I slipped on my gloves and emptied the backpack onto the bed. A dirty T-shirt, bathing suit, flip-flops, more boxers, khakis, a pair of cargo shorts. I went through the pockets. A few dollar bills and a matchbook from a Greenwich Village restaurant called Malatesta. I opened it and found scribbled directions to an address in Essex County, New Jersey. No BlackBerry, no business cards, no address book. I stuffed everything back inside and turned my attention to the room. The bureau and closet were empty, and the only thing on the coffee table was a copy of the local newspaper. Then I saw it, a slip of paper on the floor near the base of the bed. I bent down and picked it up: an Amtrak receipt—New London to Yonkers—dated two days before. In the upper corner was a name: Aidan Cole. I said it out loud, as if that might trigger my memory, but it didn’t. I’d never heard it before. How long had I been in the cabin? Two minutes? Three? I peered outside. All was quiet. I put the receipt back exactly as I’d found it, then searched the desk, the nightstand, the folds in the cheap, stained couch. Then I walked into the bathroom. A puddle had formed on the floor beside the shower (the bath mat hung undisturbed on the towel bar), and the mirror was still fogged up. A travel kit sat unzipped on the sink, and I picked through Q-tips and Chap-Stick and small packs of Advil. I felt something in the side pouch, a prescription bottle. Xanax, and most of them were gone. But the label! This time, Aidan’s name came with an address: 5 Weehawken St., New York, NY, 10014. Weehawken Street? Where was that? I tucked the bottle back away. I’d been there five minutes, maybe more. I took one last careful look around the worn-out room, as if the rotting walls might yield some secret explanation for Aidan’s presence. But they remained silent. I slipped outside, closed the back door, and retreated to my perch on the hill.
He appeared a half hour later and, as he had earlier, came out back and looked around. But this time he was frowning. There was no way he could see me, but I froze anyway. I didn’t move or breathe until I heard the screen door slam shut.
When he walked outside again, it was through the front, and he had the backpack slung over his shoulder. Had he discovered something, or was he giving up and going home? He ambled down the path toward the office; I hurried back to the car and pulled around to the front of the restaurant lot. I didn’t have to wait long. Fifty yards to my right, he nosed his Subaru out into the road and started toward town. I let a car pass, then followed. The road seemed busy for a Monday morning, and the traffic began to back up as we approached the intersection of Routes 100 and 17. Then I saw the cop at the corner. Was he just directing traffic or . . . I locked the doors. We came to a dead stop as the officer let a stream of cars pass in front of us. Then it was our turn. We inched forward. Five cars away, then four, and three. The officer stopped our line again. Aidan’s car was at the head of it, his window down. The cop leaned in close. They were talking. Frantic, I looked for an escape. The shoulder was wide enough if I needed it, but suddenly Aidan was moving again, taking a right—heading north. The woman in front of me put her left blinker on, then turned that way. And now I was at the intersection, the cop directly outside my window. Should I make eye contact? Yes? No? No. I smiled slightly as I passed him, trying to look distracted. I could feel his eyes on me, could feel my face turning red, but I kept moving forward, one rotation at a time, and finally turned right without incident. I was directly behind Aidan, practically on his bumper, the two of us moving at a crawl. Where were all these people going? I thought about shielding my face, but pulling the visor down might catch his eye. A glint in the mirror. That’s what this had come to.
I should have realized the livestock fair was to blame (Lindsay had mentioned it), but I didn’t until I saw the signs for parking. Cars were turning off the road. And now Aidan’s blinker was on. He was going to join them. We both were.
AIDAN
“WHAT DO YOU WANT?”
I knew who it was before I even turned around. Her voice was calm but forceful, just as I’d have imagined it.
“I said, ‘What do you want?’ ” She tightened her grip on my arm, and I didn’t try to shake her off. I was frozen in place beside her. We were packed in a tight semicircle in front of the basketball booth, kids squealing, shouting, pleading with parents. I opened my mouth.
“I . . .”
I tried to collect myself, but my face was turning crimson. Most of hers, meanwhile, was hidden behind large aviators, as it had been in the photograph. She’d cut her hair and was wearing very different clothes, but it had to be her. The fantasy come to life.
It hit me then: what this meant. The danger I might be in. How long had she been following me? And were there others? I wanted to look around, but couldn’t take my eyes off her for fear that . . . what? She’d disappear? Suddenly, I couldn’t remember why I’d come looking for her in the first place. Or what I’d do if I found her.
“I . . .”
What had she asked me? I was losing my grip on the progression of events. I wondered again if this might be a gag, the joke to end all jokes, a new reality show meant to test the boundaries of my sanity—
“Fucking say something,” she said, still gripping my arm.
“Are you Paige Roderick?”
“Who are you?”
“Aidan Cole.”
“What do you want?”
“To talk to you.”
Paige looked around quickly. People were everywhere.
“Are you alone?” she asked.
