One Small Sacrifice

by Hilary Davidson

  “It’s worse not being able to remember,” Alex said. “Losing time like that makes me feel like I’m losing my mind.”

  Will’s head lifted suddenly. “But those blackouts are a thing of the past, aren’t they? You haven’t had one in months.”

  “When I got home Friday night, I found Emily’s note saying she was leaving.” Alex took a deep breath. “I lost it. I got drunk and took some pills and got some crazy idea to go up to the Bronx to see if she’d taken her brother’s car.”

  “Why do that?”

  “I don’t know. It made sense at the time.” Alex shrugged. “Emily only ever uses the car to go up to her aunt and uncle’s place. I was thinking if the car was gone, that would mean she was in High Falls with them. I . . . I wouldn’t be worried about her if that’s where she was.”

  “Was the car there?”

  “I think so.” Alex rubbed his forehead. “It’s hard to picture, exactly . . .” He closed his eyes and tried to visualize the parking lot, but he couldn’t. Instead, he saw a square sheet of paper with Hemlock Avenue printed at the top. Emily’s handwriting was on it too. One more word—fentanyl—flashed through his mind.

  “It’s not so strange to forget things like that. That happens to me sometimes when I get drunk,” Will said confidently. “At least it’s not one of your stress blackouts.”

  “Posttraumatic stress disorder,” Alex said quietly. “And I think I had one that night. I blanked out after I went up to the Bronx. When I came to, I was lying in a subway station.”

  “Which one?”

  “Old City Hall. What used to be the end of the 6 line.” Alex was quiet for a moment. “The strange thing was, I had just brought my workshop students there, earlier that night. I have no idea why I went back.”

  “Like a drunken homing pigeon,” Will said. “Please tell me that you didn’t admit any of this to the police, Alex.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Good. Don’t. Because if you do, they’ll think you did something to Emily.” Will was quiet for a moment. “What did she say in the letter?”

  Alex only shook his head.

  “Of course you don’t want to talk about it,” Will said. “I understand that. But perhaps I could help.”

  “No one can help right now.”

  “Maybe if you told me what happened. I know Emily wouldn’t leave without a reason.” He paused, waiting for Alex to fill the silence; when that didn’t happen, he went on. “Alex, why do you think Emily ran off?”

  “She told me I had to trust her.”

  “Trust her to do what?”

  “I have no idea,” Alex said. “But that’s what trust is, right? I don’t need to know. I just need to believe in her.”

  CHAPTER 17

  ALEX

  Alex spotted Diana the minute he stepped into the Jane Hotel Ballroom. She was wearing a different black dress this time, tight as a tourniquet but with strategic cutouts on the back; he figured they were there to let her breathe. But the platinum hair was the same, and he watched her toss her head back carelessly as she served drinks to a group of women seated on a burgundy velvet sofa. The light was low, but the decaying disco ball hanging from the ceiling gleamed.

  He’d figured out the connection between Cori and Diana after leaving Will’s place. Cori had worked as a bartender at the Ballroom; it was the only steady job he’d known her to hold, besides working for her father at the veterinary clinic. Before Diana spotted him, he sidled up to her. “Excuse me.”

  Without turning her platinum head, she said, “No, you can’t ask me out.”

  “Diana?”

  She turned her head, and he realized he’d been mistaken. This woman was about the same age as Diana, but with huge blue eyes that made her look like an anime character and a rosebud mouth stuck in perma pout. “Guess again,” she challenged.

  “I’m looking for someone,” Alex said, but she was already walking away from him. He didn’t do any better with the rest of the staff. No one admitted to knowing Diana—or Cori, for that matter. It had been a long shot, and he’d struck out. Again.

  When he got home, he took a shower and got into bed. Sid snored gently on the pillow beside him. Alex fell asleep quickly, but the dreams came on just as fast. There was a siren screaming near his head. He was in Syria again, taking pictures, shooting a building that had just been bombed into rubble. There were small fires everywhere, pieces of wood and people that continued to burn. Two men in white helmets were desperately digging through the broken concrete.

