Page 3 of Nothing Ever Happens Here

When she finally pulls free of my embrace and tells me she’ll be safe, I wave to Julia’s mother, wrapped in a robe on the front porch, motioning Rowan inside. Then I pull away, blinking back tears and turning up an old Shania Twain song to boost my mood.I pass the Firefly on my route back home and see Shelby’s car parked outside of the front door, idling. I slow for just a moment, thinking I might stop in because she left a half hour before me and it seems odd she’s just getting to the cafe now. But I mind my business, because there are a thousand reasons that, with two little girls in tow, she could have been delayed.

I drive the half mile back to the house and feel a prickle of annoyance when I don’t see any lights on inside as I pull into the garage. A marathon ofKitchen Nightmaresand Orville Redenbacher’s was promised, and he’s already asleep? Seriously? His car’s in its spot beside me, so unless he has candles lit and is waiting for me in the bed draped in a Gordon Ramsay apron, I’m bordering on getting very pissed off.

When I exit my car, something feels really strange. I can’t explain it. It’s just the same boring garage I see every day, functioning primarily as a path from house to car. Nothing appears different. Leo’s Audi is there, the lawn mower and some rakes are in their usual corner. The kayaks are above me in the rafters, and the Christmas decorations are in their plastic containers on the shelves along the side wall, so what is it that feels so off? A chill runs through me and I quickly click the garage door fob so it closes me in, because I am overcome with the sudden, irrational fear of being watched.

I stand in the silent garage now and listen for…what? I don’t know. There’s nothing but the clicks and creaks a car makes as it cools down, and a weird instinct I can’t place. I walk into the house and see a half-empty glass of wine sitting on the kitchen counter.

“Leo?” I call out, dumping my purse and pulling off my coat. The house is quiet. No football game softly playing on the TV upstairs the way I expected. Heisasleep, damn it.

“Lee?” I say again, flipping on a lamp on an end table and calling upstairs a few more times. No answer. I sigh and make my way up the staircase,stealing quick glances into the dark guest room and hall bath on my way to the bedroom, where I will find him tipsy and passed out. And I guess that’s fine, because it’s not very often he goes out for drinks with the guys, so I decide not to give him too much crap about it. We can watch Gordon Ramsay verbally abuse people tomorrow.

When I tiptoe into the room, I use the glow of my phone screen so I don’t wake him up. It’s not until I’m in the en suite bathroom pulling out a makeup wipe that I glance into the bedroom and notice his side of the bed is empty. I feel a jolt of adrenaline rush through me, and I walk back into the room and switch on the lights.

“Leo? Leo!”

I feel the panic start to rise and my face feels hot, my heart speeding up. I rush down the hall flipping on all of the lights. I start to whip open closet doors and look under the bed for some stupid reason, because where the hell could he be? His car is here. I take the stairs two at a time and stand in the middle of our open concept main floor. There aren’t that many places to look. From my vantage point, I see the kitchen and dining area, the screened-in porch off the sliding doors of the kitchen, the living room and office. It’s all empty.

“Leo!” I call again, to nobody. “Okay, don’t panic,” I start to mumble to myself. “If his car were gone, you’d assume he was still at the Royal Oak, you wouldn’t be freaking out, so if his car is here then what…” I try to think of a “then what,” but there are no answers I can come up with. An emergency would mean he’d probably take his car. I would think maybe he took a walk, but in my twenty-two years of marriage, I have never seen Leo walk around the neighborhood for any reason, not even when we had a dog.

I text Row first, casually. Not to alarm her, but to see if she’s heard from him. When she answers back “No. Why?” I explain it away and tell her I just wanted to make sure he got a chance to say goodbye before she left tomorrow,and she texts back a heart.

Then I call the two friends he was with at the Oak, Robby and Aaron. Robby answers right away, and I can tell they’ve had a few too many. It sounds like they’re still there, because I hear the white noise of bar chatter and a Red Hot Chili Peppers song playing in the background. Robby speaks too loudly into the phone and I pull my ear away.

“Mack! Hey, ya missed dart league. We lost, but that’s because Aaron was busy getting his dick sucked in the bathroom and…” He stops and I hear Aaron shout something, and then laughter. “Naw, naw, just kidding…”

“Is Leo there?” I cut him off.

“What? No. He left ages ago. Said he was going home early tonight.”

“He left? When? What time?”

“Uh…a couple hours maybe. Why? Something wrong?” he asks.

“I don’t…know. I just… I’ll call you back,” I say, and hang up. I sit on the arm of the couch in the silence and stare across to the kitchen island and think. There has to be a goddamn reason, so I can’t let myself think the worst. It’s odd, yes, okay. But there must be a perfectly reasonable explanation that I’m not thinking of.

I’ll just—I’ll wait a little while. He’ll show up.

I do wait. I pace the floor and look in all the rooms again, and pour a drink and take deep breaths and I try not to cry, and then I wait some more, and then I start to drive the dark side roads, uselessly, in search of him. But he never does show up. By midnight, I’ve called the hospitals and all of his friends, plus the neighbors in case he ran to one of them for help. I have called Shelby twice, but I know she turns her phone down at night when the girls are sleeping, so I don’t expect her to get my message until the morning. And she was with me all night,so she probably has no ideas. Same with Rowan; I only left her the one message so as not to scare her. I’ve called the cafe, but nobody is there. I’ve called everyone I can think of, even his father in Tampa, to see if they’d had any word from him today. Nothing.

I think of his heart condition and try not to fear the worst: that he wandered off somewhere and had an attack or something and there was nobody there to help him and he’s lying in a street somewhere. God!

But no. I don’t let this take hold, because the simple fact is that he doesn’t wander off on evening jogs, and his things are here, so I try to erase that scenario and think of anything else I could be overlooking. When I have waited as long as I can stand to, I finally report him missing.

It’s not until the small hours of the morning, when I have the police out looking all over town for him, that it begins to sink in that something very bad has happened. Likereallysink in that there is no misunderstanding or simple explanation left. That this has reached a new level of full-on fucking horror show.

When I finally get a call from the police, I pick up desperately hoping they’ve found him safe, but that’s not what they are calling about at all. They need me to come down to the cafe immediately. There’s been an incident.

I drive the black back roads with shaking hands and blurry eyes, as fast as I can toward the cafe. What could have happened in the middle of the night that’s so important? A break-in? Vandalism? I don’t care. It could be burned to the ground for all I fucking care right now. I just want Leo. But Leo has vanished into thin air.

I swallow down the sobs I feel climbing my throat and I kick up dust as I pull into the dirt lot of the cafe and park. It’s swarming with cops. What the fuck? Then I see Shelby’s car, and her two girls are screaming and crying as a medic kneels down, wrapping blankets around their shoulders. There’s a small crowd of people,and red lights flashing, and people are shouting, and then I see them rolling out a stretcher. A stretcher, from the front doors of my cafe. Underneath the sheet is the shape of a body. Dear God, what’s happening? Someone’s dead.

3

FLORENCE

Fifteen Months Later

I read a story on the internet about how elderly people without hobbies are among the saddest sacks on earth, although I’m sure I have that wrong and they didn’t use the word “sacks.” Anyway, it went on to say how having hobbies could greatly reduce one’s chances of developing dementia. They didn’t give a percentage and I would have liked a percentage, because if it’s only a one percent chance reduction, well then, why bother? But I guess they wouldn’t have written the whole article, in that case, or used the words “greatly reduce one’s chances” for that matter either, would they? So I decided I would like a hobby.

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