The Missing Night

Darius left for ice at 8:17.

I remember because I paused the movie when he stood, and the time appeared in the corner of the screen.

I waited until the frozen frame went dark, then pressed the remote to bring it back. From the balcony, I could hear the gate arm at the complex entrance lift and drop. Each time, I leaned over the railing. Each time, somebody else's car passed beneath the lights.

"We have ice," I said.

"Not enough," Darius said.

"For two people?"

He lifted his keys from the bowl by the door. "You want anything?"

"For you to sit down."

He gave me a small smile, already turning, and pulled the door shut behind him.

At 8:43, I sent a text.

At 9:02, I called.

At 9:26, the call went straight to voicemail.

The grocery store was five minutes away. I drove slowly along its lit rows, then through the gas station, then past the mailboxes to the turnout where teenagers smoked in idling cars with their headlights off. Back home, I called hospitals. Each time someone told me they had no patient by that name, I thanked them. Then I sat with one less explanation.

By eleven, I had begun counting the possibilities on my fingers.

Accident. Arrest. Another woman. Alcohol. Something wrong with his heart. Punishment for an argument neither of us had admitted we were having.

I called Miss Evelyn with the phone still warm against my ear.

"He probably just needs some air," she said.

"For three hours?" I asked.

"Darius don't like feeling cornered."

"I asked him to watch a movie."

"Sometimes it ain't what you say. It's how a man feels."

I looked at his empty place on the couch, trying to remember my tone.

At 12:11, headlights swept across the living room window.

He came in carrying a bag of ice, the plastic sagging with water.

"Where were you?"

"Driving," Darius said.

"Your phone was off."

"Battery died."

"It was charged when you left."

"Then it froze. I don't know."

His words ran together at the ends. He stood beyond the reach of the lamp, looking down at the bag.

"Have you been drinking?"

"No," Darius said.

"Were you with someone?"

"Here we go."

"You disappeared for four hours."

"I came back."

He said it as though I had overlooked the only fact that mattered.

I reached for the car keys in his hand. He closed his fist and drew it back.

"Why?"

"Because they mine," Darius said.

"The car is in my name."

For a second, we stood with my hand open between us.

Then he lowered the keys to the counter, setting them down so carefully they barely made a sound.

"There. Control everything. That's what you want."

I went down to the car alone. The interior light came on when I opened the passenger door. A receipt lay on the floor mat, from a bar across town, time-stamped 10:38. Two drinks. One appetizer.

I carried it upstairs and found the bedroom door locked.

"Who was with you?" I asked.

"Nobody," Darius said through the door.

"The receipt says two drinks."

"They rang it wrong."

"And the food?"

"I ate."

"Where did you buy the ice?" I asked.

I waited with the receipt in my hand. Nothing came through the door.

I slept on the couch with the receipt flattened beneath my phone. In the morning, Darius said he had met a veteran friend who was having a hard time and had asked him not to tell anyone. He kept his voice low, as though even now he was protecting the man.

"What is his name?" I asked.

"You don't know him," Darius said.

"Then a name costs nothing."

"I'm not dragging somebody else into your suspicion."

I put the receipt back beneath my phone.

I never learned who sat across from him that night, or whether the second drink had also been his.

For a long time, I thought I needed to know before I could stop asking.

I did not.

He had come home nearly four hours later and held up a bag of ice. Water had collected in its folded corners.

On the Saturday I went back to the bar on Orange in the daylight, which I have never admitted to anyone.

It looked smaller with the lights on. Two men were watching golf. A kid was cutting limes. I sat at the end of the bar and ordered a club soda and put a twenty down for a two-dollar drink and asked the woman with the septum ring if she remembered a man with a tattoo on his neck on the previous Tuesday, around ten-thirty.

"Honey," she said, but gently this time, because it was daytime and there was no one to perform for. "What are you actually asking me?"

"I'm asking if he was by himself."

She dried her hands. She looked at me for a second longer than was comfortable.

"I'm not going to lie to you and I'm not going to tell you," she said. "Because if I tell you, you're going to go home and fight about the wrong thing."

I have thought about that more than I have thought about the receipt. A stranger with a rag in her hand identified my entire problem in one sentence and declined to make it worse. I left the twenty. I sat in my car in the lot for a while and then I drove home and made dinner.

