Exhibit Alexandra

by Natasha Bell

  Marc glances at DI Jones and he nods for him to begin. Leaning toward a microphone and looking across the room at the camera lens, my husband clears his throat. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. He’s trying to hold it together. I don’t think my husband had ever entered a police station before all this. My face from a photograph I’d forgotten smiles back at me from posters around the room. I want to turn away, but I can’t give him the satisfaction.

  “Last Thursday,” Marc says, “my wife failed to come home from work. She was last seen leaving her office on campus and saying good-bye to her colleague. She would normally have cycled across town to our home in Bootham, but nobody has seen her since she left work. This behavior is entirely out of character for Alex. We have two young daughters. Our whole family misses her and is extremely worried.”

  Marc looks up here, makes eye contact with the camera. I look into my husband’s eyes as he says, “Alex, if somehow you see or read about this, please, I urge you to get in touch. Lizzie and Charlotte need you to come home. I need to know you’re safe.”

  Journalists stand to take photographs and a female officer touches Marc’s arm, presumably in a gesture of comfort, though if I look closely enough, I think I can see it makes him shiver. DI Jones indicates that he’ll take questions. I watch Marc’s face. His eyes are dark. He hasn’t slept. He’s clenching his jaw, grinding his teeth, I think. I want to reach into the screen and soften that expression, smooth out his lips, wash away his worries.

  “Do you believe she has come to harm?” a journalist asks.

  Marc closes his eyes as DI Jones responds. “We’ve found no evidence to suggest so thus far, but we’re treating the case very seriously.”

  The journalist bows his head to scribble on his pad. Another waves his hand briefly in the air and pipes up. “Is North Yorkshire’s Police Force equipped to deal with another major missing persons inquiry?”

  “That’s hardly a fair question, Ralph,” DI Jones says, amicably. Marc glances at him and I can see he’s annoyed. “We’re praying for Alexandra’s safe and speedy return—” DI Jones goes on, but I’m watching the vein in Marc’s forehead, the line of his lips. He hates this, I think. All of it, of course, but particularly the pomp and procedures, the attention and scrutiny. I wish I could take his hand and lead him home, lock us up with the girls and shut out the world, all of it: the police officers and journalists, this awful room, the psychopath keeping me here and forcing me to watch this, everyone we do and don’t know, all of the expectations and responsibilities and every piece of bollocks that ever made either of us doubt the simple perfection of what we had.

  “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” DI Jones concludes. “We’ll keep you updated on any further developments.”

  The screen goes black and he lowers the laptop lid. He stands there, staring at me for full minutes. I stare back, listening to his deep, nasal breaths. His face is etched into my mind, clearer now than Lizzie’s or Char’s. Am I supposed to say something? Cry? I hold it in until he leaves the room. I hear him click the locks into place, then turn my head to the wall.

  1998

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 26

  Marc once told me that he spent that autumn “walking William Blake’s fires of Hell.” I laughed, of course, but he said he’d never had to get over someone he hadn’t known long enough to discover a single flaw in. He replayed every word we’d said, turning my gestures and expressions into his own personal showreel. Instead of researching his thesis, he spent his hours in the library mulling the beautiful, torturous agony of having fallen for me.

  By the time December came around he was so obsessed that he declined his parents’ invitation to return to Wales for Christmas, pleading he had too much work to take a break. It wasn’t a lie, he had fallen behind, but some shameful part of his psyche that he couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge knew he was staying because of me.

  He hoped he might run into me again on campus or in the city, but no luck. He grew more and more anxious as the snowy December days approached January. Finally, on Boxing Day of all days, he treated himself to half a bottle of Dutch courage, bought the least sad-looking bunch of freesias from the Jet garage and crunched along the river path. He knocked on the front door and, after a long, chilly pause, my father answered.

  “Sorry to disturb you. Is, uh, is Alexandra in?” He told me he felt like a fifteen-year-old, flushed and sweaty palmed.

