“No, wait a second!” Too late, Marie caught her error. She had vacillated when decisiveness was called for, and now her moment was slipping away. She could see her two years’ salary vanishing before her eyes, and suddenly I understood what Nolan had meant last night, how everything depended on trust. Without trust, a deal like this meant nothing. “I want more money, that’s all.” Her voice was desperate and shrieky. “That’s all I want. Come on, I don’t have anything, and . . . you just have to give me more.”
Nolan stepped closer to Marie. “I’m going to ask you one last time. How much more?” She was still avoiding his eyes, so he put a hand on her arm and said: “Give me a number, Marie.”
The physical contact. That was his error.
“Hey!” She yanked her arm free from his grip and backed up like a wild animal that had inadvertently crossed paths with another, larger one. “Don’t touch me.” She looked over at Jeffrey. “Get him away from me!” The irony of that glance over to her abductor for assistance wouldn’t hit me until later.
It worked, though. “Leave her alone, goddamn it,” Jeffrey said.
Jeffrey’s admonishment proved too much. That, I still believe, was what sent Nolan into action. He pointed a stiff finger at Jeffrey and held it there a second—not a word got said, but I’d never seen a more threatening gesture—and then he reached out and grabbed Marie by the wrist and tugged her toward him. For a second I thought, Here it is, he’s going to kill her—strangle her, or beat her to death—but when he had both hands around her, he pulled her toward Room A. She was fighting to get away, kicking her legs out and twisting her arms, but Nolan was strong, and in no time he had the door held open with his foot and was shoving her inside. I sat against the wall, my gut screaming, watching as she jammed a foot in the doorway, but her foot slowly slid backward as Nolan forced the door shut until it clicked, and then he locked it.
He turned around to face us, and that was the instant when Jeffrey—I had forgotten he even existed these past few seconds—rushed forward and swung the cymbal stand down on Nolan’s head.
Long ago, Jeffrey and I had bonded over stories of the brief, traumatic year we’d each spent in Little League, him in California, me in New Jersey—the dropped fly balls, the thinly veiled frustration of our coaches, the sad look on our teammates’ faces when it was our turn to bat. I was no slugger, but Jeffrey’s batting average had been a perfect zero.
This time he connected.
It was the same cymbal Nolan had thrown yesterday, the same one I’d set up again last night and had ended my drum solo with this morning. When it hit Nolan, it made a dull crack. It was a glancing blow, the equivalent of a foul ball, but enough to drop Nolan to his knees. At first Nolan looked down at the ground and did nothing. His hands covered his ears, and he shook his head a few times, the way that cartoon characters shake off an injury and become whole again. Then he looked up at us and lowered his left hand. He looked stunned but not visibly injured, though his other hand still covered his right ear.
“Nolan,” I said, “take your other hand away.”
Slowly he lowered his hand. His right ear was practically torn off.
“Oh, shit,” I said, my stomach giving one last mad lurch. “Oh, Jesus.”
Every little kid who’s ever skinned a knee knows that it takes a few seconds for the blood to start. But you know it’s coming.
This was a hundred times worse. Blood hadn’t yet started to flow, but I could see the deep gouge where the top of Nolan’s ear met his head. His eyes widened. Not because of the pain, not yet, but because of the horror he must have seen in my face.
“Is it bad?” he asked.
“I know where the nearest hospital is,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll get you there fast.”
“How bad is it?”
I shuddered. “It’s deep. Shit, it’s really deep. We need to get you—”
“Show me,” he said. “Show me in the bathroom.”
“All right, but hurry.” I helped him off the ground and told Jeffrey to stay right where he was. I opened the door for Nolan, then led him to the bathroom. On the way, the blood started to flow. In the bathroom I wetted a stack of paper towers and handed them to him. “You need to apply pressure.”
He was turning his head in the mirror. “I can’t see it! Fuck, Will, I can’t see it. Tell me what’s going on.”
Blood was oozing from him, turning the floor beneath us crimson. I forced myself to look at the wound. Nothing but blood. “I can’t tell. You need to stop the bleeding.”
“I can’t without seeing. You need to do it.”
I didn’t want to touch him. What if the ear came off in my hand? But I did anyway. I gently pressed his ear to his head with one hand, and held the wad of paper towels to the wound with my other hand. In seconds the blood had soaked the towels.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said. “We have to get you to the hospital.”
“Try!” he said. “Please.” So I got more paper towels and tried again. He shivered. “It really hurts. Oh, man.”
“I know why you don’t want to go to a hospital,” I said, “but you don’t have a choice.”
He was breathing deeply, slowly, trying to regain control. He reached up and took my place holding the paper towel against his ear. “There’s always a choice.”
“You know what I mean,” I said. “This is a serious injury.”
“I fucking know that!” he cried.
I washed my hands under hot water, scrubbed them with soap. We stood there, Nolan pressing the paper towels to his head, me looking on to see if the blood flow was slowing. And gradually—after fifteen or twenty minutes—the paper towels I handed him weren’t immediately turning red.
“Why would he do this to me? Huh, Will? Why would he hit me like that?”
“He must’ve thought you were going to hurt her,” I said.
