When She Was Gone (3 page)

They would all ride together for Linsey. Her ex-husband, Joe, had wanted to take his daughter, but Linsey had asked him if he'd meet her there instead. Linsey intervened more than she should; Abigail was grateful and ashamed, as she had been all along. She knew the divorce had wrapped her daughter in grief, but she had been too lost then to peel it off, to help her enough. It was going to be awkward, the handover, the letting Linsey go to him before really letting her go. Abigail had imagined the scene, the boys playing in the stairwell of the dorm, which she could smell already, old beer and hot linoleum, and Joe would be waiting in the room like a suitor. But then he had a conference he had to go to, or perhaps it had been invented, bless him, and he said he'd just take Parents' Weekend. Which he might miss; Abigail was prepared to take over if he did.

“He won't, Abby,” Frank had said, soothing her, perhaps, or riling her, she wasn't sure which. One week ago. They were in their bedroom at night; Linsey's music, Coldplay, made the walls vibrate softly.

“He might,” she said. “You never know with Joe. And I don't want Linsey to expect someone and then have no one. It wouldn't be fair. The twins will have their last game that week, the regionals. In Ramsey. Will you go if I have to go to Cornell?” She planned ahead. Not for everything, but for the things that worried her the most.

“I'll go even if you don't.”

“You're managing me,” she said, squeezing his broad back as he sat on the bed, his legs crossed ankle to knee to untie his pretty brown lace-ups. Abigail had been suspicious, at first, of her second husband's vast collection of Italian shoes.

“Maybe,” he had said, leaning back against her. She loved that he was so big. She loved feeling small beside him, a bird in a lion's paw.

Now it was almost time, just another week left before they took her daughter away. Abigail walked up the steps, listening to the music from next door, Mr. Leonard, playing Chopin, or maybe it was Beethoven, very fast, insistent, a bit wild. She liked Mr. Leonard though she didn't have much to say to him. She was afraid he'd heard every argument through the windows, afraid he might mind them as neighbors, and at the same time, she resented his early morning playing sometimes, or late night, even if it was spectacular, it wasn't always what she wanted, it wasn't her particular brand of passion and grief.

Abigail smoothed her short linen dress. She checked her makeup in the mirror—the first makeup she'd worn in days, and it wasn't for the women's group at the temple, where she felt welcome and shunned at the same time. It wasn't for Frank, a lunch date; it wasn't for coffee with any of her friends in town—most of them were still away in Long Beach Island or Cape Cod. She had dressed up for Margaret, her Wellesley roommate, who was now a management consultant—a partner,
in fact—with a company that owned its own glass-and-chrome dagger of a building in midtown. Margaret had an office the size of Abigail's living room. Childless, single, she was the target of the “me finger” diamond advertisements in the
New York Times Magazine
.

Abigail's cell phone rang as she was locking the door.

“Resumé?” said Margaret. “I should've had you e-mail it, but you remembered, right?”

Abigail chuckled. She did have a resumé, folded in halves and quarters and wedged into her Coach bag, her one purse, between her tiny new spiral notebook and her long checkbook wallet, which she always thought should have
MATERNAL
stamped on the cover.

“I'm serious,” said Margaret. “Just because you're not talking full-time yet doesn't mean it has to be Gap or Starbucks. You can do better, lady. This is your apprenticeship, your chance to decide what's next on the Grand Abigail Itinerary.”

“I'm not even sure—,” started Abigail.

“No,” said Margaret. “You called me, and you know how I am. You're sure. I'm excited. Morgan Library at noon. We're so ladies who lunch, you know; no one here has lunch before two.”

“Okay,” said Abigail, because acquiescing was what you did with Margaret. When they were roommates, Margaret made everything a hunt, a battle, be it dates or choosing the best dining hall or graduate school, where she went immediately after graduation. Harvard. Abigail had married Joe, and
had relinquished her casual dreams of art school, or art history, or maybe trying B school herself—though that was just Margaret's rabid influence. Abigail had never really wanted to fight that fight. Or any fight, really.

