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As soon as my next period came and went without need of Tampax, I resolved to never again allow pedestrian physical desire to cloud my regular precision thinking. I pleaded with Lenny for forgiveness and promised to not derail his life, promised to take on the sole responsibility. We sat once more on the cushioned stools in my kitchen when I delivered him the news and my apology. My parents were at work and Nana back in Savannah. When I mentioned I’d endure the responsibility alone, emotional Lenny teared up.
“Never,” he said.
“Lenny, no. This is my fault.”
“No, it’s my fault. I wanted this.”
“You wanted this?”
“Marry me, Lisa.”
Quickly, I calculated our ages and the ensuing events of our teens and twenties. The whistling kettle once again announced a profound shift in our lives, so as I slid sideways from the counter to remove it from the hot element, I responded with my truthful and calculated answer.
“Yes. But in precisely fourteen years, when we are thirty, after we’ve earned our degrees and I’ve established myself in science and you in writing.”
“Fine,” he said, wiping his eyes with his sleeve and reaching for a pen to document his inner turmoil in a chicken-scratch poem on a Chinette napkin.
To me, this was the height of romance. To Lenny, I have no idea. He spent the weekend at the library researching poets who had written about their children and came to school on Monday, bright-eyed and practically skipping to class.
How Nana would cringe to know her whimsical analogy prompted me so—I’d never tell her any of this. Even seventeen years later, I wince at writing this account, fearing her eighty-eight-year-old eyes might discover the truth about her great-grandson.
Somehow, back then in Dorothy’s jail cell, I was thinking on Nana and the night of her fateful words eight months prior. I swept up to Dorothy’s bed, her body curved toward me like a misshapen croissant, bulged of dough in the middle. I had no clue how to comfort her, and telling her how I’d killed our other kidnapper in my own jail cell would likely alienate her. She probably didn’t have the same taste in justice as I did.
Brad was downstairs pacing and throwing objects, completely unglued by the sounds of his manic screaming. A chair or a coffee table must have been smashed against a wall by the thud that ricocheted three floors up to us.
This will stop soon. Where are the cops? The cops will come. They will save us. Where the hell are they? They should be here soon. Should they be here by now?
I knew I could pick Dorothy’s country lock in a second flat; I’d already assessed this asset when I entered: old lock, easy to crack, Asset #38. But there was no point in doing anything until the cops came or, if they didn’t, until Brad left the building. Fortunately, sounds outside and below were easier to hear in Dorothy’s wing. I was pretty sure if we kept quiet, we’d find a window of time to pick the lock and haul on out. So, instead of pacing and evaluating further, my only mission was to quiet Dorothy. We’d have to listen, listen, wait, and, if the cops failed to show, use patience—Asset #11—for Brad to leave. And then, then we’d have to hustle.
Dorothy lay convulsing, and it was then I noted her wrinkled and unlined purple dress, something Mother would never have allowed me to wear—what with its assembly-line construction and poor quality. I contemplated, for the first time in captivity, my own attire. My black maternity pants, hand stitched in France, still surprisingly held their shape and with few wrinkles. Mother had purchased me two pairs the day after she discovered my pregnancy. “We are not to be uncivilized in this ordeal, Lisa. You will dress appropriately. No more of this baggy nonsense. Your appearance counts for many things, said and unsaid, personal and impersonal,” she said, while flicking an invisible crumb from her starched shirt and straightening diamond cufflinks, which rested below her embroidered initials. “It has squash to do with wealth. I could have purchased you ten cheap maternity dresses for the price of these two pairs of pants, as most pregnant women would do. But quality bespeaks quality. And it is financially stupid to trump quality with quantity. A colossal waste of money.” She brushed the air with her fingers as though setting financial ruin to a dusty corner, out of her exalted view. I did wonder at the time why my style would trouble her more than my state, but I understand now it was simply her way of coping.