“Well, I wasn’t.” He sounded out of breath.
“Or maybe he’d reached his limit of being a kidnapper.” But what I really believed, though didn’t say, was, It’s because he thinks you slept with his wife.
We stood there another minute, watching the paper towel fill with blood again. And then, as if reading my mind, he said, “I’ll bet it was revenge.”
I’d been tearing more paper towels out of the dispenser. I froze. “How do you figure?”
He looked at me strangely. “What do you mean? It’s simple: I hit him in the mouth yesterday, he hits me in the head today.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess it could be that.” I handed him the paper towels.
After another fifteen minutes, during which time I tried to clean blood off the bathroom floor, Nolan pulled the ball of paper towels away from his head and I made myself take another look. He was still bleeding, though less so, and I could see now that the wound wasn’t as dire as I’d first thought. The ear wasn’t going to come off. Still, the cymbal had sliced deeply into the cartilage, and the angle between his ear and his head seemed to have shifted by a few degrees.
“You’ve got to get stitched up,” I said. “Otherwise it’s never going to stop bleeding.”
He nodded, and I thought I’d finally gotten through to him when he said, “How’s your sewing?”
The implication made me queasy. “No. Forget it. Not a chance.”
“Yes,” he said.
“No.” There was absolutely no way. My hands were already shaking just thinking about it. “Anyway, you’ll want a plastic surgeon. This is your face we’re talking about.”
“It sure is. So you’re going to have to be careful.” When I tried to protest again, he cut me off. “Listen. This is nonnegotiable. Forget the hospital. Got it? When I’m back in Missouri—if I’m ever back in Missouri—I’ll have my doctor tend to it. He’s a good man who won’t ask questions. Until then, I’m in your hands.”
CHAPTER
17
Last night this stretch of town would’ve been deserted. The only people who came out at night here were either looking for trouble or already in it. But now it was a bright Saturday morning, and plenty of people were on the sidewalk feeding meters and pushing strollers and holding kids’ hands. My window was cracked open, and I smelled fresh bread. The sign hanging over the bank said it was fifty-two degrees. It would have been a perfect morning on the golf course.
I headed back into the outside world to get Nolan the supplies he needed. I was driving too fast, but for the first time since Friday night the kidnapping had been relegated to some less critical place in my mind. Right now I had an urgent task to do. Doing it was almost a relief. Almost. At the pharmacy, just a mile or so from the studio, I rushed from aisle to aisle, not knowing exactly what was required. Everything I knew about first aid centered around what to do until the professionals took over. What, though, if the patient refused the professionals?
I found gauze and Band-Aids and first-aid tape. Several kinds of pain reliever. I grabbed a bottle of Pepto-Bismol for my own stomach. Could you buy surgical thread at a pharmacy? Maybe not. But then, in the next aisle, I came across a small sewing kit. A needle was a needle, I figured. Thread was thread. I looked at it and looked at it, then walked away, then returned. Could I actually sew thread through someone’s flesh? I’d never even sewn on a button before. I imagined Nolan, liquored up from my whiskey, gritting his teeth as I pushed the needle through his ear with all the skill of an ape.
Disinfectant cream. I’d almost forgotten. My decision postponed, I returned to the first-aid aisle, and that was when I saw, on the bottom shelf, the First Aid & Survival Kit. Professional Series, it said. Eighty-nine dollars. I bent down, set everything I was carrying on the rack, and read the list of contents: dressings, tapes, ointments, medications, antiseptics . . . the list went on and on. There seemed to be an entire hospital inside.
And then from behind me: “Good morning, dickless!”
I turned around. Bobby Hazen was standing in the aisle wearing a Night Ranger concert T-shirt and black parachute pants. His hair was sticking up and he was holding a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, with which he saluted me.
I gave him a noncommittal “What’s up?” and continued evaluating the first-aid kit.
I knew Bobby from back when we both lived in the Village. He was one of those guys who’d spent his teenage years cocooned in his bedroom with his acne and his Fender Telecaster and emerged like some soft-spoken guitar god that everyone wanted in their band.
The coincidence of running into Bobby wasn’t so great. Despite his frequent New York gigs, he’d moved to Jersey a couple of years ago, to his brother’s place not far from here, to save on rent.
“Lycanthrope,” he said. “Tell me that’s not the shit.” I hadn’t seen him in probably a month or more, but our conversation about naming his new band continued as if there’d been no interruption. “Seriously,” he said, “what do you think?”
This was no time to engage him in conversation, but I didn’t want him to think I was acting strangely. So I told Bobby that Lycanthrope was about the worst name I’d ever heard, which was saying a lot considering what I’d heard.
He gave me the finger, yawned, scratched his stomach underneath his T-shirt, and told me about his gig at Blackbirds this coming Thursday. Blackbirds was a small club in the East Village whose dubious claim to fame was that the Spin Doctors had gotten their start there fifteen years earlier.
“We’ve been working a cellist into a few tunes,” he said. “She went to Juilliard for a year.”
“Why only a year?”
“You’re missing the point. The point is, she’s killer. And really hot.” He sipped his coffee. “Really hot.”
