The Virus

by Janelle Diller

  My last step was to put the Baja Breeze envelop in a plastic bag and put it inside the pizza box. And then I headed over to Sanjeev Srivastava’s house.

  He lived in one of those modest California neighborhoods that probably started in the six-hundred-thousand range, even in San Jose. The houses, all one level, sort of Spanish stucco ranchers built sometime in the eighties, were a dizzying repetition of each other, distinguished only by a wildly blooming bougainvillea here, a carefully tamed pfitzer there. My heart verged on exploding in my ears by the time I pulled up to Sanjeev’s house. A few cars were scattered along the street, but they looked empty. If someone was watching the address, I couldn’t tell.

  The place looked dark except for a light in a room at the back of the house, which cast a yellow shadow through the front window and onto the lawn. There were no cars in the drive, but the garage door was down, so that didn’t tell me anything. Sanjeev could be home or not.

  I took a couple of deep breaths, gathering in every molecule of courage in my bones. What was the worst that could happen? Sanjeev himself could answer the door and slam it back in my face, right?

  Well, no. If he were being watched, I would be seen, which could put his family and him on the next plane to Bangalore. And I would have been the one to leave the trail as surely as if I’d painted a bright red arrow up his sidewalk. There were a lot worse things that could happen than getting a door slammed in my face. But the longer I sat, the more suspicious I looked, so I forced myself to get out of the car and walk like a pizza delivery person, which I thought would be fast and direct. Gotta get those pizzas delivered.

  I rang the bell and waited. This is the truth. A fire engine could have raced up the street behind me and I wouldn’t have heard the siren because of all the blood rushing through my head. I counted to ten and then counted to ten again before I pressed the doorbell again. The door opened at that moment. And there he stood, looking more tired and somehow smaller than he had when we’d met just a week earlier.

  For some dumb reason, I had expected Sanjeev’s wife or mother or kids to answer. It didn’t occur to me that he’d actually be home, even though it was closing in on eight. Too much Zaan conditioning, I guess. What kind of a project manager would be home before his kids went to bed?

  “Vegetarian pizza?” I said and looked him in the eye.

  He ignored me and looked at the pizza box in my hand. He shook his head but still didn’t make eye contact. “Pizza? We didn’t order a pizza. You must have the wrong address.”

  “I have an order for Sanjeev Srivastava.” I held the box out to him.

  At the sound of his name, his eyes finally connected with mine and widened. He suddenly put his hand against the doorjamb, like he was going to pass out, but he didn’t. His eyes narrowed and his mouth shaped around the word “What—” but no sound came out.

  From behind him, dishes rattled in the kitchen. They’d had curry for dinner and something with garlic. A chirrupy child’s voice rattled off a question; an older, mellower voice answered. Sanjeev glanced back to the noise, then turned toward me again. He took the pizza box and shuffled awkwardly on his feet. I could have sworn he no longer was looking at me but past me. Then he gave a very, very small shake of his head and closed the door.

  I didn’t let myself think until I’d driven out of the neighborhood and back to a street with a strip of fast food places. I pulled into Baja Fresh, more to calm myself than because I thought I could keep a taco down.

  It was real. The fear was there. It wasn’t just my imagination. I wiped my palms again and closed my eyes. I hadn’t seen anything specific—no cameras, no people peeking out the window from a neighboring house. Yet Sanjeev had the look of a caged animal, a watched caged animal. I had to talk to Eddy, cell phone or not. But the phone rang and then switched to the answering machine. Maybe he was with Pete or out celebrating his interviews from today. But a little voice inside me softly snorted. I tried not to think about where else he could be.

  When my nerves had finally settled down and my blood pressure dropped out of stroke range, I pulled out of the parking lot and headed back north to my hotel. Less than an hour later, I arrived in one piece, but I couldn’t have told you a thing about the drive except that I was pretty sure I hadn’t hit another car.

