Stepdog (18 page)

I opened my mouth to talk, then hesitated. I wished I were back in the arboretum, or better yet, the apartment in Sara's arms, or even in my old place or maybe even Dublin or, hell, if we're going for complete regression, possibly my mother's womb. I felt everyone lean cautiously closer to me, as if they were intrigued by my dental work but didn't want to be rude. I wasn't going to be able to fake my way through this.

“I'm sorry,” I said, giving in with a heavy sigh. “There's been a family emergency and I'm a little distracted.”

That was, unexpectedly, pure gold. Immediately the vibe of the room was bubbly again, this time with ten people eager to show the talent (me) that they cared more about my well-being than any of the others, and could do the most for me.

“What's going on?” asked everyone in several concerned variations. Dougie, having shunted off the water-carrier chore to someone else, was practically holding me up.

I could not imagine how to explain the situation succinctly without my looking very bad. “If you don't mind I'd rather not talk about it,” I said.

That pushed me right to the top of the charts. Their attention was suddenly vacuum-sealed to my face. I almost felt suffocated by their assertive compassion.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “There's been . . .” No. I couldn't say it. You can't use words like “kidnapping” or “taken hostage” and then refuse to go into detail, and the detail would make it all seem ludicrous. “There's an emerging situation and I don't think I can talk about it.”
Not bad, Rory,
I thought, and then went out on a limb and added, not untruthfully albeit somewhat misleadingly, “We're waiting to hear from the police.”

The police!
What?
Instant credibility. “What can we do?” asked everyone in several variations.

Suddenly they were putty in my hands. I hadn't wanted that, but it was better than the alternative. “Is anyone hurt? Is anyone dead?” And so on. Which was lovely of them—I don't mean to paint them to be anything but lovely, only I was too overwhelmed to rise to the task of actually deserving their solicitude. What was
the best thing to do now? Stop talking and seem mysterious and possibly tragic? Tell them the truth, and appear to be irreparably odd? Take a different route altogether? Mostly I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.

“I have to get back to Boston,” I said. “I probably should have asked to postpone, I'm terribly sorry—”

I was karmically drenched with a warm loving cascade of assurances that I had done nothing wrong, that I was a terrific team player for coming all the way out here despite the emergency, that they felt awful for having compelled me, and so on—I hardly noticed the specific words, I was aware only that I was getting out quickly, my humiliation undiscovered.

Don't feel too sorry for me, though. Part of me was also furious that I wasn't getting my pat-on-the-head moment, and I wasn't furious at myself, or (at that particular moment) even Jay. I was furious at Sara for not okaying a kennel, back on the day we moved, or better yet, just agreeing to take the dog on the plane. It really was all her fault, it was her fussiness, her coddling the dog, that had led to this bollocks. I was being robbed of my moment, here, and I wanted to be angry at someone else about that robbery. So all in all, I felt like a walking piece of poison, and I was just immensely grateful to get out of there before the poison spread.

“A
RE YOU SURE
you don't want to talk about it?” Dougie asked a few minutes later, in the most confidential voice possible, as he walked with me through the lobby downstairs. But I suspected whatever I said to him would be conveyed back to all the suits. I shook my head.

“I'll tell you as soon as I can talk about it,” I said. “I'm really sorry about this, Dougie, I know you came all the way out here—”

He waved this off. “The agency pays for it. There's a production of
Pinafore
playing off-Broadway and I thought I could take you tonight, but obviously whatever's going on is more important.”

I was genuinely touched by this moment of nostalgia. “You have no idea how much I'd love to have done that,” I said. “Rain check?”

“I'm only here for two nights, but it's Gilbert and Sullivan—somebody will do it somewhere, someday, and we'll go then.”

“Good,” I said. “And thanks, mate. I know none of this would be happening without you.”

“If I live to be a hundred, no gig is ever going to give me the satisfaction of this one,” said Dougie, grinning. “Dude, you so deserve it, and I'm just thrilled to be the conduit.”

God, how I wanted to be in a headspace where I could enjoy and believe that!

“Sorry to sound like a dope,” I said, “but . . . it's bugging me that I can't even remember why we had to have this meeting. I know it was important, but—”

Dougie looked carefully amused by this. “Not really. You were coming through New York anyhow, and a bunch of the suits were in town anyhow, so we thought we'd just have a quick hello while everyone was in the same place. Not a big deal.”

I blinked. I had just exhausted myself and taken time away from the dog hunt, just to show up in a room and do a terrible job of saying hello to a bunch of strangers. One more embarrassing karmic punch in the face. Back in the golden buzz of anticipation, pre-abduction, Dougie must have mentioned this as a casual opportunity and I'd been so high on my impending glory that
I'd seized on it as Significant. How utterly ridiculous of me. I was such a wanker. I'd just given Jay an extra ten hours of getaway time.

