The Hiding Place Page 3

  “Morning, Lise,” Amber greeted me as I stepped to the counter. She was the proprietor’s niece and had been working there as long as I’d been coming. Her hair, long and straight, reflected the morning sunlight streaming through the shop’s large front window, which I noted had sustained an unsightly crack in the left upper corner since the day before.

  I tilted my head toward the window. “Looks like you took on some damage last night.”

  Amber nodded. “Something big must’ve hit it.” She turned to pull a cup from the stack behind her and began filling it with my usual. “Glad it didn’t shatter completely.”

  “Insurance should cover it, I’d imagine.” I wrapped my palms around the outside of the brown paper cup she placed on the counter in front of me, indulging myself in its warmth. Two men in suits, occupying one of the shop’s few tables, glanced at us over their morning newspapers.

  “I guess,” Amber replied. “I haven’t called Allison about it yet. Figure I’ll let her sleep another hour before giving her the bad news.” She produced a small paper cup from behind the counter. “Here, try these,” she said. “We just got them in last week.”

  Inside were two chocolate-covered almonds. I tilted the cup to my lips and let one slide into my mouth. “Why do you tempt me with these things?” I asked, shaking my head. Amber smiled and gave me a wink as she watched me down the second one.

  I heard a bell chime, and three more people entered through the front door. They looked haggard, caffeine junkies here for their fix.

  “Have a good one,” I said, handing the small paper cup back to Amber, who dropped it into the recycling bin behind her. I turned and went to the counter along the far wall, adding skim milk to the coffee and furtively spitting the chocolate almonds into a napkin that I tossed into the garbage. It was a deceitful thing to do, I realize, but there is a ledge one walks between the realms of politeness and self-discipline, and to lean too far in either direction is to risk losing contact with the other. One of the businessmen—young, good-looking, but with an air of being wound a little tight—caught me doing it. He offered me a thin conspiratorial smile, and I returned it before squeezing past the patrons toward the door.

  Outside the world was waking up, the people moving along with greater purpose than they had when I’d exited my apartment fifteen minutes before. I could hear the sound of passing traffic along the main thoroughfare a few blocks away, but like myself, many of the local commuters traveled by foot. It was one of the things I loved about this neighborhood—that feel of a close-knit community, something that’s become more elusive as the world continues to grow and the distance between each of us presses outward. There was once a time in America when it was considered normal to know everyone on your block. Now, it’s different. We guard ourselves more closely, suspicious of unsolicited kindness. We’ve grown up, lost our innocence, realizing too late that it was the best part of us and that it’s never coming back.

  Two blocks ahead, behind wrought-iron pickets, the hospital’s brick architecture rose up like a mirage against the sky—something ethereal—a place guarded from the outside world, and the world from it. The people living on either side of that fence existed in their own separate realities, aware of one another’s presence only in the vaguest sense, as an abstraction, as if the human lives on the other side of that demarcation were a backdrop, an inconsequential part of the scenery. And where do I fit in? I wondered, moving back and forth between those two worlds, but not truly belonging to either. I brought the coffee to my lips, took a careful sip, wondering—not for the first time—which population posed the greater risk. The muscles in my legs burned as I climbed the steep hill toward the facility, stopping at the gate to rest and look back upon the town below. The two businessmen had left the coffeehouse, and I caught their eye as they stood on the sidewalk preparing themselves for the day. I lifted my hand in a half wave, feeling suddenly that it was my duty to narrow the gap between us all.

  They regarded me coolly, and neither returned the gesture.

  Chapter 8

  May 12, 2010

  When he thought of that evening, what his mind kept returning to was the blood. There had been so much of it—an impossible amount—more than the human body should contain. It had seeped from the hole between the ribs, pooled beneath the body, congealing into something that was no longer liquid but rather a cooling gelatinous mass on the hardwood. The sole of his shoe brushed it as Jason sank to the floor beside the body for the second time, causing the coagulated puddle to jiggle like a dark lake of Jell-O.

  He’d been upstairs in the bedroom when it started, watching a repeat episode from the third season of Mad Men. If the doorbell had rung or if she’d knocked, he hadn’t heard it. What he did hear eventually was the sound of arguing from the floor below. At the outset, Amir’s voice had been calm, reasonable, placating. But as the discussion continued his tone took on a sharper edge, becoming defensive, even angry. Jason recognized the female voice as well, and he’d gotten up, deciding he should go downstairs to intervene.

  Then a scuffle—noisy at first, but then quiet and focused. He’d never noticed that before, how a physical altercation becomes progressively quieter as the struggle intensifies. Words turned to muted grunts. Halfway down the stairs, Jason could hear the unmistakable sound of a body striking the wall, the clatter of a picture frame falling to the floor.

  That got him running, moving quickly through the living room and into the short hallway leading to the front door.

