The Daylight Marriage Read online

  “I wasn’t sleeping,” she said, keeping herself behind the door as he approached.

  “Of course not. I’m sorry. That was no good.” He had learned that the more he tried to explain away their battles to her, the worse they sounded.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  Hannah slept in Ethan’s room whenever he had trouble sleeping, which was most nights. “Probably in your brother’s room.”

  Janine stepped carefully around the door and in front of him. “Is she OK?” His daughter could be surprisingly maternal toward Hannah.

  “Your mother’s fine,” he said automatically. “I’m fine too,” he added, not that she had asked.

  He followed her to her bedroom. He tucked her in, although she flinched at his touch, and then he sat beside her on her mattress. At last she closed her eyes.

  He stayed a moment, looking down at his daughter, the wisps of light hair across her temple, her lips barely parted as she lay there on her side. She may not have been sleeping, she may have been pretending, but he did not say anything. He was grateful that she allowed this right now, that she was letting him just stay here and look at her.

  THE EARLY DAYS. Those first few months of friendship when all that he knew of Hannah Munroe fit inside a daydream. She had grown up on Martha’s Vineyard and now lived alone in one of her parents’ two off-island homes, a four-bedroom brownstone on Clarendon, where a tree-size grandfather clock stood guard just inside the front door. She kept a rosewood box of Burdick’s honey caramel truffles on her coffee table at all times. She collected antique glass perfume bottles that were rounded and spiny, swirled with primordial indigo and deep, opaque emerald. She was passionate about the Red Sox but hated the Patriots and football in general. She gave the impression of a swan: regal but fragile, lovely and thoughtful and capable of sudden wildness. She was the most feminine, self-assured, compelling female that he had ever met.

  She called him one night with a ticket to a game against the Blue Jays the next afternoon. “My friend just backed out. I’d have called you sooner,” she began.

  He immediately accepted, and because she had a car and he did not, they agreed that she would come pick him up before the game.

  The next afternoon, she arrived at his apartment in Brighton wearing a ski jacket, her neck swaddled in a lumpy, hairy scarf. Her nostrils were pink and inflamed and she sounded congested. Had he missed it over the phone? He led her inside and offered to make her some tea. “We don’t have to leave this second, do we?”

  “No.” She shrugged. “Not just yet.”

  He hung up her jacket while she unraveled her scarf. He filled a mug with water and put it in the microwave. They sat across from each other at the wobbly card table in his kitchen. Down the hall, his roommate, Paul, labored with his trombone scales, unable to reach the higher notes.

  Hannah’s hair pooled onto her shoulders and ran over her small breasts, down over her stomach, stopping at her waist. She had these light-filled eyes, and a black eyelash clung to the side ridge of her nose. She made considerable attempts to sniff back all that was inside her sinuses.

  He went to find a box of tissues, and when he returned he asked, “You sure you’re up for a baseball game outside?”

  “I’ll be fine. The season’s almost over—we have to go. Thanks,” she said as she reached for the box. In vain she tried again to release the blockage. She wadded up the dry tissue and stuffed it in her pants pocket. She asked, “Have you ever been in love?”

  Her crazy questions—always non sequiturs—still blindsided him. “I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”

  Paul groaned and started again at the beginning of his scale. The microwave beeped and Lovell found a box of Lipton that Paul’s mother had left on her last visit. Lovell set the mug down before Hannah and she brought it to her mouth for a dainty sip. The table tottered beneath her arm and she wrapped her fingers around the mug to protect the tea or her lap. He found an empty box of Frosted Flakes with the recycling, folded it into awkward fourths, and jammed it under the shortest table leg. Once he took his seat again, she looked off beyond him.

  “So, what exactly does it feel like?” he said at last.

  “Oh, you’d know.”

  “That’s what they always say—‘you just know.’”

  The trombone grew louder, a whiny, embarrassing little brother in the next room—I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

  “The first night I met him, we slept together,” she said. This jerk named Doug Bowen had been her fiancé just a few months ago. She talked about him a lot. “And the next night too. I probably shouldn’t admit that.”

