Wish You Were Gone(29)
“Oakmont PD, this is Mo,” the woman said.
“Mo!” Gray trilled as she popped her car into gear. “I hear you haven’t been to see a Giants game all season. What do you say to four seats in the Delta Sky Box for the next four games?”
EMMA
Emma waited until the kids were happily ensconced in their rooms on Sunday night, doors closed, Hunter’s hip-hop music warring with Kelsey’s show tunes, then went straight to her bedroom, where the very sight of her bed disgusted her. The sheets hadn’t been changed in weeks. There were torn and snotty tissue balls everywhere, and crumbs upon crumbs upon crumbs. Before she knew what she was doing, she had torn the whole thing apart—removed every pillow from its gray pillowcase and the comforter from the striped duvet. She’d ripped off the sheets and piled them on the floor, then added throw pillow after throw pillow. When she was done, she went to the windows and shoved them open, the cool autumn breeze billowing the curtains.
In the very back of the linen closet, under various sets of 800-count Egyptian cotton in various tones of grays and whites and blues, Emma found the Ralph Lauren sheet set she’d splurged on at T.J. Maxx when she and James were first married. The bottom sheet was white with purple flowers, the top sheet white with purple stripes, the pillowcases a mix of both. Shabby chic was what the look had been called at the time, and it was all the rage, but James had hated them, and somewhere between Hoboken and Oakmont they’d been retired to this dark place, never to be seen again. Emma carried them to her bedroom and made her bed as if it were an Olympic sport, moving quickly and efficiently, grunting and sweating and blowing her bangs out of her eyes. When she was done, she snapped the white comforter—duvet-free—over the top of the bed. As a final touch, she dug out a bottle of lavender sheet spray someone had given her as a gift once and spritzed it all over the pillows.
It looked and smelled like a dream. Emma took out her phone and crawled to the center of the bed. Her bed. There, she did the thing she’d been dreading doing since the night James died. She opened her messenger app.
The texts to James started innocently enough.
Parking the car. Will be at the restaurant in 10.
Then:
At a corner table in back. Ordered merlot.
Then:
Are you on your way?
I thought we said 7:15
I ordered appetizers. Is all ok?
Just scrolling through, Emma’s underarms began to prickle. She could remember so vividly how she’d felt sitting at that table by herself as the booths and two-tops around her had started to fill up. People ate alone in Manhattan all the time, she was sure, but she wasn’t used to it, and she felt conspicuous, with her tiny purse and her brown envelope with the divorce papers tucked beneath it on the table. It was obvious to the world that she was meeting someone—someone important enough for a brown envelope—and yet that someone was standing her up.
What the fuck, James? Where are you???!
I’m not going to sit here all night.
If you think I’m coming to this party after sitting here by myself all night you’re insane.
Fuck this. Hope you have fun tonight.
And then, the pièce de resistance.
I hope you drink yourself into oblivion, asshole. I hope you drive off a cliff. I hope you die.
Emma’s throat closed over and she tossed the phone aside, disgusted with herself and holding back angry, embarrassed, guilty tears. The truly scary thing was that if he’d come home that night, if he were still alive, those texts could have been texts she’d sent on any other night. That was how unhealthy their relationship had been—how twisted their marriage. They seemed prescient and awful and damning now, but if not for the accident, she would have deleted them the next day with a shrug.
Had James read any of those texts? Had he laughed them off? Rolled his eyes and ignored them? Where had he been when she was sending them, exactly? At the office? At a bar? Getting the party started early downtown? He’d never replied to a single one.
She had to find James’s phone.
Emma jumped up and grabbed the briefcase out of the closet, unceremoniously dumping its contents onto her freshly made bed this time. Definitely not there. She dug through the interior compartments just in case and came up with nothing but lint under her fingernails. Jogging on her toes, she raced downstairs and grabbed the plastic bag full of his clothes, scattering them across the marble floor. No phone.
Had it been in the car? Was it flattened for scrap like the rest of the contents? Or did the police have it? If they’d had it, wouldn’t they have returned it to her by now?
Emma balled up the clothes and took them back upstairs with her, not wanting the kids to find a pile of their father’s bloodied garments when they got up for school in the morning. She tossed them onto the floor of James’s closet and turned back to the bed. She was out of breath.
Well. There was always one way to locate a cell phone. Whenever she misplaced her own—which was more often than she cared to admit—she had one of the kids call it so they could locate it by ring. She picked up her own cell, clicked James’s name, and held down the call button. If it was somewhere in the house, she would hear it. James never turned off his notifications. He was just too important for that.
It wasn’t until the line had rung three times that it occurred to Emma that James’s cell would have run out of charge days ago. Wow, she needed some actual sleep. Rolling her eyes at herself, Emma was about to hang up, when the call clicked over to voicemail.