The Windmill

By Stephanie Gertler

Published by Dutton

November 2004; $24.95US/$36.00CAN; 0-525-94800-7

From the author of Jimmy's Girl -- a writer who "hits the emotional bull's-eye dead center" (Baton Rouge Advocate) -- comes a new novel that will remind us all that sometimes you don't know how much you have until it's gone.

Known for her gift for reaching straight to the heart, Stephanie Gertler now tells the story of a couple whose seemingly perfect life is toppled in an instant and saved through their bold leap of faith. Olivia and Carl appear to have the perfect life: a son and a daughter, weekends on Cape Cod, and satisfying work as professors at Belvedere College in the picturesque town of Willow, Massachusetts. Until, one day, the seemingly stable, dependable Carl disappears without a trace -- leaving behind only a cryptic note. Alone and terrified, Olivia cannot help but relive the long-buried pain she felt when she lost her first husband. While Carl travels back to his childhood hometown to confront the demons he has always hidden from his wife, Olivia takes a journey of her own as she tries to make peace with the memories that have always haunted her. Told with graceful skill and unflinching honesty, The Windmill is a story of the secrets we are entitled to keep in a marriage and those we must share -- marking a splendid new level of achievement in this much-admired author.

Author

Stephanie Gertler is the author of Jimmy's Girl, The Puzzle Bark Tree, and, most recently, Drifting, all published by Dutton. She also writes a lifestyle column for two Connecticut newspapers, The Advocate and Greenwich Time. She lives with her family and four dogs in New York.

Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from the book The Windmill: A Novel

by Stephanie Gertler

Published by Dutton; November 2004; $24.95US/$36.00CAN; 0-525-94800-7

Copyright © 2004 Stephanie Gertler

Chapter One

Olivia

I am still not exactly certain what compelled me to go to Carl's office that Friday morning last November. Looking back, I believe it was instinct or intuition. He was troubled at breakfast that morning, more deeply immersed in thought than usual -- even for Carl. We sat with our mugs of coffee, read the newspaper, planned the weekend when we would rake the leaves and sweep away the last of autumn's debris from the gutters.

He pushed back his chair, carried his mug to the sink, and, when typically he would grab his overcoat from the rack by the door and call "See you later" as he walked out, he came over and kissed my cheek. "See you," he said, lingering for a moment.

"See you," I said in a puzzled echo.

It wasn't until later, once I knew he was gone, that the inherent finality in his voice resonated within me. Carl was saying good-bye.

I arrived early to teach my eleven o'clock class as I often do. Since Daniel and Sophie are away at school, morning chores are far less demanding. Usually, I go to the deli across the street from campus and have a second cup of coffee. I call my sister Nina or my parents from the cell phone but, instead, I went to Carl's office in the science building on the other side of campus. It is an older building, darkened stone and ivy-covered. The door is frosted glass in a dark wood frame; DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS stenciled in muddy brown. As I tried the knob, Ginny, Carl's secretary, pulled open the door.

"He's not here. Where is he?" she asked, almost as though I'd stolen him.

She startled me. "What are you talking about?"

"I didn't mean to alarm you, Ms. Hughes. But he's not here. Dr. Larkin. He's not here," she said breathlessly.

"I don't understand," I said, truly not getting the impact of what she said even though she kept repeating herself.

"Dr. Larkin didn't show up for work this morning," she said, enunciating each syllable as though we didn't speak the same language. "I thought maybe you'd know why."

I have mastered the art of transporting myself to another place in time when I feel cornered. Nina says it is the essence of protective animal instinct. And so I thought of garbage soup. I stood with my lips parted slightly and stared at Ginny, my mind back in the kitchen with my mother when Nina and I were girls. She was making a stew and Nina and I were dumping all the scrapings -- potato peel, brown celery tips, the fat she'd trimmed off meat, chips of bone and gristle -- into a giant pot of water. It was something you'd never want to look at, let alone taste. I suppose that Carl's absence was just like that crazy concoction.

