Laura Dave - The Last Thing He Told Me

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To Josh and Jacob, my sweetest miracles

and

Rochelle and Andrew Dave,

for every single thing

(lets go said he

not too far said she

whats too far said he

where you are said she)

e. e. cummings

Prologue

Owen used to like to tease me about how I lose everything, about how, in my own way, I have raised losing things to an art form. Sunglasses, keys, mittens, baseball hats, stamps, cameras, cell phones, Coke bottles, pens, shoelaces. Socks. Lightbulbs. Ice trays. He isnt exactly wrong. I did used to have a tendency to misplace things. To get distracted. To forget.

On our second date, I lost the ticket stub for the parking garage where wed left the cars during dinner. Wed each taken our own car. Owen would later joke about thiswould love joking about how I insisted on driving myself to that second date. Even on our wedding night he joked about it. And I joked about how hed grilled me that night, asking endless questions about my pastabout the men Id left behind, the men who had left me.

Hed called them the could-have-been boys. He raised a glass to them and said, wherever they were, he was grateful to them for not being what I needed, so he got to be the one sitting across from me.

You barely know me, Id said.

He smiled. It doesnt feel that way, does it?

He wasnt wrong. It was overwhelming, what seemed to live between us, right from the start. I like to think thats why I was distracted. Why I lost the parking ticket.

We parked in the Ritz-Carlton parking garage in downtown San Francisco. And the parking attendant shouted that it didnt matter if I claimed Id only been there for dinner.

The fee for a lost parking ticket was a hundred dollars. You could have kept the car here for weeks, the parking attendant said. How do I know youre not trying to pull a fast one? A hundred dollars plus tax for every lost stub. Read the sign. A hundred dollars plus tax to go home.

Are you sure that its lost? Owen asked me. But he was smiling as he said it, as if this were the best piece of news about me that hed gotten all night.

I was sure. I searched every inch of my rented Volvo anyway and of Owens fancy sports car (even though Id never been in it) and of that gray, impossible parking garage floor. No stub. Not anywhere.

The week after Owen disappeared, I had a dream of him standing in that parking lot. He was wearing the same suitthe same charmed smile. In the dream he was taking off his wedding ring.

Look, Hannah, he said. Now youve lost me too.

Part 1

I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy.

Albert Einstein

If You Answer the Door for Strangers

You see it all the time on television. Theres a knock at the front door. And, on the other side, someone is waiting to tell you the news that changes everything. On television, its usually a police chaplain or a firefighter, maybe a uniformed officer from the armed forces. But when I open the doorwhen I learn that everything is about to change for methe messenger isnt a cop or a federal investigator in starched pants. Its a twelve-year-old girl, in a soccer uniform. Shin guards and all.

Mrs. Michaels? she says.

I hesitate before answeringthe way I often do when someone asks me if that is who I am. I am and Im not. I havent changed my name. I was Hannah Hall for the thirty-eight years before I met Owen, and I didnt see a reason to become someone else after. But Owen and I have been married for a little over a year. And, in that time, Ive learned not to correct people either way. Because what they really want to know is whether Im Owens wife.

Its certainly what the twelve-year-old wants to know, which leads me to explain how I can be so certain that she is twelve, having spent most of my life seeing people in two broad categories: child and adult. This change is a result of the last year and a half, a result of my husbands daughter, Bailey, being the stunningly disinviting age of sixteen. Its a result of my mistake, upon first meeting the guarded Bailey, of telling her that she looked younger than she was. It was the worst thing I could have done.

Maybe it was the second worst. The worst thing was probably my attempt to make it better by cracking a joke about how I wished someone would age me down. Bailey has barely stomached me since, despite the fact that I now know better than to try to crack a joke of any kind with a sixteen-year-old. Or, really, to try and talk too much at all.

But back to my twelve-year-old friend standing in the doorway, shifting from dirty cleat to dirty cleat.

Mr. Michaels wanted me to give you this, she says.

Then she thrusts out her hand, a folded piece of yellow legal paper inside her palm. HANNAH is written on the front in Owens writing.

I take the folded note, hold her eyes. Im sorry, I say. Im missing something. Are you a friend of Baileys?

Whos Bailey?

I didnt expect the answer to be yes. There is an ocean between twelve and sixteen. But I cant piece this together. Why hasnt Owen just called me? Why is he involving this girl? My first guess would be that something has happened to Bailey, and Owen couldnt break away. But Bailey is at home, avoiding me as she usually does, her blasting music (todays selection: Beautiful: The Carole King Musical) pulsing all the way down the stairs, its own looping reminder that Im not welcome in her room.

Im sorry. Im a little confused where did you see him?

He ran past me in the hall, she says.

For a minute I think she means our hall, the space right behind us. But that doesnt make sense. We live in a floating home on the bay, a houseboat as they are commonly called, except here in Sausalito, where theres a community of them. Four hundred of them. Here they are floating homesall glass and views. Our sidewalk is a dock, our hallway is a living room.

So you saw Mr. Michaels at school?

Thats what I just said. She gives me a look, like where else? Me and my friend Claire were on our way to practice. And he asked us to drop this off. I said I couldnt come until after practice and he said, fine. He gave us your address.

She holds up a second piece of paper, like proof.

He also gave us twenty bucks, she adds.

The money she doesnt hold up. Maybe she thinks Ill take it back.

His phone was broken or something and he couldnt reach you. I dont know. He barely slowed down.

So he said his phone was broken?

How else would I know? she says.

Then her phone ringsor I think its a phone until she picks it off her waist and it looks more like a high-tech beeper. Are beepers back?

Carole King show tunes. High-tech beepers. Another reason Bailey probably doesnt have patience for me. Theres a world of teen things I know absolutely nothing about.

The girl taps away on her device, already putting Owen and her twenty-dollar mission behind her. Im reluctant to let her go, still unsure about what is going on. Maybe this is some kind of weird joke. Maybe Owen thinks this is funny. I dont think its funny. Not yet, anyway.

See you, she says.

She starts walking away, heading down the docks. I watch her get smaller and smaller, the sun down over the bay, a handful of early evening stars lighting her way.