“He was drunk. I’m not excusing it. But people say things when they’re drunk.”
“They tell the truth! That’s what people do when they’re drunk.”
“So what?” I said. “So he made a mistake. What do you care? You’re the one she married.”
His body seemed to be tensing up just thinking about it. His hands curled into fists. “Who did he think he was, huh? The Great Gatsby? Did he think he was some self-made big shot who could waltz in and steal my wife away?”
“Gatsby ended up dead in a swimming pool.”
“Yeah, that’s true. Served him right.”
“Come on, he was depressed. You were there. You saw it.”
“Still, that’s no excuse.”
“Isn’t it? Are you really going to sit here and claim you can’t understand how a depressed person might do something he’d later come to regret?”
We both looked over at Marie.
“Sara’s my wife,” Jeffrey said.
“Yes, that’s what makes it wrong. I see that.”
“It revealed a lot, is all I’m saying. I know you don’t like to think badly of anyone. That’s why I never told you any of this before. You like to have your little golf weekends and make insipid toasts and pretend we’re all still best friends. You pretend that history doesn’t exist. But it does. And the truth is that Nolan tried to betray me that night, just like he betrayed me before.”
Ah. So that’s what this was all about. Not some election-night impropriety. No, this went back further, to matters I’d assumed were long settled.
“You don’t know for sure that Nolan ever betrayed you,” I said. When he shook his head, dismissing the notion, I said, “Come on, Jeffrey, you were the English major. You know that life and literature aren’t the same thing.”
I was about to say that we’d been through all this before, when Nolan returned to the studio carrying a large cardboard box.
“That electronics store down the street has excellent bargains,” he said, set the box down in the control room, and tossed me my keys.
The box said Magnavox.
“You bought a TV?” I asked.
“Had to. So we can watch the news.”
“Did anybody see you?” Jeffrey asked.
“Of course. But nobody’s looking for me. I’m invisible. Unlike you—jeez, sorry about your face. Is it broken?” The fresh air seemed to have done him good. Our predicament hadn’t changed any, but I was glad to see Nolan fresh again and no longer angry.
“You knocked a tooth loose,” Jeffrey said.
“Damn. Really sorry about that. It was wrong of me. I shouldn’t’ve done it.” He held out his hand for Jeffrey to shake. Jeffrey hesitated.
“Oh, don’t be a baby,” I said. “Shake his goddamn hand and send him the dental bill later.”
Jeffrey shrugged. They shook hands, and then we went into the main recording room, where there was more space to set up the TV. As I expected, the reception was terrible. The TV had come with rabbit ears, though, and after carrying it around the room from spot to spot, two New York stations finally began to reveal themselves—NBC and ABC—both distorted, but good enough.
Crime dramas on both stations. All that seemed to play on TV anymore, besides reality shows, were crime dramas. For a few minutes we sat on the floor and flipped between stations. We watched the badge-flashing, the interrogations, the rough arrests. At no point, however, were any of these programs interrupted for the real crime in progress. No words at the bottom of the screen informing crime-addicted viewers that an actual girl had gone missing.
“Jeffrey,” I said after a few minutes, “why doesn’t anybody seem to be looking for us? Do you have an explanation?”
“No,” he said. “None.”
“Why don’t you tell us exactly what went down at the Milk-n-Bread,” Nolan said.
Jeffrey watched the screen for another minute, then reached for the TV and muted it. “First of all,” he said, “you guys need to understand how fast it all happened. I’d planned to buy a thing of Tums. I was feeling really ill. And, no, it wasn’t the clams. Listen—Sara only told me about the affair two days ago. She said she had to tell me because . . . she’s nearly certain the baby’s mine, but . . . well, you get the idea. So, yeah, I’ve been feeling pretty fucked up. Anyway, there was an old lady in the store, and when she left I looked over at the register and noticed that the cashier and I were the only two people left. And maybe she looked a little like Sara—okay, I can see that now—but it wasn’t anything I thought too hard about. Believe me, I never in my life thought about robbing a store or kidnapping somebody, but it was like this moment opened up and it became doable. If that old lady had stayed it never could’ve happened. I just stood there at the register a moment, because I was sure somebody else would walk into the store, or another employee would come in from some back room or the bathroom or wherever. But no. And right then I knew I could do it. You know how we’ve talked about how a good quarterback can see the whole field and know exactly how it’ll look a few seconds later? That’s how it felt. I saw the play come together, and I knew exactly what to do.”
I didn’t like the quarterback comparison. It meant that alongside whatever remorse he might now claim to be feeling, he was still feeling the rush, the residual amazement at what he’d done.
“All right, Joe Montana,” Nolan said, “describe the play.”
“She rang up the Tums, and I handed her some money, but the instant the register opened, I looked out the glass door and said, ‘Oh my God, she fell,’ or something like that. Marie must have known the woman, because she gasped and said, ‘Mrs. Tyler?’ And I said, ‘Yeah,’ and then she ran for the door.”
“Without shutting the register?” I asked.
