He's Gone

by Deb Caletti

  Peace and gratitude, the peace and gratitude I feel there on that dock with my fingertips rubbing one of Pollux’s silky ears—as I said, it’s a slippery thing. I guess that a sense of peace is slippery for everyone. Regular life and its noises barge in, little daily earthquakes, and any feeling, especially happiness, isn’t allowed to just be for long. But for me, it often feels especially hard to hold on to. When it’s good, I don’t always feel that I’ve earned my life or that I got it fair and square.

  Of course, there are a hundred reasons why Ian’s divorce happened, most of which have nothing to do with me. I sometimes forget that. It was a marriage of two real and flawed people who had met very young and who’d barely fit together then, and later not at all. Not for a long while. It would have been someone else if it hadn’t been me; I know that. Still, in a way, I’d stolen it. Him. I’m not a good thief. I’d be the one in the bank heist saying, “I’m so sorry. Really. Whatever you can spare. This isn’t even a real gun.” I’d have to return the next day to give the bags of money back with a note of apology. No matter what the reasons, no matter how well things turn out in the end for everyone, you do wrong and it sits with you, and that’s probably how it should be.

  If Ian had gone to Louisa’s, he’d be back by now, I realize, so I pour myself another cup of coffee. I rearrange the chairs outside so that I can sit in one and put my feet up on another. Someone’s dog is swimming out by the adjacent dock. Pollux stands and watches, as if weighing the pros and cons of his own cowardice. He hates the water. As far as athletic endeavors go, he takes after me. More than once, I’ve rowed a kayak smack into the path of a large boat and then, to Ian’s embarrassment and mine, screamed when I finally saw it coming at me. If reading counted as a sport, I’d be a gold medalist. I was an expert at the V-sit in high school P.E. Abby, though—she takes after her father. She’s my daughter, and she’s athletic? It seems a miracle. She’s brave. When she was in Little League, she’d stand there at home plate as the baseball whizzed right past her face, and she didn’t even flinch. I always flinched.

  That’s where Ian and I fell in love—a Little League game. Our daughters were on the same team. I met Ian when he was there being a father. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if we’d met somewhere else. If we bumped into each other on the street or at Safeway, say. I think, for me, something about those gangly twelve-year-old girls with their ponytails sticking out of their caps and the ping of the ball against the metal bat and the cheering—the dust, and the cut-grass smell, and the mothers in their sleeveless tops—it felt like safety, like the kind of childhood you wanted to give your kids, so different from the kind I thought I was giving my daughter. Yeah, that’s it exactly. I think I wanted Ian for her, for Abby, as much as for me. He was a better idea of home.

  Of course, he had his own daughter out there. And Abby had her own father.

  Ian and I caught eyes at a baseball game, and then we fell in love, and then more deeply in love, and it was passionate and important. So it sounds unromantic to say this, but I wonder if it could have easily been another man for me, just as it would have eventually been another woman for Ian. I was looking for rescue. Because up there behind the chain-link barrier of the team bench stood my own husband, Mark Hastings, assistant coach of the Pink Dragons. The girls chose their own name, and Mark ranted about this one night in bed, going on about how wrong it was that the Cardinals and the Braves and the Giants were gone now in place of the Sweet Rainbows and the Angel Kittens, and probably he had a point. He’d used the word integrity. Sports brought out the heroic in him. Sports were the country he was patriotic about. Still, the parents thought he was too intense. I could hear them talking. You could see it on his face right there, as he gripped the chain link of the dugout in his fingers and shouted, Follow through! Follow through! Don’t be scared of the ball! Those parents had no idea. His face would get into mine, right up close, and he would scream until I couldn’t hear anything anymore. That hollow, faraway sound would come into my head, the one you hear when you hold your breath and dunk your head underwater and stay there for a moment. His mouth would be moving, but I would watch it as if it were something separate from him, a curious undulating creature. People flinch at loud noises, or a baseball, or a raised hand, but after a while a flinch can become a permanent condition.

