Before He Finds Her

by Michael Kardos

  At least they were okay to be around. In winter, they played board games. They played cards. In spring, Melanie helped Wayne turn over the soil and plant the seedlings. Kendra bought cheap paperbacks from the CVS, and at sunup the two of them would carry their juice or coffee and whatever books they were reading out back, where they’d sit in adjacent chaise lounges, their privacy protected by the high hedges that surrounded their property, and by the woods beyond. Maybe once a month, as a treat, they ate at Lucky’s Grill—always a weeknight at 4:30 p.m., when the place was mostly empty.

  Her aunt homeschooled her through the eleventh grade, at which point Kendra admitted that she’d reached her limit as a teacher. So, frightened but excited by the idea of being away from 9 Notress Pass for seven hours each day, the next fall Melanie stepped onto the groaning yellow school bus each morning and afternoon, sitting either alone or next to Rudy, an autistic boy who pressed his nose against the window and said nothing. She didn’t join any extracurricular activities. Didn’t attend games. She went to school, ate alone in the cafeteria, and came home.

  Still, that uneventful high school year had been a morsel of freedom, and now she found herself wanting more. After all, she couldn’t stay shut inside the trailer forever, could she? If she were to die of natural causes at the age of ninety-five, having never seen or done a single thing, what kind of victory would that be?

  Many of Melanie’s high school classmates were bound for West Virginia University. They wore Mountaineer T-shirts and talked about how “we” were doing in various sports, as if they were already gone. Melanie made one weak attempt to convince her aunt and uncle that being one of 25,000 students would make her inconspicuous. She let herself fantasize a little about living in a dorm, going to football games, meeting boys. Making friends.

  That TV show Friends had been on her whole life, it seemed, and she was always amazed by the smugness with which those six New Yorkers lazed in a coffee shop and took their banter-filled friendships and their freedom totally for granted. She let herself wonder if maybe college would be like that.

  But college to her aunt and uncle meant student directories, ID cards, a wide-open campus where anyone could find her, follow her, do terrible things. In the end, they compromised. She could attend—part time—Mountain Community College, twenty miles up the road. She’d live at home and take a course or two at a time. Wayne would find her a used car and teach her to drive it. To help pay her way, she’d look for part-time work somewhere in Fredonia.

  She accepted their best and only offer. If she couldn’t be a Mountaineer, then she would be a Fighting Soybean.

  “I don’t understand your sudden interest in journalism, anyway,” Wayne said, pulling himself away from the window. He uncapped a can of Folgers and spooned heaping tablespoons of grounds into the filter. He poured water into the machine and turned it on.

  “It isn’t sudden,” she said. “I just think it’s interesting.”

  “Well, sure it’s interesting—but I still say it’s a risk.”

  “Oh, everything’s a risk, Uncle Wayne.” She was suddenly queasy from the smell.

  “That’s right,” Kendra said. “Everything is.” She came over to Melanie and took her hand. “Baby, what’s going on?”

  “See? Exactly—I’m not a baby. And you both still think I am.”

  “You could never become a journalist,” her uncle said. “You know that, right? Not until he’s caught.”

  “He’ll never get caught, and you know it.” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.

  “Melanie.” Kendra could always convey sympathy and admonishment in a single word.

  “I’m sorry, Uncle Wayne.” Melanie sighed. “It’s just that I’m an adult. If I want to take a risk, it’s really my decision.” But that sounded ungrateful. “Come on, it isn’t that big a risk when you think about it. And anyway, Ramsey Miller could be in Antarctica right now. He could be dead.”

  “He isn’t dead, Mel.”

  “Yeah, but he could be.”

  Uncle Wayne shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  She was about to keep arguing over her father’s hypothetical demise, ask how Wayne could be so positive he was still a threat, when suddenly her neck hairs tingled and she had her answer. She was sure of it.

  There was a new letter. One that actually said something.

  But she couldn’t ask about it, since she wasn’t supposed to know about the letters in the first place. And worst of all, as of about a year ago, Wayne no longer kept them in his desk.

  The dripping coffee smelled so rancid that Melanie wanted to flee the house for air—except even the trees smelled sour to her these days. Feeling less confident, she said, “It’s just a stupid college newspaper that probably nobody ever reads anyway. I don’t see why you have to freak out.” But she knew it was easy for her to talk a big game about taking risks when she had others devoting their own lives to her survival.

  Her aunt and uncle glanced at each other. “Honey,” Wayne said gently, “I love you dearly. But if you honestly think we’re just freaking out for the heck of it, it only proves you need to think it through some more.”

  Underneath the table lay a rust-colored rug. She could make out the discolored blotch where as a flu-ridden child she’d vomited. She remembered that illness more than any other, lying on the sofa and watching game shows and soap operas for a week. Sipping ginger ale, nibbling on Saltines, throwing up into a trash can. Her aunt laying cool rags on her forehead, holding her, taking her temperature. Being there for her. Always being there.

