And Then You Were Gone

by R. J. Jacobs

Then he said, “That little girl is lucky. You are, too. You must be in shock.” His voice was kind. “Probably not what you expected when you woke up this morning.”

  “Well, I’ve been awake for three days now, so technically it wasn’t what I expected on any of these mornings. But I see your point.”

  We both watched in silence as a fire crew began to spray water onto what remained of the cabin. A great burst of steam mixed with the white smoke rising into the sky.

  Mason turned his head, pointed. “He ran, right? Into those woods? You try to stop him?”

  “Something like that.”

  Mason snorted. Shook his head. “Don’t worry, doc. He’ll be found. Promise. It’s not gonna take long. Probably he’ll come to us.”

  He won’t, though, I thought. You’ll never find him. None of us will ever see him again.

  * * *

  Mason was exactly right—I went straight to the hospital. Two uniformed cops stood in the emergency room on either side of me.

  “You guys my bodyguards?”

  They didn’t answer.

  The old me might have found that uncomfortable. Not anymore. Run of the mill by then.

  The slimmer of the two said, “They called your mother. She’s on her way back into town.”

  “Thanks.”

  I wore a gown. There was a flashlight in my eyes, shots in my arms and scalp. Five stitches over my left eye.

  “Sorry if this hurts,” the resident said.

  “Really,” I told her, “don’t worry about it.”

  Then there was waiting, emotionlessness. My dirty feet freezing, brushing back and forth on a hospital floor that was supposed to look like wood.

  The resident, who looked younger than me, asked what I needed.

  “To talk to Cal,” I answered.

  Both cops shook their heads.

  “In that case, something to eat. My Lamictal. Then five days’ sleep.”

  The resident smirked, hands shoved into the pockets of her white coat. “I think you’re going to be okay,” she said.

  EPILOGUE

  “Andy,” Olivia said. “Andy.” She tossed a tennis ball, and Andy leapt, catching it in the air. The ball had been meant to help Olivia learn softball basics—throwing and hitting. It was softer and more forgiving than a traditional softball but by then was covered in Andy’s slobber and, because of that, also leaf fragments and dirt. Andy returned the ball to her, and she ran her fingers through the thick fur along his back.

  Cal touched his daughter’s curls. “Livvy, put your sweater on and take Andy out to the backyard. I’m sure he’d like to run.”

  She popped up to grab her shoes, the chimes in the grandfather clock echoing her footfalls. When she turned the glass doorknob, Cal said to her, “Sweater.”

  Olivia nodded and pulled it from the chair back where she’d tossed it.

  We closed the door behind us. “I thought I caught the slightest hint of an eye roll then, when you mentioned her sweater,” I said.

  “Probably.” He laughed. “She can roll her eyes all she wants. It’s February.”

  He turned to look at me then, his eyes steady and peaceful, the way land looks from the window of an airplane.

  The afternoon was warm enough that being outside for an hour was not completely intolerable. Half an hour earlier, a brown delivery truck had dropped off an auto part Cal had ordered, then retreated to the highway in a wistful haze.

  Cal cradled the package as we walked toward the Volvos. We laid down, crawled on our backs beneath one. The ground was hard. I could feel the cold through my puffy jacket and the blanket Cal’d laid down. I saw Andy’s paws and Olivia’s bright-blue cowboy boots pacing around the Volvo’s back bumper. My mouth tasted like the strong coffee I’d made to keep warm, but the cold I’d been nursing kept me from smelling anything of the underside of the car—which was maybe for the best.

  In a whimsical moment weeks before, wine-inspired on his porch at sunset, I’d asked Cal to teach me about Volvos sometime. I’d meant in the spring, May. Or not really ever. But I’d just finished saying I had no afternoon plans, and now that the opportunity had arrived, I simply couldn’t wimp out because it was cold. That would be backing down.

  He opened the delivery and handed me what looked like a complicated, electrical Rubik’s Cube.

  “Starter engine,” he clarified.

  Wind gusted, a high-pitched whistle blowing through the hubcaps.

