The archivist, p.68
The Archivist, page 68
“Her husband wasn’t the one following her. That’s someone else. I don’t know who it is. But her husband geo-tracked all of her movements.”
Raymond threw her a look of wild incomprehension. “You talked to Nadia’s husband?”
“Yes.” Emily’s eyes burned like twin blue gas flames.
“Why?” he cried, the tequila having afforded him a gap of livid clarity between tremulousness and sleep.
“I needed to know what he knew!” she exclaimed.
Raymond shook his head and said in a quavering voice, “Why are you dredging all this shit up? She’s gone.” Tears glassed his eyes. He blinked them back, but they had already wet his lashes a sable black.
“Because somebody’s following me. My apartment was broken into. Ransacked.” They were on different wavelengths, but their fates had intersected in the archives and now they were in his Range Rover at the Gliderport where he and Nadia had once fucked like animals. “I think the same person, hired by whomever, who followed Nadia, is following me.”
“They broke into your apartment?” he asked, taken aback.
“They’re looking for The Archivist Moleskines, Raymond!” Emily nearly shouted.
Raymond flung his head in her direction like a sick horse. The veins in his neck stood out and vibrated. His face was colored red with fear and glowing with drink. The gravity of the situation punched him in the solar plexus and awakened him to a constellation of new fears.
Emily blinked back her own tears. With extrahuman effort she sprang up into him and her lips found the chapped lips of his mouth and she kissed him ardently, hungrily, not out of romantic passion, but desperate for a palpable connection to this narrative of love that had led her downward into the fires of memory and the unredeemed past. At first stunned, he greedily kissed her back. From the force of his mouth, she felt he needed the same thing she wanted, but he had the ephemeral power of tequila and she possessed only the unmedicated reality of her occupational panic anxiety. They both felt an unexpressed abyss gaping in their souls. They had come together over an archive and the archivist who sunk her soul deep into it, words on paper had stitched them together in some surreal patchwork quilt that made no sense except to the underworld god marionetting it all. They were bound for life, no matter what happened now. And they both grasped it in that cathartic kiss that left both feeling connected to something they needed to be connected to without chancing going mad: Raymond to the grief of the past; Emily to the terror of the present and the dark of her once promising future.
Emily let her mouth drop from his and buried her cheek in his chest, kneading his shirt with her fingernails like an affection-starved cat. She felt his comforting fingers on the back of her head, and in that moment she felt closer to Nadia than ever. Her words had brought Emily to the man, and now she was clinging to him like Nadia had done in that final rendezvous here at the Gliderport. She would never be a writer like Nadia, and she would never attract a man like Raymond West to fall in love with her, but with one sustained, soul-searching kiss, she had pierced his emotional opacity and dragged him down to the flesh and blood, down to the godforsaken human.
Emily felt the weight of Raymond’s body shift toward the glove compartment. She gripped his forearm with hooked fingers. “Don’t, Raymond. This isn’t a time to bury it with alcohol.” She raised her eyes to him like Onyx did to her when he was hungry. “I need you here for me now.” She tightened her grip on his forearm for emphasis. “Okay?”
He withdrew his arm with a sigh. “You’re right.”
“I didn’t mean to do that.”
“We’re both clinging to her right now,” he said enigmatically, but Emily intuited what he meant.
“Look, I know pretty much everything,” Emily stated. Raymond nodded. “I know all about your wife and Nadia at Isla Negra.” Raymond kept nodding metronomically, absorbing the one narrative he couldn’t control. Emily persisted. “I have to ask you, is there any chance your wife would have hired someone to follow Nadia and try to get those Moleskines back?”
“It’s not her style,” Raymond answered brusquely.
“Helena Blackwell? Would she give Helena money?” Emily wanted to show Raymond the screenshot of the check Helena had handed to the unidentified man in the closed stacks, but she feared alienating Raymond with the too prodigious amount of information she was in possession of.
“Helena? I don’t know,” Raymond muttered, staring inexpressively through the windshield, shaking his head, thinking. “As Nadia’s employer she would definitely be all over her to make the problem go away, but a PI?”
