And Then You Were Gone

by R. J. Jacobs

  “Yes, I do.”

  In the background, someone spoke, and Paolo sounded eager to return to what he’d been doing. “Probably … my worst quality is the best one, too. But you know, stubborn people persevere.”

  “I hear you on that,” I said. “I do.”

  You don’t even know, I thought.

  SIXTEEN

  My thoughts, after Cal left, were organized into two basic categories: worry about the dragging of time until I met with Sandy again, and worry about what exactly Cal was talking about.

  A drug addict? A pill head? I’d been called a lot of things, but those were new.

  I thought back to the prescription bottles the police had found in Paolo’s Jeep. Unanswered questions, his right to privacy.

  Everything turned over and over in my head. I couldn’t sleep, wanted to take a pill, didn’t, laid awake. I picked up the phone to call Cal, stopped myself, and turned over in bed again.

  Cal had activated my worst fears, brought the worst time in my life right back to the surface.

  * * *

  Twenty years old. The parking structure was ghostly empty except for a few cars. I’d been up there before when I couldn’t sleep. It was close to campus, lonesome at night; attached to some kind of medical building. I didn’t know for sure. None of that was my world yet. When you’re twenty, you have only an outline sketch of how life works on which to base your plans.

  I could taste vodka on my lips, my tongue still numb from it. I walked the ramps counterclockwise upward, hands shaking, jammed into the pockets of my jeans. Floor three, floor four. My chest pounded like we were halfway through practice drills, though the soccer season had ended months before. I laid my palm on my chest to feel the hammering, then wiped the back of my hand across my cheeks.

  Inside me was the big black, the blob that ate everything it touched. The only way to not lie in bed was to stay out, to walk. To keep walking. I’d known it before, but it had never been quite so bad, so consuming. I thought of it as The Nameless Dread.

  Eventually, I’d fall asleep. At least, I prayed I would.

  It was still early enough that the only sound was the faint clink clink of metal from somewhere, like a rivet hitting a flagpole. It surprised me that cars were there, one every other ramp or so. There was a dented subcompact the color of mint ice cream, then a white pickup with a dusty bumper covered in pro-gun stickers.

  Floor five, six. Wind leapt off the concrete, shoving me in the back. My head hadn’t touched a pillow for three days. I was humming songs to myself like there was a radio inside my head—fragments of tunes, rhymes, looping on repeat.

  Floor seven.

  A bird called from somewhere in the treetops below, and my head swiveled toward it. The animal in me wanted to hear its shrill voice again. My hands trembled in my pockets. My head found, then looped a song I hadn’t listened to in years. No idea where it had come up from. Where did I …? No one would ever understand this feeling, like a shot put formed inside my chest. Around it, my heart beat.

  Maybe I’d sleep … later. Or maybe I’d do it. It would only take a few seconds; then everything would be over. The carousel could stop.

  Another car. Goddammit. Red hatchback like a drop of blood on the pavement. That’s funny, actually, I thought.

  Was it?

  I wondered if I would do it.

  Eighth floor was the top. Streetlights like a star map spread across the city floor. I climbed onto the ledge, dangled my feet over. The concrete under my palms was rough and dirty, though the air smelled clean and felt warm and good surrounding me. I was looking down. All the way down. The backs of my shoes bounced forward off the concrete wall. I started to lean forward, too, to look down, but wobbled and felt my fingertips dig into the rough wall. My nails bent back until they hurt.

  “’Scuse me.” The man’s voice behind me was so soft. “I didn’t want to startle you, but why don’t you come down off of that? You’re making me a little nervous.”

  “I didn’t know anyone was here.” I sounded drunk. I started turning toward the voice, felt my balance give, stopped. My eyes focused on the blinking red of a far-off radio tower.

  “Why don’t you let me help you come off of that?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I really think—”

  My shoes bounced. My bottom slid forward.

  “Whoa there.” I could hear him shifting from one foot to the other. “Just hang on there, all right? Hang on.”

  I watched the red radio tower light. The shot put in my chest had become like a bowling ball.

