“What’s going on? You said everything was fine.”
“Everything is fine.” Jared didn’t look at her. “No one knows what to think. She’s not here. Sort of mysterious, I admit.” He shrugged, tried to appear casual, failed, he could see, by the panicked look on his mother-in-law’s suddenly old-looking face. Well, she
is
old, Jared thought. Nearly eighty. But, boy, is she feisty. Drives herself everywhere. Dresses well. Perhaps this is what Larissa would have looked like in old age.
“Jared!”
“I’m sorry. What?”
“What are you talking about?” Barbara put her palm on her heart, and started to pant. “What’s happened?”
“I don’t know. No one knows. No one has seen her since Friday.”
“Oh my goodness! She must have been in a car accident!”
“That’s what we thought. But…her cars are here.”
“In someone else’s car!”
“Hmm. The police are looking into that.”
“Since
last
Friday?” She held on to the island. “Over a week?” When Jared didn’t answer, she pressed for more. But he didn’t have more. Certainly nothing he would tell her. “If they haven’t found her yet, they’re not doing a very good job looking,” she finally declared.
“I agree.” Jared told Barbara all he knew, that Larissa’s purse was still at the house, giving the
impression
of an unexpected departure, or perhaps of an imminent return. She didn’t mean to go, he wanted to say.
She just did.
How he wished he hadn’t gone to see Kavanagh. Hadn’t gone to the Jaguar dealer. Hadn’t gone to Albright Circle. How he wished he was still in the dark and blind. If horses were wishes.
Barbara sat for five minutes slumped on the bar stool. Emily came down, Asher.
He had to drive his kids, Jared told her; did she want to wait? He didn’t want her to. His relationship with her had been cordially strained. He never spent more than five minutes with her without Larissa present.
That was a good way to describe most of his adult life. Not five minutes of it had been spent without Larissa at his side.
Leaving Barbara in the kitchen, he drove Emily to the church, and she said, “Dad, why can’t you stay? This is a public performance.” But she had so many of them, and there was only one of him. They should have thought it through, got Barbara to come and listen, but they didn’t. Silent conflict played on Jared’s face, and Asher got out of the truck with his guitar, and said, “I’ll stay, Dad. Don’t worry. I’ll stay, and then I’ll just walk to James’s house. It’s five minutes from here. I’ll be fine. Let’s go, Em.”
Clearly, Michelangelo would have no summer clothes, ever. Jared parked the truck on the street, and then they all went in and sat in the pews, while the string quartet and the Summit high school choir played melancholy for an hour. Afterward, Asher walked to James’s house, while Emily went over Jemma’s. Jared took the cello and Michelangelo back home.
By the time they returned, Barbara had already cleaned the kitchen, the living room, the den. She cleaned like Larissa. Methodically. Or was it right to say Larissa cleaned like her mother?
After putting last year’s swim trunks on Michelangelo, Jared threw him in the pool, and made ice tea for Barbara. They sat outside and watched the boy and Riot swim. It was warm, sunny, nearly 90degF. Jared himself didn’t have any tea. The normal things had gone from Jared’s life.
But as he sat across from Barbara, surreptitiously glancing at her, trying to study her without her noticing, he wondered: what is it about this woman that had made Larissa turn into the woman she became? Barbara and Larissa had always seemed
polar opposites. Larissa was warm, funny, quick with the joke, unmeasured, natural, nice. Barbara was proper, respectful, no-nonsense, dry, serious. They both had a calmness, but Barbara’s brusqueness was replaced in Larissa by a smiling affability. Barbara kept everyone but the children at arm’s length, while Larissa kept no one at a distance. The thought of that pricked him, pierced him in the place from which he felt and breathed, like air was being let out of his lungs. That’s right. His crunching jaw set against his teeth. She kept
no one
at a distance. And with his firm face, he examined his mother-in-law for clues.
What was he looking for?
Finally Barbara could no longer ignore it. “What are you looking at me like that for, Jared?” She frowned haughtily.
He leaned forward in his chair, his hands clasped. “I’m trying to understand what’s happening.”
“You’re trying to figure out how I’m responsible?”
Jared said nothing.