  Help us! one of the men had cried out, half turning to look at Alex. He spoke the Mesopotamian Arabic Alex heard so often in Aleppo.

  In the dream, Alex only saw the men through the lens of the camera. They were digging with their bare hands, casting broken hunks of wall aside. There was something white underneath that was slowly being revealed.

  Help us!

  And then another bomb went off. It sent a shockwave through Alex’s system, yet it didn’t wake him. Instead, he found himself chained to the wall in a basement cell. A man with a long black beard was explaining to him how he was going to die. Then a voice beside him whispered, Not your turn today. He looked around and saw Maclean sitting beside him sipping beer out of a glass bottle. For a moment, Alex felt relief; US Special Forces were there, and he wasn’t going to die after all. But that comfort was short lived: there was the crack of a shot, and the glass exploded and there was blood everywhere.

  Caught in that thin membrane between sleep and consciousness, Alex screamed. He jolted upright in bed. His body was coated in sweat. He couldn’t breathe.

  Beside him, Sid whimpered and reached out to touch his chest with one paw. Alex looked at his dog and caught his breath. He remembered where he was again. “Sorry, Sid,” he said, patting the dog’s head. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Alex was used to bad dreams. For years, they’d invaded his sleeping hours, whittling them down and turning them into a kind of torture. It had been better lately, but they never let go completely. Sometimes they crept into his mind only a couple of nights a week, and he’d wake in a panic but be able to shrug it off quickly. But there were periods when they would return night after night, unwelcome guests who never knew when to leave.

  It was almost five, but he got up and dressed while Sid snored on the bed. He let himself out quietly. It was tough for him to navigate the subway during rush hour, when the swarm of crowds and frenetic pace pushed his PTSD triggers. But overnight was a different story. He got on the downtown A train and took it as far as Chambers Street. Then he walked through City Hall Park and headed down into that station. The board told him he had an eight-minute wait for the next 6 train, which meant he had more than enough time. At the far southern end of the platform, he disappeared down a metal staircase meant for MTA employees and hurried along, beside the empty subway track, to a dimly lit station a few hundred yards away.

  Of all the abandoned subway stations in New York, Old City Hall was the easiest to sneak into but the hardest to enjoy. No trains stopped there, but the Lexington 6 line used it to turn from downtown to uptown. It was one of Alex’s favorite spots in the city, but he knew its pitfalls. Every time a train trundled through on the sharp curve of the track, he had to run up a staircase to stay out of view. But the top of that staircase was, for once, his real destination. It was where he’d woken up early Saturday morning, still drunk and light headed.

  When he lifted himself onto the platform, he felt his familiar awe of the place. Once again, he was standing under that great vaulted ceiling, covered in elaborate Gustavino tile work. It was studded with brass chandeliers and milky skylights, which allowed glimmers of lamplight from City Hall Plaza to trickle in. The station was designed to be a showstopper. Even if Alex hadn’t known the history, one look at the grandeur would have spelled out its ambitions. Built at the turn of the twentieth century, Old City Hall was designed to show the world that New York had arrived. Alex knew that if he’d seen the sta
tion back in 1904, filled with walrus-mustached men puffing cigars and clapping each other on the back, he would have hated it. No, his affection for the station lay in the fact it had been shut down in 1945, too small to accommodate the ever-longer trains and too dangerous thanks to its sharp semicircle design, which left massive gaps between train and platform. Union Square had a similar problem, but it had been worth fixing. Old City Hall had been unceremoniously dumped.

  Naturally, that was why Alex liked it.

  In the low light, it was hard to see all of the decay and deterioration, but he could smell it. Years of water damage blended with layers of steel dust and dirt. It was a wreck, a beautiful ruin. Unlike other abandoned stations, it couldn’t be used as shelter by the homeless—the combination of train traffic and transit museum tour groups made for enough prying eyes to scrap any would-be settlement. The station’s loneliness and emptiness were palpable to him.

