(Though what, really, were they waiting for? Did toddlers suddenly toddle home after twenty-seven days? That’s what he could tell the cops were thinking.)
“I guess I’ll call the office tomorrow,” he said. “And make a plan.”
“And I’ll be here,” she said. “You’ll be there and I’ll be here.”
It was a terrible conversation, like a lot of those conversations couples have in dark bedrooms, late into the night, when you know the decisions you’ve been avoiding all day won’t wait anymore.
After they talked, she took four big pills and pushed her face into her pillow.
He couldn’t sleep and went into Shelby’s room, which he only ever did at night. He leaned over the crib, which was too small for her but Lorie wouldn’t use the bed yet, said it wasn’t time, not nearly.
He put his fingers on the soft baby bumpers, festooned with bright yellow fish. He remembered telling Shelby they were goldfish, but she kept saying Nana, nana, which was what she called bananas.
Her hands were always covered with the pearly slime of bananas, holding on to the front of Lorie’s shirt.
One night, sliding his hand under Lorie’s bra clasp, between her breasts, he felt a daub of banana even there.
“It’s everywhere,” Lorie had sighed. “It’s like she’s made of bananas.”
He loved that smell, and his daughter’s forever-glazed hands.
At some point, remembering this, he started crying, but then he stopped and sat in the rocking chair until he fell asleep.
In part, he was relieved to go back to work, all those days with neighbors and families and friends huddling in the house, trading Internet rumors, organizing vigils and searches. But now there were fewer family members, only a couple friends who had no other place to go, and no neighbors left at all.
The woman from the corner house came late one evening and asked for her casserole dish back.
“I didn’t know you’d keep it so long,” she said, eyes narrowing.
She seemed to be trying to look over his shoulder, into the living room. Lorie was watching a show, loudly, about a group of blond women with tight lacquered faces and angry mouths. She watched it all the time; it seemed to be the only show on TV anymore.
“I didn’t know,” the woman said, taking her dish, inspecting it, “how things were going to turn out.”
you sexy, sexy boy, Lorie’s text said. i want your hands on me. come home and handle me, rough as u like. rough me up.
He swiveled at his desk chair hard, almost like he needed to cover the phone, cover his act of reading the text.
He left the office right away, driving as fast as he could. Telling himself that something was wrong with her. That this had to be some side effect of the pills the doctor had given her, or the way sorrow and longing could twist in her complicated little body.
But that wasn’t really why he was driving so fast, or why he nearly tripped on the dangling seat belt as he hurried from the car.
Or why he felt, when he saw her lying on the bed, flat on her stomach and head turned, smiling, that he’d burst in two if he didn’t have her. If he didn’t have her then and there, the bed moaning beneath them and she not making a sound but, the blinds pulled down, her white teeth shining, shining from her open mouth.
It felt wrong but he wasn’t sure why. He knew her, but he didn’t. This was her, but a Lorie from long ago. Except different.
The reporters called all the time. And there were two that never seemed to leave their block. They had been there right at the start, but then seemed to go away, to move on to other stories.
They came back when the footage of Lorie coming out of Magnum Tattoo Parlor began appearing. Someone shot it with their cell phone.
Lorie was wearing those red cowboy boots again, and red lipstick, and she walked right up to the camera.
They ran photos of it in the newspaper with the headline: A Mother’s Grief?
He looked at the tattoo.
The words Mirame quemar written in script, wrapping itself around her hip.
It covered just the spot where a stretch mark had been, the one she always covered with her fingers when she stood before him naked.
He looked at the tattoo in the dark bedroom, a band of light coming from the hallway. She turned her hip, kept turning it, spinning her torso so he could feel it, all of it.
“I needed it,” she said. “I needed something. Something to put my fingers on. To remind me of me.
“Do you like it?” she asked, her breath in his ear. The ink looked like it was moving.
“I like it,” he said, putting his fingers there. Feeling a little sick. He did like it. He liked it very much.
Late, late into that night, her voice shook him from a deep sleep.
“I never knew she was coming and then she was here,” she was saying, her face pressed in her pillow. “And I never knew she was going and now she’s gone.”
He looked at her, her eyes shut, dappled with old makeup.
“But,” she said, her voice grittier, strained, “she was always doing whatever she wanted.”
That’s what he thought she said. But she was sleeping, and didn’t make any sense at all.
“You liked it until you thought about it,” she said. “Until you looked close at it and then you decided you didn’t want it anymore. Or didn’t want to be the guy who wants it.”
He was wearing the new shirt she had bought for him the day before. It was a deep, deep purple and beautiful and he felt good in it, like the unit manager who all the women in the office talked about. They talked about his shoes and he always wondered where people got shoes like that.
“No,” he said. “I love it. But it’s just … expensive.”
That wasn’t it, though. It didn’t seem right buying things, buying anything, right now. But it was also how colorful the shirt was, the sheen on it. The bright, hard beauty of it. A shirt for going out, for nightclubs, for dancing. For those things they did when they still did things: vodka and pounding music and frenzied sex in her car.
The kind of drunken sex so messy and crazy that you were almost shy around each other after, driving home, screwed sober, feeling like you’d showed something very private and very bad.
Once, years ago, she did something to him no one had ever done and he couldn’t look at her afterward at all. The next time he did something to her. For a while, it felt like it would never stop.
“I think someone should tell you about your wife,” the e-mail said. That was the subject line. He didn’t recognize the address, a series of letters and digits, and there was no text in the body of the e-mail. There was only a photo of a girl dancing in a bright green halter top, the ties loose and dangling.
It was Lorie, and he knew it must be an old picture. Weeks ago, the newspapers had gotten their hands on some snapshots of Lorie from her late teens, dancing on tabletops, kissing her girlfriends. Things girls did when they were drinking and someone had a camera.
In those shots, Lorie was always posing, vamping, trying to look like a model, a celebrity. It was a Lorie before he really knew her, a Lorie from what she called her “wild girl days.”
But in this picture she didn’t seem to be aware of the camera at all, seemed to be lost in the thrall of whatever music was playing, whatever sounds she was hearing in her crowded head. Her eyes were shut tight, her head thrown back, her neck long and brown and beautiful.
She looked happier than he had ever seen her.
A Lorie from long ago, or never.
But when he scrolled further down, he saw the halter top riding up her body, saw the pop of a hip bone. Saw the elegant script letters: Mirame quemar.
That night, he remembered a story she had told him long ago. It seemed impossible he’d forgotten it. Or maybe it just seemed different now, making it seem like something new. Something uncovered, an old sunken box you find in the basement smelling strong and you’re afraid to open it.