by Julie Clark
I could have gone to college locally. Worked part-time. Spent the evenings with my mother and sister around our wobbly kitchen table, where we could have sat in the warm, yellow light, my mother doing a crossword while Violet and I played endless games of gin rummy.
Instead, I’d left, and I never went home again. Not in any real sense.
* * *
The sky is streaked with pink clouds, and the lamps on the walkway flicker off for the day. It would be easy to sit here and wallow—to rail against all that has happened to me—but I don’t have that luxury. I need to stay focused and make some decisions. What do I need?
Money, and a place to hide. One out of two isn’t bad.
I won’t be able to stay at Eva’s for very long. As soon as Eva doesn’t show up downtown next week, people are going to come looking for her, and I want to be gone by the time that happens. But for now, it’s my best option. It’s free, and it’s safe.
I stand and toss my empty coffee cup and crumpled bag into a nearby trash can, making my way back toward the edge of campus, the newspapers tucked into Eva’s purse. Behind me, bells toll the hour, and I pause, listening. The chimes seem to vibrate through me, and I think of what it would be like to live here. To walk these streets on my way to a job I don’t yet have, living the quiet life I always imagined for myself when I dreamed about leaving Rory. Of all the scenarios I imagined, the glitches I prepared for, the mistakes I knew were inevitable, I never imagined a break as clean as this. Not a single person knows what happened to me, and I have to guard this opportunity—for that’s what this is, an incredible and heartbreaking opportunity—with every ounce of cunning I’ve got.
* * *
I find a twenty-four hour pharmacy a few blocks west of campus. The bright lights assault my eyes when I enter. I angle my head down, keeping my cap pulled low, and find the hair-care aisle. So many different shades, from bright reds to jet blacks, and everything in between. I think of Eva’s blond pixie cut and choose something called Ultimate Platinum. On a lower shelf is a complete hair-cutting kit—Easy to use clippers! Color-coded combs! A step-by-step guide to the most popular hairstyles!—on sale for twenty dollars, and I grab that too.
At the front of the store, there’s only one person working the registers, a pimply undergrad who looks half-asleep at the end of his shift, with glazed eyes and earbuds shoved into his ears. I set everything down on the counter and mentally calculate how much of my meager savings this will eat up.
I hesitate before sliding Eva’s debit card out of her wallet, tracing the edges of it, wondering if I can use it as a credit card. I cast a quick glance around the empty store before I slide it into the machine. It’s not like Eva’s going to come back and accuse me of stealing from her.
I bypass the request for a PIN and select credit, my heart beating out a frantic rhythm I’m certain this kid can hear through whatever music pounds in his ears.
But then the register does something I can’t see, drawing the kid’s attention back. “Credit? I gotta see your ID,” he says.
I freeze as if I’ve been caught in a bright headlight, every vulnerable inch of me exposed. Thirty seconds. One minute. An eternity.
“You okay, lady?” he asks.
Then I snap back. “Sure,” I say, and pretend to search through my wallet, finally saying, “I must have left it at home. Sorry.” I tuck the card back into my wallet and quickly pull out cash to cover the cost. When he hands me my receipt, I scramble out of the store as fast as I can, my entire body vibrating with tension and fear.
* * *
The brisk walk back to Eva’s steadies me, and when I get there, I take everything upstairs to the bathroom and strip off my clothes, propping the directions to the hair clippers against the mirror, noticing for the first time the expensive hand lotions that line the counter. I open the cap on one and sniff—roses, with a hint of lavender. Then I peek in the medicine cabinet, expecting to see numerous prescriptions leftover from her husband’s illness. Painkillers. Sleeping pills. But it’s empty. Just a box of tampons and an old razor. I close it with a soft click, uneasiness poking at me, like a minuscule burr in my sock, a flash of warning and then gone, impossible to locate.