“Who might then have hired a private investigator? Think.”
Raymond turned slowly to Emily, his face drawn with tension. “You need to walk away from this, Emily. It’s too potentially damaging. For both of us. She’s gone.”
“What did you do with the Moleskines?” Emily pressed.
“They’re in a bank vault.” He paused to let that sink in. “If something happens to me, they go to you. It’ll be on your conscience then as my archivist.”
His words paralyzed her into silence.
“I gave the bank your email and phone number. If you think they need something more pertinent, email it to me and I’ll pass it on.”
Emily reared back. “I’m . . . flabbergasted.”
Raymond drifted away for a moment from the subject of their conversation and let the alcohol talk. “Did you know that the Gutenberg Bible was created out of the hides of three hundred sheep?”
“I might have read that,” Emily said.
“Can you imagine the suffering that went into the first printed word?” he roared, the tequila in him unleashing a moment of rage. He flung his head to Emily’s averted gaze. “That’s The Archivist. But I can’t destroy it. Not now that I know it still exists. I can’t.” He pounded his fist on the dash with a resounding blow and held it there like a flag planted in the sand.
Emily watched the shifting range of emotions that played over his face. His eyes were narrowed like a hawk’s on prey, but the quarry was inward and abstract, and a hint of frustration twisted his mouth into a tormented grimace. Emily waited until the animal wailing in him had subsided.
“You knew she was pregnant?” she stated.
He turned his head slowly in Emily’s direction, a new alarm glinting in his eyes.
“Like I said,” Emily started to explain, “Nadia not only kept your correspondence, she also wrote, as I mentioned in your office, a beautiful—very personal, very detailed—memoir of your relationship, which I came across in the correspondence.” Their eyes glanced like obsidian off each other, almost producing sparks. “So just admit it.”
“Yeah, I knew. Okay?”
“And your wife knew?”
Raymond looked at her with the dark turbulence of a storm brewing inside him.
“She told her,” Emily volunteered.
“Oh, Jesus,” Raymond said. He pulled a hand over his face and held it there like the half shell of a mollusk on dark sand. Suddenly, his hand shot out for the glove compartment in a lightning-fast move. Emily made no effort to stop him. He rummaged vehemently for the flask, unscrewed the cap with deft fingers, and took a long, soul-obliterating pull of the tequila. “I told her to take care of it, and she did,” he said finally, soothed by the alcohol. He took another bracing swig. Emily let the truth serum exercise its ephemeral magic. Raymond looked despondently into the well of a past he had hoped was capped forever, and now its brackish memories were surging back to him like an inexorably rising tide.
“She told you she aborted your child?” Emily asked.
“It was a tacit understanding,” he said grimly.
“What if I told you she didn’t go through with it?”
Raymond snapped his head into the crosshairs of Emily’s penetrating eyes. Shock drained all the red out of his face and painted it a ghostly white. “What?” She was glad he had his tequila for:
“What if I told you that the autopsy report showed she was still very much pregnant with your child when they found her on the beach?”
The jolt of Emily’s disclosure lifted Raymond’s eyebrows into an arrested expression. It was now more than the errancy of his heart that imprisoned him in the memory of Nadia. His voice crawled up from deep in his soul. “I didn’t know that.” He leaned his head back. “My God.”
“I talked with the lead homicide investigator,” Emily admitted.
Raymond sighed with a snort of air through his nostrils and shook his head in astonishment at Emily’s deep well of information on Nadia’s death. “I’m afraid to ask.” He dropped his head to hers. “Do the police know whose it was?”
“No.” Emily’s eyes roamed the horizon for a door out, but clouds had closed off the sky. “They only know for certain it wasn’t her husband’s.”
Raymond nodded to himself, girding for the next blow of the sledgehammer from Emily.
