And Then You Were Gone Read online

  I called out to Paolo.

  No answer.

  The cabin door clapped closed and absently swung open again. The sheets were tangled between my feet.

  I sat up.

  That did not go well.

  I dropped back to my elbows, but the horizon spun there, too, so I fell onto my back.

  “I think I’m hung over,” I announced toward the tiny door. My head rolled to the side, searching for the bottle that we’d been drinking from. After we finished the chardonnay, he’d opened something red, big, and bright, one he knew to buy. From Argentina, I remembered. I was happy he’d picked it up, actually. Because left to me, we’d have been drinking like college kids: rum and cokes, bottles of beer, tequila shots. I remembered thinking that Paolo being in charge of alcohol was a good thing, that we’d stick to wine. And I’d looked forward to waking up feeling relatively nontoxic. Except I didn’t. My body felt beaten.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, closed my eyes. I had to find something immediately to throw up in, which ended up being a dusty wastebasket. I filled it halfway, a line of spit trailing from my lips to the plastic liner. It’s not as though I didn’t drink. More often than I would have liked to admit, I turned the veritable corner from buzzed to staggering. But it had been years since I’d woken up sick.

  The rocking boat wasn’t helping.

  I’m not drinking any more of that wine, I thought. Not tonight, not ever. “Honey? Are you okay up there?”

  I wondered if it had hit him, too.

  The door slammed, then opened lazily. I imagined Paolo with his camera around his neck, his eyes on the pastel fish darting about. I pictured his steady hand, his left eye squinted closed. “Honey, come back down.” I wanted his cool hands on my back, his lips on my neck. Then I’d feel better.

  The boat rose on the crest of a wave, then dipped in its trough. I reached for the wine bottle on the bedside table and examined the remainder—it was the second we’d opened and was still a third full. My other hand stayed on my stomach, as if anchoring it.

  “If you don’t come down here right now, I’m going to kiss you without brushing my teeth. I swear I will.” I forced myself to stand and turned on the cabin’s tiny faucet. Warm water flowed into my cupped hands. I rinsed out my mouth and splashed water over my face and neck, then dried off with the bottom of my shirt, as if I were on the soccer field again and had nothing else. When I turned off the faucet there was only silence. I steadied myself on the wet countertop.

  The door was aimless in the waves. I caught and latched it as I went up the stairs, covering my eyes, knowing I’d find him, smiling, shaking his head, telling me he thought I knew how to drink.

  “What are you doing?” My voice broke on the last word as I climbed up onto the deck. I was alone.

  My heart began to pound. I took a deep breath, fighting the edge of panic rising inside my throat, just beneath the nausea.

  The horizon was nothing but sun. Looking around, I realized that we were no longer where he’d lowered the anchor—sometime during the night we’d come unmoored and drifted. The marina looked like I was peering backward through binoculars.

  “Paolo!” I screamed. Not even an echo returned.

  I looked at the water, then jerked my gaze away, recoiling. Was it possible he’d gone for a swim? Tried to swim to shore? And if so, why on earth would he do that?

  Had he fallen in? The water looked unmanageable, opaque—pressing, pressing. The lapping waves sounded like cruel laughter. I shoved aside my fear as best I could and dropped onto the deck, my chest pressing between the faint gray footprints of his deck shoes. A single leaf, streaked with autumn orange, clung to the hull. When the boat rocked down, the coldness of the water shocked my outstretched fingers.

  I stood and paced the tiny space, two steps, swiveling, repeating, until I made myself stop. My hands shook and I clasped them together. Inside me, panic pushed aside my nausea, spreading outward from my heart. It was the fear of being lost as a child, realizing the enormity of what it meant to go missing—never finding the person you love again, or a way home. Existing among strangers.

  I imagined the horror of no breath, Paolo reaching for help in the dark—how long before?

  A sob erupted from my throat.

  “No, please no,” I prayed desperately, telling myself it would be okay, that he knew how to swim—I’d seen him do it the day before. But knowing that he could swim was not the same as an explanation for where he was. It didn’t mean he was safe.

