“Don’t pretend you don’t know who I am!” Ben roared, moving closer.
Erik pulled Linda back, and John Brace was quick to move in front of them, hold up a hand.
“Stay back, man. What do you want?”
John Brace suddenly seemed even tougher, harder, with his shaved head and broad shoulders, deep authoritative voice. The briefcase he clutched in his hand didn’t diminish this image; he looked as though he was prepared to use it as a weapon or a shield.
“She doesn’t love you, Erik,” Ben said, his voice cracking like an adolescent boy’s. “She loves me.”
Linda could see his whole body was quaking. She realized suddenly, clearly, that something was clinically wrong with him. He wasn’t just desperate or upset, or lovesick. She had a cold dawning, a terrible fear for his family, those two sweet-faced girls, his pretty wife. When he moved a step closer, into the orange glow of a street lamp, he seemed deranged, eyes wild, jaw clenching and unclenching, big chest heaving.
John spread his arms out and started herding them backward. He said quietly, “He has a gun.”
Then Linda saw it, too. She’d been so focused on his face, how totally unself-conscious he was, how lost in his own mind, she hadn’t noticed. Then he started lifting his arm.
She broke from Erik, started running toward Ben. She felt Erik, then John’s hands on her, holding her back. Heard them both yelling, following close behind as she shifted away from them. She came to stop in front of Ben, feeling small and insubstantial before him. His height and breadth, the size of his anger dwarfed her. She wanted to scream at him. Instead she put her hand on his chest and whispered, “Ben, we have children. Think about what you’re doing to your girls right now. Please.”
He seemed to hear, to shrink at her words. Anger left him, dropped the features of his face into a sagging sadness, left his shoulders to slump forward.
Then Erik was pulling her back and there was shouting all around them. Uniformed officers seemed to have poured out of everywhere, there were so many emerging from the doors of the precinct building and coming out of cars. A shift change.
Then so many different voices echoing on the concrete of the buildings around them. Freeze! Drop that weapon! Drop it! Drop it! Drop it! Coming from everywhere like the call of crows.
Erik and John pulled Linda back and she was screaming, No, no, no! Because she knew. She saw it in Ben’s eyes and watched as it spread across his face, that smile, that “Fuck you, world” smile. She’d seen it before, it was etched in her spirit, had dictated in so many ways the course of her life. She’d looked for it in every face, beneath the flimsy veils they all wore. She’d finally found it in Ben. No, no, no! She saw him raise the gun beneath his chin and, without hesitating, pull the trigger. And then in a horrible explosion of light and sound, a dreadful spray of red, it all disappeared.
20
A suicide, a miscarriage, a sudden disappearance. All abbreviations, interruptions. Variations on a theme that has run through my life.
The tickets were easily purchased with Jack’s credit card, and even though as we waited to board the plane I saw my picture flash briefly on one of the televisions mounted up high, no one even glanced in my direction. The sound was down for some reason. The text on the screen read: Real-Life Mystery: The Downtown Murder of Three People Linked to Missing Husband of Bestselling Author. The story was obviously small news at this point. It wasn’t even on the screen for thirty seconds.
I was five years younger in that photo and maybe ten pounds heavier when it was taken, but I might still have been recognizable if I hadn’t tied back my hair into a bun at the base of my neck, tucked it beneath a gray knit cap pulled down over the bandage on my head, and donned a pair of round wire-rimmed glasses that I needed but never wore.
But maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was the simple fact, as Marcus always claimed, that people weren’t looking anymore. They’ve got their earbuds in. They’re staring at tiny screens that fit in a palm. They’re talking on the phone, eyes blank, unseeing.
Even though I knew I wasn’t officially a suspect, I kept waiting for the police to arrive. Maybe my name was on some kind of a watch list of people not allowed to leave the country? I’d expected to be stopped at check-in, at security. But no, we’d glided through security checks, while a young mother was forced to empty her bags, carry a weeping toddler through one of those machines that blows air on you in sharp, quick blasts. Her little boy screamed in fright. I thought of my sister, the kids, as we walked past them.
ANOTHER THEME THAT runs though my life: airplanes. After my father’s death, I spent long hours lying in the grass behind my house, staring up at the sky. I was obsessed with the idea of direction, the Catholic concept of heaven being up and hell being down. I knew suicide was a sin, punishable by eternal damnation. I tried to imagine endless suffering for my father. I couldn’t. I couldn’t see him punished for being too afraid, too weak, and too sad to go on. It didn’t seem right-nor did the idea of his lofting up to some cloud to the sound of harp music work for me. It all seemed a bit silly, a bit earthly even to my young mind, a man-made idea, a desperate attempt to explain the unknowable.
I started noticing airplanes then. Their white, silent flight filled me with a terrible longing. I imagined the fuselage filled with passengers en route to some fabulous destination. Their lives were their own, free from tragedy and sadness. The kind of grief that held me in its grip was impossible for them. The desire to be high and far away from my life, to be someone else, anywhere else, was a physical pain, a hole in my center.
No matter where you go, there you are. Fred, of course; one of his wisdom one-liners. He’d come to join me, sat down in the wet grass beside me. I’d pointed up at the plane, told him I wished I were there. “That’s the thing you can never escape, try as you might,” he said. “Try as you might. Pick your poison-drugs, alcohol. You always wake up with yourself eventually.”
“Not him. Not my father.”
Fred went still, looked at me carefully. “Suicide is not an escape. It’s an end.”
“How do you know?”
He was quiet for so long, I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then: “I suppose I don’t really know. But I can only imagine that an action that destroys life and hope, which leaves only anger and sadness in its wake, can’t be the right course.”
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t have the words to say that I thought his idea was incomplete, unsatisfying. That maybe it was the only course open when you finally realize you can’t escape yourself and you can’t live with yourself. Maybe an end is an escape.
“Want some ice cream?” he asked me then.
“Okay.”
MAYBE IT WAS a longing like this that drove my husband. That sickening, ardent desire to be anyone, anywhere else. Maybe he chose the alternative of stepping into someone else’s skin, someone else’s name, someone else’s life. Less final than suicide, maybe even an act of hope that someplace else is better than here.
A FEW HOURS earlier we returned to Jack’s apartment and retrieved an envelope of cash from beneath his mattress. The next steps weren’t as clear to him as they were to me.
“You don’t even know that was an answer to your question. He was a dying man. He might not have even heard you.”
The truth was, it wasn’t just that. In fact, when he said the word-Praha-it made a deep kind of sense to me, as though I’d known it all along. Jack wouldn’t buy that. After all, who was going to trust my instincts at the moment? I had to convince him.
“Marcus is not going to stay in the U.S. He can’t. He has run his con and now he’s going back where he came from.”