Love Her Madly (24 page)

I tuned back in to McMurphy. Now that his cigarette was extinguished, he was rubbing his large hands together, creating a sandpaper sound. “I asked her to dinner that night. I was honestly very intrigued by her. She seemed so sweet and bright.”

My eyes stayed on his hands. He wore a gold wedding band, dull with age.

“You're married.”

He looked away, a hint of color enlivening his cheeks. “It wasn't like that. I guess she just reminded me of the California girls I grew up with back home. She was this American girl who had lived out this crazy adventure, and she needed my help. I just wanted to hear more about her life.”

With great force of will, I managed to say nothing.

“She turned me down. She was sweet about it, of course. She said she lived out in the jungle, past the jungle, so she had several hours of rough travel ahead of her. She said something like, ‘If this was America, and I could hop onto a nice, paved highway, I would happily accept.' ” He pressed his lips together
and clutched one hand with the other as if it needed to be subdued.

“Who is her husband?”

“I don't know anymore. Let's just say that her story has not stayed consistent.”

“How so?”

He sighed, and wiped a palm across his face. I couldn't be certain, but I thought I saw his chin quiver beneath his hand as it passed over. “I really don't know what to believe about her at all, to be perfectly honest with you, Gloria. I've done so much for her. She's cost me, literally, everything, and then just disappeared, as if none of my sacrifices meant anything to her.” His voice cracked, and he lowered his head so I couldn't see his face. His shoulders trembled with a weird coiled tension that made me extremely nervous. He exhaled, and with a bashful smile asked, “Do you have anything to drink in here?”

Jesus
, I thought.
What a lush
.

But in truth, I could have used a shot myself.

“No. I'm sorry.”

He reached a long arm down to the floor. I half expected him to produce a flask, but instead, he lifted a thin laptop case from his bag. “I realize that I may seem a little emotional, but I'm extremely worried. Cyn's more than just another case to me. You've probably already figured that out.”

“Yeah,” I said, watching as he powered up the laptop. He typed for a second, and turned the screen to face me. I couldn't help but gasp when I saw Cyn, frozen on the brink of speech, seated in a leather chair within a room paneled with wood so dark, it appeared almost black. She was illuminated angelically in the glow of the screen, seeming to ward off the dark shadows that surrounded her by pure force of personality.

He leaned back, watching me as I gaped at the face on the screen.

“She never came back to my office after that first visit. I left Colombia three years ago, thinking I would never see her again. But then, a few months ago, I got an e-mail from her out of the blue saying that she was in trouble and needed to speak to me. We arranged a video conference. I taped it, just in case I needed to protect myself from any liability. Would you like to see some of it? I need your help. This may help convince you that I'm not some nut.”

“I don't think that.” I'd pegged him as a lot of other things, but staring at Cyn's face on the screen in front of me, I did not think he was a nut.

He stood and leaned over, pointing a nicotine-stained digit at the keyboard.

“Hit that key to play it. Can you direct me to the men's? I'd rather not . . .” He gestured toward the laptop.

“Down the hall on the left,” I said, unable to look away from the screen. As he left, I pressed the “Play” button, and Cyn's voice, unnaturally cheerful, chimed thinly through the laptop's tiny speakers.

I felt goose bumps race across my flesh and leaned in close to the screen, willing my eyes to accept it. She'd been around. For seven years. Without a call or an e-mail or a goddamn postcard.
Why?

I realized I wanted the video. I had to get it, otherwise I might begin to doubt it all the moment McMurphy walked out the door. I reached into my desk and grabbed the first flash drive that I found. I stuck it into McMurphy's computer, opened his drive, and traced the video back to a folder named CynX. There were about twenty other files, similarly named. I held my breath, selected all, and hit “Copy.” I was amazed at myself, brazenly stealing McMurphy's private files, but something also told me I was not getting the complete story. McMurphy's laptop began making strange grinding noises, and I fought back a
wave of panic, my nail beds pressed white against the surface of my desk as I stared at the screen. My drive showed that it was loading files, albeit at an incredibly slow pace. If McMurphy suddenly returned to find me in the middle of this betrayal, our relationship could take a very, very bad turn. For all I really knew, he was a double agent, sent to reclaim Cyn and drag her back to Colombia, or worse, end her here and toss her body in the Jersey Pine Barrens. With a sense of rising paranoia, I lifted up my office phone and dialed 9 and 1, and rested the handset on my shoulder.

