by Lisa Unger
“Just tell us where he is. And,” Ivan said, shrugging and pointing to the door, “we leave.”
I had completely lost my ability to communicate; this scenario was so far out of my frame of reference, something that I might have imagined and written. But nothing in my life had prepared me for this type of event. I looked over at Fred, then back at Ivan. He gave me an almost friendly smile but there was something terrible about it, something dark.
“He’s not dead,” he said lightly. He pointed to Fred and then to his own square brow. “The head. It bleeds a lot, you know?”
To illustrate, he walked over to Fred and gave him a soft kick in the ribs. I was elated to hear my stepfather groan in pain, see his eyelids flutter. I moved over to him quickly, felt his blood soak through my skirt. I put a hand on his forehead; it was cool and clammy. I looked up at the three men.
“If you’re looking for Marcus,” I said, finally finding my voice, “I have no idea where he is.”
Ivan regarded me carefully, seemed to size me up and consider my words. I became conscious of time passing quickly. My cell phone was in the pocket of my skirt. I wondered if I could press 911 and send without him noticing. Fred needed help fast.
“He betrayed me, stole from me,” Ivan said, angry, almost petulant. “He tried to kill me.”
He lifted his shirt with his free hand to show me a swath of bandages around his chest, too much blood-garish red against the white-seeping through the gauze. I saw sweat emerge on his gray forehead. Was he the one I’d heard screaming? One of his colleagues lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall. The smell filled my sinuses. I shifted my hand into my pocket. But Ivan shook his head at me. I removed it slowly.
“He betrayed me, too,” I said finally. We could have been discussing anything-the crumbling economy, bad weather, gravity, forces out of our control that can change our lives. I felt a sudden wash of rage.
“Look at me!” I yelled suddenly, startling all of them. Both of the smaller men raised their guns. The smoker let his cigarette drop to the floor. I pointed to my own head. “Someone did this to me. A tall woman, a blonde, from Czech like you. She destroyed Marcus’s office, probably my home, too. They took everything from me. If I knew where he was, do you think I’d be here?”
Ivan considered me. I noticed a deep scar on his face, that his hands were callused. I was still yelling, trying to make him understand.
“Hush, hush,” he said, as though he was talking to a weeping child. And I realized I was weeping, big rivers of tears streaming down my face. I wiped at them with my sleeve. “Don’t yell.”
I saw it then, the way he didn’t like me yelling, was uncomfortable with my tears. He was a bit on the slow side, not quite disabled but someone with a very low IQ. There was something babyish about him, too, and something skittish. A child used to being brutalized, one who’d developed a flinch. Suddenly there was a strangely familiar expression on his face, something around his red-rimmed eyes, the corners of his mouth. I thought of Marcus’s photo album. Had he been in there? Had I seen him before?
“She was tall. Nearly as tall as you, with blond hair and green eyes,” I said more softly. “She knew Marcus,” I continued when he didn’t say anything.
He nodded slowly, a deep frown furrowing his brow, his expression going dark.
“Do you know who I’m talking about?”
He nodded again, but this time to his two friends. He said something in Czech that I didn’t understand. The two men both looked at me for a second and I wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake. They got what they wanted from me and now they’d have no use for me or Fred. I’d lost my gamble. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, the two smaller men had moved toward the door and were exiting. I heard their footfalls on the landing. They were bold, these men. Coming and going in broad daylight, not hiding themselves or their vehicle. Were they careless or apathetic? Aware that the property was removed from the street, not visible to the neighbors? They must have been watching the apartment, followed me up here from the city. I’d been too oblivious, too naive to notice.
A second later, with my heart a turbine engine in my chest, I heard a car hum to life outside. Ivan raised his gun at me, but this time I didn’t look away. I didn’t want to make it easier for him to kill me; I wanted him to see my eyes.
“Who is he?” I asked. “What’s his name?”
Fred shifted and moaned beside me. Ivan offered that same weird smile again, this time accompanied by a low chuckle.
