“You’re right about that, man,” said Ezra, finishing his beer, reaching for another, reconsidering, pulling on Maggie to get up. “It’s Larissa we’re talking about.”
They stayed with him as long as they could. But short of
staying overnight, eventually they had to go. Soon forty-eight inconceivable hours would’ve passed without a word from her.
“She must’ve left a note somewhere,” Jared said. “It must’ve blown away, or fallen on the floor, was swept into the garbage.”
“A note saying what?” asked Ezra.
“Maybe she needed to go away and think.”
“About what?”
“Well, I don’t know, do I?” Jared paused. Maggie left the kitchen. He heard her crying in the den, then calling for Dylan. “You really think she could’ve left me, Ez? This isn’t how people go. They say something. They pack. They take their children. This isn’t what they do.”
“You’re right, I’m an idiot. I’m sure there’s a very good explanation.”
“Ezra…” Jared was standing but felt like he was falling. “Left me for…someone else?”
“I don’t know, man. I’m so sorry.”
“But wouldn’t
I
have known? That doesn’t happen in a vacuum, there’s no way to hide something like that. I would have known!” Jared exclaimed. “There’d be a thousand signs.”
Ezra said nothing.
“What? Did you and Maggie talk about it last night?”
“About nothing else. We didn’t sleep till sunrise.”
“Well?”
“Well, what? Were there signs? She has been
very
distracted for months. But I do know that to do rehearsals, you’ve got to be completely into it to put on even a mediocre play.”
“But could she have been hiding in plain sight? Behind plays, rehearsals?”
“Possibly. Maggie says for some time Larissa hasn’t been engaged in her life.”
“She’s only saying this now!”
“No, dude. Maggie kept saying it and saying it. Something is not right, she kept saying: I’m so sick, I feel so bad, and
she can’t remember from one day to the next what’s wrong with me.”
Maggie came into the kitchen with Dylan, her eyes red, wet.
“Did you say this, Mags?”
“I did, Jared.”
“But you didn’t say it to me!”
“We didn’t want to pry. Especially since winter, when she looked like she was having some trouble coping. We were sure you were working it out whatever it was.”
They talked about this standing up, near the door, their car keys in their hands. Eventually they had to leave him, and he was again alone. Jared didn’t know how he would get through another night. He heard a noise at the front door, he ran to it. It was just wind. He heard a noise at the back door, he ran to it. It was just Riot. The children were asleep, the house silent. He thought of taking Larissa’s Ambien. She said it helped her sleep; it might help him. But he was afraid. What if the phone rang and he was out of it? What if the cops came, and he was unable to talk to them? What if the kids needed him and he was all strung out on drugs? He couldn’t do it.
Why did Larissa need to take Ambien anyway? Why couldn’t she sleep? He hadn’t questioned it. She had said she was having a little trouble getting to sleep, and he didn’t want her to have any trouble. When she started sleeping better, she was happier, and therefore he was happier. But why couldn’t she sleep?
With the house unbearably silent, Jared sat on the couch in the den. He put on the ballgame he had TiVoed earlier, muting the sound, then turning it up nearly full volume. He held a beer in his hands, and all the lights were off except the dim ones in the kitchen, except the cold blue flicker from the HD T V. Riot was by his feet.
What in the name of God was happening?
She did sometimes seem a little distracted, but gently
distracted, as if she were thinking about plays and lines and scenes. She would always get like that when she was hip-deep in staging, rehearsing. It wasn’t unusual.
She
had
lost weight lately; it was hard not to notice. She said she had been too busy to eat, always running around. In front of him a few weeks ago she ate a slice of cheesecake and a lemon meringue. They laughed about it, her becoming fluffy round like a lemon meringue herself.
She stopped shopping, stopped buying things. Was that proof of her restless heart?
