Die for You (14 page)

A thin, dark film started to stain the lens of my memory. Our meeting, our passionate courtship, how quickly we married. How he waited until we returned from our honeymoon—three weeks in Italy—before he devoted himself full-time to starting up Razor Technologies. So many new beginnings; it was thrilling. When he told me that he hoped I’d be part of the business, a partner, I was touched that he wanted to share that with me. I signed a flurry of documents without really looking twice.

He insisted we change accountants, use someone who knew about his industry. I fired a man I’d worked with most of my career and let Marcus take over everything with the help of a firm with which I wasn’t familiar. I signed papers quarterly and at year end for both the company and my own earnings.

When was the last time I’d looked at any of it, really perused it? Numbers frightened me, literally shut me down. I was happy someone else took it all over. My accountant left multiple messages: “Isabel, you must return my call. We need to talk about this new firm you’ve hired.” I’m ashamed to say I ignored the voice mails, never gave him the courtesy of answering.

Dread was coming on like a bad flu. I thought of Linda. She’d done the same with Erik, put her signature where her husband asked. Two smart women who knew better, who should have learned early, the hard way, not to surrender our power, our financial security to any man. Detective Crowe was still talking.

“It’s easy enough to walk around with someone else’s name and résumé, especially if he had all the documents, the driver’s license, the green card,” Breslow went on. “They look alike enough that he—whoever he is or was—could just become Marcus Raine, especially if neither of them had any real ties.”

Breslow cut in. “The afternoon of January 2, 1999, Marcus Raine, or someone posing as him with all the necessary documentation, cashed out his accounts,” she said, handing me another photograph.

A man in a blue baseball cap, jeans, and a sweatshirt stood at a bank teller’s window. His face was partially obscured by the brim. It could have been Marcus, true. But it could have been anyone with his build and coloring.

“This is
crazy,”
I said, finally finding my voice and some reserve of physical strength. I stood and faced both detectives. “You can’t just slip into someone’s identity, become that person, use his history as your own. Eventually someone would have discovered he wasn’t who he said he was.”

“Maybe someone
did
discover it,” said Crowe. “Maybe that’s what this is all about. He needed to disappear again. Everything that might have been used to identify him is”—he swept his arm—“all gone.”

“His fingerprints are all over the place—here, at the office,” I said. “DNA—everywhere.”

“That only helps us to identify him if he’s in one of the systems already,” Breslow said patiently, as if she’d responded to this statement a hundred times before. “And we won’t know
that
until the fingerprints and DNA we found here are processed and put through IAFIS and CODIS, the national databases that store this type of data. It could take a while—maybe a week for a priority case, between processing and getting the information to the FBI, waiting for them to respond. And if he hasn’t been arrested and processed for anything else in the U.S., or if his DNA doesn’t show up on another unsolved-case file, we’ll have nothing.”

I sank back down on the bed. I felt him slipping away, this man I loved and lived with for five years. I remembered him stepping into that elevator, calling, “I love you, Izzy” as it took him away. I thought that’s what he said; I assumed it was. But maybe that’s not what I heard at all. I relived that horrible screaming again, feeling a cold finger trace the back of my neck, raising the hair there.

“No,” I said. “No. This is not right. You’re making some kind of mistake here.” It wasn’t possible, was it? That the man I married was someone else entirely than I believed him to be?

Detective Crowe was leaning against the wall, staring at me hard. “He needed your Social Security number to start his business. The name Marcus Raine doesn’t appear anywhere on the corporation documents. He’s not even an employee of the company. Everything’s in your name. Yours and Rick Marino’s.”

I didn’t even know what to say. I just sat there mute, reeling.

“Do you know what Social he used to apply for your marriage license?” asked Breslow. Her tone was gentle, empathetic. I glanced over at her and saw compassion on her face; she was a woman who’d been lied to, knew how it felt. It hadn’t made her bitter, like it had with Crowe. It had made her smarter.

Our files were all gone; they knew that. “I have no idea.”

