The Captives

by Debra Jo Immergut

  Then a grinding sound, a car crossing the gravel in front of the cottage. She tossed the notebook into Frank’s bag, and as she did a folded piece of paper, thick and shiny, flew from its pages.

  She could hear voices outside now, two or three men. She picked up the paper and stuffed it into her pocket, zipped both bags closed, and shoved them into a corner.

  Frank emerged from the bathroom, stooping as always to miss bumping on the low door. Bare chested in jeans, rubbing his ruffled wet hair with a thin towel.

  Olla burst into the cottage. “Russkata,” she yelped at him and pointed toward the door. He turned to Miranda then, looked at her with a wrenching expression, a mix of rue and reassurance. “Stay inside.”

  Then he disappeared out the door. Olla frowned at her.

  He put up more of a fight than anticipated, and when it was over, Miranda peered out to see two men, one just a T-shirted teenager, the other sturdy and weathered with a leather vest and a plaid shirt and blond buzz cut, standing over Frank. Both of them were haloed in white gravel powder, Frank was rolled in the dust like a floured loaf of bread, and there he lay, eyes closed, arms flung to either side, with dark red blood flowing from his nose and mouth and oozing across his dusty chest.

  The older man entered the house as if he owned the place and looked her over carefully. “He may do okay in prison, he is not so much of a pushover.” He brushed himself off, white puffs rising from his jeans. He extended one hand to her. “I am Visha.”

  She could hear Lu saying it, in her low, laughing way. “Visha, he is the best husband you could want.”

  She walked past Visha, out to where Frank lay, open as if to embrace the air, as if offering his blood to the sky. The teenage boy stood over him, gun tucked jauntily in his waistband—the son had his mother’s yellow hair and pretty face.

  She bent close to Frank.

  “You’re going to be okay,” she said.

  His eyes moved, but didn’t open. “You’re free,” he said. “Because of me.” She laid her hand against his bloodied cheek.

  BLOOD, IN QUANTITIES, HAS AN ODOR. DENSE, SORT OF OPIATE.

  The back office of the Candora municipal firehouse. Point the gun and walk, she told herself, point the gun and walk. The revolver, compact and heavy, wobbled crazily. It seemed to float ahead of her, magically, as she passed the cash boxes stacked up on the metal desk. Bills and coins. That night’s proceeds. They didn’t seem worth her notice. The gun at the end of her shivering arm luring her on, she rounded the corner of the desk. And there, on the floor, a folding chair toppled by his side, was the dead man. Later she would learn his name. Lewis Patterson. At the trial she would hear it a million times, each mention making her flinch. Lewis Patterson, bachelor, firefighter, catcher of brook trout, local-history buff, skilled mimic of songbirds, pillar of his community. Lewis Patterson sprawled on the floor before her with blood draining from his ear and a surprisingly large and neat hole in one cheek, slivers of teeth and shredded muscle visible through the hole. His eyes open, locked on the ceiling. One hand resting on his still chest, a splatter of blood already caking across one shoulder of his Pittsburgh Steelers sweatshirt.

  The gun dropped to her side. She stood over him, staring, for what seemed like hours, at this city name spelled out across his broad dead body.

  And then she heard a sound behind her. She turned. From around the corner, from the garage where the red laddered rig stood ready for service, appeared Duncan McCray. Dragged a bulging black trash bag, then snapped it open.

  “Why aren’t you in the car?” he said, barely glancing at her. Grabbing the piled cash from the desk, thrusting it into the bag.

  “I heard shots.”

  “Look, don’t worry about it now.” He spoke excitedly as he worked. “He told me where he stashes the cash. Under the woodpile in a hunting camp. Six miles out on the state forest road. Did we bring that flashlight?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s what you can do, look around here, find a flashlight. I’m going to put this in the car.” But he’d piled so much money in the bag that when he lifted it, it began to tear.

  “Shit,” he whispered.

  “If he told you all that, why’d you shoot him?”

  “He recognized me,” he said, kneeling, gathering up some fallen bills. “At least I think he did. From the bar. He was plastered, I didn’t think he’d remember me.” He cradled the torn trash bag from underneath, hugged it to his chest. “I think I saw flashlights hanging in the garage.”

