Before He Finds Her (16 page)

“I promise, I’m a college student,” she said.

“You promise.” He laughed. “No, you’re a liar. I can spot a liar every time.” He glanced around his office at all those photographs, as if refueling. Then he massaged his temples. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “All right, Alice. I’ll tell you what I know.” He leaned in closer. “I know two things: I know you’re going to leave through the door you came in. And I know it’s going to happen right now.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me.”

Her vision began to get swimmy, and she fought to control herself. “Mr. Magruder—”

He reclined in his seat and folded his arms. “I’m waiting for my two things to come true, dear.”

“I can ask other questions.” She looked down at her notebook, the useless list. “What is it like to inform so many millions—”

“Let me make it plainer.” His voice had hardened. “Get the fuck out of my office.”

She stood up, placed her notebook back into her backpack. She felt Magruder’s stare as she walked to the door. She felt it all the way down the hall to the elevator—which took an eternity to arrive.

“Don’t keep pressing the button,” the receptionist said. “It doesn’t make it come any faster.”

After hurrying past the security guard and leaving the lobby, she walked a full two blocks before realizing she was going in the wrong direction, then backtracked the twenty blocks to Penn Station. Her feet throbbed, and she felt lightheaded and nauseous from not eating—she’d been too nervous to eat for most of the day—and all she wanted was to lose herself in the train terminal at rush hour, where thousands of people would cocoon her in anonymity.

When she got there, she saw from the list of departures that the next Coast Line wasn’t for 30 minutes, and braving the coffee smell, she stood in line to buy three donuts and a bottle of orange juice. She moved away from the counter so that she would no longer smell the coffee, sat against the terminal wall, and bit into the first donut. It was the most incredible thing she’d ever tasted. All around her, throngs weaved past one another. If everybody who lived in Fredonia was put inside this railroad station, it probably wouldn’t be this crowded, but at the moment she felt reassured by all those people, to be just one among them, an anonymous grain of sand on the beach.

She filled her stomach and was ignored by everyone. She’d botched the interview badly, probably left West Virginia for nothing—but at least she was in Penn Station, this subterranean place of human voices and music and track announcements. It was wonderful and safe. A paradise. A womb. She could stay here forever.

She drank some juice, wiped her lips with a napkin. As she was deciding which donut to eat next, a tall man in a yellowed tank top and camouflage pants ran past. He was middle age at least, his hair ratty and gray, but he had ropy arms. He’d barely passed her when a heavy uniformed policeman caught up and tackled him to the hard floor. Then an even more massive officer jumped on top of the man, who was already down, and his face mashed into the ground. This second officer lay across him, covering him with his body, while the first officer yanked the man’s arms behind him and snapped handcuffs around his wrists. By this time the man was howling wordlessly, like an animal badly hurt, and the first officer was telling him to shut up, shut up right now, as people nearby stopped what they were doing and edged closer, and a few started taking pictures with their cell phones, and one man in a business suit said to another man in a business suit, “Fucking New York,” and when Melanie saw the small pool of blood on the ground near the man’s head, the donut she’d just eaten felt like a stone in her gut.

Afraid to stand because her legs might not support her, she squeezed her eyes shut, covered her ears, and started reciting the names of Nancy Drew characters as if it were a litany:
Carson, Nancy’s father. Eloise, Nancy’s aunt. George, the tomboy; Bess, George’s plump cousin; Ned Nickerson, Nancy’s boyfriend; Hannah, the housekeeper.
…

Part 2

10

1965

His was a love story, though the love came later. First came all the climbing.

As a young boy, on nights when his father and mother put too much beer or vodka into themselves and got to screaming and hurling picture frames containing happier times, Ramsey would scurry up the black oak behind the apartment building, perch in a nook, and sway with the highest branches. Eighty feet up, his breathing eased. He’d sit up there for two or three hours before becoming so drowsy that he feared falling in his sleep or so butt-sore that he had no choice but to climb down again and face the loud and unkind earth.

