by Peter Gadol
Normally the nimble reach of surveillance systems might bother me, but hearing this now made me feel like I had an ally in Detective Martinez.
“I told you Carey is my boyfriend,” I said.
“You did.”
“He’s also the guy who was following me and ended up in my house that night. The one I mentioned when I ran into you by the dog park. Do you remember?”
Detective Martinez didn’t blink. “I assumed as much when you told me.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Well, look, there probably is a good explanation about where he is. Maybe when he ran after the bald man and the woman, he slipped and fell—”
“He fell?”
“And he’s fine,” the detective said. “He’s fine, but he’s at urgent care—”
“Then he would have called,” I said.
“Maybe he dropped his phone along the way.”
This seemed plausible. “He’ll get in touch.”
“I bet he will.”
“At which point, I’ll let you know,” I said.
“Please.”
“Does Allagash think—Am I...?”
I didn’t finish my question, but the detective knew what I was asking. “You’re the only witness we have. You’ve been nothing but helpful.”
“Do I need to find a lawyer?” I asked.
“You’re not under that kind of scrutiny. How about I let you know if I think you should? Keep in mind though, I’m only your friend here. This is Allagash’s investigation.”
She was letting me know the extent to which she could get involved; she wouldn’t interfere with her colleague’s case; whatever leads he had were his to pursue.
“His approach can be rabbity,” she said, “so be prepared for that.”
“Rabbity?”
She didn’t elaborate and stood up and straightened her gun belt.
“There’s something else,” I said. “Unrelated. Ezra. He called. He’s back.”
The detective sat back down, closed her eyes and shook her head.
“I know,” I said.
She groaned.
“I know, I know, I know.”
“Don’t get pulled back in, Rebecca. Don’t let him charm you. As if you don’t have enough to worry about.”
I was confused: Enough to worry about?
“I thought you were telling me not to worry—”
“I meant with what you’ve been through.”
Detective Allagash opened the door but didn’t step into the room.
“Detective,” Detective Martinez said. “Anything new?”
There was not. I braced myself for a new line of questions, but instead a noticeably kinder Detective Allagash thanked me for my assistance so far and let me know where I could meet the officer who would give me a ride home.
“We’ll be in touch shortly,” he said. “We know how to find you.”
ENTERING MY HOUSE I COULD SEE STRAIGHT ACROSS THE MAIN room and kitchen to the back terrace, where he was sitting in a chair facing the city at dusk, and my first thought, even only studying the back of his head and shoulders, was that Ezra occupied less space in the world than the last time I saw him. He might have heard me come in and turned slightly so I could measure him in profile, but he didn’t look back into the house. He’d cut his hair short, although his chin was still dusted with scruff. He looked gaunt. He was wearing a denim jacket, the collar turned up on one side. My instinct was to step outside and straighten it for him, or turn the collar up on the other side, too.
I didn’t want him to see me in the ill-fitting police hoodie and sweats, so I skipped into my bedroom and changed into jeans and a sweater. I washed my face and tied my hair back. I rarely wore much makeup but rubbed on a little lip gloss. By the time I stepped into the kitchen, he must have sensed my presence, because although he was still outside, he was standing and facing the house, his hands in his pockets.
I expected to cry the way I had when we’d spoken on the phone but didn’t. He stepped inside; we hugged briefly. I wanted the embrace to mean less than it did.
“You went to the museum?” I asked, meaning he went to visit Madame B, but it sounded as if I were casually asking if that was where he’d been for nine months.
Ezra cleared his throat. He was the one who was teary. He nodded.
I put on a kettle. I couldn’t look at him and busied myself finding mugs in the cupboard, selecting loose black tea, tamping it into the infuser.
“You were at the police station?” he asked. “Is everything okay?”
Was everything okay? Was everything okay? What was I doing? Oh, hi there, nice to see you, how have you been—I don’t have any lemons, but would you like some honey in your tea?
“Rebecca?”
As the kettle was heating up, it sounded like a sudden gale knocking around skiffs moored in a cove.
“I was hiking and witnessed an accident” was all I said. “I was trying to help.”
“An accident?”
I was leaning against a counter, not looking at him.
“How could you do that to me,” I said.
Ezra had to have been expecting my anger. He let it come at him.
“All this time, nothing. Nothing from you. How unbelievably cruel,” I said. And then I surprised myself: “I will never forgive you.”
The kettle whistled and I let it go. Ezra stepped over to the stove and turned off the flame.
“And then you actually went to the museum,” I said. “Thinking what, thinking I’d show up and take you home with me?”
Ezra shook his head no, no, he didn’t think that.
“Your things are in storage, by the way,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said.
“And leaving your apartment like that for me to clean up, your car? Which I sold to pay for the storage.”
“Rebecca—”
“What? What, Ezra, what?”
He had to clear his throat again. “I’m sorry,” he said.
