by Ben Dolnick
The night it happened I fell asleep before Hannah did—I was twenty pages into a history of jazz my dad had given me, and each paragraph was like a stone barricade that my consciousness could just barely climb. Hannah stayed up for a while after me going through her notebook (I remember the relief of her light going off), and then some number of hours later, I woke up to find her fingers on the waistband of my boxers. This would happen occasionally, but not for a while, that we would wake up into the act of sex. There was often an odd, impersonal ravenousness to it, as if our sleeping selves had made a rendezvous and our bodies were just the underlings. Sometimes we’d sink back into sleep afterward without having exchanged a single ordinary word.
But this time Hannah was fully awake (the moon must have been close to full, because when she pressed her forehead against mine I could see her eyes), and I remember her seeming unusually deliberate, even as I was still half-asleep. We are, I remember thinking, back in business. I can’t, or anyway I won’t, deconstruct the precise mechanics, but there was an emphatic quality to her movements, as if her hips and hands, her entire body, were a stamp pressing down with special force against a slip of paper. “I love you,” she said, and then when I answered with a grunt or a kiss, she said it again. “I love you.”
Afterward I slept like I’d been drugged, and when I woke up the curtains were pale and Hannah’s side of the bed was empty. Her notebook was gone from the bedside table. It was 8:34, late even for me. My plan for the morning had been to fix up a verse of the song I’d been working on (there was a mushy stretch passing through A minor that I thought I might be close to solving) and then to drive to the hardware store to get new lightbulbs for the basement. Hannah’s T-shirt and underwear were crumpled on the floor at the foot of the bed; her bathrobe was draped over the back of the chair by the window where she usually sat and drank her coffee. I poured myself a bowl of Chex and walked with it out into the living room.
Usually, at nine o’clock, Hannah would be setting up the museum—setting baskets of corn husks on each of the tables; counting out paper plates and pipe cleaners. I expected, after last night, for there to be a slight tender sheepishness between us; I would put my hand on her shoulder and she’d smile, tell me to knock it off whether I was doing anything or not. But she wasn’t in the living room, and she wasn’t at her desk, and she wasn’t on the porch, and she didn’t respond when I called her name from the foot of the stairs. Maybe she’d gone to get milk (no, our car was still parked outside). Maybe she’d gone for a morning run (except here were her sneakers, still muddy from the day before).
Donna came in at nine thirty—I knew from her sigh as she opened the door that it wasn’t Hannah—and she said, as soon as she was settled, “Where’s the boss lady?” It was only when I heard myself say, “I’m not sure, actually” that it occurred to me that anything strange might be going on. I still wasn’t worried, exactly—I expected Hannah to walk in at any minute—but the seed had been planted. I called her cell phone, since I couldn’t find it in our room, but the line just rang; maybe she’d turned it to Silent.
At ten o’clock a class of fourth graders showed up at the museum. Donna led them through candle making. I went upstairs and opened each door, the whole time talking to myself (“Oh Hannah, this is ver-y weird”) in that singsongy way you do when you think someone might be hiding. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Butch was at the back of the house doing something to the hinges of the screen door. “I’m not sure where Hannah is,” I told him, in a voice that I meant to sound more curious than concerned.
“Maybe she took a walk in the woods?”
I put on my jacket and walked out across the backyard, the same path we always took. It was a bright, clear day, fall photo shoot weather. I could hear the class back inside the house, Donna’s voice repeating something. I walked past the birch trees, left at the bird feeder, and onto the muddy path through the woods. The stillness was bizarre. There wasn’t a chipmunk, not even a bird, just half-bare trees and the sound of my footsteps and the smell of decomposing leaves. When I came to the hill where Hannah and I had once eaten cheese sandwiches and clementines I stopped and called her name, feeling slightly embarrassed, then turned back toward the house.
Each thought I had started out as an absurdity—could she have been attacked by a bear? accidentally shot by a hunter?—but then the more panicky parts of me would get ahold of it: jaws against that neck, her neck; blood in the corner of her mouth. Imagination is shameless. Suddenly I was walking faster, and the hair on my arms was standing up.
