by Lisa Unger
He was waiting for me outside the door under a large black umbrella. I felt a little jolt of fear.
“I’m not a stalker,” he said quickly, lifting a hand. He must have seen the alarm on my face, how I quickly turned back toward the shop door. He released an uncomfortable laugh, glanced up at the falling snow, maybe embarrassed that he’d frightened me.
“Is it crazy to ask you to have dinner with me?” he said after an uncomfortable beat.
“A little,” I said, appraising him, looking into his eyes, assessing his body language. He was tall, powerful looking. His shoulders square, hand tense, gripping his umbrella. He didn’t look like a nutcase, with his expensive leather laptop bag and good shoes. He wore a dark wool pea coat, with a gray cashmere scarf. His eyes were stunning in the lamplight, a wide, earnest light blue. An amused smile played at the corner of his mouth; his jaw looked as if it belonged on a mountain somewhere. I realized I was shivering, all exposed flesh starting to tingle.
“Well,” he said, “go a little crazy with me, then. A public place, somewhere crowded.” His smile broadened. I could see that he was laughing at himself inside, at the situation. I found myself smiling, too, at his boldness, at his allure.
“When’s the last time you took a chance?” he asked, undaunted by my silence, by the way I must have been staring at him.
I might have just walked away, hopped a cab, and headed home. This is what I wanted to do, even started to move to the curb. But I had a rare moment of self-clarity: My sister was right about me. She’d said: You’re not willing to bend or shift anything to let someone into your life. Or something like that. I suddenly, passionately, wanted to prove her wrong.
I looked at him with fresh eyes; he was still waiting, still smiling. Most men would have already walked away, embarrassed, angry. But not Marcus. What he wanted, he got. He’d wait, if that’s what it took. Even then.
“Seriously,” he started, and it was in that word that I first heard the lilt of his very slight accent. “If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it already.”
I found myself laughing with him at that, and the next thing I knew, we were in a cab together, racing through the wet, cold night.
*
WE WOUND UP at Café Orlin, a dark and cozy spot, one of my favorite East Village haunts, and stayed there until the early hours, losing our sense of time and any self-consciousness either of us had, exploring the landscapes of each other’s past, talking about books—mine, mostly (his interest and knowledge were beyond flattering)—and art, and travel. It was effortless, comfortable. When we finally left, workdays looming, the snow had stopped and the frigid night lay out before us slick and crystalline as he walked me home. He reached for my hand and I let him take it. His skin was smooth and dry, his grip so hard and strong it felt as though his bones were made from metal. Heat flooded my body as our fingers entwined.
At the door to my building, I turned to face him. I’ll call you, I expected him to say. Or, Thanks for a nice evening. Something vague, something that left it all up in the air, something that later would have me wondering if the night had really been as special as I thought.
“Can I see you tonight?” he said. What? There were games to be played, protective walls to be erected, nonchalance to be feigned. He’d clearly misplaced his rulebook.
He must have registered my surprise. “Honestly, Isabel, I don’t have time for games.” Did he sound weary, in spite of his kind eyes, his gentle hand on my arm? “If you don’t want to see me again, in your heart you already know that. So just say it now. No hard feelings. But if you do—just say yes.”
I had to laugh. “Yes,” I said. “I want to see you again. Tonight.” I had plans—just dinner with Jack. I’d cancel them. I would bend and shift and let this man into my life. Why not?
“I’ll pick you up at eight,” he said, taking my hand and pressing it to his mouth. “I can’t wait.”
He left me swooning in the soft glow of street lamps as he walked quickly up my street and then turned the corner without looking back. I halfway didn’t expect to see him again. As I entered my building, I was already steeling myself for the disappointment that surely lay ahead.
RICK HAD BEEN taken into an inner office in handcuffs; he hadn’t even turned to look at me. He hadn’t even said one word, though I’d yelled after him, desperate, pathetic.