  As he headed up the staircase, he heard a train coming in. That made him quicken his pace. But at the top, he froze. Against the wall was a mound of black ash. The sight of it hit him like an anvil. He knew what that was.

  He crouched in front of it and reached out to touch the cinders. That was why he had come back to this place in the witching hours before dawn on Saturday. He’d needed to start a bonfire. New York was tough that way: there were people everywhere, and if you retreated to your own apartment to set a fire, you risked burning the building down. He’d needed total privacy, and so he’d come to this abandoned place.

  Earlier, he’d only vaguely remembered going up to the parking lot in the Bronx; more accurately, he recalled his intention to do so but couldn’t quite picture the scene. He’d started to remember more details under Detective Sterling’s questioning at the police station. But even though he’d recalled enough to tell parts of it to CJ and then to Will, the details were hazy, and they only began to come together now as he touched that mound of ash. Suddenly, he was certain he knew what had happened: he remembered taking the 4 train uptown and making his way to the lot. The car was in place, right where they’d left it after the last time they went up to High Falls.

  He took a deep breath. The picture in his mind cleared. He could see himself peering through the car windows, looking for anything Emily might have left behind. She couldn’t just leave; her passport was in the apartment, so she hadn’t flown out of the country. He remembered staring at the car, trying to will a clue into existence. But it told him nothing; it was as spotlessly clean as always, without so much as a shred of paper out of place.

  Alex fanned the ash out, curious whether anything had survived the flames. Nothing had; he’d been surprisingly thorough in his drunken, drugged fugue state. Instead, his fingers touched metal, and he fished a small silver cylinder out of the pile. It was Maclean’s lighter, and the sight of it lifted his heart for a moment. He hadn’t lost it after all.

  Not your turn today, Maclean whispered in the back of his head.

  Holding the lighter, Alex remembered the sheaf of papers he’d carried around all day on Friday. The ones he’d found on Emily’s dresser, the ones he’d fought with Emily about at her office. The scene played out in his mind again.

  How could you do this? That was how it had started. He’d been startled and angry.

  Alex, have you lost your mind? What’s going on?

  This. How the hell could you do this? He’d held up the prescriptions, and he remembered Emily shrinking back as if repulsed, even though her voice remained calm.

  Give those to me.

  No. Tell me what’s going on.

  I can’t. Not right now.

  Since when do you have an office on Hemlock Avenue? Is that supposed to be a joke?

  It’s no joke.

  Are you in some kind of trouble?

  Of course not.

  I think you are.

  You’ll just have to trust me.

  That was the tough part: he trusted Emily completely. It wasn’t that he believed he knew her innermost secrets; there were parts of her—like any other person—that were unknowable, and he accepted that. But he trusted Emily’s judgment, her desire to do good in the world, her empathetic nature; those were elemental, and they made up the core of who she was. He couldn’t reconcile those with the prescriptions he was holding in his hand, with drugs like fentanyl and Seconal and Sublimaze. It wasn’t shocking that she might prescribe opioids or barbiturates, but those would go through her office. Instead, these scripts were tied to a fake office Alex was certain didn’t exist. It was the kind of thing a doctor with a drug problem might do, only that wasn’t the case with Emily—he was sure of it. What did that leave?

  He held the lighter tightly in his palm, unwilling to let go of it again. He remembered using it to burn those papers, lighting page after page ablaze. He’d been lucid enough to complete the only task that mattered—destroying those papers—but drunk and drugged enough to sweep Maclean’s lighter aside under the cinders.

  Alex rose to his feet slowly. He’d needed privacy for his bonfire, and that was what that abandoned station had afforded him. He still had no idea what Emily had been up to, writing those prescriptions. All of the possibilities running through his mind—selling them, helping an addicted friend—were dark, and any of them would result in Emily losing her medical license and likely going to jail. The stakes were that high. All Alex could do to help her was burn the incriminating evidence. That, and pray Emily had meant it when she told him she wasn’t in trouble.

