Adios, Scheherazade

He didn’t believe it at first, he walked left, walked right, while the other men streamed by him, while the cars pulled away in a trickle, a stream, a trickle, and he was alone.

She wasn’t there.

He was afraid then of nothing worse than accident, automobile accident or maybe something with Edwina, maybe Beth had had to rush her to the hospital. It hadn’t occurred to him there might be anything else, anything worse than that sort of worry.

He went back into the station, rooted in his pockets for a dime, called home.

No answer.

He went back outside, and now he was really scared. He hurried across the blacktop to the cabstand, where two gray and yellow cabs waited as though lonely, as though not companions for each other. He got into the lead cab and gave his home address, and sat back in the cab with his brow furrowed and his worried eyes looking out the side window at the familiar scenes of the town. Because they were so familiar they should have reassured him, but they didn’t. The very banal familiarity and known quality of everything he saw seemed to imply some disaster, some horror, some unimaginable break in the fabric of his life, like the deceptively quiet village scenes in the opening minutes of science fiction movies about invasions from outer space.

The first thing he noticed when the cab pulled to a stop in front of his house was that the car was in its accustomed place in the driveway, and the second thing he noticed was that, even though twilight was darkening rapidly toward night, there were no lights on in the house.

What was wrong?

He paid the driver, got out of the cab, hurried up the walk to the house. The door was locked. He unlocked it, went in, switched on the living room light.

Well, she wasn’t dead on the living room floor, murdered by some prowler, some sex maniac.

He called, “Beth?” Thinking it could be a simple matter still, she could have taken a nap, overslept.

No answer.

He called her name again, stood listening to the silence. With the furniture and the drapes and the carpets, there was no echo of his call. Nothing. Silence.

He moved through the house.

There was nothing strange in the kitchen, nothing at all out of the ordinary. He opened the door connecting the kitchen with the garage, and everything was also as usual in there.

Looking out the dinette window, he switched on the outside light, the back yard springing into instant existence, empty and normal and unchanged. He switched off the light again and went to check the bedrooms.

Here he began to find the odd things. In the master bedroom first, the one he shared with Beth, there were dresser drawers open. And the closet door open. Were there things missing? He looked, and it seemed to him Beth’s drawers were usually fuller than that, though they were by no means empty now. And there seemed to be a few empty places on the rack in her closet.

The suitcase was missing.

The red suitcase with the gold handle. He’d bought it for her birthday the first year they were married, and it had stood on the shelf in the closet ever since they’d moved into this house, and now it was gone.

Gone.

What was the matter? What in the name of God was the matter?

Paul moved on, to Edwina’s room, and here too there were the same signs of hasty packing, not much taken, but enough things gone to be noticeable. She hadn’t packed more than the one suitcase, that was sure.

Winky was gone.

Paul looked all over Edwina’s little bed, and underneath it, and Winky was definitely gone. Edwina’s stuffed teddy bear, with one felt eye missing, Winky was indispensable to Edwina’s sleep. She would never go anywhere without it, and it was no longer here.

Why?

He stood in the middle of his daughter’s room, arms spread out as though asking someone to explain things to him, and he looked around in a great circle without finding the answer.

But he did find it, a minute later, in the last room in the house. In his den.

It was the third bedroom, actually, but he’d set it up as a den for himself when they’d first moved in, with a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet, and a sofa on which he could read the paper or take a snooze. He occasionally brought work home from the agency, and it was in here that he did it.

He looked in almost automatically now, switching on the overhead light, not expecting to find anything, looking here simply because he’d already looked everywhere else, and at first this room seemed totally normal, unchanged, exactly as he’d left it.

And then he saw the open desk drawer.

And the papers on the desk.

And he understood.

He walked in, moving slowly, like a man pole-axed, because in a sense that was exactly what it was.

She’d read the diary.

The diary was his secret, and he understood now that it had been a shameful secret and a symptom of the long decline in his relationship with Beth. But he’d made no entries in it in the last week, not since the rebirth with Beth. He hadn’t even thought of it since then, and he now thought it likely he never would have written in it again.