  I ordered soup from room service and called home. It was nearly ten o’clock in Colorado, but the answering machine picked up. I wanted to pour out my whole evening to him. I desperately needed him to tell me I’d done the right thing. Instead, I left as cheery a message as I could for him to call me, then began mentally drumming my fingers.

  While I waited for room service, I turned on my computer and got online. As I waited for systems to load, I flipped through the TV channels until I found Fox News. It would have been nice to know when they expected to run the segment with Eddy or if they even planned to run it that same day. Maybe I’d already missed it, but I knew they could film the interview and not run it for several days or not run it at all if they decided it wasn’t shrill enough. Eddy still hadn’t called or logged in to gtalk by the time I finished eating, so I called home again. This time I didn’t leave a message. He knew I’d be an arm’s reach from the phone all night. He’d call. He always did.

  I surfed the Internet for a while, looking for any news about Tina, but very little popped up. What did pointed me back to Eddy’s site. Disheartened that his Good Morning America interview hadn’t generated more visibility for her, I turned off the computer, packed it away, and got ready for bed.

  By Letterman time, I finally decided Fox wouldn’t be running his segment, so I switched over to CBS. I tried to stay annoyed with—rather than anxious about—Eddy not calling. I’d pumped enough adrenaline through my body for a week with my trip to Sanjeev, and now this worry about Eddy not calling etched away at the little remaining energy I had. The next thing I knew, Letterman had turned into an old James Bond movie, and the clock read 2:00 a.m. I turned off the TV and lay there, debating whether to call Eddy and wake him or wait till morning.

  Nerves trumped common sense, and I dialed. The phone rang four times, then switched to the answering machine.

  Now I was awake.

  I dialed again, but the line was busy. Some day we’d get voicemail service and call waiting and caller ID—all that helpful telephone stuff that our friends had had for twenty years. Tonight I’d suffer from the inconvenience of waiting until the answering machine finished before I could dial again.

  I got up and drank a glass of water, then dialed again. Once more, the phone rang four times before it went to the answering machine.

  He wasn’t home.

  I waited five more minutes and dialed one final time. One final, painful time, the machine kicked in.

  It was one of the most selfish moments of my life: I prayed he wasn’t home because of Tina and not because something had happened to him.

  CHAPTER

  33

  I DON’T KNOW WHEN I FELL ASLEEP AGAIN. I wouldn’t have even been sure I’d slept except for a hideous dream in which Eddy and I floated on a crimson sea. Chameleons scuttled all around us in a boat that kept changing sizes. A pox-covered Sanjeev was with us and then he wasn’t. The only constant in the dream was a tsunami that hovered in the air above us. I woke with a start at 5:50 and called home—again three times. Once more, only the answering machine kicked in.

  My stomach swirled.

  I fought down the panic. I could taste it, felt its pulsing sensation as it tightened around my head and chest. Surely, this couldn’t have anything to do with my trip to Sanjeev’s house. Nothing could happen that fast, could it? I lay in bed drifting through all the horrible possibilities and fighting back the tears that came anyway. I sorted backwards through the day before, trying to remember the last I’d talked to him. I’d tried calling him a bunch, but that early morning gtalk conversation was the last contact I’d had with him, the one just after his Good Morning America interview when he’d come home and found
my health card. I picked through my memory of that gtalk. He’d told me to stay put for the weekend until he could figure out a plan—which may have been the most logical plan at the moment, but it was the least logical plan if he’d been arrested. It was closing in on twenty-four hours, long enough for anything—anything—to happen.

  At least when they came to get Tina, she had an office full of witnesses to call Pete. Eddy had no one, not even me, because I was thirteen hundred miles from home. Stranded. Helpless. My only hope was that this still had something to do with Tina.

  Calling Pete would either confirm my best hope or my scariest nightmare. I lay there, sorting through which was worse: not knowing and worrying about the worst—but also clinging to the fragile possibility that Eddy’s sudden disappearance had a logical explanation—or knowing the worst.

