Shadows and Lies (19 page)

My health is good, though sometimes my hips bother me when it gets cold out. Does arthritis run in your side of the family?

I have a boyfriend named Sean, and we are learning to waltz.

You may e-mail me back if you’d like to save on postage, though don’t tell the USPS I told you that.

Carrie Vitagliano

I reread what I wrote, made a few changes to my grammar, and deleted the part about Sean because I thought that that was privileged information and the sort of thing I thought a daughter would tell to a mother-type person. Frankly, I didn’t want Barbara to get all excited that I would tell her something personal like that. I reread my email again and sighed over the results. It was completely stilted. I had no idea what to tell her about myself, my real self, without going off on her for leaving us all in Nancy’s clutches. And, as I had told Sean, I didn’t really want to form ‘a relationship’, or ‘an attachment’ to Barbara. I just wanted my answers.

It made me feel like I was a little selfish to want things that way, so with a wince I clicked the Send icon and the message was away. I hoped too that Barbara wasn’t crazy. I hoped I wouldn’t regret replying to her letter.

I sighed. One more thing to worry about.

The next day was a work day, which started off rotten because a) Sean was not home, b) my car had shrapnel in it and c) I had trouble starting the darn thing. The last thing my poor bank account needed was for my car to quit working. At that point, I didn’t care what it looked like; I just wanted it to work. The fact that I couldn’t ask my mechanic boyfriend to take a look at it because he was likely in protective custody made me depressed, but I was also jumpy because I half expected some darkly clad FBI agent to jump out from around the corner and cart me off to an interrogation room where I might or might not be let go.

I called Sean on my lunch break and it didn’t help my nerves that I was immediately bumped to his voicemail. “Hey,” I said, my voice full of worry. “I’m just wondering how things are going, and when you’ll be home. You said you might be back tonight. Call me when you can. Bye.”

The wedding party had a dance lesson that night, and everyone asked me where Sean was. “He told me he had some business to take care of,” I told them, not wanting to lie. “I don’t know where he is though.” Thankfully, Genny and Isaac didn’t pressure me for more information. I was stuck dancing by myself for the whole hour though. When we were finished, I rushed to my purse to see if Sean had left me a message, but he hadn’t. I rushed home thinking maybe he couldn’t get my calls but perhaps he would be back by the time I was.

He wasn’t.

He wasn’t home by morning. “It’s okay,” I told myself as I got myself ready for work. “He said he might be gone for a while. He said he’d be back by today at the latest. If something was wrong, he’d find a way to contact me.” I looked at myself firmly in the mirror. “He would.”

On that brave note, I went to work.

I managed to not call Sean this time, since I didn’t want to seem overly worried or clingy. However, my anxiety level jumped another notch when I got home at eight in the evening and Sean’s truck was still gone. I called him then, not being able to help myself, but his phone immediately bumped me to voicemail again.

At that point, I didn’t know what to think so I didn’t bother leaving a message. Sean had said he’d be back by that day. The day was over. I started to pace. Sean was not here. No FBI agents had shown up to bring me in for questioning and make me sign a million nondisclosure documents. Was Sean in trouble? Was he being punished for telling me his secret? I paced till I was exhausted. Unwilling to just go to bed, I dragged one of my living room chairs over to my front window. I sat down there and kept watch over the parking lot to see if Sean would magically appear. I ended up falling asleep in that chair, waking in the middle of night only to climb blearily into bed.

The sunlight streaming in from my front window work me up, and I immediately stumbled to it and looked to see if Sean’s truck was at last parked outside. It was not. Needing information, I called Sean’s work. If all was well, he should be there. If he was with the FBI still, he had to have contacted his boss to let him know he wasn’t going to be coming in. At least, I hoped that would be the case. Sean’s work phone rang twice, and then to my relief, someone picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” said a man that had an Indian accent.

Sean’s boss, I thought. Ranjit. “Hello,” I said back, forcing my voice to sound cheerful. “I’d like to talk to Sean Whalen, please.”

“He doesn’t work here anymore,” was Ranjit’s gruff reply.

I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat. “He…quit?”

“Yes,” said his boss irritably. “The bastard did it by fax too, and with no notice.”

