Jared blanked, stood there with the wrapping paper in his hands.
“I don’t know, honey,” he said at last. His mouth twisted, he was looking deep inside for a diplomatic thing to say, for the elegant thing.
“You don’t think she’s with Che, do you?”
“No,” said Jared, knowing more than he wanted about Che and Lorenzo. “I don’t think your mom is with her. Detective Finney told me she hasn’t used her passport to leave the country.”
“What do the police think happened?”
“Finney doesn’t know.” Jared was making a mess of the wrapping. The scissors didn’t function in his hand. The Scotch tape didn’t tape. “He thinks she may have…”
He stopped, looked at his daughter. With her clear brown eyes, her open face, her ready smile, her straight brown hair, her light and steady posture, she looked so much like Larissa. So much like her and yet nothing like her. For Larissa had something else. The commonplace, yet unique. The eye-fooling thing. The heart-fooling thing. The mirage that told him she was all there.
The truth was in their bed, when she appeared wholly to be his—but wasn’t…and soon, disappeared entirely, like a magic trick, like Houdini in the wilds, a vanishing act: drink dirty martinis by the jamb of the door, smiling, wiling away the hours, candles burning on windowsills and mantels, while you are planning the impossible, hiding the impossible, hiding the missing fundamental part of yourself.
The part that would stop you.
What would Emily like to hear? What would a child prefer?
“What, Dad?” Emily stopped wrapping. “What? Does Detective Finney think Mom had some kind of accident?”
Jared shrugged. “He doesn’t tell me.”
Emily vigorously shook her head and resumed wrapping. “No.” She forced her voice to become steady and firm. Just like her mother used to. “No. She’s just traveling. You’ll see. She’ll be back.”
“Em…”
“She will, Dad. I know Mom. She’ll be back.”
“But what if she…”
“No. She is alive. I know it. I feel it.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“You’d prefer that?”
“As opposed to what?” Emily put the garlands down.
He put his whole soul down. He couldn’t face her, couldn’t reply to her.
“So what do we do? We wait?”
“We wait,” said Emily. “But we live our life, too.”
“Well, we can hardly help that part.” But how did Jared do that? Live his?
“That’s right. Soon it’ll all clear up. It’ll be all right, Dad. Don’t worry.” She patted him on the back.
He waited for more wisdom from his teenager. All she ever learned, she learned in kindergarten. It will be all right if you put a Band-Aid on it. And then pat the wounded on the back with a brief word of comfort. “And if it doesn’t?”
“I don’t have all the answers, Dad. I’m only fifteen. Ask me again in a few years.” Emily grinned. “But in the meantime, it’s not too early to start thinking about my sweet sixteenth. I want to have it at the Swim Club. I’m thinking of inviting a hundred people…”
In the new year Jared went to see Dr. Kavanagh. She seemed stunned by his reappearance—if he was here, that meant that Larissa wasn’t here. Or perhaps it was his appearance. Jared was pretty sure he didn’t look like the same man. His hair had gone gray. He’d lost a remarkable amount of weight. The saddle of what had happened sloped his shoulders downward, the weight of it had shortened him. He felt half-man standing before her.
Kavanagh herself didn’t look too good. She looked collapsed. She was thinner, though that seemed impossible; she had started out so small. The bags around her eyes, the sallowness of her skin; Jared hoped it was the light, the lack of it. She really didn’t look well. But then neither did he. And so they stood at the open door and eyed each other warily until she spoke. “Do you want to come in?” and he said, “No. But I will.”
In her office he paced once or twice from the window to the couch, and finally sat. When he looked at her again, she seemed so tired. She wasn’t curled up in the chair, she was just sitting, her hands falling onto her knees.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m a little under the weather. I’ll be fine.” She coughed. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, sure. Yeah, doing swell. Work is good.”
“Kids?”
“Kids are good.”
“They’ve adjusted?”
“As much as you can adjust to this sort of thing…”
“Kids are resilient.”
