by Ian Ballard
But I'm sure Johnny Utah here has it all under control—and speaking of, Bryce has popped up again in the doorway. He's holding a black gun and cleaning something on the barrel with what looks like a miniature toothbrush. I get the feeling there's some weird ulterior motive behind this display. Like he thinks cleaning a firearm will impress me.
“So the van is all set up,” he says. “It'll be parked a block away and stocked with a couple of agents keeping an eye on everything twenty-four seven. Meanwhile, Ronette and I will be with you all the time. We're not going to let you out of our sight.”
“So you're gonna go to class with me and everything?” I ask.
“Yep, we're theater majors now. The Bureau set it all up and the university was super cooperative. They even gave us parts in that play you're in.”
“Really?” I ask.
“Bryce Brantley starring in Caucasian Chalk Outline.”
“Caucasian Chalk Circle,” I correct him. “What part did they give you?”
“Junkyard attendant. Three lines.” he says. “Gonna do a bang-up job, too.”
There's movement behind us. “What are you gonna bang, Bryce?” asks Ronette, who's suddenly standing right behind him.
She flashes Bryce a smile, then steps past him into my room. She's got something glittery in her hand. “See this, Nicole,” she says in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Yeah?” I say.
“What I have here is a silent-alarm bracelet.” She holds it out. It's silver and has little oval pearls inlaid along its length. “The pearl in the middle is a button. If you hold it down for more than six seconds, it triggers an alarm that me, Bryce, the agents in the van, and the Boulder police will instantly hear. Try it on.”
I take it from her and fasten the clasp around my wrist.
Ronette continues. “If you push that button, way more help than you could possibly need will arrive in less than five minutes. Of course, it's very unlikely you'll ever need it, but it should at least give you some peace of mind.”
I extend my arm and look it over. Not bad, though it looks more like something a person from my mom's generation—or a passenger on the Titanic—would wear.
“Keep it on all the time. Never take it off,” she stresses.
“Even in the shower?” I ask.
“Yeah,” says Ronette. “It's designed to be waterproof.”
14
Mexico
The dead woman beyond the lip of the dune is Lisa. My Lisa. The only one there will ever be. I’m lying beside her in the sand, holding her in an awkward, frozen embrace.
My mind grapples with this. Thoughts spinning like the tires of a high-centered car.
I'm alone with the cold alabaster fact. The fact of her not being in the world. The fact of her being here in my arms in the desert of Juárez.
I close my eyes.
It was eleven year ago. Eleven years since I kissed her and she got into the white Malibu and drove away. The memories should be sun blanched or eroded with mildew by now. But they seem more vivid than things that just happened yesterday. How could they not? Hardly a day's gone by when I haven’t thought of her.
Yet, it also seems long ago. A different life. Before this one and before the blank of my childhood. She was there on the dark shores of the firmament, waiting for me.
I guess everybody—everybody who’s lucky—has one. One that stands alone when everything’s said and done. And she was mine.
One night I heard a song in a diner, just after she left me. There was a line that said If I could start again, a million miles away. Sitting there, eating a slice of key lime pie, I imagined for a moment that I’d had many lives. Imagined that I could glimpse them all at once from far away in space, a dozen Earths lining up next to one another, orbiting the same sun.
And then I imagined that these Earths began to move. And I saw myself starting a dozen separate lives. But just one of them was the one with her. And it was just beginning, my time with her still ahead, everything still possible. A version of me would live there—a doe-eyed baby Jake waiting to grow up and one day touch her.
But after our lips meet, but before I suffered the great loss a second time, I could jump to another Earth and become another me, and never know about that man one world removed whose fate it was to love and lose her. And when those planets finished their full cycle around the sun, it would all reset and begin again.
I imagine this string of worlds again, as I lay here with her in the sand. I picture that one where I'll be with her and just for a second, I almost smile. But now I watch them all slowly merge, all of them vanishing, except just one. This one now. And I know these are just the pranks of a desperate mind that wants so badly to save itself from despair.
My time with her was a thing that happened once and can never happen again.
But there had been a time when it all still lay ahead. It was the summer after my first year of law school. I interned at the DA’s office in Baltimore. Lisa got hired as an office assistant after I’d been there for about a month. An attorney named Derrick came by my office and introduced her. “This is Lisa,” he said. It was her first day, he said. “She makes copies, scans, and e-files.”
She stood there biting her upper lip. It curved like a bird in flight. The stripes on her shirt were so vivid. I can still see them. Yellow, green, and red. Terrycloth. The little fibers like taste buds on a tongue. One lithe wrist was wreathed with a yellow band, the kind people wear to show their support for dolphins or kids with leukemia. She had a way of making everything that touched her, even that little plastic band, inexplicably beautiful. She tucked the toe of one ballerina-like shoe beneath the instep of the other. A golden curl rested on her shoulder. She had a very Helen of Troy thing going.
