Stash (31 page)

He wore a baseball cap that cast a shadow across a dent in the top part of his cheek. Some of the bone must have been missing because it looked like an inch of his face had caved in under his eye.

He caught her staring. You must get a lot of that, too, he said.

Sorry. Yeah, I do. All my life I’ve had this.

I’m still getting used to it.

Where are you from? Dana asked.

And that’s when they exchanged numbers: he lived not far from where she was going to school in Canton. It would be cool to get together. Maybe they’d call each other. Neither had.

Until now. Dana pressed his number. He didn’t pick up and she was about to hang up but when she heard his message—“Talk”—she started to ramble, Hi, Aaron, this is Dana, we met at Gull and I wanted you to know I’m going to be in Potsdam tonight to see a concert at Clarkson, I don’t have a ticket yet but I heard you can get them out front and I thought if you aren’t doing anything maybe you can meet me there, if you like music, anyway give me a call if you want, but you’re probably not around, so anyway …

“Who’s that?” Heidi asked from the front seat.

“This guy I know.”

“Do you have a boyfriend you’ve been keeping secret from us?”

“I just met him before I came up. He lives around here.”

Chuck dropped them off at the Student Center in Clarkson and they followed the crowd making its way to Fander Hall. The
plan was to meet Steve and the others near the front door, once Dana got her ticket.

“Do you see anyone selling tickets?”

“Let’s look around,” Heidi said. “How much money have you got?”

“Enough.” She still had the three one-hundred-dollar bills her father had given her and had brought them along, although she’d never need that much.

At first they mulled around near the front doors and then walked farther out to a plaza of concrete planters and benches. Too bad it was raining now. Dana put up the hood on her jacket and walked with Heidi, waiting for a scalper to announce tickets.

They didn’t have to wait long. A guy in a Clarkson jacket walked past, repeating over and over: “Tickets. Who needs tickets. Tickets. Who needs tickets.”

“I do,” Dana said.

The guy stopped and showed two tickets. “One-fifty for two. Tenth row.”

They were better seats than the balcony seats her friends had.

“I only need one.”

“You gotta buy both.”

“Okay,” she said, thinking she’d get one for Aaron, too. If he showed up. If he got her message. If he cared.

After meeting up with Steve and the others, Dana followed them to the bleachers and never went to her ticketed seat. She parked herself in the aisle next to Heidi’s seat on the end and once the concert started it didn’t matter anyway because everyone got to their feet and danced. Someone passed a leather flask down the line and it ended up with Dana. She smelled the alcohol—some
kind of mixed cocktail, she thought—and started to hand it back but remembered she wasn’t running tomorrow. She took a small sip that stuck in her throat like a hot ember. No wonder she wasn’t much of a drinker. No one would mistake her for a campus party girl, which seemed to be her father’s worst fear. She didn’t even stay out late; if she were running tomorrow, she’d already be in bed asleep.

The band played for more than two hours. Dana’s ears rang from within, setting her head humming, and after a second encore she followed her gang to a bar across the street from campus. They carried fake IDs Steve had made up and sold for fifty dollars each during the first week of the semester. Good thing. A doorman checked everyone coming in and turned away a lot of people from the concert.

“Hey, no fighting in there,” the doorman said to Dana as he let her pass.

Another witty comment about her eye. Hands in her jacket pocket, she shot him the finger.

The bar was elbow to elbow, sweaty as a locker room. Her group carved out space in a rear room with a pool table, although there were too many people for anyone to play pool. Steve and Mark headed for the bar and came back ten minutes later with two pitchers of beer and a tray of glasses. Steve poured and Mark handed beers around. Dana tried to strike up a conversation with Steve’s girlfriend, Sarah, but all she got were one-word answers. The guy Heidi knew in Potsdam had met her in the bar and now three couples were paired off with Dana solo. She took a sip from her beer and put it on a shelf on the back wall of the bar. She still had songs in her head from the concert and she swayed on her feet. She stifled a yawn. It was after midnight and for the first time she wondered how they were going to get back to the dorm.

“Don’t worry about it,” Heidi said. “Have some fun.”