“Yes.”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“Seeing? You mean…? Um, no. Not like that. There’s a woman I work with who comes over on Saturdays, brings her two boys. We have dinner, the kids play.”
“Is she nice?”
“She’s nice.” Jared was uncommitted. “A bit of a whiner. I’m not much for that. You know, everything’s going to hell in a handbasket type of whining. I don’t know what she expects me to do about it. I’m like, welcome to the club, sister.”
“That seems insensitive. She must know about your situation.”
“She does. But you know how quickly people forget.”
“Yes.”
“She says to me, I’ve been so unlucky in love. This is what she said to me! I mean, come on, that takes balls, don’t you think?”
“Yes.” Kavanagh shook her critical head.
“I said to her, listen, you’ve been unlucky in love? Everybody’s unlucky in love! What do you think love is, anyway? You think it’s all dinners and walks on the beach? That’s not love. Love is seeing the laundry, the unclean kitchen, the tired husband who still wants sex, love is the everydayness of it, and you know what? It’s not sexy. It’s not romantic. It just is. Like the kids. There will be one or two moments of pure joy, that oh my God feeling, like, I can’t believe they’re my kids, but most of the time, it’s just doing doing doing. It doesn’t stop. And even when you don’t feel like it, don’t feel like checking their homework or worrying about dinner or listening, or bathing them, or watching TV with them, you still do it. That’s love. And you know, this woman looked at me like she had no damn idea what the hell I was talking about.”
Kavanagh laughed. “Who takes care of the children for you these days?”
“Things are actually okay on that front,” said Jared. “Larissa’s mother was helping for a while, but she had a minor stroke and couldn’t drive the car. She’s better. Still lives with us.”
“Larissa’s mother is living with you?” Kavanagh seemed sharply surprised by that, as if she knew things. “That’s good, Jared,” she said, calling him by his given name for the first time. “That’s very good.”
“Is it?” He shrugged. But he knew Kavanagh was right. It was good. “But this girl I interviewed back in September came to live with us. Maria from Slovakia.” Jared paused. “I hired her before Christmas. We’re a little cramped at the moment. I never thought my big house wouldn’t have enough room. But my mother-in-law is in the guest room, and Maria sleeps with Michelangelo.”
“Is she working out?”
“Yeah, she’s great. She does everything. I come home, the kids are clean, the clothes are folded. Her husband ran off to Florida, so she’s not exactly a ball of sunshine. But for me it works out great. Except…she cooks this…Slovakian food that the kids and I are not used to.” Jared smirked. “The kids are like, Dad, what’s sauerkraut, what’s kielbasa, what’s barley?” He shook his head. “So Maria tries goulash, almost edible. Or these cookies made with sour cream. Listen, I’m not complaining. She works hard. I’m thinking of getting her a Betty Crocker cookbook.”
“For when, Valentine’s Day?” Kavanagh kept a straight face.
“What? No. Just because. Not as a gift. As a hint.”
“Ah.”
They sat for a few minutes in silence. He was hunched over, hi
s elbows on his knees, looking at the carpet and his black shoes. She was squired into a tight twist roll, looking into her lap, breathing noisily.
“I’m not all right,” Jared said.
A wilted mouth told Jared of Kavanagh’s disappointment. As if she had a personal stake in this. “You seem better than before.”
“Well, yes. Before, I walked like a dead man. Now I’m waking up to things. It’s the end of January. There hasn’t been a single word. She hasn’t even sent a letter to the kids! I mean, how can that even be?” He clenched his uncomprehending fists.
Kavanagh stayed silent.
“Doctor…?” A faint interrogative. He took a breath. “You said she’d be back.”
“I’ve been wrong about many things in my life. I’m hoping this won’t be the last.” She broke into a nasty coughing fit.
“Do you think she’ll get in touch eventually?”
She didn’t look at him. “I don’t know. Do you?”