  Outside, the change of seasons caused migrating birds to sit invisibly in trees and caw at obscene decibels. Soon the leaves would change. But nothing ever changed inside these walls. Her aunt and uncle had furnished the hastily rented trailer with only two criteria: expediency and thrift—hence the Goodwill furniture, Walmart bookshelves, discount rug remnants. They assumed that their time here would be temporary. Once their initial panic had melted into a lasting, dull fear, they saw no reason (and had no money) to furnish the place a second time.

  But it wasn’t only the furnishings. The three of them—how they were around one another; the countless ways they’d arranged their lives so as not to be overtaken by their deepest dreads… a whole life could pass this way.

  “It’s always going to be like this, isn’t it?” Melanie said. She wasn’t feeling argumentative anymore. Rather, she was seeing the truth about her future, maybe for the first time. “No matter how old I am, or how old you are, or how long it’s been. Nothing will ever change, will it?”

  “When he’s caught...,” Wayne began. At one time he must have said these words with conviction. Now they sounded perfunctory. Their life in Fredonia was all she knew and, more and more, all her aunt and uncle knew, too. The three of them hardly ever referred to the past at all, let alone to the “he” at the center of it. “When he’s caught...,” Wayne began again. But he didn’t seem able to finish the sentence, because it would have been pure fiction.

  As if coming to the same realization, he frowned and poured himself a mug of black coffee. He set it on the kitchen table and steam rose into the air. Melanie willed herself not to gag.

  “In other words, never,” she said, her hand moving instinctively to her belly. She wanted to rub it, soothe it. The past couple of weeks, she’d been doing that in class, in bed, in the car. But she wasn’t going to give up this secret—not yet—and so she lowered her hand again.

  “When he’s caught,” her uncle said.

  Midafternoon, Melanie was still feeling upset by the morning’s argument with her aunt and uncle when, in her required math class, the instructor got to talking about fractals, mathematical designs that repeated at every scale. “Like how a head of broccoli has those florets,” he explained, “each one containing self-similar smaller florets, which in turn contain even smaller ones.” He was projecting images from his laptop onto the whiteboard behind him. “Or how the shoreline
has the same basic windy shape whether you’re standing on the beach and looking at a few yards of it, or if you’re up in a satellite looking down at the whole coastline.” He spoke slowly, with an air of strained mystery, as if he were a sorcerer and not a middle-aged community college instructor who wore the same blue blazer to each class session.

  The fractals made for beautiful images, equations made visual and color-enhanced, and then an idea struck Melanie with such devastating force that her palms started to sweat.

  “That’s me,” she muttered under her breath, staring at the projected image. “I’m a fractal.”

  “I beg your pardon?” The instructor stared at her. Melanie never spoke up in class, and the humming of the projector drowned out her voice. “Miss Denison, did you say something?”

  She kept looking at the geometric shape, amazed because it was so obvious and true. She hid in her small house, hidden on a deserted road, itself hidden in a small town in a remote part of West Virginia. The same at every scale, her hiding, and so total it felt like a mathematical certainty.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to the instructor. She was calling attention to herself in the worst way—a way that wouldn’t soon be forgotten. The weird, quiet girl was finally saying something. A few students chuckled nervously. “I just...” She looked around at the twenty or so other students and thought about this baby growing inside of her, how this smaller scale of herself would end up deeply hidden, too, layer under layer under layer.

  This she couldn’t allow.

  “I have to...” She made fists of her clammy hands. She wouldn’t have been able to finish her sentence even if she’d had the words. She stood and rushed out of the room, down the hallway, and into the bathroom, where she vomited into a toilet. She knelt on the floor until the queasiness subsided, went over to the sink, and splashed cold water on her face. She stood over the sink, rubbing her belly and taking controlled breaths, until she felt steady enough to drive back to Fredonia and wait for Phillip.

  She sat on the concrete front steps of his rental house, feeling the breeze on her face and laundering time.

  For the last couple of years, she had been reading old Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries in bed at night. She knew the books were for children, but she found them comforting to read at bedtime. The sleuths were always being bound and gagged, but they came out of every situation unharmed, and the criminal was always apprehended.

  In one of the Hardy Boys books, a pawnshop accepted stolen money and then over-reported its sales. Money laundering, they called it. This is what I do, Melanie had immediately thought—only with time instead of money. The two hours of homework she told her aunt and uncle she was doing in her bedroom rarely took more than an hour. With the other hour, she paged through whichever copy of People happened to be stowed under her mattress. More recently, her job at the office supply store in town never demanded those extra hours that Wayne and Kendra believed she was putting in.

  A trip to or from the college was the easiest way of all to launder time. From the start, she’d lied about her class schedule in order to give herself a full hour on either side of the day, two hours that belonged solely to her.

  She didn’t like deceiving her aunt and uncle, but they’d think it was a huge risk for her simply to be sitting here on this quiet street where no one ever walked (too hilly, no sidewalks) and where drivers, the few that passed by, had better things to do than take notice of her.

