by Robert Levy
“Are they gone?” Gabe said.
“It was Jessed, by himself this time. He left a few minutes ago.”
“I take it he’s not exactly pursuing all leads?”
“Taken correctly.” Jason cleared the dining room table and set out paper and pens, while Gabe shuffled over inside his papoose of a quilt. “Well, then. Want to get started on today’s business?”
They gathered the castoff materials that had accumulated over the past week—color-coded aerial photos, topographic maps, land surveys—and arranged them in order of proximity to the house. The rest of the morning was spent as usual: writing up detailed notes on the previous day’s canvass. They’d started their own search four days prior, when it became clear the authorities’ attention had drifted toward the missing hikers. The police had covered the neighboring woods and fields, as well as the mountain base and the marsh shallows of the bay. But there were many more doors to knock on, a seemingly infinite amount of ground to cover, and Jason came to accept that a proper search would fall to them. Realistically, this could only succeed if one of the locals had seen something, anything that might give them a starting point.
Their route was plotted using the aerial maps, spiraling out from the MacLeod House and the Cabot Trail in a carefully orchestrated canvass covering as wide an area as possible. Jason drove them in the rental car along the winding main road, where they would stop to introduce themselves at each house along the cove. Rarely was such an introduction necessary. It seemed as if most everyone in the community knew who they were by now, a subject of local gossip and a steadily shrinking item in the Cape Breton Post. The brushfires and missing hikers were still front-page news, whereas Elisa and Blue, even at the start, hadn’t warranted an article in the paper higher than page five. It was as if only one group of people could legitimately go missing at a time, and the hikers had beaten them to it.
Jason placed a follow-up call to Stanley Baker, the property agent who had showed Blue his grandmother’s house the day he disappeared. When they’d first spoken, Baker had told Jason that if he wanted access to the house he would have to go through the police and a justice of the peace with the authority to issue a search warrant. Either that or the new owners, who were abroad for the remainder of the summer. Though Jason and Gabe had snooped around, the house was locked and they’d failed to find anything of note on Flora MacKenzie’s property. It had officially been sold.
Jason asked the agent once again if he could remember anything at all about Blue’s disposition that afternoon, and this time Baker described him as “acting jumpy.”
“Jumpy? Really?”
“Truth be told,” the agent said, “by the time I left him I thought he might be on something. Came flying out of the basement like a bat out of hell. Real edgy. Maybe that’s a New York thing, though. I don’t know. There was even this smell about him, on his hands maybe . . . It was like I got a contact high.”
“And you just remembered this.”
“Look, I already told the police everything. Hey, if it makes you feel any better, the detective sounded pretty sure they just took off.” After hanging up the phone Jason kept his hand on the receiver, as if holding on to it could help him better absorb this new information. He’d been in touch with a private investigator in New York whom he’d met during his stockbroker days, and made a mental note to call him later in the day.
In the dining area, Gabe sat drawing in his sketch pad with his leg bouncing madly beneath the table. “The real estate agent,” Jason said. “He mentioned Blue seemed jumpy that afternoon. Does that sound right to you?”
“Jumpy? I don’t remember that. Kind of the opposite, actually. He looked really drained.”
“Did he say anything when he came back from the house? Anything at all you can think of?”
“He did say he felt strange being here. Coming home, I guess. He didn’t want to talk about it. Like I said, he pretty much just wanted to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“And you told the police that?”
“Sure. But I didn’t get the feeling they were interested.” Gabe shrugged. “Maybe because I didn’t push it. It didn’t sound so great that one of the last things Blue said to me was that he wanted to take off.”
“You don’t believe they left on their own, though.”
“Nope. And neither do you.”
Gabe popped a sugar cube into his mouth, his restless leg still jittering under the table. This livewire energy wasn’t Gabe’s natural state, as far as Jason could glean; the boy had changed in Blue’s absence. A distinct possibility, Gabe being a prime example of someone who had lost himself inside of Blue. Just like Elisa once had.
