Love Her Madly (23 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Raj

“What happened out there tonight?” Marshall asked, his small frame perched atop a folding chair in my airless closet of a dressing room.

“I don't know. I just, froze. It's never happened to me before.” I cupped my hands onto my knees, fully aware that they were shaking. I had frozen up in act 3, forgotten my lines, screwed up entirely, like an amateur. The rest of the cast scrambled to cover for me while I stared at them blankly, like a zombie, the inside of my mouth coated with what felt like ash. I saw them in slow motion, inventing, on the fly, ways to preserve the jokes that my stunning silence had otherwise killed.

Mercifully, the scene ended. In the wings, the other actors recoiled from me, the wounded animal of the herd. Standing in the darkness by the prop table, I was fairly sure my career on Broadway was over.

“I didn't get much sleep last night . . . ,” I began, desperation seeping sourly from my pores.

Marshall looked at his immaculate loafers and sighed. “Your theater company, the Clockwork Bird?”

“Clockwork Owl. Yes?” My heart, which had been thundering, now slowed to a crawl. I'd mentioned my company to a few cast members, but not to Marshall, our director. I thought
it best to keep it quiet, so as not to upset the hierarchy of the show by revealing my own directorial leanings. I'd seen it cause tension in other companies, when such actors were perceived as challenging the director's authority, flying too close to the sun on untested wings. I didn't want that to happen on this show. It was too valuable.

“How are things going with that? You've been working hard?”

I did not like where this was headed.

“Things are going well, thanks for asking. Listen, Marshall, I'm really sorry about tonight. In my near decade of performing onstage, it's never once happened before, and it won't again. Ever.”

Marshall sighed. “I believe you, Raj, but the producers are a little pissed off. Two of them were in the house tonight. So was the playwright and his mother, visiting from the UK.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Yes, shit indeed. Had I known, I would have informed everyone, but I just found out myself. The playwright made a big stink. I guess his favorite sequence got dropped. You know how these writers are.” He cracked his knuckles and crossed his legs. “I want you to hear it from me. They're putting out a call for potential replacements for the role of Dr. Seager.”

“I'm fired?”

“No, no. Not yet. If you're lucky, it will take a few days to get auditions together, and they may not find anyone good. Of course, I will continue to voice my support for you as the best actor for the role. I believe that.”

“Thank you.” My voice had died away to a pathetic whisper.

“This whole thing might blow over completely, but you must be sure that you are at the absolute top of your game for the next performance, and the next fifty after that. There are no nine lives in show business.”

“I understand.”

“You might want to back off on your extracurriculars, if you know what I mean. Running a theater company can be exhausting, I know. And considering what's at stake for you here on Broadway, it might be time to reprioritize.”

He stood up and folded his chair, tucking it neatly against the wall. He extended his hand like a headmaster finished with administering a caning. I stood and shook his hand. A moment later, he was gone. It was just me, and some doomed failure in the mirror, hunched double, trying not to cry.

After I pulled myself together and washed off my stage makeup, I took a look at my e-mail. There were four responses to the “Missed Connections” notice I'd posted. All appeared to be weirdos. One had included a picture, which I did not open, assuming it would be a penis, or worse. I deleted all of them, and considered removing the post completely. But the thought that it hadn't even been twenty-four hours since I'd posted it stilled my hand.

I understood on some level that what I was doing was delusional. The sad truth was, this was by no means the first time I'd put up an ad reaching out to Cyn. I'd first done it when I was in Florida, searching for a place for Glo and me to live. My search of all the free listings in New York led me to some strange places, and before long I was placing sad little notes on sites with names like LongLost, MissingABroad, and FindHerForMe. I had little faith it would work, but like a sailor tossing out a message in a bottle, I clung to the idea that the gesture itself had meaning. It comforted me, the possibility of hope being not completely dead.

Not completely dead
.

A shiver passed through me, just as it had onstage before everything went wrong, and just as had happened onstage, I found myself mired like some tar pit dinosaur in the icy gaze of
the woman at the bar. Whoever she was, she knew where to find me. Other people saw her, so I knew she wasn't a pure figment of my imagination. I needed to find out who she was and why she was lurking about, dragging my attention away from where it needed to be, like some terrible siren. I had to get a handle on whatever this was before it wrecked more than just my professional reputation.