  “You’re scaring …”

  Me. He’d almost said, You’re scaring me. But I turned my chin over my shoulder and locked eyes with him before he could finish. Dark skin, with soft, tired eyes. Maybe forty-five, maybe fifty. The age I imagined my dad would be. Was this him? Finally come back? That was crazy. I knew it was.

  What he said was, “I saw you from my window.” He pointed at the building. “I saw you walking, then climb up on this … thing. I thought maybe you needed some help.”

  There were no words inside me.

  Then, tires grumbling, a police radio. No lights, I noticed. No one wanted to spook me.

  You can’t spook a ghost. I was already dead.

  But not all the way. Not dead enough that hands couldn’t grip my shoulders, couldn’t pull me backward off the ledge and onto the concrete.

  Then the lights came on, blue and ever bright—starbursts of color, announcing something … what was it? The big black, the blob they couldn’t see had been detained. I spit on the floor of the cruiser. The handcuffs chilled my wrists. The man with the tired eyes disappeared down a flight of stairs. A metal door banged behind him.

  My head was full of … something. Something that made sleep inevitable, irresistible. Like the aliens say, I thought before my eyes closed, resistance is futile.

  When they opened again, I was in the company of another middle-aged man—Marty—who guided me through my first hospitalization. He had a kind smile and a piece of yarn in his palm, trying to show me that things that were broken could get put back together. He was no good at the trick, not yet. Years later, he’d throw away all his best judgment and recommend me for my graduate program.

  In the hospital, I knew what my diagnosis would be before anyone acknowledged it because I’d feared bipolar for as long as I could remember. I’d feared it looking back over my family history, picturing my grandmother wading into that glassy river at sunset. I’d had dreams where she’d turned and her face had been my face, her terror had been mine. I pictured bipolar laying latent, genetically, waiting for its opportunity. The way a sleeper cell does. Or cancer.

  The harder I tried to ignore my mood expressions in middle and high school, the less I could. Every down day became the beginning of my descent. Every time I laughed too long or stayed up too late made me wonder if I was just about to go careening off of the edge.

  But in the hospital, I knew. I knew definitively, even if I didn’t know how to think about it, except as a monster inside myself. The tormenting Hulk, the mutated DNA in my blood, inextricable, permanent, my deepest and most personal flaw—the dark half of my identity. Who wouldn’t be afraid? Until I snapped, it was like waiting for a bomb to go off. I knew when the whisper of my thoughts turned loud, and violent, and unyielding—before the parking garage and the cutting, cold handcuffs.

  Clinically, no healthcare worker seemed to want to say the word bipolar. But Marty didn’t bullshit me. He drew a line on a piece of paper and explained my mood as a continuum. He numbered the line one to ten. A one was very depressed, a ten completely out of control, manic. We talked about how much fluctuation I had, and the rate in which it happened.

  He taught me a word: euthymic. That was the state between four and six. Euthymic sounded like another planet, or the name of somewhere exclusive, a club I couldn’t get into, or would be kicked out of after being revealed.

  But that was where I wanted
to go—and stay—mostly. It would take therapy and meds, which narrowed the range, clipping off the extremes. Marty explained that most bipolar patients stopped taking meds after a while because they felt muted through their week-to-week lives, mainly devoid of energy. The sevens and eights felt vibrant and satisfying.

  What I needed was to minimize the ones and twos—days of complete blackness, no perspective, no ability to see my hand in front of my face. Those were unsustainable. More than that, they were intolerable. It’s like people say—no one kills themselves because they like dying. They jump from burning buildings because the fall hurts less than the fire.

  Fire’s hard to live with.

  I wanted a life—not to follow anyone into a river.

  There’s a self-centeredness to poor mental health that I absolutely hated; I wanted to be someone I liked. The teammate, camp counselor, daughter, friend.

  That first week, Marty raised an eyebrow at me when I tilted my head back and swallowed three pills at once. I told him I’d try anything. I wasn’t going back up on that parking garage.

  * * *

  On Thursday morning, my phone lit up with a text from Allie: CHECKING IN ON YOU. STILL OKAY?

