I glanced down at my own hand to see it holding her glove. I looked up, hoping to find her only a few people behind, but there were so many faces and none of them were hers.
I called her name once, twice as the crowd crushed me towards the other side of the street. It was a blessing because if they hadn’t I’d have stayed in the center of the road, screaming for Miranda as the impatient New York traffic grew tired of my antics and eventually ran me down.
Lunch forgotten, I crossed to where we’d started as soon as the cars allowed. Some part of me had this wild idea that maybe she’d just spotted something in a store window she simply had to have, some sparkling trinket that she wanted and I’d find her there, hands pressed against the glass – one gloved, one not – and when I approached she’d look up, give me that beautiful movie star smile and ask pretty please, Arthur, will you get it for me?
I backtracked all the way to our hotel. She wasn’t at any of the shops.
In our hotel room (where she also wasn’t) I went straight for the phone to call the police. She’d been taken from me, Miranda was missing and I needed help, but it was as I reached for the phone that I realized something.
The jewelry box, the one she had filled with new earrings and necklaces and other baubles just before we’d left – far too many for a few nights in Manhattan, I’d thought vaguely at the time – was gone. A quick peek into the drawer near my side of the bed proved that so was the envelope of emergency cash I’d hidden inside the Gideon bible.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Had a martini been in my hands, I would’ve spilled gin on the floor.
I’m not sure when I actually called the police. I think in a blind moment of rage I’d meant to report her as a thief but when they arrived, neat and stern in their blue uniforms, I found myself telling them that my wife had been taken from me in a crowd. I showed them the glove she’d left behind. I described her in the most clinical of terms; I told them the color of her hair (blonde) and her eyes (blue) and I never mentioned the way she burned from the inside.
Maybe it was easier that way. To tell them she’d been taken. Maybe I was embarrassed. Maybe some part of me still believed it, despite the missing valuables. Maybe in my heart I couldn’t face the fact that the beautiful, bored woman I loved had left me like a fool in the streets of Manhattan, had perhaps been planning to leave from the first moment I showed her our plane tickets to New York.
On my flight back to Nebraska, short $300 and one wife, I could hear her voice in my ears. I’m so bored, she’d said. I’m so godawfully bored.
I made myself a promise then. I wasn’t going to let her destroy me. I wasn’t going to let her be right. I wasn’t going to be boring anymore.
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