Your girlfriend, your fiancée, has started the day by going somewhere. That’s it, a woman who has safely navigated thirty years of mornings is continuing the streak. She’ll be standing in front of the class with Donna when you get back to the museum, and she won’t be able to believe, if you even bother to tell her, what thoughts you were having while she was gone.
But she wasn’t in the living room. And Butch, who looked like he’d been waiting for me, said, “Nothing, huh? She ever go walking by the river, or down toward eighty-two?”
Fear, like laughter, is a social phenomenon.
I got in the car—Hannah’s green jacket was still in the passenger seat, a brochure from the Dutchess County Fair was crumpled on the floor—and drove down Culver, about as slowly as a person running. Past the house with the corn crib, past the house with the “Repeal the Safe Act” sign, past the fallen barn. I looked through woods, up people’s driveways, over big empty fields. I thought about rolling down the window to call her name and realized that this was an impulse borrowed from looking for lost dogs. A young mother came jogging out of her driveway with a kid in a stroller and we exchanged waves as if I were heading to the post office.
Then the thought occurred to me: Hannah’s parents. Maybe they’d come to pick her up. I imagined them driving up at dawn, having decided to make one last plea for her not to marry me. It made more sense than anything else I’d thought of. I pulled onto the grass by the side of the road to see if I had reception so I could call the Rampes. But what if she wasn’t with them? What would I tell them then? The dashboard clock said it was 10:59.
Curiosities slide into idle fears slide into terrors without there being any clear points of demarcation. I think I still would have guessed, if forced to bet, that nothing serious had happened, that I’d forgotten an appointment she’d told me about or that she’d gone on a bizarrely long walk or that a neighbor had invited her over. The lifetime batting average of my worried mind was infinitesimal.
But back at the house the school kids and their bus were gone, and Donna and Butch were standing by the front window in the living room, looking concerned.
“Not to get into you-all’s business,” Donna said, “but you weren’t having some kind of fight or anything? When I was little my mom used to sometimes take off for a whole day, let my dad just sweat it out.”
Butch kept stepping out of the room and I realized he was making phone calls from Hannah’s office. “Well,” I heard him say, “it’s just strange. Yep. Uh-huh. Appreciate it.”
“Oh yoo-hoo!” Donna called out toward the back of the house. “Doesn’t it feel like she’s just maybe hiding in the basement or something?”
Butch came back in and said, “I just talked to Jeanne down at the farm stand. She’ll keep an eye out.” Then, a few minutes later, after another call, “That was my buddy Ed, over on Charwell. He hikes Culver Mountain most mornings, and he said he didn’t see anybody.”
So, a search party.
Each time the museum phone rang, I’d think for an idiotic instant that it was certain to be Hannah, but each time it would be some well-meaning neighbor with nothing to say. “Was she maybe doing something in one of the schools?” “And did you see her leave the house?” Sitting at the activity table felt like being in a hospital waiting room, except with the knowledge that what we were doing might turn out to be ridiculous.
A young woman with a tote bag walked in
at twelve thirty—she was a senior at Bard, and she’d made an appointment the week before to speak with Hannah about volunteer opportunities. Donna took her around, showed her the study. I paced between our room and the activity room, putting off the moment of calling Hannah’s parents, going over to the fridge every few minutes to eat a spoonful of peanut butter or a few bites of congealed oily pasta. I was as hungry as I’d ever been in my life.
I finally did call Hannah’s mom. “Do you think we should drive up?” she said, sounding more confused than anything else, and when I told her no, it was probably nothing, she said, “I’m sure you’re right. But do have her call us.”
At one thirty the museum phone rang again, for the first time in an hour. I was by the front window, Butch was in Hannah’s office. “Mm-hmm,” I heard him say. “Mm-hmm. Yeah? Whereabouts? Okay.” He hung up and walked out toward me.
