by Kit Reed
He doesn’t need much. When he divested, stripping his life down to the bare walls, the discovery liberated him. He doesn’t need much at all. He is cleaned out now. There is nothing left of Tom Starbird but bare walls and a dawning grief that he can’t quite source and can’t shake off.
In a way, he’d hoped Zorn’s wife would turn out to be— not all wrong, exactly, but not quite right, so he could pull the chain on this operation with a valid excuse: I’m sorry but your wife is unstable, Zorn. Not fit to take care of a child. He’d make other plans for the baby, not sure what, and if Zorn made good on his threat to lay Daria Starbird wide open via satellite news? Look, lady, I did what I could. I tried. Unfortunately, where her husband was sealed tight as an armored car, the wife’s face lay open like the door to a lovely room. A little apprehensive but smiling. Kind. Good as Starbird is at what he does, there was a bad moment in which she reached out for the baby and he gripped it tight and fell back a step, surprising both of them. Foolish, Starbird. Getting attached. Her breath came out in an inadvertent, “Don’t!” Shaken, he understood that he and Maury Bayless were weighing some of the same things. Unless they were afraid of the same things. As though she expected him to hurt her in some new and profound way.
He studied her, looking for the flaw that would justify defaulting. Instead he saw the intelligence in her face, the fear battling unquenchable hope, and he softened because with everything at risk in that moment, she still made a nice smile for him. Unlike some women with a new baby, he thought bitterly, this one is happy to see him, and he was not clear whether by him, he meant the product or himself. “It’s OK,” he murmured, “really. It’s all right. It’s going to be all right,” and with a pang, put the baby in her arms. Product, Starbird. Think product. Bye, kid. She reached out and with beautiful certainty, clamped him to her heart. Starbird coughed. It was as if a pin had lodged in his throat. The woman glowed as the baby snuggled in. Oh, don’t turn that smile on me. Her face was so bright that he had to look away. He kept his head bent over his PDA until they finished the transaction and took the baby away.
Right, he thought when Zorn slapped him on the shoulder before he could dodge. Right, he kept telling himself, struggling with what he had done. It was right. Look at her rocking him with that sweet, sad smile, so I did a good thing.
I think.
Still, he’d thought to turn on the glittering eye of his laptop to record the transfer of property. It’s just something he knew he had to do. The transaction went smoothly enough: in exchange for Zorn’s verbal reassurances, which he has recorded, he handed over the kid. Zorn and his wife have the baby, so the Conscience of Boston can shut up. The Daria Starbird expose will never air. All parties can go their own ways in safety.
First, he has things to do.
After Zorn left with his trophy kid in the Baby Björn he’d bought for it, Starbird set up the equipment he bought in preparation—not for a confession, necessarily— but for something like it. He needed to explain! The together man who always had a plan found himself empty-handed and oddly disassembled. For the first time since Tom Starbird could remember, he didn’t know what to do. Taking a deep breath, he stepped in front of the digital camera, talking as if he had the girl standing here in the room with him. What did he think, he’d give it to her later and make friends? He doesn’t know. He’s been talking for hours.
I am very good at what I do.
Sorting out the truth of this, talking for the camera, Starbird kept himself going by giving meticulous attention to process: from the detailed narrative he’s building, step by step, to the physical business of recording to the mechanical procedure of getting his story out there, wherever he wants it to go. OK, he wants the world to know. More than anything, he wants the girl to know. She may never forgive him, but at least she’ll understand.
Or he will.
It all depends on the logic of process. What Starbird does next, and when. If he can do this part right, maybe he can figure out what else he has to do.
When he bought the recording equipment, he thought he was doing it for insurance, but he understands now that he always had the girl in mind. Therefore he spent some portion of the night and much of today recording. The rest, he spent deleting his old files. It was a pleasure to watch them vanish one at a time. It’s like unwriting chapters of his life. The night and most of the day have gone by. It is midafternoon. He has finished telling the digicorder everything he has to tell. When he began, he thought he was explaining it for the girl— not for now, for when they’re older and she’s had a chance to cool down. You will thank me for it later, he thought, winding it up. Won’t you?
