The Exceptions

by David Cristofano

  I lick my lips and quietly speak to her: “Felicia.”

  She does not turn, but her leafing slows. She shifts her feet a little and I can see her torso inflate as she takes a deep, slow breath and holds it. The only sound between us is her page-flipping.

  I say it again: “F-Felicia.”

  Keeping her back to me, this time she jumps a little, as though I’d caught her by surprise, as though it was my first word spoken. One of the papers from her stack drifts to the floor as she riffles through them at a slower pace. She does not turn, does not say a thing, does not try to pick up the fallen paper. I hear her release that deep breath as a second page falls to the floor; she doesn’t bother to pick that one up either. The pages rest on the tile like the first fallen leaves of autumn; they’re hard to ignore, signal the official start to the change of season.

  I say so softly it might only be audible to me, a whisper so faint I might have confused it for a thought: “Melody.”

  She stops ruffling through the pages and carefully places them on a small table in front of her, slowly turns her body around and faces me, puts her hands behind her as she rests back against the table, a single tear running down each cheek.

  “Oh…” she whispers. She says something else but I can’t make it out, only see her lips move in an attempt to form words, then slightly quiver just before she puts her hand to her mouth. She sighs and laughs at the same time while she studies me, a pair of fresh tears dropping from her eyes.

  I take a small step forward and offer my hand and say, “My name is Michael Martin.”

  She doesn’t budge, never shakes my hand. I can read her lips as she repeats my name to herself a few times, tries to affix it to the man before her. I drop my hand. She looks into my eyes like she’s trying to put me in a trance, or has somehow fallen into mine, finally says, “Nice to meet you, Michael.”

  “I was wondering if—”

  “Close the door,” she says.

  “I…”

  She brushes her bangs with her left hand and as her fingers cross her forehead, the diamonds in her wedding band sparkle and form an arc like a comet, leave a series of dots in my vision like spots from the sun.

  “Close the door, Michael.”

  Without turning away, I step back, reach behind me, and push the door shut.

  “Lock the door, Michael.”

  It takes me a second, but I eventually pull my eyes from her, find the lock and turn it.

  She walks to the couch, puts her arms behind the stack of books and slides them off. They go crashing to the floor, spill into an even spread like fallen dominoes. She sits down and stares at me.

  I feel like a little boy, don’t know what to say, can’t find the right place for my hands.

  Suddenly, she covers her face and bursts into tears.

  I walk over and kneel in front of her, rest my arms on the couch along each of her thighs and lightly hold her lower body. “You’re not in any harm,” I say. “You need to believe me. You’re safe.”

  She looks up and wipes her nose and eyes. “I don’t care.”

  “Everything you’ve built, all that you’ve worked for is safe, okay?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I will never let anything—”

  “I. Don’t. Care.” She brushes her bangs to the side again. “I love what I do. I love this place. I love all I’ve learned and all the students. But you know what this is? All of this? This is what killing time looks like. I’ve been killing time waiting for you.” Melody looks at me and touches my face like she’s not convinced I’m who she thinks I am, then throws her arms around my neck and pulls me in, holds me and shakes. I slip my hands around her frame.

  “But the risks,” I say. “You know the risks.”

  She whispers in my ear, “Every relationship has risks, Jonathan. Not a single one is safe.” She takes a deep breath and pulls back to look at me. “I practiced this moment a hundred times, the things I would say if I ever saw you again”—she laughs a little and more tears fall—“but I’m so unprepared, can’t think straight.”

  “I—”

  “I realized it too late,” she says, touching my face again, “but once I got settled out west I finally understood how I’d blown it, nearly crushed me when I realized what I’d done.” She swallows, runs her fingers through my hair and holds the back of my head. “You were my loophole.”

  I study her expression, her eyes wide and searching mine for an understanding. I try to remember what she once told me, the way she defines loophole.

  She can read my confusion, clarifies without my asking. “Do you remember? I never allowed myself to love anyone because I’d have to lie about who I was, could never be myself, and always feared having to one day leave that person without notice when I was pulled away by the feds. And if I chose to be honest and bring that person with me, I would’ve opened them up to all the danger of being on the run and in the line of fire, being with me. That would be the case for any man I would ever meet in my life.” She gulps hard, wipes her face, and says, “Except you.”

  I shake my head a little.

  “You,” she says, “knew who I was. You would always know the real me. And if anyone could handle the dangers of being on the run, it would be you. I blew it. Realized it all too late. The one man I ever truly loved also happened to be my loophole. By the time I understood, I’d already seen what you’d done on the news, what you’d surrendered to keep me alive and protected. I loved you all the more after that, was determined to be faithful. I waited and prayed you would come to me. I… waited.” Melody’s chin wrinkles and before she starts crying she pulls me in, says softly, “Never leave me again. Never, do you understand?”