“I am having fun.”

Then someone moved between Dana and Heidi. It was Aaron.

“Hey, you got my message.”

“Yeah, but I was late and couldn’t get in, so I hung around by the doors thinking I might catch you on the way out.”

“You waited the whole concert outside?”

Aaron shrugged. Looked like an aw-shucks gesture to Dana, like it was no big deal waiting two hours, mostly in the rain, just for her.

“I got you a ticket.” She pulled the unused ticket out of her purse.

“Oh, cool, sorry. I’ll pay you for it.”

“No, that’s okay. It was part of a package deal.”

“Let me buy you a drink then.”

She held up her full glass of beer. “I’ve got one.”

He was staring at her and she waited for him to say something. Finally: “So is that a birthmark?”

She hesitated and he plowed on. “Only because, well, I thought I’d ask, you said you had it all your life and …”

How dreary to tell the same story over and over—it wasn’t really a birthmark, although she’d had it from birth—and so Dana had crafted several variations of the story. For those thinking themselves witty or original when they asked who punched her, she might reply: “My parents beat me” or “I got mugged.” One that pinged the moronic boys was “My boyfriend hit me.” With that statement she could learn a lot about a boy. The brave ones would puff up thinking they could dispatch the abusive boyfriend and take his place—until realizing they didn’t want to take the bad boyfriend’s place beside a girl with a smeared face; the gnome boys, on the other hand, would back off, not wanting
to mess with a guy willing to pound his girl in such a fashion. She’d already encountered a few of both types of boys this week on campus.

But she didn’t use any of these stories on Aaron. Because there was something incongruent about his face, he’d earned the right to the truth, although she wondered if he was talking to her only because of the mark on her face—for the exact opposite reason other boys ignored her.

She told him it was called venous malformation, a collection of extra veins that discolored and swelled beneath her eye. She was supposed to have surgery over winter break. There was nothing that could be done about it while she was a child, but the past year she had been to vascular surgeons, ophthalmologists, and neurologists and undergone numerous scans that indicated the veins were not integrally linked to the ocular veins or vessels connected to the brain. Surgery was the recommended option. Something like a sclerotherapy, which women do to get rid of spider veins, injecting the veins with a solution that would kill them. Scheduled for semester break in January, with a follow-up procedure in June.

“So it will be gone?”

“Hopefully,” Dana said. “It might not work a hundred percent but it should get a lot lighter.”

He took this news by finishing the rest of his beer—close to half the bottle in one long slurp down his throat—and again asking Dana if he could get her a drink. Again she pointed to her own almost full glass on the shelf and said she was all set. As if to prove she wasn’t much of a drinker, she picked up her glass and took a small sip and replaced it.

“I’ll be right back,” Dana said.

She turned and made her way toward her friends. Heidi took hold of her arm and said, “Is
that
the guy you wanted to meet?”

“He’s a nice guy.”

“What happened to his face?”

Dana shrugged. “What happened to mine?”

She checked the time and it was going on one o’clock. She asked Heidi again about getting back to the dorm.

“Ask Steve for a ride. I told you I’m staying here tonight.” Her friend from Potsdam was a tall jock type, with a shaved head and thick neck. Heidi held a pink drink but not very well. She tipped the glass and some of it sloshed over the rim.

“Just don’t ask him now,” Heidi added. “Look, he’s having the breakup talk with his girlfriend.”

Steve was in a back corner of the bar leaning over Sarah and she had tears in her eyes, and Dana thought: he should have taken my advice and used a text message; it would have saved the girlfriend a long trip up.

When she got back to Aaron he was standing exactly as she had left him, leaning back with his elbows on the shelf next to her beer. He looked like he hadn’t moved at all.

“You know, I was thinking, you don’t need that operation,” he said.

“What operation?”

“Your eye. You’re already pretty hot.”

She reacted as if he’d literally stroked her, arching her back, warmth rippling her spine.

“I’m getting it anyway,” she said.

He shifted back and forth on his feet and settled in a stance that listed to one side, as if he were having trouble with balance.