“I've got to get back to Boston,” I said faintly, “right away.”

“Call me later, when you can tell me what's going on,” he said. I nodded, gave him a quick hug, and headed out the door.

As soon as I was outside, I called Sara, although I wasn't sure if her plane had landed yet. She answered. “Out of the meeting,” I said simply. Didn't expect any kind of chummy response from her, it was all business, it would be all business, until I got the dog back. “How was your flight?”

“Not bad, considering,” she said. “How was your meeting?”

“Quick,” I said, hoping she'd be too distracted to ask for details.

“How soon can you get back to Boston?”

“I'm heading to the car right now. I'll be back by midafternoon.”

“That's great. Someone left a voice mail while I was in flight, I'll call you back if it's relevant. Otherwise, when you get home, check in with the police,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“Check in with all the shelters.”

“I know.”

“Okay,” she said. “Talk later, then.”

Click
.

So
that
went well.

I
GOT BACK
to the car, and sat inside, feeling the city buzzing all around me, hard and unyielding as a jackhammer. All I wanted to do was collapse onto the steering wheel and take a nap. But I had to get back to Boston, back to Lena's, back to Command Central.

I reached for the ignition.

The phone rang again. Sara.

“Have you left the city yet?”

“We talked seven minutes ago and I hadn't even reached the car park,” I said.

“We have a lead.”

Thank God! “Really? Tell me! See, I knew something would come through.”

“Yeah, it's an amazing bit of luck. I'm going to give you an address. Put it into the GPS and don't stop driving until you get there.”

“I might need to pull over somewhere, I'm not safe to drive unless I take a nap.”

“Get some coffee.”

“If I've got to drive
another
four hours, this is too much tiredness for coffee.”

“Please, Rory, this is
very
time-sensitive. I'll call you back as soon as I can, to explain.”

“All right.” I turned on the plug-in GPS. “Boston?”

“Gardner,” Sara said. “North Carolina.”

N
orth Carolina had definitely not been on my route. And it was a long distance away. I'd never get there without food, gas, and a toilet break. But I knew I better get out of the city first.

I couldn't remember Sara—or Jay—ever mentioning North Carolina . . . what the hell was in North Carolina? I listened as the soothing voice of the GPS lady told me how to head south out of the city, and waited for Sara to call back with an explanation. The GPS lady calmly told me the route she had personally selected for me would take nine hours. Ten with traffic. I could drive from Barcelona to Milan in that time—going through four countries and the southern Alps. I had already driven more than five hours today, some of it through rush-hour traffic.

The Lincoln Tunnel spilled the traffic out into the unspeakable ugliness of industrial New Jersey. Except for Newark Airport, featuring a nice tidy fleet of FedEx planes, it was mostly a sci-fi dystopian vista of cement, sprawl, and smoke-belching factories along a twelve-lane highway. The wires of the power grid hovered
everywhere. Marsh grass peeked up from the Citgo storage-bin facilities but amidst all the concrete, it didn't look organic; it just looked like mismanagement.

After a few miles, nature started to gain some ground, but only as something nobody had gotten around to paving over yet. I stopped at a Traveler's Aid for the toilet, and to buy some horrible foodlike substances, fuel the car, and get back on the road.

After about half an hour, Sara called back, sounding anxious and excited.

“I have a cousin named Alex Craggs. He's actually my second cousin once removed, my mom had the kind of family that kept tabs on that sort of thing. He's an accountant.”

“And I need to know this why?”

“We were great pals, we'd visit each other vacationing when we were growing up. I didn't see him for years, but when Jonathan and I first got together, we decided to take a road trip. Since Alex had moved to North Carolina and I wanted to catch up with him, we decided to make him our destination. Can you hear me?” she asked, sounding either irritated or concerned, I couldn't tell which over the white noise of the MINI going eighty-five.

“Alex Craggs. North Carolina. Cousin. Accountant.”

“All right. So. He had gone native. He's even got a little southern accent now.”

“Let's cut to the chase, he does the Ku Klux Klan's taxes, doesn't he?”

“It's nothing like that. He and Jonathan hit it off, which was really surprising. I would never have anticipated that.”

“It's hard to imagine Jay befriending an accountant,” I agreed.

She ignored this. “Anyhow, they got along so well, and Jonathan
had started making good money and wanted a vacation home, so he decided to buy a little cabin in Gardner. We stayed there several times, and even took Cody once when she was a puppy. So Alex has met Cody.”

