He's Gone

by Deb Caletti

  Of course, it only gets worse and worse: You find your soul mate, you go through hell to be together, but then he doesn’t trust you. And then he pecks away at you with his criticism. And then every day afterward you doubt it’ll last. And then you wonder how you could have gotten this so wrong. You try to hold on to what made you so crazy for him in the first place. You try very hard to remember what you love.

  There are the ways in which you share your life, for one thing. Share your life—a phrase like that, it’s such a cliché that the words lose meaning. They’re valentine and love-song words. But if you do hear them, honestly hear them, they’re rather beautiful. To share your life, to have someone beside you who witnesses it—it’s the best kind of beautiful; as good as it gets.

  A glass of wine would get poured as we waited for dinner to be finished.

  Today, when I was having lunch? I was sitting outside at Salvatore’s. A woman walking this big German shepherd is coming one way, and this mom with a little girl is coming the other. She’s got pink rubber boots on, so she’s clunking along.

  Seattle kid, with a tiara and a tutu with the boots? I asked.

  Yeah, but this one is cute. She’s about down here. Ian held his hand just above his knee. And the dog is right down there at her level, and she turns to her mom with her arms up in the air and she says, “Hug!” Not “Up,” but “Hug!” Really frantic, like, “Emergency! Hug!”

  That is so cute. I love that so much.

  I knew you would.

  Imagine if something that big was looking you in the eyes?

  With those teeth?

  Hug!

  I would tell him I noticed the maples changing on Ravenna Avenue, and he would tell me he thought his colleague, Mike Reynolds, had a drinking problem. I’d explain in great detail why the pair of jeans I bought were such a super deal, and he’d tell me about the comedian he heard on the radio on the way to work.

  My mother bought a new Bible, he shouted in my direction one Saturday afternoon as we paddled kayaks on the lake.

  Who buys a new Bible?

  Maybe it was new and improved.

  His hand would be on my bare hip as rain fell on the roof. His socks would be tumbled with mine when they came out warm from the dryer.

  Do you want to try the calamari? His reading glasses would be down his nose as he studied the menu in the dim light of the restaurant.

  I’ve tried calamari.

  That’s right. The tentacles.

  Exactly. The little round pieces that don’t have tentacles, fine. But you take your chances. They might put the creepy ones in there.

  Hmm, remember? We talked about that in one of our first phone conversations. Food that looks like the animal you’re eating.

  You told me you couldn’t eat fish if you’d seen their eyes.

  Honestly, I sometimes have to actively ignore chicken wings.

  Let’s get the wild mushrooms.

  You are both silent after you pass the car accident on the highway. You walk through a department store with opulent Christmas decorations and the bell-ringers out front. He points out the full moon. You ask him to pick up razors for you at the store. You bake him a birthday cake, and he runs back to fetch your purse at the restaurant where you forgot it. You share your life.

  Sometimes I would see him anew. Do you know this, do you know what I mean? You catch a glimpse of your beloved, and it’s just him you see, not your history or the worries in your own head or the mood of the house in the last weeks, just him. His sweet, soft hair. That scar at the bridge of his nose that he got playing sixth-grade flag football. Him being him, in his very own moment, pouring his own self a glass of grapefruit juice while wearing his T-shirt and jeans. He’s got bare feet. Suddenly, unawares, you’re overcome with tenderness. Your love is like glass, lovely and transparent, fragile, but stronger than you think. You can see the world through it.

  When his words pluck you from the air mid-flight, then, and when he pins you and puts the cotton ball of cyanide over your nose: Coming from someone who shares your life, it is the worst kind of betrayal.

  Ian went to Kristen’s graduation anyway, even though he’d been asked not to come. He hid in the back of the gym so he wouldn’t be seen. He left before the end, when the families descended and flowers were given and pictures taken.

  It was like I was stealing something, when they’re my children. My own babies.

