The Exceptions

by David Cristofano

  I progressed to the idea of telling her how the government operation was being jeopardized by an addicted employee, and that no matter where they relocated her, she would be found again within hours. But that would make her pass the information back to the marshal she seemed so enamored of, which would make its way back to Washington and permanently cut off our source, leaving her no safer.

  The next option was to just get her out of there, explain that she was far safer on the run without government backing, that the least hazardous thing for her to do was run from everyone at once. But if she had lived in fear before, that lifestyle would have been a nosedive into an abyss of terror. And now that my father wanted her eliminated again, someone somehow would eventually find her; I couldn’t stall things any longer.

  My final conclusion—the only remaining option, yet the hardest sell—came by way of a lesson taught to me by my father, by Peter, by Tommy Fingers, repeatedly drilled into my impressionable head as a kid: Confront your aggressors with aggression. But that night as I sat and formulated my plan, the cab of my car filled with smoke and salty air and lonely ideas, I put their advice into play, knowing the only possible way to grant Melody safety was the riskiest: I had to bring her right to my father’s feet, show him how innocent she was, that she could never pose a threat. I understood Pop’s human side like no one else, paid attention in those moments when he was buried in thought and concern, watched him darken as he used violence and revenge as a buckler against betrayal and rejection. My plan was to reach out and play on those emotions, to ask him to imagine seeing me at age five in a room with Melody as she is just learning to walk and speak her first words, ask him to fathom the idea that one day he would ask his little boy to put a bullet into that baby girl. I hoped and prayed he might not be able to betray her. That he might not be able to betray his own son.

  Yet again, the fundamentality of Gardner’s life nudged its way into mine: To win big, you’ve got to risk big. And as I longed for a better solution, I knew my plan was her only shot at true freedom. And if it failed, her story would wind up with its original ending anyway.

  I sat in my car noshing on an energy bar produced several seasons prior, washing each bite down with water, formulating what I would say when I approached her. I couldn’t exactly walk in and say, “Now listen, don’t yell for the marshal, but my name is Jonathan Bovaro. I’m not going to hurt you.” I couldn’t think of an approach more surely to elicit a scream. The only thing Melody could reasonably expect from me was violence, and I knew gaining her trust would require me to be true to who I was; I’d have to begin with fear, move backward toward apprehension, and hope to somehow land at dependence. I couldn’t allow myself to be distracted from the reason I was there: Remove Melody from false safety and deliver her to permanent freedom and security. I was not there to win her heart or save her soul. She was just a little girl who’d fallen down a well and gotten stuck, and I had come to offer her a hand to finally pull her out.

  Yet my greatest weakness that night was my greatest strength: I knew I would have to scare her. Over the span of my thirty-year life, she’d been a distant part of it for twenty, and in all those years she and I had never looked into each other’s eyes and connected, never communicated, never shared a thought or idea between us. When the moment came, unlike at the gas station, there would be no way for her to look through me. And to know that the first time she’d read my eyes and mind would be under the guise of violence broke my heart.

  Just past midnight, I slipped on a thin pair of leather gloves and stepped out of the car, carefully made my way to the darkest side of the nearly abandoned motel and walked up to a strip of rooms sheltered by the shadow of the stairwell to the second floor, recalled all those slow summer evenings with Peter and Gino as teenagers, the wagers we would place on who could break into a building the fastest—first our own family’s, then the neighborhood stores; we rarely stole anything, derived more enjoyment from rearranging things (turning all the cans upside down, emptying the refrigeration units, significantly dropping prices) and then relocking the place. Beating Peter was nearly impossible, but the attempts sharpened our skills.

  Once I’d selected the vacant room I’d be utilizing for practice, I glanced at the door for a minute, shook my head in amazement that the Marshals Service would use old motels for hiding a witness; a large hotel with doormen and security cameras seemed brighter.

  I pushed my weight against the door and could tell I’d be able to open it with a good shove, but force of any degree would not be the solution; when the time came, kicking Melody’s door in would mean a pistol pressed to the back of my neck within seconds. I pulled out my debit card and slid it down three times, each time catching on the lock and jamming. On my fourth attempt my card slid right in—and right behind the door, with it still locked. I whispered a rant of profanity I’ll refrain from repeating; I pressed my knee hard against the door until it snapped open with a metallic clang. I quickly grabbed my card and slid into the crevice of the stairwell, waited five minutes: nothing.

  I returned to the practice room, relocked it, and started again. It took me six minutes to finally break in using my card.

  The second time it took me one.

  By my fifth try, I was getting inside within seconds.

  I returned to my car and waited, tried to formulate a plan of action. No script came to mind to acquire her trust. I planned to enter, explain why I was there—then the hard part—explain why she would be safer with me, why my intentions were noble. And then… I would set her free. I would give her the option to run toward me or turn away. I would be the first one, the only one, ever to put her in control of her destiny, and I hoped the taste of freedom would linger and have her longing for a bigger drink. I wasn’t about to throw her in my car and insist the direction I was headed was the safest. It wasn’t. But I wanted her to want to come with me, not be dragged somewhere under duress, the modus operandi of the feds.

