Almost Missed You

by Jessica Strawser

  She glared at him. “You make him sound infallible. It’s not like he’s his father.”

  “Funny you mention his father. He’s kind of big on calling in favors, isn’t he?”

  Blood rushed furiously to her cheeks. “You would know.”

  “I wouldn’t use the word know. I might have an inkling.” He looked down at the floor. “But I remember you telling me once that the incident I think you’re referring to was ‘small potatoes’ to him. Which leaves me wondering what the big potatoes were. I’m guessing he wouldn’t want anyone looking into that. Especially if he has his son in mind to take his former seat.”

  Her breath was caught in her throat, but she forced herself to speak. “That would be pretty low of you, Finn. A real nice way to return the favor.”

  He shrugged. “The thing is, Cait, I didn’t ask you to bail me out then. I probably would have been better off if you hadn’t! But I’m asking you now.”

  Caitlin squinted at her friend. “Is this conversation happening? Are you completely not the guy I knew anymore, or have you just been watching too many action movies? I mean seriously, Finn. Blackmail? You? Me? Come on.”

  He shrugged. She’d thought she’d seen Finn at his worst, but she’d never known him to be so cold. Suddenly it didn’t seem so unimaginable that he’d taken Bear. And if he’d done that, what else might he do? “After everything I’ve done for you…” She was shaking, unable to form a coherent thought. “After everything George has done for you…”

  “That’s an excellent impression of what he’s going to say. To you.”

  He was standing very close to her now. “Mark my words, if you don’t help me, I will tell George the thing we both know you would strongly prefer that George not know. I’ll rekindle media interest in his father’s esteemed political career. And I’ll block his golden boy’s chance of ever having one.” Her tears burned, and at the sight of them his expression softened. “Please don’t make me,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I don’t have another choice.”

  Caitlin’s reeling mind grasped for something to hold on to. She had to pull herself together. For the twins. For Violet. For Bear. “Fine. You want another choice? Money will give you plenty. How much do you need? I can get you cash. I can find a way to do it so that George won’t notice.” She hated the sound of the desperation she was unable to keep from her voice. “You name your price, and you do what you want with it, but you leave Bear here.”

  “Bear is the price, Caitlin. This is not a negotiation.” The warning tone of his voice was too serious to defy. “And don’t think you can send me off now and then tip off the police. They show up at that cabin—or the FBI does, or Violet herself—and I will tell George. I will contact the press. No tricks. No bad directions. No wrong security code. This is real to me, and it’s real to you, got it?”

  She sniffed back tears, trying to hold her head high. “Say I go along with this—for now—to protect my good name, or George’s. And if a kidnapper is discovered hiding out in the family vacation house, that’s not going to do any damage?”

  Finn nodded, slowly. “Guess you better make sure we don’t get caught.”

  A silence fell between them as Caitlin tried to reconcile the weight of the situation before her. “I still don’t understand. Why have you taken him?”

  “He’s all I have.” His voice broke. “My only family. I just need him with me while I figure this out, okay? I can’t be alone.” It wasn’t an answer at all, though there was truth in it nonetheless. There’d been a time when seeing sweet, vulnerable Finn lose so much had taken a toll on Caitlin by proxy, when if Finn could have been summed up in one word, it would’ve been traumatized. Or, yes, alone. He was right that one word could never really do. But that dark period was years behind him now. Dealt with and done with before Violet, before Bear.

  Wasn’t it?

  “Finn, listen to yourself. He’s all Violet has, too. And he’s a child.”

  “And I’m his father. You know I’d never let anything happen to him.” He stepped back, as if they’d settled something. “Maybe it’s true, what people say about us. Maybe you and I have been too close over the years. Let’s try something new. From here on, you don’t interfere in my family, and I don’t interfere in yours.”

