He's Gone (16 page)

“Right. You know, busy …”

Kitty saves us. “He’s on his way,” she says. I don’t have the three different passes with secret fingerprints that allow the elevator to work. You’d think Ian’s building was the goddamn CIA.

Now here is Evan. Red beard, crumpled shirt. He looks about twenty, though I know he’s a good deal past that. Apparently, years of playing medieval video games can contribute to a youthful appearance. There are two kinds of computer guys, I’ve found—you have the ones who dress in food-splotched clothes, who eat out of pizza boxes, and who can’t make socially appropriate eye contact, and then you have the ones like Ian. Casually but expensively dressed. The feel of money and the lifestyle of perfection that programming code requires. The former have cars that run on soybeans and cow manure. The latter have foreign sports cars with leather seats and some satellite fantasy woman who’ll help them out of their traffic woes.

I am getting used to the look I get from Evan as he takes my hand. I imagine it’s the same one you give to the dogs at the pound, the ones you won’t be bringing home. It’s a mix of apology–guilt–pity that draws down the mouth and the corners of the eyes. I hate pity, which is probably one of the reasons I’ve never told people about what went on between Mark and me. I don’t believe in self-pity, either. I believe I’m responsible for my own messes, even this one. Reasons are not the same thing as excuses.

“Dani …” Evan has chubby fingers and the sort of squishy palms that make shaking hands unpleasant. I hate shaking fat hands. It’s one of life’s unpleasantries, along the lines of sitting in a seat still warm from someone else’s butt or smelling a stranger’s fart in a bookstore. But now he’s walking and I’m following. Evan is my day’s fate, like it or not. We’re in the elevator, then out of the elevator. He’s apologizing again and again. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry …”

More useless pity, I think. We arrive at the doorway to his office before I realize it’s not pity at all. He’s really apologizing.

I look at all those Happy Meal toys on his desk and shelves—the little cartoon cars and Ronald McDonalds and Disney characters, some I even remember from the bottom of Abby’s toy box. That
Lion King
one, right there. A rubber Simba and his lion girlfriend—her name escapes me. And that power-woman with the red-laser eyes. She has a trigger on her back that makes them spit fire.

“Hailey feels
terrible
. She only met them once, you know? So she got confused.”

“What?”

“I really am so sorry. I was telling her everything, right? And I said that Ian hadn’t been seen in days, and she said, ‘But I just saw him. He was at Bagel Oasis today, getting lunch.’ I didn’t even question. I just assumed it was him. We even called the police department, like your daughter said to. And then Hailey and I were talking this morning again. And she said something like, ‘He probably has women around him all the time, good-looking like that. That hair …’ And I thought,
I don’t think Ian …
”

I was hearing:
women
. I was hearing:
all the time
. Ian is good-looking, all right, but not exactly known for his hair. It’s cut rather seriously. Trim. Handsome, but …

Evan is shaking his head. “Ian’s
hair
? And then I just went,
Oh, shit!
”

My stomach makes an odd flip. Ian hasn’t been seen, that’s all I’m getting.

“Nathan. She saw
Nathan
, not Ian. She didn’t know. She only met them that once.” He’s repeating himself. “We are both so sorry. She feels
terrible
. She didn’t even go in to work today, she was so upset.”

I might throw up. The Happy Meal room also carries the sickening scent of cold French fries. The smell of old grease is coming off Evan’s clothes, too.

There’s a hand on my arm, and just in time, because the floor appears to be moving. “Dani?”

It’s Nathan, Nathan with the fabulous, noticeable hair. Nathan who isn’t Ian, and who looks nothing like him.

“Let’s go to my office or something. Let’s go sit down.”

There is more following, and then Nathan shuts his door behind us. There are no toys here, thank God. The windows show another wide, gorgeous vista of the city. There’s a couch, and pillows in warm fall colors. There’s a bookcase filled with books. Not only science books and tech magazines, I can see, but novels and biographies, too. There’s
On the Road
and
To Kill a Mockingbird
and
The Phantom Tollbooth
. I love that. His desk is a bit messy, which is somehow comforting.

I sit on his couch. He’s gone and then he’s back, carrying a cold bottle of sparkling water, which he hands to me. He sits on his desk chair, facing me. He is hunched forward and his hands are folded together. If someone were spying on us, it might look as if I was hearing his deepest secrets.

