When She Left: A Thriller, page 7
She had a couple of close Latina girlfriends, but like her, there was an embarrassed loss of identity, Spanish only spoken when they wanted to convey something secretive—and, more often than not, they didn’t use the right words. By almost all measures, Melissa and her friends had been raised in what approximated to a clichéd view of typical Americana. English-language television. Books that she enjoyed but that were written by and about people who looked nothing like her. Even famous people who weren’t white—newscasters, celebrities, politicians—often spoke in a way that had a universality to it, lacked distinction.
That distance from Panama had only furthered when she dated Chris. Most of her friends had mentioned an uneasiness they felt toward him, or, if they kept quiet, she noticed their tight reactions whenever she talked about him. But Melissa knew Chris better than they did, saw the conflict inside him to be good despite the evils of his family. He needed her; she was the anchor to what was honest in his life. But her relationship to him still separated her from those friends, until only Carla remained, a quiet Mexican-born girl Melissa only spoke with sporadically.
And so when Melissa returned to Maryland and Chris, it was as if she was leaving what remained of Panama within her behind. And he was waiting for her, in the ways she needed, attentive and concerned that she was going to collapse.
And she did collapse but only once. After that she didn’t cry again. Instead, another revelation surprised her, that of trying to adjust to a life without her mother’s reprimands. Her schooling, her work, her relationship . . . all of Melissa’s life was now purely, solely, her own.
Almost.
Chris was increasingly caught up in his family’s business, and that business distanced him from her, weighed on her. She sensed the danger increasing.
Months passed, and Melissa wasn’t working anymore; instead, she lived off the money Chris gave her every month, and she spent her days watching television and exercising and talking with the girlfriends and wives of Chris’s friends, who also didn’t work. They relaxed her, these new friends, other women also tangentially involved with the Winterses. These women who offered the comfort of surviving, models of how to adjust to their men.
Because it was then that the killers came.
They were quiet, serious men with harsh scars and broken fingers and haunted eyes. Men who smelled of death. Men who looked at Melissa in ways that went beyond want, to someplace darker. These men frightened her, especially when she started to sense their presence in Chris. The shyness she’d first loved in him was long gone. Now he was withdrawn and curt and often angry.
Sometimes Melissa was scared he would hurt her.
“I’d never hurt you. Or anyone,” Chris insisted when she questioned him one night, a rare moment of communion between them.
But a week later Melissa’s worry got the best of her. She awoke in bed, alone, even though Chris was home. She left the bedroom, saw a light in the kitchen. Walked downstairs, holding the banister to make sure she didn’t make any noise. Unsure why she was being secretive, but some instinct telling her it was necessary.
Chris was sitting at the kitchen table, his back to her, headphones over his ears. Hunched forward and staring into his laptop.
Melissa saw part of the video he was watching. She quickly walked away.
She couldn’t go back to sleep, terrified of what she had seen, frightened of what her life had become. She lived with a sense of foreboding, a constant premonitory feeling shadowing her, the light of the world obscured. The work Chris did was kept secret from her, and she was too scared to ask questions, worried about his answers. Almost hoping that, if she did ever ask, he’d lie.
But there was another feeling in her—doom approaching, footsteps in the dark. The insistent voice from her dead mother, cruelly chastising Melissa for her mistakes, coldly assuring her that she had chosen poorly. And, rather than rebel as she had always done, Melissa had a realization.
This wasn’t her mother’s voice or advice. This was her own.
And with that, Melissa decided to act. She woke hours later, wondering if she’d even gone to sleep, unsure what was a dream. She headed downstairs, walked through the quiet house. Chris was out, she assumed, but his laptop was still on the kitchen table. She opened it, logged in with his password—he’d written it down, carelessly left it on his nightstand a year ago, and never changed it—and found the video he’d been watching.
The video opened to a room of a man duct-taped to a chair, the camera apparently stationed in front of him. It took Melissa a moment to realize the room was in their basement, an unfurnished side room for storage that they didn’t use.
In the video Chris approached him.
Melissa couldn’t stop herself from watching Chris’s practiced ease, his ruthless persistence as he used a razor to dig out screams from the man in the chair. Until that tortured man’s head finally fell forward.
She switched off the laptop.
Her throat felt like it had been chewed.
Melissa was too scared to confront Chris about what she had seen and too frightened to run. Their once-heated love, already distant, now disappeared, like phone calls that came further and further apart.
And then Jake showed up in her life, a burning light indicating some safe shore. A place Melissa realized she’d never been.
When Jake asked her to run off with him, she took his hand.
And now she was here, hiding with him in an Eastern Shore town, desperately running from the world.
Melissa pulled out the burner phone she’d bought, used an app she’d discovered to read the texts on her other phone, the one she’d left behind so Chris couldn’t track her. It had been a lot to leave her phone: thousands of photos and videos she sometimes scrolled through, retail and social media apps with saved passwords she no longer remembered, contact information from people she may never have the chance to speak with again. A lost life.