It was killing me to look at the lack of progress on the load bar, so I focused on Cyn, who was nodding encouragingly in response to McMurphy's description of his new life in New York. She was wearing a prim, rose-colored blouse and pearls. A costume, obviously. She'd nailed McMurphy as the type to fall hard for a damsel in distress, and it was clear that she was playing her part for all she was worth. This was the Cyn I knew, with her back against the wall. Something big had to be at stake.

I heard McMurphy's steps coming down the hall, and my heart palpitated, the sweat now rolling down my sides. The download hovered at the brink of completion. I forced myself to breathe and told myself I would count to three, and whether the copy was finished or not, I would eject the drive.

One. His footfalls were three doors away, just past the water cooler. Two. The status bar still read “working . . .” Three. The download completed, and I yanked the flash drive from the laptop, letting it fall soundlessly into my lap. When McMurphy walked in, I was holding his laptop in both hands, awkwardly. I hung up the phone, as casually as possible.

“Trying to find the volume toggle,” I lied.

He took the laptop and turned it up, just as Cyn was laughing. He grimaced. “I take it you believe me?”

“Yes, I believe you.”

He stopped the video and closed the laptop. “I know she's very brave and very independent, but she needs help. Coming back home to the States was a lot for her to handle.” He paused, gently caressing the laptop resting on his thighs. When he began speaking again, his tone was soft and confiding. “We had a disagreement. I overreacted a little. I want her to know that I'm not angry. There's nothing more important to me than her safety.”

His eyes had gone dewy, and he hunched in his seat like a defeated giant.

“Can I ask you a personal question, Mr. McMurphy?”

“Go ahead.”

“Are you still married?”

His right hand swept across his left, grazing his wedding band. “Separated. Things had been rocky for a while but . . . she didn't want me to have anything to do with Cyn. When she found out I was helping her come to the United States, she left me. Took our two kids.” He said it flatly, as if all of the emotions he had were reserved for Cyn. “She served me the divorce papers last week, the same day Cyn vanished from our hotel room. So, you see, considering everything, if anything happened to her, I don't know what I'd do.”

“What makes you think something might happen to her?”

“I'm not the only one looking for her.” He picked up his laptop, and while attempting to resettle it in its case, dropped it onto my handbag on the desk. My bag fell against the cup with the spoiled coffee and the cigarette butts, tipping it over.

“Excuse me,” he said, lifting my bag quickly away from the spill. “That was so clumsy.”

I looked up and saw his hands were shaking. I took my bag from his grasp and wiped up the spill. “Don't worry about it,” I said. There was a tickling in my head. Something that I wanted to ask, but it eluded me.

McMurphy stood, packing up his laptop. “I should be
going. She might be back at the hotel for all I know.” He pulled a business card from his pocket and scrawled a number on the back. “Obviously, I'm not in the office, so when you see her, please call my cell.”

“You mean, if I see her.”

He pulled on his coat, the movement rousing its acrid funk. “No, I mean when. She's coming for you. Try to keep her in one place, if you can. And take my advice: be careful and don't trust her.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Raj

I heard the train coming as I rushed down the slick stairs into the station. I made it into the car just as the doors closed and collapsed into an empty seat. In just a few minutes, less than half an hour, we would meet. The idea simultaneously thrilled me and left me cold with apprehension.