Even now, it physically hurts to remember this. I once dislocated my shoulder playing football in Norwood Park and I remember as I was lying in the dust with Brendan Wexler standing over me, I thought, There’s something almost beautiful about how much this hurts. The pain had sophisticated patterning, a distinctive shape, it was like an iceberg exploding in slow motion in my nervous system. Remembering that moment of Butch coming out of the office feels like that.
“That was Mary Klougher,” he said. “Says she might have seen something a little ways down the river.”
I speed-walked with Butch, neither of us talking. We walked back from the museum over the stony yellow hills and then down along the riverbank, five or ten minutes, which is plenty of time for me to have tortured myself with every possible thing that could have happened, but I can’t remember what I actually thought about. Did I know already, at some depth? Was I terrified? Hopeful? Or was I so focused on getting there that the entire walk was just an adrenalized mindless blur, like a parent racing to grab a toddler out of the road?
Mary Klougher stood waiting for us between the back of her house and the river. I’d never seen her before. She had on jeans and a flannel shirt, and she had the long gray hair of someone who cares deeply about horses.
What she’d seen, it turned out, was a canoe washed up onshore. She pointed to it now; it was flipped over on its back, red and brown, unmistakably the museum’s, buried enough in reeds that I might have missed it. The last time I’d seen it, it had been leaning against the tree where it always lived, and Hannah had made me come look at a spiderweb on one of the oars.
“I was just going for a walk, then I saw it, and I thought, ’cause I’d heard from Jeanne that somebody was missing, hey, that’s a little weird.”
My internal temperature had plummeted such that my teeth were now chattering.
“Hannah ever go out paddling?” Butch said.
I told him yes, a few times.
“Could also have been a kid or something pushed it out, though, right? You-all just kept it over in the woods somewhere?”
Yes, back farther upstream, I said, behind a tree.
There’s something particularly awful about feeling terror on a sunny afternoon. Hawks were circling way overhead, the river was smooth and coffee-colored.
I walked the few feet down the riverbank and touched the water with my fingers—it was cold but not freezing. This is, I told myself, a river that nine-year-olds safely paddle down without getting their bologna sandwiches wet. This is a river that Hannah called a glorified creek.
I could actually hear my heartbeat.
I don’t know if I’d ever experienced true, sustained panic before. I understood, now, why people might run back into burning buildings, or how people could forget, in moments of crisis, how to dial a phone. I don’t think I could have added three and four right then. I’m not sure I could have told you my full name.
There is, of course, a shameful excitement to these kinds of scenes. Not for me, but for Mary Klougher, and for the neighbors who’d now wandered back out of their houses. They were buzzing, conferring, going inside to make phone calls. I’d felt it before myself, watching fire trucks swoop to a stop, witnessing a mugging. Their disaster, your adventure.
A stork-looking man came out from one of the stone houses—he was cleanly bald, frowning—and announced that he was going to get his kayak from his garage. Butch was standing in a patch of grass a few yards downriver, looking out toward the opposite shore. I heard Donna saying to someone, “Who would think about going canoeing in November, though?” I leaned against a boulder by the shore facing away from the river, wondering if there was any way I could make myself pass out and then be woken up once all this was over.
After some number of minutes the stork man came dragging his kayak across his yard, and then some number of minutes after that he came back from his exploratory paddle, clambering up the shore, his paddle on his shoulder. “Nothing doing that I saw,” he said. “I went maybe five hundred yards up and back.” I stood up to say something, but then I realized that I might actually be about to faint, which suddenly seemed not at all desirable. Butch put a hand on my shoulder and said why didn’t we walk back up to the museum.
“We’re gonna find her, buddy,” Butch said.
“I know.”
She’d been gone for at least seven and a half hours. My shoes were muddy and my hands were shaking; I made the decision right there on the crest of the hill: if she was okay, if she was at the museum, we were going to get married immediately. Forget invitations, forget caterers—we’d drive to the courthouse that afternoon, never be out of each other’s sight again.