After the divorce, Abigail had worked at a nonprofit arts agency for three years, administering grants. There were things she loved about work: the purposefulness, the sense of spreading pleasure to children and teachers, giving them a dance troupe performance, a puppeteer for a workshop; she also loved dressing up for work, flirting in the elevator, going out for lunch. She'd met Frank at a benefit. And four months into her twins pregnancy, she'd given up the job, thinking it wouldn't be for good. She still thought that when the twins were one, two. By the time they were three she knew she couldn't juggle like that; she'd have to wait and start with something else, something that let her check in at nine and check out at three. Still, she'd always daydreamed about having an arts café—art shows hung monthly on the walls; music performances and poetry readings coupled with divine desserts, chocolate-raspberry cakes and espresso with perfect
crema
in thick cottage blue cups.

Margaret indulged Abigail's dreams. “When you open your café,” was something only Margaret said, regularly. She wanted to help; she wanted to see Abigail doing, the way she had when Abigail was lost and needed to emerge from her darkness. It was Margaret who forwarded her the job opening after the divorce, Margaret who lent her a suit for her first interview.

They met every four or five months for lunch in the city, though Abigail realized she'd let it go too long this time—over a year. Last time a school nurse had called her home because Cody had broken his collarbone diving for a kickball.

Margaret still made everything a project, and was ruthless in approach, whether it was trip planning, a nanny quest, or buying a new black dress. She helped Abigail with all her acquisitions and battles—and flushed with the pleasure of the endeavor. When Abigail had needed a divorce lawyer, Margaret had met her in Hoboken, a first, with a vanilla legal-size folder, a box of tissues, and a baseball cap with
MAKE ME
spelled out in rhinestones on the crown.

“This is for going incognito,” she'd said. “When you want to dress up as someone other than Supernice Abigail and stop thinking about everyone else and make a list of wedding silver, dining sets, bank accounts, testicles, whatever you really want to get from the bastard.”

•   •   •

The train was full for midmorning. Abigail squeezed into the middle seat and recognized a man across the aisle—Charlie Sentry, her neighbor. She'd always assumed he was off at the crack of dawn, and back after bedtime, because she'd never
seen him out retrieving the paper from the walkway or seeing off the kids. She'd made quite a few assumptions about him, actually, as she had many of her neighbors, perhaps because they seemed so uninterested in her, and she'd never questioned the shield of invisibility from house to house, even when they could hear each other's voices from sidewalk to open windows.

He wore a suit, but he was surreptitiously eating an apricot Danish, and she worried for his white shirt. It was kind of charming, eating forbidden food on the train, and his eyes were open wide with childlike pleasure. Then he tucked the paper bag into a briefcase and started chatting with his seatmate, a woman in a long, soft dress who laughed and leaned back, revealing a strangely long neck. She reminded Abigail of an otter.

How did people do this every day, commute? How did they spend the whole morning getting from here to there and then plug themselves into there, producing work like the electricity that ran their empty houses, refrigerators and air-conditioning chilling and lights lighting and clocks counting the minutes of absence? Was this what she wanted to do—work in the city, or even work in town? She had spent too much time living in her house, too much time using its walls like her own skin.

She transferred in Secaucus, and her neighbor disappeared. She walked off the train in midtown, feeling the heat from the sidewalks and buildings, a whole summer's worth of heat. She saw a young woman with hair like Linsey's disappear around the corner and almost stepped off the curb before the light changed. An arm reached out to stop her—it was Margaret, early for once.

“You're early!” she yelped.

“Ready to become a working girl?”

“Probably not,” said Abigail, but Margaret waved the thought away as they crossed in the stream of pedestrians, and walked up the stone steps to their lunch destination. Then she was folded into her friend's wings, where she spent an hour and a half eating chicken salad, looking at the correspondence exhibit at the library, noting all her possibilities, and letting herself be the pure subject of Margaret's marvelous passion and attention.

