Die For You

FINALLY, I WATCHED Rick strut up the street past the cute shops and trendy cafes, tapping on his BlackBerry oblivious to my waiting by the staircase. He was tall, lanky with a mass of black curls, a thin, carefully maintained beard and sideburns. He wore a pair of faded denims, a T-shirt that read Love Kills Slowly beneath a thick leather jacket hanging open in spite of the cold. He walked right by me, took the stairs easily, light on his feet.

“Rick,” I said.

He looked up startled from the slim black device in his hand. It took him a second to place me in this context. He didn’t look well, pale and exhausted, harried.

“Isabel,” he said, a frown sinking into his forehead. “What’s wrong? What are you doing here?” He looked around, behind me, up and down the street.

“Marc didn’t come home last night,” I said. I watched his brows lift in surprise, his eyes glance quickly to the left, then come back to me-thinking of a lie, a way to stall. Before he could come up with one, I asked, “Was he really here when I called?”

Rick shoved the BlackBerry into his pocket and looked down at the concrete. I noticed the debut of coarse, wiry grays in his hair, of ever-so-faint crow’s-feet around his eyes.

“No,” he said simply. “He wasn’t here. He never came back after his meeting yesterday. Never called.” I felt the cold wash of disappointment, a deepening of my fear. “Come inside, Iz. It’s cold.”

I followed Rick up the stairs, thinking, trying to establish a time line. Marcus hadn’t phoned me after his meeting as he’d promised to do. I’d starting calling around three in the afternoon to see how it went. At that point I wasn’t even remotely concerned; he was so often absent-minded about our personal life, totally focused on business during the workday. It wasn’t uncommon for him to forget promises to call. My calls to him went straight to voice mail-not uncommon, either. I wasn’t even that concerned when he didn’t come home for dinner. But as Rick and I neared the top of the creaky slim staircase, I had the ugly dawning that no one had heard from Marcus since early yesterday.

On the landing, I wrestled with the hope that we’d find him inside, having slept on the couch in his office, maybe hungover. Izzy, I’m sorry. Things went badly at the meeting. I went to have a drink and had too much. Forgive me. Even though nothing like that had ever happened before, I imagined it vividly as Rick punched in his security code, turned the key in the lock, and pushed open the heavy metal door. I imagined it so hard that for a moment it was almost true; I almost felt the flood of relief, the blast of fury.

But no. The office was silent, empty. Rows of desks, huge gleaming monitors, industrial-cool exposed vents and pipes in the ceiling. Marc’s glass-walled office was dark, orderly. As we moved into the space, the electronic tone of a ringing phone sounded like a bird trapped inside a computer. Ricky dropped his bag and ran for it.

I watched him until he gave me a head shake to let me know it wasn’t Marc or anything to do with him. I wandered into my husband’s office, opened the light on the desk. I saw Rick glance at me through the glass, the phone still cradled between his ear and shoulder, as I sat in Marc’s large leather chair, put my fingers on the cool metal of his desk. I stared at our wedding picture; we both looked so blissfully happy, it almost seemed staged. Behind us, a glorious sunset waxed orange, purple, pink. I sifted through a pile of papers and manila folders, glanced at sticky notes on the lamp and on the phone, looking for what I didn’t know. Then I booted up his computer. Rick entered while I was doing this; he looked uncomfortable.

“He doesn’t like anyone to be in here, Isabel.”

“Fuck off, Rick,” I said quietly, without heat.

He glanced down at his feet again, shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and hiked his shoulders up so high he looked like a vulture. I thought he was too old for the urban-chic look he was sporting. He needed a visit to Barneys, needed to maybe grow up a little. Marcus was the polished one in suit and tie, classic fashion with a trendy edge. Rick had fully cultivated his programmer-punk look and aura, down to the pasty white skin that seemed permanently bathed in the glow of a computer screen. I always thought it should be Marcus who interfaced with people, but he hated that part of the business. It was Rick and a team of account managers who pitched prospective clients, fielded inquiries, handled the ever-escalating needs of their customers. Marcus was the brains of the company, rarely seen but controlling everything. Rick was a little bit of a marionette. I wondered if he ever resented it.

“Do you know where he is?” I asked him. He opened his mouth to answer but I interrupted. “Do not lie.”

He seemed to look at something far behind me. I examined his face. What did I see there? Concern-maybe even a little fear. He shook his head, curls bouncing. “No, I don’t know where he is. I-I wish I did.”

“When he didn’t come back from his meeting, when he didn’t call all day-you didn’t think that was unusual? Cause for concern?”

He lifted his palms.

“What are you saying?” I asked, angry, incredulous. “That it wasn’t unusual?”

No answer. No eye contact. I saw a sheen of perspiration on his brow. I let the silence hang between us, hoping he’d fill it, but he didn’t. Finally, I told him about the phone call, trying to keep my voice even, to keep the sound of it out of my head. Rick sank into the seat across from Marcus’s desk, rested his head in his hand while I spoke.

When he didn’t say anything, I said, “I’m calling the police again.” I reached to pick up the phone.

“Wait,” he said, looking up, startled. No, not startled, stricken. “Just wait a second.”

I let my hand rest on the receiver. “Rick, what is going on?”

Then there was thunder on the stairs outside the entrance to the office. The door exploded open and suddenly Ricky was up from his seat and I was up from mine, so quickly the chair on casters went careening, crashing against the wall behind me.

We were both frozen as a dozen people stormed through the door, weapons drawn, dressed in black from head to toe except for the white letters emblazed center mass: FBI.

Time seemed to slow and stretch. The men fanned out, moving behind desks and through the loft like rats in a maze. We were spotted by a tall, lanky woman with short-cropped blond hair as she headed in our direction; she started yelling at us. Her words were unintelligible to me; all I could see was the gun pointed in our direction. I watched Rick put his hands on top of his head, lower his chin to his chest, and close his eyes.

I thought, He’s been waiting for this, expecting this moment. What have they done? I stood stunned, mute, my fingers touching the edge of Marc’s desk, feeling like the bottom had dropped out of my life and I was free-falling through space.

WHEN I MET Marc, I had already resigned myself to the role of spinster aunt. And I was actually okay with that, maybe even relieved, after the parade of losers and weirdoes I’d had trekking through my life over the previous years. I had started to see myself as a dating oddball, as the kind of woman who couldn’t manage to fit herself into a relationship. For me, the problem wasn’t meeting men, a very common New York City complaint. I couldn’t swing a dead cat without meeting a man-in the grocery store, in bookstores and cafes, on a subway platform. The problem was that no matter how auspicious the start, things just never lasted, never bloomed into anything permanent. I’d start to get that cool, apathetic feeling, begin to dread phone calls or zone out during dates. And if that didn’t happen, he’d stop calling me, eventually disappear altogether. I rarely even got to the ugly breakup phase. Generally, there was just a slow fade to nothing.

“You know, Izzy” my sister, Linda (married, two gorgeous kids, outrageously successful photographer, older than me by five years, thank God, or I’d have to kill her), said one night over conciliatory Pinot Grigio, “have you considered that there’s just no give to you? That you’re looking for someone to fit into your life exactly the way it is now? You’re not willing to bend or shift anything”

I bristled at this statement, thought it was patently untrue. “When it’s right, I won’t have to,” I said defensively.

An ever-so-slight eye roll, a sip of wine.

“Right?”

She held my gaze for a moment, gave a quick shrug. “Well, in a sense. But more like when it’s right you don’t mind so much doing a little shifting and bending.”

“Fight the good fight, Iz,” called Erik, the perfect husband, from the kitchen. “Make