Die for You (3 page)

12:23.

12:24.

Where is he?

There was something absent about him, an emptiness to his gaze, that told me his thoughts were elsewhere. Our bodies didn’t seem to fit together right. His kiss
tasted
different. I couldn’t climax, couldn’t cross the distance between us. This had never happened before; even our bad sex was good. We’d managed to make love well even when we were furious with each other, bone tired, or sick with the flu. We’d always been able to connect physically no matter what else was going on.

I wasn’t as upset as one might imagine. There were no histrionics, no thrown dishes, or screaming assaults. I just waited for something tangible to prove or disprove my suspicions while the distance between us grew. I didn’t blame myself, worry about what was wrong with me, where we had failed. It wasn’t like that—
I
wasn’t like that. He’d met someone, they hit if off and had sex. The sex was good and he wanted more. I knew this on an instinctive level. I knew him, how he admired beauty, how powerful were his appetites. She must have been something, though, for him to stray—that was less like him. I’d met people, too, over the years. I’d been tempted. In a way, I even understood. But it wasn’t in my nature to be unfaithful or dishonest; I couldn’t even lie about how much my Manolo Blahniks had cost.
But this is barely even a shoe! It’s like a tongue depressor with some dental floss tied around it. You couldn’t walk a city block in these, Isabel
.

The tangible proof turned out to be a text message on his cellular phone. He was in the shower; it was next to me on the bedside table. It was unusual for him to leave the phone out. Usually it was on his person, or tucked in his laptop case. I heard the buzz indicating that a message had been received. I couldn’t stop myself from picking up the phone and opening the message.

A note from someone identified only as “S” read,
I can’t stop thinking about you. I can still feel you inside me
.

Marcus emerged from the bathroom, a plume of steam following him into the bedroom carrying the scent of a sage-mint body wash we’d been using. I turned to face him. He saw the phone in my hand and, I suppose, the look on my face. We both froze, locked eyes. He seemed strange and unfamiliar to me, as though I was seeing him for the first time emerging half naked from our bathroom. There was an odd tightness from my throat into the muscles of my chest. The air around us was electric with tension.

“Are you in love with her?” I asked finally. I was surprised by the flat, unemotional quality to my tone. I suppose it was the last safe question, its answer determining everything else that followed.

“No,” he said with a quick dismissive shake of his head. “Of course not.”

“Then end it.”

A pressing forward of the shoulders; a slight nod as if he was agreeing to meet me at a café somewhere. “Okay,” he said easily.

“And go sleep somewhere else tonight. I don’t want to be near you right now.”

“Isabel,” he said.

“I mean it,” I said. “Go.”

I was injured—my pride bruised, my heart cracked, if not broken. But mainly I was just disappointed. It was not that I had any illusions about him, about our marriage—hell, about marriage in general. I just thought he had more self-control; I thought he was a stronger man. To think of him lying, sneaking out of town, sleeping with a woman in a hotel somewhere—it cheapened him somehow, made him seem less to me.

We spent a few days apart, had some long phone conversations during which we agreed that there were problems in our marriage that needed to be addressed. There were tears, apologies made and accepted on both sides. He came home. We moved on. I don’t know that I got over it, exactly. But the incident was slowly stitched into the fabric of our relationship; from that point on everything was a slightly different color, a different texture. Not necessarily bad, but not the same. We didn’t seek therapy or hash over details or talk late into the night about why or when or could it happen again.

Those problems that we agreed existed—his workaholic nature, and mine, for that matter, his unavailability, my various neuroses and insecurities—were never actually addressed. I didn’t struggle with newfound trust issues. I saw the incident as an aberration. And neither one of us ever brought any of it up again. At the time, I just thought we were being so intellectual, so sophisticated about it. But was it just denial? I never told anyone about it, not Linda, not Jack. I don’t know. Maybe it was more like fear-induced laziness. You notice the lump under your arm but you can’t bring yourself to have it examined, feel unable to face the diagnosis. You don’t want anyone else to know; their concern would just make it real.

By five
A.M.
I had run the gauntlet of emotions—starting with mild worry, moving through cold panic to rage. There was a brief period of nonchalance, then a return to fear, then on to hatred, through despondency ending with desperation. I was about to call my sister when the cell phone, still clutched in my hand, started to ring. The screen blinked blue:
Marc calling
.

