Die for You: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  After the phone call, I’d dialed 911 for lack of any other action to take in my terror. The woman who answered told me a missing adult wasn’t an emergency unless there was evidence of foul play or a history of mental illness. I told her about the screams, everything I’d heard. She said that maybe it was a television or something else—some kind of joke or prank; husbands did cruel things all the time. She told me the police couldn’t even accept a missing-person report without evidence, a history, especially for someone over eighteen, especially for a man. The phone call didn’t count as proof that something was wrong.

  “Physical evidence, ma’am.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like blood, or a sign of forced entry into the residence, a ransom demand—things like that.”

  She gave me a phone number to call, and an address where I could report in person, bringing photographs and dental records. Dental records.

  “Most people just turn up within seventy-two hours.”

  “Most?”

  “More than sixty-five percent.”

  “And the rest?”

  “Accidents. More rarely, murders. And sometimes people just want to disappear.”

  Something about the tone of her voice made me feel foolish, ashamed. Like I was one of a hundred women she’d talked to that night whose husbands just hadn’t come home. Honey, he left you, she wanted to say. Wake up.

  The natural thing for me to do then would have been to call my sister and her husband, Erik, to tell them what was happening, to get their support. But I didn’t do that. I couldn’t bring myself to call Linda; I’d have to tell her about the affair then, wouldn’t I, to give them the full picture? I couldn’t face it. For all the same reasons, and a few others, I didn’t call Jack, either. His antipathy toward Marcus was unexpressed but palpable just the same.

  Jack and I had a complicated history. And beyond that, if Marc later learned that I’d called Jack in a moment of crisis, it would confirm all Marc’s past accusations about our friendship. Marcus disliked our closeness, how often we spoke, claimed it was a shade beyond appropriate for a professional friendship. In fact, my relationship to Jack had come up in my worse arguments with Marc. He thought that I told him too much, that we saw each other too often, that the way he touched me was too familiar.

  You don’t understand our friendship.

  An angry laugh. Then: I understand your friendship perfectly. I think it’s you who doesn’t understand. You’re too naive, too trusting.

  Please.

  Of course, since his sleazy affair, Marcus had less to say about Jack. His commentary was reduced to annoyed glances.

  BUT I WASN’T thinking about any of that now. I was just hearing that horrible scream, my mind alive with dark imaginings. As I’d dressed and gathered photographs, I tried to calm myself by thinking of explanations for the phone call—maybe he’d lost his phone, or it had been stolen, and what I heard had nothing to do with him. Maybe he had left, was curled up in someone else’s bed right now, had tossed his phone in a trash can on his way out of our life. Obsessively, I kept hitting Send on my phone, getting his voice mail over and over. Eventually, with the sun rising, I’d headed out to report him missing but I’d wound up at his office instead, standing outside, hoping for something to end this nightmare before it began.

  FINALLY, I WATCHED Rick strut up the street past the cute shops and trendy cafés, tapping on his BlackBerry oblivious to my waiting by the staircase. He was tall, lanky with a mass of black curls, a thin, carefully maintained beard and sideburns. He wore a pair of faded denims, a T-shirt that read Love Kills Slowly beneath a thick leather jacket hanging open in spite of the cold. He walked right by me, took the stairs easily, light on his feet.

  “Rick,” I said.

  He looked up startled from the slim black device in his hand. It took him a second to place me in this context. He didn’t look well, pale and exhausted, harried.

  “Isabel,” he said, a frown sinking into his forehead. “What’s wrong? What are you doing here?” He looked around, behind me, up and down the street.

  “Marc didn’t come home last night,” I said. I watched his brows lift in surprise, his eyes glance quickly to the left, then come back to me—thinking of a lie, a way to stall. Before he could come up with one, I asked, “Was he really here when I called?”

  Rick shoved the BlackBerry into his pocket and looked down at the concrete. I noticed the debut of coarse, wiry grays in his hair, of ever-so-faint crow’s-feet around his eyes.

