Slowly she nodded, breaking into a hoa.r.s.e cough. "If you'll excuse me, I must go into the next room where my oxygen tank is waiting for me," she said, struggling up. "I have small cell lung cancer." He stood mute and sore with pity, with awkward empathy. "I know what it is for all of us," rasped Joan Kavanagh. "You know what another word for it is? This suffering preceding death?" She wheezed. "Life."

What was Jared going to do? Mark the day of her disappearance? Commemorate it with a party, a wake? Put a marker out in the field or a cemetery, bring his kidsa"her kidsa"to it? Could the flood of friends and food help him? Oh, he loved how they took care of him. Let's go to Vegas, forget your troubles. Do you want me to cook? Come to my house. Bring the kids. Leave the kids. Come on vacation with us. They didn't want him to be alone. He understood. Trouble was, inside he was in solitary confinement, weighted down, unable to move past. And move past what? If she was coming back, then he would grit his teeth and wait. But if she wasn't coming back, then what?

His kids were waiting, even as they turned eight, and fifteen, and sixteen. He was waiting, even as he turned forty-five. He repainted the back door. He bought a slide for the pool. He bought a kitten to keep Riot and Maria company. Larissa was not a cat person; that'd show her.

He bought new dishes, a new stove. He fixed the steps to the deck and locks on the back gate. He patched up the fence that had fallen during a storm, and even got a landscaper to plant a line of four birch trees down the side yard by the driveway. Eventually, the purgatory would end, no? He couldn't remain right here for the rest of his life. He couldn't tella"was he in the middle of his life, or right at the very f.u.c.king end?

And yet each day he got up at six and showered and got all the kids up and fed and out. Every day, he didn't care what early meetings he had, he drove Michelangelo to school. Every day at four o'clock he stopped everything he was doing and called Emily, to find out if she was home, if all was well. Maria couldn't help Asher with geometry; Jared did that. And Emily needed help with Roman columns made of Model Magic. But Maria bought the Model Magic. Michelangelo needed to find a hundred pieces of something to celebrate the hundredth day of school. Instead of counting out a hundred Cheerios or a hundred pasta elbows like the other kids, Michelangelo made a hundred hearts by hand without a mold out of Model Magic, painted them red, and said, they're for Mommy, and then he cracked half of them, and said fifty of them are broken.

Every day there was something. Every night there was something. Jared's head stopped being filled with financial numbers from the latest quarterly meetings and started being filled with white paint for the winter snow scene and the broken magic markers and the dried-up glue.

Many things were rude awakenings.

Was his body gradually waking up from the shock of her aban-donment? One night Jared had a dream about Maria. He had come home and there was no one else there but her. He asked where the children were; she said they were at the Swim Club and Barbara was out shopping. Maria was stirring something at the stove, but when she turned around to face him, she was naked. The next thing he knew, she was underneath him in the family room. He was still in his suit. And then she was on top of him, between his legs, still holding the wooden cooking spoon in one hand and whispering, "We have to hurry, or the bryndzove halusky will burn."

"We wouldn't want that," Jared said in his dream, and woke up flushed and too embarra.s.sed to look at Maria for a couple of days, especially considering that whenever he came home she was always in the kitchen doing something. The ironic thing about it: he didn't even know what the heck bryndzove halushy was. Did he make those words up? He'd never heard the term before, yet it was so clear in his heada"as were the vivid other things.

"Maria," Jared said to her at dinner a few weeks later, in front of the children, as casually as he could, "in your country, is there such as dish asabryndzove halusky?"

"Of course," she replied happily. "It's one of our national foods. Potatoes, flour, cheese, maybe a little bacon." She smiled. "Some people think it tastes like glue, but that's not true."

"No, no, of course not," he said, looking into his plate, cutting up the sausage. "And how would you even know something like that?"

"Exactly!" she said. "Would you like me to make it tomorrow?"

"No, that won't be necessary."