The quality of my pants held little answer on how to calm Dorothy—no resolution appeared in the tight seams of a French cotton blend. She began to dry-heave from sobbing so hard, and then came her incoherent tirades and fist pounding on the mattress. My head bounced upon her every punch. Surely unwound, poor Dorothy fell off whatever mental hold she had previously had. I guessed that had her eyes set on mine, I’d witness her pupils roll about, like those black-and-white googly eyes you buy at craft stores.
Where the hell are the cops? It’s definitely been too long now. I’ve thought of Nana. I’ve thought of Mother. I’m sitting here on the floor, bleeding from my face. Something’s off. Something’s wrong. I need to fix this. Get us out.
Some heavy object crashed into some other heavy object downstairs, followed by a brain-splitting howl that went something like this: “Yeeee-anannaa—My brotherrr!”
Forget someone saving us. Plan for no one. Plan only on yourself. Focus on Dorothy. Keep her quiet. He’ll have to leave. Get some tool or something. He’ll leave, and then we need to be ready. Get Dorothy calm.
The only peace I could offer Dorothy was to sit cross-legged and place a hand flat by her pillow. My other hand stayed raised to stem the blood from my still-bleeding face. I thought having my hand so close to her would allow her to grab hold of me as her tether, should she find the ability to focus on the things surrounding her in reality. But this act of mine was just the mimic of something I saw Nana do for my father the day his sister, her daughter, died. Nana was crying too, but was so drained herself, she was able to offer only this minor silent gesture to my dad. He was very close to Aunt Lindy. They were nine months apart in age, and her cancer was fast and merciless.
Mother and I gave Nana and my father comfort in our own way. We spent the crying time building a highly detailed itinerary for a month-long excursion through all of Italy for the four of us: me, Mother, Dad, and Nana. I’m not sure Mother and I ever exchanged any words to directly acknowledge Aunt Lindy’s death. I took her cue on the proper emotion to display by remaining quiet in the house and focused on minute-by-minute planning of museums, churches, and restaurants. I did miss Aunt Lindy, but grieving her would not be productive to healing my father, nor toward studying Lindy’s blood samples, which I’d been able to extract when the nurses turned their backs. Aunt Lindy palmed me one of their vials and whispered in my ear, “With that mind, find a cure or fight injustice someday, girl. Don’t let your brain go to waste.” She swallowed hard, fighting through her incurably dry mouth to continue, “And screw those doctors who prod you about your emotions. Love is the only one that matters, and I think you’ve got that lassoed and reined.”
Was it love I should allow for this girl on the bed? This wretched young woman in the throes of something beyond me? Someone like me in her state, but experiencing some emotion I had no ability to comprehend in the moment. With a tepid hand on her pilled cotton sheet, I felt the warmth of Dorothy’s cheek. I studied her scrawny arms and wondered if she’d eaten a thing in her confinement. Surely she hadn’t had her lunch yet—I’d killed her delivery man.
The sun at this point was a futile smear of grainy white behind blackened clouds—a failure of a day. The shadows in Dorothy’s chill room made me think night was upon us, although the hour could not have been long past noon.
The sounds were different in this part of the building. Nature clamored outside: the mooing of cows and occasional bells somewhere long off in the distance. Also, because a rock or something had been thrown to cause a hole in her high triangular window, the nipping breeze creaked in, carrying the scent of grass and manure. Further adding to this sensory overload
was the flinging of things and spitting swearing of our agitated captor downstairs. A caged beast—the bars: his own insanity.
Cops aren’t coming. Execute a new exit.
Yet despite all of this incessant noise, Dorothy somehow stepped down her emotions when I set my hand beside her head. She clutched my fingers so tight, I thought I might be the cliff and she the fallen climber, her nails clawing a ledge of rock over the edge of the world. But I dared not move an inch, for with her widening and deeper breaths, she inexplicably slipped slowly into an eyes-batting nap. In her last blink before sleep, her big and wet blue eyes caught mine. Our faces were a mere foot apart. In that moment, Dorothy M. Salucci became my best friend ever in my life. I turned Love on—specifically for her—in the hope such an emotion would motivate me to replan and save us both, us four.
