Before He Finds Her

by Michael Kardos

  “Okay,” Melanie said, sensing more.

  But the detective waited until the food had come and Melanie’s burger was nearly finished before saying, “I need to tell you something.”

  And Melanie knew she wouldn’t be eating any more of her lunch.

  “My chief,” said the detective. “He spoke with the U.S. Marshal in Newark, and he made some more calls.” It was 3:30 in the afternoon, and the diner was nearly empty. Still, she kept her voice quiet and steady, watching Melanie closely. “After you and I spoke, I got the strong sense that your aunt and uncle have withheld the details of their protection from you. Maybe for your sake, or maybe for theirs. Because like I said, the witness protection program is just that—it’s for witnesses who have committed a crime but are exonerated in exchange for testifying. The program doesn’t just... well, the point is, I was wrong, but I was on the right track.” She lowered her voice still further. “We think your aunt and uncle have been lying to you, Melanie. The U.S. Marshals Service—they have no knowledge of you, or of your aunt and uncle.”

  “I’m not lying to you.”

  She nodded. “I know. You told me what you believed to be true, what your aunt and uncle told you was true. But what I’m saying is, we think they made it all up.” And in case there was any misunderstanding: “I don’t understand why yet, but I think that on the night of September 22, 1991, you were kidnapped.”

  22

  September 22, 1991

  All the party guests were gone.

  Ramsey was helping the soundman wrap cables. The repetitive motion was good for him. He snuck peeks at Allie, who sat on the back porch steps. Anger coursed through her like blood, he could tell. He would wait to speak with her until they had both calmed a little. When she stood up and slipped back inside the house, he didn’t follow her. Soon—but not now.

  The guys said little to one another as they packed their gear. A few words about which songs had gone best, which chords and lyrics they’d screwed up. Before long, the soundman’s cables were looped, his microphone stands folded, and his sound console back in its crate. The guys helped him load the speakers. They all shook hands. No one would look Ramsey in the eye.

  Why does everything always have to end badly? Ramsey wondered. Those cops had treated him as if he were still some young punk. All his years of good behavior had amounted to nothing.

  Some things don’t change, the officer had said.

  “We’re headed to Jackrabbits for a drink,” Eric said to him. “You should come along.”

  Come along to watch Eric sip club soda while everyone avoided Ramsey’s gaze some more and the jukebox blasted the Cure and Depeche Mode and every other whiny pop crap?

  “No,” Ramsey said. “I’m gonna stay here.”

  Paul frowned. “I think you should do what your wife says and clear out for a while.”

  “She didn’t mean it.”

  “I think she did,” Wayne said.

  So now fucking Wayne was weighing in? “Well, it’s my house, too,” Ramsey replied, but his words sounded petulant even to himself, so he tried again. “I just want to talk to her,” he said to the three of them. “And then if she really wants me gone, I’ll go.” The fire pit crackled as a piece of wood shifted and settled. “Heck, I’ll even meet up with you guys and endure that horrible fucking jukebox.”

  Allie must have been watching from inside the darkened living room, because the moment that the other men had left and Ramsey was alone, the door to the back porch slid open and she stepped outside. She looked smaller, shrunken, as if she’d been sick and lost weight. She sat on the top porch step and wrapped her arms around her knees. Ramsey glanced up at the sky and went over to her. He sat down on the lowest step. Looked up at the sky again. As a boy he had known the constellations, but even then the light-filled Jersey sky never let you see many stars. Over the years, he’d forgotten nearly every mythical man and beast who lorded over the earth. He remembered the Big Dipper. Ursa Major. Tonight it was half hidden behind the trees. Cassiopeia was overhead. The other stars were just nameless points on a map. But when the earth was no more, those stars would remain in the sky, unfazed.

  Not a word from Allie, who just sat there, breathing deeply.

  “Some party,” he said, and attempted a weak smile.

  She sat up. “What the hell’s the matter with you, huh? I mean, you can’t keep this up.”

