hesitated, a parent’s instinct to measure certain explanations. “Someone was murdered. Up on Gainer Ridge.” She glanced back at the screen, hand resting on her throat.

  Mom lifted her hands from the countertop leaving hazy palm prints, then wrung her hands together. “This would be terrible anywhere. But there? Gainer Ridge?”

  “I know,” I said, somewhat in disbelief myself. It was not a well-known place—no notable vistas to draw hikers, no water to draw kayakers. Just a rural, undeveloped part of the state—a name you might see on topographical maps in an outdoor store with no pin beside it to mark a destination. For a moment, the news came front and center in my mind, eclipsing the sadness and confusion I felt about Paolo being gone.

  Mom said what I was thinking: “What a place for a murder to happen.” She shook her head slowly back and forth.

  I’d lived in Nashville pretty much my whole life and had only been there once—years earlier, winding around for two hours on country roads to a forgotten-seeming trailhead.

  “Foul play is strongly suspected,” I heard the newscaster say, “making this potentially the first murder to be recorded in that county in the last five years.”

  I felt myself shudder.

  Was the whole world going crazy? I felt a film of sweat glaze my forehead as images rose: police tape, uniformed officers standing at the rear of a police cruiser, the sharp slope of a wooded valley. I felt sick.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m going to lie down again.”

  Mom followed me upstairs, where her dark shape cut the doorway. Her head was tilted, just slightly, and she rubbed her hands together before sitting on the end of my unmade bed. She glanced quickly around at the crumpled laundry on the floor—shadows in the curtained half-light. She touched my hair, tucked it behind my left ear. I saw her throat move as she swallowe
d.

  I knew she, of all people, understood.

  SEVEN

  My mind returned over and over to the night on the boat. The memories were like my own personal Zapruder film—I could watch and rewind them again and again, pouring over the details. I told myself I had to be missing something, some clue that would help me understand, but what was it? I pictured his sleek dive from the boat, trying to reconcile how such a practiced swimmer could possibly have fallen in the water and lost control.

  Detective Mason’s questions came back to me, too, and his skepticism had only made me more confident. No, we’d encountered no one else that afternoon or evening but the family. And no, we weren’t drunk, or high. We weren’t arguing—maybe that was the most maddening detail of all—until Paolo’s disappearance; our time together had been basically perfect. What had I missed? How could so warm and wonderful a time have led to him vanishing, I wondered, a spark of self-reproach flaring inside me for ever letting my guard down—for ever allowing myself to get comfortable in the first place.

  * * *

  A week after he was reported missing, Paolo’s family decided that there should be a small memorial service and scheduled it for the following Monday morning. The angry part of me wanted to call and chastise them for giving up, for accepting that he was dead—but there was no playbook on how to handle the situation, and I was sure they were as upset and confused as I was.

  To have bipolar and function despite it, you have to compartmentalize aggressively. I told myself that even if for everyone else the funeral service represented a period at the end of a sentence—closure—for me it would be a comma. Nothing about Paolo being gone was resolved in my mind, but skipping the service was obviously not an option.

  The night beforehand, I slept in short spells, rest coming like shreds of confetti. In the morning, I made coffee and turned on music. Music shepherds your thoughts. And for some reason, what I must’ve wanted was to picture the opening of the film The Big Chill—the funeral scene, specifically, where the characters are introduced as they arrive to say goodbye to Kevin Costner. I turned up the volume. “Heard It Through the Grapevine” kept the silence from consuming me. I pictured William Hurt’s character as I found my pills and swallowed the last two. My toes curled into the rug when the bitterness stung my throat.

  My phone chirped. Mom.

  She was already at a doctor’s appointment. “Honey, they’re not done with me here. Are you okay? Can I meet you at the service?”

  I looked at the time. Somehow it was 9:30, the service starting in an hour. “You’re where?”

  “These first appointments are always on time. They’re never this late. I’m so sorry, I’m stuck.”

  The cup inside my head was full. She would meet me at the church; we would leave together; she wanted to know if that was all right. I looked at the time again. “Sure,” I told her, “it’s fine. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Right in front.”

  “Right in front,” I echoed.

  “I’m sorry,” she added, in a quieter voice. “This thing is so unreal.”

  This thing. I ended the call and threw my hairbrush across my bedroom, where a map of the lake was spread over my bed. So unreal. I tried counting the number of times she’d met Paolo, because scheduling an appointment on the morning of his funeral seemed a measure of … I didn’t know what. Of disinterest.

  My phone was still in my hand as I bounded down the stairs. Anticipating the funeral engaged a kind of fearless autopilot in me—a state of being I’d worked hard to grow out of, but it came over me like a fever. Like Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk—that’s how a kid had described it to me once in my office—and I’d smiled with complete understanding.

  There’s only a thing to do, and a desire to do that thing. I become an observer. Like a character running in a dream. Depression felt like the shark in Jaws—even if it wasn’t visible on the surface, I knew it was always there, wanting to consume me. Sometimes doubt would flicker in my gut to warn me depression was approaching like a fin circling through languid waves.

