And Then You Were Gone

by R. J. Jacobs

  Except I was the psycho.

  Rain fell steadily. The windshield wipers strained to smear the frozen bits. Sleet touched my forearm. I reached for my phone, flashed to an image of my wreck. I could picture the other car, twisted. No. I didn’t need GPS anyway; I’d known where Sandy lived the second I’d seen her address.

  I glanced back at the glove box. Was Sandy a patient? Of course not. I considered calling Marty. Someone needed to know, and I imagined his voice—calming and reassuring.

  Then I talked myself out of it, knowing how erratic I’d sound. Marty had taken a chance on me. The last thing I wanted him to think was that I’d already gone off the deep end.

  I craned my neck. Still nothing to see beyond the line of cars stretching out under the low, Mylar clouds reflecting downtown. The car in front of me lurched ahead, then taillights blazed again. Through the rear window, the hazy light of a pale rectangle—someone leaning over a screen.

  “Go, dammit! Go!” I laid on the horn. In the rain, it sounded like a pathetic request, like someone coughing at the back of a crowd. A pair of hands raised in a shrug, as if to say, What do you want me to do? I didn’t care. I hit it again.

  Eventually, I crossed the river and found traffic was no better on the east side. I cut through a church parking lot at a slow intersection. My headlights found a closed gate, chained and locked in the center. I pictured my cousins and me shredding a field twenty years before. The engine rumbled as if to catch its breath—as if to remind me of its age—then growled reluctantly as I turned the wheel toward an opening in the landscaping and gunned through a ditch onto a side street. Air whistled in. Bare branches swayed in a canopy overhead as I tore past sleepy houses, the seat belt laid tightly against my chest.

  I ran two red lights, almost hoping icy-blue lights would appear behind me. I imagined this whole thing as a scene from a movie, a higher purpose justifying my reckless driving.

  I counted the addresses until I found Sandy’s townhouse at the far end of the row. Neat, new construction, the front lawns on either side still covered in straw.

  I slammed the truck door. Freezing rain instantly soaked through my tank top.

  Sandy’s upstairs lights were on. Along the row, the other windows were dark.

  I could hear the strain of her voice on the recording in my mind. What had she found? What had stopped her from saying? An instant passed in which my head told me I didn’t actually know Sandy very well, that I could be frozen in the cold, sobbing rain because of a misunderstanding, histrionics.

  But I knew—knew—I wasn’t wrong.

  My chest felt full of helium. Something had happened. Something devilish.

  I rubbed my bare arms. I could hardly feel the rain. One thing about mania, even hypomania—you burn inside.

  I rang the doorbell, knocked. Down the row, the door fronts stayed dark. I rested my finger on the round button beside her front door, pressed it again. The chime sounded vacant, even ironic, like I should have understood its futility already. I stepped into the landscaping for a look into the window, the soaked mulch spongy beneath my feet. Inside was like a charcoal sketch, just outlines. The edge of my boot caught the ground, and my ankle screamed in pain. I’d pushed it too far already on the bike. It didn’t matter.

  Rain pelted me as I limped back to the street. Upstairs was still and ghostly lit. Maybe she’d left the lights on, I thought; maybe she’d gone to the police, or was calling me back to say it was a mistake and that everything was all right. I limped back to the truck, found my phone, and trudged through the muddy side yard.

  The light above her back deck was out, but even from below I could see the door pushed in, swinging open. My ankle gave and splinters ripped into my hand as I gripped the slick wooden handrails and pulled myself upward.

  “Sandy?”

  The cold metal of the back door sent a chill up my arm when I pressed it open. I glanced at the tiny cuts on my palm, the warm trickle of blood already washed away in the rain. I shoved my hand into my jacket pocket.

  “Hello?” My voice seemed to drop off, like I was yelling into space.

  Water had blown into the kitchen and reflected dimly on the tile. A gust of wind yanked the wet doorknob from my hand, shoving my shoulders. I called her name again as the rain dripped off me, puddles swelling slickly around my feet. I’d rushed over, but inside her condo, on the stairs, a wave of reluctance washed over me. I shouldn’t be here, I thought, but I had to be.