  8

  AUGUST 2010

  A buzz of collective excitement was making its way across the dusk of Washington Park as Finn and his fellow Missed Connection made their place in the crowd, stretching their legs out in front of them on the blanket he’d overpaid for at a drugstore on the walk here through downtown. They’d managed to procure a purse full of miniature bottles of wine, plastic cups to discreetly pour them into, and grilled cheese with tomato and pesto from a gourmet food truck. Maribel—she’d called her name over her shoulder as they’d made a mad dash across Vine Street against the light—was revealed to be one of those people who are overcome with childlike giddiness the moment they become excited about something. For an instant after the stranger with the tickets left them, he’d wondered if the woman who was not the woman from the beach planned to make off with them on her own, perhaps call a friend. But she’d never acted as if it were a question that they would go together, in spite of the fact that she’d been in the process of dismissing him when the woman cut in. And so, partially out of curiosity and partially because he’d been caught so off guard, he found himself playing along.

  Music Hall rose up before them in silhouette, a massive wonder of historic brick, its arched façade and pointed towers eerie in the darkening sky. “I hear it’s haunted,” he told her, nodding toward the building. “Built on an old potter’s field.” He wasn’t much into that sort of thing, just making conversation.

  “Everything is haunted,” she said matter-of-factly, unwrapping the wax paper from her sandwich. “Buildings. People. It all has to do with mistakes, regrets, missed opportunities. Missed connections.” Her eyes met his, and she smiled almost shyly. “They’re everywhere.”

  Finn raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t sure he’d ever known anyone—especially not a date—to be so what you see is what you get from the moment he’d met her. Except maybe the woman on the beach. “What haunts you, then?” he asked.

  She returned his eyebrow raise with one of her own. “Nobody talks about the stuff that really haunts them,” she said. “If you’re talking about it, on some level you’re dealing with it, or at least acknowledging it.” She gestured toward Music Hall. “If those walls could talk, the stories they’d tell you might make it seem like a spooky place, or a sad place, or even a possessed place, but I’d be willing to bet it would seem less haunted as soon as the mystery was gone.”

  She seemed to have given this an astounding amount of thought. He wondered what else she had her own theories on. What an odd bird, his mother would have remarked. A fabulously odd bird.

  The white-and-black-clad mass of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra was filing into rows of chairs arranged in a white tent set up in front of the hall. He looked around him at the people covering every inch of grass and pavement and couldn’t believe he’d never heard of this event. “How many tickets do you think they sold?” he asked. “I mean, assuming the ghosts get in for free.”

  “Everyone gets in free,” she explained. “Tickets are hard to get, but they don’t cost anything. Last year was the first year: They decided to put together something over-the-top to welcome the new conductor to town, if you can imagine all this happening in your honor”—she gestured emphatically around them with the triangle of sandwich clutched in her hand—“and it was such chaos they decided they had to do something to limit the crowds. I think I heard it topped out at twenty thousand per performance.”

  So this was what twenty thousand people looked like—a sea of faces and running children and lawn chairs and coolers as far as he could see. Surrounding streets were roped off to accommodate the overflow. And he’d been expecting to find the woman from the beach in a city of hundreds of thousands. What had he been
thinking? Like Maribel had said, everyone here probably had a missed connection of his or her own. In that light, his encounter on the beach seemed less remarkable. He settled back on the heel of one hand and took a long sip of wine with the other. “Well,” he said, “thanks for letting me buy you a drink after all.”

  She grinned. “Thanks for making me look like half of an ‘attractive couple.’ And sorry if I was rude earlier. I was just, you know…”

  “I know. Me too.”

  “So do you live near here?”

  “Northside. I work for a small graphic design firm there.”

  “You’re kidding.” She brightened. “I’m a designer too. I work for an ad agency, in an old warehouse down by the river.” She nodded toward the skyline. On the other side, barges and sunset cruises would be lighting up the Ohio River by now as restaurants on the banks came to life. “It’s kind of soul sucking, though—it seems like every job I do lately has to adhere to stringent ‘brand standards.’” She made air quotes as best she could with a cup of wine in one hand and a sandwich in the other. “I’ve been doing a lot of sketching and painting in my free time to save my sanity.”

