“Right, Denny.” The officer cleared his throat. “Sir, we’re here about your wife.”
But Denny already knew this. He wanted to fast-forward, like in the old days, the VHS days, when you could watch everything move forward quickly, with white lines striped through the video. It was less traumatic that way. He wanted to move through this conversation three times as fast and without sound, get to the part where they hand him the information that matters, dispense with the courtesies. They were just doing their jobs, of course. They couldn’t help it.
“We have, ah, located a body,” the shorter officer said. “We believe we have located your wife.”
Body first, wife second. That order was striking. Death eclipsed life. Denny could feel every muscle in his body vibrating, a will to stay upright. Somewhat resistant to emotion by nature, he was now fighting his own synapses, at war with impulse.No one tells you how you turn to jelly,he thought. No one tells you how you just want to sink into the floor.
“No,” Denny said. “That’s not possible.” She had just been there. It had only been a few days. The police had told him—they hadtoldhim—not to worry.Cooling off.Their words. Not his.
“Mr. Plummer, we’re very sorry.”
“But we . . . we have a family . . . we have children.” As if this somehow precluded tragedy. As if tragedy was somehow reserved for people unlike Anna. Anna Plummer could not be dead. Anna Plummer was not the type of person, Denny reasoned, who could even die.
“Do you need help telling your children, Mr. Plummer?” the first officer asked.
It had not, in this exact moment, occurred to Denny that he would have to tell his children. This seemed like a unique and excruciating torture. Raising his children alone? Impossible. He opened his mouth to say something and found that he let out aninvoluntary shudder. The grief in him was wide, so wide that it catapulted out. He could hear a cry that sounded like it came from someone else in the room. He looked around, scared by what he had heard, until he, Denny Plummer, realized that the guttural sound had come from his own body, realized, too, that he was lying on the floor. He had, in fact, collapsed. The officers were standing by him now, grabbing him from beneath the arms and assisting him into the living room, where an armchair awaited.
“Where was she?” Denny asked, waving the officers away once he was settled. Even Denny did not know why this was the first question, why he didn’t want to know, for example, how she died, or when, or who found her. Where: It felt like the most important of these questions, came tumbling from him with such urgency that he didn’t even realize that he had asked it until it had already been loosed from him. Anna had gone out with friends on the night that she disappeared, and that fact had felt ordinary until it hadn’t. He now wanted to know this information, where Anna’s last moments had been lived, and he hoped, in the seconds before the answer arrived, that it was an answer that would bring him peace.She was asleep on a bed at the Four Seasons in Boston.Or,they found her at the Garrison, in the tea room,not a stitch more explanation than that, just the understanding that she had been having tea one minute and then, the next minute, she was gone.
But Denny knew better. He understood from the way they were looking at him—not at him, but through him—that there were secrets he didn’t need to know.
The first officer dug a toe into the wood plank flooring. “Unfortunately, a few passersby saw her in the Ipswich River. We’ll still need to do forensics, of course, but her Volkswagen was parked nearby. Near the canoe haul-out,” the officer said. “There is more investigation needed, but we believe she died of exposure.”
Exposure. A polite way of sayingfrozen to death.
The haul-out wasn’t far from the road, wasn’t far, in fact, fromcivilization. And yet, Denny’s wife had, to hear the officer tell it, frozen to death. Where had her phone been? Why hadn’t she thought to call anyone?
He had spent too many hours, he thought, staring up at the ceiling in his bedroom, circling the drain, trying to remember about Spanish class on Mondays and library books on Tuesdays. He was caught in an endless loop of responsibilities, mad at himself for not having paid better attention, for all those times that she scolded him, mad now because there would never be another opportunity even to argue about it. He saw, so clearly, the blooming blue light on the snow, and, no, he could not accept that his wife had simply turned ice white from the cold. This felt like an objective impossibility.
“I fucking reported it,” he said. “I came to you.Just cooling off. That’s what the department said. I drove around looking for her. I screamed into the trees.”
The officers looked at one another. “We understand that there was a report,” the squat officer said. “We did make the search a priority.”
“Maybe not enough of one,” Denny said. He was pale still, though regaining some color. The shock had started to fade and had been replaced with anger. These officers—they had come in the middle of a nightmare only to replace one terrible outlook with a worse one. “I want to know what happened to mywife.”
The squat officer softened his stance. He looked more like an ordinary guest in the Plummers’ comfortable living room now. He put a hand on his hip. “Well, there’s gonna be some more investigating.”
Denny nodded. He knew the officers didn’t want to tell him whatever the brutal truth was. A body.Herbody. “Do you have any other . . . details?” He practically choked on the last words.
“Mr. Plummer, I really am sorry for your loss,” the officer said.
“Was she . . . Was it fast?”
“I’m not sure we have too much information on that yet, Mr. Plummer.”
“I just . . . it’s just that I once read that if you... I once read that with hypothermia, you go to sleep? That you don’t feel it?” He felt like he was bargaining with the police for an outcome. He needed them to tell him that it had been painless, that it had been quick, that she had felt nothing, that sleep had come first, that everything had just slowed down until there had been nothing at all.
“For now, Mr. Plummer, I suggest talking to your children and taking some time as a family. And we will get back to you as soon as we know more,” the officer said. He would provide no comfort, Denny could see. No guarantee.
“I appreciate you coming out here to tell me in person,” Denny said, even though he knew this is what officers did, what they were trained to do. They were not extending him any specific kindness, nothing they wouldn’t do for any other victim on any other street on any other January evening. His anger had receded, somewhat. He was beginning to feel something else, something darker, the knifepoint of pain, the truth of what he had just learned, that Anna was really and irrevocably gone. The house was so large. The house was so large without her.
The squat officer put a hand to his head and rubbed it. He looked uncomfortable, itching to go. Like he wished he could be back in the field, investigating car accidents, clocking high-risk drivers. Anything but this.
“I’m sorry we had to bring you this terrible news,” he said.
Denny heard an echo rise from the television in the basement, where his children were temporarily sedated with his mother-in-law as stand-in mama bear, in these last few moments of hope before their world effectively ended. That was their blue light, a happier version. Later, he would have to bring them into this very room, with its deep green walls where the fireplace was, andexplain that the absence was more than a break, that it was forever, that this life, it was theirs now—an inheritance, a permanence.
“I guess we’ll be going now, Mr. Plummer,” the squat officer said. He just could not bring himself to call Denny by his preferred name. “Leave you to it.” Whateveritis when you’ve just lost a wife, when you’ve just lost a life. They both made hat-tipping gestures and turned their backs as they headed toward the door, and Denny was thankful for that, to be left alone, and there he was, staring into the gray, his face as wet and slick as the bleak January snow.