  The risks on my end, though secondary, remained huge. Should I be captured I would take an enormous fall; tampering with a federal witness is a dark corner. I could only hope my father and our crew would understand my motives, that it might make them rethink things, and that I wouldn’t spend my life in prison mired in regret. But I was willing to take this risk if it meant finally freeing Melody.

  I stared through the windshield of my car for a half hour, waiting for the heart of the night to come before taking action, watching the vehicles—mostly eighteen-wheelers at that hour—cross the bridge and pay their tolls, when an unexpected motion caught my attention. I glanced over to the long line of rooms and the marshal appeared, stepped out of his room, pulled out a cell phone, studied it like he was searching for a signal.

  I slid down in my seat and watched as he walked toward the beach, his eyes on his phone instead of the ground. He must have connected, because he put the phone to his ear and held it in place by pressing his shoulder to the side of his head, propped his leg up on the bench of a broken picnic table under a cluster of large pine trees, took off his shoes and socks, and rolled up the bottoms of his pants.

  He stood there for a few moments, talking, staring at the water of the Chesapeake, taking a few more steps toward it with each passing minute.

  Ten minutes later, he’d reached the beach, a few hundred feet from the motel. I sat back up, pulled out my binoculars, and watched him chat, the occasional smile and chuckle denoting a personal conversation, which I interpreted as a call that would last longer than anything Justice-related.

  Without realizing my actions I’d slipped the gloves over my hands again, put on my leather jacket—despite that warm May evening—to darken my body; I knew the moment would soon be upon me.

  And as the marshal slowly sat down in the sand and gazed upon the moonlit water, phone still pressed to his ear, I tossed the binoculars aside. I slipped out of my car and quietly clasped the door, tightened my jacket around my body, left the car unlocked.

  I dashed down
the dark corridor to Melody’s room, hunched over and fast in my movements, pulled out my debit card as I got closer. I took a deep breath and held it, placed one hand on the knob, slid my card over the lock with the other, and quietly opened the door, slid in, and pulled it behind me.

  Our two worlds, once hurtling toward one another, finally collided.

  I stood in the corner and let my eyes adjust to the darkness, and when they finally focused through the grain of black and white, I could see the shape of Melody’s body balled up under the covers, could smell vinegary chemicals lingering in the air, the noise of the ventilator near the window humming loud enough to cover my steps.

  Everything about who she was, all the innocence, the flesh and the spirit, was trapped under those blankets, and I hated myself for having to disrupt it, for having to toss her into a swirl of fear even if just for a minute.

  I stepped toward the bed like a cat positioning to pounce, and with each footstep I could see more of her, watched as the covers rose and fell with each breath, then her nose move each time she inhaled.

  All the risks, all the following, all the worrying, all the wonder, every thought I’d ever had about her collapsed like a black hole, and out the other end churned an energy as sharp and bright as a laser.

  I closed my eyes and took the final step forward, close enough to reach down and kiss her on the lips, to smell the powdery scent of her skin. How gently I could have whispered in her ear, “I’m here to save you, Melody. You’ll never have to run again.”

  Instead, I reached inside my jacket, pulled out a pen, and pressed the point to her neck with all the strength and intent of killing her.

  FINCHÉ C’È VITA,

  C’È SPERANZA

  (AS LONG AS THERE IS LIFE,

  THERE IS HOPE)

  ONE

  And then her body stops rising and falling, her nose stops moving.

  She shivers and says this: “Ow.”

  Through all of my years of anger and violence and fist-pounding, I can’t muster it here to save my life. There is no faking it. If only she knew: This is going to hurt me a lot more than it’s going to hurt you. I shake my head in disappointment with myself, quietly mumble, “Oh, sorry,” like I just blew a take on a movie set.

  I stand up a little, loosen my grip on her neck, and whisper in her ear, “I’m gonna let you go. Do not scream. Do you understand?”

  She shakes her head but I think she meant to nod, and as I release her, her fingers dance around her neck as though she’s expecting to find a small pool of blood. I pull back a few paces, ready to bolt if she begins screaming; I can only hope that capturing her and so quickly freeing her will provide for a temporary form of trust. Or at least confusion.

  As I watch her rub her neck through the grain, see her shake and hear her breathe and force back a nervous cry, I can tell she peed herself. And now I know I could never understand the degree of terror and trepidation she must have been living with day after day for two decades. I stand ashamed; through all my years of despicable behavior I have never despised who I am as much as I do right now.

  Melody stumbles out of bed, keeps her distance. We face each other in the dark silence, she energized by panic, I dispirited by disgrace.

  I reach in my jacket, pull out my keys, and press the button on my keychain flashlight, shine it around the room until I spot the wall switch. I flip on the light and stare at her and hope she can’t tell how hard I’m swallowing. She squints as a yellow hue fills the room, holds her hands to her chest like a praying child. She’s wearing a loose-fitting camisole and pajama bottoms, her hair has been chopped short and is two shades lighter than it was just hours earlier, the bangs that danced above her eyes abbreviated to expose her forehead. Then comes a flurry of details I could’ve never gotten close enough to notice: the exact diamond shape of her jawline, the dark rims of her irises that give her eyes the design of targets, how she actually stands a few inches taller than I’d imagined. The harder part immediately follows, the identifying what never changed, the pieces that verify who she is: the curves of her nose and ears, and the way she is blinking—more like a flicker—she could just as easily be looking up at those skyscrapers again. Today she will not throw her arms in the air. Today she will not spin like a dancer, will not be a little Mary Tyler Moore.

