by Wendy Walker
“She was there, in the fort. But not with Casey. She was there with Rick. And he had a knife to her throat.”
Rosie gasped, hands to her mouth.
“What?” Joe said, his voice raised with anger.
“It was just his stupid pocketknife. But still, he was holding her by the hair with the knife … and I just fucking lost it. My brother had been a pain in the ass, but this was beyond anything he’d done before. Seeing Laura like that … it was too much. We got into a fight, rolling on the ground, kicking and punching each other. And then all of sudden, he was off me. Lying on the ground, holding his head.”
Gabe placed his hand on his head as though acting out the scene. All of them were picturing this moment—knowing what was coming.
“I looked back,” he continued, “and there was Laura, holding this stick with both hands. White-knuckled, hair clinging to the sides of her face that was wet with mud and tears. She was a wild animal. She came at him again and I got up and grabbed the end of the stick. I got it away from her. My brother stood, cursing at both of us, but he ran. Back to the house. Of course, I told my mother what he’d been doing to Laura with that knife. He said he was just trying to scare her because she thought she was so tough. But that’s when he left.”
“Before the year was up,” Rosie said. “I always wondered why your parents didn’t wait until the end of the term. Jesus Christ, Gabe. What are you saying? What do you think this story means?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a story. But I have this image in my head. Of Laura, like a wild animal. Holding that stick. Swinging it at my brother’s head. If I hadn’t stopped her…”
“That’s enough.” Joe held up his hand. “Enough. Was this the only time it happened? Did your crazy-ass brother hurt her again?”
“I don’t know. Honestly. Rick wasn’t about to tell me, and Laura never wanted to talk about it. But, God, I think about how angry she always was and I have to wonder if my brother was the cause of it.”
“No!” Rosie wouldn’t hear any more. “I don’t believe it. If it had been more than that one incident, she would have said something. She would have done something about it.”
“Maybe,” Gabe said. “I hope you’re right. The thing is, we’re at a crossroads right here and right now. You already said, Rosie, that one of two things happened last night. And if it’s the one I think it is, maybe we give her some time.”
“Time for what?” Joe asked. “What have you two been discussing?”
Rosie looked at Gabe but didn’t answer.
“You think she hurt this guy and now we should give her time to get away? Like some criminal? Seriously?”
Gabe was about to answer when they heard the sound. The ping on Laura’s laptop.
Rosie rushed back to the table and stared at the screen. Joe was right behind her.
“No!”
Joe grabbed her by the shoulders, but he had no words to calm her.
The message was from a woman with the screen name secondchance. It was short. One word. All caps.
DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN? Had been the question.
The answer was brief.
RUN.
THIRTEEN
Laura. Session Number Nine. Two Months Ago. New York City.
Dr. Brody: I’m sorry, Laura. It must be very hard to carry such a heavy burden.
Laura: Which one? I’ve always felt burdened by something.
Dr. Brody: The guilt.
Laura: Ah, right. That one.
FOURTEEN
Laura. The Night Before. Thursday, 9:30 p.m. Branston, CT.
We don’t make it far.
He takes the same way back, and we are stopped at a light on Grand Street. A bodega is on the right, young men with their pants halfway down their asses crowd around the entrance. Yes, they still do that in downtown Branston. They haven’t gotten the memo.
On the left, two old women sit on the stoop of a dilapidated town house, their knees spread wide even though they wear skirts. There’s nothing to see but white granny panties, and they couldn’t give a shit.
Jonathan plays music again. He hasn’t spoken since we got in the car down by the water.
Finally he does.
“I have a confession,” he says.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“So what is it?”
Do we really need to go through all of this? Just spit it out.
He sighs. He says, “Okay.” Of course.
Then he tells me. “I Googled you.”
I shrug. “I Googled you. I thought that was normal.”
“What did you find?”
How is this now about me? I don’t have a confession. Not one I’m willing to make.
Still, I answer, seeing as we are playing a little game.
“Nothing, actually. No Jonathan Fields matched your picture. But I didn’t try very hard, to be honest. There are a lot of you.”
He sighs again. He says, “Okay.” Again. “My last name isn’t Fields.”
Fuck.
“What is it then?”
“Fielding.”
“And you lied because…?” My heart bangs against the walls of my chest.
“That woman—the one from the bar—she found my ex-wife using my last name. She tried to friend her on social media. Facebook and LinkedIn. Followed her on Instagram. We don’t speak much, so I didn’t know. I couldn’t warn her. They started messaging each other.”
“That’s crazy,” I say. And it is.
“It was benign at first, but then she started asking questions about me, and when my wife—sorry, my ex-wife—got suspicious and cut her off, she started saying all this stuff about what an asshole I was and how could she have married me and what kind of an idiot was she because I probably cheated on her the whole time. Stuff like that.”
I think about this as the light turns.
“So why are you telling me now?”