Jason thought some more about what the property agent had said. This was the first time since the disappearance they’d heard anything significant regarding Blue’s behavior. Donald’s freakout and Elisa’s allergy attack aside, Jason hadn’t noticed anything atypical that day, certainly not in relation to Blue. But so what? Blue’s appearance and affect often altered from moment to moment. He was a kind of human Rorschach blot who could make one person conspicuously uncomfortable, while others might dive right into his orbiting sphere of influence, only to give themselves over completely. Jason himself had felt strangely unnerved upon first meeting Blue, not terribly long after Jason and Elisa had started dating. Typical pretty boy, he’d thought at the time. But really he’d been put off by Blue’s mercurial beauty, as well as his hold on Elisa, not to mention what Jason cynically presumed to be Blue’s unearned (and downright freakish) mastery of cooking. Jason had been, quite frankly, jealous of him.
There were times when, at Elisa’s invitation, Blue would join them at an upscale restaurant or bar and arrive oily-haired and reeking of cigarette smoke, unshowered in leather pants and a moth-eaten sweater; Jason would want to crawl under the table. But right as Jason finally worked up the courage to say something, Blue would run a hand through his matted black hair and everything would fall into place. At once he would emerge artfully arranged, the change so swift it was disturbing. As was so often the case with Blue, Jason would be left to wonder if he had somehow misinterpreted.
And as for what the property agent had said, even Blue’s smell was weirdly mutable. His pungent musk of nicotine and kitchen grease could perfume in a single moment to a light sandalwood, the scent of a holy censer about him, of sacred space. It was this same distinctive smell that haunted Jason these past few days upon waking, his head heavy with dark dreams. Nightmares of someone at his bedside in the pink room, a long-limbed figure with a face cast in shadow. Pale and reedy fingers pressing upon him, forcing him down until he could not scream, could not breathe.
They were dreams of being swallowed alive, of death. In his heart, he knew they were dreams of Blue.
It wasn’t the first time Jason had endured recurring nightmares. There’d been worse ones, but then he had Elisa to help him through. That was soon after they first met, back when Jason was a trader and he and his fellow stockbroker buds had stumbled drunk into the Slipper Room, their fifth stop on a late-summer pub crawl through the Lower East Side. There was some kind of burlesque show going on, an open-mic night for “performance artists” and “gender illusionists,” basically a motley crew of exhibitionists with props. The mustachioed drag king MC, her three-piece suit accentuating her Weeble-like shape, was in the middle of doing a bit on the difference between male and female genitalia when Steve Berry from M&A set down a drained tumbler of Jameson and stage-whispered, “Is every bitch in here a dyke or what?” a little too loudly.
As if summoned by mystical means, a breathtaking young woman in a strapless black-and-white Marimekko-print dress appeared beside their booth, sparkling dark eyes set like precious stones against kohl-smeared olive skin. Berry smiled up at her, mesmerized. She smiled back before she reached over, grabbed Berry by his necktie, and dragged him from his seat to applause from the surrounding tables. Near the entrance he pushed her off. She pushed back. Jason got between
them and ushered Berry in the general direction of the door.
“Your friend is an asshole,” she said to Jason, more than ready to tussle, despite her significant height and weight disadvantage.
“I know,” he replied. “Sorry about that.”
“Why are you even here, anyway? For God’s sake, go to a strip club where you belong.”
She headed to the bar, but he intercepted her before she could get the bartender’s attention. “Let me make it up to you,” he said. “Please. Can I buy you a drink?”
He smiled, showing off his new teeth; once a crooked, orthodontia-neglected mess, they’d recently been capped. She eyed him with no small amount of skepticism. “Well. Okay. But only because I don’t have any cash on me.”
She said her name was Prudence. They spent the next couple of hours in a booth in the corner, talking, then necking, the rest of Jason’s colleagues long since vanished. At two in the morning she asked if he wanted to go home with her.
“Most definitely,” he said. “But let’s wait. Will you have dinner with me this week?”
