by Ronald Malfi
Still, it had to have been a mistake. Obviously I would have noticed if you’d been gone for two nights. I kept staring at the receipt, trying to divine some explanation from it, trying to translate these nonsensical glyphs into something my brain could grasp hold of and understand. Two nights in October would have—
But wait. When had I gone to New York to meet with my editor? It had been around Halloween, hadn’t it? I’d been in the city for three days. On that occasion I had said Come with me—those haunting words now, Allison—but you’d been too busy with work and couldn’t get away. Or so you’d said.
I went upstairs to the office, rifled through my desk calendar. There it was in my own calligraphic handwriting—I’d been in New York from October 28–30. The same days you were apparently in someplace called Chester, North Carolina, Allison. The same nights you’d stayed at The Valentine Motel.
What the hell were you doing at a motel in North Carolina while I was in New York?
4
I called Tommy Weir from down the block to see if he could bypass the password on your laptop. “It’s basically just a big coaster unless you can get in,” I told him. I did not let on that I was hunting for something; I simply told him I wanted to have access to your laptop. While Tommy went to work, I clomped downstairs and had a cigarette on the deck. After the smoke, I grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge and carried them up to the office. Tommy had already gotten into the computer.
“I’ve set up this prompt for you to put in your own password,” he said.
I typed something simple that I would remember later, then we both went downstairs to finish our beers on the deck. Tommy had been to your funeral and had paid his condolences then; there was no talk of you now, Allison, and as much as I hate to admit this, it felt good. For that handful of minutes drinking beer with Tommy Weir on the back deck, I felt close to human again. He even told some joke and I laughed. A for real laugh.
After Tommy had left, I got on your laptop but found that the search history had been deleted. Also, there wasn’t a single file saved on the hard drive. It was as if it had come straight from the factory. I called Tommy up and asked him if he had accidentally jiggered something when he’d gained access to the computer, erasing all the files and browser history.
“No, man, wasn’t me. But I noticed that, too,” he said. “Probably should have said something. Looks like Allison used a program to wipe the hard drive at some point.”
“Wipe it,” I repeated. “Like, she erased everything.”
“Yeah. It’s all gone, whatever was there.”
“Okay.” I fell silent over the line.
“You all right, Aaron?”
“Yeah.” But I wasn’t. “Thank you, Tommy.”
“Give me a shout if you need anything else.”
“I will.”
“And it was good to have those beers. Let’s do it again soon.”
“Will do,” I said, and disconnected the line.
5
I felt like someone with a terminal illness as I walked into the offices of the Herald. Heads swiveled in my direction. Who is this creature walking upright between the cubicles, pretending to be a human being? All those eyes on me, most of them not registering who I was. Some others knew right away. I was greeted by tight embraces and several sympathetic pats on the back from some of your former colleagues. It made me feel like some asshole who’d just missed the game-winning field goal. One woman—I’d met her before at some cookout or something but couldn’t remember her name—began to weep behind the tent of her pudgy pink hands as she gazed at me from over the partition of her cubicle. The pity for me in this place was palpable and it made me feel sick. A few people asked how I was holding up. In order to answer, I temporarily summoned other-Aaron, that reliable automaton, to the helpdesk, where he donned my face and provided his perfunctory, socially acceptable responses.
It wasn’t a show. You’d worked at the paper for seven years and these people loved you. They felt sorry for me by default, and a little collection of them followed me down the hall to Bill Duvaney’s office. On the way I passed your desk, shiny-clean and not a single thing on it. Someone had placed a laminated prayer card from your memorial service on your desk chair. I felt my throat tighten at the sight of it.
Bill Duvaney looked up from his laptop the moment I appeared in his doorway. “Jesus, Aaron,” he said, lifting his considerable bulk from his chair and routing over toward me. He wrapped his arms around me, his cologne overpowering, his tie clip knifing into my sternum. “What a surprise. I’m glad you’re here. How’re you holding up?” he asked once he let me go.
“I guess okay. I don’t know.”
“This whole thing.” He shook his head. Bill had been at the funeral and he’d probably spoken to me that day—so many people had—but I had no memory of it. He was in his fifties, with a dejected, hangdog face, made all the more pitiable by the expression of empathy he now wore. I could see the indentations at the bridge of his nose, left there by his eyeglasses which sat now on the ink blotter on his desk. He had inherited the paper from his wife’s family, and I could never quite tell if he grudgingly relished the responsibility of editor-in-chief or felt trapped by this whim of circumstance.
“I hope I’m not bothering you, Bill.”
“Not at all, Aaron. Sit down. Please.” He waved a meaty paw at one of the empty chairs in front of his desk. “Soda or coffee? There might be donuts in the break room.”
“I’m good, thanks.”
He closed his office door then went back behind his desk. The cushion on his chair wheezed like a punctured car tire as he dropped his hefty frame onto it. I sat in a chair opposite him and worked my way through a series of ill-fitting expressions, trying to find the right one for such an occasion.
“What can I do for you, Aaron? You name it. Anything you need.”
