All That Is Mine I Carry With Me, page 17
“I just want my mom back. But I know I can’t have that, so I just need to get used to it.”
“You’ll never get used to it.”
“How do you know?”
“I lost my father when I was young.”
“He died?”
“No, he just left. My parents split up, then we didn’t see him anymore.”
“Is that why you want to find my mom so bad?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Why do you care so much, then?”
“Maybe ’cause of you.”
“But you don’t even know me.”
“Of course I do. A little. Is there anything you want to tell me, Miranda?”
The girl said nothing.
“Well, we don’t have to talk.” He looked at her. “If you don’t feel like it.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll just sit here with you, make sure nobody bothers you.”
“Can I ask you something? When your father left, how did you know he wasn’t coming back?”
“I’m not really sure. I guess it’s like you said: I just didn’t believe in him anymore. I waited and waited, and then one day I just stopped.”
“Oh.”
Glover put his sunglasses back on and looked out at the lake, the swimmers, sunbathers. “Goodness, it’s hot,” he said.
* * *
—
Oh my, this is a sad story, isn’t it? I must be tormenting you. And things are about to get much worse, I’m afraid. But there were happy moments.
Here is my Jeff, in love:
It was around midnight. Jeff and Jamie were on the living room couch, making out with such passion they seemed to be devouring each other. Is it weird for me, the boy’s mother, to say these two young people were beautiful together? Well, I don’t care. Because my son, who had been lost, was so happy with this girl in this moment. As they kissed, he kept smiling, and his smiles interrupted the kissing, and that made her smile, too, and he had to force himself to relax his lips enough to go on kissing this pretty girl, this girl who felt to him like a gift from heaven, a gift that he did not deserve. What Jeff was feeling was not just teenage horniness—though there was plenty of that, I’m sure. It was wonder.
They kissed silently because they didn’t want to wake up the sleeping house. The relationship was a secret. It had to be, because of their parents, the weirdness of the arrangement, the possibility they might become brother and sister one day if Dan and Sarah were to marry. They couldn’t bring themselves to talk about this, to use the words brother and sister, so they simply ignored the awkward fact, kept it secret from themselves, and all the secrecy made the affair even more electric because it was theirs alone. There was no audience for it, they were not performing love for anyone but each other. Only they knew, only they understood. They were two alone.
On this night, though, they were not alone.
Dan was watching from the doorway, in the shadow of the hallway, in stocking feet. Watching his son. More intently, he was watching Jamie, who twisted her body to meet Jeff’s mouth, whose T-shirt Jeff had lifted just enough to grip her torso on either side. There was a slack, almost sorrowful expression on Dan’s face. He must have been impressed that his son had fooled him. Jeff, who was so lazy and sloppy in so many things, had been so disciplined in this.
But it was Jamie, not Jeff, who commanded Dan’s attention. You must think Dan was just horny for this girl—who, yes, might have reminded him of me at a younger age. But I think his feelings were a little like Jeff’s: he was not horny. What he felt was wonder, and yearning, not for the girl but for the passion she embodied, the possibilities. After all, Dan had once been the boy on the couch with a pretty girl in his arms, many years before. But all that was over for him now.
Somehow Jamie sensed Dan’s presence. There had not been a sound, but she pulled back from Jeff and looked toward the door.
“Did you hear something?” she whispered.
“No.”
“I think somebody’s watching us.”
“No way. They’re asleep. Come on.”
He pulled her back to him. In that moment, he did not care about the risk. My lost boy had found love. His only concern was right now—this moment, this girl, this ecstasy. The world had taken Jeff’s mother but now it had begun to repay the debt, and maybe, just maybe, he would find his way home again.
* * *
—
The last time I talked to my big sister, Kate, was the day before I disappeared, Tuesday, November 11, 1975. We spoke on the phone in the morning, as we often did, after we got our kids off to school and husbands off to work, and had a quiet moment to ourselves in our empty houses. It was our sister time. Katie was not a big phone talker generally. She was always doing something else while we chatted—reading the paper, clearing the dishes, smoking a cig, with the phone clamped between her ear and her shoulder. She had one of those princess wall phones with an extra-long cord, and you could tell when she was moving around the kitchen as we spoke. Her attention would drift in and out. So I usually did most of the talking, which, she liked to say, was my greatest talent. There was no one better to talk to. She was the smartest person I ever knew. She always knew what to do, she always knew the right answer. I was unlucky in my choice of a husband, but I had the best big sister.
That morning, I confessed to Kate that I thought Dan was getting ready to leave me.
“Did he say that to you?”
No, I told her, it was just kind of a queasy feeling. All Dan had said was that he was unhappy, but that everyone was unhappy at our age, every man anyway. Was that true?
“No, Janie, of course not. Why would every man be unhappy? It’s ridiculous.”
Well, that was what Dan had told me. I didn’t know what to do. Dan was just drifting away, losing interest. He was acting a little mean. The truth was, I didn’t trust him anymore.