“Tell me,” I said, holding his gaze. “I need to know. If you’re going to kill me, I want to know my husband’s name before I die.”
Something strange passed between us. Two people who might as well be living on different planets, our experiences and ideas, our intellects were so opposite. In that moment, we were unified by rage and betrayal. He lowered his gun.
“His name is Kristof Ragan.” The smile dropped from his face. “He is my brother.”
He raised a finger to his lips then and made a shushing noise. Then he took that same finger and drew it slowly across his neck, whispering something in Czech that I didn’t understand. On the other hand, I don’t suppose I needed an interpreter.
Then he turned and left, more quickly and gracefully than I would have imagined possible of a man his size. I was already dialing 911 when I heard the car move down the drive.
BY THE TIME Linda returned to the loft, she was frazzled and drained. After a long, slow trip uptown to Isabel’s apartment, she learned that she’d missed her sister by minutes, according to the cop in the hallway. She was shocked to look over his shoulder and see Izzy’s apartment trashed, but she wasn’t allowed inside. The detectives working the case had also left, following up a lead. She left feeling frustrated and filled with a sick anxiety. She’d inherited her mother’s proclivity for worry. Fight it as she might, she’d never quite been able to overcome it.
She had a tension headache brewing when she closed the door and saw Erik waiting on the couch. Something about the look on her husband’s face ratcheted the pain up a notch. Dread and guilt duked it out in her chest as she moved closer to him.
“What?” she said by way of greeting, more testily than she’d intended.
“We need to talk, Linda.” She felt a jangle of alarm as she flashed on her assignation in the bathroom at the Java Stop. So tawdry. So foolish. Did she want to ruin her life and marriage? Erik could have easily seen her coming or going. Maybe someone in the building had heard Ben pleading at the intercom, mentioned it to Erik.
“Sure,” she said, laying her bag by the door. She moved over to the couch and curled herself up in a ball there. In spite of the tension, she still found herself glancing about at the perpetual mess that was their home. If it was cluttered, at least it was clean-but only because of the weekly cleaning woman. How long had Trevor’s soccer jersey been hanging off that chaise? Wasn’t it anybody else’s responsibility but hers to pick up after the kids? Weren’t they old enough to pick up their own stuff?
“Don’t worry about the mess, Linda. I’ll take care of it in a minute.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
He released a breath through his nose. He was perched on a stool, a half-full glass of water in his hand. She found she couldn’t look at him directly, couldn’t hold those earnest, loving eyes. She didn’t deserve that gaze. She looked down at her fingernails. Her nails were a mess; she needed a manicure.
“I’ve made a terrible mistake,” he said. He shifted off the stool and came over to her, sat heavily beside her on the couch. “I’ve done something really stupid, possibly unforgivable, Linda.”
Relief mingled with concern and she raised her eyes to his face. She saw him then, maybe for the first time in days. Their busy life was a perpetual swing dance between kids and home, her work and his, meals and pickups and drop-offs from various activities-kung fu for Emma, violin lessons for Trevor. Sometimes they just fell into a heap on the couch afte
r the kids went to bed and watched an hour of television, or read in bed until one fell asleep and the other turned off the light. She thought some days he noticed the dishes in the sink before he noticed what she was wearing or that she’d changed her perfume. Sometimes she thought they’d see each other more if they worked apart, each of them going to an office and returning home at the end of the day.
She regarded his sandy stubble and ocean-blue eyes, the lean lines of his high cheekbones, his aquiline nose. That face had tamed her heart. He had sunshine at his core, a breezy summer day at the beach.
“What are you so mad about?” he’d asked early in their relationship. A swank gallery in SoHo; he was fifteen minutes late. It wasn’t even her show. But she raged at him on the street in the rain. “Because I know you’re not this angry about my being fifteen minutes late.”
She felt as if he’d thrown a bucket of cold water on her. Embarrassed, sobered, she caught sight of her reflection in the gallery’s picture window. She didn’t recognize her own expression, her own posture. A few people were watching; one strikingly thin woman smirked, a small plastic cup of wine in her hand. Why he didn’t walk away right then, she never could figure out.
