“To Australia?” Jared was incredulous. “What for?”
“That part I don’t know.”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know that either. But I had tracked down one of his sisters finally, now living not in Wailea, where he’s from, but Honolulu, and she told me that she remembered them talking about sailing to Australia. Can you imagine that?”
If Jared didn’t know any better, he could’ve sworn Kelly sounded impressed by their chutzpah. A sailing voyage!
“Kelly, I can barely understand a word you’re saying. What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothin’, mate. Absolutely nothin’. But look, problem is, Australia’s a big country, with twenty million people sparsely spread around. It’s taking me a while to locate just two. I’m not optimistic. I’ve been—”
“Gone over three months and you haven’t found them!”
“All righty, no need to shout.”
“You’re not on my retainer for three months of vacationing in Hawaii and Australia, Kelly.”
“I never said I was. Will a month be fair? You already gave me two weeks up front. Another two weeks and we’ll call it even?”
“Call it even on what? What did you find out?”
“The sister thought they wanted to start their own business. Some kind of bushwalking tour. So I’ve been keepin’ away from big cities. That narrows it down a bit, but the red center is one big hunk of space.”
“You haven’t found them…” Jared became utterly disheartened.
“I haven’t given up, despite the challenges. I’ve been up and down the eastern seaboard, I’ve been in the bush, and way up near Cairns in the bamboo forest. What a country, by the way. You wouldn’t believe it. What a country! Makes me not want to go back.”
“Makes you not want to go back where? To work?”
“Yeah. Who wants to work when there are things that simply take your breath away.”
“Well, I’m sure. And I do appreciate the tourist report. When are you actually coming back?”
There was a five-second silence. Jared thought Kelly hadn’t heard him, the connection was that bad.
“Look, mate,” said Kelly. “I gotta level with you. I’m not coming back.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“I’m going to rummage around the country, see if I can find them along my own travels. There are many places I haven’t seen. Do you know that I’d never been out of the country before this?”
“That’s swell, Kelly. But what’s your plan? To be on my permanent retainer?”
“No. Just Western Union me the money you owe me until today. Forget the bonus.”
“You think? Forget the bonus for finding her? Only if you think that’s reasonable.”
“Don’t be sore with me, mate. I told you from the outset, this wasn’t foolproof. You signed a piece of paper. I thought you understood. I never guaranteed my work.”
“Are you really not coming back?”
“What for? I can work here. Off the books. I don’t get much, but then I don’t need much. I work as a security guard, a bartender. I have other skills. I go to where the tourists are, work for a few weeks, move on.”
“Congratulations. I’m pleased you’ve got your life figured out.”
“Don’t be sore. If I find them, I’ll get in touch. It’ll be on my dime. You won’t have to pay. If I find her, I’ll call you.”
“That sounds great, Kelly.”
Jared couldn’t believe Kelly wasn’t coming back. He thought it was a ruse, that the detective didn’t want to admit failure.
First chance he could, Jared drove to Morristown to Kelly’s house. There was a “For Rent” sign on the lawn and the windows were boarded up. Old chairs and other tatty furniture were piled up on the porch with a sign: “TAKE. IT’S FREE CRAP.”
So not only did his wife leave him, but the private investigator he hired to find her left, too. Jared now needed a private investigator to find the private investigator!
Australia!
Jared lost track of how many months had passed before he came home one evening to find the manila envelope mixed in with the catalogs. It looked foreign, exotic.
Jared’s name and address were scrawled by a quick and careless male hand, and the return address was a post office box in Tailem Bend, Australia. He wanted to rip it open right away, go into his office, close the door and be with it, be done with it. But it was dinner time, and Maria was cooking, and tonight she had made a Slovakian version of shepherd’s pie, and when he asked what that was, smiling she said, Polish sausage, tasso ham, and Italian sausage mixed with potatoes and onions. No cheese, but some breadcrumbs on top. Asher needed to eat fast and be driven to a youth leadership meeting in Millburn, and Michelangelo had to prepare an autobiography project for school—which they kept putting off for obvious reasons—but now it was a week late, and had to be in by tomorrow. Emily learned how to make pound cake with seven eggs and was waiting for Maria’s pie to come out of the oven to start on her creation, the third try this week.
