Partial Parts - Luna

Tom wandered in late from work and Lily was sitting in the semi-darkness, bent over her laptop. She had a glass of wine at her left elbow and she didn’t really look up when he came in like she used to. In fact, she’d used to come to the door all dressed up as though they were about to go out and she had dinner waiting. He would tell her she was beautiful and pull her onto his lap, feed her forkfuls of pasta as she told him about the novel she was writing and he told her about his day on the force. She was always fascinated by his tales of running down criminals. She was the consummate police officer’s wife because she knew what she was getting into when she married him and didn’t try to change him afterward. Instead, she kept herself cheerfully busy doing her own things and then they enjoyed time together at the end of the day.

Lately though he’d been choosing to stay in the office late or go out for a drink with his buddies to unwind. Dinner was long over with and she’d stopped keeping it warm for him, or even keeping a plate out for him to microwave when he came home. She was lounging in her pajamas, her hair in a sloppy ponytail even though she knew he hated it when she wore her hair back. She didn’t look like she’d even put on makeup that day.

“Didn’t you have your ladies’ group thing today?” he asked and tossed his jacket on the chair at the kitchen counter a few feet away. His tone was clipped and he moved with irritated noise through the kitchen.

“No, that’s Tuesdays. It’s Thursday, Tom,” she said in her characteristically quiet and even tone.

He heard the sound of the glass being lifted from the side table near her elbow and a sip of wine. He knew where this was heading. He sighed venomously as he made himself a sandwich.

“Right. So isn’t it date night?” I.e. Dinner on the table even if he was late?

Lily tipped the glass up and finished its contents before setting it down a little too loudly. “No, Tom. That was last year.”

Tom clenched his teeth together. Her placidity was a mile-high wall she had erected between the two of them. Her sarcastic, pointedness was a bite to his raw nerves.

“You’re the reason this doesn’t work anymore,” he told her without even looking her direction when the soft sound of her breath catching in her throat told him he’d succeeded in breaking her calm. She would cry soon. That’s how it went when he told her the truth when she was drinking.

After a long moment of silence, Tom glanced at Lily and saw her eyes focused on her laptop screen, fingers poised above the keys. He looked heavenward and shook his head, sitting at the counter to eat the sad excuse for a sandwich supper.

“Alright, Tom,” she said eventually. Her voice was so under control and quiet that he was slightly startled.

His mind maneuvered through several responses to her but he couldn’t think of a single thing that would sting as much as her refusal to engage him right then. So he grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair and, along with his sandwich, he left.

---

Tom slammed the door behind him and looked wildly around for his wife. Lily was curled up on the couch, a soft gray afghan wrapped around her. Her eyes were big and frightened as she awakened to his noise. Her frail body trembled but she didn’t speak or more, as if she could hide right in front of his face. Her eyes red-rimmed and her pupils out of whack.

“You are such a child,” he spat out at her, towering over her with fists curled at his sides.

He would never hit her but she obviously felt his power in that moment because she gave an involuntary shudder and squeezed her eyes closed, tears beginning to trickle down her cheeks. They incensed him. When would she ever get back up on her feet and fight for herself?

“Quit that! You don’t deserve my pity. You need to get up and sober up and stop acting like a child, Lily.”

He stepped away and turned his back on her, throwing his hands up. He could hear her making soft sounds of sorrow, moving her limbs helplessly on the couch. Some deep part of him knew that she needed something from him that he couldn’t give her. Wouldn’t. Probably ever. She’d lied to him. She was behaving worthless and so she deserved whatever came out of his mouth.

“I’m sorry, Tom. I didn’t mean to do it,” she said in a tiny, pathetic voice. A voice that had once been full and beautiful, a songbird now coughing on ashes and lies.

“Shut up. I’m tired of listening to your lies. All you’re doing is disrespecting me and my job.  Get yourself together, Lily, or else.”

Lily breathed in, wheezed really. Had she gasped in fear? That made his heart pound with fury. What was wrong with her? Why was she so weak? It was so easy! If only she’d try a little!

“Wh-what, Tom?” she asked and her attempt to infuse her tone with some mettle fizzled into almost a whine. Pathetic.

He turned his face but not his body, not really even looking at her. He held up his left hand and slid off the wedding band there. He let it spark in the light before he set it on the coffee table and walked away. He could hear her weeping behind him as he stormed up the stairs, slamming their bedroom door behind him.

He expected to hear her climb the stairs and whine outside the door. She always begged at this point and he was sick of it. He wished he hadn’t come home but how would that have looked to his co-workers after his wife called to say it was an emergency. He threw himself onto the bed, folding his arms under his head, and stared up at the ceiling. Waiting.

