by Lisa Unger
She was still thinking about him. Her late-night call told him that. Maybe she wasn’t as happy with Keane as she thought she’d be. Big surprise there. He had a lofting feeling of hope in his center until Sean Keane, the man currently fucking Grady’s wife, answered her phone.
Grady stared ahead, his view a chain-link fence, a patch of overgrown grass and weeds, and the tall redbrick wall of the building adjacent to the lot. To his right was the outdoor basketball court where he and Keane used to shoot hoops after a rough shift to blow off steam. Around the corner was the bar where they’d grab a beer and a burger. They’d bitch about their wives. When they were friends, more than once he’d thought, with a twinge of envy, that Keane was a really good-looking guy. Lean and muscular, sandy-blond hair and strong jaw, jewel-green eyes with girlish lashes. All the girls in the precinct brushed the hair out of their eyes, smiled too much, laughed too loudly when he was around. Stupid. If they knew what a dog he was, those smiles wouldn’t last long.
Little did Grady know that Sean would one day be making Clara smile and so much more. He saw them talking at the Christmas party. He noticed the way she tilted her head and twirled a strand of her hair. They’d fought about it, actually.
You shouldn’t be flirting at my fucking Christmas party. It’s unbecoming.
Yeah? Maybe if you stayed with me, acted like my goddamn husband, I’d be flirting with you.
But that was a long time ago. “I would, buddy” he said, mocking Keane’s use of the word. “I would let it go. Except your fiancée keeps calling me.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line and Grady felt a rush of satisfaction. “All the shiny and new rubbing off? Underneath just the same old thing?”
Sean didn’t give him the benefit of a reaction, but Grady heard his voice tighten when the other man spoke again.
“Give it up, Crowe. The wedding’s in a week.”
“Yeah. And a year from now, you’re going to find yourself on another bar stool bitching about Clara the way you bitched about Angie.” He let a beat pass. “Hey, how’s that boy of yours? Missing his daddy?”
The line went dead and Grady enjoyed a moment of self-righteous glee. He was the injured party, the one who’d kept his vows—he liked lording that over them. It comforted him. Clara and Sean hurt a lot of people to be together; he hoped they lost a little sleep over it.
But after a moment, the rush of pleasure passed and he felt lower than he had before, which was pretty low. Now Clara would be upset with him for betraying her to Sean. If she called again, it would be in anger and disappointment. She’d phoned him in a vulnerable moment and he used it to hurt her. He wished he could take it back, what he’d said. He wished he’d protected her instead of offering her up to get his licks in with Keane.
One of Clara’s more memorable cuts came back to him: You’re not even adult enough to be someone’s husband. What kind of father would you be?
“Shit.” He almost hit the dash, but his fist still ached from the last miserable phone call. “Shit.”
By the time he’d cooled down and was entering the precinct, Jez was exiting.
“Don’t bother,” she said. “The lawyer is already here. What took you so long, anyway?”
“I was looking for parking,” he said lamely.
She seemed skeptical but stopped short of giving him a hard time again. Instead she patted him on the back to get him moving.
“Well, let’s roll,” she said. “When’s the last time you went dancing?”
“So long ago, I don’t even remember what it feels like.”
She gave a little grunt. “Join the club.”
18
I had this nervous tick of using my thumbnail to tug at the back of my wedding ring. Of course, every time I tried to do this, I was reminded that the ring was gone.
I never had a traditional wedding band, always hated the idea of that for some reason—as though it was some kind of bond to the normal, the common idea of marriage. The ring Marcus gave me at our engagement, a ruby set in a platinum band, was the only jewelry I wore. I loved its glinting red fire, the simple beauty of a single gem, something pure mined from the earth. Not flashy but stately. Not for show, for real. Of course, it was all flash, all show, none of it real. And the ring, like everything else, was gone.
“It’s all I have from my mother, from my past. I don’t know how she came to have this. But my aunt gave it to me when I left for the states. I had it set for you. It’s yours.”