  He spat those words bitterly and turned away from me. As Ian stomped up the stairs and slammed our bedroom door, I flashed on an image of Mark from when I was still in the hospital after Abby was born. Mark had never been happier. He loved babies. (You wouldn’t have thought it after what I’ve described, would you? But no man, no anyone, is ever just an angry person. They are tender and silly and confused, that’s the problem. No person is ever one thing, angry or unfaithful or critical or guilty or victimized or weak or strong; do you hear what I’m saying?)

  In the hospital, I was wearing a new robe Mark had bought me. It was more expensive than we could afford, and it was so plush, with its striped shades of peach and blue. I’d been looking for him, wobbling down the hall while clutching my newly deflated stomach, because he’d left with Abby in her cocoon blanket. He wanted to let me sleep, but I had woken up and was desperate to see her again. It was as if he’d walked away with my heart or my lungs. I needed her back. Finally, I found him on a green plastic couch in a waiting room. A television was on in the high corner of the ceiling, but he wasn’t watching it. No, he was staring down at Abby’s tiny face and her rosebud lips, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. He had his pinkie finger in her mouth, and she was sucking on it. I could see how much he loved her.

  It felt important to remember that Ian, too, had swaddled his daughters and cradled their small heads and kissed those fat baby cheeks that smelled like apple juice. They once rode on his back and danced on his feet and he took them trick-or-treating, their eyes slightly scared behind their princess masks.

  And now they’d made him (and he’d made himself) the jilted lover. He called endlessly. He sent flowers. He begged, and they turned away.

  It was too high a price. He said this. It’s too high a price.

  It was also too late to be doing the math.

  I wish you wouldn’t do that.

  Do what?

  You were biting your nails. Do you realize you were biting your nails? It’s crass.

  My heart was in his teeth, as he used to say, and he bit down. No matter how much empathy I attempted to deploy, no matter how hard I tried to see the reasons I loved him, late at night I knew the truth. Way before I went to see Mary, long before he disappeared, I knew it. Dr. Shana Berg had even spoken it, but it wasn’t something I wanted to hear back then.

  Darkness insists on honesty, doesn’t it? Any late hour is brutal with the facts. This is what I came to realize during those sleepless nights after his children had rejected him and after he had turned cruel: Ian and I were not being destroyed by the situation we’d made, but by the ways in which we’d inevitably, with time, revealed ourselves.

  Abby phones Bethy and Kristen to let them know the alert is airing. Detective Jackson has provided a phone number for any leads we might get. Now we watch for Ian on the news. When they show his picture, my mother gasps and I have to leave the room. That picture belongs to us. Just after it was taken on our boat, we’d eaten white cheddar on crackers and drunk wine, and that gray sweatshirt is in our closet. I can’t bear it. I remember the time when Ian had his picture in the Puget Sound Business Journal. He tried to act nonchalant about it, but there are still about ten copies of the article in our spare room. He turned into a bit of an ass for a while afterward. He’d get irritated about taking out the garbage or scraping grease from a chicken pan, and he dressed more beautifully, wearing his cashmere jacket to work, when he never wore his cashmere jacket to work. He was proud of appearing in the press, and I was proud of him, too.

  Now, after this piece airs, the pho
ne rings and rings. All night. Not leads—these will be phoned in to the police station, we hope. No, this is everyone who didn’t know before now that Ian has disappeared. I never realized we had so many people in our lives. A high school friend of Ian’s, Keith Machelli—never heard of him—calls; so does Cathy something, from Très, where he gets his hair cut. There are messages from Fran Sorrel, who was in my old book group, and Jan Clementine, same group. They’d probably stayed close and phoned each other right away. Yeah. They were good friends, if I remembered correctly. I’d forgotten all about them. I’d forgotten these people that I used to see every Thursday night. I’d followed their story line on a weekly basis and then promptly ditched them from my memory after we’d gone our separate ways. There are messages from a former client of mine, Mandy Shepard, and from current ones—Mrs. Yakimora, the accountant, and Jeannie Shore, who teaches Mommy and Me art classes. Ian’s old mentor, Bob Good, phones, and so does my next-door neighbor in the suburbs, Margaret Choy. Abby’s baseball coach from years ago, Greg Lippincott, leaves a message, too. My father sends his support for this new course of action but grimly urges me to “understand the likelihoods at this point.” Nathan has called. And called. And called.

