Point of Balance (4 page)

“Yes. Yes, I think you're right.”

He helped himself to more. He waved the bottle at me, but I shook my head and he didn't insist. Someone had to keep a clear head around there. Besides, I was worn through and too jumpy to hit the bottle. I longed to pick up Julia and split but couldn't do that without talking to him, and furthermore it would break my heart to drag her out of bed that late. I greatly feared I would have to stay the night.

“She was so sweet. Like a love song.
Oh sweet Rachel, oh my darling dear . . .
” He hummed for a while, getting drunker by the minute and slurring his words. “She never got mad. She was so even tempered.”

“You think she would have approved of this?”

“She didn't mind her dad having a drink now and then. No, sir.”

“I don't mean that, Jim. Where's Svetlana?”

He looked up at me, slowly, with wide staring eyes.

“In your lousy house, I guess. Is Julia here? You bring her?”

I didn't have to stop and guess whether he was lying. His stupefaction was overwhelmingly real, and with that a wave of confusion washed over me. I felt dizzy and had to hold on to the armrest.

“Of course you didn't. You never do. You're too busy saving other people's lives, Dave,” he said, almost in a murmur.

I hardly listened to him. His words were daggers that stabbed me in the guts, but there were more important issues. I breathed deep and tried to get a word in.

“Jim—”

“Everybody's life is important, except your wife's. That right, Dave?”

“Jim, when I got here—”

“The fancy brain surgeon, the star of the future, and you didn't see it coming, did you, big shot? You didn't see it, didn't see it ­coming.”

“Jim!”

“What!?”

“Jim, you said they were upstairs. Who's ‘they'?”

He stopped and seemed at a loss for a moment. His ears appeared to have caught merely a faint echo of my question, but at last it found its way through the boozy haze.

“What are you talking about? Why, my wife. And Kate, who else? She's on leave. Come to see her folks. Good girl, Kate. She knows where her heart is.”

By then he was mumbling so badly I almost missed the last bit, which sounded more akin to
wherrahardiz
, but I didn't care, because the hunch that had driven me there had melted away. It had all been a big, bad misunderstanding. Julia had been missing for hours and no one was out searching for her. To make matters worse, I was there, sixty miles from home, when I should have been talking to the police to get them to hunt down Svetlana and whoever she was in league with. All of a sudden, fear and anxiety floored me again.

I stood up and grabbed my cell phone. I dialed 911 and pressed it to my ear.

It was busy.

That was bizarre. The emergency number could never be busy. A sneaking feeling gripped my throat, an idea I could dimly remember, a cry from afar I could faintly hear.

Something was amiss, and not only with Julia.

“Listen, Jim . . . I need to use your phone.”

The old-timer shook his head and wobbled to his feet.

“Don't you go calling now. I want to talk to you!”

“It's an emergency. I have to—”

That second my cell phone buzzed to show I had a text. I clocked the screen immediately, thinking it might be Svetlana, but it wasn't. The caller ID was vacant. It didn't even say “Unknown.” It was blank.

GET OUT OF THERE, DAVE.

I unlocked the phone and opened the inbox to see who had sent it, but the text I had received a moment ago was nowhere to be seen. The latest one was from a colleague, at the hospital.

“What do you mean, an emergency, David? Emergencies have always come before your family, for you. Yes, everything's more important to you, Mr. High-and-Mighty Surgeon, yessir. A piece of shit, that's what you are.”

I started at the insult and was about to answer when the message tone buzzed again.

SAY NO MORE. TELL HIM NOTHING ABOUT JULIA.

“Jim, if you shut up a minute and let me ex—”

“How dare you tell me to shut up in my own home! She was sick, you son of a bitch. Sick, all the time, under your nose. Right under your goddamned, smart-assed Yankee nose.”

I didn't answer. I was too stunned by everything taking place around me to mind my father-in-law's words. I suppose this was the only way his sort could cry for help, but in that moment all the hatred and resentment he flung at me simply bounced off and
rebounded on him, making no impact. Except it made him even angrier.

“Answer me, damn you!” he said while he shook his fist at me, his face flushed with anger and drink.

I dodged him as best I could and shifted to one side. He stumbled, fell forward and knocked over a side table next to his easy chair. The tray with the whiskey and shot glasses fell on the floor to the sound of breaking glass.

The message tone buzzed again.

GO HOME, DAVE.

YOU'RE EXPECTED.