She whirled away from the windshield and pronounced with fierce conviction, “Do you really think she committed suicide? Nearly four months pregnant with your child? Having recently been fired? You telling her you had no choice but to abandon the book you were writing with her? And that you never wanted to see her again? What else did she have? Go back to the desert that was her marriage? After you?” She finished in a rising tone with an openmouthed glare of utter disbelief. In her look was everything Raymond West the author had failed to grasp about women in his work, except perhaps, unwittingly, The Archivist.
Raymond turned away and muttered more in resignation than in anger, “I sincerely believed her when she wrote me and said she was going through with the abortion. I’m stunned to hear this.” He shook his head, dumbfounded. “You’re positive?”
“She lied to you because she wanted to protect you,” Emily theorized. “But she wasn’t going to give up that child. Not after you abandoned her and the book. I wouldn’t’ve!”
Raymond turned to Emily and gazed at her as if the spirit of Nadia had suddenly inhabited this new archivist who had taken over the care of his papers, and the distance between them was now as diaphanous as the sheerest fabric. In the ensuing silence, large surf roared in the distance, the blows of its powerful, unstoppable waves reverberating up through the canyon fissure like the ocean’s own heartbeat.
“Her husband was tracking her,” Emily started back, in an effort to sort out the labyrinthine timeline.
The realization that their affair had been chronicled caused Raymond’s chin to drop in shameful resignation. “You said.”
“And aside from all the . . . trysting spots,” she continued, “he discovered something else.” Raymond braced himself for another bombshell with a fugitive shot of tequila. “She was making regular visits to an OB-GYN.” Emily rummaged in her purse and produced a fat, white-colored vial of pills and held them up for Raymond to see. “Her husband also found these.” The label read “Prenatal One.” “Do you still think she would commit suicide? With your child inside her? Regular doctor appointments? She was going to have that baby, Raymond. And her husband, who knew everything, was going to help her raise it.”
“Jesus.” He raised a hand and cupped it to his mouth, as if the enormity of everything Emily had told him was unassimilable as empirical truth.
“They couldn’t have kids.” Emily blinked abashedly into her lap. “He had come to terms with your affair and that it was over.” She raised her face up to his. “I know, like me, you’re an only child, so the West lineage was going to . . . continue on.” Emily looked away. “One day that child—that no doubt beautiful child—would have come into your life—”
“Stop!” Raymond cried. He tilted his head back against the headrest, absorbing the implications. “So, you think she drowned?”
“Not in waist-high surf. Not a woman who regularly trained for triathlons swimming from Scripps Pier to La Jolla Cove.”
Raymond cast portentous eyes on Emily. He closed them in quiet anguish, and they disappeared into two nests of wrinkles. When he reopened them, they were twin sapphires glinting underwater. “She was pregnant when she died,” he intoned, as if still in disbelief. “Why wouldn’t the police tell me?”
“Because Nadia’s husband lied and said the child was an IVF baby. Therefore, I’m assuming, they didn’t feel they needed to do a DNA test.”
Raymond’s face sagged in despair. He shook his head back and forth in fathomless disbelief.
“But if he hadn’t covered for you—out of his own pride—and they did a DNA test and matched it with you, you would have been a prime suspect.” Emily glared at him.
Raymond slowly turned his head to hers. “You think I killed her?”
“No! She was the love of your life. And I found the book to prove it. If I thought you killed her, I wouldn’t be here with you. Besides, weren’t you giving a talk at Dartmouth that week?”
“You know everything about me, don’t you?”
“Just like Nadia. Yeah.” She flung her gaze out the passenger window. “Even though your wife and Helena knew about the affair, and probably didn’t tell the police, you weren’t a suspect, Raymond. And I’m speculating that someone who has twenty-five million to give as a gift and has floated the possibility of running for mayor of a city as large as San Diego has the power to buy a lot of silence, even if you were.”