  And then the little gun drifted into view again. She had almost forgotten about it, its cold weight in her hand.

  “Duncan,” she said.

  He glanced back at her. At the gun. “Christ,” he said, nodding his head toward the door, still moving toward it. “We’re wasting time here.”

  “You said it wouldn’t be loaded,” she said.

  “I meant it when I said it.” He stopped, clutching the bag to his chest. “Then I changed my mind. To be safe.”

  “You said it wouldn’t be loaded.” She took a few steps toward him now.

  “He was a witness.” His face had gone so pale, it was almost blue. “I did it for you.”

  Her vision went blurry as the tears came, spilling down. “I can’t believe you killed a fireman,” she heard herself saying.

  “No,” he said. He released the bag and started for her. “I love you.” Bills all over the floor.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” she said.

  Duncan’s famous eyes were wide now and close to hers. They had never looked more vivid than when his hands closed around her wrist. “Miranda,” he gasped.

  The gun jumped when she pulled the trigger. She remembered blood bubbling out of the little hole beneath his chin like wine from the neck of a bottle, before she squeezed her lids tight and he dropped away.

  OLLA BROUGHT HER THE TWO DUFFELS, SCOLDING HER IN THE tongue she didn’t understand.

  “He’s bleeding badly, he should see a doctor first,” Miranda said to Visha. He and the teenager were loading Frank Lundquist into the backseat of the rusted black Lada, the blood and dust spackling into a paste on his bare chest. “They report to police at the clinic,” said Visha. “It would be bad for you. He will be fine. Get in, we need to go.” He tossed the duffels into the back seat.

  “Let me dust him off, at least.” She climbed in and unzipped Frank’s bag, wrestled out a shirt. She wiped at Frank’s wounds with a corner of the fabric. The door slammed behind her, the engine kicked to life.

  And so the village slipped away, Olla standing in the road waving, an envelope of Deutschmarks flashing happily in one hand. Visha drove fast while his son fiddled with the radio.

  “Lu, she says hello, she is getting out in October, thanks to Frank here.” Visha laughed softly, shaking his bristled head. “And the Macedonian, well, he sends apologies to Frank. We reminded him of certain realities. He said to tell Frank sorry.” He chuckled again. “Next time, don’t go with balkanskiy, Frank. Go straight to Russians if you have a need. The Macedonians, they are small peanuts. The Russian is czar, the Macedonian, he is serf.”

  Frank didn’t hear this advice. He was out cold, slumped against the door with his head bowed as in prayer.

  The radio played them down the rough roads of the mountains, empty but for rocks, stunted evergreens, and for the occasional clutch of sheep nibbling dry grass. Miranda noticed the gray notebook in his open bag, thought about delving into it, decided against this. She didn’t need to know his secrets. She balled up the bloodied shirt she’d used to tend his wounds, tucked it into the duffel, and zipped it closed.

  Then she remembered the folded sheet and pulled it from her back pocket, undid the creases, and smoothed it over her leg.

  One edge was ragged, the page had been torn from a magazine—or a book? Her eyes scanned quickly—“Junior Varsity Girls Track.” A team photo. Below it, a larger shot of a girl running, paper number pinned to the shirt. The run
ner’s ponytail caught swinging up. Foot hovering just above the white finish line.

  Did she win that day? The caption seemed to imply it. Miranda Greene, grade 9, flying toward first place. She remembered nothing from that day. From that year.

  Except. The thick-aired passageway outside the locker rooms. The passageway led past the phys ed office. Inside the office, a little black-and-white television set, on a bookcase next to a yellowing spider plant. Sometimes the coaches would catch an Orioles inning, sitting around with soft drinks and snacks from the vending machines. Why was it switched on that Tuesday afternoon? Who knows—the World Series had ended a couple of weeks before, there certainly wasn’t any football to be seen. But the TV was playing. As she walked past the office door, all suited up and ready to pick up her race number, Showalter, the football coach who taught her trig class, barked her name. “Greene! Get in here!”