“Rick, please tell me what’s going on!” I watched until he’d passed through the doorway with two agents and was gone.
“We have questions, Mrs. Raine,” said the female agent. “So you will need you to wait here.” She took me firmly by the arm and led me back to Marcus’s desk.
I think it’s fair to say I lost it a little. I ranted, demanded answers, raged about Marcus’s disappearance. All the while, the tall blonde just looked at me like I was the most pitiable sight she’d ever seen. I eventually wound down, ran out of juice.
“Just have a seat, Mrs. Raine. There’s a lot to talk about,” she’d said, long on condescension, short on illumination. There was something strange about her. And she didn’t seem quite official. She seemed more like a stripper with a cheap, dirty kind of beauty. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her drop into a deep, wide squat, start taking off her clothes. She held me in her gaze for longer than seemed appropriate, then she strode out, all legs and attitude. She’d closed the door behind her.
Exhausted, numb, I allowed myself to slump in the chair and watch through the glass as hard drives were removed, files confiscated, desk drawers emptied of their contents. It was all very rote, once the guns had been holstered. No one seemed overly hurried, everyone clearly with expertise in their assigned task. All the agents avoided looking at me. After a while, the whole situation took on a strange unreality, like something I was watching on television, something I’d turned on too late and didn’t fully understand. I felt the bubbling urge to laugh at my predicament, followed by the urge to scream.
I noticed that none of the other employees arrived for work that morning. I imagined they were being turned away or taken into custody in the hallway downstairs. But I didn’t know.
It occurred to me suddenly that I didn’t have to just sit here and obey like a good little girl. What if Marcus was in FBI custody? I’d asked but hadn’t received an answer. What if that’s why he hadn’t come home or been able to call? I felt a little lift of hope, a blast of adrenaline. Even if that wasn’t exactly an ideal scenario, at least it would mean he was all right. That I could help him. I realized it was time to call in the troops—Linda and Erik, my mother and Fred, Jack. And I needed to get us a lawyer. Fast.
I caught sight of my own reflection in the glass wall of Marc’s office. I looked slouched over, like an old woman, pale and harried. I wore a long black wool skirt and black leather ankle-high boots, a bulky sweater and wrap. My hair, long, past my shoulders, a black mass of unmanageable curls, was more chaotic than usual. I needed to pull myself together and take control of the situation.
I lifted the phone from the receiver and found the line dead. I looked up at the federal agents who were all still engaged in dissecting the office Marcus had worked so hard to build—months of renovation, hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans and our own money. I walked over to the door and found it locked from the outside. My mouth and throat went dry with the debut of panic in my chest as I tried the knob again. They couldn’t do that, could they? Hold me here like that without charge, arrest, without letting me call anyone?
I started pounding on the door, moved over to the glass and started banging on that so that they could see me. But no one even looked up. I started to look at each of the people individually. One man had a deep red scar that ran from the corner of his right eye and disappeared into the collar of his black vest. He was stocky, had longish hair that hung, unwashed, to his collar. Another man had tattoos on his hands. There was a woman with a bright purple streak dyed into her white hair which she’d tried to hide under a stocking cap but which kept snaking out
, dropping in front of her eyes.
I had a terrible moment of cold dawning, dread a lump in my abdomen, as I turned to see that the tall blond woman had entered the office. These people were not FBI agents. She had an ugly sneer on her face, held a large gun. It was more like a caricature of a gun, it was so dark and menacing, and yet it almost didn’t register with me. I found myself moving closer to her.
“What’s going on here?” I said, surprised at how steady my voice sounded.
“Marcus is wrong about you,” she said. “You’re going to be trouble, aren’t you?” The words landed like a spit in the face. She wasn’t even trying to hide her accent anymore. I recognized it right away.
