The Three-Day Affair (19 page)

The cave was farther than I’d remembered.

For nearly another hour we traveled at a glacial pace through the unchanging, leafless forest. Trees were beginning to bud. Soon they would distinguish themselves. At this time of night, though, everything about the landscape looked dead and
endlessly
repetitive. Up a slope. Down a slope. More trees. More walking. Hands burning. Muscles straining. My thigh ached from where the bag rubbed against it with each step. An ankle nearly twisted from a carelessly placed shoe.

After several thousand steps the hill to the left of the trail began to rise—first gradually, then steeply—and became rocky. The trail ran along the base of the hillside for maybe another tenth of a mile, and then curved away from it.

“This way,” I said, when the trail began to curve. We carried the bag off the trail and then away from it for several hundred feet, and when we reached the rocky wall we set it down.

We had first found the small cave, a couple of friends and I, back in high school. The entrance was behind several large
boulders
and not visible from the trail, but we’d been horsing around, trying to climb the rocky wall, and had stumbled upon it. We’d
only ever gone inside that one time. We’d been disappointed. It wasn’t a real cave so much as a small chamber caused by the way several large boulders jutted out slightly from the rest of the wall, forming a sort of triangle.

It didn’t take me long to find the entrance. I ran back to Nolan, and we carried the bag inside.

The chamber was no larger than a small bedroom. About half of it was covered by rock, and the other half looked up into the sky. It wasn’t much darker than the rest of the woods. But if we were looking for a secluded place, somewhere nobody would ever find, this was it.

“You’re right,” Nolan said. “This is a better spot.” He looked around some more, inspecting the place. “Still, one of us should gather up some rocks and branches to cover the hole when we’re done. Otherwise the ground is going to look freshly dug up.”

“You do it,” I found myself saying, despite my aching body. “I want to dig.”

“Okay,” he said, and handed me the shovel. “Let me know when it’s my turn.”

When he left the chamber, I tried to read my watch, tilting it until the face was readable. Four fifteen. During the last part of our walk I could see increasingly well. Probably just my eyes
adjusting
. And the moonlight glowing stronger through the
thinning
clouds. But morning was coming, and sooner than we’d like. By the time the sun came up, we had better be home.

I heaved the shovel into the ground, and my wrists nearly
exploded
from the vibration.

Stone! I cursed my stupidity. I hadn’t considered that the ground at the base of a rock wall might well be composed of rock.

“Nolan!” I whispered.

No response.

I thought about going to find him. But first I tried another spot in the ground, and, to my relief, the blade cut solidly into dirt. A few more tests, and I concluded that, no, the floor wasn’t mainly rock. At least not near the surface. I’d been unlucky the first time. And so I began to dig. It did me some good, the physical labor. I didn’t pace myself at all and was out of breath almost
immediately
. Good. Throwing myself into the hard job of moving earth, I was able to keep myself from thinking too hard about the reason I was here.

Each time I rammed the shovel into the ground, I prepared myself for the inevitable layer of rock. But each time I came up with dirt, I felt a little closer to going home.

I heard Nolan return a few times, dropping branches and rocks outside the cave. Then he came inside and asked if he could take a turn. By then a hole was already taking shape at my feet, and a heap of wet dirt was growing beside me.

“No,” I said. My face felt gritty from sweat and dirt. “I’ll keep going.”

“You sure?” he asked.

My answer was another shovelful of dirt. He left me alone without another word.

My back began to ache like it did whenever I shoveled snow. I acknowledged the pain with indifference, but I didn’t quit or even slow down. The hole was growing. Soon this would be over. The only thing that could stop me, I believed, was a layer of rock. Or maybe a thick, thick root.

