Michael Koryta: Last Words

He read on the deck for a while, fell asleep, and woke at five with the sun in his eyes. Time to get to work on dinner. He’d stopped in Sarasota to buy food and a few bottles of wine, and Lauren had promised to be there no later than six. He made a Caprese salad — her favorite; this was sure to help take the edge off — and opened the wine, and at ten to six he preheated the grill. He even set a pack of her cigarettes and an ashtray on the deck, a clear gesture of apology because he was always bitching at her to give up the habit. Beside them he set a small plastic disk — her diving permit from the first trip they’d taken together, an outing to the Saba National Marine Park in the Caribbean, where she’d given him his first lessons. She’d talked her father into bringing him, insisting that Mark would make a great instructor one of these days. That had been the weekend of their first kiss, and he’d retrieved the permit from her bag at the end of the trip and saved it. Overly sentimental? Sure. But she’d brought that out in him when he’d thought nobody ever would. He carried no artifacts with him from the West, and most of his life had been spent there.

Beside the old tag, and weighed down against the wind by her ashtray, were two tickets for a return trip to Saba. He’d pushed the AmEx card toward its limit with that one, but you passed the bar only once (ideally) and Mark — who’d grown up in a family where six months of steady work was considered a rarity — was determined to recognize Lauren’s achievement. Still, he was certain the old permit tag and not the pending trip would mean the most. He’d taken the tag because he couldn’t believe he’d be able to hang on to her — there was no chance of such a blessing for him — and he’d wanted something tangible to remind him that he’d been granted at least that one weekend.

That had been five years ago.

At six she wasn’t there, and he didn’t want to put the steaks on the grill if she’d been held up, so he called to check on her ETA. The call went straight to voice mail, and he left a message: Our place is beautiful and so are you. When will you be here?

He called again at six thirty, and then at seven. Voice mail, voice mail. By the third message, he couldn’t keep the irritation out of his tone.

At a quarter to eight, he put a steak on the grill, cooked it, and ate it alone on the deck, tasting nothing but anger. It was one thing for her to ignore his advice; it was another entirely to allow it to ruin a night that was supposed to be special.

It was eight thirty and the sun was easing down behind the water when the anger began to ebb toward concern. Lauren wasn’t a grudge holder. She always wanted to talk emotions out, a habit that ran so contrary to Mark’s style that it felt like listening to a foreign language. Even if the lunatic in Cassadaga had delayed her, she would have called by now to issue a mea culpa and tell Mark when she’d make it to the beach.

Something was wrong.

He thought of the near miss on the Sunshine Skyway then, the way he’d almost lost control of the car as he reached for his sunglasses, and for the first time he felt true fear.

He called every five minutes until ten o’clock. Voice mail, voice mail, voice mail. Sometimes he left a message, sometimes he didn’t. The call trail would later be used to clear him as a perpetrator of the horrors that had already happened in Volusia County, but he didn’t know it then. All he knew was that he’d gone from annoyed to worried to terrified.

He found the name of the psychic in Cassadaga, but she had no phone and so, short of his driving out there, her name wasn’t going to do him much good. He sent a text message to Jeff London, trying to remain low-key: Hey, Jeff, any chance you’ve heard a report from Lauren this evening?

Jeff answered immediately: No. Thought you guys were supposed to be doing the romantic weekend. She find a better offer?

Could be. I live in fear of it.

As well you should, Markus, Jeff responded.

Mark sat on the same chaise longue that he’d imagined he would be sharing with Lauren by now. Everything was as he’d pictured — the stars were out, the breeze was fresh and warm, the palm fronds rustled, and the waves splashed gently onto the sand. Everything was in place but his wife.

“Please call,” he whispered in a voice that belonged more to a prayer than anything else. He was draining the battery on his phone, checking the display over and over as if it might refute the silence and show a missed call. “Please, Lauren.”

She didn’t call. He did, yet again, and he said “I love you” to her voice mail, and so this much is true about the last words: he said them. He just didn’t realize he was saying them to a cell phone that lay in the bottom of a water-filled ditch and that the first bullet had entered his wife’s brain more than three hours earlier.

His mouth was dry and his legs felt unsteady when he stood and walked down to the beach. He took deep breaths, tasting the salty breeze, telling himself that it would be fine. There would be a story to it, sure — a flat tire in the backwoods, something like that — but it would be fine. They were young and they were healthy and so of course things would be fine, because this was promised to them, wasn’t it? They had more time. They had more days.

A beam of light passed over the dark sand then and tires crunched on the crushed-shell drive and he was so relieved he could have fallen to his knees. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

He hurried up the deck steps and through the house, thinking that none of it mattered, not the argument or the missed dinner or any of it, nothing mattered except that he was going to pull her into his arms. Then he opened the front door and saw that the car waiting there wasn’t his wife’s.

It was the Sarasota County sheriff’s.

January 24, 2014

It was snowing in Indiana.

Mark had boarded the plane in sunshine and seventy degrees, and two hours later it touched down in swirling winds that whipped snow around the tarmac. It was just beginning to accumulate, a dusting in the distant fields. The ground crew wore face masks and gloves. Passengers were pulling heavy jackets down from the overhead bins. When the flight attendant handed Mark his thin cashmere blazer, he realized that it might have been prudent to check the forecast. The truth was he didn’t even own anything like what the others were putting on. He hadn’t been north of Atlanta in five years now and hadn’t intended to be again. He’d seen enough blizzards in his youth. When he’d left Montana at seventeen, he’d hoped never to see snow again. Never to see a lot of things again.

The car waiting for him was a Ford Escape, and he was grateful to see it had all-wheel drive.

“How bad is it supposed to get?” he asked the rental attendant at the exit booth as he pulled out his driver’s license. The attendant was also wearing a wool mask and gloves. Everyone here was dressed like they were prepared to rob a bank.

“This? Just flurries, my man. Not bad at all. You’ll be fine.”

“All right.” Mark put up the window fast because the snow was landing on his lap and he was freezing already. Brought back memories: an April blizzard howling out of the mountains and across the plains, Mark searching for his mother in the snow, finding her half frozen and fully drunk. He’d left her three weeks later, taking only a backpack and a small wad of cash secured with a rubber band.

He pulled away from the airport and got on the highway, bound for Garrison, Indiana, on a fool’s errand while back in Florida, the board of directors for Innocence Incorporated gathered to discuss whether they had to terminate him or if a suspension and pay cut would suffice.