I rose and grabbed my coat. It was time to check the bait that I'd left at the Owl earlier that day. When you're fishing for a phantom, you cast many reels.

Earlier that day, I had awoken on my couch in the study to find Glo already gone. Her absence filled me with a sick feeling that was unrelated to my hangover. Glo always woke me from the couch in the middle of the night to bring me back to bed. She claimed she couldn't sleep as well without me there. I had heard her rise once when I was at the computer, but she went directly to the bathroom and then disappeared back into the bedroom without a word. If these were normal days, she would have at least stopped in to kiss me good-bye before going to work. Obviously, she was still pissed about what happened at the Dragon.

The thought of her anger only made me more resolute. I would unravel the mystery and then we could laugh about it all the way to the bedroom. There was the slenderest chance that the Craigslist post would bear fruit, and as my drowsy gaze fell upon my printer, another better idea fought its way to the surface of my consciousness.

One hour later, I'd taken the train to the Dragon armed with a full-color picture from the heady days of Cyn's nationwide fame. She had graced the cover of the
New York Post
, her yearbook picture transposed next to a shot of her kneeling topless on a fur rug, one arm covering just enough breast to be publishable
in a “family newspaper.”
MISSING GIRL MODEL STUDENT?
the headline had questioned. I had cropped the image so that it was just her head and shoulders. I found myself staring at the photo from the
Post
, pulled into daydreams as tentacles of lust-tinged nostalgia wormed through me. I hadn't seen a picture of her in years, and it struck me how beautiful, how effortlessly sexy, she had really been. I sat there looking at her photo until I began to feel creepy. A small, under-evolved part of my brain urged me to go all in and plug her name into a search engine. I knew the sort of pictures it would bring up. But I didn't do that. I hadn't done it in the seven years she'd been gone. Whenever I thought of how things ended between us, the desire drained right out of me. I clicked off and powered the computer down, proving, if only to myself, that I was still in control.

I gave the cropped picture of Cyn to Ted, the Dragon's day bartender, and asked him to show it to Steve and the bar-backs when they came in for their shifts.

“If she shows up, call me, okay?”

Ted nodded, and tucked the photo next to the tip bucket, his own wedding band clinking audibly against the metal of the rim. He and Glo were friends. They liked to geek out together about bad horror movies from the eighties.

“I know it's a weird favor, but it's a long story,” I said, my palms pressed flat against the bar's still sticky surface.

Ted barely looked up from polishing the draft pulls. “No problem, man. I see her, I'll let you know.”

I went outside and paused before the black door of our theater as another bright idea flashed into my mind. I popped into the drugstore on the corner, returning with a box of sidewalk chalk.

As I scrawled out the message, I felt my cheeks burn with embarrassment at the absurdity of what I was doing. I stepped back to check for legibility, and then drew a thin arrow to a dry
spot, where I deposited the chalk. I went into the theater and did a few hours of work. When I came out, the door was exactly as I had left it.

Hours had passed since then. Night had fallen. I had committed seppuku onstage and risen to walk again. The clouds were racing high above the peaks of the skyscrapers, shoved out to sea by the force of another incoming storm. The damp air seemed electric, pregnant with possibility.

I picked up my pace as I approached the theater, urged on by the neon flash of the orange-and-green dragon belching red fire. I hopped down the three steps to the theater door, preparing myself for the inevitable disappointment. Then I froze.

There was a response. It was written in chalk in a firm, clear hand.

I'll be at the Chimera Café at midnight. Come.

“What the fuck!” I shouted. A couple strolling by on the sidewalk above startled, and hurried past. “Seriously?”

I leapt back up the steps two at a time, expecting to see someone pop up with a hidden camera and reveal the prank. There were plenty of people on the street, but none of them was at all concerned with me. I hopped back down and shone my phone's light on the wall. I saw the chalk lying on the ground, the chalk that
she
had recently held. I picked it up and held it in my hand, and unaccountably, tears sprung to my eyes. I wasn't crazy. I had been right! Cyn was alive!