  I reach around her body and run my hands up her back and pull her against me, try to hold her firmly enough to stop her trembling. She does not yet know how I longed for her every day, how I waited and prayed as well, but that our circumstances, our outlook on what could’ve ever come of us differed in one major way: I lost faith. Melody, with no hope and no sign that we might ever find each other, believed in something beyond my ability and comprehension, kept her eyes open to the light while I collapsed into the cold darkness.

  But now, as we share the same space, our bodies intertwined, I relinquish all power and control, allow them to be replaced with optimism and intimacy. I’m going to neither look back nor question what lies ahead. My hope exists in her grasp, in her command.

  Melody and I are not heroes, not victors by any means. We are two terribly damaged individuals, cripples suffering from the same disease, cured only by being in one another’s arms.

  We hold each other so tightly that neither of us can draw a breath.

  “Never,” I promise.

  And as with a flash from a camera, I am blurry-eyed and startled, realize Melody fulfilled my hope and prayer from so many years ago when I spirited her away from Cape Charles, that she would one day set herself free, that she would open her life to another person, that some man would get lost in her, look in her eyes, and hear not a single word she is saying, that he would pull her to his chest and lightly stroke the skin of her face and wonder, What could I have done to deserve her, that he would whisper in her ear, I will never leave you. I will love you forever.

  That man is me. That moment is now.

  “I promise,” I say. “I love you, Melody. I’ve loved you all my life. I will never leave you. I will love you forever.”

  We loosen our grip on each other and her cheek scrapes against the stubble on my face as her lips slowly find mine.

  There is a song I have never forgotten, a favorite. I heard it too few times many years ago, listened to it with a careful ear and memorized every nuance, every beat, every note. A haunting melody paired with carefully chosen words, a tune that defined a moment in my life and shaped the man I was, the man I became.

  As time passed, I never experienced the joy of hearing it again, could find no station to play it, no person who could emula
te the artist. How lucky I was that the song was etched in my memory, that enough bits and pieces remained so I’d never forget what it meant to me, so I’d never fail to recognize it should it return to the airwaves.

  That music swirls around me now, and as it drifts through my brain it brings elation, a euphoria I thought I might never know again. This woman, the composer, so deft at her manipulation of every instrument and the intonation of every word, so easily hits the high notes and the lows, has me humming along. And as she finishes, completes the performance and waits for my response, I wipe the tears from my cheeks and close my eyes, have only one request on my lips. “If I begged, would you play it one more time?”

  SIX

  I am not the man I once was. I am not the person I once was. I look in the mirror and see a familiar toothbrush going into a familiar mouth, wash a face with scars from events I can still recall, but I might as well be staring at a departed spirit. All those years ago when the government recreated me, people would call me by a name I did not own. I would walk right by these folks as though they did not exist, as though I did not exist. But now, having lived in Clemson, South Carolina, for seven months, I am Michael Martin. Jonathan Bovaro is nothing more than a memory of an old friend, a loved one who died and was buried long ago. Michael Martin does not smoke, loves to cook, knows a lot about Italian culture for a guy with an English heritage, does not travel north of Richmond, south of Jacksonville. Michael Martin measures time in semesters, not months. Michael Martin is Felicia’s husband, the one linked to her fabled wedding band, the guy no one had seen for three years at two different universities, the one always absent from Felicia’s side at the department dinners and holiday parties and picnics, the guy no one thought existed. How wrong they were.

  As I wipe my face dry and look at myself in the mirror, Felicia slowly walks up behind me, closes her eyes as she slips her arms around my body, slides her hands under my T-shirt and rubs my stomach, kisses my back. I reach behind me and put my hands to her lower back and pull her in a little, close my eyes as well, assure myself it is all real. Forget the past, I think. Ignore the future, I think.

  Though Sean obviously knows where we are, he’s remained absent from our lives in any real sense. Whatever it is he thought I might “owe” him, whatever future use he imagined I could possibly have, seems to have been shelved, at least for now. I confided and confessed everything to Felicia, told her how Sean and I battled it out in Baltimore, how he cared enough about her to bring me to her door, how he promised to leave us in seclusion, to never give our location to anyone else, to never admit we were even alive. That our secret was “three people deep.” That I had no choice but to let him take care of making me officially disappear.

  Even though Sean is a link to our current and former lives—the final one—we never considered running again. The words never passed our lips, the thoughts never materialized. Clemson is our home, the place where Felicia works on her doctoral dissertation and I work as a sous-chef at a local bistro via a social security number that belonged to a Michael Martin who died twenty-seven years ago. We are determined to be the people we say we are, to stay and live and grow here, to become a part of the community. Nothing has shaken us, nothing has scared or disturbed us, even when we strolled out from Memorial Stadium—Death Valley—embedded in a sea of orange after Clemson went into overtime against Georgia Tech, and walked right past Sean as he ate a hot dog at the end of our exitway, passing us a wink and a nod as he noshed. We slowed, but nothing more. Not a smile, not a lingering glance, not a word.

  Forget the past, we think. Ignore the future, we think.

