The Exceptions

by David Cristofano

  She bites her lip again, looks over her shoulder, makes one last attempt to find that fence upon which to perch herself, hoping to size up the other option and what it might have to offer. But she exhales long and hard, like she’s uncertain as to the quality of either product. Then, without seeing her hand, I hear the latch of the passenger door quietly click as she opens it. And though she’s still looking over her shoulder, I’m hoping it’s because she wants to make sure we can make a clean getaway.

  She slides down onto the passenger seat slowly, wiggles her lower body into place like she’s trying to slip into a pair of tight pants. She reaches over and gently closes the door, rolls her shoulders and rubs her bare arms.

  “I’m not really dressed for riding with the top down.” She turns to look at me. “I mean, you’re wearing a sweater and a jacket.”

  Her words are phrased in such a way that she is not asking me to put the top back up. Maybe she thinks having the top down will preserve the possibility of being seen and rescued by the feds. Or maybe she just wants to feel the freedom of riding out in the open, of feeling the wind whip around her, of not being protected.

  “Wait,” I say, reaching behind her seat and nodding toward the bridge-tunnel, “I crossed over that monster last night, picked up some clothes for you. I figured you weren’t going to have much.” I hand her a shopping bag—three more are in the trunk—and she peeks inside before she accepts it.

  I know I need to get us away from this motel—the urgency is still buried in my gut—but with her by my side, I am foolishly pulled from concern, feel like I am adrift on the water like a castaway. Melody gently places the bag in her lap, turns to me and stares.

  She’s the first woman to corner me like this, to make me feel like I need to fill the gap in silence. “I hope these are your style.” How do you like that clever gift of conversation? She says nothing, glances in the bag again. “I was guessing you were maybe a size six?” Yes, nicely played—especially if it turns out she’s now smaller than a six and I’ve implied she’s heavier. Apparently, I do not have the magnetism that Sean has, am missing the gravity that might bring a kiss to my cheek.

  She looks inside the bag as though a dead fish were at the bottom, does not pull anything out. “You… bought me clothes?”

  Happy to have her in the conversation, I quickly respond with a flood of useless information: “Yeah, Norfolk’s right on the other side, maybe an hour or so from here. I did a little power-shopping last night. For you, I mean. To get you clothes. And stuff.”

  She widens the opening of the bag, and as she studies its contents, she does that thing: She reaches up and runs her fingers around the edge of her hairline, as though trying to tuck imaginary hair behind her ears—the hair was there hours ago, so recently removed it must feel like a phantom limb—and it looks like she’s doing nothing more than tracing the outline of her ears. I hate that there is nothing for her to tuck; I fear she may one day stop doing it. I find her delicate motion a selfish, if not guilty, pleasure.

  And with that, she slowly reaches in, selects the dark green sweater, stares at it for what feels like a time longer than if she’d seen it in the store herself. Then she brings it to her face, closes her eyes, rubs it against her cheek and inhales a breath of cotton.

  Maybe it’s the lack of sleep or the torrent of action over the last couple days, maybe it’s my fear of Melody being hurt or my narrow capacity to prevent it, but somehow emotion slips inside me, possesses my body like a demon. We should be long gone, but I can’t take my eyes off of her, can’t move. I’m staring to the point of rudeness. And then I make the ultimate mistake by saying what I’m thinking.

  “It matches your eyes.”

  The problem is this: Her eyes are still closed. She would never imagine how I have them memorized like a poem. The color was what made them memorable, but not in the way you’d notice someone with “bright blue” or “wild green” or “rich brown” eyes; hers are a vague composite, a mixture crafted from a painter’s palette. But the intensity of her irises, the dark circle at the edges, the marbled swirl of color, had me forever lost in them. Sometimes the most beautiful and breathtaking objects are those lacking vibrant colors at all, like a fresh snow-covered landscape; not everyone has eyes of autumn leaves and Caribbean waters. And so it is here my words betrayed me. True, anyone could have—would have—noticed the glow and hue within moments of meeting her, but I have revealed something more. She and I both detect the oddness of my words the second they pass my lips.

