Before He Finds Her

by Michael Kardos

  “No, Al—you know that’s not true.”

  “And Eric—what the hell is his problem?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s creeping me out lately. The way he looks at me—he’s acting weird. You’re all acting weird.” She sighed. “Even when you’re here, it’s like you’re not here.”

  “I’m here now,” Ramsey said. “I really am.”

  “Then let’s go to bed.”

  “Soon,” Ramsey said. “The thing is, I’m inviting some extra people to the gig, and I want to be sure there’s enough activities and food—”

  “What extra people? Who are you inviting?”

  He shrugged. “The neighbors.”

  “Which neighbors?”

  “Well—all of them.”

  Her hands on his shoulders curled into fists. “Because of your orbital axis.”

  “It isn’t mine, Allie.”

  She sighed. “Can I ask why you plan to invite the neighbors?”

  “I want to bring people together.”

  “You want that? Come to bed.”

  “Soon,” he said.

  “You’ll come to our bed soon? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  When he didn’t answer right away, she said, “Goddammit,” and walked away from him, toward the sink. Ramsey turned around to look at her directly. She had on her plaid pajamas. From behind, she could have been any age, anyone. A stranger. She poured a glass of water, drank it down.

  Ramsey brushed his teeth in the upstairs hall bathroom while one of the songs from tonight’s rehearsal ran through his head. He couldn’t help agreeing with Mick Jagger. Satisfaction was fucking elusive.

  The house was quiet. He imagined Allie in their bedroom, on the other side of the closed door, waiting for him, reading by the light of her bedside table.

  Unless she’d given up on him. That was a possibility, too.

  He rinsed, wiped his face. Checked himself in the mirror. There was no good mirror in the truck, and after a long haul his own face always surprised him a little. His hair had gray in it now. The lines in his face were deepening. He looked every bit of his thirty-four years. He wanted to go to Allie, longed to. It wasn’t that he preferred the trundle bed in the guest room. But the trundle was hard, like the mattress in his truck, and that was the only place he slept soundly anymore. In fact, he slept better parked at a truck stop—even with the drunken shouting, middle-of-the-night Jake brakes, and lot lizards knocking door-to-door—than he did in his quiet bedroom with Allie.

  He was no fool, though. Tonight he needed to be with her. Allie had looked beautiful earlier, sun-kissed in the doorway. The small, gradual surprises this afternoon were all enticements for him to share their bed tonight. As husband and wife. As lovers. It had been too long. He knew this.

  He got as far as their bedroom door and hesitated.

  Magruder.

  He tried to push the name from his mind. It was impractical, thinking about that man now, with Allie. Best to put it away once and for all. Your wife is in there waiting for you, he thought. Go to her. If he could be magnanimous to his neighbors, to strangers, then surely he could be that and more to his wife.

  Husband and wife. Lovers. He took a breath, held it, breathed out.

  I love you, Allie. I married you and I would marry you again and I will marry you a thousand times over, from now to as long as we both shall live.

  He gently pushed open the bedroom door. The overhead light was dimmed, the candle on her bedside table lit. Seeing him, Allie smiled.

  “Well, hello there,” she said, and closed her book.

  6

  September 24, 2006

  The rules at 9 Notress Pass arose as they became necessary. An early rule: Do not reveal your home address. Later, when Internet access became available, there was never any discussion about getting it. Wayne and Kendra knew nothing of IP addresses. They simply didn’t want their name and address in a database unless there was no choice. Sometimes, like with the electric company, there was no choice. But any time there was, they chose no: no cable TV, no Internet, no newspaper delivery.

  No library card.

  That was the first time Melanie remembered breaking one of the family’s rules. Every so often, Kendra brought her to the library, where for an hour they’d sit together quietly and read before going to McDonald’s for lunch. Sometimes Melanie would read a book, other times one of the celebrity magazines. Sometimes she’d pretend to read but really she’d be watching others in the library—mothers reading to small children, the librarians gossiping behind the book-return counter. McDonald’s was an even better place to watch people. Truckers on their way to Charleston (Columbus? Chicago?) smothered their food with ketchup and mustard, and chubby kids cried for soda refills, and teenagers a little older than Melanie punched the cash registers and barked commands to one another to keep everything running smoothly.