  Finally, I turned on the light. Eddy, my rock, had tumbled away in the night. I needed to know. Knowing is always better than not knowing.

  I scrolled through the numbers on my cell phone even though I knew I didn’t have Pete’s number programmed in. I booted up my computer and got online to do a search for Pete’s phone number. His auto body shop number popped up, but there was no home number. I remembered him complaining about having an unlisted number and discovering that his number still popped up if you did a search on the Internet. Eddy had told him how to fix it, where to send a request and get it removed.

  Apparently, the process worked.

  I got up and showered, trying to move forward with my day. But I couldn’t even move out of the shower. For forty minutes I leaned against the wall, soaking in the steamy stream of water and letting my own tears flow. His wit, his constancy, his gentle nature—I couldn’t think about life without him, but a dark shield had dropped between this moment and the future. Life without him was all I could think about. He’d been my best friend for decades. We shared the same skin.

  In between jags of sobbing, I kept telling myself that I didn’t know something had happened to him. He could be with Pete, helping Tina. Surely, though, sometime during the night, he could have found a phone and called. I was glad for the momentary flashes of anger at him for not calling since they brought me back from some abyss I didn’t want to discover. Anger is better than total emptiness.

  I finally dragged myself out of the shower and called him again, hanging up at the click that signaled the machine had started. It was now eight o’clock in Colorado. I called Pete’s shop and got some man, maybe the ponytailed guy Eddy had talked to a lifetime ago. Pete had already been in and was on a doughnut run at the moment. He’d be back, but probably not for long the guy said. He didn’t elaborate.

  I debated whether to tell him who I was and what I needed. Would Pete’s business phone be tapped these days? How could it not be?

  “Any more news about Tina?” I asked. It was the wrong way to start.

  There was no sound on the other end of the phone line.

  “My husband is Eddy Rider. The guy who’s been helping Pete.”

  “Sorry. You could tell me you’re Mother Teresa. I can’t give out information to people I don’t know.”

  I bit my tongue. If I’d told him I was Mother Teresa, he’d have to figure out if I sounded like a sainted dead woman. “Please just tell me if Pete is with Eddy.”

  “If you don’t know, I’m sure as hell not telling you over the phone.”

  The phone clicked off.

  “Wait—” My reflexes two seconds too slow.

  I pressed redial, but it went to voicemail. Had he taken the phone off the hook or did he immediately call Pete? I left a message to have Pete call me on my cell phone and gave the number. I didn’t think the information would complicate my life more. Actually, I didn’t care. I was desperate to hear anything.

  I carried the phone with me for the next thirty minutes while I got ready, not daring to risk missing the phone ring over the noise of the hair blower or even my battery powered toothbrush. But nothing happened. I kept sorting through what Pete’s employee had said for every potential meaning. But it was just too rich with all possibilities—too many of them ugly. If it was possible to know less after a phone call, I did. Through it all, I kept putting on my mascara and eyeliner, wiping it off after my tears smeared it yet once more, and putting it on again. Finally, I gave up. The puffy redness would have to be my eye makeup this morning. No one would notice at Baja Breeze anyway. It wasn’t about them.

  Just before I walked out the door, I tried Pete’s shop again. The phone rang and then went to voicemail. It could have been that they didn’t hear it over the shop noise, but I suspected caller ID. Icy fingers of panic kept marching up and down my spine.

  The drive to Baja Breeze took me up 101 and through a jungle of overpasses and concrete ribbons of highways. I always spent the ten-minute drive concentrating on earthquake detection. Random, senseless death at my tender age was one thing. Getting squashed between layers of highway while selling my soul to the evil Zaan Empire was another thing entirely. I had a couple minutes—more if traffic was bad—where I had no alternative plan, even if I could see the highway rolling down on me from a mile away. This morning, I’m sad to say, I let it distract me once again. I paid a heavy price. This time, it made me miss Pete’s return call.

