Paris by the Book(15)

Guilt, the greediest emotion, wants everything, she said. Grief just wants time. And time is just what she gave me.

So when I called her after Robert disappeared, I wasn’t surprised she told me to sit tight for another day. But when, on the third day, I called her and said I was calling the police, I was very surprised to hear she already had.

The police had told her what they’d told me, but they told me in person, during the middle of the day, all of this invisible to the girls, safely at school: wait.

I then told the girls their father had decided to get an early start on his summer writing period, always an intensive stretch, and that he’d be home soon enough. Ellie and Daphne exchanged sidelong glances—something didn’t quite add up—but Dad was Dad. And our family was our family, which is to say, a bubble, the kind I suppose a woman who loses her parents young inflates automatically. I don’t mean I bubble-wrapped my daughters, just that my default parenting position was to forestall adulthood as long as I could. The tooth fairy still called on us faithfully to collect the odd bicuspid. Daddy would return, too.

And then it was a week without him, and then it was three, and then it was the last day of school. We were crossing the street with the help of a motorcycle cop pressed into service for the great summer exodus. He blew his whistle, stopped traffic, waved us past. Ellie stopped.

“Ellie, no,” Daphne said, a hiss, a plea.

Ellie looked at me, several steps ahead, and then replied to her sister: “Well, we know she won’t.”

The policeman pointed to the curb. “Hurry along, girls; catch up to your mom.”

“Where’s our dad?” Ellie said.

And then, tears. Daphne’s, followed by Ellie’s, the latter’s quite rare, almost as rare as a policeman abandoning traffic control after two girls go to pieces mid-crosswalk. Everything that followed seemed to take place in three minutes but in real-world time took at least as many weeks: explaining to the cop—and thus, the girls—that yes, their father was missing and yes, the police knew this; and no, the police didn’t know where he was, either.

The detective assigned to us did have a theory, however, which he shared with me when we were alone. “In my experience,” he said, “the more dead they are, the more clues you find.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “So no sign,” he said, “is not the worst sign.”

And so we didn’t make signs. No flyers, no posters, no posting online. I didn’t want to advertise our loss; to do so would somehow make it real. Daddy was simply away. He’d left no clues. I shared the detective’s theory, edited, with the girls. Inane, and yet, it steadied them. It steadied me. I sounded like an adult. I spoke to them as little adults. Robert’s disappearance had aged them, but my talking this way somehow ratified that leap.

I’m not sure I should have said anything. Everyone has to grow up sometime, yes. But like most parents, I didn’t want it to happen in an instant, outside a police station. I protected them to a degree: little grown-ups they might be or were becoming, but I still took care not to say the word alive, and I certainly didn’t say dead.



* * *



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Even though he was. Had to be. Like the police, I had no evidence, except one important piece that I couldn’t share with them because they’d think I’d lost my mind. Which I had, partly, but enough remained for me to note that I didn’t feel Robert in my life anymore. I have a theory that couples are bound with some type of invisible rubber band. It expands and contracts, but it’s always there, a slight tug that you may not even notice until you notice, as I had, that it was completely gone.

What I also didn’t feel—this will sound awful, but wait—was sad. I felt scared, and angry, and alone. I could see sadness, some dark shore up ahead, but I wasn’t there yet because the truth wasn’t here yet. I felt Robert was gone; I didn’t know. And yet, amid all the advice I read about keeping the faith, keeping hope alive, I found one tough-talk website that said, your spouse might be dead. Prepare for that, too. So I did.

The funeral director who buried my parents had been ashamed at his success in overselling me—my theory, anyway, for why he gave me a pile of books, free, on death and dying and surviving, which had survived on my bookshelves ever since. With Robert three weeks gone, I went to the books and started poring over them anew. It didn’t quite make sense: Robert had not been declared dead, and as I’ve said, we resolutely avoided that word, even the concept.

But I had lost someone, hadn’t I? I had. And at least one of the books reassured me—in a chapter addressing the death of a loved one whose remains are not recovered—loss is no euphemism.

It was a start, anyway. A start into a peculiar descent into a peculiar grief. I found that, at this stage, the practical advice these books dispensed was useful: eat, exercise, sleep. I should not rush past my loss, not feel any undue burden to “move on,” but I shouldn’t linger, either. Keep moving. I did.

And I kept reading, and not surprisingly, reading about death, widowhood, survivorship, colored my thoughts—my hopes—of Robert. As weeks passed without him, these feelings gathered force, mass, became a scar.

It wasn’t right. I wasn’t right. But has there ever been a wife in the world who’s not imagined the death of her husband? Idly or urgently, depending on the situation. Mine was both. And mine was complicated still further by the fact that this was not the first time I’d wondered whether he was alive, whether he’d come back from this or that writeaway right away. I didn’t wish him ill—no, the absolute opposite. I wished him well because I hoped it would make him well, which would, in turn, make us all well. I had been losing him, Robert, and when the police asked, were there any signs he’d disappear? I lied and said no because I didn’t know how to say that he himself was the sign, that he and his words and his smile and his question marks were steadily disappearing, day by day.