For some reason I nodded as if I were accepting his apology and continued making tea. The truth was I had nothing to say. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been this exhausted.
“Should I talk about it? Where I went,” he said.
“You don’t need to,” I said. “I don’t care.”
“I can understand that.”
“You should probably leave.”
“I started playing the stranger game,” he said.
“Yes, I figured that much out.”
“Oh. You did?”
“You should go now. I’m expecting someone. He should be here soon.”
As I announced this, it did seem entirely conceivable Carey would at any moment appear, limping, phoneless. I was getting more worried about him.
“I started playing one morning,” Ezra said, “and I—”
“Ezra, I said I didn’t care.”
He nodded. “Right.”
Boy, was I sending competing signals. I had asked him to leave and yet waited for the tea to steep and then poured him a mug. I headed for the sofa. As he sat down and set down his tea and placed his hands on his legs, he seemed thin again to me, his forearms all veins. I noticed his fingers were nicked, his hands calloused. He was darker the way he used to get in the summer, but not in a healthy way: more like the sun was aging him. This diminishment, this fragility—wasn’t it my responsibility to protect him? And if ever I became infirm, wasn’t he in turn supposed to look after me? I had become used to being on my own, but I couldn’t claim that I’d worked out what it would be like to grow old alone. I needed not to think about this right now.
“You can tell me,” I said, “but then I want you to leave.”
So he did, in detail, and it took a while. As I listened to him, never commenting or asking questions, I h
ad to push against my weaker desire to move across the couch to be next to him, to rest my head on his shoulder. After all, I had witnessed a man being pushed into a ravine; I could have used some comforting.
The last thing he told me was this: “I knew it would hurt you not knowing where I was. Of course I knew that. I thought it might help.”
“Help? That’s insane. Help how?”
“You used the word cruel. You’re right. It was about the cruelest thing I could do,” Ezra said. “If you hated me, you’d move on. Finally.”
“It worked,” I said.
Ezra grimaced a bit.
“I’ve been dating someone seriously. He’s the one who should be here soon. He more or less lives here now,” I said. “We’re very happy.”
Ezra knew me well enough to know I was withholding information.
“That’s great,” he said.
And I knew him well enough to know he was lying, too. After he left, I sat in the dark. I was hungry but didn’t make anything to eat. I curled up and pulled an afghan over my legs, and that was how I slept, picturing Ezra on foot, in cars, farther and farther away—then retracing his steps, coming back to the city, back to me. This was the part of his story he left out, why he returned.
To describe the low point in his life he’d arrived at before he started following strangers, A. Craig had written a line that had stayed with me: How lonely and alone I was. Yes, this was that.
SOMETIMES WHEN I HAD INSOMNIA, I TRIED TO COAX MYSELF to sleep by picturing in chronological order every bed I’d ever slept in, starting with the earliest I could remember, the wrought iron cot that I outgrew when my family moved when I was five, this first bed covered with a great-aunt’s quilt and a blended family of teddy bears. Then in the house where I lived until heading off to college, I slept in a converted attic bedroom, the bed pushed into a corner beneath a sloped ceiling and angled in such a way that I wouldn’t hit my head on a beam. There were the late-for-class/unmade-bed years in college, the first sex beds, the first boyfriend bed banked by skiing posters. The queen-size futon on a low frame that took up all of the space in my first apartment during graduate school, and a few other boyfriend beds, one belonging to an artist who made black paintings, these canvases the antithesis of snowy skiing posters; this was the only time in my life when I consistently had nightmares. There was Ezra’s mattress on the hardwood floor at his place, surrounded by used books and library discards; he had a better night if he took a hot shower before we went to sleep, and I would wait for him, paging through outdated atlases. At some point, James the Cat started nesting at the foot of my blankets, beneath the blankets in winter. When I moved across the country, James preferred sunlit rooms, and after a mild earthquake started spending the nights under the modern plywood bed I’d bought with an early paycheck, the same bed I had now in the house on the hill, the bed Ezra joined me in, the bed he left. There was the headboardless bed in his apartment where I’d spent the night after the first disastrous encounter with Carey...
Counting beds failed: I was wide-awake. I checked my phone for messages. Carey hadn’t yet emerged.
I tried to recall all of the hotel beds I’d spent a night in, with or without Ezra, but mostly with Ezra in bed-and-breakfasts and old city inns and oceanside motels and a few grand hotels. It was three in the morning; I wasn’t really trying to fall asleep, was I? This felt more like I was trying to summon renewed warmth for him prefatory to forgiveness, but I needed to hold on to my anger. I considered deleting his new number from my phone. I also thought about calling him to find out where he was staying. Instead of setting the phone back on my night table, I got up and stashed it in a sock drawer, the best defense against temptation.