  He left a simple voice message that told me what I didn’t want to hear. “Hi Maggie. I’m returning your call. Nothing new to report about Tina.” Anguished exhaustion etched his voice. I’d lived with the whisper of the worst for the last few hours; he’d carried it on his back for nearly a week. I felt bad for not calling him earlier, but I felt even more miserable because he confirmed my worst fears: Eddy’s disappearance had nothing to do with Tina’s situation.

  I pulled into the Baja Breeze parking lot and sat trying to sort out my sorely limited options. Any other time, I’d fly home even though the flight would have come out of my pocket. Zaan allowed only rare emergencies, preferably the kind where someone ended up dead and the someone was your spouse or a blood relative no more than a generation removed. In-law and grandparent deaths resulted in snippy comments up the chain.

  It was all a moot point, though. I couldn’t fly—which only made me sicker. Plus, I now had risked everything to meet with Sanjeev. I didn’t even know if he would show, but if I missed our meeting, he’d never risk it again. I knew that.

  This moment was like that nightmare time between sleep and waking where you’re frozen, completely unable to move or make a sound, but you need to run or scream. The tears started building again, this time as much from abject helplessness as from fear of what had happened to Eddy. Even if I threw away my meeting with Sanjeev, if I pulled out of the parking lot that very moment, it would take me two days to drive home. But I could only help him from home. If he’d been arrested, the longer I waited to get home, the colder the trail would be. He could disappear into the Homeland Security rat hole and never surface again.

  I was already probably twelve hours too late, maybe nearly twenty-four. My choices were lousy and getting worse.

  I tried calling Pete’s shop again, but I only got voicemail. I pressed stop on my phone before the message ended. How could Pete have anything left in him to track through the labyrinth to find Eddy? Every cell in him would be devoted to Tina’s plight. I wouldn’t—couldn’t—be any different.

  I ached. My heart told me to go home, my head told me to stay in California. My stomach told me to go back to the hotel and stay close to the bathroom for the day.

  But the heart trumps everything. I had to go. Calm settled over me the moment I made the decision. I headed into Baja Breeze to tell Michael I was leaving, probably for good. I laughed out loud at the strangeness of the moment. The worst possible event had finally snapped the golden Zaan handcuffs, and it felt good. If I would only have believed that two months ago, I’d be in Colorado Springs and I’d know exactly where Eddy was. If I’d only listened to my heart earlier.

  I stopped at the ATM in the cafeteria to get cash for the tri
p. Two days on the road, even without using a charge card trail, shouldn’t cost more than five hundred. I pressed the numbers on the screen and waited impatiently for the machine to spit out my money. Instead, the screen flashed, “Insufficient Funds.” Annoyed, I rolled my eyes and walked away. How could a bank machine not have five hundred on a Thursday morning? I’d just have to make a stop somewhere else. A few steps away, I had a “Duh” moment: I was the one with insufficient funds, not the machine. It made no sense because we’d had over three thousand in our account the last time I’d withdrawn money, which had been Sunday night. Eddy often moved money around between accounts, but he always left enough in for emergencies and for automatic withdrawals. I went back to the machine and worked through the menu until the machine spit out a paper with my bank balance: $214.43.

  I stared at the screen, a new knot forming in my stomach as I tried to figure out where three thousand could have gone in four long days. Unless it went some place with Eddy. “Yes!” I said out loud and laughed. The brain fog I’d been living with cleared slightly.

  The gtalk conversation: “Stay put this weekend.” He’d been telling me something.

  There was no guarantee that the Feds hadn’t stepped into the middle of his plans, but the chance that he’d exited on his own crept up. My hoped-for meeting with Sanjeev tipped the balance in the head and heart debate. I would stay.

  No doubt, my stomach would have to figure out what to do with that information.

  CHAPTER