  My father smiled. “I think she’s been expecting you.”

  “Marc!” I squealed from the bowels of the house. I’d missed him too. Not in quite such an agonized way perhaps, but I’d thought about him a lot. I’d returned to Chicago and picked up my life there, thrown myself back into my immigration project and hidden from the snow in various people’s beds. But I’d also started playing around with a new piece, taking pictures of the families whose dogs I walked for cash and the servers at the restaurants and banks and pharmacies I went to. In exchange for a formal portrait, I asked them to share a secret dream with me, one that didn’t have to be realistic or achievable, but the thing they truly desired. I wasn’t sure yet what I’d do with this collection of faces and desires, but I had a title—My Fairy Tale—and I knew deep down the project had something to do with the gentle man I’d met over the summer. I’d begun making plans to move to Boystown with friends after graduation, filling in applications for jobs and grants, but every time I went to a disappointing show or sat in a bar being bored by someone I probably didn’t even want to go home with, I’d think of how much fun I’d had bumming around my dull little hometown with Marc. I’d think about the way his mouth moved when he said the word “home.”

  I raced down the hall and threw my arms around him like he wasn’t a man I’d spent only one day with. “You came!” I said.

  I was wearing a threadbare gray jumper and faded jeans. Years later Marc told me that was how he found me most sexy: all wrapped up and warm. I remember punching him in the arm and complaining I must have wasted a small fortune on lingerie, when all I needed was a charity-shop sweater.

  Marc had arrived in snow-soaked trainers and this ancient parka his dad had passed down to him. He submitted his frozen limbs to my offered embrace. My dad squeezed my shoulder and gave me a wink before tactfully disappearing through a doorway. I helped Marc shrug off his coat and happily accepted the half-crushed flowers.

  He followed me to the dining room where a gathering of our family friends was assembled around our usual extravagant roast. Marc tried to apologize and back away, but I stopped him. I found a plate and a chair and sat him down next to me. He tentatively forked a slice of turkey onto his plate, which made me laugh. I reached over my not-blood-related Aunt Margaret on my other side and slopped piles of roasted, mashed, braised and sautéed delicacies before him.

  My dad laughed at me.

  “He looks like he needs feeding up!” I said and turned back to my own not insubstantial plate of food.

  We ate and drank and talked until all three activities seemed to require too much effort and everyone at the table slunk, half comatose, into the living room. At some point I laid my head upon Marc’s lap and, although he hesitated, perhaps aware of my dad across the room and this strange collection of friends witnessing only our second real date, he placed his hand on my hair and I remember thinking I felt bizarrely content. He slept the night on one of the sofas and I woke him the next morning with a coffee and a kiss.

  * * *

  We spent the rest of my holidays wrapped in each other, devouring time in the most blissful way. I cooked while Marc and my dad jabbered away about critical theory and post-structural analysis and all sorts of yawn-worthy stuff that I secretly loved they could share. After dinner, Marc and I drank from oversized wineglasses late into the night, picking each other’s brains as if we were trying to cram the lonely years we’d lived without one another into those short hours. He read me Byron an
d Keats and I showed him grainy clips of Marina Abramović and Carolee Schneemann performances. I slept late each morning while Marc scribbled in a notebook, composing sentimental poetry about suddenly feeling enlightened to the true essence of Romanticism, his thesis effortlessly rewriting itself, he said. He drove me to Heathrow, wanting to savor every possible second we had left, even if it meant crawling through hellish traffic. He carried my bag to check-in and we kissed at the security gate. We both cried and he had to nudge me forcefully toward the unsympathetic guard.

  It was much funnier when we told this story together. We played off each other and had whole dinner parties laughing at Marc’s ridiculous appearance on my doorstep with bedraggled flowers and my absurd insistence on photographing that damn pigeon. Marc took over at this point. He said that, after watching me disappear through security, he thought he might hyperventilate. He bought a coffee at one of the kiosks, hoping to calm himself down. He watched other couples and families, tried to guess by their faces whether they were going somewhere together or if their hearts were about to be ripped out and stamped along with their loved ones’ boarding passes.