“Be patient. All marriages have ups and downs, right?”
No, some have only downs.
“Jane, are you sure the problem isn’t that you want to leave him?”
I told Kate that she probably wanted me to leave him.
“Maybe,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter what I want. The question is what do you want?”
I didn’t know. Maybe we could both use a little break, a vacation from each other. A time-out. Couldn’t every marriage benefit from that?
“You mean a separation.”
What an awful word. I didn’t even know what it meant, legally.
“It means what it says: you separate. What do you think it means?”
No, I certainly didn’t want that. I didn’t want to feel like I failed at being a wife or that I was responsible for breaking up my family.
“Who says it’s you that failed? You don’t have to be unhappy forever, that’s all.”
And that was true, wasn’t it? You don’t have to be unhappy forever.
* * *
—
What did Dan want? In the end, he got rid of the woman he didn’t want (me) and he got the one he did. He got everything he wanted, but the wanting didn’t stop. Is that how all men are?
One night around nine o’clock, not quite two weeks after he had spied on Jeff and Jamie on the living room couch, Dan found himself alone with Jamie in the kitchen.
There was a palpable awkwardness between them. The girl, suspicious but not entirely sure whether Dan had watched her kissing Jeff, was eager to act as if nothing had happened. To wish away the whole uncomfortable possibility. By this point, it seemed to have worked: the old man never mentioned it, never even let on that he knew Jamie and Jeff were together. So she must have imagined the whole thing, right?
For his part, Dan could not get the image out of his mind. The girl on the couch. He could not think of her the same way, now that he knew her body was activated, weaponized.
When she first came into the kitchen, Jamie exchanged a glance with Dan, then went to the sink with her small plate and glass, which she hoped to rinse quickly, file away in the dishwasher, and slip out of there, away from him. But there was a clutter of dishes in the sink, and she felt an implicit duty to clean up the entire mess, to be a good guest in the Larkins’ home—which was not and would never be her home.
So she stood at the sink for a few minutes, her back to Dan, saying nothing, quick-rinsing one dish after another, trapped. She did not hear Dan come up behind her, and when she felt his hand on her, weighing her right buttock, she froze for a moment, wordless, before she could gather herself enough to spin away from him and say, “Oh my God, what are you doing? What is wrong with you?”
“Sorry. I misunderstood.” But he wore a satisfied little smirk that communicated his true feelings: not sorry, no misunderstanding, certainly no regret.
“You are such a creep,” she said, rightly. “I have to get out of here.”
She ran upstairs.
When she got to her room and slammed the door, Dan had not moved but was still smiling, not at her reaction, I think, but at the memory of touching her, the feel of her, the weight of her bottom lingering on his palm. Whatever would happen next, whatever price he would have to pay, he seemed to think the grope had been worth it.
I tell you: this was not the man I married.
* * *
—
The cops brought Dan in one last time to question him, on the morning of Tuesday, January 17, 1978. They must have known the case was lost. They had been waiting for new evidence to turn up; none ever did. As a practical matter, the investigation had already ended.
Dan certainly understood the situation. The detectives had asked him politely to come to the Newton police station for an update, a bit of theater that would not have been necessary if they could have brought him in the usual way, in handcuffs. They had been reduced from bullying to begging. So Dan accepted, blithely.
He was shown into an interrogation room, one he had been in twice before for interviews on this case. He entered with his usual rooster strut, wearing a tailored suit and a blood-red tie.
Across the table, seated in a row: two state police detectives and Tom Glover. And in the corner of the room, a technician of some kind wearing a funereal dark suit, seated at a boxy machine that, from the back, might have been anything at all but that Dan immediately recognized.
“The gang’s all here,” he said
On Dan’s left was a big mirror. He stepped up to the glass and tapped it with one knuckle, making a hollow sound, then he slipped off his eyeglasses and held his nose right up to the surface of the mirror and peered into it.
“Who else is watching? Am I allowed to ask?”
“Couple of detectives, a DA.”
“Well, why don’t we just invite them all in, since we all know who’s here anyway? Wouldn’t that be more honest?”
“It’s better if you just have a seat here with us,” the lead state police detective said. This man—his name was Freeman—had a buzz-cut, square-jawed look like an old Marine. Dan found him thoroughly uninteresting. Not a worthy foe.
“Have it your way,” Dan said. “So much for honesty.”
There was one chair on the side of the table opposite the detectives. Dan slid this chair back from the table so that he had room to cross his legs. After arranging his jacket to avoid creasing it, he crossed his arms, too, so that he presented himself to the cops as a complicated knot.
The second detective, brighter looking—and higher ranking, Dan presumed—said, “We’d like to end this today, one way or the other.”
“Would you? So you have some news for me, then?”
“No.”
“No updates, no breakthroughs?”
“No.”