I was having trouble processing what Ranjit was saying. “He quit?”

“Yes,” said Ranjit. “Who is this?”

“I’m Sean’s girlfriend,” I said quietly. “I’m trying to find him.”

“Oh,” said Ranjit. His ire left his voice. “I’m sorry, young lady, but I cannot tell you much. The last time I saw Sean was three days ago. A half an hour before he was set to clock out, four men in suits came by and they were looking for Sean. He apologized to me for their presence, but said that he had to go with them. Sean got in their car, and one of the men followed them in Sean’s truck. Ten minutes later, I received a fax saying that he was quitting. He didn’t even have the decency to give notice. Just bam! He’s gone. He hasn’t been back since.”

“He’s been gone three days?” I whispered, shocked.

“Yes miss. I don’t know where is, or who he is with, and I’m sorry he’s treated you so badly as to leave you in the lurch. I thought he was a better man than that.”

I shook my head, wanting to refute Ranjit’s words. Sean was a better man than that.

“Well, I’m sorry to give you such news, but I must let you go now. I have a shop to run and I’m down my best mechanic.”

I cleared my throat. “Oh. Um, yes. Of course. Thank you for the information.” I hung up, not waiting for him to say goodbye.

I stood stock still, my eyes glued to the phone in my hand. Three days ago Sean was supposed to meet with his handler to tell them about me. But someone, my guess was the FBI, got to him first and made him quit his job on the spot. For what reason? My eyes were drawn to our shared wall. Feeling suddenly sick to my stomach, I rushed outside and tried to peer through his front window, but the vertical blinds were shut tight. I rushed back inside and called the manager’s office.

“Hello, Wendy,” I said to my land lady in a perfectly calm voice, though my hands shook violently. “Can you tell me if Sean Whalen is still renting apartment number 2009?”

“Hell, no he isn’t, the bastard,” Wendy said viciously. “Somebody in a suit with a badge came in early two mornings ago saying that Mr. Whalen was breaking his lease. He handed me a set of documents that say that I have no legal recourse and to not pursue the matter. I’ve half a mind to make a stink about it, but I don’t want no Feds coming after me. No thank you.” Wendy paused then asked belatedly, “Why do you want to know?”

“We’re friends,” I managed to say despite the fact that I felt like passing out. “I haven’t seen him in a few days. I’ve been worried.”

“Well, all I can say is you’re probably better off without him. Believe you me, when a man has the Feds on his tail, a girl is better off pretending he has the plague than making friends with him.”

“Thanks for the information,” was all I could to say, and I hung up before Wendy could rant further on the subject of deadbeat men. I stared at our shared wall for a long time, trying to get my mind around what I knew had to be the truth, but what my heart shouted had to be a lie.

Sean was gone.

He’d been taken by the Feds three days ago, and he was gone. Erased. I’d bet a whole suitcase full of hundred dollar bills that if I could see inside his apartment, it was would be clean as a whistle. It would have new paint and carpet and everything that Sean had owned would be gone.

I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t. Sean had promised me that he would be back. He’d promised me. But he was gone, without a word, without warning; he’d just vanished. I had no way of finding out where he’d been sent to, nor any way of knowing what his new identity would be and I knew that he would have a new one. People in the Witness Protection Program don’t just get picked up and moved for the fun of it. He’d likely been taken away because his life was in danger.

That broke the fog of shock that had settled around me and I started to cry. I sank down to the floor and I just sobbed with my hands covering my mouth. My whole body was clenched and I just rocked as big fat tears slipped down my cheeks.

Then my phone rang.

I sprang up and jumped for it, not even bothering to look at the Caller ID; I was sure it was Sean, it could only be Sean. “Hello?” I said breathlessly, gripping the phone in desperate hope.

“Carrie, your father’s in the hospital. He had a heart attack this morning. You need to come right away.”

I sagged against the wall. It was Nancy. Not Sean. I think I might have blacked out for a moment there, because the next thing I knew I slumped down on the floor once more and Nancy was calling out my name. “Carrie! Carrie, are you still there?”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “I’m still here.” And Sean was still gone. I tried to pull myself together. “Which hospital? What room?”

