by Deb Caletti
I laugh; I can’t help it. My mother chuckles, too. Even Abby tries to suppress a grin but smiles anyway. The year that Mark acted as his own attorney has become family lore. He’d been nicknamed Perry Mason and Atticus Finch and, most often, Clarence, as in Darrow. The humor grew as the bills mounted and the situation became ever darker.
“Sorry, Abby,” Anna Jane says.
But even Abby knows that this is what we do when things get their blackest. “Hey, no worries. I’ll call him and see if he’s got an appointment.”
“I only want the best,” I say. “Gotta keep me out of the slammer.” The idea seems so ridiculous, it’s only right to joke. “Can you see it? Me in the exercise yard?”
“With your book. Sitting in a sunny corner,” Abby says.
“At least you’d never have to worry about what to wear again.” Anna Jane knows me well.
“There’s always a silver lining,” I say.
“Maybe you’ll meet some nice dyke in there,” my mother says.
My mother always goes too far.
I pick up Pollux to stop his pacing and whining. I put my face against him. “It’s okay, boy. Everything is all right.”
He squirms dangerously, does a half flip out of my arms. It’s a wild circus move. He’s as unconvinced as the rest of us.
I try to keep the panic down. The idea of me being charged with something, arrested … It’s too far-fetched, and that’s a good place in which to rest. This would never happen. But other things that would never happen already have. I woke up one morning to find that my husband had vanished. That should have been impossible, too.
Anna Jane comes to the police station with me. It’s a Sunday, the day of the week when people go to church or stay in bed late and read the newspaper. It’s the day of French toast. But I am going to the police station. Let me say that again. I am going to the police station. Because my husband is missing. Because they want to ask me questions about his disappearance. God, even as I write these words, I still can’t believe it.
Anna Jane drives, which is a good thing, because I haven’t yet dealt with that rattle in my car. All I need now is to get stuck somewhere. On the freeway, even; I can just see it.
I hold our laptops, Ian’s and mine. The cords are wrapped neatly, the way Ian likes. It looks as if they are heading into the shop for repairs. One time, I was about to bring my laptop in to be fixed and had left it on the table as I went to get a jacket. By the time I returned, Ian had formed that cord into a tidy figure eight, secured with a twist tie from the kitchen drawer. He hates displays of carelessness.
“Can I help?” Anna Jane asks. I shake my head. I am walking into a police station. They want to look at our computers. It’d be like having her carry bloody sheets or something.
“For the millionth time, I think this is a mistake. You’re not listening—Dani, look at me.”
I look. Her forehead is creased with concern but maybe anger, too.
“You should not do this. Why are you brushing us off about it? A person has a lot of private stuff on a laptop, Dani.”
“Mrs. Yakimora is going to be pissed about the breach in client confidentiality. Now everyone’s going to know she does tax returns at a discount.”
“I don’t mean your work, Dani. Come on. You know what I’m saying. Emails, websites you’ve been to? All that.”
“Amazon? Macy’s? There were those criminal pillowcases I got on Overstock. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“God, you’re stubborn. I tried. Okay. It’s your decision. You know, we’re here. Whatever you need.”
“It’s the right thing to do.”
“This will all be over soon.” Anna Jane sighs as if she’s not so sure.
It’s been eight days. It feels like my new life.
I am with Detective Jackson for what feels like hours. After he is finished with me, I have to find Anna Jane. This time, Detective Jackson and I were not sitting at his desk by the water cooler. We were in a white, nearly empty room, and now I am lost. Finally I locate Anna Jane, who is sitting in a waiting area. She’s thumbing through a magazine, same as the time she came with me to the doctor’s office after I had that suspicious mammogram.
“Good Housekeeping?” I say. Oh, perfect.
“Halloween pumpkin ideas from two years ago. A cake that looks like a graveyard.” She shows me the picture, sets the magazine down. She collects her purse from the chair next to her. “What happened?”
We push the doors open. God, it feels good to be out of there. “Well, they didn’t keep me.” I put my arms around myself so that Anna Jane won’t see me shaking.
