The Three-Day Affair (4 page)

Now, three years after Snakepit Recording Studio had first saved me, I was counting on it to save me again.

I parked the car behind the studio, where it wouldn’t be seen from the street, and went in ahead of the others. Nobody was scheduled in the studio until my session with The Fixtures on Monday evening.

The lights were all off. “Hello?” I called out. No reply.

I went outside again.

The sky had fully opened, and thunder was cracking fiercely. I trudged through puddles to the car and waved them in.

Jeffrey got out first. He stood in the lot looking toward the street, making sure no other car was coming. Nolan went around to the backseat, opened the girl’s door, and guided her toward the studio. She had warned us in the car that her grandmother would be calling the police the minute she didn’t arrive home; we
immediately
used this information against her, making her swear on her grandmother’s life that she wouldn’t run away or scream.

Screaming wouldn’t have helped anyway. There was the
overpowering
sound of the rain. There was the thunder. But also, in the moment just after I waved them in, an ambulance went by, its
siren blaring. The coincidence was uncanny. If there was a
moment
when we could have still undone everything, that siren cut it short. It fired us into action, and fifteen seconds later the four of us were drenched but safely inside the studio. I locked the door behind us.

Off the hallway was the studio’s main recording room. Inside, along the walls, were two much smaller rooms, A and B. The doors to each room were made of glass so that musicians could see one another while recording.

Room A used to be a storage closet and locked from the
outside
. The girl sat on the floor. She had left her purse in a locker back at the Milk-n-Bread and had sworn—again, on her
grandmother
’s life—that she didn’t have a cell phone on her. We took her at her word; no one was going to search her.

Nolan, Jeffrey, and I sat in the control room staring at one
another
. Their hair was wet and their faces looked ghostly in the studio’s dim light. Looking at Nolan now—running his hand through his hair, squeezing his eyes shut—I knew there was no plan. He’d asked for the ball because that had always been his
instinct
, and I’d given it to him because that had always been mine. But the game was already over.

He opened his eyes and, seeing me, seemed to know what I was thinking. “She’d have gone to the police,” he said.

“Of course she would’ve. But this is making things worse.”

He ran a hand through his hair again, and asked Jeffrey the
obvious
: “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Jeffrey shook his head. “I tried to tell you, I’m broke. And we were promising Will all that money at dinner. And I just … I don’t know. Panicked, I guess.”

“Wow.” Nolan glared at him. “I mean, that really is the
stupidest
thing I ever heard. So how much did you steal?”

Jeffrey reached into his front pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. We watched him count it. “A hundred and eighty dollars,” he said, not looking at either of us, and put the money back in his pocket.

“You lose millions,” Nolan said, “and so you steal a hundred and eighty dollars and … you
took
somebody.” He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. “I mean, how could you?”

Jeffrey sighed. “It all happened so fast. Nobody else was in the store, just the two of us, and I know this might sound crazy but it just didn’t feel like that big of a
deal
until the second after she’d handed me the money. It didn’t even feel real. But then I pictured Sara and the baby, and the police coming after me, and … it just happened.” He glanced over in the girl’s direction, then away again. “I know that I did it, but it felt like an accident. Like I didn’t mean it at all. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Not even a little.” Nolan punched a fist into his palm. He used to do this in college during debates and later during his early
campaign
speeches. Since then, he’d learned to tame the gesture. “Robbery isn’t an accident. Kidnapping isn’t an accident. Nobody in the history of the world has ever kidnapped somebody by accident.”

“Well, I did.”

More hand punching. “Well, fuck you then.”

“No, fuck you, Nolan. I didn’t intend—”

“You didn’t intend what?”

“I didn’t—”

“You didn’t what?”

“Let me
talk
! Okay? You never let me talk. Will you let me talk?”

Rain drummed steadily on the roof. The building was well
insulated
and soundproofed, and I tried to remember if I’d ever heard police sirens from in here.

“Well? Talk!”

“Don’t rush me,” Jeffrey said.