I marched to the doorway, the feeling of unease ballooning inside me. Nothing around me made sense, and I couldn't find my way in the dark. In my haste I had banged my hip on a piece of furniture. I felt a sharp pain in my side as I pulled the front door open. The rain was pouring down now and had turned the front steps into a slide. I tripped again, and this time slithered to my knees on the sodden lawn.

All the skill God put in your hands, he took away from your feet, Dave.

Rachel's dulcet voice came back to me as I got to my feet, my pants covered in mud. I used to hate it when she made fun of my clumsiness. She would have howled to high heaven to see me climb into the Lexus in such a mess.

I would have traded in all the cars in the world to hear her taunt me, just once more.

“Come back, you!” Jim bellowed from the doorway.

I could scarcely see to put the key in the lock. The goddamned battery in the remote was busted, and I could never remember to get it fixed. The outside light came on unexpectedly, so I got the key in place. I turned it, thankfully, then ducked when I saw my father-in-law's whiskey bottle fly my way. It bashed the bodywork and shattered into a thousand pieces, leaving an ugly dent behind.

Then a fourth text landed, which made my flesh creep. I clam
bered into the car and fired her up. With no time to reverse back to the road, I turned across the lawn. Jim ran down the steps and thumped the hood.

“Run, run! That's all you can do!”

The sight of the old man threatening me with his bony fist popped up in my rearview mirror, but I paid no heed because all I could think of was Julia and the text I had just received.

NO COPS.

4

I don't remember much about the drive home.

I know I was in a total panic, such as I had never been in before and don't think I'll ever be in again. Bewilderment and foreboding had overcome me, so I drove on autopilot, lost in my thoughts. New questions piled on top of the ones that had nagged at me on the way over, and they unsettled me far more. Terrible visions of whose hands Julia might be in crossed my mind in an endless and troubling stream.

“Just let her be okay. Please, please,” I said over and over, to try to cast out those visions.

I wonder who I was pleading with. I guess with a God I don't believe in, and one I've turned to so often for help. Just two cells down from where I write these words, there's an inmate who says there are no atheists on death row.

It's easy to see why.

When I got to Dale Drive I didn't even bother to put the car in the garage. I left it in the driveway, open and with the keys in place. I dashed into the house in a beat. I stood breathless in the hallway, more because of tension than the rush, in a complete muddle and covering the mat in mud, until a new text lit up.

GO TO THE BASEMENT.

The doorway was between the hall and the kitchen, papered in the same pattern as the rest of the wall. I had to pull hard because it always jams a bit.

I went down the stairs very slowly. The steps creaked underfoot because the wood was very old, probably the same wood the house was originally made from. We never had the time or money to change them, and we didn't go down there often, anyway. Something hit me in the face, halfway down. It was the pull chain. I tugged it and a yellowy light filled the basement, casting long shadows and illuminating gloomy nooks, where before there had only been a pall of darkness.

I went on down, aware that hours before, when I had looked for Julia, I had barely stuck my head through the basement door, hollered and closed it again, but had failed to go down. Shivers ran down my spine. Perhaps I had made a fatal mistake.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, the light blinked twice, went out and left me in the dark. There was a box of lightbulbs on a shelf at the back, but I couldn't grope my way through the cavernous basement in the dark without breaking a leg. I decided to run the app that turns my phone into a flashlight.

“Julia?” I called out, in a bid to calm myself. I didn't know what I expected to find, but I was scared, very scared. Not only for my daughter, but because I have a deep-seated fear of the dark. The faint light beam from the phone did little to allay that fear.

I got close to the metal shelving where we kept electrical supplies and other seldom-used clutter. I met with an obstacle. It was Rachel's bike, which was flat on the ground. I thought that strange, because nobody had ridden it in more than a year, and it should have been on its rack by the wall. There were some boxes behind the bike, so I couldn't hop over it. I had to go around and skirt the boiler instead.

What I saw then took my breath away.

She was there.

Neither blood nor death has ever fazed me. I would even say they have come to draw me in a way others would deem unhealthy.
The clearest memory I have of that attraction goes back to when I was eleven. It was summer 1989 and the kids on our block were scuttling back and forth in their bat masks and T-shirts, in the belief it was really cool to be a crime-fighting orphan superhero. I could have told them a thing or two about having no parents, but I was minding my own business.

