Before He Finds Her (42 page)

“Hey, Will?” he said quietly.

I raised my eyebrows in response.

More silence. Then, in the careful voice of a physician making a grave diagnosis, he said, “She’s cheating on me again.”

Before I could think of a suitable reply, he looked down, brought his club back, and swung. The ball went so high that I lost it in the grayness overhead. To my eyes, never good at twilight, it simply shrank into the sky and was gone.

On the drive home, Jeffrey was being very quiet. But as we approached the little shopping center across from the entrance to my neighborhood, he said, “Pull in there.” He wanted to buy antacids at the Milk-n-Bread. “My stomach’s been killing me lately. Stress.”

“Stress?” Nolan said. “It was the clams.”

In a few hours Newfield would be placid again, but at 7:15 the Friday rush was still in full swing and traffic in the westbound lane was bumper to bumper. “For real?” I asked.

“Trust me—you need to stop.”

I put on my left blinker and, seeing a small opening in front of an SUV, raced across the lane of cars. I pulled into a parking space and Jeffrey got out.

“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He went into the Milk-n-Bread.

Nolan clicked the radio on and immediately started fiddling with the dial. “He shouldn’t have given you such a hard time back at the restaurant,” he said, settling on a Van Morrison song.

“It’s his money. He can decide what to do with it.”

“Bullshit. He’s just being negative. I love him, Will, you know that. But he can be such a downer sometimes.”

Maybe so, but Nolan’s observation was based on incomplete information. He didn’t know about Jeffrey’s marital problems, and it wasn’t my place to tell him. And so with Jeffrey inside the Milk-n-Bread changing all of our lives forever, Nolan and I sat in the car quietly and listened to the radio, while the drizzle turned to the kind of soupy rain that was good for vegetable gardens but bad for golf. The forecast was turning out to be wrong, and I hoped that our round tomorrow wouldn’t get rained out.

A white-haired woman left the store using a magazine for an umbrella. She hurried to her car and drove away.

The song ended. Another began. Daylight savings wasn’t for another week, and now that the sun had set night was coming on quickly.

When the next song ended, Nolan unbuckled his seat belt. “Oh, hell,” he said, “I’ll go and see what—”

Just then the door to the store swung open and Jeffrey came outside. But not alone. He was holding on to the arm of a young woman who was wearing the tan pants and red shirt of a Milk-n-Bread employee. They hurried toward us as if she were a young movie star and he her bodyguard, helping her quickly past the paparazzi.

Jeffrey opened the back door and half guided, half pushed her into the car. He climbed in beside her and yanked the door shut. And before I could ask a single thing, he shouted: “Drive!”

That one word, and my mouth went completely dry. All I could imagine was that the cashier had been injured. Another young woman was going to die, and I was about to watch it happen. It felt, suddenly, preordained, as if my life these past three years had been nothing but limbo, a long wait for this exact moment.

“Hurry up, Will! Go!”

“What’s wrong with her?” I managed to ask. “What is it?”

“Just fucking drive!”

What do you do when your longtime friend tells you to drive? You drive. So I did. I fucking drove, stamping on the gas, gunning the car out of the parking lot, and hanging a right onto Lincoln Avenue.

My heart raced, but unlike Jeffrey I wasn’t panicking: I knew exactly where I was going. Ever since Gwen’s death, it’d become a compulsion of mine always to know how to get to the nearest hospital. My house was 5.8 miles from Mountainside. The recording studio was 3.5 miles from Valley Regional. Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, some part of my mind was always quietly mapping routes.

We needed to go six miles—fortunately to the east, where the lane was all clear. I sped up and checked the rearview mirror. The young cashier looked left and right, eyes wide. She was either breathing quickly or shivering. It was dark in the car. Was she bleeding?

“What happened to her?” I asked.

No response.

“Jeffrey!”

“Just keep driving.” His voice quavered.

“I can have us at Mountainside Hospital in ten minutes,” I said.

“Hospital?” Jeffrey said. “Why there?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Forget it. Go somewhere else.”

