Missing Persons (3 page)

 

 

At eight o’clock I went to bed and watched the last half of a bad romantic comedy where two characters survive supposedly hilarious misunderstandings before realizing they belong together. In real life, couples like that wouldn’t last five minutes, but in TV movies we’re led to believe it’s the real thing. Watching the couple kiss and the screen fade to credits, all I could think about was that woman from the interview. “Tell my wife I love her,” her husband said as his last words. That was the real thing.

Is it wrong to envy a woman whose husband was shot in the face?

Probably.

W
hat is that?

I had fallen asleep with the television on, but the buzzing wasn’t coming from an infomercial about a device that will save hundreds of hours in the kitchen. It was something else.

I looked over at my dresser and saw my cell phone moving around on my nightstand. I’d put the phone on vibrate for the interview and forgotten to return it to ring. It was nearly midnight, never a good time to get a call. And it was Frank’s cell. This wasn’t going to be fun.

“What?”

“Kate?” It was a woman’s voice. The same woman’s voice.

“Who is this?” I decided to play dumb.

“My name is Vera Bingham. I’m Frank’s . . . friend.” Nice. Hesitation. Means she’s a little embarrassed. And should be.

“He’s not here.” I don’t know why I said that. It sounded tough.

“I know, Kate. He’s . . . well, something’s wrong. He’s sick or something. I’ve called an ambulance.”

“What do you mean, something’s wrong? Is he throwing up or something? Can I talk to him?”

“No. I thought you might want to meet us at the hospital. St. Anthony’s. It’s on Division and . . .”

“I know where it is.”

Twenty minutes later I walked through the doors of St. Anthony’s looking for my husband’s mistress. There was a grandmother type with a younger man, probably her son, holding her hand, and a twentysomething blonde wearing a short skirt and four-inch heels. It had to be her. She looked like a midlife crisis.

“Vera?” I asked.

The blonde looked up at me and blinked.

“Are you Vera?”

Behind me, I heard a woman clear her throat. “I’m Vera.”

I spun around. A third option I hadn’t seen before, a woman who looked in her early forties, with short, stylish but graying hair.

“You’re Vera?”

She smiled. “You’re Kate. I would have picked you out anywhere.” She was waiting for the doctor, she told me, so there was no news yet. She gestured toward a seat and offered to get coffee, which I accepted mostly because I needed time to think. She was older than me. She was shorter, and probably twenty pounds heavier. Not to be shallow, but I’d just assumed he’d left for perkier breasts and a smaller waistline. In what midlife crisis does a man leave his wife for an older woman?

When Vera returned, we sat and drank the bitter coffee and stared, in exaggerated ways, down the hall, hoping for a doctor, hoping for something that would prevent us from having to chat. No one came.

“What happened exactly?” I asked once I’d run out of coffee.

“I don’t know. He was fine. There’s a reunion of his basketball buddies this weekend and he’d been playing at the park all afternoon. He’s been trying to get back in shape, so he’s been playing a lot. Plus, he wanted to practice for the reunion. This evening he wasn’t feeling well. Nothing serious, just a little stomachache. And, I guess, he was acting odd.”

“What do you mean, odd?”

“He asked me why I’d gotten yellow sheets. I hadn’t. The sheets were white.”

“So he was having some problems with his vision.”

“I thought maybe he was tired.”

“Then what?”

“We went to bed. I thought he’d fallen asleep, but after a while, I realized he wasn’t breathing. I couldn’t wake him so I called an ambulance.”

“He wasn’t breathing?”

“He didn’t seem to be. I couldn’t tell.”

“But you couldn’t wake him?”

She shook her head. “The paramedic said it could be a heart attack.”

“He’s thirty-seven. You don’t have a heart attack at thirty-seven.”

“You can,” Vera said.

“But he’s in good shape. Maybe he needed to lose ten or fifteen pounds, but he doesn’t smoke or do drugs.” Unless, I thought, he does those things with you.

“He’s under a lot of stress,” she said quietly. “The divorce has been hard on him. All the anger.”