Love is the easiest emotion to switch off, but the hardest to turn on. In contrast, the easiest emotions to switch on, but hardest to turn off are: hate, remorse, guilt, and easiest of all, fear. “Falling in Love” is an entirely different beast. In fact, “Falling in Love” should not be classified as an emotion at all. Falling in Love is an involuntary state caused by a measurable chemical reaction, which leads to an addictive cycle your physical self seeks constantly to maintain. So far, I have only ever fallen in love once, the day a miniscule life fluttered within my body. What a day for me—to be so jolted with such awareness, a feeling masquerading itself as an emotion, tricking its way into my heart and burying there. I’d do anything to protect and prolong this addiction to Higher Love, one that barged into my life and offered no switches.
Garden-Variety Love, on the other hand, is most definitely an emotion, one with a stubborn, although productive when on, switch. And thus, it was this switch I jammed open in watching Dorothy rest, her wet cheek upon my now bloodless fingers.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SPECIAL AGENT ROGER LIU
Sometimes when I think about that day, I want to strangle whoever is closest and throw a brick through the nearest window. How frustrating to be so close and so cobbled.
Middle Indiana is like upstate New York, only flatter. So, flatter than flat. Running straight, as in literally straight, through the town of our destination was an infuriating four-lane “route” with one billion stoplights, the number of which must have been installed to rile passers-through, but none of the townies, who seem just fine mosey peddling along, jamming to full-stops at yellows. The tar of this main road was a worn, faded gray, a color made possible by a million beat-down days of country sun—the kind of days when armies of invisible beetles hiss in unison. But the day of which I speak could only wish for some hot hell; no, the day of which I speak was a cold spring day, and though the insufferable gray tar was still faded, spots were blotched a darker hue by the intermittent drops of rain that escaped from the black clouds above.
We drove like quiet phantoms through town, past the gas stations and the emptied parking lots of mom-and-pop hardware stores and five-and-dimes. A couple of women rolled shopping carts along the edge of the road, way beyond any supermarket in sight. Silently we crept, cognizant inside the vehicle of our inner wish to not alarm any perpetrators complicit in the scheme we aimed to unravel. The orange Volvo in which we rode, however, was a siren itself, the missing muffler a foghorn of our presence.
We passed an abandoned building with the telltale watchtower of a KFC. The boarded windows were spray-painted “ELEC” in blue with an arrow pointed down to some presumed underground cabling. I wondered why ELEC was not in orange, an indulgent thought given the task at hand.
Over the roar of Sammy’s busted-up Volvo, the chief tried to speak to me and Lola in the back. I folded forward, resting a hand on the corner of his bucket seat.
“What?” I yelled.
I unbuckled my seatbelt to scooch closer, but even with the proximity, I still could not hear the chief. The tumble of the engine rattled my eardrums as though I sat on stage at a Led Zepplin concert.
The chief turned his head from the road, twisting for a view of me and Lola. I slid back, but did not rebuckle. I looked to Lola, whose grip on her thighs had only tightened further. Her fingertips must have been blue.
“You been trailing this case for long, Agents?” the chief asked.
“Um, Chief…” Lola said, pointing ahead.
I turned myself, for I, too, had not been watching the road.
I’m not sure if I shouted about the advancing truck, or if Lola shouted about the truck’s shocking velocity, barreling in our direction. I recall the chief facing front once again and his quick spin of the wheel to avoid the collision. I strangely recall freeze-frames of actions thereafter, such as my arm springing sideways to brace Lola, who was buckled, as her arm did the same to me, and the chief’s deputy holding the rim of his hat, as though he feared an oncoming windstorm up there in the front seat. I also recall wondering why the deputy didn’t shout about the out-of-control truck, but then the other freeze-frame I recall was of him lifting his head from the map he read on his lap.
Some people say a crash is experienced in slow motion and that the sounds play as single notes, crinkling out one by one, an accordion slowly unfolding. I, on the other hand, experienced a lightning bolt of pain in my ears from the sonic boom that erupted as the engine of Sammy’s Volvo crashed headfirst into a lamppost, which guarded the entrance to a strip mall. An instant of black overcame me the moment my head slammed against the roof. The next thing I knew, Lola hooked her arms under my arms to heroically pull me from the wreckage. Hollywood would have declared, “It’s a wrap,” for as the heels of my shoes hit the pavement, the steel post fell to demolish more of poor Sammy’s car.
