On Borrowed Time

by David Rosenfelt

I figured that maybe this was all a dream. That would be a good thing, because it would still be going on, and Jen would be there when I woke up. There could be no other explanation. I was not crazy. I simply was not crazy.

  I knew I had to get out of that town. I walked down to a rental car place I had seen a few days before, when I was with Jen, when the world made sense. My car was badly damaged and I remembered Winston saying it was being repaired, but I couldn’t stay there another day. I rented a car and had reached the outskirts of town when I saw the General Store, which Jen and I had stopped in on the way into town. I pulled into the parking lot, willing to give this insanity one more chance to end.

  A woman stood behind the cash register, and I approached her.

  “Excuse me, ma’am. Do you know someone named Jennifer Ryan?”

  She thought for a moment. “Don’t think so. She from around here?”

  I nodded. “Do you know Janice Ryan?”

  She brightened. “Sure do. Lives about two miles from here.”

  “Does she have a daughter?”

  She hesitated for a moment. “No.”

  “Is Janice married?”

  “Not anymore,” she said.

  “What happened to her husband?”

  She seemed suspicious. “Why do you want to know all this?”

  “I think I might know her.”

  She nodded, as if that were good enough. “Ben must be dead a good twenty, twenty-five years now.”

  “Can you tell me how he died?” I asked.

  A wary nod. “Killed himself. Hung himself out in back where they used to have a gazebo.”

  “Do you know why he did that?”

  She looked at me even more suspiciously. “After all this time … why are you asking these questions?”

  “Please, I’m not trying to hurt anyone. It’s just important that I know.”

  “Their little girl died … she was murdered. Ben just couldn’t handle life after that.”

  I had to get home.

  Home was where I lived, where my friends were, where I prayed Jen was. I didn’t feel like there was any chance of my getting to the bottom of this; at least not in that town. The unhappy truth seemed to be that there could be no real-world explanation. None of this was consistent with reality; it was either a dream or I was insane. Or both.

  I would find out when I got home.

  The drive was surreal. I kept looking over to the passenger seat, to Jen, to see her as she was when we’d made the drive out earlier in the week. The fact that she was not there didn’t stop me from looking.

  I drove down the West Side Highway and parked in the lot underneath my building. Our building. I realized with some embarrassment that I was not ready to go upstairs. It was as if our home were the last card I had to play, and I didn’t want to use it quite yet.

  I walked over to the Legends Sports Bar. It was college bowl season, so I could be pretty sure John and Willie would be there. I was feeling very mixed emotions; on the one hand I was craving being with someone I knew, friends who would acknowledge the history we had together. On the other hand, I was afraid of what they would say about Jen. They had to know her, I was positive they knew her, but I was still scared shitless that they wouldn’t. And for all I knew, maybe they didn’t exist either.

  I felt some relief when I saw them sitting at our usual table. There were three women with them, two of whom I recognized from the other night, which seemed decades ago. The third one I’d never seen before.

  At least I didn’t recall ever seeing her before. She was the first one to notice me walking toward the table. She brightened, an immediate look of recognition on her face, and stood up. She said, “You made it,” with obvious pleasure, and kissed me. It was a light kiss, on the mouth, but it didn’t feel like a first kiss.

  Willie said, “We were about to put out a police report on you,” and John added with apparent concern and relief, “Where the hell have you been?” He looked at my bandage. “What happened to your head?”

  I decided to go straight for it. “I’ve been at Jen’s house. Where she grew up.”

  The woman who kissed me put an exaggerated pout on her face and said, “Who’s Jen?”

  “It’s his sister,” John said.

  “No, Jen’s his grandmother,” was Willie’s response.

  “His dog,” John said. “Definitely his dog.”

  They were joking, trying to cover for me in front of this woman, who apparently had some right to be jealous. But the question was, did they really know Jen?

  “I’ve got to talk to you guys.”

  I apparently said it with enough intensity that they realized that whatever was going on was not a joke.

  “Okay … sure,” John said.

  “Can we take a walk?” I asked.

  Within moments we had left the table, and I could hear the women talking among themselves about the weird way I was acting. I waited until we got outside to start.

  “I’ve got to ask you guys something. I am not joking, so please give me straight answers.”

  They both nodded, worried but clueless about where this was going.

  “Last weekend, was I here with you, at this bar, watching the Knicks play the 76ers?”

  They both nodded, and John said, “Sure. What’s going on, Rich?”

  “Who were we with?”

  Willie motioned back toward the inside of the bar. “Them.”

  “Those three?” I asked.

  “Right,” said Willie. “You okay, Rich?”

  “Was one of them my date?”

  John nodded again. “Lauren.”

  “She’s the one who kissed me?” I asked.

  Willie said, “Of course. Hey, Rich, you’re weirding me out. What the hell is going on?”

  Asking me what’s going on would have been humorous if it wasn’t so pathetic. “Do you guys know somebody named Jennifer? Jen?”

  Willie shook his head no, and John said, “I dated a girl in college named Jen. I don’t think you ever met her.”