I wanted to know more about the gem, about his mother. But his memories, he said, were fuzzy. He remembered a smiling face framed in curls, a wafting scent of lemon verbena. That was all. Of his father, there was nothing at all. It was terribly unsatisfying for a fiction writer, to be deprived of the texture and details of my husband’s history. I imagined that the ruby had been given to his mother by a man she loved, maybe not Marcus’s father, maybe a gypsy from Romania, and that she’d kept it hidden, maybe sewn inside a coat. She never looked at it, but took great comfort in thinking of its flame, that passionate blood red. It reminded her of love. I imagined that somewhere she was pleased to know the ruby was out in the light, on the hand of a woman her son loved and married. I kept these fantasies to myself. He didn’t like to talk about the past, grew stiff and cold. I used to think it was because it caused him too much pain, but more likely it was because it was too much effort to keep all the lies straight.
“What are you thinking about?” Jack walked on my left, the park yawning to the right.
“My ring. It’s gone. Someone took it.”
“I’m sorry. I noticed. I thought maybe you took it off.” There were running footfalls behind us and both of us startled, turned only to be passed quickly by a rail-thin young woman wearing headphones and breathing too hard. We started walking again.
“How could this have happened?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, just gave a slow shake of his head. We were moving fast, both of us nervous, unsure what we were heading into, or why, or what we were going to do when we got there.
“You didn’t like him. Neither did Linda. Okay. But this? Did you imagine this?”
“Linda didn’t like him?” He seemed pleased.
“Jack,” I snapped. “Answer me.”
“No. Not this. Of course not. Who could imagine this?” He took a few long strides so that he was in front of me, then turned around, stopping me. The Children’s Gate was just two blocks away now. He held out a hand.
“Give me the gun,” he said, sounding practical, assured. He was the man, he should be holding the gun. That simple.
“No,” I said, pushing past him. He grabbed my arm and didn’t let go even when I struggled.
“Jack,” I said, feeling anger, too much anger, rise in my chest, a kind of free fall in my belly. “Let go of me.”
I tried to wrest my arm from him, but he held fast.
“I mean it,” I said. “Let go.”
“Calm down, Isabel,” he said gently. “Look. It’s me.”
I looked at his face and my anger burned out. Just the eye contact calmed me, and I was aware of how rigid my body was, stiff at the shoulders, arm muscles tensed.
“We need a plan, a course of action.”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“We have no frame of reference. Nothing like this has ever happened to either one of us.”
We were moving again, Jack still holding tight to my arm as though he thought I might try to bolt. “We need to decide what to say at least,” he said reasonably.
And then it was too late. We both saw him, standing against the low stone wall. Just the look of him, furtive, anxious, told me that he was the one waiting for Camilla Novak. I was sure of it.
Jack and I separated. He kept so close behind me, I could feel him at my back. I look back at this moment now and think how foolish we were. New Yorkers think we own the world, that our proximity to reported crime—even if we are as pampered and sh
eltered as children in a nursery—makes us savvy and street smart. We believe our own international reputation as tough, rude, no-nonsense. We think we can grab a gun and confront some nameless thug on the street.
I walked right up to the stranger, who raised his eyes from the concrete to look at me. He was short, balding. His face was pockmarked and ruddy from the cold. His eyes had a kind of lazy menance, a dim nastiness.
“Camilla Novak is dead,” I said simply. My hand was on the gun in my pocket. “Now I have what you want.”
He looked at me blankly, pushed himself off the wall. His eyes darted toward Jack, back at the bulge in my pocket. He was making a threat assessment.
“I have some questions,” I went on arrogantly. “If you answer them, I’ll give you the files.”
Clumsy? Yes. Short-sighted? Sure. Of all the scenarios that had played out in my mind—a struggle, some kind of slick conversation in which I got what I wanted, even though I had no idea what that was, my actually firing the weapon, him cowering in fear, him attacking me—what happened next was a surprise. There was a beat, a pause between us where I felt Jack stiffen, start to pull me back.
“Who is Kristof Ragan?” I said, even though my heart was pumping fast now, adrenaline racing through me, causing a shaking in the hand gripping the gun. “Where can I find him?”
He released a little laugh. “You make mistake. No English.”
