And Then You Were Gone

by R. J. Jacobs

  Emily, you could be gone now, too.

  I cleared my throat. Drew in a deep enough breath to ask, “So what do we do?”

  “Matt works on a laptop that he takes with him everywhere. I’d have to literally steal it away from his hands to try to look there. I need to get back onto the computer I was using before—the one in the lab—and download whatever I can onto a thumb drive. I’ll print out screenshots if I can. But I have to wait until he’s gone to do it—Thursday at the earliest. They’ll be meeting downstairs all morning to go over the travel schedule for the conference. If not then, next week. They’re both going to their huge conference in London on Sunday morning. But if this is what I think it is—we can’t wait. Until I can get to that computer, I needed someone else to know. I figured who else could I trust more than you, considering everything.”

  “Then we’ll go to the police,” I said.

  Allie, I thought. Or Detective Mason.

  “I’ll call you the second I have something,” she said.

  I picked up the clipboard from my desk and dropped it into her hands. She gave me a puzzled look. “I don’t even know your phone number,” I explained.

  Sandy hesitated, then she set her jaw as she scribbled her information.

  My chest felt as if it had been inflated with helium, like my heart might carry me, boot and all, off the ground.

  Keep calm. Try.

  “Until Thursday?” I asked.

  She nodded, then hugged me.

  “It’ll be all right,” I told her, sounding suddenly like a reassuring psychologist. “If you’re right, the police will find everything.”

  Her nostrils flared before she went back down the stairs. The cool autumn air drifted up the stairwell. I leaned against the rail for a minute more, picturing Paolo’s smile, remembering the warm waits in my car through his long hours. At the bottom of the stairwell, a sliver of light knifed over the floor where the old door hadn’t closed fully. I stared at its sharp shape, imagining. What if it was true? What if the story—all of our stories—were about to be rewritten?

  I would remember the moment that way: a cool gust that smelled like dead leaves. My heart beating in my throat. Did that really happen?

  I entered Sandy’s number in my phone and glanced down at her address. I recognized where she lived immediately. It was on the east side, a row of two houses a block away from a bar I’d been to too often after college. She lived in number one. I felt a wicked hint of jealousy; I couldn’t help it. Where else would Miss Perfect live?

  Stop.

  Competition is such a close neighbor to jealousy.

  Could any of this be right?

  I tore up the paperwork and left a voicemail for Allie, asking if a friend and I could schedule a meeting with her Saturday morning. I said I had some new information. We might just catch a killer, I said.

  I hung up and realized I’d gotten worked up, that I’d been ranting a little, and that if Allie didn’t already regret telling me about Gainer Ridge, she likely would after listening to my message. I picked up the phone to call back. Set it back down. No, that would make it worse. She’d call me. I’d explain.

  Then I realized something else.

  There was no way on earth I was going to wait to learn about Matt. Blood seemed to rush through my veins, and a variable, high-pitched ringing began in my ears. I’d thought I had understood the dynamics of Paolo’s work life—who among his colleagues was a threat to him and to us and who was harmless. I realized as I opened my computer how wrong I’d been.

  TWELVE

  It was at the holiday party for Paolo’s lab, almost a year before. It was the sort of winter night that starts in midafternoon with clouds so low they look like hazy extensions of the trees. The Jeep’s heater was warm on our hands as we rumbled through his boss’s leafy suburb.

  “Not a boss,” Paolo specified. “A PI.”

  “Like Magnum, P.I.?”

  He gave me a look. Evidently, the show hadn’t made it to his part of Argentina.

  “I’m just joking. He was a TV character.”

  He squeezed my hand, smiling. “Dr. Silver is a principal investigator.” Through his accent, Paolo’s careful pronunciation made the words sound computer generated. “He directs what we do, secures our funding, gets our dual-use research permits.”

  “Wait, what’s dual-use?”

  He twisted his mouth the way he did when he searched for specific words. “Dual-use research of concern. Science and government.”

  “To make vaccines? Because something could fall into the wrong hands?”