The texting app was her only link, and it showed a text from Carla checking in, not worried yet, just wondering where she was. The message read as dutiful, as if she wanted to inquire but didn’t want to be drawn in further. Or maybe that’s how Melissa imagined it.
Texts from clothing and makeup stores offering sales, reaching out to Melissa as if her life had continued uninterrupted. She savored these texts, the way they brought normalcy.
Texts from her other set of girlfriends, the ones involved with Chris’s friends, asking, Are you okay? and What happened?? and Where are you??? Looking, Melissa knew, for information to pass on.
Messages from Chris, coming like clockwork every couple of hours.
Those were the only texts she didn’t read.
There was a store down the path, the convenience store Jake had told her about. Melissa didn’t know how long they were going to stay here or where they were going next, but they needed food.
She made her way down the path, water to one side, forest on the other. Jake had told her it was a half mile to the store, and now that evening was settling in, the weather was colder and windier than she’d expected.
The store turned out to be closer to a mile away—at six feet, Jake had a much longer and faster stride than she did at five two (and a half, she always added)—and when Melissa finally reached it, she was happy to push open the heavy glass door and step out of the cold and into the light. A dozen aisles of snacks, auto supplies, drinks, and various odds and ends occupied the middle. A refrigerated section along one wall held cold drinks and food opposite a sleepy teen at a register. Melissa walked over to a rotating stand of sweaters with either “Chesapeake” or “Maryland” scrawled across the front. Pulled out one in her size, another in Jake’s.
Ten minutes later she headed to the counter, arms full of food, the two sweaters slung around her shoulders. The cashier, a tall, orange-haired kid, kept glancing up at her as he scanned her items.
Melissa was used to men eyeing her, but her paranoia gave his glances a sense of danger. She hadn’t checked the news and wondered if the incident at the diner had already been reported, their faces everywhere.
She pulled out her burner, scanned TikTok, searched for her name. Jake’s name. The Heartbreak Diner.
Nothing turned up.
The unread messages from Chris were like a door Melissa was scared to open, but she had to read them. As unlikely as it was that Chris had changed his mind and accepted that she was gone, there was still room for hope. Sometimes he’d surprised her.
Melissa opened up the most recent text Chris had sent.
After the first few words, she numbly put her phone back in her purse and handed over some of her dwindling cash.
She slowed her breathing, took out her phone again.
im goin to cut you open from your
“Miss?”
Melissa hadn’t realized she’d taken a few steps away from the counter, away from the orange-haired kid and her grocery items, now stuffed in plastic shopping bags.
“Are you okay?”
Melissa couldn’t manage even a slight nod.
She’d never heard Chris like this.
“You’re really pretty,” the cashier blurted out. He bit his lip. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Melissa’s normal response would have been to apologetically smile, to excuse the man from his own clumsy words, but she was too distracted. “I’m sorry. I just have a lot on my mind.”
“It’s okay.”
At this response, his quick acquiescence, something unexpected hit Melissa, a longing. There was a longing for the stereotyped rurality in this store and town and in this shy boy’s awkwardness that suddenly washed over her.
Melissa wished she lived here, had grown up here, spent her life in a small house with the wind whipping outside and the lapping of the bay and maybe falling in love with a boy like this and having nothing but each other—no danger and no fights—just a long, quiet life and simple happiness. A garden without snakes.
“But thank you for saying that,” Melissa told him.
The boy nodded, still looking down, and said something else. His voice was too low for Melissa to understand him.
“What?”
Slightly louder. “Do you want to go in back?”
“In back?”
“I heard Mexican girls like that stuff.”
Melissa gathered her bags and left.
The walk back to the warehouse was quick, despite the heaviness of the shopping bags. Melissa walked resolutely, warmer in the sweatshirt she’d bought, carrying supplies, and, with each step, a growing determination as she strode through the cold night.
For years her life had been out of her control. Chris was always in charge of their relationship, leading her in whatever direction he wanted. Jake was different, beautifully different, similarly following a path but without the inclination to shape it. He was content to let Melissa make choices.
This wasn’t a position she’d ever been in.
She was used to reacting to everything, especially to the men in her life, and Melissa knew now that she couldn’t continue that way. Not if she and Jake were to survive.
A plan formed. She and Jake could hide in the warehouse for a few days, just long enough to befriend Harold, gain his trust, enough so he wouldn’t turn them in after they let him go. There was a nice sentiment in that notion, the chance to win someone’s trust again, to prove that they were more than simply selfish lovers. She and Jake would find a new place to run, somewhere beyond the reach of the Winterses, maybe out west where they could hide in anonymity. Put dozens of states between them and Chris, a home hidden in the deserts of Arizona or lost in the plains of Kansas or nestled in the Colorado mountains.
It was possible, provided they didn’t make more mistakes.
Melissa reached the warehouse and walked around back to the broken window.
“Hey.”
Jake emerged from the woods.
“What are you doing?” Melissa asked. “Where’s Harold?”
