She cocked her head at me. There was a pixyish look to her, the features of her face small and perfect-a lovely upturned nose and perfect valentine of a mouth, almond-shaped eyes. She was bright, electric, as if she might glow with the force of her own coiled energy if we turned off the lights. She had short, clean fingernails, wore her hair in a neat bob. Her clothes were good quality but I could see a shine to her black blazer from too many trips to the dry cleaner. Her microfiber wedges were a bit worn at the toe. The two cops seemed striking opposites: She was a saver, he was a spender. He was cool, slow, dark; she was white hot, action first, regrets later. And yet she seemed more centered, more mature.
“There’s so much rage evidenced here,” she said. “The way personal things have been destroyed, photographs defaced.”
“The kind of rage only a husband could manage for his wife?” I asked. Detective Breslow shrugged. I saw her eyes dart; she was thinking of something in her own life, went internal for a minute.
“Or vice versa,” Detective Crowe chimed in. I remembered his true confessions from the night before, the wife who left him, his bitterness.
“There is no one cooler than Marcus,” I found myself saying. My tone was harsh, even hostile. They both noticed it, exchanged a look. “He rarely raises his voice. Anger makes him silent-colder, harder. He’d never do anything like this. He wouldn’t have it in him. A waste of energy, not fuel-efficient.”
I said too much, realized it too late. Looking at both of them standing there, it dawned on me that I’d made a mistake giving them permission to access and search my apartment. I’d only been thinking of Marcus as a victim, someone who needed help. I had nothing to hide. It never occurred to me that he might.
Isabel, he’d say, drawing out my name into a gentle, paternal reprimand. Very foolish. These people aren’t here to help you. They’re here to help themselves.
“Mrs. Raine,” said Detective Breslow. Her tone was tactful, respectful, but just ever so slightly condescending. “If you know anything about what’s going on here, now would be the time to tell us.”
“My brother-in-law gave him money,” I said. “A lot of money they don’t have.”
Detective Crowe nodded. “Did you know anything about that? I mean before he disappeared.”
Disappear: to get lost without warning or explanation, to become invisible, cease to exist. It’s a common word; you’d use it for anything. My sunglasses disappeared. The hope of a sudden reappearance is connoted in that word. The way Detective Crowe used it, it sounded final, like a verdict.
“Erik just told me. My sister doesn’t even know.” I wasn’t really talking to them; I was thinking aloud, still in that stunned place where my inner world and outer world were confused with each other.
“Mrs. Raine, have you checked your bank accounts?”
The question sliced me, its edge so sharp it didn’t hurt at first. Then I felt the slow, radiating throb of dread. I moved closer to the monitor, hands poised over the keyboard, but then I stopped myself. The computer, of course, was gone. The dark screen was connected to nothing. I turned back to him.
“I have been with Marcus for six years, married for five,” I said. “What you’re implying with all your questions. It’s just not possible.”
“What do you think I’m implying?” Detective Crowe asked. He’d taken that stance again, the spreading of the legs, the folding of the arms. Detective Breslow lowered her eyes, then turned and left the room. They had a routine, roles they played. I could see that already.
“I’m asking the questions I need to ask,” he went on when I didn’t answer him. “If your answers are painting a disturbing picture, you need to think about that, Mrs. Raine.”
I looked away from him again and this time caught sight of my reflection in the monitor. I saw a woman who’d been badly beaten and looked the part. Behind me loomed Detective Crowe, a deep, worried frown etched on his face, as if he couldn’t quite figure me out. I wasn’t acting like he thought a woman in my position should act. He wanted me to be a victim, I think, weeping and afraid. He didn’t know me very well.
“I don’t know what you want from me-my husband is missing. My home-my head-in pieces.” Outside I heard the wail of a distant siren, the thunder of a garbage truck. “If you think I have something to do with all of this, you need to arrest me and let me call a lawyer. Otherwise, you have to give me a minute to think.”
“Okay,” he said, lifting a palm, his frown softening. “I hear you. But hear me. We often know more than we think we do. Something like this happens and it seems to come out of nowhere. But it never does. When something is not right in our life, we know, even if we choose not to see it.”
There was the lightest strain of piano music coming from the apartment above me. It seemed ghostly, almost eerie. Chopin. Marcus always hated Chopin-“Anemic, unsatisfying, depressing as hell,” he would say.
“Philosopher cop,” I said now.
That shade of a smile again, the lightest upturning of the corners of his mouth, as though everything he saw secretly amused him. But no, it wasn’t awful like that. I think he was just someone who saw the humor, the divine joke of it all. He’d rather laugh than cry. Anyway, he was right.
MY MOTHER REMARRIED more quickly than was seemly. “He’s not even cold in the ground,” I heard her sister whisper at the small wedding in our backyard. It was less than a year after my father’s death that my mother dressed in tasteful champagne-colored chiffon and married a man my sister and I had met only twice. There was a tiered cake with flowers, tea sandwiches, some kind of punch. Frowning faces broke into tight smiles when my mother and her groom approached. My sister was as grim and silent as she had been at my father’s funeral. My mother was, as ever, lovely with her strawberry-blond hair and alabaster skin; she was appropriate, not giddy, I wouldn’t say happy. She looked relieved more than anything. And I stood on the edges of it all, watching faces, absorbing swatches of conversations, listening to the nuances of tone.
Over a roast chicken, she’d told us a few months earlier.
“I’ll be marrying Fred. He’s a good man. He’ll provide for us, give us some stability.” She said it as if he was someone we knew, as if it was news we should have been expecting. We’d met him once when he came to pick her up for an evening. And once he’d had dinner at our house. Margie’s such a sensible woman. She always knows what to do. That’s what my father always said about her.
The news landed like a fist on the table, something inside me rattled hard. Neither Linda nor I said a word at first. We both stared at my mother and I remember her looking back and forth at each of our faces, almost defiant. My eyes drifted down to her lean, veined hands and saw that the wedding ring she’d always worn was gone. There was no mark on her finger. I wondered when she’d stopped wearing it. She cleared her throat in the silence, took a small bite of mashed potatoes, a swallow of water. My sister’s face was the same stoic mask it had been since the morning she found my father. I’d yet to see her shed a tear.
“I really have no choice, girls,” she went on when we said nothing. She smoothed out the napkin on her lap. “Your father has left us with nothing, and I’m afraid I’m without skills or experience. With what I could earn, we wouldn’t be able to keep this house. And I think we’ve lost enough.”
My sister pushed food around her plate and I remember the fork suddenly seemed very heavy in my hand. There was no sound but the clinking of silverware and the ticking of the large grandfather clock my father had loved. I looked over at the chair where he would have sat. He was the clown, my mother the straight man. He’d be cracking jokes, she reprimanding him with a smile, and sometimes a blush. He’d ask us about our days and really listen to our answers. My mother liked us to be dressed at dinner; there was no lounging in jeans, or eating in front of the television. We sat and ate together “like a nice family.” To say I missed my father would be like saying I was thirsty when all the water in the world had drained, leaving rivers and oceans dry, beds cracking in the heat of the sun. My mother saw me looking at his chair; something passed quicksilver across the features of her face, a flash of something angry or sad.