Chapter 2
AT FIRST HE didn’t recognize the lights for what they were—bleeding into the snow, a flash of mostly blue with hints of indigo and scarlet.
Denny thought his eyes were playing tricks on him.
Fresh snow often gives the illusion of being blue, after all, and he was tired.
So tired. The lights were yet another sign that his body was exhausted.
But no. It was a throb of lights. Sirens without the sound. The unmistakable pulse of a noiseless police car, parked outside his home. A tear in the fabric of his life. Something just beginning to unravel.
The second week of school after the holiday break had just started.
On Thursday, the first day that Anna was gone, he remembered that his daughter had library and tucked her book for return in her backpack, he made the lunches and threw a load of laundry in before he left the house to drive the kids to school, and he had done it all unprompted not because his memory was getting any better but because she hadn’t been there to remind him.
Also that day he had left cash out for the cleaning lady, and had texted Anna again: Where are you.
At first, he thought she had just been out late with friends, but then he had gotten increasingly worried.
While his mother-in-law watched the kids, he had circled the blocks repeatedly.
He had screamed—however unreasonably—into the woods behind the house.
There were acres all around them. Could she hear him?
Finally, he had driven down to the local police department to file a report, but they seemed unconcerned.
Bad things did not happen in small towns, or not towns like this one, where many of the property lines included two rolling acres and glossy SUVs, and the kinds of good graces you read about in a Robert Frost poem.
Good fences make good neighbors.
At the police station a good ol’ boy from a few towns over—Rowley, where Anna always loved to go flea-marketing in spring and summer at old Todd Farm—hitched up his pants and said, “Just cooling off, they do that, we see it a lot.” Then he picked something he must have found offensive off of the corner of his tongue, grabbed a notebook from the back pocket of a pair of navy department-issued pants that were too tight, and made a show of taking notes that Denny was sure the officer would never again look at.
Anna’s temper ran hot, flame-hot, everyone knew that, and maybe it wasn’t unlike her to drive to the woods and take a walk to cool off.
Maybe it wasn’t even unlike her to turn her phone off for a few hours to make the people around her feel a little uneasy.
But to disappear? That wasn’t like her, no.
Her social media bore no trace of her. She hadn’t posted any snarky memes or liked anyone’s political commentary. She had simply vanished.
Now blue light bloomed on the snow outside, and Denny dreaded whatever came next: a knock, an apology, a conversation with his own small children, who were down in the basement watching TV with his mother-in-law, an extra, worried set of hands to help out during the nightmarish past few days.
Denny sat facing the window, wondering how long it would take the officers to summon the courage to face their own demons, to admit that they had been wrong.
She hadn’t just been cooling off. Denny had spent half the week driving the roads of Essex County looking for her, looking for her Volkswagen, but it was as if the world had swallowed her up, and it would take a lot to make a woman like Anna Plummer turn small, turn invisible, turn into nothing at all.
It would take an act of God, a catastrophe so consuming it would take the icy fingers of the Hamilton Police Department itself—those dang blue lights—to make someone so large in this life disappear.
After all, only a force larger than life could change the color of the snow.
Only a force larger than life could make Anna Plummer disappear.
A door on the Crown Victoria opened. Denny watched the perfect snow absorb one man’s footsteps, then another.
In Christmas carols and movies and poems, snow was always soft, he thought, but this was animal snow, crunchy and savage, the kind that held weight, the kind that held memories.
Despite an unusually warm winter, it had snowed the week earlier, and hard, the kind that Anna had always described with a sort of childlike innocence when recalling her youth.
The annoying kind of snow, thick pack, stuck in the spokes of tires, the kind that didn’t go away, no matter how warm it got.
Denny got it now, what New England really was, how haunted by this principle of the weather, how it defined the people here. He finally understood.
There was a knock at the door, and Denny rose to open it.
Before the welcome mat at his home—her home, really—were two men he had never seen before.
They held winter beanies in their hands, out of respect, he assumed.
He almost laughed. Anna had a distaste for authority, and she particularly disliked the police.
She would have found this funny, the cops there, at her house, where her BLACK LIVES MATTER sign still lived on the frosty lawn.
How many times had she uttered responses under her breath to “thin blue line” flags as they drove through neighborhoods populated by officers?
How many times had he convinced her not to share her feelings about the cops at dinner parties or social gatherings?
It had been a mistake, he now realized, reining her in all those times, telling her what she should or shouldn’t say.
There had been no real point, after all.
You end up with the cops at your door either way.
Denny looked out at those cops now, studied the men he had never before met, despite his own trips down to the police station in search of his wife, this apparition.
“Mr. Plummer?” the taller of the pair asked. “Are you Mr. Plummer?”
“Denny,” he said, shifting his weight.
“Do you mind?” the second officer said. He was short and kind of squat with a mess of graying hair plastered across his forehead. He was gesturing inside. “Can we?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Denny said.
Denny walked the officers inside, past the small foyer, with its convex eagle mirror that Anna bought because it reminded her of the one that she had as a child in her ship captain’s home, and past the vintage bread box that she picked up well before she had children and that she had always used to store dog leashes and treats.
He brought the officers into their kitchen, where reminders of his wife were also everywhere: Here were the blue velour bar stools that they quarreled over at West Elm (too expensive, too hard to clean); here, in the center of the island, in a blue ceramic bowl, were the potatoes she bought for last Sunday’s dinner but never ended up cooking.
The officers stood around the kitchen island.
“Can I get you anything?” Denny asked, though it was mostly a formality. They demurred. They seemed equally unaccustomed to accepting things at people’s homes.
“Mr. Plummer,” the taller officer began.
“Denny,” he corrected.
“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 had told him—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 an involuntary 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.