“Where’s her lesson?”
“I don’t know. But I have karate at 4:30.”
“Where’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s Ash?”
“Well, he was playing baseball, but I guess now he isn’t anymore. So he’ll be walking home.”
“Okay.” Jared dragged himself up. “What do I do first?”
“Feed your son, Dad.”
The next morning after dropping off the boy, he went back to Kavanagh’s.
“You really should make an appointment,” she said when she opened the door to her waiting room. “I have patients all day.”
He waited three forty-minute sessions for someone to cancel. And then sat in the room on the couch for ten minutes before he was able to speak. “Is this where she sat?” he asked.
Kavanagh pointed to the other end of the couch. Jared remained where he was. “The guy left, too,” he finally said. “Quit his job, moved out. They’re not here anymore.” Which seemed almost right, because he didn’t feel her here. From the beginning, Jared felt her resolutely absent from the geographical sphere that had made up his past life.
Kavanagh said nothing.
“I think something terrible may have happened,” he said.
Kavanagh said nothing, but raised her brows in a faint question, as in, something worse than this?
“Yes. I don’t think she went with him. She left her ID behind. If someone is leaving for good, wouldn’t they take that?”
Interrogatively the doctor shrugged.
He put his face in his hands. “She could’ve drowned herself in the Passaic,” he said, his voice muffled.
Kavanagh said nothing.
He lifted his gaze to her. “She could have.”
“She could have,” agreed the doctor. “Is that what you want?”
“You know what I want? My wife back. My life back.” Jared squeezed his hands together. “Why didn’t you say something to her? Why didn’t you say to her, you can’t do it. Why did you tell her what she was doing was okay?”
“Just the opposite. I never said it was okay. She hated me because of it.”
“Why didn’t she tell me? Like other people.”
Kavanagh mulled his question. “And what would you have done, Mr. Stark, had you known?”
“I don’t understand! Who does this? Who leaves without a word or a note or an explanation? I don’t know a man who does this!”
Kavanagh nodded. “It is awful. But these things burn out. Give her a week or two. I think she’ll come back. This is why she left without taking anything. It’s a temporary thing. She’ll come back.”
“Who’d take her back!”
Kavanagh stared at him and he looked away.
“How funny it is,” Jared said at last. “When you imagine it sometimes, on the drives home, you think you’ll never forgive it, never be able to live with it. But now I’m not so sure. I can’t face my kids, I can’t go back to work, I can’t talk to my friends. I’ve lost my life. And if she came back, I don’t think I would even question it.”
“I know,” Kavanagh said, her voice full of heavy-hearted sympathy.
“How can you be so sure she didn’t kill herself?”
“She didn’t seem the suicidal type.”
“There’s a type?”
Kavanagh gently stared. “Of course.” Shrugging, she made a motion with her hands as if she were bringing a cigarette to her mouth. “He’s a young kid. She is a woman with children. They’ll wake up soon enough, come out of their dream. It won’t last.”
“Nothing lasts,” Jared said, choking. He had to stop speaking.
“Yes. Not even the way you feel right now. Not even that.”
But Kavanagh was so wrong. The way Jared felt lasted.
Was he responsible for this, by wanting to get her a car?
“Jared, don’t be ludicrous,” said Ezra, after the fifth fruitless conversation about the hows and the whys. “How could you be responsible for that?”
But again Jared got the feeling that there was something, some accusation that Ezra was not voicing. Ezra could’ve been distracted by the crisis going on in his theater department, since the director of the play opening tomorrow was absent for dress rehearsal, final stage prep, the dress rehearsal dinner, absent without explanation, to the great detriment of the cast and crew, who were in panic mode, especially Megan, who, without Larissa’s stern voice and firm direction could not raise authority for her pliant Joan. Ezra told him that he said Larissa had had to leave on emergency family business and wouldn’t be back for a while, but Jared, staring at Ezra glassy-eyed, said, “Ez, I don’t give a shit about the play. Can you understand?” So Ezra stopped talking about it, but this might explain the hostility in Ezra’s voice when discussing Larissa’s disappearance. Perhaps he was angry at Larissa for ducking out on the last theater event of the school year and making him look bad. It was so inconsiderate.
