Die For You

all seemed a bit silly, a bit earthly even to my young mind, a man-made idea, a desperate attempt to explain the unknowable.

I started noticing airplanes then. Their white, silent flight filled me with a terrible longing. I imagined the fuselage filled with passengers en route to some fabulous destination. Their lives were their own, free from tragedy and sadness. The kind of grief that held me in its grip was impossible for them. The desire to be high and far away from my life, to be someone else, anywhere else, was a physical pain, a hole in my center.

No matter where you go, there you are. Fred, of course; one of his wisdom one- liners. He’d come to join me, sat down in the wet grass beside me. I’d pointed up at the plane, told him I wished I were there. “That’s the thing you can never escape, try as you might,” he said. “Try as you might. Pick your poison-drugs, alcohol. You always wake up with yourself eventually.”

“Not him. Not my father.”

Fred went still, looked at me carefully. “Suicide is not an escape. It’s an end.”

“How do you know?”

He was quiet for so long, I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then: “I suppose I don’t really know. But I can only imagine that an action that destroys life and hope, which leaves only anger and sadness in its wake, can’t be the right course.”

I didn’t answer him. I didn’t have the words to say that I thought his idea was incomplete, unsatisfying. That maybe it was the only course open when you finally realize you can’t escape yourself and you can’t live with yourself. Maybe an end is an escape.

“Want some ice cream?” he asked me then.

“Okay.”

MAYBE IT WAS a longing like this that drove my husband. That sickening, ardent desire to be anyone, anywhere else. Maybe he chose the alternative of stepping into someone else’s skin, someone else’s name, someone else’s life. Less final than suicide, maybe even an act of hope that someplace else is better than here.

A FEW HOURS earlier we returned to Jack’s apartment and retrieved an envelope of cash from beneath his mattress. The next steps weren’t as clear to him as they were to me.

“You don’t even know that was an answer to your question. He was a dying man. He might not have even heard you.”

The truth was, it wasn’t just that. In fact, when he said the word-Praha-it made a deep kind of sense to me, as though I’d known it all along. Jack wouldn’t buy that. After all, who was going to trust my instincts at the moment? I had to convince him.

“Marcus is not going to stay in the U.S. He can’t. He has run his con and now he’s going back where he came from.”

“You don’t know that. I thought you said he hated the Czech Republic, that he never wanted to go home.”

“It’s the only course open to him now.”

“You don’t know that,” he repeated.

“He can disappear. Take back his name, Kristof Ragan, and just leave. At this point, they don’t even know his real identity. He’ll be swallowed. They’ll never find him. What’s the extradition policy between the Czech Republic and the U.S.?”

Jack looked at me blankly. “How should I know?”

The other truth was that I didn’t have any ideas about where else he could be. Was it a desperate act to board a plane to Prague in search of my husband? Yes. But it didn’t seem that way at the time.

Out of sheer exhaustion, not a lack of anxiety or urgency, I lay on the plush down of Jack’s bed as he threw things into a large duffel bag-jeans, underwear, some old clothes of mine from a night I’d spent here after a party, a pair of sneakers I’d left after the last time we ran in Central Park together. When I closed my eyes I saw the dying stranger in Central Park. I saw my ruined home. Jack left the room for a minute and came back with a shaving kit.

“I packed you a toothbrush.”

“We’re not going on vacation.”

“You can’t travel overseas without luggage. It looks suspicious.”

Jack was ever the pragmatist; I always feared his reading of my novels. “I don’t get it,” he’d say. “How did she get from here to there?” Or: “How did he find her in that huge crowd?” Or: “What’s her motivation for doing what she did? It doesn’t make sense.”

He liked the linear progression, the logical course of events, motivations so obvious that they didn’t brook questions. I liked the illogical leap in time and tense. Meaning that the nuts and bolts-how the window got unlocked or what vehicle was used to transport my character from this scene to that-bored and annoyed me.

It’s the essence, the energy of character and action that moves me. I don’t want to tell how the vase found its way to the ground. Was it dropped? Was it thrown? I just want to show the shards, glistening and sharp, on the marble floor. Because that’s life. We don’t always act out of logic. Things can’t always be explained. Sometimes we don’t know how the vase got there, just that it has shattered, irreparably.

“Let me ask you something,” Jack said. He zipped up the duffel and moved it over toward the door. Then he returned to sit at the foot of the bed. “What’s this about?”

“We’ve already had this conversation. You know what it’s about.”

“Is it justice you’re looking for? Or revenge? When and if you find him, how exactly do you plan to dole that out?”

I didn’t answer, just stared at the ceiling. He wasn’t looking for an answer. This was his way. Just put it in your pipe and smoke it, he’d say.

“Or is it just about the why and how, Isabel? Is it just about the knowing, the understanding that you need?”

I still didn’t feel compelled to answer.

“Because I’m your friend. I’m with you. I’ll buy the tickets. I’ll get on a plane and go with you wherever you need to go. But let’s make sure it’s for the right reasons.”

“What makes a right reason?” I asked.

“Something that, when bad things happen and it all goes to shit, is still worth all the trouble. Something that means enough to risk everything you’re risking right now.”

I looked at his profile, the crooked ridge of his nose. He seemed tired to me suddenly. I looked around the room and noticed that it was another minimal space, like his office. Just the low platform bed, covered in expensive linens. The walls were white, the floor hardwood. Where was all his stuff? His magazines and dirty clothes, his photographs and unpaid bills? I remembered his dorm room from NYU-a pigsty of staggering proportions. When did he become so neat, so anti-clutter?

“My father didn’t leave a note,” I said. We’d never really talked about this element of my life, though of course he knew. And it had come up again and again in my fiction. He was a careful reader. He probably knew my issues relating to my father’s death better than anyone, including myself. For Jack, I was an open book.

“Okay, Isabel,” he said softly. “I get it.”

“You don’t have to come with me.”

“I know that.”

He moved over to the door and, with effort, I lifted myself off his bed.

“You have to do one thing before we go. Nonnegotiable,” he said. “Two things, actually.”

“What?”

“One: Call your sister. And two: Write down everything you didn’t tell that detective and e-mail it to him. Let him know you’re on his side. It might work in your favor. It might even help you get what you want-answers.”

I thought about arguing, but I could tell by the look on his face that he was unmovable on these matters. Also, a small part of me still recognized a good idea when I heard one. I did what he asked. I left a message for my sister, surprised to get her voice mail. And I wrote a long note to Detective Crowe, telling him everything I had learned, including my husband’s real name and mentioning the e-mail I’d had from Camilla. Then, whether it was the right action or not, for the right reasons or not, Jack and I left for the airport.

IN MY SEAT I fidgeted and squirmed, unable to relax or get comfortable. The hours stretching ahead of me seemed endless, a river I would never cross. I kept waiting for the pretty flight attendant to look at me with a