  Eventually, reluctantly, he returned to his car, getting lost in the maze of levels and cursing the machine for not accepting one of his pound coins. Muttering angrily to himself, he walked to the end of the row where he’d parked and unlocked the door. As he sat down, the passenger door opened and he bit his tongue in surprise.

  “Very casually,” I always interrupted here, “I unfolded myself from where I’d been crouched for what felt like a year beside the car and slipped into the seat beside him.”

  Our friends always gaped at this. They never saw it coming and I loved it.

  “Hey,” I said with a smile.

  “W-what?” Marc stuttered, his bitten tongue starting to bleed. He looked at the clock on the dashboard. “Your plane’s leaving in fifteen minutes.”

  “I’m not going.” I stared ahead, trying to look as if I was waiting for him to turn the key and drive, trying not to smile.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I decided not to go,” I said with a shrug. Oh, I was so pleased with myself. My heart was pounding and I was still not entirely certain I was doing the right thing, but the amazement on his face made me so happy I wanted to scream. “I like it here,” I said as levelly as I could. “With you. I’ll ring them tomorrow and tell them I can’t finish the year, maybe make up something so they return part of my tuition.”

  “But, what about—what are you going to do? What about your work?” Poor Marc was so flustered.

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” I said. “I’m happy with you and I can’t face six months on different continents. Maybe I’ll try teaching again; it might be better up north. And I don’t need some pretentious art school in order to make art. I can do it here if I want.”

  “What about your stuff? Your suitcase is on the plane. Your apartment—”

  I wrinkled my nose. “It’s just clothes and junk,” I said. “I can replace it or ship it, or I don’t know. I don’t care. I’ll figure it out.”

  “Are you sure you’re making the right decision?”

  “Don’t you want me to stay?” I said, pouting.

  “Of course I do!” Marc pulled me into a fierce, uncomfortable hug over the handbrake. “Oh God, are you really doing this?”

  “Yep, I’m really doing this.” I giggled and kissed his bloody mouth.

  Monday

  Four Days Gone

  I’ve seen a photo of the Family Liaison Officer in the press clippings. She has a kind, freckled face. “Do you think that’s a requirement of the job?” I would have joked to Marc if I’d been there.

  She held out her hand and Marc shook it without registering the motion. He opened the door fully and the woman stepped inside, removing her hat to reveal a tidy bun of red hair. They headed to the dining room and she sat with her hands, palms up, on the table. There must have been polite introductions, insignificant small talk, but Marc’s mind was too full to absorb anything but the basics. He gathered her name was Nicola Swift, that she was there to help him through this “difficult time.”

  “If you’d like,” she said, “I can begin by explaining the protocols we’re going through and how we’re working to locate your wife. Some people find it comforting to know how everything works.”

  Marc nodded and she talked about taskforces and agencies and bureaus, how she and DI Jones would liaise to get the best possible response to the search for me. There’s only one response, Marc thought, but kept quiet. She handed him information on the charity Missing People, telling him that they have a good success rate for finding lost or missing individuals. She offered to help him make the call.

  “I’m sure I can manage,” Marc said, struggling to perform himself, but taking the leaflets.

  “Of course.” Nicola cleared her throat but maintained eye contact. “Now, I can’t make any promises, of course, but I can give you a few statistics that might ease your mind. Three quarters of all the missing persons cases we deal with are solved within the first week. And where adults are concerned, two thirds of them have left voluntarily as opposed to by force or unintentionally. Four days without contact is not actually very long.”

  Marc nodded, then shook his head, unsure what he was agreeing or disagreeing with, feeling only half present or as if his eyes and ears were full of water.

  “Having said that,” Nicola continued, “girls and women across all ages do face higher risks of being involved in crimes, which is why we’re taking Alexandra’s case seriously, although that is just a precaution at this stage.”