  I went to every practice, and so did Ian’s wife, Mary. Mary, who had the name of a Madonna but who was a real person, as we all were. I wonder how that name worked on Ian, though, with his Catholic upbringing and with his own religious mother. Subconsciously, or whatever. I remember seeing Mary there at those practices before I met Ian, talking on her cellphone. I remember an overheard conversation about her husband, who was away in Europe. I remember how she flirted with one of the fathers, Jessica Halloran’s dad, a too-handsome short man who built up his muscles to make up for his stature, the way short men often do. He’d made some joke about her big breasts, which she seemed to somehow be known for, the way some people are known for a particular talent, like playing the piano. She enjoyed his appreciation, I could tell. He lifted her up over one shoulder and carried her around, and her dark hair fell down his back. She laughed teasingly, and after I met Ian, this image replayed in my mind. It said something important about their marriage, I thought, something maybe even he didn’t know.

  He showed up at the second game, home from his trip. I only vaguely noticed the back of his expensive-looking T-shirt and jeans as he stood next to another dad during the pregame parent meeting. It was sunny, and all of us were gathered on the sidelines of the baseball diamond in our suburban neighborhood. There was a pool down the street, and an elementary school, and a tennis court. Here, every life looked the same from the outside. Same house, different floor plan; same cars; same backyard patios with barbecues and Costco faux-ceramic pots; same women with their matching outfits and manicures. My own hands were plain and I knew my own secrets, and so I felt different. My front door was painted in a designer shade just as theirs was, but what happened behind it was mine alone. I thought so, anyway. Probably I wasn’t the only woman whose stomach clutched up in worry whenever her electric garage door went up, that rumbling, grim sound that meant a husband was home. But I felt like I was. The suburbs are one of the loneliest places on earth.

  On that sunny spring morning of the Pink Dragons’ second official game, though, as my tennis shoes got dusty from the newly raked baselines, and as the team mom passed around some new, unnecessary handout, Ian turned and looked at me and held my eyes, and something passed between us. I’ve always known right away when someone is going to be important in my life. I’d felt this way with Mark, too, and with all the people who’ve been significant to me. Something shifted. An internal mountain range moved over. One look, and it felt huge. I felt it in my whole body. It seemed like an arrival: of God or fate or the future. Change, announcing itself with silent but circuit-blowing undercurrents.

  You could call it love at first sight; we did. It had all the required components of love at first sight—eyes connecting, an electrical charge rarely experienced in a life. Walk around someplace with a lot of people—the mall, an airport—and you realize how great the odds are against such a thing. But rarely, too, do you happen to meet a person whose jagged notches match perfectly with your jagged notches, their key to your lock, damaged roots meeting rightful, barren soil; there are too many metaphors here, but you get the idea. I’ve come to believe that love at first sight is more likely recognition at first sight—a complicated, instantaneous recognition made by a shrewd and cunning inner Cupid. It doesn’t have to be ruinous if what you are viewing from that deep, crafty submarine scope of the unconscious are the best qualities of old Mom and Dad. But if it locks on to the worst ones, as so often it seems to do, the key opens the lock, and you’re a perfect match, and love at first sight is also disaster at first sight, only you don’t know it yet. You can’t know it or hear it over the roar in your chest.

  Out on the dock that da
y, with my coffee cup warming my hands, I relive that particular feeling: I recognized him. We barely spoke, yet there it was. This is the part I often play over and over again in my mind—our matched gaze, the sense of importance. Our meeting felt like a reunion. I didn’t attribute this to anything tragic or doomed, not then, anyway; I didn’t see the ancient, wrecked ruins of childhood all around us. No, it felt magical. A coming together again after a long time apart. There was a sense of relief at his appearance in my life—the way you feel when you’ve been standing at the roadside for far too long and then the tow truck arrives. Oh, there you are, I wanted to say. Finally. He felt the same way, he’d tell me later. Like we’d been living in wrong, separate countries, lost to each other until right then. Yeah. Just—at last, you.

  We caught each other’s eyes, and then he smiled. He looked slightly taken aback. He made some joke, and I laughed. I laughed the way Mary had laughed with small Mr. Halloran, and my laugh felt tacky to me. This is what happens within the daily confines of the suburbs, flirtations and affairs and bored people making passes at other people’s spouses at drunken summer parties as the kids play tag on the cul-de-sac. I didn’t like it. I hated it, actually. It was a cliché, for starters (well, that entire neighborhood was), and it was cheap. The kind of cheap of slurred words and vicious gossip and dirty secrets. It wasn’t the kind of life I wanted. I liked to go to sleep at night knowing my conscience was clear. I liked simple days of pancakes and the library and helping Abby with some school project involving glue and old magazines. And I liked to think I was a better person than that.

