Men.
“. . . in case you want privacy.”
Manny had been talking to her. She followed his gaze to a black door on her left.
“Did you use the privacy room last time you were here?”
“No,” she heard herself say. “I didn’t.”
“Will you need it today?”
“Yes.” There had to be six hundred boxes in here. For a small, former farming community? What were people putting in here—recipes for peach cobbler? Daddy’s Timex?
“Well,” Manny said.
“Well.”
He led her to the middle wall. She reached into her bag for the key. Held it between her index and thumb, felt the numbers there. She dropped it into her palm—865—as Manny inserted his own key into the box marked 865. She placed her key in the other lock and they turned them together. He withdrew the box, rested it along his left forearm.
“You said you would be needing privacy?”
“Yes.”
He indicated the door with a jut of his chin and she opened it. The room beyond was tiny, nothing in there but four steel walls, a table, two chairs, and thin white shafts of recessed lighting.
Manny placed the box on the table. He looked directly at her with their bodies only inches apart and she realized the asshole was actually hoping for a “moment,” as if his charms were so universal and magnetic, women had no choice but to act like porn stars in his presence.
“I’ll be out in a few minutes.” She moved around to the other side of the table and slipped her bag off her shoulder.
“Of course, of course. See you out there.”
She didn’t even indicate she heard him and only looked back up again once he’d closed the door behind him.
She opened the box.
Inside, as promised, was the messenger bag she’d seen Brian enter the bank with four days ago. Had it only been that long? It felt like a thousand years in her rearview.
She wrenched the bag out of the tight space and held it by the handles as it unfurled. The cash was on top, as he’d said it would be, stacks of hundred- and, in one case, thousand-dollar bills, neatly rubber-banded together. She transferred them to her bag. All that was left were the six passports.
She reached in and pulled them out and a small bit of bile and vomit reached her mouth when she saw that there were only five of them.
No.
No, no, no, no.
She beseeched the recessed lighting and the cold steel walls: Please, no. Don’t do this to me. Not now. Not after I’ve come this far. Please.
Hold it together, Rachel. Look at the passports before you lose all hope.
She opened the first one—Brian’s face stared back at her. His latest alias was there as well: “Hewitt, Timothy.”
She opened the next one—Caleb’s. His alias had been “Branch, Seth.”
Her hands shook when she reached for the third passport. Shook so bad she had to stop for a moment and clench them into fists and then press the fists together and breathe, breathe, breathe.
She opened the third passport, saw the name first—“Carmichael, Lindsay.”
And then the photograph:
Nicole Alden.
She opened the fourth passport: “Branch, Kiyoko.” Haya stared back at her. She opened the fifth and final one—the baby’s.
She didn’t scream or throw anything or kick over a chair. She sat on the floor and placed her hands over her eyes and stared into the darkness of herself.
I’ve watched my life away, she thought. I’ve failed to act at every step of the way, and I’ve justified that by claiming I was here to bear witness. But in reality I was just choosing not to act.
Until now.
And look what that’s gotten me. I am alone. And then I die. All else is window dressing. Wrapping paper. Sales and marketing.
She found a pack of Kleenex at the bottom of her bag, past the stacks of money, and used a couple of tissues on her face. She found herself staring back in the bag, the money taking up the left side, and on the right, her keys, her wallet, the gun.
And as long as she stared at it, and it could have been ten minutes or one, she had no idea, she knew in the end she could never point a gun at him and pull the trigger a second time. She didn’t have it in her.
She was going to let him go.
Without his passport—fuck him, that was staying here—and without his money, because she was walking off with that.
But she couldn’t kill him.
And why?
Because, God help her, she loved him. Or at least the illusion of him. At least that. The illusion of how he’d made her feel. And not just during the false happiness of their marriage, but even in these last few days. She would rather have known the lie that was Brian than the truth of anything else in her life.
She dropped the pack of tissues back into her bag and pushed the stack of money in over it and that’s when she saw the flash of dark blue vinyl. It slipped out between two stacks of bills like a card used to cut the deck.
She pulled it out of the bag. It was a United States passport.
She opened it.
Her own face stared back at her—one of the photos taken that rainy Saturday in the Galleria Mall three weeks ago. The face of a woman who was trying hard to look strong but hadn’t gotten all the way there yet.
But she was trying.
She put all six passports into her bag with the money and left the room.
34
THE DANCE
Leaving the bank, she again looked for the woman with the neck tats and the perfect posture but, if she was in the building, she wasn’t anywhere Rachel could see her. She turned right past the waiting area and saw Manny behind the teller’s window, speaking to Ashley with his chin tilted toward her shoulder. They both looked up as she turned left at the door, Manny’s mouth opening as if he were about to call after her, but she went through the front door and into the parking lot.
