Thought I Knew You (18 page)

I go upstairs and undress quietly. When I climb into bed, Greg is awake. His arm goes around me, and we spoon. We don’t speak. I have no idea if he heard Drew. I strain my ears, trying to imagine if I could hear a conversation taking place twenty feet below the window. I sleep fitfully, replaying the night’s events with different endings in my dreams. When I wake in the morning, I am exhausted.

Sunday passes in a blur of activity. The house fills with family and friends. Drew picks up Sarah from the airport, and I am thrilled to see her. Throughout the day, I wonder if the night before was real. Everyone seems normal. Greg and Drew have resumed their banter, and I relax in the affable atmosphere. Leah cries when presented with her cake and everyone singing, but she loves her presents, ripping into the bright wrapping paper.

Sarah is staying for the week, taking Drew’s place in the guest room. After the party, Drew packs up and gives the girls big hugs with promises to return as soon as he can.

“Come back and visit again soon, Drew,” Greg says, shaking his hand. “Or we’ll come to you one night. Leave the girls with Claire’s parents and come have a wildly fun night in the city.” He puts his arm around my waist. “That actually sounds like a lot of fun. Doesn’t it, Claire?”

I nod. “Yeah.”

“Sounds good,” Drew says. “I’m sure I’ll be back soon. Are you guys having your holiday party again this year?”

“I don’t know,” Greg replies. “I guess it depends on my mood.”

The hint is subtle, but I get it immediately. I can’t tell if Drew gets it, but he falters. Time stops for a beat, then resumes. Greg picks up Drew’s bag and walks him out to the car; his hand is paternally clamped on Drew’s shoulder. I stand alone in the hallway, while Sarah waves from the doorway. She picks up on nothing. We shut the door and go into the living room with Hannah and Leah. Life continues as usual. The effect is imperceptible.

Except to me.

Chapter 22

D
uring the spring, I did
all I could do to keep up with the grass, the gardens, and basic repairs. I lost a gutter anyway, despite my clearing attempts. For the replacement, I hired someone. I was done with Pastor Joe’s ladder. The girls rode their new bikes in the driveway while I weeded, trimmed, and cleared fallen sticks from the yard. I mastered the riding mower after two or three mowings. I learned how to use the weed whacker. The lawn wasn’t going to look great, as I didn’t know Greg’s whole regime of overseeding, aeration, and grub treatment, but I was proud of myself and felt confident the rest would come in time. I had nothing if not time.

I no longer considered I wouldn’t need to learn those things. I no longer mentally added
if Greg’s not home
to the end of thoughts or sentences. After eight months, I had finally accepted that he was not coming home. I was still angry sometimes, but not frequently. When I focused on it, which wasn’t often, my anger was on behalf of the girls. If Greg had disappeared by choice, what he had done to them was unforgivable. I’d read that children were resilient, and I supposed that was true. I’d watched my kids adapt and move on in ways that amazed me—that part was Darwinian. What I didn’t read, or talk about, was that adaptation came at a price. The girls were irreversibly changed, and that thought haunted me, sneaking up at unexpected moments and breaking my heart all over again.

They no longer asked for Greg every day. But Hannah was wary of everyone. Her small, pure heart had become guarded. When I left her at school or at my parents’ house, she would ask me if I was definitely coming back. She had learned to see the world as unkind at too young an age. She smiled less frequently, and those smiles were hesitant, as though at any moment someone could snatch them away.

At Hannah’s insistence, we did adopt a cat from the ASPCA. He wasn’t a kitten, but he wasn’t full-grown either. He was gray-striped with small, delicate white feet. The cat really took to Hannah, following her around the house and sleeping on her bed at night, curled in a tight gray coil of fur. Hannah named him Sunshine. When I asked why, she shrugged and said, “He looks like a storm cloud, but that’s not a very happy name.” The cat seemed to be helping, at least with Hannah.

Leah was different, too, but not as much. She had always been more headstrong than Hannah. She resisted me in almost every way, simply to assert her independence. I couldn’t tell if her changes came from being parented from one perspective rather than two, or if she would have developed that way anyway. She was obstinate for the sake of being so, rather than for any real reason. Assertive to a fault, Leah fought discipline in a way that pliable Hannah never did. I roamed message boards at night, looking for disciplinary answers, when a year ago I would have bounced ideas off of Greg. Reward charts, time-outs, time-ins, and then more complicated, reverse reward charts, reverse time-outs, reverse time-ins, the suggestions made my head spin. When had raising a child gotten so complex? Or had it always been, but the complexity was divided in half, and therefore manageable?

