The Invisibles (6 page)

Once I'd pulled away the bandages and sunglasses he remembered me. Because I was so upset, he hardly needed to hear my story to come running with me around to the back of the rink. It was difficult to run on my skates, but I was afraid of being left behind, isolated in a space where no one could see me, the only kind of space where I'd be vulnerable to the man I'd seen next to the rink. The traffic cop barked into his radio as he ran ahead of me around the corner into the empty back lot. I nearly lost my balance when I saw there was no maroon van waiting for us.

The officer didn't need to think twice. “We've been looking for that van. He's probably driving something else.” He pulled open the emergency exit door of the rink and ushered me inside. “Come on. Show me where you saw him.”

We hurried into the red light that filled the domed room, and from the rail along the rink scanned a hundred masked faces for the one I'd seen watching me all night. I looked out on the floor, along the tables by the concessions area, among the few arcade games on the far wall. There was no place where the man could have been hiding, not really. The traffic cop dashed into the men's room and then the ladies' room. A group of little girls came running out, then the cop, looking frustrated.

A minute of confusion passed before the rest of the police came running in. The music was stopped and the children were herded off the floor so the cops could search the premises. The situation quickly became humiliating and inexplicable, with a lot of adults scowling, tweeners complaining. The man who'd been watching me was gone. None of the twelve-year-olds questioned remembered seeing him at the rail. A few said they might have seen
somebody, but their voices were too eager. Their descriptions contradicted each other.

In all there were eight police cruisers in the parking lot, their lights flashing in the pungent autumn night. Some of the twelve or so officers complained while looking at me, to let me know I'd wasted their time. Detective Volmar showed up in an unmarked white car and was very kind to me. He told a few other cops that they couldn't understand what I'd been through, though I had the feeling that he, too, was irritated. He put me in the back of his car with the door open and told me to put my shoes back on. Then he telephoned my father.

About a year later, the man who became known as the Lake Erie killer was arrested in a small town in southern Michigan, a short drive from our suburb in the cornfields. The police discovered the bones of an estimated thirty-one people in the crawl space beneath his house. Brianna and Randall's clothes were some of the first pieces of evidence found, and a detective said it was only a matter of time before their skulls were identified. Also found in one of three garages built on the killer's sprawling property was the maroon travel van my friends and I had seen outside Great Skate the night they'd disappeared. I saw this after school in a news flash I watched in my living room and saw part of an interview with the killer's mother and then a segment where a serial killer expert compared this killer to others. When the station broadcast footage of the police arresting the man who had murdered my friends, he wasn't anyone I recognized. He was older, around average height, with neat brown hair and glasses. He had soft cheeks, the sort of face I would never imagine hid plans to kill somebody.

My father and stepmother were there with me, waiting for me to speak, to say that this was the guy I'd seen in the rink that night the police had tried to come to my rescue. They wanted to see my
fear vanish forever. I only shook my head. What if my mother was one of the bodies they'd found, one of those so decayed it would never be identified? The more I thought about it the more possible it seemed and the more I understood I might still be sick. My face must have betrayed my fear, because my father and stepmother suddenly grew ashamed of themselves.

“Let's get out of here,” I said. Soon, I knew, the telephone would be ringing. Randall's parents and Brianna's mother would be calling to speak to me. There was weeping to do, relief to share, and bitterness to acknowledge, and now there was a figure to blame it on. Out the window behind my father and stepmother, the sun rippled in the golden light above the drying, broken stalks of last summer's corn. It was getting cold again, the days shortening. Soon the outdoor businesses would close for the winter.

“How about ice cream?” I said.

By then I'd stopped dreaming about Brianna and Randall in the skating rink. They appeared in my dreams, but in the usual nonsensical places, their faces no longer marbled with decay, but fresh and young, as I had known them. They didn't seem to remember what had happened to them, even when, during a dream set in my front yard, I saw the maroon van drive slowly past us. In the dream it was sunny, there were birds hunting worms in the grass, and I felt no fear after the van had gone. “I've been wanting to ask you two,” I said to my friends. “Is the driver of the van the killer or not? Or is he someone else?”