“You silly boy,” she said. “I’ve got three sons all older than you—I can call you this. You silly boy. Haven’t you figured out yet that her whole life Larissa has been grappling with the same question. How to blame me.”
“Blame you for what?” Jared asked. “She was wonderful.” He clenched his fists. “And she had a good life. Why would she blame you for anything?”
“Why are you referring to her in the past tense?”
Jared wasn’t about to answer.
And she didn’t answer him. “Blame you for what?” he repeated, but his lungs had deflated. He couldn’t speak anymore, his anger deflated also.
After five minutes of stunted silence, Barbara spoke. “What can I do? How can I help?”
“Do you have any idea where she might be?”
“Of course not! Why would I?” She put down her empty
glass. “You know she didn’t confide in me. Even if something was terribly wrong, Larissa always pretended that everything was fine. Her whole life she did this. Inside turmoil, but on the outside, all smiles and neat clothes! That’s why I didn’t know she was failing science, and Spanish, didn’t know she was involved with a bad crowd in high school, until one of them got arrested for shoplifting in a supermarket and another attacked by security dogs while trying to steal drugs from a walk-in clinic. What, you didn’t know this? You know what else I didn’t know? That she loved theater. No interest in it in high school, and suddenly she’s majoring in it in college. I should’ve known she was all about the drama and secrets. About pretending to live outside society’s rules while doing the traditional thing. She just adored that false Romantic dichotomy.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You two eloped! Wanted to do things your own way. You weren’t going to be dictated to. But you eloped to get
married
—can’t get more conventional than that. Traditional rebels you were—and thinking only of yourselves. You didn’t even give me an opportunity to participate in a proper wedding of my only daughter.”
“You misunderstand,” stammered Jared. “We were broke, and we didn’t want you to spend the money.” He said it guiltily. He had never felt okay with it.
“You let her rope you into that?” Barbara exclaimed. “Selfish! Selfish. To deny me the pleasure of seeing my only girl be married. To deny your own parents seeing their son get married.
I
didn’t misunderstand. You misunderstood your role in your own life and in the life of your family. And you wonder why I’ve always been terse with the two of you. You let her connive you, convince you into running away.”
“Stop it.” Jared wanted to get up, run away himself. “Stop it! What does that have to do with this, with anything?”
“Well, according to you, nothing. Because you’re still not making the connections. That’s fine. One day, perhaps you will. You will see that it has everything to do with your current predicament.” Barbara stood up. “Stop looking at me like that. I have no answers. I don’t know where she is. I don’t even know who she is.” Lightly she touched his shoulder, and he didn’t recoil. “And you know what the trouble is right now?”
“Do I ever.”
“The woman you think you know could not have done this. Yet she’s not here.
That’s
the trouble, my boy. You don’t know who Larissa is either.”
2
All Things Under Heaven
I
t took Jared two weeks to locate Ernestina’s number. Two June weeks during which he went back to work and pretended everything was hunky and dory, and coordinated with Maggie about Michelangelo and Asher’s band and Emily’s all-State concert at the high school at which she was first cello. Maggie couldn’t pick up Michelangelo every day because she had to be at the hospital for tests, and Jared spent his evenings calling Tara or some of the other class parents, asking them if they could keep his son for a few hours until six o’clock when he got home, and to everyone he said, “Larissa had to leave on some family business. Really hate to impose.” He would’ve put the boy into afterschool Milk and Cookies program for working parents, but with the year ending in a few weeks, the option was closed to newcomers. “Perhaps in September, Mr. Stark?” said Joan, the program coordinator.
“Oh, I’m sure I won’t need it then,” he said. “But thank you.”
Dinner was the hardest thing. When you don’t cook for twenty years, merely pretend you cook because you fire up the grill and put the burgers on, which someone else seasoned and shaped into patties, it’s a rude awakening to have to every single relentless day think about what to make for dinner for
five finicky people. Take-out is what you make. Chinese, Indian, Thai, Mickey D’s, diner food, Chinese again.
Jared didn’t know Ernestina’s last name, and she wasn’t in the Rolodex; Larissa must have thrown out her card when she had let her go. Jared found it in a box of Christmas cards from four years ago. And only because Ernestina’s card said, “Merry Christmas from the Lopez Family.” But because she ran a company called Lopez Professional Clean in Millburn, Jared was able to find her in the Yellow Pages.
