The Three-Day Affair (11 page)

I cracked open the door to Room A, leaned my head in, and told Marie that we’d like to talk with her. “There’s more room out here,” I said. “Can we trust you not to make a break for it?”

Trust and precaution, however, need not be mutually
exclusive
. We had already moved some equipment—a couple of
amplifi
ers
, that big canvas bag of drum gear—in front of the exit leading to the hallway. It would be impossible for her to make a fast
escape
even if she wanted to.

Marie nodded. I opened the door farther and stood aside as she slowly got up, stretched, ran a hand through her hair, and then emerged. The moment she left Room A she glanced over to the blocked doorway. Then her gaze moved to Jeffrey and Nolan, who were seated on folding chairs. I took a seat behind the drums and noticed that The Fixtures had stuck one of their bumper stickers onto the snare drumhead. I began to work the sticker off with my thumbnail. I was always peeling bands’
bumper
stickers off things.

“Please,” Nolan said, pointing to the empty chair beside him. Marie took a seat. “Look, we’ll get right to the point. There’s something we don’t understand, and we’d like to hear what you
have to say about it.” Her eyes widened a little. She waited for him to continue. “Will, why don’t you explain it.”

Marie looked like a model student—hands folded in her lap, head lowered in deference, or perhaps in an imitation of
deference
. “You told me earlier,” I said, “that you were working the noon-to-eight shift.”

She nodded. “That’s right.”

“Okay, that’s what confuses us.”

I didn’t enjoy having this conversation. It felt as if we were
antagonizing
somebody we had no right to antagonize. For this
reason
, I suppose, I’d sat at the drums. This was where I felt most comfortable, partially obscured behind cymbals and tom-toms. “You told me you’re a junior in high school.”

“A junior,” she said. “That’s right.”

“But today’s Friday.” I shrugged. “So we were wondering how it is that you could be working the afternoon shift.”

She looked up at the ceiling. If we’d been in a house, we would’ve heard the ticking of a wall clock. A refrigerator might have clicked on. Instead, we heard only our own breathing.

“We didn’t have school today.” Her foot began to tap on the wooden floor. “It got canceled.”

I glanced at the other guys, then back at her. “Can you tell us why?”

This was a job for a lawyer, or for someone like Nolan who enjoyed trapping people with his words.

“It was a teacher convention,” she said. “In Atlantic City. They have those conventions all the time.”

They don’t have them all the time. They have them once a year, and in the fall. Years of public school education had
permanently
etched in my brain this two-day vacation, occurring each year just before the weather turned too cold for outdoor play. I couldn’t recall, now, whether the convention was in September or
October, but it wasn’t in April. I remembered always being
surprised
that we would be granted a reprieve from classes so close to the beginning of the school year.

“I’m sorry, Marie,” I said, “but that doesn’t sound right.”

“There’s no need to lie to us,” Nolan added. “We’re on your side here.”

“But I’m
not
lying.” More foot tapping. “I mean … maybe it wasn’t the convention. Okay, I might have that wrong. The thing is, I had to take the day off from school anyway, because the store needed someone to cover. Okay? That’s the whole story.”

Nolan’s response was instantaneous: “That may be the story, but we’d prefer the truth.”

“What?” She glared at him but then looked away. Her voice raised in pitch, and her breathing quickened. “I’m
telling
you the truth.”

Jeffrey, who’d been listening quietly until now, put up a hand, silencing her. “You aren’t in school anymore, are you?”

“What?” she repeated, and I was reminded of myself as a
teenager
, choosing deafness rather than defiance as a means of
dodging
the probing questions of a teacher or parent.

“Did you drop out of school or have you already graduated?” Jeffrey asked.

“I don’t like this,” she said. “It isn’t fair.”

“No, it isn’t.” Nolan’s voice softened. “It’s completely unfair what we’ve done to you. But the one thing we’re going to need from you in order to get through this together is honesty. We’ve done a terrible thing, the three of us. We know that. But we’ve also been straight with you from the beginning. This was an
accident
. We never planned for it to happen. I really hope you
believe
that, because it’s the truth. And it’s also the truth that we want nothing more than to get you home, and the sooner the
better
. Do you believe me?”

