The Exceptions Read online

  I get in the driver’s side and watch her for a few seconds, then reach behind her seat and hand her the bag with the textbook. “For you,” I say.

  She looks at me and passes a smile that appears forced. “You’re always bearing gifts.”

  “Well, I had time to kill in Baltimore.” She opens the bag and pulls out Zwiebach’s monster, stares at it like a practical joke she doesn’t understand. I rub my forehead, feel like an idiot. “Not as useful as a sweater, I suppose.”

  But when she turns to me, her eyes are wet. “Are you kidding?” She reaches over the gearshift and hugs me. I slide my arm around her back and slip my hand beneath her underarm, tighten it around her body. She lets go before I do. “You pick this out on your own?”

  “Get real. I would have thought string theory had something to do with the clothing industry. I spoke with the dean of math… stuff, who told me what the class after differential equations would be. He reeled off a list of titles that gave me a headache. The only one that stuck was string theory, and a girl at the bookstore told me this was the best one for self-study.”

  She shakes her head and looks at me like she’s trying to interpret a newly learned language. “I can’t believe you called a dean to research this—and that you remembered I was ready to move beyond differential equations. That’s so”—she struggles for the word, is reluctant to use it once found—“romantic.”

  I swallow, hard. She stares at me, shows no sign or interest in stopping. I look up to the sky, darkening with clouds from the west. Eventually she looks up, too.

  “Where’s that useless fed of yours?” I ask, half waiting to be pistol-whipped right here on Walnut. Who’s to say her tears and sadness aren’t those of guilt?

  “Who knows, really. I ditched him a few miles back. Last night.”

  I check all my mirrors. “He managed to lose you twice in two days. That’s gotta be a career killer.”

  I casually watch Melody from the corner of my eyes. She already returned her interest to the textbook. She runs her fingers around the edge of it like she’s caressing a lover’s hand, smiles as though someone just whispered something sweet in her ear.

  She notices me watching her; I cannot look away.

  “You know,” she says, “your dad referred to you as Little Johnny.”

  Her having actually conversed with my father appears like it might be true. I try again for closure: “How did you get his number?”

  She closes her eyes and dips her head. “I’ll tell you later.” I don’t respond. She looks at me and adds, “I cheated and lied to get it. I deceived some people into getting what I wanted. It’s not something you would likely find endearing.”

  I give her a blank stare. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten who I am.”

  She puckers her lips and sort of narrows her eyes at me, rips off an undoubtedly abbreviated, stream-of-consciousness edition: “I called information in New York for Bovaro and they found a listing but it was unpublished to a post office box address so I called the post office in that borough and posed as your mother and insisted the information they had in their system was incorrect because our mail—your father’s mail—was delivered to a neighbor’s house and that the whole reason we rented a post office box in the first place was to avoid having mail go to a physical address and hey if it’s going to go to a physical address why didn’t it come to ours so I concluded that their information was out of date and demanded the guy read whatever information they currently had on file to see if it was correct and he gave me an address on Hicks Street along with the phone number I used to contact your father a few hours ago.”

  She could never know how hard I’m trying not to smile. Turns out introducing her to my family might be easier than I’d imagined; she’s already one of us. I don’t mean to give my family too much credit; honestly, we’re not that crafty. But it appears our motivations and means are quite similar. Though the greatest benefit of her story comes from my ability to drop any worry that she’s working in collusion with the feds, setting up my family—and me. I know Melody’s had to develop skills at deception and misleading people that I could never understand, but I could never be convinced this elaborate scheme was scripted.

  Melody turns her hands out as if to imply, That’s all I got.

  I can no longer restrain the smile, and it bursts through embedded in laughter. “Man, Melody, you really are…” She looks at me like she’s anxious to hear the rest, leans forward like she wants to make sure she hears the punch line of the sentence. Instead, I just repeat it, and end it: “You really are.” I mentally follow with all the things I’m thinking but cannot confess: beautiful, clever, misunderstood.

  She sits back, nods in disappointment: It’s okay.

  I start the car and pull away from the café. Rain begins to trickle, noticeable on the windshield before it can be felt. I put the top up while we’re slowly drifting toward a red light. Normally, a few drops of rain would mean nothing, but I use it as an excuse to keep us veiled from the outside world. We roll out to I-68, and as the sun drops and our speed increases, the temperature in the car has cooled enough that I put the windows up. The sudden quietness in the cab makes noticeable how we’re not talking.

  Melody rests back like she’s considering sleep, then slowly turns her head to me. I can sense her staring; I ignore it for a while, but feel compelled to return it. I catch her stare, clear my throat and ask, “Do you want me to take you anywhere?”

  She keeps her eyes on me, reaches down and unbuckles her seat belt, carefully leans over and drops her head to my lap, lays her cheek on my thigh, and says, “Yes, take me anywhere.”

