And Then You Were Gone

by R. J. Jacobs

  A moment passed.

  “Okay,” she said, passing the phone to me.

  I put the phone to my ear.

  “Emily,” the voice said. “It’s me.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  In shock, sound disappears. Neurons slow time as a defense mechanism.

  For an instant, then, time vanished—no divisions between past and future existed.

  No sensible ones, anyway.

  * * *

  I was ten again, hair rising along the back of my neck an instant before a knock at the front door. All morning, the house had been so quiet it echoed the hallway clock’s ticking. My mother, already so edgy that she’d wept earlier when a glass slipped through her hands and broke, rushed through the foyer, smoothing her hair. She knew already, I’m sure.

  Because I knew, too.

  Silence was a language—a meaningful lull, a body releasing breath.

  Out front, two men squinted in the sun, both with folded hands. One had the courage to look at Mom directly. Neither dared to glance at the eight-year-old girl standing behind her.

  “Yes,” my mom said, answering their question. “This is the home of Dr. Sydney Firestone.”

  The men stepped inside; the taller of the two closed his eyes. He explained that medical missions carried tremendous risks. A virus, he said, named H1-N24, was both lethal and contagious, and had the shortest incubation period anyone had ever seen.

  My mother dropped the kitchen towel she had been wringing between her hands.

  It fell so heavily that I swore, for years, I could see a mark where it landed—a curled, shadowy symbol, dented into the hardwood, signifying the rapidity of change.

  Life before, life after.

  It marked the ease with which people disappear.

  But as it turned out, the opposite happened sometimes, too.

  * * *

  I coughed, words failing me. “Who—”

  “Emily, It’s Paolo. It’s me. You have to listen. You’re in danger right now.”

  I knew right then that some part of me had refused to accept his death all along. They never had found him. There was a funeral, but he’d never died.

  There’s perception, then there’s thought, and then, beneath thought, feelings reside. But beneath feelings, deepest of all, is intuition.

  And I never should have ignored my intuition.

  I was now in a reality where his words continued to be part of this world. The impossibility of his voice narrowed my field of vision. The edge of everything blackened.

  “I know, it’s a shock. I’m sorry. I had to … I got involved in something way beyond … I wanted to contact you another way, but you have to listen, now.”

  Through my chest, the stages of grief began to cycle in reverse. Anger, fury burst through. Then disbelief. “Who is this?” I demanded.

  “It’s me,” he whispered. “Emily, you’re not safe.”

  There is no safe, I thought. Safe is a fake idea. The last six weeks began to rewind in my mind like a film.

  The ghost who called himself Paolo continued, “I read about Sandy, Emily. The news said she was found by a local psychologist. I knew that meant you were involved. Please. I want you to come with me. At least for now.”

  “With you?”

  Like I was going anywhere with him.

  Olivia stared at me. Somehow, I continued to drive.

  My mind circled the word it wanted like a cord around a tether pole. “Why?” I murmured.

  In his sigh, I heard acknowledgement that some explanation was needed before anything else he said could matter.

  “I got pulled in way, way too far. Silver wouldn’t let me stop, said we had to keep going. I ended up a part of something …”

  The dirt road to the cabin approached on our left. The wheels spun through loose dirt as I cut past the rusted mailbox, rumbling over the uneven ground. Dusky shadows spiderwebbed over the bare brush and pine straw. We bumped along toward the cabin. At the road’s end, the porch was on one side, the property’s lake on the other. The truck skidded to a stop. I cut the engine. The country quiet surrounded us with its tiny harmonies, a hush of gentle calling and answering. My heart pounded.

  Olivia looked at the lake, then to me. Can I look at the water? she mouthed.

  I nodded. “Keep back from the edge, okay? Very steep.”

  Her eyes smiled exactly like Cal’s. She trotted through the breezy grass, parting the faint flow of pale green.

  It was already getting dark—the sky dimming by the minute.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes.” How was I continuing to talk? I had no idea.

  “Emily, where are you now?” he asked.

