by Lisa Unger
“Just come here,” he said. He sounded strong, in control. He was always exactly what she needed him to be. “And call that lawyer.”
“Okay,” she said, standing up, pulling herself together. “I’m coming.”
She didn’t know if Ben was still idling in the parking lot, and if he was, how she’d get herself and the kids out without him seeing her. But she would.
She quickly splashed some water on her face and exited the bathroom. In the wide empty foyer, she saw a frail, worried-looking woman gazing about, confused. She wore a trim navy blue coat and was toting a suitcase on wheels. It was a split second before Linda realized it was her mother; she seemed so out of place in the context of the mess of her life somehow.
“Mom.”
“Oh, Linda,” Margie said with relief. “What in the world is going on?”
Margie seemed to take in the all the details of her daughter’s being, her tousled hair, the shadow of mascara under her eyes, the coffee stain on her coat—all the things Linda had just been focusing on in the mirror. Margie’s brow sunk into a deep frown.
“What,” she repeated, “in the world is going on?”
17
What surprised me the most about marriage was how quickly it settled, became not mundane, necessarily, but normal. After the euphoria of finding love, the magic of courtship, the thrill of engagement, the busy fun of planning a wedding, there’s the lovely honeymoon and then all the little pleasures of setting up house, putting away the extravagant gifts, adjusting to life as married people; we, not I, us, not me. Everything shines, everything is new and fresh. And then—it’s not as if it goes bad or sour, nothing like that. It’s just that it becomes normal in a way I didn’t expect. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me. Linda was a very canny tour guide.
“When you’ve really chosen well, when you really love your spouse, it’s not as if the fire dies precisely,” she told me one time. “It just goes from being an inferno to a pilot light. If you’re not vigilant, you won’t notice it until it’s gone out completely.”
“You and Erik still have romance,” I said.
“Yes, but we work at it. The main part of our life is our children and our work. I never go to dinner or the movies without some barely conscious worry of Trevor and Emily at the back of my mind. Sometimes when we make love, I’m wondering if he remembered to paid the electric bill.”
“Linda!”
A quick shrug, a flutter of the eyelids (so like Margie). “That’s married with children. It’s not as bad as it sounds from the outside.” She smiled the smile of the older, wiser sister. “You’ll see.”
Not me, I thought. Never us.
And it never was quite that way with Marcus and me—not sexually. Though we fell into that domestic rhythm of work, dishes, laundry, bills, he always excited me; I never thought about the electric bill when we made love. But then again, we never had children, leaving us free from that special kind of fatigue I saw in Linda and Erik after months, going on years, of spotty sleep and an endless monitoring of needs.
And then, of course, I never really knew Marcus. I was always sleeping with a stranger, maybe subconsciously never comfortable enough, never intimate enough to allow my mind to wander. Maybe it is the unknowing that excites passion within me, the desire to understand that keeps me interested. Maybe that’s why, even when things were bad—his apathy about the pregnancy and miscarriage, his affair—I stayed. Curiosity. Who are you?
JACK WAS TALKING, pacing the room like a preacher giving a sermon, hands waving, voice raised. I wasn’t listening; I was sinking into a deep well of self-pity. I felt a barren place inside me, a place where no life could grow, where no love could last.
He’d fed me a tuna melt and made me take my antibiotics and was now lecturing me on my stupidity, threatening to call the police, or physically drag me to the lawyer himself. Jack was prone to ranting. Something to do with being born and raised in Manhattan, this loudmouthed, totally self-assured dissertation on whatever.
“This is not some novel you’re writing, Isabel,” he concluded. “This is your life.”
“What’s the difference?”
He stopped moving and fixed me with his gaze. I don’t know how to describe Jack; he’s so familiar, it’s almost as if I can’t always see him. His dark hair was a careful mess, his darker eyes always kind, always in on the divine joke of it all. There’s an interesting shape to his nose, broken during a fistfight in high school and never healed quite right. He was fit, beefy, muscular in the way of someone who spends just enough time at the gym, soft in the way of someone who can’t quite give up the foods that bring pleasure.