“What driver?” Randall said.

“I don't know any van driver,” Brianna said.

On the day the police caught the Lake Erie killer, my father, my stepmother, and I came back from the ice cream stand having licked our fingers clean. The burnt flavor of sugar cones lingered in our mouths, and rather than accept the grim circumstances awaiting us, my father suggested we use the remaining daylight to
build a scarecrow in the front yard. He dug a flannel shirt and a pair of brown corduroys from a trunk of old clothes, and I found a pillowcase we could use for a head. In the yard we stuffed these things full of leaves. We posted an old shovel handle in the hard ground and hung the great grotesque doll on it. I'd painted ferocious blue eyes and a stitched red frown for a face, and my father fastened on a gray fedora with safety pins. My stepmother sat on the porch swing, bundled up in a blanket, watching as she sipped hot peppermint tea.

The day turned dark over the bare trees, faster than we'd expected, and by the time we joined my stepmother on the porch swing, with leaf scraps clinging to our hair and sweatshirts, the sun was setting, and a wild wind had sprung up. The trees swayed, noisily rattling their branches together. We sat in a tight row on the wooden seat and watched the scarecrow flail its arms in the dusk, casting dead leaves up at the shuddering boughs of our maples, like a wizard trying to rebuild the summer. Inside the house, the telephone rang and rang. The answering machine kept switching on, and we laughed to hear my father gloomily repeating that we weren't home. Maybe that was a little cruel, hiding just then, but we would make up for it later. We would call those people back, and shout, laugh, cry — produce the sounds that people make when they're together. We owed them that much, out of the empathy we felt, listening to them speak slowly, faithfully putting words into the void of our answering machine, against the chill that grows when a name is said and silence answers.

He fell in love, briefly, with a younger woman. They met on project and hit it off one morning in the coffee line, making small talk to ward off a panhandler. Turned out they both loved movies. He wrote screenplays in his free time — scenes, really, which he showed no one — and she had been to film school in North Carolina. Now they both traveled around teaching older people how to use auditing software. They passed hours in unfamiliar offices, explaining keystroke combinations to resistant workers and reading about industry advances, and when it was over they escaped, usually to the art cinema or the place that showed pictures by Antonioni and Godard. As the dark theater brightened around them, something changed. She laced her arm through his, he went tight in the throat, and they would say things he blushed to recall later. There were nights in her hotel room, perhaps many, but the affair went no further than that. Maybe it was because he returned to his bed while it was still dark and the halls were empty, and when he saw her back at the office, she wore a fresh mask of makeup and acted like a stranger, not coldly, but like the friendly stranger he had met that morning in the coffee line. Maybe she had never loved him; maybe he scared her. She was twenty-four, he thirty-seven, married, with twin girls who fought over the phone when he called.

He did not know what made her end it, only that he had been preparing to leave his family without telling her. Being with her had dominated his thoughts as he held filthy rails in trains and sat amid the babble in airports and took long morning swims at
the
YMCA
near the hotel. More than anything else, he thought, his wife's pride would be hurt. Cindy had gotten what she wanted from him in their daughters, twins with fiery red hair and a penchant for singing together and losing clothes in the yard. After a while, she might even forgive him. A small, energetic woman who had not been without a network of friends since college, she had been his ally for years, and then she had become a mother and forgotten him. Perhaps it was unfair to put it like that, but he sensed she had lost her interest in being his wife, and he did not hold it against her. They had known each other too long, and the basis of their marriage had been friendship. He now saw the mistake they had made, but there was no taking back lost years and no use in pointing fingers.

