David Klein

by Stash (v5)

  The band played for more than two hours. Dana’s ears rang from within, setting her head humming, and after a second encore she followed her gang to a bar across the street from campus. They carried fake IDs Steve had made up and sold for fifty dollars each during the first week of the semester. Good thing. A doorman checked everyone coming in and turned away a lot of people from the concert.

  “Hey, no fighting in there,” the doorman said to Dana as he let her pass.

  Another witty comment about her eye. Hands in her jacket pocket, she shot him the finger.

  The bar was elbow to elbow, sweaty as a locker room. Her group carved out space in a rear room with a pool table, although there were too many people for anyone to play pool. Steve and Mark headed for the bar and came back ten minutes later with two pitchers of beer and a tray of glasses. Steve poured and Mark handed beers around. Dana tried to strike up a conversation with Steve’s girlfriend, Sarah, but all she got were one-word answers. The guy Heidi knew in Potsdam had met her in the bar and now three couples were paired off with Dana solo. She took a sip from her beer and put it on a shelf on the back wall of the bar. She still had songs in her head from the concert and she swayed on her feet. She stifled a yawn. It was after midnight and for the first time she wondered how they were going to get back to the dorm.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Heidi said. “Have some fun.”

  “I am having fun.”

  Then someone moved between Dana and Heidi. It was Aaron.

  “Hey, you got my message.”

  “Yeah, but I was late and couldn’t get in, so I hung around by the doors thinking I might catch you on the way out.”

  “You waited the whole concert outside?”

  Aaron shrugged. Looked like an aw-shucks gesture to Dana, like it was no big deal waiting two hours, mostly in the rain, just for her.

  “I got you a ticket.” She pulled the unused ticket out of her purse.

  “Oh, cool, sorry. I’ll pay you for it.”

  “No, that’s okay. It was part of a package deal.”

  “Let me buy you a drink then.”

  She held up her full glass of beer. “I’ve got one.”

  He was staring at her and she waited for him to say something. Finally: “So is that a birthmark?”

  She hesitated and he plowed on. “Only because, well, I thought I’d ask, you said you had it all your life and …”

  How dreary to tell the same story over and over—it wasn’t really a birthmark, although she’d had it from birth—and so Dana had crafted several variations of the story. For those thinking themselves witty or original when they asked who punched her, she might reply: “My parents beat me” or “I got mugged.” One that pinged the moronic boys was “My boyfriend hit me.” With that statement she could learn a lot about a boy. The brave ones would puff up thinking they could dispatch the abusive boyfriend and take his place—until realizing they didn’t want to take the bad boyfriend’s place beside a girl with a smeared face; the gnome boys, on the other hand, would back off, not wanting to mess with a guy willing to pound his girl in such a fashion. She’d already encountered a few of both types of boys this week on campus.

  But she didn’t use any of these stories on Aaron. Because there was something incongruent about his face, he’d earned the right to the truth, although she wondered if he was talking to her only because of the mark on her face—for the exact opposite reason other boys ignored her.

  She told him it was called venous malformation, a collection of extra veins that discolored and swelled beneath her eye. She was supposed to have surgery over winter break. There was nothing that could be done about it while she was a child, but the past year she had been to vascular surgeons, ophthalmologists, and neurologists and undergone numerous scans that indicated the veins were not integrally linked to the ocular veins or vessels connected to the brain. Surgery was the recommended option. Something like a sclerotherapy, which women do to get rid of spider veins, injecting the veins with a solution that would kill them. Scheduled for semester break in January, with a follow-up procedure in June.

  “So it will be gone?”

  “Hopefully,” Dana said. “It might not work a hundred percent but it should get a lot lighter.”

  He took this news by finishing the rest of his beer—close to half the bottle in one long slurp down his throat—and again asking Dana if he could get her a drink. Again she pointed to her own almost full glass on the shelf and said she was all set. As if to prove she wasn’t much of a drinker, she picked up her glass and took a small sip and replaced it.

