Just the Nicest Couple(49)

I shiver, despite the warm fall day. I wrap my arms around myself to keep me warm. Did Jake think he couldn’t trust me?

Ryan is apologetic. He searches visibly for words. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insinuate that... I didn’t mean to say anything bad about your husband. It just seemed like the logical choice.”

“Why?” I ask, my words brusque and I don’t mean to take my feelings out on Ryan, but it happens. “Because Jake seems like a stalker or because husbands in general do?” I ask.

Ryan looks hurt. He says, “I’ve only met him a couple times. I don’t know anything about your husband.”

“Then why do you assume it was him?”

“Please don’t be like that,” he says, and I regret the tone I took with him. “You know I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m just trying to help.”

I shake my head. I put my head in my hands. The only reason I took offense was that he touched a raw nerve, because I was thinking it too.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have reacted like that.” I try to think, to process what’s happening, to make sense of this. “I just don’t know why Jake would do something like this.”

“But if not him, then who, Nina?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I have no clue.”

Ryan bends his knees slightly to lower himself to my height, so he can look me in the eye. “You would tell me if things weren’t okay at home?”

“Yes. Of course,” I lie.

“Would you?”

Ryan can tell that I’m lying. “No,” I say, shaking my head.

“No what?” he asks. “No everything is not okay at home, or no you wouldn’t tell me?”

“No everything is not okay at home,” I say, my voice and posture crumbling. With my confession come tears. “Shit,” I say, swiping at my eyes. I hate to cry. I’m not the crying type, especially not in public like this, with Ryan and only God knows who else as a witness.

He looks around the parking lot first to be sure no one is watching us. Ryan comes closer. He reaches for my shoulders and tentatively pulls me into him. I resist at first, but then I give in, finding comfort in his embrace. His arms wrap around me. He quiets my crying. “Shhhh,” he says. My own arms hang stiffly at my sides, but I lean into him, resting my head on his chest, knowing that I haven’t been this close to another man except Jake in years.

He runs a hand the length of my hair. It’s calming. “Talk to me, Nina. Tell me what’s wrong.”

I pull back, but we still stand close. The sun is behind Ryan. It’s bright. I tent a hand to my eyes as I say, “Jake left me,” feeling a sense of shame wash over me. Now that my mother saw Jake at our house the other day, I know definitively that he isn’t dead and he isn’t missing. He made a choice to leave. He doesn’t love me anymore. I went so far as to call the police this morning and tell them what I discovered. There was no point in them searching for Jake when they have truly missing people to try and find.

“What do you mean he left you?”

It isn’t that Ryan is confused. It’s that he finds it inconceivable that Jake would leave me, which I appreciate.

“We got into a fight a few days ago. These days, it seems we’re always getting into fights. I can’t do anything right. He left for work Monday morning and never came home. I thought something terrible had happened to him, but no. My mother saw him over the weekend and he’s fine. He just left me.” More than once, Jake has threatened to leave. He finally made good on his threat.

“Then he’s an idiot,” Ryan says, reaching for my elbow, his eyes holding mine for a long time.

Noise comes all of a sudden from the school building. I fall away from Ryan, pulling my arm back, turning to look. A cluster of teenage girls has stepped outside, giddy and happy and laughing. I feel my cheeks go red, hoping they didn’t see Ryan and me so close. I can only imagine what they’d say about catching Mrs. Hayes and Mr. Schroeder in an embrace. My eyes return to Ryan’s. He, too, was watching the girls. He looks back to me.

“I’m sorry you’re going through this, Nina,” he says.

I swallow. “How does it work anyway?” I ask, wiping my eyes on the back of a hand, eager to change the subject because I don’t want to talk about Jake anymore or our homelife.

“This?” he asks, holding up the tracking device.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know for sure,” he says, turning it over again in his hands, “but I think it’s a real-time GPS tracker, where someone can monitor your location from their own cell phone.”

I imagine a little map with some digital cartoon image of myself, giving real-time updates every time I get into my car to head to work or to the grocery store. I imagine someone watching from afar as a dotted line tracks my movements across town. Work. Errands. My mother’s doctor’s appointments. A cool wind sweeps across the parking lot and I shiver, hugging myself tighter as the tiny hairs on my arms and on the nape of my neck lift in the breeze. I wish I’d brought my jacket.

“You look cold,” he says, his eyes going to my arms, which are spread with goose bumps.

“I am. I have to go,” I say, suddenly remembering about my mother’s biopsy. I look at my watch. “Shit. I’m going to be late.”