She handed me three more pieces of paper. A copy of Marcus Raine’s green card with his picture, a copy of his Social Security card, and a copy of our marriage license.

“That’s Marcus Raine,” she said. She came to stand beside me, pointed a finger at the stranger’s picture. Then she tapped the copy of the Social Security card, then the marriage license. The numbers were the same.

Crowe picked up a picture of Marc from my desk. “This is not the same man.”

We were all quiet, my mind racing through options, possibilities, ways this might all be a mistake.

“So you’re saying that he stole another man’s identity, used his Social Security number to marry me, then used my name and Social to establish a corporation for Razor Technologies.”

I couldn’t believe I was still speaking. I was shredded like the mattress I was sitting on, little pieces of me drifting into the air and floating away.

Breslow nodded. “It looks that way to us at the moment.”

“Then what happened to this man?” I asked, holding up the copy of the green card.

“That’s another very good question,” said Crowe.

I thought I should rail in defense of my husband, the real Marcus Raine, rant about what a terrible mistake they were making, threaten to sue, do something other than sit there and stare at the wall. But I couldn’t.

“So,
Mrs
. Raine, any thoughts on who you might have married?”

I had the oddest sensation, sitting in my ruined bedroom faced with two detectives who knew more about my husband than I did. It was as if my train had reached its final destination, except when I stepped out onto the platform, I was in a place I hadn’t intended to visit and couldn’t name, but one that was vaguely familiar just the same.

My phone vibrated in my pocket again. I flipped it open and read the text message there, feeling the bottom drop out of my stomach. I tried to keep my expression neutral but my cheeks warmed.

“Your sister again?” Crowe asked. I couldn’t tell if there was suspicion in his tone. I nodded but couldn’t find my voice, shoved the phone back in my pocket, walked over to the window.

“Mrs. Raine,” said Detective Breslow, “I strongly suggest you check your bank accounts.” Her tone implied that she already knew what I’d find.

She’d asked him not to say it. She didn’t feel obliged to answer. She found herself watching his face, thinking, No, I don’t love you. And as she succumbed to an earthquake of an orgasm, she buried her face in his shoulder to keep herself from crying out,
I don’t love you. I love my husband
. Strange as it was to be thinking this as he shuddered and moaned with pleasure. “Oh, God.” He let his weight press against her. She felt his chest heaving and she clung to him.

She was someone else with Ben, not a mother, not a wife, not someone defined by her relationships with other people. She was an artist, an unencumbered heroine in a story that took place in her imagination.

“Are you okay?” he asked, pulling up his pants and glancing at the door they’d locked behind them. She always hated these moments when the pleasure had passed and they hastily pulled on their clothes. The groping and ripping off of garments was always exciting. The aftermath was just
cheap
. A grimy happy holidays sign hanging on the back of the door just made it worse.

She turned away from him, lifting her panties over her hips and letting her skirt fall. She looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t look so bad after all, did she? Maybe it was the lighting.

“You can’t do this,” she said lamely. “Turn up at my apartment like that. We both have families.”

“I know,” he said, looking ashamed and miserable. “I know.”

She didn’t feel guilty yet. That would come later when he was gone, when the kids came home, or when she was laughing with her husband. Now she just felt sated, or rather as if something that pained her had been salved.

“I have to go,” she said, moving to him, resting against him.

“What’s going on?” He put a gentle hand on her arm, looked at her with concern. “A family emergency, you said.”

She hated when he did this, acted like their relationship was real, not some asinine mistake they were both making. He always wanted to chat and cuddle, or talk about his feelings like some teenage girl. Didn’t he understand? She just wanted to
forget
about herself for five minutes. When they first started seeing each other, what thrilled her the most was that her worries about the kids, money, her career, disappeared during these little romps. If the relationship evolved, all those worries would just carry over into this new place. The euphoria, the blessed escape of it would disappear; it would become just another thing to worry about. And that she couldn’t manage.

She told him quickly about Marcus and her sister, tried not to be curt or dismissive. Someone knocked on the restroom door; it was the only one in the back of the small coffee shop. Outside, she heard the clinking of silverware, the mutter of conversation. The aroma of bacon and maple syrup made her remember she’d skipped breakfast.

