by Lea Geller
I wanted to avoid a brawl between the two women, so I ignored Sondra’s question. I just looked at her imploringly. “What should I do, Sondra?” I asked. She smiled a smug but nervous smile and put her hands on her hips.
“Call Don,” she announced, leaving me to wonder how the hell she’d figured that out before me.
Jack did not have friends, and the people he socialized with mostly serviced him—the secretaries in his office who presumably fought for his attention, his tennis partner, his car guy, his trainer. The only real friend Jack had was Don.
Don was Jack’s college roommate, and an accountant as well as a lawyer. (I always suspected neither one alone would have been enough for Don.) I was never really sure if he was our accountant and lawyer, but I knew that he and Jack did some business together.
Don and his wife, Cheryl, a real estate agent, had three school-age children, all much older than Grace. Their lives were full of travel team games, recitals, and swim meets. We always went to their house for Christmas Day. I had to sit and smile while their children tore through the wrapping and complained openly at the insufficiency of their gifts.
Don had always been very nice to me, but Cheryl winced when talking to me, as if she’d taken a sip of rancid milk. I knew why. Jack wasn’t the only fiftysomething man in Los Angeles to marry someone almost twenty years younger. But as far as trophy wives went, I was a disappointment. I was educated, reasonably well read, and I knew what happened in the seventies, even if I hadn’t been born then. It would have been far easier for Cheryl had I been a Pilates instructor or, even better, a life coach, but I once made a literary reference and poor Cheryl almost burst into tears. Maybe she thought that in another life I could have been her—someone with her own career and a wall of calendars, each for a separate but incredibly busy child. Busy was Cheryl’s favorite word. She wore her full life as a badge of honor and she resented anyone who wasn’t as busy as she was, even if her busyness was a choice. She wasted no opportunity to mention how much she had on her plate—how much work was piling up, how much driving she was doing. There was nothing busy about my life, and Cheryl couldn’t stand it. Each time she looked at me, with her bad-milk face, all she saw was wasted opportunity and time. Lots and lots of time.
What Cheryl didn’t know was that I wasn’t looking to never be busy, to have nothing but time on my hands, my only job to look after myself and pretend to be busy with my house and child. Had she bothered to ask me, Cheryl might have known that this was the first time in my life that I didn’t have at least one job, plus the gnawing fear of staying on top of my money. If she’d bothered to ask, Cheryl might have known that a full scholarship was the only reason I was able to go to college. She did not know that when the college meal plan points ran out and I was between paychecks, I ate tuna and corn out of the can. To mix things up, I ate cereal, but the off-brand kind. I don’t know if Cheryl had ever had a bite of Krispy Rice Bits or Flaky Bran. She did not know that when the last of my foster mothers pressed fifty dollars into my hands on the day she dropped me off at college, it was the very last time anybody would give me money until Jack.
I wasn’t looking for Jack. He found me. I fell in love with him and happily took what he was offering. My parents had died in a car accident right before I started middle school, and with no other family around, I went to live with a series of foster families, because nobody wants to adopt an adolescent, or because nobody wanted to adopt me. I had been orphaned and shuffled around. Jack didn’t just offer me money. He offered me order and structure and the one thing I wanted most, even if I didn’t know it at the time. He offered me family.
I never bothered explaining this to Cheryl. She never gave me the chance.
Because they were so very busy, Don and Cheryl were ordered and efficient in a way that was dull rather than impressive. But when you have no idea where your husband is and you don’t even know where the checkbooks are kept, you need order and efficiency. I pulled my hair into a bun and called Don.
“Don,” I said, racing to get it all out. “It’s Jack. I don’t know where he is.” My heart was pounding in the back of my throat.
“Agnes,” he began, “take a deep breath. You need to calm down.” Don was the kind of older man who had never learned that telling a woman to calm down actually has the opposite effect. I had nothing to say in response that did not involve hysterics.
“Are you there?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied, as calmly as I could. “I’m here.”