Can there be forgiveness after what happened?

Jared's mind didn't think so.

Then why did his body so emphatically think so?

Oh, the treachery of also yourself, Jared thought, taking a sleeping pill every night so he wouldn't be forced to lie in bed awake and alone. How can you trust another human being when you can't even trust yourself? I'm outraged by Larissa, I can't think of her, speak of her, yet every night every physical thing in me seeps for her. Weeps for her.

He had to do something. He couldn't just continue like this. But do what? Make a decision one way or another. Say to himself, admit to himself, she was gone, wasn't coming back. But every time he started to think this way, even for five minutes, another lunatic part of him began a maddening argument. People make mistakes. They learn the error of their ways. Like everyone, she'll learn it, too, and come back. How can she not? Every morning when he woke his kids and got them off to school, he thought, how can she not? Look at them. Of course she will come back. Her children are here.

But when the months pa.s.sed, and there was still no word from her, Jared concluded he might need to try another tack, another path.

2.

Private Investigations

His name was Glenn Kelly. He looked like a front-loaded dweeb, not at all like Jared had been picturing him as he drove to Morristown. Kelly was running his office, "Discreet Investigations" out of a tiny light-blue cape, sandwiched between other similar-size homes on a quiet residential street. The blue house had a porch with a rusty screen door out of which the screen and the gla.s.s had long fallen out.

Inside was clean. Kelly's office was the living room; first thing Jared saw when he walked in was the enormous desk, an Oval Office-size desk. After shaking his hand, Kelly went behind it to sit down. He looked like a dwarf behind it, a dwarf with a large ungainly stomach. He wore an old blue Big and Tall suit (to match the house?) that had been tailored to fit his short, wide frame, he had on crooked gla.s.ses, and he chewed his pencils and his nails, and the corners of his fingers; he tapped incessantly on the desk with either the gnawed fingernails or the gnawed pencils, all giving the impression of a man not calm, not listening, but restless and barely contained.

"How can I be of service, Mr. Jared?" he said, slightly panting, his round face looking down into a piece of paper where he had scribbled down Jared's name. Kelly didn't come highly recommended; he didn't come recommended at all. How could Jared ask anyone for this sort of reference? He found Kelly in the Yellow Pages.

"Would you be requiring a drink, Mr. Jared?" Kelly asked.

"No, thank you. And it's Mr. Stark. Or you can call me Jared."

Kelly lost his nose in the piece of paper, examining it as if it were an FBI fingerprint sheet. "Yes, yes. Please excuse me. I must've written it down wrongly. Nonetheless. Will Jared be acceptable?"

"Please." Jared took a breath.

"What can I do for you?" asked Kelly. "How can my services be ofaservice?"

"Mr. Kelly, I want to hire you to find my wife."

"Ah. Yes. Of course. And how long, could I inquire, has your wife beenanot in your possession?"

After a pause Jared said, "Since May of last year."

"May!" On his fingers, Kelly counted out the months until he ran out of fingers. Perhaps he could use his toes. Every folded digit was a nail hammered twelve times into Jared's palms and feet and heart. "Hmm." He glanced up, looked away. "That's quite some time to have had her missing, Mr. Ja"Stark," he said.

"Well, this isn't an active thing on my part," Jared said, "having her missing. I would prefer she weren't."

"Of course."

"I've been waiting for her to come back."

"No harm in that. A pa.s.sive game, waiting. Not much is required. Do you have, um, any indication that she might be coming back?"

"Um, no."

"And you don't know where she is?"

"If I knew where she was, why would I be here?"

Kelly laughed. "You're so right. Because you know"a"he tapped his pencil three timesa""she's definitely not here." He waved his fingers before Jared had a chance to glare. "Just lightening up the atmosphere, with a small, humorful remark. Now please. Tell me what you do know."

Jared didn't speak.

