“Yes.”
“Are you crossing your fingers?”
“No! You know I would never, ever, ever do something like that to you. You know that, right?”
Steve puts the arm I didn’t wreck around me. “He’s not a great shot. But I know the difference between an accident and a target. I was the accident.”
“And there’s no way—?”
“Ask fifty times, it’s still no. Ask a hundred times, no. Cry and breathe into a grocery bag, no. And forget about the French doors. Welded shut for all the good they’re going to do you.”
“Who’s waving the keys to the jailhouse now?”
“You’re not throwing your life away on a Manx boy. One of them blackmails the other to kill my little girl? They’re scum. I’m sending you back to the counselor. Don’t say no, it’s yes. Say yes.”
I say yes.
I want my life back. This is how to get it.
88
Jack
It’s over.
Don says everything he has to say to save his ass, as expected. For the purpose of Don’s hearing, the Feds—who showed up hoping Don would reveal a vast interstate criminal conspiracy—love me. When it’s all over, the police, in the form of Agent Birdwell, keep coming at me, looking for contradictions I don’t provide. When I come out of Interrogation Room A, I’ve been in there for five hours straight.
My mother’s in the hall thanking Mr. Ferro when Nicolette comes out of Interrogation Room D with her lawyer, who looks like she eats alligators for breakfast. Nicolette looks like she just crawled out of an avalanche, white and traumatized. Esteban Mendes is standing half an inch from her, holding a little pink case with her dog, Gertie, in it.
I want to wrap my arms around Nicolette. I want to take her hand and run out the emergency exit and into the street.
“Nick, are you all right? Can we talk for a minute?”
Mendes says the most definitive no I’ve ever heard.
Ferro tries to steer me to the opposite side of the hall.
Birdwell, just behind us, close enough to grab me in case someone tells him in his earpiece that he gets to arrest me, says, “I would advise against that.”
Mr. Ferro loves getting under this guy’s skin. “You dropped all the charges. You can’t stop them from talking.”
Mendes extends his arm in front of Nicolette, as if they’re in a car that’s about to make a sudden stop, and he won’t let her lurch forward when he hits the brakes. But there’s something about not being allowed to do pretty much anything that galls her. She says, “Steve, don’t. Let me. Just this once. Please.”
He says, “You want to cross me on this?”
“Fifteen minutes. Please.”
Mendes says, “Fifteen minutes is right.”
Her lawyer reaches back and opens the door of the room they just came out of. It’s a lot nicer than the room I just came out of, upholstered chairs, wooden table.
Ferro says, “The recorder still switched on in here? No, thanks,” and pulls open the door to an adjoining break room with a coffee maker and a microwave.
Our lawyers follow us in.
Nicolette says, “I can take care of myself.”
They don’t seem so sure about this, but they leave us alone.
Nicolette stares out the window across the skyline to the steel grey river.
“I’m so sorry,” I say to the back of her head. “If you could forgive me, ever—”
“Stop it!” She turns, and I’m looking at her real eyebrows, pale brown, and her hair bleached back to the blond it’s supposed to be. She looks like a badly disillusioned angel. “You’ve more than paid.”
I say, “I told the truth.”
“I know,” she says. Then she whispers in my ear, “God will probably smite me for lying to the police, but I’m not putting you in prison.”
I hold her while she cries. I’m surprised she lets me, but maybe it’s an any-port-in-a-storm kind of thing. Her body is still so warm, still the only girl I can imagine wanting. And it’s not just lust-wanting. I’m capable of lust-wanting anyone. I could probably lust after her scary lawyer stripped down if you dared me. I want Nicolette like wanting to be in the same room with her forever, wanting to take care of her even though she can take better care of herself than I ever did.
But even in the middle of her narrative, which is saving me; and Mr. Ferro’s narrative, which has kept me ten paces ahead of the law; and Birdwell’s narrative, which has me as a cold-blooded killer who heartlessly fucked his victim before kidnapping her and dragging her off to be murdered, I have to know what really happened in Esteban Mendes’s kitchen.
