HOW WAS IT, JOY WONDERED, that she was ending a pregnancy and talking about ghosts? Maybe it wasn’t all that far off the mark. She knew there were all sorts of things that could come back to haunt you.
She felt cramping, and she winced. She could still hear the whir of the machine that did the suction. It seemed like an oversight; surely they could have given her headphones, like the kind they had on planes that canceled out all the noise? Or piped in heavy metal music, so that you wouldn’t have to lie here and listen to the sound of your pregnancy ending?
Maybe that was the point—they didn’t want to make it easy. They wanted you doing this with your eyes (and your legs) wide open.
Joy stared at the ceiling at a Where’s Waldo? poster, where there were a thousand penguins wearing red and white scarves and one lone guy in a striped hat. Why would you try to find Waldo? Let the poor guy stay lost.
The suction was a choke, a throttle, a throat clearing. Little vacuum, Joy thought. Cleaning up her mess.
Nine a.m.
HUGH WAS PAINTING WITH WATER. THAT’S WHAT HE CALLED POLICE work that was not only painfully boring but ultimately a complete waste of time. Today, it was processing a 2010 Toyota RAV4 that had been taken for a joyride after its owner, a college kid, left the keys in the ignition. It had been found off the side of the road, dented and reeking of pot. Christ, you didn’t have to be a detective to figure out what had happened here; or to realize that the amount of time that Hugh spent processing the car and the scene—a dusty ditch off the side of the highway—was going to exceed the value of the check the insurance company would eventually send the owner for repairs. Who wanted to spend his fortieth birthday getting the fingerprints off a stolen vehicle? He sighed as he attempted to dust the interior. It never worked, because of the texture of the dashboard, but if he didn’t do it, he’d be told he had overlooked evidence. He’d already photographed the vehicle 360 degrees and also taken pictures of the tracks in the grass made by the tires. He had noted how far back the seat was reclined, what station the radio was tuned to, what detritus lived in the console. Later today, he would have the dubious honor of contacting the car’s owner and giving him this list—gum, Kind bar, water bottle, key chain, baseball cap, receipts from a Piggly Wiggly, junk mail—and then ask the guy what else was missing. Hugh would bet his house that the owner wouldn’t be able to answer. There wasn’t a person on earth who could accurately catalog the contents of their console and glove compartment.
He stood up, feeling himself sweat beneath the collar of his shirt. He was supposed to canvass the area to see who might have heard or seen something, but he was literally six miles from the nearest exit, and the only visible evidence of humanity was a giant Confederate flag that snapped in the wind across the highway, towering over the tree line as a reminder or a threat, depending on your politics. Hugh set his hands on his hips and jutted his chin toward the flag. “Well?” he demanded out loud. “Would you like to give an eyewitness report?”
Deciding that he’d done due diligence, Hugh started back to his own car. He had to burn all these stupid photos to disk and do a shit ton of paperwork now. True, nothing was going to come of this case—they’d never find the thieves—but even if it sucked, he was going to do the right thing. This mantra was as much as part of Hugh as his height or his hair color or his lineage. True, this had not been his intended career path, but then he’d met Annabelle and they’d gotten pregnant. Somehow instead of tracking the movements of the stars at NASA, he had wound up tracking the movements of the residents of Jackson, Mississippi. He had watched Columbo, like every other kid in the eighties, and detective work had seemed an exciting backup plan. Well, the joke was on Hugh—he wasn’t thwarting jewel heists, he was dusting for fingerprints on a gas cap.
His cellphone buzzed in his pocket, and he answered, thinking it might be the owner of the vehicle. He’d left a message that morning for the kid. “McElroy,” he said.
“Hugh.”
His eyes closed. He’d conjured Annabelle, just by thinking of her. “You weren’t who I was expecting,” he said, and in the silence that followed, he turned over the implications of that sentence.
Her voice sounded like filigree, delicate and irreplicable, with a hint of a French accent that he supposed was cultivated after years of living in a foreign country. “I wasn’t going to forget your fortieth,” Annabelle said. “How are you?”
He looked around at his surroundings—the looming Confederate flag, the trampled knee-high grass, the scraped and dented car. Instead of giving an answer even he wouldn’t want to hear, he turned his back away from the highway. “What time is it there?” he asked, squinting into the sun.
She laughed. God, he’d loved that sound. He remembered playing the fool, sometimes—leaving a shaving cream mustache intentionally on his upper lip when he came downstairs in the morning—just to hear it. When had he stopped making her smile? “It’s quitting time,” Annabelle said.
“Lucky you.” There was a bubble of silence. Amazing, to think that she was so far away, and he could still hear the hesitation in her voice. “How is she?”
Hugh exhaled. “She’s good.”
Annabelle had agreed to give him custody of Wren because, she said, that way Wren could be as comfortable as possible. If her parents were splitting up, at least she got to stay at home with her friends and her father. Hugh had always believed that her magnanimous gesture was a result of guilt: she knew she had cheated; as a consolation prize, she left Hugh the best part of their marriage.
“Are you happy, Hugh?” Annabelle asked.
He forced a laugh. “What kind of question is that?”
“I don’t know. A Parisian one. An existential one.”
He imagined her with her long red hair, a waterfall that used to slip through his hands. He could still see her face when he closed his eyes—the pale eyebrows she had darkened with a pencil, the way her eyes darted left when she lied; how she bit her lower lip when he made love to her. When you lost someone, how much time had to pass before the details began to fade? Or at least the feeling that you had an unfinished edge that might unravel at any moment, until you were nothing more than a tangle of the person you used to be? “You don’t have to worry about me,” Hugh said.
“Of course I do,” Annabelle replied, “because you’re too busy worrying about everyone else.”
There were seventy-five hundred miles between them and Hugh felt claustrophobic. “I gotta go.”
“Oh. Of course,” Annabelle said quickly. “It’s good to hear your voice, Hugh.”
“You, too. I’ll tell Wren you called,” he promised, although they both knew he wouldn’t. The relationship between Wren and her mother was more complicated than the one between him and Annabelle. He felt the way he did when he misplaced something important—a little angry at himself, a little frustrated. Wren felt like she’d been the important thing that was misplaced.
“Take care of yourself,” Hugh said, his subtle way of acknowledging that her new lover couldn’t do a good job of that and she was on her own.
He hung up, savoring his small and lovely victory of a sentence.
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