  I need to phone him back, but I can’t right now. I can’t face his kindness.

  “I’m making more flyers,” Abby says. This has become her corner of operations, and she attacks the job with the no-nonsense vigor of a sergeant in the midst of battle. “The other ones are wet and falling off, and we should use the picture from the news.”

  There are foam containers of takeout on the counter, and the phone rings and rings and rings. Abby is making the new flyer on her laptop at the kitchen table, and my mother is talking to her good friend Joyce, and I can feel the situation unspooling. The room had been filled with three butterflies and now there are twenty and now two hundred and the gossamer threads that created their beautiful wings are unraveling and unraveling, falling to the floor in ugly, tangled heaps. I need to do something, more than this, more than helplessness or thinking of possibilities that lead nowhere, more than errant cuff links and betrayals that aren’t. There are no more possibilities. I should put a stop to all of it. I should say it, before anyone says it to me: There is that lie, that letter I never sent to Ian, and mud on the plastic mats of Ian’s car and on our sheets.

  There is that dream, and that memory, and those damn pills. A black hole of forgetting. Is there a secret self I am not willing to see? If it was me, if I have done something … Please, let it not be so. I need to stop this mad, pointless unraveling, this panicked fluttering. I am making fools of the good people around me.

  The problem, the biggest, most insurmountable problem, is that I can’t visualize him home that night. Can I see his hand on that key, opening the door? Can I remember anything, him laying down his jacket, his keys on the counter, him telling me good night? His hand on the light switch, anything? Wait, go back. Can I see him getting out of the car, walking down the dock? Did I take his arm; did he say a word, any word? There is nothing. Only my dropped shoes, my own bed.

  “Where are you going?” My mother holds the phone to her chest so Joyce won’t hear.

  “Out for a minute. I need to make a call.”

  My mother’s eyes send distress signals. “They might watch your calls.”

  My stomach is an elevator descending, the cord cut. She thinks of everything.

  “Dani …” She’s pleading. I ignore her. I have a crazy thought: When I go outside, will there be cameras and lights and microphones? But it is only the same quiet night it always is. There’s a fingernail moon—that’s what we always call it; a narrow sliver. Old Joe Grayson has his soaker hoses on; I can hear them trickling pleasantly.

  I need privacy, and there is none to be found on that dock. I head toward Pete’s. I set my back against the far wall of the store, near the dumpsters, near the empty cardboard crates marked BEE SWEET CITRUS and CHIQUITA.

  I will look guilty of something if someone sees me there.

  You have reached the office of Dr. Shana Berg. If this is an emergency, please dial 911 …

  I speak fast. “I’m not sure you remember me. I saw you a few years ago, during my divorce? This is Dani Keller. Dani Hastings? I know you’re just getting back from a trip, but I’m hoping I can see you as soon as possible. Tomorrow? It’s an emergency.” Well, that’s something people in their profession surely hear all of the time. A wife found cheating, razor blades on wrists, imminent job loss, and a life not worth living. “Not one I can dial 911 for,” I clarify. The open phone line buzzes. “Please.”

  I hang up. I see a thin tail slide behind a box. You don’t want to think it, but there are likely rats all around this place.

  While I’ve been gone, Abby’s friend Marcus has shown up, and so has her friend Hannah. Marcus has brought more printer paper and ink in an Office Depot bag. I like them both, I like them a lot, but not right now. The printer whirs and whirs and then jams up. Of course it’s protesting these unfair working conditions, hours without a break, overtime. Marcus lifts the lid and he and Abby peer in to investigate, then they slam the lid shut again and the tired whirring resumes. Hannah is creating some website on her laptop, a missing-persons site; who knew. The first time I sent a fax, it was as if I’d witnessed water turning to wine. That was years ago. Still, I’m not young enough to believe that there’s a technological solution to every problem. Ian’s face stacks up on our desk, another Ian and another. I want to pull the plug of that printer. I want silence. The whirring, the jams, the Ian-faces—I can feel a scream inside, wanting out.