“It wasn’t him,” I say.

Nathan gives a single shake of his head.

“We still don’t know anything.”

He shakes his head again.

I look out at the city. So many stories are there, in each of those windows and tiny cars. Every single person has his or her own story line going on at that very moment, one that involves the urgency of
right now
, but with motivations and themes that go back generations. Out there are lost fortunes and broken hearts and great ideas and daughters who’ve never truly left home.

Nathan’s office is strangely cozy and confessional. It calms me,
though maybe it’s all of those books, all of those life stories. Books can have that effect in a room. It reminds me of Dr. Shana Berg’s office. She also has a bookshelf and a couch with pillows in fall colors.

“I was the best I could be,” I say. It sounds bad, even to me. I rather hate myself for letting it slip out.

“What do you mean?” Nathan’s voice is soft. His cellphone rings, but he only glances at it and then shuts it off.

I don’t answer at first. How to explain? In my marriage with Mark it had been clear, the state things were in. We had even gone to marital counseling a year or so before I met Ian. Dr. Frederick Mercury—yes, that was the psychologist’s name, poor man, he could never be called “Freddie.” He listened without saying much all that time. I got to wondering, you know, what we were paying for. But after a few months, near the end of our time with him, he only looked at us both. He said, “I have to question if you can fix something so broken.” Just that. The comment still hurts, even now. But it was clear is what I’m saying.

“Some of his clothes are gone.”

“You really think he left you?” He leans back in his chair. He runs a hand through that memorable hair.

“What else?”

“He could be injured somewhere. Dani, I don’t want to be blunt, but he could be—”

“He’s not dead. He’s left me.”

“In that case, he’s left you, his kids, me, our business …”

“He’ll come back to those things. He won’t come back to me. I believe that.”

“But
why
?”

“He lost so much because of me. The kids, all that money. Their friends. You have to be so much
more
to make it all worth it.…” Nathan is one of the few people in our lives who would
know to what I’m alluding. When you have our history, you don’t exactly advertise it. It’s always awkward, that moment when you’re asked, “So how’d you meet?” You skirt the truth.
Through friends
, you might say. You don’t say those friends were your kids, who played on the same baseball team when you both were married to other people. But Nathan’s known Ian for a long time. He’s been through the gory details with him.

“He loves you. He’s crazy about you. His eyes follow you. I mean, you’re gorgeous and you’re kind and you’re funny.… You see the world in your own way—”

“No, don’t do that. I don’t need you to say that.”

“It’s true.”

“I don’t want you to say that. It doesn’t matter. There are always these
things
. I can’t seem to get it right for him.”

“That’s how he
is
.”

“I didn’t see it, not really, until we got married.”

“Maybe he was trying to be better than who he’d been.”

“Maybe.”

“For as long as he could.”

“The way he flirts, though—even at that party.”

“It doesn’t mean anything, you know that. It’s Ian being his charming self.” Nathan rubs the arms of his chair. He’s at a loss. “You deserve better, Dani. So do I, actually.”

“Where is he, for God’s sake? Nathan,
where
?”

“You know what I think? What I honestly think? I think he’s feeling unappreciated. That night, he was pissed. At me. At you, too. I mean, I noticed. I saw.” Nathan meets my eyes. He waits for some acknowledgment from me, but I don’t know exactly what he’s referring to.
What
did he notice?
What
did he see? “He’s like the kid on the playground who picks on people and then sulks when they don’t like him for it. We’ll appreciate him now, won’t we?”

Nathan’s hostility surprises me. But, really, why should it? This is what happens when nice people are pushed too far. We give too many chances, and so when we’ve finally had enough, we are well and truly done. When a nice person shuts a door on you, it’s shut for good. “I want to go into his office,” I say.

Nathan smacks his forehead. “I’m an idiot. Of course you do. You want to
look
.”

“There’s got to be
something
 …”

Nathan gathers up his keys in one swoop, grabs his coffee cup. We head down the hall to Ian’s corner office. Nathan unlocks the door. Ian’s office is so different from Nathan’s. You can tell that Nathan handles the creative end of their partnership while Ian manages the technical side. Ian’s choice of furniture is contemporary and high-tech. His own couch is made of black leather panels stretched onto linear brushed metal. His coffee table is a thin iron structure topped with fragile glass.