First, what I see in dreams: the bag beside me moving almost imperceptibly in the moonlight. So slightly, I wonder if it’s only shadows paying tricks. Or the defective vision of someone who’s been shoveling dirt too long. I resume my digging, but then I hear a slow zippering sound. Fascinated, I watch as the bag unzips
an inch, then two, then three. First I’m hit with the rotting stench of a thousand corpses. Then a finger slides out.
Sometimes
it’s the stiff, hairy finger of an aging panhandler. Other times it’s a young, feminine finger, the nail carefully polished, and I know right away that it’s Cynthia in the bag—badly hurt, but not dead. Sometimes it’s one finger; sometimes it’s two or three. When that happens, the diamond in her engagement ring reflects the moonlight.

And then the nearly deceased speak to me. They ask simple questions, the only ones that matter.

What have I done wrong?

I tell them they’ve done nothing wrong. I try to explain that I never meant for any of this to happen. I just kept believing we could fix our mistakes without anyone getting hurt.

Must I die?

Yes. You must.

But you can change your mind.

I’m sorry. There’s nothing to be done.

But you could if you wanted to.

What makes you think I can be a hero now, when I couldn’t do it two days ago when all I had to do was stop a car?

Not a hero. Just a human being.

I’m sorry.

Then you must be the devil.

I don’t think I am. But I suppose it’s possible.

Every so often, in the dream, I’ll surprise myself. Yes, I see your point, I’ll say, and unzip the bag. And whoever it is inside will emerge as if from a cocoon, whole again, and I’ll feel a joy unlike anything I’ve ever felt in waking life. But when the dream takes this course, eventually I realize that I’m dreaming, and that this dream, as beautiful as it is, hasn’t been worth it, because now I’ll have to wake up. But I don’t wake up. When the dream shoots off
in this joyous direction, it always repeats and repeats until
eventually
it gets back on track and the worst thing happens.

I don’t know why these dreams always include the sound of the bag unzipping. It isn’t what happened out in the woods that night.

The sound I heard was different.

Soft, breathy, lasting about three seconds. A sound like the last moments of an air mattress deflating. Then it stopped.

I froze. Wondered if I’d imagined it. Or heard a gust of wind, made strange by the acoustics in this rocky chamber.

It hadn’t sounded like the wind, though. It sounded like a sigh of resignation, an animal’s last gasp. Maybe even a blissful
utterance
, an unconscious response to a final dream of shimmering light. But one thing was sure: It was a sign of life.

Sometimes the dream will begin much earlier, back at the house in Newfield. Sitting on the back deck with Cynthia on a sunny late afternoon drinking iced tea. Or it will begin at a gig. I’m a
drummer
again, living in New York City and playing with High Noon, and Gwen is playing the bass, and everyone I’ve ever loved is there in the audience watching, cheering me on, and I feel so glad to be making music again that I can’t help myself from sobbing.

But no matter where the dream starts, or how often it repeats, it always ends exactly the same way: in the cave, with the bag slowly opening.

And then—always—the shovel.

This is where my nightmare and my waking world collide.

I held perfectly still, staring at the bag and listening. I stared and listened and prayed that my ears had played a trick on me. Then I heard it again. Unmistakable. A human breath. My eyes widened,
and my skin crawled, and my heart—already racing—lurched crazily. For an instant my whole life nearly forked differently as I imagined the cold days of my future warmed by the knowledge of this one decent thing I’d done. But I hadn’t done it—not yet, not ever—and then the instant was over, and what I saw was how this canvas bag in front of me was all that lay between me and the rest of my life, and I raised the shovel and brought it down and began to smash the bag as hard as I could. Again and again and again. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times. And I wasn’t only hitting the bag, I was stabbing it with the shovel’s sharp point. I was massacring it. I was no longer Will Walker—I was an animal in the woods and I was making this other animal go away. Nothing would be left when I was done. I was going to turn the contents of that bag to soup.

I don’t know how much time passed, but when Nolan returned I was sitting on the ground, hands tucked into my armpits,
shivering
because my sweat had turned cold, the shovel lying beside me in the dirt.

I let him dig awhile.

