He's Gone

by Deb Caletti

  I steer with one hand and, with the other, I punch button number one on my phone. I imagine a police car pulling me over for cellphone use. I feel a bit hysterical at the idea of it—it would be one of those arrests you see on television, where they pull over a guy who’s speeding and find a dead body in his trunk. Bad driving in the wake of my husband’s disappearance would speak to my guilt, even if the only rules I’d broken before were minor traffic laws and major marital ones. I stole a library book once. I was too embarrassed to check it out. It was about battered women in the suburbs. Previously, I’d always believed that librarians would be the kind of people I’d love to have as friends. They were smart, open, and well-read. Understanding, definitely. But the folks behind counters can know more about you than you’re comfortable with. Librarians, receptionists in doctors’ offices, the ladies who work at Rite Aid. The people behind counters know your secrets.

  You’ve reached Ian Keller. Please leave a message …

  We’ve become adversaries, that voice and I. It’s infuriating, the way he doesn’t answer. We’re matching wits. One of us will do the other in first, and it’s going to happen soon. There are pigments in a caterpillar’s blood that allows it to understand days and hours and minutes. It knows when the light is dimming and the days are growing shorter. It knows when it’s time to hurry and find a safe place in which to protect itself.

  Where are you? Goddamn it, Ian! Speak to me!

  Not everything about me is your business.

  He isn’t dead. I am trying to remain adamant about that. I keep coming back to the same question. I would know it if he were dead, wouldn’t I? I would feel it; people say they do. I’m supposed to be sure, damn it. Mary will be sure.

  He can’t be dead! He isn’t. But fear may be clouding my sense of certainty. That’s what it does, right? Fear stands in front of the truth like an armed guard.

  Except that my armed guard—he’s becoming unreliable. He’s put down his weapon over the last few days, gone off to have a smoke. Truth (was it truth?) is trying to sneak past. Truth is insistent, persistent. There’ve been these disturbing gaps in my memory, but images are forcing their way in, images that twist and tangle with logic. Those damn pills, that wine. My feet were muddy, but I had been on that wet grass. In the dream, though, my bare feet are on the ground. My hands are shoving against his chest.

  I reach for my purse on the seat beside me. I glance at the purse, the road, the purse, the road. The last thing I need is to get into some accident. I feel around inside the zippered pocket. That cuff link. He’d wanted so badly to go back and find it. Why? It was a gift. It had to be. You don’t care that much about something you bought at Macy’s.

  Wait. Where is it? The pocket is empty. I search around in there, beginning to panic. My hand makes contact with my wallet, my hairbrush, a folded compact whose mirror came unglued long ago. A package of mint gum, a folded grocery list. The purse, the road—oh, shit! I slam on my brakes. My fender is a mere inch from the stopped car in front of me. The driver’s eyes glare from the rearview mirror. I send profuse mental apologies. The cars have slowed down. We are sitting in traffic now, and I’m going to be late.

  A pen, its separated cap, a lipstick—where, where, where? My fingers find some loose change covered in a layer of something sticky. Ah, okay. The smooth jade and gold of that cuff link. Relief. The cuff link is a key in every definition of the word: a clue, but also an object that unlocks a door and sets you free. Someone gave him that cuff link, and that someone was important enough for him to disappear for. It’s the last theory I’ve got. If not that, then something else happened. Something horrible. I can’t think about that.

  I switch my gaze; now the game is clock-traffic. I hate being late. I get crazy anxious when I’m late, even in my regular life. It’s that profound sense of responsibility again. Or, wait. Maybe it’s not that at all. Maybe I’m just too much of a coward to face another person’s anger. This suddenly occurs to me. It’s a revelation, right there on the 520 bridge. All this time, I’ve both faulted and congratulated my ultra-responsible self. But she hasn’t been as accountable and organized and respectful as I liked to think, has she? She’s only been afraid.