“When did you last see him?” he asked. His voice was unsurprised, as though he knew it was just a matter of time before he got a call like this.
“This morning,” I said. “Breakfast.”
“He didn’t come home from work?”
“No. He didn’t show up for our massage,” I said, hating that I had to reveal this to Don. “We have a standing appointment. I’ve been calling and texting him all afternoon, but he’s not answering.”
“Does he have his car with him?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“How about his passport?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Did he take any of your jewelry with him?”
“What? No. At least, I don’t think so. Don, Jack’s just a little late. Why are you asking me this? Why are you making it sound like he’s done something wrong?” But Don wasn’t answering questions, he was just asking them.
“Has he emptied the bank accounts?”
“Emptied the bank accounts? Of course not! Well, I don’t know. I’m not actually sure where to look . . .” That metallic taste returned to the back of my mouth. I found a glass and spat into it.
“I’ll check all that,” he said, without asking me for my Social Security number or any bank account numbers—nothing. I thought there was only one bank account, and I didn’t even know the account number.
“One more thing, Agnes,” he added before hanging up. “Don’t call the police.”
“What?”
“Don’t call the police,” he repeated, his voice calm and flat.
“Why? What if something has happened to him?”
“Agnes, he’s fine. He’s OK.”
“How do you know?” I didn’t wait for Don to answer. I just kept spitting out saliva and questions.
“I just know that he’s all right. That’s all,” Don repeated, his tone hardening. “You can’t call the police. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“I need to be certain you get it.” His voice was finally taking on a nervous tone. “If you call the police, Jack could be in real trouble.”
“I get it, Don. No police.”
“Be at my office tomorrow night at eight. I have to go now.” Don hung up, without waiting for me to reply, without waiting for me to ask him how he knew Jack wouldn’t be home by then.
“What the hell is going on, Jack?” I spat into his voice mail a few seconds later. “I have no idea where you are or what you’ve done, but I just had the worst conversation with Don, and that’s saying a lot. You should know better. You should know me better.”
-3-
When your husband has been missing for more than twelve hours and his only friend tells you not to call the police, there isn’t much you can do. There are some things you should not do, however, and one of them is sit in an armchair near a dark window in the middle of the night and look through old pictures.
Jack kept meticulous albums. There was an album for each year we had spent together. The albums were all an identical navy leather with the year embossed in gold on the spine. His life before me was also laid out in albums, but those were red. Pictures of my life before Jack were in a hodgepodge of mismatched albums. Some were glued onto pages of spiral-bound notebooks, some taped into journals, and some in plastic bags from unique stores, or uninteresting stores that just happened to have a shopping bag worth saving. They all lived in a box in my closet.
I crept into Jack’s study and sat in the deep, bro
wn leather armchair near the bookshelves. I would often sit in this chair and read or nap while he worked. Jack was not territorial about his space in the way that some of my friends’ husbands were. I knew nothing about our finances, but I was never physically shut out. After years of being on my own, I wanted him to be in charge, to take care of things, and of me. I was allowed into the nerve center, and I chose for that to be enough.
The rain was coming down hard against the window. I pulled the first album off the shelf, sat down in the chair, and there I was, a ponytailed twenty-four-year-old preschool teacher, standing proudly in front of the shabby beachside bungalow that housed Sunny Day Nursery. I grinned, leaning against its chipped white fence. Jack lived in a house—this house—only two blocks off the beach, several blocks north of the school. Within three months of our first date, I had moved out of my dusty, crowded apartment, waved goodbye to my roommates and my life of chore wheels and marked food in the refrigerator, and into Jack’s house. Views of the Pacific replaced views of a Korean deli, and chore wheels were replaced by Sondra.