“You’re too young, too beautiful, too good to let yourself be this way,” he whispered, taking her hands. She knew then that he really saw her, that he might have been the first and only person who ever had, other than her sister. The face she wore for everyone else, the demure and polite smile, the unfailingly kind demeanor, the proper girl who did everything right… he didn’t even notice it. When he looked at her he saw straight to the heart of her.
Within a month, she was seeing a shrink, trying to figure out why indeed she was so angry. And then she had to claw her way out of the quicksand of her own inner life before coming to shore. In a cozy office on the Upper West Side, a motherly psychologist with a comforting wave of gray hair and a soft bosom asked her, over time, questions she almost couldn’t stand to hear.
“Do you really blame your mother for moving on, for doing what she thought she had to save herself and her girls? Do you really hate Fred for loving your mother? Isn’t it just that you’re angry with your father for abandoning you, for being absent emotionally before that? Isn’t it just safer to be angry at living people because there’s no way to resolve the anger you have toward your father? Do you really think he loved your sister more than he did you?”
These were the hard things she had to face and answer. But she never would have thought to confront them at all if not for Erik. And where would she be then? She reached for him, touched his face and let her hand drift down to his shoulder.
“How could anything you’ve done be unforgivable?” she asked. He lowered his head at this, put his chin all the way to his chest.
“Linda.”
“I forgive you,” she said. “Whatever it is.”
She slid into him and wrapped him tight in her arms. She held on to him, her buoy against the great tides of regret and shame, guilt for the things she’d done, how she’d betrayed him. I’m so sorry, she said to his heart. I’ll never see him again.
“Linda,” he said again, pulling away from her. She looked at his face and didn’t like what she saw there. Despair. A dark flower of dread started to bloom in her center.
“Erik,” she said, releasing a breath with his name. “What is it?”
IT HAD SEEMED like only seconds after the 911 call, as I begged and pleaded with Fred to open his eyes, that police and paramedics were at the scene. The next thing I knew, Fred was lifted into the back of an ambulance, I climbed in after him, and we raced toward the hospital. More police were waiting when we arrived and Fred was wheeled away.
I stared after him, wondering if my carelessness had ended his life. I didn’t feel anything but a kind of numbness. A voice in my head kept telling me, This is not happening. Wake up.
A cop started asking me questions: What happened? How was it that I was already injured? Could I describe the men who did this to my stepfather? I asked for Detective Crowe. He was called. I was escorted to a waiting area.
I waited, pacing. Fatigue was replaced by nervous energy. I couldn’t stop moving, couldn’t keep my mind from racing back over the story of my marriage, looking for the chinks, the flaws in the plot. And there they were, the clues, the foreshadowing that the hero was really a villain, waiting behind the curtain with his dagger drawn.
But no. Life’s not so simple. People are many things, each of them true. Marcus was my husband. He was right: We were great friends and excellent lovers. That was true once, even if it didn’t matter much now.
I came back to the present when a doctor pushed into the room, told me that a bullet had grazed Fred’s head, leaving a valley over his ear but never penetrating his skull. He’d lost a lot of blood but he’d walk away from the injury. A lucky man. Then, suddenly, Detective Crowe was there with his little black notebook and expensive pen, taking a statement from me that I now barely remember giving. I wondered how he’d gotten there so fast, and he told me they’d been in Inwood, searching the apartment of Charlie Shane, my doorman, another familiar figure in my life who, it seemed, was not what he appeared. They’d found nothing useful. But Charlie had disappeared.
I vaguely recall offering Detective Crowe a recount of the events at Fred and Margie’s house. Was it skepticism that I saw on his face as I recounted the scene?
“Isabel.” There was that friendly use of my name again. “Are you leaving something out?” His pen hovered.
“Of course not,” I answered, indignant.
