Excerpt: Picture of a Car Wreck - working title

Merry grabbed the packing tape gun and taped the top of another box. The shriek of the tape pulling out was loud in the mostly empty apartment, echoing off the flat undecorated walls. She was in a small island of unoccupied carpet putting the last odds and ends into boxes. The rest of the room was a sea of boxes, awaiting the moving truck. The kids were at a friend’s house for the afternoon, and she was alone in the quiet for the first time in days. The girls were dealing with the move in widely varied ways. One moment they would be excited about their new bedrooms, and the next heartbroken that they were leaving their favorite tree behind. Merry had found the packing without them around to go much more smoothly than when they were here. They wanted to help, and tried very hard to, but in the end, they ended up playing with the things that Merry was trying to pack away. In one memorable incident, Merry had asked Sierra, her oldest daughter, to pack up the Legos. When Merry had returned to the room, she found that Sierra had instead built what looked to be her new room, all set up and complete with a small Lego girl playing in it.
Merry herself was not immune to becoming engrossed in the things she was packing. Photo albums were the easiest to fall into. She loved looking at her girls grow across the pages. Several hours had been spent looking through Sierra and Emmaline’s baby albums. Sierra was now ten and Merry had a hard time believing that Sierra had ever been that small. Emmy was of smaller build, and still had her baby face at six, so the transformation was less startling, but Sierra had thinned out and looked little like her baby self. The girls had found their mom looking through all the albums one night, and they had spent the evening curled up on the couch together while merry told them stories about what they were like as babies. They giggled over Sierra’s painting the kitchen with maple syrup and icing and met the tale of Emmy playing in the cat box with loud calls of “ewww!” and “gross!”
The only time Merry had not stopped to look at one of the albums was when she found the lone album of picture of her late husband. Or at least her presumed dead husband. Emmy had been several months old and Sierra almost four the night David didn’t come home from work. At first Merry thought that he was working late, and had simply lost track of time. He had been at work that morning and she had spoken to him during the day, but when dinner time came and went with no sign, she began to worry. Merry had spent a sleepless night one the phone with the police, driving to David’s office and waiting at home. At his office the next day they had found all of his things; wallet, laptop and cell phone with nearly 50 messages from Merry. His car was in the lot, locked and nothing was disturbed. David was simply gone. They hadn’t found any trace of him since then. Sierra had been very worried when Daddy didn’t come home, but now, 6 years later, only remembered him from pictures.
Merry had gone back to work when David had been gone for three weeks, putting her big girl panties on and keeping her small family running as best she could. The police had pretty much told her that her husband had run out on her and obviously didn’t want to be found, and had stopped looking for leads. Merry had gone to America’s Most Wanted with the story and they had run the story, but absolutely nothing had come of it. He was still considered a missing person, and as such, none of the life insurance would kick in until he was declared dead. A lawyer had advised her to continue paying on it until a resolution was found. Finally, last month, she had begun the papers that would finally declare David dead. Moving now was partly for Merry’s job, and partly to end the feeling of waiting for David to come home. She had kept his things, as they were when he left, until now. That was the last project on the list this evening before the movers came in the morning: to clean out David’s things. It was another reason that Merry had sent the girls out. They probably wouldn’t have minded, as long as they could remember, those things were just in the closet they used to play hide and seek, but Merry knew it was going to be hard to close the door on the possibility of his return.
David’s mother, Sheila, had decided that Merry must have had some part in David’s dissappearance, and for a while, had been pushing for an investigation. She had even arrived at the police station screaming that her son was buried in Merry & David’s small courtyard. She must have been convincing, because the police showed up with several investigators and a van full of equipment to check the following day. It was a short investigation as the courtyard was very small and half concrete. In order to fit David’s body in there, the investigator told Sheila, Merry would have had to cut him up into little bits, bury him standing up, or jackhammered and repoured concrete in less than a week. Oh, and found a 1968 concrete company seal to stamp it with and because none of the tiny patch of grass was disturbed or even turned up, and the concrete was clearly over 40 years old, he wasn’t buried in the yard. Sheila had wailed that Merry was a horrible murderer and she would have her revenge as the police escorted her away from the small apartment. The next day she had arrived on the doorstep to threaten to take David’s children away. Merry had filed a restraining order against Sheila later that week, when Sierra began having nightmares about Grammy coming to get her and Emmy.
Merry’s friends had fallen into two camps. One camp was supportive and helpful, offering to take the kids, or bringing them dinner when Merry had to work late. The other camp was unsure of what to say or do when faced with the whole situation, and had slowly but surely stopped contacting Merry at all. Merry found herself suddenly too busy with trying to take care of her two daughters, working, and trying to find any information about where David had gone to really notice the loss except on rare occasions. Life had, for a while, turned into simply moving one step at a time. She trudged along and coped, kept things together and moved on. The girls grew, Sierra stopped asking for Daddy, and eventually she found that she was happier. She could go out and see a movie with friends without searching every face for David or take the kids to the park without worrying that whoever had taken David would try and take her girls. It had been good to realize that she was doing okay.
