When He Vanished Read online

  I finish cleaning up the kitchen and my mind swings to work and what’s in store. One of my patients has Lewy body dementia. Another has Alzheimer’s. We just got two new people admitted to the ward. It’s going to be a busy week.

  * * *

  Just before bed, I hear John on the phone in his study. Melody is in her room, sprawled on her bed with her headphones on and swinging her feet. Russ is playing with Lego and I get him dressed in his pajamas and we go through the ritual of brushing his teeth. Somehow he manages to spit more saliva on the bathroom mirror than he gets into the sink.

  I usher him into his father’s study for a goodnight kiss. John has his back to us, but turns around, puts his hand over the mouthpiece. For a moment I see something in his eyes, just a hint of something unfamiliar. It’s gone in an instant and he says, “Hang on a sec,” and sets the phone on the desk beside him. Still in his chair, he leans forward and spreads his arms and Russ leaps at him. John catches him and goes sprawling back, banging the desk, and he starts roughhousing with our son, nipping at his neck and growling in his ear and making him roar with laughter.

  “All right, all right . . .” I hold out my hand. “Come on, buster.”

  “Night, Dad. Love you.”

  “Love you too, buddy.”

  Russ pads over to me, yawning. I take his hand and he starts to lead me out of the study and I look back at John. I half whisper, half mouth, “Who you talking to?”

  He shakes his head and sticks out his lower lip, a dismissive face. It’s nothing.

  Then I’m pulling his door closed, tucking Russ into bed. Weird. Not that my husband and I are privy to every single detail in each other’s lives, but we’re pretty damn close. And if he’s having a talk with Bruce, either to let him down gently or because he’s getting suckered back into something, it’s odd he didn’t give any sign.

  I knew early on that John was a contender for being my partner because of the way he was so open with his life. I didn’t want secrets like I’d had with Melody’s father, Marcus. I didn’t want drama, but transparency. John was an open book, honest and straightforward about his recovery, about his doubts and his dreams. We like a lot of the same things: movies, books, shows. We vote along the same lines, have similar religious views, all the necessary ingredients for compatibility. But I’ve never really seen that look in his eyes before, and as I give Russ a kiss on his forehead and turn out his light, a coldness forms in the pit of my stomach.

  CHAPTER FIVE / THE WARD

  Sunday, March 24th

  It’s evening when Selma often gets disoriented. Sometimes she wanders around the hospital looking for her husband. Her husband died three years ago. Tonight, though, she’s sitting in her chair by the window as the daylight fades.

  “Selma?” I set the clipboard down on her bed. “How are you feeling, dear?”

  I call her that because she calls me it, too — it’s her preferred salutation for just about everyone she meets. Oh, hello, dear.

  She is lit in the soft glow of the window. I stand beside her a moment wondering if she’s aware of me. An unfinished game of solitaire shows on the laptop on the corner desk. Our patients are encouraged to play card games and use computers (with certain limitations — Twitter recently sent one octogenarian into panic-like paroxysms). They’re encouraged to read, do crossword puzzles, play games. Seeing the half-finished cards on the screen, I wonder if Selma is having some sort of episode after all, perhaps triggered by an inability to focus.

  They were Henry and Selma Ford, from Morrisonville, about an hour north, where she taught fourth grade for almost thirty years. Not wishing to induce thoughts of Henry if Selma’s fugue is unrelated, I ease down beside her, mindful of my lower back. “Selma? It’s Jane. How are you feeling?”

  What do you see out there? I want to ask, but don’t. Being haunted by government-looking SUVs is my problem, not something I wish to transfer to anyone else, especially when I’ve spent years routing the conspiracy-theorist inside me.

  Selma has a small, pretty face. Her upper lip sprouts a couple of corkscrew gray hairs she calls her “whiskers.” I see her chest rise and fall as her hands grasp the chair arms, bony knuckles protruding against papery skin. She is somehow redolent of sea air.

  “Mrs. Ford?”