Jared opened the envelope in the car, after he drove Asher to Millburn. He sat in the parking lot in the dark, idling the engine; for ten minutes he sat before he could unwind the string of the manila.
Inside was a letter from Glenn Kelly and another white envelope with photos in it. He read the letter first, like opening the card before the gift, except this was a black mass gift, a black mass card. Jared’s hands were clenched around the paper.
Dear Mr. Stark,
I know it’s been a long time since you heard from me. I don’t remember when we last spoke, could it be over a year already? I can’t tell you what a royal pain in the ass it was to find her. But she is alive and well, living in a ski town called Jindabyne. He and she operate a little tour company in the summertime. I don’t know what they do during ski season. It sounded to me from snippets of their conversation like not much. I went on the two-day tour with them, that’s when I snapped the photos. I am sending you two, but like I said, you paid me way back, and I know we had an agreement for more, but being that I quit the gig I don’t think it’s fair to pay me the bonus, since I wasn’t actively in your employ all this time. If you don’t want to see, I think you shouldn’t see. They run a pretty neat tour. The Americans were quite impressed, including me. Everyone raved about it. Don’t look at the pictures if you don’t want to. Just go on with your life, Mr. Stark. You still have so much of it left.
I don’t know how long I’m gonna stay on the Murray River. I may be moving on soon, want to hike out to the Western Territories. Two local dudes say they make the two-thousand-mile trek once a year—on camels! Can you imagine?
If you want to get in touch, I’m here for a few more weeks.
Jared didn’t know what to expect when he slid the two eight-by-ten glossies out of the white envelope. He squinted to see better under the interior console lights. There was his Larissa. She was sitting in some kind of a troop-carrying vehicle, tancolor, all-terrain, like a Hummer but bigger. She was shot with a long lens from the back of the truck; there were blurred heads in front of her; the image was grainy, fuzzy. There was unmistakable truth in the photo. Before she saw Sugimoto make the fake look real, she used to say, a picture doesn’t lie. It catches a snapshot of what’s already there.
Here was the truth that Kelly’s camera caught. Larissa, her hair straight, bleached light, left long, unstyled, sitting hippielike, her lean legs casual and bare, in khaki shorts and a sleeveless safari jacket, smiling like a teenager, with open happy eyes—no, not smiling, laughing! She clearly was responding to something that was good. She looked twenty contented years younger than the last time he had seen her, gaunt and entrenched. She was tanned; she wore no makeup.
It was the worst photo Jared had ever seen until he saw the second photo.
The second photo was a wider shot of her and the driver in front of a truckload of tourists. The driver was him. He was sitting down, his hands draping the enormous
wheel. Beyond the front windshield were leafy eucalyptus trees, sagebrush, unpaved and dusty distances. He sat with his head turned slightly to her in profile. He was also wearing shorts, a sleeveless safari jacket. He looked like a stalk with nearly black bare arms. His long hair was pulled back into a ponytail. He looked like he was speaking, saying something to her, his eyes shiny, full of delight, good humor. But it was her face that was wrenching! Her unabashed adoring face as she gazed at him, her white teeth, her wide smile, as she laughed at something he said.
Jared didn’t know what he had expected. Not this. Blankly, he willed his eyes away and stared into the parking lot, into the fluorescent streetlamps outside the youth center, at other cars. Look, he wanted to yell at the people who weren’t there, yell at Ezra, her friend, Emily, her child. Look—is this a face that’s coming back any minute? Is this someone who is coming back?
He might have cried.
So years later, he finds her on the shores of some man-made lake, certain that she has her man-made problems, and instead, she’s sitting in a truck smiling, laughing with her mouth open, all tanned and twinkling. She looks twenty years old. She is carefree. She is in love! A hammer chiseled away at the hard ball of pain in the middle of his black heart.
