So, friends may think it’s out of character, but given the current stressful circumstances and all the evidence that he was alive and well, and perhaps just a coward, a side of him not seen before, there is no reason to treat this as a missing persons case.
Between fits and starts of sleep, I found myself mostly awake in the hospital for days after it happened, coming up with explanations for their findings. Someone might have stolen his phone and bank card to use them. Detective Sterling argued that the likelihood of someone obtaining his PIN number, and squaring that with the coincidence of a large withdrawal before the party and a missing passport was... He didn’t even finish the sentence; he just looked at me, a fatherly look, telling me to be reasonable, put it together. Maybe if the phone and ATM were the only bits of evidence, it would have changed things, but all of that together was implausible.
I’m the one who told them his passport was missing, after they’d asked me about it, and now I wish I hadn’t. Maybe less information would have forced them to keep the investigation open. I suggested they search our house in their initial half-assed investigation. I opened the locked file cabinet and whipped out folders and important papers. I showed Detective Sterling the folder with our passports; I pointed mine out, sitting in a manila folder by itself. I thought it would be helpful, but it proved to be the last piece they needed to be certain Liam wanted out.
After I’d been home a few weeks, my leg still in a cast, I shot out of bed from a fevered sleep. I hobbled across the room to the light switch, knocking half a bottle of wine onto my white pillow, letting it glug out of the top as I felt around the sheets for my phone, making my bed look like the scene of a homicide. When I rescued my phone from a knot of bedsheet, I called Sterling. He didn’t answer. All my knowledge of police work was from bad crime shows that flung one-liners around shamelessly, but it seemed to me that whenever you called a detective on a case like this, day or night, they answered. This was urgent. He did not answer. I leave a frantic voice mail.
“Detective Sterling, it’s Faith Finley...um, I just... I’m sorry to call so late but...you said he made an ATM withdrawal after the accident. It was... I looked at the bank records, and it was the ATM at Wells Fargo near the airport. It has a camera. I’ve used it before. It has a camera. You could see if it was him...him who made the...who used it, right? Please call me back.” I hung up shakily and fluttered my hands to my robe, clasping it closed, looking at the bloody cabernet puddle in my bed.
Completely unable to deal with it, I pull Liam’s favorite fleece blanket from its folded spot at the end of the bed—the one Potato loved to curl up in, and drag it out to the couch to pour a vodka soda and wait.
The next morning when Sterling calls back, not only does he remind me that this is no longer an open case, therefore not his case any longer, he also tells me, not without a little condescension, that of course they’d checked the camera on the ATM, but that unfortunately, the camera had been out of commission for a few days. No evidence pointed to tampering or that it was linked to this case...when it was a case, he adds, trying to keep sympathy in his voice. He assures me if they’d found something of consequence like that when they were looking into it, they certainly would have mentioned it to me.
I can explain away any of that evidence to make a case that Liam was in danger—that he didn’t leave. I even have a whiteboard of bullet lists that I drag from my office into the living room, outlining multiple scenarios that could explain away all the so-called evidence. But now, Len knocks on my door and hands me almost irrefutable confirmation that their theory is true.
But...the timing. I was driving. How could he have planned to disappear that night? Something happened to him. Maybe he was planning it. Maybe there’s evidence of that, but that night? Is my life now a B movie about supernatural phenomena? It’s incomprehensible, I think. I had held out a thread of hope with that thought—that it was just impossible—until Officer Bloom, a large woman with a pillow of girth beneath her uniformed pants, pulled high around her large waist, had told me that faking your own death was a pretty straightforward way to try to disappear. “If he had been planning to leave and not be found,” she’d said, “maybe the opportunity just presented itself.” That had never occurred to me. She’d said this the day I got out of the hospital, after Liam had been almost one month missing. I’d felt like crawling back into that sterile bed and never getting out. I couldn’t be left alone with that idea, so I’d chosen not to believe it. He loved me.
But this fucking email printout? Fuck you, Len. I know why Liam was angry that night. I know the months leading up to the party were our toughest and that he’d tried not to blame me—to be the kind and understanding man I knew. But I saw the light in his eyes shine just a little dimmer, and I heard his boisterous laugh less often, and the worst part is that all the shit the press was saying about me—I saw it taking its toll on him more than me. Now it’s possible he may never know—never really know—that I did not do what they were saying I did.
Liam’s email log-in stares back at me. His smiling face in a thumbnail photo beside the empty search bar, blinking, waiting for me to type in his password. It’s all I can do not to smash the screen into pieces with a kitchen mallet, but the Klonopin is settling into my bloodstream, and I simply give up trying and close the laptop.
My job is to counsel. My specialty is mending abusive relationships and knowing the signs of narcissists, abusers, and secret-keepers, yet here I am, shamefully unaware of Liam’s secret life. What other explanation could there be? I have proof in hand. An elaborate plan had been set up to deceive me while I handed out advice to other women about their marriages—how to spot a scammer, a liar, a cheater.
I’m still going to find him. If grief could fuel months of looking, anger can now carry me even further. He can’t do this without answering to me. I top off my vodka and sit on the couch. I wait to start sobbing, a nightly ritual. By dusk I can hear a few of the neighborhood kids playing kickball in the cul-de-sac. I catch scraps of their conversation, petty protests about who’s cheating and who’s “it.” Janie Stuart will sit on her porch with a cup of tea—something we’d done together before I turned into an inconsolable basket case with unkempt hair and dark circles under her eyes whom everyone avoided as politely as possible. It wasn’t out of cruelty. People just don’t know how to watch someone else in pain. It makes them uncomfortable, so they bring casseroles and “send prayers” for an acceptable amount of time, and then avoid contact and hope it goes away. I can’t say I blame them.
I flip on a show about hoarders. I haven’t started to sob yet. I watch a woman climb over a wall of garage sale toys and soiled clothes in order to make it to her kitchen, overrun with cat boxes and rat feces. This is completely normal to her. She pees in old soda cans because she can’t find the bathroom any longer. It’s covered by a barricade of newspapers dating back to 1942. I found myself watching this a moment with less judgment that I expected. It’s not impossible for me to see how she could let it get that bad. I can see giving up, I really can.