Dark Matter (30 page)

“I just need you to listen for a minute.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Something happened on my way to work. I'll explain everything when—”

“Are you okay?”

“I'm fine, but I'm in jail.”

For a moment, it gets so quiet on the other end of the line that I can hear the NPR show she's listening to in the background.

She says finally, “You got arrested?”

“Yeah.”

“For what?”

“I need you to come bail me out.”

“Jesus. What did you do?”

“Look, I don't have all the time in the world right now to explain. This is kind of like my one phone call.”

“Should I call a lawyer?”

“No, just get down here as soon as you can. I'm at the Fourteenth District Precinct on…” I look to Hammond for the street address.

“North California Avenue.”

“North California. And bring your checkbook. Has Charlie already left for school?”

“Yeah.”

“I want you to pick him up and bring him with you when you come to get me. This is very—”

“Absolutely not.”

“Daniela—”

“I am not bringing my son to get his father out of jail. What the hell happened, Jason?”

Officer Hammond raps his knuckles on the Plexiglas and moves a finger across his throat.

I say, “My time's up. Please get here as soon as you can.”

“Okay.”

“Honey.”

“What?”

“I love you so much.”

She hangs up.

My lonely holding cell consists of a paper-thin mattress on a concrete base.

Toilet.

Sink.

Camera over the door, watching me.

I lie in bed with the jail-issue blanket draped over me and stare at a patch of ceiling that I'm guessing has been studied by all manner of people in the throes of despair and hopelessness and poor decision-making.

What runs through my mind are the innumerable things that might go wrong, that could so easily stop Daniela from coming to me.

She could call Jason2 on his cell phone.

He could call her between classes just to say hi.

One of the other Jasons could decide to make his move.

If any one of those things happens, this entire plan will blow up spectacularly in my face.

My stomach hurts.

My heart is racing.

I try to calm myself down, but there's no stopping the fear.

I wonder if any of my doppelgängers have anticipated this move. I try to take comfort in the idea that they couldn't have. If I hadn't seen that belligerent drunk at the bar last night, obnoxiously hitting on those women and getting thrown out by the bouncer, it would never have occurred to me to get myself arrested as a ploy to make Daniela and Charlie come to me in a safe environment.

What led to this decision was a unique experience that was mine alone.

Then again, I could be wrong.

I could be wrong about everything.

I get up, pace back and forth between the toilet and the bed, but there's not much ground to cover in this six-by-eight-foot cell, and the more I pace, the more the walls seem to inch in closer until I can actually feel the claustrophobia of this room as a tightening in my chest.

It's getting harder to breathe.

I move finally to the tiny window at eye level in the door.

Peer through into a sterile white hallway.

The sound of a woman crying in one of the neighboring cells echoes off the cinder-block walls.

She sounds so far beyond hope.

I wonder if it's the same woman I saw in the booking room when I first arrived.

A guard walks by, holding another inmate by his arm above the elbow.

Returning to the bed, I curl up under the blanket and face the wall and try not to think, but it's impossible.

It feels like hours have passed.

Why could it possibly be taking this long?

I can only think of one explanation.

Something happened.

She isn't coming.

The door to my cell unlocks with a mechanized jolt that spikes my heart rate.

I sit up.

The baby-faced guard standing in the doorway says, “You get to go home, Mr. Dessen. Your wife just posted bail.”

He leads me back to the booking room, where I sign some papers I don't even bother to read.

They return my shoes and escort me through a series of corridors.

As I push through the doors at the end of the last hallway, my breath catches in my throat and my eyes sheet over with tears.

Of all the places I imagined our reunion finally happening, the lobby of the 14th District Precinct wasn't one of them.

Daniela rises from her chair.

Not a Daniela who doesn't know me, or is married to another man, or another version of me.

My
Daniela.

The one, the only.

She's wearing the shirt she sometimes paints in—a faded blue button-down spattered with oil and acrylic—and when she sees me her face screws up with confusion and disbelief.

I rush to her across the lobby, wrapping my arms around her, and she's saying my name, saying it like something isn't adding up, but I don't let go, because I
can't
let go. Thinking—the worlds I've come through, the things I've done, endured, suffered, to get back into the arms of this woman.

I can't believe how good it feels to touch her.

To breathe the same air.

To smell her.

Feel the voltage of my skin against hers.

I frame her face in my hands.

I kiss her mouth.

Those lips—so maddeningly soft.

But she pulls away.

And then pushes me away, her hands against my chest, her brow deeply furrowed.

“They told me you were arrested for smoking a cigar in a restaurant, and that you wouldn't…” Her train of thought derails. She studies my face like there's something wrong with it, her fingers running through two weeks' worth of stubble. Of course there's something wrong with it—it's not the face she woke up to today. “You didn't have a beard this morning, Jason.” She looks me up and down. “You're so thin.” She touches my ragged, filthy shirt. “These aren't the clothes you left the house in.”

I can see her trying to process it all and coming up blank.

“Did you bring Charlie?” I ask.

“No. I told you I wasn't going to. Am I losing my mind or—?”

“You're not losing your mind.”

Gently, I take her by the arm and pull her over to a couple of straight-backed chairs in a small waiting area.

I say, “Let's sit for a minute.”

“I don't want to sit, I want you to—”

“Please, Daniela.”

We sit.

“Do you trust me?” I ask.

“I don't know. This is all…scaring me.”

“I'll explain everything, but first I need you to call a cab.”

“My car is parked two blocks—”

“We're not walking to your car.”

