I thought better of sharing that Amy had suffered similarly. “I’m so sorry.”
Andrea grunted.
I was about to excuse myself to check her phone when she spoke again:
“... could you... ”
She was holding her foot, staring up at me hopefully. I didn’t understand what she was asking me to do. Then I did and I faltered. While the tone of her voice — of our entire relationship — had in it not one iota of sexuality, I had never touched her except to exchange wary hugs.
Like most anxious people she was highly attuned to any suggestion of wrongdoing. She lay down again and shrank into a ball. “Forget it.”
“I—”
“I said never mind.” She rolled over, hugging the pillow. I wanted to shake her, demand that she sit up and talk to me; could she please, for once, pause the Andrea Show. The shirt drooped against her ribs. She had lost weight, not a small amount.
Amy was thirty-three. We’d gotten pregnant with Charlotte by accident. The current pregnancy was planned but nearly as effortless. Say what you will about Luke’s shortcomings — I’ve said plenty — he loved my daughter and was a good uncle to her, and I believed he would do the same for the new baby. When I called to share the news he congratulated me enthusiastically.
Andrea was forty-four, three years older than Luke. She’d never offered us congratulations. If the subject arose at Edison family brunch, she didn’t leave the table or make snide comments or do anything so overt. She didn’t participate, either, biding her time until a new subject arose, as though pregnancy and children were as arcane and unrelatable as Hammurabi’s code.
I looked at her now, fetal on the mattress, and thought about her loud disavowals of Western medicine. I thought about the lab-made hormones coursing through her and the desperation that had driven her to resort to them.
Her eroded body, radiating tension. Her feet, small and distended and unwashed.
I sat on the bed, lifted her ankles onto my lap, and began massaging the soles of her feet. She made a brief show of resistance and went limp.
“Too hard?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Let me know.”
“He does this every night,” she said miserably. “Every night, until I fall asleep.”
I nodded.
“He’ll come home,” she said. “He has to.”
I let a minute go by. “How do you guys coordinate your schedule? Do you share a calendar?”
“No.”
“Where’s his computer?”
“He keeps it at work.”
“He doesn’t bring home a laptop or anything?”
“I’ve asked him not to.” She yawned and scratched her upper arms. “God, I’m so itchy.”
“I’m thinking of anything that could tell us what he’s up to. What about his email account?”
“What about it?”
“He has two, right? Work and personal? Do you know either of the passwords?”
“I’m not going to tell you that.”
“You check. Or put the password into my phone.”
“I said no, Clay.”
The wind keened.
“Do you have a key to the Camaro?” I asked.
“Why do you care about his car so much?”
“I have a friend in the market. I thought maybe Luke’d be interested.”
She didn’t react to the obvious lie. “I don’t have a key. I never drive it.”
“Does he keep a spare around? In the car shelter?”
“I have no idea.” She yawned again. “You can look if you want.”
The candle at her bedside guttered and went out.
I said, “Is he keeping up with going to meetings?”
No reply.
I thought she might’ve nodded off. I leaned over. Her eyes were open.
“He’s clean,” she said.
“You’re sure of that.”
“I’m his wife.”
“All right. I’m going to take a quick peek at the phone. What’s the PIN?”
“Our anniversary.”
“Remind me, please.”
She did.
“I’ll put it back in your car,” I said. “Are you going to be all right?”
She tugged up the blanket.
The Galaxy’s lock screen showed Andrea and Luke in hiking gear, holding hands on a rocky outcropping. I keyed in the PIN, unleashing an avalanche of notifications, an indication that the phone had been off for some time.
I called him. It struggled to connect, and his voice came through chipped into digital packets.
You’ve reached Luke Edison at Bay Area—
The log showed several missed calls from him, all made the day before between two thirty and five thirty p.m.
No voicemails. No recently deleted voicemails.
I opened the text messages. The thread with Luke was at the top of the list.
One unread.
Sun, Oct 1, 5:54 PM
Baby I’m sorry
Chapter 5
Spam overflowed the phone’s inbox. The most recent email from Luke was weeks old, a forwarded invitation to the Bay Area Therapeutics Labor Day cookout. Vegan and gluten-free options available.
When he and Andrea communicated electronically, texting was their medium of choice.
I scrolled up the thread. They sounded like any happily married couple, covering practical matters (pick up chicken feed; home by seven), sharing photos and jokes, proffering affection.
Also a few squabbles. Luke had canceled a doctor’s appointment, arousing Andrea’s ire.
Call them and reschedule TODAY
Nothing suggested real trouble.
Nothing explained his final message.
Baby I’m sorry
The timing gnawed at me.
Sunday, five fifty-four p.m. Soon after the power went out.
Right around the time of Rory Vandervelde’s death.
What did Luke have to be sorry about?
I texted him from Andrea’s phone.
Can you call me please
The wind chimes clanked and banged.
Are you there I wrote.
Please call when you get this
Call your brother too
If Luke and Andrea shared a plan, his phone ought to show up in her device-finding app.
It didn’t.
I debated whether to take the Galaxy with me. Andrea clearly didn’t want it around; in that sense I’d be doing her a favor.
But I’d told her I would put it back. She might wake up to the fact that her husband wasn’t home, panic, and rush to her car to check. I zipped the phone in the pouch, tucked the pouch in the Leaf’s glove box, and crossed the grass toward the car shelter.
It was sorely out of place, a ludicrous contradiction to their carbon-neutral lifestyle. Oil cans littered the concrete pad. The surrounding soil was stained with coolant and paint overspray. Luke had stockpiled enough gasoline to supply a Parisian riot.
That was my brother. Meek and macho. Thoughtful and careless. Generous without warning and staggeringly self-involved.
The shelter’s tarp walls had been drawn back and secured to the posts with bungee cords, like a crude canopy bed. A chain saw with bark-crusted teeth hung from a hook. Grubby rags; a mechanic’s creeper; extension cords and buckets and jacks. Everything looked well used. By comparison, the repair station in Vandervelde’s garage was the Sistine Chapel.
No spare key on a nail.
A mug sat atop the tool chest. I sniffed coffee, stale and cold.
I went through drawers. No keys there, either.
Bins held paint cans, mementos of cars come and gone.
Cherry red: ’73 Dodge Challenger, the first car he bought after his release. He wasn’t allowed to drive yet. The DMV had deemed him a negligent operator and suspended his license indefinitely. He was working at Walmart and living with my parents rent-free. They’d hired a lawyer to help him get his license back. Presumably they gave him money for the Challenger, too. He picked it up in wretched shape, on the cheap. Whenever I stopped by I’d hear him hammering away in their garage.