  Cal’s voice was slow and patient. “Turn it right,” he said. “Just like that. Now just tighten those bolts, and that’s basically it.”

  I’d never considered that working on cars could be relaxing, but I could see what he’d meant. In the information age, consumed with technology, it felt like a throwback. Something my grandfather might have done on a Sunday afternoon. “This isn’t too bad, Cal.”

  When I finished, we stood against the car.

  “If you came with a warning label attached to you,” I asked, “what would it read?” The question left a hollowness in me, a slight ache of anticipation. Some part of me wanted to take it back.

  Cal cocked his head at me curiously, blinking. Then, looking toward the road, he pulled off his baseball cap and scratched the side of his beard, just below his ear, standing still for a moment. “I’ll have to think about that,” he said.

  He handed me a rag that I wiped over my hands.

  “Do you think about him?” Cal asked. His smile was somehow both lost and centered. Maybe it meant acceptance of what we didn’t know and never would.

  “Sure. Don’t you?”

  “I try not to,” he said. After a moment, he added, “They might find him.” Cal raised an eyebrow, just subtly enough that I couldn’t tell whether he wanted them to or not.

  “No,” I answered, surprised at how sure I sounded. “I don’t think so. He’s in Argentina, or Europe.”

  “No disrespect to the Vanderbilt police, but federal agents have a few more resources at their disposal—they won’t play around. There are the murder cases, and then there’s everything they’ll uncover about virus samples. That’s national security. I’ll bet you a dollar Paolo turns up.”

  “I’ll take that bet,” I said. We shook hands, even though I knew Cal was probably right—Paolo disappearing again would be nearly impossible, especially considering he’d left on foot. Mason had told me that the car Paolo had driven was towed away and searched. Everything Paolo had told me about the way he’d lived matched the evidence they found. Essentially, he’d been living out of the car for nearly a month. I’d had no hesitation in relaying what he’d told me to the investigators, including how he’d gotten away before. I didn’t see how he’d eluded them for a single day, but then again, he’d surprised me before. Within an hour of Paolo running into the woods, the FBI had taken over the investigation. They’d begun combing through Silver’s lab the following morning, then turning over every inch of Paolo’s and Sandy’s apartments. Silver’s home was locked down. They’d interviewed me twice, each time over the course of an entire morning, sorting through details I would’ve never considered.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t get arrested,” I said, remembering Silver’s tactic. In the blur of that day, I hadn’t heard many of the details of Cal’s dealings with the Vanderbilt police. “I guess I didn’t think completely through the legality of the plan.”

  “I know you didn’t.” Cal’s eyebrow rose. He didn’t smile, exactly, but his eyes brightened. “But neither did I. I knew it was breaking the law, but it was the right thing to do.”

  Then a realization hit me. “You never told me if they cuffed you.”

  “They locked the door at the substation. No cuffs, though. I told them the truth—that I broke in because it was an emergency. I must have talked a blue streak about what we thought Silver was doing. I couldn’t stop thinking about where you were.”

  “Not to mention Olivia,” I said. Across the yard, she climbed the porch steps.

  “If I’d kn
own she was there, I don’t know what I would have done,” he said quietly. “It was only when the campus police got to my phone, saw how many times you called, that they started to believe me—enough to let me call the Metro Police.”

  As long as we were getting real, I decided to take the conversation a step further.

  “You know, my worst fear,” I confessed, “is losing my mind. When I think about him, it all gets so twisted. What was real? If some of it was fake, was all of it? I don’t know. I think about the impossibility of him showing up just as the truck turned over the embankment.”

  “I know,” Cal whispered.

  My eyes found Olivia again.

  “You knew him,” Cal continued, after a pause. “I did, too. That person existed. We knew that person. And that was real.”

  The idea was soothing, comforting.

  “We’re the lucky ones because we both saw the same things. Knew the same person. He’s alone, wherever he is. Asking himself who he really is.”

  It was true.

  Witnesses to an experience make it real. We shared that.