  “The cabin,” I admitted for no reason I could discern. My sense of what was real turned wavy.

  Paolo’s surreal explanation continued. “We were close. He started testing the H1-N24 vaccine on people. He wanted me there to record the trial, but it all went wrong. The man died. The vaccine gave him no protection when Silver introduced the virus. Silver had to set a fire to stop a possible contagion.”

  His accent had deepened in the weeks he’d been away—a strange paradox. As if, alone, he’d reverted to a truer version of himself. He sounded like one of my teenage patients—that blend of embarrassment, relief, and pride in admitting the procedure of a crime.

  “After that, I ran. That was the first week of October.”

  The picture.

  “You were there,” I mumbled.

  I remembered the weekend after—the leafy shadows flying over us in his Jeep, his indifference to checking messages. His half smile.

  We’re on our holiday, he’d said.

  Here’s to freedom, I’d said.

  His voice broke. “Then I heard what happened to Sandy. That can’t happen to you. I started driving back this morning. I’m almost to Nashville now.”

  Too much; a flood of reality.

  “I … have to go,” I said, hanging up.

  The need to find Cal washed over me in a wave.

  I went to Olivia, who stared back at me wide-eyed. I swallowed, crouched down, rubbed her arms. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Let’s go inside where it’s warm.”

  And I was. I was really, really sorry she was a part of what was happening. A pit of self-hatred flared inside me, reminded me of how I infected everyone’s life with madness. I’d make it up to her, I thought. Her and Cal. Somehow. I took her hand. I sorted through my key ring and found the key that unlocked the cabin, gripping it tightly between my forefinger and thumb.

  “Are you okay?” Olivia asked. She looked at my shaking hand.

  On the front steps, my phone chimed again. I slid the key in the front door.

  Reflexively, I brought the phone to my ear.

  Paolo’s voice again, shouting now. “Go to the police. Please, turn around. He knows, Emily. He knows you know—”

  Movement from behind the front door.

  I felt a sting in the back of my neck.

  As I dropped to my knees, I heard Olivia, her scream liquefied in my ears by whatever I’d just been given—as if we were both deep under water.

  “There’s a little girl here,” I protested, drowsily, “A girl …”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Consciousness never left, not fully. The sedative was like a dip into an indefinite dream; light blinked out, but the sound continued, volume low. Murmurs, Olivia’s terrified pleas. Then, silence. I felt the sensation of my body being dragged and the horrifying inability to resist. My skull felt dented, damaged. Pain radiated across my left side.

  Then, there were slivers of light, like looking through a dark sheet. Just movement, shadows. The sun was a blot on the tree line, casting a thin, pink gauze over the surface of the lake.

  I was in a chair, one from the kitchen. My shoulders bent unnaturally, arms behind my back, hands zip-tied.

  Just like the murder victims, before they were burned.

  Olivia lay beside me, curled on the rug. H
er chest rose and fell, dreamily.

  Silver stomped past—a different version of the man I’d met on campus, at the fund-raiser, at his party. The elbows of his ski jacket were torn, his hair carelessly askew. He’d hidden in the dark, I now understood. He was muttering about changing the tires on his car to avoid being tracked, his pacing reverberating through the old floor like gentle thunder.

  “It’s an animal sedative. She, and you, won’t feel a thing.” He squinted at me, seeming to read my consciousness as defiance.

  Like I could be sedated, I wanted to say. Mania, usually so destructive, simply plowed through whatever he’d given me. The same rush that loomed over my life now propped me up, gripped on to the moment. It wouldn’t be denied. My mania took a dozen different sedatives, a professional crisis, and a hospitalization to derail. Silver’s sedative was just turbulence.

  He began opening the kitchen cabinets, stammering—not full sentences, but phrases, the sparks of some deluded fever dream: “… to start this … they’ll think … I’m sorry … which of these things …” The floorboards creaked lightly in the quiet, country dark. The dim hallway light created an odd sense of vacancy, as though the three of us weren’t actually there.

  Where was Cal? I glanced at the window, praying for his headlights.

