Now though, I can do more than cry and post desperate social media pleas offering a reward for any information about Liam. When it happened, they treated me like some unstable drunk in the hospital who was making up stories. When they learned who I was, the pacifying condescension shifted into something else. I was credible enough, I surmised, that they would at least not dismiss what I was saying, no matter how implausible it seemed. But they were the ones on the scene, and they assured me I was the only one in the car. They weren’t looking for a second person at the time, though, so I’m sure they did only a half-assed look around. After a few days, when Liam Finley did not show up at his wife’s side in the hospital, nor did he show up to work or his Saturday pickup basketball game at the Y, they finally started to ask real questions, not just bullshit ones, half-accusing me of being a pill popper and therefore an unreliable voice on what had happened in that car. Even with the new evidence, they still didn’t believe me.
I hate this bar. A string of lights spelling out “live, laugh, love” blink above the front door, sluggishly, weary from the task of boosting spirits. Tacky plaques with obscene quotes decorate the wall behind the long, ancient, oak bar. Every surface of wood is scratched and weathered; mirrored rows of glass bottles are disordered and dressed with sugary overspill. The smell of stale cigarettes and urine are only circulated, not alleviated, by the dusty ceiling fans.
Liam loved the nostalgia of the place, the mammoth Pac-Man game in the back, the jukebox with real vinyl in it. I loved it because he loved it, and we spent nights here, dancing to Neil Young on the makeshift dance floor on Saturday nights and relishing our quiet escape from the city that we’d discovered. But now it’s just the closest place to numb myself.
I want to believe that the impossible things the detectives are telling me are lies. Liam withdrew money before the accident; it looks like he planned to disappear. It’s outrageous, laughable. Except that I discovered his passport missing, and I’m running out of plausible reasons for him to have taken out a large sum of money without telling me. I wish I never opened the goddamn drawer our passports live in. I was looking for a receipt for some stupid thing. I never even thought to check to see if his passport was in its place, and I wish I didn’t know. I wish I never looked. The bartender places another drink in front of me before I need to order one; I gulp it down in a few swallows, and push the dark thoughts away.
The waitress, Pearl, smiles at me as she sits in a booth with her scratch-offs. I order an Old Fashioned and nod in her direction to passively say hello. After her husband died, the bar owner gave her a job even though she is clumsy and forgetful and the customers complain about her. The regulars look out for her, though, because of the tragedy. The stories about her misfortune vary. The most consistent version is that her husband worked for a metal factory in town until one night, on the graveyard shift, he fell asleep and his sleeve was pulled into a three-roller press. He was squeezed all the way through until all of his insides were pressed out, leaving only strips of papery flesh behind to gum up the cogs and gears.
It’s said that Pearl always packed him a lunch basket full of things like sweet potato cakes, candied figs, heaps of pasta, and warm buttered bread, and she’d always drop it off for him before she went to bed at night. She didn’t witness the accident, but she did arrive at the factory just after it happened—in time to see bloody strips of him left behind—his skin and tissue flooding over the sides of the press. Some say she lost her mind that night.
I offered her my services once, no charge, if she ever wanted to talk. She never took me up on it. It’s true she’s not quite lucid all the time, so she mostly just chain smokes and drinks translucent coffee until it’s time to clean up for closing. She looks smaller than usual tonight, slunk in her stool, swimming in her big sweater that was meant to match her earrings. Across the front is a cross-stitched jack-o’-lantern, whose triangle cut-out eyes and nose are meant to light up, but the sweater has no batteries and the pumpkin’s dead face makes her look even more lifeless than usual.
I want her to mother me. I want to ask how she coped with such devastating loss, so she might comfort me and tell me to be strong, but she hasn’t coped, and that’s why she scares the hell out of me. She laughs abruptly, her square jaw bobbing like a ventriloquist’s doll. Then she stops and looks around, offended as if some phantom person has asked her to be quiet.
I order another drink. My phone vibrates across the bar top. It’s Ellie again. I can picture the conversation already. I know that she is, at this moment, standing in her kitchen over a pot of Hamburger Helper, browning the meat with a diapered baby on her hip and a toddler nearby in a bounce chair. I’d be at the counter with a glass of wine, picking at the fresh baked, from a tube, sheet of cookies, no doubt contaminated by greasy little kid fingers. This is Sunday night. I suppose there is a comfort in the routine of it. I answer. She finishes hollering to her husband before saying hello.
“Joey! Like, it’s not hard. You want poop in your green beans, fine by me,” she yells. Then a pause. “Then take him. Diapers are in the trunk. I forgot to bring them in.” I can hear Joe sigh or scoff as he takes the baby.
“Ell?” I’m not sure if she forgot she called.
“Faith. Hey. Sorry ’bout that. How are you doin’?” she asked, changing her tone dramatically from the moment before with Joe.
“I’m okay.” I down my drink in one swallow and gesture for another. There are a few minutes of talk about the cold front, her call to Sprint customer service earlier, how little Hannah is going to go as a cupcake for Halloween because she found the sweetest little costume at Pottery Barn. I remember when Ellie and I were little and she went as Bob Ross. She sported an epic afro and carried around a little painting of woodland creatures. A cupcake? I guess parenthood does weird things to a person. She finally squeezes in hints that I should come back to the city.
“We’re gonna pawn the kids off on Joe’s parents and do like an adult dinner in a couple weeks. Do you think you might be in town...wanna come?” she asks carefully. Joe is a Chicago cop, and she is an overwhelmed stay-at-home mom, so they rarely get any time away. She never asks me to watch the kids, thank God, but I feel a little bad she knows it would be hell for me.
“Um... I mean, maybe,” is all I have to offer at the moment. Sometimes I wonder if she was right about going back to the city. It was Liam’s idea to move out here. He wanted an idyllic little corner for us. We were still in the city several days a week usually, but he had grand plans for this small town life he’d never had. We both grew up in the city, grad school on both respective coasts. We traveled, we had months, maybe years, where our careers could have easily splintered our relationship if we weren’t so committed...and yes, in love.
He’d thought Sugar Grove would be our place. A house you couldn’t even dream of in Chicago for the price point—with a hot tub on the deck, an acre for future dogs to run in, and a big ole BBQ pit he dug himself. He adored it. All of it. It even had a small airport, and since he reviewed all over the country, he could use it for last-minute trips if he needed to without driving to Chicago.