  He saw them go down together, arms clasped around each other in what could’ve been misconstrued, under different circumstances, as a lovers’ embrace. Amir landed on top of her, the air from their lungs making an umph sound as it was simultaneously forced from their bodies. She arched her back, dug for something attached to her belt, and a second later she was driving a clenched fist into the left side of his rib cage. A single strike and Amir lay still—odd, Jason thought, because she hadn’t hit him that hard—and he had time to wonder if maybe Amir had struck his head on the way down, had knocked himself out when they’d contacted the floor. Then she was pushing herself out from under him, was getting to her feet, and there was blood on her hands—too much of it already—bright red and dripping from one fingertip onto the blue jeans of the inert body at her feet.

  His eyes fell to Amir, to the area where she’d struck him, only now he could see the blood pumping from a wound on the left side of his torso, the knife lying next to him on the floor. Jason dropped to his knees, stuck his fingers into the hole in the shirt left by the knife, and tore the fabric apart to get to the wound. “Help me hold pressure!” he pleaded, placing a hand over the site, the blood spilling through the small spaces between his fingers. It was everywhere now: on his hands, arms, and clothing. Days later, he’d notice faint crusted remnants clinging to the underside of his fingernails.

  She knelt down beside him, taking hold of his forearms as she shook her head slowly from one side to the other.

  “He’s gone, Jason.”

  “No. He’s not gone. Help me move him to the couch. We’ve got to—”

  “He’s dead,” she said, letting the words fill the hallway, the town house, the crater of irrevocable absence above which the two of them now perched.

  Not dead, not dead, he thought, for the person lying here had been alive and well ten minutes before, had sat at the bistro table and eaten dinner two hours ago in the kitchen behind them. How can he be dead when the blood is still warm? he wanted to argue, but he realized that was no longer true. The blood—inert and useless now—had already started to cool.

  “What have you done? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!” he cried out, his words filling the hallway, racing through every room of the town house and back again. But, of course, he knew what she had done. She had come here to protect him—just as he’d known she would. Just as she always had.

  She stood, fished a cell phone from her pocket, dialed a number.

  “Are you calling an ambulance
?” he asked, as if this were a situation that might still be salvaged—might still be undone.

  “No,” she said. “I’m calling my field office. We’ll need a cleaner.”

  Chapter 9

  Let’s go back to your relationship with your sister. What was she like?” I asked as we passed Morgan Hall—the main administration building—on what had become our routine walking route across campus. The brick exterior of the building was chipped and scratched beneath the windows, as if something roaming the grounds at night had done its best to claw its way inside.

  Jason offered me that half smile of his—ironic and sad, but not completely devoid of hope.

  “She always looked out for me, protected me. It’s what I remember most about our relationship.”

  “What sort of things did she protect you from?” I asked, and he was silent for a while, as if the conjuring of those memories required a force of will, a certain mental preparation.

  “I tend to think of my early childhood as being fairly happy, although I wonder if I was just too young to know any different. It wasn’t until I was about fourteen, though, when things really started to change for me.”

  We’d come to a stop near the east end of the perimeter. There was a small gate built into the fence here. From the looks of its rusted hinges and neglected condition, I guessed it had been padlocked shut for the past twenty years, maybe longer. I’d forgotten it was here, and it occurred to me now that so much of Menaker was like that. It lay quiet and unobtrusive, like a water moccasin sunning itself on the trunk of a fallen tree along the riverbank. There are parts of this place that you can almost forget exist until you stumble upon them and they strike out at you from the high grass. I glanced over at Jason, who was looking out past the fence at the tree line beyond, his expression lost in recollection. I said nothing, only waited for him to continue.

  “Fourteen is a … turbulent age. I think we were all rediscovering girls back then. I still remember how strange and terrifying and wonderful that was. It was like we’d known them as one thing our whole lives but were encountering them for the first time as something other than what we’d established them to be. Part of it was their physical development. Their bodies were changing—maturing and becoming different from ours in obvious ways that could no longer be ignored. Part of it was our own hormones kicking in, awakening from over a decade of dormancy and demanding to be dealt with.

  “I had this friend, Michael. I guess you could say he was my best friend. He lived a block over from me, used to stop by every day after school—you know: hang out, ride bikes, toss the football around, that sort of thing. We’d both been living in the same neighborhood since we were born, had grown up together. Our families sometimes even spent vacations with each other, renting out a beach house for a week or driving up to Pennsylvania for a few days of skiing. We were pretty close, and I valued that friendship—relied on it, I suppose—in a way that I didn’t fully understand or have the ability to articulate.”

  The wind moved through his hair—tussled it almost—making him look much younger. I could imagine him as an adolescent.

  “Our best friends are those we make in childhood,” he said, his eyes clearing for a moment as he looked over at me. “Do you ever notice that? You can live to be a hundred and meet all kinds of interesting characters along the way … but our best friends are the ones we had as children.”

  He turned his face away from me, absently brushed a lock of dark hair back from his brow. “Michael and I were in the same grade at school and shared several classes—used to even copy each other’s homework from time to time.” He smiled. “There was this girl in our English class—Alexandra Cantrell, I still remember her name—who joined us midyear when her parents relocated to Maryland from somewhere in the Midwest, maybe North Dakota.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “Man, she was beautiful. Long blond hair that she liked to wear pulled back into a French braid; tall and thin with a slightly athletic build; light blue eyes that reminded me of the way the sky looked just before dawn. She was smart, too—easily one of the brightest students in our class—and had this sort of innocent kindness about her that made you just want to be around her, even if you were only in the periphery of her circle of friends.”

