I start eating again. It gives me a place to look and an action to complete while I try to think of how to explain my game plan. Despite the tension in our bodies, in the air, we’ve been finding the food both necessary and enjoyable. Melody returns to her plate after watching me for a minute, and over a five-minute period we each consume half of our meals.
She finally breaks the silence, hits me with an off-the-wall question, one for which I am ill-prepared.
“Where do you rank in your family?”
I take another bite, wish I had a positive answer. Here the reality can’t be avoided. “Not high.”
“Why?”
I lick my teeth. “The fact that I indirectly turned my father in to the cops embarrassed my family greatly.”
She frowns. “How sad.”
“You can make fun, but it turned into a real mess. We’ve been trying to clean it up for years. The truth is the only way I could earn back the trust and honor of my family, of my peers, was to correct the… mistake.”
She squints a little and taps the bottom of her wineglass. “Correct it how?”
“In order for me to regain my honor, I needed to kill you and your parents.” We stare at each other. “Most kids are worried about getting their driver’s license at sixteen; I was worried about rubbing out three people.”
Melody slowly reaches for her knife, grips it like a hammer. “You killed my parents?”
“No… but I tried.” It’s official: I’ve lost any ability to deceive her. And as my honesty enwraps her, it loosens her fingers from the knife. “I was supposed to do the killings, but I didn’t have the stones. I had your folks in my sight, but I could’ve never pulled the trigger.”
She exhales so hard and long that it flows over my face. Her next question is predictable, would have been mine as well. “So who did?”
“My older cousin. He was with me for backup—and sort of a witness, to tell everyone back home. He could see how incapable I was, just… pushed me out of the way and snapped off the bullets that killed your parents. Then he took me back to the car and beat the crap out of me.” I point to the mark on my temple.
“Why’d he do that?”
“Because I failed. I failed my family once again. It was like there was no way to honor them.”
In comes a brief gap in the conversation that Melody ends with a probable deduction, the very reason—indirect as it is—that I am running toward her. “Except… by killing me.”
We’re stuck looking at each other, which I eventually break by nodding. “I kept going to wherever you’d moved and… waited.” I lean in. “I would have never done it. Never. I mean, sure, I used to rough guys up at home when it was necessary. It’s the way things are handled in our business, but please believe me: I could never—will never—hurt you.”
Who knows why, but this particular iteration of my promise of safety seems to stick; she visibly relaxes: Her fingers bend at the knuckles, shoulders droop, a sigh escapes.
“What did you tell your family every time you came back empty-handed?”
“That I couldn’t find you.”
“But… what made you keep coming back? Why didn’t you just say you had no idea where I was in the first place unless you really had some intention of killing me?”
I lean even farther forward, as close as I can get to her without getting up and moving to her side of the table. I slowly move my hand toward hers, curve my fingers around the palm of her hand; she makes no attempt to move it away. I gently tighten my grip, and she squeezes back, closes her eyes a little as though a drug is just starting to kick in. I hope she can’t feel my hand trembling.
Then I say, “To make sure you were okay, Melody.”
She opens her eyes, but they look sleepy. “I was never okay, Jonathan.”
I grasp her hand a little tighter. “You are now.”
She breathes slow and full and nods a little. As she analyzes my words, our situation, the nodding gets slower and slower until it stops.
Then, like she’s thinking out loud: “But now you’re here. No longer hiding.” She drags and slurs this word like the little bit of wine she’s consumed has suddenly kicked in: “Why?”
I hate to do it, but I tighten my grip on her hand; the implied affection all but vanishes.
“Because they finally found you.”
She looks down. “Your family?”
“Someone within the organization. Let’s just say the urgency’s changed, and someone had to take you out. I volunteered.” She looks at her hand in mine like she wonders how it got there, how to pull it back.
So I let it go.
“You’re safer with me than the feds, Melody.”
She pinches her bottom lip, studies me for a reaction, for a sign that my aim is true.
“My family didn’t have to try hard to find you,” I say. “The information was pretty easily handed over.”
“What do you mean? By who?”
I turn away; I know I can’t tell her. If she equates her lack of safety to the hole in security at Justice—a wholly valid notion, mind you—she might think one last run back to the Marshals Service would be worth attempting, that she might be able to correct the problem by informing Justice of their leak, that she might really be safe if the leak were fixed. But an even greater consequence exists: If I lose Gardner, I lose her. I lose it all.
“Just trust me that the information is and always will be completely accurate. And if you can try to believe it’s possible for a good guy to be in organized crime, you must also believe that it’s possible for a bad guy to be in the Justice Department, so the converse is true.”
She turns and stares out the front window and the sun hits her eyes directly, tightens her pupils and exposes a layer of color in her irises I had not yet been given the pleasure of noticing. “Actually, it’s not a converse, or an inverse, or a contrapositive, or any other geometric derivative. Your statement was just a mess of attempted logic. But I get the point.”
I laugh, having not the slightest idea what she’s talking about. I love her intelligence and understanding of things beyond my reach, her ability to see things invisible to me, her talent for not just stepping around me, but dancing.
