North Carolina had definitely not been on my route. And it was a long distance away. I’d never get there without food, gas, and a toilet break. But I knew I better get out of the city first.
I couldn’t remember Sara—or Jay—ever mentioning North Carolina . . . what the hell was in North Carolina? I listened as the soothing voice of the GPS lady told me how to head south out of the city, and waited for Sara to call back with an explanation. The GPS lady calmly told me the route she had personally selected for me would take nine hours. Ten with traffic. I could drive from Barcelona to Milan in that time—going through four countries and the southern Alps. I had already driven more than five hours today, some of it through rush-hour traffic.
The Lincoln Tunnel spilled the traffic out into the unspeakable ugliness of industrial New Jersey. Except for Newark Airport, featuring a nice tidy fleet of FedEx planes, it was mostly a sci-fi dystopian vista of cement, sprawl, and smoke-belching factories along a twelve-lane highway. The wires of the power grid hovered everywhere. Marsh grass peeked up from the Citgo storage-bin facilities but amidst all the concrete, it didn’t look organic; it just looked like mismanagement.
After a few miles, nature started to gain some ground, but only as something nobody had gotten around to paving over yet. I stopped at a Traveler’s Aid for the toilet, and to buy some horrible foodlike substances, fuel the car, and get back on the road.
After about half an hour, Sara called back, sounding anxious and excited.
“I have a cousin named Alex Craggs. He’s actually my second cousin once removed, my mom had the kind of family that kept tabs on that sort of thing. He’s an accountant.”
“And I need to know this why?”
“We were great pals, we’d visit each other vacationing when we were growing up. I didn’t see him for years, but when Jonathan and I first got together, we decided to take a road trip. Since Alex had moved to North Carolina and I wanted to catch up with him, we decided to make him our destination. Can you hear me?” she asked, sounding either irritated or concerned, I couldn’t tell which over the white noise of the MINI going eighty-five.
“Alex Craggs. North Carolina. Cousin. Accountant.”
“All right. So. He had gone native. He’s even got a little southern accent now.”
“Let’s cut to the chase, he does the Ku Klux Klan’s taxes, doesn’t he?”
“It’s nothing like that. He and Jonathan hit it off, which was really surprising. I would never have anticipated that.”
“It’s hard to imagine Jay befriending an accountant,” I agreed.
She ignored this. “Anyhow, they got along so well, and Jonathan had started making good money and wanted a vacation home, so he decided to buy a little cabin in Gardner. We stayed there several times, and even took Cody once when she was a puppy. So Alex has met Cody.”
“Okay,” I said.
“When Jay and I split, Jay stopped going there. I thought he had sold the cabin, so it didn’t occur to me to call Alex. But then Alex called this morning, that was the message on my voice mail, and he said, ‘Sara, this is strange, I saw Jonathan in the Piggly Wiggly, but he was trying to avoid me. I was just wondering if you knew anything about his coming back here.’”
I felt relief flood through me, and gratitude for this beneficent all-seeing cousin who was going to save my arse. I had no idea what I’d do when I got there, but at least now I had a place to go—complete with in-house ally!
“That’s fantastic,” I said. “I’ll drive straight there. What’s a Piggly Wiggly?”
“Supermarket chain. Let me warn you, though, Rory, I can’t say he was thrilled to learn about you.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t know you existed till an hour ago, so he gave me the third degree and I don’t know if I sold him on the validity of our marriage.”
“Accountants are so anal and proper. It’s none of his business,” I said.
“It is if we want him to help us.”
“You’re family! Isn’t that enough?”
“Mmm . . .” she said carefully.
“Mmm? What does ‘mmm’ mean? Why ‘mmm’?” Why couldn’t this just be simple? Why couldn’t something about our circumstances be simple?
“Well . . . okay, for starters, before he was an accountant, he served in Iraq and Afghanistan, he was in the army, so he’s got more of a band-of-brothers kind of loyalty than a conventional sense of family loyalty.”
“What do you mean when you say that? You’ve never seen Band of Brothers,” I said. “I bet you haven’t even seen Henry V, which is where the phrase comes from.”
“Oh, good, a history lesson,” said Sara tersely. “That’s one thing you and Alex will have in common. You get all yours from Shakespeare and he gets all of his from Civil War reenactors. I wish I could be there to hear the mash-up. And I did too see Henry V, you were the Welsh guy and you were a hoot, and I hadn’t even met you yet.”
