I told Cynthia about the kidnapping. Monday morning I’d called and canceled my session with The Fixtures, telling them I had the flu. When Cynthia came home from Philadelphia late that afternoon, I sat her down at the kitchen table and recounted every detail of the weekend, except that in my rendition, the story ended when Nolan and I came home from dinner and went to sleep. She cried, and I cried, and it would be a lie to say that the next couple of days weren’t excruciating. I’d catch her glancing at me, watching me differently from how she’d ever watched me before—struggling, I’m sure, to square these new, unsavory facts with the man she thought she’d always known.
She didn’t leave me, though. Didn’t call the police. Little by little we discussed what all of this meant in terms of our future, which I hoped to mean our future together. The second evening, I remember, we spoke softly in bed all night, and by the time the morning birds were piercing the darkness, we were all talked out and I felt that we’d be okay. Two years later, eating our first breakfast together in our small fixer-upper in nearby South Orange, our daughter, Kim, running in the grass, I felt surer of it.
And yet nighttime always came. After television or a chapter in a book, after the lights went out and Cynthia rolled onto her side and pulled the blanket up to her chin, and it was just me looking up into the dark, despite my best effort not to, I’d find myself listening for police sirens. For that knock on the front door. It felt as if a radioactive rock were sitting on my nightstand, with a long yet unmistakable half-life. Every month that passed without hearing those sirens or that knock seemed to decrease the likelihood, down the road, of ever hearing them. But the half-life was long, very long.
There was no half-life, however, to my dreams. Each night, I fought sleep for as long as possible. And when I felt myself losing my hold on consciousness, I did so with undiminished terror, because I knew I was about to enter the woods again.
A month ago I got roped into seeing a community theater production of My Fair Lady. This was what happened when you bought a house and became a member-of-your-community. You supported the local arts. Our babysitter, a local college student, was singing in the chorus. Cynthia and I went closing weekend (after struggling to find an alternate babysitter). The performance was forgettable, though the woman who played Eliza Doolittle was terrific—she had a belting soprano voice and was a believable actress and strong dancer. It was midway through the second act—when she walked to the front of the stage and the spotlight hit her just right—before I recognized who it was underneath all that theatrical makeup. Of course there was also the cockney accent and the fact that she was now three years older. But at one point she seemed to look right at me, and I nearly bolted out of the theater.
The only thing that kept me in my chair was the knowledge that this wasn’t the first time I thought I’d spotted Marie. Far too often she’d be in my periphery, crossing a street or entering an elevator. My head would snap in her direction and she’d be gone or have turned into somebody else, a stranger. The eyes play tricks. I quickly paged through the playbill, and the name of the lead actress—Gloria Diamond—brought me a measure of relief.
After the show, Cynthia went to congratulate our babysitter. I lagged behind, watchful. And just as my wife was chatting with our sitter, Eliza Doolittle emerged from the dressing room. She hadn’t seen me, and I quickly ducked behind a door. I peered around it to see her hugging friends and cast members. A tall middle-aged woman approached her and, beaming, said, “You were wonderful!” They hugged.
Marie’s teeth looked huge, framed by the thick, dark lipstick. Her blue eyes blazed, and it only then occurred to me that Gloria Diamond was exactly the sort of stage name that she’d have chosen for herself.
“Thanks, Mom!” she said. The two separated, and when her mother turned toward me, I got a good look at her. An attractive woman. Gorgeous blue eyes. Although the mother was a blonde, the resemblance to Marie was striking. And suddenly the pieces snapped together to a puzzle that I didn’t even know existed.
I ran for the parking lot, hid in the car, and waited for Cynthia.
“Why’d you do that?” she asked several minutes later, clearly annoyed. “I had no idea where you were.”
“I started to feel really ill,” I told her, and was a mile down the road before she even had her seat belt on.
After not sleeping at all, early the next morning I drove to the Timber Cove assisted living facility in Elizabeth to see who, exactly, occupied room 1615. Since I wasn’t a relative, doctor, or cop, I assumed that getting an answer might not be easy.
It was, though.
“There is no room sixteen fifteen,” said the friendly lady in the white uniform. She was behind the counter in the lobby. Beside the Danish and Styrofoam cup of coffee was a clipboard. She looked at it, flipped to the second page. “Maybe you mean room fifteen sixteen?”
I said that maybe I did. She probably wasn’t supposed to give me a name. “That’d be Len Burnham,” she said.
I asked how long he’d been living in that room.
“Mr. Burnham has been here for as long as I’ve been here.”
“And how long is that?” I asked.
Eleven years.