Ink and Bone(74)

He couldn’t stand the sight of her. For the first time, he saw her for what she was, the bleach-blonde embodiment of all of Wolf’s failures and mistakes. His throat was thick; he had no words.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked. “Like I’m something you can’t scrape off of your shoe?”

They’d met at a press party. She was the publicist for a luxury hotel group and was hosting an event at their new Manhattan property on the stunning rooftop bar.

She’d been wearing a shift with sequins glittering on the front. He saw her when he first walked in; she’d greeted him at the door, looked at him with big eyes.

“You’re Wolf Gleason,” she said. “I love your work!”

She was just—shiny. Dress, nails, lips, eyes. Everything sparkled. Merri didn’t exactly sparkle anymore, certainly not for Wolf. Lately, it seemed like his wife only noticed him when she was mad about something he’d neglected to do. Mostly they just fought and shuttled the kids back and forth to school, and worked, and stood around on fields or sat in small chairs at parent-teacher conferences. In fact, there was very little sparkle in midlife, it seemed to Wolf. That was maybe, more than anything, what had attracted him to Kristi—that she wasn’t everything else. Of course, nothing sparkles forever.

“Why did you tell me about that place?” he asked now. He’d been wondering about it for a long time, could never bring himself to ask. He didn’t even want to remember that it had been Kristi who first told him about The Hollows.

She blinked, confused. “What place?”

“The Hollows.”

She blew out a breath of disdain, rubbed a hand to her forehead. “Not so that you would take your family up there on a f*cking vacation.”

Her voice had come up an octave, and a woman walking down the sidewalk on the street turned and stared, then kept moving.

“Then why?”

She shook her head, gave him the look that women always seemed to give him sooner or later—angry, disappointed, tired.

“You don’t even remember, do you?” she said. Not really a question. “Because that’s where I’m from. I was trying to tell you about myself. But you never heard that, because you never gave a shit who I was, or am, or what I wanted.”

Had she told him that? She was right: he didn’t remember. He never listened when she talked, kind of like the kids who tended to prattle on about nothing, some video game or drama with friends. They know when you’re not listening, Merri had chided a million times. We all do.

Somehow, the name of that town had rattled around in his head until he Googled it when Merri said she wanted to spend a week “upstate.” They were considering buying a country house—or he was. Thinking it might be fun to check it out for a week, he searched around and found a New York Times piece “36 Hours in The Hollows” Pick apples at the Old Cider Mill; wander miles of gentle nature trails; breakfast at The Egg and Yolk; take an iron mine tour with a local guide and learn some history, yadda yadda.

Wolf went to VRBO and impulsively rented Clarabel’s Lake House. It all happened inside an hour, none of the usual back and forth between him and Merri—should we, shouldn’t we, can we get away, aren’t we spending too much money? In fact, he didn’t even ask until after he’d booked it. She was happy enough about it, though. He remembered feeling like it was meant to be, the perfect getaway. And did they ever need it.

Merri had been trying to wean herself off the pain pills she’d been prescribed for her knee surgery a year ago and was still taking. They figured she had the mettle to cut back until she could go cold turkey; and she claimed that she’d been doing that, cutting back. She’d planned to stop taking them altogether when they were away. (He had no idea that she’d brought a bottle with her, just in case. On the day Abbey disappeared, she’d taken three Vicodin before noon.)

Wolf himself was still reeling from having his piece pulled from Outside magazine. The editor was a good friend of his, so things had been handled delicately. Some of your quotes can’t be verified; sources can’t be reached. Why don’t you get me those contacts, and maybe we can reschedule the piece?

They needed a rest. The Hollows seemed like the perfect place to go to get some distance, some perspective. They’d come back refreshed, renewed—Merri would be well, he’d break up with Kristi, talk his way out of the Outside magazine thing. Everything was going to be fine. That’s how he felt as they loaded up the Range Rover and headed upstate.

But he hadn’t even been up there a full afternoon before the place—the kids and all their incessant whining and complaining and Merri’s aura of enduring yet another thing that Wolf wanted to do and she didn’t—started closing in around him. He was suffocating before they even got to the lake house. The town—with all its precious (overpriced: Christ, it wasn’t SoHo!) shops and mediocre coffeehouse, and allegedly farm-fresh ice cream parlor—fell short of his expectations. He thought it would be somehow more. In fact, what was suffocating was that he thought all of it—his life, his marriage, his kids, vacations—should somehow be more. He had these grand visions of what things should be and it was never that.

Life is not a travel magazine article, Wolf. One of Merri’s endless “grow-up” speeches. No matter where you go—no matter how the water sparkles, or how they serve champagne in flutes at sunset—you still have to haul yourself there, deal with all the moments in between, pay for it in the end. That’s real life—all the time between those beautifully filtered images you post on Facebook.