It felt like I'd been clobbered with a crowbar in the face. I scratched a place on my nose that didn’t itch. Her presence made breathing seem so complicated.
It was imperative to say something witty and professional that would mask my state of inner turmoil and start the infinitely delicate process of wooing her. I undertook the word hello, but what came out was the squeak of a panicked mouse.
When the door closed, I sat listening to my pounding heart. I'd set my foot down firmly on a cobra. And as I well knew, there was no escape, or antidote, or hope. The lovely venom was already at work and within a month I was utterly and desperately in love with her.
One Friday afternoon at five o’clock, fate placed us alone in an elevator going down. I was always depressed Friday afternoons since it meant I wouldn’t see her until Monday. Sixty-six some odd hours, if you were counting. But her sudden nearness in the enclosed space incited my heart’s ludicrous and now familiar palpitations.
It was casual day and she looked at me and said, “I like your jeans.”
I stammered and said, “I like yours too.”
But, unfortunately, she was wearing a skirt. She smiled awkwardly and stepped off the elevator. The doors closed and I continued my descent to the lowest level of the parking structure.
Of course, I didn't really let myself believe that it could really happen. She'd probably sooner develop feelings for a baked potato than for my scarred and mangled mug. And, of course, there was a boyfriend in the wings. Inevitably, a villain. A man I despised more than anything and would have given anything to be.
But then one day, without pretext really, she told me she wasn’t with him anymore. We exchanged numbers and talked on the phone until late one night. Things were hinted at.
A few days later, by some inconceivable chain of events, she was in my bed, as if the dream world had invaded and overtaken the real one. At one point during our first night together, she whispered to me not to wear a condom. And during the two seconds that I considered the issue, I saw no good reason why I should. Because, come to think of it, it wouldn’t really be so bad to have a child with her. And come to think of it, wasn't a child with her what I wanted more than anything in the world?
And so, for several
weeks we carried on like that, as unprotected as a tightrope walker cavorting about without a net.
Then one morning I said, “If we are doing this, it must mean something. It must mean we want to be with each other.” That last part was a question.
She said nothing.
Then I said, “I want to be with you.”
And she said, “I think you’re the most amazing person I’ve ever met.” Maybe she meant that. Maybe she didn’t. Either way, she was sort of side-stepping the issue.
The most crucial things are always ambiguous. She either loved me or she didn’t, but there was no way of ever knowing. Even alive, the truth was hermetically sealed up in her skull, behind her inscrutable eyes, beneath her inscrutable words. There was always the unbridgeable gap between minds that neither love nor intimacy could ever overleap. And even if, for a moment or two, we'd cleared that gap, you could never prove it.
Before anything happened between us, during those first two months of lovesick simmering at the internship, I’d written her a poem. The only poem I’ve ever written. The only time I’ve ever felt the slightest urge to write a poem. I hadn’t planned to give it to her. But that night I felt compelled to, the way lemmings throw themselves off cliffs.
On what turned out to be our last night together, during a brief coital intermission, when we were whispering sweet nothings to each other, baring our souls and whatnot, I got the poem and read it to her. After I was done, she looked at me with lost, forlorn eyes, as if searching for something in my face. Something she didn't quite know how to recognize.
Then she crawled over to me and held out her wrists. She was showing me her scars. Presenting them to me. Like a ceremony. Of course, I'd noticed them—you couldn't miss them when she wore short sleeves—but I'd never directly asked what happened.
She told me she did it in high school. She'd done it three or four times, and once she almost didn't make it.
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
She looked down. I think there were tears shimmering in her eyes. “Not yet,” she whispered. “I’m not ready.”
“That's fine,” I said.
For a while she said nothing. Then she looked up at me. “I'm kind of jealous of you, Jake.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your brain—it let you forget.” She gave a little laugh. “Mine always makes me remember.”
I held her in my arms, just like I'm holding her now, and I told her everything would be okay.
We spent most of the next day together in bed. That afternoon, I gave her a peck on the lips in the driveway as she was leaving my place. I thought I was kissing her goodnight on a Sunday evening, but it was good-bye forever. She waved and drove off in the white Malibu.
Late that night she called me and said simply “I can’t see you anymore.” Her voice, empty and distant. There was some guy in the background. She hung up and that was that. She never showed up at work again and supposedly moved out of town. I was never clear on the details. It had something to do with the ex-boyfriend and maybe on a deeper level, with her being messed up in the head.
It could have been that she left because she just hadn’t liked me enough. Maybe she couldn’t envision herself growing old with me, or she found my heart and soul somehow insufficient. Or maybe I hadn’t made her come the way she needed to on some animal level. Or I could have just been a rebound. Or my burned-off ear could have secretly made her sick. There are a hundred possibilities. Not sure which is the worst.
What I felt back then is preserved inside me, just as it was the day she left. Forever. It became the template of what love is—defining, framing, and perhaps making impossible all subsequent loves.
There would never be truth, only interpretations.
That I loved her was the only real thing.