Thoughts raced through my mind the way they do in a dream. Rapid, all jumbled together, and barely discernible. Part of me wondered if I had willed this to happen. Certainly there had been times when I wished Carl would just go away. No harm, no drama, no major scenes. I can't imagine there isn't a wife on Earth who hasn't felt that way at one time or another. Or a husband, for that matter. But Carl was far too practical to simply disappear, let alone deviate from his routine. That he was not where he was supposed to be was unsettling. It was the antithesis of Carl. My grandmother always said, "Be careful what you wish for."

Poor Ginny. She'd been there for nearly a year and had the patience of a saint, unlike the string of temps who preceded her. There she was, her stringy brown hair tied back with a limp chiffon kerchief, her navy skirt dotted with lint, her eyes wide and clearly panic-stricken beneath thick-lensed glasses. She was probably in her mid-forties although she could have just as easily been sixty.

"Ms. Hughes? I'm looking to see if I missed something," Ginny said, scanning Carl's appointment book, running her index finger up and down the columns, flipping pages back and forth, as though she might find the Perfectly Reasonable Explanation as to why he wasn't there. She kept muttering, "I can't understand where he is," over and over again, the way we do when we misplace something.

"Now, let's just think for a moment," I said. "You've checked his book." As the words left my mouth, I realized how ridiculous they were. I was trying to calm her down -- and myself -- in the hope that this was all some sort of misunderstanding or miscommunication.

She looked at me blankly, down at the book in front of her, then back at me. "I am checking," she said.

"I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking," I said. "What time did you get here this morning? I mean, maybe he got here before you did and then left. He left the house at seven-thirty."

"I got here around seven-thirty," she said softly. "The bus was on time this morning."

"Well, maybe he had a dentist appointment or something."

We both knew I was grasping at straws.

"Actually, he went to the dentist last week," she said meekly.

"Right. I forgot," I mumbled, though truly I hadn't known.

"Well, there has to be some explanation," I said. "Something must have come up that he forgot to mention."

Ginny's mouth was so parched that there were sticky little white patches in the corners. "I suppose," she said. "It's just so unlike him."

Ginny inadvertently validated my fears. We both knew that Carl made no appointments by himself. His scheduling was precise and executed with constant reminders from whomever was assisting him that week or that month: Post-Its stuck on his computer and on top of his mail and then, finally, someone practically ushering him out the door with more last-minute reminders telling him for the umpteenth time the name of the person he was meeting, the location -- even the topic. Carl's poor secretaries did everything but slick down his hair, stick an identification tag on his lapel, and hang his car key around his neck. They booted up his computer, returned his phone messages, retrieved his voice mail, his e-mail, and generally ran interference among his colleagues, who found Carl to be brilliant but distracted to the point of vacancy. Those who didn't know Carl well might have thought him to be condescending or aloof. It wasn't that at all. Carl was just profoundly introspective, private, and abysmally disorganized -- the reasons why the temps usually threw their hands up in the air after a month or so and quit.

I played a game in my head sometimes: How would I answer if someone asked me to describe my husband? "Carl Larkin, fifty-eight years old. Chairman of the Department of Physics at Belvedere College in Willow, Massachusetts." Handsome and rugged in a rumpled, absentminded professor sort of way. He lived and breathed physics, waxing on and on about his fascination with the "duality of pairs." He was a self-admitted loner, although I believed that, deep down inside, he cherished his children and even me. He presented himself as though he had an aversion to intimacy although I often wondered whether it was avoidance or fear. He seemed to eschew metaphor, symbolism, or emotion and yet I often felt that was a disguise as well. Whenever I attempted to scratch beneath Carl's surface, a nearly visible armor covered him. At that very moment, I chastised myself for not being more relentless with Carl, for retreating so easily instead of forcibly penetrating him. But, then again, had I reached into his soul, I would have had to allow him to reach into mine.

The week before Carl disappeared, I turned fifty. People say "It's just a number," but fifty is synonymous with words like "milestone" and "turning point." Epithets that do little to soften the blows from AARP cards coming in the mail and children who remind us that fifty is half a century. Certainly, it's an age that begs us to take stock. Once, a long time ago, I thought I would be an actress. When the kids entered grade school, I began teaching drama at Belvedere, a poor substitute for the stage but my life had changed: I was married with children. Another physics professor, a colleague of Carl's, once joked that I was undoubtedly Carl's id: Carl was matter and I was spirit. Carl was concrete where I was abstract. Diametric opposition, he said, but of course, they say that opposites attract. It was that sort of evaluation, that coming-of-age examination of myself and my marriage, that occupied me for the months before my birthday.