Dr. Roger Evans, my adoptive father, felt strongly about interacting with other kids, and that afternoon he came into the backyard to share them.

“David, why don't you go out to pl—?”

He broke off midsentence, most surprised.

I was squatting on the ground. A dead cat lay at my feet, one that had belonged to Mrs. Palandri, who lived at end of the block. I had a stick in my hand and was busy hauling out a good length of the poor creature's large intestine with it.

The doctor appeared neither horrified nor appalled. Merely surprised.

Someone else in his situation—myself included, had it been Julia—might have yelled, acted on gut instinct, whatever. But not Doc Evans. He was a patient man whose greatest pleasure consisted of getting himself over to Nalgansett Creek with a fishing pole and sitting still hour after hour.

I had had occasion to try his patience to the limit after I had moved into his home two years before. At first it didn't work out. I broke stuff, valuable heirlooms. I wouldn't eat. I cussed.

Doc Evans simply waited. A few weeks later, he went up to my room and said:

“You've behaved as badly as can be and we haven't thrown you out. We'll never do that. Now, don't you think you've tried us enough?”

His voice carried that selfsame tone of wisdom and boundless patience when he asked me:

“Did you kill it?”

I shook my head and stood up.

“It was that way already when I got here.”

“And what are you doing with that stick?”

“I wanted to see its insides. I want to see how they work.”

He stared at me for a while, his arms folded. Nowadays that answer would have earned me a couple of years' counseling and stacks of little pink pills. Things were different in those days, but he was a smart guy, anyway. He knew no good would come of kids who tore the wings off flies or stove cats' heads in with rocks. I think he was searching for something perverse or unhinged in my interest in the cat, but he didn't find it. The more I think of it, the more convinced I am that that stare was a pivotal moment in my life. The way I turned out had a lot to do with that gaze.

He finally made his mind up to believe me. He lowered himself next to the animal, examined it and looked around. Our backyard had a wire fence around it with more holes than the Clippers' defense. And behind our house was a wood. Not big, but a thick one.

“That will have been a fox or a coyote. Give me the stick.”

I did so, but what came next surprised me. Instead of burying the poor thing, as I thought he would, he put it on the garage table. He spread out some garbage bags and old newspapers and then had me fetch his doctor's bag. It was big and made of worn leather, had his initials engraved on it and weighed a ton. I had a hard time lifting it up to the table. From it he extracted a scalpel and forceps.

“To harm a living thing is wrong, but this was an accident. It's sad, but we can learn from it.” He hesitated, then went on. “You still want to see an animal from the inside?”

I nodded.

“Then we have to do this properly,” he said as he rolled up his sleeves. His arms were dark, tanned and hairy, while his hands were large and skillful.

I sat next to him while he dissected the animal. He did so in the way he did everything in life: slowly, gently and respectfully. He briefly explained what the internal organs were, what they were for and what happened if any of them went wrong.

Today they don't do dissections in high school, not even on frogs, as they did in my day. In less capable hands than the ones I was in, it can be a traumatic experience. Even many years later, kids shudder to recall the smells and sounds of dissection.

I simply remember the smell of Old Spice and Doc Evans's deep, dry voice. That afternoon he won me over. I began to call him Daddy and he set me on my way to becoming a doctor.

Twenty-six years later, as I beheld Svetlana Nikolić's body, I remembered the day my father had taught me to fear neither blood nor death. I took a deep breath and tried to take in what I saw.

The nanny was bundled up in a thick, see-through plastic sheet. Only her bare feet stuck out from under it. She was clad in a blue sweat suit such as she often wore around the house, although it looked much darker, almost black, through the gruesome wrapping. Her head jutted from the top end, at an unnatural angle. You didn't need to be a brain surgeon to tell her neck had been broken. It was an instant and almost painless execution, but one that required brute strength, a lot more than it seems in the movies. Even for a skinny Serbian college girl.

The worst thing was her eyes.

Whoever had done it hadn't troubled to close her eyelids. On the contrary, her eyes stared straight ahead and accusingly reflected the flashlight. They were at precisely the right angle, which was weird. Anyone who approached that shelving would have to come round the bike and meet those eyes.

Whoever had killed Svetlana was a very sick son of a bitch, and he had Julia.

Then the phone pinged again. In the pitch-dark cellar those three cheery chimes were doleful, a beast howling in the depths of a cave.

I THINK YOU'RE READY TO MEET ME, DAVE.