For all of Ian’s precision, his office is a disaster. It always has been. I remember being surprised by this on my first visit; it seemed so unlike him. His desk is dominated by his huge computer screen, and the screen is flanked by magazines meant to be read and mail meant to be sorted. There are boxes and piles of paper and masses of file folders on a round table in one corner of the room. Computer components are stacked in another corner, their cords neatly wound and tied with rubber bands. A bookshelf is haphazardly decorated, as if the task had been abandoned halfway through. There’s a tech-magazine award that Ian had won (a glass pyramid on a black stand—he won it two years in a row, and we have another one in our office at home) and a chunky clay pot painted garish colors, made by Bethy in elementary school. There’s a photo of us that I gave him. In it, we’re leaning against the
New View
, and the sun is setting.

I take it all in. It’s not the office of a person who never makes
mistakes, and something about this makes my heart soften. He’s a complicated man, but I love him. I am choked up, about to cry.

“I don’t know where to begin,” I say.

“All this mess …”

I am overwhelmed in front of those piles of file folders and stacks of paper. There’s too much. Each item represents a thought that had once crossed through his mind. I could be there for days, just searching for a single receipt or a small jotted note that might tell me what his plan had been. And there had to have been a plan. Ian’s not exactly spontaneous. Look how long it took him to finally leave Mary—two and a half years of both mental and actual back and forth. He researches the layout of the parking lot before going to the Opera House. He keeps a log of his gas mileage.

But if I am there to learn something, anything, it suddenly offers itself. I only have to run my eyes over that room, past his desk, to what’s lying on the floor. There is his blue gym bag, with the Mariners logo on it. He isn’t a baseball fan, so where it came from, I don’t know; he’s had it for years. And while he hasn’t been to the Fifth Street Gym in a long time, he sometimes goes for a run after work. He comes home sweaty and tired and starving.

The gym bag—I know what it means before I even look inside.

I lean down to pick it up. The slippery nylon is so familiar, as are the woven handles. I’d forgotten about this bag and what is likely inside it.
Stupid, stupid, stupid
.

“Look.” My voice is unsteady.

“His gym bag?” Nathan doesn’t get it.

I set it on Ian’s desk and unzip it with shaking hands. Yes, there it is. That T-shirt. Ian’s favorite one, with the winged guitar. And there are the running shoes. There are also a pair of
sweatpants and shorts I hadn’t realized were missing. A zip-up sweatshirt, too. An empty water bottle.

I hold the T-shirt up for Nathan to see. I feel a flip of nausea that turns to terror.

“Dani …” Nathan might not know what this means, but he can read my face. He puts his arms around me. The T-shirt is between us, in my hands.

I can feel my heart beating against Nathan’s chest. There are no certainties now. Every possible thing is possible all over again, same as the day Ian disappeared. We don’t know anything. He could be anywhere, with anyone. He could be in some foreign country; he could be hurt somewhere; he could be dead, maybe even murdered; he could be driving in some convertible down some road with a new identity in his pocket.

Or worse. The terror in my chest is saying that:
Or worse
. My sheets were muddy that morning. The heels I’d worn to the party had been muddy, too, but so had the bottoms of my feet. My missing memory of that night—it’s the plumpest blackberry out of reach, hanging past the thickest thorns.
What
had Nathan seen? My heart is thumping hard against Nathan’s chest—it is fear, a shadowy kind of fear. Because there are all the ways I’ve disappointed Ian. But there are all the ways he’s disappointed me, too.

8

I drive back home. In reverse now, I pass the Java Jive and the Black Cat and the Sureshot, the Allegro and the Tully’s and the Pete’s and the Starbucks, Starbucks, Starbucks. Next to me, a man in a Fat Boys Plumbing truck sips from the tiny lip of a white lid, and two girls with multicolored hair cross the street to get in line at Cool Beans. Tattoos snake up their arms and wind around their necks. In this city, colored hair and multiple tattoos are as commonplace as middle-aged women in turtlenecks. A golf sweater would be an act of rebellion here.