There we lay, panting for breath, cradling our bloodied heads, me and Lola, while the chief and his deputy, also pulled free by Lola, slumped unconscious. I strained up to sit, using my shaking arms for a brace, and searched the battlefield. The chief lay on the driver’s side, prone on the pavement, his shoulders distorted and both arms obviously dislocated, what with their rag-doll angles. The deputy was on the passenger side, also prone on the pavement. He had a bleeding gash from his forehead, across his closed right eye, down his cheek, and ending somewhere under his chin. What a hideous scar that will make, I thought. The hat he fussed with teetered topside down five feet from his left ankle, which flopped cockeyed in the wrong direction. The humming static from the chief’s walkie-talkie told me Sammy-the-donut-eating-dispatcher was off to God Knows Where. We were alone.
With the chief and his deputy badly hurt, his dispatcher uselessly unavailable, the remainder of the puny police force two-and-a-half hours away at a funeral, and my back-up, who I’d called when we left the station house and had the address of Appletree Boarding School, likewise two to three hours off, I had only one call to make.
“Lola, my phone, where’s my phone?” I said, sitting up straighter and closing my eyes as I talked. The blood racing to my skull throbbed loudly, demanding I stop talking.
“Lola, my phone, my phone, get my phone.”
Through my squinting eyes, I saw her crawl across the lot, her hands pressed firmly in the loose gravel of the top layer of tar. She entered again the clunking and smashed car, the doors still ajar from her extractions. I thought she might back out on all fours with my phone antenna in her teeth, like a hunting dog retrieving a dead duck.
Images of others vaguely came to appear in my periphery. Knocking began within the car, which forced me to inspect it more closely. Flames flattened out, escaping the steaming hood, the engine aflame. Urgent, orange flames spread and contracted, spread and contracted, blazing fingers desperately searching to touch skin and scar. A trail of gas snaked beneath the trunk, creeping closer to my foot.
“Lola, get out of the car, now! Fire!”
I don’t think she heard me, because I don’t think I was really yelling. I felt trapped in one of those dreams, trying to scream my lungs out, but unable to muster even a gurgle.
I tried again.
I allowed the phone to plummet to the ground and likewise wobbled toward the chief and deputy. Taking my share of the work, I pulled the deputy opposite the direction Lola pulled the chief, just far enough and fast enough to miss the flaming paint that began to rain down upon the scene as the car burst up and out.
Once settled, I reclined to the ground and watched the inferno in a mesmerized hypnosis. The fire raged madly, seemingly furious upon being set free, as if it had been bottled for centuries under the hood of Sammy’s Volvo.
And I am always this way with a fire, remembering the time my father set our barn ablaze when I was five. On the day of the barn fire, just one week into owning the chickens and with my mother and baby brother shopping, my father asked me to run inside and fetch us both a cold Pepsi. However fast I was, however long it took me to scramble my five-year-old feet inside, fling open the refrigerator, fist the two bottles, and run back on out to find my father, well, that was how long it took for the dead grass my dad had raked up for a bonfire to catch a gust of Great Lakes wind and stick within the crevices of the dried barn boards. There I stood, useless, clenching Pepsis, as though I were choking two geese. A wall of wicked fire, running upwards from ground to sky, no sideways flames, no doubt of direction, flames streaming up and up and pushing me, plastered back to the house.
“Get inside,” my father must have screamed, his arms gesturing wildly. “Get inside,” he must have repeated loudly, but all I heard was the roaring hiss of the red-orange flames, which insisted I do nothing but stare. Many years later in middle Indiana, doing the same as I watched, unblinking, the Volvo burn, a shadow formed overhead. One of the women with a shopping cart who we’d passed only moments before attempted to umbrella me from the irregular drops of rain.