  CHAPTER 18

  EMILY

  The first time Emily Teare came to, it was only for a few seconds. She was lying on a cold surface with a bright light above her head shining in her eyes. How had she ended up there? Had there been some kind of accident? She tried to wiggle her fingers and toes, and they obliged grudgingly. Out of the corner of one eye, she spotted a gloved hand. When she opened her mouth to speak, all that came out was a sharp cry, like a hatchling chick’s. Something jabbed her shoulder, and she gasped. It felt like molten lead was pouring into her body, deadening every nerve and synapse. Her brain couldn’t resist. She went under again.

  The second time Emily started to wake, the light was gone, and everything was pitch black. She blinked rapidly, but there was nothing to see. The absence of light was startling. Am I blind? she wondered, feeling the first shivers of panic. She was moving, but she didn’t know how, because her feet weren’t on the ground. In her mind, she was running. She was in the park again. She could hear footfalls over her own panting breath. But that sensation lasted only for a split second before Alex’s face floated through her mind. She wasn’t running. Strong arms were carrying her along. The heavy breathing wasn’t her own, but his.

  “Alex?” she whispered.

  Something shifted in the darkness. Dizziness swelled over her as they came to a jerky stop. He dropped her legs, and she felt the softness of grass under her feet, even though her legs were too weak to support her weight. Then he pressed a cloth against her face, and she was overcome with the chemical stench of chloroform. It plunged her into unconsciousness again.

  The third time Emily came to, the first sensation that hit her was that she was very cold. She moved her head from side to side, feeling stiffness in her neck. She was lying on a dirt floor. The room was dark, but it wasn’t the stygian blackness she’d experienced last time, one that admitted no light at all. But what was the last time she’d been conscious: an hour ago, or a day? How long had she been knocked out?

  There was a light bulb at one end of the room, maybe all of twenty-five watts, dangling from a wire in the ceiling. Emily blinked at it, grateful for any proof she hadn’t lost her sight. She tried to lift her head, but it was too heavy, so she lay there for a minute, trying to focus her eyes. The bulb swayed back and forth gently, but there were dark vertical lines obscuring it. What’s happened to me? she thought, feeling bile crawl up her throat. As her eyes started to focus, she realized the problem wasn’t with her vision.

  The
dark vertical lines were bars.

  She reached out one arm to touch them, unsure whether she was dreaming. This felt more like a nightmare than reality. Her arm unfurled slowly, as if she were underwater. But when her fingertips brushed against cold metal, it jolted her.

  Even though her head throbbed like someone was hitting it with a mallet, she forced herself to sit up. The dirt floor was cold under her legs. She remembered that she had been running in Central Park. That was the last clear memory she had. She’d gotten home from work on Friday, changed into leggings and a T-shirt and a light jacket, and went for a run. It was part of her routine. That was what she always did on Friday evenings. What she struggled with was what had happened in the park. She knew it was bad, even if she couldn’t figure it out. She squeezed her eyes shut and put every ounce of mental energy she had toward remembering. She’d followed her usual route. It had been a quiet night. At some point, everything went blank. If someone had attacked her, she’d blocked it out.

  Moving slowly, she rose to her feet. The bars were freezing to the touch.

  “Hello?” she called out, her voice cracking. Her throat was so dry.

  There was no answer.

  She took in as much as she could of her surroundings. The ceiling wasn’t high, and it was unfinished, with wood beams visible. If the dirt floor hadn’t been enough of a hint, the rough ceiling told her she was in a cellar. In a cage in a cellar, she thought. Behind bars in a basement. Her body was stiff. Her leggings were torn at the knees. Her T-shirt was black, so she couldn’t see any blood on it, but she could smell it. Her hands looked red and pulpy in the low light. She couldn’t see the cuts, but she could feel them. Her arms were covered in dark bruises. When she touched her scalp, she moved her fingers gingerly until she found the bump. Concussion, she thought immediately. You didn’t get a lump like that on your head without damage. Her medical specialty wasn’t the brain, but she knew hers was in bad shape. Her area of expertise was the spine, and as she fought to stand straight, hers cracked and popped. Not a good sign.