Now she had the perfect angle on the cars under the tree, and the sun was cooperating too. Of the four cars that remained, only one was clearly occupied. It was the Chevy that had backed into its spot, and a man sat behind the wheel. It was still too shady to see his features, but it was definitely a man’s head—squared off at the top and at the jaw, ears the size of change purses. No way to tell if he was there to kill her or survey her or if he was simply a middle manager ducking out on his work, a john getting a blow job, or an out-of-town salesman who’d arrived early for an appointment to beat the traffic that clogged I-95 in Providence between eight and ten.
She looked straight ahead as she passed between the Employee of the Month’s car and a van parked in the handicap spot. It too had backed in, the sliding door by her left shoulder now, and she imagined the sound it would make as it was pulled open and hands reached out and yanked her inside.
She passed the van and a long black SUV approached from her right. She watched with a strangely detached fascination as the driver’s tinted window slid down and the driver thrust his arm through the opening even before the window had completed its journey down into the door slot. He wore a dark suit with a white shirt cuff peeking out at the wrist. She hadn’t thought to reach into her bag for the gun or at least try to run back behind the van for cover before his arm reached full extension, a cigarette nestled between the index and middle fingers as he exhaled a grateful plume of smoke, his head pressed against the headrest. He shot her a lazy grin as he passed, as if to say, It’s all about the little pleasures, ain’t it?
After he rolled past, she put her hand in her bag, thumbed the safety off the P380, and kept her hand there as she reached the Range Rover. She opened the door with her left hand and climbed inside. Put the bag on the front passenger seat and the gun on the console beside her, finger still on the trigger, safety off. She said, “You still there?”
“Had a few birthdays while you were gone,” he said mildly. “Fucking took you so long?”
“Really?” She removed her
finger from the trigger, thumbed the safety back on, and put the gun in the space between her seat and the console. “That’s my greeting?”
“Gosh, hon, you look beautiful. Is that a new something? You look like you dropped a few pounds too. Not that you ever needed to.”
“Fuck you,” she said, surprised to hear a chuckle trail the words.
He laughed. “My bad. How’d everything go? Should probably start the engine, by the way, and do the phone trick if we’re going to keep talking.”
She turned the car on. “Couldn’t they assume I’m going hands-free on the cell?”
“You’re not wearing a headset and you’re driving a car from 1992.”
She put the phone to her ear. “Touché.”
“Was there a plant in the bank?”
She pulled out of the slot, turned toward the exit. “Hard to tell. There was a girl in the waiting area I’m still unsure about.”
“How about the parking lot?”
“One guy in a car in the employee section. Couldn’t tell if he was watching us or not.”
She reached the road.
“Turn right,” Brian said.
They drove up a mild incline and then passed a cluster of clapboard houses—most red, a few blue, the rest faded to the brown-gray of old baseballs. Once they passed the houses, they hit a straightaway between two pastures that unfurled for miles. The sky that rose before her was a blue she’d seen only in dreams and old Technicolor movies. A bank of white clouds formed in the southeast corner but cast no shadow on the fields. She could see why Brian had chosen this road—there were no crossroads for miles. What was left of Johnston’s farming community, it appeared, was right here.
“Well,” Brian said after about two miles.
“Well what?” She laughed for some reason.
“You see anyone in the rearview?”
She glanced up. The road behind her was a gunmetal ribbon with nothing on it. “No.”
“How far back can you see?”
“I’d guess about two miles.”
After another minute, he said, “Now?”
She looked again. “Nothing. Nobody.”
“Rachel.”
“Brian.”
“Rachel,” he said again.
“Brian . . .”
He sat up in the backseat and the smile that broke across his face was almost too big for the car.
“How do you feel about yourself today?” he asked. “Right now? Pretty fucking bad or pretty fucking good?”
She caught his eyes in the rearview and presumed hers were as adrenalized as his. “I feel . . .”
“Speak it.”
“Pretty fucking good.”
He clapped his hands together and whooped.
She stepped on the gas and punched the roof and let out a howl.
In another ten minutes, they reached another small strip mall. She’d clocked it on the way in; it contained a post office, a sub shop, a liquor store, a Marshalls, and a Laundromat.
“What’re we doing here?” Brian peered at the low-slung buildings, all gray except for the Marshalls, which was white fading to eggshell.
“I need to run a quick errand.”
“Now?”
She nodded.
“Rachel,” he said, and failed to keep a whiff of condescension out of his voice, “we don’t have time to—”
“Argue?” she said. “I agree. Be right back.”
She left the key in the ignition and the bag she’d carried out of the bank at his feet. It took her ten minutes in Marshalls to change out of her Nicole Rosovich outfit and into a pair of jeans, cranberry V-neck tee, and black cashmere cardigan. She handed the tags to the cashier, transferred her previous outfit to a plastic store bag, paid up, and left.
Brian watched her exit and started to sit up, but then his face darkened as she gave him a quick four-finger wave and entered the post office.