Yet the earth wasn’t always unkind. Saturday afternoons, his mother sometimes took him ice-skating. He kept to the perimeter, hand on rail, but enjoyed the friction of his blades on the ice. He liked watching his mother, an expert skater. A single warm-up loop and she was drifting toward the center, where she might slide backward, spin, even leap into the air. While the strange truck smoothed the ice, Ramsey and his mother would put quarters into a vending machine near the skate-rental counter, and a paper cup would drop down and begin to fill. They passed the salty chicken broth back and forth. It gave them the warmth they needed for another hour on the ice.

And sometimes he went with his father to the Shark Fin boatyard, where Ramsey would watch his old man climb inside churning engine rooms as large as bedrooms. His father might explain a thing or two about whatever he was working on. Sometimes he took advantage of Ramsey’s smaller size and asked him to squeeze into a space. More often, he let Ramsey explore the docks and climb aboard the dry-docked yachts. The other men in the boatyard trusted Ramsey not to drown or fall or break anything. They always took the time to shake his hand, not because they cared about him but because they respected his father. Ramsey liked these men’s faces, red and deeply lined from the wind and sun, and he liked their generous laughs and the black coffee they drank out of Styrofoam cups, and how their clothes were always stained with grease from a hard day’s work. He liked knowing that his father was one of these men.

When the workday was over, the two of them would share a Dr Pepper at the end of the dock overlooking the bay. Standing there, the sun warming the backs of their necks, his father would look out at the charter boats returning with their day’s catch, a cloud of seagulls hovering over the decks.

I got my mind set on a thirty-eight-foot Sea Ray
, he’d say. Or:
I got my mind set on a forty-six-foot Viking
. Or maybe that day his mind would be set on some other yacht, as if he had all the money in the world to spend and all the time in the world to contemplate his purchase.

It would be years before Ramsey started to sort out just how much of his parents’ troubles came from life’s usual slop of suffering—money troubles, boredom, graceless aging—and how much was due to the particularly poor alchemy of two people with hard tempers and short fuses. More and more, anything could set their ferocity into motion: something quoted from a newspaper, someone’s car in the wrong parking space, a comment, a glance, or nothing at all. Ramsey would sit rigidly on the sofa or on his bedroom floor and wait for it to start. He could always sense it in the atmosphere, the way animals know a storm is coming. And when one parent’s remark begat a louder response, and when the profanity started, and certainly by the time the first coaster or mug or TV remote got slammed down onto a coffee table or hurled against a wall, Ramsey would be long gone, already halfway up his tree. His parents never stopped him or called his name. When he came home again, they never asked him where he’d been. Then again, the flecks of dirt and crumbles of tree bark on his clothes and in his hair surely gave him away.

One fall night a week before his ninth birthday, Ramsey was hiding in his tree and imagining, as he often did, how it might be to live alone in a log cabin in the mountains, maybe by some lake, where at night all you heard were crickets and coyotes, and where there were a zillion stars overhead. He’d been learning constellations at school and was naming them to himself when a patrol car pulled silently up to the apartment building, its flashing lights blotting out the stars and brightening the branches around him like a multicolored strobe. He felt cold, sitting up there without moving, but seeing the patrol car made him start to sweat. One of his parents, he figured, had finally gone and killed the other. Neither had resorted to physical violence before, unless you counted the sliver of glass lodged in the meaty part of his mother’s hand, just below the thumb, from when she’d slammed down and shattered a mug. But their rage had grown worse in recent months, and now anything seemed possible.

But no: His parents were still shouting at each other. The wind that night came from the west, carrying their voices all the way up the tree.

The officer knocked. The shouting halted.

A short while later, the officer emerged from the apartment, shook his head once as if clearing it of muck, walked to his car, and sat in it for several minutes with the headlights off. Like the officer, Ramsey sat and waited for the fighting to resume. When the officer finally drove away, Ramsey counted to five hundred before climbing down again.