6
¹
/
₂
SYCAMORE STREET

I
t was nothing like
The Graduate
. First of all, she wasn't that old; her oldest was in high school and Jordan was done with college, practically a man, though practically, she thought, not actually, despite how he made her feel; he still had this particular hesitance, this asking for permission, that occasionally made her cringe when they were together. But he did know what he was doing; there was nothing virginal about the way he pushed her up against the door inside his diminutive carriage house, the way he liked to keep their clothes on, to thrust past unzipped teeth and the crotch of her underwear pulled aside. There was no way around the fact that he thrilled her, that she thought about him when she was emptying the dishwasher and came without touching herself, that his mouth was just the right amount of hard and narrow, that he was rough enough, but never cavalier. Second, it was nothing like
The Graduate
because, despite his underlying indecision, he had come after her. Fully.

One morning she'd been at Starbucks with Helena, ordering her usual—a single shot of espresso with hot water and a tiny dollop of foam, which she and her friends called
short-hot-shot; it was their joke, only she said it a bit too loudly at the bar, waiting for her drink, and the barista, a young man who looked familiar, as if he was one of Steve's friends; perhaps she'd seen him in the local paper as captain of the hockey team, said, “Short hot shot for you, gorgeous.” He was young, but deeply masculine, his mouth lush and ironic, his black hair glossy as wet stone. It was as if they were in a bar, a real bar, a drinks bar with desperate men and flashy ones, with women who were hot without trying and women who were trying too hard. She hadn't been trying anything. She was a housewife. She talked mostly to women, to Helena, the Group, to children and to cashiers and on the phone to mail-order folks in Wisconsin who joked about the kids' footie pajamas with comforting aplomb and thanked her for being such a good customer. She was; she was a good customer. But she'd forgotten how sexual she had once been, until this young man.

“You're not short,” he said, handing over her drink. He didn't collect her money—he tapped the cup and his lips, mouthing
gratis
.

It made the back of her neck warm, the movement of his mouth, the implication. Her blood diverted the course of its circulation, determined new necessary spots, prepared itself for animal intentions. It was absurd. He teased her one day, another, and then she started going for coffee at least daily. He was a kid and she was sucking down designer drinks and giving herself reflux by leaving out the half gallon of milk she ought to use to soothe the lining of her esophagus.

Whitening her coffee with milk reminded Reeva of her great-aunt Bertie, who was always complaining about her gas and reflux and saying things like, “Oh, I can't possibly have that, it'll make me fluff,” the worst moniker for farting Reeva had ever heard, to this day. Bertie was pigeon breasted and let her hair go gray, then dyed it so it shined a glossy light blue. Bertie was prone to streaks of jokes, which made her laugh so hard Reeva suspected it had made her wet herself. Reeva feared she might become like Bertie, but crass without the joy. She had this postpartum problem herself, and always had to wear little panty liners. She kept a Post-it with a
K
written in red permanent marker on the dashboard of the Explorer, but she hardly ever remembered to do her kegel exercises anyway, and if she ran more than a few yards, if she laughed too hard, she peed just a little. It was horrifying.

The thing with Jordan had started eight weeks ago, when Charlie was going to Utah twice a month for some project that bored her so much she didn't listen when he told her about it and then she felt guilty when she had to ask about his day in great abstraction. She worried, a low-grade, chronic worry, that maybe Charlie had found someone else. She was sure she was turning old too young, not listening, wetting herself. Pathetic. Then one day she was looking in her closet, digging out the short leather skirt she got between Tina and Johnny, when she'd been using the gym religiously, every day, for six months, and had a flat enough belly to buy herself something new and sexy. Charlie didn't really like the skirt, made his special silent grimace of disapproval when he saw
it, but she wore it to Starbucks and, just as she'd imagined, only better, Jordan had said something about it.

“Nice skirt,” he said, leaning over the counter, putting his long-fingered, hairless hand too close to hers. His skin looked so smooth, she thought, too young.

“I thought I might get something for my friend,” she improvised, waving toward the overpriced coffeemakers. “Can you help me pick something out?”