I had a moment of self-doubt when I felt very, very silly. But no. It was the same voice I’d heard on the phone, the same gruffness, the same thick accent.
“Really?” I said. I pulled Camilla’s phone out of my pocket and found the number on the call log, hit send. The ringing coming from his pants—some indecipherable pop tune—seemed to startle him; he glanced annoyed at his own pocket. Then he pushed past us like a linebacker, snatching the bag from my shoulder, knocking me to the hard concrete and body-checking Jack against the wall. He broke into an impossibly fast sprint into the park. Jack and I exchanged a shocked look. I scrambled to my feet and gave chase.
“Are you crazy?” he yelled after me.
“He’s got the bag!” I called, as if this justified risking my life. And in the moment it seemed to.
I broke away and ran down the concrete trail past the ornate lampposts and benches, but by the time I reached a fork in the trail, he was nowhere to be seen. Jack came up behind me. In his hands were the pieces of Camilla’s cell phone, which I must have dropped when I fell to the ground. The despair that swept over me might have brought me to my knees if my attention wasn’t diverted by two sharp reports cracking the night. Then Jack was on me, pulling me behind a large rock formation off the paved trail. Two more shots rang out, and a car alarm answered, filling the air with its mournful, incessant wail.
We huddled speechless until we saw the stranger stumble into view. He took a few staggering steps and then fell hard onto his belly with a low, terrible moan. Stupidly, I left the cover of the rock and kneeled beside him, touched his shoulder. He was talking, mumbling in a language I recognized but didn’t understand. I leaned in close to him, barely aware of Jack behind me, pulling at my arm. He was saying something like, “Isabel, there’s someone coming. Someone shot this guy; they’re coming after us.”
But I didn’t hear him then, because I was listening to the whispering of a dying man.
“Who is Kristof Ragan?” I asked him. “Where is he? Please.”
There was no reason for me to think he might know the answer to this question. And it was blindly selfish, some might even call it depraved indifference, to make demands of this person who lay bleeding on the cold concrete of Central Park. But every ounce of my drive lived in this question. And this stranger was the only one I had to ask. In all his final mutterings, which ceased in a horrifying gurgle, I only heard one word I thought I understood. Whether it was the answer to my question or not, I wouldn’t know until later.
He said, “Praha.”
Prague.
That magical city with its bloodred rooftops and towering castle, its muscular bone buildings and dark hidden squares. It captured me the first time I walked its cobblestone streets and marveled at its magnificent architecture. How I dreamed of Franz Kafka in the cafés he haunted. How I reveled in the predawn hush, the only quiet moment on Charles Bridge, that cascade of stone with its towering, tortured saints moaning through the ages. How I loved it even more the second time with my husband-to-be. I felt it became mine somehow when I married Marcus, someplace that would become a part of our lives, of the history of the children I hoped to bring into the world. The next time I visited Prague its secrets would try to swallow me, devour me whole. But I didn’t know that yet.
It made sense to me then. He would return home, of course. How long had it been since I’d seen him in Camilla’s apartment? Two, maybe three hours. He could be on a plane already, couldn’t he? There’d be a stop in London, maybe Paris. But then he’d go back to the place that made him.
When I looked up again from the man whose name I never knew, I saw her standing about a hundred feet away—the woman I knew only as S. She wore a strange expression as she stared directly at me. I heard Detective Breslow’s words again. There’s so much rage evidenced here. She hated me. She envied me. I saw it there in the features of her perfect face. Why? Because he’d loved me once? She had it all now, didn’t she? My husband, my money, even my ring?
She looked like any slim New Yorker taking a run in the park too late at night, except that she had Camilla’s bag strapped over her shoulder and across her chest. She wore black leggings, a short white jacket with black racing stripes down the sleeves. Another man—I might have recognized him as one of the faux FBI agents who took apart Marcus’s office, but I couldn’t be sure—was behind her. He was dark and thick-bodied, but he hid in shadows and I couldn’t clearly see the character of his face.
I rose and Jack moved in front of me. He didn’t know who they were; the weapons they must have been carrying weren’t apparent. But he knew their malice instinctively, acted to protect me.