  It is close to one in the morning.

  “Let’s call it a day, gang,” my mother says. She’s been nervously looking my way all night, as if I’m a bomb that might go off. She can tell that the visitors and the commotion are slicing my frayed nerves, or else they’re doing the same to hers. We both understand something they don’t. She looks exhausted. Her face is a shade of gray. She’s brought me another one of those brown drinks on ice. One for her, too.

  I hurry through the goodbyes and the thank-you’s and then through the long, supportive hugs from Abby and my mother. I want to be alone. I need to think. I need to figure out the right thing to do.

  Another day has passed, and another nightfall, in our dreaded bedroom. Ian’s reading glasses are folded and sitting exactly where they’ve been for days now. In our bathroom, his razor stands up on its end in the cup, still and unused.

  I go through it again. The things I know for sure:

  The pills before the party. The wine. The need to leave, my aching feet. Something lost. An argument. Feet on wet grass. Fury.

  An argument, and then what?

  We are home. We. Is it we? Is he there? Is he even there? If only I could remember. I drop my shoes, yes. I get into bed with relief.

  Weeks before, a letter. I write this down in a letter I don’t send: I am thinking of leaving you. Finally this needs to be said, even if the thought of it is killing me. It’s killing me because I’ve failed. I’ve failed twice. If a person brings the same self again and again to every relationship, if Ian had, so had I. In Ian, I had chosen Mark but not Mark. I had chosen rescue that wasn’t rescue. Of course, in the butterfly world, mimicry makes it almost impossible to identify a toxic species. There are nontoxic butterflies with the markings of toxic ones, and there are toxic ones imitating one another. There are control freaks and out-of-control freaks, and at the end of the day they look pretty much the same.

  And weeks before that, months—Kerry Park. My wrists pinned. You’ve taken everything from me! Struggling to get free. Hands shoved against his chest. More strength than I knew I had.

  Now that dream. We are back at Kerry Park. We go back because of that stupid cuff link. He is still furious, and so we return. Fine! Fine, go back, then! Wrists pinned. Hands shoved against his chest. He is going down, down that ravine.

  I cannot remember him at our house that night when we ar
rived home. I have said that that is the biggest problem, but it isn’t. There is something worse, much worse, and the very fact of it makes me sick with horror. The argument that night, it is the small seed-heart of a large growing fear, a guilt fear, which is blooming and climbing like a vine of ivy in a Grimm’s fairy tale.

  Not everything about me is your business.

  Ian! Damn you! No shoes, wet grass, mud.

  I grab his arm; I feel the possibility of rage.

  What is wrong with you?

  I see his furious eyes. I dig my nails into his arm. I do not want to face this fact, I am terrified to, but it is true: I hated him that night. That stupid outfit; the way he came up behind me and whispered that I’d been rude to Dennis Singh and his wife, Stella. They said so? I asked. No, but you interrupted him. And then Desiree Harris on the lawn and his refusal to say what he’d lost and needed to find … No, more than this. Way more. The years I waited for him. The ways I was never enough. His endless monitoring and criticisms and jealousies.

  That night, I hated him. Dear God, I had.

  I am still awake, and still awake. I get up. Maybe I will sit outside in that warm night and watch the lights of the city. To have those lights right there—it’s such a privilege. I forget what a privilege it is. How often do I ever think to really see it and take it in? Maybe the fresh air and the rocking of the dock will calm me.

  When I get up, I see that my mother is sitting awake, too. She is also looking out onto the lake, from the couch in the living room. Her feet are on Pollux, who is doing what he does best: giving comfort. I sit down beside her, and we stay like that. You don’t sleep when the hunched man in the dark coat is inside your body. You don’t sleep when the hours are closing in.