Nolan pulled his chair closer to Jeffrey’s. “Let me explain
something
. You and Will and I are in the deepest of shit. Do you
understand
? You robbed a convenience store and kidnapped the clerk, and unless we figure something out fast, the three of us are going to pay for it. The police are probably on their way already. They might be here in ten minutes. They might ransack Will’s house first and buy us an hour or two. Either way, there’s, you know, a good reason to hurry things along.”

The thought of Cynthia returning from Philadelphia to find our house ransacked made me sadder, in a way, than the thought of her returning to find me in custody.

“She looks cold,” Jeffrey said. She was sitting on the rug, arms around knees, head down. Shivering, maybe crying.

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

“Where are you going?” Nolan said.

I ignored him and went into the main recording room and turned up the thermostat. Then I knelt in front of the bass drum and pulled out the blanket that I kept in there to dampen the drumhead. The blanket was stiff and musty.

“Back up a little bit, okay?” I called through the thick door.

She scooted backward. Her hair was dripping.

I unlocked the door and opened it just enough to hand her the blanket. She took it and immediately wrapped it around herself.

“So can I please call you by a name?” I asked, and she looked at me. But I didn’t know what else to say. I wondered who she was, this girl of the Milk-n-Bread. Did she work there to save money for college? To help support her family? Did she have a boyfriend? What were her ambitions?

I wanted her to understand that this was all a mistake. But I couldn’t think of a way to explain, and there was no time. I started to close the door.

“Wait!” she said. The door remained a few inches open. “This is scary, you know?”

“I know it is.”

“The police are probably already on their way.”

“It’s possible.”

“You really didn’t know this was going to happen?”

“Scout’s honor.”

“That guy’s your friend?”

I nodded. “He’s all right, once you get to know him.”

Her shivering had subsided a little. “Marie. That’s my name.”

I knew it was my turn, and lying seemed pointless. “I’m Will.”

“Is that your real name?”

“Yes. Is Marie yours?”

Her answer was a sneeze. For the first time, I really looked at her. The freckles at the base of her nose said tomboy, and yet she had smooth, feminine skin, the look of someone who could make herself glamorous if she wanted to. I’d been wrong about seeing her before in the Milk-n-Bread. That wasn’t why she looked familiar.

“My nana is sick,” she said. “She doesn’t have anyone else. It’s just me and her. My shift ends at eight o’clock, and I’m supposed to go home after.”

Of course she had a grandmother depending on her. “We’re going to do everything we can to get you home on time. I promise.”

“Will?” she said.

“What is it?”

“Please don’t let anyone … hurt me.”

I looked away and saw the nicked-up wooden floor. The rotted ceiling tiles. Microphone stands and cables lining the wall. One of Joey’s posters of Pamela Anderson, circa 1995, for the musicians to ogle.

This was Joey’s studio, but it was my turf. Jeffrey might have grabbed the girl, and Nolan might have ordered me to drive. But I had taken us here. I was responsible, and she seemed to know it, and she was letting me know that she knew it.

What if I told her to leave right then, just run as fast as she could out into the street? Would anybody stop her? And why wasn’t I giving her that chance?

Optimism is a strange word, given the situation, but I believe that’s what kept me from letting her go right then, before
everything
else that happened happened. I was as frightened as I’d ever been, yet alongside my fear was a trace of optimism, because I knew what this girl didn’t: We meant her no harm. Together, Nolan, Jeffrey, and I would solve the problem, fix the damage that’d been done. All we needed was a little time.

“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” I said. “We’re going to get you home really soon. In the meantime, try to warm up.” I clicked the door shut.

When I returned to the control room, Jeffrey and Nolan were looking at me too expectantly. I didn’t like being looked to for
answers
. All I’d done was produce a lousy blanket. Yet I’d also made a discovery.

“It’s because she looks like Sara, isn’t it?” I asked Jeffrey.

“No, she doesn’t,” he said. “Why would you say that?”

“She does,” I insisted. “She looks like your wife. And if Sara’s been cheating on you—”

“She has?” Nolan said.