  “I’ll be in England this time tomorrow,” Silver announced, shoes clapping across into the hallway, two rolls of paper towels clutched to his chest. His shadow clover-shaped beneath him, knife-sharp and murderous. I gritted my teeth, picturing him boarding a plane in the morning, leaving all of this—ashes, death—behind.

  Cold air penetrated the room, cooling my sticky left cheek. Through the stream of blood running down my face, my vision was a blur. I forced my left eye closed. With the right, I saw that my boot had come off. My left leg hurt so bad I couldn’t feel it.

  “We’re going to be okay,” I whispered to Olivia, but she was sleeping.

  My heart fluttered at an impossible pace, like hummingbird wings.

  I coughed, catching Silver’s attention. “How did you find us?” I managed to say. My manic voice was lower, scary-steady. I caught him doing a double take, looking at me as if I were a vicious dog. I knew that if I died, it would be with the satisfaction that he’d looked into my eyes and felt afraid.

  “The police suspect you, so you wouldn’t go to them. I knew you’d come here—your hiding place. ‘Down the dirt road after the Concord exit,’ ” he recited, absently.

  I thought back to the party, Paolo bragging about my family’s “land.”

  “Cal’s on his way here,” I informed him.

  “No, he’s been detained.” Silver opened another cabinet, peering inside. “He’s good at sneaking in, but not so good at sneaking out. Breaking and entering.”

  “You called the police?” I nearly laughed. “He hacked your computer, downloaded proof of what you’ve been doing. He’s telling them everything, right now. It’s over.”

  Silver kept his gaze straight ahead. He mumbled as if replying to a voice inside his own head. “As if I’m that stupid. Whatever your friend found, I put there to find. We’ve … come too far. It takes years to get a vaccine approved. Years. Trial upon trial, no money. Oversight but no help. Getting strangled for trying to help the world.”

  When he turned, I could see that his eyes were missing something. They were flat like a shark’s or the fields in west Tennessee. He twitched with the same derangement I’d seen in hospitals—edgy desperation, unable to cloak the rolling boil of his thoughts.

  A figure from a nightmare. The devil in my home.

  I hated him.

  A sane person, I knew, would submit to the obvious hopelessness. I blinked blood out of my eye, strained forward trying to stand. My chair nearly tipped over. The zip tie was intractable, cutting into my wrists.

  Silver moved into the interior hallway, arms full. The corner of my eye registered another light switching on.

  “Sydney Firestone’s daughter,” he mused, voice echoing off the bathroom tile. “I always wanted to meet your father,” he said.

  The bitter toxicity of something like lighter fluid wafted toward me. I strained upward, lurched forward, falling helplessly.

  When Silver returned, he rested his hand on the doorknob and glanced at me curiously. “I did it, you know.” He stopped and faced me. “It works. Just know that. The fourth subject showed complete immunity. H1-N24 is going to be wiped out—like smallpox. Like Polio. It’s over.”

  My mind couldn’t register the words, but somehow I knew I would remember them exactly. Forever.

  “I never wanted it to be like this,” he said. “For you, of all people.”

  “Let her go.” My voice broke as I jerked my head toward where Olivia slept. “She has nothing to do with any of this.”

  But Silver’s face turned trancelike as he went to the door.

  And then he was gone, down the back steps, leaving the door creaking behind him.

  “What are you doing?” I screamed, but I knew exactly what he intended. I was in a wooden structure with wood paneling and floors. I knew that accelerant was hardly needed. A fire would turn the cabin to ash in no time. The lighter fluid smell was strong enough to burn the inside of my nose.

  I tried to inch closer to Olivia, the chair legs squeaking as I scraped them across the floor. “Olivia, you have to wake up.”

  She hardly stirred, perfectly numbed by whatever he’d given her and me.

  As wind ripped through the curtains, I heard the first rush of the fire behind me. Feverish energy reddened my skin, widened my eyes. I worked my wrists against the ties as flames rose in a great whoosh behind my back. The curtains had caught fire.

  Olivia’s eyes barely cracked open. “Hold on,” I said to her.

