He's Gone by Deb Caletti

been in together. Maybe some people would find that comforting, but I don’t. It’s a bed of mixed emotions. Beds often are, even in the best of circumstances. I get up. In the living room, Pollux lifts his chin from his pillow and watches me, decides it’s not worth the effort to follow. He tucks his chin back down again. He’s been up way past his bedtime, too, with all those people around. I open the sliding door to the deck and sit down in one of the Adirondack chairs. I pull my robe around me. My phone is in my pocket in case Ian calls.
    If you have taken off somewhere, I am going to be so fucking mad at you , I tell Ian, wherever he is. The moon is large and white (he’s under it, too, somewhere) and the water out there shimmers with light. I can smell the deep murkiness of the lake. The dockgroans and creaks and sways a little—soft, lulling rhythms. The New View sloshes and bumps against the dock.
    The party, the drive home, the grim face.
    I try and try to remember.
    The cool sheets. The bliss of rest.
    I take my phone from my pocket. Her name and number are still on my list of contacts. I dial.
    You have reached the office of Dr. Shana Berg. If this is an emergency, please dial 911 …
    I listen to her voice, wait to leave a message, but there’s a beep on my phone. It’s the double ring of another call coming in. It’s midnight. It’s him, of course it is. Who else? He’s heard about the commotion here tonight, and he’s feeling bad that he’s worried all those people. I feel sick with fear and relief. I feel joy, and fear and sickness, but, thank God, whatever it is, now I’ll know. I punch the button on the phone and wait to hear Ian’s voice.
    “Dani?”
    “Yes?”
    “It’s Nathan.”
    “Nathan?”
    “I’m sorry to call so late. I really am. So many people were there tonight … I wanted to talk to you, but …”
    “What, Nathan? What? Do you know something? You know something.”
    He is quiet. For a moment I think we’ve lost the connection. “Nathan?”
    “I think maybe we should meet.”
    When I was a child in the suburbs of Seattle during the 1970s, we lived next door to Mr. and Mrs. Harris, who were quiet and kept to themselves, even on Halloween, when they turned their porch light off. They were the only ones who did that, the onedark house on that street. One summer, I was sure that Mr. Harris had done in Mrs. Harris and their small dog, Trixie. I hadn’t seen Mrs. Harris’s large, floral-clad rear end bent over in the garden for a number of days, and I hadn’t seen Trixie flinging her small body against our shared fence whenever we let our cat out. But Mr. Harris kept coming home from work every night at six P.M ., same as ever. It seemed possible that Mr. Harris had buried Mrs. Harris right under one of those flat, cement squares of their back patio, because he was a funeral director and because school was out and I was bored. For a long while, it was my understanding that this was where they put all the bodies from O’Dooley’s Funeral Home: beneath their patio, under the Harrises’ barbecue and Mrs. Harris’s tomato plants, the very place where Mrs. Harris sunned herself on a tippy, webbed chaise longue, slathering on the Sea & Ski and drinking Tab out of the can.
    I spied on Mr. Harris for a few days and took notes in a spiral pad I’d decorated with a cool STP sticker. He washed his car. He hauled out his garbage cans. He turned on their sprinkler and forgot to turn it off until late at night, when the lawn was soaked. I watched too much Dragnet with my father, too much Adam-12 . I read Two-Minute Mysteries and Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew , and funeral directors seemed likely capable of anything.
    Mrs. Harris and Trixie returned, though, after apparently spending several weeks at the local Travelodge. I heard my mother tell my friend Becky’s mom that Mr. Harris had gotten involved with someone he worked with at O’Dooley’s. This was extraordinarily