“I don’t think so,” he admitted. The look in Ezra’s eyes from the summer continued to prickle Jared, burn him. That might be a conversation for another day: how to resume his intimate friendship with people he couldn’t face. Maybe Kavanagh would tell him he needed new friends. “If she had wanted me to find out, I would’ve found out. It wouldn’t have taken much.”
“More than it took.”
“Yes. But she wasn’t just careful. She wasn’t just meticulous. She was preternaturally scrupulous. I mean, she took thousands of dollars from our account in practically singles! She knew I examined the account, so she did it in tiny increments, making sure I wouldn’t notice. She left behind her license, but got herself a new one, as if she wanted to give herself a head start to wherever she was going. She left her passport behind, but got herself a new one. Why would she need a passport, Doctor? She’s never been out of the country, not even to Mexico. Last time I checked, Hawaii was still a state in the union. She doesn’t need a passport to go to Hawaii, does she? She didn’t take any of her clothes, as if she wanted me to believe she just stepped out.”
“What’s your point?”
“It was a commando operation from the start. It was a tactical nuke. I was ambushed. I know you keep wondering how I could’ve been so blind. What I’m saying is, I don’t think she was hoping I would find out. Just the opposite. She was hoping I would never find out.”
Kavanagh sat. Her hands squeezed together.
He sat defeated. To a medical professional, as if to a secular priest, Jared couldn’t for certain, for one hundred percent, for absolutely, deny whole-heartedly that he wouldn’t have killed her if he found out. His face felt too hot, even now; his heart, too.
“Don’t be fooled by the premeditation,” said Kavanagh. “For her it was nothing short of agony.” She paused. “And I use that word deliberately. Agony, the suffering preceding death. The anguish of her choice—to stay, or to go. To lose her life, to regain it. I’m sure what she is going through right now is nothing short of the same.”
Jared stood to go. There was nothing left to say. “What do you think this is for the rest of us?” he asked.
Slowly she nodded, breaking into a hoarse cough. “If you’ll excuse me, I must go into the next room where my oxygen tank is waiting for me,” she said, struggling up. “I have small cell lung cancer.” He stood mute and sore with pity, with awkward empathy. “I know what it is for all of us,” rasped Joan Kavanagh. “You know what another word for it is? This suffering preceding death?” She wheezed. “Life.”
What was Jared going to do? Mark the day of her disappearance? Commemorate it with a party, a wake? Put a marker out in the field or a cemetery, bring his kids—her kids—to it? Could the flood of friends and food help him? Oh, he loved how they took care of him. Let’s go to Vegas, forget your troubles. Do you want me to cook? Come to my house. Bring the kids. Leave the kids. Come on vacation with us. They didn’t want him to be alone. He understood. Trouble was, inside he was in solitary confinement, weighted down, unable to move past. And move past what? If she was coming back, then he would grit his teeth and wait. But if she wasn’t coming back, then what?
His kids were waiting, even as they turned eight, and fifteen, and sixteen. He was waiting, even as he turned forty-five. He repainted the back door. He bought a slide for the pool. He bought a kitten to keep Riot and Maria company. Larissa was not a cat person; that’d show her.
He bought new dishes, a new stove. He fixed the steps to the deck and locks on the back gate. He patched up the fence that had fallen during a storm, and even got a landscaper to plant a line of four birch trees down the side yard by the driveway. Eventually, the purgatory would end, no? He couldn’t remain right here for the rest of his life. He couldn’t tell—was he in the middle of his life, or right at the very fucking end?
And yet each day he got up at six and showered and got all the kids up and fed and out. Every day, he didn’t care what early meetings he had, he drove Michelangelo to school. Every day at four o’clock he stopped everything he was doing and called Emily, to find out if she was home, if all was well. Maria couldn’t help Asher with geometry; Jared did that. And Emily needed help with Roman columns made of Model Magic. But Maria bought the Model Magic. Michelangelo needed to find a hundred pieces of something to celebrate the hundredth day of school. Instead of counting out a hundred Cheerios or a hundred pasta elbows like the other kids, Michelangelo made a hundred hearts by hand without a mold out of Model Magic, painted them red, and said, they’re for Mommy, and then he cracked half of them, and said fifty of them are broken.