“Is this being recorded?” Dan glanced around the room. “I have a right to know that.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Good. And your friend here, Silent Sam”—he nodded toward the man in the corner—“who is he?”
“A polygraph expert.”
“Oh, a polygraph expert. Is that like a phrenology expert? A voodoo expert?”
“It’s a lie detector expert.”
“Oh, good Lord, are you this desperate? You have no idea what happened to my wife, do you? All this time and you have nothing.”
“We’d like you to take a lie detector test.”
“Forget it.”
“Why? What are you afraid of?”
“I’m afraid of charlatans like Silent Sam over there.”
“Why would you refuse a lie detector unless you’re lying?”
“Really? We’re going to do this? All right, please make sure the following statement is recorded and included in your reports of this interview: I would refuse a lie detector because there’s no such thing as a lie detector, and you know it. It’s a bunch of hocus-pocus. You’re going to hook me up to a machine to measure my blood pressure and my heart rate, and from that you’re going to guess whether or not I’m lying? Please. What you have there—and I’m being kind—is an anxiety detector. That’s all you can measure. The trouble is, some people can lie without getting anxious. And some people—most people—will get pretty damn nervous if you drag them into a police station, hook them up to that machine, and accuse them of murder.”
“An innocent man would jump at this chance.”
“An innocent fool, maybe. Why don’t you try a Ouija board instead?”
“Are you refusing the test?”
“How about this, detective: You take the test. We’ll hook you up to the machine, and I’ll cross-examine you right here and now. I’ll ask you questions, I’ll accuse you of murdering my wife. What do you want to bet I can make your heart race a little?”
“Are you refusing the test, Mr. Larkin?”
“Oh yes, I am refusing the test. And for the record, and for the men behind the mirror and for the evening news, I am also refusing to let you perform a séance or read my palm or ask the Amazing Kreskin what happened to my wife.”
“You realize I’ll have to draw an inference from the fact you refused the test.”
“And what inference is that?”
“Consciousness of guilt.”
“Ah. I think you’ve already drawn that inference. Here’s the inference I’m drawing: you all failed. Your assignment was to solve this case and you failed. I begged you—I begged you—to find my wife, and you failed. All of you. And I promise you—believe me, I do not bluff—if I read in the paper that I refused this test today, I will say in public what I just said here, and I assure you the story people remember will not be ‘Man Kills Wife,’ it’ll be ‘Clueless Cops Botch Case.’ I do not just sit back and take punches; I punch back. You will not bully me. This is my business, this is what I do.”
Dan stood up and buttoned his suit coat. He always enjoyed making speeches, especially when he got to dress down men taller than himself, which was most of them. But it must have bothered him that Tom Glover had remained silent.
He said, “What about you, Mr. Glover. The smartest man in the room is usually the quietest. What do you think about all this?”
“I think you killed your wife.”
* * *
—
On my last day—Wednesday, November 12, 1975—I stirred from sleep at the sounds of Dan showering and dressing. He was never very quiet. He seemed to think that the noise he made was a kind of service to the rest of the family, a gentle way of waking everyone up. So he would blow-dry his hair with the bathroom door open, or whistle or hum as he went about his morning routine. He was evidently in a good mood that morning. He was not going to the office or to court, he said; he had a brief to write and would spend the day at a law library downtown. That meant he could stay at home a little later than usual and even drive Miranda to school if she wanted (of course she did). He wore his usual dapper suit, however, because you never knew when you might be pulled into court.
So we had a rare family breakfast together, if you could call it a family breakfast with the kids drifting through the kitchen in various stages of getting dressed, gathering up their books and gym clothes, wolfing down their food, while I assembled three lunches for them.
Dan sat at the center of this chaos eating his muffin with a fork and knife, his red necktie flung over his shoulder. Since he never helped get the kids off to school in the morning, he was at a loss how to pitch in. But he was unusually kind to me—unusually kind, I mean, by the standards of our increasingly chilly marriage. He gave me a little smile as if to say, Look at these beautiful kids and this crazy, happy home we’ve made together. As if he was just now discovering his own family.
He made me see it, as well. My three kids. And my handsome man, too, in his trim suit and fancy glasses, and his childish, innocent self-importance. How precious it all was. That breakfast made me just a little hopeful. Stupid me.
Dan waited for the boys to leave in Alex’s car. Alex was pissy because his little brother always made them late, Jeff was morose because he had to suffer Alex’s lecturing.
Car key in hand, Dan attended upon Princess Miranda, who was intent on dawdling in the house as long as possible, to make the most of her ride to school.
He even dabbed a little kiss on my cheek before he left with Miranda.
Was it all an act? I had no suspicion, certainly. Why would I?
An hour and fifteen minutes later, he came back.
I heard his car pull down the driveway and the back door open.
I called downstairs, “Dan? Are you all right?”
“Yeah, just forgot something.”
It didn’t feel right. He never forgot anything, this meticulous man.
