How to Disappear (30 page)

“ ‘Jack was all,
Hello, Nicolette, I was sent here to off you, but never fear, I’m Dudley Do-Right.

“ ‘Then
I
explain it was
Steve
behind the whole thing, and Jack’s all,
Oh no, it was Karl Yeager; my brother said it was Karl Yeager; your dad would never do that.
And I say,
Really, do you know Steve? Did you hear what he said?

“ ‘I’m such an idiot.

“ ‘Jack’s whole thing was, he didn’t want me to go into my house. After I convinced him it was Steve who was after me. But I made him take the gun. To protect me from Steve. Turns out he was lucky to have that gun because Alex Yeager would have killed us, right? That was a really big knife.’ ”

I look Mr. Ferro dead in the eyes. “That isn’t how it happened.”

“It is now. You tried to give her, and I quote, ‘a bunch of money.’ And you offered to buy her, wait, this gets good, ‘a rubber plantation’ in Argentina.”

I start to speak but Mr. Ferro puts a finger to his lips. “That’s what she says happened. No one believes her. But if she keeps saying it, they can’t prosecute you.”

I say, “But the guy in the parking lot—”

“What guy in what parking park? There’s no police report. She says she stabbed a would-be rapist, but her psychologist thinks it’s the pressure of captivity speaking.”

“They think she was my
captive
?”

Mr. Ferro massages the bridge of his nose and scans the transcript. “She says not. The party line is you’re a misguided saint who
had her stashed away to save her, and she’s a spitfire who thought she was in mortal danger.”

“She
was
in mortal danger.”

“Not,” Mr. Ferro says, “from you.”

I shrug.

“Look, Jackson—”

“Jack.”

“I know you’re not as stupid as she’s making you out to be, and I know it wasn’t this clear-cut. But this girl is your fairy godmother. Don’t mess this up.” Ferro shakes his head. “And Jack, no guns. Your name is Manx. You can’t go near a gun.”

This is the one thing he doesn’t have to worry about, and not because of what my name is.

I beg Steve to let me call up Jack, but it’s a no.

Steve says, “These people aren’t joking. That one with the squinty eyes who asked you why you told your boyfriend to shoot me, he has handcuffs and keys to the jailhouse. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Are you crossing your fingers?”

“No! You know I would never, ever, ever do something like that to you. You know that, right?”

Steve puts the arm I didn’t wreck around me. “He’s not a great shot. But I know the difference between an accident and a target. I was the accident.”

“And there’s no way—?”

“Ask fifty times, it’s still no. Ask a hundred times, no. Cry and breathe into a grocery bag, no. And forget about the French doors. Welded shut for all the good they’re going to do you.”

“Who’s waving the keys to the jailhouse now?”

“You’re not throwing your life away on a
Manx
boy. One of them blackmails the other to kill my little girl? They’re scum. I’m sending you back to the counselor. Don’t say no, it’s yes. Say yes.”

I say yes.

I want my life back. This is how to get it.

It’s over.

Don says everything he has to say to save his ass, as expected. For the purpose of Don’s hearing, the Feds—who showed up hoping Don would reveal a vast interstate criminal conspiracy—love me. When it’s all over, the police, in the form of Agent Birdwell, keep coming at me, looking for contradictions I don’t provide. When I come out of Interrogation Room A, I’ve been in there for five hours straight.

My mother’s in the hall thanking Mr. Ferro when Nicolette comes out of Interrogation Room D with her lawyer, who looks like she eats alligators for breakfast. Nicolette looks like she just crawled out of an avalanche, white and traumatized. Esteban Mendes is standing half an inch from her, holding a little pink case with her dog, Gertie, in it.

I want to wrap my arms around Nicolette. I want to take her hand and run out the emergency exit and into the street.

“Nick, are you all right? Can we talk for a minute?”

Mendes says the most definitive no I’ve ever heard.

Ferro tries to steer me to the opposite side of the hall.

Birdwell, just behind us, close enough to grab me in case someone tells him in his earpiece that he gets to arrest me, says, “I would advise against that.”

Mr. Ferro loves getting under this guy’s skin. “You dropped all the charges. You can’t stop them from talking.”