"Listen, Mr. Jared," Kelly said, indifferent to being correct or corrected. "Let me tell you something. It's your money. I charge two fifty a day for my time, except for this free consultation, which is free only if you employ my expertise, otherwise it's two hundred and sixty-nine dollars plus tax for the consult. So. Two fifty a day, plus expenses, hotels, food, travel, doc.u.ments, etcetera. Whether I find her or don't, you still pay. So if you keep stuff from me that makes it hard for me to find her, well, whatever. It's your dime. Perhaps you don't like your money. You want to give it away? Fine with me. None of my beeswax. I'm just telling you, I'm not your parent. I'm not here to judge you or discipline you. Tell me or don't tell me, but I want my money up front."

Looking at the modest, to say the least, surroundings, Jared suspected that the $250 a day work wasn't coming as fast as it should, and perhaps that was the reason for the urgency of the tap-tap-tapping. At the same time, the irascible Kelly wasn't the first private eye Jared had gone to. The other four were even more wrong than Kelly, not to mention more expensive. Jared hadn't liked their digs: either in gla.s.s offices or in neighborhoods more seedy than this one. So he stayed put, though silent, though hesitant.

Finally he spoke. "I will pay you your rate," Jared said. "No matter what. But there's a ten-thousand-dollar bonus if you actually find her."

"Ten thousand?" Kelly whistled. "Okey-doke. All the more reason to be straight with me, Mr. Stark. All the more reason to tell me what you know."

Jared spoke for ten minutes. His whole marriage, seven thousand three hundred days in ten minutes.

When he was done, Kelly was quiet, rapping his moist ragged pencil on the desk, drumming, tutting, thinking.

"Well, well, well," he said at last. "You got yourself quite a situation here, Mr. Stark. You want me to find her? Really? You sure? There's no denying I could use that bonus. Buta" Kelly looked up, poker-faced, panting, yet pitying. "What do you want to go digging in these black holes for?"

When Jared didn't reply, Kelly drummed some more. "I been in this business a long time. I was a night-shift beat cop for ten years, a detective for seven, then I got shot, now I do this. Been doing it for fifteen. I'm fifty-three. Got a couple of years on you. Been around the block, married four times, so clearly I'm not one to advise you in that particular department. But I will tell you that what you want me to do, no good can come of it."

"That's not true."

"Wait, let me finish. Most of the people who come to me are women, mothers, looking for their husbands, the fathers of their kids, who ran out and left them without child support. Seventy percent of my marital cases are like that. Ten percent are women wanting photographic evidence of their husband's misbehaviors to slam them in divorce court. Five percent are men looking for their wives who took the kids. They want their kids back. Ten percent are men wanting to know if their wives have been faithful."

"How does that work out?"

"Usually, by the time the man gets wind of it, it's very much blindingly obvious to everyone else. Easy money for me, so I don't complain. Men, I'd say, are pretty clueless in this regard." He coughed. "I speak from personal experience, so I don't mean no disrespect there, Mr. Stark."

"None taken," said Jared. He had been clueless. "That may be over a hundred percent there."

Kelly counted on his fingers. "I think we're right up to a hundred, give or take ten or fifteen. What I'm saying, is, sometimes the woman goes but takes the kids with her. In an abusive relationship that often happens. But to leave like your wife? I've had two cases before you of the wife skipping out without the kids, and both of them turned up floaters. One in the Pa.s.saic, one a little further out in the Ohio." Kelly smacked his lips and shook his head. "That was a beautiful river, though, by Westport, Kentucky. If it weren't for the body three months dead being dredged up, the sunset over the river was a sight to behold."

Jared fiercely rubbed the s.p.a.ce between his brows.

"Did you say the detectives ruled out a kidnapping?"

Jared nodded. "They and I both. Besides, I already told you she was involved with someone. You mean she might've been kidnapped unrelated to the affair she was having? As a coincidence?" He tried not to scoff.