He’d always been good at reading people, and, as much as it would have thrilled him to bed her that night, he knew that if they slept together he would never hear from her again. He would become “that black broker guy I fucked,” a funny story for her friends, instead of a man who might mean something to her. He could already tell that she meant a great deal to him.
Indeed, his reticence had intrigued her. They went on a few more dates, one in which she told him her name was in fact Elisa, and another over a mind-blowing home-cooked meal at her place in Alphabet City that consisted of two varieties of paella and an amaretto flan for dessert; only much later did she reveal that Blue had prepared everything for her in advance. The next night, their obvious and electric sexual connection was consummated. Following dinner and a movie, they’d gone back to Jason’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights and spent hours in bed—kissing, fucking, spooning, everything hot and tender and beautiful, just right. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so blissed out, so centered and sane. He was in heaven.
In the morning he left her in his bed. He quietly showered, shaved, and dressed, kissing her on the forehead before he slipped out the door. Because of a call from his sister’s hospital he was late getting on the train at High Street, and stepped out of the World Trade Center station to a commotion at the mouth of the subway entrance. People pointed up at the Twin Towers, smoke and flames spewing from the higher floors of the North Tower, where Jason’s office was. He used his briefcase to shield his eyes from the morning sun and watched as pieces of things fell, debris. No. No, bodies. Jumpers. One, then a few moments later another: a woman whose skirt had blown off, two others holding hands, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. Each eternal descent was followed by a rat-a-tat crash, the sound of matter meeting the earth, followed by screams at street level, then stifled sobs.
A man hanging from one of the building’s girders was waving something in his hand, a desperate semaphore in the direction of those staring up from the ground, the object a black square of darkness against the piercing blue sky. An unknown force made Jason shove his briefcase under his arm and sprint toward the tower, dodging gawkers and cars alike: something about the sight of the man, a thousand feet overhead, had compelled him. And then the man let go, his limbs pinwheeling in the wind, and it was like watching someone trying to swim against a deadly current. There was no more noise, everything silent, the man flung around the side of the building as the object flew from his hand at the last second.
Jason was less than fifty yards from the base of the tower when he recognized the thing the man had refused to relinquish in his final moments, the holy object he must have held so dear. It was a simple black briefcase. Jason stared down at his own black attaché, identical in every respect, and looked on from outside his body as the briefcase slid from his grasp and hit the pavement soundlessly. He backed away from it, slowly, then turned and ran.
By the time he finally made it over the Brooklyn Bridge and reached home, Elisa was waiting by the door in one of his dress shirts. The cordless phone was dead in her hand, the TV blatting prophecies of doom from the other side of the apartment. They embraced, and Jason couldn’t stop shaking his head, kept saying, “Oh, Jesus, oh God,” over and over. Elisa shushed him, kissed him, said, “I’m here, I’m here.” She held him tighter, ran her hands up into his closely cropped hair, across his neck, down the back of his sweat-soaked shirt. “I’m here. I’m here.”
And she was. When he woke up from nightmares of falling, the earth spinning out from beneath him; when he called his firm a few weeks later to say he wouldn’t be returning to work at their new location; when he sought a therapist specializing in PTSD. He’d known so many of the dead. Thirty-seven personally, including Steve Berry from M&A, who, in his own drunken and heedless way, had introduced Jason to his future wife.
With Elisa’s encouragement, he researched accelerated programs in psychology, a new calling. Because of his insane family he’d always had a vague appreciation for mental health professionals, but now Jason understood the vital need for their services firsthand. He wanted to help others the way he had been helped, back to life, and to love.
Elisa, flaky and obstinate as she could be, was a godsend. Once he started grad school, she made sure he ate properly and exercised, never complaining about the long nights he spent at the library on his thesis or interning at the Brooklyn House of Detention. She kept him sane, and, best of all, laughing, attending his graduation at NYU in a cap and gown, robe shredded and refashioned as an avant-garde wrap dress with the mortarboard hung jauntily from the side of a fresh asymmetrical shag cut. Elisa allowed him to throw himself into his work, innately grasping his need to problem solve, to puzzle out other people. In doing so she avoided—to both her credit and her advantage—becoming the problem or puzzle herself.