One of those nights when I was scrolling through websites looking for help with potty training my stubborn Leah, my cell phone rang. Looking at the display, I noted a San Diego exchange, and for one crazy minute, I thought
Greg
. I immediately amended the thought.
Will.
I let it go to voicemail. My memories of our night together were precious to me. After I got back, I had considered calling him a few times, especially after a few glasses of wine in those quiet, lonely hours late at night. I didn’t do it, in part because I didn’t want to know the
real
Will. The Will in my mind was too perfect for any real flesh and blood human. I didn’t want more heartbreak in my life. For that reason, I also avoided Drew. Although, I convinced myself that I wasn’t actually avoiding Drew.
Our conversations take hours. And with everything I have to do, I don’t have the time right now. I’ll call tomorrow.

I picked up my phone and dialed my voicemail.
Hi, Claire. It’s Will Pierce. From San Diego. I hope you remember me. Anyway… uh… I was wondering how you were doing. I think of you. Call me sometime. Hope you’re well. Bye now.

I smiled.
Nice.
If nothing else, it was nice to have a man thinking of me.

I had a nine o’clock appointment the next day with Detective Reynolds. We had migrated to monthly meetings; he would come for coffee. Nothing ever changed. He assured me the case wasn’t closed, and every once in a while, he’d call with a question about something he needed to follow up on from the file. But the investigation was all re-examination of old information. I looked forward to his visits, though, in part because they allowed me to hold a tether to my old life, but also because I genuinely enjoyed his company. He knew my situation and was endlessly sympathetic, unlike my former acquaintances from the neighborhood, church, or library.

People weren’t deliberately cruel. They just didn’t know what to say to me, so instead chose silence, avoidance of me entirely, or worse, pretending nothing had happened. Yes, I often thought Greg dying would have been easier.

My brain swam with too many thoughts. I took a shot of whiskey and went to bed. I woke up in the same position I fell asleep in.

Detective Reynolds sat at the breakfast table, drinking coffee. He always brought my favorite Boston Cream doughnuts. I didn’t need the calories, since my grieving diet seemed to be ending. I filled out my clothes a little more and blamed the nightly bottles of wine. In my defense, some nights, I only drank half of a bottle.

“So, no more hunting trips planned?” he asked, half-smiling. He hadn’t been surprised by my trek to San Diego, nor by the fact that I had failed to tell him about it until after I returned. He had, however, informed me that he had already checked out a Thai place across from Omni due to my last hunch, and they didn’t find any record of Greg going there, and no one remembers seeing him. But the last time we knew of Greg being in San Diego was last May, almost a full year ago. So unless Greg did something particularly memorable, which I doubted, it seemed unlikely anyone
would
remember him.

“No.” I spun the coffee mug in my hands. “I think I’m done for now. I need to be home. I need to stay focused on my kids. And…”

Detective Reynolds made no move to fill the silence. I loved that about him.

“And I’m not sure there’s anything to find,” I added. “Well, what’s this month’s theory?”

Every month, he seemed to ponder my question and answer it slightly differently. If nothing else, it gave me the illusion of progress.

“I’m starting to seriously consider the possibility he might be dead.” He had always leaned more toward that theory than I did.

“If he died, then how would we not know it? Where is his body?”

“Oh, the possibilities are endless there. A victim of murder could be buried or thrown in the river, and we might never know.”

It hit me how blasé the discussion was when we were talking about
my possibly dead husband.
I tried to force myself to feel
something
, but came up empty.

“The inheritance supports this,” he continued. “It’s a lot of money to leave behind.”

“Unless he has a significant amount more, and that was a red herring,” I suggested, playing devil’s advocate. It all seemed farfetched for me, too, especially for the Greg I thought I knew. He was so
conventional
.

“Well, we looked into that. We subpoenaed his bank records from 2001 and 2002, as well as his mother’s from when she was alive. The figure is about fifty thousand dollars short, but after her funeral—plus it looked like she donated some to charity—it came pretty close to the mark. There’s a few thousand bucks we can’t find. But that was eight years ago. Things get lost, you know?” He reached out and put his hand on mine. “We’re still going to look for him, Claire. I know how badly you need closure.”

I felt tears brim my eyelids. “Thanks, Matt. I hope you eventually figure it out.” I wiped the tears away before Hannah or Leah could come bounding in from the living room and see them.

He leaned back again. “I want to. There are definitely some cases that get to you more than others. I want peace for you and your family. Unfortunately, a death in absentia ruling takes at least seven years.”

“What does that mean?”

“If Greg is still missing six years from now, we can petition the courts to issue a death certificate without evidence of death.”

“Six more years seems a lifetime from now. What will that do? A death certificate, I mean.”