I felt the weight of his gaze. “Don’t be foolish,” he said quietly, moving a little closer to me.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He let an awkward minute pass, during which I looked at my cuticles in the horrid white fluorescent light. I watched nurses with their swift, quiet steps, listened to the incessant electronic rippling of a telephone that no one answered.
“You know what’s starting to bother me?” he asked finally.
“What’s that?”
“You seem to be having all these run-ins with unsavory types-FBI impersonators and European thugs-and yet you always emerge unscathed. Meanwhile, the bodies of the injured and dead litter the scene.” Poetry again, from the gentleman cop.
I fixated on the word choice a moment, as I’m prone to do, analyzed it for its appropriateness. Unscathed: without suffering any injury or harm.
“I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve ‘emerged unscathed,’ Detective. Quite the opposite.” I pointed to my head but I was thinking of the deeper injuries, my riven life, the derailed narrative of my marriage.
“Relatively speaking,” he said with an assenting lift of his shoulders. “What I meant was, there was really no reason I can see for any of these people to leave you breathing. We’re not talking about people operating with conscience. We’re talking about murderers and thieves. So I find myself asking: Why are you still alive?”
It was a good question and one I’d certainly asked myself, even posed to my sister.
“Any theories?” I asked, only half a smart-ass.
“One theory might be that you have a greater involvement in this than we initially suspected. That rather than a victim, you might be an accomplice, hiding in plain sight, playing the role of the injured wife.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Because to me, you don’t seem like the type for this sort of thing. This woman you see on the talk shows-her husband has another family in Kalamazoo, or her suitor took off with her life savings-that’s not you. You’re sharp, aren’t you? Together.”
“Maybe not sharp enough to be immune to subterfuge, but definitely too sharp to be a part of anything like this. People dead around me, my stepfather very nearly killed, all my money gone, my sister’s money? No. No.” Just the recounting of it all filled me with that dangerous cocktail of rage and fear. I realized suddenly that both of my fists were clenched hard, nails digging ruthlessly int
o my palms. I released them with difficulty.
“Then just tell me what you’re holding back.”
“Nothing,” I said, trying to look as earnest as possible. “I swear.”
Lies are a contagion, a virus that replicates itself. Marc’s deception was the germ that had infected me. I was sick with it, fevered with a compulsion to understand how he’d managed to deceive me and why, so I was coughing up lies of my own. The detective was right. I was withholding information. The text message from Marcus, the name given to me by Ivan, his alleged brother-those things belonged to me. It felt like all I had left. If I let him have these things, I’d have lost ownership of them as well.
“I don’t believe you,” he said simply.
“I want a lawyer.”
He raised a hand, gave me a warning look. “If you go down that road, it puts us on opposite teams.”
Oh, spare me. Did he really think he could manipulate me out of my rights?
“Our conversation ended thirty seconds ago,” I said.
The detective pressed his mouth into a thin, tight line and I saw his nostrils flare just slightly. Would he blush or pale with his frustration? I wondered. Then his cheeks fired up, a lovely rosey blush on the white of his skin. Marcus always used to go gray when he was angry. It didn’t seem healthy. Red is the color of emotion brought forth, a brilliant rush of flame that burns hot and incinerates itself. Gray is the color of ire that’s eating you up inside, hollowing you out.
Detective Crowe opened his mouth and then clamped it shut again. We had a brief staring contest, which I won. He lowered his eyes, turned and left the waiting room, the electricity of everything he had wanted to say trailing behind him. He’d have slammed the door, I’m sure, but the hydraulic hinge only allowed it to close with an unsatisfying hiss.
He wasn’t gone long-I was still staring at the door-when Linda and Erik burst through. I’d called Linda upon arriving at the hospital, quite by instinct. I barely remembered the conversation. Her arrival caused some odd combination of anxiety and relief. Trevor and Emily followed behind, holding hands, looking like bush babies with wide eyes and nervous smiles. The sight of this made me sad. If they weren’t fighting, they were scared. I had to take responsibility for everything. I’d let Marcus into our lives, and he’d damaged us all.