I can’t pull my eyes from hers. I get distracted by her knowledge of math and ask her what is was like to be a teacher—a question serving little value at this point in our time together, but nothing could have prevented it. I find myself wanting to learn whatever I can about her, the details I could never acquire from afar.
The delay in her answering is long enough that I assumed she either didn’t hear me or was simply ignoring me, but finally the answer comes, her eyes still fixed on whatever is beyond the window, like a sick child watching other kids play. She tells me she requested that the feds get her any job that dealt with math, that the discipline had become an obsession for her as a child, that with all of the moving and changing of locations and names, as all of the uncertainty unfolded year after year, there was one thing she could count on as an absolute truth: math. I’ve stopped putting my fork to my food, stopped eating, stopped being aware of anything but the woman before me. I listen to every word, sink down in depression like quicksand.
She has me forgetting who I am, where I am.
Melody tells me how she used math as a protective device, that when things were scary and tentative, she would solve increasingly difficult equations—find the proverbial answer—and know she could be certain of something. Her introspection is honest and accurate, but she does not appear to understand the dark, final destination to which her insecurity has taken her. She tells me how on her own she learned it all, that while her classmates in algebra struggled she’d go home and finish off books on calculus, that she’d self-taught herself differential equations and was about to embark on the next level of advanced coursework. But even I, rough hood that I am, can see she will eventually run out of material, that eventually there will be no next class, that she will never find the ultimate truth
by way of mathematics.
And then my own final destination is lit like a concert hall, all lights aimed at me. She is with me for one reason only: I can give her the ultimate truth of her life.
I take a few bites of my risotto, which has cooled and coagulated and lost its intensity. Then, like she’s checking to make sure she got the better deal, Melody asks, “Why am I safer with you?”
I gulp down the risotto and answer, “My family will kill you if they find you alone. My family will not kill you if they find you with me. And if you’re with a fed or anyone else?” I shrug.
“But why? Why do they want me dead? You know how many times I sat in my bedroom and imagined that all my running was for nothing, that you guys had forgotten who I even was? I mean, what damage could I possibly do to your family? The government lost all the cases that involved my parents’ testimony.”
I take a drink of wine. “Yes, but therein lies the problem. Your parents testified—not you. It’s a long story, but there’s a big storm brewing, and—I don’t mean this to sound casual—my family doesn’t want any loose ends. Your testimony could end up being useful, even critical. It’s just easier if you’re gone.”
She closes her eyes and drops her head. “Just like that, huh?”
I put my fork on my plate and take her hand again, but this time it’s limp and cold like the palm of the corpse I’m trying to prevent her from becoming.
“I will protect you, Melody. Trust me.”
She looks up, glances in my general direction like I’m the one invisible thing she can’t see. And as she glares right through me, I realize I’ve become one of them; I just made her the same promise the feds have been making her whole life, and I’m no more certain I can keep it than they were. And Melody’s too experienced to assume otherwise.
We finish our meal with a pair of espressos, sit in a silence that does not feel awkward, a quiet space more common to couples who have lived a full life together, where just being next to each other is its own form of companionship.
And as I predicted, ’Tone never brings us a check, just stops by to see if we need anything else and wishes us well in our day. It shames me.
As I start playing with the key to the Audi, Melody asks, “What’re you planning to do with me once we get to New York?”
“I, uh… I want to take you back to my family and introduce you to them.”
She flops back in her chair, waits for me to laugh at my own joke. “You’re kidding, right? This is your plan?”
“Hear me out, okay?”
“I might as well jam this knife in my gut right now.”
“Hear me out.”
“Know what might be less painful? Tie me to the bumper of your car and drag me around the beltway.”
“Melody, just wa—”
“Oh, better, can you do that thing where you wrap the wire around my neck and strangulate me?”
“A garrote. And no, no one is—”
“This trip is a death sentence!”
I wave my hands in front of her. “Melody! Nobody is killing anybody, okay? Like I’ve explained, if you are with me, you’re safe.”
She wipes her eyes, then her entire face. “Let’s hear this brilliant scheme.”
I clear my throat like I’m preparing to step up to the microphone for a presentation. “I’m going to show my family what a nice woman you are”—Melody smirks, wipes her nose—“how you’re no threat to them, how you’re a person.”
“I’m no threat to them if I’m a dead person.”
“I’m going to show them you are not some file of incriminating evidence they’re trying to erase or a rat spilling his guts to the cops, but a real human being with feelings and emotions and something worth—”
“Are you stupid?”
“What?”
“Take drugs or something?”
“Of course not.”
“Suffer from any mental disease or deficiency?”
Debatable.
“Because,” she says, “I can’t figure out what could possibly be running through your mind, what might make you think I stand the slightest chance of survival if you bring me to your home. It’s like introducing a deer to the patrons of a hunting lodge.”
I stand, motion for her to get up as well. I offer my hand to help her out of her chair. She stares at it, but eventually takes it. We lumber to the front of the restaurant and exit, meander down the nylon green walkway and pause when we arrive at the end. In the bright sunshine, we inhale the lingering dust of ash and stone, gaze at a thirty-foot-high man-made hill of gray and silver rock lining the other side of the road. Trucks drive by and gravel spills to the road as they pass over potholes.