Now I was utterly confused. “Go
where?
”

We were at least a mile down the road, leaving Newfield now, passing storefronts and a supermarket and a car dealership. Another driver might have sized up the situation differently, maybe more accurately, but all we had was me behind the wheel. Only me, with my particular history and my refusal ever again to wait around impotently for an ambulance to arrive. It simply hadn’t
occurred to me, yet, that this could be anything other than a second chance for me to save a young woman’s life.

The oncoming lane was at a standstill, but we were flying. I sped through the next intersection toward Mountainside Hospital and waited for answers as the road widened to four lanes.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Nolan said, his voice louder than before. “Will somebody explain what the fuck’s going on? Honey, take a deep breath and tell me what’s the matter.”

“Really?” The girl looked at me, then Nolan. Maybe she saw the bafflement in our faces. “He just—” She took a deep breath, and another. Jeffrey was looking down at his lap. “He just—” But then she began to hyperventilate and couldn’t get out another word.

2

Once i began to understand the key facts—there were no grave injuries; this was no mad dash to the hospital after all—my first feeling, however fleeting, was relief. I was at the wheel of my trusty Cutlass Ciera with my old friends and, yes, this young cashier, but the radio was on and I was driving the well-worn roads of my daily life. These were facts I could cling to. Whatever the girl thought might have happened, she must be mistaken. This was Jeffrey. All hundred and forty pounds of him. He was not a threat. A little moody? Sure. But not a mean bone.

When he finally spoke, only a few more seconds had gone by, but we’d traveled another full block. “I didn’t mean to take her.”

Take her
. Those two words, despite all the immediate evidence, hit me like a knockout punch.

The girl lurched for the door—foolish, since we were going more than forty miles an hour. “Hey, be careful,” Jeffrey said, grabbing at her hands. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Don’t touch me!” She yanked her hands away.

“Take it easy,” Nolan said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

“You
kidnapped
me!” Her eyes were wild. I couldn’t stop looking into the rearview mirror. A car blared its horn at me for drifting into the oncoming lane.

“Jeffrey,” Nolan said, “what in God’s name—”

“I had to take her,” Jeffrey said. “I swear—now wait a minute. Just listen to me for a second. Just listen. The thing is, I’m flat broke.”

This was either a brazen lie or an astonishing revelation. Either way, I couldn’t have cared less.

“What’s your point?” Nolan asked.

“My point?” Jeffrey sounded offended. “Didn’t you hear me? I lost it all! You can’t imagine—”

“The girl,” Nolan said. “Connect this to
her
.”

“Connect?”

“Why is she in our fucking car?”

“She would’ve called the police,” Jeffrey said, as if this made perfect—or any—sense.

“What am I missing?” Nolan asked.

Jeffrey sighed. “I sort of robbed the place.”

“No, you didn’t.” Nolan shook his head. “Tell me you fucking didn’t. Holy Jesus Christ.”

I tried to imagine Jeffrey committing a crime. What had he said? Did he have a weapon? But the details would have to wait. What mattered right now was the girl in the backseat. Through the rearview I could see that she had a small nose, freckles, thin lips. I might have seen her before, working at the Milk-n-Bread. I’d probably flirted with her a little at the register, just to convince myself that I was still young enough to flirt with someone her age, even though I knew I wasn’t.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

She met my eyes through the rearview. “Are you insane? I’m not telling you anything.”

“Well, I’m going to take you back to the store now.”

“Don’t you dare turn this car around.” Nolan’s voice was almost calm, as if he’d made a decision and already come to terms with it.

“Nolan.”

“Think about it. Robbery, kidnapping… it doesn’t matter how
long
we kept her. No one will care about that.”

I shook my head. “You’re only saying that because of the election.” It was easy to imagine the headlines. The scandal. Even if we let her go and Jeffrey were somehow able to take the heat alone, Nolan was still ruined. That much seemed obvious. “You’re afraid of bad press. That’s why you’re thinking—”

“Bad press? You don’t get it—if you stop this car, the three of us are going to prison. Trust me on that.”

Jeffrey groaned. “I think I’m going to be sick.” The girl scooted farther away from him.

I could better comprehend vomiting than kidnapping. Cynthia and I had just finished paying off the car. And the prospect of Jeffrey getting sick in it was what finally made this unreal moment all too real, leaving me with a new set of facts.

