The Wrong Man (13 page)

She turned slowly and began to let her vision creep over the small world of her apartment. Michael O’Connell had spent precisely one night here, and it had been a truncated night, at that. She had thought they were both a little drunk, and she’d invited him up, and she tried to replay what had taken place in her current, scared-sober imagination. She berated herself for being unable to recall just exactly how much he’d had to drink. One drink? Five? Had he been holding back while she indulged? The answer to that question had been lost in her own nervous excesses. There had been a nasty looseness to the night, a mood of abandon that she was unfamiliar with and was out of character for her. They had clumsily fallen out of their clothes, then coupled frantically on her bed. It was rapid, edgy lovemaking, without much tenderness. It had been over in a few seconds. If there was any real affection in the act, she could not remember it. It had been an explosive, rebellious release for her, right at a time when she was vulnerable to poor choices. On the rebound from a noisy, unpleasant breakup with her junior-year boyfriend, who’d lingered into her final year despite some fights and general dissatisfaction. Graduation and career and school uncertainty dogging her every step. A sense of isolation from her parents, her friends. Everything in her life had seemed to her to be forced, to be a little misshapen, out of tune, and out of sync. And into that turmoil came a single bad night with O’Connell. He was handsome, seductive, different from all the students that she’d dated through college, and she had overlooked the singular way that he’d stared at her across the table, as if trying to memorize every inch of her skin and not in a romantic way.

She shook her head.

The two of them had slumped back on the bed in the aftermath. She had grabbed a pillow and, with the room swerving unsteadily and a sour taste in her mouth, plummeted into sleep. What had he done? she asked herself. He had lit a cigarette. In the morning, she had risen, not inviting him for a second tumble, making up some story about needing to be at an appointment, not offering any breakfast, or even a kiss, just disappearing into the shower and scrubbing herself under steaming water, sudsing every inch of her body, as if she’d been covered with some unusual smell. She had wanted him to leave, but he had not.

Ashley tried to recall the brief morning-after conversation. It had been filled with falsehoods, as she had distanced herself, been cold and preoccupied, until finally he had stared at her in an uncomfortably long silence, then smiled, nodded, and exited without much further talk.

And now, all he talks about is love, she thought. Where did that come from?

She pictured him going through the door, a cold look on his face.

That recollection made her shift about uncomfortably.

The other men she had known, even if only briefly, would have exited either angry or optimistic or even with a little bravado after the one-night stand. But O’Connell had been different. He’d merely chilled her with silence, then removed himself. It was, she thought, as if he were leaving, but he’d known it wasn’t for long.

She thought to herself, sleep. Shower. Plenty of time with her back turned. Had she left the computer on and running? What was strewn about her desktop? Her bank accounts? What numbers? What passwords? What did he have time to find and steal?

What else had he taken?

It was the obvious question, but one she didn’t really want to ask.

For an instant, the room spun again, and then Ashley rose and, as quickly as she could, raced to the small bathroom, where she pitched forward, head over the glistening toilet bowl, and was violently, utterly sick.

After she cleaned herself up, Ashley pulled a blanket around her shoulders and sat on the edge of her bed, considering what she should do. She felt like some shipwrecked refugee after rough days adrift at sea.

But the longer she sat there, the angrier she got.

As best as she could tell, Michael O’Connell had no claim on her. He had no right to be harassing her. His protests of undying love were more than a little silly.

In general, Ashley was an understanding sort, one who disliked confrontation and avoided a fight at almost all costs. But this foolishness—she could think of no other word—with a one-night stand had really gone too far.

She threw the blanket off and stood up.

“God damn it,” she said. “This is ending. Today. Enough of this bullshit.”

She walked over to her desk and picked up her cell phone. Without thinking about what she was going to say, Ashley dialed O’Connell’s number.

He answered almost immediately.

“Hello, lover,” he said almost gaily, certainly with a familiarity that infuriated her.

“I’m not your lover.”

He didn’t reply.

“Look, Michael. This has got to stop.”

Again, he didn’t answer.

“Okay?”

Again, silence.

After a second, she wasn’t even sure he was still there. “Michael?”

“I’m here,” he said coldly.

“It’s over.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s finished.”

There was another hesitation, then he said, “I don’t think so.”

Ashley was about to try again, but then she realized he had hung up.

She cursed, “You goddamn son of a bitch!” then redialed his number.

“Want to try again?” he answered this time.

She took a deep breath.

“All right,” Ashley said stiffly, “if you won’t make this easy, I guess we can do it the tough way.”

She heard him laugh, but he did not say anything.

“Okay, meet me for lunch.”

“Where?” he asked abruptly.

For an instant she scrambled about, trying to think of the right place. It had to be someplace familiar, someplace public, someplace where she was known and he wasn’t, somewhere she was likely to be surrounded by allies. All this would give her the necessary gumption to turn him off once and forever, she thought.

“The restaurant at the art museum,” she said. “One this afternoon. Okay?”

She could sense him grinning on the other end of the line. It made her shiver, as if a cold breath of air had seeped through a crack in the window frame. The arrangements must have been acceptable, Ashley realized, because he had hung up.