I took the appointment book from Ginny's desk and flipped through the pages. "People don't just disappear," I said, closing the book, placing it back on the desk, reassuring myself as much as I was reassuring her.

"I hope he's OK," she said softly.

"Carl can take care of himself," I said unconvincingly.

Ginny nodded -- just as unconvincingly.

"Are you sure nothing odd happened in the last day or so?" I sounded more like a detective than a wife. "You're not forgetting something?"

"I don't think so, Ms. Hughes."

"Anything distressing about a grant he didn't get or something like that? That always eats him up inside."

Ginny paled. "You're not thinking he was in some sort of state?"

"No. Not at all. I'm thinking that maybe there's something he failed to mention or just mentioned casually. Maybe he had to meet with administration or something." I swallowed. "You know, like something last-minute."

She was pulling up Carl's e-mails now. I looked over her shoulder and could see it was mostly spam. "It's been a quiet week," she said.

"So, nothing?"

"Well, he met with a student on Monday who wanted to change his lab date." Ginny inhaled deeply. "But that happens all the time."

"What does?"

"Kids wanting to change labs and tests and whatever."

"And Carl usually handles that?"

"No, actually, he doesn't," she said. "Dr. Larkin just happened to be in the outside office and, since I was on a phone call to NIH, Dr. Larkin was good enough to take care of it."

"And?"

"And nothing. The boy changed his lab and that was that."

"Well, I tell you what. I'll keep you posted if I hear anything and you do the same." I smiled. "I'm sure by the end of the day, we'll have this all straightened out. Now if he calls you . . ."

"I'll have him get in touch with you right away, Ms. Hughes, not to worry."

I squeezed her hand. "Thanks, Ginny."

I made a loop around the campus just to see if Carl's car was parked outside one of the other buildings. I even drove by the dorms, though I knew that Carl had to be smarter than to park his car by a dorm if he was having an affair with a coed. I went to the Shell station hoping his car was there with a flat, or that his car was due for inspection or something. I drove back to campus and was late for my class. I checked in with Ginny before rehearsal for Antigone later that afternoon.

"Ms. Hughes, you don't think you should call . . ."

"The police?" I asked, my heart pounding. "I'm not sure."

"Is there anything else I can do?"

I looked at my watch. "It's almost five, Ginny. Why don't you just go home?"

***

It was nearly seven when I left the auditorium. I checked my cell phone even though I'd left it turned on throughout rehearsal. There were no messages. Last fall was unseasonably warm until mid-November. The leaves never turned the way they usually did -- just fell lifeless to the ground. As I walked to my car, the combination of pitch black and balmy warmth was particularly disorienting. There was a scent of smoke and dust in the air. I'd mentioned it to Carl just the evening before when we were walking Emmet, our half-Lab, half-Shepherd.

"What is that smell?" I asked.

"Mold," he said, matter-of-factly.

"Mold? Can you smell mold? Really?"

"When it's bad enough."

I shrugged. "That's it?"

"Mold and mildew," he said. He smiled at me. "What did you think?"

"I was hoping for something more romantic. Shooting stars heating up the earth."

"Shooting stars are just temporary. They're really just rocks that catch fire. They don't scorch the earth."

You see? Duality of pairs.

Even though Carl's car wasn't in the driveway, I called his name as I walked in the door. I was enveloped with emptiness when there was no answer. I thought of Sophie and Daniel and how I would explain that their father was missing.

I was hanging up my coat when I caught my image in the oval mirror that hangs above the boot bench in our vestibule. For a moment someone else was there. Surely, it wasn't my reflection. Mine would be someone younger, with a defined jaw and wide eyes. A sense of time and dread came over me like webbing.

I heard the faint drone of the old boiler and the hollow clicks of my heels on the ceramic floor. Our ramshackle house on the Connecticut River suddenly felt unfamiliar. It appeared dilapidated, accusing me of neglect: The carpets were shiny with age and sprinkled with paint chips. There were piles of papers in places where papers didn't belong -- on the dining table and the kitchen counter. Old newspapers, unopened mail. Junk. Too much junk lying around. Emmet nuzzled my leg. He'd been sleeping in his spot under the kitchen table.

