He's Gone

by Deb Caletti

  We bring the dishes in. There’s the pleasant clatter of china and silverware in an evening hour, a sound that usually means all is well. Abby is sponging off the counter, and my mother’s hunting for where she put her car keys. She looks in her purse and coat pockets and in the dish by the phone, where we always put ours. She picks up the cuff link, which I’d set there. She holds it aloft, as if she’s found a pearl in the oyster, or maybe the crucial evidence at a homicide scene.

  “Dani! Did you ever tell the detective about this?”

  I shake my head. “I forgot all about it.”

  She narrows her eyes at me. She’s given that same look to teenagers lingering too long in our street, and to ill-behaved children in stores, and to men ogling my sixteen-year-old self when I was wearing my tube top and shorts.

  “There’s been a lot on my mind,” I remind her.

  “Where’d you get it?” Abby takes it from my mother. She holds it in her palm and shakes it as if she’s playing Yahtzee.

  “Someone dropped it by here. They must have thought it was Ian’s.”

  “Doubt that. It’s kinda Vegas. He’s got better taste.”

  “That’s what I said,” my mother pipes in. “Not Mr. Classy’s type.”

  Abby returns the cuff link to the bowl. “God, Grandma. Ian’s missing. Be nice. He could be hurt somewhere. He could be … I mean, no clothes are gone that we know of. His cards haven’t been used.… I don’t even want to say it.” Her voice catches. I put my arm around her shoulders. I pull her close. I agree with her about my mother’s words. There should be reverence for what is lost, no matter how it has become so.

  “Well, I never understood that, why people talk nicer about someone when they’re gone. Why? Their bad luck makes them a better person? You’re an asshole alive, you’re still an asshole dead. Personally, I think it’s just covering your bases. In case God’s still nearby listening in, we’d better be nice or he might throw some of the same bad juju our way.” She’s looking in her jacket pocket again for her keys, then finds them in her purse, the first place she looked.

  “I don’t know why we do it,” Abby says. “I just know it feels bad when you talk like that. I care about him. I care about him a lot.”

  I look at my little, now-grown Abby. She’s so strong. I’d have never talked to my mother like that. Abby always says what she needs to say, without fear of consequences. She’d never be someone who would lose her voice while looking for rescue.

  Maybe we all try to give our parents what they most ask for, what they most value but don’t have, whatever that is—perfection, compliance, success, strength. The liquidy caterpillar evolves into adulthood in that chrysalis. It becomes something new. For better or worse, it emerges.

  9

  My sheets are a tangled mess from the bad dreams, and half of them are on the floor. They look like they’ve had a rough night. When I sort out my bed, I can still see the faint marks of mud on them. I took off my shoes after the party; I know I did. I remember that. My feet were killing me. There’s an explanation. Still, that dream replays again and again.… His hand on my mouth. His grip on my wrists. Dreams tell you important things, don’t they? They tell the truth? I am desperate for my sleeping mind to say something to me, to convey some information about his whereabouts. After all, there are people who have dreams like that. My college roommate, Fiona, had a dream about hurricanes the night before one hit in her own hometown, and she dreamed of boys falling out of windows before a brokenhearted student jumped from the balcony of a fraternity house. I want to have a dream that shows me where Ian is—in some woman’s car, driven off a cliff; living in an orange stone house in San José del Cabo; in a Motel 6 the next town over; anything. I’ll take whatever I get as long as it’s an image handed over to me in deep slumber by some sympathetic higher power. But the psychic airwaves have remained mute.

  I keep having that same nightmare, and it’s beginning to haunt me. It’s shaking my sense of myself. When I wake up after that dream, I worry that I have experienced my own metamorphosis, that I have become something horrible. The repetition is making this feel true. It’s probably only fear speaking. It isn’t information, Dani, you idiot, I tell myself, just your worst ugly doubts let loose, your subconscious unraveling its darkness. Knock it off. But it’s not that easy. A dream can be meaningless, but a dream can feel so real.

  Here it is: The contents of my heart are what leave me uneasy.

