The Three-Day Affair Page 4

  “Are you into any hard drugs?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Are you a douchebag?”

  I told him I wasn’t.

  He nodded. “I could actually use a little help. I got a band coming in an hour. You want, you can stick around and assist. Like an audition.”

  I called home and left a message telling Cynthia where I was. That I’d be home late.

  “Okay,” Joey said, shutting the magazine and setting it on the console. “Have a seat. Let’s talk.”

  At eleven that night, after the band left, Joey hired me on a trial basis. We negotiated a salary (that is, Joey proposed one; I agreed). We shook hands and left the studio together.

  The street was quiet except for a streetlight buzzing at the end of the block. On the curb beneath it stood an old man in torn pants and a gray hooded sweatshirt, rocking from foot to foot. Seeing us, he started to come our way.

  “And here we go,” Joey said. “You work here, you’ll be seeing a lot of this one.”

  The man asked us for a dollar. “For protecting your car,” he said.

  “Ignore him,” Joey said, “or he’ll be your friend for life.”

  I couldn’t ignore him. My father spent his professional life helping just such people. He was licensed in clinical social work and directed Hudson County Coalition, an organization that oversaw local shelters and soup kitchens and, when there were funds, did some occupation training. Back in high school I volunteered there sometimes. My interest had more to do with helping out my father than the homeless, but ever since then I’d never been able to ignore a panhandler. At least I had that check mark on the merit side of God’s scorecard.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out two quarters. In the months and years that followed, I’d drop countless quarters into that same hopeful hand.

  The man stuffed the change into the pocket of his sweatshirt, which was several sizes too large for his small frame.

  “You seen my dog?” The man had the veiny nose of a longtime drinker and the fragile eyes of somebody who’d disappointed his share of well-meaning counselors.

  I told him I hadn’t seen any dogs. “What kind is it?”

  “Man, you know my dog.”

  “Sorry, I don’t,” I said, concluding that the dog in question probably had never romped anyplace other than this man’s imagination.

  “How about you?” he asked Joey. “You seen him?”

  “I told you a hundred times already, I haven’t seen your dog. I see him, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Through with us, the man went back to his spot beneath the streetlight and sat down on the curb. Joey and I kept walking. When we were out of earshot, Joey said, “I don’t care much for that guy, but I kinda liked his dog. Real well behaved. Last week I saw it on the side of the street, about a mile from here. Road pizza.” He shook his head. “Well, good night.”

  I got in my car and turned on the radio but didn’t drive anywhere. Joey beeped his horn as he rode past. When he was out of sight, I got out of my car again and walked to the sub shop a half block down the road. Chairs were stacked in the window, and a lone employee wearing a sauce-splattered apron was sweeping the floor, but the neon sign overhead claimed open for business. I bought a cup of coffee and a footlong Italian sub. Extra tomatoes, no hot peppers, exactly the way I liked it. When I left the shop five minutes later, the neon sign was dark.

  “I’ll keep an eye out for your dog,” I said, and handed the man his dinner.

  When I began to work at the studio, the equipment—and the other engineers—were all in states of dysfunction. Joey knew I could help him. I was dependable and competent, and lacked the sort of ambition that would have me leaving him suddenly for a better studio and stealing his clients away.

  Almost immediately, he began to give me more responsibility. Rather than work the sound console himself, he preferred to drop by and shoot the bull with the bands. The studio was his own small kingdom where he could come and feel welcomed. Otherwise, he wasn’t too interested in the day-to-day business of the studio, and in six months I was in charge. I fired the incompetents and lobbied Joey to overhaul the main console, which he had bought used when he first opened the studio.

  This became my life, working at a third-rate recording studio in the middle of New Jersey, spending the bulk of my days with musicians of questionable talent, and then coming home to our house in the burbs. Cynthia and I were living the middle-class dream, only we weren’t middle-class, and I needed to figure out if this bothered me. And if it didn’t, why not.

  Yet I must not have been entirely without ambition, because after about a year at the studio I began to toy with the idea of starting up a small record company. At first I kept it to myself. I began to save a little, and convinced Joey to throw some money into fixing the studio’s worst atrocities.

  When I finally told Cynthia about my idea, I remember being bothered by her instant enthusiasm. It was August, and we were sitting on the back porch having breakfast. The porch was my favorite part of the house. Our little yard felt private, its perimeter lined on the sides with burning bushes and in the rear with forsythia hedges that, come fall, would turn a brilliant yellow.

  “It isn’t a terrific plan,” I told her. “It’s risky as all hell.”

  “Maybe so,” she said, “but I love the idea of our working together on something. And anyway, you need this. I know you do.”

  I hadn’t been any fun at all for quite some time. That was putting it mildly. Not that I walked around sulking. But I had accepted unhappiness as a small price to pay for a life filled with most of the things I wanted.

  “There are other remedies for depression,” I said, “besides throwing our money into a risky business.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. Prozac? Therapy?”

  Cynthia took my hand and began to rub it. And trying to sound nonchalant, she said, “Why not all three?”

