NINA
I drive to Jake’s office, which is the last place anyone saw him before he went missing. His office is located about thirty minutes from the high school where I teach, on the third floor of a four-story medical building. I leave straight from work, driving to it, not getting there until close to five o’clock.
I circle the lot first. I do so slowly, leaned forward in my seat, searching through the window for Jake’s car. His car isn’t here and, though I’m not surprised, I am disappointed; there was a part of me still holding out hope that it would be.
I park in the lot and walk into the modern glass building, taking a wide, open staircase up to the third floor where Jake’s office is. I follow the signs on the walls, moving down the hall and into the neurology office at the end of it, the one with Jake’s name on the door along with two other physicians’ names.
The receptionist looks briefly up from her computer when I come in. She smiles and asks for my name, as if to find my appointment on the schedule.
I say, “I don’t have an appointment. I’m Nina Hayes, Dr. Hayes’s wife. I was hoping to speak with someone about him.”
Her face changes. She straightens her back, sitting more upright. “Mrs. Hayes. Yes, of course. Just a minute please.” She gets up from her desk. She excuses herself and disappears somewhere that I can’t see, behind a partition. A minute later another woman, a doctor in a white coat and low heels, peeks her head out from behind the same partition. “Are you Mrs. Hayes?” she asks, coming closer, clutching a tablet to her chest, a stethoscope wrapped around the back of her neck. “Of course you are,” she goes on to say. “I recognize you from the picture in Jake’s office.” Her hair falls over her shoulders and down the front lapels of the coat. Her hair is long and ginger and I’m taken aback though it’s silly that I am, but for all the times I’ve thought of Jake at work, I’ve pictured middle-aged colleagues—all of them, in my imagination, inexplicably male—and not a woman this attractive. When Jake mentions colleagues by name, they’re almost always Dr. Winter and Dr. Caddel, and it’s my fault that I never thought to ask more about these people he works with.
“Nina,” I say, extending a hand as she shifts the tablet to one arm to reach out and shake my hand. “I’m here about Jake.”
“Andrea Caddel—Andi,” she says, and I realize my mistake. I’d just assumed the Andy that Jake sometimes mentions was a man and not the short form of Andrea. “Dr. Hayes isn’t here, Mrs. Hayes. I thought someone from the hospital called and spoke to you?” she says.
“Yes,” I say, “they did. I’m sorry. I should have clarified. I know Jake isn’t here, but that’s why I’ve come. I was hoping to speak with someone who would have been working with him on Monday. I’m trying to figure out where he might be. No one has spoken to him since Monday. No one has seen him either.”
She nods. “Yes, of course,” she says, softening. “Let me grab his nurse. We’ve been trying to reach him for days,” she says, as the receptionist returns, slipping back into her chair. “Everyone here is just so worried about him.”
“I know. I appreciate that. I’m worried about him too.”
“You must be completely beside yourself,” she says.
“I am.”
“Have you spoken to the police?”
“Yes. I’ve been to see them and I’ve filed a missing person’s report.”
“I just hope that, wherever he is, he’s fine. Let me see if I can get Tricia, Dr. Hayes’s nurse, for you. I wasn’t working on Monday, but she can tell you more about what happened that day. The last I saw, she was in with a patient, but maybe she’s through.”
The receptionist takes me to Jake’s office to wait, so that I don’t have to stand in the waiting room with patients. “Thank you,” I say as she unlocks the door and lets me in, and then leaves me alone with Jake’s things. His office is bland. The furniture—a desk, a slender bookshelf with books and potted plants that someone else must be watering and keeping alive—is laminate and ordinary. If I know Jake, he probably hates it. It’s nothing like his office at home, which is high-end and done by a professional designer. I haven’t been to this office of Jake’s before. I’ve been to the building only once to meet him for lunch, though Jake met me in the lobby that day. It’s not strange that I haven’t been here before, I don’t think. But it strikes me now how Jake and I have the life that we share, and then we have entirely separate lives.
It takes a minute, but Dr. Caddel finds Tricia.
“Hi, Tricia,” I say as she comes into Jake’s office wearing light blue scrubs, her hair pulled back into a ponytail with loose curly pieces that fall from her hairline. “I’m Nina Hayes, Dr. Hayes’s wife. I was hoping I could talk to you for a few minutes about Jake.”
“Sure,” she says. “What did you want to know?”
“Dr. Caddel tells me you were working with Jake on Monday.”
She nods. “I was.”
“Can you tell me anything about that day? Was it a typical day?”
She thinks back. “Yes, for the most part. Dr. Hayes worked Monday morning as scheduled. But then around, I don’t know, maybe two or two thirty, he said that he needed to run out for a while and that he’d be back.”
“Was that unusual?” I ask. “For Jake to run out in the middle of the day?”
She considers this. “Yes and no,” she says. Dr. Caddel stays and listens, leaned against the wall. Her tablet is gone now so that her arms are empty. She crosses them against herself, nodding slowly, listening intently. “He doesn’t do it often, but he’s done it before. He had a cancellation too, so there was a gap in his schedule. His next appointment wasn’t until four, and the morning had been so busy that neither of us had time for lunch. I didn’t think anything of him leaving. I thought he was just going to get a bite to eat or that he had an errand to run.”
“But then?” I ask, leading.
“But then,” she says, “the next thing I knew, it was four o’clock. Dr. Hayes’s patient was here, but Dr. Hayes wasn’t. The office manager, I believe, tried calling him, but as far as I know, he never answered. Someone told me he hasn’t come home.”
“No.”
“It’s so unlike Jake,” Dr. Caddel says.
“It is,” I say, because Jake is always so punctual and so conscientious. “How did he seem when he left?” I ask, my eyes going back to his nurse, Tricia.
“Fine,” Tricia says, “for the most part. He had a difficult appointment in the morning, a follow-up meeting with the family of a patient who died.”
Dr. Caddel says, “Those are never easy.”
“I can imagine they’re not. Was Jake upset about it?” I ask, looking to Tricia, but again it’s Dr. Caddel who speaks.
“With every surgery comes risk, which is why patients are required to give informed consent before we operate on them. Sometimes a surgeon can do everything right, the surgery can be incredibly routine, and still a patient dies. Despite his efforts, Dr. Hayes could not stop that particular patient from bleeding out. From what I’ve heard, the family was devastated and they took it out on Jake. For as hard as we try, it’s impossible for a surgeon not to feel shaken when something like this happens.”