“You’re telling me you don’t know the difference between fact and fiction.” His eyes rested accusingly on the cut he’d just bandaged, as if this might be the culprit responsible for my mental instability.
“Not at the moment.”
“Are you just being existential, tortured? Or have you officially walked over the edge?”
The edge: the outside limit of an object, area, or surface; a place or part farthest away from the center of something. Which edge did he worry I’d stepped off—the edge of sanity, reality, reason?
“Neither. If I were writing this, right now I’d be wondering what my heroine should do next. I’d be exploring the field of possibilities. Which is precisely what I intend to do.”
“In the real world there are consequences for mistakes, Isabel.”
“In fiction, too.”
“Fine,” he snapped, frustrated with me. “But no edits, no rewrites. In the real world? Consequences are a stone wall.” He smacked fist against palm for emphasis.
I turned away from him and stared at a huge engineer’s sketch of the Brooklyn Bridge that was framed and hung on the wall—precise lines and exact measurements, tiny hand-scrawled notes about cable lengths and river span. I’d always envied engineers their exacting spirits, their certainty of tools and craft, their faith that the world would be as it was measured. My world seemed so liquid by comparison, everything shifting and changing so often as to be incalculable.
Jack had a point. A good one, which drained what little was left of my energy. I returned to the place of doubt I’d visited on the street. I thought of Detective Crowe and his number in my pocket. Everyone I cared about and respected wanted me to turn myself in to the lawyer. Why was I being so stubborn? What did I think I was going to do?
“Your phone’s ringing,” I said, lying back and examining the high white ceiling, the ornate molding, the sleek track lighting—a lovely blend of original and modern features. He really had done a stellar job with the place. I noticed a hairline crack in the ceiling, some insect corpses behind the glass in the lamps. We both listened to the faint chirping of the phone.
He shook his head. “Must be yours. Mine’s right there.” He pointed his chin toward the slim black device on the granite countertop.
“It’s not mine. I tossed my phone.”
We both looked over at Camilla’s purse. It lay where I’d dropped it with my own on Jack’s leather couch. We looked back at each other. I dove for it. He dove for me.
“Don’t answer that,” he said, grabbing my arm.
“Why not?” I pulled away from him and reached for the bag. I rummaged through the contents, until I found it still ringing and vibrating at the bottom. It was hot pink, scratched and battered. The screen blinked, Blocked number. I flipped it open and turned to Jack, triumphant. He looked stricken, as though he’d just watched me walk over a ledge. Overreacting, as usual. I didn’t say anything, just listened.
“Camilla?” A man’s voice.
I thought about it a second. “Hi,” I said, after a beat. I tried to imitate her voice from what I’d heard in our brief conversation earlier. My voice just came out sounding strangled, strange. Jack was shaking his head, inching closer to me. I wondered if he was going to try to wrest the phone away from me. Then instead he blew out a breath and walked over to the refrigerat
or, pulled the door open angrily. It was completely empty except for a bottle of Gray Goose, a bottle of seltzer, and a bowl of limes.
“You’re late,” said the voice on the line.
His tone was gruff, accent thick. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t trying to be crafty. I just didn’t know how to best lead the conversation. I issued a cough, just to fill the silence that followed. Jack mouthed, Hang up the phone. He made a wide circle with his index finger at his temple. This is crazy!
“Well?” said the voice on the other line. The sound of traffic was loud behind him. A siren wailed nearby.
“I’m having some problems.” I lowered my voice to a whisper, counting on him not being able to hear me well.
There was a pause and I thought he’d caught on, that he’d hang up.
“But you’re coming?” he said finally.
I decided on silence again.
“I’ll wait—but not much longer. By the Children’s Gate, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have the files?” he asked then. “Am I wasting my time?”