  “Right. The vaccine would protect people against an H1-N24 infection.”

  Of course, I thought.

  “But to make one, you have to figure out the specific protein changes, the amino acid substitutions, needed for the virus to be transmitted to humans from birds. That transmission is what the vaccine protects against. But if someone wanted to go to war, they could make a lot of people very sick just by knowing the protein mutation sequence.”

  I took a deep breath.

  His eyes stayed on the road. “Before anthrax got mailed around this country, people weren’t aware. Labs did dual-use research without even knowing it. Then politics got involved. And now … take a guess what it’s like to be from another country, working here, filling out forms to work with a virus. They watch. Every move, they watch you so suspiciously.” Paolo’s jaw tightened.

  He worked so hard, over so many late nights. I put my hand on his.

  Had I been in Paolo’s place, my emotions would have cracked through by then, but his voice was steady, nondefensive.

  “But I get it,” he said. “Really. The reason they watch is the same as why we work so hard. One leak, you’re looking at a pandemic. Air traffic today, a highly pathogenic virus could spread in no time, go global. So, there are regulations. The more serious the virus, the more tightly they regulate.”

  He turned down a wide street where patches of snow reflected posh lamplight. I’d grown up in Nashville, but we were way out of my territory. The dry-stack stone fences and elaborate Christmas greenery inflamed my fears of being an imposter, even though I couldn’t understand how an academic could afford such an address.

  “I should have gone into microbiology,” I said.

  Paolo clicked his tongue and shrugged, answering my comment self-assuredly. “This work we do,” he said, “I’d dreamed of doing something so important. A vaccine—it will save lives, make history.” He glanced at me as he said the last word.

  I wished I could laugh—part of me wanted to; the other part swelled with admiration, like when I let myself daydream about introducing him to my father.

  Dr. Silver’s house was nestled between two shadowy oaks. Cars parked three deep in the steep driveway, overflowing onto the roadside. Toward the front door, tidy, underlit hedges rose like statues on either side of the stone steps. I glimpsed shapes in the kitchen. Laughter echoed inside.

  The front door opened just as Paolo reached to knock.

  Leaning against the door frame was a compact woman with shoulder-length blonde hair who looked directly at my boyfriend. “It took you long enough,” she teased, the glint in her eyes making me instantly jealous. “I thought you said you’d be here by eight, you jerk.” She gave his shoulder a playful punch.

  Paolo staggered a small step backward. “Emily, let me introduce you to Sandy.” He turned to me. “Sandy and I work together.”

  “For what? A full year now?” she asked him.

  I extended my hand and smiled as he began to answer. “Hi there, I’m Emily. I’m Paolo’s girlfriend.”

  She took my hand quickly, her mouth barely moving as she spoke to me. “Oh, hi, it’s nice to meet you.” Then she added, with what very well may have been sarcasm, “I hear your name all the time.”

  All the time? Standing beside me, Paolo shifted from one foot to the other. I pinched his side as subtly as possible as we stepped into the warm foyer. Sandy turn
ed and led us into the kitchen, where a half-dozen graduate students looked up in unison and I was introduced all around. They were drinking sangria; I could smell the fruit as Sandy led us to an open space.

  “Dr. Silver was just asking where you were,” she scolded him.

  I wanted to announce that we were late because we’d pulled the Jeep over to have sex, but I stayed quiet.

  “Late start,” Paolo apologized.

  She wore a distant, unfocused smile. “He wanted to be sure he saw you before he left tomorrow.” She turned to me and explained, “Dr. Silver will be in Poland until the end of the month. Paolo knows the lab so well, he practically runs everything while he’s away.”

  “I’m happy to help coordinate.”

  “Don’t be shy about it.” Sandy touched his arm again, then asked me, “Why’s he always so shy?”

  I shook my head. “He’s not.”

