It was almost three in the morning by the time I got back to our apartment. Our car was still parked in the same spot. I wondered if Frank would have taken it if we’d had it with us on the job, if Froehmer hadn’t insisted on us using the rental. I walked into the apartment and knew no one had been there. Nothing had changed. Everything was where we had left it, Frank’s clothes in the closet, his toothbrush next to mine, his copy of Meditations open and page down right where he left it. His saxophone was in the living room. Everything was all exactly where we had left it, and maybe it would all stay there. It seemed impossible that he would leave everything, with no explanation, but I thought that if he hadn’t come back by now, he wouldn’t be coming back ever. All of a sudden it didn’t feel like home. Maybe Frank really wasn’t coming back. There were no answers anywhere, none that I could see.

I woke up well after noon. I was still tired and could have stayed in bed another week or more. But I didn’t. I checked my phone and made a few calls and then found a meeting. I didn’t go every day, but enough that people knew me, even more knew Frank. He still talked to a few people whenever they needed someone to talk to, and they always needed someone to talk to. No one knew anything about Frank. A few of them had tried to reach him but hadn’t heard anything either.

“Trouble in paradise?” someone snided at me and I ignored it. I didn’t know what to say to them, how much to tell anyone. These weren’t my friends. But it was my community.

“It’s easy to look after people you like,” Frank had told me. “It’s another thing to care about people you don’t like.”

Most of them cared about me; all of them cared about Frank.

“I haven’t heard from him in a couple of days,” I said. “It’s not like him, that’s all.”

Everyone agreed. It wasn’t like him. I didn’t think he was the type to turn his back on everything, to walk out of his world without a word, without an explanation. But maybe he was exactly that type. Maybe that was the only way he could do it. They tell you in treatment that you can’t go back to your old life, because you’ll go back to your old habits, so maybe that’s what Frank did, changed everything.