by Daniel Mills
They reach the canal, the bridge, and the sea-wind blows her skirts free of him as they cross over. A teamster curses and draws up his horses, their hooves flashing over him as his mother pulls him hard to the right and the road turns to climb toward the top of the hill.
The church is ahead of them, the black spire of which she has often spoke. The street is empty with the trees in rows to either side, branches stripped by the winds and their leaves upon the ground: crimson and yellow and brown about the edges with the mud from the weekend’s rain. The paving is slick, yielding. The boy’s feet slip, give way, and his hand slides from her grasp. He strikes the paving with his knees then his hands and heaves onto his side as the light shifts and changes, sun compassing sky so the shadows swing toward him from the trees and alleys and from the doors of the church, left open to receive her.
The bare trees rattle. The shadows writhe and stretch and bend upon themselves, turning to fragments when his mother reaches the church and hurtles through the doorway, visible to him in that instant as she spreads wide her arms and the wind encircles her with its roaring. Her mourning dress shreds, spins loose from her body. Her corset next so the pale limbs show, her nakedness, though this, too, dissolves with the whirling shards of fabric and flesh that twist and circle, ringing the center which is her illness: a churning chaos.
The wind recedes, releasing itself.
The doors fall shut and his mother is gone. The pieces of her move away down the street like flapping leaves: shadows of the coming winter, a mountain he cannot reach.
A hansom pulls up. His grandfather is seated within, slumped against the far door with a handkerchief to his mouth. Beside him rides the man in the cloak and top-hat with a doctor’s bag placed between his feet.
It’s alright, the doctor says and offers his hand.
The carriage brings them back to the house, where all is quiet and cold. His mother is nowhere to be found and his aunt paces in the kitchen, pipe-smoke drifting from beneath the closed door. By now his fever is worse, and his grandfather carries him upstairs to his bedroom, gasping with the strain.
Evening. There are shadows on the wall, wings and hooks retreating with the elms that toss and sway. His grandfather departs but returns with a kerosene lamp. He lights the wick, sets it burning by the bedside. Then waits with the boy for the fever to break and for the sickness to go out of him, a shadow passing.
Dream Children
The cats are at the door. The black, first, with a white blaze at her breast. Then the gray tom, wiry fur, tail like a curling feather. He stands on hind-paws, bats at the glass. Beside him the kitten with stripes and one eye, blue, the other sealed by scar tissue.
I slide back the door, scatter kibble on the rug. They eat. When they are finished, the tom lifts his tail to spray the wall then slips outside, the black cat following. The floodlight sends their shadows ahead of them into the dark.
Nearly dawn. The sky is souring, purple and red.
The kitten lingers. I kneel before him, but he backs away, making for the sliding door, watching me all the while. His blue eye shines out of the dark.
7 am, Thursday. I turn on my phone.
One new voicemail, a man. His name’s Mark Karimi, he says. He’s worried about his wife, believes she might be missing. Can I call him back?
I look him up. Karimi is an architect, junior partner in a downtown firm. I find his photograph on the firm’s website. His jaw-line prominent, hair close and black. He’s smiling.
The phone rings and rings.
“Hello?” his voice slurred with sleep.
I’m returning his call, I say. “Your wife is missing?”
“Yes. Well—I’m not sure. She’s gone, anyway.”
“Have you contacted the police?”
“They think she’s left me. That she’s gone off with someone else.”
“But you don’t think so.”
A burst of static. His breath on the receiver.
He says: “Can we meet?”
He provides his address, a street across town in the North End.
“I’ll be there in an hour,” I say.
The house is new and modern: big windows, copper siding. A two-car garage in the same style with concrete flooring inside. Twin SUVs, both black, washed and gleaming.
Mark shows me in. We pass through a living room with a flatscreen on one wall and a piano against the other. The table in the dining room is zinc, blurred with a watery patina. French doors open to a covered patio, a lawn adrift in unraked leaves.
Mark sits opposite me with hands round a coffee mug, face wreathed in steam.
Music is playing. Slow beats, heavy bass, a woman’s voice.
“Do you mind?” he asks, meaning the music.
“No.”
“Just—it helps to keep me calm.”
“You don’t need to explain yourself.”
“Only it feels wrong somehow. Fiona always hated stuff like this.”
“Maybe you should tell me what’s happened.”
He explains. He was out of town on Monday, performing a site survey. He spent that night at a hotel in Springfield and spoke with his wife on the phone as usual. Tuesday morning he tried calling her again from the car, driving back, but received no answer.
“Was that unusual?”
“Not really,” he says. “She wouldn’t pick up when she was practicing.”
“Practicing?”
“The piano,” he says. “She’s always played.”
He went straight to work, wasn’t home til dinnertime. There was no one in the house. Her car was in the garage but he wasn’t worried. Mornings, Fiona practiced yoga or played the piano. In the afternoon, she walked the nearby bike path, north past Leddy Beach with her earbuds in, stopping sometimes to look at the lake. He assumed this was where she’d gone. Then he noticed her phone on the table. A note with it, handwritten on her favorite stationery.
