And yet the adjustment to Newfield was hard, the silence itself unnerving. The calm we’d sought away from the city made it too easy for me to become preoccupied by my own thoughts. Eventually I found work at a small recording studio not far from home. The hours and pay were lousy, but it was a job I knew how to do, one that put me in contact with other musicians and demanded my full attention. And in time, I found myself able to sleep through the night again.
If our lives weren’t exciting, they were nonetheless filled with happy moments. Husband-and-wife moments. Nights-out moments. Christmases-by-the-fire moments. By the time the Twin Towers fell nearly two years later, our lives were far enough removed from New York City that our horror held no special currency.
I wasn’t making music anymore, but I was helping others to make it. Cynthia got promoted several times at the PR firm. And when we found out she was pregnant, we were glad. Three years had passed since our move to Newfield, and we felt ready for this child in our lives. By then, violent crime was about the furthest thing from my mind, until the night when I helped one of my best friends kidnap a young woman.
PART ONE
1
It almost didn’t happen—the kidnapping and everything after. That’s the part that gets me, even now.
The phone call came early Sunday morning, waking me out of a dead sleep.
“You’re going to have to count me out, man,” he said, before identifying himself.
“Who is this?” I’d had to fumble for the telephone in the pitch-black bedroom.
“I should stay in California.”
“Jeffrey?”
“Guilty as charged,” he said. “And completely and utterly in hell.”
He would talk this way sometimes, full of woe and melodrama, back in college. But college was a long time ago. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Is everybody okay?”
Cynthia was awake beside me then, hand on my arm. I glanced at the clock on my bedside table: 4:55 AM.
“Oh, crap,” Jeffrey said, “you were asleep, weren’t you?”
“Forget it. Just tell me what’s the matter.”
“Wish I could,” he said. “I really do. But I shouldn’t even be …” His voice dropped off; the sudden silence frightened me.
“Jeffrey?”
“Ah, shit,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing. My glass fell over.”
It occurred to me that it was 2 AM in California and that Jeffrey was slurring his words. “Where are you?” I asked.
“Me? I’m at home.”
“Is Sara with you?”
“She’s upstairs sleeping. She doesn’t know I’m calling.”
“Why are you calling?”
“Trust me,” he said, “you don’t want to know.”
Of course I did. After all these years, I was glad that Jeffrey still saw me as someone he could reach out to in the middle of the night with a problem—even if the problem was that he’d been drinking and needed an old friend to dial up, to remind himself he still had old friends to dial up.
“Try me,” I said.
“No, I shouldn’t have called. Sorry to bother you—but I’m serious about the trip. You don’t want me there.” He was due to arrive in just a few days, along with Nolan and Evan, my other two best college buddies. “I’m not in a good place. I should really call the airline right now and cancel. I’m serious.”
I sat up a little in bed and tried to sound more awake. “Listen to me—we’re your friends. We want to see you, even if you’re feeling like shit. It’ll be good for you. So forget about canceling, all right?”
Outside my window, a single car drove by, its headlights briefly casting light on the bedroom shades. I watched the window darken again, thinking that Jeffrey might have fallen asleep at the other end of the line. But then, as if remembering his manners: “So how are you and Cynthia doing?”
Classic Jeffrey. I told him we were doing fine, and that I looked forward to giving him the complete update when I saw him in a few days. “Seriously, though, are you okay?”
I heard him yawn into the phone. “Sorry,” he said. “I think I’m a little tired.”
“If you want, we can talk tomorrow, when we’re both a little more awake.”
Another pause. Then: “Yeah, that’s a good idea. You always were the smart one.” His voice was fading fast. “Okay, good night, Will.”
When I awoke again a few hours later, the call already felt like a half-forgotten dream. Except, when I checked my e-mail that afternoon, I had this message:
Hey, Will—
Wow. I’m really sorry to have woken you up like that. And to have been so melodramatic. God, I’m a jerk. A lot of that was the gin. I’m really okay. Anyway, you’re a good friend. (Okay, the best.) And you were right—of course I’ll be there. A return to Jersey? No way am I missing that.
Looking forward to seeing you and the guys soon.
Your friend,
Jeffrey
Neither of us mentioned the call again. I assumed he was probably embarrassed by it, and I knew there’d be plenty of time for us to talk when we saw each other in just a few days. So I waited.
But there it was. He was going to cancel his trip, and I had talked him out of it.
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