  I dropped to my knees and threw up again, this time over the side. I watched the pieces of my dinner spread and dissolve, and I could taste the stickiness of the wine. Tears streaked my cheeks. Were we the only ones who had spent the night on the water? Where had the family gone—the one with the missing keys? I pulled back my hair and let the sun warm my face, then screamed his name into a wind that swallowed my voice.

  I dug into my purse for my phone though knew I’d have no signal before I tried it. I threw it down. Then I beat the cabin door like a kid throwing a tantrum.

  There was no one to ask what to do. The feeling was like the uncertainty of a midday power outage, but much stronger—when lights, computers, appliances just blink out—half of me accepting the suddenness of a new plan—like it or not—but at the same time sensing pure terror.

  Terror too powerful to look at directly.

  Back in the cabin, I went through his things, looking for something—I didn’t know what—pulling through the pockets of his clean shorts, then tossing them onto the half-wet floor like dirty laundry. There was nothing. Of course there was nothing. I emptied out his bag, picked everything off the floor and looked though it again.

  Beneath the silver steering wheel was a radio, which seemed comical to try to use, like I was in a high school play. I flicked it on, turned a dial, and spoke into the handset.

  Nothing, then a screech, then nothing.

  I told myself to calm down, that I would figure it out. I’d call somewhere—shore, someone at a desk, and they would send a boat out to help me. They would take me back in, tow the boat, and I would reconnect with Paolo later. I told myself that.

  Then I would lovingly wring his neck for doing this to me.

  The radio crackled when I turned the dial. For a second, I heard a voice, clicked a few buttons, and spoke at the same time, like a kid with a CB. Then music played—’70s gold, something like ABBA. “Dancing Queen.” I pressed it again, turning a dial, yelling. Once, I heard a man’s voice, but he wasn’t speaking to me. I was overhearing his conversation with someone else. He muttered something. I yelled, but he spoke in a low, calm voice about his weekend, his catch. It was like searching for extraterrestrial life among the stars.

  The horizon shifted through the porthole. The impossibility of one shade of blue touching another. Back up top, I tried to gauge the distance to shore. Part of me felt that to leave was to abandon him. Another part knew I needed help.

  Sunlight glinted off the water, which was coming from a midmorning angle but seemed to arrive from every direction. I squinted. The brightness alone made me sick; it made me want to throw up again. I ran my fingers down the mainsail, slick from morning dew. I looked at the levers, the shiny rivets, touched the taut, rough ropes. Figuring that out would take forever.

  I turned to the ignition. Right—that. The orange float-thing. I stuck the key into the ignition, turned it. The little trolling motor chugged to life. I thanked God.

  This I could do.

  I yanked up the anchor, set it beside me, and a puddle the gray-green color of silt spread over the white surface.

  I called Paolo’s name a hundred more times as I splashed through the chop, little waves biting at the side of the boat like piranhas. Finally, I turned away from the emptiness, toward the marina, steering the boat like a car.

  A trail of froth bubbled up in my meager wake as I wiped tears and asked myself if he’d abandoned me, or I’d abandoned him. This is my gasp for breath a
bove the surface of this lake.

  Eventually I ran straight into the dock we’d left the afternoon before. All the birds were gone. The boat hit the dock solidly, and when the sound of the fiberglass hull scraping along wood reached the office, a teenager in deck shoes came running, waving his arms. He hopped down, looking over his shoulder toward the office window. “Hey, uh … That’s not the way to …”

  The boat might have drifted if he hadn’t dropped to his stomach to grasp the bowline. Gritting his teeth, he rolled and planted his feet, streaks of limestone gravel up the front of his blue T-shirt. He started to say something about the right way to tie off when I cut him off.

  “I need to find my boyfriend. He wasn’t with me when I woke up.”

  I leaned onto the dock, stomach scraping on the wood as I pushed myself to my feet.