“I’ll be just a minute,” she called. There was no answer.

“What do you think happened to him?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, pulling her phone from her pocket and glancing at it, looking for messages.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” he offered. “I know the crime-beat reporter pretty well.”

She’d met Ben at a gallery opening for her work. He was an art critic who’d been less than kind to her in an earlier review.
Common, maudlin
, were the words that stuck in her mind. But still, she found herself drawn to him. He was a tall, powerful man with close-cropped dark hair and a neat goatee, a small silver hoop in each ear. From the nastiness of his written comments and his striking appearance, she expected him to be verbose, loud or overbearing. Instead she found him soft-spoken, carrying an aura of vulnerability. She found herself watching his face, for that moment when he thought no one was looking, when the muscles shifted and relaxed, revealing the true man. It never came. He was guarded, always.

“Seems like it’s always the people who do the least with their lives who have the nastiest things to say about those who do the most,” she’d said to him the night of their meeting, having had a bit too much to drink. The circle of people standing around them went silent, but she could feel Erik smiling beside her. He liked it when she got feisty.

Ben gave her a slow nod, took a sip of wine. “I’m sure it must seem that way. But how do you feel about all those critics who have nice things to say? Do you hold them in such disdain?”

She had to laugh. It came out deep and throaty and she saw his eyes shine at the sound of it.

“Of course not,” she answered. “
Those
critics are obviously brilliant.” And everyone joined in their laughter, relieved that the tension had dissipated.

“I love your work, Linda,” he said, and she saw a flash of arrogance. The way he talked to her in that group, the way he said her name as if they were old friends—it gave her a strange charge. “I hold you to a very high standard. That’s why I’m so disappointed when your work doesn’t meet your abilities. Which, admittedly, isn’t often.”

He raised a glass to her and the others in their group did the same. She could have been gracious here, but she wasn’t.

“So, are you a failed photographer, like so many critics? Do you have stacks of photographs somewhere that no magazine would buy, no agent would represent?”

Linda felt Erik give her a little warning squeeze on her lower back; they both knew wine changed her personality a bit, made her more aggressive, prone to saying things she never would sober. She held Ben’s eyes, enjoying the slow smile that spread across his face.

“No,” he said. “Even as a child my only ambition was to stand in judgment of artistic achievement.”

The group let out a roar of laughter that caused everyone else in the gallery to look at them.

Linda and Ben were fucking within the week.

“That would be great,” she said, moving into him, wrapping her arms around his middle. He was much bigger than Erik, broader through the shoulders, fuller in the middle. She liked this about him, his size. It made her feel safe, even though there was nothing safe about him or anything they did.

“I’ll text you,” he said into her hair.

She broke away from him and unlocked the door, peered out and didn’t see anyone waiting in the slim hallway leading back to the restaurant dining area. She cast him a backward glance and saw a sad look of longing on his face that made her heart catch.

“I’m sorry,” she said, though she didn’t know why.

“Me, too,” he said.

The difference between them was that he wasn’t happy in his marriage. Love had left his relationship long ago. He told her that he stayed with his wife because of their two daughters, ages six and eight. She’d seen pictures of them, both sweet faced, one dark, one light, just like her and Isabel. The sight of them made her feel such acute shame that she had to force herself not to look away when he trotted out whatever new photographs he had with him. She couldn’t imagine bringing pictures of her kids to these meetings, couldn’t understand why he did that.

Linda didn’t know which of them was guiltier in this affair, though she was fairly certain she was doing the most harm. Here she was, someone blessed with love and success and still unsatisfied. As she walked through the restaurant, no one noticed her—none of the diners, not the waitress at the busy counter or the cook over the grill. She loved the anonymity of New York City. You were always alone; no one cared what you did, what you wore, with whom you were sleeping. Everyone was so wrapped up in the dream of their own lives and what they wanted to be that they never saw you at all.

She called her sister again from the cab heading uptown. No answer.