  “No,” he said simply. “He wasn’t here. He never came back after his meeting yesterday. Never called.” I felt the cold wash of disappointment, a deepening of my fear. “Come inside, Iz. It’s cold.”

  I followed Rick up the stairs, thinking, trying to establish a time line. Marcus hadn’t phoned me after his meeting as he’d promised to do. I’d starting calling around three in the afternoon to see how it went. At that point I wasn’t even remotely concerned; he was so often absent-minded about our personal life, totally focused on business during the workday. It wasn’t uncommon for him to forget promises to call. My calls to him went straight to voice mail—not uncommon, either. I wasn’t even that concerned when he didn’t come home for dinner. But as Rick and I neared the top of the creaky slim staircase, I had the ugly dawning that no one had heard from Marcus since early yesterday.

  On the landing, I wrestled with the hope that we’d find him inside, having slept on the couch in his office, maybe hungover. Izzy, I’m sorry. Things went badly at the meeting. I went to have a drink and had too much. Forgive me. Even though nothing like that had ever happened before, I imagined it vividly as Rick punched in his security code, turned the key in the lock, and pushed open the heavy metal door. I imagined it so hard that for a moment it was almost true; I almost felt the flood of relief, the blast of fury.

  But no. The office was silent, empty. Rows of desks, huge gleaming monitors, industrial-cool exposed vents and pipes in the ceiling. Marc’s glass-walled office was dark, orderly. As we moved into the space, the electronic tone of a ringing phone sounded like a bird trapped inside a computer. Ricky dropped his bag and ran for it.

  I watched him until he gave me a head shake to let me know it wasn’t Marc or anything to do with him. I wandered into my husband’s office, opened the light on the desk. I saw Rick glance at me through the glass, the phone still cradled between his ear and shoulder, as I sat in Marc’s large leather chair, put my fingers on the cool metal of his desk. I stared at our wedding picture; we both looked so blissfully happy, it almost seemed staged. Behind us, a glorious sunset waxed orange, purple, pink. I sifted through a pile of papers and manila folders, glanced at sticky notes on the lamp and on the phone, looking for what I didn’t know. Then I booted up his computer. Rick entered while I was doing this; he looked uncomfortable.

  “He doesn’t like anyone to be in here, Isabel.”

  “Fuck off, Rick,” I said quietly, without heat.

  He glanced down at his feet again, shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and hiked his shoulders up so high he looked like a vulture. I thought he was too old for the urban-chic look he was sporting. He needed a visit to Barneys, needed to maybe grow up a little. Marcus was the polished one in suit and tie, classic fashion with a trendy edge. Rick had fully cultivated his programmer-punk look and aura, down to the pasty white skin that seemed permanently bathed in the glow of a computer screen. I always thought it should be Marcus who interfaced with people, but he hated that part of the business. It was Rick and a team of account managers who pitched prospective clients, fielded inquiries, handled the ever-escalating needs of their customers. Marcus was the brains of the company, rarely seen but controlling everything. Rick was a little bit of a marionette. I wondered if he ever resented it.

  “Do you know where he is?” I asked him. He opened his mouth to answer but I interrupted. “Do not lie.”

  He seemed to look at something far behind me. I examined his face. What did I
see there? Concern—maybe even a little fear. He shook his head, curls bouncing. “No, I don’t know where he is. I—I wish I did.”

  “When he didn’t come back from his meeting, when he didn’t call all day—you didn’t think that was unusual? Cause for concern?”

  He lifted his palms.

  “What are you saying?” I asked, angry, incredulous. “That it wasn’t unusual?”

  No answer. No eye contact. I saw a sheen of perspiration on his brow. I let the silence hang between us, hoping he’d fill it, but he didn’t. Finally, I told him about the phone call, trying to keep my voice even, to keep the sound of it out of my head. Rick sank into the seat across from Marcus’s desk, rested his head in his hand while I spoke.

  When he didn’t say anything, I said, “I’m calling the police again.” I reached to pick up the phone.