  Call the police.

  My mouth was dry. The door slammed behind me with a gust, and the blinds scraped as they swayed back and forth. I took my hand from my pocket and let it guide me up the stairs, toward the only light.

  The bedrooms were dark. A long triangle of light stabbed out from beneath the bathroom door. My stomach knew already that she was inside.

  I pushed open the door. Her blonde hair was half floating, a wave beneath the water. The hem of her white shirt rose to the surface, her dark jeans like black weights around her legs.

  Sandy’s eyes were empty, dead.

  Still, I dove for her, letting out something between a scream and a howl as I struggled to hoist her. I dragged her onto the tile, part of me knowing it would be no use. I went through the motions of CPR. Around us, the floor flooded. Her head fell back coldly onto my knees as I pinched her nose, breathed into her mouth.

  Gone. Nothing was inside her.

  Her skin felt a way I didn’t know skin could feel—not warm and not cold. It felt like water the temperature of your own body. Like an ocean you disappear into. Or dissolve in.

  I was in an out-of-body spell.

  This was shock.

  When my phone fell out of my pocket, I wiped it off and dialed 911.

  “5411 Boscobel Street,” I cried. My head hit the hard side of her sink as I slipped. “My friend has drowned.”

  Whatever she’d learned had killed her.

  But I needed to find out what it was. Immediately.

  SEVENTEEN

  “You need to get up.” A rough hand on my shoulder, then one under my arm, pulling up. Uniforms behind me. Then static, voices through small speakers.

  “How long had she been in the water?”

  “I don’t know. She was in the tub when I got here.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Ten minutes?” I guessed. Time was distorted. I thought back to the rain, the splintery handrail. “Maybe fifteen.”

  Maybe I was dragged backward; maybe I floated. Footsteps splashed behind me, navy-blue shirts filled the room and hallway. Lights turned on abruptly—the hall, the bedrooms. A voice giving directions. Another asking me questions. I couldn’t look directly at anyone. I’m not here. This isn’t happening.

  When I stood, I paced the hallway, wild-eyed and shivering, glancing at Sandy every few seconds, like she might sit up, spit water from her mouth like a fountain, and cough. Like she might end the nightmare.

  A blue shirt appeared in front of my face, blocking my path. A light shined in my eyes until I pushed away the hand that held it. I was acting crazy. I knew that.

  They might think I was crazy, I considered.

  Or they might think I killed her.

  Then someone muttered the word drugs. A voice asked me directly, “What have you been taking tonight?”

  I swallowed, shook my head. I wondered what they already knew about me. I pictured Cal’s expression. I started to find words to describe what I’d taken that day, to say it was just for symptom control—a mood stabilizer—but they were drowned out by the reverberation of a singular idea: Sandy had drowned.

  I realized I was trying to think up a path toward a place where what had just happened … hadn’t.

  I bit my cuticles, walked a tight circle.

  Water everywhere, puddles under shoes.

  There had to be something to do. That was the problem—helplessness. There was absolutely nothing to do.

  I couldn’t think about Paolo, not yet. But the great
expanse—of he and I, and the way he died—was rising inside me like a bubble from the bottom of the ocean. It was only a matter of time before it reached the surface and became a part of the atmosphere.

  How did this happen? Matt’s name, his hoodied shape, his smoky trail at Dr. Silver’s holiday party, were sharpening in my mind.

  Then there was another voice, light reflecting off metal badges, and the scratch and crackle of a radio. There was a hand suddenly on both of my shoulders. “Excuse me, Miss.” These weren’t questions, I ascertained; they were directives for me to stop pacing. My shoes squeaked to a halt. When my eyes found the face from which the voice was coming, I understood it was not an EMT. This was a cop, somewhere in his late twenties, crew-cut blond hair wet from the rain.

  He asked, “Did you place the call to 911?”

  “Yes. Me.”

  “Oh. Hi,” he said. A wave of recognition washed over his face. “I need you to come on downstairs for me. Okay?”

