He read it to me over the phone in a stairwell at twenty past four in the morning. It said: Marcus — I’m not here. Don’t wait. I’ve called someone and they know where I am and they know your name. My daughter had taped a note to her own front door addressed to a man I have never heard her mention, and every word of it was a lie except the last clause, and the man who’d answered her phone was standing in her apartment when I called.
She’d gone out her bedroom window onto the fire escape at eleven o’clock with a backpack and her cat in a carrier. She’d left her phone deliberately — charging, face down, so he’d hear it ring and assume she was in the building. The note was to buy the twenty minutes it takes a person to decide whether to believe something. She was in a motel in Aurora by midnight. She’d told exactly one person, a woman from her office named Pris who I have since sent flowers to twice, and she hadn’t called me because she’d known, correctly, that I would have been in the car and on that highway inside four minutes.
He’d been in her life since February. I’d heard the name Marcus maybe once, in passing, described as somebody from her building. That’s the part I’ve had to sit with — that a thing which required a fire escape and a note and a false trail had been running for seven months inside a nightly phone call where she told me about her work and asked about my knee.
There’s an order now, and he’s back in Nebraska, and the cat has recovered better than either of us. She moved in March to a place with a doorman and no fire escape, which she pointed out to me herself, dryly, the day she signed. We still say goodnight. She calls at nine her time and I pick up on the first ring like a woman with no dignity whatsoever, and every so often, when she’s tired, she’ll end it the way she has since she was small — okay, that’s it, that’s the whole day — and I let her go and then I sit there a minute.