“Okay,” I said.

“When Jay and I split, Jay stopped going there. I thought he had sold the cabin, so it didn't occur to me to call Alex. But then Alex called this morning, that was the message on my voice mail, and he said, ‘Sara, this is strange, I saw Jonathan in the Piggly Wiggly, but he was trying to avoid me. I was just wondering if you knew anything about his coming back here.'”

I felt relief flood through me, and gratitude for this beneficent all-seeing cousin who was going to save my arse. I had no idea what I'd do when I got there, but at least now I had a place to go—complete with in-house ally!

“That's fantastic,” I said. “I'll drive straight there. What's a Piggly Wiggly?”

“Supermarket chain. Let me warn you, though, Rory, I can't say he was thrilled to learn about you.”

“Why?”

“He didn't know you existed till an hour ago, so he gave me the third degree and I don't know if I sold him on the validity of our marriage.”

“Accountants are so anal and proper. It's none of his business,” I said.

“It is if we want him to help us.”

“You're family! Isn't that enough?”

“Mmm . . .” she said carefully.

“Mmm? What does ‘mmm' mean? Why ‘mmm'?” Why
couldn't this just be simple? Why couldn't
something
about our circumstances be
simple
?

“Well . . . okay, for starters,
before
he was an accountant, he served in Iraq and Afghanistan, he was in the army, so he's got more of a band-of-brothers kind of loyalty than a conventional sense of family loyalty.”

“What do you mean when you say that? You've never seen
Band of Brothers,
” I said. “I bet you haven't even seen
Henry V,
which is where the phrase comes from.”

“Oh, good, a history lesson,” said Sara tersely. “That's one thing you and Alex will have in common. You get all yours from Shakespeare and he gets all of his from Civil War reenactors. I wish I could be there to hear the mash-up. And I did too see
Henry V,
you were the Welsh guy and you were a hoot, and I hadn't even
met
you yet.”

“I am appeased.”

“My point is, blood is not thicker than water to Alex. He's got a very specific . . . code.”

“Like a tax code?” I asked.

“That's not even funny, and I've clearly done a bad job of explaining him.”

“Actually, if you're explaining the weird men in your life, I'm much more interested in what you have to say about, eh,
Jonathan
? Because as much as I admit it's my fuckup, it's hard for me to believe I'm
in
this situation.”

“I don't know what to tell you, Rory,” she said, softening. “He believed he was entitled to have the perfect girlfriend and the perfect dog, and when the girlfriend wised up and escaped, he still felt entitled to the dog.”

“But he gave her to you, right? I mean, she is
your dog
? You own her?”

“Of course,” Sara said impatiently. “He put a bow on her and everything. But in his universe, he owned
me
—sort of, I don't mean he consciously thought of it that way—so by extension he also owned her. So when I left his universe with
my
dog, he saw that as someone stealing
his
dog, because he couldn't grasp the concept that I existed independently of him.”

“I absolutely don't get that,” I said.

“That's why it's not worth talking about. I think it's more important you understand what you're getting into with Alex.”

The walls around the highway had disappeared, replaced by mostly open land—despite the cranes and bland office buildings and pylons, it had a more comfortable feeling than New England, as if when I breathed, my lungs could freely expand outward, not just up into my collarbone anymore. I had no idea where I was.

“All right,” I said. “I'll bite. What am I getting into with Alex?”

“Well . . . he's not really the kind of guy who would approve of a green-card marriage. I mean if it was
just
a green-card marriage. I tried to make it clear to him that we have a real relationship, but he knows the actual getting-married part was just for the green card, so just don't be surprised or defensive if he spends some time sussing you out to make sure he can be certain of your intentions toward me.”

“My
intentions
? You're joking,” I said.

“I'm not,” she said. “And you need his help, so please indulge him. I mean, just be yourself, but really
be
yourself. You're a wonderful man. Let him see that. Show him you've got integrity and you're serious about treating me well.”

“Isn't it enough his own government already believes that?”

“He's an accountant. He knows how easily the government can be fooled.”

“Funny girl.”

“Anyhow, he's expecting you, but he hopes you get there soon because he's postponing his fishing trip for us.”

“Smokes his own trout, does he?” I said archly.

“Yes,” she said, not noticing the archness. “And herring or something, I forget what they catch down there. Also, just so you know, he's a biker.”

“Cyclist, like?”

“No, Harley-Davidsons. He's pretty serious about it.”

“Everyone's got their hobbies,” I said. “I'll be sure to act impressed.”