  How to respond? Anyway, Lovell had a chemical oceanography paper due the next day. He should have been finalizing his isotope indicators. Proofreading. He had a hundred things he should have been doing other than sitting here with this girl.

  “You’ve never done that? Slept with someone right away?” She made one last heartbreaking attempt to breathe through her nose.

  He had, but he didn’t think it was love, nothing like that. “What’s the right answer?”

  “There’s no right or wrong.”

  “I guess there was this one girl and we almost did. We got really close,” he said. “But I didn’t want to hurt her later on, so I held off. I mean we both did.”

  “Ah, the right answer anyway.”

  He watched her guide the tea bag around the water by its paper tag. He was a gawky, long-limbed PhD candidate from semirural Maine. He was allergic to shellfish, and in his rare free time he did little other than monopolize his roommate’s Nintendo. She was light years out of his league.

  “Now the wrong answer,” she said.

  “Yes, we went ahead and slept together, but I didn’t really love her.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “She—” he began. A section of his chest withered. He felt protective of it. “Naw.”

  “No?”

  He shook his head.

  “Good for you.” She nodded. “Really. It’s none of my business.” She finished her tea and drew a deep breath, this time through her mouth. She sat up straighter and looked at him anew, as if only now realizing that he was in the room with her, Lovell and not someone else. “You’re a good person, aren’t you?”

  “I try,” he said.

  She studied his face, side to side, up and down. “I could use a good person. I need someone good in my life right now.”

  “Good,” he said sadly. He had landed on that brotherly side of the spectrum.

  “Oh.”

  “‘Oh’ what?” His face was hot. It was too late.

  “Nothing,” she said carefully. But she half smiled—embarrassed? Maybe, hopefully, intrigued? “Are we ready to go?”

  LOVELL CHECKED ONE more time to see whether both cars were in the driveway. When he saw that they were, he headed downstairs for his laptop and answered some work e-mails. There would be no point trying to fall asleep after this night. He skimmed the newspaper, considered finding his banjo, which he had not played in a few years. He flipped through some magazines.

  He eventually made his way back upstairs and into bed. Later he heard the Mekenner kid on his bike outside and the smack of newspapers landing on driveways, as well as the sound of the milk truck screeching down Winter Street, that compact, joyless, bovine woman (Hannah’s term—it made him howl) who left bottles of organic milk on people’s porches once a week.

  In the morning, Hannah remained steely for the brief time that he saw her before he had to leave for work. But she allowed him to give her a quick kiss good-bye, and he hoped this might be a precursor to a truce.

  He turned his thoughts to all that lay ahead of him at his office: the numbers from Pago Pago would screw up his estimates of potential intensity and of tropical cyclones, as well as his data proving that increases in sea surface temperatures had to be associated with spikes in potential intensity. Hurricane Katrina had garnered him and his theory some attention, but there were still ple
nty of naysayers in the government. Lovell arrived at Mass Environmental and the day began.

  Chapter 2

  Thirty hours after he had kissed Hannah good-bye and headed off for work, Lovell waited, his chest pounding, on the front steps of a brick bunker, where by a set of automatic glass doors he met Bob Duncan, a short, doughy detective with sprawling black eyebrows and a crushing handshake.

  “You’re not a small man,” Duncan said, looking up at Lovell’s face.

  “My parents are both tall.” At six feet five inches, he heard this sort of thing all the time, but it sounded kind of different now.

  He followed the detective into an overheated office barely large enough for its desk and two metal chairs. Lovell had contacted the police himself this morning and reported her missing. He had had no idea what else to do. Should he have come out and told the kids that she was quite likely in the process of leaving him? She had taken off once about a year ago and spent the night at her sister’s, although she did return early the next morning, before the kids woke.