  Of course, our dreams were real, too, Ian’s and mine. The dreams for our future. They were meaningless perhaps, or at least misguided, but they were real to us. After Mark found out about our affair, though, Mary found out, as well, and then everything went crazy. Visions of happily ever after have a hard time weathering crazy. Mary threw Ian’s clothes out onto the lawn (bit of a cliché, that), and she once turned into a madwoman, driving her big black Explorer toward Abby and me as we walked down the sidewalk, veering away at the last moment. It was another wonderful memory to paste into Abby’s baby book. Mothering regret number four hundred seventy-five. Your dreams always take some direct hits.

  The tribe, the Greek chorus, whatever, chimed in, too. Anyone who’d been to your wedding, or any wedding, or who was in a marriage and deeply needed to feel the strength of the institution just then (most likely because they were feeling its vulnerability just then): they needed to be heard. They needed to shake your shoulders and look you in the eyes and tell you how wrong you were to do what you did and how foolish you were to do what you were planning. They do these things because they think they know what’s best, when they can never know the universe that lies between you and your spouse in that bed, the speeding comets and stars burning up, the black holes. They shake your shoulders because your marriage is marriage in general and it’s capable of tumbling in a gust or even a breeze. One failed marriage seems threatening to all of them. The butterfly effect. One butterfly flaps its wings and it can supposedly cause a hurricane weeks or months or years later.

  Two mothers from school, women I didn’t even know, called me up to ask me to rethink my relationship with Ian. That’s a polite way to put it. And then, Ian’s old friends Toby and Renee phoned Ian and asked him to go for a ride. They drove him back to their house, where several other friends sat in a circle in their living room, waiting for him. They attempted to bring their wayward one back to them, as if he’d turned to a life of heroin or had joined a religious cult. Which was the cult, really? That neighborhood with all its mirror-image houses and identical people—well, an argument could be made, is all I’m saying.

  Ian and I sat in that damn car again. This time, we were parked on the leafy campus of the university. It was near his work but not near his work. I loved it there. On other days, we’d met on that lawn with a blanket, under the old Denny Hall clock, the ancient elms standing sentry on either side of a stone walkway. You could feel relaxed among students. Lots of young couples were out there on blankets. This day was different, though. We had met there to bring in the field reports and discuss strategy. It was clear that we were being defeated. Ian could take Mary’s anger but not her tears. The sad look in his children’s eyes crushed him, as did the judgment of his friends. Neal and his wife, Rory, all those people they used to have over to their house—their disapproval was Paul Hartley Keller a thousand times over. And Mark. A broken countertop, a shattered windshield (he’d put his fist through it—how that was even possible, I don’t know), the smashed glass of a painting that had hung in our home … His most useful weapon was his strength, while Mary’s was her weakness. Oh, we wanted out so badly, didn’t we? Ian and I struggled so hard to get free. Still, I caught Abby getting cereal out of the cupboard one morning, actually tiptoeing, trying not to make noise. That was the feeling in our home. Glass was everywhere, cracked in its spiderweb fashion, barely holding together. The slightest move or sound might cause the final, drastic break.

  Home—it felt unfair to use that word. It’s a word cross-stitched in delicate threa
d, a word for wedding cakes and the flushed cheeks of sick toddlers, a precious, priceless word. But it had become a bad word then, a place to avoid.

  All the damage we’d caused—we’d harmed other people, and even each other. And all the damage that had already been done before that, between us and our “loved ones,” all the damage over the damaged generations, people trying their best to love one another and maybe feel a little safety in the process … Ah, human beings. We cause problems to solve problems.

  The situation brought out the best and worst in all of us, though the truth of who we really were was still in there somewhere. When you’re holding on, fighting, for your security, all kinds of sudden transformations and tactics are possible. Mark became the perfect husband for a short while but then changed strategies, taking sadistic competition to new heights. Mary exploded first but then changed strategies, becoming the perfect wife. She cut down on her spending and eliminated the parties; she cut down on her drinking, which had gotten excessive. She read books and tried to discuss them with him after he acknowledged his need for depth in his life. She bought him that motorcycle he wanted. She grew her hair long like mine and turned to him for sex every night, or so he confessed later.

