by Lisa Unger
She knew her friends loved their children; she didn’t judge them. But it seemed to her that only she and Erik were parenting full-time, fitting work and life around Trevor and Emily, putting personal wants and needs last or never. Which way was right? Who was better off? She honestly didn’t know. She just knew she couldn’t be another way.
She remembered reading somewhere that the look on your face when a child enters your field of vision is one of the single most important factors in the shaping of that child’s self-esteem. Luckily, she couldn’t keep the delight off her face when she looked at Trevor and Emily; their faces, the sound of their voices, their accomplishments—from walking to potty training, from academic achievement to personal blossoming—filled her with more joy and excitement than anything else she’d known in her life.
But that statement had caused her to think back to her own childhood, to remember faces, expressions. She remembered wandering eyes, hard stares into the distance, furrowed brows. Not directed at her. Just in general, the faces she saw were sad ones—and she had never been enough to brighten them.
She was thinking this as Erik emerged from wherever they’d been holding him, with Margie’s lawyer, John Brace. Actually, he was the son of Brace the elder, Fred’s longtime attorney, who was getting too old, too frail to come out to the police station in the middle of the night. There was something harder, not as gentlemanly, about the younger Brace. A hard-ass. His face was all sharp angles, still and pale. She examined him as he talked to Erik, low, intent. She thought, He’s a wolf. Feral, lonely, merciless. Good, perfect, exactly what they needed now.
They approached her and she embraced her husband, longer, harder than was appropriate with a stranger present. But she couldn’t seem to let go of him. She saw Brace turn discreetly away, give them the privacy of not staring.
“It’s okay,” said Erik softly, rubbing her back. “I’m okay.”
Brace cleared his throat and they turned to look at him. “This is an emotional time for you. But we have a lot of ground to cover. Your financial losses. Your sister, how we get in touch with her and convince her to return to the fold. Your potential culpability in this matter. How we proceed from here to protect ourselves. Where should we do that?”
“It’s late,” said Erik. “Let’s do it tomorrow, John.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. A lot can happen between now and then. We need to be prepared.”
Looking weary, anxious, Erik nodded. “Home,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
“No,” said Linda, too quickly. By the time she’d left the hospital with Trevor and Emily, and shuttled them into a waiting taxi, Ben had left. But she couldn’t count on him not to be lurking around the apartment, waiting to ambush them on their return.
“Let’s go to a café or something. Café Orlin is right around the corner. It’s quiet, private. I’m starved.”
Erik looked as if he was about to argue but then seemed to change his mind.
“Fine,” he said, taking her hand. “That’s fine.”
Brace nodded uncertainly, took a quick glance at his watch. Then he ushered them toward the exit. Linda noticed and liked that he seemed in charge, but was still deferential. She felt safer, calmer with him there, as if there was no problem he couldn’t make disappear. The elder Brace didn’t have this quality, didn’t seem like an enforcer, more like a trusted adviser and friend. Someone who would do his best to help, within the letter of the law, but would bow to forces bigger than himself. His face was soft at the jaw, kind and warm at the eyes. There was no kindness or softness in the face of the younger man, just granite.
The three exited the precinct and turned left, toward First Avenue. As they proceeded down the block, Linda saw—just out of the corner of her eye—Ben, waiting in his Mercedes across the street. Her heart nearly stopped in her chest, her stomach bottomed out completely, but she kept walking, pretended not to see.
She hoped he was a coward, that he’d stay in the periphery, a looming threat that never materialized. But then she heard a car door open and slam hard. She found herself cringing, clinging close to Erik, not able to bring herself to turn around even as she heard the footfalls behind them. John and Erik, already in conversation, seemed not to notice.
“I’m going to need you to start from the beginning, Erik,” John was saying. “How Marcus Raine approached you, what documentation he provided, what you signed. Then we’ll work our way up to the events of this evening.”
“Okay,” Erik said. “I can do that.”
“Can I make a suggestion? It really would be better if we went back to your place. I’m reluctant to discuss your private matters in public. And in lieu of a secretary, I’d like to record our conversation to be transcribed later.”
“I agree. Linda?”
Linda barely heard them. She had the vague sense that she was being asked something that needed answering, but she couldn’t hear over the rushing of blood in her ears. They were just about to turn the corner.
“Linda!” called Ben, loud, insistent. All three of them stopped moving and turned back, startled at the sound of his voice.
Ben stood there, legs spread, arms akimbo. In the dim light of the street, the bulk of his frame was dark, menacing. She could barely see his face. She found herself unable to move, to open her mouth.
Please, Ben, she wanted to say, don’t do this to him. Don’t do this to me. Not now. But she couldn’t; it all lodged in her throat. Her life was a china teacup, already on its way from delicate grip to marble floor. She had no one to blame but herself. She thought of her babies, Emily and Trevor, how she’d betrayed them more than she had anyone else with her vanity and stupidity. What kind of mother was she if she could lead herself and the father of her children into a moment like this?
“Who is that?” asked Erik, his face open and earnest, even in such a moment.
