I waited for the police first in the kitchen, but the acrid smell of the burnt teakettle was curling up in the back of my throat, underscoring my need to retch, so I drifted out on the front porch, sat on the top stair, and willed myself to be calm. I kept trying Amy’s cell, and it kept going to voice mail, that quick-clip cadence swearing she’d phone right back. Amy always phoned right back. It had been three hours, and I’d left five messages, and Amy had not phoned back.
I didn’t expect her to. I’d tell the police: Amy would never have left the house with the teakettle on. Or the door open. Or anything waiting to be ironed. The woman got shit done, and she was not one to abandon a project (say, her fixer-upper husband, for instance), even if she decided she didn’t like it. She’d made a grim figure on the Fiji beach during our two-week honeymoon, battling her way through a million mystical pages of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, casting pissy glances at me as I devoured thriller after thriller. Since our move back to Missouri, the loss of her job, her life had revolved (devolved?) around the completion of endless tiny, inconsequential projects. The dress would have been ironed.
And there was the living room, signs pointing to a struggle. I already knew Amy wasn’t phoning back. I wanted the next part to start.
It was the best time of day, the July sky cloudless, the slowly setting sun a spotlight on the east, turning everything golden and lush, a Flemish painting. The police rolled up. It felt casual, me sitting on the steps, an evening bird singing in the tree, these two cops getting out of their car at a leisurely pace, as if they were dropping by a neighborhood picnic. Kid cops, mid-twenties, confident and uninspired, accustomed to soothing worried parents of curfew-busting teens. A Hispanic girl, her hair in a long dark braid, and a black guy with a marine’s stance. Carthage had become a bit (a very tiny bit) less Caucasian while I was away, but it was still so severely segregated that the only people of color I saw in my daily routine tended to be occupational roamers: delivery men, medics, postal workers. Cops. (‘This place is so white, it’s disturbing,’ said Amy, who, back in the melting pot of Manhattan, counted a single African-American among her friends. I accused her of craving ethnic window dressing, minorities as backdrops. It did not go well.)
‘Mr Dunne? I’m Officer Velásquez,’ said the woman, ‘and this is Officer Riordan. We understand you’re concerned about your wife?’
Riordan looked down the road, sucking on a piece of candy. I could see his eyes follow a darting bird out over the river. Then he snapped his gaze back toward me, his curled lips telling me he saw what everyone else did. I have a face you want to punch: I’m a working-class Irish kid trapped in the body of a total trust-fund douchebag. I smile a lot to make up for my face, but this only sometimes works. In college, I even wore glasses for a bit, fake spectacles with clear lenses that I thought would lend me an affable, unthreatening vibe. ‘You do realize that makes you even more of a dick?’ Go reasoned. I threw them out and smiled harder.
I waved in the cops: ‘Come inside the house and see.’
The two climbed the steps, accompanied by the squeaking and shuffling noises of their belts and guns. I stood in the entry to the living room and pointed at the destruction.
‘Oh,’ said Officer Riordan, and gave a brisk crack of his knuckles. He suddenly looked less bored.
Riordan and Velásquez leaned forward in their seats at the dining room table as they asked me all the initial questions: who, where, how long. Their ears were literally pricked. A call had been made out of my hearing, and Riordan informed me that detectives were being dispatched. I had the grave pride of being taken seriously.
Riordan was asking me for the second time if I’d seen any strangers in the neighborhood lately, was reminding me for the third time about Carthage’s roving bands of homeless men, when the phone rang. I launched myself across the room and grabbed it.
A surly woman’s voice: ‘Mr Dunne, this is Comfort Hill Assisted Living.’ It was where Go and I boarded our Alzheimer’s-riddled father.
‘I can’t talk right now, I’ll call you back,’ I snapped, and hung up. I despised the women who staffed Comfort Hill: unsmiling, uncomforting. Underpaid, gruelingly underpaid, which was probably why they never smiled or comforted. I knew my anger toward them was misdirected – it absolutely infuriated me that my father lingered on while my mom was in the ground.
It was Go’s turn to send the check. I was pretty sure it was Go’s turn for July. And I’m sure she was positive it was mine. We’d done this before. Go said we must be mutually subliminally forgetting to mail those checks, that what we really wanted to forget was our dad.