  Up toward the house, Olivia had devised some sort of game—two sticks and a passage between two of the Volvos. She wanted Andy to play, to figure it out. To chase.

  “You know, Silver’s vaccine worked,” I said. “That night, he told me it did and I believed him. Even while the cabin was burning around us. He was going to present a paper on it in London. Do you think …”

  “Do I think it was worth it? That the number of people who’ll be saved justifies the killing?”

  My eyes felt hot. I nodded.

  Three people dead, including Sandy. James Mandel left with lifelong scars.

  “No,” Cal answered quickly. “Murder is wrong. Always. Even a breakthrough discovery can’t happen that way.”

  I knew it was wrong, too, even as a small part of me imagined a girl, somewhere, who would never hear a knock on her front door, or watch her mother’s dish towel fall to the floor from shock and grief.

  Earlier that week, when a federal agent told me that the CDC had already taken the vaccine and started analysis of its sequencing, I sat up straight.

  I thanked God.

  “I do feel bad about Matt,” I said. “No, more than that. I feel bad for Matt, too. He was getting framed for everything going on around him. Everything horrible happening. He must’ve felt like he was going crazy. Everything pointed to him. The flowers I sent, wow.”

  Cal squinted, considering this. “Just a regular guy, after all, as manipulated by Silver as everyone else.”

  “Yeah.”

  I combed my hands through my hair.

  He leaned against me, and I sniffed, shaking off a strange idea.

  “What?” Cal asked.

  “I had a thought, but it’s terrible. I can’t …”

  He shrugged; a pause, a slight smile. “Suit yourself.”

  “I was just thinking about Matt interviewing for his next job. When he gets asked about conflict with supervisors and dealing with unforeseen complications, he’ll have a hell of a story.”

  “Oh my God, Emily.” Cal shook his head.

  “I told you it was terrible.”

  I handed him the rag, only then realizing it was an old T-shirt. He took my hand in his and continued cleaning a spot I’d missed.

  “This can be hard to get off,” he said.

  When he finished, he reached for my other hand, cleaning it.

  I looked at him.

  He sighed. “So what would yours say?” he asked, eventually. “Your label.”

  I was great at asking questions. Better at asking than answering. They say being a therapist is the best way to hide.

  “ ‘Warning,’ ” I said, “ ‘Occasionally doesn’t sleep. Has unusual thoughts from time to time. Sometimes hears a voice. Difficult to turn off.’ ”

  Cal considered it. “That sounds about right,” he said. He draped the rag on the shoulder of his old jacket.

  “You didn’t answer,” I pointed out.

  He squinted. “I was thinking,” he said. “I guess mine would say, ‘Caution: Doesn’t care for loud noises. Avoids crowds. Slow to warm up.’ ”

  “It wouldn’t say anything about avoiding crazy women, or being judgmental, or being stubborn?”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he admitted with a laugh. “It would say that about crazy women. I try to steer clear.”

  I shook my head and smiled. “You’re not trying very hard.”

  We were quiet after that for a long time.

  “I’m no good at this,” Cal said finally.

  “You’re not kidding,” I said. “But neither am I.”

  “I guess I’m warned. The label and all.” From his pocket, he produced a key with a black plastic rectangle, handed it to me. “Let’s see if it starts.”

  We climbed in, shut the doors.

  Not having to blow into a Breathalyzer was nice. Six more months and that would be over.

  “It’s yours,” Cal said.

  “What?” I was shocked. “You can’t just give me a car.”

  “Why not? I have three others.”

  I glanced up. There they were in a line.

  I felt like I was on The Price Is Right or something.

  “I’m not sure, Cal.”

  “Think about it,” he said. “You never liked that truck much. And it’s not going anywhere now. Besides, now that this one’s fixed up, I need to clear some space for the one I’m looking at.”

  Me in a Volvo. Cal and me together.

  My face turned up toward the sky. A feeling of weightlessness.

  Who would have guessed?