He’s downloaded the video he made of the transfer of property, spent hours editing to his satisfaction and burned his DVD. Six copies. That should be enough, no matter what he decides to do. The same-day messenger service will pick up the Jiffy Bags and deliver today, guaranteed. All he has to do is make the call.
If he makes the call.
He’s still figuring it out.
Working mechanically, the way he does when he needs to keep grounded, Tom has queued up the emails he can send the minute he decides. Unless he deletes them. He still doesn’t know. There they are: mails to go to the major networks and Boston area affiliates, with his one-line pitch and a brief description of the low-res three-minute videos he plans to attach and send as ZIP files. Not top quality video, but the files are small enough to travel fast and make it past spam filters and firewalls alike. They’re built for a quick download at the other end, which is the issue here. Getting attention and getting it fast.
There is a comfort to be found in this kind of work. Who doesn’t love computers? The monotony of logic. The wonderful predictability of the analog mind. The magic of connectivity and the illusion that everything is happening right here, in this very room. Tom Starbird has spent his life connected, no problem; he can make a wireless connection anywhere, darting in and out of servers without leaving a trace. It’s one of the talents that sets him apart. He understands now that he’s always been a man apart and he has no idea whether this is a burden or a gift.
And now that he has these emails queued up?
All he has to do is hit SEND.
So what if he left a paper trail in that high end computer supplies store in Alexandria, Virginia? No problem. If a blind bull mastiff could find Starbird’s footprints on the emails he has queued to send, that’s cool. Everything he ever cared about is gone. He has nothing more to lose. Whether he decides to hit SEND today or deletes the files and walks away, it no longer matters that he can be traced.
Once you’ve agreed to shoot yourself in the foot, no matter what your motives you have shot yourself in the foot. The interesting part is discovering whether it hurts and what comes down after.
He only took this job to stop Zorn. He made a deal for his mother’s, he supposes it’s freedom; the deal was his mother’s freedom in exchange for what he has done. The Conscience of Boston hit Tom here with things that he’s spent his life trying to forget. The abandonment, which yawns inside him like an open wound. Examine Starbird’s motives— and he does— and even that girl Sasha would have to understand that he got into the work because he wanted to make things right. Outsiders may look at what he’s done and say it was wrong, but they don’t know. How could they possibly know? Tom Starbird has spent his life trying to do the right thing, he has given his heart to it and he still doesn’t know what, exactly, that is.
This as much as anything is what draws him back to the TV Flicking it on, he drops to his knees. Empty now, unless he is reamed and bereft, he kneels there watching CNN. Not watching, really, just physically present like a whale watcher staring into the Atlantic. He is waiting for the Savannah press conference to surface again. In most cases, a TV moment like this one runs on the day the story breaks and then disappears, but this kidnapping—
Wait a minute. Kidnapping?
This event is being played up because even exhausted, r
aging and desperate, the girl is so pretty and so articulate that the mystery of the missing baby looks like a better story than it is. Yesterday’s press conference is old news but the Egan sound byte still surfaces regularly. CNN surrounds it with new information to keep the story fresh but those first shots of the girl Starbird wishes he’d never met and knows he never should have spoken to are deeply embedded in all the second-day video on the case. If nobody starts a new war and no explosions preempt, the network will go on replaying it until new footage comes in.
Terrible and amazing to know that a woman who can’t get 911 to come in time to stop a thief knows how to reach millions before Starbird can complete delivery of the property and walk free, that she knows how to cut into his guts and turn the knife, that she can do it from six hundred miles away and she can do it again and again.
Starbird’s mind has been going around the block nonstop ever since he first turned on CNN in Myrtle Beach. He has played and replayed her diatribe in his heart and he knows in his heart that nothing he can do or say will change what Sasha Egan thinks of him.
