Die For You

BY THREE A.M. I was thinking of his affair, wondering about her, about all the things I hadn’t wanted to know at the time-her name, what she looked like, her dress size, what she did for a living. Redhead, brunette, blonde? Stylish? Smart? I was wondering: Is he with her now? Or someone else? Has he left me?

Funny that I never imagined he’d been in an accident-pushed onto the subway tracks by a deranged homeless person, hit by a city bus, suffered a head injury from the crumbling facade of a postwar building, all those New York City-type accidents you hear about now and then. It just didn’t seem possible that something like that could befall him. He was too, I don’t know, on his game. He was a man in control of his world. He didn’t believe in accidents.

By five A.M. I had run the gauntlet of emotions-starting with mild worry, moving through cold panic to rage. There was a brief period of nonchalance, then a return to fear, then on to hatred, through despondency ending with desperation. I was about to call my sister when the cell phone, still clutched in my hand, started to ring. The screen blinked blue: Marc calling.

“God, Marc. Where are you?” I answered, so angry, so relieved, so dying to hear that voice offering me a reason for this, something I could buy: Come get me at the hospital, Isabel. I was mugged, hit over the head, just regained consciousness. Don’t cry. I’m okay.

But there was only a crackling on the line, the faint, distant moaning of some kind of horn or siren. Then voices, muffled, both male, tones angry, volume rising and falling, words impossible to understand.

“Marc!” I yelled.

Then there was screaming, a terrible keening. A horrible, primal wail that connected with every nerve ending in my body, causing me to cry out. “Marc! Marcus!”

But the screaming just went on, rocketing through my nervous system, until the line went suddenly dead.

3

What makes a great marriage? The kind you see on the diamond commercials-the shadowy walks and the glistening eyes, the held hands, the passionate kiss beneath stars, the surprise candlelight dinner. Does that even exist? Aren’t those just moments, studded in the landscape of a life where you floss your teeth together, fight about money, burn the risotto, watch too much television? Did I have a great marriage or even a good one? I don’t know. I don’t know what that means. I loved him, couldn’t imagine my life without him, showed him all the places inside me. In spite of all our individual flaws and the mistakes we made in our lives and in our marriage, we’d come together and stayed together for a while.

But those last moments in the kitchen when we’d shared croissants and kisses, when if there’d been more time we’d probably have wound up back in bed, making love again-they were just moments. If you’d tuned in on another day, you might have found us bickering over who was supposed to do the grocery shopping, or ignoring each other, him reading the paper, me staring out the window thinking about my current novel. You might find me crying over my miscarriage and how I hadn’t been able to conceive since, him withdrawing, arms crossed. We’d been ambivalent about children in the first place. My pregnancy was an accident. You might hear him say so, as if that should make me feel the loss less profoundly. Each moment just a sliver of who we were; only he had the full picture.

* * *

BY NINE A.M. I was standing on the street outside Marc’s office building. His software company leased the top floor of a small brownstone on Greenwich Avenue. There were other offices at that address, too-a lawyer, a literary agent, a mystery bookshop that occupied the storefront on the basement level. I’d tried the key I had to the street door but it didn’t work. I remembered then, the break-in a month ago-someone used a key to get in and steal nearly a hundred thousand dollars in computer equipment. The locks had been changed after that, a new alarm system installed.

So I waited. I huddled near the stoop, trying to keep out of the brutal, cold wind. Across the street, the shops-a trendy boutique, a pharmacy, a sex shop-all had windows decorated in red and silver for the holidays. I watched people hustling along in their busy lives, coffee in one hand, cell in the other, big bags slung across their chests. They were thinking about work, about getting their shopping done, whether or not it was too late to send cards. Yesterday that was me-hustling, always one step ahead of myself, not present in the least. Twenty-four hours later I felt as though I’d been in a life wreck; my life was a crumbled mass of metal and I’d been hurled through the windshield. All the initial panic I’d felt when Marcus didn’t come home, the shock and dread that gripped me after the horrifying phone call, had drained. At this point, I was stunned, bleeding out by the side of the road.

After the phone call, I’d dialed 911 for lack of any other action to take in my terror. The woman who answered told me a missing adult wasn’t an emergency unless there was evidence of foul play or a history of mental illness. I told her about the screams, everything I’d heard. She said that maybe it was a television or something else-some kind of joke or prank; husbands did cruel things all the time. She told me the police couldn’t even accept a missing- person report without evidence, a history, especially for someone over eighteen, especially for a man. The phone call didn’t count as proof that something was wrong.

“Physical evidence, ma’am.”

“Like what?”

“Like blood, or a sign of forced entry into the residence, a ransom demand-things like that.”

She gave me a phone number to call, and an address where I could report in person, bringing photographs and dental records. Dental records.

“Most people just turn up within seventy-two hours.”

“Most?”

“More than sixty-five percent.”

“And the rest?”

“Accidents. More rarely, murders. And sometimes people just want to disappear.”

Something about the tone of her voice made me feel foolish, ashamed. Like I was one of a hundred women she’d talked to that night whose husbands just hadn’t come home. Honey, he left you, she wanted to say. Wake up.

The natural thing for me to do then would have been to call my sister and her husband, Erik, to tell them what was happening, to get their support. But I didn’t do that. I couldn’t bring myself to call Linda; I’d have to tell her about the affair then, wouldn’t I, to give them the full picture? I couldn’t face it. For all the same reasons, and a few others, I didn’t call Jack, either. His antipathy toward Marcus was unexpressed but palpable just the same.

Jack and I had a complicated history. And beyond that, if Marc later learned that I’d called Jack in a moment of crisis, it would confirm all Marc’s past accusations about our friendship. Marcus disliked our closeness, how often we spoke, claimed it was a shade beyond appropriate for a professional friendship. In fact, my relationship to Jack had come up in my worse arguments with Marc. He thought that I told him too much, that we saw each other too often, that the way he touched me was too familiar.

You don’t understand our friendship.

An angry laugh. Then: I understand your friendship perfectly. I think it’s you who doesn’t understand. You’re too naive, too trusting.

Please.

Of course, since his sleazy affair, Marcus had less to say about Jack. His commentary was reduced to annoyed glances.

BUT I WASN’T thinking about any of that now. I was just hearing that horrible scream, my mind alive with dark imaginings. As I’d dressed and gathered photographs, I tried to calm myself by thinking of explanations for the phone call-maybe he’d lost his phone, or it had been stolen, and what I heard had nothing to do with him. Maybe he had left, was curled up in someone else’s bed right now, had tossed his phone in a trash can on his way out of our life. Obsessively, I kept hitting Send on my phone, getting his voice mail over and over. Eventually, with the sun rising, I’d headed out to report him missing but I’d wound up at his office instead, standing outside, hoping for something to end this nightmare before it began.