  I sagged against a parked car. My nightmare was ongoing. They asked me again what was going on, and I told them everything, in excruciating detail. I kept hoping for some flash of recognition, some restored memory, but there was none. Nor was there any sign of deception, but I wouldn’t have expected that. These were my friends; they wouldn’t be a part of any conspiracy. And there couldn’t be a conspiracy this wide.

  When I was finished, John put his hand on my shoulder. “Rich, I don’t know what to tell you. I would say it’s some kind of amnesia deal, except then you’d be forgetting things that happened. What you’re doing is remembering stuff that never happened. But if you were living with somebody, if you were going to get married, we’d know about it.”

  “I don’t know much about this stuff,” said Willie, with apparent embarrassment. “But I think you ought to talk to somebody. My sister went to this shrink, she says he’s really good, and—”

  I interrupted him. “Will you guys take a ride with me?”

  They agreed, and John went back in to tell the women that we had to leave in order to deal with something. Willie took advantage of the time to say, “Hey, Rich, you’re not bullshitting us, are you? I mean, this isn’t some kind of weird joke, right? I mean, I hope it is, in a way, but if it is, you should tell me now.”

  “Willie, it’s the furthest thing from a joke I’ve ever experienced.”

  We walked over to the parking lot and got in my car. On the way, I kept mentioning stories of things they had done with Jen and I, of times we had shared. I was desperate to get them to remember something, anything, but they kept drawing blanks. They thought I was crazy, and it was becoming pretty likely that they were right.

  We drove down to the art gallery in Soho, the one that Jen was a partner in with Sandy Thomas. John and Willie had never been to the gallery, though they certainly should have known of its existence through Jen.

  If Jen ever existed.

  The gall
ery was instead a check cashing/Western Union place, with MoneyGram advertisements in the front window. I drove around the block, in case I had the wrong address, but I knew that I didn’t. I had been there numerous times. To pick up Jen, not to send MoneyGrams.

  I begged off going back to the bar and dropped Willie and John off there. I asked them to convey my regrets to Lauren, whom they informed me I had been dating on and off for almost six weeks.

  As they were getting out of the car, John said, “You gonna be okay?”

  “Probably not,” I said.

  “I’ll get you the name of that shrink,” said Willie. “Just in case you want to use it.”

  “Okay,” I said, if only to get them out of the car.

  It was time to go home.

  I took a deep breath before I entered my apartment … our apartment. I turned on the lights and felt like I had been punched in the gut. It was nothing like I had left it, and exactly like it had been before Jen came into my life. No pictures on the walls, no throw rugs, no treadmill, none of the small touches that Jen had added to turn it into a home.

  I moved through the apartment, almost in a daze, but coherent enough to realize that there was no trace of Jen there. I got to the bedroom and looked at the bed, still unmade, yet Jen had never left an unmade bed in her life.

  I didn’t feel my legs give out from under me, but somehow I found myself sitting on the floor.

  And then I started to cry.

  The subject has returned to his environment.

  That was how the man known as Juice began his first official report. He knew that was the kind of language his superiors preferred, so he used it, even though he thought it was ridiculous. Were he to write in his normal style, it would have read, Kilmer went back home.

  It was also their idea that he use a code name in all aspects of the operation, and though he found it a little dramatic, he would have suggested it had they not. These people put everything in writing, that was their style, and he didn’t want his real name showing up anywhere.

  Not with murder involved.

  The name “Juice” was his own idea. It was taken from O. J. Simpson, a man he had no use for, but one he felt he could learn from. The real Juice had literally gotten away with murder, and was living what seemed to be a carefree life in Florida, playing golf and thumbing his nose at those who would have him in jail, or worse.

  Then he tempted fate by doing that stupid thing in Vegas, and in the process gave the people who hated him another bite at the apple. They didn’t waste it, and they put him away.

  The lesson for the new Juice was that there is always time to screw things up, no matter how well everything is going. And when this job went well, his life would make Simpson’s time in Florida seem like living in a dungeon.

  The new Juice would never have to work again; he would buy some villa on a beach in the Caribbean and spend all his time sucking down drinks with those little umbrellas in them. Or better yet, he’d buy his own beach. Either way, doing something stupid simply wasn’t his style.

  For the time being, all Juice had to do was keep close tabs on Kilmer and chronicle every move he made. With the technological tools at Juice’s disposal, that would be easy enough. Maybe even a little boring …

  Kilmer was likely to be pretty pathetic, running around like a chicken without a head. But that wasn’t Juice’s problem; all he had to do was keep track of him and deal with any eventualities that came up.

  And then, of course, when the time came, to put Kilmer well out of his misery.

  I slept for about an hour, just long enough to dream about Jen. It was a bizarre dream, but certainly no more bizarre than my waking life. We’re walking on the street, and she takes my arm. The look on her face is frightened, but when I ask what’s wrong, she says that I know what’s wrong, that I’ve always known.

  Within moments, she starts to disappear … no, it’s more like disperse, right in front of my eyes. Her body starts to somehow blend in with the air, until there is no distinguishing it and air is all that is left. The entire time, her grip on my arm is getting stronger, as if she is fighting this force, and she’s saying my name, over and over.