Three years passed before I saw any of them again.

Nolan lost the election. Would the extra money for his
campaign
have made a difference? It’s anyone’s guess. The 2004
election
was more a referendum on George W. Bush than anything else, and Nolan was a Democrat running in a Republican state with gay marriage on the ballot. From the news stories I read
online
, he seemed to have fought a good fight. But how could his heart have been in it? He lost by eight percentage points and,
following
his concession speech, dropped out of the news, relegated by an unforgiving political machine to the status of burned-out firecracker. Not a has-been, but an almost-was. I don’t know what he’s doing now. I haven’t asked.

Evan made partner. I read this in the “Class Notes” section of the
Princeton Alumni Weekly
. I assume his life now is much as it was before he made partner, except there is more of everything: more money, more hours, more responsibility, more anxiety. I thought briefly about sending him a congratulatory e-mail, but then thought better of it. There was no way he’d want to hear from me.

Nor did I correspond with Jeffrey. A couple of times he
e-mailed
me—short, polite messages hoping that Cynthia and I
were well. I never replied, and in time his messages stopped.
Despite
the kidnapping, I didn’t resent him. In fact, I felt bad for him. He’d come to my town battered and bruised, and left with
nothing
. That saddened me, but not enough to communicate with him ever again.

Without my money or anyone else’s—the two million got wired exactly as we’d all agreed—Long-Shot Records got put on indefinite hold. To avoid thinking too hard about what had
happened
, I started spending long hours in the studio. And
gradually
the unexpected happened: I stopped thinking of the studio as the place where we’d kidnapped a girl and started thinking of it as a place for music again. Joey began to take more notice of my work and to see the studio’s full potential. He invested money to refurbish. With digital recording technology
exploding
, he was able to modernize the place without spending a
fortune
. Word spread about the studio and the work I did there. We weren’t a record label, and we didn’t plan to become one, but several indie labels started sending their bands to us to
record
their albums. My name started appearing on liner notes under
engineer
and, occasionally,
producer
. I started to pull in
better
money for the studio and some for myself, too—enough that Cynthia and I began to talk about moving out of Newfield and buying a place of our own.

I told Cynthia about the kidnapping. Monday morning I’d called and canceled my session with The Fixtures, telling them I had the flu. When Cynthia came home from Philadelphia late that afternoon, I sat her down at the kitchen table and recounted every detail of the weekend, except that in my rendition, the story ended when Nolan and I came home from dinner and went to sleep. She cried, and I cried, and it would be a lie to say that the next couple of days weren’t excruciating. I’d catch her glancing at me, watching me differently from how she’d ever watched me
before—struggling, I’m sure, to square these new, unsavory facts with the man she thought she’d always known.

She didn’t leave me, though. Didn’t call the police. Little by little we discussed what all of this meant in terms of our future, which I hoped to mean our future together. The second evening, I remember, we spoke softly in bed all night, and by the time the morning birds were piercing the darkness, we were all talked out and I felt that we’d be okay. Two years later, eating our first
breakfast
together in our small fixer-upper in nearby South Orange, our daughter, Kim, running in the grass, I felt surer of it.

And yet nighttime always came. After television or a chapter in a book, after the lights went out and Cynthia rolled onto her side and pulled the blanket up to her chin, and it was just me looking up into the dark, despite my best effort not to, I’d find myself
listening
for police sirens. For that knock on the front door. It felt as if a radioactive rock were sitting on my nightstand, with a long yet unmistakable half-life. Every month that passed without
hearing
those sirens or that knock seemed to decrease the likelihood, down the road, of ever hearing them. But the half-life was long, very long.

There was no half-life, however, to my dreams. Each night, I fought sleep for as long as possible. And when I felt myself losing my hold on consciousness, I did so with undiminished terror,
because
I knew I was about to enter the woods again.