He can’t bear it. He can’t shut it off.
“Whoever you are, wherever you are,” she says with her eyes crackling and her hair wild, “do you know what you’ve done to me? Do you know what you are? Do you really know?” That pause that breaks her heart. Maybe this time she won’t say it. Then she does. “You are a monster!”
Again and again, she advances on the camera with her teeth bared and her dark hair flying and she and Tom Starbird, whose fatal error turns out to be caring, are connected, like it or not. Whether or not he is watching, he will see her advancing on him for the rest of his life. Even with the television set on MUTE, he hears. From the far side of the moon he will know. He has it by heart. Judgment rolls down on him like the great stones into the pharaoh’s tomb, sealing him in. Outraged and coming at him from a place he didn’t know existed, the girl he told himself he was helping flows into the room in full cry.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
What’s the matter here, Starbird, why do you need to keep seeing this? Why do you need to see it again and again?
Bizarre, getting hung up on this, considering what he’s been through. Dangerous, being in stasis when he should be on the run, but necessary. He is deciding what to do.
In theory, he’s free to go. He and Zorn are protected by a mutually assured destruction pact. If Zorn gives so much as ten seconds of air time to Daria Starbird, he risks having this transaction exposed, and given the nature of the supplier— the jaws tearing at the inside of Starbird’s stomach tighten and start grinding whenever he thinks of her— Zorn could go to jail for kidnapping, slavery, whatever the courts dish up. Of course Starbird would go to jail if they caught up with him, but that’s been a given from the first. Trial and conviction, death penalty implied. Secrecy is the glue keeping this arrangement in one piece. It’s a matter of collaborative protection. The Zorns are safe and Tom Starbird is safe.
Unless, of course, he tries to take the baby back.
Everything is open to question now.
Interesting, how you can know you’re doing something wrong and rationalize until you convince yourself that what you’re doing is absolutely right. Starbird knew at the outset that this transaction was a mistake. If you’re quitting the business, you don’t take on a job. What happens next is preordained. It’s bound to play out like a movie— the cop’s partner says, after this case it’s, hello, Sun City, Florida, and you see this stamped on his forehead: MARKED FOR DEATH. Tom should have whacked Zorn’s smooth face with the flat of his hand and walked away. Letting the Conscience of Boston stampede him was the first mistake. Unless the central mistake was caring what happens to Daria Starbird, who could care less what happens to him. His encounters with the girl— correction, the mark— compounded the, OK, the felony. Then, shit. He interacted with the baby. Handing him off was like losing a friend. The baby he handed off to Zorn last night looked at him over the wife’s shoulder as they left. It had her eyes.
What have I done?
Staring into the screen he sees the mark— no, the girl whose baby he took— come blazing into the room, and where he has run on through life unencumbered, they are connected. He needs to see her again. Again. He has to know!
He is torn. There was Maury’s smile when he proffered the baby. That baby snapped into her arms like a key in a lock or a space shuttle docking, he could almost hear the click.
There was that, then. Now there is this. Tears flying as Sasha Egan whips them away with an angry hand. Again. For as long as he lives. The tirade on a perpetual loop. Stricken, he shouts, although she is nowhere near, “I’m not like that!”
OK! He will expose Zorn. Forget the wife, he wants to expose Zorn.
He wants the girl to understand.
He wants to leave the country with everybody happy, and this is where the plan destructs. Happy as Maury Bayless was to have that baby— happy as she was and happy as the baby seemed when she rocked it and whispered the new name she had chosen for it— it isn’t hers. And the girl, the girl he thought he was doing a favor? She thinks he’s a monster. She always will.
Unless, he thinks. Unless I get her baby back.
There is no way to do it without hurting somebody.
Defeated, he closes in on the TV He’s in so tight that he can see his breath condensing on the screen. Sasha Egan reduced to glittering pixels, condensed fury in HDTV. He needs to look deep into her because it’s the only way he can see into himself.