"Some watchdog you are, " I said, stroking his head. "So, tell me, where is he?"

I opened and closed the refrigerator. The thought of food was unappealing although my stomach growled. I hadn't eaten since breakfast. I walked up the stairs and opened doors to every room, slowly, carefully, afraid of what I might find -- Carl crumpled on a floor, beyond resuscitation -- something horrific like that. Finding nothing was a relief.

It seemed rather premature, but I called the police. My hands shook as I dialed.

"Willow Police."

"My husband didn't show up for work this morning," I said. "He's missing."

"Hang on," the person sang as though I called for a hair appointment.

I was patched through to the detective division where Detective Rossi listened as I explained that Carl never got to work that morning. The detective punctuated his attention with "uh-huh" every few seconds.

"So, why do you want to report him missing if he just didn't show up for work?"

"Because he always shows up for work."

"We don't take reports on competent adults with no medical or mental history for forty-eight hours," he said. "He doesn't have one, right?"

"Right."

"What's his license plate?"

I told him and he left the line for a moment. "We have no reports on the car."

"What does that mean?"

"No accidents. Not stolen."

"I see."

"Ma'am, are you having marital problems?"

"No. Well, I mean, every marriage has something," I said defensively.

And then he just went on. Do you think he's having an affair? Does he have a drinking problem? Did you argue before he left? Did he leave at the same time that morning? Did he wear the clothes that morning that he usually wears? How was his demeanor last night? Has he ever disappeared like this before? Any enemies? Friends I could call and who might know where he'd gone. What about his cell phone?

When I said that Carl didn't own a cell phone, that surprised the detective more than Carl's disappearance.

"Call Sunday if he's not back by then," he said as though I'd merely lost my wallet.

"Sunday? But he's my husband."

"That's protocol, ma'am. Sorry."

I was about to hang up when he said, "Oh, and you might want to check the twenty-four-hour line at the bank."

"What for?"

"Cash withdrawals," he said bluntly.

"I don't understand."

"Sometimes, if someone is planning to leave for a while, they'll take cash with them."

Clearly Detective Rossi had been down this road before, and I wondered how many wives called for the same reason. I called the bank and nothing had been withdrawn from either checking or savings. Part of me thought I might have felt better had he emptied an account. At least then I would have known this was calculated, that he was alive and had simply left me. Emmet nuzzled me again. I patted his head but he kept pulling at my hand. In all the commotion, I'd forgotten to feed him.

We keep a thirty-pound bag of food in a covered barrel in the mud room. I grabbed Emmet's bowl and there, taped to the side of the barrel, was a blue envelope with the Belvedere insignia.

Dear Livi,

Forgive me. I have started this letter a half dozen times and conclude that the only thing I can tell you right now is that I am fine. I haven't lost my mind and intend no harm to come to myself. I will explain. I promise. I'll call by Monday. I do love you.

Carl

I read the letter over and over, trying to read between the few scrawled lines, astonished and frightened because Carl said he loved me. When was the last time we'd told each other? I couldn't remember. I folded the letter into my pocket and grabbed my coat. I needed to go down to the river. Emmet abandoned his food and followed me. I used to take Daniel and Sophie to the river when they were little. We'd pack a picnic basket and bring piles of picture books and Old Maid cards and sit on the weathered dock until the sun set over the old foot-bridge that crossed the narrows.

Another wife might have waited by the telephone or sat and wrung her hands that night. She might have called friends for comfort and conversation, vacillating between worry and anger, rationalization and fear. Honestly, except for Nina and my parents, there was no one to call. I was as much a loner as Carl. Instead, Carl's absence lured me to a place I'd resisted and needed to think about -- back to the summer of 1978 when it was I who disappeared, only to return a few years later as Carl Larkin's wife.

Reprinted from The Windmill by Stephanie Gertler by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © Stephanie Gertler, 2004. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

For more information, please visit Stephanie Gertler's Web site, www.stephaniegertler.com, or www.writtenvoices.com.