  “Wait,” he said, looking up, startled. No, not startled, stricken. “Just wait a second.”

  I let my hand rest on the receiver. “Rick, what is going on?”

  Then there was thunder on the stairs outside the entrance to the office. The door exploded open and suddenly Ricky was up from his seat and I was up from mine, so quickly the chair on casters went careening, crashing against the wall behind me.

  We were both frozen as a dozen people stormed through the door, weapons drawn, dressed in black from head to toe except for the white letters emblazed center mass: FBI.

  Time seemed to slow and stretch. The men fanned out, moving behind desks and through the loft like rats in a maze. We were spotted by a tall, lanky woman with short-cropped blond hair as she headed in our direction; she started yelling at us. Her words were unintelligible to me; all I could see was the gun pointed in our direction. I watched Rick put his hands on top of his head, lower his chin to his chest, and close his eyes.

  I thought, He’s been waiting for this, expecting this moment. What have they done? I stood stunned, mute, my fingers touching the edge of Marc’s desk, feeling like the bottom had dropped out of my life and I was free-falling through space.

  WHEN I MET Marc, I had already resigned myself to the role of spinster aunt. And I was actually okay with that, maybe even relieved, after the parade of losers and weirdoes I’d had trekking through my life over the previous years. I had started to see myself as a dating oddball, as the kind of woman who couldn’t manage to fit herself into a relationship. For me, the problem wasn’t meeting men, a very common New York City complaint. I couldn’t swing a dead cat without meeting a man—in the grocery store, in bookstores and cafés, on a subway platform. The problem was that no matter how auspicious the start, things just never lasted, never bloomed into anything permanent. I’d start to get that cool, apathetic feeling, begin to dread phone calls or zone out during dates. And if that didn’t happen, he’d stop calling me, eventually disappear altogether. I rarely even got to the ugly breakup phase. Generally, there was just a slow fade to nothing.

  “You know, Izzy” my sister, Linda (married, two gorgeous kids, outrageously successful photographer, older than me by five years, thank God, or I’d have to kill her), said one night over conciliatory Pinot Grigio, “have you considered that there’s just no give to you? That you’re looking for someone to fit into your life exactly the way it is now? You’re not willing to bend or shift anything”

  I bristled at this statement, thought it was patently untrue. “When it’s right, I won’t have to,” I said defensively.

  An ever-so-slight eye roll, a sip of wine.

  “Right?”

  She held my gaze for a moment, gave a quick shrug. “Well, in a sense. But more like when it’s right you don’t mind so much doing a little shifting and bending.”

  “Fight the good fight, Iz,” called Erik, the perfect husband, from the kitchen. “Make them bend.”

  “Shh,” said my sister as he walked into the room. “You’ll wake them up.” The kids: Emily and Trevor.

  “Did you bend?” I asked Erik.

  “Hell, yes, I bent. I’m still bending.” He flopped his lean form onto the low suede chaise across from us, inviting himself into the sister talk session. He rolled his head back for maximum drama.

  “Oh, please.” My sister smiled at him, eyes glittering, reaching out with her bare foot to knock him on the knee. The way she looked at him embarrassed me sometimes—naked adoration. They adored each other. There was none of that insidious bickering or sarcasm, none of the whispered comments or veiled insults so common in my friends’ marriages. Not that they never fought. Oh, they fought. But it was always so aboveboard, so earnest, and over quickly. Healthy; they were very healthy. Sometimes it made me sick.

  I remember thinking that night, I’ll never have this. It’s just not going to happen. With this thought, instead of despair, my system flooded with a strange relief. I’d given up at twenty-eight years old. It felt good, a justified surrender.

  “What about Jack?” She’d asked the question and I had answered it so many times that I just got up to refill my glass without comment.

  AND THEN THERE was Marcus.

  His first words to me: “I’m a big fan.”