  Hurry, I plead with the cars. I am dying of heat, beginning to sweat badly. She will see the sweat marks. I roll up my window and try the air conditioner, which hasn’t worked well since old Blue was a baby. We inch along, and then, without explanation for the holdup, the traffic loosens and we’re moving again. Finally, I’m over the bridge and heading toward the mountain foothills. Even though I’d been out this direction to meet Bethy and Kristen not two days before, this is different. This time I have to drive in to my old neighborhood, past the street where my former house is. Past the swimming pool, and the park where Abby played baseball. Past the elementary school where Abby went. There is a memory on every corner. We rode our bikes there; we had a Mother’s Day picnic there. We have a picture of Abby in her plaid skirt in front of that JFK ELEMENTARY sign; she’s holding her Princess Jasmine backpack on the first day of kindergarten.

  I feel a distinct pull when I arrive at my former street. I want to turn and settle into that driveway. I want to unpack some groceries, head up to my old bedroom, and get my cozy clothes on. There’d been the comfort of routine and familiarity in that place, home. But the sick heaviness in my stomach is conveying mixed feelings; it reminds me of the bad memories, too—the raised fists, the anger, the devastation of divorce, and that fax machine by the burbling aquarium, all long gone. Someone else lives there now. Who knows what’s in the corner where the aquarium was. Still, the rosebushes out front are ones I planted. I put the bulbs into that ground. Those are my flowers that come up year after year, even though I’m not there anymore.

  I don’t turn. There’s no time for sentimental forays. Besides, it would be too painful to see the house, or to happen upon an old neighbor who still lives there, whose life hasn’t changed like mine has. I go on, toward Mary’s house. Ian and Mary’s house. It looks different. The trees have grown. After living in the city, it seems like the lawns here have gotten wider, the road, too. But these houses are showing their age. The paint colors and the tall, arched brick entryways are almost from another era, when every garage had room for three cars and every bathroom had two sinks. The enormous faux-cement pots from Costco are faded. The tan trim of the windows looks dated.

  It’s the same driveway, though. So many things change and don’t change. Mark had driven up this curve of cement with me as his wife in the passenger seat, a much younger Abby in the back. It had been filled with cars for that party. A badminton net had been stuck in the grass. But today there is only a sprinkler attached to a garden hose set in the center of the lawn. On this warm day, the hose might burn a snake shape into the lawn. Ian would have hated that. I know that about him now, but I never would have guessed it about him the day we first pulled up that drive.

  I turn my engine off. My phone is in my lap, and so I return it to my purse. I notice ink on my fingers. There was that pen without a cap, and I’d marked myself with several frenzied lines of blue.

  The door has a big gold knocker in the shape of a family crest. It looks intimidating, as door knockers generally do. Using it would be a particular kind of bold move, a statement, versus the polite, less-intrusive song of the doorbell. I ring the bell. I hear a dog go crazy, barking, running toward the door full speed. I hear toenails sliding on wood. I didn’t know Mary got a dog. Yes, there he is. I can see his fluffy white face appearing and disappearing in the glass of the side window as he jumps up and down. He’s letting me know he has things handled in this place.

  “Shush, shush, shush,” I hear Mary say, and the door opens.

  Mary. She looks different than I remembered. Her face is plain; she’d grown prettier in my imagination over the years. She’s gained weight. The boobs that had been a focus of so much attention don’t seem sexual anymore, only heavy and ancillary. She wears a violet velour jogging sui
t and a pair of jeweled sandals. I’m not the only one who is mismatched with the weather.

  We’d never spoken after their divorce. Not once. And yet she and I have a relationship that’s as full and complex as the one I have with Ian. She’s been in my head and in his over the years, and she’s hovered over our relationship, steadfast and vengeful, a devoted ghost. But here she is, a regular woman in the flesh, too, with flashing eyes and with her dog under one arm now.

  “So annoying.” I think she means me, until she squeezes the dog closer to her. She steps aside to let me in. “It’s cooler in here,” she said. “We’ve added air-conditioning.”

