Things around town didn’t help, either. The whisperings were like a river.
Denny had grown up in the Rust Belt, where people preferred Springsteen to pretty much any other songwriter. He was the raconteur of the blue-collar worker, penning ballads for those who could never seem to get out of their own way. Trenton, Pittsburgh, Scranton, little cities and towns that ran down through the Tri-State Area and west through Pennsylvania and into Ohio—these were a dime a dozen to the people up in New England. Ask Anna and she couldn’t even tell you where New Jersey ended and Delaware started, but every kid who grew up trying to figure out how to turn a quarter into a dollar down through the forgotten states that fell somewhere between the Northeast and the Midwest could sum it all up in a Springsteen song.
“The River” was one of those songs, and even though it came out when Denny was just a toddler, he sometimes felt like it was asong that was meant to express his entire small-town life growing up: people who got stuck in a place for too long, who made one stupid choice and never really recovered. Now Anna was dead, found in a river, and the gossip flowed from that river, tributaries of sound all around him. Every time he stopped to get gas at the Citgo station and every time he went in for a cup of coffee at Honeycomb and every time he bought groceries at Market Basket over in Rowley.
He brought the kids to Market Basket, in fact, on a Saturday afternoon in February. There was snow coming, the forecast said; otherwise, Denny would have waited to shop during the week, like always. Less potential for running into people he knew that way. The parking lot was mostly full when they got there. He had already resolved to let the kids get whatever they wanted. Doritos. High-octane Coke. Ice cream. All of the off-limits junk that Anna had objected to. What were they waiting for, anyway? It was, he now realized, the first real storm since she had disappeared, the first time that they would all be stuck in the house as a family of three. They would learn to survive without her.
Actually, that wasn’t quite right. They would never reallylearnto survive without Anna. They would accept it. Denny himself had been accepting her absence in the same way that a patient, newly emerged from surgery, accepts the information about the loss of an important body part. His phantom limb haunted him, day and night. It pained him. It was visceral. Sometimes he found himself doubled over in the kitchen, heaving with it. He worried he might vomit in front of the children, and he steadied himself from memories that came on so urgently and thick that he wasn’t sure where they had been hiding. A pulse of lilac—but from where, in the middle of winter?—triggered a memory of walking with Anna in late spring to watch the sunset at the Montauket, with too much time on their hands, nowhere to go, no one to care about but themselves. One night, the smell of mushrooms on pizza catapulted his grief back toward a tavern in New Havenwhere they had stopped on the way home from a long drive, where coal-fired pies had greased their fingertips and burned the roofs of their mouths.
The reality of living without her had started to settle on him. Not just the everyday living so much as the darkness that seeped into every single corner of his life. What was it like when someone shut off the lights, when your favorite person wasn’t there anymore? So many times, he came home thinking of the things he needed to tell her, and she wasn’t there, she would never again be there, and he had to remind himself, in the throes of his burgeoning grief, that it would always be like this, that he was training his brain, once again, to live the way that he had lived in the days before he had ever known Anna Denton. It was a process.
Denny hadn’t seen Sticks since his visit to the station, but he knew the officer wasn’t exactly done. It wasn’t just his imagination that people from town had cooled to him. In the first days after Anna’s disappearance, there had been a warmth from the community. An empathy. That feeling had faded. Now, everywhere he went, he was Denny Plummer, Prime Suspect, and he knew this, just as surely as he knew that he had done nothing to his wife.
“Grab a cart,” he told Louisa as they got to the door of the grocery store. He could already see two people he knew, Matt Lennox, a local dad from the softball league that Anna had convinced him to join in their first year, and Karen Pistoulia, a PTO member he had never really talked to before. Matt wore a backward baseball cap—Red Sox, typical, Denny thought—and a ski jacket over a pair of jeans. It was a very specific look, a very specific nod to how wealthy he was and how subtly he wanted people to see it. Those jackets: five hundred bucks apiece, Denny knew.
Karen Pistoulia, who stood near the seasonal items, to the left, was a completely different story. Floor-length puffer coat, Moncler, at least two thousand dollars, and she wanted everyoneto know it. She was talking to someone he vaguely recognized—Please,Denny thought,let this conversation last long enough for me to get past unnoticed—but the man, who was bulky and looked to be in his mid-fifties, ducked out of the way as they approached. Denny tried to keep his eyes trained to the ground. Just then, Ben jumped onto the back of the cart as they made their way through the store and the cart, unevenly balanced, took a nosedive forward, and the noise of the commotion drew everyone’s attention. And there was Karen, looking straight at Denny, with her honey-brown hair, almost the same color as Anna’s, swept up into a messy ponytail.
There was no avoiding her. Denny had to push the cart aside to avoid a collision.
“Karen,” he said, nodding. He had intended to keep going, but she put a hand on his shoulder.
“Denny,” she said. She had a weird half-smile on her face, like she knew something he didn’t. She brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. “How are you? How are the kids?” She looked down at Ben and Louisa and made a motion as if she was going to hug them, but then held back.
The attorney general. That had been the familiar-looking face, Denny now remembered. Denny had voted for him, maybe, or seen him on TV. “We’re okay. We’re all okay,” he said, trying to make quick work of the conversation. “Hanging in there.”
“I hear the cops have . . .” She hesitated, letting the wordcopstwist for a minute. “Well, anyway. If you need anything, I hope you know that the community is here. The PTO is here!” She smiled. Her teeth were very white. Anna was always saying that, that the women of Hamilton had extremely white teeth, like they all used the same toothpaste. It had made her uncomfortable.
The cops, it was true, were still sniffing around. But they had stopped short of calling him a suspect.Don’t go running off, Sticks had told him yet again over text, but Denny was officially freeto do as he pleased. He hadn’t been arrested, and even though he knew the police were watching him, he lived his life as if they were not.