  * * *

  On the first warm day of spring, I returned to the lake where Paolo had disappeared. I rolled down the window on the country road, and my hair, which had grown in slightly, was whipping against my sunglasses. It was midafternoon, and the sky was clear and bright, the world seemingly all solid colors. The kind of light that makes everything seem to radiate from within. At the marina, I stopped in the gravel, same lot as before, and took a deep breath. Sun flooded through the windshield, warming the skin of my bare arms, my neck, my face.

  Aside from a pair of the marina’s work trucks, the space was empty. Faint birdcall from the nearly bare trees. I slipped off my shoes, slung a backpack over my shoulder. The ground was soft after the previous night’s thunderstorm, cool, gray mud pushing between my toes as I followed a trail toward the water’s edge. Having no cast around my ankle, no boot or cane, felt freeing, as if the wind at my back was nudging me upward toward the swaying pine branches. My chest rose, my steps were light.

  Along the edges of the path, the branches were sticklike and barren, like flashes of lightning coming up from the earth. Aching to be reborn. But here and there, where the sunlight had reached in, dots of green had appeared. Buds emerging. The first signs of life, rising impossibly from tangled brambles.

  Winter was ending.

  Driving, I’d wondered if I’d be overcome, but calm washed through me as I stepped from the woods into the clearing. The open space accelerated the wind, which was pushing at my chest. A gust raised gooseflesh on the backs of my arms, and I leaned in, pushing again toward what I couldn’t reach. The whooshing quiet of vast openness. Space itself, breathing.

  The lake’s surface was a million ripples marching.

  I dropped onto the seawall and rolled my jeans to midcalf before continuing along the edge of the low tide.

  I wanted.

  I wanted to find just the right place.

  I’d told Cal my plans that morning. It was still dark when we woke up, his silhouette framed by the window in the burgeoning dawn. Down the hall, Olivia was surely asleep. Cal sat up slowly, the bed gently creaking. He smoothed his beard.

  “I’ll go with you,” he’d offered.

  His arm was warm where I touched it, the bedroom air around us still night-cooled.

  “This I want to do on my own,” I’d said.


  I needed to see the place Paolo and I’d anchored, where the boat with the family had pulled beside us and Paolo had dived in, returning with their keys. I needed to be where these things had happened, where I’d awoken so alone. So frightened.

  I stood on the shore, the silty lake gently lapping, freezing my bare feet.

  The cold stung in a way I liked.

  I remembered Paolo on that day, wind nudging strands of hair on his forehead. The way he shielded his beautiful, uncorrected smile beneath those Wayfarer sunglasses.

  This was a visitation. He hadn’t died, but he had. He was still on this earth, somewhere. But the person I knew was gone.

  I backed into the grass, set down the backpack, unzipped it. I pulled out the tripod Cal and I had planted on my office roof, attached Paolo’s camera. The tripod feet dug into the wet ground. I unattached the filter, aimed the lens at the horizon and found the correct zoom. The image was perfectly in focus.

  The sun blurred the horizon. The water and the sky blended.

  I remembered the look on Silver’s face when he’d told me he’d wanted to meet my father. I’d seen the sliver-thin division between insanity and greatness in that instant—a place I’d approached closely enough to understand. I’d felt the sun scorch my wings, flying so high.

  I leaned forward, closed my right eye.

  My finger rested on the warm plastic.

  Breath left my lungs. Now, I thought.

  Click.

  I pulled back to examine the image.

  I made a slight adjustment.

  Click. I checked.

  Perfect.

  Now, I’d go home.

  Footsteps behind me. A reluctant voice.

  I visored my eyes as I turned.

  A teenage boy. I recognized him. He’d been on the dock before, white headphone cord running into his pocket and a hose in his hand. He’d gotten taller since then, stood straighter. He wore a collared shirt, the marina’s logo emblazoned on his chest.

  “Um, Miss? We’re not actually open right now. Can I help you with something?”

  I must’ve looked odd, standing there alone. Yet, his expression was kind. In the distance, trees swayed behind him. A white bird paced curiously along the dock.

  “Thanks,” I answered. “But I actually just finished up. Now I’m all done.”