Before He Finds Her Page 6

  On the next loop she spotted Phillip again—he had moved off to the side, near where she’d be exiting—and she shouted, “Stop the ride!” just as it began to slow. The attendant started letting people out of the cars beneath her, but the process was maddening: one car, then another, then another. Finally, hers. She ran down the ramp and nearly collided into Phillip.

  “Did you see that man?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  She grabbed Phillip’s arm and tugged him in the direction the man had gone. “He was watching me. He took my picture. We have to find him.” As they ran, she described him: thin, older, gray facial hair, faded blue jeans. They move in and around the crowd, which had swelled from just a few minutes earlier. There were too many people. They’d never find him. He was already gone.

  Then, remarkably, there he was: over by the game where you threw Wiffle balls into colored cups to win prizes. His camera was out again.

  “Why did you take my picture?” Melanie asked, breathless.

  The man turned to face her. “I did?” He studied her face. “Oh—the Ferris wheel.” He stuck out his hand. “Manny Simpson, Mason City Democrat.”

  “You work for the newspaper?”

  “Of course.” He nodded to his camera. “I’m taking pictures for tomorrow’s paper.”

  She was momentarily relieved. Who had she thought this man was? She’d been reading too many Hardy Boys novels. But her relief lasted only a moment. “You can’t put my picture in the paper.”

  “You looked lovely up there—so happy. And with that flower in your hair...”

  She reached up to where she had put the dandelion behind her ear, but it must have fallen out during her rush across the carnival grounds. “You can’t use it.”

  “She doesn’t like being photographed,” Phillip said.

  “I’m taking hundreds of photos, and the paper will probably only use two or three, so it’s highly unlikely—”

  “You can’t, though,” Melanie said. “You have to promise.”

  “All right. I’ll make a note of it. No lovely girl on the Ferris wheel.” He smiled and turned away.

  Still feeling uneasy, and no longer hungry, Melanie said to Phillip, “I want to leave.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She didn’t want to disappoint him. This was supposed to be their day out. Their day together. “I’m sure,” she said.

  They walked away from the carnival, back toward Phillip’s house, neither of them talking. Finally, he said, “What about my own camera. I’m just curious. Would you ever let me take a picture of you?”

  She thought about it. “No.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “It isn’t a matter of trust.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If I didn’t want you to photograph me naked, would you understand that? Even if you never planned to share the photo with anyone else?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Then just think of me as naked all the time.” She didn’t like her own response—too flippant for the occasion—and she stopped walking. “Okay, I don’t like having to say this, but I will. I need you to protect me. Not like a policeman or a parent. I’m not a helpless child. But I’m also not some typical college freshman. I spend every minute of every day looking over my shoulder. It isn’t a joke.”

  “I get that,” he said, rubbing her arm. “It’s just that it was all so long ago—”

  His touch felt good, but she needed him to understand. “You’ve been dealing with this for less than a day. I’ve been dealing with it for fifteen years.” The sun had moved out from behind some clouds and was heating up the ground. Before long, the day would probably be as oppressive as yesterday. They started walking again. “Forget it,” she said. “We can talk about it some other time.”

  “All right.” He put his arm around her. “But I can handle it. I really can.”

  These were reassuring words that raised her spirits until about three seconds after he’d said them, when a squirrel dropped out of the tree under which they were passing. It had either misjudged a jump or slipped, and came whooshing out of the branches and plopped down onto the road just a few feet in front of them.

  Melanie heard: Slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap.

  The squirrel froze, momentarily stunned, before finding its bearings and darting away from the road toward the curb and scurrying up the nearest tree.

  Melanie looked left. Phillip was no longer beside her. She turned around. He was at least twenty feet back, looking sheepish in his flip-flops, which had broadcasted his hasty retreat.

  “What the hell was that about?” she asked.

  “It startled me.”

  “You ran away from a squirrel?”

  He walked back to her. “It could have been rabid.”

