These absences hit him faster now, and his gut churned with nausea. A quick glance at the curio cabinet behind the chair revealed awards he had won and small statuettes, knickknacks of a lifetime. Bronze replicas of western-motif sculptures by Frederic Remington were side by side with the carved glass Viking he’d picked up in Sweden and the crystal ball Jonathan had given to Jim after he’d earned his first million-“to see the future,” he’d said.
His face felt flushed, and he leaned against the chair, staring in through the glass doors of the cabinet. His hands were shaking as he reached out to touch the knob. They had built in a magnetic latch to keep Holly from getting into the cabinet, but the door pulled open easily. No latch.
Gone were the Lladro figures that Jenny had so loved: the mermaid, the mother and daughter, the Japanese woman in her kimono, and others he could not recall. Gone were the matryoshka nesting dolls Jenny had brought home from St. Petersburg when she was pregnant with Holly.
Shaking his head, trembling even more, he backed away from the curio cabinet until his legs hit the coffee table. He turned around in circles, a peculiar kind of anger blazing up within him, fueled by fear and confusion. “This. Isn’t. Funny!” he shouted.
You’re being ridiculous. The common-sense voice threw cold water on his panic. It’s a joke. A really horrible, almost unforgivable joke .
He left the living room behind, striding purposefully into the dining room. Something on top of the china cabinet caught his eye. A platter, incredibly detailed, bone china with blue trim. It had sat in the same place in his childhood home in Andover, used only on Thanksgiving, a family heirloom that had come down from his mother’s grandmother, and it would have been his, except that on the first Thanksgiving after he and Jenny had begun dating, she had caught her foot on the carpet and tripped, destroying both a century of family history and Thanksgiving dinner in seconds. Jim’s mother, God rest her, had never forgotten. For the few years she had left of her life, she had tried to make light of it, but Jim had felt the distance the woman had placed between herself and her future daughter-in-law, and he knew Jenny had felt it, too.
In his mind’s eye, he could still see the shattered platter and the ruined bird on the floor of his parents’ dining room, the shards like the rough edges of broken clamshells.
Yet there it was, good as new, on display on top of his china cabinet.
It broke him. He stood on tiptoes, reached up on top of the cabinet, and swept the platter onto the floor. It shattered, smashed as it should have been, and then Jim bolted for the stairs, not pausing to study the kitchen for the thousand inaccuracies it no doubt contained. One picture hung on the stairwell’s wall-him and a gorgeous young woman he did not know, holding hands on a skyscraper balcony somewhere-where there should have been a dozen snaps of him, Jenny, and Holly. He ignored the unknown picture and ran his palm along where the other frames should have been, a cold knot forming in his belly. He passed the door to the guest room, running into his own room. His and Jenny’s.
His eyes began to burn with unshed tears, blurring.
She’d left no trace of herself behind.
“Jenny!” he called, like a medium trying to summon a ghost, looking at the ceiling and at the shadowed corners of the room. “This isn’t funny!”
This isn’t funny. The plaintive wail of a child left alone in the dark by his older siblings.
Slowly he turned to look at the door to the corridor-the one he’d just come through. He took short, sharp breaths and then forced himself to leave his bedroom and walk toward the back of the apartment. If it wasn’t a trick, what was it? Had she left him? Could he have done something terrible to her without even knowing it? Something so awful that it could have driven her to abandon him so thoroughly?
No. He’d seen the love and the sweet mischief in her eyes just this morning. They had made love in the shower, as tenderly and as hungrily as they ever had. And if Jenny had left, that didn’t explain the apartment. Why would she bother to erase all evidence that she had ever been his wife? How the hell could she have done it? It would have been easy enough to drug him this morning, something in his breakfast or his coffee, or in the donuts that Jonathan brought-
Jonathan. He denied even knowing Jenny. And Holly! How could he do that? He had to be involved.
But even with him sedated, could they have changed everything so completely in just six hours? Could he really have been that heavily drugged and not feel any lingering effects now?
He stood in front of the last door at the end of the hall. No, she wouldn’t have left. Not the woman he had loved all these years. Not the woman who had smiled at him so beautifully, so intimately, that morning. Not his Jenny. But that opened up another possibility. Had his family been taken? If so, by whom? And again, the most troubling, most impossible question-how?
Jim pushed open the door to Holly’s bedroom, a picture in his mind of the soft pink decorations, the princesses, the bookshelf he had built for her, the fairies he had painted on the wall.
The room held only a desk and filing cabinet, an old computer, boxes of books, and an old love seat. On the seat cushion was a dark stain from where he’d spilled grape soda the last day of fourth grade. Thirty years ago.
Jenny had persuaded him to put that love seat out at the curb for trash pickers to cart off when he put his parents’ house up for sale after his mother’s funeral. It had been taken away within an hour, and he hadn’t seen it since.
It couldn’t be there.
Jim sank into the love seat, numb and hollow, this impossible piece of furniture that had been left-along with his great-grandmother’s platter-in the place of his wife and his little girl.
Minutes passed-he didn’t know how many-before he blinked and looked around, as though waking from a trance. He wiped away tears with the back of his hand as he stared first at the boxes and then at the old computer. “What the fuck is this?” he whispered to himself.
Then he was up and moving, because he knew what he had to do.
Jim’s building stood on a corner across from Union Square in Boston’s trendy South End. The six-story bowfront brick row house was the last on the block. Its upper five stories were split between two apartments, with the Banks family taking the top three, including the dormered attic where Jim had his studio. The ground floor housed Tallulah’s, a restaurant and cafe that specialized in European fare and damn fine coffee. The apartment in between was occupied by a fiftyish travel writer named Carole Levitt and her latest boyfriend, Oliver Chin.
Jim knocked so hard the door shook. He waited only seconds before knocking again, standing in the dim light of the stairwell landing.
“All right, all right!” Carole called from inside. Jim heard the lock slide back, and then she opened the door, irritation creasing her brow. “You don’t look like you’re on fire. What’s the-”
“Have you seen Jenny and Holly today?” he demanded, jaw set, daring her to say no.
A bemused smile lit Carole’s eyes, and she leaned against the door frame. “Are those the two college girls you had up there a while back? If so, then no, and I’m sure Ollie hasn’t seen them, either, because he would definitely have noticed. He sure noticed them the night you brought them home.”
Of all possible responses, this was one Jim had not considered. It struck him dumb for a moment, then he shook his head, trying to clear it. “Listen, Carole-”