The Family Tabor Read online

  There is the adobe building where CST is based on the top floor, the five-story building she and Harry own, that will eventually belong to their children. Rectangles of windows all the way up. The lobby is lit, as it always is, but she’d been hoping, when they passed, that CST’s windows would be, too, and she would know Harry was in there, for whatever reason—she wouldn’t even care why. But everything is dark.

  The detectives turn onto Agapanthus Lane, then up the drive, the roar of their souped-up cars reduced to purrs.

  When Roma steps out into the very early morning, the night is beginning to fade, the stars slowly retreating, the air cooler than it was when they left the resort, twenty-eight long miles ago. She thinks of Noelani McCadden’s slow and sleepy movements dissipating the moment her tiny tennis shoes slap the pavement, the girl running at an unbelievable speed, the wind she creates blowing back her fine loose hair.

  “You’re staying, right? Of course you’re staying,” Simon says to the two detectives, whose names she can’t recall.

  “Yes,” the tall one says. “We’re going to do a thorough search here.”

  “I’ll put on coffee,” her son says.

  Elena says, “I’ll check on the girls,” and disappears into the house.

  Roma does not need to be led into her own home, but her daughters insist, hanging onto her wrists, taking her through the wide entry, into the living room, placing her on one of the deep white couches, never letting go.

  One of the reasons she excels as a psychologist is because of her ability to burrow into the minds and bodies of her patients, regardless of their size, the inarticulateness of their thoughts. Never once has she ever wanted to actually experience what they do, but she would like to be Noelani right now, racing away.

  And there’s the epiphany: if the McCadden house is a safe and happy home, Noelani would first have to overcome the tug to turn around and return to that embryonic environment, before finding her stride. That’s what Simon tells her he needs to do when he sets out on a morning run. One only takes flight at full speed when a house is not a home. And that’s what Jeanine said Noelani does, runs fast straight out of the door, as if being pursued, running those seven miles at breakneck speed, a slow returning walk only at the last block, before putting her hand on the knob of the McCadden front door.

  That definitiveness of Noelani’s actions tells her everything: Noelani is running away from something, not running toward something.

  The mystery of Harry is up in the air, but this one she has solved, though is that something Noelani fears real or imagined or a heightened collision of the two?

  She looks from one daughter to the other. “I can’t sit here like this. As if I, all of us, are waiting for the heavens to crash down on our heads. I want to be in the pool.”

  “You want to swim?” Phoebe asks.

  “I want to be submerged in water.”

  Phoebe looks at Camille, who nods her head, then up at the tall detective, who nods, too.

  “Camille,” Roma says, “I have to tell you something. Your phone rang yesterday afternoon and I answered it.”

  Camille glances at Phoebe, who raises her eyebrows.

  “That’s okay, Mom,” Camille says.

  “It was Valentine Osin.”

  “Okay.”

  “The connection was bad. I couldn’t hear anything. I need to know. Is Valentine a man or a woman?”

  Camille looks at Phoebe, puzzled. The two detectives look at each other, and then at the sisters.

  “Valentine is a man, Mom. You know that.”

  “No, I didn’t. You’ve never once used a pronoun to describe Valentine. But now I do. Thank you.”

  Roma shakes off her daughters’ grips, stands, touches their heads, takes a few uncertain forward steps and turns.

  “Phoebe. What kind of fight did you and Aaron Green have?”

  Startled, Phoebe says, “No fight, Mom.”

  “Then why isn’t he here?”

  “Work, that’s all.”

  “You should let him know what’s going on.”

  If he existed, Phoebe would. Or she thinks she would. Maybe she wouldn’t. It’s impossible to imagine what she would do if he were real.

  “Why don’t Camille and I go in the pool with you,” she says.

  “That would be nice,” Roma says.

  BLANCA HAS LEFT ON the hall spotlights, just as Roma does for Harry on Friday nights. She wishes she hadn’t sometimes pretended to be asleep when he climbed into bed so carefully, had instead embraced him. But she didn’t, and now all those Friday nights when they could have been talking about the thoughts he has under the moon, or making love again, are gone, at least for now. She won’t do that anymore when he returns. She’ll roll over and hold him.