“Back in October, did you send Allison on assignment to North Carolina? Some mountain town called Chester?”
I could tell, based on the tightening of Bill Duvaney’s features, that this wasn’t the type of question he had been anticipating. “North Carolina?” he said. “Why would I send her to North Carolina?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
“Well, no, I didn’t,” he said, holding his hands out to profess his innocence. “We’re a small community newspaper, why would I send her out of state?”
“I didn’t think you would.” It felt like something small and hard was attempting to expand in the center of my stomach. “Was she working on anything that might send her down there on her own, even if you weren’t aware of it? Some special project she might have been working on?”
“Back in October? She’d been working on a local bake sale, Aaron, and a story on the Halloween display at Sandy Point. She was helping one of our interns digitize our paper files into our computer system.”
I felt my head bobbing up and down.
“What brings this up, Aaron? What’s going on?”
I considered how to respond. Did I want to air this laundry? I thought about the people out there in the newsroom, in the cubicles and the hallways. I thought about the prayer card on your desk chair, Allison.
“Maybe I’m just being silly,” I said.
“You’re in mourning,” said Bill Duvaney. “It’s grief, Aaron. What’s it been? Five weeks? No one expects you to click back into reality this quickly.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right. Your mind, it’s all over the place. How old are you?”
“Uh,” I stammered. “I’m thirty-two.”
“Thirty-two,” he repeated, shaking his head as if he was in awe of such a number. “And here you are.” Still shaking his head. “At least that son of a bitch had the decency to take his own life.”
Bill Duvaney was not the only person to express this sentiment to me. And although I understood why he’d say it and why he felt that way, I was in staunch disagreement. How dare th
at motherfucker rip you from me then take the easy way out? A part of me yearned for a future paved with months or even years of trial prep and consultations with lawyers and law enforcement to give me an avenue through which I could exorcise my grief and focus my fury. The gunman had not just robbed me of you, Allison, but he had taken away a structured foreseeable future during which I might be capable of finding some resolution to my anger, my sorrow, my nightmares. There would be no resolve for me now. The gunman was as dead as you, Allison.
“Have you been following the news on the guy?” Duvaney went on.
“The guy?”
“The shooter.”
“No. Not really.”
“He’d been in and out of juvie when he was younger. He’d threatened to kill his parents about a half-dozen times. Police had gotten involved. Back when he was in high school he was taken into custody for threats against some students there. Threatening to shoot up the school, that sort of thing. All the classic signs of a common sociopath, I guess.” He reclined in his chair in exasperation. “And what does anybody do? Nothing. That’s what. Another one slips through the cracks in the system and everyone wonders how the hell something like this could’ve happened. We’re all so shocked, right? As if it wasn’t staring us in the face the whole goddamn time.” Something in his voice hitched. He glanced away from me. “And now you see what we’re left with?”
“I guess,” I muttered.
“We’re all left with the aftermath.” He looked back at me, pointed at me. “You, Aaron. You’re left with the aftermath. Christ, you are the aftermath.” He shook his large, square head. “Those poor people. Your poor wife. Son of a bitch.” He cleared his throat and said, “The kid’s parents were loaded, you know.”
“What kid?”
“Vols,” he said. His eyebrows knitted together, as if he was confused by my inability to follow this conversation. “Robert Vols. The shooter. I’ve got it on good authority that some people are filing civil suits against the parents’ estate.”
“You can do that?”
“It’s what I heard. You should look into it. Why the hell not? I can make some phone calls for you, if you’d like.”
“I’m not looking to sue anybody, Bill.”
“The family is gone. The parents are dead.”
“It’s just not something I want to pursue.”
“Right,” he said. “It won’t bring her back. But it might—”
“Might what?”
His face softened. “Listen, Aaron.” He turned his laptop around on his desk so that we could both see the screen. “I want to show you something.” He pecked out a command on the keyboard then manipulated the mouse. An image blinked on the screen. An image of you, Allison. Not a blown-up image of your byline photo like all the other newspapers and media outlets had used, but of you standing at the center of a heap of smiling children. If memory serves, this was from a story you did on young volunteers. You had wanted to highlight their compassion.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Page two of our memorial issue,” Duvaney said. “Everyone on staff is contributing. Even the IT guys. It’s coming out at the end of the month.”
“That’s very nice, Bill.” You would have been embarrassed as hell by the fanfare, but I didn’t tell him that.
“What I’d like is to get a photograph from you of Allison that we can use for the front page. Everything we’ve got is… it’s stock bullshit, Aaron. They’re mostly headshots.” Given how things ended with you, he must have realized how distasteful this sounded, so he quickly added: “They’re like bad author photos, I mean. I was hoping to get something less staged. Something that really captures her.”
“I’ll look around the house for something.”
“That would be wonderful.” He closed the laptop. “I really can’t express how I feel, Aaron. We’re all just so shaken up.”
I nodded.
“Just one other thing,” he said, “so you won’t be blindsided.”
“What’s that?”