Did they make love less? Jared didn’t think so. Maybe a little less, he had to admit. But they were busy. Life intervened. She never asked for it, but she never refused him either. If he got busy and tired, and was sometimes too quick, too functional, that wasn’t her fault, it was a product of their full and busy life. On vacations, during anniversary weekends, in the summer in Lillypond, they more than made up for the utilitarian approach to their physical intimacy. For the last sixteen years this was how they lived, ever since the kids came. Sometimes when he looked down at her, her eyes were closed. But so? His were closed too. She was so sexy, to control himself, sometimes he didn’t want to open his eyes and gaze at her. She kissed him, she did the things that good wives do. She made his lunch and picked up his shirts, she made him dinner, dressed his children and bathed them, she was the perfect hostess on Saturday nights and let him watch baseball without complaining (too much). This is how she had been and that is how she was. Nothing in her recent demeanor suggested she was living a double life.
Except…
And it was only because he started to think about it, painstakingly raking over the grains of the days, the chaff of memory. Sometimes she really did seem more than just a little distracted. But he was a fine one to talk, so stressed out about
crises at work, about diminishing returns, unpaid dividends, capitalization, amortization, that he himself could barely see what was on TV unless it was a ballgame. When they sat and watched a movie, her eyes were open, she was looking at the screen, sitting close, eating popcorn, but once, a few months ago, she told Ezra she’d never seen
Zoolander
, when they had all watched it together a few Saturday nights earlier and laughed their asses off, even her. They had teased her about it and she had sheepishly laughed.
But this was Jared projecting! Grasping at straws. Doug told him Kate always fell asleep during movies. Was that a sign of treason? A wife who didn’t open her eyes at the TV? A wife who didn’t laugh at
Seinfeld
?
The money remained in their account. All her clothes were in her closet. Though how could he tell? She could have taken two pairs of jeans, a skirt, five shirts, ten, five bras, ten. He wouldn’t know. It was almost summer, the winter stuff had been packed away. Her spring jackets hung in the hall closet. The suitcases were down in the basement. Her makeup and perfume were on her dressing table. Her reading glasses! She didn’t go anywhere overnight without her Versace reading glasses, and they were still by the bedside. He checked.
Tara said Larissa had been carrying some kind of bag. But that could’ve been anything. Tara said she had been walking as if
to
something. She waved with the hand that wasn’t holding the bag. Waved like how, Jared had asked. Waved like she was saying goodbye?
“Yes,” said Tara. “But, Jared, she actually was waving goodbye. And I waved goodbye to her.”
When was the last time Jared saw her? Friday morning. He’d been running late, they’d gone to bed late, woke up late; there was a direct relationship. As a result, he’d been barely able to kiss the kids, kiss her, grab the mug of coffee she made him, say, “G’day, fellas. Be good for your mom,” and speed out the
door. She waved (goodbye?) to him, too. She said, “Have a nice day, honey. Drive safe.” Perhaps she didn’t always say
drive safe
. Perhaps she never said it. But he had been in a hurry. She had been engaged in the world around her. She wasn’t distracted. She was getting milk for Michelangelo, and she smiled at him from behind the island. Her smile had been…
Again, it was only now. At the time, he thought nothing of it. Now he was animating her smile, personifying it with attributes it hadn’t had at the time. Now it seemed to him that she glistened as she smiled, that her eyes had been wet, that she gazed at him longer than usual, smiled at him and studied him, as if what? As if she had known she wasn’t going to see him again?
This was absurd! He had asked Michelangelo earlier. He was such a sensitive boy. Did Mommy seem different Friday morning?
“Different how?”
“I dunno. You tell me. Did she seem in any way different?”
“Nah,” he said. “She seemed exactly the same. She hugged me for five minutes.”
“She did?”
“Uh-huh. I was like, Mom, let go, I have to go learn something.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. Said she loved me.”
“Was that unusual?”
“No, Dad,” Michelangelo said slowly. “Mom says she loves me all the time.”
“Of course she does, son. And do you know why she says it?”
“Because she loves me?” he said happily, skipping away.
She hugged Michelangelo for five minutes. Her eyes looked wet when she waved goodbye to Jared, and smiled. She didn’t remember
Zoolander
. She lost weight. She stopped shopping.
The evidence was in, ladies and gentlemen! Clearly this woman was contemplating the unthinkable! The unimaginable.
