The New Husband(16)
Nina was back in Dr. Wilcox’s office, seated on the now familiar comfy chair, soothed by the sounds of the fountain and the white noise machine. How should we start today’s session? she asked herself. Should she talk about Maggie and Simon, their argument about the TV remote that was really about so much more? Or maybe she should talk about her career; share her worries and fears about being professionally put to pasture and Simon’s concerns over her resuming a demanding job?
As it turned out, Dr. Wilcox had a different topic in mind.
Glen.
She glanced up from the notes she’d jotted down. “In a previous session you said you didn’t think you’d ever date again after what Glen did to you. Can we talk about Glen now?”
A flood of memories rushed over Nina as if she were drowning in them. She remembered driving down her dirt road, dazed, seated in the back of the police car, where the prisoners usually go, on her way to the station to discuss her missing husband.
“I spent a lot of time with Detectives Wheeler and Murphy, answering their questions,” Nina told Dr. Wilcox, who studied her with a look of sympathy and concern. “I thought maybe Glen had cut himself badly with a fishing knife, fell, hit his head hard, and somehow ended up in the water. He was an excellent swimmer, so he could have made it to shore, got lost in the woods, maybe he had a concussion and was disoriented. It gave me hope.”
“But that wasn’t the story?”
“No, it wasn’t. Because the police searched the woods, with dogs even, and there was no sign of Glen anywhere. Then they asked me all sorts of questions. Was Glen depressed? Could he have been suicidal? They even wanted to know about our marriage.”
“What did you tell them?”
Nina opened up about several issues that hadn’t seemed worth mentioning to the detectives. They were little things, really, like how Glen still resented her for moving them out of the city. Seabury was too isolated for him, and moving there had only confirmed his belief that “rural” equaled “remote.”
Nina, on the other hand, had adjusted quickly to their new town. It was safe, the kind of community she’d always wanted to live in, a place where other mothers kept an eye out for her children, where everyone had each other’s backs. Nina appreciated Glen’s willingness to move, and told him so almost daily for the first few years. It was an idyllic community in so many ways—it just wasn’t Boston, as Glen took every opportunity to remind her.
The marriage gradually became overwhelmed, thanks in part to the move north coupled with the daily grind of life. Spontaneity had yielded to schedules. Glen did what he always did: put his focus and energy into his work, moving up the career ladder, while Nina directed hers into the kids and home. As time wore on, and his work responsibilities grew, Glen showed increasingly less interest in her world—the mundane tasks of gardening, shopping, cleaning, laundry, the dog, and the kids—because he’d become too consumed with his.
The day-to-day went along smoothly enough, but Nina was also aware of a growing gulf between them as exhaustion replaced intimacy. Then again, wasn’t that most marriages? Didn’t most couples start off feeling some sort of imperative, an insatiable need for the other person, until those feelings became so familiar they went as unnoticed as breathing?
“But you never talked about divorce or separation?” Dr. Wilcox asked.
“No, no,” Nina said dismissively. “We were happy … I mean happyish, right? I mean, who doesn’t have problems? But I wasn’t going to get into all that with the police. I felt the focus needed to be on finding Glen. Nothing else mattered. So eventually, I went home because I had to break the news to the children.”
“How did they take it?”
“It was hard, of course. I know the words ‘Dad,’ ‘accident,’ ‘missing’—they all came out in the course of the conversation, but for the life of me I have no recollection of saying them. All I remember is Mag’s sweet voice cracking when she asked for her daddy. We hugged and cried together. Even Connor cried so hard he couldn’t speak.”
“How painful for all of you.”
“Oh, it was. But it was just the start.”
Nina recounted the first night after Glen had gone missing, reliving those moments in vivid detail for Dr. Wilcox’s benefit. That evening she felt like she was hosting a wake for a person who wasn’t dead. At least forty people were in the house, probably more, with cars lining the side of the road almost to the end of the street.
Several news vans had parked out front, their bright portable lights turning twilight into daylight. They had wanted a statement from Nina and the children. They wanted tears on camera, raw emotion that would make for a juicy tease to get viewers to tune in and satisfy advertisers.
Nina wasn’t going to play their game, but she did want Glen’s picture on the broadcast in case he was an amnesiac, lost and wandering. Susanna went on TV, functioning as the Garrity family spokesperson. Nina watched the News 9 broadcast live from outside her home. The picture they used for the report was of Glen smiling after a family hike to the top of Mount Monadnock. Susanna found the photo on Facebook, and everyone agreed it was the best one to use.
“Where were Maggie and Connor while all this was going on?” Dr. Wilcox asked.
“Maggie was hiding out in her room. It was too overwhelming to be downstairs. Connor wanted to go to the lake and search for his father—in fact, a whole group of us suggested we do just that, but the police didn’t want us there. That part of Lake Winnipesauke by Governors Island has all sorts of terrain, and they had professionals on the scene, and we would have been in the way.