the design of targets, how she actually stands a few inches taller than I’d imagined. The harder part immediately follows, the identifying what never changed, the pieces that verify who she is: the curves of her nose and ears, and the way she is blinking—more like a flicker—she could just as easily be looking up at those skyscrapers again. Today she will not throw her arms in the air. Today she will not spin like a dancer, will not be a little Mary Tyler Moore.
She looks me over, but mostly locks on my face, and I can tell she really did look right past me at that gas station in Kentucky. There is no you look familiar statement on its way.
I take a nonaggressive step in her direction.
“You know who I am?” I ask. She says nothing, does nothing, eyes still flickering, hands still clutched to her chest. I answer my own question: “I’m John Bovaro.”
My words are a potent weapon, slice her as badly as any knife, put a hole in her wider than from a hollow-point bullet. The blood washes from her face—an inverted blush—and now her fingers are dancing on her chest. Worst of all, as she holds back tears, her mouth turns to a casual frown, as though what’s running through her mind is that’s what I was afraid of, like she’s finally being fired from a job where she’d been underperforming.
And then, like she’s already given up, she whisper-yells, “Sean. Sean.”
I laugh a little, not at Melody but at the odd selection the Marshals Service made for her guardian. If the marshal from the Sheetz was next door, I’d have a serious problem. But Sean? This entire event may have been predetermined.
I cast an open hand toward the end of the bed, suggesting she take a seat, and say, “Sean isn’t going to be here anytime soon.”
She doesn’t sit, loses whatever blood had remained in her face, and whisper-yells again, “You killed him?”
I pull out my cigs, flip one to my lips, and light it. “Didn’t need to. He’s out on the beach, walking the shoreline.” I take a record-breaking drag, feel an immediate drop in anxiety, and as I am about to blow out two full lungs of smoke, I catch myself and quickly turn my head away from Melody as the cloud escapes. “He’s got his pants all rolled up like he’s going clam-digging. I gotta tell you, that guy’s a useless fu-huh…”—I catch myself again—“fellow.”
Melody keeps her eyes on mine, reaches down to the bed like a blind person, carefully sits. She stares at me—I am no longer a person she can pass over the way she did in Kentucky—and I have become an image that will never escape her mind, that may even appear in nightmares that knock her awake and breathless in sweat-soaked sheets. I feel compelled to fill the silence.
“You know what that marshal makes?” I can’t remember but I take a guess. “Forty grand. What kind of protection is forty grand going to get you?” Which might matter if the guy worked for organized crime instead of against it.
My words are having no positive impact. I watch her watch me, notice how she can’t stop trembling. Every time I have seen Melody, year after year and through every phase of her young life, she has looked different, either through natural maturation or a change forced by the feds. I’ve never seen her look the same twice, always being modified, preparing for a new role in a new town. She has been an actress, and I her paparazzo. Though every time, I could never deny the natural beauty underneath; you can’t cut, color, or restyle inherent loveliness.
I run my thumb around the filter of my cigarette, slowly bring it to my mouth and finish it off, and with the hit still inside me, say, “I like your hair this way.” I take the butt, snuff it out on the metal edge of the mirror, and put the DNA-laced filter into the pocket of my jacket.
Melody slips her hands under her thighs in what looks like an attempt to get them to stop shaking, but it comes off like a sign of surrender.
“What do you want from me?” she says. She’s not ready for the answer. I pull out my Marlboros, hold the pack in her direction with the offer of one. Her response allows us both to relax: “My parents always told me cigarettes would kill me.” My prior