  I’d been impressed by the house’s exterior, but the inside was even more striking. Dark wood floors, a stone mantel, rolling flames reflected in the crystal chandelier. The artwork was all original, I noticed—each piece luminous in display lighting. Like a place in a magazine, I thought, absorbing the tink of silverware on delicate plates. It could have belonged to the parents of kids I’d gone to school with.

  I folded my arms.

  A minute later, Sandy went down the stairs toward the living room, weaving between groups, turning heads. Ice rattled in glasses above soft music.

  “She was nice,” I coughed out, but Paolo was looking the other way.

  At the far end of the kitchen, a dark-haired man in skinny jeans and a hoodie pushed himself off the counter toward us. He took a drink from his green bottle of beer and seemed to look at Paolo expectantly. Aggressively. I worked to keep my expression neutral but apparently was unsuccessful, because Paolo laughed out loud. He sounded weary, feigning formality. “And let me introduce you to Matt.”

  Matt nodded crisply. He tucked his hair behind his ears, showing burning blue eyes. There wasn’t a name for their color. They locked on Paolo, and Matt scowled. A slight lift of his chin.

  Paolo said, “Enjoying the party, my friend?”

  No answer. Matt’s eyes narrowed, and his mouth became a smirk. He shook his head. Eyes forward, he strode wordlessly out of the kitchen. As he passed, I caught a whiff of the stale cigarette smoke that clung to his shirt.

  Paolo blew air from his mouth, his head shaking back and forth once in disbelief. “Grow up,” he said. “Go have another cigarette.” He whispered something in Spanish to himself, then said to me, “Seriously, who smokes? That guy might actually get something accomplished if he wasn’t taking cigarette breaks.”

  Matt glanced over his shoulder once more before disappearing.

  I hadn’t smoked in years, but the tension actually made me want a cigarette. I turned to Paolo. “What was up with that?”

  Paolo had picked up a wine bottle and was examining the back label. His eyes had a look of devious false-surprise. “What? Oh, Matt?” he asked, as though nothing had happened.

  “Um, yeah. That was awkward.”

  He dribbled the wine into a glass, swirled it around, and held it to his nose. The contour magnified his smile and his voice resonated in a tiny echo. “It’s nothing. He’s being a baby. Authorship order on our last paper. Nonsense.”

  “You were ahead of him, I’m assuming?” I glanced in the direction Matt had gone.

  Paolo sipped the wine and closed his eyes for half a second, nodding. Then he laughed a little, recalling. “Yeah, and on the one before, actually. Matt’s kind of …” He searched for a word. “A douchebag. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  The phrase sounded like a dissonant note—the beauty of Paolo’s accent somehow carried the power to also make a word sound especially ugly. When my expression turned inquisitive, he shrugged.

  He filled a separate glass and placed it in my hand.

  I set it on the countertop. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Since when are you a wine connoisseur?” I asked.

  “You should try this one,” he suggested.

  Then, a murmur. I heard someone nearby say, “He’s about to talk.” The room quickly hushed.

  Jay Silver had the forward-facing look of a man who seemed destined to arrive at his prime in midlife, wearing round glasses and a cardigan the color of the Syrah swirling in Paolo’s glass. His eyes looked warm and gracious as he clasped his hands in front of him like a priest before a homily—perfectly at ease as the center of attention.

  He bowed his head slightly before he began. “I want to take a minute to say thank you to everyone for coming here tonight. It’s not often we take time from our busy schedules to socialize with each other. I know I’m probably mostly to blame for that.”

  A gentle wave of laughter rolled through the room like the hush of a receding tide. Silver looked at his shoes, grimacing with feigned apology.

  “But stepping away from our benches and getting together is important from time to time. It reminds us of our shared direction and of the larger purpose of our hard work. Together, we’re humanitarians here, are we not?”

  With his head cocked, he seemed to read confusion in the eyes of the students in front of him.

  “Is that putting it too strongly? I hope not. Bubonic plague took two million people. In 1918, influenza took fifty million in a single year. That’s more than World War I. Smallpox? Five hundred million people. It keeps happening. We know this. In fact, it’s speeding up. Now, H1-N24. The CDC has counted twenty-four outbreaks in the last thirty-four years. We’ve known about the virus since 1976, but modern air travel could easily take it global in days,” he said.