“What did you say?” I asked. My voice came out in an incredulous whisper. “Who are you?” Though she was taller than me by about three inches, broader at the shoulders, stronger, I could see, at the legs and hips, I wasn’t afraid of her. In fact, I was overcome by the urge to put my hands on her long, white throat—gun or no gun. She seemed to register this; I saw her eyes widen just slightly. Then she raised her hand quickly and brought the gun across hard on my temple. I didn’t have time to ward off the blow, didn’t even really feel it. I just heard a loud, private thud inside my head. A curtain of red fell before my eyes and the next thing I saw were her thick black boots as the floor rose up fast to greet me, then a blue light. Then black.
4
Someone yelling, Help me! For the love of Christ, please help me! There was the stench of urine, over that a heavy odor of antiseptic. And something else, something sweet and metallic. Blood. The soft sound of busy footfalls racing back and forth. A phone ringing. Harsh white light, too bright. That phone kept ringing, like a lance through my brain. I tried to move and felt bottle rockets of pain behind my brow and down my neck. When I finally adjusted to the light, I saw Linda’s face. My sister. Her eyes were rimmed red, blue moons of fatigue beneath. Behind her, Trevor and Emily were huddled together, leaning against a white wall looking around them, with matching wide, green saucers for eyes. More curious than scared; they’re like that.
“Are you out of your freaking minds? We’ve been here for five hours. She has a head injury.” It was Erik’s voice, I realized, loud and booming with anger.
I was lying on a gurney parked in a busy, grimy hallway off an emergency room. I guessed it was St. Vincent’s in the Village. How I’d gotten here, I had no idea.
There was a measured, deadpan response to Erik’s ranting that I couldn’t quite hear. Something about two strokes and a gunshot wound. “She’s been unconscious for hours,” he said loudly. “You can’t tell me that’s not serious. She’s barely been looked at.”
“Sir, you will get out of my face,” responded a deep female voice, very stern and more loudly. “Sit down right now or you will be asked to leave.”
Erik had a bad temper when it came to things like this. When he felt at the mercy of a bad system, he generally blew a gasket—no doubt he would have exploded into an embarrassing string of expletives had his children not been present. But if he said anything else, I didn’t hear it.
Linda saw my eyes open and leaned in close. “Oh, Izzy, Izzy, Izzy,” she said, putting her hand on my forehead. “Oh my God, what happened?”
Why was she whispering? Then I saw the cop, a uniformed officer sitting in a chair about five feet from Emily and Trevor.
“I don’t know,” I said, gripping her hand and trying to sit up but lying back down. I told her how Marcus didn’t come home, how I went to the office, what happened there. The events of the night before and that morning came back in vivid snapshots; I was firing off frames of memory, my words coming out in a manic tumble. I wasn’t sure how much sense I was making as my sister stared at me intently. She’d always looked at me that way, even when we were girls, even when I was telling her the most trivial things. She listened. I felt my face flush with the powerful brew in my chest—anger, fear, despair.
I saw all of those things on Linda’s face, too. “Oh my God, Izzy. Why didn’t you call me?”
“Linda, where is he?” I asked, a sob escaping me, tears coming in a hot, wet stream. “What’s happening?”
She shook her head, looking as helpless as I was, gripped my hand. “We’ll figure it out,” she said bravely. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
She was always the optimist. Not me. The way I saw it, things could only get worse, but I didn’t say so.
“Can I hold your gun?” Trevor had sidled over to the cop. Ten years old, blond as sunlight like Linda, and honey-sweet.
“Don’t be an idiot, Trevor,” said Emily, with an extravagant eye roll. Thirteen, hair the same inky black as mine but straight as razors, same major attitude problem.
“Emily,” said Linda. “Be nice to your brother. And Trevor, leave that officer alone.”
There was an unusually sharp, tense edge to her voice and both kids turned to stare at us. They were pampered children, treated tenderly at home and at school, rarely hearing an angry tone or unkind word. They both looked as if they’d been slapped. I’d never been sure how good it was for them to be treated so gently, worried that they’d be torn up when they stepped out of Montessori privilege and into the real world. Like right now.