No. She was nowhere inside. You can feel when a house is empty the same way you can feel when a TV is off. I walked back into our room. Her robe was still hanging over the back of her chair, her wallet was still on the dresser. Someone you love going missing is a tightening vise: each second of understanding that this has actually happened, and that any possible resolution is not going to be one you like, is another twist. “I’m going to call the sheriff,” Butch said. That, I think, was when the vise twisted tight enough that something happened to my breathing, or to my brain: suddenly there was a high whining sound in my ears and an extra layer of distance between me and everything around me. I sat down in the chair by the welcome desk and pressed my fingertips against my eyelids.
“Since either late last night or early this morning,” I half-heard Butch say. “She may have gone out on the river. Why don’t you go ahead and send as many folks as you can spare.”
. . .
The sheriff pulled into the museum’s driveway in a car that actually said “SHERIFF” on the door. He had sunglasses hanging from his collar and a belly like the prow of a ship. Explaining to him and his two deputies what had happened forced me to get myself more or less together. “What you want,” he said, pulling a backpack from his car, “is to try to find her before the sun goes down.”
The next half hour was all cars pulling into the driveway and along the road, as if there were going to be a party. Don and Jeanne from the farm stand. Butch’s wife and his twentysomething son, who looked just like Butch except thinner and with a crown-of-thorns tattoo on the back of his neck. The checkout woman from Peck’s with the hairline smoking wrinkles all around her mouth. Barry, the head Wrighter. A handful of people I’d never seen before. I felt in serious danger of bursting into desperation-and-gratitude-induced tears.
Sheriff Cole divided us up into teams: he sent some of us back down to the river, some of us into the woods west of the house, some of us out along the road. He distributed walkie-talkies, one per group. He assigned me to the woods, along with a grandmotherly woman and a scoutmasterish goateed man. While we walked—dead wet leaves everywhere, bare tree trunks, coffee-bean clusters of deer poop—the scoutmaster kept stopping to whistle with both pinkies in his mouth, as loud a sound as I’d ever heard a person make. I felt a general gelatin-boned shakiness that I think must have been adrenaline poisoning. “This is going to turn out just fine,” the grandmotherly woman told me. “My son once went
missing for a full night, dinner to breakfast. I imagine Hannah might just have gone off for a walk by herself and not told anybody.”
Every single rock, bird, half-rotten tree stump, seemed for a millisecond like it could be Hannah—crouching down to tie her shoe, standing behind a tree; I kept thinking I felt my cell phone buzz, which I didn’t; there was no reception in the woods—but still, each time, my heart would leap and I’d tear my phone out of my pocket thinking I’d see “Hannah” on the screen and the whole nightmare would dissolve. The scoutmaster said I was looking a little gray and made me eat a few bites of a granola bar that he pulled out from one of his many pockets. I had a vision of him, for some reason, with a full emergency kit in the trunk of his car, leaping out to set up road flares around a minor accident. “You just finish that up,” he said. “You want to hold on to something? You all right?”
Every fifteen or twenty minutes my panic-despair would be pierced by a voice saying that this was all insane, us tromping around the woods, splashing into the river, that I’d dragged half the county in to witness the breaking of an engagement. Because that, more and more, was how I thought this was going to end: her shamefaced reappearance, a weeping fight, a U-Haul. Maybe that emphatic middle-of-the-night sex had been her goodbye. Maybe she’d met someone else.
As soon as I had the thought it was like lock tumblers falling into place: of course she’d met someone. The sleeplessness, the shiftiness, the guilt. It was the only way any of it made sense. I felt a spike of such sharp relief, thinking of it, that I had to hold on to a tree. This wasn’t a life disaster; this was a romantic disaster: she was walking teary-eyed by the side of the road, or (God help me) she was off fucking someone, in a motel or in a backseat, maybe the organic farmer with the Adam’s apple, maybe one of the Wrighters, anyone, please, just please, let her be alive and not dead. I’d be furious, humiliated, devastated, but oh God I would collapse to my knees with gratitude, it would be the most wonderful day of my life.
