A Spark of Light(93)

He stood up, feeling himself sweat beneath the collar of his shirt. He was supposed to canvass the area to see who might have heard or seen something, but he was literally six miles from the nearest exit, and the only visible evidence of humanity was a giant Confederate flag that snapped in the wind across the highway, towering over the tree line as a reminder or a threat, depending on your politics. Hugh set his hands on his hips and jutted his chin toward the flag. “Well?” he demanded out loud. “Would you like to give an eyewitness report?”

Deciding that he’d done due diligence, Hugh started back to his own car. He had to burn all these stupid photos to disk and do a shit ton of paperwork now. True, nothing was going to come of this case—they’d never find the thieves—but even if it sucked, he was going to do the right thing. This mantra was as much as part of Hugh as his height or his hair color or his lineage. True, this had not been his intended career path, but then he’d met Annabelle and they’d gotten pregnant. Somehow instead of tracking the movements of the stars at NASA, he had wound up tracking the movements of the residents of Jackson, Mississippi. He had watched Columbo, like every other kid in the eighties, and detective work had seemed an exciting backup plan. Well, the joke was on Hugh—he wasn’t thwarting jewel heists, he was dusting for fingerprints on a gas cap.

His cellphone buzzed in his pocket, and he answered, thinking it might be the owner of the vehicle. He’d left a message that morning for the kid. “McElroy,” he said.

“Hugh.”

His eyes closed. He’d conjured Annabelle, just by thinking of her. “You weren’t who I was expecting,” he said, and in the silence that followed, he turned over the implications of that sentence.

Her voice sounded like filigree, delicate and irreplicable, with a hint of a French accent that he supposed was cultivated after years of living in a foreign country. “I wasn’t going to forget your fortieth,” Annabelle said. “How are you?”

He looked around at his surroundings—the looming Confederate flag, the trampled knee-high grass, the scraped and dented car. Instead of giving an answer even he wouldn’t want to hear, he turned his back away from the highway. “What time is it there?” he asked, squinting into the sun.

She laughed. God, he’d loved that sound. He remembered playing the fool, sometimes—leaving a shaving cream mustache intentionally on his upper lip when he came downstairs in the morning—just to hear it. When had he stopped making her smile? “It’s quitting time,” Annabelle said.

“Lucky you.” There was a bubble of silence. Amazing, to think that she was so far away, and he could still hear the hesitation in her voice. “How is she?”

Hugh exhaled. “She’s good.”

Annabelle had agreed to give him custody of Wren because, she said, that way Wren could be as comfortable as possible. If her parents were splitting up, at least she got to stay at home with her friends and her father. Hugh had always believed that her magnanimous gesture was a result of guilt: she knew she had cheated; as a consolation prize, she left Hugh the best part of their marriage.

“Are you happy, Hugh?” Annabelle asked.

He forced a laugh. “What kind of question is that?”

“I don’t know. A Parisian one. An existential one.”

He imagined her with her long red hair, a waterfall that used to slip through his hands. He could still see her face when he closed his eyes—the pale eyebrows she had darkened with a pencil, the way her eyes darted left when she lied; how she bit her lower lip when he made love to her. When you lost someone, how much time had to pass before the details began to fade? Or at least the feeling that you had an unfinished edge that might unravel at any moment, until you were nothing more than a tangle of the person you used to be? “You don’t have to worry about me,” Hugh said.

“Of course I do,” Annabelle replied, “because you’re too busy worrying about everyone else.”

There were seventy-five hundred miles between them and Hugh felt claustrophobic. “I gotta go.”

“Oh. Of course,” Annabelle said quickly. “It’s good to hear your voice, Hugh.”

“You, too. I’ll tell Wren you called,” he promised, although they both knew he wouldn’t. The relationship between Wren and her mother was more complicated than the one between him and Annabelle. He felt the way he did when he misplaced something important—a little angry at himself, a little frustrated. Wren felt like she’d been the important thing that was misplaced.

“Take care of yourself,” Hugh said, his subtle way of acknowledging that her new lover couldn’t do a good job of that and she was on her own.

He hung up, savoring his small and lovely victory of a sentence.

—


AT PRECISELY 9:01 A.M. Wren popped out of her chair and walked up to Ms. Beckett, the health teacher. Everyone was taking a test that involved labeling the parts of the male and female reproductive systems—with points taken off if you spelled fallopian or vas deferens wrong. Ms. Beckett was pretty cool, as teachers went. She was young and had married the hot gym teacher, Mr. Hanlon, last year. Although Ms. Beckett hadn’t officially told anyone yet, it was clear from her ever-loosening wardrobe of jumpers and caftans that she was going to need a long-term sub in a few months while she was on maternity leave. There was a poetic justice to that, Wren thought—a sex ed teacher who had gotten pregnant.