“God, Marc.
Where are you?”
I answered, so angry, so relieved, so dying to hear that voice offering me a reason for this, something I could buy:
Come get me at the hospital, Isabel. I was mugged, hit over the head, just regained consciousness. Don’t cry. I’m okay
.

But there was only a crackling on the line, the faint, distant moaning of some kind of horn or siren. Then voices, muffled, both male, tones angry, volume rising and falling, words impossible to understand.

“Marc!” I yelled.

Then there was screaming, a terrible keening. A horrible, primal wail that connected with every nerve ending in my body, causing me to cry out.
“Marc! Marcus!”

But the screaming just went on, rocketing through my nervous system, until the line went suddenly dead.

But those last moments in the kitchen when we’d shared croissants and kisses, when if there’d been more time we’d probably have wound up back in bed, making love again—they were just moments. If you’d tuned in on another day, you might have found us bickering over who was supposed to do the grocery shopping, or ignoring each other, him reading the paper, me staring out the window thinking about my current novel. You might find me crying over my miscarriage and how I hadn’t been able to conceive since, him withdrawing, arms crossed. We’d been ambivalent about children in the first place. My pregnancy was an accident. You might hear him say so, as if that should make me feel the loss less profoundly. Each moment just a sliver of who we were; only he had the full picture.

So I waited. I huddled near the stoop, trying to keep out of the brutal, cold wind. Across the street, the shops—a trendy boutique, a pharmacy, a sex shop—all had windows decorated in red and silver for the holidays. I watched people hustling along in their busy lives, coffee in one hand, cell in the other, big bags slung across their chests. They were thinking about work, about getting their shopping done, whether or not it was too late to send cards. Yesterday that was me—hustling, always one step ahead of myself, not present in the least. Twenty-four hours later I felt as though I’d been in a life wreck; my life was a crumbled mass of metal and I’d been hurled through the windshield. All the initial panic I’d felt when Marcus didn’t come home, the shock and dread that gripped me after the horrifying phone call, had drained. At this point, I was stunned, bleeding out by the side of the road.

After the phone call, I’d dialed 911 for lack of any other action to take in my terror. The woman who answered told me a missing adult wasn’t an emergency unless there was evidence of foul play or a history of mental illness. I told her about the screams, everything I’d heard. She said that maybe it was a television or something else—some kind of joke or prank; husbands did cruel things all the time. She told me the police couldn’t even accept a missing-person report without evidence, a history, especially for someone over eighteen, especially for a man. The phone call didn’t count as proof that something was wrong.

“Physical evidence, ma’am.”

“Like what?”

“Like blood, or a sign of forced entry into the residence, a ransom demand—things like that.”

She gave me a phone number to call, and an address where I could report in person, bringing photographs and dental records.
Dental records
.

“Most people just turn up within seventy-two hours.”

“Most?”

“More than sixty-five percent.”

“And the rest?”

“Accidents. More rarely, murders. And sometimes people just want to disappear.”

Something about the tone of her voice made me feel foolish, ashamed. Like I was one of a hundred women she’d talked to that night whose husbands just hadn’t come home.
Honey, he left you
, she wanted to say.
Wake up
.

The natural thing for me to do then would have been to call my sister and her husband, Erik, to tell them what was happening, to get their support. But I didn’t do that. I couldn’t bring myself to call Linda; I’d have to tell her about the affair then, wouldn’t I, to give them the full picture? I couldn’t face it. For all the same reasons, and a few others, I didn’t call Jack, either. His antipathy toward Marcus was unexpressed but palpable just the same.

Jack and I had a complicated history. And beyond that, if Marc later learned that I’d called Jack in a moment of crisis, it would confirm all Marc’s past accusations about our friendship. Marcus disliked our closeness, how often we spoke, claimed it was a shade beyond appropriate for a professional friendship. In fact, my relationship to Jack had come up in my worse arguments with Marc. He thought that I told him too much, that we saw each other too often, that the way he touched me was too familiar.

You don’t understand our friendship
.

An angry laugh. Then:
I understand your friendship perfectly. I think it’s you who doesn’t understand. You’re too naive, too trusting
.

Please
.

Of course, since
his
sleazy affair, Marcus had less to say about Jack. His commentary was reduced to annoyed glances.