“Yes. Are you?” It was all I could manage. Rote dialogue. Words she expected.
“We can’t stay here. Follow me, but at a distance.”
With that, she let go of my arm, kind of discarded it, and started walking quickly through the crowd. I almost lost her right away and had to jog a few steps to catch sight of her again. She was taller than I’d imagined and was wearing a plain V-neck T-shirt and cords. Brown cords. In August. Why was I thinking about fashion? Because I couldn’t think about anything else. Bumper cars. Pirate ships. A creaking Tilt-A-Whirl. We ducked off the midway and entered the livestock area, rows of clapboard barns housing goats and pigs and giant horses. A cow-milking exhibition. A sheep-shearing contest. The State Bucksawing Championship was getting under way at the Woodman’s Center, and a crowd of large men dressed in Carhartt milled around outside. We kept walking—past the Alpaca Farm, the Dairy Tent, and finally the jam-packed Ox-Pulling Pavilion—until we found ourselves alone beside a split-rail fence that marked the edge of the property. Beyond us lay a patchy meadow overrun with tents and trucks and trailers. The fair’s ugly underbelly.
“So talk,” she said.
“I’m not sure where to begin.”
“Let me help you. Who do you work for? How did you find me? And what the fuck do you want?” She was leaning against the fence, her right foot propped up on the lowest rail, as if she might hop it at any moment and disappear among the generators and clothing lines spanning the temporary trailer park.
“I don’t work for anyone. Not like that. I’m . . . I’m a blogger.”
“A what?”
“A blogger. Someone who—”
“I know what a blogger is.”
“Well, then.”
She was staring at me, through me, her jaw locked in place. And still I couldn’t quite make her out behind the glasses, the sweeping bangs, the elusive movements that held the potential of sudden flight.
“I . . . I received an anonymous e-mail about the recent bombing in New York, and it said you were involved.”
“What else did it say?”
“That’s it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Were you involved?” I asked.
“Who sent it?”
“I told you, it was anonymous.”
“Listen,” she said. “I’ll take off. I’ll take off right now if you don’t start answering my fucking questions.”
“Will you calm down for a second? If I were going to turn you in, don’t you think I already would have?”
I hadn’t m
eant to say this. It just came out, but the words had a visible effect on her. Slowly, she took her foot off the railing and edged closer, as if this were something approaching a normal conversation.
“Don’t raise your voice,” she said.
“There’s no one around.”
“That’s what I thought, then you showed up. Now tell me exactly what the e-mails said.”
And so I did. And then I told her more. Why not? It’s not as if I knew that much. She stood stoic against the fence, listening closely as I explained (without using names or incriminating details) how I’d tracked her down. She interrupted only twice. When I mentioned the bomb going off on the wrong floor, she asked when, exactly, I’d received that e-mail, and what, exactly, it had said. And a few minutes later, when I told her I’d spoken with her parents, she asked how they’d sounded. Otherwise, she remained silent until I’d finished, at which point she turned to take in our surroundings. Paused in profile, my ingrained image of Paige Roderick finally fell away, and the woman herself came into focus: the long legs, the narrow waist, and a blossoming upper body—broad shoulders and full breasts—evident (albeit to a trained eye) even under the loose T-shirt. And still, it came back to her face, vaguely European—Dutch perhaps—in its eccentric beauty. She had a wide mouth and full lips and a high forehead like some ultimate crowning achievement. Only her eyes remained a mystery.
Ten seconds passed, maybe more, and just as it seemed she was going to speak, a roar went up inside the Ox-Pulling Pavilion. We both looked over at the giant tent.
“They’re done in there,” she said. “I have to go.”
“Wait.”
“For what?”
“I just told you everything, and you haven’t—”
“Listen.” She stared straight at me. “Just go back to wherever you’re from and forget we ever met.”
The hordes began trickling out, a few already wandering in our direction. Paige looked around again, then hopped the fence in a single scissorlike motion.
“Tell me where you’re staying,” I said. “We can talk this through.”
“Fuck off.”
“I won’t call the cops. I won’t say anything, I promise.”
“What is it you want? Money?”
“I want your story.”
“My story?”
“Yes.”
“For your stupid website? I swear it’s people like you that—”
“That what? Anyone else would have posted your picture or called the FBI as soon as they saw it. You know, under the circumstances, you might consider showing me the benefit of—”
“So why haven’t you? Huh? I don’t understand. If it’s notoriety you want. I can’t think of a better way to get famous then turning in an alleged terrorist.” She was raw with anger, and I paused a moment before I spoke again.
“I don’t want notoriety. I want to understand.”
“How we did it?”
“Why you did it.”
We had crossed a line, accepted for a moment the hypothetical crime that had brought us together. She must have felt it, too. She adjusted her sunglasses and took another glance at the exiting crowd.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Well, I’m telling the truth. For a long time I didn’t believe in any of this myself. In you, I mean. All I had was the fucking photograph.”