I ran my fingers over pictures of us on the beach, out to dinner, on vacation, and then to the picture of me standing in the same spot in front of Sunny Day, on my last day of work, just before Jack and I were married. I was surrounded by teachers, students, and Marge, the eighty-year-old woman who’d run Sunny Day for over fifty years. On that last day, she told me that she would always have a place for me, should I ever decide to come back. She also told me, as I got up to walk out of the sunroom she used as her office, that I was to make sure I kept a space carved out for myself. I smiled indulgently at her, but she pressed on.
“Keep it,” she warned me, “even if it is so small you can barely see it. It will be all yours.”
I knew what she meant, just as I knew what the other teachers, as well as the mothers at school, were talking about when they thought I could not hear. In my future life as the younger wife of a wealthy man, they said, I didn’t know what I was really giving up. I didn’t know what price I would have to pay for those large diamond stud earrings or that house near the beach.
But I knew the price. I knew that when you couple with someone your own age, someone in the same stage of life as you, you get to grow up together, you get to form each other. I knew because people around me were doing it—other teachers, college friends, roommates. When you marry someone who is older and richer, someone who wants to take care of you, even if it is not sinister or calculating, as those women all thought it was, it was different. I was marrying someone who was twenty years older and already formed, whose ideas about money, time, and personal space were set without any influence from me. Jack was not a Svengali, a term I overheard two moms using when they thought I wasn’t listening. But he had a head start on life and adulthood, and because we now shared a life, it meant that I walked into an adulthood that was already formed for me.
I skipped to the album that included pictures of my thirty-fourth birthday and Grace’s arrival. Jack had wanted to wait to start a family. “I want you for myself, at least for now,” he’d said. In many of the pictures, I sat in baby-group circles with other new moms. We all sported the same diamond studs, we all wore our skinny jeans weeks after giving birth—even to twins, as several had. When you had a personal trainer and a postpartum doula who also doubled as a chef, the weight didn’t stick around for long. Peppered in between our blonde-streaked, blow-dried hair were the other moms. These were the moms who had married men they met in college, in graduate school, or at work—men their own age. Their husbands were not rich, or at least not yet. They did not have large diamonds in their ears. They took many months, even well over a year, to lose all their baby weight, if ever. Their hair was ponytailed and frizzy, and their strollers and diaper bags were not fabulous. One by one these moms dropped out of our overpriced, moderated baby group because you could not make a mortgage payment on your first house and pay sixty dollars an hour to sit with other moms and get advice you could read for free online. But we all smiled in those photos, as if we were one happy group of cohorts, even if we were not.
I kept flipping through albums, watching Grace grow. Jack smiled at the camera, at me, at Grace, his arms around us protectively. I wasn’t stupid enough to look for clues in his face. If I hadn’t seen any of this coming in real life, how could I expect to find clues in the curated pictures of the past?
I stared at the most recent pictures. Some of them had been taken only a month ago. It wasn’t Jack that I was looking at anymore, or even at Grace. Now I was looking at me, something I rarely did. The me in these pictures felt safe and cared for. The me in these pictures had few worries, other than canceled reservations, missed naps, or Alma calling in sick.
I got up out of the chair and walked around the study. I circled the desk and moved in front of Jack’s chair. I could smell his cologne on the seat as I looked down at the desktop. I ran my hands over the wood, leaning on it for support. I closed my eyes and breathed him in, and suddenly, for the first time in over a day, I felt his presence. I could hear his voice in my ear—“We’re your family now, Aggie, me and Grace.” I felt his arms circling me, I smelled the base of his neck, and I could almost feel the weight of his body as I fell on him for support. I felt safe and cared for and loved. It was not a cynical love, like those nursery school moms thought it would be, and it was not a purchased love, as I suspected those lumpy, ponytailed moms in my baby group thought it was. It was real and I could feel it, surrounding me, keeping me warm.
When I opened my eyes, it was gone.
-4-
I didn’t have parents or siblings to tell. Sitting alone at my kitchen table long after Grace had gone to sleep and hours after I should have followed suit, I called the only other person I had in the world besides Jack. I called Beeks.