  A year and a half had passed since the shooting and our flight from the city. And now, rather than the heavy exhaustion following our move to Newfield, I felt tired of mourning. Tired of being tired. Tired of sadness. It was enough already.

  And after a few more months, and with a little help from both Dr. Shelling, PhD, and Pfizer Inc., I felt myself finally coming out of something I hadn’t even known I was still so deeply in.

  Cynthia and I began to laugh a little more, make love more often. We began to talk about the future: not only the record company, but us. Being together. Starting a family. We even started thinking of names.

  CHAPTER 4

  Now, three years after Snakepit Recording Studio had first saved me, I was counting on it to save me again.

  I parked the car behind the studio, where it wouldn’t be seen from the street, and went in ahead of the others. Nobody was scheduled in the studio until my session with The Fixtures on Monday evening.

  The lights were all off. “Hello?” I called out. No reply.

  I went outside again.

  The sky had fully opened, and thunder was cracking fiercely. I trudged through puddles to the car and waved them in.

  Jeffrey got out first. He stood in the lot looking toward the street, making sure no other car was coming. Nolan went around to the backseat, opened the girl’s door, and guided her toward the studio. She had warned us in the car that her grandmother would be calling the police the minute she didn’t arrive home; we immediately used this information against her, making her swear on her grandmother’s life that she wouldn’t run away or scream.

  Screaming wouldn’t have helped anyway. There was the overpowering sound of the rain. There was the thunder. But also, in the moment just after I waved them in, an ambulance went by, its siren blaring. The coincidence was uncanny. If there was a moment when we could have still undone everything, that siren cut it short. It fired
us into action, and fifteen seconds later the four of us were drenched but safely inside the studio. I locked the door behind us.

  Off the hallway was the studio’s main recording room. Inside, along the walls, were two much smaller rooms, A and B. The doors to each room were made of glass so that musicians could see one another while recording.

  Room A used to be a storage closet and locked from the outside. The girl sat on the floor. She had left her purse in a locker back at the Milk-n-Bread and had sworn—again, on her grandmother’s life—that she didn’t have a cell phone on her. We took her at her word; no one was going to search her.

  Nolan, Jeffrey, and I sat in the control room staring at one another. Their hair was wet and their faces looked ghostly in the studio’s dim light. Looking at Nolan now—running his hand through his hair, squeezing his eyes shut—I knew there was no plan. He’d asked for the ball because that had always been his instinct, and I’d given it to him because that had always been mine. But the game was already over.

  He opened his eyes and, seeing me, seemed to know what I was thinking. “She’d have gone to the police,” he said.

  “Of course she would’ve. But this is making things worse.”

  He ran a hand through his hair again, and asked Jeffrey the obvious: “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  Jeffrey shook his head. “I tried to tell you, I’m broke. And we were promising Will all that money at dinner. And I just . . . I don’t know. Panicked, I guess.”

  “Wow.” Nolan glared at him. “I mean, that really is the stupidest thing I ever heard. So how much did you steal?”

  Jeffrey reached into his front pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. We watched him count it. “A hundred and eighty dollars,” he said, not looking at either of us, and put the money back in his pocket.

  “You lose millions,” Nolan said, “and so you steal a hundred and eighty dollars and . . . you took somebody.” He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. “I mean, how could you?”

  Jeffrey sighed. “It all happened so fast. Nobody else was in the store, just the two of us, and I know this might sound crazy but it just didn’t feel like that big of a deal until the second after she’d handed me the money. It didn’t even feel real. But then I pictured Sara and the baby, and the police coming after me, and . . . it just happened.” He glanced over in the girl’s direction, then away again. “I know that I did it, but it felt like an accident. Like I didn’t mean it at all. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Not even a little.” Nolan punched a fist into his palm. He used to do this in college during debates and later during his early campaign speeches. Since then, he’d learned to tame the gesture. “Robbery isn’t an accident. Kidnapping isn’t an accident. Nobody in the history of the world has ever kidnapped somebody by accident.”

  “Well, I did.”

  More hand punching. “Well, fuck you then.”

  “No, fuck you, Nolan. I didn’t intend—”

  “You didn’t intend what?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You didn’t what?”

  “Let me talk! Okay? You never let me talk. Will you let me talk?”

  Rain drummed steadily on the roof. The building was well insulated and soundproofed, and I tried to remember if I’d ever heard police sirens from in here.

  “Well? Talk!”

  “Don’t rush me,” Jeffrey said.

  Nolan pulled his chair closer to Jeffrey’s. “Let me explain something. You and Will and I are in the deepest of shit. Do you understand? You robbed a convenience store and kidnapped the clerk, and unless we figure something out fast, the three of us are going to pay for it. The police are probably on their way already. They might be here in ten minutes. They might ransack Will’s house first and buy us an hour or two. Either way, there’s, you know, a good reason to hurry things along.”

  The thought of Cynthia returning from Philadelphia to find our house ransacked made me sadder, in a way, than the thought of her returning to find me in custody.

  “She looks cold,” Jeffrey said. She was sitting on the rug, arms around knees, head down. Shivering, maybe crying.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  “Where are you going?” Nolan said.