I checked out my reflection in the dark glass of the train window opposite me, beneath which a bone-thin Asian woman sat staring into space, a red plastic bag of groceries balanced on either thigh. I looked passable. Slightly frazzled, certainly damp. I suspected that I still carried the lingering sourness of flop sweat in my sweater, but my scarf, when I tested it, smelled only of the cologne that Glo had bought me for Christmas.

I realized with a sudden pang that I hadn't called Glo after my show like I normally did. In truth, I hadn't been in a big hurry to tell her about my onstage blackout, or the death knell of a conversation I'd had with Marshall. Then I'd seen the theater door. Glo would probably perceive my not calling as neglect, or a cold war continuation of our argument from the night before. Things were already too rocky between us for me to let that idea stand. I vowed to text her just as soon as I got off the train, and tell her an unexpected meeting had arisen. The astonishing details could wait until I got home and could
deliver them face-to-face. She'd probably be a little miffed that Cyn had wanted to see me first, but considering the miraculous improbability of it all, she'd get over it fast.

I heard a burst of female laughter and noted a quartet of attractive ladies, all dressed up for a night on the town. They were young, college girls from the look of it. We had been that young not so very long ago. I looked away from their skintight skirts and strappy high-heeled sandals, a truly masochistic choice for such a cold, rainy night. They tittered and teased one another, aloft in a heady world of gritty excitements. So was I, for that matter.

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply through my nose, like I did whenever I felt the first tickle of stage fright. Seeing Cyn wasn't a performance, but I still felt deeply unprepared, unsure how I should face her or what I would feel when I finally saw her up close. In the bar, she would no longer be a phantom, but instead my living breathing ex-lover, close enough to touch. I had so many questions. Of course I was ecstatic that she was alive and well, but I was also extremely pissed off that she had let us believe that she was dead. That was really, truly fucked. I couldn't think of a reason that would make someone do that, and unless she supplied some really compelling explanation, I couldn't see how we would ever trust her again.

The train stopped and the doors opened, granting release to the college girls and access to new bodies; a great human tidal flow. My car remained mostly empty. In four more stops, and a quick walk, I'd be there.

Printing out Cyn's picture that morning was the first time in years that I'd really allowed myself to revisit her in detail. After her disappearance, it had been too painful. I missed her, viscerally, even when I wasn't trying to think about her. Her smell, the feel of her lips on mine, the way that she would let me hold her in the night, whispering stories into her ear until we both fell
asleep. More than that, I'd miss talking with her. For months, a random thought would trigger a memory of some debate we'd had, or some big idea that we'd wondered about together, speculating grandly in that quintessential college-kid way. She always saw things differently. Even years later, I would read something that I knew would light her up and feel a dull ache. Her light was out, forever.

The train stopped again. The doors open and shut.

I found myself flashing back to my college girls, the two of them smiling up at me from Glo's bed on the night that Cyn had the big idea for a binary love affair. I felt like I was floating when I drifted down their stairs that night, but within days, reality set in, and I felt the weight of what I'd agreed to like the heaviest acting role ever. My paired audience, the most exacting critics. The green eyes of one following my every gesture, snapping to crystalline attention whenever I moved within reaching distance of her beloved rival. I touch Cyn, I feel Glo's eyes on my hand, questioning, comparing, calculating, even when she's not in the room. While Cyn, sphinxlike, watched me flirt with Glo with a lazy disinterest, like we were characters in some mildly engaging television show. If jealousy was part of Cyn's emotional roster, I never saw it. I convinced myself it was all a mask. I suspected her as the superior actor.

It had gotten so stressful that I began to avoid them when they were together, sometimes even avoid them alone. I played the part even when they weren't around, struggling to treat them equally in my heart and in my mind, excoriating myself for signs of preference. But inevitably, my heart made its choice. I loved Glo more, and not just because loving her was easier. I slapped the thought down when it arose and vowed to try harder with Cyn. I didn't want to be the one to make the experiment fail.