She came back out five minutes later. Brian looked a lot paler when she got behind the wheel. Smaller, too, and a little sickly. Her bag still sat at his feet, but he’d clearly gone through it—a stack of bills peeked through the opening.
“You went through my bag,” she said. “So much for trust.”
“Trust?” It came out sharp and high like a hiccup. “My passport isn’t in there. Neither is yours.”
“No.”
“So where are they?”
“I have mine,” she assured him.
“That’s wonderful.”
“I think so.”
“Rachel.”
“Brian.”
His voice was nearly a whisper. “Where’s my fucking passport?”
She reached into the Marshalls bag and retrieved a shipping label, handed it to him.
He smoothed it on his thigh and stared at it for some time. “What’s this?”
“It’s a shipping label. Global Express. Guaranteed from the United States Postal Service. That’s your tracking number right there in the upper right corner.”
“I can see that,” he said. “I can also see you addressed it to yourself as a guest of the Intercontinental Hotel in Amsterdam.”
She nodded. “Is that a good hotel? Have you ever stayed there? It looked good on the website, so I went with it.”
He looked at her like he was thinking about hitting something. Her, perhaps. Or himself. The dashboard possibly.
Probably her, though.
“What did you mail to the Intercontinental Hotel in Amsterdam, Rachel?”
“Your passport.” She started the Range Rover and pulled out of the parking lot.
“What do you mean, my passport?” His voice was, if possible, even quieter. It was how he got in an argument just before he exploded.
“I mean,” she said with the slowness one reserved for very young children, “I mailed your passport to Amsterdam. Which is where I plan to be by tomorrow night. You, on the other hand, will still be here in the States.”
“You can’t do this,” he said.
She looked over at him. “I kinda already did.”
“You can’t do this!” he repeated, but this time he shouted it. And then he punched the ceiling.
She waited to see if he’d hit anything else. After a mile or so, she said, “Brian, you lied to me through our entire marriage and for the year leading up to it. Did you actually think I was going to overlook that? Say, ‘Gosh, you big lug, ya, thanks for looking out for me?’” She turned left at a sign for 95, still ten miles away from the on-ramp.
“Turn the fucking car around,” he said.
“To do what?”
“Get the passport back.”
“You can’t get mail back once you’ve handed it over. Something to do with interfering with a civil servant on his appointed rounds or something.”
“Turn the car around.”
“What’re you going to do?” She was surprised to hear a chuckle trail the words. “Go back and stick up a post office? I’m going to guess they have cameras, Brian. You may get the passport, but by then you’ll have Cotter-McCann, the local police, the state police, and—since this would surely be a federal crime—the FB fucking I on your ass. Is that really the option you most want to explore right now?”
He glowered at her from the other side of the Range Rover.
“You hate me right now,” she said.
He continued to glower.
“Well,” she said, “we always hate the things that wake us up.”
He punched the ceiling again. “Fuck you.”
“Aw, sweetness,” she said, “would you like me to elucidate your remaining options?”
He popped the glove compartment with the side of his fist and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He lit the cigarette and cracked the window.
“You smoke?” she said.
“You mentioned options.”
She held out her hand. “Give me one.”
He handed her his and lit another one and they drove the empty road and smoked and she
felt a hundred feet tall for a moment.
“You can kill me,” she said.
“I’m not a killer,” he said with a weary indignation that fell somewhere between charming and offensive.
“But if you do, you’ll never get your passport. With all the heat on you, even if you could get someone to make you another one, they’d probably charge you a king’s ransom and sell you out to Cotter-McCann anyway.”
She looked in his eyes and saw that she’d scored a direct hit.
“You’ve got no one left to trust, do you?”
He flicked his ash out the crack in the window. “That’s what you’re offering? Trust?”
She shook her head. “That’s what I’m demanding.”
After a while, he asked, “And what’s that look like?”
“It looks like you scurrying around for a few days like a rat with everyone chasing you while me, Haya, and AB wander the canals of Amsterdam.”
“You like that image,” he said.
“And at the appointed time and place, you retrieve the passport I’ll have sent back stateside.”
He sucked so hard on the cigarette the tobacco crackled as it burned. “You can’t do this to me.”
She flicked her own cigarette out the window. “But I already have, dear.”
“I rescued you,” he said.
“You what?”
“From a prison you built for yourself. I spent fucking years getting you ready for this. If that’s not love, then what—”
“You want me to believe you love me?” She pulled to the side of the road and slammed the shift into park. “Then get me out of this country, give me access to the money, and trust I’ll send you the passport.” She stabbed the air between them with her finger, surprised at the swift appearance and infinite depth of her rage. “Because, Brian? There is no other fucking deal on the table.”
He dropped his gaze and looked out at the gray road and blue sky and the fields yellow with the promise of summer.
Now, she thought, comes the moment when he threatens you.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay, what?”
“I’ll give you what you want.”
“And what’s that?”