  “Keep what up?” he said, and she screamed in frustration, high and piercing and long.

  “Hey!” he said.

  “What—are you worried about the neighbors? You’re a little late for that.” She shook her head. “And forget about me—you have a daughter. If you cared about her even a little, you wouldn’t be antagonizing the police, practically begging them to arrest you.”

  “I do care—”

  “No. All you care about is your superconjunction, which you have to know isn’t real and is nothing and is a fucking joke.”

  He looked up at the sky. “Al—”

  “No, you’re going to listen to me now. You’re on the road too much. You get these ideas in your head, and there’s no one around to tell you you’re wrong. Well, I’m telling you now. You’re wrong. You’re so fucking wrong about everything.” She was crying. “I want a divorce.”

  “How could you sleep with that man?”

  “Oh, my God—didn’t you just hear me? I’m leaving you.”

  The words he heard, of course, but they didn’t square with the facts. They were married, he and Allie. “You’re my wife.”

  “No—I don’t love you anymore.” She might as well be taking an axe to him. “Maybe I once did, but I don’t now.”

  He looked at his wife. “You have no right, saying that. Not when you’re having the affair.”

  “I’m not having an affair! For God’s sake, get it through your head—you’re so... David and I are... nothing. We’re nothing. We’re less than nothing.”

  He heard Eric’s words in his head as clearly as the day he’d said them.

  They were still kissing when I drove past.

  A real kiss?

  You don’t want the answer to that.

  “I don’t believe you,” Ramsey said. He couldn’t unsee the image of their kiss, or the images he created in the kiss’s aftermath, images perfected after three months of seeing them. “You’re lying to me.”

  She stared at him. “Well, then to hell with you.” She opened the sliding door, rushed inside, and slammed the door home.

  Ramsey sat there a minute on the step. “You’re a liar, Allie,” he said to the used-up yard with all its trash.

  He wanted to go inside. His anger and sense of injustice were such that he wanted to continue this, escalate it. He wanted to lose control. He wanted to break through.

  That ain’t you anymore, he told himself under his breath, but the words rang false. He said them again anyway, and then a third time, but he wasn’t able to convince himself.

  I could hurt you, he said.

  And these words shimmered with truth.

  He went out the side gate to his car and pressed the automatic door opener for the garage. In the garage, he got the empty five-gallon gas can and returned to his car. He started the engine and backed out of the driveway. He’d had more to drink tonight than he had in many years, but not nearly enough. He could still see straight. Could still drive. Could still think—which was why he had to escape from here, fast, before he let his thinking go too far and he acted on those thoughts. He passed Jackrabbits and headed east. Stopped at the Sunoco station that was attached to a mart and liquor store. Filled the gas can, put it back into the trunk, then went into the mart and bought a fifth of Jack Daniel’s. Returned to the car and drove toward the bay.

  This town, this town. Thirty-four years, and what? One store became another, a diner went out of business and a month later opened under a new name. Same flooding every few years when a nor’easter came through—houses damaged, houses repaired. Same yellow scho
ol buses. Same schools. Same firehouse. Everything a little faded, a little dingier after three decades—but not fundamentally any different.

  Some things don’t change.

  The road took him over marshes toward the bay, which at night was dark in the middle but shimmering along the edges from the streetlights and porch lights. He passed two marinas, then followed the road as it curved into a quieter area of larger, spread-out homes with views across the bay. This was a part of town he never visited when he was younger, where the real money was. It was dark enough here to miss the entrance to the boatyard’s narrow lot, but Ramsey made the turn—a little too fast—and crunched along the gravel. Some of the boats were dry-docked for the season, but many were still in their slips. Beyond the hedges and trees stood houses to either side.

  Ramsey only ever took his motorboat into the bay three or four times a summer. But when he’d bought the boat from the yard’s manager five years earlier, the man had quoted Ramsey a next-to-nothing docking fee (the Sea Nymph was only twelve feet long), and he hadn’t upped the fee since.

