He reaches out and touches my hand, his thumb caressing my palm. Despite my anger, a thrill goes through me. He hasn’t touched me in months. His hand slides up my arm and strokes my hair. It feels delicious. I tilt my head back and close my eyes. He kisses my neck, softly, leaning in toward me. His body is warm against mine. He is aroused. By me or Melinda?
“Mommy, I’m hungry.” Hannah is standing in the doorway of the living room.
Greg jumps as if caught doing something wrong. I give him a wry smile. Later, I mouth. The evening passes, dinner, bath, bedtime. Slowly, Greg retreats back into himself. The moment has dissipated. I try to draw him out, be more ‘Melinda-ish.’ It doesn’t work. By the time I come back downstairs after putting the girls to bed, he’s asleep on the couch. Frustrated, I go upstairs. Alone.
At two, I hear him walking around downstairs—his nightly wandering. I think I hear his voice, but I can’t tell if I’m dreaming. I drift back to sleep. When I wake up in the morning, he has left for work. It’s Monday. Tomorrow, he will leave for a business trip to San Diego.
Chapter 17
One thought plagued my mind regardless of what I was doing, and I could not break free from it. Is Greg in San Diego? I’d stayed up all night more than once, looking for the link between San Diego, California, and Rochester, New York. I couldn’t find one, except for the fact that Advent sites were in both places. His secret life, as I’d come to refer to it, had to be linked to his job.
I began seeing a therapist, a bespectacled fifty-something woman whose office was more like a day spa with sandscapes and trickling fountains. She played Enya softly in the background, and her office had woven tapestries hanging from wooden dowels on the wall. The place was calming, and I found myself thinking of it in moments of despair. She advised me to channel my fixation constructively into my children and reminded me to let the police focus on finding Greg.
After five months, the police hadn’t found any major clues as to Greg’s whereabouts. Detective Reynolds still followed his breadcrumbs, but his updating visits were less frequent. The FBI became peripherally involved, but because no one could be sure Greg wasn’t missing of his own volition, they wouldn’t fund a task force to aid the Hunterdon County police department. Greg’s picture appeared on the FBI’s missing person’s website, and Detective Reynolds had permission to use FBI resources should he find information leading to Greg. But Greg had vanished, gone without a trace.
Most of the time, I was resigned to the fact that Greg would never return. I didn’t believe he was dead. Although logically, I had no way to know, I somehow thought I would feel it. On the other hand, Greg and I had been so disconnected prior to his disappearance that insisting I would somehow “know” if he died sounded senseless.
I resumed my life, to some extent. We went back to church and attended story time at the library. Hannah returned to preschool full time, which meant her scheduled three days a week, as opposed to the sporadic times I remembered to take her in the first three months after Greg’s disappearance. I frequently felt like an observer of my life, rather than someone actually partaking in it. I read to the children and periodically played the piano and sang. But I watched things around me happen and felt nothing.
I had yet to touch the inheritance. I didn’t need the money yet, and I fluctuated between repulsion and wanting to spend the whole thing on something lavish that Greg would have despised. Sometimes after the girls went to bed, I’d trawl online travel sites for exotic locales—Madrid, Paris, and the Turks and Caicos. I spent hours looking at expensive jewelry I’d never wear—large diamonds with sapphire accents, necklaces, and earrings. To where? The supermarket?
I didn’t have the courage to return to work. I was still on unpaid leave, and I felt no guilt from dipping into our savings account. My boss would periodically call to check in, and I would make the concerted effort to sound sadder and more listless than I was until the silence stretched out across the line, and out of pity or laziness—I was never sure which—she would agree to another month. Can I just fax you the leave paperwork?
Greg’s manager called to tell me that, unfortunately, the company was going to have to terminate Greg’s employment. For the first four months, Greg’s pay had continued to be deposited—I supposed from vacation time, personal time, and sick time, and then the kindness of his management—but understandably, that couldn’t go on forever. I had some financial fear, but not much. I contemplated paying off the house with the inheritance money, but knew I really needed to see a financial advisor.
In the meantime, I shape-shifted into a suburban stay-at-home mom. The real me was hollow, checked out, unavailable.