So she was saying this was my fault. I took a deep breath, considered slamming her head into a wall, realized it wasn’t the most productive solution, plus there were witnesses, and just nodded.

“Well, you don’t die of a heart attack at thirty-seven,” I said.

And she agreed. The two of us, with our nonexistent medical training, discussed the best way for Frank to make a full recovery and the odds that he would be home (her home, I assumed) in days. By the time an hour had passed, I was half convinced it wasn’t a heart attack at all, but something more like indigestion. I was starting to feel annoyed I was losing a night’s sleep over it.

A tall man, African American, wearing a doctor’s coat and a worried expression came toward us. “Mrs. Conway,” he said to Vera.

“I’m Mrs. Conway,” I said.

I could see the confusion and embarrassment in his eyes. Though I was the wife, I was clearly not the woman who had brought Frank to the hospital in the middle of the night.

“How’s Frank?” Vera asked.

He grabbed an empty chair and pulled it toward us, positioning himself so he was facing us both equally.

“I’m Dr. Milton. I have some bad news. We did everything we could but it was too late. Frank didn’t respond to our treatments. He didn’t make it. I’m very sorry.”

I could feel myself blinking. I could hear the blonde tapping the toe of her boot on the floor. But the doctor’s words had entered some kind of echo chamber. They were vague and didn’t make sense. He was saying Frank was dead. But that couldn’t be true.

Vera gasped and grabbed my hand.

“Was it a heart attack?” I asked.

“Probably,” the doctor said. “We’ll know more after the autopsy.”

“No.” Vera sounded suddenly emphatic. “Frank wouldn’t want that.”

The doctor shifted uncomfortably. “Are you a relative?” he asked, as if he were about to suggest this wasn’t any of her business.

“I’m his fiancée.”

I looked at her. First I was hearing of it. “Well, I’m his wife,” I said as coldly as I could. “I want to know what Frank died from, so, as his next of kin, I’m authorizing the autopsy.”

The doctor patted my knee. “Mrs. Conway,” he said, “I’m glad you feel that way, but I want you to understand, I want you both to understand, that I wasn’t asking for permission. When we have sudden, unexpected death in a relatively young, otherwise healthy person, an autopsy is essential.”

“But not required,” Vera said.

The doctor took a deep, calming breath that was, I’m sure, supposed to inspire Vera and me to do the same. “Not always,” he said.

Because of a documentary I’d done about the death industry in the United States, I knew that autopsies were rare and getting rarer. People who die in accidents or from possible homicides get an autopsy, but people who die in the hospital, older people, and those with known diseases rarely do. In some states the number is as low as five percent. It costs money to perform the procedure, there are fewer people interested in the specialty, and many people can’t stomach the idea of their loved one being cut up, so doctors rarely press for them. Unless the police are involved, they mostly don’t happen. I knew that. Obviously the doctor knew that. But what was interesting was that Vera seemed to know it as well.

I let go of Vera’s hand. “I want an autopsy. I want to know why Frank died, and I’m sure his parents will as well.”

The doctor nodded. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said in the general direction of both of us.

We sat there for a while, each in our own thoughts. I watched as a small boy with a cast on his arm walked over to the blonde, who hugged him tightly. As they left, I got up.

“I guess we should start planning the service,” Vera said.

I ignored the comment. I wanted to point out that whoever she thought she was in Frank’s life, I was legally his wife. I didn’t need my husband’s mistress to help me plan his funeral. I wanted to point it out, but I didn’t.

“I have to call his family,” I said.

“I’m sorry.” She looked up at me, tears filling her eyes.

“Me too.”

As I walked away, I could hear her sobbing behind me.

F
rank’s mother wouldn’t believe me. His father asked for the name of the doctor. His best friend since high school, Neal, just kept saying “shit” over and over. After spending twenty minutes convincing my parents I didn’t need them to come to my house, I decided to leave the rest of the calls for the morning.

I crawled into bed and hugged the pillow. Neither tears nor sleep would come. I just lay there remembering the night we met.