  At last she blinks and regards me with faded blue eyes. I don’t see recognition in her face, but that’s okay — Selma almost never remembers me. I stick out my hand for her to touch, if she wishes. “Hi, Mrs. Ford. I’m a nurse. Do you know where you are?”

  She keeps looking at me until someone moves past the open door. A male patient shuffles along, mumbling under his breath. Another sundowner; it’s almost five o’clock and the sun sets in half an hour. Things are about to get their busiest — the time when, as John once put it, the patients at Hazleton Medical wander like acid-trippers at a Grateful Dead show.

  Knowing I can’t linger — there’s too much else to do tonight — I bring my attention back to Selma. “Mrs. Ford, you’re at Hazleton Medical Center. My name is Jane Gable. Can I get you anything? Do you need anything?”

  She keeps looking at me with those milky-wet eyes, but she’s not really seeing me. Who knows what face she conjures out of mine, what memories she’s living in.

  Selma’s dementia is mid-staged but it’s advancing rapidly. Sundowning, or “late day confusion,” is considered a symptom. The full-spectrum light beside her bed keeps the room well lit through late afternoon and evening. That way, patients hopefully skip disorientation and get solid sleep when the lights go out. Selma seems peaceful as she turns her wrinkled face to gaze outside again.

  “Well I’ll keep your door open, Mrs. Ford. Okay? If you need anything, I’m just outside.”

  I take up the clipboard and make some notes: when I was here — 5:11 p.m.; what sort of state Selma was in — peaceful but unresponsive; and I check to make sure she’s updated on all of her meds. As I’m writing, Selma mutters a few soft, unintelligible words.

  “What’s that?” I move closer.

  “A nice man.” She’s still looking out of the window.

  I bend down to track her line of sight. Poplars line the sidewalk and a gray house with brown shutters sits across the street in the abandonment of late afternoon. A green car rolls slowly past.

  “You see someone out there, Selma?”

  “He was nice, always nice when he visited. A nice man.”

  Her voice registers just a tick above inaudible. Despite her diminutive size, I know Selma can turn up the volume when she needs to; a fourth-grade teacher has to be able to speak above the din of an unruly classroom.

  “He was a nice man? Do you mean Henry? Or your son, Adam?”

  Her wrinkles deepen into a frown then relax. She’s not talking about either of them — or she doesn’t know. Speaking of loud voices, I can hear the patient from the hallway, and it sounds like he’s getting worked up. With a soft pat on Selma’s bird-boned shoulder I start to leave and she grabs my hand, turns her head and looks up with that dreamy expression. “He is a nice man but he has a trouble.”

  Intelligence outshines her opaque eyes. Sometimes it’s prudent to follow the thoughts of a patient, even if they seem delusional, because they aren’t always such. I lean closer, whispering, “What trouble does he have?”

  She has a hold of me with her left hand. She raises her right arm in the air, trembling slightly. “He has a trouble with this.”

  The way she’s holding her arm out she might be talking about a former student struggling with penmanship. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s recalled her teaching days.

  I lower her arm gently to her chest. A crooked finger stays pointing in my direction. “Well, I’m sure you’ll know what to do,” I say.

  Apparently it’s the wrong response. As new wrinkles cut through the brittle skin, tears bubble up in the saggy pouches beneath her eyes. “No. He won’t.” Her lower lip shudders and she shakes her head. “He won’t listen.”

&nb
sp; “But he’s a nice man,” I assure her. “Remember? A nice man. Maybe he had trouble when he was young, but that’s over now, right?”

  “He wants to protect his family.”

  The words are like nettles pricking my scalp. I see my husband the way he was last night, sitting on the phone in his study, looking at me with the eyes of a stranger. Obviously I’m conflating one thing with another. Even if there was the most remote chance she means John, Selma taught school in another district and would have no cause to know him.

  Unless . . . Well, there was the one time John found my cell phone and brought it to me at work. But he wouldn’t have come into one of my patients’ rooms to shoot the breeze.