“He’s inside. And he has our gun.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
JAKE
Jake couldn’t tell if Melissa was angry, bewildered, or both. And he was too embarrassed to meet her eyes and figure out which. Instead, he gazed up at the dark shadows of trees, their bare branches like ancient writing scrawled on the night sky.
“I’m not a great guard,” he admitted.
“No?”
A slight mocking tone in Melissa’s voice. He blindly lifted his camera and took a picture in the general direction of her face.
But even as Jake snapped the photo, he kept looking up. As if, should he stare hard enough at those branches, he would decipher their writing.
“So what happened?” Melissa asked.
“I had to use the bathroom. And I left the gun on the other side of the room from Harold, and I thought that would be okay. But when I came back, Harold had knocked his chair to the floor and dragged himself over to the gun.”
The wind through those branches was a whisper, a chant or prayer.
“You walked back into the room,” Melissa asked, “and Harold was on the floor with our gun?”
“Yeah. Then I walked back out.”
Melissa rubbed her forehead.
“But at least he’s still tied up,” Jake added helpfully.
A rustling sound within the warehouse.
“Maybe not so much anymore.”
Jake was trying to be glib, but he hated this feeling. This sense of failure returning, a bruise he’d borne since childhood. The idea that everything Jake did led to helplessness, the sense that he was never good enough.
He remembered his high school counselor’s face, the resignation when she’d told Jake he didn’t have the grades to graduate.
The way that experienced photographer had stared down at Jake’s portfolio, dismissively flipping through the pages.
His mother sitting quietly on the couch when Jake closed the door to her house, when he’d left despite her admonishments and warnings. The last time he’d ever seen her and the pain he felt after that door shut. He was abandoning her . . . even if he’d felt that, long ago, she’d left him for alcohol and depression.
It was this futility that plagued Jake in everything in life, including photography. Art offered an escape, but it also provided a challenge unlike anything he’d ever faced, a difficulty that struck soul deep. Jake’s art, the rare times he’d shared it, only seemed to make his limitations more pronounced. When someone looked at his photographs, Jake felt like they were looking at him in a way that went beyond a physical or even emotional understanding; it was like standing before God, his soul weighed.
Those doubts drove him, kept him staring into his camera or monitor for hours, working relentlessly, retouching a photo until the exact image he wanted was realized. And this despite the very real and extremely likely chance that none of his efforts would amount to anything. Jake didn’t use social media, even though it had worked well for other photographers. Something about those platforms seemed poisonous to him, desperate and, most damaging, identical to everyone else. Jake didn’t like how those sites compressed photos, losing the minute details and heartbreaking colors he savored, the resonance he’d discovered in whatever inspiration had driven him to this particular photo and that he’d spent days or weeks or, when he’d first started, even months developing.
It had started with a book, a collection of black-and-white photographs from Margaret Bourke-White he’d found in his high school’s library. A photo of African Americans in the early twentieth century waiting in line, underneath a poster of a beaming white family next to the words “There’s no way like the American Way.” Even at his young age, Jake found the contrast overstated, but that wasn’t what drew him to the photo. It was the expressions of the waiting men and women, resolute and disappointed, a few of them glancing doubtfully at the camera, others glumly staring forward, as if they’d been waiting lifetimes and there was no end in sight. Jake stared at the image for almost the entire lunch hour, noticing small details about each person, the way one man clutched a bucket, the way another stared warily behind himself. Jake returned the next day and wanted to lose himself in the photo again, the way someone might repeatedly listen to a song, but instead he flipped through the book, his hand trembling, and saw Bourke-White’s other photographs. Industrial images hopelessly darkened by gray smoke. Scenes of nature, but as if they’d been taken abruptly and on the verge of nature changing, wilting plants, melting snow. Grim people, often working, toiling with a sense of inescapability and despair. These photos left Jake with so many questions about the subjects and their lives—and, strangely, he felt that if he only examined the photos closer, he’d discover the answers.
Jake did have hopes for his own book someday, a long, flat book with protective covers and soft pages and quiet text on the sides or underneath his pictures: title, date, and location. An introduction by a master of the field in the beginning, an index at the end. A photo of Jake on the back, a self-portrait taken somewhere like Baltimore’s Patterson Park, just below the famed Japanese Pagoda, Jake smiling with his arms outstretched.
He’d never told anyone about this fantasy, even Eric, despite everything his friendship with Eric had given him. Only Eric had understood him, and only Eric had seen most of his work. He wanted to, would look at Jake’s photographs with the type of rapt attention and curiosity Jake was too embarrassed to admit he craved. Eric understood Jake’s work, and so Eric understood him.
And Jake knew what he offered his friend in return. Eric’s mother’s death had haunted him; his abrupt departure to South Carolina, where he’d grown up after her loss, had left him isolated, the only half-Asian kid in his school, seemingly in the entire state. Jake would listen to Eric’s stories, absorb them because, somehow, on some distant level, he empathized.