To cope, I drowned myself in scripts, my socially sanctioned fantasy worlds. The works I loved best were the most clear-cut,
their heroes facing death in battle, or loss of liberty or a simple goddamn marriage plot. I envied the characters, even the most miserable, because they at least could take action. I had no idea what actions I could take that wouldn't end up badly hurting one or all of us. I didn't want to lose anything, but I didn't know how much longer I could keep up the act. I was failing, dangerously.

I looked down at my lap and realized my hands had balled into fists. I eased them open and tugged at the neck of my sweater. It was too hot in the train. I couldn't wait to get off and get the meeting over with before my mind dredged up all the bad stuff that I had allowed to sink like toxic waste to the depths of my memory.

As if sensing my rising impatience, the train suddenly screeched to a halt. The jolt sent a teenager, who had been leaning against the door across from me, flying against the side of the seats. He cursed but managed not to drop his phone. There was a pause of a couple of seconds when it seemed like we might resume, but then the train shook with a great shudder and there was a loud hydraulic hiss as the machinery beneath us powered down.

Attention, passengers:
Due to an emergency situation, this train is temporarily out of service
—

Quite unlike the standard incoherently mumbled announcement, this conductor's voice came through the speakers crystal clear, each syllable vibrating with distress. The intercom remained on, buzzing softly, for a second after the transmission, and I thought I heard her report, “Driver couldn't do anything. Jumper's underneath—” The intercom kicked off, and the train car filled with moans of discontent. Passengers who had been standing shuffled toward empty seats and settled in, arms crossed, radiating dissatisfaction.

It won't be long
, I told myself, adamantly denying everything I'd thought I'd just heard.

I focused my thoughts on something practical. When I met up with Cyn, in a matter of minutes, how I should greet her. Handshake? Hug? Kiss on the cheek?

The door leading to the front of the train slid open with a screech, and a Hispanic woman led her tearful preteen daughter to an empty bench. Everyone stared as the mother spoke soothingly to her daughter, stroking the girl's dark braids.

An old woman seated opposite them asked if she could be of help.

The mother shook her head. “We were in the front car. The train hit someone.” She nodded down at her daughter. “She saw.”

I felt my gorge rise and gripped the seat beneath me. I had an absolute horror of train strikes. I don't know if I watched
Stand by Me
at too tender an age, or fixated on
Anna Karenina
too deeply in high school lit, but I harbored a secret terror of the platform edge. My greatest fear wasn't even that I would get pushed—I kept my back against the wall whenever possible to avoid a psychopath's shove—but that I would accidentally witness a suicide. I had nightmares about it. The blaring horn of the train. The screams of fellow passengers. Bright red arcs of blood splashing up against the white tiles.

I dipped my head and stared at the toes of my shoes, trying to stay calm. Why had this happened
now
, of all times?

I stood, feeling the ground beneath me sway, and noted that the car before ours was filling with refugees from the lead car. The door opened and more people trudged through, every face downcast. A woman who had been holding a handkerchief to her face lowered it as she took a seat next to the Asian woman. As the car began to fill, conversations broke out between the witnesses and their seatmates. I didn't want to listen, but the thing about gory details is, they're enthralling.

“You could feel it when we hit her. Like a
thump-thump
.”

“Someone said she ended up under the back wheels.”

“They made an announcement not to move, but the smell, it was terrible. I had to get outta there—”

“—even worse when the door opened.”

“I didn't look, but someone said you could see her. It was some blond white lady. You'd have to be crazy—”

“You okay, bro?” I heard. I looked up into the face of the teenager who had almost fallen. He was eyeing me warily, as if I might be preparing to puke on his sneakers.

I managed to nod, and caught my reflection in the black mirror of the door. The sight of my sweaty, bloodless face was not encouraging, and I too began to worry about the future of my neighbor's shoes. I leaned my forehead against the disgusting handrail, waiting for the spins to pass.

“This is the second time this has happened to me this year,” announced a middle-aged man who wore the muddy boots of a construction worker as he dropped into my abandoned seat. “It's gonna be forty-five minutes, at least, till they fish her out. My advice is, get comfortable.”