Mendes extends his arm in front of Nicolette, as if they’re in a car that’s about to make a sudden stop, and he won’t let her lurch forward when he hits the brakes. But there’s something about not being allowed to do pretty much anything that galls her. She says, “Steve, don’t. Let me. Just this once. Please.”

He says, “You want to cross me on this?”

“Fifteen minutes. Please.”

Mendes says, “Fifteen minutes is right.”

Her lawyer reaches back and opens the door of the room they just came out of. It’s a lot nicer than the room I just came out of, upholstered chairs, wooden table.

Ferro says, “The recorder still switched on in here? No, thanks,” and pulls open the door to an adjoining break room with a coffee maker and a microwave.

Our lawyers follow us in.

Nicolette says, “I can take care of myself.”

They don’t seem so sure about this, but they leave us alone.

Nicolette stares out the window across the skyline to the steel grey river.

“I’m so sorry,” I say to the back of her head. “If you could forgive me, ever—”

“Stop it!” She turns, and I’m looking at her real eyebrows, pale brown, and her hair bleached back to the blond it’s supposed to be. She looks like a badly disillusioned angel. “You’ve more than paid.”

I say, “I told the truth.”

“I know,” she says. Then she whispers in my ear, “God will probably smite me for lying to the police, but I’m not putting you in prison.”

I hold her while she cries. I’m surprised she lets me, but maybe it’s an any-port-in-a-storm kind of thing. Her body is still so warm, still the only girl I can imagine wanting. And it’s not just lust-wanting. I’m capable of lust-wanting anyone. I could probably lust after her scary lawyer stripped down if you dared me. I want Nicolette like wanting to be in the same room with her forever, wanting to take care of her even though she can take better care of herself than I ever did.

But even in the middle of her narrative, which is saving me; and Mr. Ferro’s narrative, which has kept me ten paces ahead of the law; and Birdwell’s narrative, which has me as a cold-blooded killer who heartlessly fucked his victim before kidnapping her and
dragging her off to be murdered, I have to know what really happened in Esteban Mendes’s kitchen.

I open the door to a balcony that runs along the outside of the room. We stand in the far corner, facing into the noise of the traffic below.

I say, “Baby, how well did you know Alex Yeager?”

As if it’s nothing, as if it’s just something to say between bites of burger, Jack says, “Is Alex-the-creep-from-Ann-Arbor Alex Yeager?”

I know how to do,
Yikes, busted!
I do. I’m the reigning princess of the cute confession. If cute confession was classified as an official talent, I’d be Miss Ohio Teen USA.

But I don’t know how to do
this
.

“How . . . ?”

“Your friend Olivia. She thought I might be him in Cotter’s Mill, when I was looking for you.” He pauses, waiting for something I don’t give him. “And there was the car. There was a red Camaro at the end of your driveway.”

I start to cry, which is a key element of cute confession, but it’s completely real. Real and unstoppable.

Plus, I have a headache. I don’t even get headaches. But this is like an ax hacking off the top of my head.

“Don’t be mad at me.”

“Is there some reason I’d be mad at you?” It’s like he’s torturing me, and I haven’t even told him the things he should be torturing me with yet.

“You know there is, or you wouldn’t be asking! You know the answer.” Shouting makes my head ache more. It’s like the mother of being hungover.

“I suspect the answer.”

“Jack, come on. Please.”

He closes his eyes. “I’m going to sit here in complete control while you tell me if I shot your boyfriend.”

“
You’re
my boyfriend! Is it that he touched me first?”

“Not even close.”

“Please, please, please, let’s not go there. You don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to say it.” At which point, it occurs to me I could have just answered the first question with,
Alex who? Huh?
and this wouldn’t be happening. I’d still be a terrible person. I’d be lying through my teeth. But at least he wouldn’t
know
.

I say, “You first. Tell me something terrible about yourself. The absolute worst thing.”

“Apart from shooting someone?”

“That was kill or be killed. It doesn’t count. Some other worst thing.”

“You know the worst thing after that. It’s what I did to you when I was J and you were Cat—and what I thought about doing.”

Jack is so earnest, like the face on an
earnest
vocabulary flash card.