I did drift off and woke up with a hangover of anxiety and pensiveness. I had ended up in the center of the bed rather than staying on the side I preferred when sleeping with Carey. I smelled his pillows—nothing, no scent at all. I checked the closet: a few shirts on hangers, trousers, some recently folded laundry. This was the only trace of him. If everything were fine, he would have at least called me, and I pictured him unconscious in a hospital bed with a broken leg, no identification on him, no one knowing who to contact.
I made a quick list of nearby hospitals and then began calling. I realized I would need to claim a familiar or uxorial connection to get any information, and so I claimed the latter, deciding that if pressed I would say we were fairly newlywed and I had not taken his name. However, I wouldn’t need to worry about presenting credentials because I reached five emergency rooms and no one fitting Carey’s description had been admitted in the last twenty-four hours.
I stood under the shower a long while, almost lulled back to sleep, and when eventually I stepped out of my bedroom into the main room, I noticed a dark sedan parked in front. Detective Martinez had never come to my house before.
When she rolled down the window, I asked how long she’d been sitting there, and she said, “A few minutes.”
“Would you like to come inside? I’ll make coffee.”
I noticed the detective was already holding a white cup in her lap. She raised a second at me.
“Do you have a moment?” she asked when she unlocked the door. “I won’t stay long.”
The latte wasn’t too warm, which led to me to believe she’d been parked out front awhile.
“You could have rung the bell,” I said.
“I didn’t want to disturb you. We know the identity of the victim. His name is Carlos Garcia. A professor, retired. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“To me? No. Should it?”
“Not necessarily,” Detective Martinez said.
“How is he?” I asked. “Is he conscious?”
“No, he’s still critical.”
“And do we know why anyone would want to harm him?”
“We do not, not yet.”
“What about the 911 caller?”
“We have a name but haven’t located him yet.”
“Definitively not Carey,” I said.
“That’s correct.”
“I called around to some hospitals to see if he’d been admitted,” I said. “I mean, if he did fall or—or I don’t know—”
The detective nodded. “I’m on it.”
“Occam’s razor,” I said, wanting to appear sanguine.
The detective didn’t respond.
“I mean as far as what happened to Carey. The simplest explanation—”
“Allagash thinks it’s possible you pushed the victim,” she interrupted.
“What?”
“It’s one line he’s following—”
“You’re joking, right?”
“And according to Allagash, Carey is in hiding because he’s afraid he’ll get dragged into the investigation, and he doesn’t understand why you did this, and so forth.”
I was dumbfounded.
“I know,” Detective Martinez said. “It makes no sense. That’s why I’m telling you, which I shouldn’t be doing.”
“What possible motive would I have?”
“That’s what I asked. Allagash wasn’t more forthcoming.”
The detective blinked.
“This is fucked up,” I said.
“I agree, but Allagash is pursuing this, and maybe the best thing you can do for yourself is to find Carey.”
“To corroborate my story.”
“I’m looking for him, too,” Detective Martinez said. “But you know him, his habits. You know where he hangs out, where he might lay low.”
Did I?
“To be honest, I don’t know what angle Allagash is working here,” the detective said. “So can you do me a favor? Can you let me know if he talks to you?”
“I should probably have a lawyer with me if he does—”
“No,” Detective Martinez said.
&nbs
p; “No?”
“Not yet. I want you to tell me what questions he asks you. If you have an attorney, I don’t expect he’d be as casual.”
“But—”
“Can you do that for me, Rebecca? Please?”
Why was she asking this of me? Why couldn’t she confer with him directly?
“I will let you know what he asks,” I said.
“Thank you,” Detective Martinez said. Not for the first time she added, “Please be careful,” and not for the first time, I knew I would not heed her warning.
WHEN I WENT INTO THE STUDIO EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, MY partner Rick was the only person there. He’d been designated by our other partners to ask me if I would take a leave. Given that cash flow was touch-and-go, it would need to be unpaid. I wasn’t being asked if I would do this so much as told. It wasn’t only that I wasn’t bringing in clients and not completing the tasks I took on, but also that when I was in the office, I wasn’t present.
“What do you mean I’m not present?” I asked, although I knew what he meant.
“You’ve been playing that game, haven’t you?” Rick asked.
I hesitated a beat too long. “What game?”
“Oh, come on. I’m right, aren’t I? You said you thought Ezra was playing, and you’re all caught up in it, too.”
I didn’t want to lie to him but didn’t confirm his suspicion.
“Sorry if I’m wrong,” Rick said, “but it does seem like something has taken hold of you.”
Then he handed me a card, the name of a therapist who specialized in treating people who had become obsessed with the stranger game.
“This is a specialty now?” I asked, and laughed.
Rick saw no humor in this. I pocketed the card and thanked him for putting up with me, promised I’d be back healthy and cured, and left without taking anything from my office. I had some savings, I could last awhile, but not forever, although I was too preoccupied to panic right then.
I walked over to Carey’s office building, heading past the fountain in front and past the guard’s desk, straight to the elevator bank like I knew where I was going.
The guard caught up with me. “Ma’am, you need to sign in.”