  “You got a dog, too.” It’s an inane comment on my part, yet the dog surprises me. We haven’t spoken in years, but I know so much about her. I know that she looked at a million swatches before she had her couch reupholstered and that her mother had gall bladder surgery last year. I know that she was a virgin when she married Ian and that she’s afraid of deep water.

  “Ken says he curses the day I brought her home. Sophie,” she croons. “Be a good, quiet girl.” She sets the dog on the floor. Sophie jumps up and sniffs my pant legs intently, getting to know Pollux in his absence. They’ve never met, but I’m sure she knows plenty about him now. “He says he doesn’t even like dogs, but he treats her like his little baby.”

  Ken. The mention of him so soon—I wonder what it means. Honestly, in all my imaginings, I haven’t given Ken that much thought. He’s Mary’s longtime boyfriend, but they’ve never married. He’d be easily shoved aside, I’ve always assumed, if Ian chose to come home. Ian is the lost prize; Ken is someone to go to the movies with.

  Mary brushes white dog hair from her velvety top. “Look at this,” she says. “What a mess.” I follow her past the formal living room, which looks somber and unused—beige carpet, beige brocade couch, beige brocade chairs; a new crystal chandelier that Ian would despise for its drippy excess. Ian and I sat on the floor in that room long ago, listening to his music as the party went on outside. Oh, I don’t belong here. It’s the house of my rival, and now, inside, all her private details are available to me. They feel embarrassing. Stepping over the threshold seems as wrong as looking in her underwear drawer.

  Mary makes her way through the kitchen and into the adjoining family room. She’s rearranged the furniture and has painted the room a new color, an unsettling deep olive. That’s another thing you do after divorce: You paint. You rearrange the bookshelves or get new ones. You hope Bermuda Pink in the bedroom or Courtyard Green in the bath will cover over the history there. Fresh paint can smell like a fresh start, and he’d have never agreed to Bermuda Pink, so it’s all you, powerful you, the master of your home and your destiny. I did it myself. Haystack Yellow in our bedroom.

  Mary gestures to the large leather couch that bends into an L-shape. It’s huge enough for any Super Bowl party. The television in front of me is the size of a billboard. Why is everything so large in the suburbs? On the coffee table, there’s the television guide that came in the Sunday paper, and a box of cheese crackers. The box of cheese crackers is so big, it could feed a tribal village. There’s a hairy dog bed in the corner of the room, several dog toys strewn about, and on the side table, an enormous picture of Bethy in her senior year. Her face glows and she looks upward as if pondering her bright future. Someone made pancakes this morning. The smell of them lingers, and I can see the handle of the pan sticking up from the sink.

  I try to imagine Ian here. Even though I have memories of him in this room, I can’t for the life of me see him here now.

  I sit, but Mary remains standing. She folds her arms in front of her. The niceties of weather and dogs are gone. I’m trapped in the plush leather folds of that couch. I might need help getting out. For years she’s likely wished to have me cornered. I’m sure she’d love to give me a piece of her mind, and I wouldn’t blame her if she did. I’m not afraid, though. More, the purple velour and the Super Bowl couch make me feel a sadness I can’t name, and the jeweled sandals hit me with a guilt I always knew I had but never comprehended the depths of. I wait. I wish for and dread what she might say. It’s coming—information about Ian that even Bethy and Kristen don’t have.

  But Mary only stands there with the angry folded arms and glaring eyes of a vice principal dealing with a disrespectful ninth-grader.

  “Mary …” Where to go from here?

  “I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “I thought you might know something,” I venture. It’s weak. Pathetic. I am hating that weakness more and more.

  “Well, I don’t. This sounds like a personal problem between you and him.”

  I weigh this. Would she keep his secrets? Certainly she’d want me to suffer as she had. Why would she tell me if she knew where he was? “He’s been gone over a week, Mary. I’m worried sick. I’m trying everything, everyone.… I think we might need to go public.”

  She shrugs. “Do what you want. Maybe he just needs time to think.”