“They better not have kept you. You were in there a long time.” Anna Jane looks worried. Maybe she realizes this, because she puts her sunglasses on, hiding her eyes. We walk toward her car. I head for a silver four-door sedan.
“Over here,” she says.
The wrong silver four-door sedan. Cars basically look the same to me even when I haven’t just been sitting in a police station being questioned. I am nearsighted but rarely wear my glasses, which probably contributes to the problem. Ian gives me a bad time about it. I’ll head purposefully to a black car I think is his and wait to be let in, and then I’ll see some baby seat in the back or realize he’s across the way, unlocking a different car door entirely. Black Jaguar? he’ll say, lifting his eyebrows. He’s offended, I think, that I could confuse his Jaguar with anything else.
“Get in. Let’s get out of here,” Anna Jane says.
It’s a relief to be in her car with her, with the doors shut, surrounded by the comforting smell of leather seats and Anna Jane’s lingering perfume. She’s so familiar to me, with her broad cheekbones and soft brown hair. She’s family. There aren’t too many people who see the whole crazy picture of your life, from junior high (when we’d met) until now. We shared a locker. I wore a now cringe-worthy pink satin dress in her wedding, a size bigger than normal, as I was pregnant with Abby. I was with her during her mother’s illness and listened to her cry when she found out she was unexpectedly pregnant for the third time. She cried harder after she miscarried. She stood up for me during all my life markers—wedding, pregnancy, divorce—and I did the same for her. Now this.
“I want to go somewhere far away.” Wait, did I leave my purse in that place? No, thank goodness, there it is.
“You better stay right here.” She’s joking but not. She backs out of the parking space while simultaneously reaching toward the backseat. She tosses me a water bottle. That’s how efficient she is.
I look over my shoulder, too, making sure it’s safe for her to go. I drive along with other people, which makes Abby crazy. When she catches me doing it, we have the same You’re controlling/I’m trying to be helpful argument that all anxious people find themselves having regularly.
“So?” Anna Jane sneaks a look at me.
“It was fine.”
“What does that mean, Dani?”
“I managed. It was all right. He did get a little …”
“What? He got a little what?”
“Aggressive, I guess. A little aggressive. Repeating himself. Details. What I remembered.”
“Jesus. This is crazy.”
“Did he do this that night? Did he do that? What I heard and didn’t hear. Making me say it again and again.”
“God, Dani. Like this isn’t bad enough without them questioning you.”
“Well, Bethy called him, right? They told him all these things—”
“Of course they did.”
“Same old bullshit stuff.”
“I can understand being worried, but, come on.” Anna Jane turns on her signal and pulls neatly out into traffic.
“They told him we weren’t getting along.”
“You’ve never gotten along.”
“Not them and me. Ian and me.”
“Oh? And how would they know that? Spy cam in the fruit bowl? Jesus, people.”
“Ian had lunch with Bethy a few weeks ago.
According to Bethy, when she asked him how he was, he answered with one of those I’m okays that don’t sound okay. She asked how I was, how we were. He said we were fine but shrugged it off like something was bothering him.”
“She thinks she’s on fucking 48 Hours Mystery or whatever it’s called.”
“I know.”
“And big deal, anyway! Who doesn’t shrug stuff off? I told my brother I was fine last week after Peter and I had gotten into some argument. I don’t even remember what we fought about now.”
“That’s what I said, too.”
“And isn’t that one of Ian’s specialties? The I’m okay that’s not okay? That passive-aggressive thing, that care-about-me-I’m-suffering-silently thing? How many times have you told me—”
“It makes me want to scream.”
“I’d want to strangle him,” she says. “Goddamn it, did you see that? That guy pulled right out in front of me.”
I saw. My foot is jammed down hard on my own personal passenger brake. “Ian and I are happy. We’re mostly happy. What does happy mean? We’re not happy all the time.”
“Who is?” Anna Jane snitches another sideways glance at me, weighing my words. “What does Bethy know about that? She’s, like, sixteen.” Nineteen, and she knows it, but Anna Jane is right. Nineteen cannot know this.
