The Three-Day Affair

by Michael Kardos

  “Good lord,” I said.

  “Don’t ‘good lord’ me. I understand your horror. It’s horrible. Don’t you think I know that? But we created the horror. The moment we drove away with that girl in your car, somebody was going to die. All we’re doing now is seeing it through. This”—he looked down at the bag—“is the endgame.”

  “Don’t call it a game,” I said.

  He watched me, maybe waiting to see if I’d bolt back to the car. “Nobody saw me do it. And nobody’s going to miss him. It’s done.” He stood up, brushed dirt off his jeans. Picked up the shovel from the ground. “So I’ll ask you again. Please, Will, take an end, and let’s finish this already so that we can leave here and go home to bed and pretend this was all a nightmare.”

  We walked. But it wasn’t easy.

  The spot where we’d parked the car was a tenth of a mile from the trail. As seventeen-year-olds lugging a case of beer, we’d had no problem. Now, shrubs and vines and lack of light, as well as the weight of our load, kept us moving slowly, the bag’s handle carving into my tightly gripped palms. We stepped uneasily over the hilly ground. Several times we almost walked right off the trail, which was hidden underneath a layer of wet, decaying leaves.

  We took breaks every few hundred feet, and we massaged our palms, and then we walked again.

  I wondered what the man’s name was. I’d never asked. And I wondered other things: where Nolan had done it. And how. And what he’d felt at the exact moment it was happening. But I wasn’t going to ask, because I didn’t really want to know. Nor was there any need to satisfy my morbid curiosity, because I was certain that Nolan had covered his tracks. His epitaph someday would read: Nolan Albright. He covered his tracks.

  We followed the trail deeper into the woods. It was very difficult going. The trail was too narrow for us to walk side by side. So we had to walk practically sideways, single file, Nolan ahead of me, the bag between us. The only sound was the uneven rhythm of our footfalls on the trail, punctuated by the snapping of a twig or the rolling of a rock kicked accidentally.

  After about thirty minutes, Nolan stopped walking and looked around. By then our eyes had adjusted somewhat. We’d been walking so slowly, we probably hadn’t gone more than a mile. But this section of the forest looked untouched and particularly dense.

  “This will do,” he said. “Let’s head off the trail now.”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  Yes, we were about as far from civilization as one could get in New Jersey. Yes, my hands and arms were burning, and I wanted nothing more than to stop. I was desperate for it. But by now I had a destination in mind, and I was pretty sure we could find it if we kept walking.

  CHAPTER 26

  The cave was farther than I’d remembered.

  For nearly another hour we traveled at a glacial pace through the unchanging, leafless forest. Trees were beginning to bud. Soon they would distinguish themselves. At this time of night, though, everything about the landscape looked dead and endlessly repetitive. Up a slope. Down a slope. More trees. More walking. Hands burning. Muscles straining. My thigh ached from where the bag rubbed against it with each step. An ankle nearly twisted from a carelessly placed shoe.

  After several thousand steps the hill to the left of the trail began to rise—first gradually, then steeply—and became rocky. The trail ran along the base of the hillside for maybe another tenth of a mile, and then curved away from it.

  “This way,” I said, when the trail began to curve. We carried the bag off the trail and then away from it for several hundred feet, and when we reached the rocky wall we set it down.

  We had first found the small cave, a couple of friends and I, back in high school. The entrance was behind several large boulders and not visible from the trail, but we’d been horsing around, trying to climb the rocky wall, and had stumbled upon it. We’d only ever gone inside that one time. We’d been disappointed. It wasn’t a real cave so much as a small chamber caused by the way several large boulders jutted out slightly from the rest of the wall, forming a sort of triangle.

  It didn’t take me long to find the entrance. I ran back to Nolan, and we carried the bag inside.

  The chamber was no larger than a small bedroom. About half of it was covered by rock, and the other half looked up into the sky. It wasn’t much darker than the rest of the woods. But if we were looking for a secluded place, somewhere nobody would ever find, this was it.

