American Subversive (22 page)

That was the chance we took, the awful risk we lived with.

As the smoke began clearing with the morning's first light, the blast site became visible. Firemen were moving around inside; the reflective bands on their jackets flashed when the cameras zoomed in close. I studied the damage, what was gone, and still there. Because something seemed off. I stared past the color-coded alerts and terror advisories taking up so much of the screen, the endless updates and breaking developments. And then I knew. The hole in the building:
it was on the fifteenth floor
.

Indigo's offices were on
fourteen
.

I counted the floors of 660 Madison again and again as the camera panned out and almost missed a bleary-eyed reporter confirm what I'd been waiting to hear: no one had died or even been injured. I leaned back and exhaled, and right on cue, a car turned into the driveway. It was them. Keith parked out of sight of the road, and together they came bounding up to the house, beaming like newlyweds. I greeted them at the door.

Are you guys clean? I asked.

Spotless, Lindsay answered. I got in and out, no problem.

Keith hurried to the laptop. Have they mentioned Indigo yet?

No, I said. They keep talking about Barneys, as if it takes up the whole building.

They'll figure it out.

Well, that's the thing, I said, looking from Keith to Lindsay and back again. I'm not sure, but I think we might have a problem.

It's always the smallest detail. The busted brake light. The earring left under the pillow. Or the simple fact that many buildings don't have thirteenth floors. Lindsay made the mistake, but any of us could have caught it.

I put on coffee and the three of us sat down to work through what had gone wrong. A dark stairwell, a small-beamed flashlight, the mask she was wearing. Lindsay had counted the flights in her head, she told us, because there were no floor numbers next to the exit doors (I couldn't remember if that was true).

I went to the computer and began searching the building's online rental records. It didn't take long.

It looks like the office we hit is some kind of fashion showroom, I said.

Was, Keith said.

Was.

Well, there's nothing we can do now, he said, but wait for someone to make the connection. The thing exploded directly above Indigo. They'll have sustained a lot of damage, too, and plenty of people will be sniffing around. I'm not that worried.

Then should we open the champagne we bought? Lindsay asked.

Sure, Keith said.

By the way, Lindsay added, turning to me. I like your hair. I meant to tell you.

And so we drank champagne while New York City smoldered. While mothers watched television and held their children close. While the government increased its threat level and a president vowed revenge. At some point on that Sunday morning, the rain reached us. Lindsay went outside and held her arms wide as it soaked her through. Keith joined her. They clinked glasses and he spun her around. Then, without hesitating, he looked through the sliding-glass door and beckoned to me. I couldn't tell if he was sincere, but I needed to believe he was. We would be three or we would be none, and so I walked outside and raised my glass to theirs.

I told you, Keith said.

What?

That we could do this.

I always believed you.

And the bomb, it went off without a hitch. The timer, the wiring, everything worked perfectly. Did you see the hole in the building? It was really . . . beautiful.

He wiped the rain from his face and drank straight from the bottle,
his last word still hanging in the heavy air. It sounded familiar. And then I knew. Keith had gazed into the woods on the Merritt Parkway and said the same thing.

Nature and violence and a man who found beauty in both.

This, then, was the point of no return. We were violent criminals now, enemies of the state (even if the state didn't yet know it). When Keith and Lindsay finally went to bed, I stayed on the deck to watch the day creep in. The woods had come alive after the rains, and I tried to hitch the moment to a happier memory. But the past seemed unreachable. I couldn't find Bobby, couldn't see his face. Only then did the full gravity of what we'd done hit me. It hit me so hard I sat down against the side of that soaking house and started shaking.

AIDAN
 

MY MOTHER COOKED BREAKFAST AND WE ATE TOGETHER AT THE KITCHEN table. Bacon and eggs and lots of coffee. I wasn't much for a.m. chitchat, so she did the honors, catching me up on her summer—volunteer work, travel plans, news of family friends. She seemed content. She'd navigated middle age so gracefully. How old was she? Sixty-one or sixty-two. The perfect time to find happiness, I thought. I was anxious to hit the road, but shrugged off my more petulant self and stayed awhile and listened and afterward was glad I did.

I left around 10:30 a.m. Simon's van was in the driveway, and I thought of him, back there in the barn, trying to shape the unshapable. Maybe he'd be a good man to talk to about Paige Roderick. But what could a sculptor tell me about a terrorist? No, Touché had made me gun-shy. This was my story for now. I climbed into my mother's Subaru and pointed it north.

The New York Thruway on that heat-choked Sunday morning was eerily empty. The radio offered only church sermons and right-wing talk shows, and when I could no longer tell them apart, I started sifting through my mother's ancient CDs—Anne Murray, Dan Fogelberg, Loggins & Messina, some bizarre-looking duo named the Captain & Tennille. I settled on Gordon Lightfoot.

I didn't have a plan, exactly, but I didn't care. I was exhilarated; no
more planes or trains. The simple act of driving seemed fresh and exotic, even if the route was familiar—that straight shot up the spine of New York State, then winding back roads into Vermont. We used to make the trip half a dozen times every winter when I was kid. We'd set off from the city late on a Friday afternoon, my mother packing the station wagon, then swinging down to Midtown, where my father, waiting impatiently on some predetermined street corner, would hop behind the wheel and proceed to take his latest, greatest shortcut out of Manhattan. From there it was a race against the coming night, a bulky radar detector our only ally, Dylan and Johnny Cash our only friends.

Now, as then, I stopped for a quick bite in Glens Falls, then took Route 4 east toward the state line. Nothing had changed. The towns—Fort Anne, Whitehall—dated back to the Revolutionary War and had suffered through any number of American booms and busts—railroads, industry, farming, tourism. As a child I'd been whisked past their empty storefronts under cover of night, but now, unsheathed in daylight, they appeared beyond redemption or repair. I shivered as I drove past the maximum-security Comstock Prison—now the Great Meadow Correctional Facility—lording over a nearby hillside like an ominous warning.