  “I’ll be right back,” Dana said.

  She turned and made her way toward her friends. Heidi took hold of her arm and said, “Is that the guy you wanted to meet?”

  “He’s a nice guy.”

  “What happened to his face?”

  Dana shrugged. “What happened to mine?”

  She checked the time and it was going on one o’clock. She asked Heidi again about getting back to the dorm.

  “Ask Steve for a ride. I told you I’m staying here tonight.” Her friend from Potsdam was a tall jock type, with a shaved head and thick neck. Heidi held a pink drink but not very well. She tipped the glass and some of it sloshed over the rim.

  “Just don’t ask him now,” Heidi added. “Look, he’s having the breakup talk with his girlfriend.”

  Steve was in a back corner of the bar leaning over Sarah and she had tears in her eyes, and Dana thought: he should have taken my advice and used a text message; it would have saved the girlfriend a long trip up.

  When she got back to Aaron he was standing exactly as she had left him, leaning back with his elbows on the shelf next to her beer. He looked like he hadn’t moved at all.

  “You know, I was thinking, you don’t need that operation,” he said.

  “What operation?”

  “Your eye. You’re already pretty hot.”

  She reacted as if he’d literally stroked her, arching her back, warmth rippling her spine.

  “I’m getting it anyway,” she said.

  He shifted back and forth on his feet and settled in a stance that listed to one side, as if he were having trouble with balance.

  Her mouth was dry and that current she’d felt running down her spine turned out to be a bead of sweat. She took off her jacket and reached for her beer and this time took several sips.

  “So I hear you’re a produce supplier. Do you work on an organic farm or something?”

  “A what?”

  “You deliver produce to Gull, right?”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  She smiled. “Are you going to tell me anything about yourself or not?”

  Sense of Direction

  Kids finally asleep, Brian alone downstairs. He drank one of the beers Gwen had bought at the market but it did little for his nerves. He didn’t dare another. He needed a clear head, although there was nothing to do except wait and pace.

  He’d driven the roads. He’d called the sheriff. How else could he help?

  He circled the possibilities again: Gwen stalked and caught by Gates as punishment for informing on him, or Gwen having an affair. Neither made sense. Gates hadn’t followed her and couldn’t have been lurking near their house waiting to find her alone. And Gwen wouldn’t run off with him after coming home anxious about seeing him.

  Which left getting lost or injured.

  He tried her cell phone again. No answer. He tried their home number in Morrissey and got Gwen’s voice saying You’ve reached the Raine residence, followed by Nora and Nate chiming in together to please leave a message. His throat tightened and he hung up.

  The only other thing he could think to do was call Detective Keller in Morrissey. Maybe he had turned up something in his investigation that might be useful, to either cast hope or deal further despair on the situation.

  He still had Keller’s card in his wallet with the detective’s cell phone number written on the back. He pressed
the numbers.

  “It’s Brian Raine,” he announced when Keller answered. “You’re handling the case of my wife, Gwen. I think she might be in trouble—with Jude Gates.”

  “Don’t tell me she’s dealing with him?” His voice sounded surprised.

  “No. He knows Gwen reported him to the police.”

  Keller sighed into the phone, the long, heavy exhale of the exhausted and exasperated, all surprise gone.

  “What did she go and do that for?”

  Brian went through the story—the trip to the Adirondacks, Gwen running into Gates at the market, admitting to him what she’d done, coming home and telling Brian about it, then going for a walk and not coming back.

  “I called the county sheriff. He thinks she’s having an affair and will come home when she’s ready to, or not come home at all.”

  “It is the most likely situation,” Keller agreed.

  “Jesus Christ, is that all you people think about?”

  “Settle down, Mr. Raine, I know this is upsetting. I’m here to help you.”

  “Gwen wouldn’t have told me about meeting him if she was trying to sneak off and have an affair.”

  “Your wife tells more than she should sometimes, as we’ve just discovered. This could be another example: she wants to be caught. It’s not unusual.”