I open the door to a balcony that runs along the outside of the room. We stand in the far corner, facing into the noise of the traffic below.
I say, “Baby, how well did you know Alex Yeager?”
89
Nicolette
As if it’s nothing, as if it’s just something to say between bites of burger, Jack says, “Is Alex-the-creep-from-Ann-Arbor Alex Yeager?”
I know how to do, Yikes, busted! I do. I’m the reigning princess of the cute confession. If cute confession was classified as an official talent, I’d be Miss Ohio Teen USA.
But I don’t know how to do this.
“How . . . ?”
“Your friend Olivia. She thought I might be him in Cotter’s Mill, when I was looking for you.” He pauses, waiting for something I don’t give him. “And there was the car. There was a red Camaro at the end of your driveway.”
I start to cry, which is a key element of cute confession, but it’s completely real. Real and unstoppable.
Plus, I have a headache. I don’t even get headaches. But this is like an ax hacking off the top of my head.
“Don’t be mad at me.”
“Is there some reason I’d be mad at you?” It’s like he’s torturing me, and I haven’t even told him the things he should be torturing me with yet.
“You know there is, or you wouldn’t be asking! You know the answer.” Shouting makes my head ache more. It’s like the mother of being hungover.
“I suspect the answer.”
“Jack, come on. Please.”
He closes his eyes. “I’m going to sit here in complete control while you tell me if I shot your boyfriend.”
“You’re my boyfriend! Is it that he touched me first?”
“Not even close.”
“Please, please, please, let’s not go there. You don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to say it.” At which point, it occurs to me I could have just answered the first question with, Alex who? Huh? and this wouldn’t be happening. I’d still be a terrible person. I’d be lying through my teeth. But at least he wouldn’t know.
I say, “You first. Tell me something terrible about yourself. The absolute worst thing.”
“Apart from shooting someone?”
“That was kill or be killed. It doesn’t count. Some other worst thing.”
“You know the worst thing after that. It’s what I did to you when I was J and you were Cat—and what I thought about doing.”
Jack is so earnest, like the face on an earnest vocabulary flash card.
Earnest with a dark side.
Human.
“Worse than that.”
His jaw moves around like he’s trying to decide whether to open it or not. “I liked holding that gun, in the kitchen. I knew what I was doing was stupid shit, but I felt like God.”
I’m not confessing to a guy whose worst thing is something he felt. “Oh no, a boy who likes guns. I heard there’s a club with, like, forty million of you in it. Come on, something you’re ashamed of.”
Jack looks like he wants to throw me but not catch me. Not the look a girl wants to inspire.
“Besides what happened to my father? Isn’t that enough?”
“Stop yelling.”
Jack retakes control of himself. I’m pretty sure he can change his pulse, heart rate, and body temp at will like anc
ient yogis.
Oh God, I really didn’t want to make him go there.
I say, “Fine, I’ll tell you. I went to a lot of parties last summer. U of M college parties. I made out a lot, are you happy?” I’m halfway between you-asked-for-it and wanting to jump off the balcony. “I was all, ‘Eff you, Connor, you think you can sleep your way through the dance team and I won’t notice? I’m with college guys, ha!’ I was fifteen.”
“Right, and now you’re sixteen. I don’t care if you did every guy in Sigma Nu—”
Why would he say something like that? I halfway want to tell him just because it’ll make his stomach hurt.
Jack says, “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. Nick? Sorry.”
“Like you never went to parties or drank or hooked up?”
“I’m sorry. I never should have said that. But, Nicolette: Alex Yeager. Was Alex Yeager your boyfriend? It’s a yes-no question.”
“He was not my boyfriend! He was cheating with me.” It just falls out of my mouth when I didn’t mean it to. “He had this other girlfriend. Only he says they broke up. Except they didn’t. Then he says he loves me. Only he didn’t. And I totally didn’t love him—I was getting back at Connor. I was being an idiot. I was having an adventure.”
