Now You See It by Allison Lynn

Author:Allison Lynn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

1997

After six months of sleeping badly, in the bed he had shared with Jessica, David reconstructed his life in the guest room. He moved his clothes into the closet. He carried his clock radio from the master bedroom and set it on his new night table, a temporary flea-market find that they’d meant to replace once they got around to buying real furniture, pieces without this night table’s shady, unknown history. He brought his favorite water glass, his jar full of change, the small, framed map of Peru that had gently rested against the lamp on his dresser. He lugged his shoes, three pairs at a time, and arranged them at the foot of his new bed. It was a good bed, polished maple and extra-firm and high off the ground, more than adequate for a guest and perfectly acceptable for David.

He left the pillows, throw rug, and lap blanket behind. He left everything that smelled like Jessica. He was sure it was this smell that kept him up at night, awake for hours, until, finally, rest came, an irregular sleep, marred by nightmares. Images of Jessica, sad and confused, standing over their bed and wondering why she wasn’t in it, or standing a block from their apartment but unable to navigate her way home. He dreamed he was a boy lost on Nantucket again and woke wheezing and reaching for his mother. In a dream so vivid that David almost searched the house for Jessica afterward, he saw his wife pregnant, her stomach extending far beyond her toes. Jessica, carrying a child, something they had imagined together, all the time. In the dream, she grinned and said nothing.

So David left the master bedroom and moved to the guest room where, free of Jessica’s smells and their shared history, he could sometimes forget about all of it for the six, seven, eight hours that he slept.

Jessica’s belongings remained in the master bedroom as she’d left them. The only things he removed were the loose odds and ends that usually lay splayed on the dresser. Seeing it all—her hairbrush, her makeup, the small bowl full of safety pins and hairbands, a pile of grocery receipts—was, to David, like looking at a painful collage of her used parts. He swept the entire dresser top into a shoe box.

A larger cardboard box sat in the corner of the kitchen. Every time he spotted a clipping that someone, someone with a bad sense of cause-and-effect, might think pertained to Jessica’s disappearance ( WOMAN ABDUCTED IN SOUTH JERSEY or RAPIST ARRESTED IN PITTSBURGH ), he dropped it in the box. None of this truly had anything to do with her, he knew this. He’d given up on believing flimsy leads and wallowing in unsubstantiated hope. Still, every time he saw a clipping that reminded him of some aspect of his wife, he dropped it in this box. He tossed in photos from magazines if the model had Jessica’s haircut. He threw in clips of person-on-the-street interviews if the person said something David could envision coming from Jessica’s mouth.

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