  Brian could understand why Keller would see it that way, but the detective was wrong. “What about Gates?” Brian asked. “Does he want to be caught?”

  “That’s a good question. We’re still not sure where he stands in all this.”

  “You haven’t found anything on him?”

  “And now we’ll find even less. Doesn’t your wife know that tipping off a suspect puts a damper on our investigation, let alone that she can be charged as an accomplice?”

  “You said you were going to help me.”

  Keller paused. “I am going to help you. What else can you tell me?”

  Brian told Keller about the van Gates was driving and the license plate number his son had memorized, and that the sheriff could not identify any property owned by Jude Gates on the county tax rolls.

  “Let me see what I can come up with,” Keller said. “Can I reach you at this number?”

  “Yes, it’s my cell. I’m at our house now in Tear Lake.”

  “Is it raining up there like it is here?”

  “It was,” said Brian. “Looks like it’s over now.”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  So this is helplessness, a condition he knew little about. He’d always been a person of action, a decision maker, and now his only action was to go upstairs and get into bed. When the aloneness and anxiety piled on and tried to suffocate him, he got up and went into the kids.

  Nora had kicked away her blanket; he tucked her back in, kissing her forehead. Nate had pushed himself against the wall. Brian climbed in with him, causing his son to stir, and Brian whispered: it’s okay, it’s okay; and he lay his cheek on a warm downy spot on the nape of his son’s neck and tried to be still and silent and strong, but mostly he repeated Gwen’s name over and over to himself.

  Gwen had walked along the road and cut up the old fire trail she recognized near their house. She climbed beyond the ledge where she and her family had picnicked in June. She returned Jude’s call.

  After speaking with Jude for a few minutes, she decided that telling him about the police was the right thing to do. He thanked her for explaining the situation: the accident, the arrest, the charges. He told her the police would be bored following him. He told her to forget the whole episode.

  She was so relieved by his words that she missed the transition in their conversation when it stopped being about Gwen explaining what she did and Jude understanding 100 percent, and started being about Jude propositioning her again.

  When she did notice, when he reminded her about the intensity of their brief relationship years ago, when he asked about her coming to see him again, she still was so grateful he wasn’t angry that she relaxed her guard. She protested his advances, but not too much. Rather than ending the call, she allowed herself to listen to what he had to say. Didn’t she? She couldn’t help wondering what triggered his interest in her. Why her? Why now?

  The thing about living in Morrissey is that you can lose your sense of uniqueness. You probably could swap places with almost any other woman you knew and no one would notice. The Morrissey wives. The names and faces and little problems and joys would change, but ultimately it reduced down to kids, school, home, taxi service, and if you were lucky, occasional intimacy with your husband.

  You were no more special than your neighbor. No one made passes at you. No men told you how beautiful you looked. And each year the likelihood of being noticed seemed further past, which 90 percent of the time didn’t matter because you were already 90 percent fulfilled with your life. You could harbor fantasies to close the small gap, but there really wasn’t anyone to be the object of your fantasies. The husbands were as interchangeable as the wives. Those key parties Gwen had heard about taking place in the seventies weren’t as daring as they sounded. So you went home with someone else’s spouse for a night; you might not even notice.

  So she let Jude flatter her. It was hard to resist having her ego stroked this way. And it was only over the phone; she wasn’t going to take it any further. She knew she wouldn’t see him again. In any event, it was much better than being frightened because he was angry with her over telling the police.

  But then he asked where she was at that moment, and she recognized his intent to find her and be with her right now. His question snapped her back to reality, caused her to look up and shift her focus. What she saw was unfamiliar.

  And then the line went dead.

  She stared at her phone. The battery had drained. No charge, no signal. She studied the blank display a few seconds longer and then looked up again. She took a moment to catch her breath, and then turned and looked behind her, in the direction she’d come from. At least Gwen thought it was the direction she’d come from. She walked a few yards that way. Where was the trail? She stood at the edge of a small meadow, with dense stands of trees on three sides and on the fourth a rocky outpost that grew into an escarpment as it curved out of sight into forested land. A breeze flitted the treetops, but otherwise a silence surrounded her like a solid wall.