“Can you bring her back?” He sort of half smiled as he said it. It was funny—before, every once in a while Anna would catch him doing something like this. She loved it about him, that her normally demure husband would justonce in a whilego off-course. Karen Pistoulia never would have expected quiet, grieving Denny Plummer to ask a Hamilton Mommy to conjure his dead wife from thin air, but here he was, doing just that, in the Market Basket, of all places.
“I’m . . . I’m sosorry,Denny!” she stuttered, the words hissing out of her. She was cornered now, stuck in the store’s goddamned Valentine’s shit.
“Oh, I’m sure you are,” Denny replied. “Everyone isso sorry.Hey, don’t forget the conversation hearts!”
She backed away, and Denny started to laugh. It was a little funny, this outburst, and he felt a tiny bit bad about it, but he could imagine no circumstance in which he would go to Karen Pistoulia for any kind of comfort. Her husband, Greg, was a burly Greek guy, and every summer they went off to Santorini for two weeks with their three kids, posting photos of creamsicle sunsets and round blue rooftops and octopus drying in the sun. Anna hadn’t trusted Mimi Mar, but Karen Pistoulia—well, Karen she straight up disliked. Denny had never seen it, exactly. He had believed that his wife’s proclivities for drama outpaced her capacity for reason. But now it was as if he could hear Anna in his head, merged with him somehow. There was something he hadn’t seen before—something in the performativeness of that coat at a grocery store before a major storm, picking up cans of, Denny saw, tomato soup. He didn’t like her. She wasn’t just some Stepford wife. She was looking at him with judgment, making her own private case for his condemnation.
What was it about her, he thought, that had triggered him so completely? He had only ever seen her a handful of times before, at school events mostly, and they had been cordial. But today he felt revulsion toward this woman, like he had somehow swallowed the feelings his wife had felt for her all this time. All those comments Anna had whispered under her breath aboutinequalityandcliquesandkeeping up with the Jonesesseemed to sink in right this minute, right now, at Market Basket, over the NECCO conversation hearts and stuffed teddy bears holding pink messages of endearment.Forget me not. I love you. Be mine.
Karen Pistoulia’s cart hadn’t been full of valentines, and neither had Denny’s, and it was a sad state of affairs, being stuck together in that tiny section of the grocery store, commiserating over all of the junk that people would buy and eventually forget. Last year, and the year before, and the year before that, he had been the one buying it, too. Karen’s house was probably the kind, Denny thought, where long-stemmed roses arrived in a skinny white box at the doorstep, but Anna always preferred Russell Stover chocolates, which reminded her of the times when she worked at a Hallmark store in high school, listening to rom-com movie soundtracks and eating expired candies.
Anna had wanted the world, but really, in the end, she had been easy to please. A box of cheap chocolate, that had done the trick. She was no Karen Pistoulia, and standing there, surrounded by the Pepto-Bismol pinks, he became aware of a deep ache that he had not addressed, the realization that he would see Anna’s ghost in every Hamilton mom, that every moment going forward in this life without Anna Plummer was a moment of persuading himself that he was thriving when he was merely surviving, living a life that used to be light and joy and pleasure and was now just air and food and water. And maybe his eyes said all of this to Karen Pistoulia or maybe they said none of it, for he felt, in that moment,like a shark who had died, who had simply stopped moving in the water, dead shark eyes, black and hollow, dead.
Karen was still looking at him, in the way that people looked at him ever since Anna died. With pity. With derision. With blame. As if his face contained a question mark. Fuck all of it, he thought. Fuck every last bit of it.
Chapter 9
IN HER MARRIAGE,there were things she told Denny Plummer and things she kept to herself. It wasn’t that Anna didn’t trust her husband so much as the fact that she considered herself the self-reliant type. She had sworn, in the years leading up to her engagement and marriage, that she would never become the type of woman who fell too hard for a man, that she would never become the type of woman who lost her grip. Finances: She shared these with her husband. Travel plans: Of course she shared. What she intended to make for dinner: Everyone was in on this, to avoid any possible fuss. But if there was something that bothered Anna Plummer—truly bothered her, down to the core of her being—she might sock it away, bury it the way her old pet Russian tortoise had buried himself beneath layers of substrate to keep warm.
She had debated telling Denny about the rest of the messages. There had been so many of them, after all, it had been hard to keep track. But the more she thought about it, the more she was sure that he would only weigh in on the matter in a way that would not be helpful.You should never have opened this box,he would have toldher, orI did tell you to just let this one go. She could picture him sitting on the couch, looking straight ahead, not bothering to see the injustice she felt, scolding her, as if this had somehow been her fault. As if she deserved it.
It was easier, then, to disable the social media accounts, and to change the settings in her MacBook, one by one, blocking every single unknown address from contacting her. It took the better part of the next day, a Saturday, but she had sent Denny and the kids up to Salisbury Beach to the arcades to get energy out. She had to work, she told them, a deadline for a copywriting client.
After they left, she made herself a coffee and stared at the computer. Where to begin? Facebook account: delete. Instagram: comments deleted, settings privatized. One by one, she ticked away at them until there were just a few manageable emails left to go. Things had slowed down from the night before, and she felt less like a stranger in her own skin. She had blocked over forty-seven accounts, though she wasn’t really sure what to do now. Her phone was dead, her only text capacity on her computer. She’d have to go to the Verizon store tomorrow with Denny to handle that piece of the puzzle. An accident, she’d say, and he’d be pissed, but he’d get over it.
Di texted to ask what her situation was.How many more???
Oh hundreds but I just finished blocking most of them