  “You’re right,” Nolan said. “This is a better spot.” He looked around some more, inspecting the place. “Still, one of us should gather up some rocks and branches to cover the hole when we’re done. Otherwise the ground is going to look freshly dug up.”

  “You do it,” I found myself saying, despite my aching body. “I want to dig.”

  “Okay,” he said, and handed me the shovel. “Let me know when it’s my turn.”

  When he left the chamber, I tried to read my watch, tilting it until the face was readable. Four fifteen. During the last part of our walk I could see increasingly well. Probably just my eyes adjusting. And the moonlight glowing stronger through the thinning clouds. But morning was coming, and sooner than we’d like. By the time the sun came up, we had better be home.

  I heaved the shovel into the ground, and my wrists nearly exploded from the vibration.

  Stone! I cursed my stupidity. I hadn’t considered that the ground at the base of a rock wall might well be composed of rock.

  “Nolan!” I whispered.

  No response.

  I thought about going to find him. But first I tried another spot in the ground, and, to my relief, the blade cut solidly into dirt. A few more tests, and I concluded that, no, the floor wasn’t mainly rock. At least not near the surface. I’d been unlucky the first time. And so I began to dig. It did me some good, the physical labor. I didn’t pace myself at all and was out of breath almost immediately. Good. Throwing myself into the hard job of moving earth, I was able to keep myself from thinking too hard about the reason I was here.

  Each time I rammed the shovel into the ground, I prepared myself for the inevitable layer of rock. But each time I came up with dirt, I felt a little closer to going home.

  I heard Nolan return a few times, dropping branches and rocks outside the cave. Then he came inside and asked if he could take a turn. By then a hole was already taking shape at my feet, and a heap of wet dirt was growing beside me.

  “No,” I said. My face felt gritty from sweat and dirt. “I’ll keep going.”

  “You sure?” he asked.

  My answer was another shovelful of dirt. He left me alone without another word.

  My back began to ache like it did whenever I shoveled snow. I acknowledged the pain with indifference, but I didn’t quit or even slow down. The hole was growing. Soon this would be over. The only thing that could stop me, I believed, was a layer of rock. Or maybe a thick, thick root.

  First, what I see in dreams: the bag beside me moving almost imperceptibly in the moonlight. So slightly, I wonder if it’s only shadows paying tricks. Or the defective vision of someone who’s been shoveling dirt too long. I resume my digging, but then I hear a slow zippering sound. Fascinated, I watch as the bag unzips an inch, then two, then three. First I’m hit with the rotting stench of a thousand corpses. Then a finger slides out. Sometimes it’s the stiff, hairy finger of an aging panhandler. Other times it’s a young, feminine finger, the nail carefully polished, and I know right away that it’s Cynthia in the bag—badly hurt, but not dead. Sometimes it’s one finger; sometimes it’s two or three. When that happens, the diamond in her engagement ring reflects the moonlight.

  And then the nearly deceased speak to me. They ask simple questions, the only ones that matter.

  What have I done wrong?

  I tell them they’ve done nothing wrong. I try to explain that I never meant for any of this to happen. I just kept
believing we could fix our mistakes without anyone getting hurt.

  Must I die?

  Yes. You must.

  But you can change your mind.

  I’m sorry. There’s nothing to be done.

  But you could if you wanted to.

  What makes you think I can be a hero now, when I couldn’t do it two days ago when all I had to do was stop a car?

  Not a hero. Just a human being.

  I’m sorry.

  Then you must be the devil.

  I don’t think I am. But I suppose it’s possible.

  Every so often, in the dream, I’ll surprise myself. Yes, I see your point, I’ll say, and unzip the bag. And whoever it is inside will emerge as if from a cocoon, whole again, and I’ll feel a joy unlike anything I’ve ever felt in waking life. But when the dream takes this course, eventually I realize that I’m dreaming, and that this dream, as beautiful as it is, hasn’t been worth it, because now I’ll have to wake up. But I don’t wake up. When the dream shoots off in this joyous direction, it always repeats and repeats until eventually it gets back on track and the worst thing happens.