“I am appeased.”
“My point is, blood is not thicker than water to Alex. He’s got a very specific . . . code.”
“Like a tax code?” I asked.
“That’s not even funny, and I’ve clearly done a bad job of explaining him.”
“Actually, if you’re explaining the weird men in your life, I’m much more interested in what you have to say about, eh, Jonathan? Because as much as I admit it’s my fuckup, it’s hard for me to believe I’m in this situation.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Rory,” she said, softening. “He believed he was entitled to have the perfect girlfriend and the perfect dog, and when the girlfriend wised up and escaped, he still felt entitled to the dog.”
“But he gave her to you, right? I mean, she is your dog? You own her?”
“Of course,” Sara said impatiently. “He put a bow on her and everything. But in his universe, he owned me—sort of, I don’t mean he consciously thought of it that way—so by extension he also owned her. So when I left his universe with my dog, he saw that as someone stealing his dog, because he couldn’t grasp the concept that I existed independently of him.”
“I absolutely don’t get that,” I said.
“That’s why it’s not worth talking about. I think it’s more important you understand what you’re getting into with Alex.”
The walls around the highway had disappeared, replaced by mostly open land—despite the cranes and bland office buildings and pylons, it had a more comfortable feeling than New England, as if when I breathed, my lungs could freely expand outward, not just up into my collarbone anymore. I had no idea where I was.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll bite. What am I getting into with Alex?”
“Well . . . he’s not really the kind of guy who would approve of a green-card marriage. I mean if it was just a green-card marriage. I tried to make it clear to him that we have a real relationship, but he knows the actual getting-married part was just for the green card, so just don’t be surprised or defensive if he spends some time sussing you out to make sure he can be certain of your intentions toward me.”
“My intentions? You’re joking,” I said.
“I’m not,” she said. “And you need his help, so please indulge him. I mean, just be yourself, but really be yourself. You’re a wonderful man. Let him see that. Show him you’ve got integrity and you’re serious about treating me well.”
“Isn’t it enough his own government already believes that?”
“He’s an accountant. He knows how easily the government can be fooled.”
“Funny girl.”
“Anyhow, he’s expecting you, but he hopes you get there soon because he’s postponing his fishing trip for us.”
“Smokes his own trout, does he?” I said archly.
“Yes,” she said, not noticing the archness. “And herring or something, I forget what they catch down there. Also, just so you know, he’s a biker.”
“Cyclist, like?”
“No, Harley-Davidsons. He’s pretty serious about it.”
“Everyone’s got their hobbies,” I said. “I’ll be sure to act impressed.”
There was a hesitation, then: “Well, anyhow, he’s waiting for you. I’ll text you his number when we get off the phone, and just keep me in the loop. Call me as soon as you arrive. Sooner, if you need to.”
“Okay,” I said. “I think this nightmare will be over soon.”
“I hope so,” she said, and sounded so fragile for a moment that it melted all my defensive irritation.
I had to get there in one piece, which meant staying awake. Having despaired of finding a diner, let alone a real café, I stopped at a traveler’s mini-mall for a Starbucks sandwich on the go with a large coffee, and set off for the slog ahead.
I was on the largely tree-lined New Jersey Turnpike for what felt like light-years. I could see housing estates through the trees. Things were more leafed out here than in Boston. In the arboretum. In the place where I’d met Jay. Jay. For fuck’s sake. How did this all happen? I had to sort this out, it was such a head-wrecker.
He had moved to the area less than a year before I hooked up with Sara—so almost right after she had taken Cody and left him. Was it a coincidence that he’d moved near her, that he’d taken to hanging out in a place where his ex-lover’s new husband just happened to walk the dog?
No way to know that one, plus: not a good time to think about his being her ex-lover, so: skip to the next point.
The karmic sucker punch, the part that flummoxed me, was that I’d trusted him so completely. His whole abduction plan relied on the fact that I trusted him completely but also that I wouldn’t want to tell Sara why I trusted him—that being that he took care of Cody after the chocolate cake incident. So either the chocolate cake incident was an amazingly convenient coincidence for him . . . or else he had staged the chocolate cake incident in order to win my trust that way.