“Are you listening to me, Ezra?”
“I’m listening, Jared.” It was late Wednesday. Ezra came over after the dress rehearsal that he said went terribly. Ezra himself was pale and gaunt-eyed.
“I mean,” Jared asked, “was she perfectly content, and then one day met him? Is that what contented people do? Implode at the slightest provocation?” He told Ezra everything about Kai except the salient thing, the appalling thing—his mortifying age.
But there was something else, Jared thought, as he got Ezra a Corona and some chips and salsa left over from Memorial Day. Jared wasn’t remembering it accurately. He had to think back, but finally it came to him. The conversation at the dinner table.
He didn’t mention Jag to Larissa. He wasn’t even thinking Jag. He was thinking of something half the price. She was the one who said, “Jag?” Which meant she must have already known that kid, known that he worked there.
But still—she didn’t bring it up. He brought it up. She never hinted, she never said, oh, wouldn’t it be nice to get a Jag, she didn’t in any way plant the idea inside Jared’s head. That was all his doing. He was driving to work one morning, thinking of what special thing to get her for her fortieth birthday and he was smoked by a red Firebird, so close it almost hit his Lexus truck, and first he swore under his breath and then a light went on, and he said to himself, wait a minute! That’s it! I’ll get her a sports car! A car for youth, for beauty, because she is beautiful and deserves it. She’s always driving the kids around, and the Escalade is filled with candy wrappers and old homeworks and melted crayons. I’ll get her a car in which no kids will be allowed, a car that only she or I can drive, and we’ll feel like we never felt when we were twenty, because then we had nothing. But look at what we have now.
“Forget the Jag,” said Ezra. “If you didn’t get her a car, she would’ve gone there pretending to shop for one. Once the possibility was open to her, she would’ve figured out a way. The thing of it, man,” he continued (another day? Another conversation? Or the same endless one that followed the same endless day?), “you’re looking at it wrong. It’s not: how could it have happened when things were going well, it’s: it could never have happened when things were going badly. It’s all about the struggle. Without it, the organism falls into disrepair. It’s all over the animal kingdom. And in the human kingdom, the organism falls not just into disrepair but despair. And the worst is when it ‘lives’ and doesn’t even know it’s in despair. When it doesn’t even know to look out the window, or to question its own self, or read for discovery or take up art. Striving is the condition required for all life.”
Jared heard and didn’t hear, listened and yet not, understood, yet didn’t.
“We didn’t stop striving,” he eventually said. “Our life was busy. We had a thousand things to do every day.”
“For seven years that’s what she did. That’s a lot of days staring out onto the golf course while picking up the kids’ toys.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying. Peace is goo
d. Struggling is bad. Worry, anxiety, they’re bad things.”
“Clearly the organism doesn’t think so,” Ezra said gently.
“Ezra, you’re full of shit. Read any self-help book. They all say the opposite. Peace of mind is all they talk about, serenity.”
“Has it helped? How are all those books working out for us? Are we helped? Are we at peace, serene? Have we learned to let go of our fears? Not to worry so much? Where have all those books gotten us?”
“Where have your books gotten you?”
“Nowhere,” admitted Ezra.
“So what’s the answer?” Jared whispered.
“The answer,” said Ezra, “is perhaps in that question alone. With or without books, with or without faith, how do you become a worthy keeper of your immortal soul?”
“Ezra, do you have any answers at all?”
“None,” the red-tied man replied. “I don’t even know if I’m asking the right questions.”
“You’re asking the wrong fucking questions,” said Jared. “As always, you’re making this an intellectual exercise, hiding behind your books, when something real is going on that you can’t deal with, can’t help, can’t solve.”
“It’s true,” said Ezra, lowering his head. “I can’t deal with it. I can’t believe she would do this. This is how I hide. Maggie hides in other ways. What do you do?”
“I don’t have the luxury of hiding,” snapped Jared. “Michelangelo has karate in twenty minutes, and Emily finishes volleyball at five. I have to go.”
“Will you come to the play?”
Jared glared at Ezra as if his friend had twelve Medusa heads.