The front door closed sharply downstairs. Outside, the door to his car popped open and then shut. The engine started and Tom was on his feet, watching Lily backing out of the driveway in the brand new Mercedes. He’d smelled her. She was drunk. She should not be driving. He pounded the window and shouted.

“Lily, you idiot! Get back here!”

He raced down the stairs toward the front door, throwing it open and running out into the street. But she was gone before he got there. A neighbor, his garden hose spewing copious amounts of water into a hedge across the street, raised a brow at Tom who bent down and picked up the newspaper from the end of the drive. He waved it to the man and smiled before trotting inside, fuming.

Pulling out his phone as he shut the front door behind him with a sharp smack, he dialed his wife. But he hung up and stepped forward with a stunned numbness filling him. For there was her wedding band on the coffee table right beside his.

---

Three days passed before Tom bothered to try to find Lily. He thought over and over that she would be back. She’d have her little tantrum and come crawling back. He checked the police scanner and called hospitals once a day just to do his due diligence.

On the fourth day, Tom realized something more was happening. He called their credit card companies and the cards had not been used. She’d left behind her purse he discovered shortly after that. Her cell phone was in it along with money and identity. He called in the car as stolen and it was found within an hour, abandoned in a train station parking lot 200 miles away from their house. Almost empty of gas. There were strange things in the car that made him unsure whether or not Lily had driven the car herself all of that distance. Coils of rope and duct tape in the trunk that did not belong to him or his wife were in the trunk and it chilled him to the bone. Had she walked out of their house into a crime? Where was his wife?

---

On the twelfth day, Tom stopped his investigation. It was all dead ends and he was just furious. She was such a child. Racing off with nothing and hiding. She had to be hiding with friends or family.  Her mother refused to tell him if Lily had even contacted her which meant she probably had. Well, let her stay with that woman. She’d realize what how ridiculous she was being soon enough and come back. He didn’t need to keep looking.

---

On day twenty-one, Tom got a frantic phone call from Lily’s mother.

“Why can’t I reach her, Tom? Where is she? You were looking for her. Did you find her? Her phone is shut off!”

Tom rolled his eyes. “Of course it is. Why would I pay for that phone from my hard-earned pay when she’s off playing games?” he demanded. “Tell her to grow up and come home if she wants her toys back!” And he ended the call abruptly.

---

A month after Lily left behind her wedding band and her home and her husband, a wider manhunt was set into motion for her by her mother. Tom felt a shard of fear slice through his heart when he saw his own wife’s face on the news and then up on his office’s missing person’s board. His co-workers looked at him strangely and whispered. It was impossible to hide the fact that he’d been the last person to see her and hadn’t reported her officially missing himself. His superiors watched him daily and the pressure built on his shoulders. He wasn’t permitted anywhere near the case and eventually his superiors asked him to take a leave of absence with pay. Turn in his gun. Turn in his badge. Rest. See a therapist.

Answer questions from internal affairs. From detectives. From the press who waited outside his door with their obnoxious suppositions and impertinent demands on his personal life. He started staying in hotel rooms, his best friends the little bottles in the mini bar. One night he went out to get out of the room, brought back a girl who reminded him of Lily. He had so much to drink that he thought it was Lily by the time she locked the door behind them and pushed him onto the bed. She called him “baby” and it broke the spell. She was not Lily and he kicked her out.

Two hours later, even drunker, Tom found himself face to face with a very large pair of men demanding that he pay for the pleasure he’d refused earlier. Time was money.

The next thing Tom remembered was waking up in the hospital. They’d at least had the decency to tell the front desk clerk he was bleeding nearly to death on the floor of his room even if they didn’t leave names.

Days later, Tom went back to the front desk to talk to the clerk. A ferrety little man with beady black eyes, greasy brown hair, and yellow teeth, he almost got back into his apartment before Tom stopped him.

“I really don’t have the time for you to waste. Tell me facts and we’ll be friends.”

The clerk told him about the trafficking bosses who had roughed him up. They were careful and well-financed. The girls never looked like what they were but he knew because he saw them often enough with older men. Various men. Usually with their hands places they shouldn’t be on a respectable girl. Their eyes always called out to him, pleading in the brief seconds before the door shut behind them. He didn’t know what to do. Those guys were serious and they’d threatened to kill him.

Tom looked at him with revulsion. “I hope they do kill you,” he said tersely and shook his head, stalking away to nurse his wounds at the bar across the street.