“You probably saw what happened here tonight,” his father said to him, sitting at the foot of Ramsey’s bed an hour later. It was a school night. Ramsey already dreaded having to wake up in a few hours. He watched the fish decals stuck to the walls. During the day they looked happy, but at night, lit by the dim lamp on his dresser, they were shadowy and sinister. But because they’d always been there, he never thought of asking that they be taken down.

“The police came,” Ramsey said.

“They came because some nosy neighbor felt he had to get involved.” His father found one of Ramsey’s feet under the covers and began rubbing it in both of his hands. “But it’s true, your mother and I are no good at keeping our mouths shut. We’re going to try fixing that.”

Ever since Ramsey could remember, his father’s coarse thumb on the soles of his feet calmed him. It never tickled. “I don’t like it when you fight,” Ramsey said.

“Of course you don’t. I don’t like it, either. That’s why your mother and I are going to fix it.”

“You promise?” In daylight he never would have dared ask his father to promise anything. But the dark bedroom made it hard to see his father’s face and therefore easier to push.

The rubbing stopped. “Listen to me, son. You don’t know yet what it’s like to be in love. How sometimes it makes you crazy.”

“You’re in love with Mom?”

His father laughed. “Indeed, I am. Most of the time, anyway.”

He’d never tell his father this, but Ramsey was in love, too. With Rachel Beaner. But there was no possibility that what he felt, looking over at Rachel in the next row of desks, had anything in common with what his father might have felt, looking at his mother. And besides, Ramsey knew that if he and Rachel ever married, he’d love her
all
of the time. And he’d never raise his voice to her, not ever.

“Then why won’t you promise?”

“Jesus, Ram...” From the kitchen came sounds of dishes being rinsed, then clanking together as they were placed in the drying rack. More than once, his father and mother had fought over not owning a dishwasher. Ramsey couldn’t remember, now, which side either of them was on. Or maybe they’d switched sides. “Yeah, okay, kid,” his father said. “I promise.”

They shook on it in the dark. And for six days, his father kept his promise. His mother maintained her own civility, too, despite not having promised anything. And on the seventh night, a Sunday, the night before Ramsey’s birthday, his father and mother went out for a drive, and only his father came home.

The rain had fallen steadily that day—not violently, but nice—and Ramsey’s mother and father had sat together on the sofa, reading parts of the paper aloud, something they hadn’t done for some time. His mother’s feet were up on his father’s lap. Ramsey lay on the rust-colored carpet reading the comics and listening to the rain on the roof.

After supper, his parents went out on a few errands, his father’s wink—so fast, Ramsey had nearly missed it—leading Ramsey to believe that birthday presents were involved. They left him at home in front of the TV with a glass of soda and a bowl of pretzels. His mother said something to the effect of “We’ll be back in an hour”—but who knew, exactly? By then, Ramsey was fully engrossed in
Lassie
. When the rain began to fall heavier on the roof, he got off the sofa and turned up the volume. Sunday was a good night for TV. He watched
Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color
, then
Branded
. By then he should’ve been in bed.
Bonanza
was on next and when no one returned by the end, he watched
Candid Camera
and then
What’s My Line?,
which his parents sometimes talked about but never let him stay up for. By then he knew something was wrong, and when the building’s superintendent led in two policemen, and Ben Cramer’s father went over to the TV and shut it off, Ramsey—whose arms by now were shaking and legs were shaking and mouth was dry despite all the soda—looked up and, not knowing what to say, said, “Hey, I was watching that!”

“Tell me,” Ramsey said.

Outside. Recess. The day after the funeral.

“You sure you want to hear this?” Larry Ackerman’s father was a cop, which meant that Larry heard the sort of rumors that could be trusted. His parents had no clue that the air-conditioning vent in their bedroom broadcasted all their conversations.

“
Tell me.
”

Larry glanced over at Ben Cramer as if he were Ramsey’s keeper. Maybe for the moment, he was. Ramsey had stayed with Ben’s family in the days leading up to the funeral, and had only returned to the apartment yesterday. Today was his first day back at school, and Ben’s parents must have asked him to stick close—that, or Ben was as loyal a friend as a nine-year-old could ever hope to have.