Love You Hard Page 2

  It might behoove me also to explain that he is a workaholic, a quality not reserved just for his career. Most days he doesn’t seem to be able to sit still. If there’s a dirty dish or an unmade bed or an electric bill somewhere waiting to be paid, TC is on the job before I can blink, a quality that has a twofold effect. One, it’s made me quite lazy. And two, it makes me feel ever so guilty for those hours in which I long to collapse in a Real Housewives of New York City marathon.

  But I should probably start here: by explaining how excited TC was to go to the baseball game last night. The Nationals were playing the Mets, and they were giving away retro caps, which TC wanted to be there early to claim. Beyond that, it was his first time spending time with friends in longer than I can remember. He’d nearly backed out a few days earlier, plagued by the guilt of being away from Jack.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I told him. “Your son is nearly two. You don’t need to be at home every single night.”

  But it was pointless to argue. I’d watched the way fatherhood had changed my husband, had brought up all the questions and traumas of his own childhood. After Jack’s birth, TC developed a renewed interest in his own biological father, the one he hasn’t seen since he was ten.

  “Maybe I’ll drive out to West Virginia and try to find him,” he had remarked offhandedly throughout the summer, exploring the idea aloud.

  I bit my tongue. There was no right response. From my perspective, TC’s interest made no sense. He’d been fine without his biological father for all these years. Better than fine. Yes, things had been hard at first in those days after his mother took the boys and left. They had no money, no immediate place to stay.

  But eventually, Ruth remarried and life began to settle again. And during that time—those two decades that separate TC’s last memory of sipping root beer on a barstool beside his dad—his father has reached out only a handful of times, in the form of handwritten letters.

  I hoped it would pass, my husband’s existential need to reconcile the past. There was so much to be grateful for in this very moment; I hated the idea of TC being too preoccupied to enjoy it. For instance, he’d just gotten the big job offer from a competing firm in New York. And as if that weren’t enough, his current company had fought to keep him, offering a generous promotion that would root us in Washington. TC was a rising star in the renewable-energy field, even if he was too modest to admit it.

  I’d never met anyone who learned things as quickly as my husband. From the way he’d taught himself to play the guitar as a punky middle school kid, to the way he’d pushed himself at Duke while he was studying for his master’s, the drive and focus TC dedicated to learning something new was a jolt to my aimlessness. For although I’d been a bright and ambitious kid, young adulthood had zapped much of my natural curiosity and ambition. They had disappeared, somewhere in that space between self-awareness and self-criticism, where dreams go to die. Maybe this experience is a by-product of growing up. Or growing up female. In any case, TC somehow managed to avoid the loss.

  I ponder these disparate memories, struck for a moment by the possibility that I could be wrong about something. Perhaps missing some vital clue that would explain why my otherwise reliable husband failed to crawl into bed with me last night by midnight as promised.

  What if TC drank too much? Not just enough that he passed out on a friend’s couch (which is what I’m still holding out hope has happened), but enough that he’s made some deeply regrettable mistake. What if he’s with another woman? I force myself to imagine it for a moment: TC tucked under the thin sheet of someone else’s warm bed, his long, tanned legs intertwined with the limbs of someone who is not me.

  But it’s impossible. I know my husband. That’s probably the line all women say just before making the shocking discovery of their spouse’s infidelity, but I know. Know in my gut.

  And so I tell the officer this instead: I tell him about yesterday. The day TC went missing.

  Yesterday morning—Friday—he woke up early to go running. With characteristic discipline, TC set his alarm for 6:00 A.M. and left the apartment before sunrise. I woke up only after he returned, as he stood sweaty and breathless in our tiny bathroom, preparing to take a shower.

  “How far did ya go?” I asked, standing on my toes to kiss him on the cheek as his mouth overflowed with toothpaste foam.

  He bent over the sink to spit. “Down to the Tidal Basin and back,” he replied. “I don’t know how far that is. Maybe seven or eight miles?”

  I lifted my eyebrows in impressed awe. “Wow,” I mused, distracted by my examination of his post-run body. His lean ankles grazed the tops of his gray-and-orange Nikes. Perspiration glimmered from his light-brown sideburns. His damp T-shirt clung to the muscles in his chest. He looked good. Sexy. Strong.

  I’ve never run seven miles in my life, let alone before breakfast, but this is not a surprising fact. For years, I’ve eschewed any kind of fitness I deem as “not fun.” This includes anything having to do with boot camps, barbells, weight machines, spin class, and most of all—especially—running. Running has been, and always will be, for crazy, type A masochists, of which there are plenty in Washington, D.C. But it is most definitely not for me. I possess neither the will nor the motivation for something as joylessly difficult as running.

  Yesterday he went on a run. And then he went to work at his office downtown, where he prepared data models and fielded phone calls and did all sorts of tasks related to energy forecasting. He worked all day, then rode the Metro to the Capitol South station, where he popped by my classroom as I was unofficially “working.” Mostly, I was gabbing with co-workers I hadn’t seen since June and deciding where to arrange my bookcases for the upcoming school year. In his dress pants and shirt, he helped me move furniture. Then we picked up Jack from the nanny and headed home. An hour later his brother, Sean, arrived and they left again, into the buzzing city air, to join friends at the stadium. A one-mile walk from which TC wouldn’t return home.