  One afternoon when she was fifteen, Melanie convinced her aunt to drop her at the library before running her errands, rather than leaving her at home or taking her along.

  At the library, Melanie examined the “newly received” shelf, looking at the covers of novels until one caught her eye. It had a picture of a girl about Melanie’s own age standing on a balcony and looking out over a city. The city wasn’t in America—she could tell from the way the buildings looked: very old, colorful, and built into a hillside. The novel was titled The Cobbler’s Sister, and from the inside flap, Melanie learned that the city was Salamanca, Spain.

  She was sitting by the window, reading the opening pages, which had wonderfully descriptive sentences that wound around like the narrow streets of Salamanca, when a number of younger kids stomped into the library. The middle school must have just let out. The kids’ pent-up energy, released all at once, made reading impossible, so Melanie closed the book and began to page through a magazine. Practically the whole issue was devoted to the wedding between Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey. Ordinarily, she’d be enthralled. An eleven-carat diamond headband was attached to the bride’s veil. But that day, she wished she could keep reading the novel. Her aunt would be returning soon. So she went up to the counter, determined to get her own library card. Taped to the counter was a note:

  To obtain a library card you must present either a driver’s license or a piece of mail addressed to you showing that you reside in the town of Fredonia. No exceptions. Thank you.

  The only mail that she could remember coming to her house, rather than the P.O. box, was the phone bill. Maybe she could steal the envelope from the kitchen trash the next time it came. But when would she next be left alone here at the library? It could be weeks, maybe longer.

  “May I help you?” asked one of the librarians.

  If there were a house nearby, she’d have dug through strangers’ trash to find an envelope and said to the librarian, Yes, this is me. But there were no houses on this block, just a barbershop and a dollar store and a Baptist church.

  “No, ma’am,” she said, and returned to her seat by the window, furious. She tried to free her mind of Salamanca, its 800-year-old cathedrals, its olive trees. Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey had been serenaded by a twenty-five-member gospel choir. The reception hall had been decorated with 30,000 roses.

  By the time her aunt picked her up, Melanie vowed that the next time she was allowed to visit the library alone, she would leave with her own library card and as many novels as she could cram into her backpack without her aunt noticing.

  Eight months later, she did just that.

  The books she borrowed, she read late into the night and hid in her closet or under the bed. The library was a way to escape Notress Pass, and the books they contained allowed her to escape it further.

  Tonight, however, Melanie had come to the library not to borrow books but rather for its Wi-Fi. Behind the building, in the dim shadows cast by an orange streetlight some hundred yards in the distance, she crouched against the library’s brick exterior wall, holding the
laptop computer that Phillip had lent her two months earlier. PROPERTY OF FREDONIA REGIONAL HIGH SCHOOL read the label stuck to its side.

  There was so much to see and learn online, and not just about celebrities. If the library books were her glimpse at the larger world, the Wi-Fi Internet connection was freedom writ large. Whenever she snuck out her bedroom window and walked here at night, she sat on the ground and read as fast as possible, no agenda, just clicking links and typing words and phrases into search engines and exploring the wider world though the computer screen. Once her initial thirst was quenched, she visited a few particular websites: the online edition of the Silver Bay News. The Star-Ledger. The Asbury Park Press. There were others, too, but those were the papers that had published the fullest coverage of her mother’s death and the failed hunt for her father. Her aunt and uncle had only ever told Melanie the barest facts of the crime. Beyond that, they never spoke about the place where Melanie had lived for the first thirty-three months of her life. From the newspaper archives, she began to fill in the gaps.