Every day there was something. Every night there was something. Jared’s head stopped being filled with financial numbers from the latest quarterly meetings and started being filled with white paint for the winter snow scene and the broken magic markers and the dried-up glue.
Many things were rude awakenings.
Was his body gradually waking up from the shock of her aban-donment? One night Jared had a dream about Maria. He had come home and there was no one else there but her. He asked where the children were; she said they were at the Swim Club and Barbara was out shopping. Maria was stirring something at the stove, but when she turned around to face him, she was naked. The next thing he knew, she was underneath him in the family room. He was still in his suit. And then she was on top of him, between his legs, still holding the wooden cooking spoon in one hand and whispering, “We have to hurry, or the bryndzove halusky will burn.”
“We wouldn’t want that,” Jared said in his dream, and woke up flushed and too embarrassed to look at Maria for a couple of days, especially considering that whenever he came home she was always in the kitchen doing something. The ironic thing about it: he didn’t even know what the heck bryndzove halushy was. Did he make those words up? He’d never heard the term before, yet it was so clear in his head—as were the vivid other things.
“Maria,” Jared said to her at dinner a few weeks later, in front of the children, as casually as he could, “in your country, is there such as dish as…bryndzove halusky?”
“Of course,” she replied happily. “It’s one of our national foods. Potatoes, flour, cheese, maybe a little bacon.” She smiled. “Some people think it tastes like glue, but that’s not true.”
“No, no, of course not,” he said, looking into his plate, cutting up the sausage. “And how would you even know something like that?”
“Exactly!” she said. “Would you like me to make it tomorrow?”
“No, that won’t be necessary.”
Can there be forgiveness after what happened?
Jared’s mind didn’t think so.
Then why did his body so emphatically think so?
Oh, the treachery of also yourself, Jared thought, taking a sleeping pill every night so he wouldn’t be forced to lie in bed awake and alone. How can you trust another human being when you can’t even trust yourself? I’m outraged by Larissa, I can’t think of her, speak of her, yet every night every physical thin
g in me seeps for her. Weeps for her.
He had to do something. He couldn’t just continue like this. But do what? Make a decision one way or another. Say to himself, admit to himself, she was gone, wasn’t coming back. But every time he started to think this way, even for five minutes, another lunatic part of him began a maddening argument. People make mistakes. They learn the error of their ways. Like everyone, she’ll learn it, too, and come back. How can she not? Every morning when he woke his kids and got them off to school, he thought, how can she not? Look at them. Of course she will come back. Her children are here.
But when the months passed, and there was still no word from her, Jared concluded he might need to try another tack, another path.
2
Private Investigations
His name was Glenn Kelly. He looked like a front-loaded dweeb, not at all like Jared had been picturing him as he drove to Morristown. Kelly was running his office, “Discreet Investigations” out of a tiny light-blue cape, sandwiched between other similar-size homes on a quiet residential street. The blue house had a porch with a rusty screen door out of which the screen and the glass had long fallen out.
Inside was clean. Kelly’s office was the living room; first thing Jared saw when he walked in was the enormous desk, an Oval Office-size desk. After shaking his hand, Kelly went behind it to sit down. He looked like a dwarf behind it, a dwarf with a large ungainly stomach. He wore an old blue Big and Tall suit (to match the house?) that had been tailored to fit his short, wide frame, he had on crooked glasses, and he chewed his pencils and his nails, and the corners of his fingers; he tapped incessantly on the desk with either the gnawed fingernails or the gnawed pencils, all giving the impression of a man not calm, not listening, but restless and barely contained.
“How can I be of service, Mr. Jared?” he said, slightly panting, his round face looking down into a piece of paper where he had scribbled down Jared’s name. Kelly didn’t come highly recommended; he didn’t come recommended at all. How could Jared ask anyone for this sort of reference? He found Kelly in the Yellow Pages.