I have to go to him, it read. I can’t wait any longer.
He drains his coffee mug, knits his fingers. Lets them rest folded on the table before him. “I contacted the police, showed them the note. I told them about the car, how she’d left it, but it was obvious what they thought.”
“That her lover picked her up.”
“It isn’t like that, though. She isn’t like that.”
“What is she like?”
He produces his phone. Swipes to unlock the screen and shows me his background. A photo of them together, their arms wrapped round each other. Behind them the lake at nightfall, a row of trees with leaves of the same sunset color.
Fiona is tall, her husband’s height, with eyes spaced close but of a pleasing color, more green than blue. Her hair is long and straight and very fair.
“This was on Friday,” he says. “That warm night we had. She was excited. Something was different somehow. We’ve been trying for a baby, you see, and it’s been more than a year since we started. Last Monday she had an appointment with an OB/GYN.”
“And?”
“All good news, Fi said. This weekend she seemed happy.”
More questions. They are thirty-three and thirty-four, married three years. They met when Fiona was working downtown as a restaurant hostess, when she was still Fiona Peale. Her mother is dead, her father estranged. She grew up in Maine but moved to Burlington for school. She studied music at UVM, piano performance, but dropped out in her third year.
“Health issues,” Mark says. “That was the reason she gave. She used to drink.”
“Used to?”
“She gave it up. Around the time I met her.”
“You said she saw a doctor last week.”
“She wanted a child so badly—we both did—but it wasn’t happening. That was hard. So she went to the doctor just to make sure everything was okay. And it was. Like I said, she’s been happier lately. I thought things were getting better.”
Wind in the yard. Leaves in whorls and rising.
I stand up. He stands too.
/>
I say, “You mentioned she left her phone behind.”
He nods.
“Can I borrow it? It might help.”
He goes upstairs. Footsteps on the ceiling. Rain on the French doors.
I go back to the living room. Sit at the piano, touch my fingers to the keyboard.
Sheet music on the stand: Elgar, Dream Children, the first movement. Andante in G Minor. The book appears new or at least little used, its spine uncreased.
“Do you play?” Mark asks. He holds out her phone.
I shake my head, swipe the screen. Nothing.
“It’s dead,” he says. “The battery went last night.”
“You’ve tried contacting her friends?
“Yes, but she doesn’t have many. I called Kate. Kate Spear. They’ve known each other since college.”
“And she hasn’t heard anything?”
“No,” he says. “No one has.”
I say goodbye, walk to the car. Close the doors, connect her phone to the stereo. Let it charge as I drive home down Riverside Ave and park at my apartment.
The screen illuminates. No new voicemails, no new texts.
I open her calendar, recent appointments. A doctor’s visit last Monday. Yoga on Tuesday morning. Coffee with Kate after yoga. Thursday afternoon: a piano recital at the University. Dinner with Mark on Friday.
Then nothing. I scroll back further. Dentist’s appointments, Pilates, weekly meetings with Kate. A red X to mark her periods.
Recent calls. Most are from her husband but there are a few missed calls from Kate since last Tuesday, an outgoing call on Wednesday to a Burlington number. Duration: 3 min 16 sec.
Rain on the windshield, running down the hood. The wipers thump, thump.
I call Kate Spear. No answer. I hang up, unplug the phone, bring it inside. I’m just through the doorway when it vibrates in my hand.
Kate. A photo of a woman in her thirties: dark hair, silver earrings, sunglasses.
“I already told Mark,” she says. “I don’t know where she is.”
“I realize that.”
“She’s probably gone off somewhere, God knows.”
“Mark doesn’t think so.”
“Listen,” she says. “I’m at work. Come meet me. City Hall Park. Twenty minutes.”
We sit together. Kate’s dressed all in black, skirt, blazer, and tights. Red leather shoes with heels and a floral-print umbrella wide enough to cover us both. Rain pours from it. Bare trees blur together, brick faces of the buildings opposite.
“We met at UVM,” Kate says. “Freshman year we were on the same floor and in our second year we roomed together on campus. The year after that we moved in together. We had an apartment downtown with two other girls.”
“It must have been around this time Fiona dropped out?”
“Her third year, yeah. Midway through the fall semester. Her grades had been slipping for a while. She drank too much. We all did.”
“But you stayed close.”
“After graduation I moved away for law school but we kept in touch. Just chatting online, talking on the phone, that kind of thing. She told me how she met Mark, how she stopped drinking. Then last year I got a job in Burlington and moved back.”
“You reconnected.”
“We used to get coffee, talk about our lives. She was different, of course. The years had changed her as much as they changed me, but lately she seemed moody, depressed. I knew something was wrong but I didn’t want to press her.”
“Is this what you talked about on Tuesday?”
“They were trying for a baby. Nothing else mattered to her. It’d been months and months and no luck. I told her she should go to the doctor, make sure everything was as it should be.”
“And?”
