His questions about my father prompted me to see flashes of incomplete, disjointed thoughts and memories that had no right showing up in that moment. I thought of a Barbie doll I had when I was very young and how I had swallowed both of her tiny pink shoes for no reason at all. I thought of my mother’s instant coffee, of the sharp garlic smell of marinara sauce on the stove on days when the sun set long before it was ready to be nighttime, the sound of canned laughter from a sitcom played down the hall from my room where, without looking, I could see my mother on our yellow couch looking past the television at something so far away that I would never see.
I told him about my childhood home. I saw it clearly although I hadn’t been home in years—the blistered paint and tawdry wicker furniture on the slanted balcony of the shitty apartment building. The rusty, archaic Radio Flyer that housed weary soil and dead plants, the years of unhappiness there. My mother was probably still spending her days sleeping in the back bedroom with a box of wine on the bedside table. My father was long gone.
I told Liam about my reasons for specializing in domestic abuse—the time my mother drove through the rain in our Pontiac Bonneville, searching all the bars in town for my father. She sat me on an overturned milk crate inside the front door of our apartment and handed me the Remington shotgun that she kept under the kitchen sink next to a bottle of Ajax and a pile of molded steel wool. She told me if he came back, warn him once to leave, and then shoot. I was eight.
She planned on finding him first and shooting him with the handgun she kept in her purse. It wasn’t because the night before, he had forced her to lie on the bathroom floor and stomped the back of her head into the herringbone tiles, causing her to lose two teeth, and who knows what sort of head injury she’d sustained. He did this often. Maybe he was careful to use just the right amount of force to not cause life-altering wounds. More likely, though, it was so he wouldn’t get stuck raising me and my sister. No, it wasn’t retaliation for that. That, she didn’t seem to react to anymore. In fact, she’d have two over-hard eggs and a bacon smiley face on his plate at breakfast the next morning after waking up on the bathroom floor. This particular night, she’d heard that he was seen with a hand up LeAnne Butler’s skirt down at Shorty’s bar.
When they came home in the small hours of the morning, together, I was asleep in the front hall with the Remington clasped in my arms. I don’t know why I was surprised when they laughed at the sight of me and stumbled past me to the back bedroom. I didn’t feel particularly protective of my mother, all told. She never protected me.
“Jesus,” Liam said, stroking my hair mindlessly as I lay on his chest. “You don’t still talk to the son of a bitch, do you?”
“No.” I reached for a piece of pizza and sat cross-legged in a T-shirt and underwear, ready to be done with the conversation. It was making me more anxious than I had anticipated.
“Your mom?” he continued.
“Well, not really. She still lives in the same place. I guess I see her every few years by accident. She showed up at Ellie’s wedding, uninvited and hammered,” I laughed, humorlessly.
“God, Faith. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“When’s the last time you saw your dad?” he asked, genuine care in his eyes.
“A long time. I wish I could say my mom finally grew a set and left, but he worked as a trucker, and met some ‘bimbo in Missouri and moved into her trailer and just never came back.’ That’s the way my mom tells it, anyway.” Even though I’d mentioned once, in a similar late-night conversation over wine, that I’d worked through all of my shit, so not to worry. It was in a joking context. I was a little worried, though, that he’d see the piles of baggage I came with and I’d be regretful for opening up, but he just took the pizza out of my hand and dropped it in its box. He slipped off my T-shirt and kissed up my body, and although I was aware of the immeasurable gesture of unconditional love this was meant to be, although we’d only dropped the L-word a few weeks earlier in the infancy of our romance, I still hid the flood of tears streaming down my face as we made love. I turned over and pushed my face into the pillow to hide it as I felt him press his body into my back and kiss my neck. What the hell was wrong with me? That was a million years ago.
The concerned, loving Liam I saw in him that night was the Liam I got every day. It wasn’t a best-foot-forward facade I got for a few months until the newness wore off and I’d begin to discover a gambling addiction, or that he was a closet smoker, or that he usually spent five hours playing Grand Theft Auto when he got home from work. There was no temper lying dormant, no looking over my shoulder at a prettier girl. He even found my 1930s jazz obsession “sort of adorable” and hummed along to Ella Fitzgerald when I had it singing from my laptop while we cooked together. When my dog, Potato, was still with us, he baked him a birthday cake. Could there really be such a thing as a perfect man?
FIVE
NOW
After Len leaves, I throw up, running to the toilet and retching myself sober. I cry for what seems like hours until fatigue and mundane thoughts drift in, easing me out of it. All the drinks I just had were gone now. A waste of money. And so I take a Klonopin and pour a glass of port to chase it with.
I sit at the kitchen table and open Liam’s laptop. I have tried every password I can think of, from his beloved grandfather’s name and his birthday with and without exclamation points after it, to “password” and “1234,” which I know he’d never use, but I was desperate. I had welcomed the police to seize his computer so I could find out what was on it, what the hell I had missed, but as Len pointed out, “they had reasons not to pursue it.” Meaning they had evidence that Liam had left of his own free will and didn’t want to be found. And there was no law that could force him to return. Or so I was told by a detective whose downward glare insinuated that I wanted to “force” Liam to return.
Liam was an only child of a single mother who was deceased. So, no family was hovering around to insist it was out of character for him to walk away from his job and wife. His coworkers and friends echoed my statements that that was the case, but the police are nonetheless disinclined to spend precious money and manpower on a case that has “overwhelming” evidence the “subject” left of his own accord:
A. There was a large bank withdrawal made just before his disappearance. Approximately $6,000.
B. His bank card was used the day after the accident by the O’Hare Airport. Although no one with the name Liam Finley had flown from Chicago, he could have used an alias for a local flight and then flown internationally.
C. His passport is missing.
D. And now, I’ve discovered that he left a note on his work computer saying that he needed a break from everything. Maybe a permanent one. (Translation: the scandal his wife was caught up in was reflecting badly on him.)