I met Beeks the summer after high school while we were both scooping ice cream. She had gone to a different high school, but we were both headed to the same college. At eighteen there is meaning to everything, even nothing, and we took our chance meeting as a sign that we were to be friends for life.
“It probably doesn’t matter if we even really like each other,” I remember Beeks saying, her long, curly hair tucked up into her Fairy Freeze hat. “But what are the odds that we’d be the only two people in this godforsaken town going to Lewis, and that here we are, scooping ice cream together?”
Oh, but I did like Beeks. I liked her instantly. I liked that she knew what she thought, that she didn’t speak in questions—the ends of her sentences were firmly grounded, while mine raised into a question even when I wasn’t asking one. I liked that she was funny, but mostly at her own expense, and that she could spot a phony a mile away. Mostly, though, I liked that she thought I was terrific. To everyone else—my foster families, my classmates, my teachers—I was bumbling and insecure. To Beeks, I was brilliantly undermining, observant, and, for the first time ever, funny. It was my job, at the end of each of our shifts at Fairy Freeze, to provide her with a list of the five dumbest things that Amy, our shift manager, said or did. Often it was hard to narrow this list down to five. We’d sit on the floor in the storeroom, where we were supposed to be doing a final count of supplies for the night, our bright-orange wings removed from the backs of our Fairy Freeze T-shirts. (It was one thing to serve ice cream in a fairy costume; it was another entirely to sit on the floor of a glorified supply closet in one.)
From that summer on, Beeks was my lodestar. So it was Beeks I called at 1:00 a.m., which was 4:00 a.m. in New York City.
“What haffened?” Although she’d been out of braces for years, Beeks was a creature of habit and she still slept in retainers. For me, she didn’t need to take them out. I’d spent years conversing in nighttime Beeks talk.
“He’s missing, Beeks,” I whispered. If I said it aloud to Beeks, if I announced it to her, then it would be real and unchangeable. For Beeks, the words only deserved a whisper.
I heard her spit out her retainers, and I picture
d her wiping the spit off her mouth with the back of her sleeve.
“Who’s missing? What’s wrong? What happened, Aggie?”
“Jack. Jack is missing.”
“Can you speak up? I can barely hear you. Where are you?”
I looked down at the kitchen table. I wasn’t sure I had the strength to say the words to her again, let alone to say them louder. I felt my eyes grow moist and hot.
“Jack is missing. He went to work this morning and never came home.”
“Have you called the police?”
“Not yet. Don told me not to.”
“That idiot? Why would you call him?” She had a point. I often called Beeks after spending time with Don and Cheryl and debriefed by complaining endlessly. The first time I mentioned them to Beeks, she shrieked, “Don? What the hell kind of name is Don? Who has that name anymore?”
“I had to call him. Don is Jack’s closest friend.”
“By closest you mean only,” she said and then caught herself, softening her tone. “I’m coming, Aggie,” she announced. “I will be there by lunchtime.” As always, there was no question in her voice. I pictured her sitting up straight on the edge of her bed, her eye mask pushed atop her mass of hair.
“Please don’t,” I said. “Beeks, if you come, then this is all really happening.” I could hear her breathing more heavily as she jumped out of bed and ran somewhere else in her apartment where she could talk privately and possibly start yelling at me. Many conversations with Beeks involved what she called the yelling portion. She would announce the portion by saying to me, “Aggie. This is the point in the conversation in which I am going to yell.” This time, she didn’t announce it first.
“YOUR HUSBAND IS MISSING!” she roared. “HIS CLOSEST AND POSSIBLY ONLY FRIEND HAS ADVISED YOU NOT TO CALL THE POLICE! THIS IS HAPPENING!”
“Beeks—”
She cut me off, speaking in a somewhat quieter voice. “This doesn’t sound sketchy to you?”
“No, Beeks,” I said. “It all sounds just fine. I’m totally cool with it. Did I also mention that Don asked me if Jack has his passport with him, or if he took my jewelry or emptied our bank accounts?”
