Lisa Unger - Die For You

“And the rest?”

“Accidents. More rarely, murders. And sometimes people just want to disappear.”

Something about the tone of her voice made me feel foolish, ashamed. Like I was one of a hundred women she’d talked to that night whose husbands just hadn’t come home. Honey, he left you , she wanted to say. Wake up .

The natural thing for me to do then would have been to call my sister and her husband, Erik, to tell them what was happening, to get their support. But I didn’t do that. I couldn’t bring myself to call Linda; I’d have to tell her about the affair then, wouldn’t I, to give them the full picture? I couldn’t face it. For all the same reasons, and a few others, I didn’t call Jack, either. His antipathy toward Marcus was unexpressed but palpable just the same.

Jack and I had a complicated history. And beyond that, if Marc later learned that I’d called Jack in a moment of crisis, it would confirm all Marc’s past accusations about our friendship. Marcus disliked our closeness, how often we spoke, claimed it was a shade beyond appropriate for a professional friendship. In fact, my relationship to Jack had come up in my worse arguments with Marc. He thought that I told him too much, that we saw each other too often, that the way he touched me was too familiar.

You don’t understand our friendship .

An angry laugh. Then: I understand your friendship perfectly. I think it’s you who doesn’t understand. You’re too naive, too trusting .

Please .

Of course, since his sleazy affair, Marcus had less to say about Jack. His commentary was reduced to annoyed glances.

BUT I WASN’T thinking about any of that now. I was just hearing that horrible scream, my mind alive with dark imaginings. As I’d dressed and gathered photographs, I tried to calm myself by thinking of explanations for the phone call-maybe he’d lost his phone, or it had been stolen, and what I heard had nothing to do with him. Maybe he had left, was curled up in someone else’s bed right now, had tossed his phone in a trash can on his way out of our life. Obsessively, I kept hitting Send on my phone, getting his voice mail over and over. Eventually, with the sun rising, I’d headed out to report him missing but I’d wound up at his office instead, standing outside, hoping for something to end this nightmare before it began.

FINALLY, I WATCHED Rick strut up the street past the cute shops and trendy cafés, tapping on his BlackBerry oblivious to my waiting by the staircase. He was tall, lanky with a mass of black curls, a thin, carefully maintained beard and sideburns. He wore a pair of faded denims, a T-shirt that read Love Kills Slowly beneath a thick leather jacket hanging open in spite of the cold. He walked right by me, took the stairs easily, light on his feet.

“Rick,” I said.

He looked up startled from the slim black device in his hand. It took him a second to place me in this context. He didn’t look well, pale and exhausted, harried.

“Isabel,” he said, a frown sinking into his forehead. “What’s wrong? What are you doing here?” He looked around, behind me, up and down the street.

“Marc didn’t come home last night,” I said. I watched his brows lift in surprise, his eyes glance quickly to the left, then come back to me-thinking of a lie, a way to stall. Before he could come up with one, I asked, “Was he really here when I called?”

Rick shoved the BlackBerry into his pocket and looked down at the concrete. I noticed the debut of coarse, wiry grays in his hair, of ever-so-faint crow’s-feet around his eyes.

“No,” he said simply. “He wasn’t here. He never came back after his meeting yesterday. Never called.” I felt the cold wash of disappointment, a deepening of my fear. “Come inside, Iz. It’s cold.”

I followed Rick up the stairs, thinking, trying to establish a time line. Marcus hadn’t phoned me after his meeting as he’d promised to do. I’d starting calling around three in the afternoon to see how it went. At that point I wasn’t even remotely concerned; he was so often absent-minded about our personal life, totally focused on business during the workday. It wasn’t uncommon for him to forget promises to call. My calls to him went straight to voice mail-not uncommon, either. I wasn’t even that concerned when he didn’t come home for dinner. But as Rick and I neared the top of the creaky slim staircase, I had the ugly dawning that no one had heard from Marcus since early yesterday.

On the landing, I wrestled with the hope that we’d find him inside, having slept on the couch in his office, maybe hungover. Izzy , I’m sorry. Things went badly at the meeting. I went to have a drink and had too much. Forgive me . Even though nothing like that had ever happened before, I imagined it vividly as Rick punched in his security code, turned the key in the lock, and pushed open the heavy metal door. I imagined it so hard that for a moment it was almost true; I almost felt the flood of relief, the blast of fury.

But no. The office was silent, empty. Rows of desks, huge gleaming monitors, industrial-cool exposed vents and pipes in the ceiling. Marc’s glass-walled office was dark, orderly. As we moved into the space, the electronic tone of a ringing phone sounded like a bird trapped inside a computer. Ricky dropped his bag and ran for it.

I watched him until he gave me a head shake to let me know it wasn’t Marc or anything to do with him. I wandered into my husband’s office, opened the light on the desk. I saw Rick glance at me through the glass, the phone still cradled between his ear and shoulder, as I sat in Marc’s large leather chair, put my fingers on the cool metal of his desk. I stared at our wedding picture; we both looked so blissfully happy, it almost seemed staged. Behind us, a glorious sunset waxed orange, purple, pink. I sifted through a pile of papers and manila folders, glanced at sticky notes on the lamp and on the phone, looking for what I didn’t know. Then I booted up his computer. Rick entered while I was doing this; he looked uncomfortable.

“He doesn’t like anyone to be in here, Isabel.”

“Fuck off, Rick,” I said quietly, without heat.

He glanced down at his feet again, shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and hiked his shoulders up so high he looked like a vulture. I thought he was too old for the urban-chic look he was sporting. He needed a visit to Barneys, needed to maybe grow up a little. Marcus was the polished one in suit and tie, classic fashion with a trendy edge. Rick had fully cultivated his programmer-punk look and aura, down to the pasty white skin that seemed permanently bathed in the glow of a computer screen. I always thought it should be Marcus who interfaced with people, but he hated that part of the business. It was Rick and a team of account managers who pitched prospective clients, fielded inquiries, handled the ever-escalating needs of their customers. Marcus was the brains of the company, rarely seen but controlling everything. Rick was a little bit of a marionette. I wondered if he ever resented it.

“Do you know where he is?” I asked him. He opened his mouth to answer but I interrupted. “Do not lie.”

He seemed to look at something far behind me. I examined his face. What did I see there? Concern-maybe even a little fear. He shook his head, curls bouncing. “No, I don’t know where he is. I-I wish I did.”

“When he didn’t come back from his meeting, when he didn’t call all day-you didn’t think that was unusual? Cause for concern?”

He lifted his palms.

“What are you saying?” I asked, angry, incredulous. “That it wasn’t unusual?”