  I think we need to separate for a while, he said to me. It was fall, appropriately. The leaves were falling; we had fallen in love; things had fallen apart. The leaves were vivid orange, red, yellow, but, of course, those leaves were dying.

  All right, I said. I didn’t feel all right. I felt used and abandoned, as we all did in one way or another. I felt like wailing my protest. But I also felt relieved.

  I need to do everything I can to save my marriage before I end it.

  I heard the illogic. If you know you’re going to end it, you’re not doing what you can to save it. But I understood this, too, the primary conflict: What does it mean to be a good person? Do you owe someone else your life? When you want to be a good person and you’re not being one (in their eyes or your own), you’ve got to twist the logic to be able to live with yourself. Your heart knows when it’s over. Something dies. You know it, whether you’re ready to face what it means yet or not. So what do you do? The least you can do is check-mark the right boxes. Therapy, whatever. Marriage counseling, “trying.” How else do you sleep at night?

  I know.

  He sobbed into his hands. We held each other and grief filled my chest. I love you so much, he said. I love you so much, I said. It felt like the future was over, or at least our vision of it—the joy and the possibilities. This way, that way, this way, that way. The torment of indecision. This way, our future was over. That way, Mark’s and Mary’s were. It was devastating. It was “the right thing.” You weren’t supposed to choose yourself.

  It was temporary. To go back to something that was already broken even before you stomped on the shattered pieces—the destruction is too great. Mark’s revenge could go on for a lifetime. Mary’s best behavior couldn’t. A choice like ours … Well, somewhere inside you know that you’re pulling the plug on your dying marriage the minute you enter a relationship like that. You’re closing your eyes and turning away and cringing, but you’re still pulling the plug.

  It’s over, I told Mark. Between Ian and me.

  He said nothing. I could read his face; it held righteous conviction. He was taking the higher road. His intention was to move on but to never forgive. I realized I’d given him a permanent excuse to do what he never had an excuse to do before. If I stayed, that is. Now I could never stay. As Dr. Shana Berg said, it wasn’t the best plan, but it was a plan. The sorry old soldier that I was put the butterfly between my own lips and promised myself rebirth.

  Mark made me scrambled eggs because I was depressed and devastated. Let me repeat that: Mark made me scrambled eggs. He assumed my tears were contrition, and my lack of appetite was remorse. My weakness had transformed him from killer to nurse, though he was still the kind of nurse who might put deadly medicine in your IV while you slept.

  He took my hands. His touch made me cringe. When it’s over, even your skin knows it. He looked into my eyes.

  I want us to know everything about each other. No holding back. I want to know you.

  I said nothing. I was a thousand miles away by then. We were in our bedroom, but I was at some gas station in the desert, with a warm breeze at my back and a credit card in my own name in my wallet.

  I want you to know me. He squeezed my hands. He paused. Then: I had a near miss, too. A woman at work. Maria. Diego.

  The name was familiar. I remember passing a desk where a dark-haired woman sat. There was a picture of two small boys in a frame. We talked. A lot, you know? I met her after work. We had drinks. Nothing happened.

  Outside, someone started up his lawn mower. I heard the revving, the chomping of grass and fallen dead leaves. In my head, a semi truck whipped past on that desert highway, and my hair caught in my mouth. The keys to a fast car were in my hand.

  Finally my marriage was over.

  “Mom, what are you doing?”

  “This …” I shove those sheets in. I pour some bleach into the rising water.

  “Laundry? Now?” She is shouting over the sound of the washing machine. She holds the phone with her hand over the mouthpiece.

  “I just want them clean.” I think of Lady Macbeth. How can I not? I think of Medea. There are ancient themes here, as I replace the cap on the Tide.

  “It’s for you.” She nods her head toward the phone.

  “I didn’t hear it ring.”

  “Over this noise? What a surprise. It’s Bethy.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t want to—”

  “Mom!”

  “No!”

  “Fine.”

