Four score and two days after the death of my wife my bank account got a notice of a charge to our holiday account we opened together.
It was a car rental.
mad with the thought that I ran to the place where they sell that stuff and showed the picture to the clerk.
He paled, and said, This woman was here.
She was out with man, who addressed her as Birdie.”
I was still as a statue. My wife, Alina had been killed in an automobile accident. Closed casket. They were burnt to a cinder. And I knew her by a bracelet she wore and gold locket that she always wore. The hospital, the coroner and the police never, everyone had told me that it was her.
What then was this?
Ref: Is that certain? I forced the clerk to repeat the response.
He nodded. “Positive. Women, you know, had a dimple when they smiled and she, when she laughed, she laughed as if she were in a good place.”
A fine place?
I went away in daze. Alina was a depressed woman. She was exhausted–she was weary of it all, of the routine, of motherhood, of the dissemblance that everything was all coming off. Never in my life did I think that she would stage her death. That did not make sense. She liked our son, Kadeem. She worshipped him. Why should she take off?
Yet that name of Birdie clanged about in my head like a pinball.
The following day I took what I had found to the police. They said that it was likely to be a coincidence. It is a woman resembling my wife, resembling features, people ask to show grief. I mistrusted them almost.
Almost.
Until I recalled a thing that had never been easy on my mind.
She had posed me this question 4 days before the accident, she said: if someone had to run away, could he be forgiven, in case it was to survive?
I believed that she was philosophizing. I believed that she referred to a film that we had seen.
I had reckoned amiss.
Then I began to dig. I inspected our house cameras, the cameras we did not use much. One has saved several minutes, although the system is broken half. On the eve of her so-called accident, Alina went out at 1.47 a. m. She had not her customary robe. She wore the jeans and sneakers.
Her shoulders were slung with duffel bag.
Then two minutes later the man was seen waiting at the end of our street in the next shot. He opened the door into which a passenger gets in. She entered.
She never returned.
I was trembling as I watched it. One side of me was feeling sick with betrayal, so was the other side–as it may not mean that she was dead. That perhaps, perhaps I might find her, and get the truth.
I traced the car renting business. The specified rental was returned in Alabama which was almost 600 miles far. No surveillance camera. The drop is prepaid and no name there. A helpful agent had one weird memory, however: a woman inquiring about bus routes, with a map in her hands, and a circled circle on it, written with a red pen, the phrase: Willow Creek.
It was not a lot, but it was something.
Willow creek was a town that did not even appear much on Google maps. I went there on a weekend by car. I had a working trip, told Kadeem. He put a minimum of questions–he had been less talkative of late.
Loss in grief also fools around with kids.
There was a cafe close to the bus stop. It was shabby-genteel. I demonstrated Alina photo to the barista. She blinched and said, Oh. Birdie.”
The same name.
She joins on Thursdays in the morning. And what does he get? The same thing black coffee and banana bread.”
So does she come alone?
The girl shook her shoulders. Occasionally I used to go with an old man. Possibly her daddy?”
Her dad?
Her father was dead at the age when Alina was fifteen. Unless…
That could not be a lie.
I bided three days.
I met her in the morning of Thursday.
She came in, as though nothing had happened. Hair shorter. A trifle slim. But this was her. My wife.
I never walked up. I only looked on. She was sitting there alone reading. Calm.
I was not able to breathe.
After awhile I rose and crossed over.
“Alina.”
She froze.
With a long drawn gaze, she stared up slowly. Her eyes misted at once. She put her mouth open, and made no reply.
I said, very low, You are killed.
She swallowed. “No. I escaped.”
I discussed it with them four hours. She brought it all out to me.
It turns out that several years ago even before we met she found herself in risky relationships with a man who trafficed women. She had run away, married using another name, had made a life. However, a few months back, she came across a person of her past. Some one that knew her.
That is why she was so jittery, paranoid, aloof.
She did not do because she did not want to involve me and Kadeem in it. She reasoned that they would quit pursuing her in the event of her “death. That she would be able to become free.
She claimed that it was a retired, private investigator who assisted women disappear out of those networks; the man who had assisted her called her Birdie.
I would like to have come back daily. But I did not dare,” she answered.
“And Kadeem?” I asked.
Her face split. I can only think about him by the second.
We were sitting without speaking.
Then I told him, You can not stay away all the rest of your life.
I did not make any more effort about her in the following weeks. Still I did what I could. I made her talk to an attorney who was familiar with both witness protection and relocation statutes. She began to go by her real name again it was her real real name before all the aliases.
Three months after she was home.
She had known Kadeem at the park. At a distance first of all. A day came when he flew to her from across the street just as had always been the case.
We are not complete yet again. Such a break is not something that can be cured within a single night. But we discuss. We co-parent. We are restoring, step by step, decently.
There are times you are made to lose out by having people vanish not to make you suffer, but to protect themselves.
When someone close to you is not acting right, question it. Listen. Dig deeper.
Just like you always never know what kind of pain he/she carries silently.
❤️