Part 3 — Fourteen Past Two
Amber made the sound first, and then the whole yard heard it. The black and white photograph from 2009 showed the driver-side window of the Buick, and the face behind the glass belonged to a woman of fifty-two with her hair pulled back and both hands on the wheel. It was not Ricky. It was Irene. My wife. She was alive at fourteen minutes past two, and she was driving herself.
The detective let me hold the photo as long as I wanted. My hands shook so hard that it rattled in the air. Irene looked tired and scared and determined, all at once, the way she looked the morning she told her father she was marrying a tow truck driver. “Mr. Novak,” the detective said gently, “we found her this morning. She is alive. She is in a care home in Valparaiso. She is waiting to see you.”
I do not remember sitting down. I know someone slid a folding chair under me, and I know the Chamber lady brought me a paper cup of water. When I could talk, I asked the only thing I had ever wanted to ask. “Where has she been?” His answer came out in a rush of paperwork and apology, and I held onto every word of it.
On the night of November 12th, 2009, Irene packed a bag and drove off. She was not leaving me. Her sister Colleen in Tucson was ill, and Irene, proud and stubborn, had decided not to trouble me with it while my heart was bad. She meant to leave the Buick near the bus station in Chicago and ride the Greyhound the rest of the way. Ten miles past the turnpike plaza, a deer came across the dark road. The Buick hit it, and Irene hit her head on the wheel.
A passing driver called for help, and an ambulance took her to the hospital in Michigan City. Her purse and suitcase were locked in the trunk of the Buick, so she was admitted with no name. When she woke, she did not remember one. The nurses called her Jane, and later a kind woman at a care home named her Reenie, and she lived there quietly for sixteen years, humming Sinatra and watering the geraniums, until she began to say my name in her sleep. A social worker took a flyer from the cold case unit and laid it on her tray. Irene put her finger on my picture.
Ricky sat down on the bumper of his Peterbilt like a man whose strings had been cut. The detective said the rest, and I will say it plainly. A state trooper had called for the nearest wrecker, and that wrecker was my rollback, driven by my son. He towed the Buick back to our yard that night, found the purse and suitcase of his mother in the trunk, and understood exactly whose car it was.
The hospital telephoned our shop the next morning, because the registration led there. Ricky answered. He was twenty-two years old and he had been taking small amounts of money from the register, and he was afraid that his mother, if she woke up, would tell his father. So he said he did not know the woman. He threw a tarp over the car, and he told me she had run away with a trucker, and he let me look for two years. A lie that begins small can still grow large enough to hide a whole life.
“Dad, I was a kid,” Ricky said, with his face in his hands. “And then it was too late to tell anybody.” Amber was standing very still beside the ribbon. “You told me she ran off,” she said. “You told our children.” She took the keys to his truck from his belt, gently, and put them in her purse.
Ricky pleaded guilty in the winter to false informing, obstruction of a missing person inquiry, and theft from the business. The judge gave him two years of supervised release and a restitution order, and she added a requirement that he spend one afternoon every week visiting his mother. My lawyer argued that a contract signed while a man is being lied to about the whereabouts of his own wife is not a contract worth keeping. The judge agreed, and Novak Towing came back to me in March.
Irene was sitting in a sunroom in a pink cardigan with a blanket across her knees. She looked at me for a long time. Then she smiled, a little crooked, and said, “Clem, you got old.” I laughed so hard that the nurse came to the door. We held hands and did not speak much. She touched the medal of St. Christopher on the strap of her purse, which the detective had brought, and she said, “I was coming back, you know. After Tucson.”
Colleen is eighty-four, and she cried on the telephone for twenty minutes. In October we drove Irene home for supper. The Buick, polished by Amber and the children until the burgundy paint shone, was parked in the driveway with a bow on the hood. Irene ran her fingers along the fender. She said it was the nicest thing anybody had done for her in sixteen years, and she got into the passenger seat like she had never left.
The RICKS RECOVERY sign came down on a Saturday. I climbed the ladder myself with a heat gun and a putty knife. When I took the last sticker off, the old letters were underneath, faded but there. NOVAK TOWING, SINCE 1986. I have not mowed around that back corner in months. There is nothing there now but grass, and in the evenings Irene sits on a lawn chair beside it, with a glass of iced tea, watching the trucks come home.
