At the end of the day, I blame my husband for this. He always had a very old-school view when it came to answering the phone which essentially was that you should always answer it when it rang. It frustrated him endlessly when I watched unknown numbers flash across my screen and let them go to voicemail.
“If it’s important then they’ll leave a message,” I always said.
“If it’s a spam call then you can just hang up, but if it’s important then you’ll know and be glad you answered,” he’d always retort.
I always rolled my eyes.
Then the first call came. It was early Sunday morning. A number that I didn’t recognize but had the area code of our city. I contemplated it while it rang. On the one hand, it looked like a normal phone number. On the other hand, scammers can spoof numbers easily, so it was probably a scammer anyway. I wasn’t expecting a call, after all. It went to voicemail.
The “new voicemail” notification popped up.
“Laura,” the frantic voice of my boss at work filled the phone. “It’s Michelle, please call me back immediately. I’m calling from a phone on site.”
I was one mistake away from getting fired at work. I’d been distracted and not doing my best work. I knew it was only the grace from Michelle that kept me on. God only knows what I’d done to warrant this frantic call from my boss, but I was probably in trouble for something or another.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I muttered, quickly dialing her number.
“Yes?” her bleary voice answered.
“Hi, yes, I’m sorry I missed your call. I’m just calling you back.”
After a very annoyed conversation that boiled down to “don’t fucking call me on a Sunday morning” and “no, I didn’t call you. Are you drunk?” I hung up the phone, completely confused. The voicemail was still on my phone. It hadn’t disappeared or done anything strange, but it clearly hadn’t been my boss.
The following Monday I was let go. That was the last straw, they said, in a string of erratic behavior from me.
Another phone call came a couple of days later. I stared it down, once again contemplating answering the phone. Again, no one should have been calling me anyway, so I let it ring. I didn’t feel up to any human interaction.
The voicemail notification popped up.
“Laura, it’s Caroline. Please call me back. It’s about dad. I’m calling from the hospital,” my sister’s voice said, sounding vaguely tinny in the phone’s speaker.
I dialed her back.
“Please Laura, we’re worried about you,” she’d said at the end of our conversation. “I know you’ve been through hell but you can’t be doing this. Be honest, are you drinking again?”
She hadn’t called either.
The calls kept coming. Sometimes I answered the unknown numbers but was always met with silence. When I let them go to voicemail, the distressed voices of the people in my life always met me on the other end. Sometimes it was my elderly neighbor Mary telling me that a car had hit my dog or that a tree had fallen through the roof. Sometimes it was an old friend calling to tell me someone we knew had died or that they themselves were going to die. Once it was a voice I didn’t recognize telling me to call the local precinct as I’d been implicated in a hit and run. It was always something.
It was a gamble to take with each phone call. Ignore the call and risk the chance that it was a genuine call or call them back and continue the pattern of alienating everyone in my life. I’d already lost my job. My sister threatened to send me to rehab if I called her one more time. Old friends had blocked my number. My neighbor avoided me. I’d been sternly told by the police department to stop wasting their time. It was just me.
I tried answering every call that came through, hoping to be greeted by blissful silence on the other end. That stopped working when the calls began coming in the middle of the night when I was asleep. I woke up every morning to my voicemail filled with panicked pleas for me to return their call. I changed my sleeping patterns - shifting to short bursts of naps throughout the day, then to no sleep at all. The calls kept coming. I couldn’t answer them fast enough.
“Laura, it’s me,” the voice came from the most recent voicemail. A voice that needed no introduction beyond “it’s me.” The voice I’d been begging and pleading to hear for the past ten months. The voice I never thought I’d hear again. Missing, presumed dead. My husband hadn’t been seen in ten months. The reason I’d never changed my phone number. I’d been waiting for this day.
“Come meet me at the police station. I know I have so much to explain,” his voice said.
I entered the police station fifteen minutes later and told the front desk my name. She gave me a funny look and ushered me back. The detective who had been working on my husband’s case looked shocked to see me.
“Laura, have you heard?” he stood up abruptly from his desk.
“Is my husband here?” I asked, searching the room.
He looked down.
“Well, I was just about to call you. Please sit down. I’m very sorry to say, well, we’ve found your husband’s body. We’ll need to hear from autopsy for any details, but well, I’m so sorry.”
The next few hours were a whirlwind. I found myself unable to say anything worth saying, opting instead to sit numbly in the corner while they tried explaining things to me. They’d found his body in the woods. He hadn’t been alive for a while, at least for six months based on decomposition. They needed more information from the autopsy before saying anything definite. Could anyone come to pick me up? Would I like any coffee while I waited? Did I know anyone who would’ve done this?
“Did he have his phone?” I finally asked.
He did and they were charging it as we spoke. I could look at it, but they had to keep it in case it was relevant to their investigation. The detective had to stay with me while I looked to make sure I didn’t tamper with evidence. I understood. I only wanted to look at the call log.
It was filled with calls to my number, over a hundred.
All calls were timestamped in the last couple of weeks.