I reached for the gun in my pocket and gripped it hard.
“I have a gun!” I yelled from behind Jack. I sounded pathetic and desperate.
S turned to look at her partner and they both started to laugh, filling me with childish rage. I almost took the gun out and starting firing, so unhinged was I in that moment. But they both broke into a run. As she turned, she lifted her hand in a friendly wave. And then she was gone, the shadows of the trail swallowing them both. I let them go, drained, stunned. I knew when I’d been beaten. I’d made a gamble and lost. We both stood there for I don’t know how long, just staring after them. Then we heard the distant wailing of sirens.
“We should stay and wait for the police,” Jack said sensibly. “Tell them what happened.”
The foolish things we do in the wake of lost love. How angry we are, how desperate when it’s snatched from us, as though we had some right to have and hold it forever. We don’t see love as an organic thing that might fade and die like flowers in a vase. We compare it to minerals and gems, things that last unchanging through time. When love dies we see it as something precious, solid, owned, that was stolen from us. We chase it, beg for its return, revenge its loss, try to steal it back. We don’t imagine that it could fade like vapor, that it was just a moment that has passed as life itself will.
I was in the grip of righteous anger.
“I need my bag and my money,” I told him, holding his dark, fearful gaze.
“Iz.” He turned, put his hands on my shoulders. I put my hands on top of his. The wailing of approaching sirens grew louder.
“Are you my friend?” I asked.
“Iz.”
“Are you?”
“Of course.”
“Then give me your keys. Tell me where the money is, and let me go.”
He shook his head. “Go ahead. I dare you to pull a gun on me, too. I’m not Erik. I’ll make you shoot me.”
I dropp
ed my chin to my chest. “Please, Jack. I can’t let him have so much. I’ll never be able to live with myself. I’ll die.”
I couldn’t bring myself to meet his eyes. I didn’t want him to see how deep was my rage and my shame, how total my desperation.
“Okay,” he breathed. “Let’s go.”
The disease that Marcus brought into my life had infected everything and everyone connected to me, now Jack included. But he’d always been my coconspirator, the one who understood my mind best, so it was only natural that we should come together now in the writing of this story, the end unknown to both of us. We’d bandied about countless plots, argued over motivation, plausibility, fought about truth in character. Of course, he’d want to help me resolve the fiction of my life with Marcus. I might have convinced him to let me go; I knew he loved me enough to let me do what my heart dictated, no matter what. But the truth is I didn’t want to face alone what lay ahead.
We joined hands and ran.
19
Linda didn’t have an off-switch, not when it came to her children. She and Erik didn’t take a week away, like their friends often did, leaving the kids with Izzy or one of the grandmothers. She just couldn’t imagine it, boarding a vehicle that would loft into the air, separating her by hundreds or even thousands of miles from Trevor and Emily. Margie thought this was very unhealthy, that ultimately it would take a toll on the marriage, that the children would become too dependent, too needy, never self-reliant. And maybe she was right. She and Erik were in crisis. Trevor cried like a toddler when she’d left them earlier with Erik’s mom; Emily sulked. But Linda thought Margie’s off-switch was a bit too well-developed, that she had disconnected too easily and too often from her girls. That sometimes even when she’d been present, she’d been absent. Izzy didn’t share her feelings about this, remembered things differently.
Linda remembered often feeling alone in her family, that she was no one’s first thought. Her shrink thought this caused her to be overly vigilant to Trevor’s and Emily’s needs. It was true that since Emily was born there hadn’t been a morning when she wasn’t immediately upon awaking tending to one of her children. There had been no mornings of languishing in bed with her husband, no really abandoned nights out. Ever. Was this unusual? She didn’t really know. Most of their friends, other artists or professionals, had chosen to have only one child. Most of them had full-time nannies or au pairs, young, live-in girls from Europe who seemed in the best cases like surrogate children (whom you’d never had to diaper and who now did the dishes and cared for the smaller child), and in the worst cases like tight-bodied interlopers gazing with barely concealed avariciousness at their wealth and husbands.