  Duncan had already spoken with Janine and several of Lovell’s coworkers and Ethan and one of his teachers, who had seen Hannah yesterday morning. Lovell knew that the detective had talked to Sophie, whom Hannah had called that morning, and even a neighbor, who had confirmed that Lovell’s car had remained in the driveway during the nights before and after she went missing. Wasn’t interrogating the neighbors and the rest of them a little much? A thought materialized: What if one of them had heard his and Hannah’s exchange? What if the kids had said something to Duncan?

  The detective had called about an hour ago and had asked Lovell to come down to the station and bring one of Hannah’s hairbrushes, “one full of hair, if you’ve got it.” Duncan said that a bracelet, maybe hers, had turned up. A hairbrush? A bracelet? Lovell had thought that this was beginning to sound more like an investigation than a search effort.

  Now Duncan said, “Just so you know, we found the bracelet on a beach in South Boston.”

  “Southie?”

  “Yep,” he said. “Carson Beach. Be right back . . .” He left Lovell alone.

  Lovell dropped his eyes to the eggplant-colored carpet. The room was still. He had the sensation of standing alone in the eye of a storm. Every second of this grew stranger and more unnerving. He thought for some reason of Boston University and Doug Bowen. Neither had anything to do with South Boston, as far as he knew.

  Lovell had given Hannah several bracelets over the years. Had she gone for a walk and, thinking back on that last night, decided to heave one of them into the ocean?

  Duncan returned and handed Lovell a heavy plastic bag with a bracelet inside. The silver links, the small amber beads. He had gotten her this one for their last wedding anniversary. Lovell’s mouth went dry. The detective waited, his thumbs dug into his pants pockets.

  Lovell set the bag on the desk. “Yes,” he finally said.

  “Any reason she might have been in Southie?”

  “I was just trying to figure that out. We don’t know anyone there.”

  Duncan made his mouth impossibly small and clapped his hands together. “One of the girls at the flower store? Hannah called her to say she was running late for work because Janine was home sick.”

  “Janine wasn’t home sick,” Lovell said.

  “We know. Hannah made the call from Boston,” the detective said. “You look a little sick yourself, Mr. Hall.”

  Lovell blinked. “Please call me Lovell. I have no idea where my wife is right now. I’m standing here in a police station identifying her bracelet. So yes, I don’t feel so well. Do you have people searching South Boston?”

  “Can you give me your best guess why Hannah might have driven herself to Carson Beach?”

  “I honestly—I’m telling the truth—I have no idea,” Lovell said. The argument might explain some part of what was going on right now but certainly not everything. “I assume you checked with her sister? Her parents?”

  “We did.”

  “I know you talked to her friend Sophie. None of them knew anything?”

  “Not a thing.” Duncan cleared his throat. “Jeez, you really are tall. I guess Hannah’s tall too for a woman, but not as big as you are.”

  Lovell almost wished this man would come out and accuse him of something.

  If he admitted that they’d had an explosive exchange the night before she left, if Lovell admitted that Hannah may well be off somewhere planning her next move, deciding whether to even stay married to him, the police would probably halt their search. If they had even begun it. He would rather have them drag her back home to him than leave her alone out there, pissed off or defeated or distressed and vulnerable in some place that might not be all that safe.

  “Any other insights you can give us?” Duncan asked.

  “I guess not,” Lovell finally said.

  “Need you to sign this,” the detective said, beginning to shuffle through a stack of papers on his desk. He handed Lovell a ballpoint pen and a clipboard that held a triplicate form onto which his alibi had been typed. He had been at work during the time Hannah disappeared, save the twenty minutes he went out to grab lunch and the brief time later when he had to get something he had left in his car. Lovell signed his name. Duncan muttered his thanks and told him they would be in touch.

  THAT EVENING, ETHAN came and crawled onto his father’s lap on the couch, though he hardly fit anymore. “Come sit with us?” Lovell asked Janine, patting the space next to them.