Kavanagh was right, Ezra was right. They said, you’re never going to get away from the bitterness unless you let it go. How can I let it go? he had shouted. I don’t even know what I’m letting go of. What if she is dead? That’s a different sort of a letting go, isn’t it?
He screeched out of the parking lot, glanced at the time, and raced across two towns to Kavanagh’s office. Perhaps she had evening hours on Thursdays. He needed to see her, needed to tell her about the worst of himself after discovering the best in his once wife.
The lights were on and the door was open, but Kavanagh’s waiting area had changed. The furniture was different, the curtains had gone, the TV was a plasma, the magazines were Architectural Digest, and the person who opened the door was not Kavanagh but a tall man.
“I must be in the wrong place,” Jared muttered. “Sorry about that. I was looking for—”
“Joan Kavanagh?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. But she died. The cards had gone out; you didn’t get yours? Seven hundred people came to her memorial. So sorry. She was very close to many of her patients. They were distraught to lose her. You never know how many people love you until you’re dead, isn’t that sad?” He shrugged. “I’m Dr. Messina. Can I help you in any way?”
“I’m so sorry she died,” said Jared, stumbling back. “She was a good woman.”
“Yes. A good woman who smoked too damn much.” Turning politely from Jared, Messina motioned to his next patient.
Outside in the parking lot, Jared slumped against his car, the manila envelope in his hands. Last time he saw Kavanagh, after he helped her into the tiny adjacent cubicle room where she kept her oxygen tank, after helping her sink into a chair and to press the clear breathing mask to her mouth and nose for a few minutes, Jared stood, discomfited, upset, watching her hollowed out by sickness, and thinking that he was also ravaged by real pain.
Kavanagh had said to him, when she could breathe and talk at the same time, “You want to know why your wife left? Look at me. In me you have your answer. Because duty is an ugly word. Obligation, responsibility. It implies your requirements to someone else. And we have all been taught, some of us too well, that our responsibility is only to ourselves and to ourselves first. Well, I smoked my whole adult life, despite what my two daughters wanted, what my husband wanted. Smoked two packs, one pack, twenty, thirty, forty cigarettes, pretending to everyone it was only six, or eight, or that some days I even skipped entirely; I didn’t need to smoke, I lied. But I wasn’t fooling my body. It knew. And knowing I was weak and frail, knowing that I’d been getting respiratory infections the last twenty winters, knowing I was on constant antibiotics, that I had the beginnings of emphysema, knowing my daughter was finally pregnant with a boy after having two girls, ask me if I stopped smoking. It’s a rhetorical question. You know the answer already. Knowing it could kill me, I didn’t stop.” The mask went back over her lower face. “Jared,” Kavanagh called out to him, whistling cancer out of her trachea, “try to judge her less harshly. Remember: Larissa cannot give you what she doesn’t have.”
Jared sat in the car with the manila envelope in his hands.
He would rather have her dead than happy. That’s what love looked like inside Jared’s heart. Like hatred. He was angry with Kavanagh. I thought you promised me she was suffering, he wanted to yell. Isn’t that what you said? But he was covering for his own shame, trying to erase from his mind the words of his daughter. “Dad, I’d rather Mom left us than died. If she’s alive somewhere, there’s always hope she might come back.”
He sat alone in Kavanagh’s parking lot, with his life in his hands.
Not a thing was taken, not a thing was stolen. One day she was, and the next day she simply wasn’t. She went out to get a gallon of milk, some paper towels, she went out to paint the set for Our Town, stage the puppet scene for The Sound of Music, and on the way to lunch in Hoboken, one moment she was driving, paying, getting out her cash, and the next—
She just wasn’t.
Everything else remained intact. The children, their hectic schedules, their classes, their music, their sports and friends and movies, and rooms with the bedspreads she bought and patched with her own hands. She taught them all, even the baby boy, to make their bed in the morning. She left them that. Jared had to teach them nothing. They got up, they brushed their hair, their teeth, they made their bed. They had breakfast, grabbed their backpacks, waved, shoved their way onto a yellow bus, were gone for seven hours, then came back.