I’d seen him walking the halls of our high school, though I doubt he’d seen me. He was hard to miss. Tall, with dark-brown hair and caramel eyes, he had more confidence than I’d ever seen in anyone not running for political office. We didn’t speak in freshman or sophomore years, though we were always in several classes together. High school is not exactly a place where athletes and geeks mingle.

At the beginning of junior year, I was invited to the sixteenth birthday party of one of the most popular girls in school. She’d invited the entire junior class to witness the middle-class Chicago version of a coming-out party. It started with her parents giving her a car and ended when the birthday girl vomited a combination of scotch and sausage pizza on her mother’s living room carpet.

In between, Frank introduced himself to me. He told me he liked my book report on
The Crucible
. I told him I liked the way he drew pictures for his report, rather than just giving an oral presentation—a viewpoint the teacher didn’t share. That’s when he told me he loved to paint and I said I wanted to travel. Before I knew it he had walked me home and kissed me good night.

It was my first kiss. It was a perfect kiss, though in all honesty I have nothing to compare it to. I would never admit this to anyone who hadn’t known me for twenty years, but Frank is the only man I have ever kissed. We started dating after that night and had never been apart again, until, well, I guess until four months ago.

On that first night, as he walked me home, he quoted Keats, gave a fairly convincing argument as to why it would be the year the Cubs made it to the World Series (they didn’t), and shared with me his secret for the perfect French toast (orange juice in the batter). He was a sixteen-year-old Renaissance man.

And he looked at me as if I were the first person in the world to really get him. I don’t think it was an act. I think a lot of people only saw the star athlete or the best-looking guy in school. But he had all this promise in him. All this potential. He was smart and curious. He could install anything, fix anything, create anything.

What he lacked was persistence.

I’d fallen in love with all he could be and found myself married to what he was. But I guess he could have said the same about me. He once said he loved introducing me to people and watching as they realized how cool I was. It remains the nicest compliment I’ve ever received, even though I’m absolutely certain the last thing I am is cool. Maybe, eventually, he realized that too.

“How did we get from that night to this, Frank?” I asked the empty place on his side of the bed.

There was a slight breeze in the bedroom, and I thought for a moment that he might be haunting me, but I realized I’d left the window open. I don’t believe in ghosts, and I don’t think the dead come back to spend time with their loved ones. But even if Frank was a ghost, I knew he wouldn’t be coming to me. He would be haunting Vera.

“C
rap, crap, crap.” I got louder with each repetition as I ran from room to room. “Where did I put it?”

On the night Frank had left, after he’d calmly told me he was in love with someone else and would prefer—that was his phrase—not to be married to me anymore, I’d taken off my wedding ring and thrown it at him. I’d never bothered to go in search of it until now. I was heading to meet his parents at the funeral home and I knew his mother would look at my hand to see if it was there. I knew everyone would look. I stood in the kitchen and relived every humiliating moment of that conversation, trying to remember where he had been standing when I finally had my turn to speak.

I wish I’d said something pithy and sophisticated, like a character in some movie from the 1930s where divorce was the plot of a screwball comedy, the husband was Cary Grant, and everyone drank constantly. I could have used a drink that night.

What I actually said was both incomprehensible and slightly crazy, and something I would prefer never to repeat. It was also the last time Frank and I had ever been alone in a room together. He’d made sure of that. The coward.

“The refrigerator,” I suddenly remembered.

I lay on the floor, which desperately needed sweeping, and reached my hand into gunk and crumbs and whatever evil things live under a refrigerator, until my fingers reached a hard, round object. I pulled it out, rinsed it off, and put it back on my finger. It felt a little tight.

By the time I got to the funeral home, I was late. And just as I was about to walk in, my phone rang. I almost didn’t answer, but it was Ripper Productions, my best client. They produced mostly true crime and some medical mystery shows. The money they offered was nothing special, but they paid within two weeks. Getting paid quickly, sometimes getting paid at all, is something of a battle for freelancers like myself, so I always worked for Ripper whenever they could use me.