  What now? thought Miranda. More about her missing homework?

  “Your old man’s on TV!” he said, pointing to the little screen.

  And yes. There was her father. It was election day 1982. He’d been predicted to lose.

  “. . . Greene, who is hoping to make a comeback, lost this same Pennsylvania seat four years ago after serving a single term. Watching early election returns with supporters, Greene paid special tribute to cable-television magnate Neil Potocki, whom he called his close friend and invaluable . . .”

  And there he was, wrapping his arms around the man. A great big bear hug. An exchange of wide hearty smiles and shoulder thumps. A bear hug for the man with the blue car.

  She stared at the yearbook photo. Something tumbling down inside, as if the car seat beneath might suddenly shift, break, give way. Like thin-crusted deep snow. And now she recalled more. The taste of tears in her mouth as she ran. The shouts of the onlookers. The waning sun, the chill clear November air, the world blurring before her hot eyes.

  And afterward, alone in the locker room. Changing in the cold. Crying and remembering and ripping that sticker from her locker door. Greene for Congress. She could hear her father calling Amy’s name, shrugging off Potocki’s consoling hand on his arm as the officers stood in the grand entry hall under its blazing chandelier. Turning on the man, grabbing him by the throat. Potocki swearing she’d stolen the keys. “She didn’t,” cried Miranda. “Don’t you ever show your lying face to me again,” said her father to the man.

  One year later, bear hugs on the television.

  She quit the track team the next day. She started fucking a random varsity football player the next night. She couldn’t think of any reason why not. Why not?

  And now she looked at the photo in her hands one more time. She looked past the running girl. People in the background arrayed in a row alongside the track.

  Tall enough to stand out in the row. His face: thin, beneath the forelock of blond. The face of a boy, but unmistakably him. And his eyes, bright, wide, fixed on the girl flying by. His expression—surprised? enthralled? hopeful, perhaps? His arms are half raised, as if he were readying to throw them up in the event of a win.

  His mouth half open, frozen forever in its cry.

  “HALLO,” CALLED VISHA, STARTLING HER. “THIS IS THE SPOT.” HE swerved the car into the lot of a forlorn-looking gas station and stopped next to a dented white Volkswagen. He handed her a car key. “The airport is ten kilometers south, the border is thirty to the east.”

  Frank seemed to be asleep. His face looked so young. Unlined. Like a boy’s.

  She remembered how bottomlessly alone she’d felt that race day, no parents there. No sister.

  But she had new information now. She hadn’t been alone.

  She checked her bag one more time, passport, Swiss documents for the money, the funding from Candora. All there. She tucked the papers back into her duffel, along with the yearbook page. Zipped it tight.

  She rubbed her fingers over his, trying to summon him to wake.

  She thought she could hear his voice. Could she hear it, a boy’s voice sailing above the others, urging her on? Could she hear him shouting her name?

  And staring at his battered profile, could she see him? Yes. She glimpsed him there on the sidelines as she crossed the finish line, could see him clear and sharp. A tall, thin blond boy, surprised, enthralled, hopeful.

  She rubbed his fingers harder, thought she felt him stir. She bent to his ear.

  “I remember you.”

  In a minute she was seated behind the wheel of the white car, watching the black Lada recede in the rearview. Watching it disappear far down the road behind. She flung the car into forward gear.

  Now drive.

  Postscript

  November 9, 2016

  Maybe you reject the idea. The notion that what happened to me is universal. You think it could never happen to you.

  Have you ever experienced impossible love? Have you ever wrestled with the demons and the devils? Have you skirted the fringes, flirted with poor choices, aimed for goodness, aspired to greatness?

  If you have, then you’ve veered as close to my fate as to any other.

  I’m not sure what prompted me on this particular day to pull the thick manila envelope down from its shelf. It has gone a bit stale, a bit musty with time, but still bears the typewritten label with my name and my number. 0281-J-00, because I was the 281st inmate to enter NYS DOCS Facility J, a.k.a. Auburn Correctional Facility, in the year 2000. The top left of the envelope is printed with my lawyer’s address: Burwick & Spivak LLP, 42 Catharine Street, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601.