  She started walking quickly ahead without him, this man whose quirky fears were suddenly not remotely endearing. Maybe she’d been drawn to him because he was so different from her aunt and uncle. But if they were smothering her, this was no antidote. An antidote like this would get her killed.

  “I need to go home,” she said. “I need to not see you right now.”

  “Melanie—”

  “Let’s just walk.”

  The carnival sounds faded. Soon there were only their footfalls and the cars going by, and the birds and, yes, squirrels mocking them from the trees. When they reached Phillip’s house, they went inside and Melanie collected her backpack and returned to the front door.

  “I’m sorry,” Phillip said.

  She wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t talk to him. She wasn’t intentionally giving him the silent treatment, but she felt nauseous and sweaty and exhausted. She descended the concrete steps and returned to her car.

  There was only one way to deal with the storm she was walking into. By the time she’d made it back to Notress Pass and driven up the pebbly driveway and put the car into park, her aunt and uncle were already rushing out of the trailer.

  “I’m fine,” Melanie said, shutting the car door behind her. “I spent the night with the man I’ve been seeing. But things between us didn’t work out. I’m very tired and need to rest. We can talk about anything you want, I promise—but later. I’m very, very sorry for worrying you, and I love you both very much.” She walked between them, her face hot with humiliation, and was quickly past, up the stairs, into the trailer, into her bedroom, shutting the door and locking it behind her.

  Her aunt and uncle, to their tremendous credit, didn’t come knocking.

  An hour later, she’d emerged from her bedroom and was lying on the living room sofa, feet resting on her aunt’s lap. Her uncle sat in a chair opposite them. “I thought there might be a future with him,” Melanie said, “but I was wrong. That’s really all there is to it. I’m sorry to have worried you—I know that was awful of me.”

  She’d expected plenty of yelling when she returned home. Wayne and Kendra weren’t people who yelled, but Melanie had never stayed out all night. There was no rule forbidding it, because such a transgression was unthinkable.

  Yet there had been no yelling, no tirades when she came out of her room—only concerned embraces and as much patience as she could possibly hope for. They were wonderful from time to time, she had to admit.

  “Who is this man?” her uncle asked.

  Melanie shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over.”

  “When did you meet him?” her aunt asked.

  “Did he hurt you?” her uncle asked.

  “No, nothing like that. He’s a decent guy. It just didn’t work out.”

  Her aunt and uncle exchanged glances. “You told him, didn’t you?” Wayne said. Melanie briefly considered lying, but her hesitation told them everything.

  “So what happened?” Kendra asked. “He couldn’t handle it?”

  “Something like that,” Melanie said.

  Her aunt, eyes wet, reached out and took Melanie’s hand. “That’s why you have us. We’ll pro
tect you—always, always, always.”

  5

  September 20, 1991

  Before that amazing and utterly accidental late-morning moment seven years back when Allison Anne Pembroke stepped out of the elevator and into the third floor of Monmouth Regional Hospital, Ramsey’s entire life had added up to nothing, 0 + 0 + 0 = 0, the equation of a loser whose existence was as aimless as it was pointless. Flash forward a year, and the two of them were still together, and not just together but a whole new equation with a sum far greater than anything he’d ever imagined himself contributing to. In quiet moments he’d fall into the habit of asking himself the obvious.

  What if we hadn’t met? What then?

  He’d imagine the alternatives when falling asleep at night, and on interstates, and while fueling up. The scenes he imagined always led to the same conclusion: He’d be dead. Beer bottle to the head, knife to the gut, maybe a high-speed chase. Or he would’ve woken up one gray day and said enough already and used his belt to rig up a nice noose. Or something less dramatic—illness, since Lord knows he didn’t take care of himself when he was on his own. Surely he’d have died as he had lived: angry and alone, underwhelmed and underwhelming, unwilling to give of himself to another or see the beauty in anything or anybody. He’d have left the world a little worse off than he had found it. That would have been his legacy. His tombstone would have read, Here lies another shithead.