  In Sandy’s kitchen, he half rotated a chair and pointed at it. “Just stay here for right now. Okay?”

  I looked at him without looking—dark-blue uniform with even-darker blue splotches from the rain. He had young, inquisitive eyes. He took the chair between me and the door. I couldn’t place him, but he looked familiar.

  My heart continued pounding.

  Police were smart, I thought. I’d tell them what I knew, and they would go find Matt. If I could just think of his last name, then they’d go get him. I lit up my phone.

  The familiar blond cop turned to me. “You’d better set that down for now.” He sounded helpful, like a hardware store employee pointing me in the right direction.

  I set down the phone.

  My hair, arms, and legs dripped a mixture of gym sweat, rainwater, and bathwater. An EMT draped a blanket over me. Even shivering, my cheeks burned as I glanced around Sandy’s condo—a calendar on the cabinet with notes in her handwriting for appointments she wouldn’t keep, a ceramic bull on whose horn she’d hung her keys, its eyes resigned, mournful. Her family photos sat, waiting like lost children.

  I touched the crescent-shaped scar on my wrist, fighting the feeling that some giant hand seemed resolved to knock my world off its axis again and again.

  Lights flashed through every window. The blond officer sat with me while the others lingered around the door frame, taking turns pointing at the sky. I could hardly sit still, unintentionally rocking in the chair. The nontemperature feel of Sandy’s cold body crashed over me like a determined sequence of waves; when one hit, another was eager to follow.

  The blond officer checked something on his phone and assured me, kindly, that more people would arrive to talk with me very soon. He beat on his knees with flat palms in a fast rhythm, some old, nervous song from inside himself.

  “Listen.” I tried not to sound wild. “I know who … I know some things, some important information.”

  “If you’ll hang tight for just a minute more—”

  I stood. He stood, too. He lowered his palms. We both sat again.

  More police arrived. One mumbled curses every few seconds. He reared his fist back like he was about to strike something.

  “The rain’ll complicate things,” the blond officer volunteered.

  “It destroys evidence,” I said quietly.

  His body straightened. He glanced back at the doorway, then at me—a slight hesitation. “Maybe so, yeah.”

  “I need to talk to … somebody. A detective.” I reached for the cop’s arm.

  He pulled it back just as a stout woman in a yellow raincoat appeared. She slipped covers over her shoes, gloved her hands, and ascended the stairs.

  Cool air blew in from outside. “Medical examiner’s here.” He nodded very slightly and pointed his chin toward her.

  “Look, I’m on your team here. I need to talk to …” My mind searched for a name—pink gum, razor nick. A rose on his neck. “Detective Mason! Andre Mason.”

  I’d said the magic words. Semi-magic, at least. His head swiveled. He looked at me for a doubtful second, began to stand, stopped, then completed the movement. “Stay here?”

  I agreed.

  He went to the others by the door, downpour raging behind them. They alternated turns glancing over at me. One raised his phone to his ear.

  On the stairwell, a flash erupted like lightning—two, three, four times. They were taking pictures of her. I pictured Sandy’s body in the lewd, forensic light and shook my head to clear the image from my thoughts—the blankness in her eyes, the lack of reflexes that should have cleared the water and hair from her mouth. The vacancy of death. I fought a protective impulse to run upstairs, take the blanket from around my shoulders, and cover her.

  I fought the impulse to think about Paolo, too, what his expression might have been like in the water.

  When Mason arrived, his eyes found me from the doorway. He covered his shoes and strode over with the familiar blond flanking him.

  With a quick nod to me, he turned a chair around and sat, glancing down at that training watch. “They said you called about twenty-five minutes ago?” His voice was calm clarity, unimpeded by gum, uncomplicated by whatever conventions had lingered between him and Allie.

  His way of smiling a beat too quickly, I noticed, was gone.

  I forced a deep breath into my lungs to interrupt the sudden crying jag that was about to hit me. “Yeah. I found her. I tried … I pulled her out of the water and I tried—” A part of me needed him to know this so he’d understand I was a decent person; another part was trying to tell him I was innocent.