Jack is over being sorry.
You can see it in his face. In the way he tilts his head, waiting for me to tell him the rest. And it’s not that I don’t want to tell him. It’s that I want to tell him and for him to still like me.
What are the odds?
Jack won’t even look at me. “Get to the part with Connie.”
“Stop judging me. I completely blame myself for that, I do. If I’d broken up with him when I figured out there was this other girl. Or if I’d figured out that the reason he wanted us to be a big secret was so not because I was so underage. If I’d done one thing differently . . .”
My ears are ringing so much, it feels like my head is going to shatter like a wineglass when a show-offy soprano belts a high note.
“This isn’t recounting your life to Saint Peter to get into heaven,” Jack says. “I hunted you down. My good-guy credentials were canceled, ask a cop.”
“Fine. So he tells me he broke up with her, but she’s, like, a stalker. I can sort of tell he’s a creep, but he keeps saying he loves me. And he’s in college. And he comes out for the weekend sometimes. We go to the drive-in in Kerwin.”
Jack looks up. “Esteban Mendes let you go to the movies with this twenty-one-year-old sleaze son of a mob boss? Try again.”
“I’m not making this up! I didn’t tell Steve! Are you kidding me? I mean, this guy drives his Camaro out from Michigan to go on a date. It’s not like I wanted him in jail for statutory rape. Which is what Steve would have done to him. He would have skinned him and hung his head over the fireplace.”
“But I graciously did it for him.”
“Please, that wasn’t supposed to happen!”
Jack is stone-faced.
“If you don’t even believe me, can I stop? Even though this is no end of fun.”
“No.”
It’s the no you don’t want to poke with a stick. That no.
“Fine. So life is going along fine. Alex supposedly loves me. Everybody still thinks I’m all that. Then his girlfriend shows up.”
“Connie Marino just happened to be taking a walk across your property?”
“I told you, she was a stalker. Who follows her boyfriend to the next state? You figure out he’s a dog, and you dump him. But she follows him! She shows up. She’s parked down the street from my house. And God, Jack, the minute I saw her, she was so pretty and in love with him, plus she wanted to make him hurt as bad as he hurt her. Which I totally get. Only she thought it was my fault. My fault! She won’t stop screaming at me.”
Jack is looking at me like I’m a piece of stinky cheese.
“Jack! She was going to tell everyone I was a slut. Everyone was going to believe her. She was going to tell my dad and everyone. I felt bad for her. I didn’t even want to look at Alex again. I wanted her to get in her car and take him back to Michigan and shut up. I didn’t want her dead, I just wanted her to be quiet.
“So I’m telling him to make her be quiet. Steve’s going to hear. I’m going, ‘Make her shut up!’ and Alex is going, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ and I’m going, ‘You’re freaking Alex Yeager. Think of something!’ ”
Jack says, “Shit, no.”
“Oh God, Jack. There’s so much screaming. I run into the trees to make him stop, but he’s waving his knife at me. He’s covered in blood, like, he’s dripping! Then he’s on the phone to some guy to come help him, and he tells me to go inside and stay in my room and don’t come out and don’t say anything to Steve or anybody or I’m next. I’m next! And she’s dead.”
Jack’s head is in his hands. He says, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”
“I’m on the edge of the woods yelling, ‘Do something! Make her shut up!’ at Alex freaking Yeager—how is it not my fault?”
90
Jack
When she pulls herself together, she says, “I can’t see you. You understand that, right?”
“We could at least communicate, couldn’t we?”
“I was in love with you when you were there to kill me.”
She was in love with me? I start to say her name, but she says, “Don’t you want your life back? Talk about something else.”
How do you talk about something else? We go inside and sit in two upholstered chairs facing the window, me stealing glances at her, her not looking back.
I say, “Mendes wants my head, right?”
“Of course he does. But not everyone’s dad kills people, all right? Just don’t show up at my house.”