  They left their bedroom neat and orderly. Bed made, pillows fluffed, the drapes opened wide. There are her palm trees and her flowers and the still water of her meditation pool, but the early light coming in seems new to her. How has she never seen that the white light of desert dawn has an omniscient force?

  What is her advice to the parents of her patients when they are facing the unknown, when the therapy for their children has only just begun and there are no answers yet to their questions? That they must ground themselves while suspended in confusion, welcome a nebulous existence. Advice she herself must follow.

  In the bathroom, she notices Harry’s closet door is closed, perhaps the first time ever in all these years in this house, and she inhales a faint hint of his spicy cologne, and when she feels a scream gathering power, she focuses instead on what she has learned: Phoebe has no boyfriend. Camille is not gay. Simon and Elena did not comfort each other while Chief Hernandez issued his search-party instructions and they rode home in separate cars. Her husband is missing.

  She rips herself out of the golden gown, bites hard at the fabric, gnashing at it with her teeth, gnashing as the insects must have done with Tatiana’s burial shroud, until one seam finally splits, the cleaving so neat anyone handy with a needle and thread could repair it in minutes.

  Why did Phoebe think she had to lie about her love life?

  Why did she think Camille was gay?

  What has gone wrong in Simon and Elena’s marriage, and is it minor or major?

  Why isn’t Harry here to share, if only in a metaphysical way, this calamity?

  Why has he left her?

  Is that what she really thinks?

  That Harry has left her?

  It’s a vertiginous thought that doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

  Not once in their long marriage has either of them contemplated leaving the other.

  Except.

  Except.

  Except once she did.

  Once she did.

  When Harry came to her and bowed his head.

  When Harry came to her and told her about the shortcut he had taken, the wrongful act oft repeated, then bowed his head and gave her rationales for what couldn’t be explained—the loss of his moral fiber, the perversion of his strong ethics.

  She had been appalled. Speechless on the couch, she had wanted to escape the sordidness and the secrets he laid at her feet, his misery and contrition, his useless apologies.

  She had wanted to hit him, then pack up herself and the girls and drive away in the snow, but she imagined them lost, or stuck, the girls cold and crying in the backseat, the three of them freezing to death, not found until the snow ceased, the roads cleared. But one only ran to preserve the sanctity of life, and she was not entitled to such an irresponsible action. What Harry told her did not threaten the actual existences of herself and her children, only what they were creating together—love, family, future.

  As he sat with his head bowed, the rationalization of his actions concluded, he had waited for her to respond, and she thought then of telling him to leave, to walk out the door and never return.

  And then she had hesitated again, when she thought of Phoebe and Camille fatherl
ess, lacking his deep paternal love during their growing-up years, knowing what that lack would cost them and the ways in which it would alter them. She knew, because of what Tatiana and Inessa had told her about being fatherless, because she saw it in the children she treated.

  And out of that hesitation came her recognition that if he had a plan to rectify his mistakes, she would consent, on the condition he give away every last dollar.

  And he did have a plan, and she said that if he held onto any of the money, she would take the girls and leave him, wherever they might be living. But he had donated it all, and she hadn’t had to leave him, and they had moved to this desert, and then that awful time was in the past, behind them, and they’d never spoken of it again, and life had resumed. In fact, this morning was the first time she’s thought about it, and only because the Man of the Decade honor was evidence of all he has accomplished since then, of the man he has become.

  They’ve been very happy all these years, facing the expansive future together, and she wants that expansive future with him.

  Did he not want that expansive future with her?

  Is it possible that his disappearance wasn’t involuntary, as she has been assuming?

  That he has disappeared voluntarily? If so, then why?

  Did turning seventy impact him in ways that went unnoticed, that she didn’t notice? Did he grow tired of helping so many others for such a long time and wanted it all to cease, to be left to himself? Did he want his freedom and so effected his escape?