  THANKS FOR ASKING, I typed, picturing her surrounded by paper piles. I was lucky to have a friend so caring. HOW ARE YOU?

  The ellipsis on her end of the conversation breathed while she evidently touched her screen—sitting at her desk, I imagined.

  YOU WANTED TO MEET ABOUT SOMETHING ON SATURDAY? I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN. MY SCHEDULE IS OFF THE RAILS, THE WHOLE DEPARTMENT IS IN A FRENZY. IT’S ABOUT TO BE ALL OVER THE NEWS—THERE’S BEEN ANOTHER KILLING. ANOTHER BODY FOUND.

  I felt pain in the back of my throat as my head dropped back. All I could picture was Sandy’s terrified expression as I replayed the hours after she left, all my texting and calling. My legs tightened, ready to run. My hand shook. I typed, A WOMAN?

  At that moment, I didn’t care if Allie wondered why I was asking.

  A sweeping stretch of time before her next text came. Beads of sweat on my lip.

  VICTIM WAS A MAN. THEY THINK HOMELESS. WE COULD BE LOOKING AT A SERIAL KILLER.

  I set the phone down and covered my mouth, swallowing hard. Don’t, I thought. Don’t take solace.

  Go to the news.

  * * *

  The body had been found at dawn the day before—Halloween. A local artist, moving through the dry brush, made the discovery. She wore the decade-old overalls in which she taught community ed, her late husband’s field jacket hung over her shoulders. In the dawn light, her breath had been a series of tiny spirits.

  She’d set out early to capture a peak autumn landscape in acrylic.

  Brushes jangled inside her canvas backpack. As she stopped to tie the jacket arms around her waist, coffee sloshed inside her thermos. When she looked up, she recognized the black, twisted vines in the modest clearing as a body. She understood that the surrounding pines had been bewitched in ash, and she dropped everything to the ground.

  She placed her horrified call. Police arrived within minutes.

  These remains were less than a mile from the site of the previous murder, four months earlier. The circumstances were similar. Like before, the victim had been zip-tied to a metal chair. This time, the chair had been chained to a tree. The killer had ensured that the victim wasn’t going anywhere. But since everything was scorched, the cause of death was indeterminable.

  No one understood at the time why the victim had been kept in the same place for days. Or why his last days, but not death, had been recorded.

  As with the first murder, two sets of footprints led toward the clearing. Only one set led back toward the road.

  Late in the afternoon, the police found a Zippo lighter in the brush that was assumed to have ignited the blaze.

  A murder like that, if it could be understood at all, couldn’t be comprehended emotionally. The killer had to be someone who had no feelings at all. I turned this over and over in my mind—the fact that Paolo seemed to have been to Gainer Ridge before the previous murder, Sandy’s conviction about what she’d found out about Matt. Was this murder connected to the previous one? Allie sure seemed to think so. But could Matt possibly be involved?

  I called Sandy again, then texted her. WE NEED TO TALK.

  * * *

  Waiting was torture, trusting that Sandy was going about collecting whatever evidence she could. It felt helpless, out of control. To discharge whatever anxiety I could, I returned to my lifelong strategy: exercise. Working out always got me out of my head. I needed to be out of my head. Sports had been my go-to since elementary school, when I’d gravitated toward PE more than any other girl I knew. In high school, it got serious; and at soccer, I got seriously good. Then my college team had been a sort of sweet torture, testing the limits of love versus overexposure.

  At twenty-one, Advil had turned into a vitamin. My body became a machine. A machine that performed until what I felt like stopped mattering. I willed myself to move in unnatural directions, to tolerate the passage of boredom, to anticipate directional changes fifty yards away.

  That evening, my truck creaked over speed bumps in the parking lot of the Green Hills YMCA. The parking lot was nearly full, but I found a spot near the back. The seat fabric felt cold on my neck. As raindrops began to dot my windshield, I watched car lights splash in and out of the parking lot until my breath began to fog the glass. After daylight savings in Tennessee, it feels as though it’s dark all the time.