“For starters, you could file for life insurance.” He stared at me intently. Gauging my reaction?

“I… I hadn’t even thought about that. In fact,” I said, feeling instantly stupid, “I have no idea how much Greg’s life insurance policy is. Why don’t I know that? Isn’t that something a wife knows about her husband?”

He shrugged. “The strangest part to me is that we’ve had no reported sightings of Greg. We’ve had missing posters up around here and in Rochester for over six months now and nothing. Not one person has called to say they’ve seen him. It makes no sense. It’s part of the reason I think he has to be dead. Men cannot change their appearance that easily.”

Matt stood and put his cup in the sink. “I should head back to the station. I have another meeting in a bit. Are you going to be okay?”

“Thanks, Matt. Yes, I’ll be fine. It’s just something to think about. That’s all.” I walked him to the door, then went back to clean up and throw away the temptation of the two remaining doughnuts. The girls didn’t need the sugar any more than I needed the extra calories.

I called Mom to fill her in on the monthly meeting. She offered to take the girls for a few hours so I could do some of the yardwork. The week before, we’d had a storm that brought down part of a tree. I needed to break up the tree limbs as much as I could, then Dad planned to take a chainsaw to the rest. In addition, the physical exercise would help me clear my head.

Mom came to pick up the kids, and I got dressed in an old T-shirt and jeans. I put on my iPod and was a quarter way through the mess when I caught a flash of movement. When I looked up, I nearly fainted. Bounding toward me, as if no time at all had passed, was Cody. His coat looked different, longer than we’d ever let it get, and he had a blue bandana around his neck.

“Oh, my God.” I pulled off my headphones and knelt on the ground. Cody tackled me, licking my face. He smelled like dog shampoo and potpourri.

I grabbed him by the collar. “Seriously, you’ve been gone for eight months! Are you trying to kill me?” I wrapped my arms around his neck, something I had always done before. I rubbed his belly and began to think.

After a minute, I realized that I had grabbed him by the
collar
. We were terrible at keeping a collar on him. His head and neck were close enough in size to make a collar virtually impossible to keep on him. Instead of fighting it, I would typically leave his collar lying on the counter or on top of the fridge until we wanted to walk him, which was almost never because he had the run of the yard. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it likely the collar was still on top of the fridge. Then, what was this collar? I checked the tag. Cody’s name was “Walter,” and he apparently lived at an address about ten miles from our house.
What a completely terrible name for a dog,
was all I could think. And then it occurred to me. Cody had a new home, a new family.

Cody had been ours first, and I had to fight the instinct to take him into the house and keep him.
But what if his new family had kids?

I inspected him. His fur hung a bit long, but I grudgingly admitted that was more personal taste than hygiene. I pulled open his mouth. His teeth were white and clean. That was definitely above and beyond. I’d never had his teeth cleaned. His ears were clear, too.

I went to the barn, and Cody followed me. I dug out one of his old tennis balls and threw it as hard as I could—about halfway to the driveway.
Pathetic. I need to work out
. He picked it up, brought it back, and then did something he had rarely done when living with us. He dropped it. And sat. Like a real dog. Someone had taught him in less than a year what we’d been unable to in five years.

“Well, this is new!” I ruffled his ears. We played catch for about twenty minutes.

I checked my watch and saw that I had only an hour before the girls would be back. Sighing, I loaded Cody into the van. The house that matched the address on “Walter’s” collar was a new construction home in a development about ten miles away. The houses were on acre lots with large fenced-in yards. I wondered how he had gotten out and managed to run ten miles home.
Not home anymore.
He was a canine Houdini when he wanted to be.

I kissed his head and knocked on the door.

A boy about eleven years old answered. “Walter!” He bent to hug Cody-Walter. “Mom! Some lady brought Walter back!”

A woman came rushing out on the porch. “Oh, my God, we were so worried! Thank you, thank you. We have no idea how he got out. We were visiting friends in Clinton, and one minute he was in their yard, and the next,
poof!
He was gone. Ben! Come look. Walter’s back!”

A man and another young boy, around thirteen or fourteen, came out on the porch.

“Can we offer you anything?” the man asked. “I’m Ben Fields. And this is my wife, Amanda, and two boys, Jimmy and Leo. We were so worried about Walter. Amanda and Jimmy drove around all morning looking for him. We were about to call the ASPCA, but we were hoping someone would just find him and bring him back.”

My eyes started to water. “No, thank you. I understand. Our dog ran away once. I’m glad I could help.”

I gave a little wave and began to walk down the steps, off the porch. I knew I’d made the right decision. Our family had moved on. I couldn’t see doing to Jimmy and Leo what had been done to Hannah and Leah.