  If he did, what better way than with a public disappearance? He’s told her the plots of enough of the crime novels he reads, and she’s seen enough thrillers, to know people do that.

  What she’s contemplating feels wrong and incomplete, with dangling narrative strands she doesn’t know how to connect and read.

  That she should know how to connect and read.

  That’s hubris, she admonishes herself. A lifetime excavating her patients’ interior realms, their hidden pockets, has taught her that such protracted diving into the depths of others can’t be sustained outside the therapeutic environment. In real life, relationships, always tenuous and tremulous no matter their apparent strength, would crack under the weight of such incessant mining. We bind ourselves to others in the heat of love, and the intimacy convinces us we know everything about the other. But we don’t. We never do. We never can.

  For a moment, she forgot that salient and distinguishing truth between therapy and life.

  As close as she and Harry are, as well as she might understand him, she’s thinking like a fool. What he once kept from her proves she doesn’t know, could never know, what goes on inside of him at a cellular level.

  Other cryptic secrets might be deeply buried, secrets to which he himself may not be privy.

  She ought to be doubting the extent of her Harry-centric knowledge.

  Whatever explanation she’s reaching for is irrelevant, because there is only one actual fact: despite all the eyes of that large crowd, her husband is missing, vanished, gone, and she is in the midst, they are all in the midst, of the direst emergency.

  What happens when the sun comes up? What happens the rest of this day, and all the days to come? If Harry isn’t found, or doesn’t reappear on his own, or she’s wrong about the nature of his disappearance, then what is she to believe?

  Her children are exhausted from searching. She is numb. Despite the desert heat, she is looking at an icy blank space that can never be filled. She thinks of Lucy and Isabel in Simon’s old bedroom, asleep and dreaming, as she had hoped she was in the detective’s car and knew she was not. They are in their twin beds, protected all these last hours from what the future may hold. If she can do nothing else, she would like to keep them innocent forever, splashing in the pool, the sunshine warming their heads.

  On the bathroom floor, her golden gown is caught in that omniscient white light. Like a dead fantastical creature, like a phantom of happiness.

  FORTY-ONE

  SIMON IS CHANNELING HIS mother, carrying the red lacquered tray he remembers her using with his father’s business colleagues when he was a teenager. Coffee pot, mugs, and the only sweetener he could find in the house, green packets that purport to be just like sugar. He did not bring milk in a pretty pitcher, as his mother would have. He wants these detectives highly caffeinated. He wants them working with speed and intensity, and he wants them to provide answers.

  “I can make more coffee,” he says as he sets the tray on the stone cocktail table. “I’m sure there’s leftovers from lunch, and cookies, if my father’s still eating them, so if you’re hungry, just say so.”

  Elena has not returned from checking on the girls. Phoebe and Camille are catatonic on a couch. He doesn’t know where his mother has gone. And the detectives don’t react when he waves his hand at the tray. He wants to shake a mug at them, tell them to drink up, get moving. He fills mugs for his sisters and hands them over. Pours one for himself and takes a gulp that sears his throat.

  Why aren’t the detectives doing anything? What are they supposed to be doing? He wishes he knew.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten your names.”

  “Detective Peter Zhang,” says the short one, burly with a clean-shaven head, and the green markings of a neck tattoo peeking out of his collared shirt.

  The other one reminds Simon of Victor, the very tall waiter in his story, the story he told Elena only yesterday afternoon, when time was moving properly, neither conflating nor telescoping, when his father was not yet lost or missing or worse.

  “Detective Aaron David,” the tall one says, and Phoebe knocks over her mug, the extra-strength coffee spilling and splattering. To the three Tabor children, it happens in slow motion, a black plume rising and falling.

  Phoebe grabs the stack of napkins piled on the red tray, scrubbing and scrubbing at the couch. “Goddammit,” she says, and runs into the kitchen.

  “So what happens now?” Simon asks Detectives Zhang and David.