Was that possible? He hadn’t provided the cake . . . but he had suggested it.
No, Nick had asked for it.
But . . . Nick had asked for it because of the way Jay was talking about chocolate. And the cake was large because Jay had suggested a party.
So, all right then . . . Jay, having prompted Nick to ask for a huge chocolate cake, and being in charge of that cake, had deliberately placed it where Cody could reach it, at a moment when I was distracted.
Yes, that could have happened. He could have staged that scenario, knowing that he could immediately bring Cody to his house and fix the problem. The result being that I would trust him with Cody’s well-being, but wouldn’t want to mention the event to Sara. He had even made a comment about having recently lost his dog and that he hadn’t gotten over it yet.
And come to think of it . . . if I was right about all this . . . he’d suggested the party the day—the hour—the moment—he’d realized Cody might be headed to Los Angeles.
Could that possibly be right, though? He could not have known that we’d need a place for Cody to stay for a few hours on that final day. We ourselves didn’t know that until a week before. Maybe he’d had a number of plans in place, and we just stumbled along a labyrinthine path to one of them. Maybe if I’d never asked him about her staying with him, he had some other scheme, or schemes. If he was that determined to snatch her, then I didn’t feel like as much of an eejit. He’d have gotten her somehow, even if he couldn’t make me look stupid as part of the plan.
But if he could make his ex’s new man look stupid, naturally he would. That was the other part of this that made my world wobble: he was Sara’s ex. I could not shake off the creepy feeling this knowledge gave me. Sara had wanted that. Sara had been drawn to him, somebody so unlike me that I was—as Lena had even called me to my face—the anti-Jonathan.
How could Sara—my Sara, who seemed so perfectly designed by God for my companionship—be drawn to somebody so entirely different from me? She’d gotten something out of that relationship. Whatever it was, she couldn’t be getting the same thing out of our relationship. So our relationship was lacking something, and therefore doomed. Unless I could figure out what he offered her that I didn’t. I made a mental list.
He had more money than I did. That was all right, I was about to make it big in Hollywood. And even if that fell through, Sara seemed remarkably indifferent to material wealth. I mean, she’d married an unemployed actor, for starters.
He was better educated. Yes, but I could recite Shakespeare as well as Beckett, Joyce, and Synge, and transpose major keys on the fly. And I did know something about art and music and American history from my “guest lecturer” gig at the museum. His education led to his work; mine came from my work. Surely that was of equal value.
He was more exacting and controlling than I was. That couldn’t be it; that was the very thing that drove her away—after bullying her into giving up painting. She liked my impulsive, free-spirited half-arsedness. It was part of my charm.
He was incredibly calm all the time, paternal and fatherly. Well, I was more fun.
He loved Cody more than I did.
Um. Yes. Obviously. No way around that one.
NEAR THE CITY of Baltimore, the urban spread began again. It was a little lusher, broader, and relaxed than up north, but still basically the same stuff. Home Depot. “Business Centers.” Huge freight rigs. Pyramidal piles of what would eventually become cement. The Port of Baltimore. A tunnel that looked as if it had been tiled with snakeskin.
I emerged from the tunnel into the actual city—no, above it, really, the huge curving highway arcing, looming over water. I was part of the skyline, driving above America, detached from reality, with limited access to all below. This felt somehow symbolic but I was too tired and frazzled to make out how. After Baltimore, I was returned to ground, where cement walls sprang up on either side of the freeway, to protect me from America, or more likely, the other way around. The sky was grey, inviting drowsiness even going eighty-five. Drowsy. What a lovely word. How seductive to just get lost in drowsy.
Thank God my phone startled me to alertness. It was Alto. We’d swapped numbers back in Boston while he was helping us hunt down Jay.
“Squire Alto!”
“Just checking in for news.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it. We’ve actually got a lead, he’s in North Carolina. I’m driving there now.”
“Shit, that’s a long way,” said Alto, expressing my own sentiments. I explained the situation, asked him to tell Marie and the museum crowd, and gave him Danny’s number to keep him in the loop, too. It lifted the despair the littlest bit to know that there were folk back home looking out for us and thinking of me as something other than a wanker.
