Two Hours

"I rang a detective and demanded the truth, and I was lying to him inside a minute. That was the fifth day."

By the Wednesday I had stopped running from the house.

That was the first thing the waiting did to me: it wore the fear down into something I could live alongside. I had fled that house on the Tuesday night as though it were on fire, and by Wednesday morning I was back in it, alone, with Sammy safe at my mother's and the school told I would not be in — because I had decided, somewhere in the cold that came after the rage, that I was done being chased out of my own home. If somebody wanted to walk in and out of my drawers, they could do it with me sitting in the middle of the room. I had gone somewhere colder than frightened, and I meant to use it.

Five days. I said it to myself in the empty living room — since the Saturday morning my husband had put his boots on and driven down the mountain and not come back — and the house said it back to me, in creaks and in the wind off the mountain and in the silence of a place built for two adults and a child and left with one.

Then I did the thing I had sworn, not fifteen hours earlier and in the dark of my own car, that I would never do again. I picked up the phone to ring the police.

There was nothing clever in it. There was only days of nothing, and a private detective who would not have a thing for me for days yet, and the plain unbearable fact that somewhere in an office down in the city sat a man who might know something about my husband that I did not — and I could not stay in the silence one more hour without asking him. Pride was a thing I could afford right up until I could not. Karl Jenkins, at least, had taken a proper statement off me. Karl Jenkins was not Linda Powell. I told myself that as I dialled, the way I had been telling myself things all week to make my own hands do what I needed them to do.

He answered on the fourth or fifth ring. "Detective Karl Jenkins."

"Detective." Just that; and I heard him place me on the one word.

"Mrs Triffett." Formal, and careful with it. "What can I do for you?"

I had meant to be calm. I had rehearsed calm, pacing that carpet for an hour. What came out of me had five days behind it, and none of the calm survived it. "I want to know what's going on with the investigation into my missing husband."

"Have you not heard anything further from him?" His tone had gone gentle — a soft, practised gentleness I had learned, in the days since, to trust rather less than plain rudeness. "No calls. No text messages?"

There was the question, held out to me plainly — and I had the answer to it in my coat pocket, and in a cracked text from an unsaved number, and in a pair of knickers in a bin up the mountain. I could have told him. I could have said: as it happens, Detective — one of my own students watched my husband climb into his ute down at the wharf last night with a woman, laughing, so he is alive, and he is in Hobart, and he has left me.

"Nothing!" The word came out of me sharp and fast and shut like a door.

Which was true, if it was cut finely enough, and I cut it finely enough. Nothing from him. Serena's message had not come from Nial; the knickers had come without a note. I sat there and snapped a technically true word at a detective, built to keep my husband's disappearance the exact shape I needed it — mine to solve, mine to punish, and not a walkout for Linda Powell to close with a satisfied little tick — and I told myself, even as I did it, that I was managing the situation. I was not managing anything. I was doing to Karl Jenkins the precise thing I had rung him up to accuse him of doing to me.

"We're still investigating several new leads," he said.

I knew that line. I had spent my whole life listening for the hollow place in what people said — it was the whole of my job — and this was all hollow place. Several new leads. It had the worn, smooth feel of a thing said a great many times that week, to a great many frightened people, and meant for none of them. He was not lying to me, exactly. He was reciting.

Something in me gave way at that — at the sheer worn smoothness of it, at five days of my life handed back to me as a phrase he kept in a drawer. I had wanted to be the woman who demanded and got. Instead I heard the sob come up out of me before I could stop it, ugly and involuntary, down a phone line to a man I barely knew. "Please, Karl." His first name, out of nowhere, because I had run clean out of anything else to reach for. "Just tell me something, anything!"

There was no answer. For a moment there was only the line, and his world coming down it — phones, a voice calling something across a room, the enormous ordinary machinery of a police station in the middle of a working day, carrying on behind him while mine sat stopped in a cold room up a mountain. He had gone quiet. Somewhere in the middle of my begging, Karl Jenkins had stopped being on the phone with me, though he had not yet hung up.

"Are you still there, Detective?" I said, and heard the panic climb into my own voice.

"Ahh... yeah... Look Jenny, I'm really sorry. I'll call you back in a couple of hours." Distracted, half of him already somewhere else entirely — and Jenny, now, not Mrs Triffett; whatever had just landed in front of him had knocked the formality clean out of him.

I got as far as "Wait—" and the line went dead in my ear. He had hung up before I could say the rest.

I stood in the middle of the living room with a dead phone against my ear and the dial tone starting up in it, and I did not move for a long while.

Because I knew that shape. Whatever else the week had done to me, I could still hear that much: the small private change that had gone through him the instant something he had been waiting for was put into his hand. Something had come in, on his end, in the middle of my sentence. Something about a body, or a car, or a name. Something worth hanging up on a frightened wife for.

I stood there and let the possibilities come, because there was no stopping them. That they had found him. That they had found the ute. That they had found him in the ute. That the thing Karl Jenkins had just been handed was my husband, in a ditch off some road, five days cold — and that the affair, the knickers, the wharf, the whole furious story I had built myself a house inside overnight, was about to turn out to be somebody's idea of a joke, and the thing I had put down on the bathroom floor the night before had been the true thing all along.

I made myself stop. I was good at that now. I put the phone down on the arm of Nial's chair, and I looked at the clock on the mantel — his grandmother's clock, that he wound every Sunday night and that I had not wound since the Saturday and that had somehow not yet stopped — and I did the sum. A couple of hours, he had said. It was ten past two.

So I sat down in my husband's armchair, in the cold, with the phone where I could reach it. I did not put the heater on. I did not put the lamps on as the afternoon went grey and then dark against the windows. I sat there in my coat in the failing light with my eyes on a silent phone, and I told myself Karl Jenkins was a man of his word, and I waited.