  The boat was the epitome of simple—aluminum, flat bottom—and ideal for puttering around the bay on the occasional summer morning to fish for fluke. For an hour or two he’d float with the tide and jig his rod and feel the morning air on his skin. Whatever fish he caught he’d take home and cook. If he caught nothing, the outing was no worse.

  Tonight the tide was high, the ramp down to the floating dock not steep at all, which made carrying the gas can easier. The bay was absolutely still tonight, but Ramsey knew he wasn’t sober, so he stepped carefully into the boat, cradling the gas can and then, once in the boat, setting it down gently at his feet. He opened the cap on the outboard and poured some gas in until it seemed like enough. Capped the engine, capped the gas can. The eight-horsepower engine started on the first pull—a rarity, as if it’d been waiting for him. He untied the line from the clamps at port and starboard, dropped them onto the dock, and idled into the bay. His boat was so small it left no wake, so once he was twenty or thirty yards away from the dock he turned the throttle, and the outboard motor’s pitch raised (an almost comical whine compared to the truck’s 560-horsepower engine), and the boat moved slowly but steadily away from the lights and into the mouth of the bay.

  This was not a boat made for the ocean. But tonight it cut through the calm water like a blade, and with all these houses and condos in sight even from the middle of the bay, he couldn’t find the solitude he sought. So he motored out toward the tip of Coral Hook, and even there, a place where the ocean meeting bay usually created strong currents, his small boat glided on. There was an outgoing tide, helping him along, and in no time at all (thirty minutes? forty-five?) he was around the tip of the hook, with the Verrazano Bridge and New York skyline to his north, the ocean to the east and south. He headed southeast, where ahead of him was more water, more water, then glorious nothing, where he would have a front-row seat to the end of all things. In the storage compartment underneath the seat was a flashlight, he was pretty sure, but the whole point was to escape the light. If another boat slammed into him, then so be it. The odds were slim.

  He opened the bottle of whiskey and drank. The air was still warm and humid, unusually so, with barely any sea breeze at all. For a while he kept checking the sky, but eventually he stopped doing that and simply piloted his boat. Kept heading southeast, steady and true, and tried to free his mind of everything but the small engine’s hum. The shoreline was always in sight but receding. The New York City skyline faded to a brownish-orange smear over the northernmost part of the sky.

  For maybe another hour he puttered along. By then, Ramsey’s eyes were fully adjusted to the dark, and when he took another drink and leaned back in his seat, he almost got knocked out by what he saw.

  Stars everywhere. So many more than he ever could have imagined as a boy sitting high in a tree. Even when he used to imagine mountaintops, he never imagined this: so many stars, they ruined constellations. So bright they were screaming. He couldn’t have been more than five or six miles offshore. Unbelievable, that his whole life he was so close to this view and never knew it. He cut the engine. The only sounds were his own breathing and water lapping the side of the boat. Finally a breeze kicked up, warm and comforting.

  He slid down to the floor of the boat and lay back, resting his head against the plank seat. He drank some more, capped the bottle, and cradled it under an arm. Looked up at the unobstructed heavens.

  Other than the moment when he saw Allie stepping out of the hospital elevator for the first time, this night sky was the most beautiful sight of his life.

  “My marriage is ending,” he said aloud.

  The wide, white-gray splotch running across the sky. That was the Milky Way. He was seeing the entire galaxy from his small boat.

  “My marriage is ending, but the world is not ending.”

  To his ear, the sentence was a paradox. Black was white. High was low. So he tried again. “My marriage, and not the world, is ending.”

  The boat softly drifted. There was more fuel in the gas can. He could douse the boat with the spare fuel and set it alight. One last grand gesture. But at the moment, grand gestures had lost their appeal. He thought about having sold his truck for a song, and let out a sad laugh. Only one of many problems for tomorrow.

  There would be a tomorrow. He had believed in the superconjunction, just as he had believed that he was nothing without Allie, who had saved his life. But maybe everything he believed, he believed a little too hard.