  I knew the statistics; I’d heard Paolo say the same figures almost verbatim. But this time made me picture my father detecting his first symptoms. I pictured a map with circles of infection spreading around all the major cities, my stomach hardening with fear. I wanted to run out of the room but realized Paolo was holding my hand. I squeezed his palm, anchoring myself with the sensation of his skin touching mine.

  The holiday party still hushed, Jay Silver paused. “I call our work humanitarian because we’re working for humankind to outlast us.” Silver’s voice was catching with emotion. Maybe he’d prepared part of what he was saying, but his eyes glimmered with the promise of improvisation. Around him, the room was still. I realized I was chewing the nail of my pinkie finger. I picked up the wine glass Paolo had filled for me a minute earlier and took a long sip.

  “I want to tell you all a quick story about my first experience with H1-N24,” Silver continued. “I’m used to talking about the economics of developing a vaccine, but this is a story about the people most vulnerable to an outbreak. I’ve never told it before. It’s about the year I worked in an East African village during my residency. It was a very rural place, and the people there lived simply. If you’ve never been to Africa, go. See what’s there. It’s magnificent in many ways.

  “I was just starting out, and had a lot to learn about medicine. The first month, I wore a necktie every day to clinic because I thought looking professional was important. Most of my med school classmates had taken more conventional residencies here in the States, and when I imagined the clinics where they were working, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. If my being in Africa was a mistake. But on my first day, a woman knocked at my door at the clinic and asked if I could help her child.”

  Silver pinched his fingers together.

  “And for just a second, I felt the sting of irritation, nipping at me, biting like an insect. Part of me wanted to go home, to leave even before I got started. But there was anguish in her eyes. I could feel her desperation, and I thankfully snapped myself out of my little moment of self-importance. I had her daughter brought in. They laid her on an exam table, and I began to search for a pulse with my fingertips. I searched her arms, her chest. I expected her to be burning up with fever, but he
r skin was cold. And after a while, I realized I couldn’t find her pulse because she was already gone. I had to explain this to her mother. It was more horrible than you can imagine. I decided then that I would do everything in my power to fight the scourge of infectious disease in this world. I took off my necktie. I never put it back on.”

  Silver quickly wiped at his eye.

  “And we should celebrate. Not to congratulate ourselves, but to energize one another. Because we’re close. We’ve gotten very lucky in our work, truthfully. But, tonight, we’re closer than ever before to having a vaccine. Because of what we do.”

  Silver swept his hand in a circle as if stirring a cauldron, and a wave of applause washed through the room. In the context of H1-N24, the enthusiasm made me shudder and I felt my feet shuffle slightly backward. I recognized the eagerness in Silver’s voice—it reminded me of the way my father had spoken about meaning in his work before he left on his last medical mission trip.

  Later, Mom and I had learned that there was a minor outbreak of “flu” in the area where he was working, although details never became clear. He complained of having a fever about a week after he arrived and stopped working, isolating himself, perhaps understanding the possibility of what was happening. Forty-eight hours from when his symptoms first began, he fell into a coma from which he never awoke.

  At the age of ten, of course, I didn’t know what Liberia even was, or why there was a civil war there, but Mom explained to me what refugees were and how my father had gone to help. He was to help provide basic health care there along with mass vaccinations. She told me years later that he’d planned to speak on the attacks against hospitals and feeding stations when he returned.

  Of course, being my father, it would only make sense that he would volunteer for the most dangerous mission trip. I wished I’d been old enough to have the words to ask him why he went. He had a sadness about him—hopeful, but with some resignation—at least that’s what I remembered. Years later, I’d wonder if he ever struggled with depression, like I did.

  After Silver spoke, soft jazz returned, then the hum of conversation. I felt like I was on the set of a movie. Paolo placed his hand on my arm, and I realized it felt uncomfortable.