There was a hesitation, then: “Well, anyhow, he's waiting for you. I'll text you his number when we get off the phone, and just keep me in the loop. Call me as soon as you arrive. Sooner, if you need to.”

“Okay,” I said. “I think this nightmare will be over soon.”

“I hope so,” she said, and sounded so fragile for a moment that it melted all my defensive irritation.

I had to get there in one piece, which meant staying awake. Having despaired of finding a diner, let alone a real café, I stopped at a traveler's mini-mall for a Starbucks sandwich on the go with a large coffee, and set off for the slog ahead.

I was on the largely tree-lined New Jersey Turnpike for what felt like light-years. I could see housing estates through the trees. Things were more leafed out here than in Boston. In the arboretum. In the place where I'd met Jay. Jay. For fuck's sake.
How did this all happen? I had to sort this out, it was such a head-wrecker.

He had moved to the area less than a year before I hooked up with Sara—so almost right after she had taken Cody and left him. Was it a coincidence that he'd moved near her, that he'd taken to hanging out in a place where his ex-lover's new husband just
happened
to walk the dog?

No way to know that one, plus: not a good time to think about his being her ex-lover, so: skip to the next point.

The karmic sucker punch, the part that flummoxed me, was that I'd trusted him so completely. His whole abduction plan relied on the fact that I trusted him completely
but also
that I wouldn't want to tell Sara
why
I trusted him—that being that he took care of Cody after the chocolate cake incident. So either the chocolate cake incident was an amazingly convenient coincidence for him . . . or else
he had staged
the chocolate cake incident
in order to
win my trust that way.

Was that possible? He hadn't provided the cake . . . but he had suggested it.

No, Nick had asked for it.

But . . . Nick had asked for it because of the way Jay was talking about chocolate. And the cake was large because Jay had suggested a party.

So, all right then . . . Jay, having prompted Nick to ask for a huge chocolate cake, and being in charge of that cake, had deliberately placed it where Cody could reach it, at a moment when I was distracted.

Yes, that could have happened. He could have staged that scenario, knowing that he could immediately bring Cody to his
house and fix the problem. The result being that I would trust him with Cody's well-being, but wouldn't want to mention the event to Sara. He had even made a comment about having recently lost his dog and that he hadn't gotten over it yet.

And come to think of it . . . if I was right about all this . . . he'd suggested the party the day—the hour—the
moment
—he'd realized Cody might be headed to Los Angeles.

Could that possibly be right, though? He could not have known that we'd need a place for Cody to stay for a few hours on that final day. We ourselves didn't know that until a week before. Maybe he'd had a number of plans in place, and we just stumbled along a labyrinthine path to one of them. Maybe if I'd never asked him about her staying with him, he had some
other
scheme, or schemes. If he was that determined to snatch her, then I didn't feel like as much of an eejit. He'd have gotten her somehow, even if he couldn't make me look stupid as part of the plan.

But if he could make his ex's new man look stupid, naturally he would. That was the other part of this that made my world wobble: he was Sara's ex. I could not shake off the creepy feeling this knowledge gave me. Sara had wanted
that
. Sara had been drawn to him, somebody so unlike me that I was—as Lena had even called me to my face—the anti-Jonathan.

How could Sara—
my Sara,
who seemed so perfectly designed by God for my companionship—be drawn to somebody so entirely different from me? She'd gotten something out of that relationship. Whatever it was, she couldn't be getting the same thing out of our relationship. So our relationship was lacking something, and therefore doomed. Unless I could figure out what he offered her that I didn't. I made a mental list.

He had more money than I did.
That was all right, I was about to make it big in Hollywood. And even if that fell through, Sara seemed remarkably indifferent to material wealth. I mean, she'd married an unemployed actor, for starters.

He was better educated.
Yes, but I could recite Shakespeare as well as Beckett, Joyce, and Synge, and transpose major keys on the fly. And I did know something about art and music and American history from my “guest lecturer” gig at the museum. His education led
to
his work; mine came
from
my work. Surely that was of equal value.

He was more exacting and controlling than I was.
That couldn't be it; that was the very thing that drove her away—after bullying her into giving up painting. She liked my impulsive, free-spirited half-arsedness. It was part of my charm.

He was incredibly calm all the time, paternal and fatherly.
Well, I was more fun.

He loved Cody more than I did
.

Um. Yes. Obviously. No way around that one.

N
EAR THE CITY
of Baltimore, the urban spread began again. It was a little lusher, broader, and relaxed than up north, but still basically the same stuff. Home Depot. “Business Centers.” Huge freight rigs. Pyramidal piles of what would eventually become cement. The Port of Baltimore. A tunnel that looked as if it had been tiled with snakeskin.