“So I suppose,” I said, “in a way this is all about recognition. Everyone needed to see what was happening.”

“Yes,” she replied. “Easy to say. Hard to do.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. You know we like to presume that we can recognize danger when it appears on the horizon. Anyone can avoid the danger that has bells, whistles, red lights, and sirens attached to it. It’s much harder when you don’t exactly know what you’re dealing with.”

She thought for a moment, while I remained quiet. She was drinking iced tea and lifted the glass to her lips.

“Ashley knew.”

Again she shook her head. “No. She was scared, true. But just as much as she was frightened, she was annoyed, which truly hid the desperate nature of her situation. And, in reality, what did she know about Michael O’Connell? Not much. Not nearly as much as he knew about her. Curiously, although at a distance, Scott was closer to understanding the real nature of what they were up against, because he was operating far more out of instinct, especially at the beginning.”

“And Sally? And her partner, Hope?”

“They were still outside fear. Not for much longer, though.”

“And O’Connell?”

She hesitated. “They couldn’t see. Not yet, at least.”

“See what?”

“That he was beginning to truly enjoy himself.”

9

Two Different Meetings

W
hen Scott was unable to reach Ashley either on her landline or on her cell phone, he felt a sweaty sort of anxiety, but he immediately told himself it amounted to nothing. It was midday, she was undoubtedly out, and he knew his daughter had on more than one occasion left the cell phone charging back at her place.

So, after he’d left brief “Just wondering how things are going” messages, he sat back and worried whether he should be worried. After a few moments feeling his pulse rate rise, he rose and paced back and forth across the small office. Then he sat down and maneuvered through some busywork, responding to student e-mails and printing out a couple of essays. He was trying to waste time at a moment when he wasn’t sure that he had time to waste.

Before long he was rocking ever so slightly back and forth in his desk chair while his mind fastened on moments in Ashley’s growing up. Bad moments. Once, when she had been little more than a year old, she’d come down with severe bronchitis, and her temperature had spiked and she’d been unable to stop coughing. He’d held her throughout the night, trying to comfort her, trying with soothing words to calm the hacking cough and listening to her breathing grow increasingly shallow and difficult. At eight in the morning, he’d dialed the pediatrician’s office and been told to come straight in. The doctor had leaned over Ashley, listening to her chest, then swung about and coldly demanded to know why Scott and Sally had not taken her to the emergency room earlier. “What?” the doctor had questioned. “Did you think that by holding her all night she would get better?”

Scott had not answered, but, yes, he’d thought that by holding her she would get better.

Of course, antibiotics were a wiser choice.

When Ashley started to split her time between her two parents’ homes, Scott would be up pacing in his bedroom, waiting for her to come home, unable to prevent himself from conjuring up all the worst cases: car accidents, assaults, drugs, alcohol, sex—all the nasty undercurrents to growing up. He knew that Sally was asleep in her bed those late nights that Ashley the teenager was out rebelling at Lord knows what. Sally always had trouble handling the exhaustion of worry. It was, Scott thought, as if by sleeping through the tension, it never actually happened.

He hated that. He’d always felt alone, even before they were divorced.

He grasped a pencil and twiddled it between his fingers, finally cracking it in half.

He took a deep breath.
“What? Did you think that by holding her all night she’d get better?”

Scott told himself that worry was useless. He needed to do something, even if it was completely wrong.

Ashley arrived at her job perhaps ten minutes earlier than normal, her pace driven by anger, her usual leisurely walk replaced this day by a quick-time, jaw-set preoccupation with Michael O’Connell. For a couple of seconds, she looked up at the huge fortresslike Doric columns marking the museum entrance, then she turned and swept her eyes across the street. She was pleased with herself. Where she worked was filled with the colors of her world, not his. She was comfortable among the pieces of art; she understood each, she could feel the energy behind every brushstroke. The canvases, like the museum, were immense, taking up great patches of wall space with their insistence. They intimidated many of the visitors because the paintings dwarfed everyone who stepped in front of them.

She felt a touch of satisfaction within her. It was the perfect place to extract herself from Michael O’Connell’s crazy claims of love. Everything here was
her
world. Nothing was
his.
The museum would make him seem small and inconsequential. She expected their meeting to be quick and relatively painless for both of them.

She played it out in her head. Firm, but uncompromising. Polite, but strong.

No high-pitched complaints. No more whiny
please
s and
leave me alone
s.

Just direct, to the point. End of story. Finished.

No debate about love. No discussion about possibility. Nothing about the one-night stand. Nothing about the computer messages. Nothing about the dead flowers. Nothing that would lead itself into a wider exchange. Nothing that he might take as criticism. A clean, unencumbered break. Just, Thanks. Sorry. It’s over. Good-bye forever.

She even allowed herself to imagine that once she’d gotten through this meeting, perhaps Will Goodwin would call. It surprised her that he hadn’t. Ashley wasn’t really familiar with boys who didn’t call back, and so she was a little unsure how to feel. She spent some time thinking about this, as opposed to Michael O’Connell, as she made her way through the museum offices, nodding to the people she knew, and allowing herself to fill up with the benign normalcy of the day.