The landscape changed as I crossed into Vermont. Dead fields came to life in flourishes of color. Small towns bustled with people. The Mad River Valley was tucked away in the Green Mountains, two-thirds of the way up the state. It was a near mystical place of steep slopes and steady snows and, better still, was tough to get to, a fact of geography that kept the worst of the weekend ski warriors away (their caravans stopped at Stratton and Killington—the full-service resorts farther south). The Subaru ground its way up the Lincoln Gap and coasted down the other side, past boarded-up inns and alpine lodges, then Mad River Glen, its legendary single chairlift hibernating in the heat. But the valley's workhorse was Sugarbush, and through the trees I could catch glimpses of its crisscrossing trails hanging high above the valley. It was one of the largest ski areas in the East, and for a time, in the 1960s, the most glamorous. They called it Mascara Mountain back then, in tribute to the wealthy New Yorkers who journeyed up in booze-filled buses for long weekends of excess on- and off-piste. Soon, though, the in-crowds moved on—to the Rockies, the Bugaboos, the Alps—and the Mad River Valley never
quite recovered (which explains why my young, cash-strapped parents, and later, their college-aged son, could afford to ski there).

I'd never seen the valley in summer, the thousand shades of green and the overgrown nearness of it all. I passed an ancient lumber mill, crossed a small bridge, and found myself at the intersection of Routes 17 and 100. To my left was the village of Waitsfield, but I'd save that for later. I needed a place to stay, so I turned right and a mile down the road spotted a cluster of weathered cabins spread among a grove of trees. The Mad Mountain Motel. I turned into the driveway and parked in the near-empty lot.

I rang the counter bell once, then again, and finally a petite woman well into her seventies appeared through a side door. I asked for something cheap and quiet.

“All the same price,” she rasped. “Up here for the fair?”

“Excuse me?”

“The livestock fair. Best in the state.”

I nodded, not sure what to say, then handed her my credit card. She ran it through an old machine.

“Cabin six,” she said. “Last one on the left.”

She gave me a key along with my card, and I shouldered my bag and took off on foot. Cabin six was on the edge of the property, a good thirty yards beyond its closest neighbor. It was a glorified wood hut, the inside all brown—even the bedspread. There were no glass windows, just screens with shutters, but they wrapped around three sides and kept the cabin from being too gloomy. No air conditioner either, so I opened everything up including the back door. I stepped outside, but there wasn't much to see—just a gravel path that led past a forlorn flower bed and disappeared into the base of a hill.

Now what? I sat on the corner of the lumpy bed and considered my options. I felt like Paige was close. Like I was close. Yet the valley spread out for miles in every direction. And so I would, too. I showered under a lukewarm trickle and changed into the nicer of my two shirts. I thought about calling Cressida again, but drove into town instead. It was almost 5 p.m.

Waitsfield had shrunk since my college days, but the supermarket was still there, anchoring the modest strip mall along Route 100. It had been years since I'd been to a real grocery store (I bought my food at delis), and I weaved around kids and shopping carts in a state of
bewilderment. This must be where
she
shops, I kept thinking. I imagined her darting down the aisles in a baseball cap and sunglasses, like a celebrity or a battered wife, then keeping her head down as she paid in cash. When
I
reached the checkout line, I realized I'd accumulated only potato chips and a couple of bottles of red wine (there was no fridge in the cabin for beer). Two lanes were open, two cashiers: an almost anorexic-looking blond woman about my age, and a ruddy-cheeked young man so full of overachieving spirit (he kept scanning items so fast they didn't register) he must have been angling for management. I got in his line.

“Having a party?” he asked, when it was my turn. He smiled and ran the bottles through until they caught. “There's a liquor store down the road if you're looking for the hard stuff. We can't sell it. State law.”

“How'd you know I'm not local?”

“Small town in summer,” he said, as I gave him a twenty.

“Well, speaking of that . . .” I reached into my pocket and produced a copy of the Barneys photo I'd printed out back in New York. “You don't know a girl named Paige Roderick, do you? She's an old friend of mine, and I heard she was living around here.”

He studied the photograph closely, then gave me my change and looked again.

“Can't see her face too well,” he said. “But still, I'd remember someone like that. If you really think she's in the valley, try a bar down the road called the Purple Moon. It's where everyone goes.”

“I will. Thanks.” He handed back the picture and I began walking out, but something didn't feel right. I turned around, wondering if I'd forgotten a bag, but I had everything, and the kid was already busy with the next customer.

The only thing to do was go door-to-door. The hardware store, the Internet café, the Ski & Sports Warehouse where the stoner behind the counter stared at the photograph as if he might know something, then looked up and said, “Sorry, dude, haven't seen her. But she looks pretty hot.” I tried the shopping center across the street. Pharmacy, toy store, real estate office. And then the bookstore. It was the only other place I could imagine her—leafing through the earnest musings of Señor Guevara.

But it was closed.

What was I doing? Chasing a character I'd invented through the
landscapes of my youth. The truth was, I barely recognized the single-minded person I'd become. I guess I'd never taken anything so far. But now there was nowhere left to go. Did I give up then? I think so, yes. I drove to the Purple Moon (it was on the way back to the motel) to get a drink and curse this brief foray into fiction.

The place was half-full and a ball game was under way on the TV behind the bar—the Mets and Sox at Fenway. Sunday-night interleague baseball. That was something, at least. When the bartender finally came over, I ordered a Ketel One and tonic.