A month ago I got roped into seeing a community theater
production
of
My Fair Lady
. This was what happened when you bought a house and became a member-of-your-community. You supported the local arts. Our babysitter, a local college student, was singing in the chorus. Cynthia and I went closing weekend (after struggling to find an alternate babysitter). The performance was forgettable, though the woman who played Eliza Doolittle
was terrific—she had a belting soprano voice and was a
believable
actress and strong dancer. It was midway through the second act—when she walked to the front of the stage and the spotlight hit her just right—before I recognized who it was underneath all that theatrical makeup. Of course there was also the cockney
accent
and the fact that she was now three years older. But at one point she seemed to look right at me, and I nearly bolted out of the theater.

The only thing that kept me in my chair was the knowledge that this wasn’t the first time I thought I’d spotted Marie. Far too often she’d be in my periphery, crossing a street or entering an
elevator
. My head would snap in her direction and she’d be gone or have turned into somebody else, a stranger. The eyes play tricks. I quickly paged through the playbill, and the name of the lead
actress
—Gloria Diamond—brought me a measure of relief.

After the show, Cynthia went to congratulate our babysitter. I lagged behind, watchful. And just as my wife was chatting with our sitter, Eliza Doolittle emerged from the dressing room. She hadn’t seen me, and I quickly ducked behind a door. I peered around it to see her hugging friends and cast members. A tall middle-aged woman approached her and, beaming, said, “You were
won
derful!” They hugged.

Marie’s teeth looked huge, framed by the thick, dark lipstick. Her blue eyes blazed, and it only then occurred to me that Gloria Diamond was exactly the sort of stage name that she’d have
chosen
for herself.

“Thanks, Mom!” she said. The two separated, and when her mother turned toward me, I got a good look at her. An attractive woman. Gorgeous blue eyes. Although the mother was a blonde, the resemblance to Marie was striking. And suddenly the pieces snapped together to a puzzle that I didn’t even know existed.

I ran for the parking lot, hid in the car, and waited for Cynthia.

“Why’d you do that?” she asked several minutes later, clearly annoyed. “I had no idea where you were.”

“I started to feel really ill,” I told her, and was a mile down the road before she even had her seat belt on.

After not sleeping at all, early the next morning I drove to the Timber Cove assisted living facility in Elizabeth to see who,
exactly
, occupied room 1615. Since I wasn’t a relative, doctor, or cop, I assumed that getting an answer might not be easy.

It was, though.

“There is no room sixteen fifteen,” said the friendly lady in the white uniform. She was behind the counter in the lobby. Beside the Danish and Styrofoam cup of coffee was a clipboard. She looked at it, flipped to the second page. “Maybe you mean room fifteen sixteen?”

I said that maybe I did. She probably wasn’t supposed to give me a name. “That’d be Len Burnham,” she said.

I asked how long he’d been living in that room.

“Mr. Burnham has been here for as long as
I’ve
been here.”

“And how long is that?” I asked.

Eleven years.

That afternoon I asked Joey for a few days off so that I could travel to San Francisco. He agreed to split the ticket with me if I set up
meetings
with a couple of record labels while I was there. Then I e-mailed Jeffrey, telling him I was visiting on business and wanted to see him.

His reply—
It’ll be nice to get together after all this time
—seemed innocent enough, but in its terse politeness I read guilt.

It was early evening, just a few days later, when I arrived in San Francisco, and as soon as I’d checked into my hotel I called his cell phone. “I’m glad to hear your voice,” he said, and asked if I’d like to come over to the house later that night for a drink. No, I told
him, that wouldn’t work. We agreed to meet up at the Starbucks near my hotel the next day at noon.

The fog lifted in the morning to reveal a bright California day. When I arrived at the café, Jeffrey was already seated at a table with a drink. I noticed that he was clean shaven and had cut his hair short. The short-sleeved oxford shirt he had on was an olive color that showed off his tan. He looked healthy—way more fit than the last time I’d seen him.