  Finn was surprised. He could usually sniff out a fellow artist. He’d had Maribel pegged as … what, he didn’t know, but definitely some kind of other ballpark entirely. “I’m lucky,” he replied, trying to sound nonchalant. “We do a lot of signage, and some of it’s actually really creative stuff. I draw too, though. Just sketches and line drawings, mostly, but sometimes I can get a client to incorporate them into a project, which is pretty cool.”

  “Man,” she said, “usually I can spot a fellow artist. I was way off.” Finn must have gaped at her speaking his own thoughts aloud, because she laughed. “I feel like I owe you an apology.”

  “For what? Wait—” Finn held up a hand. “Never mind. I don’t want to know what you thought I was. Apology accepted.”

  The violinists were starting to tune their instruments, and the chaotic sounds added a not unpleasant backdrop to the buzz of conversation and laughter around them.

  She wrinkled her forehead. “If you’re tapped into the art community, I can’t believe you never heard of LumenoCity.”

  “I don’t come downtown much,” he admitted. “Sometimes I go to open galleries—Final Fridays and whatnot—but usually just around Northside, Clifton … small neighborhoods.”

  “I didn’t know they had galleries in Northside,” she said. “I’ve been a downtown girl ever since I moved here from Indianapolis. I guess I never got as familiar with the outlying neighborhoods.”

  “I’m always hearing there’s a lot of cool stuff happening down here. Reclaiming the bad streets, etcetera. I mean to come, I just—” Finn could not think of a single actual reason he hadn’t. He shrugged. “Don’t.”

  Maribel downed the rest of her wine and pulled another miniature cabernet out of her purse. “Tell you what,” she said, filling his cup. “Cool stuff we know about. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” They drank to it. “I have to admit, though,” she said, “I’m not sure I’m married to the place. Long term, I mean.”

  “Where would you rather be?”

  “Asheville. North Carolina. Have you been?”

  He nodded, closing his eyes to conjure the Blue Ridge Mountains rising all around him, the low-lying clouds, the crisp air, the sidewalks filled with people who seemed to be living exactly the life he wanted to be living. About five and a half hours away, Asheville was one of Cincinnati’s most popular road-trip destinations. If you weren’t aiming for a bigger hub like Chicago or Pittsburgh, it was one of the rare jewels you could drive to in an afternoon—but he didn’t just love it the way other people loved it. He went for a weekend every time he got the chance. Made a point of stopping for a day en route to anywhere farther east or south, too.

  “Just to be part of a community like that, one that appreciates art, lives art—.” Maribel sighed. “I mean, I’d probably be in danger of becoming a total hippie, but I’d love to live there one day. And do you know Asheville is in, like, the top five U.S. cities for days of sunshine? I don’t know who’s in the bottom five, but my money’s on Cincinnati.”

  Finn laughed. “I’ve thought about moving there too. Something about those mountains. It’s like food even tastes better.”

  “Because it is better. Their restaurants all seem to be locally sourced, organic—”

  “And there’s this little Irish pub where they have bluegrass and rockabilly and serve local beer—”

  “Jack of the Wood! I go every time I visit, because I always end up cheaping out and staying at this fleabag motel on that end of town…”

  “The Edge Inn!”

  “Oh my God. Yes, the Edge Inn. I can’t believe I’m admitting to you that I’ve slept in that place. You’re going to think I have syphilis.”

  “Well, in your defense—and mine, actually—it’s slim pickings if you don’t want to have to catch a pricey cab ride to your hotel. I just make sure I’m good and drunk by the time I turn in, and then run like hell at daybreak.”

  She laughed. “Sounds familiar. I think we’d make good travel companions.” She averted her eyes and shifted a little on the blanket, and he couldn’t tell if she was regretting that she’d said it, or hoping he’d say it back.

  “Well, now you’ve got me jonesing for a Green Man Porter from Jack of the Wood,” he said, choosing neutral ground.