  She pulls the sweater from her face, opens her eyes but avoids eye contact. “You’ve seen me for just a few minutes of my life and you know my dress size and the color of my eyes?”

  I can’t read her words, can’t determine if she is flattered or creeped out. In either case, it wakes me up, has me shoving the car in gear and the wheels in motion at a speed high enough that precludes jumping out. “I got you a bunch more stuff in the trunk, but we gotta get out of here.”

  I pull onto Route 13, whip an illegal U-turn, and within seconds we’re driving northbound at sixty miles an hour. Melody shifts lower in the seat and drags the sweater across her torso like a blanket. She covers her face with her hands and shakes her head, a series of motions that could only be translated as what am I doing? I’m glad she’s taken the risk to trust me, and though she might be fearing what the feds will infer if they find out she willingly left with me, it would have to be slight compared to their finding out how she manipulated the program for her personal benefit.

  The sound of the concrete under my racing wheels acts as a buffer to our talking. The air is still moist and thick, will have us feeling dirty when we finally stop. We drive for a few miles before Melody assembles the confidence or curiosity to glance at me, and even then it is only for a second before she looks away. A mile later, she glances again, her eyes lingering longer. She repeats this as I drive, each time her gaze staying upon me with greater time, greater boldness. We are no more than ten miles north of Cape Charles and she is now officially staring at me.

  I try not to look her way, but the harder I try the more impossible it becomes. I meet her eyes and smile, take my hand off the stick and wipe my forehead, reach under the seat and pull out my CD case, hand it to her. “Pick anything you can listen to at top volume,” I say, hoping to avoid the silence, the space between us that can only be filled with explanation; I want her to relax before I unload.

  But as she unzips the pouch, I realize I’ve made a second critical mistake. She says, “What do we have here? Bach? Mozart?”

  Hardly. It’s like the friggin’ Melody Grace McCartney funpack. How freaked will she be when she sees a collection of her favorites? Tipped off to her purchases at Best Buy so long ago, I moved from one band to another, inadvertently associated similar artists, likely mirrored her library.

  She flips through the collection, studies each disc, slows with each one. “You’re a… pretty mellow guy.”

  I shrug, need a cig. “I have my moments.”

  She frowns, keeps turning the pages. “We have surprisingly similar tastes.”

  Just one of many surprises to come. She pulls out Hot Fuss by the Killers and waves it in front of me. “Funny,” I say as I jam it in the CD player.

  The car screams up the road, a perfect line to the north, and when I tell her of my plan, I hope it’s the only thing screaming. Mr. Brightside I’m not.

  Miles pass and so do the tracks. By the time “Somebody Told Me” finishes, it feels like I should be talking myself, that enlightenment on her situation should be forthcoming, that the clean getaway has been achieved and it’s time to move on. “All These Things That I’ve Done” ends and Melody stares into the distance, appears lost in disbelief. I know my delay in explaining is going to create a forest of doubt I’ll spend the remainder of this journey axing down. Her imagination is likely producing more terrifying tales than what the future actually holds.

  I think.

  Even though awkwa
rdness is present, like a passenger in the backseat, I waste tracks six, seven, and eight. Melody seems lost now, props her elbow on the edge of the door and rests her head on it.

  I edit the formulated words in my head—a succinct retelling of why I am here, how I have watched over her, how I am watching over her now, how I will set her free to live her life by her own design. “Believe Me, Natalie” begins. And as I drop my speed, turn to her now that we’re well distanced from Cape Charles, all deep-breathed and ready to tell her everything, I see she’s fallen asleep.

  And now it’s my turn to stare. I spend more time looking at her than I do the road before me. Her head rests back and to the side, her hands positioned across her chest holding the sweater in place, her feet tucked together under the dash and her legs cocked sideways. It feels like I’ve taken a girlfriend for a country ride. I get a flash of her and me at the ages our lives first became entangled, me at ten and she at six, imagine for a moment that we’d grown up down the street from one another, the girl and boy next door, realized we’d been in love all our lives, and now we’re making a far more innocent escape together.