She hesitates. Then says: “I assumed the worst, the way she spoke to me.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “Let’s just say she turned on me. We argued. She said—awful—things. I got up, stormed away. Told her to sort herself out. I tried calling later to apologize but she wouldn’t pick up. She’s like that sometimes.”
Sunlight through rain. Colors like oil in the puddle at our feet.
“And you believe that’s where she’s gone? To sort herself out?”
“Maybe,” she says. “I don’t know.”
She says goodbye. Stands and shakes out the umbrella. Sidesteps the puddle, her red shoes shining.
Fiona’s phone is in my hand, her music in my headphones. Webern. Scriabin. Schoenberg. I draw up a timeline of the last ten days.
Mon, 11/30. Her doctor’s appointment.
Tues, 12/1. Her meeting with Kate. Their argument.
Wed, 12/2. 10:34 am. She dials a Burlington number.
Thurs, 12/3. Piano recital at UVM.
Fri, 12/4. Dinner with her husband. Her apparent happiness, the setting sun behind them.
Tues, 12/8. I have to go to him.
Recent calls. I flip back to Wednesday, 10:34 am. Turn off her music, press redial.
A woman answers. “Abernathy Clinic.”
“I’m calling to confirm my appointment,” I say.
“Under what name?”
“Karimi.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You have the wrong number.”
She hangs up. The line is dead.
I try again but there’s no response.
I drive to the North End. Leave the car at Leddy Park and walk down the bike path with her phone in my hand, her music playing softly. Alban Berg, Violin Concerto. The music is strange, atonal. Strings squeal and scrape, mix with my footsteps in the leaves, a dry scratching.
Dusk is at hand, the cold night nearing. I follow the path where it bends along the lakeshore, walking north, Fiona’s route. Past an apartment complex, a condo development. A row of brick townhouses with windows facing west.
In one window, the third, an old man in a white coat sips liquid from a Dixie cup. His glasses are mirrored, the lake before him streaked red and blue.
The music stops. Water-sounds. Tree-sounds. Leaves slipping loose with the wind that shakes them. I turn round in the dark, walk back toward Leddy.
Home again, and the black cat is waiting. She sits in the glare of the floodlight with the kitten beside her, its one blue eye. In her mouth: a savaged bird.
Morning, and the cats come and go.
I sit at the computer. Look up Elgar’s Dream Children. Fiona left the sheet music on the stand. Played it, maybe, before leaving the house. Most recordings are orchestral, but I find an arrangement for solo piano, press play. The melody is slow and wistful, haunting. It hangs in the air, circles the room. Nothing at all like Berg or Webern.
I open the University’s website. Search by date til I find last Thursday’s recital. “Solo piano with University Distinguished Lecturer Eugene Salterton.” Link to the program. Debussy. Chopin. The recital concludes with “Selections from Elgar, arranged for solo piano.”
Eugene Salterton. I find his bio. He’s from Newburyport, Massachusetts, has taught piano performance at UVM since 1998. There’s a photo of a gray-haired man in his sixties. Jaw pointed. Nose long and thin. His smile appears forced, teeth white and prominent.
His office is in the music building. Southwick Hall: named for a woman who never married, who died young. I park nearby and let myself in by a side-door. Salterton’s office is locked, but a work-study student points me toward the performance hall.
Rows of chairs, all empty, and the man from the photo on-stage. He sits before the grand piano, dressed in a tweed blazer and paisley bowtie. His posture is perfect, his playing forceful. Struck chords echo from the paneled walls, down the deserted aisles.
I sit in the first row, nearest the stage. The piece concludes and the old man stands and slaps his hands together. Sweat flies from them. He steps to the edge of the stage, looks down at me. “May I be of some assistance to you, dear child?”
His speech is c
lipped, slightly accented. Boston Brahmin.
I say, “I hoped to speak to you about Fiona Karimi.”
“Karimi? The name, alas, is unfamiliar.”
“You would have known her as Fiona Peale.”
He smiles. “Ah, yes. Dear Fiona. Very gifted. Fond of the Second Viennese School, as I recall. Curiously fond, I always thought.”
“She was your pupil?”
“At one time, yes. Though she was ultimately unable to complete her studies.”
“She dropped out.”
“An awful waste. There were—issues.”
“She drank,” I say. “Is that what you mean?”
“As you say,” he replies, waving the words away. “But all this was many years ago. And I am likely an old fool, but I cannot pretend to understand your interest in poor Fiona. Are you acting on Miss Peale’s behalf?”
“Her husband’s, actually.”
“Ah. That would be Mr. Karimi.”
“Fiona’s left him. Monday night she walked out. Or maybe Tuesday morning.”
His smile unslipping. “Dear child, I fail to comprehend how any of this is my concern.”
“She came to see you.”
“Me? I really fear you are mistaken.”
“Last week. She was at your recital.”
“Was she? If you are right I consider myself deeply flattered by the implicit compliment. All the more because she never much cared for my style of playing.”
“And why is that?”
“Why—because I am a Romantic.”
“And she wasn’t.”
“Plainly not,” he says. “She preferred Schoenberg and his ilk. Or do you truly know so little about her?”
