The Three-Day Affair Page 17

  “My friend, everything you say is right.” He wasn’t taking his eyes off the bill.

  When Nolan handed it to him, he held it up by its ends like a prize fish, then tucked it into the pocket of his flannel shirt.

  “Now find some other street,” I told him. “Somewhere across town.” But why would he cross town, knowing he could get twenty dollars from us?

  “As good as done,” he said. “God bless. You’re good men.”

  “Sure we are,” I said. “Now go.”

  He took his time walking down the hallway and out the door. I slammed the door behind him, and like a fool hanging a smoke detector on the charred embers of his burned-out house, I made certain it was locked.

  Evan called from the airport, where he’d bought a ticket for Newark. The flight was scheduled to leave at 4 pm Central Time. But weather in the Twin Cities had worsened. No spring blizzard, as some had predicted, but freezing rain and lots of it.

  “So far no flights have been canceled,” he said, “but it’s coming down hard.” He promised to call again when he had an update.

  More waiting. And now the minutes seemed to matter again as they began to pile up. I paced the control room. Four o’clock came and went, and the phone continued not to ring. Then came four thirty and five, and still no word.

  We had to let Marie go. That fact had always quietly filled the studio like ambient noise. You could put it out of your mind, but only for a while. There would be no money paid in exchange for her silence. Not anymore. Undoubtedly, she would go to the police, and it wouldn’t be long—hours? a day?—before we were arrested. And then we would confess. We had no alibi. Also, we were guilty.

  We’d been arrogant, believing that any problem could be solved as long as you had intelligence and determination and a little time. We had all those things but couldn’t solve this one, and now time was up. I was beginning to feel ready. Whatever ­disgraces—prison? Divorce? A hungry media?—I was about to face were, for the first time, being overshadowed by a basic need to do the right thing.

  And yet I strongly believed that the way we handled our surrender now would have far-reaching consequences down the road, the way that traveling a few degrees off course could mean, upon crossing an ocean, the difference between landing on your continent and missing it entirely. Although the beginning of this weekend had been out of control, the end of it was still unfolding and, I believed, still subject to our influence. Should we write up a confession? Go to the police ourselves? Have them come here? Evan would know. That was why it was so important for him to get here.

  At 6:15 I called his cell again. “We’re waiting for the plane to get here from L.A.,” he said. “The good news is, flights are still coming in and out.”

  “How’s it look outside?” I asked.

  “Like hell. But I think they’re used to that here.”

  By 7:00 we were all hungry. And I really wanted cigarettes. I remained spooked, however, from my run-in earlier and was afraid to go outside. So we all sat around waiting, looking at our watches and at one another and at the telephone that kept not ringing—until, finally, it rang.

  There was a problem.

  Evan was scheduled to change planes in Chicago, but because of his delay, by the time he’d get there he’d have missed the last plane leaving for any of the New York airports. The only other option was a direct flight to Philadelphia, scheduled to leave Minneapolis at 11:30.

  If everything went perfectly, he’d land at 3 am. We were located about two hours from Philadelphia. That would get him here shortly after 5 am. It would mean another night in the studio.

  Another goddamn night. Another ludicrous phone call to ­Cynthia—Everything’s great!—followed by a thousand more years of waiting.

  “Book it,” I said, and then asked Jeffrey to help me again with the sofa.

  Marie retreated obediently to a corner of Room A so we could cram the sofa in for her. We went through the routine again:

  “Swear on your grandmother’s life that you won’t try to escape when we open the door.”

  “Aren’t we past all that by now?”

  “No. Swear it.”

  Hesitation. Then a shrug. “I swear on my nana’s life.”

  We told her there would be no dinner tonight for any of us. Jeffrey removed the blanket from the bass drum again, spread it out on the floor, and lay down on top of it. Nolan took his spot by the television. I went to the control room and dimmed all the lights in the studio. I sat in my chair for a while and presided over my wrecked kingdom. In this artificial twilight, Marie’s resemblance to Sara increased. It was more than physical ­likeness—it was the posture, the way she carried herself. And this, I thought, was because of the violence, or the threat of it. It produced a sort of grace, whose purpose was to mask fear. We could tell Marie a thousand times she was in no danger, but she’d never fully believe it. And why should she? To her, violence was always imminent.

  I hadn’t been witness to Sara’s violence—that’d all happened long before college—but we all felt the wake of it. Every now and then—not often, maybe once or twice a year—she’d say something horrible to Jeffrey. She’d find ways to dig at his insecurities by praising her ex-boyfriend’s athletic body. Telling him that some nights she craved a real man’s shoulders, and chest, and cock. When this happened, he would become severely depressed until, a day or two later, they would talk and cry together and, to outward appearances, become better again. She was testing him, evidently, waiting for him to do something brutal, because in her experience that was what men did. She crossed the line to see if he would, too.