Linda shook her head. She opened her mouth but still no words came.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know who I am!” Ben roared, moving closer.
Erik pulled Linda back, and John Brace was quick to move in front of them, hold up a hand.
“Stay back, man. What do you want?”
John Brace suddenly seemed even tougher, harder, with his shaved head and broad shoulders, deep authoritative voice. The briefcase he clutched in his hand didn’t diminish this image; he looked as though he was prepared to use it as a weapon or a shield.
“She doesn’t love you, Erik,” Ben said, his voice cracking like an adolescent boy’s. “She loves me.”
Linda could see his whole body was quaking. She realized suddenly, clearly, that something was clinically wrong with him. He wasn’t just desperate or upset, or lovesick. She had a cold dawning, a terrible fear for his family, those two sweet-faced girls, his pretty wife. When he moved a step closer, into the orange glow of a street lamp, he seemed deranged, eyes wild, jaw clenching and unclenching, big chest heaving.
John spread his arms out and started herding them backward. He said quietly, “He has a gun.”
Then Linda saw it, too. She’d been so focused on his face, how totally unself-conscious he was, how lost in his own mind, she hadn’t noticed. Then he started lifting his arm.
She broke from Erik, started running toward Ben. She felt Erik, then John’s hands on her, holding her back. Heard them both yelling, following close behind as she shifted away from them. She came to stop in front of Ben, feeling small and insubstantial before him. His height and breadth, the size of his anger dwarfed her. She wanted to scream at him. Instead she put her hand on his chest and whispered, “Ben, we have children. Think about what you’re doing to your girls right now. Please.”
He seemed to hear, to shrink at her words. Anger left him, dropped the features of his face into a sagging sadness, left his shoulders to slump forward.
Then Erik was pulling her back and there was shouting all around them. Uniformed officers seemed to have poured out of everywhere, there were so many emerging
from the doors of the precinct building and coming out of cars. A shift change.
Then so many different voices echoing on the concrete of the buildings around them. Freeze! Drop that weapon! Drop it! Drop it! Drop it! Coming from everywhere like the call of crows.
Erik and John pulled Linda back and she was screaming, No, no, no! Because she knew. She saw it in Ben’s eyes and watched as it spread across his face, that smile, that “Fuck you, world” smile. She’d seen it before, it was etched in her spirit, had dictated in so many ways the course of her life. She’d looked for it in every face, beneath the flimsy veils they all wore. She’d finally found it in Ben. No, no, no! She saw him raise the gun beneath his chin and, without hesitating, pull the trigger. And then in a horrible explosion of light and sound, a dreadful spray of red, it all disappeared.
20
A suicide, a miscarriage, a sudden disappearance. All abbreviations, interruptions. Variations on a theme that has run through my life.
The tickets were easily purchased with Jack’s credit card, and even though as we waited to board the plane I saw my picture flash briefly on one of the televisions mounted up high, no one even glanced in my direction. The sound was down for some reason. The text on the screen read: Real-Life Mystery: The Downtown Murder of Three People Linked to Missing Husband of Bestselling Author. The story was obviously small news at this point. It wasn’t even on the screen for thirty seconds.
I was five years younger in that photo and maybe ten pounds heavier when it was taken, but I might still have been recognizable if I hadn’t tied back my hair into a bun at the base of my neck, tucked it beneath a gray knit cap pulled down over the bandage on my head, and donned a pair of round wire-rimmed glasses that I needed but never wore.
But maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was the simple fact, as Marcus always claimed, that people weren’t looking anymore. They’ve got their earbuds in. They’re staring at tiny screens that fit in a palm. They’re talking on the phone, eyes blank, unseeing.
Even though I knew I wasn’t officially a suspect, I kept waiting for the police to arrive. Maybe my name was on some kind of a watch list of people not allowed to leave the country? I’d expected to be stopped at checkin, at security. But no, we’d glided through security checks, while a young mother was forced to empty her bags, carry a weeping toddler through one of those machines that blows air on you in sharp, quick blasts. Her little boy screamed in fright. I thought of my sister, the kids, as we walked past them.
ANOTHER THEME THAT runs though my life: airplanes. After my father’s death, I spent long hours lying in the grass behind my house, staring up at the sky. I was obsessed with the idea of direction, the Catholic concept of heaven being up and hell being down. I knew suicide was a sin, punishable by eternal damnation. I tried to imagine endless suffering for my father. I couldn’t. I couldn’t see him punished for being too afraid, too weak, and too sad to go on. It didn’t seem right—nor did the idea of his lofting up to some cloud to the sound of harp music work for me. It all seemed a bit silly, a bit earthly even to my young mind, a man-made idea, a desperate attempt to explain the unknowable.
I started noticing airplanes then. Their white, silent flight filled me with a terrible longing. I imagined the fuselage filled with passengers en route to some fabulous destination. Their lives were their own, free from tragedy and sadness. The kind of grief that held me in its grip was impossible for them. The desire to be high and far away from my life, to be someone else, anywhere else, was a physical pain, a hole in my center.