“I made it all sound really urgent,” he said. “So yeah. I leaned over the counter and grabbed a handful of bills from the register and stuffed them in my pocket. Marie didn’t even notice—she was already opening the door to go outside, so I hurried up and went with her, and then when we were out there I took her arm and said, ‘Hurry, follow me,’ and that’s exactly what she did. She must’ve thought your car was the old lady’s car right up until the last second. It was dark and rainy, and it all happened so fast, I don’t think she knew what was going on until she was already in the car. I know I didn’t.” He looked at us, as if trying to gauge our reaction. “It sounds really calculated, but that’s not how it felt. It felt as if I hadn’t even decided to do it until it was already done.”
I thought I understood better now why the authorities might not have been notified. Marie had been alone in the store. She’d come outside willingly. There was nothing to see and no one to see it.
“But here’s what I still don’t get,” I said. “Her shift runs noon to eight. I looked at my watch. “It’s now after ten. So what happened when the new employee showed up at eight and didn’t see Marie? And what about her grandmother? Wouldn’t she be worried by now?”
“Two hours late coming home?” Jeffrey said. “That isn’t so long. Think about when you were a teenager and—”
“Stop.” Nolan was staring at me.
“What is it?” I asked.
His gaze stayed on me. “How do you know when her shift started?”
“Because she told me,” I said, feeling a little proud that I was the one she’d confided in. “She was scheduled from noon to eight, and at eight she was supposed to punch out and go home to her grandmother.”
Nolan was shaking his head. “No, something’s not right. We need to have a chat with Little Red Riding Hood. Right now.”
I glanced in her direction. Like me, she’d been devouring one cigarette after another. “Am I missing something?” I asked.
“Yeah, Will, you are. She’s been bullshitting us.”
CHAPTER 14
I cracked open the door
to Room A, leaned my head in, and told Marie that we’d like to talk with her. “There’s more room out here,” I said. “Can we trust you not to make a break for it?”
Trust and precaution, however, need not be mutually exclusive. We had already moved some equipment—a couple of amplifiers, that big canvas bag of drum gear—in front of the exit leading to the hallway. It would be impossible for her to make a fast escape even if she wanted to.
Marie nodded. I opened the door farther and stood aside as she slowly got up, stretched, ran a hand through her hair, and then emerged. The moment she left Room A she glanced over to the blocked doorway. Then her gaze moved to Jeffrey and Nolan, who were seated on folding chairs. I took a seat behind the drums and noticed that The Fixtures had stuck one of their bumper stickers onto the snare drumhead. I began to work the sticker off with my thumbnail. I was always peeling bands’ bumper stickers off things.
“Please,” Nolan said, pointing to the empty chair beside him. Marie took a seat. “Look, we’ll get right to the point. There’s something we don’t understand, and we’d like to hear what you have to say about it.” Her eyes widened a little. She waited for him to continue. “Will, why don’t you explain it.”
Marie looked like a model student—hands folded in her lap, head lowered in deference, or perhaps in an imitation of deference. “You told me earlier,” I said, “that you were working the noon-to-eight shift.”
She nodded. “That’s right.”
“Okay, that’s what confuses us.”
I didn’t enjoy having this conversation. It felt as if we were antagonizing somebody we had no right to antagonize. For this reason, I suppose, I’d sat at the drums. This was where I felt most comfortable, partially obscured behind cymbals and tom-toms. “You told me you’re a junior in high school.”
“A junior,” she said. “That’s right.”
“But today’s Friday.” I shrugged. “So we were wondering how it is that you could be working the afternoon shift.”
She looked up at the ceiling. If we’d been in a house, we would’ve heard the ticking of a wall clock. A refrigerator might have clicked on. Instead, we heard only our own breathing.
“We didn’t have school today.” Her foot began to tap on the wooden floor. “It got canceled.”
I glanced at the other guys, then back at her. “Can you tell us why?”
This was a job for a lawyer, or for someone like Nolan who enjoyed trapping people with his words.
“It was a teacher convention,” she said. “In Atlantic City. They have those conventions all the time.”
They don’t have them all the time. They have them once a year, and in the fall. Years of public school education had permanently etched in my brain this two-day vacation, occurring each year just before the weather turned too cold for outdoor play. I couldn’t recall, now, whether the convention was in September or October, but it wasn’t in April. I remembered always being surprised that we would be granted a reprieve from classes so close to the beginning of the school year.
“I’m sorry, Marie,” I said, “but that doesn’t sound right.”
“There’s no need to lie to us,” Nolan added. “We’re on your side here.”
“But I’m not lying.” More foot tapping. “I mean . . . maybe it wasn’t the convention. Okay, I might have that wrong. The thing is, I had to take the day off from school anyway, because the store needed someone to cover. Okay? That’s the whole story.”
Nolan’s response was instantaneous: “That may be the story, but we’d prefer the truth.”
“What?” She glared at him but then looked away. Her voice raised in pitch, and her breathing quickened. “I’m telling you the truth.”
Jeffrey, who’d been listening quietly until now, put up a hand, silencing her. “You aren’t in school anymore, are you?”
“What?” she repeated, and I was reminded of myself as a teenager, choosing deafness rather than defiance as a means of dodging the probing questions of a teacher or parent.