Maggie asked Jared to come to the monastery with her on Sunday morning.
“You know, Maggie,” Jared said bitterly, by way of raw refusal, “in the very beginning I was afraid she was dead. The fear was like a sickness inside. You know all about that. So I prayed. Dear God, anything. Just don’t let her be damaged, suffering, kidnapped, dead. Please. Anything. That’s what I prayed for. That’s right, Mags, don’t look at me. And isn’t it nice to know that even without going to Sunday lauds, there is an interventionist God who answers your fucking prayers?”
Barbara had called him on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Finally on Thursday, right after he brought the kids home with McDonald’s for dinner, Jared, afraid she would drop in unannounced if he didn’t pick up the phone, picked up the phone.
“Jared!”
“Everything is fine, Barb. How are you?”
“What are you doing home so early?”
“I took a day off today. So what’s going on? I was just running out…”
“Can I talk to Larissa? Isn’t her play on this weekend? I wanted to drive in and see it. Can she leave a ticket for me?”
“What play?” said Jared.
“Saint Joan!”
“Barbara…she won’t…I’m sorry…she won’t be at the play, she’s had to drop out…what? She didn’t tell you? Yeah…sorry about that. You can still come, but we won’t be there…oh, she’s not here at the moment, she just stepped out…may I take a message?”
“What are you, a hotel operator? Dropped out of the play? For heaven’s sake, why?”
“She’ll call soon, explain it all, I’m sure.”
“I’m not going to hold my breath. Don’t forget to give her the message.”
“Course not.”
That was Thursday, seven days after.
But on Saturday, what Jared feared happened. There was a brusque knock on the door around lunchtime, and Barbara, impeccably dressed as usual, strolled in. Michelangelo ran to her. Emily and Asher waved hello from the den. Emily had a recital for WWII vets at Calvary Episcopal in a few minutes. Asher had band practice. Jared was about to drive the older kids and then take Michelangelo to Old Navy to buy him some summer shorts. Everyone was in flux, and Barbara had the knack, not just today, but always, of intruding at the least opportune time. There was a period in their early marriage, before Hoboken, but after the arrival of Emily, when Jared and Larissa were so broke and jobless that they had to live with Barbara in Piermont. Jared loved the proximity of the grand Hudson River, loved the small town life, loved Orange County, but both he and Larissa agreed that no visual esthetics could ever again outweigh the stress of living with your mother-in-law, even temporarily. “Not just any mother-in-law,” Larissa had said, “but my mother.”
“Hello, children,” Barbara said, hugging the smaller boy.
“Hello, Grandma. We were just leaving.”
“Where are you going? And where is your mother?”
Emily glanced desperately at Jared, who shook his head, and said, “She’s not here.”
It was Michelangelo at Barbara’s hip, who gave away the farm. “She hasn’t been here since like last year,” he said, time sands shifting. Is that what it felt like to him, Jared thought, stepping forward and pulling the boy away from the imperious gray-haired woman who had straightened up and leveled a cool look at her son-in-law. Jared had always suspected he didn’t measure up. But then Larissa all her life suspected much the same: that she didn’t measure up. Which was odd; who did measure up then?
“What do you mean, she hasn’t been here?”
“Mommy’s gone,” Michelangelo said. “The police are looking for her. Dad too.”
There was a slow-motion moment of silence. No one moved, no one blinked, no one spoke. Jared felt that it wasn’t because they didn’t want to, but simply because the digital camera of life went click, and was still processing the image and they were stuck in it, frozen, while the little round clock timer whirred and whirred.
Ah, there it was. The moment before—and the moment after.
“Jared…?”
“Barbara, everything’s fine,” he said. He didn’t want to panic the kids. “Come in the kitchen. You want some coffee? Em, take Michelangelo upstairs and dress him. We’re going out.”
“Dad, we have to go in fifteen.”
“I’ll be ready,” he said to her. “Will you be ready?”
With a roll of her eyes, Emily rolled away.
Asher, without a word, walked upstairs to his room.
In the kitchen, Barbara turned to Jared. “I don’t want any coffee.”
“That’s fine,” he said quietly. “Because I wasn’t going to make any.”
“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 b
lind. 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.