I stopped and turned, wanting to know the answer to a question, but not sure how to ask. “How old is he?”

“We aren’t sure,” Ben said. “We found him about, oh, maybe a year ago now? We put up signs and called the ASPCA, but no one ever claimed him. He’s such a great dog; we couldn’t figure out why someone wouldn’t want him back. He’s an escape artist, though, as you can tell.”

I almost laughed, wondering what they would say if I told them the truth. I felt a little sad that I never thought to call the ASPCA.
Would I have even seen the signs?
My memory of that time was of drowning. I had been reclusive, barely leaving the house, certainly not driving all around New Jersey. I doubted Dad had driven ten miles out to put up our posters.

I had chosen saving myself over saving Cody. Watching him with his new family, I realized Cody hadn’t needed saving.

One of the boys—Jimmy or Leo, I wasn’t sure—bounded off the steps with Walter behind him and ran toward the backyard. They shut the gate, and I could no longer see them.

Goodbye, Cody.

I climbed in the van and drove home.

Chapter 23

T
he summer arrived with ferocity,
setting more than one high-temperature record in the month of June alone. In July, we spent our days in the yard between a sprinkler and a baby pool. I achieved a nice summer tan, but the kids became restless. By midday, we had to seek refuge in the air-conditioned house, where we rambled around, irritated and snapping at each other.

I enrolled Hannah in day camp while preschool was out of session, and that helped break up the days. I still had not gone back to work, but the end of my sabbatical was looming. I had yet to make any firm decisions about my future.
At the end of summer,
I promised myself. In the meantime, we were bored.

“Why don’t you take the girls to the Arnolds’ summer home in Brigantine?” Mom suggested one day.

The Arnolds were my parents’ closest friends and owned several homes all over the country. Mom and Dad rarely paid for a vacation, but the drawback was they always had to vacation with the Arnolds. Deb and Don were nice people, but Deb talked more than anyone I’d ever met, including my mother, which was a feat. Don hardly ever said a word, probably because he was so used to not being able to get one in edgewise.

“Would the Arnolds be there?” I asked pointedly.

“No, they’re in… I’m not sure actually, possibly Africa, although in July? That seems odd. You’d think it would be too hot to safari in July, but then who knows? It’s the other side of the world. Aren’t their seasons different?”

“I have no idea. Listen, Ma, do you think they’d let us? That actually sounds like a great idea.”

She shrugged. “I can give you Deb’s cell phone number.”

“Can you call them?” I suggested hopefully. I had no desire to talk to Deb. Who knew what she’d say? The call would surely be awkward. Most of my conversations with acquaintances were awkward.

Mom paused, clearly thinking along the same lines.

I put a hand to my forehead. “I’ve been through so much…”

Mom rolled her eyes. “There will be an expiration date on this, you know.” She dug through her purse for her cell phone.

“Really? At some point, you’ll stop having sympathy for me and my kids whose father ran away and possibly died? That seems kind of heartless.”

Mom swatted me on the arm and dialed Deb’s number, stepping inside to talk to her. Almost a full half-hour later she emerged, shaking her head. “That woman never stops. Yes, they’re in Africa, and no, it’s not hot. In fact, it’s their winter! Isn’t that neat?”

“Neat. What about the house?”

“Oh, Deb doesn’t care. It’s not baby-proofed. She was a little concerned over breakables. But they aren’t renting it this year because they’re going to be in Africa for three months. But I can go over to their house tomorrow—the one here in Clinton—and pick up the Brigantine key.”

“Really? That would be fantastic!” I wondered why we had never done it before—Greg and I with the kids, as a family. I had actually never even thought about it. We’d always traveled for our vacations—North Carolina, Florida, and once, Maine.

I planned the trip for the following week, from Monday until we decided to come home. Probably a week or less, I figured. I packed and loaded the van with everything from bread and peanut butter to dishes, pots and pans, towels, bathing suits, and sunscreen. The doors to the van barely shut, and by the time we pulled out of the driveway, I was exhausted. We spent the first hour singing songs that all had the same lyrics, “We’re going to the beach!” with different melodies as dictated by Hannah.

During the second half of the trip, which in total turned into three hours due to traffic—
Who goes to the beach on a Monday?—
I turned on the DVD player because I ran out of songs to turn into the “Going to the Beach” song. When we pulled into the driveway of the Arnolds’ ranch a block from the ocean, I was so tired, all I wanted to do was nap. But since the kids had both slept during the third hour, they clamored for the beach
right now.