  She sat across from them in an easy chair with her chin resting on her knees. She shook her head, her eyes on the floor. She had been uncharacteristically subdued since yesterday. Her tangled sand-colored hair fell around her face and down her shoulders. With her wide jaw and thin, jutting nose, she resembled Lovell more than Hannah. Ethan had inherited his mother’s looks.

  “I’m scared,” Ethan finally said.

  Lovell wrapped his arms around his son, his heart thumping against Ethan’s narrow back. “I know.” He could not think of how to set their minds at ease.

  Yesterday afternoon, Ethan’s teacher phoned him at the office to ask why no one had come for pickup. “He’s been waiting here for an hour,” she told him. Lovell hurried to close out of a labyrinthine power dissipation model at work and, perplexed and miffed, drove during the onset of rush hour to pick up Ethan.

  Lovell threw together a dinner of grilled cheese and deflected the kids’ questions about Hannah in whatever way he could, trying to hide the wave of dread mounting within him. He surreptitiously peered around the kitchen and living room for some note or clue, a missing suitcase or toiletries. Her car was gone, her jacket and purse too, but nothing else, as far as he could tell. He assured the kids that she would show up soon or at least call, of course she would. She had probably forgotten about some old friend’s birthday, he told them, or a dinner with her sister. The two met for dinner or drinks every month or so. The kids appeared to buy it, as did Lovell to some extent after a while. “If you can, try not to worry,” he told them.

  After three games of Boggle and a repeat episode of Nova about the spread of eelgrass in some coastal California lagoon, after more secret searches of every room in the house, including their basement, he ushered the kids upstairs to bed and promised to send Hannah directly to their rooms the minute she got home so that she could kiss them good night.

  He kept his arms tight around Ethan’s now.

  A commercial for Mr. Clean was on the TV. Janine picked at a Band-Aid around her finger. “How come it’s always women in these ads for cleaning shit?”

  “Language,” Lovell said.

  “No men clean their houses?”

  “That’s a woman’s job,” Lovell tried to joke. She saw everything in black and white, and sometimes it was difficult not to parody.

  “You’re hilarious,” she deadpanned. It was unfortunately true: he rarely picked up a mop or a broom.

  “That policeman asked me what we talked about in
the car when she drove me to school that morning,” Ethan said. He wriggled free from Lovell’s arms. “And where I thought she might be, like a million questions about all the places she goes and people she sees and why—like he thought I was keeping something secret.” He went back to the beanbag that he had brought downstairs from his bedroom.

  “They did?” Lovell said. “Did they ask you anything about our family or, or about me?”

  “Just whether you guys ever fought or anything.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Janine watched Lovell.

  “I said I guess so, that sometimes you guys argued.”

  Lovell exhaled. He supposed Ethan could have said worse. Ethan or Janine may well have heard only pieces of what was said, pieces that without context would have sounded awful. Lovell was too often mistaken by members of his family for what he was not: self-absorbed rather than thoughtful; blunt, not honest; impatient, not logical. It was idiocy. What had Janine told the policeman? Lovell was afraid to ask her.

  They watched TV quietly for a while, but he could hardly sit still. He hated that he was forced to view his own kids with suspicion right now. He hated that he was secretly agonizing about himself.

  If nothing else, he reminded himself, he had his alibi.

  Southie. Carson Beach. It was not a place where Hannah would have gone. She would have driven to Gloucester or Rockport, where she and Sophie used to go in college, if she wanted a walk on the beach. He finally rose and went to the kitchen. Had she ever gone to Carson while at BU? He estimated the distance from her parents’ old town house to the beach.

  He scrubbed spots of Janine’s yogurt off the kitchen counter and then swept the tile floor. He made his way to the front hall and paced back and forth, his head down, his eyes on his feet.

  When he looked up, a beam of light poured through the window by the door. A woman with a microphone was standing on the sidewalk, a cameraman next to her. Was that Susan Sperck from the local news? Strange. He remembered that a house a few blocks away had burned down just the other week. Maybe there was another fire in the neighborhood. He switched on the porch light and moved closer to the window.