  “She must have been pretty popular,” I commented, and he nodded.

  “All the guys went crazy when she got there. Most of them were too chickenshit to do anything about it, but the way they used to talk about her …” He grinned. “The general consensus was that she was untouchable, out of our league, although I don’t recall wondering whose league she might’ve been in.”

  “Girls like that,” I said, “spend a lot of Saturday nights at home without a date.”

  “I know that now, but I didn’t back then.” He shrugged. “It didn’t matter, though. I was less intimidated by her popularity than most of my peers. I hung out with her because she was a nice person and fun to be around. Michael, too. The three of us spent a lot of time together that year.”

  “So there was you, and your best friend, and this beautiful girl,” I summarized. It wasn’t difficult to see where this story was heading.

  “Right,” he said. “There were other kids, of course. Like I said, lots of people liked to be around her. But for the life of me, I can’t remember who they were. In my mind, what it came down to was the three of us.”

  “Three is an unstable number,” I commented, and he nodded his agreement.

  “There was a pond close to our house that would freeze over in the wintertime. We used to go there to skate and play hockey. I remember telling Alex about it one day after school, and her eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. ‘Take me there,’ she said, and so I did, neither of us bothering to stop home on the way. I don’t know where Michael was at the time, why he wasn’t with us that day, but he wasn’t. We took the school bus, Alex getting off at my stop instead of hers, and we walked two blocks down the street and cut left through the woods to the pond. It had snowed lightly the night before, and we walked mostly in silence, listening to the soft crunch of wet powder beneath the soles of our shoes.

  “I remember how, when we came to the edge, she dropped her book bag on the ground and just charged out onto the ice without testing it first, trusting that it was thick enough to hold her weight because I said it was. And of course I ran out after her, planting my feet when I was three-quarters of the way across and sliding the remaining distance to the opposite side. I could hear the ice cracking and settling beneath us—we both could—but she never paused, never cast an uncertain look down. I gathered a snowball and lobbed it out toward the center of the pond where she was standing. It missed her by a good two feet, but she grabbed her chest and fell to the ice like a wounded soldier, lying with her face turned up at the sky, her arms and legs fanned out as if she were in the midst of making a snow angel. I went back out onto the pond, dropping down on one hip and using my momentum to slide into her. We bumped and our bodies did a half turn on the ice, coming to rest with our heads together, our torsos angled slightly away from each other. Laughing, I started to get up, but she reached over and put her hand on my arm. ‘Wait,’ she said, and so I lay there in the quiet of the afternoon, looking up at the blanket of gray above us. I could hear the steady beat of my heart in my ears, and I wondered if it was loud enough for her to hear as well. I began to say something, but she said, ‘Shhh,’ and so we lay there together in silence as the wind moved through the trees and the ice buckled and cracked beneath us.

  “That was when I started to wonder just how strong that ice was. There’d been a warm spell the week before, and I counted in my mind the number of days since then that the temperature had hovered around freezing. Five—no, four days, I realized, and I wondered if that was enough. I could feel the chill of the frozen surface biting through my jeans, imagined the paralyzing temperature of the water just beneath, and considered the thin barrier that lay between. In my mind, I could suddenly see it giving way, the two of us plunging
downward, the startled expression on our faces as our heads disappeared below the surface. I could see us reaching up to clutch at the edge of the hole, the ice there breaking away as we attempted to hoist ourselves out. I could feel the shocking chill turn to numbness, our bodies becoming slow and lethargic, the white plume of our breath dissipating over the minutes that followed until at last … there was nothing.

  “‘We should go,’ I told her. ‘The ice is thinner than I thought. I don’t trust it.’

  “She turned her body to look at me. ‘It’ll hold,’ she said, and put her right arm across my chest, resting her head on my shoulder.

  “Suddenly, I was sure that it wouldn’t, that we were lying out there on borrowed time already, that it was prone to give way at any moment. I heard it shift again beneath us, and this time it sounded like the last warning. ‘Get up,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to go.’

  “I remember her looking at me with a wounded expression as I nudged her off me so I could stand, like I was rejecting her instead of trying to keep both of us from harm. ‘What’s your problem?’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I don’t think she was intending for her words to come out so accusatory, so sharp, but they sliced into me before either of us knew it was going to happen, and once they had there was no taking them back.

  “‘Nothing,’ I replied, backing away from her. ‘Nothing’s wrong with me.’

  “I turned my back on her then, not caring if she fell through the goddamn ice or not, and walked off and left her there. I could hear her calling out to me as I trudged up the hill through the light snow—‘Jason, I’m sorry. Whatever it is, I’m sorry’—but I pretended I didn’t hear her, pretended it was anger I felt instead of something else.