Just the Nicest Couple(60)

“Thank you. I’d appreciate that. I’m worried about my husband too,” I said. “He’s still missing. It’s been over a week now since he’s been home. Nine days to be exact.”

“My understanding,” he said, “is that you canceled your missing person’s report. I was under the impression that you’d seen your husband since reporting him missing.”

I exchanged a look with my mother. I felt awful throwing her under the bus like this, but the officer had to know what happened. “My mother,” I said, reaching a hand for her knee, offering a sympathetic smile that she most likely couldn’t see, “has trouble with her vision.” I looked back to Officer Boone, who was looking at my mother. You wouldn’t necessarily know there was anything wrong just by looking at her. “Macular degeneration. She makes mistakes sometimes. She thought she’d seen Jake at our house the other day, but instead she saw this man,” I said, making a motion to my phone.

“I see,” he said. “So your husband is still missing.”

I nodded, remorseful. “Yes,” I said, thinking sadly of these last few wasted days when no one was looking for Jake.

“Okay,” he said, and then Officer Boone promised to dig more deeply into Jake’s disappearance, to continue speaking to the people Jake and I know, to ask around and see if someone knows something they’re not telling me.

Because someone, somewhere has to know where Jake is.

It’s late at night now. My mother is down the hall, getting ready for bed. I should be asleep, but I don’t know that I even want to lie down in bed and let myself sleep. I thought about taking melatonin or a sleeping pill or drinking yet another bottle of wine, but it isn’t necessarily that I can’t sleep. I haven’t tried. It’s that I don’t know that I want to sleep. I don’t want to be vulnerable and unconscious. I can’t stop thinking about the ease with which that man let himself into my house. It’s only been a few hours since I watched the video of him coming in, but still the shock of it hasn’t worn off. I don’t think it ever will. Every time I think about it, it’s as real and raw as the first time I watched it. I watch the video again and again on repeat, as if to torture myself. I can’t stop watching it.

I paid a small fortune for a locksmith to come out. He offered twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week emergency service. It was expensive, but I was grateful he could come on such short notice. He replaced all the locks on the house. I’m the only one with a key.

I got a garage door repairman to come out too. I now have a new garage code that only I know. My mother didn’t even want to know it. The repair person turned his back as I programmed it in. I watched him and I made sure he wasn’t looking. It was paranoid, but who could blame me?

I spoke to ADT on the phone. I scheduled an appointment for them to come out and install a security system next week, which is the soonest they could get me on the schedule, though I offered five hundred dollars if someone could come tonight. I practically begged, but they couldn’t. I’ll feel so much better when we have a home security system, when I can arm all the doors and windows before coming up to sleep for the night. On average, ADT responds to an intruder in something like forty-five seconds—that’s what the customer service representative told me on the phone—though the sound of an alarm going off is likely to scare him off much sooner and, with any luck, the signs in the yard will deter him from even attempting a break-in. When the security system is installed, no one can get in. No one can hurt my mother or me. We’ll be completely safe.

But that won’t happen until next week.

I can’t shake the thought of someone—specifically the man in the hat and the jeans—letting himself into my house when I’m out cold. For the last few hours, I’ve thought about almost exclusively nothing but him. I imagine him breaking into my house for a third time. I think about the confidence with which he walked, about the efficiency with which he punched in the garage code and opened the door. He knew the garage code. He knew I wouldn’t be home.

What else does he know about me?

That night, I leave the bedroom. I creep downstairs, to find and take Jake’s gun from the safe. I’d just feel safer if it was with me. A gun locked in the safe downstairs doesn’t do me any good if someone breaks into the house at night. If someone broke in, I couldn’t get downstairs in time, much less unlock the safe, load and shoot the gun.

It’s dark in Jake’s office. The only light is from the moon, coming in the curtainless window. I make my way across the room, the wood hard against my bare feet. I come to Jake’s desk, which is massive in size, a charcoal-colored executive desk. It’s longer in length than me in height. I feel my way around the edge of the desk, running my hand along the back of his tufted swivel chair. Behind the desk, Jake has two bookcases to match the desk, but between the bookcases hangs an original abstract painting that he bought from a gallery because he liked it, and also because he needed something to hide the wall-mounted safe. The painting is bright orange and turquoise, and if I had to guess, I’d think it was mountains rising out of the ocean, but it’s hard to tell.

I lift the painting from the wall. As gently as putting a newborn to bed, I set it on the floor, and then I stand upright and face the safe. The safe has a code. I start pressing the numbers in, remembering how I didn’t know how to shoot or even hold a gun until Jake took me to the shooting range for practice. That was years ago, when we were younger, happier. When the future still held promise. I had objected to having a gun in the house at the time. As a rule, I hate them; no good can come of having a gun in the house, I tried telling Jake. But what Jake wants, Jake gets. He thought I’d feel differently if I knew how to handle and shoot the gun. He said it wouldn’t feel so foreign to me. I went to the shooting range with him. I shot at a paper target. I did quite well. I remember that Jake was impressed. He didn’t think I had it in me to shoot at anything, and I think he thought I was going to lose my nerve once the gun was loaded and in my hands. I didn’t. Still, punching holes in paper must be far different that shooting at a human.