We had been driving for almost five minutes.

We were already several miles away from the Milk-n-Bread.

We had not yet returned the girl.

The radio played on. Rain smacked the windshield. My hands were sweating on the steering wheel as the tang of panic rose higher in my throat.

“We have to take her back,” I said, “or go to the police ourselves to explain.” But I was already in the next town and had no idea where the police station might be. Mapping police stations had never been my compulsion.

“Wrong,” Nolan said. “We need to go someplace—Will, shut the goddamn radio off.”

I shut it off.

“We need to go someplace,” he repeated, “where we can talk this thing through. Work out a solution.”

“We’ve only gone a few miles,” I said.

“Wake up, man! Look at what’s just happened. Three men in their thirties just took a teenager against her will and
drove away with her
. Do you think the police will care how far we went?”

“I thought she was injured! I was heading to the hospital.”

“Liar!” screamed the girl, who’d clearly had enough. “You all planned this—I mean, you’re driving a
getaway
car!” She glared at me again through the rearview.

“See?” Nolan said. “Nobody’s going to give a shit what we say.” His voice lowered, sounding grave. “Get this through your head, Will: Jeffrey robbed that fucking store, and
she’s
right. You’re driving the getaway car. It happened. It’s happening. The minute we let her go, she’s running to the police.” He looked over at her. “And don’t even pretend you aren’t.”

“Damn right I am.”

Nolan shook his head. “Will, buddy, I know you don’t know what to do, so I’m telling you. Drive someplace safe where we can think for a few minutes and figure this out. You need to trust me. That’s what you need to do right now.”

I wanted to argue with him, but there was no time to think. That was the maddening part. I looked at the clock: 7:22—now seven minutes had passed. Everything was happening too fast. Buildings and streetlamps were flying past us, and every second that I didn’t make a decision, a decision was being made for us, because we were getting farther and farther away from the Milk-n-Bread with no easy way back. The traffic in the fucking westbound lane was at a standstill. I’d been caught in Friday rush before. If I turned the car around right now, it would be forty minutes, easy, before we were back at the store. And with the rain? More like an hour.

I couldn’t bear the thought of her being in my car that long, and I was searching desperately for something to say or do when Nolan added, “Mark my word. If you stop this car, you’re going to miss out on a lot of your kid growing up.”

His words made my gut squeeze and my eyes lose focus. The streetlights along the road dimmed for a moment, and I was afraid I might pass out. I’d always believed in Nolan, trusted his instincts. For as long as I’d known him, he was the guy who wanted—and deserved—the ball with ten seconds left. I gripped the wheel tighter and my vision returned. The car was still slowing down—my foot had been off the gas for the last quarter mile—but it didn’t seem to matter. Nolan was already on to other things.

“This’ll work out just fine for you,” he was saying to the girl now, his voice less dire. “So don’t sweat it for a second. We’ll have you home in no time. You have my word. This’ll be just fine.”

It turned out that those words, directed toward the backseat, were what I most needed to hear. Jeffrey had lost his head, but now we’d set things right. Nobody was injured—thank God for that—and nobody had meant anyone any harm; therefore, I told myself, everything could be fixed. All we needed, as Nolan said, was a little time to work out a solution.

Trust Nolan
, I kept telling myself—a simple, comforting mantra.
Nolan will know what to do
. I gently placed my foot back on the gas. We passed the army/navy store and the Lincoln Diner.

“He’s right,” I said to her, forcing myself to sound calm and reassuring. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

“
You’re
the one who should worry,” she said.

She was a young, frightened girl trying to sound tough, but I didn’t doubt her willingness to make our lives immeasurably harder. She’d never allow us to walk away from this. Not unless we convinced her.

“We should go to your house,” Jeffrey said to me. “The house is empty, right? So that’s where we need to go.”

“With all that traffic?” Nolan said. “We’d never get there.”

“So we drive around awhile first until the traffic lightens.”

“No,” I said. “I know where I’m going.” Home was out of the question. And to get to the hospital, I’d have had to turn off this road a mile back. Then I realized that for the last minute or so, I’d already been heading away from the hospital and toward the safest place I knew.