“Do you have it now?”
“Yeah, sure.” I reached into my pocket and handed it to her. The printout was crumpled, the back covered with nonsensical notations—numbers and addresses, the raw statistics of this anomalous pursuit. She unfolded it slowly, as if it held great value. “I don’t have the best printer, so it’s not as clear as the image on-screen—”
But she wasn’t listening, hadn’t heard a word. No, she was staring at herself crossing Madison Avenue as if confronting irrefutable proof of the afterlife. Just as I was about to speak again, she looked up at me. The color had drained from her face, all the robustness, the life. She handed the page back and without so much as a parting word she turned and strode quickly across the field toward the sprawl of trailers.
When I called after her, she began to run.
PAIGE
THE DUST WAS THE SAME, A CLAY-COLORED GRIME THAT LOOSED ITSELF FROM ten thousand trampling feet and stuck fast to your clothes, your skin. The sounds were the same, and the sweet smells and rust-dappled rides built a generation ago. Even the dispirited animals, which you’d think would vary by region, were the same in Vermont as they were at the Haywood County Fair in Waynesville, North Carolina. We used to go every September, the four of us setting off at some impossibly early hour so my mother could join the other Maggie Valley women in the morning skillet throw. The men would cheer from the sidelines as the frying pans took flight amid a volley of laughter. But after twenty minutes of being ignored, the husbands inevitably drifted away, taking their bouncing children with them. I don’t know where the other families went—to see the giant pigs, probably—but they never came with us. Our destination was a secret even from my mother. Bobby always took charge, my father and I struggling to keep up as he led us to the unkempt corner of the fairgrounds that housed the freak show. There they were, the bearded lady and the Siamese twins, the midgets and magicians, and the man who hammered nails up his nose. They operated in ill-lit booths, peddling their aptitudes and appendages to the young, the curious, the gullible. Bobby and I were all three, and yet we hardly even glanced at these lesser attractions, for our hearts belonged to the man behind bars at the end of the alley. He was huge, a seven-foot-tall leviathan, spitting and snarling and drooling down the front of his filthy shirt. And still, we always snuck up close to read the story posted on the cage. For what a story it was. He was called the Smoky Mountain Man, and after a lifetime in the wild he had wandered into a backwater in the most remote part of the state and begun terrorizing its citizens. He broke into houses, even stole rotten children. But he never stole from the poor. And the children were always returned without a scratch. It didn’t matter. The government began a manhunt that spanned two decades and claimed a dozen lives, and finally they caught him. That his jail cell was a flimsy sideshow cage at a regional state fair was a fact Bobby and I never questioned. We were too young to know the world that way. We believed in him, identified with him. He was the shadow just beyond the foot of my bed, the noise in the woods where the backyard ended.
Then one year it rained. The skillet throw had no-shows, so the Maggie Valley squad was forced to draft my father. When Bobby and I complained, he told us we could go see the Smoky Mountain Man by ourselves. If we were careful. My brother was eight, I was seven, but we never gave it a second thought. We scampered fearlessly through the puddles until we reached the freak show, and the ominous cage at the end of the alley. The place was deserted. And the Mountain Man? He was sitting in the back of his cell, legs crossed . . . reading a book! He didn’t see us or, anyway, didn’t look up. Bobby was stricken, but quickly recovered. He took my arm and we backed away. This is our chance, he said urgently, as the rain streaked down his cheeks. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Still, I let him lead me around to the rear of the cage, which was covered by a heavy tarp. Bobby peered inside. It was pitch-black.
Let’s get out of here, I said.
Hold on. I have an idea. Bobby pulled aside the canvas curtain and stepped into the darkness. I’m going to set him free.
Before I could respond, my brother was gone. I heard his tentative footsteps, and then only rain on the canvas. I was standing on a service pathway behind the booths and tents. No one else was around. No one to witness what would happen next. I wanted to cry, but what good would that do? And who would care? From somewhere inside the cage I heard a knock, and the squeak of hinges, a door opening. There were muffled voices, Bobby’s and another. I’d never heard the Mountain Man speak, and I imagined roars like thunder, but his voice sounded calm and measured. For a moment, I thought I heard laughter. Then silence. Had Bobby be
en attacked? Killed? Eaten? I was about to run back around to the front, but then came footsteps, and a familiar voice calling my name. I’m here, I said. The canvas ruffled, then parted, and there was my brother, looking brave as ever, but confused, and a little bit lost.
He wouldn’t come with me, Bobby said. Then he shrugged a sad little shrug and we started back toward the grown-ups.
The following year was our last, for we’d become skeptics. We saw glue on the ground near the bearded lady. And noticed a blanket positioned over the twins’ attached torsos. The Mountain Man was still there, as always, but we didn’t go see him. We were finally old enough to understand what had happened, and already too old to talk about it. It didn’t matter. Our heroes now were the mountain men still at large.
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