  The boy’s neck was ropy, straining as he wound the rope around his forearm. “I have to get this boat secure. You can’t just—”

  I was scanning the marina, the path through the pines. Even then, part of me thought that Paolo might still appear—with two cups of coffee and a mischievous smile; that I would spend half the day furious with him and then return to having a wonderful weekend. That this might actually be funny someday.

  The boy went on as he frantically secured the boat, muttering to himself more than talking to me, “There could be some serious damage to a boat if it doesn’t. That siding is …”

  A voice came out of me that belonged to someone else. “I don’t give a fuck about the boat.”

  He stopped, looked up, held still.

  “It’s an emergency. I went out with my boyfriend yesterday, and he wasn’t on board this morning. I don’t know where he could be. I don’t know where he is.”

  The boy held up a palm and wrapped the bowline around a cleat. Light from the rippling water reflected in his gray eyes. “Can he swim?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, maybe he swam in.”

  Like I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Maybe. I hope.” I was pacing. “Have you seen him? Black hair. About this tall?” I raised my hand six inches over my head.

  His eyes followed me, the summery ease in them fading by the second. He shook his head.

  “Do people just …? I mean, has this happened before?”

  “Lady, my boss just ran out. He’ll be back in about twenty minutes.”

  No way was I going to hang out for twenty minutes. “Do you get cell service out here?” I asked.

  “Uh. Depends on the carrier.”

  “Do you?”

  “Sometimes,” he said.

  I glanced at the corner of his phone peeking out from his pocket, and before he could back away or refuse, I plucked it out and called 911.

  I handed the boy his phone and stepped back onto the boat for a last look around, as if being docked might illuminate something I’d missed before. The sound of the boy’s fast footsteps echoed off the dry dock as I opened the cabinet where Paolo had stored his camera case. My heartbeat whooshing in my ears, I slipped the camera case into my overnight bag between my still-folded clothes and set the bag on the dock as I climbed off. Paolo loved that camera, I knew, and I wanted part of him with me. Besides that, I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear watching it be potentially mishandled or, worse, dropped accidentally in the water.

  Ten minutes later, the tires of a police car crunched to a stop in the limestone gravel. The officer was an enormous man, with a pale, moonish face that made it impossible to tell his age. His hair was ballplayer short, and the polo shirt he wore made him look oddly informal—almost like an actor who’d been hired to stand in at the last minute while the real police took care of more pressing concerns. I expected him to flip open a pad, the way police do in old movies, but his fingers hovered over a tiny laptop.

  The more rushed a person feels, the slower everyone else seems to move. He was no exception. He introduced himself, but my mind couldn’t store the words. I was a hundred feet ahead. I tried explaining but I couldn’t. The tall cop typed at a glacial pace. He looked at me like I was insane.

  I looked for the teenager who’d tied off the boat. I wanted some kind of support—as if he might validate the truth of my story, having witnessed the sincerity of my panic. But he’d retreated back behind the rental counter, slouching with the intention of invisibility.

  I gave Paolo’s physical description, down to the details of the clothes he was wearing—medium T-shirt, gray deck shoes.

  “So tell me, from the start, what happened yesterday,” the cop said. His shadow was the exact length of mine across the sun-bleached boards.

  I tried to sound calm. I told him how we arrived, got on the boat.

  “You were getting along?” he asked. “Any arguments yesterday?”

  “No.”

  “Just a regular start to a vacation,” he confirmed.

  “Yes.”

  I desperately wanted to see what he was typing.

  “Then we took the sailboat out. Late afternoon. Paolo knows the water, knows boats. He did everything, I didn’t pay much attention. He wanted to spend the night on the boat.”

  “Rented from this marina?” He pointed.

  “Yeah, right here, this one,” I explained. I told him about fishing, about the other family.

  He perked up like a retriever. “Did you catch their names?”

  “No.” I thought, trying to form their images in my mind.

  “Maybe they were staying near here? Maybe he went back in with them?”

  “No, we don’t know them.” I shook my head. “They were gone before sunset.”

  “Okay.”

  He snapped the laptop shut and walked up to the marina office.

  When I looked at the water, I wasn’t sure if what I was seeing was real anymore. It looked set-like, like something that had been specifically designed to be horrific.