The cop saw then that I was conscious, pulled a heavy black radio from his belt, turned away to talk. Something about the witness.
“Is that me? Am I ‘the witness’?” I asked my sister.
“They’ve been waiting to talk to you,” Linda said, nodding and rubbing her eyes.
“Who has?”
“The police,” she whispered, leaning in close. “They found you in the office. Izzy it’s been destroyed, everything stolen or smashed, spray paint everywhere. Someone called nine-one-one. You were unconscious behind Marc’s desk. They brought you here and called us. Detectives are supposed to come when you wake up.”
“Those people—they weren’t FBI agents,” I said in an absurd statement of the obvious.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “They weren’t.”
“Why didn’t they kill me?”
“Izzy!”
It wasn’t a lamentation; it was a question of pure curiosity. They should have killed me. I saw them all, could easily identify any of them and would likely be doing so shortly. But they hadn’t. Why not? To someone who constructed plot for a living, it seemed stupid, careless.
My sister put her head in her hand and I saw her shoulders start to shake a little. She always cried from stress or anger. Some people viewed it as weakness. But I knew it for what it was—her release valve. The kids crowded in around us, Trevor resting his head on his mother’s shoulder, Emily taking my hand. Trevor’s tangle of silky curls mingled with his mother’s.
“What happened to you, Izzy?” Emily whispered in my ear. Her breath smelled like fruit punch. She’d never called me “aunt” for some reason, and I was glad for it. That title seemed too formal, too old-fashioned, put a distance between us that I hoped she’d never feel. I squeezed her hand, looked into her worried face. She was rail-thin, and all hard angles, a cool city girl with a poet’s heart.
“I’m not sure,” I said lamely. She turned away, glanced toward the cop, who had returned to his seat and opened a copy of the Post. He seemed impervious to our drama, just putting in his time.
“Where’s Marcus?” Emily said, looking back at me. I tried not to cry again; one of us crying was enough. Children shouldn’t have to comfort adults.
“I don’t know, Em,” I managed, squeezing her hand.
“What do you mean?”
Trevor had turned his eyes up to me and both he and his sister looked frightened now. Then Erik came up behind them, put a hand on each of their shoulders. Both kids turned to wrap their arms around his middle.
“Okay, everyone,” he said, strong, light. He was not an especially tall man but there was a powerful, energetic force to him. Men liked him; women flirted with him. Everyone just felt better when he was around.
&n
bsp; “Let’s all try to pull it together. Everything’s going to be fine.”
He had four sets of uncertain eyes on him. I saw him muster his strength.
“It is,” he said brightly. “I promise.”
*
IT WAS HOURS more before I was treated—a deep gash at my temple cleaned, stitched, and bandaged. I had a severe concussion, according to the very young doctor who attended to me. He warned me to care for the wound, take my antibiotics and rest.
“Or pay the consequences. Head injuries are very tricky. Not to be taken lightly.”
He was frighteningly pale, the skin on his hands nearly translucent, the veins beneath, thick blue ropes. He looked as if he lived day and night beneath the harsh fluorescent bulbs.
We were still in the emergency room, but in one of those curtained-off little areas no bigger than a shoe box, that same cop sitting outside. I could see his bulky shadow through the white gauzy barrier. The detectives who were supposed to come talk to me still hadn’t arrived.
“A blow to the temple can be fatal,” the doctor said gravely. “You’re very lucky.”
I didn’t have the will to answer him. My sister sat beside me on a tiny, uncomfortable-looking stool, holding my hand. Erik had taken the kids to his mother’s and afterward was planning to see what he could find out about Marcus, about the office breakin, if you could call it that. An odd calm had come over me; it was more like a brownout, the result of a brain short-circuit. You can only handle so much pain, fear, grief before your head switches off for a while. That’s how the psyche handles trauma. A clinical psychiatrist had told me this once during a research interview I was conducting for one of my novels; it made sense to me then. I understood it better now.