“Mister Jared, I no know where she is,” said Ernestina when she called back. “I so sad she fire me. I no hear from her a long time.”
It took Jared ten minutes to explain what he needed. Mrs. Jared had gone missing. Did Ernestina remember anything strange about her last few months? Did she see anything, hear anything, out of the ordinary?
“No, everything was okay, Mister Jared, nothing was wrong. That’s why I so surprised she fire me.”
He spent another five minutes of trying to make the highly nuanced clear: not something wrong with you, but something wrong with
her
. Was she amiss? Did she do strange things?
“She did no strange things, Mister Jared. She good to me, she good lady. She never treat me bad till the day she fire me.”
Five more minutes.
“Sometimes,” said Ernestina, “she would take long time to get ready.”
That was Larissa.
“And I would say, you sure look nice Miss Larissa to go to supermarket, and she would say, well, you never know who you gonna run into, Ernestina. But she always look real nice. That’s all.”
Ernestina didn’t remember any phone calls, anyone coming to the house.
“The only other thing I notice,” she said, “is that Miss Larissa stopped talking to me about cleaning this or cleaning that. One time I broke a Christmas figure and she didn’t care. One time I forgot to clean shower curtains, she didn’t care. She stopped asking me to do extra stuff. She always pay and say thank you, house looks beautiful, even when my girls did something wrong. Not like before.”
When Jared hung up, he wondered what to make of that. Larissa was absent-minded about cleaning? It was hard to fault her on this; Jared didn’t even know how much they paid Ernestina.
A few days later Ernestina called back. “Mister Jared, I remember something I want to tell you.”
“Yes?” He jumped off the bar stool in the kitchen, his hand held on to the corner of the island. It was eight in the morning—Michelangelo was pulling on him to go. He gestured sharply to his son to stop and turned his back, to hear Ernestina better.
“Right before we got fired, one of my girls, she clumsy a little and she knock over a wooden box on top of Miss Larissa’s dresser. She was dusting and she—”
“Yes, yes?”
“Well, a lot of cash fall out on the floor.”
“What fell out to the floor?”
“Cash.”
“Like
money
?”
“Yes, Mister Jared.
Lot
of money.”
“How much is a lot?”
“A
lot
. I didn’t count, I start helping Cindy pick it up, and Miss Larissa come in, and she upset with us, like, what are we doing? Maybe she thought we was stealing or something, but I been with her for six years, I don’t take a penny that don’t belong to me.”
“She knew that, Ernestina.”
“Yes, but it was very next week after that she fire me.”
Jared remembered Larissa had said to him she thought the girls were stealing. But he recalled her saying “jewelry.” Not cash. She wasn’t a cash kind of girl.
“What kind of money?”
“Fifties, hundreds. I never seen so much cash in one place. She told me it was her Christmas tip fund.”
Jared had hung up. He was racing upstairs.
“Dad!”
“One minute, son!”
“We’re going to be late!”
“Yes, we’re going to be late.” He slammed the bedroom door behind him.
The large wooden box stood on Larissa’s dresser, given to her years ago as a birthday present by Maggie. It was light wood, painted ornamentally with pastel flowers. Maggie painted it herself when she was in her stenciling phase. Jared held his breath, set his teeth, and opened the box.
It was empty. There was not a penny in it, not even on the bottom, under a business card for a hair place, a business card for a podiatrist in Sparta, a $20 receipt for a water gun from three years ago, and a ticket stub from a movie they had gone to see before Michelangelo was born and they were still going out to the movies. There was no money in it.
Michelangelo. The boy was waiting downstairs, his backpack on, his shoes and jacket on.
They were forty-five minutes late to school that morning. Michelangelo was so mad he wouldn’t even let Jared kiss his head before he stormed tardily down the hall.
After Jared came home, he searched every drawer in her dresser, every nook in her closet, every pocket of her jeans, every book on her shelf. There was no money squirreled away anywhere. The phone kept ringing, but he ignored it. It was work. He’d forgotten to call in. The excuse he
mouthed to Jordan the receptionist when he finally did call was pathetic. He emailed Larry so he wouldn’t have to hear it in person. Sorry. Family emergency. I hope to be in tomorrow.