Of course after the call, my mind wandered back to Jay. Had he bought his place just to be close to Sara? Had it been an if-then sort of thing: maybe he heard she’d moved to Jamaica Plain (how, though?), and figured, if she lives in JP, then she probably takes the dog to Peters Hill, the place all the dogs go off leash. If I buy a house overlooking Peters Hill, then I might see her with the dog.
And then—the one thing he could never have anticipated—the dog but not Sara starts making regular-as-clockwork appearances. Which is a coup for him, only it happened in a manner that must have insulted every fiber of his being.
First, Sara was willing to hand off the treasured creature to someone who didn’t treasure the creature. This made Sara bad and further surely confirmed for Jay that he’d be the better owner, and therefore justified in nabbing Cody. Also, Sara had found romantic happiness so quickly after dumping him—with somebody who was inferior to Jay in every way that mattered to Jay. I was poor, undereducated, unreliable, and foolish. I was dependent on Sara to even have the right to be in America. And Sara wanted me more than him.
So your Mr. Jonathan was a deeply insulted man. I thought I’d be petty enough to find satisfaction in that, but instead it only made me anxious: the more deeply he felt insulted, the further he would go in seeking satisfaction. It only takes a couple of Shakespeare villains to know that about human nature.
Howard County. Montgomery County. Spring came at me in a rush as I hurtled southward. Everything along the road was now a lush, glorious, full-bodied green. After a stretch of raised and crossing highways, the road spilled toward and over water, ushering me into Virginia. I wished I knew my American geography better. How far exactly from Virginia to North Carolina?
Suddenly I missed Ireland something terrible. If this had happened back home, it would have been easy enough to deal with it. I knew people in every county, could set up a network to keep an eye out, and it’s a small country, he couldn’t hide forever. But nobody in Ireland would be fool enough to get so obsessed about a dog in the first place! That was part of my exasperation: this was such a ridiculously American problem we found ourselves with. In Ireland, we saved our fury for family feuds, or sports competitions, or complaining about the government without actually doing anything about it.
I had definitely reached the fatigue point, where everything looked exactly like everything else. Virginia is proof that you can have beautiful country roads and also plastic shite side by side. Given the choice, the American ethos will still go for plastic shite. But then I remembered all the ghost estates all over Ireland and realized that nobody has cornered the market on plastic shite, or abuse of the environment or resources. Shortsighted ugly greed is common to all cultures. Well, maybe not so much in the Scandinavian countries that despite being, like Ireland, too far north, underpopulated, and alcoholic, had still managed to create the highest standard of living in the world, at least according to Facebook polls that Marie liked to inform us about on Peters Hill.
God, I missed Marie. And little Nick. And Alto. And even the person I’d thought Jay was. In fact, I think I missed him most of all. No, most of all I missed Danny, but at this point even Lena would have been welcome company.
The road was slick but the sky ahead was clearing as I turned onto a smaller highway, just two lanes each direction. There was less urban sprawl now, and incredible lushness everywhere. It had rained here recently and the hardwood trees looked particularly lovely, with the trunks so dark from the wet. The sun was slanting heavily westward. Would I make it to Alex’s by nightfall? I had been on the road since four A.M. Except for failing to get a hug from Sara at Logan, and making an utter eejit of myself in midtown Manhattan, I had done nothing today but drive. I hated that steering wheel and that big retro-style dashboard almost as much as I hated Jay.
I was getting very bleary-eyed again. So I can’t vouch for this, but I believe the “Welcome to North Carolina” sign went on to say it was “the most military-friendly state.” Hang on: North Carolina! What? Here I was in North Carolina! A mere ninety miles or so and finally I’d have arrived at Alex Cragg’s. And then I’d get the dog back.
The main thing I noticed about North Carolina compared to all the states above it was the emergence of incredible pine trees—full and robust and enormous, and when I looked down the highway, everything was a mottle of different greens.
“Welcome to Durham, City of Medicine,” said a sign as the GPS lady sent me onto a smaller highway. I skirted the city then found myself in suburbia. Except for those amazing looming pine trees, it could have been any suburb in any state or county in New England. How could I have driven so fucking far—farther than it would take to drive across Western Europe—and find myself in the same place I’d left?
Finally, in a suburban cul-de-sac right in front of a nondescript ranch-style house, the GPS lady uttered those six magic words that made me love her: “You have arrived at your destination.”
Time to get out of the car at last. Time to meet Alex Craggs. Time to get the dog back.