Lisa Unger - Die For You

“Isabel. Don’t come after me.” I was used to this tone. Paternal. Uncompromising. “Start over. Forget. You’ll be fine.”

I think I smiled at him. Then, beneath the thin mantle of numbness, a rage filled me, replacing any love I’d ever had for him. It was a transformation that took place in minutes-no, seconds.

“If you think you’ll walk away from this, you’re wrong. I’ll find you or die trying.”

I saw something on his face-anger, fear, pity, I couldn’t tell. He opened his mouth to speak but then changed his mind. I didn’t try to stop him as he moved toward the door again. I closed my eyes instead, willing him away. When I opened them, he was gone.

“You mean there aren’t ever any new days?” Trevor asked. He was young, really young. Anyway, too young for an existential crisis. “Just the same days repeating over and over again forever?”

There was something like horror on his face, as if he couldn’t believe life could be that mundane, with so few surprises. I’d been charged with watching him for the afternoon while Linda took a meeting with her agent and Erik was with Em on some father-daughter trip. Trevor and I had planned for a walk to the chess shop off Washington Square Park, then some kind of high-caloric snack his parents would never allow between lunch and dinner. Maybe he was five or thereabouts.

At the chess shop, we’d lingered for nearly an hour, inspecting chess pieces of all shapes and sizes and incarnations-dragons and wizards, Alice in Wonderland characters, medieval courts, Smurfs. There were elaborate boards of marble and glass, soapstone and metal, plastic. In the end, he chose a simple wooden set with hand-carved pieces. Our Trev, the purist. He had his prize in a bag and we were sitting on a bench in the park, near the speed-chess players, with the leaves changing colors and NYU students moving about with dense backpacks, some kids doing skateboard jumps, and a homeless man aggressively jangling a cup of change.

“But how do you know? You don’t know what will happen in forever,” he said, always practical. “No one does.”

I shrugged, feeling the full weight of my failure to explain this matter. “It’s just the way it is, kiddo.”

It made a kind of hopeful sense that we might wake up one day and it wouldn’t be Tuesday or Saturday, but Purpleday or Marshmallowday . And on this day, things would be different; maybe gravity would be just slightly altered so everything would seem lighter, or the sun would have a slightly pinkish tint to it and everyone would look a little prettier.

“These markers of the passage of time are constructed by the human mind,” I told Trevor. He couldn’t have really understood me. But he seemed to, gazing at me thoughtfully. “The days are always the same because people made it that way. To keep order.”

He seemed to ponder this for a second, picking at a loose thread on his jeans.

“That’s stupid,” he said finally, bereft.

And I was suddenly mad at myself that I hadn’t allowed him the hope that one day in his life wouldn’t be exactly the day he expected it to be. I could have conceded that he was right, that, in fact, I did not know what would happen in forever. I backpedaled.

“Every day is different, Trevor, you know. Surprises and magic can happen anytime.”

He nodded quickly, as though at the advanced age of five he already knew this.

“But it will always happen on a Wednesday,” he said heavily. “Or a Monday.”

I’d always thought of Emily as the poet, but maybe Trevor had a little bit of the tortured artist in him, always striving to make the world match his vision, always wishing for stardust where there was only ash.

“Come on, Trev, let’s go get a shake and fries,” I said.

He brightened then, as though the conversation that left me grieving had never occurred. That’s the gift of childhood, the ability to be distracted from the big things by the little things.

FUNNY, HOW YOU find yourself thinking of the most inane things in the worst moments in your life. I could have run after Marcus but I didn’t. Instead I stood rooted, for I don’t know how long, stunned by the woman on the floor, by my encounter with my husband. It was impossible to reconcile my life as it was in this minute with the life I’d had just a few days ago.

I knelt down beside the woman I recognized as Camilla Novak from the photo Detective Crowe had shown me and put my hand on her shoulder. I’d just talked to her; it seemed impossible that she’d be dead. In spite of all the blood, I wondered stupidly if she might be breathing, like Fred had been. At first glance, I’d thought he was gone, since he’d been so pale, had lost so much blood. But no, her body was already unnaturally rigid, still.

I touched her for another reason, something less noble than hoping to save her life. I just wanted to see what that white, white skin felt like. I didn’t feel any revulsion in that moment.

Her flesh was like clay earth. Under my hand, I could feel the warmth draining. What leaves us? When the heart stops pumping blood through our veins, when the lungs stop filling and releasing, a door opens and something exits, leaving behind the bare stage. The curtain is open but the lights come down. What is it? It’s more than the failure of the machine to operate, isn’t it?

“Most people would flee from a dead body, get as far away as possible,” Crowe would later say. “Only in the movies do civilians lean in close to see if someone lying in a pool of blood-with her throat cut, no less-might still be alive. People literally swoon, faint, vomit at the sight of so much gore.”

“I’m not most people.”

“I’m getting that.”

But that was much later.

“Oh my God.”

I turned, startled from my thoughts, to see Erik standing in the doorway. He looked stricken, as if he might pass out. He turned away, took a step back toward the hallway.

“Shut the door,” I said sharply. “Lock it.”

“We have to get out of here, Isabel,” he said, glancing behind him. “Right now we’re going to that lawyer. What are you doing?”

“Christ, Erik,” I hissed. “Get in here and shut the door.”

He hesitated, seemed reluctant to leave the safety of the doorway, and then obeyed.

“Who did this, Izzy? Did you-”

“Did I ?” I stared at him, incredulous. He looked so horrified, so much like Trevor, his eyes wide, this earnest line to his mouth.

He lifted his palms. “Then who?”

I looked back at Camilla Novak-her long, thin limbs, the exposed lace of her bra. On the coffee table there was a half-full cup of tea, the press of her lipstick on the rim. Her jacket and purse lay on the sofa. She was on her way somewhere when Marcus came to her door. She’d let him in. He might have been able to trick her from the street door. But she would have kept her apartment door shut until she saw him. She knew him; she opened her door and let him in. Then he killed her.

“Marcus was here,” I said.

“You saw him? Here?”

I nodded, thinking of that look on Marc’s face. It wasn’t malice really, or anger. It was a look I recognized, a superior kind of patience. Who was he?