“No.” Jim frowned, looking around for an empty glass or bottle. Have I? No, that was last night, because I always get horny the morning after a drink and … He remembered sex in the shower, and the taste of Jenny on his tongue.
“So who are Jenny and Holly? Did you have one of your weird dreams again?”
“Okay, that’s enough. I’m tired and cranky and—”
“You’re cranky? The love of my life has left me, my liver’s about to call it quits, and you’re cranky?”
“Jonathan?”
“Yes, dude?”
“What are you doing?”
“Jim … this is just weird. I mean … you know what I’m going through here.” He fell silent again for another few seconds, his breathing not as light as before. “Jim, you’re not on drugs, are you?”
“No! You know I’ve never …” Jim closed his eyes and trailed off, rubbing at his head and trying to contain his anger. Then he opened his eyes again, looking at where their wedding photo had once hung.
“What’s happening?” Jim asked. “Where are they? Help me here, Jonathan.”
“Jim, I have no idea who you’re talking about. Jenny? olly?”
“Holly! My daughter, Holly. And Jenny, my wife.”
“Riiight …,” Jonathan drawled. “Okay. Well, considering you’ve never been married—”
Jim snapped the cell phone shut. He’d seen something that thumped at his chest, something not there that he’d only just noticed, because things not there were so much harder to see. He closed his eyes and thought back. The photograph had been there forever. Mummy and Daddy got mallied, Holly would shout, and Jonathan never failed to comment on his superior photography, and how his talent was wasted as Boston’s most successful artistic agent.
He opened his eyes again and walked across the room to where the picture had been removed. There was no square mark where the paint on the wall behind it had faded over the years, no hook, no nail.
No hole.
It was as if the picture of him and his wife had never hung there at all.
Chapter 2 - Man with No Country
BREATHE, JIM. He squeezed his eyes shut, forced himself to take four long, shuddering breaths, then opened his eyes again and looked around the living room. His hands were clenched into fists—not in anger, but in some subconscious attempt to grab hold of the fabric of the world, as if he could clutch it to himself and it would not slip away.
The wedding photo had been just the beginning. His mind had been muddled by sleep and then by irritation with Jonathan, but that empty place on the wall where the photo should have hung—and the absence of any faded paint, any hook, any evidence of a nail—sparked a barrage of tiny epiphanies that paralyzed him. At first he’d thought the furniture had been rearranged, but that impression lasted only a split second before he realized that the room around him had changed much more than that.
The armchair by the fireplace had been stiff-backed, striped in white and burgundy, but the chair that now occupied that spot was wider and plusher, upholstered in a chalky shade of blue. The end table beside the sofa and the long teak coffee table were the same, if a little more pristine than he remembered, but the lamps were different. When Jenny’s grandfather had died, her mother had sold the house and asked them to take whatever they wanted. The only furnishings Jenny had claimed were a set of antique lamps with glass shades hand-painted with red and pink roses. The lamps had vanished, replaced by more modern lighting, including a brass floor lamp Jim could not imagine ever buying.
“Jenny?” he shouted in the empty apartment. “Holly?”
His voice filled the place, giving it a sense of occupancy that felt entirely wrong. His voice alone shouldn’t be enough to make the apartment seem full. The very life and laughter of the place had gone from it, and it did not yawn with emptiness the way a home ought to when its people were out.
He glanced at the mirror over the fireplace. He had inherited it from his own mother. It remained, but something caught his eye, and Jim finally snapped from his paralysis and rushed over to stare at the mantelpiece. The two small framed photos that had always seemed to attract too much dust were now missing. One had been a baby picture of Holly, the other a snapshot from a Vermont trip a few years ago when Holly had been four or so, the three of them sitting on an old-time toboggan in the snow. But the pictures weren’t there. Neither did he see any sign of the usual detritus that having a daughter provided. Jim and Jenny were constantly picking up small parts of her toys—plastic Barbie shoes, pet bobbleheads, Super Balls, beads from broken bracelets—but the mantel was clear.
These absences hit him faster now, and his gut churned with nausea. A quick glance at the curio cabinet behind the chair revealed awards he had won and small statuettes, knickknacks of a lifetime. Bronze replicas of western-motif sculptures by Frederic Remington were side by side with the carved glass Viking he’d picked up in Sweden and the crystal ball Jonathan had given to Jim after he’d earned his first million—“to see the future,” he’d said.
His face felt flushed, and he leaned against the chair, staring in through the glass doors of the cabinet. His hands were shaking as he reached out to touch the knob. They had built in a magnetic latch to keep Holly from getting into the cabinet, but the door pulled open easily. No latch.
Gone were the Lladró figures that Jenny had so loved: the mermaid, the mother and daughter, the Japanese woman in her kimono, and others he could not recall. Gone were the matryoshka nesting dolls Jenny had brought home from St. Petersburg when she was pregnant with Holly.
Shaking his head, trembling even more, he backed away from the curio cabinet until his legs hit the coffee table. He turned around in circles, a peculiar kind of anger blazing up within him, fueled by fear and confusion. “This. Isn’t. Funny!” he shouted.
You’re being ridiculous. The common-sense voice threw cold water on his panic. It’s a joke. A really horrible, almost unforgivable joke.
He left the living room behind, striding purposefully into the dining room. Something on top of the china cabinet caught his eye. A platter, incredibly detailed, bone china with blue trim. It had sat in the same place in his childhood home in Andover, used only on Thanksgiving, a family heirloom that had come down from his mother’s grandmother, and it would have been his, except that on the first Thanksgiving after he and Jenny had begun dating, she had caught her foot on the carpet and tripped, destroying both a century of family history and Thanksgiving dinner in seconds. Jim’s mother, God rest her, had never forgotten. For the few years she had left of her life, she had tried to make light of it, but Jim had felt the distance the woman had placed between herself and her future daughter-in-law, and he knew Jenny had felt it, too.
In his mind’s eye, he could still see the shattered platter and the ruined bird on the floor of his parents’ dining room, the shards like the rough edges of broken clamshells.