Jeffrey shot me a look, but maintaining his confidence had dropped on my list of priorities.

“And then you run into this cashier,” I said, “who happens to look like her….”

“Wait a goddamn minute.” Nolan looked over toward Marie, but her head was buried in her arms. “Let me get this straight. So to get even with your wife for fucking some other guy, you
kidnap
an innocent teenager?”

Jeffrey shook his head. “That isn’t why I did it.”

“Okay, then why?” Nolan asked.

“I already told you why, she was going to call the—”

Nolan waved Jeffrey’s words away. “Why would you rob the fucking store in the first place?”

“We’re all ears,” I said.

Jeffrey sighed. “Maybe it’s like … you know, what we were talking about at dinner. Why guys go skydiving or whatever.”

“Now
this
I don’t need to hear,” Nolan said.

“Look, you’re the one who said, ‘Surprise yourself.’”

Nolan stood there, shaking his head. Almost any explanation would’ve been better than that. But what did we expect to hear? Some secret chamber to Jeffrey’s heart revealed? No. People
committed
self-destructive acts every hour of every day. There had been days in my own not-too-distant past when I felt about as bad as a person could feel. The only difference was that Jeffrey had acted on those feelings and taken us along for the ride.

“Well, has it worked?” Nolan forced a laugh. “Do you feel alive? We’d all sure like to know.”

Jeffrey looked down at the floor. “I don’t—”

“You don’t know, you don’t know
—we heard you!” Nolan
lowered
his voice. “But do you
know
that our lives are ruined because of you? Do you
know
that we’re all probably headed to prison
because
of this?” When Jeffrey didn’t answer, he murmured, “
Fucking
lunatic.”

“Okay, here’s an answer you might understand,” Jeffrey said. “Maybe I
was
feeling depressed, and she did look a little like Sara, okay? And so I panicked. And when we panic, we do stupid things.”

Nolan’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, ‘
I
might understand?’”

“Nothing. I don’t mean anything. Just that … as someone who has also
done things
that maybe you shouldn’t have—”

“What things? Huh?”

“Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”

“No, I really want to know.”

“I said forget it.”

“All I know is, I never decided to fuck over my friends. Jesus. Next time you panic, do us all a favor and just kill yourself.”

“Shut the fuck up, Nolan,” I said. My departure from Dr.
Shelling
and her prescriptions for Zoloft were too recent for that sort of crack.

Marie shifted positions and seemed to be watching us now. Waiting for our next move.

“She thinks we’re going to do something awful to her,” I said.

We all looked at her. When Nolan spoke again, his voice was calmer. “Jeffrey. I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean that.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“All I’m saying is, you feel depressed, you deal with it. Like Will did. You get help. You don’t do …
this
.”

Sensing the shift in mood, Jeffrey said, “I’ll take full responsibility.”

My own anger flared. “What planet do you live on?”

“I will. I’ll tell the police—”

“You’ll tell them what? That you somehow forced Nolan and me to help you commit a felony? What could you possibly say that would make things any better?”

“No, I mean, I could …” But he was out of ideas.

“And anyway, we aren’t innocent, are we? I drove the car. Nolan said not to return her to the Milk-n-Bread. I listened to him. Now we’re all here. And I don’t see any of us rushing to set her free. So
that means we’re all in this.” Nobody contradicted me. “So what do we do?”

“We let her go,” Jeffrey said. “What else
can
we do?”

Nolan shook his head. “Money.”

“Come on,” I said. “She’ll take the money and turn us in
anyway
. We fucking kidnapped her.”

“Yes, Will. We fucking kidnapped her. I think that’s already been established. You and Jeffrey and I all kidnapped that girl over there. So stop saying it already. Please. I’m begging you.”

“I don’t think,” I said, my words more measured, “that a bribe will work.”

“Have you tried? Do you have another suggestion?” His voice lowered. “Do you want to
kill her
? Because we could always do that.” He looked at each of us. “No? I didn’t think so. There, we’ve ruled out murder. See? Progress.”