  I would awake alone, although some part of me anticipated the discovery. My aloneness was not startling or surprising. I had tossed and turned throughout the night, let the dog out for several quick pees in the front yard, recognized that TC did not arrive home by his self-imposed curfew. Or by 2:00 A.M. Or by 4:30 A.M. I did not worry. I told myself husbands get drunk once in a while, even though mine rarely did. I told myself they sometimes need a night to crash on their old roommate’s couch. I told myself the mathematical probability of any other explanation was nearly impossible.

  And then I went back to sleep.

  The details play in my mind in perfect order. The same sequence again and again, as unchangeable and repetitive as the most persistent song lyrics. The details feel both terribly important, the only bits of straw I can grasp at to solve this increasingly frantic puzzle, and also profoundly mundane, nothing my brain would have cause to recall had the outcome of last night been different.

  I look at the officer and feel powerless. If my job is to convey to this stranger the value of my husband’s life, the entirety of our lives together, or the many reasons TC’s absence should panic us all, there are no words that will adequately do the job.

  CHAPTER 2

  Life in Washington is not without its difficulties. The days are long, the streets are full of traffic, and everything down to a three-bite cupcake costs more than it rightfully should. But still I’m in love. Not with the city’s most notable features: The National Mall, lined by stately museums and bookended by the Capitol and the alpine Washington Monument. Or even the cherry blossoms that emerge annually, a sweeping carousel of color that makes it impossible to drive responsibly down Independence Avenue, so distracting is the backdrop of the delicate pink petals against the shiny, blue current of the Potomac and the imposing white marble of the memorials dedicated to presidents past.

  What I love most are those quiet, precious hours before the city wakes, wh
en the grass of nearby Lincoln Park shimmers with dew and the brick sidewalks that form its perimeter sit bare. When I can sit on a park bench or the stoop of my building, a cup of coffee in hand, and consider the possibility of a day that has not yet unfolded.

  This quiet corner of the eastern side of the city has been our home for three years now, but it feels like much longer. I was eight when I first visited my godparents, Jim and Moira, on the Hill. They’d been living in the city since long before I was born, trading in their tiny Connecticut Avenue apartment on the opposite side of town for a slightly less tiny row home in Capitol Hill, where they could begin life as a family with their newly adopted infant daughter.

  Jim had been my dad’s best friend since 1975, the year they became roommates and colleagues at the D.C. office of the National Endowment for the Humanities. My family made the long trip from Phoenix to visit Jim and Moira in Washington whenever the occasion demanded it: christenings, holidays, my dad’s work trips. I should have suspected, given all those visits back east, that we’d eventually move closer to the city my father long considered home.

  I look out at the park now, where I can still see my sister and nine-year-old me dragging plastic sleds across the flat snow. We loved Capitol Hill, loved even more this tiny section of it known as Eastern Market, which contained not only the market itself, an indoor/outdoor treasure trove of fine foods and vibrant candies, but my godparents’ dollhouse of a home on Eleventh Street and the corner market that sold potato chips, a place Jim referred to only by the nickname Police, as it was often staffed by off-duty cops.

  That was back in the early ’90s, when Capitol Hill had a reputation for being highly dangerous and the city often felt like two separate cities, split along its western and eastern quadrants. That the capital of the country was also the murder capital of the country wasn’t something I knew until I was an adult, long after the seeds of gentrification had been sown and the crime statistics had begun to swing in D.C.’s favor, taking the city’s real estate prices skyward with them.

  After a year living in a rented row home down the street from Jim and Moira, TC and I made our first meager offer on the only place in the neighborhood we could afford, our two-bedroom treetop apartment in an old brick building facing East Capitol Street.

  “Are you sure this is the place for us?” I remember asking him skeptically, taking note of the bright orange paint that lined the apartment’s long hardwood hallway and the narrow galley kitchen with appliances that predated me.

  But in his mind, my husband was five steps ahead, already signing the papers, the affordable listing price being the only feature of this place that really mattered. And even though the apartment wasn’t my first choice, I trusted TC’s instincts, confident that whatever place we chose, it would quickly become home.

  Five months later, Jack made his entrance on a perfect autumn afternoon. In true D.C. fashion, I went into labor on the day of the 2010 midterm elections. While the people of Washington sat stunned, chewing over their Democratic losses in the House, TC helped pull Jack from my swollen body, cut the umbilical cord, and held him in the sturdy crook of his arm, tightly swaddled in the hospital-issued white cotton blanket.

  “I’m hungry,” I croaked after the nurses disconnected the monitor and finished cleaning me off. But when am I ever not hungry? Labor had been hard, but not nearly as hard as I expected. Or maybe Jack had just made it easy for me. I had bounced on a ball the night before, bounced until I stood up just as the credits for Million Dollar Baby began to roll and my water broke all over the living room floor. But there was time. Time to take a shower. Time to apply makeup. Time to straighten my hair. We got to the hospital and there was more time. Time to settle in. Time to read a magazine. Time for an epidural. They told me when to push, told me not to expect the baby to come flying out in a few short minutes. I took it as a challenge and pushed down with every bit of force I possessed and then he was here. Seven pounds, blue eyes, my exact nose. A little longer than the few minutes they’d told me to forget. Jack Kieran. My million-dollar baby.