  I checked my phone again for service. I needed a familiar voice—my mother, or Marty, my first supervisor, who now served in the role of my dad. But to tell them what? I had no idea.

  Soon, people arrived. Handshakes and low voices.

  From doing evaluations during my postdoc, I knew enough about police work to understand the basics of what was happening, but no more. I understood who was who, what questions they would probably have. What they were looking for. Not that I had any intention of outsmarting anyone. I wanted to help but I could hardly hold myself together.

  Another minute and two more officers appeared. One in uniform, one not. They wanted to look around the boat. I nodded, watching it rock when one, then another, stepped aboard. A minute later, they were holding up Paolo’s clothes with a wooden dowel.

  Then the tall cop was back. “We’re going to try to track down the family you mentioned. Maybe they saw something.”

  Then my ear caught the word drowned.

  “He couldn’t have drowned,” I insisted.

  The police looked up, then one looked away. “Okay,” one said.

  “I’m serious. He grew up fishing. He can swim, well. I watched him, diving for a set of keys.”

  I was raving. I didn’t care.

  Ripples reflected off the sunglasses of the cop who couldn’t look at me. His neck had the slow, mechanized swivel of an animatron.

  There was a limit to what I could do, answering these questions. One too many, and I’d break. The tall cop seemed to sense that point was nearing, pursed his lips and squinted, working the puzzle behind his eyes. He twirled a red stick in his Styrofoam cup and furrowed his brow. The others stood up against the rail, talking quietly. One of them raised a set of binoculars that reflected what remained of the sunrise. Then he dropped the binoculars, and they swayed back and forth against his round belly. I looked, but the horizon was mist. No visibility.

  On the boat, someone raised my prescription bottle.

  “Does Mr. Fererra take any prescription medication?”

  “No. That’s mine.”

  “It’s—”
>
  “For anxiety. I can’t swim.” The admission choked me. I made a determined face, but I sounded defeated.

  He nodded like I’d said some magic words. “Did he take any of that?”

  “No way.”

  Hardly pausing, the tall cop approached the same basic question with slightly different wording. “Mr. Fererra takes no life-sustaining medication?”

  Surely, he would have said something. “I wish you’d stop calling him Mr. Fererra, and yes, I’m positive. I took one when we left. He had a few glasses of wine, that’s all. It’s not like that.”

  “Do you remember how many were in the bottle yesterday?”

  “Um, ten, fifteen? I don’t take them much.”

  “That bottle looks empty to me.” I knew he didn’t mean to antagonize, but it felt as though he’d slapped me.

  We both watched as the cop on the boat shook it, then shook his head.

  “Did you two argue at all?”

  “No!” I yelled. It slipped out like a tiny bird escaping from my lungs. I gathered myself, rubbing my palms up and down the outsides of my arms as if trying to stay warm. “Look, I know you’re just doing your job. But no, we had a great night. We had dinner, then we went to sleep.”

  If there was sympathy in the officer’s eyes, it was obscured by the sunglasses he was wearing. “Has he ever done anything like this before?”

  “No,” I replied, flatly.

  “Would you mind if we had a look through the vehicle?” he asked.

  The request made me furious, but I agreed. I watched other boats heading out. People going about their usual routines. Other people spreading blankets, preparing to enjoy the lake. I watched them. From the corners of their eyes, they watched me, too.

  I ached for a simple explanation.

  Then there was a female cop with hair-sprayed bangs who wore a dolphin necklace that she tucked inside the collar of her polo shirt when she caught me looking at it. She seemed to think I should be crying. Should I have been? Would that have helped? Would people move faster if I screamed?

  Her presence made me want to call Allie, if only just to translate somehow. My old friend, working as the public affairs officer for Nashville Metro. On my college soccer team, Allie had been a scholarship player who seemed not to need the scholarship—which might normally have engendered bitterness among the other players, but she was so consistently gracious and supportive, resentment toward her was impossible. The words Allie and ally twisted in my mind. She was normally the person I called when I had any contact with the police.