I take a last look at myself in the mirror, the way my hair tumbles and curls around my face, and take a deep breath before attaching the medium-sized comb to the clippers and turning them on. I remind myself that even if I mess up, it won’t matter. Eva’s words about Berkeley come back to me. It’s easy to blend in because everybody’s a little weirder than you are. No one will look twice at a bad haircut.
I’m surprised by how easy it comes off, leaving an inch and a half of hair resting against my scalp. My eyes look bigger. My cheekbones more pronounced. My neck longer. I turn one way, and then another, admiring my profile, before turning to the box of hair color. Not done yet.
* * *
The dye has to stay on for forty-five minutes, so while I wait, I spread the newspapers open on the coffee table and read, my scalp tingling and burning, the sharp smell of chemicals making me dizzy. The articles are filled with details of the crash, though they’re incomplete, gleaned only from radio communication with the air traffic controllers. But it’s enough to chill me, to force me to reckon with what I’ve done. Approximately two hours into the flight, after they’d crossed Florida and were over the Atlantic, one of the plane’s engines went out. The pilots tried to turn around and radioed Miami, requesting an emergency landing. But the plane didn’t make it, instead crashing into the water thirty-five miles off the coast. The article is filled with statements from NTSB officials, and of course, Rory’s representative on behalf of the families. No details are given yet about recovery, other than to say it’s ongoing.
I try to imagine my bag, my phone, my pink sweater, torn from Eva’s body and floating in the water, waiting for someone to scoop them out and identify them. Or nestling onto the sandy bottom of the ocean, where they’ll soon be lost forever. I wonder whether they will try to recover remains, or if that’s even possible. And what might happen if they come across someone whose dental records don’t match anyone on the flight manifest.
I take several deep breaths, focusing on the biology of it. Oxygen entering my bloodstream, feeding my cells, then releasing carbon dioxide into the quiet space that surrounds me. In and out, again and again, each breath a reminder: I made it out. I survived.
* * *
Forty-five minutes later I stare at myself in the mirror of Eva’s bathroom, astonished. Taken on their own—my eyes, my nose, my smile—I can still see my old self, looking back at me. But as a whole? I’m someone completely new. If I seem familiar to anyone, they’re going to search different corners of their mind, different parts of their life—someone from work or college. Perhaps the daughter of a former neighbor. They won’t see Rory Cook’s wife, who died in a plane crash.
The look suits me, and I love the freedom it offers. Rory always insisted I keep my hair long, so that I could wear it up for formal events and down for casual ones, arguing it was more feminine. I grin, and am surprised to see flashes of my mother, of Violet, smiling back at me.
* * *
On the nightstand next to Eva’s bed, the clock flips to seven o’clock, and I can’t help but think about what I’d be doing right now if I were still living my old life in New York. I’d be sitting across from Danielle in my office, outlining our schedule for the day. Morning Meeting, she called it. We’d discuss the calendar—meetings, lunches, evening events—and I’d give her the tasks I needed her to work on for the day. But if my plan had worked, I’d be somewhere in Canada. Maybe on a train, heading west. I’d be scouring the news for any hint of my disappearance, the plane crash just a sad story that might have caught my attention for a moment. Instead, it’s the turning point for my entire life.
I return to my computer and pull up the CNN home page, clicking on a short human-
interest piece titled “Rory Cook’s Second Heartbreak,” with my photo alongside Maggie Moretti’s. They rehash her death over twenty-five years ago and the subsequent investigation into Rory’s involvement, and for the first time I realize how similar Maggie and I are. Some of the information I’d already known about her—she’d been a track star at Yale, where she’d met Rory, and she, too, had come from a small town. But I hadn’t known that her parents had also died, when she was even younger than I was. Looking at us side by side, it makes me wonder if Rory had a type, zeroing in on women alone in the world who might be eager to join an established family like the Cooks. I know I was at first.
* * *
We’d met at an off Broadway play two years after I’d graduated from college. He sat in the seat next to mine and struck up a conversation before the curtain rose. I’d recognized him immediately, but nothing prepared me for how charismatic and funny he was in person. Thirteen years my senior and well over six feet, Rory had light brown hair streaked with gold, and blue eyes that seemed to pierce straight through me. And when I was under his gaze, the whole world faded away.