She sighed. “Whatever.”

“I really hope you do, Marie.” I wondered if she cared whether or not we were truthful. None of it changed the fact that she was here, and we were here, and several hundred pounds of musical equipment blocked her exit.

“But this truth,” Nolan was saying, “this honesty, has to cut both ways. Because the more we find we can trust you, the more we’re inclined to keep on trusting you. But if we find that we
can’t
trust you, then that’s a problem. So please, tell us the truth. Are you or are you not still in high school?”

First, nothing. Then a barely detectable shake of the head.

“Is that a no?” Nolan asked.

She said, “I graduated last year.”

“So that makes you, what? Nineteen?”

“Yeah,” she said.

I was confused. “Why did you tell me before that you were still in—”

“Because you’re all a bunch of kidnappers! I’m sorry. I know you think you aren’t, but you really, really are. And I thought that if you believed I was just some high school kid, maybe you’d feel bad and let me go.”

“Thank you for being honest,” Nolan said.

Easy for you to say
, I thought. I was the one she’d confided in. Now, hearing the truth, I couldn’t help feeling a little betrayed. “What about your grandmother?” I asked. The pink sweaters. The jet black hair. I felt as if I’d be able to recognize the old lady shuffling down the streets of Newfield. I’d even begun to think that maybe I had. “Is she just someone you made up?”

“No!” She sounded offended but then caught herself. “I wouldn’t lie about her. She raised me, just like I said. Only, I don’t live with her anymore.”

“So who do you live with?” I asked.

“I don’t live with anybody.”

I hadn’t considered that Marie might have been fabricating parts of her story. But why shouldn’t she? From the moment
Jeffrey
had forced her into my car, her one concern would have been her own survival. If she’d had money, surely she’d have given it to us in exchange for her freedom. But the only currency she had was our perception of her. And so why shouldn’t she bend her life story a little, mold herself into someone she thought we might feel protective toward and unwilling to harm?

“Look,” she said, “I’d show you my ID except, like I told you, my purse is in a locker back at the Milk-n-Bread. But I swear I’m not lying.” She must have felt the need, now, to prove her candor beyond any doubt, because she began to describe for us her lonely life. A life unlike the one I’d pieced together from the few details she’d already told me. I’d envisioned a difficult but comfortable life with her grandmother, energized by school and friends,
punctuated
with her after-school job at the Milk-n-Bread to help pay for clothes and movie tickets. I had it wrong. There were no movie nights in Marie’s life. The Milk-n-Bread job was full-time. She lived in her grandmother’s house and paid whatever bills she could. Her grandmother’s dementia, meanwhile, had become bad enough that last year Marie had to put her in a nursing home. “Some depressing place in Elizabeth called Timber Cove.”

I knew the place, and it
was
depressing—from the outside anyway. The old structure stood ominously on Route 1, its bricks yellowed and tarnished. I assumed it used to be a psychiatric
institution
or maybe a veterans hospital. You could tell it wasn’t where people of means took their aged and infirm to live their final years in serene dignity. When you drove to the airport, you passed it just before miles and miles of power plants, or, as I’d called them as a kid, “fog factories.”

“Is it Alzheimer’s?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Parkinson’s. But she’s eighty-three, you know? And Parkinson’s can make you senile. Or it was the
medications
she’s on. But it was getting bad. I couldn’t leave her alone in the house. I came home once from work and she’d burned her arm really bad from the iron. I had to rush her to the ER, and in the car she kept screaming the whole way, and I had to roll down the windows because I could smell her burned skin.”

So there it was. She lived alone at the house, worked at the Milk-n-Bread, and visited the nursing home when she could, even though her grandmother was becoming more confused and less likely to call Marie by the right name.

“But no,” she concluded, “I’m not a student or even a kid. I’m nobody. And there isn’t a single person who knows or even cares that I’m here right now. So there’s your honesty. And if it makes you want to kill me”—she held out her arms to us, naked wrists facing the ceiling—“then go right ahead and get it over with.”