  Before meeting Allie, he had never been in love or close to it. When he would stop to dwell on the matter as a teenager and young man, this lack of love gnawed at him, so he tried to convince himself that he didn’t give a shit. He had honed this particular skill, not giving a shit, over many years, which served him well much of the time but also made him take risks he knew he shouldn’t. The cars he stole, for instance. You ought to feel a thrill, revving somebody else’s engine and peeling away from the curb. Going through their glove box, looking under the visors. But there was no thrill in it. What he stole, he stole to pay rent and buy food. The fights he got into brought him no satisfaction, either—not when a fight almost always meant a night in some drunk tank that reeked of every human excretion. And it wasn’t as if his fights were ever about anything noble. Nobody was defending anyone’s honor. Typically it was about nothing at all. You get drunk, you get mad, shit happens. It was sad, this life of his, like a mushroom pushing out of the ground after a hard rain, random and poisonous. He actually tried out this metaphor on his friend Eric while lying in the hospital seven years back, hopped up on painkillers. Eric was trying to cheer him up with dirty jokes, but Eric was too religious for the jokes to be dirty enough, and there was no cheering up Ramsey that day, anyway. He had mangled his leg out of his own stupidity, he’d just been canned from the only good job he’d ever had, and he’d been given a summons for taking a drunken swing at a cop.

  A mushroom? Eric had said. What you are is a fool.

  He was absolutely right. And yet a day later, Allie stepped out of the elevator and into Ramsey’s life.

  He didn’t deserve her—especially not then, when anything redeeming about him was hidden under a thick shell of defensiveness, evasion, and straight-up aggression cultivated over many years. But they got together, he and Allie, and they stayed together. She taught him what love meant, how it was the truth that made all other truths possible. She came along at the exact right moment and saved his life in every way that a life could be saved. So for her, he did that singular thing that human beings almost never did no matter how much they might want to, and never, ever for another person.

  For her, he changed.

  The door swung open as he was reaching with the key. The surprises revealed themselves gradually. The late-afternoon light always made her face lovely, for instance, but today her beauty staggered him.

  And when he stepped into the house, he was struck by its tidiness. The housekeeper came on Wednesdays, letting herself in and out, but by Friday, especially when Allie was alone all week with the kid, the place would revert to its natural state. Not today.

  He followed Meg inside. “The house looks great,” he told Allie. “So do you.” It immediately occurred to him he should have reversed the order of compliments.

  “You didn’t tell me they were coming over,” Allie said.

  “I didn’t? The guys? Sure, I did.”

  “No.”

  Of course they needed to rehearse, with the gig on Sunday. But maybe he hadn’t told her. When she bent down to kiss Meg on the head, saying, “Hi, sweetie,” Ramsey saw that underneath Allie’s Monmouth College sweatshirt was a lacy red bra. The panties would match, he was sure of it. Allie used to keep two sets of underclothes, one for when Ramsey was on the road and another for when he was home. He only ever saw the shapeless, faded garments in the laundry hamper, until after the baby was born, at which point dutifully separated laundry became an extravagance, and the only pertinent question became whether something was clean enough.

  These small surprises—tidy house, sexy underwear—were like Easter eggs for him to find. A lit candle somewhere filled the house with the smell of fall. A Sam Cooke CD was playing, though the sounds coming from the garage drowned it out.

  Meg ran through the house toward the kitchen. Watching their daughter together somehow reset their reunion. “It’s good to see you,” Allie said. She placed a hand on his arm and kissed his lips. “Thanks for getting her today.”

  “Happy to,” he said. Allie could have gotten Meg from day care herself—she often came home from work early on Fridays—but before leaving town last week Ramsey had said he would do it. He had developed, over the years, this technique for proving his own decency to himself—making small promises that he could fulfill. This time the promise had come from the basic need to spend a little time alone with Meg before the weekend’s bustle of activity.

