“Wait, what?” Rainey stammered, slamming her mug down harder than she intended, sending a tsunami of coffee into the air and all over the granite counter top, splashing her white blouse. A drop flew into her left eye. “You talked to Mike?” she asked as she rubbed her freshly done mascara, trying to soothe the sting but making matters worse. “Did he call you?”
“No,” Brandon said cautiously, drawing the word out for a couple of seconds, concluding it with a questioning inflection. He could sense that something was wrong, but couldn’t fathom what it was. Mike and Rainey had been his clients for fifteen years. “I called him. Like I mentioned in my voicemail, I needed to get the square footage on your shop for the insurance company. Since I couldn’t reach you, I just tried Mike’s cell.”
“And he just answered?”
“Yes?” Brandon said in a similar fashion as he previously said “no.” “What’s going on?”
Rainey didn’t know how to answer this. She’d tried that phone number at least ten times a day for the last year. She knew it was still active – his voicemail message hadn’t been changed. It was still on their family account, and he still paid the bill every month. Other than paying a couple of bills – Netflix, the phone, even the goddamn mortgage – he had completely ghosted her.
“You sure you don’t want to ride with me to drop Sam off?” Mike had asked her last year.
“No, you go ahead together. It will be a nice father-son trip. I’ll see him at parent’s week next month. It’s the same week of your convention, so I’ll have my mother-son time with him then.”
“Okay then. See you later on,” he said with a strange shoulder pat as he grabbed his overnight bag off the dining room table and called Sam. “Ready, Son?”
Their only child bounded up the stairs, hands full with a duffle bag and a guitar case. “Yep, let’s go.” He was off to college, a ten-hour drive away. Close enough to get to in a day, far enough for him to spread his wings. Rainey had pulled out her cell phone and backed herself in between her son and husband.
“Mom, not another selfie!” Sam protested.
“Just one for the road. It will hold me over until Christmas.”
Rainey put her phone on speaker and pulled up her photo gallery while Brandon asked her again, “Rainey? What’s up?” She looked at that family picture again--their last--looking for clues, just as she had done hundreds of times before, and just as every time before, coming up empty.
She shook herself back into the present day and said “Brandon, look, I gotta go. Email me if you need anything else for the insurance company.”
She hung up and tried Mike’s number. It rang to his voicemail.
“You talk to our insurance agent but can’t answer my calls?” She punched the red end button, longing for the satisfying days of smashing a heavy headset down onto its cradle; if you slammed it just right, a faint ring would punctuate the moment.
A year earlier when he hadn’t come home the following day as she’d expected, she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to trouble Sam on his first few days away from home if there wasn’t anything to tell. But by the end of the weekend, her worry was overwhelming. She called the cops to report him missing, telling herself she would tell Sam when she had something – anything – to tell. The cops investigated briefly, then told her that Mike wasn’t missing. He was alive and well and knew exactly where he was. He just didn’t want her in on the secret. The detective’s furrowed brow as he explained this to her only emphasized her shame.
“But why?”
“He didn’t say. He didn’t want to file a restraining order, but he didn’t want us to tell you where he is either.”
She wanted to scream and cry and scratch their eyes out. None of it would solve anything.
“Have you talked to your dad?” she asked Sam noncommittally during Parent’s Week, a blur of silly activities, mostly spent with other mothers whose lives seemed as polished and perfect as hers was irrevocably broken. She was afraid to hear his answer.
“Yeah, I flew to Seattle for his retirement party last weekend. Didn’t he tell you? It was too bad you couldn’t be there,” he’d replied, clearly as unaware of his father leaving his mother as she was of his early retirement. Before she could think of some way to suss out more details, Sam shifted the subject to a story about his least favorite professor.
Rainey didn’t intend to keep Mike’s secret departure from their lives to herself, but realizing he would answer calls from cops and not tell their son he’d left her made her curious. She took the next two weeks off work and spent them tearing their house apart for clues. Fine combing credit card and bank statements, digging through files in their cloud account, monitoring their credit report, arranging her days to “run into” his friends, hoping one of them would let something slip. Nothing.
After those first several weeks, Rainey realized she was out of her depth. She hired a private investigator. A week later, he came by the house and gave her money back. “Mike IDed me before I did him,” he said. “He doesn’t want to be followed or ‘stalked.’ That was his word. If you decide to divorce him, feel free to give me a call to serve him. Otherwise, there’s not much I can do. My advice? Move on.”
Rainey wanted to claw his eyes out too.
The more time that went by, the more embarrassed she was to tell people that her own husband wanted nothing to do with her. With every omission, the lie got bigger and more insurmountable. “No Mike?” People would ask at social events. “Not tonight,” she would smile vaguely. Nobody challenged her. She wondered sometimes if it was she who had disappeared.
Sad ending. You do a great job of detailing Rainey's frustration with her husband's behavior.
This is so good and it left me dying to know what happened!