“Did you drop out of school or have you already graduated?” Jeffrey asked.
“I don’t like this,” she said. “It isn’t fair.”
“No, it isn’t.” Nolan’s voice softened. “It’s completely unfair what we’ve done to you. But the one thing we’re going to need from you in order to get through this together is honesty. We’ve done a terrible thing, the three of us. We know that. But we’ve also been straight with you from the beginning. This was an accident. We never planned for it to happen. I really hope you believe that, because it’s the truth. And it’s also the truth that we want nothing more than to get you home, and the sooner the better. Do you believe me?”
She sighed. “Whatever.”
“I really hope you do, Marie.” I wondered if she cared whether or not we were truthful. None of it changed the fact that she was here, and we were here, and several hundred pounds of musical equipment blocked her exit.
“But this truth,” Nolan was saying, “this honesty, has to cut both ways. Because the more we find we can trust you, the more we’re inclined to keep on trusting you. But if we find that we can’t trust you, then that’s a problem. So please, tell us the truth. Are you or are you not still in high school?”
First, nothing. Then a barely detectable shake of the head.
“Is that a no?” Nolan asked.
She said, “I graduated last year.”
“So that makes you, what? Nineteen?”
“Yeah,” she said.
I was confused. “Why did you tell me before that you were still in—”
“Because you’re all a bunch of kidnappers! I’m sorry. I know you think you aren’t, but you really, really are. And I thought that if you believed I was just some high school kid, maybe you’d feel bad and let me go.”
“Thank you for being honest,” Nolan said.
Easy for you to say, I thought. I was the one she’d confided in. Now, hearing the truth, I couldn’t help feeling a little betrayed. “What about your grandmother?” I asked. The pink sweaters. The jet black hair. I felt as if I’d be able to recognize the old lady shuffling down the streets of Newfield. I’d even begun to think that maybe I had. “Is she just someone you made up?”
“No!” She sounded offended but then caught herself. “I wouldn’t lie about her. She raised me, just like I said. Only, I don’t live with her anymore.”
“So who do you live with?” I asked.
“I don’t live with anybody.”
I hadn’t considered that Marie might have been fabricating parts of her story. But why shouldn’t she? From the moment Jeffrey had forced her into my car, her one concern would have been her own survival. If she’d had money, surely she’d have given it to us in exchange for her freedom. But the only currency she had was our perception of her. And so why shouldn’t she bend her life story a little, mold herself into someone she thought we might feel protective toward and unwilling to harm?
“Look,” she said, “I’d show you my ID except, like I told you, my purse is in a locker back at the Milk-n-Bread. But I swear I’m not lying.” She must have felt the need, now, to prove her candor beyond any doubt, because she began to describe for us her lonely life. A life unlike the one I’d pieced together from the few details she’d already told me. I’d envisioned a difficult but comfortable life with her grandmother, energized by school and friends, punctuated with her after-school job at the Milk-n-Bread to help pay for clothes and movie tickets. I had it wrong. There were no movie nights in Marie’s life. The Milk-n-Bread job was full-time. She lived in her grandmother’s house and paid whatever bills she could. Her grandmother’s dementia, meanwhile, had become bad enough that last year Marie had to put her in a nursing home. “Some depressing place in Elizabeth called Timber Cove.”
I knew the place, and it was depressing—from the outside anyway. The old structure stoo
d ominously on Route 1, its bricks yellowed and tarnished. I assumed it used to be a psychiatric institution or maybe a veterans hospital. You could tell it wasn’t where people of means took their aged and infirm to live their final years in serene dignity. When you drove to the airport, you passed it just before miles and miles of power plants, or, as I’d called them as a kid, “fog factories.”
“Is it Alzheimer’s?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Parkinson’s. But she’s eighty-three, you know? And Parkinson’s can make you senile. Or it was the medications she’s on. But it was getting bad. I couldn’t leave her alone in the house. I came home once from work and she’d burned her arm really bad from the iron. I had to rush her to the ER, and in the car she kept screaming the whole way, and I had to roll down the windows because I could smell her burned skin.”
So there it was. She lived alone at the house, worked at the Milk-n-Bread, and visited the nursing home when she could, even though her grandmother was becoming more confused and less likely to call Marie by the right name.
“But no,” she concluded, “I’m not a student or even a kid. I’m nobody. And there isn’t a single person who knows or even cares that I’m here right now. So there’s your honesty. And if it makes you want to kill me”—she held out her arms to us, naked wrists facing the ceiling—“then go right ahead and get it over with.”
Her attestation of adulthood was undercut somewhat by her continuing flair for the dramatic. The gesture wiped away any hurt feelings I had at having been lied to, and I found myself feeling a great deal of compassion for this young woman with a dead-end job and problems beyond those for which we were directly responsible.
“For God’s sake, put your arms down,” Nolan said. She lowered her arms to her sides. “You’re here because the three of us made some bad decisions, no more and no less. Personally, I don’t care whether you’re sixteen or nineteen or ninety. What matters is that we all keep on telling the truth.”
The Three-Day Affair Page 11