“What do you mean?” He doesn’t glance at me because he’s driving again.
My heart slows, the volume clicked down to a tolerable level. This all sounds reasonable in the world of online dating.
Not that I would know. But that doesn’t stop me from accepting his explanation.
“She didn’t flip out on you until you slept with her on the third date and then ended things. Which, I have to admit, still has me curious about what happened in that bedroom that you found strange but turned her into a strung-out addict for more of you and whatever it is you had going on that night.”
This gets me a smile. Or maybe a snicker.
“Don’t you think you should have waited to tell me? You haven’t even given me a fighting chance to go psycho on you yet.”
Another smile. Another light. This time we have an empty street corner on one side, and a deserted park on the other. He takes the opportunity to look at me.
“It’s the first time I’ve lied about my name. It feels wrong. Like if we ended up seeing each other again, it would be too late to tell you and then I would have messed things up.”
Sweet. Jesus. Christ.
He might want to see me again. Happy.
Lying will mean the end. Sad.
Confusion sets in. I’m not good with confusion.
“So,” I say, struggling now. “Is that your confession?”
Light turns. Car doesn’t move. He doesn’t see the light because he’s looking into his lap with his eyes closed.
“No,” he says.
Now I’m worried. What’s so bad that he can’t even drive the car?
A pimped-out pickup truck pulls up behind us, lights blinding as they pour into the Toyota. Then a honk. Jonathan Fields—scratch that—Fielding—drives through the light and pulls over at the curb.
“I Googled you,” he says again.
“I know. You said that.”
“I found you.”
The engine hums as it sits idling. We are beside the park, which has a fence running along the side of the road. Not a
soul in sight now that the wifebeaters have driven past. I consider my options. They aren’t good.
Did he stop here on purpose to tell me that he’s found me?
I play it cool.
“Okay,” I say.
“I mean you. The real you. Not Laura Heart. Laura Lochner.”
“So we both lied about our last names? Is that what you mean?”
He shakes his head. I knew he would. I was just buying time. Think. Think. There’s the door handle. The street. The deserted street and the fence and the bodega two blocks away.
“I get it,” he says. “I mean, I would use a different name too.…”
I stop him right there. “How did you find my real name?”
The best defense is a good offense.
“There were no Laura Hearts who matched your photo. But Heart is your middle name so an image came up with all three. Names, that is. All three names. Laura Heart Lochner.”
I don’t know if I believe him. I’ve been so careful. I Googled myself before I started this misadventure, and I didn’t see any images of me with all three names. But then again, I didn’t look at every image. Maybe he has more patience. Maybe he’s more careful because of that woman. Or maybe he’s more careful for other reasons.
Or maybe he already knew.
“Okay,” I say again, only this time with resignation. I’m cornered.
“Look,” he says. “I read all of it. Every article I could find about what happened, and obviously I still came to meet you … so…”
I don’t let him finish. “Are you a reporter or something?”
He gets offended, but I can’t tell if it’s rehearsed. Reporters can be sneaky as hell.
“No!” he insists. “I told you. I just wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting myself into.”
“I could say the same.” I pull out my phone, prepared to Google Jonathan Fielding. But my phone is dead. I don’t know when it died, but it’s dead.
He hands me his phone. “Do you want to check? It’s only fair.”
I push his hand away. “No,” I say. What am I going to find that could even come close?
I face the executioner straight on. I feel him hang my hope first so I can watch it die before my eyes. That’s what they used to do to exact the maximum punishment—hang the coconspirators one at a time, making them watch.
“So what do you want to know? Everything is right there—in the articles you read. It was eleven years ago, so there’s plenty of them.”
He tries to find my eyes, but I can’t bear it.
“It’s okay,” he says. Suddenly I can’t stand that word. “Look, I just wanted you to know that I knew. Like with my last name. I like you and I don’t want to start out with lies.”
I close my eyes. Count to five, then six, then seven. I’m still counting when he speaks again.
“Something happened to me when I was a teenager. Something traumatic like that. I mean, not just like that, but similar in that it stayed with me. Hung over me for years. I think it still does.”
He waits for me to engage, but I’m still counting numbers, looking straight ahead. My hand is on the handle of the door.
I can’t stand this conversation. I can’t go back there. To that night. I was an idiot to come home and think the past wouldn’t be here waiting for me.
He keeps talking.
“I was at the beach with some friends. We used to go there to drink and hang out. It’s a small town, where I grew up. Cops turned a blind eye. Anyway, we saw this old guy out there, in the ocean; he was swimming laps. Back and forth, in the moonlight. We didn’t pay any attention after we realized what he was doing—you know, just swimming.”
I try to listen. I try to focus on Jonathan’s story. But the woods are pulling me back.
“Then all of a sudden he stopped—like he was too tired or something. He waved an arm and called out to us. I took off my shoes and started running toward the edge of the water. A girl was on her phone calling 911. The other kids were like, What are you doing? He could drown you! And I knew they were right. But it just seemed wrong not to try to help him.”