I got everyone in bathing suits and lathered up with sunscreen, and we walked the block down to the public beach. Hot sand sank beneath our feet as we walked. Two other families were there, and I dropped our blankets, umbrella, and chairs between the two setups. I smiled and nodded a brief hello. Pulling the blanket tight, I anchored it with our bag and the cooler, then surveyed the area. The water lapped gently, and my cautious mothering side noted the lack of any real waves, only small swells advancing and receding.

The salt air was invigorating, and I inhaled deeply, feeling the heavy humidity in my lungs. The girls took their buckets and shovels to the water’s edge, and I dragged my chair down after them. As I watched them dig in the sand, talking to each other in their own private language, I was surprised to realize I was crying. Tears fell freely down my cheeks. Free from anger and hate, I would periodically have moments where I simply
missed Greg.
I wasn’t missing having a husband, or my kids having a father, but I missed the person he was, or at least the person I had known. I still believed I fundamentally knew him. I thought that when he buried Hannah in the sand last year and spent a half hour pretending she was lost and calling for her, even going as far as jumping in the ocean to look for her, causing her to giggle incessantly, that he wasn’t pretending, that he was being himself. And I still loved that part of him. I knew that despite his sometimes serious and sullen moods, of the two of us, he was the sillier one. And our kids would have become better people if he was still in their lives.

The girls never looked up from their digging, and I reined in my emotions before they could turn and see their mother crying on the beach. I closed my eyes briefly, tipping my face to the sun feeling the warmth on my eyes, drying the tears. They had caught me crying a few times, and I thought it a good thing overall that they saw me grieving for their father, but it worried them. And Hannah always tried to make it better, her innate mothering bubbling to the surface, brows creased with concern beyond her years.

Back at the house, I made spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, which we ate while still wearing our bathing suits. The smell of sand and sunscreen had already permeated everything, and it was only the first day. I could feel the tension falling away, sliding off my shoulders like seaweed in the ocean. The knots in my back unfurled, and the anxiety I always seemed to carry with me, a twisted, sick feeling in my gut, melted away, leaving in its place only a small reminder of uneasiness, like a child’s sand footprint.

Everyone got a bath, and we watched a movie on the small living room television. They insisted on sleeping in the same bed.
It’s A-cation, Mommy. Do we have to have house rules on A-cation?
I relented, and they slept in a double bed in the room adjoined to my room. I watched them sleep, the rise and fall of the blankets in perfect unison, as though they had synched on purpose. Hannah sucked her thumb, and Leah’s hands outstretched wildly, her temper evident even in dreams, with her Uglydoll lying next to her. They slept with their backs to each other, but touching.
Hiney to hiney,
Hannah would say. I fell asleep on the floor and woke in the morning with the sun.

The days blended together, as they tended to do on vacation. I planned no activities, save for going to the beach. I did want to try to find the boardwalk once, if there was one, but every night I told myself,
Tomorrow, we’ll go.
I was simply enjoying the seclusion of our hideaway. I felt protected from the world, and all the evil in it. I tried every few days to get the girls back to the house for midday naps. As the sun and sand took their toll, the girls’ energies drained, and their dispositions would deteriorate. During those naps, I would take a baby monitor and a book out to the pool in the backyard and read.

The Arnolds’ aboveground pool was small, but it did the trick. I would float and, for an hour or so, get lost in another world. I read
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
because the story seemed like something I would never accidentally relate to, and it was absorbing.

One day, when I checked my watch, I realized I had been floating and reading for over two hours. I dried off and ran inside to wake up the girls. If they slept any longer, they definitely wouldn’t sleep at night. When I opened the door to their room, Hannah sat straight up in bed, blinking, startled from sleep. Leah’s side was empty.

“Where’s Leah?” I asked, alarmed.

Hannah shrugged, unconcerned, as her sister frequently went missing. Leah was usually found hiding somewhere nearby.

I pulled Hannah up by her hand. “Come on. Let’s go find her.” We went through the house calling “Le-AH!” in every room, looking under beds and in closets. I kept checking out the window of the back bedroom that overlooked the pool, relieved to keep seeing the calm, undisturbed water.

After ten minutes, I started to feel a tightening in my throat. “Leah! If you are hiding and you don’t come out
right now
, I will put Uglydoll in time-out for a
whole day
!”

I ran back down the hall and checked the bed. I looked under the bed and in the closet. No Uglydoll. I went back to the kitchen and sat at the table to calm down and think. Panic scrambled my thoughts. Surely, she was hiding.

Hannah came out of the bathroom, shaking her head. “She’s not in there.” She sat in a chair next to me, watching my reaction. I stood up and grabbed her hand. There were so many places Leah could go. And oh, God, the ocean—
only a block away
.