The first step toward the move had come when her job had offered her a promotion and a change or branch locations. Merry had been thrilled, both for the raise and for the location move. Their apartment had been in an okay part of town, but one without many children and where the schools were not what Merry had hoped. With the new position, they would be able to afford a house of their own, and would be in a school district that would be better for the girls. Merry had house hunted for a long time until finally a small house had become available within walking distance to her office and was in her price range. The girls were overjoyed that it had a real backyard and that there was a tree to climb. During the school tour, the girls had both fallen in love with their teachers and their future classes. On the block they were moving to there were a lot of families, several with children Sierra and Emmy’s ages.
The second shove toward the move had been in the form of a phone call from Merry’s lawyer. Shortly after the promotion offer, the phone rang at dinner time on evening. Merry answered to find her lawyer, and friend, Shane, on the phone. Shane had been there for merry the whole time, and this call was no different. The time had come to begin working on the paperwork to declare David dead. The police investigation was technically still open, though no one had touched it for years. Merry was still married to David, and the lack of any trace of him anywhere, even a sighting meant that this was the final step. Merry had been shocked, but agreed it was time. Any doubts she had about moving on had been eliminated and she started hunting for a house the next day. The story had a happier ending than she had ever thought it would, and it was time to go forward.
Merry stood up and stacked the last box of odds and ends on a nearby pile, grabbed her Sharpies, tape and Coke and headed for the bedroom. Everything was packed or disassembled and they had gotten out their sleeping bags for a campout in the living room that night. The only thing left to do was to go through David’s things. His half of the bedroom was still put together, dresser and closet intact, pictures of his family and the girls on the wall. It looked like a shrine in a box factory, surrounded as it was with packed things. There was a layer of dust over all of it and Merry paused at the door and studied it. She hadn’t moved anything, though she sometimes dusted the dresser top. Mostly she just forgot about it, rather like when something breaks in the house, and you get used to just not using it. She had just gotten used to half of the bedroom being occupied by things that weren’t hers. She gathered herself up, took a deep breath and crossed to the dresser. Putting her things on the dresser and quickly building a box to put things for donation into, she eyed the top drawer warily.
“Come on, Merry Anne, what do you think is in there?” She gave herself a good mental shake and pulled open the top drawer. “Wow. I didn’t know it could get dusty inside drawers.” She dragged her finger through the dust that was on the top layer of clothing and wiped it on her jeans. She paused and realized that this was David’s underwear. For a moment, she just stared and then began laughing. The bizarre reality of living with her presumed dead husband’s dusty underwear in a drawer for 6 years was just too much not to laugh at. Shaking her head she shook off the top pair and placed it in the donation box. the drawer was emptied in short order and she was on to the next one. Soon, two boxes were full and the dresser was empty. Another box held the keepsakes and things she wanted from the top of the dresser and it was done. She pulled the drawers out and put them by the door, and moved the frame next to the other dresser. There were several pieces of paper behind the dresser that she tossed into the box of keepsake, pausing over a phone number she didn’t know, and a note she had left for David to pick up some toilet paper on the way home from work. The pictures on the wall went into the box on top of the slips of paper and she taped it securely closed.
That done, she reached for the garbage bags she had brought in earlier, and shook one to open it. Behind the closet door were David’s clothes and shoes. He had kept an orderly closet, and now every perfectly hung garment was dusty and probably permanently hanger creased. Merry dove in and began pulling clothing off of hangers and putting it in the garbage bags. She had a friend who was coming to pick this stuff up and take it to a homeless shelter tomorrow. As she got to the pants, she checked the pockets out of force of habit. David had often left things in his pockets, and she always checked before washing them. She found some money, several business cards, and three Kleenexes. She pocketed the money and tossed the other bits and reached for the last pair. As she pulled them off the hanger, something fell out of the pocket. She quickly checked the pockets and tossed the past aside before bending to pick up the set of keys that had fallen out. She thought they might have been his work keys, but thought those had been at the office with his other things. Merry put them in her pocket and decided she would stop by his office and see if they were work keys. They had probably long since changed the locks, but if not, they could have them back.
The floor at the back of the closet was a pile of shoes and clothing which was out of place for David’s neat ways. Merry guessed that Sierra and Emmy had been playing in there and had made a bed, or a fort or a clothes monster and then left it behind. She shook out each item and put it in the bag and paired the shoes up to go in the shoe box. Reaching into the closet as she checked her watch, she was surprised when her hand hit something hard under the clothing. She raised and eyebrow and muttered about the girls leaving things in the closet that should have been packed by now and uncovered a box. The box was sealed, and looked as if it had been mailed to Merry and David about 6 months before David had disappeared. She didn’t remember receiving a package, much less putting it in here, but she figured anything was possible given the chaos that had followed David’s disappearance. It was possible that the girls had put it in here too, as they had always loved playing on Daddy’s neat and clean side of the closet. She looked for a return address and finding none, decided that it could wait until the move was over and done tomorrow. She certainly wasn’t unpacking any boxes that were already packed! The last of the clothes went into the garbage bag, and a noise at the door signaled that the girls were home again. Shutting off the light in the bedroom with a final glance at the odd box, she heard the girls holler hello from the entryway.
“Hey, you two! How was Cecily’s house? Ready for pizza and a movie?” Merry asked as she pulled the bedroom door shut.