I was telling Riordan about the strange man I’d seen in our neighbor’s vacated house when the doorbell rang. The doorbell rang. It sounded so normal, like I was expecting a pizza.
The two detectives entered with end-of-shift weariness. The man was rangy and thin, with a face that tapered severely into a dribble of a chin. The woman was surprisingly ugly – brazenly, beyond the scope of everyday ugly: tiny round eyes set tight as buttons, a long twist of a nose, skin spackled with tiny bumps, long lank hair the color of a dust bunny. I have an affinity for ugly women. I was raised by a trio of women who were hard on the eyes – my grandmother, my mom, her sister – and they were all smart and kind and funny and sturdy, good, good women. Amy was the first pretty girl I ever dated, really dated.
The ugly woman spoke first, an echo of Miss Officer Velásquez. ‘Mr Dunne? I’m Detective Rhonda Boney. This is my partner, Detective Jim Gilpin. We understand there are some concerns about your wife.’
My stomach growled loud enough for us all to hear it, but we pretended we didn’t.
‘We take a look around, sir?’ Gilpin said. He had fleshy bags under his eyes and scraggly white whiskers in his mustache. His shirt wasn’t wrinkled, but he wore it like it was; he looked like he should stink of cigarettes and sour coffee, even though he didn’t. He smelled like Dial soap.
I led them a few short steps to the living room, pointed once again at the wreckage, where the two younger cops were kneeling carefully, as if waiting to be discovered doing something useful. Boney steered me toward a chair in the dining room, away from but in view of the signs of struggle.
Rhonda Boney walked me through the same basics I’d told Velásquez and Riordan, her attentive sparrow eyes on me. Gilpin squatted down on a knee, assessing the living room.
‘Have you phoned friends or family, people your wife might be with?’ Rhonda Boney asked.
‘I … No. Not yet. I guess I was waiting for you all.’
‘Ah.’ She smiled. ‘Let me guess: baby of the family.’
‘What?’
‘You’re the baby.’
‘I have a twin sister.’ I sensed some internal judgment being made. ‘Why?’ Amy’s favorite vase was lying on the floor, intact, bumped up against the wall. It was a wedding present, a Japanese masterwork that Amy put away each week when our housecleaner came because she was sure it would get smashed.
‘Just a guess of mine, why you’d wait for us: You’re used to someone else always taking the lead,’ Boney said. ‘That’s what my little brother is like. It’s a birth-order thing.’ She scribbled something on a notepad.
‘Okay.’ I gave an angry shrug. ‘Do you need my sun sign too, or can we get started?’
Boney smiled at me kindly, waiting.
‘I waited to do something because, I mean, she’s obviously not with a friend,’ I said, pointing at the disarray in the living room.
‘You’ve lived here, what, Mr Dunne, two years?’ she asked.
‘Two years September.’
‘Moved from where?’
‘New York.’
‘City?’
‘Yes.’
She pointed upstairs, asking permission without asking, and I nodded and followed her, Gilpin following me.
‘I was a writer there,’ I blurted out before I could stop myself. Even now, two years back here, and I couldn’t bear for someone to think this was my only life.
Boney: ‘Sounds impressive.’
Gilpin: ‘Of what?’
I timed my answer to my stair climbing: I wrote for a magazine (step), I wrote about pop culture (step) for a men’s magazine (step). At the top of the stairs, I turned to see Gilpin looking back at the living room. He snapped to.
‘Pop culture?’ he called up as he began climbing. ‘What exactly does that entail?’
‘Popular culture,’ I said. We reached the top of the stairs, Boney waiting for us. ‘Movies, TV, music, but, uh, you know, not high arts, nothing hifalutin.’ I winced: hifalutin? How patronizing. You two bumpkins probably need me to translate my English, Comma, Educated East Coast into English, Comma, Midwest Folksy. Me do sum scribbling of stuffs I get in my noggin after watchin’ them movin’ pitchers!
‘She loves movies,’ Gilpin said, gesturing toward Boney. Boney nodded: I do.
‘Now I own The Bar, downtown,’ I added. I taught a class at the junior college too, but to add that suddenly felt too needy. I wasn’t on a date.