  Six, seven years ago he would come home from a week away, and within minutes he and Allie would fall into bed. But Allie was still trying, the Easter eggs proved it, and Ramsey knew he ought to try, too. His face needed a shave, his hair a trim. He didn’t like wearing sunglasses, and over the years his squinting had etched permanent gouges in his face. He should’ve exercised more. He was thin, always had been, but that wasn’t the same as being fit. Not like when he was younger and could drink a twelve-pack and spend the whole next day in the sun doing some rich guy’s yard work.

  In the kitchen, Meg was peeling magnetic letters off the refrigerator and dropping them on to the floor. “I was thinking we could get pizza for the guys,” Ramsey said. “From the good place.”

  “How long do you think rehearsal will go?”

  “Don’t know—but I’ll make sure we turn everything down at eight.” Meg’s bedtime.

  “Because I was hoping you and I could have some time tonight.”

  Already the plastic letters were everywhere. Now Meg was over by the toy barn. When she threw a plastic pig across the room, Allie said, “Sweetie, don’t throw the animals,” and Meg pursed her lips and slammed a cow onto the ground.

  “Are you little mad?” Ramsey asked her, and cursed himself for forgetting to use this surefire trick back at the park.

  “Big mad,” she answered, already smiling, her anger allayed by their inside joke.

  Ramsey winked at Meg and said to Allie, “The thing is, this isn’t some ordinary jam session. We got a gig coming up.”

  “You do?” Feigned astonishment. “Why, I had no idea.”

  Okay, he deserved that. He’d been yammering on about the gig for weeks. But Allie only knew the half of it. There hadn’t been time during these last few days of reflection and near--constant driving to tell her that the plan had expanded. And they had to be finished rehearsing by ten tonight because of the town’s noise ordinance. When they’d first moved to Sandy Oaks, a cop had broken up a weeknight jam at 8:30 p.m. Someone in the neighborhood had called the cops on them anonymously, rather than just knocking on the door like a normal human being and asking Ramsey if they could turn i
t down a notch or two. Welcome to the neighborhood.

  “I want us to be great, is all,” he said, getting a six-pack from the refrigerator and setting it on the counter.

  Laid out on the kitchen table were 3 x 5 index cards, with more cards in a plastic box. Allie had a computer in her office at work, but she preferred the index cards, which she carried with her when she traveled from doctor’s office to doctor’s office, wearing tight business skirts and being outgoing and drumming up demand for whatever new drug her company decided that these doctors’ patients’ bones or blood or organs couldn’t do without. Fridays, she confirmed the next week’s appointments. It wasn’t lost on Ramsey that at different points in their lives, they both worked as drug pushers—he as a sixteen-year-old pot dealer, she as a grown woman shilling expensive pharmaceuticals for a megacorporation. But he kept this observation to himself.

  Allie handed Meg her Little Mermaid cup of water. “You guys will be playing for family,” she said to Ramsey. “They’ll be proud no matter how you sound.”

  “Yeah, about that.” Just then, the bass amp got a lot louder. The last thing they needed was a cop breaking up their rehearsal before it got started.

  “About what?” Allie asked.

  But Ramsey was heading upstairs to the guest room for his guitar case. “About what?” she called after him. Seconds later, he was back. He kissed Allie’s neck, bent down and kissed the top of Meg’s head.

  “I’ll tell you later,” he said. When Allie’s eyes narrowed, he added, “Don’t worry—it’s good. Like a surprise. Killer bra, by the way.”

  He grabbed the six-pack with his free hand and headed to the garage. As soon as he’d opened the door separating the laundry room from the garage, a beer can was arcing toward him, and he had to drop the six-pack on the ground (it was either that or the guitar) to catch it. Ramsey opened the can, took a swallow, and looked around.

  “I had a dream last night,” he said, closing the door behind him. “I could fly, and breathe underwater.” He set the guitar case on the ground and snapped it open. “I could do anything. I think that dream was about this gig.” He looked up at the guys. “It’s going to be like that on Sunday. Like flying. And breathing underwater.”