Chapter 1

25 October 2000

Every scar is a lesson. Don't touch. Look first. Keep out. The strange mnemonic new skin--dark or tough or puckered or slick--preserves the lesson in flesh, reminds us of both how weak we can be and how much we can survive. Wisdom, then, is the set of scars we acquire doing battle with life.

Jeffrey Rook had only one major scar, a thin pale line running at an angle from just above the webbing of his left thumb to the bottommost crease of the knuckle. When he was 26 and working his first and only night as a sous-chef, his knife had slipped and gouged into him so deeply that he saw the white of bone. He gasped and then the gasps became obscenities--though none of them was as obscene as the deep red chasm in his thumb, filling with dark blood, now overflowing, unstoppable, dripping down his raised hand and wrist.

A prep cook, Reynaldo, noticed him standing there leaking. “Whad you do?” he said.

Jeffrey gasped another obscenity, feeling the blood drain from his face so that it could join the tide exiting his body through the hole in his hand.

Reynaldo gave the hand a cursory glance, then shrugged. “Eh,” he said. “I've had worse.”

The doctor who sewed him up said, “Another quarter-inch and you'd have severed the thumb.” It would have given Jeffrey some pleasure to tell Reynaldo that, except there on the hospital bed--with the stupor of painkillers over his senses and (despite the painkillers) a dull heavy pain in his left hand and the smell of onions still distinct on his skin amid the odors of hospital and antiseptic--he knew absolutely and finally that he would not see Reynaldo again. He would not return to the kitchen. He would not become a chef.

Had he returned, over the next fourteen years the scar would have vanished among others. Every inch of skin on his hands would have been burned, callused, slashed, blistered, nicked. But at 40 Jeffrey Rook cooked dinner only for himself and his wife, the single line urging caution and reserve.

Butter in the cast-iron skillet, then the sulfur hiss of green onions. Then mushrooms, coriander, sherry. The starch-thick bubble of rice on the rear burner, rattling the lid in a familiarly hollow threat. Trout in the grill pan, carbon-black and silver. Greens, walnuts, dried apricots, chèvre, and the brown eyewatering tang of balsamic vinegar—and usually Anita was home by now but tonight she was not. Two more minutes spelled calamity for the fish. One more minute spelled calamity for the fish. He took the pan from the gas flame and stared mournfully at the trout, its flesh cooling and toughening and its flavor dying even now beneath the fine silver scales. He stood before the stove a moment longer, as though his own stillness might slow time enough to keep the fish at least palatable. Then he poured a glass of wine and sat down to read and wait.

She did not come. He stared at the newspaper until it blurred. The heater made ill-tempered noises in the basement.

He called her office; she was not there. She was running errands, probably. Maybe.

He could no longer contain his hunger. He put a plate in the oven for her, sat on a barstool at the counter and ate, too quickly to taste the fish--no longer worth tasting in any case. When he finished, his stomach in pain from its rapid expansion, he called her office again. He could not think why she might have gone back there, but what else could you do?

He knew the message by heart--“Hello. This is Anita Rook, with Henderson, Cuthbert.” At home she called it Henderson, Cutthroat. “Sorry I can't take your call right now. Please leave a message and I'll respond to you as soon as possible. Or press zero for my assistant, Amanda”--but he listened through to the end, feeling the first melodramatic stirrings of panic, that this might be his last memory of her voice. When the tone cued him to leave a message he was silent for a moment, willing her to go on speaking. After a pause tight with hope and panic he came to himself and stammered out, “It's me. Are you working late? Please call.”

Book club. Whose house? A list of thirty names. Book club was Tuesdays. Not book club.

Anita's friend Spencer, the frizzy-haired self-proclaimed feminartist who barely tolerated Jeffrey. Her machine picked up. Jeffrey gritted his teeth and assumed what he hoped was a nonphallocentric tone: “Hi, Spencer; Jeffrey Rook. Anita hasn't come home yet and I was just wondering if she were out with you and had forgotten to tell me. Could you give me a call, please?” She would never call him.

Now it was late, legitimately late, late enough that Anita would have called if she could have. She was hurt somewhere. She was being held up at gunpoint. She was dead.

The floppy heft of the Yellow Pages: hospitals.

“A patient. Do you have a patient by the name of Anita Rook?”

“Rook?”

“Anita Rook?”

“I'm sorry, sir. Maybe you should try back later.”

He rehearsed a description of her: Short. With straight dirty-blond hair that acquired a fine halo of curls in humid weather, and, up close, a smell of lemon and thyme. Square-chinned. Pear-shapped. Abrupt. Tenacious. Aggressive. She was the fighter of the two of them; she would be doing this better; she would not be getting pushed around by customer service representatives and foreign voice mail systems. He tried to remember what she had been wearing that morning. Purple? Blue? No one asked.

A long column of checkmarks and Xes seeped ink into the soft cheap paper. It was past 11:00. She was gone; she had disappeared; she had been disappeared.

He dialed 911, lost and abject and unimaginative.

“She's an adult?”

“Yes,” he nearly screamed, “she's my wife.”

“Adults have to be missing for 48 hours before you can file a missing persons report,” said the operator, so mechanically that Jeffrey wondered how many such calls she got in a given shift. “Until then I am sorry but it's not an emergency.”

“Can't I--?”

“I am sorry,” she said, in exactly the same tones.

He hung up and surveyed the kitchen as though it might offer some hint of what to do next. An inescapable memory breathed down the back of his neck: the smell of his mother's cigarettes, of oatmeal, the morning after his father hadn't come home; following it came the equally unsettling recollection of his sister-in-law Clara's searching voice on the phone. He swatted at them, batted them back into unconsciousness, furious at Anita for rousing them into life. The wall clock ticked later, later, inexorable. His head was heavy with wine and carbohydrates and the fine smudged print of the Yellow Pages. He left on the light in the foyer, in case Anita came home in the night, and trudged up the stairs to the cold baffling bed.

He was brushing his teeth when the phone rang, and he stumbled, gagging on foam, to the bedside table. “Hello?”

“Jeffrey Rook. It's Spencer.”

“Oh,” he said, unable to keep the surprise and disappointment from his voice, even with the garble of toothpaste at the back of his throat.

“Anita's not here.”

“Oh,” he said. “Thanks. Sorry to disturb you, then.”

“She didn't come home?” said Spencer. She was getting more strident with age. Even her questions came out as demands. But there was something more this time, something--curious?--something that suggested she might be holding back amusement.

“No,” said Jeffrey, “she didn't.”

“Hm,” said Spencer. She paused. She was probably sucking on a clove cigarette. “She's--” She broke off, exhaled. “She's not here.”

“Thanks anyway,” said Jeffrey, beaten.

“You're welcome,” said Spencer, cryptically--cryptically because it sounded as if she meant it, and she had never welcomed Jeffrey to anything.

He stared into the dark until his eyes hurt. Every noise, every creak, every shift of the cooling house announced his solitude. At last he dreamed fitfully of distant voices and telephone calls, and black, nameless panics that shot through his limbs and seized him into waking. He woke and woke and woke. The pillow stank of the stale must of exhaustion. Through it all he was stalked by a sense of having forgotten something important.

Copyright 2004 E. A. Bagby