  He seemed to be thinking something else entirely. “It’s okay. I need a lot of information from you, and I’m going to get you out of here so they can work. Do you need to stop at home? Change clothes?” His chin gestured at the wet patch of floor beneath me.

  “You need to find a guy named Matt—Matt Cianciolo. He works in the same lab as—”

  Palms up, assuring eyes. “Emily, do you want to stop at home?”

  “No,” I said.

  He turned to the familiar blond. “Can you drive her?”

  “Drive Dr. Firestone?”

  Something about the way he said my name made Mason’s eyes narrow. His voice broke with a juvenile sort of disbelief. “Do you two know each other?”

  “Well, sort of, yeah. I mean, kind of.” He sounded all golly-gee, and right that second I remembered where I knew him from. “She did my psych eval when I came out of the academy.”

  Shit, I thought.

  I knew that didn’t sound good, as I watched Mason’s expression harden. Like a twist in a bad movie, I realized the omission of this fact made it seem like I was covering something up. That there were deeper, and maybe devious, reasons I’d obfuscated knowing about police work.

  When was I going to stop looking guilty?

  Mason’s eyebrow rose, only slightly. He checked that triathlete watch once more and carefully pulled a stick of gum from his pocket. His voice slowed back to interrogation pace. “Why don’t you stick around here? Help them out. I’m fine to drive her.”

  Then he looked at me like he intended to never let me out of his sight.

  “Are you about to question me?” I asked, my voice breaking.

  “Yes, I am,” Mason said. The smell of his cologne hitting me as he turned me toward the back door.

  * * *

  I left my cane behind. It was somewhere outside Sandy’s apartment. Or inside. I didn’t know. At the precinct, I stumbled down the claw-marked hallway and past Allie’s office, each step a pang in my ankle. I had this minuscule fantasy that some officer, maybe the blond one from Sandy’s condo, would burst through the door and say that Matt had been detained. That the search was over.

  Nausea stabbed my stomach. I covered it with my hand, keeping my eyes on Mason’s collar as he led us through the hall with his ballplayer stride.

  The room was the same—same cafeteria-style table, same coffee urn, same Walmart-at-two-AM l
ighting. Same photocopier smell. This time, it seemed smaller and damper.

  There were more chairs around the table, but for the moment he and I were alone. Mason’s video camera had been set up when we walked in and was pointed at the chair where I’d sat before, with its steady red light like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I considered how I looked.

  When I ran my fingers through the still-damp strands of my hair, the splintery cuts from Sandy’s stairwell stung.

  “Coffee?” Mason asked.

  He’s put something in it.

  Don’t be crazy, Emily.

  I set my palms flat on the table. “No. Thanks. I know why you brought me in here like this. I should probably be calling my lawyer right now.”

  Unflinching calm. Energy leaked out of me, but Mason’s pulse was probably resting at fifty-eight. He glanced out at the hallway, at Allie’s dark door. “Now’s the time, if you want to do that. We’ll get started in a second, but it can wait.”

  “Look, we’re wasting time. I’d only call just to not be stupid, but I don’t give a fuck because I’ve done nothing wrong. If you don’t start listening to me, I’m gonna scream.”

  Mason didn’t blink at the profanity; his expression said, Go ahead and scream, then.

  “How long did you do those police evaluations?” he asked with a provocative evenness, eyes flicking down at the video camera, daring me to call a lawyer.

  I straightened defiantly, stared back at him. Willed my voice to slow down. “All during my postdoc, then for about a year afterward. If you’re asking, yeah, I learned a little about police work. But I’m not a cop, obviously. I’m a psychologist. I mostly work with kids, Detective.”

  But he knew that. Since our last interview, he’d learned more about me than he was going to let on, I was sure. He’d read my booking sheet from the crash, knew about my blood alcohol content. He’d seen my mug shot.

  There was a knock at the door as two more people, a man and a woman, entered with the purposeful efficiency of the pre-subpoenaed. Mason introduced them, but my eyes washed over their blank, well-trained expressions. The man wore a white button-down shirt, and the woman carried a portfolio case and wore her hair in a high, serious-looking bun.