  I ignored him and went into the main recording room and turned up the thermostat. Then I knelt in front of the bass drum and pulled out the blanket that I kept in there to dampen the drumhead. The blanket was stiff and musty.

  “Back up a little bit, okay?” I called through the thick door.

  She scooted backward. Her hair was dripping.

  I unlocked the door and opened it just enough to hand her the blanket. She took it and immediately wrapped it around herself.

  “So can I please call you by a name?” I asked, and she looked at me. But I didn’t know what else to say. I wondered who she was, this girl of the Milk-n-Bread. Did she work there to save money for college? To help support her family? Did she have a boyfriend? What were her ambitions?

  I wanted her to understand that this was all a mistake. But I couldn’t think of a way to explain, and there was no time. I started to close the door.

  “Wait!” she said. The door remained a few inches open. “This is scary, you know?”

  “I know it is.”

  “The police are probably already on their way.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “You really didn’t know this was going to happen?”

  “Scout’s honor.”

  “That guy’s your friend?”

  I nodded. “He’s all right, once you get to know him.”

  Her shivering had subsided a little. “Marie. That’s my name.”

  I knew it was my turn, and lying seemed pointless. “I’m Will.”

  “Is that your real name?”

  “Yes. Is Marie yours?”

  Her answer was a sneeze. For the first time, I really looked at her. The freckles at the base of her nose said tomboy, and yet she had smooth, feminine skin, the look of someone who could make herself glamorous if she wanted to. I’d been wrong about seeing her before in the Milk-n-Bread. That wasn’t why she looked familiar.

  “My nana is sick,” she said. “She doesn’t have anyone else. It’s just me and her. My shift ends at eight o’clock, and I’m supposed to go home after.”

  Of course she had a grandmother depending on her. “We’re going to do everything we can to get you home on time. I promise.”

  “Will?” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “Please don’t let anyone . . . hurt me.”

  I looked away and saw the nicked-up wooden floor. The rotted ceiling tiles. Microphone stands and cables lining the wall. One of Joey’s posters of Pamela Anderson, circa 1995, for the musicians to ogle.

  This was Joey’s studio, but it was my turf. Jeffrey might have grabbed the girl, and Nolan might have ordered me to drive. But I had taken us here. I was responsible, and she seemed to know it, and she was letting me know that she knew it.

  What if I told her to leave right then, just run as fast as she could out into the street? Would anybody stop her? And why wasn’t I giving her that chance?

  Optimism is a strange word, given the situation, but I believe that’s what kept me from letting her go right then, before everything else that happened happened. I was as frightened as I’d ever been, yet alongside my fear was a trace of optimism, because I knew what this girl didn’t: We meant her no harm. Together, Nolan, Jeffrey, and I would solve the problem, fix the damage that’d been done. All we needed was a little time.

  “Nobody’s going to hurt you,” I said. “We’re going to get you home really soon. In the meantime, try to warm up.” I clicked the door shut.

  When I returned to the control room, Jeffrey and Nolan were looking at me too expectantly. I didn’t like being
looked to for answers. All I’d done was produce a lousy blanket. Yet I’d also made a discovery.

  “It’s because she looks like Sara, isn’t it?” I asked Jeffrey.

  “No, she doesn’t,” he said. “Why would you say that?”

  “She does,” I insisted. “She looks like your wife. And if Sara’s been cheating on you—”

  “She has?” Nolan said.

  Jeffrey shot me a look, but maintaining his confidence had dropped on my list of priorities.

  “And then you run into this cashier,” I said, “who happens to look like her. . . .”

  “Wait a goddamn minute.” Nolan looked over toward Marie, but her head was buried in her arms. “Let me get this straight. So to get even with your wife for fucking some other guy, you kidnap an innocent teenager?”

  Jeffrey shook his head. “That isn’t why I did it.”

  “Okay, then why?” Nolan asked.

  “I already told you why, she was going to call the—”

  Nolan waved Jeffrey’s words away. “Why would you rob the fucking store in the first place?”

  “We’re all ears,” I said.

  Jeffrey sighed. “Maybe it’s like . . . you know, what we were talking about at dinner. Why guys go skydiving or whatever.”

  “Now this I don’t need to hear,” Nolan said.

  “Look, you’re the one who said, ‘Surprise yourself.’”

  Nolan stood there, shaking his head. Almost any explanation would’ve been better than that. But what did we expect to hear? Some secret chamber to Jeffrey’s heart revealed? No. People committed self-destructive acts every hour of every day. There had been days in my own not-too-distant past when I felt about as bad as a person could feel. The only difference was that Jeffrey had acted on those feelings and taken us along for the ride.

  “Well, has it worked?” Nolan forced a laugh. “Do you feel alive? We’d all sure like to know.”

  Jeffrey looked down at the floor. “I don’t—”

  “You don’t know, you don’t know—we heard you!” Nolan lowered his voice. “But do you know that our lives are ruined because of you? Do you know that we’re all probably headed to prison because of this?” When Jeffrey didn’t answer, he murmured, “Fucking lunatic.”