“Unbelievable!” I laughed. Then, rereading the message, I checked my watch. It was eleven thirty. I turned and jogged toward the subway.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Glo

A gust of strong wind forced its way through my open office window, rattling the blinds. I had thought the bracing, storm-whipped air might help me to focus, but it only served to blow papers around and make noise. Following the trail of an airborne sticky note, my gaze landed on the framed photos behind my desk. Raj and me in Madrid on our honeymoon, arms wrapped tightly around one another's waists in a shot captured just seconds before a heavy downpour left us soaked to the bone. My smiling parents, flush with champagne at their thirtieth-anniversary party. Suneeta and me, sparkling in yellow saris at the wedding of a cousin, little Rosie grinning up at us from elbow height.
All evidence of a full and happy life
, I thought with a derisive snort.

After a near sleepless night, I had the focus and attention span of a hummingbird and was as grumpy as an old crow. A wiser Glo would have packed it in hours ago, but the rain, and the yawning emptiness that was sure to greet me in the apartment, had kept me at my desk. A low rumble of thunder echoed through the urban canyon, and I turned my chin back toward the brief on my computer. Immediately the words began to swim and scatter, and soon my thoughts were back in that plaza in Madrid, and the airy hotel room that overlooked
it with the wide bed and narrow balcony. If I closed my eyes, I could still see Raj, naked but for a sheet wrapped around his waist, alluringly smoking a hash cigarette on the balcony as the heavy rain blurred out all life but the one unfolding in our quarters. How painfully I longed to be
that
couple again, so dizzy with love that even four straight days of rain could not dampen our bliss.

My office phone bleeped, startling me.

“Yes?” I looked at my watch. It was almost seven o'clock. I was astonished that our receptionist, Marisol, was still at her desk. No one answered, so I tried again. “Yes?”

“Oh, you are still there.” Marisol's voice sounded equal parts weary and annoyed. “You have a late visitor up here. Says he doesn't have an appointment.”

“Who is it?”

“A Ryan McMurphy. He's from the State Department. Should I ask him to come back on Monday?”

I rose from my desk and went to my door. The secretarial pool was long gone, their computer monitors blank with sleep. Most of the windows above my colleagues' doors were dark. I'd be seeing this Ryan McMurphy in what appeared to be an entirely empty office.

“Are you staying much longer, Marisol?”

“No, ma'am. Have to catch the express bus at 7:35.”

“Okay.” I stared blankly at the carpet, indecisive. I was so tired and out of it that I could think of no possible reason why anyone from the State Department would have business with me after hours on a Friday. Wearily, I pressed my finger to the intercom. “Tell Mr. McMurphy that I can give him fifteen minutes. If that's sufficient, please send him back.”

I hung up, and suddenly felt leery. Marisol would be leaving in a matter of minutes, and then I would be alone. I picked the phone back up and began a bit of amateur theatrics, speaking
louder than necessary to the dial tone in a voice that sounded completely unlike my own. I could hear Marisol's unmistakable carpet-abusing shuffle as she approached.

“Just wanted to let you know I might be a few minutes late, honey. I have one last quick meeting and I'll be done, so it may be more like eight fifteen. Yes. Great. Love you, too. See you soon.” I hung up, feeling myself flush in the sudden silence.

“Right in there,” I heard Marisol say, her loafers already scrubbing a path back toward reception.

A tall, broad figure filled my doorway. He looked like something out of a vintage comic book, standing with his head bowed in a tan trench coat, an umbrella in one hand and a hat in another. My eyes fixated on the hat. The last time I'd seen a hat like that had been during a screening of
The Godfather
.

The man crossed under the door into my office, ducking slightly as if freshly transported into a new body and unsure if he would clear the frame. He extended a hand, and as I stepped forward to shake it, I was overcome by the lingering ghosts of a thousand spent cigarettes.

“Thank you for seeing me, Ms. Roebuck. I'm Ryan McMurphy.”

He set his umbrella down and removed the coat, hanging it over the side of a chair. He ran a hand through his sand-colored hair and made himself comfortable in a chair opposite my desk. For a moment he sat there without speaking, staring past me at my photographs. I swiveled my chair to block his view, and his eyes met mine.