  Marc’s chest felt tight. He didn’t care what the statistics said. He knew me. He knew I wouldn’t have left on purpose. But he wasn’t ready to face the other options either. Five days ago his life was normal.

  “I’m sure your mind is tormenting you with all the high profile cases you’ve seen in the media,” Nicola said. “But only 0.6 percent of missing person cases are resolved by the discovery that the person has died.” She paused, a flicker of alarm fighting through her calmly composed features. Marc wondered how many times she’d done this before, whether perhaps she was quite new at it and maybe there was some handbook telling her the number one rule was never to mention the d-word. She twitched the corner of her mouth in a pinched half-smile and continued, “I bring that up to try to comfort rather than worry you.”

  Marc stared blankly through her, thinking of me sitting in her place last Wednesday and asking what he felt like for dinner. He was drowning in some parallel world and in many ways that felt simpler, more tangible and digestible than whatever his real body was experiencing in our real dining room with this real policewoman.

  Misreading the silence, Nicola reached out to touch his arm. “Do you have any questions yet?”

  My husband recoiled. “I don’t think so.”

  “I know it’s a lot to take in, Dr. Southwood,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.” Marc scratched his temple and glanced at the clock. “My children are upstairs, would you mind if I check on them?”

  “Of course, I’ll be right here.”

  He closed the door and paused in the doorway, his mind reeling with statistics. He gulped mouthfuls of stale indoors air. He knew she was only trying to help, but this was the first time anyone had acknowledged aloud that there was a possibility, even a 0.6 percent possibility, I might be dead. He shook his head and tried to compose himself as he climbed the stairs. I was not dead, I just couldn’t be. But wherever I was, I was in trouble. I needed him to find me.

  He found Fran dragging a brush through Emma’s hair while Lizzie and Charlotte rummaged through an upturned washing basket, both about midway on the pajama-to-clothes spectrum.

  “I need to go home to pick up Emma’s homework and I can’t be late for work,” Fran said first, turnin
g a creased forehead to Marc.

  “Of course.” He attempted an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry to do this, but is there any way Lizzie and Charlotte could come with you and you could drop them at school? I can pick them all up this afternoon, but there’s an officer downstairs who needs to go through more details.”

  “Does she know where Mum is?” Lizzie said.

  “She’s trying to work it out,” Marc replied, hoping his voice sounded reassuring.

  He thanked Fran, feeling bad for imposing on her further, then gave each of our girls a squeeze. “Work hard at school. How do you feel about pizza tonight?”

  Lizzie shrugged and Charlotte nodded, biting her lip. He wanted to stay, to step toward our girls, touch them, heal them—take them far, far away from this horrible nightmare. But Fran was handing Char a pair of socks and Officer Swift was downstairs and suddenly he was drowning all over again.

  He inhaled deeply before re-entering the dining room. “Sorry about that, Officer.”

  “Please, call me Nicola.”

  She checked it was okay, then pulled a small Dictaphone from her pocket. Marc waited while she examined the tape and depressed the red record button.

  The rest I know. He’s played it for me. Over and over. I’ve listened to my husband’s voice, tried to read between his hesitations, to picture his hands as he speaks. Nicola begins by saying she needs him to help her break down my movements in the weeks leading up to my disappearance. She asks about our work routines, apologizing for the repetition and explaining they need to gather “the whole picture.”

  My husband sighs, but tells her my lecture days vary, that I try to schedule things in school hours so I can collect the girls, but sometimes we take it in turns, that lately I’ve been staying late to work on a paper for a conference next month. I close my eyes and slip back into our world. I hear our alarm and smell the coffee Marc brews as I rouse the girls. I sit us around the breakfast bar, imagining the canyons carved in the butter and the flakes of cereal spilt on the counter. I pull a jumper over Charlotte’s wriggling limbs, feel good-bye kisses on my skin.