  She turns her back to me and leaves. She’s pissed. I am a contemporary parent; we can’t stand the displeasure of our children. I clang the lid of the washer down. It starts to rumble vigorously. Ever since I moved it here from my old house, it hasn’t worked correctly. Maybe it’s the floor or something, the occasional tilt of the houseboat, I don’t know. What I do know is that it tries too hard. It shimmies its little appliance heart out. One time I came back to find it in the center of a room, as if it had attempted escape but had given up.

  Right then the thought crosses my mind: I’ll have to ask Ian about it when he comes back. And then comes the sick rush of truth. The truth I’ve been avoiding all morning. It has been one week. One week without even a phone call. One week must mean he’s never coming back. One week could mean he’s dead. Don’t think it!

  I pour a cup of coffee. Abby made it strong. My grandma would have said, Strong enough to curl the hair on your chest. It was one of those things that you were pretty sure was a joke at age seven but were a little uneasy about anyway.

  “I told her you were in the shower.” Abby gets a bowl for cereal. She slams the cupboard door. She looks at me disapprovingly. She gets that look from my mother. I am part of the unfortunate generation that first had to please our parents and now has to please our children. We never got our time in the sun. No wonder we rebel.

  “I at least need my coffee before I take her on.”

  “They want to see you. Can you blame them? Their father is missing! You’ve got to talk to them, Mom.”

  Still. All the best parts of you can end up in your children, can’t they? His power, your generosity, but in the appropriate amounts. It can give you some faith that maybe there is a bigger plan in action, one that might succeed, even if we poor misguided souls continually do our best to fuck it up.

  I want to get back to that laptop. I want to sift through all of Ian’s electronic stratums, all of the things he keeps hidden deep down beneath a password. It is the thing to do: Lift up and look underneath. It’s important to see. This is all about unfaithfulness, I’m sure. How can it not be? It runs through our bloodlines, and it runs through the history of us. Maybe more than that—I can see his hand on the back of that woman’s dress that night and her hand on his sleeve. I need
to find out who she is.

  But first I have to meet Bethy and Kristen. I do the right thing, of course. I return the call after my bolstering cup of coffee, and I arrange a meeting. I will go to them, because going to them is how it generally works. Our house “never felt welcoming,” Bethy once told Ian. I suppose it wouldn’t if you walked in shooting your shotgun eyes at everything there, at every piece of furniture or artwork that wasn’t from the old homestead. If you walked in as a reporter, ready to write down the details to bring home to Mother, then those details could be made ugly and certainly “unwelcoming.” Every verbal misstep of mine, every look that did or didn’t pass between Ian and me, a rug they thought was ugly, a runny sauce—they were all good stories to snicker over later, or even right then, just loud enough for me to hear. Perhaps if we had hung their family portrait over the fireplace, perhaps if I had made their mother’s recipe for stroganoff but failed it miserably, then maybe I could have somehow once and for all shown that I acknowledged their mother’s superiority. We could all move on then. I had trumped their mother with Ian, and that was the problem.

  This sounds bad, because I got what I deserved from them; I know that. They were a family, and I had helped to ruin that. It was understandable for them to make their point again and again. Still, it had gotten tiring, and that’s what I am now, tired. If people in general cannot see the dark universe that sits between a couple, well then children, most of all, are unable or unwilling to see it. I guess it’s true no matter what the situation: A parent’s experience is an unknowable one. How, after all, can a child fathom what it means to be a parent, let alone a parent of a certain generation, with a certain personal history, with a certain spouse, with even a certain child?

  I get ready for my meeting with them. I take a shower, and then I become stuck in front of my closet. As the clock ticks, my indecision about what to wear shifts from a nagging concern to an all-out panic. On certain occasions, the choice of black pants versus a black skirt can feel full of meaning and possible consequences. I stare at my clothes, paralyzed, and then, worse, begin heaping desperate piles of options on my bed. And shoes—God. Why is it that heels, boots, covered toes or bare ones, all carry different messages? It becomes about nuance, appropriateness, sensitivity. Fashion is a communication problem to solve, and I have enough trouble speaking with words, let alone footwear.