By Spencer Fleury

Nicole

Before we start, I think you should know that I am not the sort of person who opens up easily. This whole thing feels unnatural to me. So, yeah. Just putting that out there.

As bad as it is to hear the words that your husband is missing, as bad as you would imagine that to be—and it was bad, I mean of course it was, I’m not saying you’d think it wasn’t—it honestly isn’t the worst part. It’s pretty bad, I guess. But I think I actually found that part to be kind of manageable, really. I think what I did was, I decided right away to treat it like just another piece of bad news, like finding out my car had been stolen or something.

It wasn’t the clueless teenaged police officer, just a baby really, who broke the news—Um, we found your husband’s boat on fire off Pass-a-Grille Beach this evening but he wasn’t on it and his car is in the Eighth Avenue Marina parking lot but he’s not in it and it’s after midnight so, um, he wouldn’t happen to be here, would he?—while standing on my front steps and holding a cup of coffee in his hand. A cup of coffee. Really. I know. He even took a sip while I was saying something and he was obviously thinking about something else entirely. I wonder if he even realized he was doing it.

No, the worst part came later, once they’d gone. They left without answering any of my questions, but because of how they deflected everything, I didn’t really notice that until much later. They left me sitting there on the very edge of the couch, all alone, to digest and process the life-changing information they’d stopped by to deliver. Like it was a pizza or something. They just dropped it all in my lap and left me alone with a four-year-old girl asleep upstairs, a girl who, when she wakes up in a few hours, is going to want to know where her daddy is.

That’s the worst part of it. Wondering how you’ll tell your daughter.

I was all alone. Really alone. I mean, I’d been alone before, but this was different. This one time when I was eight or nine, my family took a vacation to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and I got lost in the woods one afternoon. My dad found me about three hours later, which might not sound like much but is actually a long time to be wandering around the woods by yourself at that age. That was a terrifying experience. What I felt that night was more of a trapped-on-an-ice-floe kind of alone, I think, like I was drifting off into the unknown, all by myself, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. I don’t know. Maybe that doesn’t make any sense.

I knew I wouldn’t get any sleep or answers that night. It was 3:26 in the morning and I kept thinking I should start making phone calls. But I was hesitant about calling everyone to let them know my husband was missing. Is that even done?

Well of course it is. Don’t be ridiculous.

But it was the middle of the night. I had literally no idea what the accepted etiquette was for that. Should I just start waking people up?

Yes. If I’m up, they can be too. It was time to make a list.

Making lists is my most effective coping mechanism. I love lists. I’ve got notebooks full of nothing but lists that I’ve made over the years. Sometimes I will even make lists of the lists I’ve got going at any given moment. It kind of embarrasses me to admit that out loud. It sounds way OCD. And maybe it is, I don’t know. It seems like it would be pretty common, though. I’m sure in your work you’ve talked to plenty of other people who do the same thing, probably as a way to bring order to the chaos of their lives or something. At least, that’s why I do it, I think.

I grabbed the Sharpie from the side table and an old ATM receipt that I was using as a bookmark in a novel I’d been reading for the last month; it wasn’t really my thing but I never have been able to abandon a book halfway through unless it’s really horrible. Across the top I printed out “People to Call” as carefully as I could. I underlined it twice, because the title of the list should be set off from the body of the list. Then I underlined it a third time for emphasis.

So. List started. All right. Now who should I call?

Parents. That one seemed obvious. Let’s start with parents. So I wrote it down and then thought, Aha, but whose parents—mine or his? Well, if I’m being honest with myself about it, I meant my parents. So I thought I’d better add his too. I printed out “Gail & Bob” next, just so I knew whose parents should be called in which order. Then I added “Alton” in parentheses, in case I forgot whose parents they were.

Oh, for the love of Christ.

Clearly, the list wasn’t helping. Maybe it was too soon. I don’t know. I could already feel things spinning out of control, all these thoughts in my mind running away from me almost before I could even understand what they were. It was all slipping away from me already, and I had to be strong for Clara. Had to. She was going to need me so much. So I stood up, folded my arms and picked a spot along the baseboards where I could focus my eyes. Deep breath. Another. You can do this. Be calm. Focus.