"No, that's not what I mean. But maybe she didn't want to go, and the lover forced her hand. Maybe he threatened her life, or her kids, or you, maybe he told her he would tell you unless she went with him? He could've blackmailed her into going."

"Is that likely?"

"Why not? You say she was taking money out of your account? Maybe she was giving it to him."

"He was Jag salesman of the month for a year straight. He got a whole Jag out of it. Sold it without driving it once, and pocketed seventy grand. He didn't need her money."

"Okay." Kelly shrugged. "All's I'm saying is, we don't know what happened."

"She could've gone with him out of her own free will," Jared said quietly. "She could've wanted to go. She could've gone with relief, with joy."

The investigator looked skeptical, as if he didn't believe that could ever happen. Only coercion and violence made any sense to him. "She would've written, in that case," said Kelly. "She would've come back, called, pet.i.tioned you for a divorce. Her silence is abnormal."

"What do you think happened?"

"She's likely dead," Kelly stated without preamble. "She'd be back otherwise. Perhaps he was murderously jealous."

"For over a year she got together with him and then came home to me. Does that seem like an act of Oth.e.l.lo to you?"

"Who? Oh, yeah. Uh, guess not. But I don't rule anything out in a strange case like this. Its very oddity is the reason of a good chance for all kinds of shenanigans. Maybe she wanted to come back and he got so furious, he killed her. And then killed himself. You're waiting on your wife when you should be mourning her and moving on. You're a good-looking guy in the prime of his life, making money, suddenly unattached. I may be spitting in the wind here, but I bet there are one or two women out there who might, just might, find that combination appealing."

"You think?" Jared said evenly.

"Something tells me."

"Hmm. Well, I'll be on the lookout for that, but in the meantimea"

"You see?" Kelly exclaimed. "Her being dead is really the best thing that could happen to you! Then you can tell your kids that Mommy wanted to come back, but has bought the farm and can't."

Jared agreed closure of some kind would be nice, even though he didn't share Kelly's enthusiasm for it.

"Exactly. I definitely see it from your point of view," said Kelly. "But because you want to pay me good money, I also have to see it from a point of view that's not yours." Now it was Kelly's turn to hesitate. "There's also an admittedly small but real possibility that I might find her. And if I find her, there's a real possibility that she ain't coming back, and I don't know how to say this tactfullya"

"Not coming back because she doesn't want to?" finished Jared.

"Precisely!"

"Okay. But don't you think I need to know that?"

"I don't know," Kelly said, reaching across the desk and extending his hand. "Do you? Think about it and give me a call."

They shook hands. "I'm ready right now," Jared said.

"Think about it and give me a call, Mr. Stark. You'll thank me later."

It was just bravado. Kelly was right. Jared didn't want to know. He couldn't live his life not knowing, but he didn't want to know. Perhaps in his body language, the private investigator, who, after all, got paid to see things about people, divined Jared's paralysis.

After days of thinking about it, or rather, thinking about everything else but that, Jared called Kelly back. "I want to do this," he said.

"Mr. Stark. I don't think you do. Ask yourself the most important question about this, as about everything: what do you hope to achieve? If she's happy as a clam, will that be good? What will you tell your children? And what will you do? See, I don't want to get involved in anything that might later on make me an accessory to a felony, Mr. Stark. I don't want no Armani legal suit proving in the court of law that I had had every indication that you would go and off her, and yet I still went and found her for you. I get twenty-five years for conspiracy to commit murder."

"You're just shaking me down for more money," said Jared. "Fine. Twenty thousand if you find her. And I'll visit you in Sing-Sing once a month."

"That twenty grand ain't going to do me much good there," said Kelly.

They met, exchanged information, and money.

Jared gave him Finney's number, pictures of Larissa, the missing persons police report, her driver license number, her social security number, her pa.s.sport number.

"Good-looking broad," Kelly said. "Looks happy in the pictures."

"Yes, well. Perhaps we'd do better to look at the things which are not seen."

And then Jared sat and waited.