  Until finally she is gone.

  Unlike most dreams, this one didn’t fade when I woke up; every bit of it remained embedded in my mind, like frames in a movie. It was somehow comforting, though I’m not sure why. Maybe it was simply because in a way I had gotten to spend more time with Jen, when I no longer expected to.

  I made myself coffee and tried to make some sense out of what had happened. I believed that Jen did, maybe does, exist. She was too real, my memories too vivid, for me to have made her up. I’m simply not that imaginative, nor do I consider myself that crazy. I say this knowing that if someone else told me this exact story, I would dismiss it as looney.

  I did a fairly thorough search of my apartment, which confirmed my fear and expectation that there would be no trace of Jen. I was already realistic enough to doubt that I was going to find her anywhere, except perhaps in my mind, but I simply could not give up looking. I was not yet ready to go on with my life as if Jen had never happened.

  I spent the next three days retracing our steps, talking to people who knew Jen, going to places we went together. I ran into one wall after another, and accomplished nothing other than convincing pretty much everybody that I was a lunatic. The jeweler who sold me Jen’s ring claimed never to have met me, and I had no financial record of my ever having purchased it. Sandy Thomas said that I looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place the face. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

  I was not doing too well.

  Willie’s sister set up an appointment for me with her shrink, Matthew Rawlins, a kindly gentleman who specialized in art therapy. He would have his patients draw pictures, artistic talent didn’t matter, as a way of opening up one’s feelings about the subject and related matters. He had me draw Jen, and I spent about thirty minutes of the forty-five-minute session crying.

  As we approached the end of the session, he said, “You’re in terrible pain.”

  “That’s not exactly a news flash,” I said. “I’ve known that for a while.”

  Dr. Rawlins said that it was the pain that was important, more so than the credibility of the cause. He suggested long-term treatment, it was a hundred and fifty an hour and he supplied the crayons. I told him I’d think it over.

  Lauren, the woman from the sports bar whom Willie and John told me I was dating, called to find out why I had stopped coming around. I apologized, but told her I had met someone else. She hung up on me, which was probably as smart a thing as she had ever done.

  After a few more days, I set up a meeting with Scott Carroll, an editor I’ve worked with at Manhattan magazine, since even a raving, mourning lunatic needs money to live. We met at a small Italian restaurant called Spumoni’s, on Second Avenue and Eighty third Street. Scott’s also a friend, and he and his wife once had dinner at this place with Jen and me.

  I didn’t ask him about Jen, since I dreaded the reaction it would get. Scott is funny, incisive, and brutally honest, and there was a chance he would cut me to ribbons with his comments, once he heard my story. So instead I pitched him ideas for pieces I could write for the magazine, none of which I was really interested in or motivated to write. He didn’t seem terribly impressed either.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Richard,” he said, “but why don’t you write about what you’re going through?”

  Since I hadn’t mentioned to him anything about what I was going through, I wasn’t sure what he was saying. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about this woman you’re looking for, Jennifer?”

  “Did I speak to you about her?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, but I’m the only person in America you haven’t.” He leaned forward. “Conservatively speaking, twenty people have told me about it.”

  “So I’ve become the laughingstock of the city?”
/>   “Why are you limiting it to the city?” he asked, smiling to soften the blow. “Richard, you’re screwed up, okay? Join the club. But at least you’re screwed up in an interesting way. People would lap it up.”

  Was he serious? “You’re suggesting I expose myself as a maniac in your magazine?”

  He laughed. “You’re already exposed. Why not get paid for it?”

  “I’m having trouble seeing the humor in this, Scott.”

  “Sorry,” he said, though I doubt that Scott has ever been sorry about anything he’s said in his life. “But writing the piece is a good idea. A great idea, actually.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s because you’re not opening your mind to the possibilities. Think of it as a chance to present your side of it. Or as a cathartic, cleansing experience. Or as an attempt to help others who might have the same delusion. Or as an opportunity to find Jennifer. Or as a way to sell magazines. Whatever works for you.”

  “No, thanks,” I said, still a little miffed. However, by the end of the lunch he had turned me around. It really could be a way to broaden my search for Jen or, if she was simply a figment of my imagination, to help others with similar figments.

  “When can you get it in the magazine?” I asked, by then enthused about the prospect.

  “How fast can you write it?”

  “I’ll get started right away,” I said. “As soon as I get home. I’m starting it in my mind right now.”

  “Great. And one more thing. The magazine will hire a portrait artist who will draw Jennifer to your specifications. Like the police artists do. Can you describe her?”

  I nodded. “To the last detail.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll set it up.”

  I left him with his coffee and the check, and went home to get to work. I sat down at my computer and had the most intense writing experience of my life. I can usually remain detached from what I write, but this time I couldn’t even come close.

  I finished at four o’clock in the morning and read over what I’d written.

  Jen had come back to life.

  She was on every page, in every word. I had conveyed the real Jen, while at the same time openly admitting to the readers that I could not otherwise prove she ever existed. It was simultaneously and incongruously an acknowledgment of insanity and a piece of which I was very proud.