All his life Tom Starbird has run ahead of consequences. He could do what he did as long as he worked fast and moved on, so he didn’t have to see what happened next. He did what he had to and that was it; that was all. That would be all, for as long as he kept moving at tremendous speeds. Consequences are nothing he has time for. It’s why he is so good at what he does.
Now look. No matter what he decides, somebody will get hurt. The girl. He doesn’t mind hurting Zorn, but he feels sorry for the wife. There is his mother to think about.
The man who always has a plan is completely empty now—bone-dry. Has he eaten? He forgets. Staring into the dancing pixels, hypnotized, he falls into the truth of what he’s been doing.
No. What he is.
“Oh!”
Staggered, he turns off the set and retreats to the desk. Picks up a pen.
Years’ worth of consequences accrete and roll in, sealing the exits as they pin him in place. He can forget about flight. Motives aren’t the issue, he realizes. Outcomes are. You go along in good faith; you go along telling yourself that you’re doing the right thing but sooner or later what you were really thinking catches up and you discover that you have done something terribly wrong. There are ways out, there have to be. Right now he can only think of one.
A noise outside pulls him back into the room where his body is sitting. Surprised, he looks down. Without thinking it through, he has drawn a diagram. The street below: the sidewalk, the curb, the Dumpster. An X. A string of words. I will land here. At least it would be over. For him. End it and he’ll never make up for it. Stand on the sill and aim for the X and everything you’ve done so far will damn you. Hit the X and nobody wins.
Scratch out the drawing. Crumple it up. You want to throw it into the street but you’re afraid to open the window. No telling what else might drop into the street.
He has things to do.
It becomes important to let her know that the baby is safe.
For Starbird, this is not the most important thing. Before that, before anything, he wants her not to hate him. He wants to hear her voice when he tells her the baby is safe.
He waits to make the call. First, finish up with FedEx. He orders an express pickup. By the time he lets himself pick up the phone to call the girl the same-day delivery messenger has been. His DVDs are on their way. His laptop is connected, with the emails queued up, complete with the short video, high concept late breaking news. All he ha
s to do is hit SEND.
The complete package he produced today is on its way to major markets in Washington, Boston and New York. The complete Zorn scandal, on high-res DVD. It will be in news directors’ hands by tonight, but the three-minute preview he is emailing will hit its targets first. He wants the teaser to air on the early news in all three cities and, in Boston, on the local stations that Jake Zorn and his exposes have leached of viewers like a sprawling carnivorous plant. Because Zorn takes no prisoners, his enemies will probably preempt whatever they are showing, interrupting regular programming for the bulletin. You bet they’ll go with it. In Boston, where he is much hated, his rivals will run for the barn.
Jake Zorn will be ruined before he can ever do the show. It won’t matter what he tells people about Starbird, Daria, anyone. Nobody will believe him now. Whether or not his station fires him, whether or not cops close in as he leaves for the studio today, the network will drop him faster than a glob of steaming shit.
With everything in place, Tom phones the DelMar. He can hear the double click as mechanisms kick in, tracing the call. So, fine! In the background he hears muttering— police or Feds— the buzz of an argument. Then they call her to the phone.
His whole life rushes into his mouth. “It’s me.”
In the long silence Tom Starbird can hear her breathing. He hears a fusillade of clicks. The police audio guys will lock onto the source, no problem. You want to come and get me? Come and get me. In full knowledge of what he’s doing to himself, he is calling from the hotel telephone. Land line, in seconds the cops will know what city, which hotel and which room. Still she doesn’t speak. I love you. Say something! Holding his breath, he waits. He waits for a very long time.
When he’s sure police trackers have locked on, he says, “Don’t worry about the baby. Your baby.”
He hears her draw a little breath.
“He’s fine.”
He thinks it doesn’t matter what she says, as long as she says something to him. Please. She does not speak.