Her attestation of adulthood was undercut somewhat by her continuing flair for the dramatic. The gesture wiped away any hurt feelings I had at having been lied to, and I found myself
feeling
a great deal of compassion for this young woman with a
dead-end
job and problems beyond those for which we were directly responsible.

“For God’s sake, put your arms down,” Nolan said. She
lowered
her arms to her sides. “You’re here because the three of us made some bad decisions, no more and no less. Personally, I don’t care whether you’re sixteen or nineteen or ninety. What matters is that we all keep on telling the truth.”

She glanced toward the blocked door, then back at Nolan. “Okay. So what else do you want to know?”

We wanted to know why there hadn’t been a single mention of the robbery on the radio or television. We wanted to know how it could be that nobody knew of her disappearance.

As she answered our questions, it was the closest we all ever came to talking like regular people. We began to understand why the police hadn’t yet pounded down the door. No other customers or employees had been in the store when she’d left. The store’s surveillance camera hadn’t worked since she’d taken the job.

And what about her replacement, we wondered, arriving at eight o’clock to find Marie nowhere on the premises?

“I’m not really known as the most reliable employee,” she
explained
. “It wouldn’t be the first time I ducked out before my shift ended.”

“But someone must be expecting you at home,” I said. “A boyfriend?”

She shook her head. “I meant it earlier when I told you I could keep this secret. I know you thought I was just a kid then, but now you know I’m not a kid. And I don’t have anyone to tell. So I hope you can believe me.”

I wanted badly to do just that. Probably if at that moment Nolan or Jeffrey had said, “Sure, Marie, we believe you,” I’d have helped to move away all the stuff blocking the door and, despite any feelings of trepidation, bade our hostage farewell. I’d have hoped for the best.

But as I’d told Marie earlier, it didn’t matter whether she could keep our secret. All that mattered was if we could imagine
keeping
it ourselves if we were in her shoes. How much, in other words, did we trust ourselves?

Nolan’s answer came when he stood up, walked over to the drum set, lifted up a cymbal in its stand, and hurled it across the room. It was a large cymbal, an eighteen-inch crash, and crash it did—violently so, before skidding toward the wall. I jolted in my seat. Marie gasped.

“
I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK TO DO
!” he shouted.

These were words I thought I’d never hear come out of
Nolan
’s mouth. Like the cymbal crash, they echoed crisply off the wooden floor and then were sucked out of the air and into the panels of soundproofing foam mounted on the walls.

Nobody moved or spoke for a few seconds, and in this silence the plan came to me fully formed. I became, for an instant, the
quarterback
able to visualize the entire field and all the players on it.

“Nolan,” I said, “please sit down for a minute.” He seemed not to mind taking instruction for a change. “Good. Now—Jeffrey, Nolan—I have an important question for you both. A simple
question
.” They were looking at me intently. “Do you believe her?”

She’d lied to us once; there was no reason why she wouldn’t do it again. And yet I found myself believing her. I did. And I
wondered
if the others did, too.

Jeffrey studied her a moment. “Yeah,” he said.

“I don’t know,” Nolan said. “Sure, why not.”

Hearing this, I went over to the door leading to the hallway and, trusting that I was doing the right thing, began to remove the equipment we’d stacked there.

“What are you doing?” Jeffrey asked. “Hey, wait a minute.”

“Will?” Nolan said, but that was all. He didn’t get up to stop me. Good. I didn’t want to stop. Didn’t want to second-guess myself or have Nolan or Jeffrey try to talk me out of what I was doing—because they probably could have.

When there was nothing blocking the door any longer, I
returned
to my chair.

“Please, Marie,” I said, “would it be all right if I asked you just a couple more questions?”

She stayed where she was, though she was clearly eyeing the door.

“How much money do you make, working at the Milk-n-Bread?” I asked.

“Six-fifty an hour,” she said.

I did some quick calculations. “So that’s, what, about fifteen thousand a year?”