She didn’t come back. She made the life, then left it.
But she left it good. She didn’t leave it in shambles. Only her absence was shambles.
Dare he say it?
It was as if she had died. And seven hundred people might’ve come to her funeral because she was once the moon that reflected in every pool.
In the state of New Jersey, when the spouse has been missing for more than two years, and all relief efforts of the police to locate her have produced no results, she was presumed dead. The marriage was dissolved. The husband was free to marry, to love again.
He stared into his hands while he suffocated.
With his whole heart Jared saw Larissa as he had known her, the person she once was. Nothing in over twenty years he had spent with her could’ve helped him at this moment.
That’s what he had been searching for in the rubble of ashes and burned paper and metal and shards of grieving steel, this very thing: a bone, a sliver of calcium that would tell him, yes! Yes, this is your loved one. But she is dead. Now you can put her in an open casket, bury her and mourn and go on with your life.
He started up his truck and gunned it to Millburn to get Asher from youth club.
The picture of her in Jindabyne was the open casket.
“When we were twenty and before she met you,” Ezra was telling Jared, late one night, the two of them in sitting in Joe’s Tavern in Summit, kids home, Maggie in the hospital waiting for a new kidney, “I remember waiting in the last row of the dark theater for her as she practiced the lines for a play she was rehearsing. She was so good, so bohemian with her big black skirts,” Ezra said sheepishly, nostalgically.
“She was.”
“She was like a moveable painting. Something out of Caravaggio, yet walked, breathed, spoke in loud tones of plague and misfortune. I listened to her on that gray stage. She was reading both sets of lines, but when she caught a glimpse of me sitting waiting for her, she changed tone suddenly, decided to have fun with me, I think, and started reciting lines memorized from Anne Sexton. You know, no college gal can go four years without memorizing Anne Sexton.”
“Unthinkable.”
“The lines had stuck in my head all these years. She could’v
e read anything, recited anything. She could’ve been funny, tragic, she could’ve been eloquent or profound. Instead, you want to know what Sexton poem she read?”
“I’m not sure I do.”
Ezra took a breath.
“I live in a doll’s house
with four chairs,
a counterfeit table, a flat roof,
and a big front door.
Many have come to such a small crossroad.
There is an iron bed,
(life enlarges, life takes aim)
a cardboard floor,
windows that flash open on someone’s city
and little more.”
Jared drank down his beer. Ezra too fell silent. “Later I asked why she chose that poem,” he said. “Was it to torment me or to showcase her talents? She replied that it was neither. ‘It’s simply the saddest thing I could imagine,’ she said, ‘living a cardboard life, and I wanted to know if I could carry it off, not knowing what it means to actually live it.’ It was just an exercise in evocation of imagined emotion, nothing beyond that.” Ezra swallowed. “I told her she had carried it off beautifully.”
“Carried it off pretty far, Ez,” said Jared. “All the way to Jindabyne.”
They ordered another round. They chased it down with tequila. They wondered how they were going to get back home, without Maggie to drive them, and Jared said that Maria would come pick them up.
“We’re about to get embarrassingly plastered,” Ezra said.
“About to?”
Another round, more tequila, more lime, Jared’s head willfully foggy, everything gaseous, floating, nothing hurt. Ezra was becoming morose, sounding sadder. She’ll be all right, Ez. She’ll be fine. Maggie will get a new kidney, she’ll be as good as new. Lucky for her, her brother was a match, and was willing to give it.
“Do you know something?” Jared suddenly said. “Father Emilio came to the Philippines originally because he was a doctor. It’s fascinating. Apparently there’s a huge market in kidneys in the Philippines. It’s a booming business. The British doctors go there and marry the Filipino kidneys to desperate Westerners who can’t find a match in their own countries. That’s why Father Emilio had come to Manila. He had been a surgeon and wanted to help.”