Missing. Missing. What a horrible word, the bland everyday-ness of it. How could that be right, missing? What the hell would he have been doing, taking the boat out on a cold and windy afternoon? And the Scotch—he didn’t even drink Scotch. Did he? No. Why would there be two empty bottles of Scotch in the car? Could he even drink that much? Did someone else put those in there? Did they have something to do with this? Was he dead? Was he hurt? Goddamn it, where the hell was he?

I was walking laps around the couch without realizing I was doing it. My arms were still folded tight across my chest. Work. I should probably call his office. So I picked up the receipt again and wrote it on the list: “Office (Alton).” Better add mine too; I had a lot of projects going on just then, but they’d have to get by without me for a day or two. Oh, and also Pineview School, not because I planned on keeping Clara home but because I wanted to make sure they knew what was going on, just in case. Clara would need structure; school would help with that. So I wrote “Pineview School (Clara)” at the bottom of the list. I guess I added her name in case I forgot which family member went to Pineview. So ridiculous. Then I crumpled the receipt and threw it to the floor as hard as I could, which was incredibly unsatisfying because you really want whatever you throw in a situation like that to have a little more heft to it. It just frustrated me more. So I flung the Sharpie down the hall and into the dining room, where I heard it skitter across the hardwood floor and ricochet off a stick of furniture. “Goddamn it.” I said it out loud, to nobody, and that was when I felt my breath hitch, just for a second, but that was enough. With my very next breath I was sobbing, a quaking mass of useless, in a heap on the floor, leaning against the couch, face buried in my hands. To this day I’m so thankful there were no mirrors in that living room.

And then, the strangest thing. For a minute or so, I cried harder than I’ve ever cried, before or since. The sounds that were coming out of me—well. I can’t imagine it was a good look for me. Let’s just leave it at that. I don’t think I had ever felt that exact combination of emotions before: angry, scared, cheated. There was some other stuff mixed in there too. It was probably the most intense feeling of helplessness I have ever experienced.

And then it just . . . stopped. I can’t really explain it. I cried for less than two minutes and then it just switched off, as suddenly as it had started. It was almost as if I had somehow forgotten why I was crying in the first place.

Of course, I hadn’t forgotten. It hadn’t even been two minutes. But I couldn’t feel it anymore. The emotion behind the expression just burned itself out. It all seemed less real for a moment, like it was happening to someone else.

Who am I really crying for?

What if . . . what if he was dead? What if all this was real, I mean really real? What if he actually had been on the boat that night and it caught fire and he fell overboard without a life vest because of course a man’s man like Alton could never wear a life vest—and then he was just . . . gone? Would that really be so bad?

Of course it would. Of course. It would be horrible.

But you know, maybe not.

Maybe . . . maybe it really wouldn’t be so bad after all.

There would be insurance. There had to be. Anyone who earned as much as Alton did—earned, he’d been missing for less than six hours and I was already thinking of him in the past tense; I know, I’m an awful person—would have to have insurance. I knew my paycheck alone wouldn’t keep Clara and me in the house, but we had money saved, investments, because there was no way he could possibly have spent everything he made. Clara was safe. I had Clara. And I had—

I stopped myself right there. That wasn’t good karma, thinking these things so soon after he was gone. First things first. Take care of Clara, which was going to involve telling a four-year-old girl that her daddy’s never coming back. I know that technically he was only missing, not dead, but “probably never coming back” didn’t sound any gentler to me. She loved Alton. She worshipped him. They had such a bond, those two, which I always found a little surprising because his work schedule didn’t always leave much time for anyone else. This was going to crush her, and I really didn’t want to have to be the one to deliver the blow.

I heard a noise on the stairs, and then I saw Clara, sitting there, watching me.

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Spencer Fleury has worked as a sailor, copywriter, economics professor, and record store clerk, among other disreputable professions. He was born in Michigan, spent most of his life in Florida, and now lives in San Francisco. How I’m Spending My Afterlife is his first novel.

Learn more at SpencerFleury.com

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