  TC came alive like I’d never seen. Jack was his most precious thing, and I, the protector of his most precious thing. Fatherhood made him go inward and outward all at once. Alive and fiercely in love, my otherwise mellow husband began to radiate a vitality I’d never sensed from him before. He began to sing to Jack, in a tender and surprisingly skillful voice I always wished he’d use more. And when we took our family strolls, TC insisted, passionately, on being the one to wear Jack in the Baby Bjorn, citing to me the collective evidence on parental bonding via baby wearing.

  It was as if Jack was TC’s pass to more fully occupy the world, to experience joy in its most intense, abrasive form. And then, at the same time, he buried the experience within. Kept Jack in a safe, sacred place where nothing could be spoiled or changed or morphed by anyone else’s interpretation. TC was keenly aware of his father’s mistakes. He would not avert his eyes or leave Jack unprotected, even for a moment.

  * * *

  Now, at twenty-one months old, Jack toddles the perimeter of the landscaped front yard, pulling blades of grass from under the wrought iron fence that separates the yard from the sidewalk. I look out past the shock of his baby-fine white hair, out onto the street, where I can’t stop staring. This is where we greet TC every night on his way home from work, his brown loafers made dusty from the dirt path that cuts diagonally across the park, his leather messenger bag slung casually over his shoulder, before walking into the apartment whose orange walls have since been drenched in muted blues and crisp whites.

  But the neighborhood I’ve built my life upon, the one that once felt as comforting and familiar as my own reflection in the mirror, has taken on an unfriendly foreignness now that my life is in crisis. A few yards from where I sit, Capitol Hill carries on in its usual charmed way. Families stroll infants along the perimeter of Lincoln Park while dog owners congregate on the open grass, throwing tennis balls and chatting with one another about weekend plans.

  The scene is playing out just as it always has during the three years of Saturday mornings we’ve lived here, but it no longer offers the reassurance of home. Instead, I feel like an outsider. Someone who has been unexpectedly and cruelly uninvited from the party.

  The longer I wait, watching this cop as he relays information back to some stranger on the other end of his radio; the longer I watch Jack play in the grass, oblivious to my rising anxiety; and the longer each passing second separates me from my last conversation with TC, I become more disturbed and frightened.

  What is it that has kept me in denial for so long this morning? Sleeping in late and frying bacon in TC’s absence, as if it were a normal routine for me to wake up alone? Is it that I was scared of overreacting? Or have I been in such a genuine state of denial that any attempt to make rational sense of the situation has been immediately rejected by my brain? TC is gone, and the only explanation remaining is one I’ve been avoiding until now: something very, very bad has happened.

  The truth is obvious to me now, and a universe of potential scenarios floods my mind. The worst word, the one that begins with M, has begun to wrap its claws around my imagination. I try to shove it away.

  Murder.

  Good God, could that even be real? My breathing halts as the word reverberates in perseveration. Murder. Murder. Murder. Now I can’t make it stop. Was TC robbed, shot, or left for dead somewhere last night?

  I think of Eve Carson, the young girl who lost her life in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the year I worked at the university. She was a senior, the beloved class president, months from graduation, when she’d been taken from her home and shot dead in the street. The circumstances were unspeakably tragic, the details, unconscionably cruel. Eve’s murder rearranged my insides, made me sick with a grief I couldn’t understand, especially since I hadn’t known her. At the core of it was an embattled acceptance of something I’d never wrestled w
ith before: that in the war of truly good and genuinely evil, evil might triumph.

  Now that the possibility of murder has entered my brain, there is no way for me to unthink it.

  TC’s graduate school friends, Ryan and John, are out scouring the neighborhood for their friend. I called them an hour ago, panicked, minutes after I called my brother-in-law, Sean, who now sits next me in solidarity, a pained, stoic expression occupying his face.

  “When’s the last time you saw TC?” I had demanded breathlessly into the phone, my stomach knotted with hope that Sean could clarify his brother’s absence.

  “What? Huh?” he’d responded, confused. “I left early last night. TC stayed behind with his Duke friends to have another drink.”

  Sean is three years our junior, TC’s only sibling. He rents a room in a house just a few blocks north of here, and with no kids of his own and no serious girlfriend at the moment, Sean seems content in his bachelor life. But sometimes I think of us as two members of the same club: the one where TC, our fearless leader, holds our hand and walks us through adulthood. TC’s the one we count on to help us understand the thousand tiny responsibilities that now fall squarely in our court. Income taxes. Dental insurance. Student loans. The minutia Sean and I are simply too impatient to work out ourselves.

  I can only assume that, like me, Sean is searching the pockets of his own mind for the simple explanation we must have missed. But there are police involved now. We can’t wait any longer to inform the two most important people in TC’s life.