Theo spent a rainy Saturday archiving all the photographs of Kay he could find. From a fat album, he scanned in their wedding photographs and then dragged a few dozen images from the social media sites she haunted. He reached into the cloud and ran off prints until the color ink faded to sketches. He plucked another hundred off an old digital camera he had forgotten about, and from his phone, he downloaded a batch from Québec, the latest, the last. Some that she had taken he had never seen, and he searched for some clues, but there was nothing. Any image from that night was locked in her phone, wherever that might be, wherever she might be. He saved what could be found to the hard drive and then made two separate backups on his portables to leave nothing to chance.
A thousand faces. A thousand memories.
They had met through friends of a mutual friend at a rooftop party in Manhattan. Kay was with a man who worked in marketing. Theo had shown up alone and was having a miserable time until he met Kay on a corner of the roof overlooking the Flatiron Building. The summer humidity dampened everyone, and she had taken off her light jacket and stood in a sleeveless blouse and skirt, her bare legs and arms alluring. With a swizzle stick, she stabbed at the lemon in her melting drink. She smote him with a smile. They were the last to leave the party.
Reaching for another tissue, he wiped his wet face and blew his nose. He was surprised at how quickly he could be torn apart. The photographs were safely preserved, at least, but they only recorded a part of her story. Kay’s mother had the other pieces to the mosaic. On their trips to Vermont, she had shown him all the scrapbooks—baby’s first steps, school days, the gymnastic meets all duly memorialized by newspaper clippings and faded ribbons pressed between the leaves.
“I’m sure Theo doesn’t want to look through all that stuff,” Kay had said. “Don’t subject him to that torture, Mother.”
“But I do, I really do,” he said. “I want to know what you were like before we met.”
Dolores flashed a triumphant smile. “Now you see, Kay. I know him better than you do. Come sit by me.…”
How long had it been since he had spoken with his mother-in-law? Two months? Their conversations had been a chore and a heartache, her questions filled with recriminations over Kay’s disappearance. At first, her tone had been accusatory, looking for signs of his culpability, but in time he thought he had convinced her of his baffled grief. When he returned to the city to begin the school year, Theo tried to reassure her, despite the lack of any news. “How could you give up?” she had asked. “Why aren’t you staying in Québec to keep looking for her?” He explained that he could not quit his job. Their savings had been slowly draining away, and while the college might have considered a leave of absence, the truth was he needed the distraction of the classroom. And his translation. Thank God for Muybridge.
Her latest phone call had been one long wail of grief and frustration. “Why did she ever marry you?” Anger had bubbled between Theo and Dolores from the beginning. She resented how he had taken her daughter away from her in a time of need and had intimated on many occasions that he was too old for Kay. He bristled at her interference and how quickly she could make Kay feel guilty for having, at last, a life of her own. The accident that had put Dolores in a wheelchair had changed her, or so Kay claimed. She used to be such a sweetheart, Kay would say, but Theo was not so sure. Over the months of his courtship and marriage to Kay, he tried his damnedest to be liked by her mother, since love seemed a too-distant horizon. Why did she marry him if her mother trusted him so little?
He was so lonesome that he nearly picked up the telephone to call Dolores, just to have the chance to talk about Kay with someone who knew and loved her as well, but he could not bring himself to dial her number. And there was no one else. Kay’s few friends in the city had been solicitous at first, but they, too, had gone on with their lives, and there wasn’t a soul in New York to commiserate.
Night fell earlier than usual. Perhaps the rain hastened the darkness. Framed in the window directly across the street from his apartment, a couple sat down to dinner, an ordinary evening. Theo watched them eat, chatting over the salads, losing steam when it was time for ice cream. She took away the dishes, and he sat at the table slumped forward, holding his head in his hands, thinking deeply about a serious matter. He did not move until she returned and laid her palm on the back of his neck, and he threw an arm around her hips, pulling her close, and rested his head against the softness of her belly. They remained in this silent embrace for a long time. When they left the dining room together, shutting off the lights, Theo rose wearily and lay on the couch in front of the television.