  I turn the music down, even though so many other things might have brought her out of sleep—stoplights, sirens, loud trucks; she’s out cold. “Everything Will Be Alright” ends, and so does the disc. I turn the stereo off.

  I merge back onto Route 50, begin driving west toward Annapolis, where shortly thereafter I will wind my way to I-95 and begin the journey to New York. The clean, smooth pavement and stretches of highway deliver a constant white noise that helps keep Melody asleep. When I’m not noticing her I’m practicing my words, getting it down to a rhythm, sharpening their meaning and effectiveness. I run through the routine a few times before I get lost in looking at Melody again. With her hair so short, all choppy-edged and irregularly colored, I take in the entire shape of her face. Her smoothly chiseled jawline, the delicate shape of her ears, the lonely empty hole at the bottom of her lobe, the widow’s peak at the top of her hairline, a face so soft and appealing and blemish-free it could hardly matter what happened to her hair. Someday far from this moment, after I have set her free to be herself and she has opened her life to another person, some man will get lost in her, look in her eyes and hear not a single word she is saying, he will pull her to his chest in bed and lightly stroke the skin of her face and wonder, What could I have done to deserve her, and he will whisper in her ear, I will never leave you. I will love you forever.

  Until then, I have to open her cage and shake it a little or she’s never going to fly.

  FOUR

  I’m pleased with our progress, having crossed the Bay Bridge in Maryland and wound over the highways that bring us back to I-95. As I pull off of the exit ramp from Route 32 to merge onto the interstate, my foot slips off the clutch and I accidentally grind the gear as I put it into fifth. The car jerks a little and the noise is loud, especially with the top down.

  Melody wakes, rubs her eyes, clears her throat. She sits up a little, lets the sun beat down on her and pulls the sweater from her chest, and as she recognizes her surroundings she comes to attention.

  “Why are we going back to Columbia?”

  “We’re not,” I say over the road noise. “We’re going home.” She looks at me like she just swallowed a mouthful of sour milk. “To my home.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My home. Where I live.”

  Though I’m sure of my plan, she stares at me like she’s trying to decipher the words of a foreigner, shakes her head as if to suggest, This is the basket I put all my eggs in?

  “Please tell me you live in Pennsylvania.”

  I laugh, throw my arms in the air. “New York City, baby. The Big Apple.”

  How could I know I was riding beside a loaded gun? I couldn’t have, until my words pulled her trigger. As if I’d spoken some code word, she fires: Melody yanks up on the parking brake and grabs the steering wheel, spirals us across two lanes of traffic, narrowly making it in front of a FedEx truck and a Mini Cooper, drops us off on the shoulder of the interstate like a bag of trash crashing at the bottom of a landfill. We’ve stopped moving and I grip the steering wheel in my white-knuckled fists like the security bar of a roller coaster. As I breathe in dust from the cloud we’ve created, Melody quickly reaches over, turns off the car, and pulls the key from the ignition. The air fills with a chorus of screeching tires, shrilling horns, and yelling drivers.

  This event serves as a teachable moment, helps me to learn my very own lesson: When violence arrives, it rarely knocks. It did not tap me on the shoulder, suggest I get ready. It sought to create change by way of confusion.

  I never saw it coming.

  I’m so panicked, my breath is nowhere close to catchable. I get out what I can. “Are you. Out. Of your mind?”

  I’m confused by her level of calmness. “Why are you taking me to New York?” I stare at her, my eyes drooping like a dog aware of forthcoming punishment. I almost start explaining, but this is not the right time, definitely not the right place.

  Cars slow as they pass, most trying to figure out what happened, others yell for us to go back to New York and wave fists or middle fingers.

  “What’s the matter,” she says, “can’t handle the wet work yourself? Need an uncle or a big brother to do the—” Big breath and scowl. “Oh, that is it!” She laughs and shakes her head. “Oh, you were so clever with all your ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I promise I won’t hurt you.’ Yeah, but see that psychotic maladjusted freak over there? Yeah, he might hurt you. He’s more of a damage-oriented kind of guy. I’d watch yourself around him.”