  Some things don’t change.

  But I did, Ramsey thought.

  He knew he was right, and that the cop back at the house was jaded and wrong. Yet he understood how the cop could have made that mistake, understood how fucking tempting it was to cling to easy beliefs and call them truths.

  He never should have thrown the party. Never should have stormed out on Allie back in June. Never should have spent so many days and nights away from her and from Meg, who wasn’t even remotely a baby anymore, and who seemed, tragically, to be replaced by someone new every time he went away and came home again. God damn, he wished he knew his kid better. His list of never-should-haves was long, and his head, full of whiskey, wasn’t up to reviewing all of it. But he knew that even if Allie were to leave him, even if she didn’t love him anymore, there would be a tomorrow.

  I will never, ever hurt you, Allie.

  He added this vow to the one he made seven years earlier. They were vows he’d keep even if they divorced. He would honor her and obey her and protect her and love her till death do they part.

  He imagined his wife kissing David Magruder. His hand on her ass.

  “But I’m big mad at you, Allie!” he shouted into the darkness, and choked out a pitiful laugh. “I’m big, big mad!”

  To the west, over land, a flash of heat lightning punctuated his words.

  He lay back and drank some more. Looked up at the canopy of stars and silently mourned the end of this part of his life as the boat drifted and rocked and drifted.

  23

  September 29, 2006

  Detective Isaacson received a call on her cell. She didn’t say what it was about. “I’ll be right there,” she said into the phone, and then offered to drive Melanie the couple of blocks back to her hotel.

  Melanie didn’t want to spend a minute longer in the company of Detective Isaacson. “No, I’d rather walk,” she said.

  After the detective left, Melanie remained in the booth and picked absently at her French fries. She had been attacked almost ten hours ago. Since then she’d been scanned, poked and prodded, stuck with needles, interrogated. Her injuries had been photographed for evidence. And now this detective was asking her to accept that her whole life was a lie.

  Melanie found herself resenting Detective Isaacson—no, hating her—for laying all this on her. She had known the detective for less than a day. She had known Wayne and Kendra for fifteen years. It was too much, too fast. She sat
in the booth a while longer and then walked numbly from the diner to her hotel. She felt tired but didn’t want to be alone in her hotel room, and her legs carried her toward the beach. It wasn’t a terribly long walk—she had driven it in only a few minutes—but she got winded easily these days, so she took it slowly.

  We do not discuss the past.

  She’d convinced herself that the reason was so simple, the pain and memory of loss, the sadness that threatened, always, to bubble over. We don’t discuss the past because that’s our way of dealing with the past. It’s how we cope with the present.

  But what about Melanie’s lack of curiosity over so many years? What accounted for her easy acceptance of her aunt and uncle’s explanations? She had wondered about her mother, but never about herself. What if, at some deep level, she knew that if she ever probed too much into the puzzle of exactly how she and Wayne and Kendra had ended up hidden together in that remote West Virginia town, the pieces might not fit together so well? What if she knew she lacked the stomach for the truth? Might she not have been complicit, all these years, in her own ignorance—contributing right along with her aunt and uncle to the myth-making? Ramsey Miller, bogeyman, always about to get her. A terrible way to live—but far better than the possibility that you were being raised by your kidnappers.

  But what about the letters from the U.S. Marshal’s office? Forged, she supposed. But if the detective was right about her aunt and uncle, then of course there was the most basic question of all: Why had they done it?

  Her walk was on its way to becoming a substantial hike when she reached the ocean block. She hadn’t noticed the first time she’d been here that the houses were in states of decay. Hadn’t paid much attention to the trash on the boardwalk and the beach. Still, seeing the ocean made her wish she’d been seeing it all her life. She wished she’d grown up here. How dare her aunt and uncle convince her that Silver Bay was someplace to fear? She sat on a bench and watched the waves, putting off the return walk as long as possible. When the wind suddenly shifted, cooling the air, she told herself to get a move on.