Still, it wasn’t enough. He had to analyze everyone, not only his clients but his friends, his family, and of course Elisa. He needed to dissect everything around him in order to avoid taking a scalpel to himself. Was that what her disappearance was, a final, vituperative rejection of his overbearing nature? Or was that thinking too much of himself? Yes, he had provided her with stability and kindness—indeed, with love—but he’d let the passion slip away; it was no great wonder she began to drift.
But now the time had come to pack down the guilt and focus his energy on bringing her back. Let that be his redemption.
In the days following Detective Jessed’s follow-up interview at the house, Jason and Gabe continued to canvass the cove with even greater urgency. They spoke with an elderly couple of third-generation Cape Bretoners, both of whom had a lovely Gaelic brogue; a flophouse of teenage meth addicts, where Gabe did most of the talking; a cabbage farmer who asked Jason if he happened to be the son of a football player who played for the Patriots back in the seventies. There were so many others, a blur of compassionate faces. And while each resident was largely polite almost to a person, not a one had much to share, other than their sympathies. At least they aren’t treating me as if I were some kind of murderer, Jason thought. Just a run-of-the-mill cuckold, like any other. He wasn’t sure if this was a relief, exactly.
On a bright Tuesday afternoon—the thirteenth day after the disappearance—their canvass brought them to the far side of the cove. They pulled past a mailbox plastered in bright stickers of plump cherubs and up a dirt drive to a prefab minihome, a beat-up yellow Volkswagen Beetle on the lawn with a faded 9/11 decal in the back window that depicted an exhausted firefighter slumped on a street curb and flanked by a pair of translucent, consoling angels.
Jason killed the ignition. “Who have we got?”
“Tanya Darrow,” Gabe said, reading from the clipboard in his lap. “Thirty-something single mother, according to Maureen, although she wasn’t completely sure about her age. Her husband died in a car crash and she mostly keeps to herself.”
Bare platform steps
led up to the entrance. Twin wind chimes in the shape of seraphs swayed like hanged men on either side of the stairs, an Annunciation scene crocheted on the seat cushion of a wicker chair beside the door. Jason knocked and stepped back, while Gabe loitered a few feet away on the lawn. A harried-looking woman came to the door. She was lanky with crimped red hair, dark bags under clearwater eyes that squinted fearfully into the midday light. A moment later three young children appeared, circling her as if she were a covered wagon under siege.
“Hello, Ms. Darrow? My name is—”
“Oh, I know who you are,” she said. “You’re the one whose wife . . .” She wasn’t going to finish.
“Yes. Jason Howard. And this is Gabriel Peck,” he added, poking a thumb in Gabe’s direction. “Do you have a minute?”
She shooed the kids inside and shut the door behind them. “Sorry to bother you,” Gabe said from the lawn. He held his scar-blemished hand behind his back, as he often did. “We’re going door to door, to see if anyone might have heard something about our friends.”
“I was wondering whether you were going to come this far around the bend.”
Jason smiled. “News travels fast.”
“Fast as an echo. But sorry, I really don’t think I know anything useful. It’s just the strangest thing that happened, isn’t it? How awful. It’s like the earth opened up and swallowed them.”
Swallowed them, Jason thought. That’s exactly what it feels like.
“Of course,” she went on, “I hope there’s been some kind of mistake. I wish you all the luck in the world.”
They’d had the same conversation with seventeen other Starling Cove residents that very afternoon, and Jason had long tired of the ongoing lack of substantive information. There had to be someone who knew something, anything. It was time for him to step up his game.
“It’s been so hard for us,” Jason said, affecting a more somber tone as he forced tears at the corners of his eyes. Was he really going to do this? Forgive me, he pleaded to the dead, if not to God himself. “Not knowing where they are. We’ve already been through so much, coming from New York and all. So many lost. Almost five years past now, but for us it still seems like yesterday.”