At intermission, he bought me a drink and told me about an art program the Cook Family Foundation was bringing to inner-city schools. These are the things that made him three-dimensional and more than just a face I recognized from the pages of magazines. His passion for education. The fire he had to make the world a better place. At the end of the show, he asked for my number.
I’d kept my distance at first. Older men like Rory—with their money, privilege, and connections—were not my speed. I didn’t have the cultural knowledge or the wardrobe. But he’d been subtly persistent, calling to ask my advice when the foundation hit a wall with an organization they wanted for their arts education initiative, or inviting me to a show at one of their project schools. I was lured in by his vision of philanthropy, of how he wanted to use his family’s money to better the lives of others.
All of that impressed me, but I fell in love with Rory’s vulnerability, the way he’d strived and failed to hold his mother’s attention. “As a young boy, it was hard not to resent her long absences, the months she spent in DC,” he’d told me once. “The constant campaigning—for herself, or for others—and the causes that would consume her. But now I can see why it was so important. The impact she had on people’s lives. I still get stopped in the street by people wanting to tell me how much they loved her. How something she did years ago still affects them now.”
But that kind of legacy always has a price. Whether he liked it or not, Rory was defined by his mother. When you Googled Rory Cook, she always popped up too. Images of her with a young Rory, on vacation or the campaign trail. Rory at age thirteen, scowling in the background at one of his mother’s political rallies, all elbows and pimples and one eye squinted shut.
And hundreds of images of Rory doing the bidding of the Cook Family Foundation, his mother’s dying gift to the world. People loved Rory because of who he almost was. And he’d spent his entire adult life trying to step out from behind her long shadow.
* * *
I click off the CNN home page and toggle over to take a look at Rory’s inbox, careful not to open anything that isn’t already read. He has at least fifty folders on the left-hand side, one for each of the organizations the foundation contributes to. Buried in that long list is one labeled Claire. I click on it and scan the condolence emails. Hundreds of them, page after page, from family friends, Senate colleagues of his mother’s. People who have worked with the foundation, quick to offer their sympathy. Let us know if there’s anything you need.
I open an email Bruce sent to Danielle several hours after the initial reports emerged about the crash, but before I’d been publicly named as one of the victims. He’d cc’d Rory. The subject line reads Details.
I’m already drafting the statement and should have it ready well before any scheduled press conferences. Danielle, please handle the staff in New York. They are not to speak to anyone. Remind them that they all have active non-disclosure agreements.
Another folder, Google Alerts, is filled with mostly unread notifications. Every time Rory’s name appears online, he gets an email about it. Danielle also gets them in her inbox, because it’s her job to sort through them and brief Rory on anything important he might have missed. My mind leaps back to last week, Danielle and I on our way home from a Friends of the Library event, me staring out the window at the slushy streets of Manhattan while Danielle flipped through that day’s alerts. “A fluff piece in HuffPo,” she said, almost to herself. “Trash.” I turned to see her deleting the alerts, one after the other, only opening the ones from major media outlets. She caught my eye and said, “We’re going to need to hire an intern for this once the campaign starts. Hundreds a day are going to turn into thousands.”
Now I scan the long list of unread notifications in the wake of the crash and smirk. Too bad, Danielle.
I click over to the Doc. Blank. At the top it now reads Last edit made by Bruce Corcoran 36 hours ago.
I take a sip of Diet Coke, the carbonation tickling my nose. No one would ever imagine I wasn’t on that plane.
The sun is fully up now, and I study the room. The hardwood floor is covered with a deep red area rug, which contrasts beautifully with walls painted a warm shade of yellow that reminds me of the color of my mother’s living room, and in this moment, I feel protected, like a hibernating bear. While the world races on without me, I’m tucked up here, invisible, waiting until it’s safe to emerge again.