  She looks me over, but mostly locks on my face, and I can tell she really did look right past me at that gas station in Kentucky. There is no you look familiar statement on its way.

  I take a nonaggressive step in her direction.

  “You know who I am?” I ask. She says nothing, does nothing, eyes still flickering, hands still clutched to her chest. I answer my own question: “I’m John Bovaro.”

  My words are a potent weapon, slice her as badly as any knife, put a hole in her wider than from a hollow-point bullet. The blood washes from her face—an inverted blush—and now her fingers are dancing on her chest. Worst of all, as she holds back tears, her mouth turns to a casual frown, as though what’s running through her mind is that’s what I was afraid of, like she’s finally being fired from a job where she’d been underperforming.

  And then, like she’s already given up, she whisper-yells, “Sean. Sean.”

  I laugh a little, not at Melody but at the odd selection the Marshals Service made for her guardian. If the marshal from the Sheetz was next door, I’d have a serious problem. But Sean? This entire event may have been predetermined.

  I cast an open hand toward the end of the bed, suggesting she take a seat, and say, “Sean isn’t going to be here anytime soon.”

  She doesn’t sit, loses whatever blood had remained in her face, and whisper-yells again, “You killed him?”

  I pull out my cigs, flip one to my lips, and light it. “Didn’t need to. He’s out on the beach, walking the shoreline.” I take a record-breaking drag, feel an immediate drop in anxiety, and as I am about to blow out two full lungs of smoke, I catch myself and quickly turn my head away from Melody as the cloud escapes. “He’s got his pants all rolled up like he’s going clam-digging. I gotta tell you, that guy’s a useless fu-huh…”—I catch myself again—“fellow.”

  Melody keeps her eyes on mine, reaches down to the bed like a blind person, carefully sits. She stares at me—I am no longer a person she can pass over the way she did in Kentucky—and I have become an image that will never escape her mind, that may even appear in nightmares that knock her awake and breathless in sweat-soaked sheets. I feel compelled to fill the silence.

  “You know what that marshal makes?” I can’t remember but I take a guess. “Forty grand. What kind of protection is forty grand going to get you?” Which might matter if the guy worked for organized crime instead of against it.

  My words are having no positive impact. I watch her watch me, notice how she can’t stop trembling. Every time I have seen Melody, year after year and through every phase of her young life, she has looked different, either through natural maturation or a change forced by the feds. I’ve never seen her look the same twice, always being modified, preparing for a new role in a new town. She has been an actress, and I her paparazzo. Though every time, I could never deny the natural beauty underneath; you can’t cut, color, or restyle inherent loveliness.

  I run my thumb around the filter of my cigarette, slowly bring it to my mouth and finish it off, and with the hit still inside me, say, “I like your hair this way.” I take the butt, snuff it out on the metal edge of the mirror, and put the DNA-laced filter into the pocket of my jacket.

  Melody slips her hands under her thighs in what looks like an attempt to get them to stop shaking, but it comes off like a sign of surrender.

  “What do you want from me?” she says. She’s not ready for the answer. I pull out my Marlboros, hold the pack in her direction with the offer of one. Her response allows us both to relax: “My parents always told me cigarettes would kill me.” My prior attempts to lower the tension were ineffective, and under the circumstances it’s impressive tha
t she came out the tempered one. She’s a lot stronger than her trembling suggests.

  I accept her olive branch and pass her one in return. “The death I can handle. It’s the bad breath and yellow teeth I find troublesome.”

  Melody puckers, tries to bring moisture to her mouth. “Why not try the nicotine gum?”

  I shake my head and scrunch my nose. “You can’t intimidate people by snuffing out chewed gum on their forearms.”

  Indeed, that came off a little dark; I was trying to strike a chord, not a nerve. I force a chuckle, then slide up a blade of the blinds in her room, see the marshal still out on the brightly moonlit sand.

  “John Bovaro,” she says, the first thing she has said this loud, the first attempt at trying to get someone’s attention. I walk back in the center of the room and lean on the dresser. “Or, what, you go by Johnny? Little John?”

  I slide my glasses up the bridge of my nose. “Actually, if you really want to know, I prefer Jonathan.”

  She gives me a look identical to the one Peter did when I told him the same thing; he’d responded with a blank stare, followed by, “Seriously?”

  The difference: Melody giggles and says, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  I smile, let her know she can feel free to even the playing field however she sees fit. I walk to the chair next to the window, glance out at the shoreline once more—the marshal is still spellbound on the beach—and reach down to the back of the chair and grab her robe and hand it to her. “Here. If you want to slip into something dry.” She doesn’t immediately take it. I move closer, practically put it in her hands. I read the uncertainty and confusion in her gaze, so I try to cement what I hope she is already thinking. “I’m sorry if I scared you.”