No, no,
no.

I yanked the phone from my bag and pulled up some music, pressing the earbuds deep into my skull. Despite my efforts not to, I'd already imagined the dead woman under the car, her tragically bruised organs drifting to rest across those filthy black tracks.

Some
blond, white woman
.

In my mind, I gazed deep into Cyn's dark eyes in the ­theater. I recalled the lifeless expression she wore as she threw herself into the cab, and the funereal face she'd directed at me in the bar. She was miserable, that was obvious to me now, but she wouldn't . . . I widened my stance, feeling light-headed as the pieces fell together, forming a truly gruesome picture. She knew I'd be coming from the Owl, knew the train I would be taking.
Was it possible that she'd thrown herself in front of my train as some bizarre statement?

“No. That's crazy,” I said, loud enough, and with enough conviction, to make people back away from me. I looked up and saw a collection of wary eyes checking me out, darting away like rabbits the second I looked their direction. I was
that guy
on the train.

I shouldered my bag, and the crowd in the car parted, relieved to be rid of me. I walked through the masses and stepped out onto the small platform bridging the cars, where I paused, inhaling the darkness of the tunnel. If death was present, I didn't smell it in the air.

It was a perverse thought. What the fuck was wrong with me?

I slid open the heavy metal door and moved to the next car. Then the next, trying to focus on my music and outrun my imagination. To get out of my head, I made an effort to notice other people. A bad feeling had settled into the train. I saw it echoed on the faces that surrounded me, all of us hired mourners, destined to get stiffed on the pay. I shrugged off my sweater and scarf as I moved. Finally I reached the last car, the farthest-possible place from the body that I had decided, definitively, was not Cyn's.

She was never, I convinced myself,
that
sick.

I took a seat, feeling my anxiety abate. But then it rose afresh as I checked my phone. It was already 11:50. If Joe Construction was right, I would be an hour late. Would she still be there? I had no idea. I could never predict anything with Cyn, ever, which is probably the biggest reason that things fell apart for us so spectacularly.

It all went down right before the girls left for Costa Rica. Cyn and I were alone together for a week, something that had never happened before. I was feeling a little sorry for myself because I knew as soon as Glo returned, they would both be
heading off to Costa Rica. Immature asshole that I was at the time, I held Cyn's excitement against her, mostly because it was happiness that had nothing to do with me. There was also the sex thing, the supercell disturbance over our relationship that only darkened and never broke. Whenever we were alone together in a room with a bed, it thundered, or, at least, it thundered for me.

At first I didn't ask for anything. But as the months wore on, I couldn't hold that good-guy posture, and soon, even to myself, I was the dick boyfriend from every TV movie ever, pressuring my virtuous girlfriend into something she “wasn't ready for.” There were very dark moments, like when we'd be making out in my bed at night, and she'd abruptly stop, pull on a shirt, and roll onto her side, cutting off her affection like turning off a tap. Or the times when I would drop her off at Ecstasy II. She would kiss me good-bye, and I would drive off nearly blind with rage. How different, I fumed, was what she gave me from what she gave her paying customers?

I wondered if she didn't want me. If she didn't think I knew what I was doing, or thought I couldn't please her. Maybe despite what she said, she didn't actually find me all that attractive. I needed some answer to wrap my mind around, other than the simplest one: that she was frigid, or cruel. I sometimes thought maybe she was crazy, that her parents had planted some ineradicable virgin complex in her head, which applied only to her behavior with me, while to the rest of the world she flaunted herself as the South's most willing whore. I hated myself for having such thoughts about someone I loved. But I was greedy. I was hungry. I felt entitled. I was, and this is true, desperate to connect with her. Despite all of our big deep talks, I still felt like I didn't really know her. She had this unreachable secret core that seemed impossible to penetrate. Sometimes her face would turn distant and she'd go quiet, and I'd know she was
there, in that place that she wouldn't acknowledge and to which I couldn't journey.