Raymond collapsed onto Emily’s shoulder. He wept violently into her blouse. “I don’t know how much more I can take. I miss her,” he bawled uncontrollably. He looked at her with sodden eyes. “And you, holding all this inside, all alone?” he said, with unexpected sensitivity to everything Emily had been going through. He enveloped her in his arms. She could feel his weeping face trembling on her shoulder, his scraggly beard scratching her neck like fine sandpaper. His sad, tequila-scented breath. This broken man, this once heralded writer, disassembled all over again as he was when Nadia had been found dead. No catastrophic molt and consequent rebirth were forthcoming. In that moment, Emily wondered why she had carried this on her lone shoulders as far as she had. And she knew the reason as she clung to him: she couldn’t live with a lie.
“I had to tell someone,” Emily said tearfully. “I didn’t know whom to turn to. And I thought you should at least know that Nadia was definitely pregnant when she died.” She drew air sharply through her nose. She realized at that moment that nothing less than his conscience was on trial.
Raymond hugged her tightly. Then he pulled away from her. A ray of terror crossed his face like a bleak shadow. Holding her by the shoulders, as if afraid she were going to abandon him, he slowly turned to her, as if a new, deeper, horror had finally dawned on him: “Do you really think she was murdered?”
“I don’t know for sure. The police don’t think so. Maybe she did walk into those dark waters because she was inconsolably depressed.” Emily thrust out her jaw. “Maybe my instinct is all wrong. But I think she truly believed you were going to finish the book you were writing together. I think that meant everything to her. And when you abandoned it, told her to destroy it, pushed her away . . .” She trailed off. “I don’t know what I would have done if you had told me to go fuck myself. I can’t even begin to fathom the depth of her despair.”
“What do you want from me?” Raymond asked in a helpless voice.
Emily shook her head. “Nothing. I just wanted to tell you this because I thought you should know, that’s all.” With a vast rush of feeling for him, she reached up and embraced him, her arms not even reaching around his broad shoulders. Their heads coupled for one last cathartic moment. Emily pressed down on the door lever. It sprang open. She didn’t want to leave. She twisted back to him. “If I never see you again, I’m sorry I got pulled into this personal world of yours and hers.”
He met her eyes. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Emily.”
Emily reached into her purse one last time. She took out a single sheet of paper and handed it to Raymond.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Mr. Pencilhead. The poem that got you into trouble with your high school principal. The first thing you ever wrote. Nadia found it.”
Raymond drew a hand to his mouth as he cursorily examined the Xerox of the original. He closed his eyes and tears leached from them.
“That’s how brilliant of an archivist she was.”
In a trembling voice, Raymond said, “She told me she would find it.”
“She did. And so much more. Goodbye,” said Emily to a nonplussed Raymond. She stepped out of the car, dropped three feet to the ground, back in her world. His “Be careful” as she closed the door to his Range Rover trailed her like the faint whisper of a ghost, or the cell door clanging shut on a still imprisoned man.
Emily drove in silence following the coastline. Even though it was still light out, she parked on the street again and approached her apartment, step by step, circumspectly. She had wanted to believe eleven was her new lucky number, but now she wasn’t sure it hadn’t reverted to its superstitious status of unlucky.
Once inside she locked the sliding glass door and jimmied the broom pole in place. She and Onyx met together in the living room as effortlessly as couples should meet in a contented relationship, thought Emily. Wanting to see each other. Missing each other. Needing each other. In their brief moments she felt that with Raymond, strangely enough, but it was much more complicated.
Emily refreshed Onyx’s bowls to quiet his plaintive meowing. A half-eaten Japanese takeout that had gone cold and wilted in the refrigerator served as her dinner. She picked at it unenthusiastically, made it palatable with a bracingly cold Societe IPA. Then, unable to stop her racing mind, Emily went into the bedroom and opened her laptop. Silence enveloped the apartment like a fragile skin.
Obsessing again, Emily googled “seymour’s catering la jolla del mar san diego.” Nothing. Confused, she tried alternative spellings. Still nothing. The only thing she came across was a Seymour’s Catering with a PO box in neighboring Solana Beach. She google-mapped it. It was a PostalAnnex+, one of thousands of the cookie-cutter franchise that offered a variety of mail services.
