Had she told him that? She was right: he didn’t remember. He never listened when she talked, kind of like the kids who tended to prattle on about nothing, some video game or drama with friends. They know when you’re not listening, Merri had chided a million times. We all do.
Somehow, the name of that town had rattled around in his head until he Googled it when Merri said she wanted to spend a week “upstate.” They were considering buying a country house—or he was. Thinking it might be fun to check it out for a week, he searched around and found a New York Times piece “36 Hours in The Hollows” Pick apples at the Old Cider Mill; wander miles of gentle nature trails; breakfast at The Egg and Yolk; take an iron mine tour with a local guide and learn some history, yadda yadda.
Wolf went to VRBO and impulsively rented Clarabel’s Lake House. It all happened inside an hour, none of the usual back and forth between him and Merri—should we, shouldn’t we, can we get away, aren’t we spending too much money? In fact, he didn’t even ask until after he’d booked it. She was happy enough about it, though. He remembered feeling like it was meant to be, the perfect getaway. And did they ever need it.
Merri had been trying to wean herself off the pain pills she’d been prescribed for her knee surgery a year ago and was still taking. They figured she had the mettle to cut back until she could go cold turkey; and she claimed that she’d been doing that, cutting back. She’d planned to stop taking them altogether when they were away. (He had no idea that she’d brought a bottle with her, just in case. On the day Abbey disappeared, she’d taken three Vicodin before noon.)
Wolf himself was still reeling from having his piece pulled from Outside magazine. The editor was a good friend of his, so things had been handled delicately. Some of your quotes can’t be verified; sources can’t be reached. Why don’t you get me those contacts, and maybe we can reschedule the piece?
They needed a rest. The Hollows seemed like the perfect place to go to get some distance, some perspective. They’d come back refreshed, renewed—Merri would be well, he’d break up with Kristi, talk his way out of the Outside magazine thing. Everything was going to be fine. That’s how he felt as they loaded up the Range Rover and headed upstate.
But he hadn’t even been up there a full afternoon before the place—the kids and all their incessant whining and complaining and Merri’s aura of enduring yet another thing that Wolf wanted to do and she didn’t—started closing in around him. He was suffocating before they even got to the lake house. The town—with all its precious (overpriced: Christ, it wasn’t SoHo!) shops and mediocre coffeehouse, and allegedly farm-fresh ice cream parlor—fell short of his expectations. He thought it would be somehow more. In fact, what was suffocating was that he thought all of it—his life, his marriage, his kids, vacations—should somehow be more. He had these grand visions of what things should be and it was never that.
Life is not a travel magazine article, Wolf. One of Merri’s endless “grow-up” speeches. No matter where you go—no matter how the water sparkles, or how they serve champagne in flutes at sunset—you still have to haul yourself there, deal with all the moments in between, pay for it in the end. That’s real life—all the time between those beautifully filtered images you post on Facebook.
He’d texted Kristi while Merri was getting the kids some ice cream or something.
I’m dying up here without you.
Usually she texted him back instantaneously, as if she were always just waiting for him to reach out to her. This time she made him twist. She didn’t respond for more than an hour. Finally:
who told u to go?
I’m sorry. I miss you.
Kristi had, just a few days earlier, delivered an ultimatum (which was one of the real reasons he was trying to get away from her): tell Merri, or she was going to break it off. End his marriage? Destroy his kids’ lives? For a girl like Kristi? Not going to happen.
So he’d started distancing himself. Before her there had been flings, one-night stands, nothing lasting, nothing emotional. He’d expected her, like the others, to recede from the stage at his cue. But Kristi wasn’t having it. Lately, she’d been texting and calling, once even dared to ring the landline.
Someone named Kristi Blaire? Merri had called that night, reading from the caller ID but not answering. She’s one of your press contacts, right? Merri was the least jealous, least suspicious woman he’d ever met. It was one of the reasons he’d married her. Anyway, the night of that call was when he decided they needed to get away. But up in The Hollows, fully immersed in “family time,” he found that he missed Kristi.
With the kids finally zoning out in front of the television and Merri taking a shower, Wolf called her from the porch.