  I heard the quiet rumble of Silver’s car starting outside.

  Keep on, my heart said. You can’t stop.

  I tried standing, collapsed, tried again. My cheek rubbed roughly against the dusty boards. But falling knocked the slats away from the bottom of the chair, just slightly. I strained my shoulders up, working the plastic into my skin, slipping my wrists down. I’d learned in soccer how to treat my body like a machine—that it was just a thing that could do incredible and destructive things. I’d learned about unnatural ways it wasn’t supposed to move, but could. I’d learned how to play hurt. Pain, you just ignore it. I knew I’d break the chair apart, even if it wasn’t possible. Invincibility doesn’t have to be rational to be real.

  A rush of air brushed my hair back as flames shot up the living room wall. In seconds, it was all orange and white light, pulsing and alive. My forearms and neck registered the immense heat, my mouth dry from exertion.

  I worked my hands looser. Blood where the zip tie cut into me ran into my palm. I pressed the side of my foot against the floor, testing the leverage. I wiggled my wrists further down the slats, collapsing my stomach, then arching my back until one hand, then the other, popped free. I pushed myself onto my hands, brought my knees under me, stood. A rush of dizziness into the front of my head, the headache where I’d hit the floor nearly overwhelming, threatening to crumple me.

  I steadied myself against the mantel, brought Olivia to my chest, still mercifully asleep. Her downy breath calm in my ear.

  I staggered to the rear door, then stopped. The ceiling was a bitter cloud that I could taste. Part of me knew my eyes stung, but another part couldn’t care. Heat pressed behind us, drawn through the open rear door toward the dark wood as the air swam with confetti-like ash.

  Headlight beams sliced the dark. Silver had concealed his car earlier, I could see, and now struggled to get it free. The wheels spun helplessly in the grainy sand at the edge of the wood as his engine howled its tantrum, gray arcs rising from behind his rear tires.

  I spotted my keys, resting where they’d landed after flying from my hand when Silver attacked me. I scooped them off the floor.

  “Hold on,” I said, swiveling. I staggered back throug
h the cabin toward the front door. Flames reflected off my truck’s dark hood, and in the rippling lake beyond.

  Down the porch steps, I could hear the crush of wet grass, then gravel, beneath my feet. My heartbeat was liquid bass, thumping in my ears, my breath a frantic cloud in thin, persistent waves.

  The truck’s door creaked as I flung it open. I laid Olivia inside, keys jostling in my hand. My ears rang, lungs searching for air as I reached for the Breathalyzer. Spittle ran down my cheek as I blew desperately. I turned the keys until the engine growled to life. I shifted into gear, eyeing the edge of the lake as I cut toward the driveway leading to the road. But before I could press the accelerator, I sensed movement in the rearview mirror. The driver’s side door opened and suddenly Silver was beside us, his face a mask of twisted fury, strained from sprinting. I reached out to block his advance, but his fist landed against my left side, met my shoulder hard, then my skull.

  Hot pressure, pain.

  He brought his fist down again, this time grabbing the back of my neck. I blocked his reach as he shoved me aside, jumped in the cab, and grabbed for the column shifter. His hand grasped onto the steering wheel beside mine, pulling, turning us. I stomped the accelerator.

  The driver’s side door flapped with each bounce. I prayed Silver would lose his grip on the wheel as I accelerated toward the fence line that rushed toward us.

  The angle of the fire in the rearview mirror began to turn.

  The left tires lost traction on the embankment as the truck surged left, screaming.

  We rolled—the world inverting, violently. I reached around Olivia.

  The hood plunged into the lake with a sound like a wave against a seawall. The engine sobbed a pleading hiss as it followed. Water like liquid black filled the truck cabin, shockingly cold, as we came to rest on the driver’s side of the cab underwater.

  Then I was a girl watching my grandmother wade into the river, a girl whose head had been held under water during a swim lesson. I was a teenager sitting nervously on a dock during a class trip. I was a girlfriend who’d agreed to try one night aboard a sailboat.