No matter where you go, there you are. Fred, of course; one of his wisdom one-liners. He’d come to join me, sat down in the wet grass beside me. I’d pointed up at the plane, told him I wished I were there. “That’s the thing you can never escape, try as you might,” he said. “Try as you might. Pick your poison—drugs, alcohol. You always wake up with yourself eventually.”
“Not him. Not my father.”
Fred went still, looked at me carefully. “Suicide is not an escape. It’s an end.”
“How do you know?”
He was quiet for so long, I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then: “I suppose I don’t really know. But I can only imagine that an action that destroys life and hope, which leaves only anger and sadness in its wake, can’t be the right course.”
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t have the words to say that I thought his idea was incomplete, unsatisfying. That maybe it was the only course open when you finally realize you can’t escape yourself and you can’t live with yourself. Maybe an end is an escape.
“Want some ice cream?” he asked me then.
“Okay.”
MAYBE IT WAS a longing like this that drove my husband. That sickening, ardent desire to be anyone, anywhere else. Maybe he chose the alternative of stepping into someone else’s skin, someone else’s name, someone else’s life. Less final than suicide, maybe even an act of hope that someplace else is better than here.
A FEW HOURS earlier we returned to Jack’s apartment and retrieved an envelope of cash from beneath his mattress. The next steps weren’t as clear to him as they were to me.
“You don’t even know that was an answer to your question. He was a dying man. He might not have even heard you.”
The truth was, it wasn’t just that. In fact, when he said the word—Praha—it made a deep kind of sense to me, as though I’d known it all along. Jack wouldn’t buy that. After all, who was going to trust my instincts at the moment? I had to convince him.
“Marcus is not going to stay in the U.S. He can’t. He has run his con and now he’s going back where he came from.”
“You don’t know that. I thought you said he hated the Czech Republic, that he never wanted to go home.”
“It’s the only course open to him now.”
“You don’t know that,” he repeated.
“He can disappear. Take back his name, Kristof Ragan, and just leave. At this point, they don’t even know his real identity. He’ll be swallowed. They’ll never find him. What’s the extradition policy between the Czech Republic and the U.S.?”
Jack looked at me blankly. “How should I know?”
The other truth was that I didn’t have any ideas about where else he could be. Was it a desperate act to board a plane to Prague in search of my husband? Yes. But it didn’t seem that way at the time.
Out of sheer exhaustion, not a lack of anxiety or urgency, I lay on the plush down of Jack’s bed as he threw things into a large duffel bag—jeans, underwear, some old clothes of mine from a night I’d spent here after a party, a pair of sneakers I’d left after the last time we ran in Central Park together. When I closed my eyes I saw the dying stranger in Central Park. I saw my ruined home. Jack left the room for a minute and came back with a shaving kit.
“I packed you a toothbrush.”
“We’re not going on vacation.”
“You can’t travel overseas without luggage. It looks suspicious.”
Jack was ever the pragmatist; I always feared his reading of my novels. “I don’t get it,” he’d say. “How did she get from here to there?” Or: “How did he find her in that huge crowd?” Or: “What’s her motivation for doing what she did? It doesn’t make sense.”
He liked the linear progression, the logical course of events, motivations so obvious that they didn’t brook questions. I liked the illogical leap in time and tense. Meaning that the nuts and bolts—how the window got unlocked or what vehicle was used to transport my character from this scene to that—bored and annoyed me.
It’s the essence, the energy of character and action that moves me. I don’t want to tell how the vase found its way to the ground. Was it dropped? Was it thrown? I just want to show the shards, glistening and sharp, on the marble floor. Because that’s life. We don’t always act out of logic. Things can’t always be explained. Sometimes we don’t know how the vase got there, just that it has shattered, irreparably.
“Let me ask you something,” Jac
k said. He zipped up the duffel and moved it over toward the door. Then he returned to sit at the foot of the bed. “What’s this about?”
“We’ve already had this conversation. You know what it’s about.”
“Is it justice you’re looking for? Or revenge? When and if you find him, how exactly do you plan to dole that out?”
I didn’t answer, just stared at the ceiling. He wasn’t looking for an answer. This was his way. Just put it in your pipe and smoke it, he’d say.
“Or is it just about the why and how, Isabel? Is it just about the knowing, the understanding that you need?”
I still didn’t feel compelled to answer.
“Because I’m your friend. I’m with you. I’ll buy the tickets. I’ll get on a plane and go with you wherever you need to go. But let’s make sure it’s for the right reasons.”
“What makes a right reason?” I asked.
“Something that, when bad things happen and it all goes to shit, is still worth all the trouble. Something that means enough to risk everything you’re risking right now.”
I looked at his profile, the crooked ridge of his nose. He seemed tired to me suddenly. I looked around the room and noticed that it was another minimal space, like his office. Just the low platform bed, covered in expensive linens. The walls were white, the floor hardwood. Where was all his stuff? His magazines and dirty clothes, his photographs and unpaid bills? I remembered his dorm room from NYU—a pigsty of staggering proportions. When did he become so neat, so anti-clutter?