“He asked if there were any problems between us. ‘Anything bigger than who gets the remote?’ I said no. I said I love Ian deeply. I said that we had been through a lot to be together, and I wanted it to stay that way.”
“Of course you do.”
“Bethy, though—”
“That girl is a troublemaker. And I know you guys don’t like to say bad stuff about Mary, but what’s up with the dressing your daughters like they’re sexy little hot stuff when they’re in middle school, huh? What’re you trying to do? Yeah, honey. Great idea. Show your ass like a baboon. That’s what we want to teach our girls to be?”
Oh, how I love Anna Jane. I know how upset and concerned she is. Her hands are gripping that wheel. But the words she offers are purposefully everyday ones, and the kindness of that makes me want to cry. You’d never guess where we’ve just been and what I’ve just been asked. You’d think we were sitting at Starbucks, having a latte, gossiping over a shared slice of pumpkin bread on a fine spring day.
We go to Safeway. Anna Jane needs lunch, or so she says, which probably means she thinks I need lunch. A grocery store is a wrong, outlandish place when your life has tumbled into anguish. The music and the clanging shopping carts and the cakes with Happy Birthday written in neon-blue icing, the donut case, the row of international foods—none of it makes sense to your assaulted brain. What doesn’t seem surreal now, let alone something as ordinary as a grocery store? Anna Jane sends me to get some fruit while she collects sandwich fixings, and I try to open one of those plastic produce bags. It won’t open, though, on either end, and when I lick my fingertips and try again and it still won’t, I almost sit right down by that display of red and black plums and weep.
I can’t find Anna Jane. We didn’t make a plan of where to meet, so we’re in that grocery-store hell of missed connections, where the store becomes a complicated maze with a moving cheese, more frustrating after the brief glimpse of a familiar shirt color, now disappearing. Flour, sugar, baking mixes; no, not there. Cereals, so many—virtuous choices and self-indulgent ones, the whole aisle screaming good and bad, with righteous bran and decadent pastel marshmallows. Even cereals judged. Whatever happened to those Kellogg’s variety packs with the six small boxes you could slice the back of and use as waxed-paper-lined bowls? Did they make those anymore? Or the fabulous and garish cereals of my youth—Quisp and Franken Berry and Kaboom, with its smiling fruit faces that turned the milk a disturbing purple-brown? So much of your life just goes.
So much of your life is loss—contemplating loss, avoiding loss, dealing with loss. Objects go, cereal goes, time, places, people. The whole place is starting to spin. Frozen dinners, frozen vegetables, hard squares of spinach and corn. I decide to stay put. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when lost? I feel suddenly awful. Did he take off his jacket, Mrs. Keller? Where did he put his keys? What did he say before going to bed? There’s an awful lot you don’t remember, Mrs. Keller. My stomach lurches with alarm. My God, my God, my God. I am near the refrigerated beers. Someone might see the way I look and my location and jump to the wrong conclusions, but I can’t move. I’m nauseous. The beers with their hip names and labels (What happened to Schlitz? What happened to Hamm’s and Olympia?) swim in front of me, and I feel clammy. I start to sweat. A man comes down the aisle, rolling his cart. There is nothing in it but a steak and a People magazine.
“Are you okay?” He has a big beard and kind eyes. I am gripping the edge of the refrigerator case.
“I feel a little …” I wave my arm in a circle.
“Here.” He grabs a beer, sets the cool bottle against my cheek; he smells like past-tense cigarette smoke. I’m grateful for his ingenuity. The man glances around for someone to give me away to. He seems slightly panicked. He feels, I imagine, the way I did that time in the second grade when I had to walk Sandra Waldo to the office when she was about to throw up.
I hold the bottle against my cheek. That morning, as I wrapped up our laptop cords, I had racked my brain to make sure there was nothing on my computer that would look bad. I didn’t want to keep things from the police, I wasn’t hiding anything, but I didn’t want them to misconstrue something innocent. But what was there for them to see? Pamphlets in process, website designs? Our old letters, Ian’s and mine—so what?
But I had forgotten something. Somewhere between the flour and the sugar of the baking aisle, I realized this. I’d forgotten a letter. A day where I’d had enough. It was private, my own private thoughts. I hadn’t even sent it.