Her mouth was dry and that current she’d felt running down her spine turned out to be a bead of sweat. She took off her jacket and reached for her beer and this time took several sips.

“So I hear you’re a produce supplier. Do you work on an organic farm or something?”

“A what?”

“You deliver produce to Gull, right?”

“Where did you hear that?”

She smiled. “Are you going to tell me anything about yourself or not?”

Kids finally asleep, Brian alone downstairs. He drank one of the beers Gwen had bought at the market but it did little for his nerves. He didn’t dare another. He needed a clear head, although there was nothing to do except wait and pace.

He’d driven the roads. He’d called the sheriff. How else could he help?

He circled the possibilities again: Gwen stalked and caught by Gates as punishment for informing on him, or Gwen having an affair. Neither made sense. Gates hadn’t followed her and couldn’t have been lurking near their house waiting to find her alone. And Gwen wouldn’t run off with him after coming home anxious about seeing him.

Which left getting lost or injured.

He tried her cell phone again. No answer. He tried their home number in Morrissey and got Gwen’s voice saying
You’ve reached the Raine residence
, followed by Nora and Nate chiming in together to please leave a message. His throat tightened and he hung up.

The only other thing he could think to do was call Detective Keller in Morrissey. Maybe he had turned up something in his investigation that might be useful, to either cast hope or deal further despair on the situation.

He still had Keller’s card in his wallet with the detective’s cell phone number written on the back. He pressed the numbers.

“It’s Brian Raine,” he announced when Keller answered. “You’re handling the case of my wife, Gwen. I think she might be in trouble—with Jude Gates.”

“Don’t tell me she’s dealing with him?” His voice sounded surprised.

“No. He knows Gwen reported him to the police.”

Keller sighed into the phone, the long, heavy exhale of the exhausted and exasperated, all surprise gone.

“What did she go and do that for?”

Brian went through the story—the trip to the Adirondacks, Gwen running into Gates at the market, admitting to him what she’d done, coming home and telling Brian about it, then going for a walk and not coming back.

“I called the county sheriff. He thinks she’s having an affair and will come home when she’s ready to, or not come home at all.”

“It is the most likely situation,” Keller agreed.

“Jesus Christ, is that all you people think about?”

“Settle down, Mr. Raine, I know this is upsetting. I’m here to help you.”

“Gwen wouldn’t have told me about meeting him if she was trying to sneak off and have an affair.”

“Your wife tells more than she should sometimes, as we’ve just discovered. This could be another example: she wants to be caught. It’s not unusual.”

Brian could understand why Keller would see it that way, but the detective was wrong. “What about Gates?” Brian asked. “Does he want to be caught?”

“That’s a good question. We’re still not sure where he stands in all this.”

“You haven’t found anything on him?”

“And now we’ll find even less. Doesn’t your wife know that tipping
off a suspect puts a damper on our investigation, let alone that she can be charged as an accomplice?”

“You said you were going to help me.”

Keller paused. “I am going to help you. What else can you tell me?”

Brian told Keller about the van Gates was driving and the license plate number his son had memorized, and that the sheriff could not identify any property owned by Jude Gates on the county tax rolls.

“Let me see what I can come up with,” Keller said. “Can I reach you at this number?”

“Yes, it’s my cell. I’m at our house now in Tear Lake.”

“Is it raining up there like it is here?”

“It was,” said Brian. “Looks like it’s over now.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

So this is helplessness, a condition he knew little about. He’d always been a person of action, a decision maker, and now his only action was to go upstairs and get into bed. When the aloneness and anxiety piled on and tried to suffocate him, he got up and went into the kids.

Nora had kicked away her blanket; he tucked her back in, kissing her forehead. Nate had pushed himself against the wall. Brian climbed in with him, causing his son to stir, and Brian whispered: it’s okay, it’s okay; and he lay his cheek on a warm downy spot on the nape of his son’s neck and tried to be still and silent and strong, but mostly he repeated Gwen’s name over and over to himself.

Gwen had walked along the road and cut up the old fire trail she recognized near their house. She climbed beyond the ledge where she and her family had picnicked in June. She returned Jude’s call.