  I don’t know why these dreams always include the sound of the bag unzipping. It isn’t what happened out in the woods that night.

  The sound I heard was different.

  Soft, breathy, lasting about three seconds. A sound like the last moments of an air mattress deflating. Then it stopped.

  I froze. Wondered if I’d imagined it. Or heard a gust of wind, made strange by the acoustics in this rocky chamber.

  It hadn’t sounded like the wind, though. It sounded like a sigh of resignation, an animal’s last gasp. Maybe even a blissful utterance, an unconscious response to a final dream of shimmering light. But one thing was sure: It was a sign of life.

  Sometimes the dream will begin much earlier, back at the house in Newfield. Sitting on the back deck with Cynthia on a sunny late afternoon drinking iced tea. Or it will begin at a gig. I’m a drummer again, living in New York City and playing with High Noon, and Gwen is playing the bass, and everyone I’ve ever loved is there in the audience watching, cheering me on, and I feel so glad to be making music again that I can’t help myself from sobbing.

  But no matter where the dream starts, or how often it repeats, it always ends exactly the same way: in the cave, with the bag slowly opening.

  And then—always—the shovel.

  This is where my nightmare and my waking world collide.

  I held perfectly still, staring at the bag and listening. I stared and listened and prayed that my ears had played a trick on me. Then I heard it again. Unmistakable. A human breath. My eyes widened, and my skin crawled, and my heart—already racing—lurched crazily. For an instant my whole life nearly forked differently as I imagined the cold days of my future warmed by the knowledge of this one decent thing I’d done. But I hadn’t done it—not yet, not ever—and then the instant was over, and what I saw was how this canvas bag in front of me was all that lay between me and the rest of my life, and I raised the shovel and brought it down and began to smash the bag as hard as I could. Again and again and again. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times. And I wasn’t only hitting the bag, I was stabbing it with the shovel’s sharp point. I was massacring it. I was no longer Will Walker—I was an animal in the woods and I was making this other animal go away. Nothing would be left when I was done. I was going to turn the contents of that bag to soup.

  I don’t know how much time passed, but when Nolan returned I was sitting on the ground, hands tucked into my armpits, shivering because my sweat had turned cold, the shovel lying beside me in the dirt.

  I let him dig awhile.

  CHAPTER 27

  Three years passed before I saw any of them again.

  Nolan lost the election. Would the extra money for his campaign have made a difference? It’s anyone’s guess. The 2004 election was more a referendum on George W. Bush than anything else, and Nolan was a Democrat running in a Republican state with gay marriage on the ballot. From the news stories I read online, he seemed to have fought a good fight. But how could his heart have been in it? He lost by eight percentage points and, following his concession speech, dropped out of the news, relegated by an unforgiving political machine to the status of burned-out firecracker. Not a has-been, but an almost-was. I don’t know what he’s doing now. I haven’t asked.

  Evan made partner. I read this in the “Class Notes” section of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. I assume his life now is much as it was before he made partner, except there is more of everything: more money, more hours, more responsibility, more anxiety. I thought briefly about sending him a congratulatory e-mail, but then thought better of it. There was no way he’d want to hear from me.

  Nor did I correspond with Jeffrey. A couple of times he e-mailed me—short, polite messages hoping that Cynthia and I were well. I never replied, and in time his messages stopped. Despite the kidnapping, I didn’t resent him. In fact, I felt bad for him. He’d come to my town battered and bruised, and left with nothing. That saddened me, but not enough to communicate with him ever again.