He tried to imagine explaining it to Lindsay, the young woman from work. Sometimes he looked at her and thought, She's just a girl, I'm too old, and I'm doing something very wrong here. But other times he saw her deflect another consultant's advance or stand up for herself to their manager, and she seemed more than a match for him. She knew he was married and a father, and she still went to the movies with him and let him put his hand on her waist and climbed on top of him in the stiff hotel bed. Sometimes when he thought about it he was startled by her forwardness. Maybe she was the stronger one. It was in the midst of this bittersweet confusion, as he sat one morning with his laptop deleting e-mails he had barely read, that he finally understood he was in love.

He resolved to tell her. He had to. He owed it to himself, and to Lindsay. In a way, he owed it to his wife. She was getting older, too; she might want to remarry, and there was no denying that finding someone was harder for a woman in her late thirties, even a woman as attractive and charming as Cindy. It was right to give her as much time as possible. And so, armed with
this reasoning and the half belief he was doing the right thing, he went to Lindsay's hotel room that evening. He should have called, but he was feeling anxious to see her. She had not been around the office that day, and he had not found an opportunity to ask about her in an unassailably innocuous manner. She had not responded to his e-mails and text messages, but that meant nothing; they were often very busy with clients. She had probably only been working on a different floor, but he was nervous, afraid something was wrong, that she had stopped loving him because of some fatal remark or gesture, and he told himself soon he would know she had a minor cold and all would be fine. He stood at the door to her room, and when he was sure the hall was empty he put his eye to the peephole. He saw the collapsed image of a sunlit room and white curtains, a slender blur standing in the middle. His feeling of relief was instantaneous. He readied himself for whatever mood she might be in and knocked hard enough to sting his knuckles. He felt as if he were being stabbed in the heart over and over. The chain on the other side of the door rattled, the handle flipped down, and the door opened a few inches.

“Can I help you?”

“Lindsay?” he said. He said it even though he knew right away that this woman was not Lindsay, was too old to be Lindsay, was someone Lindsay would never talk to, unless she was some relative from New Jersey who wore costume jewelry, dyed her hair yellow, and rasped. His hopes collapsed before she answered the question.

“No Lindsay here. You sure you got the room number right?”

He was no longer looking at the woman. Three months, he thought. It had only lasted three months. Why had it seemed so much longer? “I'm sorry,” he said. “I made a mistake here. Wrong floor.”

The woman's eyes shined with pleasure and distrust. “Okay sir. You have a nice evening.” She shut the door and from within came the sound of the dead bolt thrown and the security chain reattached.

He did not know what he would do. He had to call home at some point tonight but just now lacked the strength. If he heard his wife's voice, happily surprised and breathless from some task involving the girls, he might break down and confess what had been his mind these past weeks. He must be careful now, when he was feeling desperate, not to blunder and lose everything. He rode the elevator down listening to two younger men excitedly discussing Victoria's Secret models.

The project manager, Rajan, was in the bar, drinking some kind of Scotch. The Sikh signaled from across the room, smiling through his black beard, looking characteristically dignified in his eggshell-colored turban. His easy grace and discretion were both impressive and terrifying. “Let me buy you a drink, Michael,” he said. “I bet you could use one. Now that Lindsay is gone.”

Taking the stool beside his manager, he gestured to the bartender to bring him whatever Rajan was having. He didn't care what it was, only that he had a drink to hold. “That obvious, I guess,” he said. It was not a question. He wondered, feeling more exhausted than afraid, if Cindy knew.

Rajan was watching
NFL
highlights on the
TV
above the bar. It was after six, and the tables were taken up by other businesspeople, good-looking men and women smiling tiredly, speaking in loose and rolling cadences, glad for the solace of trendy entrees and a cocktail at the end of another day in a strange city. Rajan chuckled, a light and musical sound. His dark brown eyes looked incredibly young. “No one knows,” he said. “She confided in me.”

“What happened? Did I scare her?”

Rajan sighed, as if there was nothing he could say that was not
obvious to both of them. Then, shaking his head, he flagged down the bartender. “We will need shots,” Rajan said. “Something with a big burn. This man is in pain.”