I ease open the top drawer of Eva’s desk, curious. I’m living in her house. Wearing her clothes. I’m going to have to use her name—at least for a little while. It would help to know who she was.
I start tentatively at first, as if I’m afraid if I move things around too much, someone will know I was here. Most of what I find is generic—faded receipts I can’t read. A few dried-out pens, a couple pads of paper from local real estate agents. As I begin to grow more comfortable, I reach my hand to the back, sliding the jumble of pushpins, paper clips, and a tiny blue flashlight to the front, trying to peer beneath the mess to the person who threw these items into the drawer, believing she’d have time to sort them out.
* * *
Two hours later, I sit on the floor of the office, papers strewn around me. I’ve emptied the desk and gone through everything in it. Bank statements. Paid utility and cable bills. All of them in Eva’s name. I’d found a box in the closet containing files with more important documents. Her car registration. Her social security card. But I’m struck by what’s missing. No marriage license. No insurance paperwork you’d expect after a long illness and a death. What had been nagging me about Eva’s house yesterday returns, this time in sharp focus. There aren’t any personal touches. No photographs or sentimental pieces anywhere. There is absolutely no evidence that anyone other than Eva lived here. For someone who couldn’t bear to face all the belongings of a deceased and beloved husband, there are zero reminders of him to have left behind.
I work hard to find explanations for what’s missing. Maybe her husband had bad credit and all the bills had to be in her name. Maybe everything related to him is boxed up in the garage, too painful to even have inside the house. But these feel flimsy, half-color fabrications that are simply not true.
I pull out the last file in the box and open it. It’s escrow paperwork for an all-cash purchase of this side of the duplex, dated two years ago. At the top, her name only. Eva Marie James. And underneath it, the box next to Single is checked.
I can still hear her voice in my mind, the way she spoke of her husband. High school sweethearts. Together for eighteen years. The emotion in her voice when she described her decision to help him die, the way it broke, the tears in her eyes.
She lied. She fucking lied. About all of it.
Eva
Berkeley, California
August
&nbs
p; Six Months before the Crash
Ten minutes before her scheduled meeting with Brittany, Eva parked her car in a lot at the outer edge of Tilden Park, rather than driving into the interior. She preferred to walk in and out, arrive and leave silently. Tucking the package into her coat pocket, she turned toward a path that would take her to a tiny clearing where she used to come and study, a lifetime ago.
The full trees cast a dappled shade on the path, yet a cool wind kicked up from the bay, despite it being the last month of summer. Even though the sky above was clear, Eva caught glimpses of San Francisco Bay in the distance, of the marine layer gathering over the Pacific, and knew in a few hours that would change. She shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her favorite coat—army green with several zippered pockets—and felt the outline of the pills through their wrapping paper.
The trees that surrounded Eva were old friends. She recognized them individually, the shape of their trunks and the reach of their branches. She tried to place herself back in time, coming here after classes were over, spreading her books across the picnic table or on the grass if the weather was warm. Sometimes Eva caught flashes of that girl, like images from a passing train. Glimpses into a different life, with a regular job and friends, and she’d feel unsettled for days.
When she arrived at the clearing, she was relieved to see she was alone. The scarred wooden picnic table still stood beneath a giant oak tree, a concrete trash can chained to it. She wandered over to the table and sat on it, checking the time again, the familiar location drawing her mind back in time.
* * *
Fish ran the drug underworld in Berkeley and Oakland, and Dex worked for him. “Most drug dealers get picked up quickly,” Dex had warned her at the very beginning. He’d taken her to lunch at a waterfront restaurant in Sausalito, so he could explain what she’d be doing. Across the bay, San Francisco had been swathed in a deep fog, only the tops of the tallest buildings visible. She’d thought of St. Joseph’s and the nuns who’d raised her, buried under the fog and the assumption that Eva was still enrolled in school, still on track to graduate with full honors in chemistry, instead of where she was—three days post expulsion, sleeping in Dex’s spare bedroom and getting a crash course on drug selling and distribution. Eva tore her eyes away and focused back on Dex.