Did he even sleep? Jared didn’t know. It was the second night he hadn’t gone to his bedroom. He showered in the kid’s bathroom, put on Asher’s deodorant, hadn’t shaved since Friday morning and was sporting a formidable gray stubble that made him look older and tired, as reported by Michelangelo, who was the first one up, climbing onto Jared’s chest, turning on the T V, rubbing Jared’s rough cheeks and saying, “Dad, did you fall asleep in front of the TV again?”
“Can you believe it?”
Michelangelo kissed him, patted his chest, climbed off, nuzzled close. “I can believe it because you’re a weirdo.”
Jared slept the broken shallow sleep of the anguished as his seven-year-old watched four repeats of
Full House
.
At ten on Sunday morning he called the detectives. After they came by, Jared spent an hour with them going over every detail he could think of for their missing persons report. They pretended not to study him as they took down the information. Except they couldn’t help it; they both stared when Cobb asked him, “You sure there was no trouble in your marriage?”
“No,” said Jared, in a defeated voice because she wasn’t home. “Nothing beyond the usual.”
“What’s usual?”
“I don’t know. Occasional short tempers. Bad moods. Nothing serious. No yelling.” Except for that one strange night in February when for an evening he thought Larissa was losing her grip on reality, on sanity. But that passed, it was just an aberration. And it was nearly four months ago! She didn’t go back to the city for the hair color, even when he tried to insist; she dismissed it, was no longer interested. Jared stopped speaking, worn out.
They continued to stare at him.
The husband is always the suspect, Cobb told him. Always. That’s who we look to first.
“How can I be the suspect?” Jared scoffed. “I was the one who reported her missing.”
Husband always reports her missing. He is always distraught. He always goes on the evening news and pleads for his wife’s safe return. He is always the one searching, calling us incessantly, boisterously lamenting her absence.
“Is that what I am? Boisterous? Calling you incessantly?”
You are searching.
“Are they usually found?”
Yes. The detectives said nothing after that, as if the silence was the meaningful part.
“Alive?”
No.
“Ah.” Jared waited, thought it out. “Is the husband usually the culprit?”
Nearly always, Mr. Stark.
After that Jared fell silent. To find her, that would be good. Alive, even better. To prove them wrong, a corollary benefit. But that wasn’t the question swirling around in his head. It was more vague, laced with torture and ambiguity and terror for his days ahead, like night covering the rest of his life.
“What if…what if…” How to say it? How to ask.
What if she is not found? Finney asked for him.
“Thank you. Yes.”
What’s your question, Mr. Stark?
“What happens then? In the past, what’s happened if months have gone by and the wife has not been found? Has that ever happened?”
They thought about it. Twice, Finney said.
“And?”
The husband called off the search.
“The
husband
called off the search?”
That’s right.
Funny, that. Because Jared couldn’t imagine doing that. And now he couldn’t even if he wanted to. How could he? That’s what the husband
always
did.
“Were those two women eventually found?”
Yes. Again with the laden silence.
“Alive?”
No.
Jared tried hard not to take a deep breath before he asked. “Culprit?”
“Who do you think, Mr. Stark?”
He heard that last part loud and clear. It was he who was responsible for Larissa’s disappearance.
At eleven in the morning, Emily came downstairs, still in her nightgown. “Is Mom back yet?”
“No.” Jared didn’t know what else to say. “Mommy might have gone to visit her friend Che,” he added, struggling to say something that might sound like the truth. “She may have gone to the Philippines. But Che has no phone, so we’re waiting to hear.”
“Mom left for the Philippines without saying goodbye?” The child cut right through to the truth of things. The incredulous tone reflected the absurdity of that, the incongruity of it. “Dad, that’s ridiculous.”
“I know.”
“So why are the police here again?”
“They came to check on things. See how we’re making out. Tell me, on Friday morning when you saw Mom, did she seem out of sorts with you?”
“Not at all. We were running late. She shoved us out the door at 8:10. She yelled something that sounded suspiciously like I love you. We couldn’t believe it.”
“Didn’t answer her?”
“No.” Emily paused. “She hugged me before she shoved me out the door.
Actually
hugged me. Arms and everything. Kissed me on the cheek. I said, Mom, don’t be so strange. What the hell is wrong with you?”