  I used to wonder about her past but hadn’t felt comfortable asking. And Jeffrey wasn’t the type to share somebody else’s secrets. Yet college, more than any other time in one’s life, puts a person in situations where the questions that can’t get asked get asked anyway. Sara and I were doing laundry one Sunday evening in the basement of our dormitory. This was early in our senior year. We’d both scored large single rooms, luck of the room lottery, and this night found us sitting at a rickety wooden table, sick of studying, and waiting for our things to dry. I mentioned that my mother had called me earlier in the evening and given me hell for forgetting my father’s birthday (“What? Not even a card?”), and Sara asked if my parents were happily married. “Sure, I guess so,” I said, and then felt funny because I knew that her family life had its problems. All she’d ever mentioned outright, though, was her hometown’s unforgettable name: Slaughter, Texas.

  She must’ve felt like talking that night, though, because suddenly she was telling me about being raised by her single mother, how she’d never even known her father.

  “And I’m not one of those people who’ll track him down thinking we have some magical connection,” she said. “Though I imagine he was exactly like every guy my mother ever dated.”

  I asked her what she meant.

  “This one guy she was with, back when I was fourteen . . .” She shook her head as if remembering, or maybe trying not to. “Leo. He owned a garage and always seemed greasy. I think my mom broke up his marriage. Anyway, he rented an apartment in town but stayed at our place a lot. Whenever he took a shower, his towel was always ‘accidentally’ slipping down. I used to lock my bedroom door, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and swear I heard the doorknob rattling.”

  “That’s incredibly creepy,” I said.

  “Damn right it was.” A few other students were in the laundry room with us, at other tables, heads down in their books, but the sound of the machines kept our conversation private. “Then one night I came home from being out with friends, and my mom was walking around the kitchen in obvious pain, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She said Leo had been there, but that was all.”

  “Pain where?” I asked.

  “So that’s the thing. I noticed she wouldn’t sit down. Then I
noticed Leo’s long leather belt draped over a kitchen chair. I remember the buckle had a Cowboys logo on it. Mom didn’t sit down all evening or the next day. When she was awake, she just stood around grimacing. She managed a bookstore at the time but couldn’t even go to work. She refused to talk to me about it, except to say that if Leo called, I was supposed to tell him she wasn’t home. And to this day I still don’t know if his beating her ass was something kinky or a straight-ahead whipping. But she stayed with him. That killed me. You know, my mom’s got three siblings. I don’t see them much—they’re scattered all over the country—but when we do I’m always amazed by how ordinary they are. Ordinary marriages, ordinary jobs . . .”

  “Managing a bookstore sounds pretty ordinary,” I said.

  “It was an adult bookstore.” She watched my face turn red and smiled. “All I know is, within the week Leo was back, showering in our bathroom, watching football on our TV.”

  My own life had always lacked drama. My parents had gotten along. They’d protected me and sacrificed again and again for me. I wasn’t sure if this made them ordinary or extraordinary, though I knew it should’ve made me grateful. And it did, usually, though at the moment I felt sorry that I had nothing to share, nothing of my own to balance out her story with. All I had were questions.

  “Is your mom still with him?”

  “No. She finally dumped him. One night at dinner—this was during a pretty good spell, actually—he wiped his face with his napkin, like a real gentleman, and told Mom and me that he had this terrific idea. Something that the three of us could do together. He said it so matter-of-factly, he could’ve been talking about us all going to a Cowboys game. But he wasn’t.” One of the washing machines behind Sara began to shake violently as it entered the spin cycle. “Anyway, that’s what it took for my mother to get rid of Leo.”

  I was twenty-one years old that year, old enough to know that even among friends full disclosures were rare. They always came when you least expected it—in line for burgers, or at the movies just as the lights dimmed, or waiting for your clothes to dry. And often you had just that one brief window, and you knew it wouldn’t stay open for long. So you’d better find out all you could.

  “Did things change after that?” I asked. “With your mother?”

  “No, she just took up with another troublemaker. Some ex-army guy, retired but still built like a truck.” Then she laughed. “My mom calls herself a passionate woman, and she claims her men are passionate, too. But she just uses that word to excuse people for their bad behavior. Her so-called passion leads her from one loser to the next. She was a beautiful woman, though. Still is. Very alluring. One day she’ll be alone, that’s for sure. I feel bad for her. And I won’t let it happen to me. It almost did, you know.”

  “The baseball player.”

  She smiled. “He played backup second base for the county high school. He was always throwing the ball over the first baseman’s head. Beautiful eyes, though. The boy was beautiful, I’ll give him that. And not violent or mean. But a local guy. Small-minded. The sort of guy who thinks that the ultimate thing a woman would want is her name spelled correctly when it’s tattooed on his bicep. You’ve got to be crazy to build a future with a guy like that. When I told him I wanted to go to college and become a novelist, he literally laughed, and then when he saw I was pissed he said all he meant was that there was a perfectly good newspaper right in Slaughter that I could write for.” She shook her head. “Which was extra stupid because it wasn’t a ‘perfectly good newspaper.’ It was a shoddily written weekly devoted mainly to church activities.”

  “You really need to stop bringing that guy up in front of Jeffrey,” I said. “It makes him crazy.”

  She nodded. “I know. I hate when I do it, even when I’m doing it.”

  “Well, maybe just don’t do it.”

  In that regard, our conversation wasn’t just informative, it was practical. Because as far as I know, she never mentioned him to Jeffrey again.