Nancy gave me the information, and I wrote it down. “I’ll be there soon,” I assured her mechanically, and then hung up.

I pulled myself to my feet and looked around. What could I do but pull some clean clothes on and call in a family emergency at work? It wasn’t as if Sean was likely to show up. He was presumably in some other part of the country, while in the meantime my father was here and in the hospital.

I was the last one to arrive at Dad’s hospital room. Vanessa and Lindsay were already there, standing off to one side of the room trying to look invisible while Nancy and Clarissa stood on either side of my Dad, who was wide awake and sitting up in bed, arguing vehemently with each other. Nancy and Clarissa usually got along pretty well, but Clarissa was very protective of her little brother. Nancy took exception to anyone who tried to take the reins in any given situation, let alone the care of her husband, and that issue it seemed, as I eased inside the room, was at the heart of their argument.

“If anyone’s going to call a doctor, Clarissa, it should be me. I’m the wife. You’re only the sister.”

“I know how to work the system and get the doctors to hop to it. I want an update on the tests – so do you, you know, and if I can help, you should let me!”

Nancy poked a finger in Clarissa’s direction. “I’m not going to let you take control. That’s all you ever do. You stick your nose in our business and try to arrange things to your liking. That’s why you stopped by the other day, to snoop and pry. I have no doubt that you’ve manipulated Vanessa and Lindsay into doing and saying all sorts of things about me now that they’re living with you. And that’s another thing. How dare you insinuate yourself into our dealings like that! What gives you the right?”

Clarissa threw her hands up in the air. “You threw Vanessa’s dog against the wall! You’re lucky Vanessa didn’t call the police on you! And as for getting involved, you’re damn right I’m going to get involved when my nieces are scared for their lives because you can’t control your temper! And – and! – as for coming over to your house, I was trying to be nice and make sure you were alright. I was not coming over to snoop.”

“Bullshit!” Nancy growled. “And my girls were not afraid for their lives. You’re being overly dramatic! As usual.”

The tension in the room was so thick it was suffocating, and my anxiety level, already high, and my nerves, already worn thin, couldn’t take anymore, and I started to tear up. I wanted so badly to leave that little room, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I was stuck in place watching the family drama unfold. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of hiding my tears, but Nancy had always had excellent radar for weakness, and she trained her angry eyes on me.

“Quit blubbering Carrie! Look, your father’s still alive. Crying now isn’t going to help him, and it certainly isn’t what I need right now. If you can’t get yourself under control, you can just leave!”

While Clarissa took exception to Nancy’s words to me and took up the argument once again, this time on the merits of Nancy’s worthiness as a human being, I fled. My sisters followed me, and we sat in the waiting room, me crying helplessly, unable to stop, while they just sat quietly. Vanessa put her arm around my shoulders while Lindsay sat on my other side reading a brochure on menopause and in general ignored me. Vanessa tried to comfort me, but I was inconsolable, crying the kind of tears that make you hiccup uncontrollably, the kind that make it hard to talk coherently.

They all thought I was crying because of Nancy, and I was, but mostly I was crying because Sean was so obviously gone. I couldn’t talk about him though, not there, not then. I couldn’t risk Nancy overhearing; I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to take it if she started in on me over that too. We were in the waiting room for maybe five minutes when we saw our cousin Michael come in.

He stopped and stared at me – I was still weeping like a faucet – and he said, his face growing pale, “Oh my God. Is he dead?”

“No,” Lindsay said in a deadpan voice. “Dad’s alive. Nancy and Clarissa are just arguing.”

“What?” he asked. He actually seemed to be surprised at the news.

Vanessa got up and explained the situation to him in hushed tones a few feet away from me. Michael shook his head, but he didn’t bother to go into my Dad’s room. He just sat down with us, and I tried hard to get ahold of myself.

“It’ll probably be safe to go in when one of them comes out,” he said after a moment.

“If they don’t get thrown out first,” Lindsay said, pointing to a nurse that was hustling into Dad’s room.

In the end it was Clarissa who came out, looking angry, embarrassed, and little like she wanted to cry too. She sat down in a chair across from the four of us and crossed her arms across her chest. “That woman would test the Devil’s patience.”