  I’m losing objectivity. The psychologists call it transference. “Let me get you a glass of water, Mrs. Ford. Would you like that?”

  But she won’t let go. The patient in the hallway is getting louder, too. I know who it is: Edward Cormack, a seventy-nine-year-old with Alzheimer’s, and I need to get out there. Another patient shuffles past the doorway with a look of alarm. A nurse follows quickly after, talking in soothing tones. We’re heading toward the critical hour when the aged flower children are fully peaking, lost in the thrall of Jerry Garcia’s long strange trip.

  Selma is shaking her head, grasping at me. “He loves you.”

  “He loves me?”

  I stare back at her, the anxiety crawling through me now like tight packs of termites, even as my rational mind protests the emotional response — this has nothing to do with me. I run through the locked-in elder care ward at Hazleton Medical. None of my patients know a thing about my personal life, beyond the fact that I’m married and a mother.

  Selma blinks at last, as if returning to the present from some faraway place. “I’m sorry. I’m not who I think I am.”

  The words strike a chord that rattles through me: wasn’t John talking about something similar?

  Coincidences stacking up, I free myself finally from her grip and move to the bathroom. I fill her a glass of water, drink it myself, fill it again. When I step back into the room, Selma stands beside her bed with a worried, watchful look. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  I have to go through the whole routine again: reintroduce myself and tell her where she is. We’re back on familiar ground and the anxiety starts to drain off. I urge her to sit back down but she’s not having it. She wants to leave. We’re not allowed to physically restrain the patients at Hazleton, nor would I ever want to. We only intervene if they’re going to hurt themselves. But Selma is scurrying out of the room now and I quickly set the water down and chase after her.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, our wayward male patient is in restraints, spit bubbling in the corners of his mouth, eyes gone pink from stress and fatigue. A nurse named Caitlin gives him his injection and his body almost instantly puddles. In five more minutes, Nurse Jagger and an orderly named Beaumont attempt to coax another patient back into her room, but she’s insistent that she’s lost her wallet in the vending machine and if she gets somebody to help her turn the machine over, it might just shake loose. As I pass through the lobby with a fake wallet from a stash we keep behind the front desk, I notice the bank of monitors, cycling through the cameras on two hallways and each of the eight rooms on the ward. The cycle just happens to be on Selma’s room and she’s in her bed. After I leave the placebo wallet with Jagger and Beaumont, I check in on Selma. She’s awake, having a moment of clarity, and knows where she is. She remembers that her husband passed and she has two grown children, a son and daughter, who live far away.

  “Selma? Do you remember what you said to me a little while ago?”

  “What, dear?”

  “Do you remember I was in here earlier and we talked?”

  She gives me a blank look. I get her comfortable with a book and exit her room with the door ajar.

  While I’m in the coffee room feeling my aches and pains, Caitlin walks in. Her forehead shines with perspiration and she washes up at the sink then pulls a juice from the fridge — the kind she likes, called Naked — and guzzles half before swiping a hand across her mouth. “Phew. That was a good one.”

  “He’s going to be fine.”

  “I know but it’s Renita who gave me a chase over the whole damn hospital. I haven’t gotten that much exercise in years. I’m telling you we got to put rubber tabs on the bottom of those slippers, slow them right down.”

  I smile at Caitlin as she vents. I have a good staff here; they all have big hearts and are dedicated to what they do. At some point each of them realizes, like I did, that in order to get through it you have to be able to poke a little fun at the patients and at yourself. If you take it all too seriously it can drag you down.

  She gives me a look. “How you doing?”

  “I’m good.” My phone is in my hands and I set it down on the table next to me.

  “Mrs. Ford give you any trouble?”

  “No, she wasn’t any trouble.” She just said some things that I can’t shake.

  Caitlin stretches. “I’m going to do the bed check.”

  “Thanks, Cate.” I look at the phone once she’s gone. Tonight is no different from any other night, things patients say no different than at any other time.