  “You know, I’ve never told anyone about Leo,” she said, several minutes later, once our shirts were dry and folded.

  “Except for Jeffrey, you mean.”

  “Nope.”

  “Just me?”

  She must have seen the confusion in my face, because she smiled. “It’s no big deal. I just sort of felt like talking, that’s all.” She shrugged. “Anyway, you’re a good listener.”

  Her compliment filled me with satisfaction, though I didn’t believe I’d done anything to earn it. “You know I’d never—”

  “I know you won’t. There’s no need to say anything.”

  My fear, now, was that we were creating just those sorts of “Leo” moments in Marie, instilling the presumption of violence and betrayal in a person who hadn’t asked for it and didn’t deserve it. She’d been foolish, trying to get more money out of us. And greedy. But in the scheme of things her faults were small-time and forgivable.

  At some point during my musings, she had lain down on the sofa. She turned onto her side and curled up her legs, making herself smaller, and then was still.

  Sleep, Marie. From the control room I further dimmed Room A until it went black. Sleep.

  CHAPTER 22

  The philly-bound plane had sat on the runway so long it needed to be de-iced all over again, and by the time Evan called us saying he’d touched down in Philadelphia, it was nearly five in the morning.

  “Sorry if I woke you,” he said.

  “You didn’t,” I said.

  He hadn’t woken any of us. Jeffrey, Nolan, and I had spent these hours apart. Even after Evan’s call I spent two more hours staring at my hands, wishing for my friend to get here already while simultaneously hoping he’d never arrive. At seven thirty he called again from the parking lot behind the studio, asking to be let in.

  Only two days earlier I’d tried to keep Evan away. Now, despite my stiff limbs, I couldn’t get to the door fast enough.

  The bright morning sun nearly took my breath away. It must be how gamblers feel stumbling penniless out of a casino and being shocked that the colorful world is carrying on without them. Evan stood in the doorway, framed by the morning light. He wore a gray business suit and carried his computer bag. He looked tired, but if his expression reflected what he saw, I must have looked worse. We shook hands. “Thanks for coming,” I said, and led him into the studio. “It’s good to see a friendly face.”

  We kept walking down the hallway, past the bathrooms.

  “Look, Will,” Evan said, “are you going to make me guess what’s going on? Or are you going to tell me . . .” We had rounded the corner into the main recording room. Evan stopped walking and looked around.

  There was a drum set and guitar amplifiers and cables and microphone stands, but what he saw, I’m sure, were the pizza boxes and full trash bags, and a television, and when Nolan and Jeffrey came around the corner from the control room he saw one friend with a bandaged head and another with a busted lip. And of course he saw the girl—looking tired and miserable, but curious, too—on the floor of Room A, sitting on the sofa and looking at him quite calmly, almost as if he were the one imprisoned and on display, like at a zoo. She sat with her head in her hands, with only her gaze trained on us. She looked incapable of becoming excited anymore, of getting her hopes up, though she must have been wondering if this new man who’d entered the room was indeed the savior I’d promised or merely the beginning of some new indignity.

  “What the hell have I just walked into?” he asked.

  We had planned to tell him everything. Nolan, Jeffrey, and I would sit in the control room with Evan and begin back at the Milk-n-Bread, telling him what we’d done, and, as best we could, why we’d done it. We would try to convey how basic concepts like time, like morality, had become distorted and unpredictable when mixed with the impurity of panic.

  Nobody would raise his voice. Nobody
would interrupt. We wouldn’t even rush. Evan had flown halfway across the country. Marie had been our hostage for three days. What did it matter if we explained ourselves in thirty minutes or an hour? We would confess everything and calmly ask for his counsel. We would follow his advice wherever it led us.

  That was our plan, but it didn’t happen. Because the moment Evan saw Marie, the rest of us were forgotten. He rushed over to Room A, opened the door, and went inside.

  Their conversation looked strangely animated. Almost heated. It went on a long time, nearly an hour, and when they emerged, Evan looked distinctly perturbed. Not sad, exactly. Annoyed, and frustrated. Like a student who’d failed an exam because of trick questions. Marie was with him. Not running for the door. Just standing beside him.

  We caught up with them in the main studio. “So,” I said, “what’s the verdict?”

  Evan said nothing, just continued on with his annoyed look, lips pursed, head shaking slightly. Marie stared me down. Didn’t nod, didn’t say a word. Her gaze moved to Nolan, with his bandage and his bloodstained hair. And to Jeffrey, his lip swollen, his eyes ghoulish from lack of sleep.

  “This young lady narrated quite a story.” Evan frowned. “I keep telling her that maybe she wants to rethink what she told me. That maybe her recollection isn’t exactly right. But she insists that it is.”

  “I know it must sound crazy,” I said, “but I swear, we never meant—”

  Evan held up his hand like a stop sign. “She says that you, Will, first met her several weeks ago at the convenience store where she works. That you heard her singing along to the radio one day and complimented her voice. Said it was the best voice you’d heard in ages. Then, last week you invited her to record some demos at your studio while your friends were in town. You began to fill her head with talk of how you all would make her a star.”