CHAPTER 11
My body went rigid, freezing my jaw open and my eyes wide. Ruby, who was standing nearby, gripped my arm, fingernails digging hard into my skin, prying for information. She leaned over, putting her face close to mine, willing me to look at her. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Ruby’s mouth saying the words, “Who is it? Who is it?” I held up my hand, a wave. Leave me alone, I was saying to her. I’ve got to think! Holy crap! I switched the phone to my other ear, keeping my back to Ruby. She moved in close, her body pressed up against mine, ear attuned to whatever snippets of conversation could be heard.
“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number,” I said into the phone.
A long pause ensued that seemed to drag for eternity. My stomach clenched, releasing a wave of nausea through me.
“We both know that’s not true,” Uretsky said. His resonant baritone voice sounded throaty and coarse, while his vocal inflection, if graphed, would come out flat like the EKG of a dead man. Calm as a windless sea.
I took in a deep breath but found it impossible to slow my racing heart. Fear rode the back of my throat as I flashed on what was to come. Uretsky would phone the police, we’d be arrested, and Ruby would lose access to her medication. My subconscious acted on behalf of my frozen thoughts, doing what I’d trained it to do since I started taking climbing seriously—look for an escape route. Only, I couldn’t see any way off this particular mountain. Through a twisted reversal of fortune, I’d become Brooks Hall, swinging pendulum-like from a rope, hovering helplessly above the infinite, while Uretsky assumed the role I had once played, wielding that knife, angling to slice the safety line in two.
Karma . . .
I pulled the phone away from my ear, readying myself to end the call, but something made me stop.
We could run, I was thinking. We’ll run! But how will Ruby get her medication?
I felt Ruby’s nails digging harder into my shoulder.
“Are you still there?”
Uretsky’s voice made me shudder, the way a dark storm cloud could whenever it slipped over a ridgeline to make an unexpected appearance.
You can’t hang up on him, I thought. He called you for a reason. He could have just gone to the police directly. Why did he call?
Ruby swiveled me by the shoulders, forcing me to face her.
Maybe . . . maybe he’ll take pity on us. . . .
“Who is it?” Ruby demanded to know. “Who?”
I mouthed the name “Uretsky” and watched a look of terror stretch across Ruby’s face. Her features contorted—eyes gone wide and wild, mouth falling open as though her jaw had come unhinged. Her hand went to her mouth; next, her color blanched.
“Please,” I said into the phone. “Please, let me explain.”
“Oh, I’m interested in your explanation,” Uretsky said. “Why don’t you tell me all about it?” His voice filled my head like an enveloping blackness, a suffocating smoke that made it impossible to speak. “I’m waiting,” he said.
“My wife . . . my wife is very sick.”
“Yes, I know,” Uretsky said.
I recoiled as though I’d just been hit in the face.
He must have called UniSol and gotten access to the account again. That’s how he knew about Ruby’s cancer. That’s how he found our phone number. Our only saving grace was that he couldn’t know where we lived. Our home address was nothing but a post office box, and the phone number he called couldn’t be used to trace us to here. But he still could go to the police, and if he did, it wouldn’t take much to find out our real identities.
“Mr. Uretsky,” I said.
“Elliot, please,” he said, with a slight chuckle, chilling as a moonless winter night. “We should at least be on a first-name basis. After all, you’re me. But you know my name, and I don’t know yours. Your real name, that is.”
“Elliot,” I said, swallowing hard. “What I did was very, very wrong, and very stupid. But I did it out of desperation. My wife has cancer, and we didn’t have insurance for the drug she needed. There was no way we could afford her medication without better health insurance. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I swear that’s true.” I started to speak quicker because I was struggling for breath and on the verge of hyperventilating. “Please, you’ve got to understand. We were desperate. You’re married. What if it were your wife?”
“The old walk a mile in your shoes, eh?”
I nodded emphatically, though of course, Uretsky couldn’t see me.
“Yes. Yes,” I said. “Think about if it were your wife who was sick.”
“Hmmm . . . that’s a good idea. Let me think about that.”
The only sound to punctuate the lengthy quiet that followed was Uretsky’s own heavy breathing. The sonorous breaths were like that of a sleeping man. Was he heavyset? I wondered. All I had to go on was his Facebook avatar, which was nothing but a picture of Mario from the video game Super Mario Bros.
I glanced over at Ruby, who appeared to have gone catatonic. She sat on a stool at the kitchen island, kneading the fingers of her hands; her eyes, unblinking, remained fixed on an empty spot on the hardwood floor.
Eventually Uretsky let out a long, protracted sigh—a signal to me that he had come to some sort of a decision.
“I’m done thinking,” he said.
“Please . . . Elliot . . . don’t report us to the police. We’ll work something out.”
“I have no interest in reporting your crime—to the authorities, or anyone else, for that matter,” Uretsky said.
I breathed out a protracted sigh of my own.
“Thank God. Thank you, Elliot. Thank you for being so understanding.”
“Oh, I never said that I was understanding. I just said I’m not going to report you to the police.”
I stammered before speaking. “What do you want? What can we do to make this right?”
My blood was burning now, like I had downed a pot of coffee with several Red Bull chasers.
“Do you like games?” Uretsky asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Games. Do you like games? How much clearer can I be?”
“I . . . I guess . . . but to be honest, I don’t really see what you’re getting at.”
“Well, I like games,” Uretsky said. “I like games a lot. Online games especially. They’re so much fun.”
Of course Uretsky was a game fanatic. I’d seen how many hours he logged playing One World. I felt the room darkening, an illusion, just a trick of the eye, I knew, but still, everything around me seemed to dim. I sensed what he was going to say next. Don’t ask me how, but I just knew—gut instinct. I asked the logical next question, anyway.
“Tell me what you want,” I said.
“Naturally, I want to play a game.”
I took in an uneven breath as my eyes closed tightly.
I was right.