“Why?”

“It's not safe out there for us.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Daniela, will you please just trust me on this?”

I think she's going to balk, but instead she takes out her phone, opens an app, and orders a car.

Looking up at me finally, she says, “Done. It's three minutes out.”

I glance around the lobby.

The officer who escorted me here from the booking room is gone, and at the moment, we're the only occupants aside from the woman at the welcome window. But she's sitting behind a thick wall of protective glass, so I feel reasonably sure she can't hear us.

I look at Daniela.

I say, “What I'm about to tell you is going to sound crazy. You're going to think I've lost my mind, but I haven't. Remember the night of Ryan's celebration at Village Tap? For winning that prize?”

“Yeah. That was over a month ago.”

“When I walked out the door of our house that night, that's the last time I saw you, until five minutes ago when I came through those doors.”

“Jason, I've seen you every day since that night.”

“That man isn't me.”

Her face becomes dark.

“What are you talking about?”

“He's another version of me.”

She just stares into my eyes, blinking.

“Is this some kind of trick? Or a game you're playing? Because—”

“Not a trick. Not a game.”

I take her phone out of her hand and check the time. “It's 12:18. I have office hours right now.”

I type in the number to my direct line on campus and hand Daniela the phone.

It rings twice, and then I hear my voice answer with, “Hi, beautiful. I was just thinking about you.”

Daniela's mouth opens slowly.

She looks ill.

I put it on speaker and mouth,
“Say something.”

She says, “Hey. How's your day going so far?”

“Great. Finished my morning lecture, and now I'm seeing a few students over the lunch hour. Everything okay?”

“Um, yeah. I just…wanted to hear your voice.”

I grab the phone from her and mute it.

Jason says, “I can't stop thinking about you.”

I look at Daniela, say, “Tell him you've been thinking, and that since we had such an amazing time in the Keys last Christmas, you want to go back.”

“We didn't go to the Keys last Christmas.”

“I know that, but he doesn't. I want to prove to you he's not the man you think he is.”

My doppelgänger says, “Daniela? Did I lose you?”

She unmutes the phone. “No, I'm right here. So, the real reason for my call—”

“Wasn't just to hear the dulcet tones of my voice?”

“I was thinking about when we went to the Keys for Christmas last year, and how much fun we all had. I know money's tight, but what if we went back?”

Jason doesn't miss a beat.

“Absolutely. Whatever you want, my love.”

Daniela stares into my eyes as she says into the phone, “Do you think we can get the same house we had? The pink-and-white one that was right on the beach? It was so perfect.”

Her voice breaks on the last word, and I think she's right on the verge of losing her composure, but she somehow manages to hold the scaffolding together.

“We'll make it work,” he says.

The phone begins to shake in her hand.

I want to tear him slowly apart.

Jason says, “Honey, someone's waiting out in the hall to see me, so I better jump off.”

“Okay.”

“I'll see you tonight.”

No you won't.

“See you tonight, Jason.”

She ends the call.

Reaching down, I squeeze her hand and say, “Look at me.”

She looks lost, addled.

I say, “I know your head is spinning right now.”

“How can you be at Lakemont and also sitting here right in front of me at the same moment?”

Her phone beeps.

A message appears on the touchscreen, advising that our car is arriving.

I say, “I'll explain everything, but right now we need to get in this car and pick our son up from school.”

“Is Charlie in danger?”

“We all are.”

That seems to wrench her back into the moment.

Rising, I give her a hand up out of the chair.

We move across the lobby toward the precinct entrance.

A black Escalade is parked at the curb, twenty feet ahead.

Pushing through the doors, I pull Daniela along the sidewalk toward the idling SUV.

There's no trace of last night's storm, at least not in the sky. A fierce north wind has raked away the clouds and left in its wake a brilliant winter day.

I open the rear passenger door and climb in after Daniela, who gives the black-suited driver the address to Charlie's school.

“Please get there as quickly as you can,” she says.

The windows are deeply tinted, and as we accelerate away from the precinct, I look over at Daniela and say, “You should text Charlie, let him know we're coming, to be ready.”

She turns her phone over, but her hands are still shaking too badly to compose a text.

“Here, let me.”

I take her phone and open the messaging app, find the last thread between her and Charlie.

I type:

Dad and I are coming to pick you up from school right now. There's no time to sign you out, so you'll just have to excuse yourself to the bathroom and head out front. We'll be in the black Escalade. See you in 10.

Our driver pulls out of the parking lot and into a street that's been plowed clean of snow, the pavement drying out under the bright winter sun.

A couple blocks down, we pass Daniela's navy Honda.

Two cars ahead of hers, I see a man who looks exactly like me sitting behind the wheel of a white van.

I glance through the rear window.

There's a car behind us, but it's too far back for me to see who's driving.

“What is it?” Daniela asks.

“I want to make sure no one's following us.”

“Who would be following us?”

Her phone vibrates as a new text arrives, saving me from having to answer that question.

CHARLIE now

Everything ok?

I respond with:

All good. Explain when we see you.

Putting my arm around Daniela, I pull her in close.

She says, “I feel like I'm caught in a nightmare and I can't wake myself up. What's happening?”

“We'll go someplace safe,” I whisper. “Where we can talk in private. Then I'll tell you and Charlie everything.”

Charlie's school is a sprawling brick complex that looks like a mental institution crossed with a steampunk castle.

He's sitting out on the front steps when we pull into the pickup lane, looking at his phone.