  I was aware of his presence throughout that whole game, though. I would watch Mark pace along the baseline, socking his fist into his mitt with a resolute thwock, thwock, and I would cheer for Abby when she came up to bat, her eyes serious under her little helmet, and I would watch that new set of shoulders, which were now hunched on the bleachers near me. I had no doubt he was aware of my presence, too. He would glance over his shoulder every now and then. Something had unfurled inside, like a plan, but a plan that had materialized. I guess that’s what fate feels like. I might as well have been sitting in a red plush seat in a theater, watching a film, because I knew that what was going to happen had already happened. It was being set into motion, and it was thrilling and terrifying but, more than anything else, it was a fait accompli. Yes. Even though I hate it when someone throws a French phrase into their narrative, that’s the right phrase. Something had finally begun, which meant other things were over. My life wouldn’t forever be what it had been. It was one of the largest moments of my life. Still, if I could undo it all now, I would. I would be braver than I was. I would do things the right way.

  You want to be a person who holds your head high, but you are not always that person. This is what happened when our eyes met. Love and wrongdoing were that particular truth.

  Inside the houseboat, the phone rings. I’ve been thinking so hard about Ian that I’m sure it’s going to be him, calling from his office. I take my coffee cup inside, and Pollux follows me dutifully. He’s such a hard little worker.

  “You’ll never believe what the idiots across the street are doing now.”

  It’s not Ian.

  “What?” My mother has regular disputes with her neighbors. Garbage-can conflicts, encroaching tree branches, cats using her flower beds for litter boxes.

  “They’ve been cleaning up their yard, and—what a fool I am—I thought it looked great. A nice big patch in the middle of the lawn … I’m expecting maybe a hydrangea, some nice heather … but, no. Can you hear that?”

  I can hear her TV on in her living room, that’s all, and the regular old buzz from the open phone line. Since my mother booted her companion, Douglas Hanks, from her home years ago, she’s lived alone. Douglas Hanks had a roving eye, and, in a last fit of fury, my mother stomped his cowboy hat flat and tossed his collection of 78s. Right afterward, her hair went white, as if shocked by the cruel vagaries of love.

  She’s back again. “It’s a damn chain saw! It’s been going all morning!”

  “I don’t know how you can stand it,” I say. “What are they doing, cutting down a tree?”

  “I wish. You ready for this? They’re making a totem pole! A fucking totem pole!” The women in my life—my mother, my sister, my good friend Anna Jane, even my daughter—they swear like construction workers. I’m the nun in the family, as far as that goes.

  I picture it—a tower of vacant eyes and downturned mouths, the wings of a raven outstretched on top—and I want to laugh. The neighbors are a retired couple who golf a lot and wear matching sweatshirts. They have an American flag flying out front, too. It is bad, though. The large windows of my mother’s Northwest contemporary home face that yard, and the totempole raven will be permanently staring in. “Oh, no. Chain-saw art.”

  “You should see the old guy who’s doing it, too. He’s even got suspenders. He looks straight out of Deliverance.” My mind clicks along. Deliverance, Burt Reynolds, a flashback: my mother’s stashed copy of Cosmo when Burt Reynolds was the first male centerfold. I was maybe seven or eight when my sister and I found it in her cedar chest. It’s funny what you remember. I can still see Burt with his deep-black hair and furry body on that white rug, an ashtray beside him. He had those rugged, 1970s sideburns, from the days of gas shortages and Shake ’N Bake and Moon Boots. Isabel Eleanor Ross, my mother, she liked rugged. A collector’s item, she’d explained, before snatching it back. Ha.

  Right then she gives her voice a hillbilly twang. “ ‘Did you ever look out over a lake and think of somethin’ buried underneath it? Man, that’s just about as buried as you can get.’ ”

  “You lost me,” I say.

  “It’s from the movie. I just watched it again last weekend. Held up pretty well, I thought. Some of those old films look ridiculous now.”

  “I made Abby watch Born Free with me once. God, I loved it when I was a kid.”

  “You cried like a baby over that lion.”