“I’ll tell you what,” I say. “I left my keys on the table in the restaurant. I’m gonna go back in and get them. If you think you’ll be safer with the feds than with me, feel free to leave. If you think you’ll be safer with me—and I hope you will—then be here when I come back out.”
I look at her, hoping she does not answer me on the spot—either way. I really want her to consider it, be part of the plan for real, to make a commitment. She studies me for a second, just nods. I turn and walk back toward the restaurant.
Of course, I did not forget my keys, fabricated the entire excuse to give her a minute to consider the dump of information under which she’s now buried, a pile more weighty than those stones across the street.
’Tone spots me and I wave him over. We share more Italian, loses me near the end so I cut him off, tell him how outstanding the meal and service was, how my father wishes them all well. A quick handshake/hug combo and he walks back into the kitchen. After he’s completely out of sight, I reach into my pocket and pull out my wad of bills and toss two hundred in twenties on the table.
And when I return to the front—hesitate while I take a breath and hold it—and exit the restaurant a final time, Melody is waiting for me with a smile. Actually, I think her mouth is turned up from extreme squinting, the harsh sun blasting her face. Either way.
“Thank you,” I say.
As we stroll to my car, I put my hand on the small of her back and I’m almost certain she’s letting some of her weight fall against my palm. I notice her stealing short glances of me again, like when we were riding up the highway from Cape Charles. I find myself trying to hold her glances, to see the look in her eye and understand the way she’s starting to view me. Something has changed within her and I want to figure out what it is, what produced it, how to sustain it. When I finally catch her eye, she slows her pace a little and grins at me, seems like she has something to say, but quickly turns and drops her smile as she looks at the Audi.
I follow the path of her eyes and spot two teenage boys with their backs to us, staring and pointing inside my car. And laughing.
We stop moving. I regretfully pull my hand from Melody’s back, yank up my sleeves, and whisper, “Stay here.”
“Do it again,” I hear one of the kids say.
As I quietly approach them, one of them leans over the door and spits all over the upholstery on the passenger side. I wait for another truck full of rock to roll down the street, use it to mask the sound of the broken pavement and gravel under my feet. I sneak up behind them, say, “What do you little fu”—I glimpse Melody and she’s looking down, her interest and hope in me long vanished—“funny guys think you’re doing?”
Both kids try to bolt, but I grab the slower one as he passes, my fist full of hair and collar. His knees buckle like he’s a marionette and I’m annoyed by his weakness, that this bug is causing a disruption in all I’m trying to do, that I have to spend even a second swatting him away. The product of my emotions has become distilled, and the only essential element remains: rage.
I swing him around, shove his face inside my car, bend his body over so far he nearly falls in the cab. “Funny now? Still funny? C’mon, laugh. I wanna hear the laugh.”
His friend stops in mid-escape and returns, does nothing more than watch.
I pull back on the kid’s collar and wind up for a slam onto the frame of the car door, and as I do I shoot a look at Melody. I’m not sure I’ve ever so easily read disappointment in someone’s face.
She slowly shakes her head, shrugs, and says, “It’s just saliva.”
Her disapproval sucks the anger from me, hamstrings my ability to take these varmints out. I shove the kid to the ground and say, “Go home and hug your mother.”
“Yes, sir,” he mumbles, as his buddy helps him to his feet. They both look at me for further instructions.
“Run, you little sh—shysters.” Boy, am I longing for some profanity. I start my way back to Melody, turn my head out of her view, and whisper, “You’ve got three seconds, you little faccia di merda.”
They both depart so quickly that they slip and fall in the gravel, stumble into one another. As the kids run down the street, Melody and I analyze the car. They must have been at it for a while, because not only are there several gobs of spit on the seats, but some have already dried.
I groan under my breath. “Let me go back in the restaurant and see if I can get some paper towels,” I say.
Melody doesn’t respond. She stares at the seats but I can sense her eyes are out of focus, her thoughts elsewhere. I’ve lost her. The weak accrual of convincing and nominal amount of trust I might’ve secured throughout our meal have been crushed to rubble by disillusionment. I start toward the restaurant but keep my eyes on her with every step. She reaches in the car and pulls out the green sweater, checks it over, starts to put it on. I decelerate as she bunches it up at the collar and pulls it over her head, her arms up and her shirt pressed tight against her frame, the sun detailing the shape of her body as she slowly brings it down and covers and hides her body again. She turns away so that her back faces me, gently shifts her hips so that she’s leaning against the body of the car, and slips her hands in the pockets of her jeans.
As I reach the door of the restaurant, I stop. I look at her and want to correct every instance of how I’ve failed her, from twenty years ago to twenty seconds ago. I fantasize about moving up behind her, gently wrapping my arms around her belly, and whispering in her ear, “It’s all right. Everything’s gonna be all right.” And then she would close her eyes and push her head against my neck and then, for once, we’d both feel a brief wave of contentment, a peek of what it might be like to be at peace, to be safe.
The Exceptions Page 19