  She wasn’t the sort of person people noticed, anyway. A girl in Melanie’s freshman composition class, Raquel something, was tall and blonde with huge blue eyes, and looked like she belonged on the red carpet. She carried herself with remarkably casual poise. I’m happy to, she’d say to their instructor whenever he asked her to pass out an assignment. How was your weekend? she’d ask whoever was sitting next to her. She chatted with people as if their presence made her day special.

  Melanie didn’t look like Raquel, and she didn’t know how to act like Raquel.

  And yet here Melanie was, and not Raquel.

  It was 3:15. She didn’t mind waiting, watching the cars pass. Her own home sat at the end of a long driveway on an unpaved road that cut through the woods. For a number of years, long before Melanie ever lived there, the road was nameless. Over time, a large, hand-painted NO TRESPASSING sign that somebody had stuck into the ground where the road began suffered enough weather damage that those final three letters became too faded to read. First the neighbors, then others in town, and finally the U.S. Postal Service began referring to their road as Notress Pass.

  Other than that sign and the story behind it, nothing was remotely notable about the road where she lived, which was the whole point. There were a dozen homes, about half of them trailers. On any given day, fewer than ten cars might rumble by. Now, sitting on Phillip’s stoop, she imagined she was behind the wheel of each car that passed, on her way to somewhere. It didn’t need to be somewhere amazing. Just somewhere else. She thought about Dorothy, singing about wanting to go somewhere over the rainbow. It’d been on TV again the other night, that stupid movie. Why on earth would Dorothy want to go home at the end? She’s a hero, she has friends, everything is in beautiful color. What a tragedy, returning to Kansas.

  The high school let out at 2:30. Unless there was a faculty meeting, Phillip was usually home by three. He wasn’t expecting her today, though, and it wasn’t until 3:40 that he came walking along up the hill, carrying a stuffed-full paper shopping bag. He owned a thousand-year-old Mazda hatchback, but it had broken down twice on his drive to West Virginia last year, and the brakes made an awful metal-on-metal scrape. He preferred to leave it in the carport, which meant lugging his groceries a half mile from the store.

  Seeing Melanie, he smiled and set the bag down on the ground.

  “A sight for sore eyes,” he said. “An absolute vision.”

  The temperature had spiked since this morning, the humidity returning. Phillip still had on his coat and tie. His face glistened as if he had the flu.

  She got up from the stoop and went over to him.

  “Don’t,” he said. “I’m disgusting.”

  She moved in for an embrace. Phillip’s heart thudded against her, and she imagined that she, and not the walk in the heat, had caused it. They separated, and she picked up the grocery bag while Phillip fished in his pocket for his keys and opened the door. When they went inside, no cold blast of air greeted them—just some noisy overhead fans pushing around the oppressive air.

  “What’re you doing here?” he asked. “Your face is flushed—let me get you some water.”

  She was hot suddenly, and woozy. In Phillip’s bedroom window was an old air-conditioning unit, but it only half worked and it blocked out the room’s natural light. So she sat down on the sofa. The house was a one-bedroom shotgun shack, smaller than a single-wide, tidy, and decorated not so differently from her own home: everything bought cheaply or used.

  He set the groceries on the kitchen table, filled up a glass of water, and handed it to her. She took a long swallow despite the taste and passed the cup back to him. He downed the rest.

  “Your water tastes rusty,” she said.

  “Really?” He looked into the empty glass.

  If only she had that girl Raquel’s ability to put people at ease. But Melanie never had anyone to practice on. She knew it had to be frustrating for Phillip, trying to get close to someone who seemed capable of bluntness and secrecy and nothing in-between.

  “I’ve been meaning to buy a filter,” he said.

  “Why don’t you sit down.” She patted the sofa beside her, but he was eyeing the grocery bag. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s just... I don’t want this stuff to spoil.”

  She knew what it was like when every dollar counted, each egg or ounce of milk something to take seriously. Her family had more money now that Kendra was freed up from tutoring Melanie and could work at the dollar store. But they’d never be a name-brand famil
y. “Put everything away first. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t be—just hang out for two seconds. Can I get you something else? Juice? Glass of wine?”

  “No, nothing, thank you.”

  He stowed ground beef and yogurt and milk in the refrigerator—the other stuff he left in the bag—and sat on the sofa beside her.

  “I’ve never seen you move so fast,” she said.

  “I don’t like to keep my women waiting.”

  “How many do you have?”

  He smiled. “Dozens.”

  “I have something serious to tell you.”

  “Oh.” He sat up a little straighter. “Okay.”

  She couldn’t just say it, could she, with no preamble? Melanie placed a hand on Phillip’s knee and forced herself to look him in the eyes. “You’re a really...” and to her horror, the word that sprang to mind came straight out of a Hardy Boys novel. Swell.

  Swell?

  She couldn’t say that, of course, so she tried harder. “...a really great guy. What I mean is, I care about you.”

  He pulled his gaze away and bit his lip. He looked absolutely distressed. “You’re breaking up with me.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what you’re doing.”

  “It is?”

  He looked at her again. “It isn’t?”