  Standing over me like that, she seems huge. In my head, she’s always towered over both of us. “Has he …” I can’t say it. Has he talked to you? Come to you for friendship, or more?

  Her laugh is scornful. “You think I know something you don’t? Is that what this is about? Because I don’t know him anymore. I don’t know what’s in his head! I haven’t known for years. Ever since he started up with you. And, in case you haven’t figured this out yet, he’s your problem now.”

  “I deserve that.”

  “You deserve at least that.”

  I want to apologize. I’ve wanted to apologize for years. But it’s not the time. The purple velour and the folded arms and the blazing eyes tell me it’ll likely never be the time.

  “I was under the impression that you soul mates would never even have marital problems like us regular people.”

  “Mary …” It was a mistake to come. She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t know one damn thing about where he is, either.

  She marches across the room. She places her palms flat on the kitchen counter, faces me down. “You’re not exactly the person I want to have in my home.”

  My home—the pronoun sets a fence around the word. My home, my marriage, my husband, my child—the verbal equivalents of those medieval villages set on high rock pinnacles. They kept invaders out that way. “I’m sure I’m not.”

  “Hardly the person.”

  “I wouldn’t have come unless I had to.”

  She shrugs again, rolls her eyes dramatically. So? I should never have come, never, never, never. The wrongness landslides. I can’t picture him here, not at all. I try to imagine him standing beside her, putting his arms around her, the two of them entwined in bed together, and I can’t see it. They were mismatched, terribly. It is so clear. Another great irony: You find your soul mate, you go through hell to be together, and then, every day afterward, you doubt it’ll last.

  She doesn’t even know me, he’d said so long ago. She doesn’t know who I am. It’s not my house. It’s not even my life.

  The dried-flower arrangement in a large basket on the kitchen table, the tall faux-gold candlesticks meant to look like they’d come from an Italian villa—it isn’t his life. Not then, and certainly not anymore.

  “What is it you want from me? What else?”

  I have to know this, anyway. “My mother. She said she saw the two of you in that restaurant. The day before he went missing.”

  Mary is back in the family room again. She is smiling, nodding her head, pleased. It’s the kind of bitter pleasure you get when you realize you’ve been right all along. “He didn’t tell you about it himself.” She sits down in the matching leather lounge chair across from me. She stares at me with her blue eyes. Pretty blue eyes, I notice. Lovely, really. Ian said that he had fallen in love with her because he’d been especially lonely at that time in his life. She was social and vibrant, Catholic like his mother, a virgin. But he might have fallen in love with those eyes, too.
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  “No. He didn’t tell me.”

  “Well, isn’t that rich.”

  I trace the threads on the leg of my jeans with my fingernail. Up, down, in a small square of the tight, intricate weave. The regret and the guilt and the anger all merge into shame.

  “Wait,” she says.

  I look up. The dog has curled up on her bed, and now she watches the proceedings as if they’re a salacious but slightly tedious episode of some real-life courtroom trial on television. Mary had loved those shows, I remember. It was one of Ian’s complaints, the way she spent her days. He judged. He still judges.

  “I get it now. I get why you’re here. You don’t just think I have information. You think I’m the reason he left.” She is laughing. “Ian! Come downstairs!” she calls. “Let’s break the news to her!” Her voice rises with sarcasm. She tosses her head in disgust. On her bed, Sophie scratches vigorously with one small hind leg. “This is too much, you know that? We met because I asked to meet. I didn’t want him to hear it from the girls. It seemed only right that it should come from me. You two didn’t give me that courtesy.”

  She holds up her left hand to show me the ring.

  “Ken and I are getting married.”

  I’m shocked. This is a complete surprise. Somehow I thought we’d sit in our triangle for the rest of our lives—Mary wanting Ian, me wanting Ian, Ian in some state of perpetual indecision no matter what roof he was under. I thought the story would go on forever.

  “I wanted to tell him personally. Don’t you think that’s the respectful thing to do? We were married for seventeen years. We have children.”