  But I’ve texted John twice now, just to see how he’s doing, and he hasn’t responded.

  CHAPTER SIX / THE DISAPPEARANCE

  When Melody turned twelve, I considered her ready to babysit. John thought it was too soon. “Let’s give it one more year.”

  “Come on,” I teased, “kids used to take care of each other on the farm when they were seven, eight years old. Arthur Miller’s father came here from Poland when he was just a boy and had his own business going by eleven, right? You’re the one who told me that.”

  It was like that for me, too. I was already cooking and cleaning by age nine. My mother had different men in her life as I grew up and I was alone with my younger half-brother and half-sister much of the time. By eleven I could prepare a three-course meal and feed them.

  When I said as much to John he correctly pointed out, “Yeah but that pressure you faced caused a rift between you and your mother.”

  Ding-ding-ding . . . Tell him what he’s won, Vanna.

  Now, even if sometimes I feel guilty, like I’m sheltering her, keeping her from growing in self-reliance, I remember that Melody ought to have a childhood. I never really did, and I was about to commit the same mistakes my mother had.

  It works out fine. You just have to find a balance, like with our diet; there’s a place bestriding lofty ideals and devil-may-care eating. And there’s a place for kids in between spoiled entitlement and expecting too much too soon. It’s not Little House on the Prairie times anymore and childhood goes quick enough as it is.

  She’s asleep now in her room. I check in on Russ next — he’s half out of his covers and flopped over the bed at an odd angle but sleeping like a log. The room smells faintly of chocolate and boy farts.

  I check the study for John but he’s not in there.

  The queen-sized bed in our room is still made from the morning, so I flick on the basement light and go downstairs, calling his name softly. Sometimes he’ll take a break from writing by doing some woodworking, but he hasn’t had anything going for a few months and there’s nothing to indicate a new project: no fresh scent of pine lumber in the air, no sawdust, no trace of the joint on which he’ll puff occasionally.

  I return upstairs to check his study again and my heart does a little somersault when I find his cell phone sitting beside his computer.

  John takes his phone everywhere he goes. We joke about how kids who used to leave the house with nothing grew into adults afraid to go fifty yards without a device linking them to every imaginable support and convenience.

  He’s got to be around somewhere. Our nearest neighbors are a quarter-mile away, a family expecting their first child. He’s a correctional officer at the county jail and she’s a waitress at t
he local diner. We had them over for lunch once, but it wasn’t an obvious fit as far as friendly couples go — about as awkward as Bruce and Rainey.

  Who knows — maybe it’s us?

  John wouldn’t be at their house unless it was an emergency and, if so, he would’ve let me know.

  The door gives a long, low squeak as I lean outside. “John? Honey?”

  This time of year, early spring, even warm days can dip below freezing at night. I grab a light parka from the coat rack to wear over my nurse’s uniform.

  So as not to disturb anyone’s sleep, I’ve parked in the driveway, avoiding opening the garage door. The area light trips on as I walk to the car, flooding the driveway in a white wash. It takes me back to the other night: the SUV tailgating us as we sliced through the dark at speed, lights blaring.

  I cup my hands to the garage door windows to find it empty of John’s Subaru.

  He’s gone.

  Maybe he just went out for milk and eggs? Or he had a writing breakthrough, took a quick run to the convenience store for a Pepsi. But it wouldn’t explain why he hasn’t responded to my texts for the last four hours. Even if he’d been in the midst of a writing frenzy and hadn’t looked at his phone, he’d have checked it and responded before leaving the house, surely. But then why leave the phone behind?

  The cold starts sinking into my skin. There’s another possibility — he’s out drinking something else, something he’s not supposed to be. The theory makes sense of his abandoned phone. There are two bars in Hazleton, one at each end of the town — if he’s at either one of them, he doesn’t want to be reached.

  Returning to John’s study, I pick the phone up and look at it. Notification of four missed texts, all mine, sent over the course of the night — and a missed call bearing my number from a half hour ago. To bypass the home screen requires a password.