  Perhaps the greatest vanishing act of all was the way the Bovaros disappeared from the newscape. I’ve been hard pressed to find any new information over the last half year. I’ve tried repeatedly, and as far as I can tell Justice has grown to ignore the entire organization, focused increasingly on the families we once battled; those crews now appear with regularity. I can only imagine how Randall told Justice time and again that he never gave me any list, that producing one would have been risky in and of itself, that he was above that kind of behavior. I do not doubt, despite the proof that Randall gave me information of one particular witness, he eventually swayed them all into thinking I was the liar I claimed not to be.

  But over time, as key figures in the other crews drop and go missing, become popular news items for no more than a week or two, I do not for one second believe that Justice is truly incapable of gaining evidence against all things Bovaro, would be like living in Miami and assuming a hurricane will never hit. I hope that Pop and Peter and my brothers understand what I know from this far distance: Justice is saving the best for last.

  One bitter cold day between the fall and spring semesters, South Carolina’s Department of Motor Vehicles contacted Florida’s to get a digital copy of my lost driver’s license—in order to issue me a new one by way of the Palmetto State. With that new license, the plastic still warm as I plunged it into my pocket, Felicia and I traveled to Kentucky, where the only requirement for marriage is one proof of identification; you don’t even need to be a resident of the state. Though so much of what we are was fabricated, right down to calling each other husband and wife to those around us, this was the one component we wanted to be original, to be real.

  This winter she became—legally—Felicia Martin.

  Felicia and I are slowly becoming who we claim to be. We speak of things that’ve occurred in our short history, recall events from our new life together. Lives built on truths. We have made a collective transformation that could only occur through the reflection of another human being, another person who can step up and say, “That’s not how I remember it.” We are real because we are loved—by each other; the false personas are given life through this love. We are perfectly cast for the roles we have to play, two people with experience in lying and manipulation, in convincing those around us we are something other than what everyone sees—something else, if not something greater.

  We were magicians performing vanishing acts upon ourselves. Now we’re here to stay.

  We appear so happy, so enamored. There is something different about us, something unusual that can’t be identified. Whatever rules are applied to relationships, however couples are assembled and fueled through life’s inspirations and survive through its trials, we’re doing it in ways that could hardly be understood. Those around us say, “All the couples we know have gone through this type of thing”—then the pause—“except maybe Felicia and Michael.” Compare us to the multitude and know this: We are the exceptions.

  You might wonder about your own neighbors, the ones with the incongruous backstory to their lives. You might wonder, “He doesn’t seem like the accountant type,” or “I would never guess she grew up in Georgia.” You might wonder what has them moving into your neighborhood in the middle of the night, has them staying out of view. You might wonder.

  At your next block party, church gathering, company social event: Look closer.

  And so here we are, Felicia and I, walking and living around you South Carolinians, the nice married couple down the street. We accidentally bump your cart in the grocery store. You wait behind us in line at the coffee shop. You wave our car in front of you as we exit the ramp. We blend in, then wash out and fade away. We’re the couple walking hand in hand down the shoreline until completely out of view. Could you ever be sure we’re even here? Indeed, we are. We’re right behind you. We’re all breathing the same air. Ghosts among the real, my friend. Ghosts among the real.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book was written in the dark—or during it, at least. The entire manuscript was composed between 3 and 6 a.m. in the basement of my home, seven days a week, for a full year, the only way I could balance writing and working a full-time job with the federal government. And it would not have been possible without the support of my wife, Jana, whose endurance of my crankiness, exhaustion, and lack of availability was far greater than any bur
den I had to bear. She is a true partner in every sense of the word, and this book could never have been completed without her. From her daily encouragement to her editing skills, this story would not be what it is were she not in my life.

  That said, I should also thank the Mayorga Coffee Company of Rockville, Maryland. I drank over sixty-six gallons of their Colombia Supremo while writing this book. It was 3 a.m., after all.

  And thanks to God, for perseverance on the days I wasn’t sure that I could do it anymore. Indeed, all things are possible.

  Special thanks to my editor, Michele Bidelspach, for possessing the remarkable skill of being able to refine the big picture and the pixels simultaneously, and for knowing exactly what needs to be modified and why. She is a pleasure to work with, and this book is all the better because of her. Thanks also to my copy editor, Roland Ottewell, for his astounding attention to detail, and to Claire Brown for designing a beautiful cover. And to everyone at Grand Central, especially Mari Okuda and Bob Castillo for putting it all together.

  Much appreciation must be given to my agent, Pamela Harty, who has guided me through an industry I still struggle to understand, and for being a genuine advocate and perpetually available for guidance and direction. She has been with me since day one. Thanks also to Deidre Knight, Elaine Spencer, and all the wonderful folks at the Knight Agency. You guys are awesome.

  And thanks always to Jacob and Megan for being the best, and for cracking me up when I needed it most. To my family and friends who have been so enthusiastic and supportive throughout this journey, and to all the booksellers and librarians who tirelessly help bring my books to a greater audience. And to every reader and for all the wonderful emails. You are what make this possible.