Earnest with a dark side.

Human.

“Worse than that.”

His jaw moves around like he’s trying to decide whether to open it or not. “I liked holding that gun, in the kitchen. I knew what I was doing was stupid shit, but I felt like God.”

I’m not confessing to a guy whose worst thing is something he
felt
. “Oh no, a boy who likes guns. I heard there’s a club with, like, forty million of you in it. Come on, something you’re
ashamed
of.”

Jack looks like he wants to throw me but not catch me. Not the look a girl wants to inspire.

“Besides what happened to my father? Isn’t that enough?”

“Stop yelling.”

Jack retakes control of himself. I’m pretty sure he can change his pulse, heart rate, and body temp at will like ancient yogis.

Oh God, I really didn’t want to make him go there.

I say, “
Fine,
I’ll tell you. I went to a lot of parties last summer. U of M college parties. I made out a lot, are you happy?” I’m halfway between you-asked-for-it and wanting to jump off
the balcony. “I was all, ‘Eff you, Connor, you think you can sleep your way through the dance team and I won’t notice?
I’m
with college guys, ha!’ I was
fifteen
.”

“Right, and now you’re
sixteen
. I don’t care if you did every guy in Sigma Nu—”

Why would he say something like that? I halfway want to tell him just because it’ll make his stomach hurt.

Jack says, “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. Nick? Sorry.”

“Like you never went to parties or drank or hooked up?”

“I’m sorry. I never should have said that. But, Nicolette: Alex Yeager.
Was Alex Yeager your boyfriend?
It’s a yes-no question.”

“He was not my boyfriend! He was
cheating
with me.” It just falls out of my mouth when I didn’t mean it to. “He had this other girlfriend. Only he says they broke up. Except they didn’t. Then he says he loves me. Only he didn’t. And I totally didn’t love him—I was getting back at Connor. I was being an idiot. I was having an adventure.”

Jack is over being sorry.

You can see it in his face. In the way he tilts his head, waiting for me to tell him the rest. And it’s not that I don’t want to tell him. It’s that I want to tell him and for him to still like me.

What are the odds?

Jack won’t even look at me. “Get to the part with Connie.”

“
Stop judging me.
I completely blame myself for that, I do. If I’d broken up with him when I figured out there was this other girl. Or if I’d figured out that the reason he wanted us to be a
big secret was
so
not because I was so underage. If I’d done one thing differently . . .”

My ears are ringing so much, it feels like my head is going to shatter like a wineglass when a show-offy soprano belts a high note.

“This isn’t recounting your life to Saint Peter to get into heaven,” Jack says. “I hunted you down. My good-guy credentials were canceled, ask a cop.”

“Fine. So he tells me he broke up with her, but she’s, like, a stalker. I can sort of tell he’s a creep, but he keeps saying he loves me. And he’s in college. And he comes out for the weekend sometimes. We go to the drive-in in Kerwin.”

Jack looks up. “Esteban Mendes let you go to the movies with this twenty-one-year-old sleaze son of a mob boss? Try again.”

“I’m not making this up! I didn’t
tell
Steve! Are you kidding me? I mean, this guy drives his Camaro out from Michigan to go on a
date
. It’s not like I wanted him in jail for statutory rape. Which is what Steve would have done to him. He would have skinned him and hung his head over the fireplace.”

“But I graciously did it for him.”

“Please, that wasn’t supposed to happen!”

Jack is stone-faced.

“If you don’t even believe me, can I stop? Even though this is no end of fun.”

“No.”

It’s the no you don’t want to poke with a stick. That no.

“Fine. So life is going along fine. Alex supposedly loves me. Everybody still thinks I’m all that. Then his girlfriend shows up.”

“Connie Marino just happened to be taking a walk across your property?”

“I told you, she was a stalker. Who follows her boyfriend to the next state? You figure out he’s a dog, and you dump him. But she
follows him
! She
shows up
. She’s parked down the street from my
house
. And God, Jack, the minute I saw her, she was so pretty and in love with him, plus she wanted to make him hurt as bad as he hurt her. Which I totally get. Only she thought it was my fault.
My
fault! She won’t stop screaming at me.”