I decided to end the call rather than respond. The voice on the line, harsh and unyielding though it was, had a desperate edge. Camilla had something he wanted; he was waiting, though she must have been very, very late. I thought of her lying there, bleeding out, of her cooling flesh.
Jack was drinking from a lead crystal lowball, ice chinking, eyes on me.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said. I realized I was still standing, staring at the phone in my hand.
“Do you have my money?” I asked, snapping back into the present.
The phone call had given me a little juice. The lethargy that was settling into my bones dissipated. I took Camilla’s purse and emptied the contents out onto the low coffee table.
“He said something about files,” I said.
Jack sat down across from me. I could see the curiosity on his face, though he wore a deep scowl. He was an agent, a broker of story—he loved a good one more than anyone else I knew.
A cheap lipstick, a bottle of glitter nail polish, a half-smoked pack of cigarettes. Or half-unsmoked, if you’re an optimist.
“That depends,” he said, reaching for the tube of lipstick. He opened it and rolled the bottom until the little pink tip of makeup emerged. Then he recapped and tossed it back on the table.
Her tacky sequined wallet was overstuffed with singles and receipts—a nail salon, Taco Bell, a bookstore. A small black makeup bag containing more cosmetics—lip liner, mascara, a small black compact of blush.
“You have it or you don’t, Jack.”
A small plastic photo book, grimy in the way of something that’s been in your purse forever, well-thumbed. I flipped through the images, feeling a weight settle on me. Camilla smiled with an older woman, clearly a relative, probably her mother. Another young woman with Camilla’s eyes and nose, but darker, less pretty somehow, held a sleeping, wrinkled baby wrapped in a pink blanket. A little girl in pigtails and a blue corduroy jumper smiled, revealing an adorable gap in her teeth. There was a photo of a man I recognized as the missing Marcus Raine. He sat on a bed, holding a guitar, but looked directly at the camera with a smile. A man in love.
The rest of the contents—a bag of M&Ms, a cigarette lighter, a little notebook covered with hearts—littered the table. The detritus of a life. All the stuff she collected and bought and carried with her, things that were important to her. All now in the possession of a woman she’d never met, who’d stood over her dead body, touched her dead flesh, then took off with her belongings. If someone had told her that when she bought her M&Ms, what would she have thought?
I remembered the gun, took it from my pocket and put it on the table.
“Hey—whoa. What you doing with that?”
It was a small .38 revolver. I only knew this because a cop I’d interviewed once showed me a similar one. It was a gun cops often used as an off-duty piece, smaller, less conspicuous. It was light and perfect for a woman’s hand. My nephew would be pleased. You might need one, he’d warned, prescient.
“It was in her bag,” I said. “Are you going to answer me? Did you get my money?”
“So wherever she was going, she was going armed?” I could see it in his face: curiosity breaking and entering, making off with common sense.
He reached out and picked up what I’d thought at first glance was a small silver cigarette lighter. In Jack’s hand, I realized that it was a thumb drive, a tiny device that stored computer files. I reached for it quickly and he snatched it back.
“I heard the whole conversation,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking.”
He probably did know what I was thinking. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. He held the thumb drive up in the air.
“But what’s your agenda, your goal for this meeting?” he asked. “How will you recognize who you’re supposed to meet, and what will you do once you’re there?”
I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. He should know this about me. He seemed to read it all on my face. He rolled his eyes, leaned back in his chair.
“Let’s look at that drive. See what’s on it,” I said.
“We don’t have time,” he said, standing up. “And maybe it’s better if we don’t know.” He walked over to the closet and took out a distressed brown leather jacket and shrugged it on, pulled a stocking cap over his hair.
“It’s never better not to know. Trust me.” I held out my palm.
He ignored me. “Do you even know what the Children’s Gate is?”
I gave him a look. Mr. I Know Everything About New York City. It was a hobby of his; he was always explaining, correcting, pointing out items of interest. Sometimes it was cool; more often after our many years of friendship it was annoying.