  I happened to have vodka in my freezer. Someone had brought it months earlier to make Christmassy drinks. I poured it over ice and colored it with orange juice, sipping it as I turned on the shower. It was cold when I swallowed, pleasantly stinging and numbing my mouth, the ice rattling and swirling in the glass. Bitter. I got why patients cut themselves sometimes. You want your body to match your feelings.

  A number I didn’t recognize rang my phone, and I let it go to voicemail. People had been calling all week. “Shh,” I said to it. I couldn’t possibly.

  Out of the shower, I drained the glass, returned to the kitchen, and repeated the sequence: ice, vodka, orange juice.

  Then I dried my hair and tried to put on makeup. I turned the music louder and slipped on my dress, humming in a purposeful, feeling-suppressing way. The future two hours just seemed like a vague place where I didn’t want to go but had to.

  I told myself I knew how to drink. I’d been doing it since I was fourteen. By the time my uncle sat on the side of my bed as I was packing to leave for college, wanting to talk with me about alcohol on campus, I’d already been to so many keg parties in empty fields, and held the hair of so many friends, I probably could have taught him a thing or two.

  I tested my breath and decided to take an Uber.

  My phone rang again. I switched the setting to mute.

  Waiting for the driver ten minutes later, I watched the clouds darken. On my phone, the guy was going in circles. My convertible sat on the curb like a dog eager to be walked. It was starting to look like rain.

  Finally, he called, lost. “No, it’s the other direction,” I told him. I hung up with zero confidence he would find me. Overstuffed clouds continued to shift. I was about to get soaked.

  I didn’t want to show up drenched, so just like that I canceled the ride. I twirled my keys around my index finger as I started toward the curb. It seemed like nothing bad could happen—all of my bad luck had already hit.

  I pulled a U-turn in front of my condo as the clouds opened up. Disaster had been averted. I smoothed my hands over my dress.

  The church was five minutes away. His mom and brothers would be there. I would sit on the other side of the aisle. I turned on the radio for something to listen to, but nothing seemed to fit—too happy, or angry sounding. Or worse, romantic. I picked up my phone to find music, set it back down. Don’t be stupid, I thought. Pay attention. This is a five-minute drive.

  At a red light, I pulled down the mirror. My eyes looked like someone else’s. Someone who wore makeup. I burped some of the vodka into my fist. Fine, I thought. I look fine.

  Then the light changed. The pavement was so bright it looked like it was lit from inside. I crested a hill on Woodmont, and my phone lit up again. “Stop,” I said. “Stop calling me.” I reached, turning it over on the seat. When I looked up, I heard an urgent horn. There was no time. Cutting the wheel only made it so the collision wasn’t fully head-on; their car spun mine, the rear landing in an overgrown ditch, pointing upward into the rain.

  The air was smoke. All the airbags had deployed—seeing them blown fed some curiosity I’d never realized I had. This is shock. My horn was stuck on, playing a single note that sounded like a low howl, the bray of a wild bird. The windshield was three spiderweb cracks, and through them I could see flames rising from the engine. Get out. Get around the airbags, look past the black smoke. See what you’ve done.

  I managed to open the door, but my leg wouldn’t work. It buckled beneath me, broken midcalf, and I fell face-first into mud that smelled like gasoline. Pain I’d never felt before. Not like athletic pain, pain you know can be iced down and healed by your young body. This pain was lightning through my leg, a turn and tear and unnatural cutting. Pain like fire inside my skin.

  I screamed as my elbows came up onto the ground. I reached toward the other car with my left hand, seeing two of my fingers extending in wrong directions,
like tree limbs after a storm. I’ll get there.

  I’m in shock.

  Already, I could hear a siren.

  I couldn’t see into the back of the car because of my angle from the ground. Just the lazy, gray clouds, moving slow and orderly; indifferently raining. With the wind knocked out of me, my yell was a stage whisper.

  “Are you okay?” I tried. Of course they aren’t.

  The driver’s side door opened and the mother flew out, calling to her son.

  The asphalt was steam under my hands, raw against the tops of my legs. In the middle of the road, I heard brakes screech, another horn. I spit something out of my mouth. Part of a tooth. Blood dribbled from my bottom lip, spread in a trail across the speckled blacktop. My eye focused on a piece of glass that caught the sun as the siren became a scream so bright and loud I tried to turn away from it.

  Someone said, “Oh my God.”

  Someone else said, “I never.”

  A third person dragged me off the road.

  “She might have a spinal,” the first voice cautioned. “Don’t move her too fast.”

  I might have a spinal. Oh my God, please let me not have hurt that child. Not hurt anyone. Please let me not have hurt. Please not hurt.

  “She’s out,” someone said. “She’s definitely out.”

  I remember that.

  EIGHT

  Even before I woke, I knew I was in a hospital—the simultaneous smells of sterility, infection, and urine were unmistakable. When I opened my eyes, I saw a tray at the foot of my bed, where a covered plate and a cup with a bendy straw rested.

  I tried sitting up, but an IV taped to my arm resisted my movement. I winced at the sting as the needle pulled my skin. In the hallway, a police officer was talking with a nurse. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but her eyes were narrowed. Angry, even. When she looked back over her shoulder, I closed my eyes. I heard the door click, then the officer’s voice.