“Maybe you should sit down,” the man says, and then all at once there is Anna Jane.
“Dani, honey, there you are! I just called your phone. Are you okay?”
“Dizzy or something,” the man says.
“Oh, no.”
“Take care, huh?” The man rolls his cart away, relieved, I’m sure. It was a narrow miss, and now he’s off to his peaceful evening of red meat and celebrities.
We pay for the groceries. We leave that beer bottle behind, the one I’d held to my face. It seems wrong. Someone might pick it up and take it home, bringing traces of my horror with them.
“I’m fine,” I assure Anna Jane.
But I’m not fine. I’m sick with dread. Is this how it feels when your life is over? I had told Detective Jackson that Ian and I were happy. That I hadn’t been thinking about leaving.
Now I’ve been caught in a lie.
My divorce from Mark dragged on. After a months-long investigation, a guardian ad litem had given her recommendation to the court regarding custody of Abby. Mark was outraged—the two weekends a month he’d been given were unacceptable. The evaluator had been biased, Mark claimed. She was a woman, for starters. She was on my side for that reason alone. He actually said that. He threatened to fight until he got what he wanted, and what he wanted was equal time and no child support. We’d go to trial, he said. My legal bill was rising—thousands and thousands and thousands. It was unlikely I’d ever dig myself from the wreckage.
But, unexpectedly, he changed his mind. It happened out of nowhere one day. He was finished. Probably he’d met someone. My attorney moved fast then. A person who changes his mind suddenly can just as suddenly change it back. Once more I stood by that aquarium next to our old fax machine, and I madly sent signed pages. My hands were shaking, because it was that part of the movie where the music’s ominous and she’s about to escape, but you know he’s still in the house with that knife. Everything was hurry, hurry, hurry.
And then, all at once (an all-at-once that lasted more than a year and a half), the divorce was final. Final—another tidy word, a declaration a fed-up parent makes after sending each quarr
eling kid to bed with a decisive shut of the door. That’s it! That’s final! No more!
Wouldn’t it be great if that really were true—final? But the kids never stop quarreling, even behind their own doors. Final is wishful thinking.
It was strange to have those papers signed. Like any big project or crisis that takes every waking and non-waking moment of your life, it was odd to have it concluded. A move, a college degree, a wedding—something long-strived-for is completed, whatever the outcome, and there is a huge space where it all once was. All that open time now, and a continuing nagging sense that there’s something you need to be doing.
Still, it was shocking, freeing, fabulous. I was new. Yeah. Exhausted and weather-beaten, but new. I loved my bare, ring-less hand. I loved that so much, because it felt like my very own hand then. Just Abby and me eating dinner—whatever we wanted for dinner, whenever we wanted it—it was as close to joy as I’ve ever felt. Impromptu takeout brought a soaring sense of independence and liberation. My clothes breathed and expanded in all that new closet space. I could fix the damn vacuum-cleaner belt myself. Mark had always handled that job before, leading me to believe it involved some mechanical proficiency beyond my abilities. Well, look there. It was inanely simple. The vacuum-cleaner belt was a glorious fuck-you. So was barbecuing. So was starting the gas mower. Even when my finances were keeping me up at night in fear, the vacuum-cleaner belt felt like victory.
There was triumph, but there was also crushing sadness. There were all the things that were gone now, and all the things that had been left behind or abandoned. Not only family vacations and silver anniversaries, but objects. The crappy garden tools he didn’t want because their wooden handles had become worn after being left outside in the rain—they were in the garage. The oil stain from his car was still stubbornly there, too. The wedding album (yes, Abby, hats were in then; stop laughing) was moved to the back of the closet. That extra-large cellphone, our glorious, exciting first (which he’d bought even though we couldn’t afford it), had been dumped in the garbage with the coffee grounds and old lettuce. It had been my job to pack up the last of the clothes he’d left behind when he moved out. I stuffed them into large green plastic bags, the kind you use for grass clippings and garden trash. I handed them over to him in a parking lot, eyes averted, as if it were a sordid, illegal exchange.