“And you're from the State Department?”

He nodded, and stared at me. I stared back.

He was attractive. Handsome in a rugged, Robert Redford manner, but his eyes were bloodshot and his lips chapped in a way that whispered of despair and joyless excess. Despite my
better intentions, I was intrigued. If I was going to be carving time out of my Friday night for some dull government rigmarole, at least they'd sent me someone with character.

“I know you have somewhere to be at eight fifteen, Ms. Roebuck, so I'll get to the point. I've been working on a very sensitive investigation, and I'm hoping you have some information for me.”

He narrowed his eyes and rubbed a finger over his upper lip. I waited for him to say more, but evidently, that was the pitch. I almost laughed.

“I think I'm going to need a little more help, Mr. McMurphy. Is this with regard to one of my cases?”

He smiled thinly. “No. It's not.”

He caught sight of my scraped knees, and I saw a glint of interest in his eyes as they returned to my face. I smoothed my skirt and scooted my chair closer to the desk, annoyed at myself for running out of tights and annoyed at this McMurphy person for making me self-conscious.

“It's a personal matter, for you.”

“Personal?” My annoyance dissolved into fear. Had Raj and I grossly fucked up our taxes? Were my law licenses up to date? Had I made some glaring mistake in my case work that could get me disbarred? None of these possibilities seemed likely, nor, I remembered as the adrenaline ebbed, were they business for the State Department. And then my one major dealing with that particular branch of government burst to the forefront of my mind, like a firework over a dark field.

“Is this about Costa Rica?”

He sat back in his seat. “Yes.”

“Oh.” I glanced at the clock. It had been five minutes. While moments before my worry had been being left alone with a strange man, I was now concerned about Marisol, notorious
water cooler gossip, overhearing our conversation and spreading my story all over the building. She'd be gone soon if she hadn't left already.

“I'm looking for Cyn,” he said. “I'm hoping you can help me find her.”

I watched the words come out of his mouth, his bared teeth flashing as he spoke her name, but I still could not believe what he was suggesting. “You're kidding, right?”

McMurphy tilted his large head.

“Do you have any identification I can see?” I said, feeling my face flush. I reached for the handset on my phone, suddenly quite afraid that this guy wasn't from the State Department at all, but was instead some weirdo goon with an interest in dead girls and their friends.

He slapped his wallet open on my desk. I stared at his photo. It was the same exact state-issued ID I'd seen countless times. He was legit.

I eased my hand off the phone and sunk into my seat. Nothing made sense at that moment. Not even when he said, in the plainest English, “Cyn's alive.”

“No.” I said.
She can't be
.

“This has obviously come as a surprise to you. Forgive me.”

“Of course it's a surprise! She's been alive all this time?”

His gray eyes were fixed on me, unblinking, and I became incredibly conscious of all the strange things I'm sure my face was doing.

“She's really alive?” I asked, redundantly. My cheeks were aflame. I felt like I might pass out.

“Yes. She's very much alive, and in the city. I take it you haven't seen her?”

“No!” I yelled, and then laughed, loudly. Even to myself, I sounded hysterical. “I mean, I thought I had seen her, but that happens all the time. It's never her.”

He nodded. He was studying me intently, absorbed in the spectacle. His presence suddenly felt intrusive. I wanted a moment of privacy to absorb the news, but I also didn't want to leave him alone in my office. He was too curious. His dispassionate observation reminded me of all those cameras surrounding me so many years ago, and I felt my shoulders tighten. But I wasn't that frightened girl anymore. We were on my turf, and it was my turn to ask questions.

“How do you know she's alive, and what makes you think I've seen her?” I asked, doing my best to sound calm and collected, all the while a siren in my head blared,
She's Alive! She's Alive!

He looked over his shoulder and signaled to the door. “May I?”

“There's no reason for that. We're alone.” I regretted the words even as I spoke.

He looked down at his hat. “I know she's alive, and I know that she's here because I brought her here from Colombia.”

“Colombia?”

“Yes. You haven't heard from her?”