Because she was right, and I knew she was right, and I kept fighting about the wrong thing for another year anyway. The night was never the point. The point was that a grown man had a category of hours he did not account for, and every time I went looking for the contents of those hours instead of objecting to the category, he got to be the one being accused, and I got to be the one apologizing for the tone of the accusation.

Eventually, Darius supplied a name for the veteran friend.

Marcus.

I searched the contacts in Darius's phone, then scrolled through the M's. No Marcus.

"He changed his number," Darius said.

"What's the new number?" I asked.

"Why would I give you his number?"

"Because he's your explanation for four missing hours."

"I'm not asking another man to verify me to my woman."

He straightened as he said it. We were no longer discussing a phone number.

Weeks later, he called the friend Malcolm, slipping the name into a sentence without hesitation.

I did not correct him immediately.

"How is Malcolm?" I asked.

"Who?" Darius asked.

He looked at me, waiting for a name he recognized.

The morning after Darius disappeared for ice, I stood at the head of a conference table and presented a strategy to executives.

I had slept ninety minutes. Under the bathroom light, I pressed concealer beneath my eyes and smoothed the lapels of my tailored blazer. Its shoulders held their shape even when mine did not.

The presentation went well.

I answered the difficult questions and defended the budget. When a senior man began presenting one of my recommendations as his own, I returned to the slide bearing my name and walked the room through it again. Afterward, people stopped beside my chair to congratulate me.

In the bathroom, I slid the stall latch into place and checked my phone.

The night in March that he did not come home, I drove.

I want to describe the driving, because it was four and a half hours of my one life and I have never told anyone the whole route. I went to Reggie's first, off Michigan, and sat outside with my headlights off looking at a dark house with no cars in the driveway. I went to the bar on Orange he liked, and walked in in my work clothes at eleven-forty and asked a bartender with a septum ring if she had seen a man with a tattoo on his neck, and she said, kindly, "Honey, I've seen nine of those tonight."

I drove to the studio house where the tapestry was. I drove past Julian's apartment complex and looked for his car in the lot and could not remember which building. I drove to the hospital on Orange Avenue, parked in the emergency lot, and walked to the desk and asked whether they had admitted a Darius, and the woman behind the glass asked if I was family, and I said no, and she said she could not tell me anything, and something in her face told me she was being kind by not being able to.

At one-fifty I stopped at the Wawa on Semoran because I had run the tank down to a quarter, and I stood in the fluorescence at the coffee station with my badge still on my waistband and made myself eat a banana, because I had not eaten since a granola bar at one in the afternoon, and because I had a nine a.m.

A woman came in behind me, fifty-something, scrubs, tired in the specific way of a person at the end of a shift and not the beginning of a crisis. We reached for the same lid dispenser.

"You okay, baby?" she said.

"Long night," I said.

"Mm." She put her lid on. "He'll turn up."

I have thought about that stranger many times. She had not asked who. She had looked at a woman in office clothes buying coffee at two in the morning and known the entire category of the situation, which means she had stood in it herself, or beside someone who had, and it means the category is enormous.

I got home at two-forty. I lay on top of the covers in my clothes with my phone in my hand and my heart going, and I did the thing I am most ashamed of in this entire book: I rehearsed.

Not what I would say to him. What I would say to his grandmother, to Nadine, to my mother, to my director if I had to take a day off. I drafted the reasonable version of it in my head so that no one would have to be alarmed. I built the alibi for a man who was not yet home while he was somewhere unaccounted for, and I built it before I built anything for myself.

He came in at four-fifteen. I heard the deadbolt, the keys on the counter, water running, his shoes hitting the floor by the couch, one and then the other.

He did not come into the bedroom. He slept on the couch, in his clothes, and in the morning the apartment smelled like a bar in a way the air conditioner could not take out, and my alarm went off at six-thirty, and I got up and showered and put on a blazer and went and ran the nine o'clock.

There was no apology from Darius. He wanted to know whether I had moved his car keys.

I read the message twice beneath the fluorescent light. The people outside trusted me with decisions affecting millions of dollars. I was standing beside a toilet, trying to remember where I had last seen his keys.

I returned to the conference room, opened my notes, and called the next meeting to order.

My work gave no one a reason to worry about me.

Beside my open notebook, the phone lay facedown.