  A shot of adrenaline surged through her, leaving her stomach queasy and throat hot and dry.

  She looked at the sky. When had the sun disappeared behind the clouds? She turned in a circle, trying to decide which way was back down. None of them looked down. There was no horizon, no view. Only trees and boulders.

  One skill she had never learned was how to avoid getting lost. She was terrible at following directions and often took wrong turns driving in unfamiliar areas. She didn’t remember landmarks. Once in New York City she’d taken the subway to Brooklyn to visit a friend in Marine Park but turned the wrong way when she emerged from underground and walked for blocks and blocks until she realized she’d ended up in a decrepit neighborhood where no one looked like her and everyone looked at her. Fortunately, she spotted a policeman in a squad car and enlisted his help. Brian wanted to know what it was about women and their sense of direction. She resented his sexist generalization but in her case it was true. One of her earliest memories was being lost. She was three or four and playing outside and was supposed to stay in front of her own house and she always did, but that day she happened to see a beautiful black cat on the lawn next door and she went over to pet it and the cat started to purr but then the cat started to walk away and without thinking, Gwen followed. She followed it down the sidewalk all the way to the corner, which was only three houses away, and then around the corner. When she turned the corner, the cat had disappeared.

  Gwen had told this story to the kids once.

  Did you go back home? Nora asked.

  I tried, Gwen said. But the problem was that a tall hedge bordered the corner house, and as soon as Gwen h
ad turned the corner, the hedge blocked the view of her own house and she no longer knew where she lived. She was lost. And scared. She sat down on the sidewalk right at the base of the hedge and started to cry. She didn’t know how long she cried for. Then a lady walking down the sidewalk approached her carrying a shopping bag from the market and she asked why Gwen was crying, and Gwen answered she didn’t know. The woman said, I know you, you’re Irene Cassert’s little girl and I know where you live. She reached into her groceries and came out with a whole bag of Hershey’s Kisses which she gave to Gwen, and she walked her home around the corner and back to her mother.

  How many Hershey’s Kisses did you eat? Nate asked.

  I shared them with my brother and sister.

  You got lost just around the corner?

  I was little.

  Now she was grown up. But her sense of direction hadn’t gotten much better and so she was lost again, and instead of being just around the corner from home she was in a mountainous wilderness and could see no guardian angel with a bag of Hershey’s Kisses who would take her hand and lead her home. If Gwen was going to be saved, she’d have to do it herself.

  Okay, then. She’d just have to find her way back to the trail. One thing she remembered from Girl Scouts was how to find a trail you’d lost. You walked in a rectangular pattern, small rectangles, then larger ones, fanning farther and farther out with each pass until you came upon the trail. That’s what Gwen would do, although she’d never had to do it before.

  A hawk circled overhead, pierced the air with a long screech, then drifted away.

  Gwen set out, somewhat confident, but the terrain varied up and down and she had to detour around thick brush and rock formations. It was difficult to know if she’d covered the same territory or was working a proper grid. Her feet grew sore in her thin shoes.

  An hour later she’d walked many rectangles. An hour after that the rain started falling.

  Out to Catch Bad Guys

  After getting off the phone with Mr. Raine, Keller returned to the Yankee game he’d been watching with his son, Andy, and told his wife he had to go out for work. The Yankees were losing, 6–1, to the despised Red Sox, and it was only the fourth inning, their starting pitcher already chased after giving up two home runs, two doubles, and three walks. The team stood four back with three weeks to go, and after tonight would be five back. If he’d been watching alone, Keller would have turned the game off earlier, knowing his team faced a long and painful night, but Andy would stick it out until the end, whatever the score, reminding his dad their team could always come back no matter how far behind, since the clock does not wind down in baseball.