  The envelope arrived at mail call back in December 2009, when they were closing down those law offices after old Arthur Burwick retired. Sent by a legal assistant, containing a notebook that had been misfiled with some other case. A flimsy gray-cardboard composition book, filled with my scrawl. Arthur had discovered it in a bag of my few belongings—a barely used fly-fishing jacket, a yellowed old snapshot, an unusual striped pebble—and tried to enter my scribblings as evidence. The judge rejected it. When the notebook arrived here, I had no inclination to open it. I put it back in the envelope, stuck the envelope on the shelf with my books and papers, and tried to forget it was there.

  And I did, for almost seven years. So what was it today? The turning of the season, the late-autumn sunshine? The flickering of that light in the last auburn leaves, refusing to let go of the trees, beyond the fence near the handball courts? The noise of another election season, so loud, so tumultuous this year that it has penetrated even these fortress walls?

  IT DIDN’T MAKE FOR PLEASANT READING. GOES WITHOUT SAYING. Painful, even after the passage of so much time.

  But still, maybe, I can claim some small measure of redemption. Some positive achievement.

  It didn’t end well for me, that’s safe to say. But I try to do good where I can. I run a peer counseling group in the lounge, every other Wednesday at 11 A.M., before TV hours begin, when the room is quiet. And though most of the guys just show up for the cookies and tea, I occasionally feel as if I might be having some impact. Bumping a life, here or there, onto a slightly better track. Admin has signaled its approval of the endeavor, finally granting me extra yard time and regular visits—Clyde brings his daughters, now and then—after all those years under tight restraint.

  I served very hard time, when I first arrived, convicted, as I was, of recruiting CO Jerrold Liverwell to smuggle crack cocaine and Elavil into Milford Basin’s C Unit, and of coercing the case’s informant, Ludmilla Chermayev, to distribute those substances, thereby being party to the deaths by overdose of inmates April Toni Nicholson and Weavy Moore. And of course, for aiding the escape of my alleged coconspirator, Miranda Greene.

  Yes, I can come out and say her name now. She is dead and gone, after all.

  According to the official record, that is.

  Per my testimony—and my testimony was upheld by New York state, federal, and Interpol courts—Miranda Greene died that day back in March 2000. The men—still at large—who dropped
me by the curb in front of that flea-bitten backwater outpost of the Macedonian police, unconscious, encrusted with my own blood—they stole her, they killed her. I told the court: I saw what they did. I told the court: they burned her body to ashes and threw the ashes in the lake.

  As far as they know, a few of her molecules drift there still, in the potash-poisoned waters under the slopes of Mount Ulsec.

  As far as they know.

  And here’s what I know: she remembers me.

  Acknowledgments

  This story has a complicated story of its own. It could have so easily never escaped from my virtual desk drawer. That it did has been an incredibly happy twist of fate, and it would have been impossible without the kindness and bolstering faith of some very key people and organizations.

  I offer my profound gratitude to: Virginia Paget, Bob Gangi, Susan Rosenberg, Robin Aronson, and Tara McNamara, for aiding my explorations of the lives of incarcerated women and men. The MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo, for solitude and fellowship. The Immergut and Marks families, Deborah Lewis Legge, Kahane Corn Cooperman, and Doug Wright, for their steadfast love. Ann Lewis and Edie Meidav, for their illuminating feedback and spiritual uplift. James Hynes, Barrie Gillies, Miliann Kang, Anthony Schneider, Scott Moyers, James Yu, and John Townsend, for unexpected, generous, and utterly essential doses of encouragement as I walked a long path.

  I also owe a towering debt of gratitude to my agent, Soumeya Bendimerad Roberts, for spotting me in her crowded inbox, for her revision genius, for her whip-smart advocacy. I consider it a great stroke of luck and a privilege to work with Megan Lynch, an editor of deep integrity and insight, plus Emma Dries, Laurie McGee, and the entire team at Ecco/HarperCollins.

  And at last, for everything that underlies every word of this story and every moment of each day, I thank John, my rock and my redeemer, and Joe, my joy.