Bobby was my last remaining link to a life I once led, and seeing him always aroused my pity and envy.
“I’ll try to be there,” I said, and looked at my watch. “Look, I gotta run.”
He grinned. “You’ll be there, huh? You’re such a fucking liar.” He slapped my back and went in search of whatever it was he’d come in for.
“I’m not lying!” I called after him. I meant it, too, or at least I wanted to mean it. But seconds later I was carrying the First Aid & Survival Kit up to the checkout counter, and my thoughts returned to injured ears and stolen people.
The clerk ran the kit through the scanner. “I’ll bet you’re a speedboater,” he said, “am I right?”
“No,” I said.
“Rock climber?”
I shook my head. “Sorry.” I ran my credit card through the machine.
He handed me my receipt and I signed it.
“Well, whatever it is,” he said, “you be careful.”
I didn’t know Evan’s cell phone number from memory. It had been stored in my own cell, now smashed to bits. If his home number wasn’t listed, then I would have to drive back to the house to get it out of my address book. With Nolan’s injury there wasn’t time for that. I parked my car at the gas station, exchanged some singles for quarters, and dialed directory assistance. The operator asked me to repeat the last name three times, and then to spell it. Finally I was given the number.
I got his answering machine. There was no choice but to leave a message, simple and unambiguous: Call me at the studio. It’s urgent. We need you here. I left the studio’s phone number on the machine.
And then, as an afterthought: Be sure you erase this message.
Not until I’d parked behind the studio again, and my stomach cramped up so hard that I saw floating flecks before my eyes, did it occur to me that I’d forgotten to take the Pepto-Bismol up to the register.
CHAPTER 18
I sat there with the engine running, hugging my gut and waiting for the pain to pass.
How was it, I wondered, that I’d crossed over to a world that gave weight to the rules of revenge? We were merely four friends who met up each year for golf. For some good meals and beer and cards. For joking around and reminiscing.
What could be simpler?
In all the years we’d spent together, I hadn’t once considered whether Jeffrey might still harbor some deep grudge. And why would he? He’d married Sara. He’d gotten the girl. He’d won.
So why, then, the violence? Why the attack? Did he really believe he’d been protecting Marie from Nolan? Or was it something else? And did he himself even know? This was, after all, the same man who’d kidnapped Marie fewer than twenty-four hours earlier. All I could come up with was that his recent problems with Sara must have dug up emotions that’d been buried ever since that one fraught night nine years earlier.
It almost hadn’t been a problem, either. We’d just about graduated. Only a couple more days. We’d already stripped our dorm room walls of posters and prints and bulletin boards, stuffed dirty clothes into suitcases, stacked textbooks and notebooks and a year of assignments into cardboard boxes. Sara had even begun to tape shut some of the boxes in her room. She just hadn’t gotten around to taping all of them.
That close.
The weekend before graduation, Princeton University transformed itself into a many-ringed circus. Everyone other than seniors had already left for the summer, their now-vacant dorm rooms rented out to thousands of alumni who returned to campus for the school’s annual reunion. In all the major courtyards across campus, enormous tents had been erected, under which, for three days, alumni and their families would be treated to gluttonous meals, live music, dancing, and unlimited alcohol, all in the service of maintaining strong ties between the university and its alumni—and, some would readily admit, encouraging alumni donations.
It really was some party, though. The rumor was that it was second only to the Indianapolis 500 in terms of kegs of beer consumed. Three days of parties, of games for the kids, guest lecturers for the scholarly minded, service projects for the service project–minded, three days
of reuniting with lost friends, lost loves, three days of social (and, it would be fair to say, sexual) intercourse, and all of it culminating in a parade—called, naturally, P-rade—where Princetonians wore their orange-and-black garb (each reunion class having come up with its own themed clothing, strangely a source of little embarrassment to accompanying spouses) and marched through campus just as previous generations had marched before them. Leading the P-rade was the oldest living alumnus, riding beside the university president in an orange and black golf cart. Bringing up the rear an hour or so later were eleven hundred inebriated, raucous graduating seniors staggering their way toward the end of college and the beginning of the rest of their lives.
Alumni and their families traveled far and wide to be here. Watching them, we couldn’t help imagining ourselves in five or ten or twenty years, returning with our own spouses, many of whom we hadn’t yet met, with our children whose births were still years away. We wondered what our future selves might be like, and what we’d think of them. And we wondered what that older self might have in the way of advice or wisdom for a twenty-one-year-old just now on the threshold of leaving the security of this privileged place.
Quickly, though, we stopped wondering and started partying. Final exams were done, senior theses turned in, and so we drank. And then we drank some more. Thursday, Friday, then the P-rade on Saturday. By Sunday we were wiped out. The alumni were leaving. By dinner they were gone, all twenty thousand of them. The circus had left town, and now only the tents remained. Late Sunday night, against official university policy and at the risk of getting injured or, worse, busted by campus police so close to graduation, several of us planned to adhere to another Princeton tradition.
We would go tent sliding.
The idea was to boost one another up onto one of the tents, crawl up to its apex, and slide down again on the steep mountain of thick canvas, ideally stopping before reaching the edge and the ensuing eight-foot drop to the grass below.
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