Boney was peering into the bathroom, halting me and Gilpin in the hallway. ‘The Bar?’ she said. ‘I know the place. Been meaning to drop by. Love the name. Very meta.’
‘Sounds like a smart move,’ Gilpin said. Boney made for the bedroom, and we followed. ‘A life surrounded by beer ain’t too bad.’
‘Sometimes the answer is at the bottom of a bottle,’ I said, then winced again at the inappropriateness.
We entered the bedroom.
Gilpin laughed. ‘Don’t I know that feeling.’
‘See how the iron is still on?’ I began.
Boney nodded, opened the door of our roomy closet, and walked inside, flipping on the light, fluttering her latexed hands over shirts and dresses as she moved toward the back. She made a sudden noise, bent down, turned around – holding a perfectly square box covered in elaborate silver wrapping.
My stomach seized.
‘Someone’s birthday?’ she asked.
‘It’s our anniversary.’
Boney and Gilpin both twitched like spiders and pretended they didn’t.
By the time we returned to the living room, the kid officers were gone. Gilpin got down on his knees, eyeing the overturned ottoman.
‘Uh, I’m a little freaked out, obviously,’ I started.
‘I don’t blame you at all, Nick,’ Gilpin said earnestly. He had pale blue eyes that jittered in place, an unnerving tic.
‘Can we do something? To find my wife. I mean, because she’s clearly not here.’
Boney pointed at the wedding portrait on the wall: me in my tux, a block of teeth frozen on my face, my arms curved formally around Amy’s waist; Amy, her blond hair tightly coiled and sprayed, her veil blowing in the beach breeze of Cape Cod, her eyes open too wide because she always blinked at the last minute and she was trying so hard not to blink. The day after Independence Day, the sulfur from the fireworks mingling with the ocean salt – summer.
The Cape had been good to us. I remember discovering several months in that Amy, my girlfriend, was also quite wealthy, a treasured only child of creative-genius parents. An icon of sorts, thanks to a namesake book series that I thought I could remember as a kid. Amazing Amy. Amy explained this to me in calm, measured tones, as if I were a patient waking from a coma. As if she’d had to do it too many times before and it had gone badly – the admission of wealth that’s greeted with too much enthusiasm, the disclosure of a secret identity that she herself didn’t create.
Amy told me who and what she was, and then we went out to the Elliotts’ historically registered home on Nantucket Sound, went sailing together, and I thought: I am a boy from Missouri, flying across the ocean with people who’ve seen much more than I have. If I began seeing things now, living big, I could still not catch up with them. It didn’t make me feel jealous. It made me feel content. I never aspired to wealth or fame. I was not raised by big-dreamer parents who pictured their child as a future president. I was raised by pragmatic parents who pictured their child as a future office worker of some sort, making a living of some sort. To me, it was heady enough to be in the Elliotts’ proximity, to skim across the Atlantic and return to a plushly restored home built in 1822 by a whaling captain, and there to prepare and eat meals of organic, healthful foods whose names I didn’t know how to pronounce. Quinoa. I remember thinking quinoa was a kind of fish.
So we married on the beach on a deep blue summer day, ate and drank under a white tent that billowed like a sail, and a few hours in, I sneaked Amy off into the dark, toward the waves, because I was feeling so unreal, I believed I had become merely a shimmer. The chilly mist on my skin pulled me back, Amy pulled me back, toward the golden glow of the tent, where the Gods were feasting, everything ambrosia. Our whole courtship was just like that.
Boney leaned in to examine Amy. ‘Your wife is very pretty.’
‘She is, she’s beautiful,’ I said, and felt my stomach lilt.
‘What anniversary today?’ she asked.
‘Five.’
I was jittering from one foot to another, wanting to do something. I didn’t want them to discuss how lovely my wife was, I wanted them to go out and search for my fucking wife. I didn’t say this out loud, though; I often don’t say things out loud, even when I should. I contain and I compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you’d never guess from looking at me.
‘Five, big one. Let me guess, reservations at Houston’s?’ Gilpin asked. It was the only upscale restaurant in town. You all really need to try Houston’s, my mom had said when we moved back, thinking it was Carthage’s unique little secret, hoping it might please my wife.
‘Of course, Houston’s.’
It was my fifth lie to the police. I was just starting.