  How strange it always was to see that name—Meg Miller—in print, to read about her own alleged demise. Death by drowning. Reading those words always made her throat constrict and chest tighten as if she really were being held underwater. Then again, everything in those articles made her lightheaded and nauseous, a feeling not unlike morning sickness.

  One reporter in particular wrote about the crime over a period of years for the Silver Bay News, with articles appearing on the first anniversary, the fifth, the tenth. One night, Melanie had searched online for the reporter’s name—Arthur Goodale—and learned that he’d retired from the paper but kept up a news blog. Sometimes he would write about the “Miller killings,” and these posts always struck her as surprising and sort of wonderful. To know that somebody still thought from time to time about her mother, and about her, too, made her feel less alone. She hoped that he might write about her mother this week, with another anniversary coming and going—the fifteenth.

  She didn’t expect to read that Arthur Goodale was dying.

  His heart had given out, and now he might never leave his hospital bed or write another word. This connection to her past, tenuous as it was, would soon be severed. She herself had no memories at all of Silver Bay. She tried over the years to see her mother’s face, the walls of her nursery, the kitchen where she must have sat in a high chair and eaten meals. Anything. But not a single image remained.

  She shut the laptop computer, stood, brushed the dirt off her blue jeans, and began to walk toward the woods, toward home. Why hadn’t she told her aunt and uncle this afternoon that she was pregnant? Was it embarrassment, believing that she and Phillip would... what, get married? Live happily ever after? And live where? In Fredonia? In Connecticut, near his family? She had let herself believe that Phillip Connor might be the key to a fresh start, but she should have seen that for the fantasy it was. She never should have let herself get carried away. It was depressing and dangerous.

  Anyway, none of that mattered. Phillip probably thought she was crazy by now, and her aunt and uncle would find out about the baby soon enough.

  The night sky was brighter than usual, the moon nearly full. She crossed a couple of streets and entered a larger section of woods that would have her home in fifteen minutes. Had she driven to the library, the car’s engine would almost certainly have woken Kendra, who was a light sleeper, and these excursions were too important to jeopardize. Plus, Melanie liked the woods at night. She’d never been afraid of them, and consequently she knew them well. Or maybe it was because she knew them well that she wasn’t afraid.

  Yet tonight she wasn’t enjoying the walk. Despite herself, she kept thinking about Phillip, leaving him at his front door looking hurt and confused. Had she broken up with him? Even she didn’t know. So he ran away from a squirrel. So what? And then she started thinking about that poor journalist in New Jersey dying alone, eighty-one years old and totally off base about the case that had haunted him for years.

  “Surprise!” she said aloud. “Meg Miller is alive!”

  A twig snapped.

  Someone was in the woods with her.

  She looked around and saw no one. Her imagination? Other than the occasional deer, the only animals out here were small—squirrels, possum—and they kept to themselves.

  She found the woods comforting, she reminded herself, not spooky. Whatever hormones had turned her favorite smells putrid were playing games with her brain’s fear center. Or something. Her pace quickened, and she tried to move quieter, and then she started thinking about killers and rapists on the loose, behind every tree.

  Her breathing quickened. I’m losing the woods, she thought. They were mine, and now they won’t be anymore.

  Before her semester began, her aunt and uncle had given her a cell phone with prepaid minutes, but she’d used up all the minutes long ago, talking to Phillip. Still—if she’d had minutes left, would she have called him now? She hoped not. These were her woods. She willed herself to slow down, relax—no one is here; no one is here. Yet by the time she saw the abandoned tractor, the landmark telling her she was just a few hundred yards from Notress Pass, her sweat had turned cold and her pulse throbbed in her neck. The air was still. The only sounds were her quiet footfalls and her heavy breaths. As she passed the tractor, she could swear she saw a shadow glide across it, and she let out a gasp and started sprinting. She squeezed through the tight gap in the hedges, discovered long ago, onto her own property. Her aunt and uncle must not see her leaving or returning, or else there would go her freedom. Still, she half hoped that one of them would spot her darting across the lawn. At this moment she yearned for their safety, yearned for them to take away her freedom. It didn’t matter that the woods had been hers. They were gone now. She climbed through her bedroom window, closed and locked it, and slipped soundlessly into bed, not even removing her shoes.