  PHOEBE FINDS A CLEANSER under the sink that claims: All Stains Gone! She’s got the can in her hand, and takes a step, then finds herself sitting on the floor, staring at her filthy feet.

  Her feet are filthy because she took off her heels to search, pushing her way beneath bushes, hugging tree trunks to look up at their arms, to see if her father had climbed them. Stepping back and brushing bark from her dress and her hair when she grasped he would not be hiding in the branches like a Boy Scout gone crazy, run amok.

  All that time searching, she feared she would be the one to find his body splayed out, his energetic brown eyes wide-open and unseeing, still and unmoving as he’s never been in life. But he wasn’t anywhere at that resort. He was just gone.

  She doesn’t want these awful images in her head. She doesn’t want to return to the living room, to hear Simon and the detectives speaking about the next steps. She needs her cool, analytical self to return so she can do whatever’s required to bring her father back.

  She breathes in and out, and the names Aaron Green, Aaron Gold, Aaron David slither through her brain. Could this detective, with his first name, be important? Another Aaron manifested out of her never-ending lie?

  She knows from her mother this is avoidance coping, and it’s no more useful than her attempt to draw love into her life.

  She wipes away her tears. She is prepared to clean up her mess, and figure out how to help, but then she’s sobbing again, and all she can do is sit there on the kitchen floor.

  FORTY-TWO

  DURING HER FIRST MONTH in the Trobriand Islands, three people went missing at sea off Vakuta. Two sank, but one crawled out of the water. Camille was on the beach with their clan when they hauled the survivor onto the sand, slapped his chest, ocean spurting out of his mouth, a man transformed into a whale transformed back into a man. In the hours before, she had watched the Vakuta islanders performing Trobriand rites and rituals, invoking magic to reclaim them all. They only reclaimed the one, but it had been cause
for a subdued celebration.

  Camille only needs to reclaim one with the Kilivila words the islanders intoned, the dances they performed, but whatever is still stored in her brain is crowded out by memories of the funeral she attended not long after, on Kitava. The village had been thronged with three distinct groups: the general mourners—heads freshly shaved, bodies thickly smeared with soot, howling like demons, though they were not the dead man’s matrilineal kinsmen; the true grievers—who were the dead man’s kinsmen, from his clan, not shaved, smeared, or howling, not costumed or ornamented to declare their mourning, but composed, only a few softly weeping, and aloof from the corpse because of the express taboo that if they touched the body, the deceased’s spirit might infect them, causing illness or death; and the dead man’s widow and her children—who were considered neither kin nor clan, and under the Trobriand moral code, their grief was not considered spontaneous, but an artificial duty springing from acquired obligations. They were displaying the required histrionic version of bereavement, sitting closest to the body, to the grave, bearing witness, but nothing about their manic demonstration spoke of true heartache and sorrow. She stayed on, through all the elements of the mortuary ritual. She’d read about it in Malinowski, but still was flustered when the remains were constantly worried—the body buried and twice exhumed, then cut up, some of its bones peeled out of the carcass, given to one party and then to another.

  “Do you know the password to your father’s computer?”

  What Malinowski had also written about in The Sexual Life of Savages, Camille personally viewed: the strictest and heaviest shackles of marriage were laid on the wife after the real tie was dissolved by death. The widow was not set free by the event. She was required to play the role of chief mourner, to make an ostentatious and onerous display of grief for her husband from the moment of his demise until months, perhaps years, afterward. She had to fulfill her part under vigilant eyes, complying fully with the demanding traditional morals, suspiciously surveilled by the dead man’s kin, who would have regarded it as a grievous offense to their clan’s honor if she flagged for a single moment in her duty and performance. Camille returned to Kitava many times during her two years in Melanesia, but once, near the end, expressly to see what had become of the widow. Nearly twenty-four months later, she was still dramatically grieving. And Camille had said to one of her colleagues, “This breaks my heart. When are you allowed to forfeit a dead love here?” The answer: apparently never.