“I won’t. I’m sorry.”
She brushes against me as she heads for the door, her skin against my skin. I still want her. Maybe she’s not a candidate for sainthood, but what did she do that was anywhere close to what I did? I want to buy that plantation on an island somewhere and take her there.
She says, “It’s going to be fine. You’ll see.”
And then she’s gone.
Jack Says
So here I am in college, spring semester. My life is supposed to be rolling along down the same path as usual, with a minor interruption between the end of high school and now.
I spent fall semester doing a gap thing, built an orphanage in Oaxaca, learned carpentry, went to bed exhausted, and not with anybody. The girls were great, very dedicated, very cute. But they weren’t Nicolette.
I did months of heavy labor. I told my mom I was exhausted and she wrote back, Be grateful you’re not in prison. Stop complaining and plaster some walls.
I wasn’t complaining, it was a statement of fact. Not only am I grateful I’m not in jail, I’m grateful for all the other things I deserved but I got out of.
Agent Birdwell kept saying, “We have our eye on you,” as if there were a big, disembodied eye that the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation could program to follow me around while I ate refried beans in Oaxaca and beam pictures of my fork scraping across my plate back to headquarters.
But I’m not even on any kind of probation, thanks to Nicolette lying like a rug on my behalf.
My mom keeps dabbing her eyes and saying, “I don’t understand,” about everything she doesn’t want to understand.
“It’s not just Don who grew up in that house,” I say.
She says, “I don’t care if you’re eighteen. You’re on a six-inch leash.”
“One more Manx requiring careful supervision or who knows what he’ll pull.”
“Jackson, stop!” She shakes her head, shakes herself (temporarily) out of mourning the loss of her delusional take on Don, looking more furious than I’ve seen her for a while—even at me. “You got exploited because of your last name. Assumptions were made. . . . But listen up.” She’s right in my face. There’s no way to avoid listening up. “You were trying
to save me, and Don, and yourself, and this poor little girl. Are you hearing this, Jack? I spent seventeen years with Art, and you’re not like him.”
I wish I believed her.
“I have your future in an iron grip,” she says. This I believe. “Don’t try to throw it out again.”
Thus the heavy labor to pay for my sins. But there’s no way to make up for what I did to Nicolette. Stuck in my head forever is the image of her giving me that heartbroken last look.
Then Esteban Mendes, who had his arm around her, said, “You come near her, you’re dead. You call her, dead. You text, you get a sock puppet to send her a text—dead.”
He said this within the hearing of the police, his lawyer, Nicolette’s lawyer, my lawyer, and my mom. They kept looking at the little pink case he was carrying, the one holding Nicolette’s dog, Gertie, and they didn’t take him seriously. As for me, by the third time the man got to the word dead, I believed him.
Don isn’t even in much trouble—for him. He’ll be in Witness Protection prison before being released into the world someday with a new identity. Years from now, my mom and I can meet up with him at a secure, secret location. My mom will go. I won’t.
College is weird but good. I live in the Mercer freshman dorm with a roommate and a resident advisor named Bonnie we’re supposed to take our troubles to. My roommate paints his face for basketball games and puts a sock over the doorknob when his girlfriend is there. As far as I can tell, they go at it with face paint on.
I walked on to the crew team. The coach was pissed I hadn’t shown up in the fall, but he wasn’t going to turn me away. I train harder than anyone. I’m still programmed to go for the fastest time, the highest A, the most outstanding honors.
I might have to get an apartment pretty soon, though, before I bang my head against the dorm room wall so hard, I end up staring down the guys in the next room over and then having to go work through my aggression with Bonnie the RA.
I don’t hold out much hope that I’m getting Nicolette back. She got her real life back, and I was never in it. I keep trying to think of ways to show her I’m a different guy. That now I’m the guy who, when his brother tries to dupe him into killing her, says, Are you fucking insane? and calls the FBI—not the guy the police want to sic a big, hovering eye on.
How to Disappear Page 24