  She fell asleep but was awakened by images of hundreds of snapping turtles crawling over one another to get at her—a recurring nightmare since childhood. She awoke several more times, sweating, then freezing, then sweating again. During one of the sweating spells, she removed her shoes and clothes. During the next freezing spell, she found her pajamas in the dark and put them on.

  The next time she awakened was to the hard wrap of knuckles on her bedroom door.

  “Yeah?” she groaned.

  “Get up.” Her uncle’s voice, uncharacteristically stern.

  The room was getting light. She looked at the clock: 7 a.m. Her alarm would go off in fifteen minutes. So why the urgency? She sat up in bed a moment, trying to shake off sleep, and left her room wearing her pajamas and slippers. Her aunt was seated at the kitchen table. Her uncle stood beside her, leaning over the morning paper.

  “Come over here,” he said without looking up.

  She knew without having to look. But she looked anyway.

  “He promised not to use it,” Melanie said. “I made him promise.”

  The photographer must have had a powerful zoom lens. She could see individual freckles, each petal on the dandelion.

  “People can’t be trusted, Melanie,” her aunt said.

  There were three photographs in a row. Hers was in the middle. To her left, two small children with wide grins, attacking a tall cone of cotton candy. To her right, an older man wearing a gold-and-blue West Virginia T-shirt, giving the camera a thumbs-up. Behind him, the Zipper ride in motion, a blur of purple and green.

  A single caption described all three pictures: Local Fredonia residents enjoying the First Baptist Church’s Carnival for Christ.

  Her uncle shut the paper and began to pace the small kitchen.

  “I never gave him my name,” Melanie said. Still. There was her photo, large and clear, placing her right in Fredonia. And the Mason City Democrat published an online version. Did her aunt and uncle know? Probably not, but she knew. Her image was now online. Permanently.

  “So is this your definition of being ca
reful?” Uncle Wayne put his hands up to his head and massaged his temples. He sighed. “I want you to come to work with me. Learn the trade.”

  “What—you mean fixing cars?”

  “It’s been good for this family. You’re left alone to do your work—”

  “Uncle Wayne, I’m in college.”

  “Well, your aunt and I don’t think you should be. It’s causing a lot of problems.”

  “College has nothing to do with it.”

  He glanced over at his wife. “We’ll talk about it tonight, Mel. You have class today, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then go to class. But I want you to consider something. You’re seventeen and still alive. That isn’t luck.”

  “I know, Uncle Wayne,” she said.

  Her uncle made the coffee. She endured the smell and poured the juice. They sat together at the table.

  Thank you, Lord, for providing us with this food that will nourish and sustain us, said Aunt Kendra.

  Amen, they all said.

  After Wayne left for work, Kendra walked out of the kitchen and, a minute later, returned again carrying a manila folder.

  “You’re right, you know,” she said to Melanie, who remained at the table. “You aren’t a kid any longer.” She placed the folder on the table in front of Melanie. “I’m going to take a shower. I think you should take a look at these.” She squeezed Melanie once on the shoulder and walked toward the bedroom.

  When Melanie heard the water come on, she opened the folder. The newest letter was right on top of the small stack, dated just a little over a month earlier.

  It was worse than she’d imagined.

  VIA NEXT-DAY EXPRESS MAIL

  August 18, 2006

  Wayne Denison

  P.O. Box 31

  Fredonia, WV 26844

  Mr. Denison:

  Pursuant to our phone conversation of this afternoon: Ramsey Miller is confirmed to have been in Morgantown, West Virginia, on the afternoon of August 14.

  His fingerprints were taken off the handle of a switchblade after an incident near the University of West Virginia campus. By the time police arrived, Mr. Miller had fled the scene, and his whereabouts at this time are once again unknown. The fingerprint match, which came through this morning, was conclusive.