He rose to shake my hand, and so I shook it. Then, while he waited at the table, I stood in line for the largest coffee in the place. It’d become a compulsion to ingest as much caffeine as
possible
in order to limit my sleeping to light, dreamless naps
between
recording sessions and during the commercials of TV shows. Most days, I went through at least a dozen cups of coffee in my ongoing struggle to avoid the terrors of deep sleep.

I set down my drink and sat across the table from Jeffrey. He hadn’t asked why I wanted to see him, and I hadn’t told him. But he knew. I could tell from the way he avoided my gaze, the way he seemed to be interested in the bags of coffee beans on display, in the people waiting for their drinks, in the words printed on his paper cup. I let him ask me a couple of polite questions—“How’s the family? How’s the house?”—and then we sat in
uncomfortable
silence, his eyes still looking around the café for anything that was not my face, until I said, “So who was she?”

Jeffrey looked at me and frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

“Was she Sara’s niece? Younger sister?” He shook his head slightly, still pretending not to understand. “I saw the girl’s mother,” I said. “She could be Sara’s twin.” And then to be as clear as possible, I added, “Don’t fuck with me, Jeffrey. I
know
. That’s why I’m here.”

He sighed, took a sip from his drink, then set it down again. Drummed his fingers on the tabletop. There was music being pumped into the café, soft jazz, but Jeffrey’s drumming had
nothing to do with the beat. Finally, he said, “The mother is Sara’s first cousin. That makes Marie—I’m not actually sure. Her cousin once removed?”

I’d had little doubt about my suspicions, but hearing Jeffrey confirm them made me want to climb over the table and hurt him, witnesses be damned.

“Did you even lose your money?” I asked. “Or was that a lie, too?”

“Of course I did—I lost all of it, just like I said.” Now he stared straight at me, looking offended, as if I were being unkind to doubt him.

“So I guess the two million dollars came in pretty handy.”

“It wasn’t quite that much.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, a hundred thousand of it was already mine.” He bit his lip, as if trying to balance his need for secrecy against his need to show me how clever he’d been. “And then there was the cost of two years of living expenses in New York City.” I must have given him a confused look, because he added, “For Marie. She wanted to be an actress. This way she didn’t have to wait tables.” So that was their deal. “But yes, the money was extremely helpful. Sara and I live a lot more modestly now. I prefer it, actually.”

“You’re still together, then.”

He shrugged. “What do you want me to tell you?”

“Your marital problems … the guy she was cheating with at work … you made all that up?”

“Sara and I are peas in a pod, Will. Same as you and Cynthia.” He saw me shaking my head. “Look—I needed money. Nolan had it. So I took it.”

“That simple, huh?”

“I didn’t say it was simple. Come on, you were there—you know it wasn’t simple. It was probably the hardest thing I ever did. But he had it coming.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “College was a long time ago. People make mistakes.”

He was about to take a drink, and he slammed his cup down on the table, spilling some of his hot coffee. “We were in love! And he
knew
it. And he slept with her anyway and didn’t even have the balls to tell me.”

“Then who did tell you? Was it Sara?”

“She didn’t have to.” He looked at me as if I were being obtuse. “It was all in her
story
. Look, you read it, too. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“So you planned this for, what, ten years?”

“Of course not. I had no idea Nolan inherited all that money. But I was online one day, reading about his campaign, and all the information was right there in the article. I knew right away what I had to do. I knew what he deserved.”

Jeffrey looked better than he had in a long time. Even his teeth looked whiter. He was definitely feeling clever, and I hadn’t counted on that. He seemed almost to be enjoying himself,
revealing
to me how wise and cunning he thought he was. But he didn’t know anything. I sat there looking at him, thinking about how easy it would be to change him forever. Reduce him to dust.

“Honestly, Will—I wasn’t sure I could pull it off,” he was
saying
, “and I was so fucking scared the whole time. But it worked. She’s a good little performer, isn’t she?”