  “Elsa. We couldn’t get through more than twenty minutes of it. Abby made fun of me for days. ‘I could see why that made you cry, Mom. I was sobbing myself, it was so bad.’ She thought she was hilarious.”

  My mother has stopped listening, though. She’s peeking out her front window again, I’m sure. “I’m going to chop that thing down in the middle of the night.”

  Well, she might, too. The evidence supporting that possibility piles up like a memory traffic jam: The time she pulled the stakes out of the Beckers’ tent after she and Patty Becker got in an argument on one ill-fated family camping trip when we were kids. The time she poured a drink on my father’s lap when some woman started dancing provocatively in front of him at a party. The time she screamed Creep! at my high school boyfriend when we found out he’d been cheating with Carla Cummings, whose talent, if I recalled correctly, was woodworking. Which brings us full circle.

  “Remember Carla Cummings?” I say.

  “Who?”

  “She won some award in high school for wood shop. Bobby’s girlfriend after me.”

  “Well, it’s not her. It’s some old geezer. Honestly, I’m supposed to look at this thing the rest of my life?”

  I open the fridge, take a couple of spoons of apple crisp from two nights ago. Apple crisp—a reason to love life. I drop Pollux a bit. He keeps licking his lips afterward, which shows what good taste he has.

  “Hey, Mom? I’ve got to go. I think Ian’s home.”

  And it’s true. Someone has stepped onto our deck. You can feel when this happens. The houseboat is a large two-story home, one of the largest of the three hundred twenty-four on the lake, but there’s still a slight dip whenever anyone sets foot on the house’s floating platform.

  “Where’s he been? It’s Sunday morning! You two have another fight?”

  I should never tell her anything. “He was just getting us coffee.”

  “Well, that’s better than pulling the wings off insects.”

  �
�Stop,” I say.

  “It’s brutal. I should call PETA.”

  “That stuff is his father’s. You know that.”

  “I’m going to fill my yard with garden trolls and flamingos. See how those idiot neighbors like that.”

  “Good luck, sweetie. I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  I wait for Ian. And I wait. Since he doesn’t come right in, I listen for the creak-woosh of the outdoor faucet turning on—maybe he’s giving the plants a bit of much-needed water. But that doesn’t happen, either. I expect to hear him talking with the neighbors or dumping his trash in the recycling, something, but there is no other sound.

  I open the front door. A padded envelope falls across the doorway. I pick it up. It has his name on it, but that’s all. I don’t think twice about it. He gets packages all the time. I set it on the kitchen table, where he’ll see it when he comes in. The funny thing is, I’m not even curious.

  A few hours pass. I eat a bowl of raisin bran for lunch and promptly rinse the bowl, because raisin bran has a death grip if you let it sit. I’m getting a little pissed—at least he could have left a note. I call his cellphone. It rings and rings, clicks over to his voice mail. This is Ian Keller; I’m not available to take your call … I hang up. I call back and leave a message. I huff around at his bad behavior

  “You know, I would never do that, Poll. I wouldn’t. It’s inconsiderate.” Pollux agrees, I can tell by his eyes. Dogs are most helpful as an excuse for talking to yourself.

  I think about what to have for dinner. I stare at the contents of the freezer for far too long. I consider making some cookies for Ian, which means I want them for myself. Instead, I gather up a load of laundry and toss it into the wash.

  On the way back downstairs, I pass our small office. It’s part den, part hobby room. Ian’s desk and leather chair and books are squeezed in there, but so are the two cabinets of thin drawers, the narrow table, and the shelves with supplies stacked neatly on them. After that day at Kerry Park a year ago, that supposed picnic, I don’t think he touched this stuff again. Everything in the room looks the way it has for many months: the spreading board, the boxes of glass-headed pins, the killing jars, and the small bottles of cyanide. They were his father’s things, passed on to Ian while he was still married to Mary, an old pastime of Paul Hartley Keller’s that Ian dutifully tried to take on. I avoid that room. I work from home, doing part-time website design and graphics work for a handful of clients, but I prefer to spread out across the kitchen table rather than use that office. I don’t like the pictures on the walls, those rows of monarchs and painted ladies trapped behind glass. It is brutal. He once showed me how to relax a butterfly’s wings so that they could be spread open and pinned down, but I couldn’t stand to watch. I had to leave. I told him I thought the whole thing was gruesome.