  Without my money or anyone else’s—the two million got wired exactly as we’d all agreed—Long-Shot Records got put on indefinite hold. To avoid thinking too hard about what had happened, I started spending long hours in the studio. And gradually the unexpected happened: I stopped thinking of the studio as the place where we’d kidnapped a girl and started thinking of it as a place for music again. Joey began to take more notice of my work and to see the studio’s full potential. He invested money to refurbish. With digital recording technology exploding, he was able to modernize the place without spending a fortune. Word spread about the studio and the work I did there. We weren’t a record label, and we didn’t plan to become one, but several indie labels started sending their bands to us to record their albums. My name started appearing on liner notes under engineer and, occasionally, producer. I started to pull in better money for the studio and some for myself, too—enough that Cynthia and I began to talk about moving out of Newfield and buying a place of our own.

  I told Cynthia about the kidnapping. Monday morning I’d called and canceled my session with The Fixtures, telling them I had the flu. When Cynthia came home from Philadelphia late that afternoon, I sat her down at the kitchen table and recounted every detail of the weekend, except that in my rendition, the story ended when Nolan and I came home from dinner and went to sleep. She cried, and I cried, and it would be a lie to say that the next couple of days weren’t excruciating. I’d catch her glancing at me, watching me differently from how she’d ever watched me before—struggling, I’m sure, to square these new, unsavory facts with the man she thought she’d always known.

  She didn’t leave me, though. Didn’t call the police. Little by little we discussed what all of this meant in terms of our future, which I hoped to mean our future together. The second evening, I remember, we spoke softly in bed all night, and by the time the morning birds were piercing the darkness, we were all talked out and I felt that we’d be okay. Two years later, eating our first breakfast together in our small fixer-upper in nearby South Orange, our daughter, Kim, running in the grass, I felt surer of it.

  And yet nighttime always came. After television or a chapter in a book, after the lights went out and Cynthia rolled onto her side and pulled the blanket up to her chin, and it was just me looking up into the dark, despite my best effort not to, I’d find myself listening for police sirens. For that knock on the front door. It felt as if a radioactive rock were sitting on my nightstand, with a long yet unmistakable half-life. Every month that passed without hearing those sirens or that knock seemed to decrease the likelihood, down the road, of ever hearing them. But the half-life was long, very long.

  There was no half-life, however, to my dreams. Each night, I fought sleep for as long as possible. And when I felt myself losing my hold on co
nsciousness, I did so with undiminished terror, because I knew I was about to enter the woods again.

  A month ago I got roped into seeing a community theater production of My Fair Lady. This was what happened when you bought a house and became a member-of-your-community. You supported the local arts. Our babysitter, a local college student, was singing in the chorus. Cynthia and I went closing weekend (after struggling to find an alternate babysitter). The performance was forgettable, though the woman who played Eliza Doolittle was terrific—she had a belting soprano voice and was a believable actress and strong dancer. It was midway through the second act—when she walked to the front of the stage and the spotlight hit her just right—before I recognized who it was underneath all that theatrical makeup. Of course there was also the cockney accent and the fact that she was now three years older. But at one point she seemed to look right at me, and I nearly bolted out of the theater.

  The only thing that kept me in my chair was the knowledge that this wasn’t the first time I thought I’d spotted Marie. Far too often she’d be in my periphery, crossing a street or entering an elevator. My head would snap in her direction and she’d be gone or have turned into somebody else, a stranger. The eyes play tricks. I quickly paged through the playbill, and the name of the lead actress—Gloria Diamond—brought me a measure of relief.

  After the show, Cynthia went to congratulate our babysitter. I lagged behind, watchful. And just as my wife was chatting with our sitter, Eliza Doolittle emerged from the dressing room. She hadn’t seen me, and I quickly ducked behind a door. I peered around it to see her hugging friends and cast members. A tall ­middle-aged woman approached her and, beaming, said, “You were wonderful!” They hugged.

  Marie’s teeth looked huge, framed by the thick, dark lipstick. Her blue eyes blazed, and it only then occurred to me that Gloria Diamond was exactly the sort of stage name that she’d have chosen for herself.