  I smiled and thanked him for his kindness, took the book he held out to me. The first thing I noticed about him were his hands, how large and strong they were. I’d just finished a reading from my recent novel in a small bookstore to a small crowd who had, with the exception of this gentleman, all promptly left without buying a single copy. Outside, the wind pushed at the door, causing the little entry bell to jingle. Snow fell in fat, wet flakes that didn’t bother to stick to the ground and make themselves pretty. I signed his book with a black Sharpie, thinking about my pajamas and down comforter, Seinfeld reruns. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the clerk at the counter issue a yawn. Other than the three of us, the store was empty; it was nearly nine o’clock.

  I handed the book back to the stranger and then he just stood there for a moment, awkward. He was working up the nerve to say something. I expected him to start talking about the book he was writing, ask about getting an agent or publisher. But he didn’t.

  “Thanks again,” I said. “I appreciate your coming out on such a terrible night.”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it,” he said.

  I stood up then and took my coat off the back of my chair, barely registering the tinkling of the bell over the door. By the time I turned around, he was gone. I was so tired that night, so wanting to go home that, other than his hands, I hadn’t really noticed much about him, wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a lineup. This was unusual for me. I absorbed details, energies, like a sponge, couldn’t even stop it if I wanted to. The curse of the writer. But not that night. Fatigue, maybe, or just a single-minded focus on trying to get home? Or was it something about him, his energy, that allowed him to be overlooked, go unnoticed? Whatever the reason, I didn’t think about him again as I said my farewells to the clerk and headed out onto the street.

  He was waiting for me outside the door under a large black umbrella. I felt a little jolt of fear.

  “I’m not a stalker,” he said quickly, lifting a hand. He must have seen the alarm on my face, how I quickly turned back toward the shop door. He released an uncomfortable laugh, glanced up at the falling snow, maybe embarrassed that he’d frightened me.

  “Is it crazy to ask you to have dinner with me?” he said after an uncomfortable beat.

  “A little,” I said, appraising him, looking into his eyes, assessing his body language. He was tall, powerful looking. His shoulders square, hand tense, gripping his umbrella. He didn’t look like a nutcase, with his expensive leather laptop bag and good shoes. He wore a dark wool pea coat, with a gray cashmere scarf. His eyes were stunning in the lamplight, a wide, earnest light blue. An amused smile played at the corner of his mouth; his jaw looked as if it belonged on a mountain somewhere. I realized I was shivering, all exposed flesh starting to tingle.

  “Well,” he said, “go a little crazy with me, then. A public place, som
ewhere crowded.” His smile broadened. I could see that he was laughing at himself inside, at the situation. I found myself smiling, too, at his boldness, at his allure.

  “When’s the last time you took a chance?” he asked, undaunted by my silence, by the way I must have been staring at him.

  I might have just walked away, hopped a cab, and headed home. This is what I wanted to do, even started to move to the curb. But I had a rare moment of self-clarity: My sister was right about me. She’d said: You’re not willing to bend or shift anything to let someone into your life. Or something like that. I suddenly, passionately, wanted to prove her wrong.

  I looked at him with fresh eyes; he was still waiting, still smiling. Most men would have already walked away, embarrassed, angry. But not Marcus. What he wanted, he got. He’d wait, if that’s what it took. Even then.

  “Seriously,” he started, and it was in that word that I first heard the lilt of his very slight accent. “If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it already.”

  I found myself laughing with him at that, and the next thing I knew, we were in a cab together, racing through the wet, cold night.

  *

  WE WOUND UP at Café Orlin, a dark and cozy spot, one of my favorite East Village haunts, and stayed there until the early hours, losing our sense of time and any self-consciousness either of us had, exploring the landscapes of each other’s past, talking about books—mine, mostly (his interest and knowledge were beyond flattering)—and art, and travel. It was effortless, comfortable. When we finally left, workdays looming, the snow had stopped and the frigid night lay out before us slick and crystalline as he walked me home. He reached for my hand and I let him take it. His skin was smooth and dry, his grip so hard and strong it felt as though his bones were made from metal. Heat flooded my body as our fingers entwined.