Die For You

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.

“There were a lot of things I didn’t know about your father,” she said then. “Someday when you’re older, you’ll better understand.”

“What things?” I said, finding my voice. The words sounded surprisingly sharp, loud and startling, like a hard and sudden rap on the door. How did I know I wasn’t supposed to talk, to ask ugly questions? No one had ever said as much to me. But my question was an uninvited guest in the room, greeted with stiff politeness, clearly unwelcome.

My mother closed her lavender-shadowed lids, then opened them slowly. It was something she did to show us she was summoning her patience. She gave me the lids, our father would say.

“It’s not important now, Isabel.”

“I want to know what you’re talking about,” I said firmly. “What didn’t you know?”

She shook her head, released a long breath, as if she regretted starting the conversation and now lacked the will to go on. Looking back, I realize she was very young to be a widow with two daughters, just two years older than I was the day Marcus disappeared. She’d married at nineteen, been pregnant by twenty. She was thirty-five when my father killed himself.

“I’m sorry, girls. I shouldn’t have said that,” she said, sounding weak and tired. “Really, the only thing you need to know is that he loved you both. Very, very much. You were everything to him.”

She reached for our hands. I let her take mine. Linda snatched her hand away.

“Did you even love him?” my sister asked. All the color had drained from her face. My mother looked down at the table, tapped her outstretched hand on the wood, seemed to consider her answer.

“Marriage is not just about love. Only little girls believe that.” She didn’t say it unkindly. Her voice was thick, unlike her.

“He killed himself because he knew you didn’t love him anymore,” my sister said simply with a prim shake of her head. There was a frayed edge to her voice; her hands quavered. I felt anxiety building in my chest; it was expanding, threatening to bust me open wide.

“That’s not true, Linda,” my mother whispered, tears springing to her eyes. “It’s just not true.”

“Yes, it is,” she said, strangely bright, her eyes wide. “And everybody knows it.”

My mother dropped her head to her arm and started to sob right there in front of us. My mother, who was a study in self-control-never speaking too loudly, never laughing too hard. Her makeup was always done; her clothes were always perfect. To see her sink like a rag doll and weep was shocking. I put my hand on her back and felt her heaving, touched the silk of her hair. I remember how golden it looked against the green cotton of her shirt. She was so real in that moment, so soft and full of life, so overcome by grief. It was terrifying and at the same time exhilarating. She was solid, was tied to the world by her pain. She couldn’t just drift away and be gone like him.

“You silly, selfish bitch,” Linda said. Rising from the table, she looked down at our mother, who released a deep sob at her words. Linda’s features glowed with a dark victory, a grimace of disgust and condescension pulled at her mouth. She was a sliver of a girl, thin and narrow as a pencil, but that night she was a titan in her rage and her sadness. Just months before, she’d loved Duran Duran and set the VCR to tape episodes of The Young and the Restless while we were at school. She’d slept with the same blanket she’d had since she was a baby. She’d giggled at all my stupid jokes and stories. That girl was gone, just her brittle shell remained. Then she left us there. I listened to her walk up the stairs, her pace measured and unhurried, and slam the door to our bedroom hard.

I sat rubbing my mother’s back. “It’s okay, Mom. Don’t worry.” It was all I could think to say.

“I did love him, Isabel,” my mother whispered. “I truly did. It just wasn’t enough for him.”

And, even at ten, when I didn’t understand the power of things like love and money and secrets between husbands and wives, I knew it was true. My father was a ghost who walked among us. He was a sweet, kind man, who always had a smile, who always said the right thing, who always gave the most extravagant gifts, who never failed to hug or stroke. But even as a child I sensed that he held the largest part of himself inside, that he was too far away to ever touch. He was like a bright-red helium balloon always just about to loft away-until he did.

BUT I WASN’T like my mother, turning away from signs, closing shadowed eyes against the things I didn’t want to see or know. I couldn’t be that. I’m the seer. The observer. Life is a liquid that sinks into my skin; I metabolize all