Free He's Gone by Deb Caletti

Kristen say about this? Do they have any idea where he is?”
    “Kristen said she’ll make some calls. Bethy …” I shake my head. “ ‘Maybe he finally got smart.’ ”
    “She’s such a bitch.”
    “I don’t think they were too worried until last night, when I told them I called the police.”
    Abby’s forehead wrinkles in concern. “Mom, I don’t know how to ask this … but was he depressed or anything? I mean, sometimes he can get kind of down. Grandma thought he might be, you know, upset enough to—”
    “She reads Psychology Today and thinks she can diagnose people. Ian, his religion … Suicide’s not an option. I don’t think it’s an option. He loves his work, he loves—”
    “You.”
    Abby and I look at each other. In my head, I play the scene again. We are in the car. Ian’s face is grim in the light of the passing streetlamps. We’d had words, but it is more than that. It goes deeper. I could make a hundred guesses—I wasn’t friendly enough, my laugh was too loud, I stumbled after drinking that wine, I glared at the woman with her hand on his sleeve. Ian likes things to go right. He likes the towels folded a certain way; he likes the car vacuumed a certain way; he likes an email to be written a certain way. He doesn’t like errors of balance or manners or grammar. He never makes mistakes, I swear. Never a misstep. It can get exhausting, trying to measure up. You start to feel as if you’re on a perpetual job interview.
    After that party, I was tired. This, I do remember. I got into bed. I didn’t think about Ian, because I was sick of thinking about Ian. There were the cool sheets, sleep.
    “You guys are happy, right?” Abby asks. “It seems like it.”
    “Of course!” But this sounds wrong. It’s too cheerful under the circumstances. It’s obviously what you say to a daughter so she won’t worry. I’m not sure what it even means, happy . We haddone so much to find our happiness. We had worked so hard and struggled so much to get to it. Happy could be like anything else you worked too hard to get—an expensive vacation, say, that you saved for, and gave up other things for, and dreamed of, in some location that you flew long and difficult distances to reach. After hours of jet lag and waiting in dirty airports, you could find yourself on the shiny, disappointing shore, exhausted and sick from foreign water, wondering how you possibly got so far from home.
    I go through it again. The party, the drive home, the grim face. The cool sheets. The bliss of rest.
    There were more weekend parties at their house, the baseball team’s end-of-season bash, the neighborhood gang 4th of July, someone’s birthday. Mary must have just finished tossing paper napkins and washing glasses before she began planning for the next get-together. It was distraction, I guess, the way some people keep the TV on all the time so they don’t have to hear their own thoughts. When we were with them, it was obvious how the lines between the couples were drawn—Mark and Mary, with all they had in common; Ian and me, with all we did. Mark and Mary were physical people, who wanted to drink and laugh and spend. Ian and I loved books and music and quiet places. He’d take me into their living room and show me his old albums. He had his father’s Tony Bennett, and he had the Cars and Leo Sayer (which we thought was pretty hilarious, Leo with his big afro). He had Patty Griffin and Emmylou Harris and the Clash. He’d play me songs he loved that I loved, too, while Mary and Mark drank more beers and margaritas and Bloody Marys and joked with the crowd in the other room.
    My friends are asking where you came from , Ian said to me asJohn Prine played. Toby and Renee, especially . Toby and Renee were longtime buddies of the Kellers. They’d all lived in the same neighborhood in the Silicon Valley before moving to the Northwest. Renee thinks you’re too flirtatious. I think she’s jealous because you’re