  Another body. Horrific.

  The case was something I couldn’t look away from, even though knowing about it ached.

  I realized my hands were gripped so tight that my fingernails were marking crescent moons into my palms.

  Go on, I thought, get up there. You came here for a reason.

  Inside, I hung my sweatshirt and leaned the cane under the row of hooks. I situated myself on a recumbent bike beneath a television so large it seemed satirical. I took my left foot out of the boot, slipped on a running shoe matching the one on my right foot, then started turning the pedals.

  This wouldn’t really be working out, I thought; this would be a warmup. This wouldn’t be sprints till I threw up.

  I set the timer on my phone to chime after thirty minutes, then turned it facedown in the bike’s drink holder.

  In no time, sweat beaded my face. My hands turned slick on the grips.

  A dull ache pounded my left side.

  Keep going.

  I could picture the screws flexing inside my ankle. It felt rigged together, like some kind of contraption that might fall apart. I reached for my phone but stopped myself.

  Don’t think about time. Keep going.

  I focused on the wall opposite me, ignoring the television flashing overhead.

  Then my phone was chiming. My gaze snapped back into the room. I wiped at my face with the front of my shirt as the shock of pain I’d willed myself to ignore burned my left side, heel to hip, like that whole section of me had been ripped open.

  My mind flashed like a scream to the image of a burned body in the woods. Why? Like everyone else in the city must’ve wondered: why?

  I unclenched my jaw.

  The chime sounded again. Time was up.

  I turned over my phone and realized there were four missed calls, all from Sandy. There was a voicemail from her number. I checked my texts, my fingers making sweaty prints on the screen. Three from Sandy, their time stamps like punctuation points between the calls. Some part of me knew, even as I hobbled off the bike, that these would someday be examined by a detective.

  They read:

  I WAS RIGHT. I FOUND MORE.

  I HAVE TO GO TO THE POLICE.

  I’M SORRY.

  The air was full of electricity. Still panting from the bike, I started the voicemail, but the whir of machines made listening impossible. I shoved back into my boot and grabbed my cane, took the stairs down two at a time until I was back out in the breezy parking lot,
where lights reflected off the wet asphalt. Sitting on the wooden bench beside the entrance, a new whoosh of air flew over me each time the doors opened.

  I pressed the phone against my damp cheek to listen.

  She sounded terrified, hushed but echoey, as if running—footsteps pressured her speech like a metronome swaying too quickly. I pictured her looking back over her shoulder, blonde hair slashing back and forth across her tiny shoulders. I pictured her pretty, perfect teeth as I heard her voice.

  “It’s Sandy. I hope you get this tonight. I need to see you as soon as you can. I found more. Much more. You can’t trust anyone, can you? Nothing matters now. I’m never going back.”

  Something great and terrible started to swell in me, familiarly.

  I replayed the message. Her thoughts were raw and unorganized—fear had disallowed any pretense.

  I called back. Her phone rang to voicemail.

  My heart pounded. I moved to the truck, grabbed the cracked steering wheel, the Breathalyzer, and blew. I knew I was going to her apartment, that nothing was going to stop me.

  I started driving and called again. Five rings, then voicemail. I didn’t leave a message. What would I say? Call me?

  A line of cars formed in front of me along Woodmont, someone waiting to turn left while headlights streamed ahead.

  I was going to bang on Sandy’s door until she answered.

  Had I taken medication that morning? Yes, surely, I thought.

  This wasn’t manic, I told myself.

  But the only things that existed were Sandy’s apartment and getting there. My mind raced to guess the distance. Two miles? Three, maybe? Distance was time. Time needed to pass.

  On the interstate, traffic slowed again, then it stopped altogether. I changed lanes. The truck’s turn signal made a sound like cracking plastic. Some kind of construction ahead, or something, that I couldn’t make out—just a grinding line of brake lights and wispy tailpipes. An orange light flashed somewhere up ahead.

  “Goddammit,” I screamed, beating the steering wheel. I pictured Janet Leigh’s expression in Psycho.