I hear my own voice echo quietly on the phone, then: “Guess who?”
I pull my foot off the accelerator. “I don’t know.” I check my phone to read the incoming number. “Someone calling from the Mountaineer Coffee Mill?” I’ve slowed down to forty-five miles per hour. Cars zoom by so fast my car shimmies with each passing vehicle.
“Right,” the female voice says. “Now, who do you know who could be so unfortunate to be calling from a coffeehouse in Morgantown, West Virginia?”
I’ve spoken with Melody so little, yet I recognize the sarcastic downturn in her voice, as true and unique as a fingerprint. “Well, that certainly narrows it down.” My nerves are sparking. I do not want this call to get dropped. “How are you, Melody?”
She sighs as though she’s trying to hide it from me. “I’m cold, dirty. Exhausted and broke. I’m at the end, Jonathan.” Another sigh, louder. Then she whispers, “I didn’t leave you. I want you to know I didn’t leave you.”
Thirty-five miles per hour and falling. “I know,” I say, but a more honest voice would have confessed, I hoped.
“I was taken. Stolen. Lifted right off the ground and tossed in the backseat, then raced away. Next thing I know, I’m”—long delay as if she’s examining her surroundings—“here.”
A guy in a commercial plumbing truck pulls up next to me, blows his horn, and yells out the passenger window, “Hey, Granny! The other pedal! Press the other pedal!”
I turn and answer, “Hey, up yours, you fug-g-gantastic driver.”
“Always the gentleman,” she says.
I try to get my car moving, except I’m moving so slowly that sixth gear has been rendered useless; I keep the phone to my ear, press my knee against the steering wheel, and shift down to third, punch the accelerator, and three seconds later I pass the truck like it’s a tree in the median.
Then it occurs to me how odd it is that her opinion of me—whether in jest or not—would be that I’m some form of a gentleman, that some sheath of honorableness covers the real me. How could a man with so much blood on his hands ever be categorized this way? Her perception of me is only what I’ve displayed. Why did I not curb my tongue in front of the women I’d dated? Why could I never put aside a cigarette for the girls who detested the habit? My goal is to improve—to fix—her life, but the unpredicted by-product is that she makes me want to be a better man.
Melody makes me want to be that something else.
I speak what I’m thinking, speak without thinking: “You have an unexpected positive effect on my life, Melody.”
I regret the words as soon as they pass my lips. The sentiment had to be from the adrenaline-fueled rush of finding her, of knowing she is okay, of knowing she wants me to rescue her and free her once and for all. That the emotion running through me is composed of something more than excitement, that some percentage of this experience is dedicated to sentiment, alarms me. Except…
“And for some reason you have the only positive effect on mine,” she says, “which is why I want you to know that I didn’t leave you. I was taken away.”
With her words, my guard drops, falls to the ground and shatters to pieces. I’m afraid to look in the rearview for fear of seeing a dopey smile in its reflection.
“It seems no one wants me to have you,” I say. “Not the good guys or the bad guys. It’s just one big”—apparently I had a backup guard, because it rises in front of me—“hey, how’d you get my number?”
My instant fear: I’m being set up, that the feds wore Melody down or somehow extorted her, and they’re collectively preparing some trap.
Except Melody quickly answers, “Your dad gave it to me.”
“No, really.”
“Does 718-555-4369 sound familiar?”
“That’s… impossible.”
“You mean that was dear old dad? The Disemboweler of Brooklyn?”
“The better question is where did you get that number? That’s the private line for his office in Brooklyn. Not many people have it.”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“Wait, no. My father would’ve never handed out my cell phone number.”
“I’ll tell you lay-ter. Where are you? I’m a damsel in distress here.”
“Distress?”
“West Virginia, Jonathan, West Virginia.”
“I’m still in Baltimore.”
I hear her slowly inhale over the line, then she asks in the sweetest voice, with a subtle surrender that no man could ever deny: “Will you come find me?”