Asked and answered
, I thought, but I noticed there was an edge to the question that it took me a moment to decipher. It was, I realized, hope.

“No.”

“What about your husband, Raj?”

He said it casually, but it was obvious he was watching my reaction closely, as I was now watching his. I raised my eyebrows and stated, “No, my husband, Raj, has not been in contact with her either. Is she in some kind of trouble?”

He made a face that would have been a smile had it possessed anything resembling warmth. “She's in every kind of trouble. She is trouble.”

I leaned back in my chair as the wind picked up, sending
the blinds bouncing against the window frame. “I can't believe she's alive.”

He chuckled drily and raised his wide shoulders in a small shrug.

“How do you know her? Why is she here? What is this trouble you're referring to?” These were the questions I asked, but all I could think was,
Why the hell didn't she let me know she'd survived?

McMurphy leaned forward over my desk, his head craning to see my computer monitor. From closer up, I saw that he was younger than I'd thought. His gray eyes flicked toward me.

“It appears to be almost seven thirty. Do you have time to hear this?” There was a note of challenge in his tone, as if he knew somehow that my “phone call” was bullshit. It dawned on me that he had probably done his research and knew perfectly well that Raj was not waiting for me anywhere but was instead getting in costume in his tiny dressing room several densely packed miles away.

“I can make time for this, Mr. McMurphy.”

“Please, call me Ryan.” He shifted in his chair, and his face relaxed into a more pleasant expression. “I've heard a lot about you from Cyn. It's strange for me to be sitting here speaking to you. You're something of a legend to me, like Elvis, or Marilyn Monroe.”

Both dead
, I mentally noted. The cigarettes caught my eye. The rain was pounding down outside, and the wind kept sucking the blinds outward. I needed a cigarette. “Do you smoke?” I began, on the verge of calling him Mr. McMurphy again. Ryan seemed far too intimate.

“Trying to quit”—he smiled, suddenly boyish—“for about five years now.”

I stood, feeling light-headed, and threw the window wide open. The patter of the rain infiltrated the room, softening the silence that had fallen.

“I'm guessing your smoke detectors have also left for the weekend?” McMurphy jested, apparently unperturbed by the thought of the fire department showing up to join our meeting.

The thought didn't faze me either. At that moment, nothing did. Apparently, just the mention of Cyn spurred me toward reckless behavior. It was almost Pavlovian. I offered him my pack and walked behind him to close the office door and keep the fumes contained. We lit up as the wind rattled the horizontal blinds.

“How is she?”

McMurphy ashed into the coffee cup that I offered. “She's troubled. She needs help. It's important, if you see her, that you let me know. I've been working on her case, but last week, she went AWOL on me. Disappeared.”

“And you haven't seen her since?”

“No.”

“Why are you so certain she'd come to me?”

He puffed and squinted toward the rain. “You were her best friend.”

“That was years ago.”

“Doesn't matter. Not to Cyn.”

“How exactly did you meet her?”

“Five years ago. In Colombia. I was stationed at the embassy, doing visas, going crazy with boredom. Foreign service sounds glamorous, but really, it's a desk job like any other but with shittier air conditioning. Anyway, that's just to say the day she walked into my office was a pretty good day. She came in to talk to me about getting a passport for herself, and a visa for her husband.”

I stubbed out my cigarette. “Husband?”

“Some Colombian national. She said he was an engineer. She told me this extraordinary story, I don't know how much of it was true, about being abducted by drug smugglers as a student. She told me the cartel members took her back to Colombia, and
for years she had stayed because she was too ashamed to return to the United States.

“I asked her why, and she told me to type her name into a search engine. I had been in the Philippines when she disappeared, so I'd never heard anything about her. But seeing the search results, I understood why she hadn't wanted to hurry back and face all of that. The press really went after her, and she was practically just a kid.”

I made a noncommittal noise, which McMurphy interpreted as a signal to catalog the things his search had found. I tuned out. I knew what the press had done, but I didn't believe that shame alone would have kept her from fighting her way home if she wanted to return. She never cared much about what people thought. But being held captive by the cartel made the picture a little clearer. Maybe that was why she hadn't reached out to me.