Die For You

“Let’s go to a cafe or something. Cafe Orlin is right around the corner. It’s quiet, private. I’m starved.”

Erik looked as if he was about to argue but then seemed to change his mind.

“Fine,” he said, taking her hand. “That’s fine.”

Brace nodded uncertainly, took a quick glance at his watch. Then he ushered them toward the exit. Linda noticed and liked that he seemed in charge, but was still deferential. She felt safer, calmer with him there, as if there was no problem he couldn’t make disappear. The elder Brace didn’t have this quality, didn’t seem like an enforcer, more like a trusted adviser and friend. Someone who would do his best to help, within the letter of the law, but would bow to forces bigger than himself. His face was soft at the jaw, kind and warm at the eyes. There was no kindness or softness in the face of the younger man, just granite.

The three exited the precinct and turned left, toward First Avenue. As they proceeded down the block, Linda saw-just out of the corner of her eye-Ben, waiting in his Mercedes across the street. Her heart nearly stopped in her chest, her stomach bottomed out completely, but she kept walking, pretended not to see.

She hoped he was a coward, that he’d stay in the periphery, a looming threat that never materialized. But then she heard a car door open and slam hard. She found herself cringing, clinging close to Erik, not able to bring herself to turn around even as she heard the footfalls behind them. John and Erik, already in conversation, seemed not to notice.

“I’m going to need you to start from the beginning, Erik,” John was saying. “How Marcus Raine approached you, what documentation he provided, what you signed. Then we’ll work our way up to the events of this evening.”

“Okay,” Erik said. “I can do that.”

“Can I make a suggestion? It really would be better if we went back to your place. I’m reluctant to discuss your private matters in public. And in lieu of a secretary, I’d like to record our conversation to be transcribed later.”

“I agree. Linda?”

Linda barely heard them. She had the vague sense that she was being asked something that needed answering, but she couldn’t hear over the rushing of blood in her ears. They were just about to turn the corner.

“Linda!” called Ben, loud, insistent. All three of them stopped moving and turned back, startled at the sound of his voice.

Ben stood there, legs spread, arms akimbo. In the dim light of the street, the bulk of his frame was dark, menacing. She could barely see his face. She found herself unable to move, to open her mouth.

Please, Ben, she wanted to say, don’t do this to him. Don’t do this to me. Not now. But she couldn’t; it all lodged in her throat. Her life was a china teacup, already on its way from delicate grip to marble floor. She had no one to blame but herself. She thought of her babies, Emily and Trevor, how she’d betrayed them more than she had anyone else with her vanity and stupidity. What kind of mother was she if she could lead herself and the father of her children into a moment like this?

“Who is that?” asked Erik, his face open and earnest, even in such a moment.

Linda shook her head. She opened her mouth but still no words came.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know who I am!” Ben roared, moving closer.

Erik pulled Linda back, and John Brace was quick to move in front of them, hold up a hand.

“Stay back, man. What do you want?”

John Brace suddenly seemed even tougher, harder, with his shaved head and broad shoulders, deep authoritative voice. The briefcase he clutched in his hand didn’t diminish this image; he looked as though he was prepared to use it as a weapon or a shield.

“She doesn’t love you, Erik,” Ben said, his voice cracking like an adolescent boy’s. “She loves me.”

Linda could see his whole body was quaking. She realized suddenly, clearly, that something was clinically wrong with him. He wasn’t just desperate or upset, or lovesick. She had a cold dawning, a terrible fear for his family, those two sweet-faced girls, his pretty wife. When he moved a step closer, into the orange glow of a street lamp, he seemed deranged, eyes wild, jaw clenching and unclenching, big chest heaving.

John spread his arms out and started herding them backward. He said quietly, “He has a gun.”

Then Linda saw it, too. She’d been so focused on his face, how totally unself-conscious he was, how lost in his own mind, she hadn’t noticed. Then he started lifting his arm.

She broke from Erik, started running toward Ben. She felt Erik, then John’s hands on her, holding her back. Heard them both yelling, following close behind as she shifted away from them. She came to stop in front of Ben, feeling small and insubstantial before him. His height and breadth, the size of his anger dwarfed her. She wanted to scream at him. Instead she put her hand on his chest and whispered, “Ben, we have children. Think about what you’re doing to your girls right now. Please.”

He seemed to hear, to shrink at her words. Anger left him, dropped the features of his face into a sagging sadness, left his shoulders to slump forward.

Then Erik was pulling her back and there was shouting all around them. Uniformed officers seemed to have poured out of everywhere, there were so many emerging from the doors of the precinct building and coming out of cars. A shift change.

Then so many different voices echoing on the concrete of the buildings around them. Freeze! Drop that weapon! Drop it! Drop it! Drop it! Coming from everywhere like the call of crows.

Erik and John pulled Linda back and she was screaming, No, no, no! Because she knew. She saw it in Ben’s eyes and watched as it spread across his face, that smile, that “Fuck you, world” smile. She’d seen it before, it was etched in her spirit, had dictated in so many ways the course of her life. She’d looked for it in every face, beneath the flimsy veils they all wore. She’d finally found it in Ben. No, no, no! She saw him raise the gun beneath his chin and, without hesitating, pull the trigger. And then in a horrible explosion of light and sound, a dreadful spray of red, it all disappeared.

20

A suicide, a miscarriage, a sudden disappearance. All abbreviations, interruptions. Variations on a theme that has run through my life.

The tickets were easily purchased with Jack’s credit card, and even though as we waited to board the plane I saw my picture flash briefly on one of the televisions mounted up high, no one even glanced in my direction. The sound was down for some reason. The text on the screen read: Real-Life Mystery: The Downtown Murder of Three People Linked to Missing Husband of Bestselling Author. The story was obviously small news at this point. It wasn’t even on the screen for thirty seconds.

I was five years younger in that photo and maybe ten pounds heavier when it was taken, but I might still have been recognizable if I hadn’t tied back my hair into a bun at the base of my neck, tucked it beneath a gray knit cap pulled down over the bandage on my head, and donned a pair of round wire-rimmed glasses that I needed but never wore.

But maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was the simple fact, as Marcus always claimed, that people weren’t looking anymore. They’ve got their earbuds in. They’re staring at tiny screens that fit in a palm. They’re talking on the phone, eyes blank, unseeing.

Even though I knew I wasn’t officially a suspect, I kept waiting for the police to arrive. Maybe my name was on some kind of a watch list of people not allowed to leave the country? I’d expected to be stopped at check-in, at security. But no, we’d glided through security checks, while a young mother was forced to empty her bags, carry a weeping toddler through one of those machines that blows air on you in sharp, quick blasts. Her little boy screamed in fright. I thought of my sister, the kids, as we walked past them.

ANOTHER THEME THAT runs though my life: airplanes. After my father’s death, I spent long hours lying in the grass behind my house, staring up at the sky. I was obsessed with the idea of direction, the Catholic concept of heaven being up and hell being down. I knew suicide was a sin, punishable by eternal damnation. I tried to imagine endless suffering for my father. I couldn’t. I couldn’t see him punished for being too afraid, too weak, and too sad to go on. It didn’t seem right-nor did the idea of his lofting up to some cloud to the sound of harp music work for me. It