A woman’s voice comes at me through the speaker. “Hello,” she says. “Can I speak to Mrs. Hayes please?”
“This is she.”
“Mrs. Hayes,” she says. She says that she is the chief surgeon at the hospital where Jake works, and my heart accelerates quickly. Why is the chief surgeon at Jake’s hospital calling? “Dr. Hayes has you listed as an emergency contact,” she says, and with that, my whole body goes numb. I lose feeling in my legs and hands.
Emergency contact.
Oh my God, he’s dead, is all I can think. Jake is dead.
I lean against the exterior brick of the building, letting it support me. A bus pulls up to the curb. Its engine is loud. I have to press a finger into my ear to hear this woman’s voice over the noise. I watch as kids climb out of the bus, down the steps. Half-asleep students walk like zombies past me and into the building.
“Are you there, Mrs. Hayes?” the woman asks.
“Yes,” I say, my voice weak.
“Mrs. Hayes, we’re concerned about Dr. Hayes. He hasn’t shown up for his surgeries in a couple days, and his office staff reported that he didn’t make it into the office for his afternoon appointments on Monday. His staff has tried to contact him, but hasn’t been successful. Is everything alright at home?” she asks and, for the first time I realize that not only has Jake not been coming home to me at night, but he hasn’t been going into work. He hasn’t returned my calls, but he hasn’t returned the hospital’s calls either.
Jake hasn’t just left me.
Something has happened to Jake.
“Jake hasn’t been coming home either. I thought…” I say, but then I let my voice drift off because I don’t want to say more than I need to say. This woman is a colleague of Jake’s, but she’s a stranger to me. I recognize her name, Dr. Morris. I recognize the names of most of the people Jake works with because he talks about them at home, but that doesn’t mean I know them. She doesn’t need to know about the fight I had with Jake. “Jake is missing,” I breathe, and as I say it, it has such a different implication than that Jake left me or that Jake didn’t come home.
Jake is missing.
Oh my God. Jake is missing.
As soon as I hang up with the chief surgeon, I go straight toward my car in the parking lot. I don’t go back into the building. I call the school office from my car and, when Pam answers, I tell her an emergency has cropped up and that I’ll be late.
“Is everything okay, Nina?” she asks, and I say only that I don’t know.
I slip the car into Reverse. I pull out of the parking spot and onto the street. Traffic is getting even heavier on the roads. It’s starting to build, not just school traffic but morning rush hour, which backs up at intersections. Even worse, the police station is located on the other side of the Metra station from here. The commuter train, during rush hour, comes by with some frequency. I have to wait for not one train, but two trains to pass. I get upset at a car in front of me that doesn’t immediately go as the gate lifts. The driver is on her phone. If she waits too long, another train will come and we’ll be forced to wait even longer. I honk my horn and the car goes.
The police station is a squat brick building. I’ve driven by it a thousand times, but I’ve never been inside because I’ve never had a reason to be. The building is unremarkable and dated, reminding me of an old elementary school.
My hands are shaking as I pull into a parking spot. I put the car into Park and step from the vehicle. I try closing the door but my seat belt gets in the way, and I have to open the door and push it back in.
“I need to report a missing person,” I say with a shaking voice to the front desk officer once inside. The lobby is practically empty. Other than the front desk officer and me, there is only one other person here, a man who sits in a chair facing the windows, looking out.
I’m worried about Jake. But I’m also feeling guilty and ashamed that I waited all this time to come to the police. It never crossed my mind that something might be wrong, that something might have happened to Jake. I only thought that he was upset with me, that he was avoiding me.
“Who’s missing?” she asks.
“My husband,” I say. “Jake Hayes. Dr. Jacob Hayes.”
“Okay, ma’am.” She pulls something up on the computer screen. “When did you last see him?” she asks.
“Monday,” I say.
I think back to Monday morning. Jake and I were both up and getting ready for work. That is the last time I saw Jake. Because it wasn’t a surgery day, he didn’t have to be in the office until eight, which meant we were getting ready at the same time. Usually on mornings like that, Jake and I would talk, catch up. I looked forward to them. There was less of an urgency on nonsurgery mornings. We would have breakfast together and talk about our plans for the day. But not this Monday because, this Monday, we moved in silent circles, giving each other a wide berth because we were angry with each other, and hurt. We didn’t speak to one another, at all. We didn’t say a single word, not until Jake left, leaving me with three final words that got under my skin. It wasn’t so much what he said but the way he said it. What if those are the last words he ever speaks to me?
Instead of talking that morning, chair legs scraped against the floor. Doors slammed. Drawers were flung noisily shut. Tension hung low and heavy in the air like fog.
I’d spent Sunday with my mother. She needed things like groceries for the week, and a new fall coat because the days are getting cool. I’d taken her to the mall and the grocery store, in that order, but first we went to church because that’s another thing my mother can’t do without me and, for the most part, she’s a devout Christian and loves going to church.
Later, when we got back to her house, my mother asked me to stay for dinner. She didn’t say so, but I know she hates being alone. She gets so lonely. “Let me make you dinner to repay you for taking such good care of me,” was how she phrased it, but I knew she wanted me to stay because she didn’t want me to leave. She was desperate for company. I said okay and I stayed. I texted Jake to let him know. He never replied to my text. My mother made my favorite meal, like she did when I was a girl and she had a rare night off work. I could tell she enjoyed having someone to cook for again, other than herself. It was a struggle, because of her vision, but she did it mostly by herself, cooking from a recipe she had memorized. Her mother, my grandmother, also had macular degeneration. It’s hereditary. If someone in the family has it, then you’re far more likely to get it too. It’s hard, watching my mother struggle and knowing this is very likely my own fate.
The problem was that Jake doesn’t work on Sundays, unless he’s on call. He wanted me home with him. He didn’t tell me that. I was just supposed to know, to use mental telepathy I suppose, to read his mind, though lately, even when we are both home, he likes to be alone and not with me. It seems like whenever I come into a room he’s in, he finds a reason to leave it.
When I came home after seven, he stared icily at me from across the room. He didn’t speak. He was drinking a whiskey sour. At first I felt threatened by the lowering look. For whatever reason, I thought of that patient of Jake’s who died after surgery. The one he told me about. The young woman who was shot dead by her husband. The one with brain stem death. I don’t know why I thought of her just then, but I thought again about why her husband might have shot her, and then wondered if she did something as innocuous as spend the day with her mother.