  “I know where you can get a fairly similar one around here. I could show you, if this doesn’t let out too late…”

  He grinned. “Are you trying to get me drunk? Is this, like, your thing? Meeting guys from the Internet and then getting them drunk?” She punched his arm.

  The darkness had settled in thickly around them by now, and the crowd was starting to quiet down. The idea that a night out with Maribel stretched before him filled Finn with warmth, and he felt himself relaxing, letting go of all the expectations he’d brought into the evening. It seemed so natural to be sitting with her this way. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so at ease with a stranger. Well, maybe he could. It had to have been that day in Sunny Isles. Still, this was different. It was almost—

  The tent lit up in a brilliant soft white-yellow, and a hush fell over the park. Then came the opening notes as the entire exterior of Music Hall was at once illuminated. Maribel reached over to refill his wine and clicked the lip of her cup to his. And then it began.

  “It’s a laser light show,” Maribel had explained back in Fountain Square. “It uses the Music Hall as its canvas, while the symphony plays.” It sounded kind of cheesy. But this was no zigzag of neon lasers—it was itself a work of art, a complicated projection and optical illusion composed by teams with an ear for harmony and an eye for the spectacular. And the building was no canvas. As the music picked up tempo, the lights transformed the brick façade into a living, breathing thing, a larger-than-life kaleidoscope set into motion. The circular stained-glass window in its center became the spinning, twinkling focal point as all around it the building itself seemed to twist, dance, bounce, sway, then magically crumble to the ground and just as quickly reassemble itself. The crowd oohed and ahhhed, cheered, breathed as one, and finally surrendered to the genius and the beauty of the animation.

  For a full ten minutes of Tchaikovsky, the lights and music sustained their dance, and then after thunderous applause, whistling, and hollering, it started up again. Finn managed to pull his eyes away to glance over at Maribel, and was almost as mesmerized by what he saw across the blanket from him. Her face was illuminated with a rosy glow from the lights and lasers, her gaze filled with a look of pure awe and contentment that mirrored his own. Even as he reminded himself that he’d only just met her, and that he’d come here intent on finding someone else, he could suddenly see, clear in his mind’s eye, him and Maribel together—sharing morning coffee over their sketchpads in a sunny Asheville kitchen, sitting on their porch swing looking out over the mountains, partnering
up to start their own graphic design firm right from home, walking arm in arm to local cafés, coming home at night and making love, and all the while marveling that everything they’d ever wanted was right there between them and around them.

  It was unlike Finn to act before thinking it through—but the visions seemed so real, so out of nowhere and yet so clear, that before he could stop himself, he leaned over and placed the point of his finger on her chin, tipped her face toward his, and kissed her softly, slowly on the mouth.

  * * *

  Finn was awakened by a headache reminding him that switching from wine to draft beer late in the night was never a good idea. And then he remembered why it had been a good idea anyway. A very good idea.

  He opened his eyes. Empty. His bed was empty. The bathroom door was wide open—no one inside. He strained for any sounds of Maribel moving about the apartment but heard nothing except the annoying drone of the raspy old refrigerator he’d been begging his landlord to replace. A few minutes went by, and he was sure. Gone. She was gone. Damn.

  He’d known it was too good to be true.

  He closed his eyes and felt a smile stretch itself across his lips as he replayed the previous night. The surprise and magic of the symphony and the lights. The beers at the old hole-in-the-wall afterward, where they’d finished the job of getting quite drunk, until their conversation had returned finally to how their night had begun.

  “The thing is,” Maribel had said, leaning forward on her barstool confessionally, “I kind of had a feeling before I came tonight that you might not be the guy.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “Then why—”

  “I figured a fifty-fifty chance. But I kind of liked the sound of you anyway.”

  “Ah. So you weren’t that disappointed, then? Could’ve fooled me.” He grinned, remembering that she’d actually pouted. He’d never been so aware that a grown woman could effectively pout.