“There are twenty gates to Central Park,” I said. “That one’s on Seventy-sixth and Fifth.”
He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, gave a deferential nod. “A-plus,” he said, zipping up his jacket. “We’re close. Let’s go and get this over with.”
How easily he slipped into the plot, became accomplice and co-writer.
“We have time to look at the drive,” I said. “If he waited this long, he’ll wait awhile longer.”
He paused another moment and I thought he was going to put up more argument. But instead he moved quickly to his office down the hall. By the time I caught up with him, he was already sitting at his computer with the drive in his USB port. It was a simple room, not yet finished. Just a shining glass desk and ergonomic black chair. Atop the glass sat an impossibly thin black laptop, a spindly halogen lamp. The walls were floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books. He was the only one in the world with more copies of my novels than I had. They lined his shelves—U.S. copies, foreign editions, trade paperbacks, mass market editions. All my stories, my imaginings bound, translated into languages I wouldn’t understand, my millions of words offered in neat packages. I saw my name in myriad typefaces and colors: Isabel Connelly. Not Isabel Raine. No, I was never that in print. The place where I was most real, most alive, most myself—on the page—I was never Isabel Raine. I felt a strange gratitude for that now.
“Pictures,” he was saying.
I came to stand behind him, feeling a bit wobbly, and steadied myself on his shoulder. Without looking at me, he stood and gave me the chair, keeping his eyes on the screen, his hand on the keyboard, flipping through what looked like fifty or sixty black-and-white photographs.
Four men stood in a loose group at the edge of a dock, hands in pockets, hunched against the cold. Three of them wore long black coats. The water behind them was gray and choppy. The fourth appeared to be dressed only in a suit. His shoulders were hiked up in tension, arms wrapped around his middle obviously for warmth. In the next frame one of the coated men had a big hand on the arm of the suited man. In the next a gun appeared. Each frame—grainy, moody—was separated from the last by a matter of seconds. I could almost hear the rapid s
hutter clicks. The next frame zoomed in and with a start I recognized two faces—Marcus and Ivan. Ivan, the man with the gun. Marcus with his arm locked in another man’s grasp.
“Is that Marcus?” asked Jack, incredulous.
But I’d lost my voice. In my head I heard the screaming, that horrible keening, and all the hairs on my arms and neck started to rise. As Jack flipped through the frames, faster now, we watched as Marcus laid his hand across the hand on his arm and moved into a quick, hard, practiced twist that dropped the other man to his knees and left him on the ground, his mouth open in a scream. The camera caught a muzzle flash from Ivan’s gun, but in the next frame the gun was in Marcus’s hand. Each successive frame saw another man on the ground until it was just Marcus and Ivan surrounded by bleeding corpses. Two frames showed them standing there, Marcus holding the gun, Ivan with his hands up in supplication. In the next frame Ivan was on the ground. Marcus started rolling bodies into the river, the dock splattered with blood. Then it was just Marcus and Ivan again, the big man lying on his side writhing, his face a mask of pain, arms around his center, Marcus standing over him, the gun aimed at his brother’s head. He lowered the gun. The camera caught him walking away, Ivan’s mouth open in a scream of pain or rage or both.
“Izzy” said Jack, after a moment of us both staring at the screen. “Are you okay?”
I leaned forward and continued scrolling to watch Marcus walk, unhurried, up the dock and disappear between two large warehouses. He was wearing the suit he’d been wearing when he left me.
“He killed three people,” Jack said, his voice dropping to an amazed whisper. “Left the other one to die.”
I felt myself separating from a rising tide of emotion—grief horror, fear. I rafted it like a white-water current, otherwise I would have drowned.
“Where would you say that is?” I asked. He leaned in close and I could smell the scent of Ivory soap on his skin, mingling with the vodka on his breath. He put a finger on the screen. I saw the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in the distance.