“You know Allison—she worked her tail off. She was at least three months ahead of schedule on her column.”
“Yeah?”
“I plan on running ‘Allison’s A-List’ into late spring, maybe early summer. Unless, of course, you have some objection.”
“Why would I object? Allison was very proud of that column.”
“I just wanted you to know. I didn’t want you to open up a paper a month from now and see her photo, her byline. You know what I mean?”
“I appreciate the notice,” I heard myself say from some great distance. I was retreating into the gray again, curling myself into a fetal ball and preparing to disassociate. All of a sudden I wanted nothing more than to be back home.
“I can’t express…” Duvaney began, but his words died in the air between us. He lifted his hands off the ink blotter in a gesture of genuine helplessness. “You’ll let me know if I can do anything for you, won’t you?”
“I will.”
“You name it, all right?”
“All right.” I stood quickly and felt myself coax a wooden smile to the surface of my face. I suddenly needed to get out of here very badly. “I should go.”
Duvaney planted both hands atop his desk to hoist himself out of his chair. He came around the desk and gave me another hug. That tie clip might be the death of me.
“Anything at all,” he repeated. “I’m serious, Aaron. We all loved her very, very much.”
“Thank you,” I said, and fled from his office.
6
A handful of days later, I asked Julie Sumter to meet me for lunch. Probably your closest friend in the area, yet you and Julie could not have been more different. Where you were reserved, contemplative, brooding, a coalescence of dark, enigmatic space dust, Julie was buoyed by a bright, warm center and an unremitting cheerfulness. You liked her because she was genuine. I liked her because she had been good for you.
Julie was already seated at a window table with a mug of tea at 49 West when I arrived. She offered me a sad smile, got up, hugged me tight. I hugged her back, suddenly weakened by the strength of it all. We stood like that long enough to draw attention from some of the other customers. When we parted, Julie’s eyes were glassy.
“Thanks for coming out.”
“Of course, Aaron.”
“Go on,” I said. “Sit down. Please.”
We both sat, and the waiter was perceptive enough to give us some time to ourselves.
“You’re growing a beard,” she said. “I like it. Makes you look like a mountain climber.”
I wasn’t so much growing a beard as I was neglecting certain aspects of my personal hygiene, but I only smiled and nodded in response.
“Is your sister still in town?”
“No, she left a few weeks ago.”
“That was good of her to come. Where does she live again?”
“Minnesota. She wanted me to go back with her for a while.”
“You didn’t want to?”
“It just didn’t feel like the right thing to do,” I said. “Also, do you know how cold it is in Minnesota right now?”
She laughed. Said, “My parents have a timeshare in Florida. I’m trying to wrangle a week there, get some sun, you know? But it’s always booked.”
“Allison and I went to the Keys last year for Christmas.”
“I remember! Al got me that T-shirt from one of Hemingway’s favorite bars.”
The sound of your nickname on Julie’s lips drove a dagger into my heart. You were Al to your close friends and colleagues. You let them call you this even though you despised nicknames. You said they were juvenile, presumptuous, demeaning. Once, when I playfully called you Allie-Cat after a particularly rousing session of lovemaking, you clammed up and wouldn’t speak to me for an hour.
The waiter came over and I ordered a club sandwich, even though I wasn’t very hungry. There had been a persistent knot twisting in my gut for some time now.
> “I need to ask you something,” I said after the waiter had left. “And I just want to say upfront that I’m ashamed to even ask it. My head may not be screwed on as tight as it once was, I suspect, but I need to ask it.”
There was a slight drawing together of Julie’s eyebrows. She leaned forward and placed one hand atop one of my own. Her palm was warm from holding her mug of tea. I felt as if I’d just confessed that I was dying of some rare disease.
“Was Allison having an affair?” I asked.
Julie sat back in her chair. Her hand lingered on mine for a heartbeat more before it slid away and retreated along the tabletop, her collection of thin silver bracelets jangling. “What are you talking about?” she said, a little breathless.
“I just need to know.”
“You’re being serious right now? Was Al sleeping around on you?”
I told her about the receipt from The Valentine Motel.
“Well, I wouldn’t say that’s conclusive evidence of anything, Aaron.”
“I was out of town that same week. She went to North Carolina and stayed at a motel for two days while I was in New York. She paid in cash so I wouldn’t see the charges on the credit card statement.”
“Maybe she was there for a work event. Sometimes she went to those media bazaars.”
“It wasn’t work-related. I called her every night from New York. She never said, ‘Hey, by the way, I’m in North Carolina right now.’ I thought she was home. She wanted me to think that.”
“Maybe it was a last-minute work thing and she didn’t want to worry you about her being on the road while you were away.”
“It wasn’t work-related, Julie.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I spoke with her boss.”
“Oh, Aaron.” A shadow of pity fell over her face. “You went to her boss about this?”
“I didn’t get into specifics, I just asked if she had been out of town on assignment for any reason back in October. She wasn’t. She never traveled out of state for the paper.”
“Allison was not having an affair, Aaron.”