  I really wish I could compose myself. I try to look her in the eye, but fail. “You got me all wrong, Melody.”

  Her disposition shifts like I’d spoken another code word. Of the six I’d said, the only one that could have packed any value was Melody. Her true name is my secret weapon, her kryptonite. She sits with her back against the passenger door, slumps a little, holds the keys in the palm of both hands like a cup of tea.

  I finally connect my eyes with hers. “Hear me out, okay?”

  She stares me down, lifts the sweater back to her torso, fingers the weave. She gives it a strange look, like she can’t make sense of it, can’t determine its place and purpose, can’t clarify the reason behind my buying clothes for someone facing certain death. Originally an unscripted part of my plan, making those purchases might have saved me, though more importantly, saved her. Right now I may be a blackbird in her eyes, but she’s having a hard time explaining that single, bright blue feather.

  I wipe my face clean of perspiration and dust. “Look,” I say, ready to get out of here before a cop comes inquiring, “you want to grab a bite? Let’s get a table and talk. There’s a great place nearby.”

  “You know this area?”

  “The ground is very soft and moist, buried a few people here years ago.” Neither of us laughs.

  She ignores my joke, says, “My nerves are shot… but I guess I should try to eat something.”

  I put out my hand for the keys. She waits a second before delivering them, but when she does I grab both the keys and her hand at the same time, squeeze them both firmly. I tug her arm a little, pull her in my direction like I’m going to give her a kiss: “You’re safe with me, Melody, okay? As long as I am with you, you are safe.”

  She looks in my eyes like she’s trying to read something, anything, that might indicate where this is all going. She licks her lips, shakes her head no but silently mouths the word, “Okay.”

  We continue driving northward, avoid Little Italy and head toward the geographic center of Baltimore, through an iffy section of midtown, to a signless restaurant owned but not run by the Bovaros. The unassuming place was the collateral of an unpaid debt to my father some fifteen years earlier, a debt whose makers have long since perished. My folks brought us to Baltimore a few times when we were kids, usually for a baseball game, lots of food and late nights with di
stant family. On more than one occasion we went to the downtown portion of the city that rests right on the water, would stroll and shop together, almost a normal family. And when we were done we would get in the car and drive to this little hole-in-the-wall. Except this hole had sensational food, could whip up an osso buco that even a finicky child would devour. I do not recall my father ever paying a single bill. We would walk in, eat, and leave without dropping a penny on the table. And as we were escorted to the door by the manager, we’d be thanked for merely dining there, as though Pop were a sitting senator or a food critic for the Baltimore Sun. They knew us then. And when Melody and I arrive, they will know of me still. Melody and I will be temporarily safe there, a desolate world belonging to my father’s galaxy.

  We leave the highway and drive down a street covered in enough rock dust that you can see tire tracks. I make our way to the restaurant and park on pavement that has cracked and crumbled, disintegrated into disrepair so long ago that it feels like we’re parking on gravel. I leave the top down and rush to open the door for Melody, but she’s out before I get to the other side. She looks at the door, then at me, and says, “Oh.” She appears bewildered, and appears tired of fighting it.

  The building, an old stone house that somehow survived the blue-collar influx that eventually encircled it, has nothing to indicate it’s a restaurant other than the powerful scent as you draw near, an aroma of simmering sauces that makes you want to draw nearer. A dirty faux grass runner welcomes us, a path we follow until we’re standing under a crippled awning in front of the glass entrance. I get the door for Melody. She half looks at me as though a second blue feather has appeared, whispers, “Thanks.”

  We’re so early they’re not yet ready for the lunch crowd. The place is just starting to wake up; a server in the back is folding napkins and a busboy is still positioning chairs in front of the tables. I can see an annoyance in the server’s eyes as we’ve arrived before they’re technically open—as a restaurateur, I empathize fully—but then his eyes focus on me. He throws a quick wave in the air, a signal to stay put, then opens the kitchen door, yells something I couldn’t decipher over the speakers streaming Julius La Rosa’s “Eh, Cumpari!”