He pauses and I realize I should be having a reaction, an Oh my God, what did you do? or a What happened next? But I haven’t been listening closely enough. Something about the beach and a man swimming …
He continues without me.
“By the time the police came, he’d gone under. Just like that. I will never forget that sight. Watching his head disappear and then, the very last thing to go under the black water—the hand that was waving for help.”
I say it then. “So what happened?”
“He drowned, that’s what happened. Right in front of my eyes, and I did nothing to help him. I didn’t even try.”
I find more words. “What could you have done?”
He shakes his head like he’s heard this a thousand times, and I wonder if he tells this same story to every woman from findlove.com. I wonder if he told it to that crazy woman who stalked his ex-wife. I wonder if it’s even true.
“Nothing—I know. He was too far away for me to have gotten to him, and I didn’t have any training or anything. He could have grabbed me and pulled us both down. I know all of that. Still, the sight of it haunts me. That hand, just disappearing.”
Long pause. Heavy sigh. He’s waiting for my confession now. I don’t give it.
Instead …
“I’m sorry. That must be very hard. To carry such a burden.” I got that line from the shrink.
“Anyway…” says Jonathan Fielding. This is his second favorite word, and I hate that I am finding things not to like. Things I can use later, after it ends badly, to convince myself he was all wrong—anyway.
“So when I read about what happened when you were in high school, I understood a little bit about how these things can happen and then affect you for the rest of your life.”
I smile. It comes over my face like a mask.
“I read everything I could find. One of the articles said that they’d found the car abandoned at the other end of the preserve. Deep in the woods. And some homeless man sleeping inside it.”
“Lionel Casey,” I say, finally. Might as well.
“Right. Lionel Casey,” he repeats after me. “He never went to trial, because he was found mentally incompetent. He died in an institution still claiming to be innocent.”
I shake my head. “Yes,” I say.
Long pause. And then …
“Do people still think you did it? Is that why you don’t use your real name?”
I look at him now and I don’t know what I see. My mind has gone there, back to those woods, back to that car, back to that night, and he has become part of it now, this burden of all burdens. My hand squeezes the handle, and before I can stop myself, I am out of the car, running alongside the fence to the park.
I hear him call my name. “Laura!”
I hear another car door shut and my name, louder this time. “Laura! Stop!”
I run and run until I find the entrance and then I am in the park, the dark, littered park, that I pray will swallow me up.
Jonathan Fielding is fast. Faster than I am in my high heels, and I have a new theory on why men invented them. I feel his hand grab hold of my arm and yank me back so that I fall into him and we are both on the ground.
“Jesus Christ!” he says, standing up, brushing himself off. “What’s the matter with you?”
I don’t get up or brush myself off or do anything except stare at this stranger whose name I don’t even know.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have asked you that—if people thought you killed that boy. Please…”
He reaches his hand out, but I don’t take it.
“I wasn’t implying that you … I just, I was just trying to relate. To understand what you might be going through being back here, where it all happened.”
I’m listening again. He pulls me back with what sounds like reason.
Then he looks
around us.
The park is silent but ominous somehow, like we have silenced it. Like it’s waiting to come back to life and feast on us. People have been murdered in this park over car keys and wallets.
“We shouldn’t be here. Let me drive you back to town at least. Please, Laura.”
He reaches out his hand again, and this time I take it and pull myself up to stand. I brush the dirt from Rosie’s dress. We walk, quickly, back toward the entrance. He doesn’t stop talking. Explaining.
“People said things about me too. About all of us who were at the beach that night. They asked us why we didn’t try to save him.”
It’s not the same. Not even close. But I let him continue.
We get to the car. He opens my door and I get inside.
Again, for the third time, I get in his car.
“I really just didn’t want there to be any lies between us so early on—that’s all. That’s why I wanted to tell you I knew and tell you that I understood, so you wouldn’t think that I thought badly of you.… God, I’m making it worse, aren’t I?”
Jonathan Fielding is a talker now. He knows just what to say, because I believe every word. I have crawled deep inside our story, the story of me and Jonathan, and I only see what is right in front of me. I don’t see that two days ago I had never heard of him and he had never heard of me. I don’t see that our story is now chapters long, filled with questions and explanations and secret investigations into the lives we were not ready to reveal. That woman in the bar. That night in the woods. The holes in his story.
Am I doing it again? Am I constructing him? Writing our story to fit my desires?
I can ask all I want. There is no one there to answer. I’m alone with my defective mind.
Alone. The story of my life. And in spite of everything I know but can’t see, that’s the only story I want to end.
FIFTEEN
Rosie. Present Day. Friday, 2:45 p.m. Branston, CT.
A second email arrived soon after the first. The same woman from findlove.com who had sent the first email. The one that said, simply, RUN!