That it was my fate to lose her and to one day find her again, murdered in the Mexican sand—maybe that is the only real thing.
But really, it's neither.
It's her absence that's the only real thing.
*
A police vehicle comes and picks up Lisa's body.
Silva and I drive back through the desert. Slower than before. The city's still far away. The lights, a twinkling smear in my wet, half-closed eyes.
Silva covered for me with Sandoval. He told the officer that the case just meant a lot to me and that I was upset at having so narrowly missed the chance to bag the killer. Sandoval will be on thin ice as a result of his late arrival, so hopefully, spreading rumors about my meltdown will be the farthest thing from his mind.
Clouds are covering up the moon and the desert seems much darker now. The sand's a dim charcoal hue and all the details are lost. For a long time neither of us speaks and there's only the sound of the engine and the tires treading across the terrain.
Finally, Silva turns to me. “Who was she, Jake?”
His question interrupts my thoughts and I look over at him. “What?”
“The woman,” he says, his eyes studying my dejected face. “You knew her—didn't you?”
I look away from him, out the window. “Yeah. We were close once. I hadn't seen her in a long time.”
Silva shakes his head to himself, as if refusing to believe it. A long sigh empties the air from his lungs. “Jesus, what the fuck is going on here?” The words are almost a whisper.
I look at him. “I don't know what's going on,” I say. “And I don’t know if I want to.”
“Before, when you mentioned the names in that book of yours, the ledger, I didn't really know what to make of that, but now . . . Jesus, Jake. Is it possible that—”
I cut him off. “Look Silva, this has to stay absolutely between us. That I knew the girl. I don't know what the fuck is going on or what this means, but no one else can know. Got it?”
“That goes without saying Jake—”
“I've got to sort all this out. Figure out where it leaves me as far as the case goes.”
“What do you mean?” He sounds concerned.
“What do you think I mean? An agent can't stay on a case if the subject of the investigation is someone he's had a relationship with. It's a conflict and the second I mention it to anyone—what happened tonight—they're going to ship me back to the US without batting an eye.”
Silva thinks for a moment. “Well, what do you want to do, Jake? Do you even want to stick with the case after this?”
The look on my face answers his question. Of course I want to stay on the fucking case.
Silva clears his throat. “If you don’t report it, would there be any way for the Bureau to find out?”
“It was eleven years ago, in a different state. I doubt they'd ever be able to connect her to me.”
A long pensive silence. I can see Silva's mulling it carefully over. “So don't tell them.” Then he lights a cigarette and cracks the window.
“I'm not sure if it's that simple, Silva.”
“It is, Jake,” he says. “Whatever your reasons are for wanting to stay on, that's great and I support you. It's obvious it's the right thing to do. But the far more important issue, from my perspective, is that there's no fucking way you're leaving me in the middle of this one.”
15
Austin
Courtney had spent the last three or four hours reading for her modern world lit class. The Spider House coffee shop on Guadalupe Street. was her favorite place to study. Her brain was in high gear after two nonfat lattes and a blueberry scone.
“The Master and Margarita is an awesome book,” said a man’s voice to Courtney’s left.
She looked up. She was skeptical at first—probably some ex-con creeper was her first thought—but she relaxed once she saw how cute the guy was. He was wearing a striped turtleneck, horn rimmed glasses, and a Johnny-Depp-Pirates-of-the-Caribbean goatee.
She smiled.
When she saw he was reading a criminal procedure textbook, her smile broadened. Law Student. “Yeah, I’m really, really enjoying it,” she said.
<
br /> “I love the first scene where the devil starts up the conversation with the guy at the train station,” he said. He took a sip of his yerba mate and underlined a passage with a pink highlighter.
“It’s so freaky when the dude gets decapitated by the train!”
“I know, right? And the way the devil hinted it was going to happen ahead of time and there was nothing he could do about it.”
“This is already on my list of top ten favorite books.”
He took another, almost indulgent, sip. “That’s surprising.”
Courtney studied him, trying to place the context of the comment. “What’s surprising?”
“That you’ve read ten books,” he said, his face deadly serious.
She scowled, then cracked up when she realized it was a joke. “So I take it you’re a law school student,” she said gesturing at his book.
“Yeah, I’m a second year.”
“Do you know Doug Dimpsel?” she asked.
“Yeah, I know Doug real well. We were in property class and moot court together. Super-bright guy.”
“Are you sure we’re talking about the same Doug?” Courtney laughed. “He was friends with my older brother in high school. I always thought he was a total douche.”
“I think that’s just an act,” he said, adjusting his glasses. “He likes to keep his intellect on the DL.”
“He does a good job of it.”
At this point, the turtleneck stood up—perhaps a bit abruptly—and walked over to Courtney’s table. He was tall with broad shoulders. Apparently law school hadn’t forced him to skip any workouts. “I’m Jeff, by the way,” he said, presenting her with his hand.
“Courtney.” She smiled. “And what’s your last name?”
Jeff yawned. “Misner,” he said.