  Within seconds, the heat of her face seeps through to my leg. I glance at her long torso extended across the center of the cab, at the rise and fall of her curves. I try to again remember her as the innocent little girl twirling about the sidewalk in front of Vincent’s, but that image is nowhere to be found. I can’t deny that the grown woman whose body is stretched before me has developed into a masterpiece, a work of art worthy of study and emulation. It would be easy to dismiss how attracted I am to her, that our history together is improperly skewing my opinion of who she is, but it seems unlikely; isn’t the girl next door, the one you’ve known over too many years, the one usually overlooked? Even if how she’s been a significant part of my life and attention for so long is somehow influencing me, it doesn’t change the fact that she is genuinely attractive—it just makes her more attractive.

  I take my right hand from the steering wheel and let it slowly drop to her shoulder and I squeeze it softly, run my thumb gently against the back of it. She takes a deep breath, and as she lets it out, she slides her hand around my thigh and underneath, so that it rests between the seat and my leg.

  We drive like this for ten minutes and she eventually falls asleep. Every now and then she makes a quiet vocal sound in her sleep like a newborn. I notice her shirt has drifted up and exposed her midriff and back. I carefully slide my hand over and try to pull her shirt down to keep her warm, but I accidentally brush her skin, and as I do her body shifts a little and rises to meet my hand, and I keep it there longer than I should.

  Then I remember why I’m doing all of this, why I want to set her free—and none of it has to do with feeling anything romantic toward Melody. Without question, romance is the worst thing I could offer her. I quickly return both hands to the steering wheel. What Melody needs is unfettered freedom; being tied to me in any way would be more damaging than what she has now.

  I’m lucky if I drive three miles before my attention drifts to her again. I look down and notice the smoothness of her neck, fully exposed by her short hair. I bite my lip and carefully bring my hand to her neck and gently caress the skin from the edge of her hairline down to the top of her shirt. I do this for the next half hour.

  Self-control has never been a strong suit of the Bovaros.

  The sun sets as we retravel the eastbound lanes of the highways I’d covered hours earlier. With
the tinted windows of my car and the cloudy sky, the cab has been nearly blackened. Crossing over Braddock Mountain on I-70, the last mountain range on our journey back toward Baltimore, my cell vibrates. I carefully shift to the side, pull it from my left pocket, and flip it open.

  Gardner finishes a yawn and mutters, “No update.”

  Quietly, I respond, “I have to say I’m becoming increasingly less concerned with the capabilities of your employer.” Melody wriggles her body a little.

  Randall mumbles something out of range, sounds like he may have hit the sauce before heading back to the office to check for new information. “I don’t know, maybe they haven’t moved her. Maybe she’s still in Columbia.”

  “Stay a technologist, buddy. You have no future in operations. What, you think they’d keep her there forever? ‘Got an idea, let’s just drive around in a big circle and take her back home.’ ” Melody shifts again.

  “What do I care?”

  “I admire your commitment to excellence.”

  Then, with boozy sarcasm: “No update.” When I finally get around to seeing Gardner again, I’m going to beat his head with a nine iron just for the sheer pleasure of it. “Look, the system will catch up, and you’ll find her nearby, blah, blah, blah.”

  “She’s probably in North Dakota.”

  “Listen, I was thinking maybe I could start getting a bigger boost, considering how helpful I’ve—”

  “Yeah, I’ll let you know what I find out.” I hang up on the scumbag.

  “Jonathan?”

  Melody’s voice startles me and I jerk up in my seat and accidentally slam her head into the bottom of the steering wheel and throw our car across two lanes of traffic. I overcompensate and slide back into the fast lane then off onto the shoulder, then back again.

  “Geez,” I say, “you scared me to death.” Cars behind us slow down as we get back up to cruising speed.

  “Sorry.” Melody sits up and rubs her neck and head. “How long was I asleep?”

  My eyes move from mirror to mirror, make sure no police lights are coming up the rear. “About three hours.”

  She nods a little. “We must be getting close to Philadelphia.”

  “Baltimore, actually.”

  She rubs her eyes and yawns. “Wouldn’t it have been faster to take the Pennsylvania Turnpike?”

  I glance her way, then back to the road. “We’re avoiding Philly. For the moment.”

  She stops rubbing her eyes. “What’s in Philadelphia?”

  “Some bad people, who were given some bad information.”

  I feel like a parent trying to avoid telling his daughter that her puppy got run over. The bad people are various members of our crew who had several targets to eliminate in Philadelphia. Two crew members were in DC, taking out one very important target. Baltimore was technically my location, and despite the fact that my target moved, I claimed it as my own—and claimed to have made a successful hit: the bad information. My goal for now is to keep us between the two cities, allow the rest of the crew to finish its business—according to Peter all is well—and return home; I don’t want anyone trying to check in or meet up with me while they’re in the area. I want them all settled and in one place when we arrive back in New York.

  “And who knows where the marshals and the FBI are at this point,” I add. “They’re a completely separate issue.” That’s no exaggeration. The only insight I have into what they’re thinking is the confirmation from Gardner that they know nothing.

  Melody doesn’t say a word, merely digests everything I’ve told her. I have no doubt she’s wondering what she’s done, putting her trust in the hands of a mobster, of a monster, to protect her. I can’t begin to imagine how miserable her life has been, though I’m certain it’s led her to desperation. It is far easier to embrace hopelessness than hope. I have no delusions of grandeur, no comprehension that I am anything more than what happened to be waiting at the end of her rope. What she could not know is that I have no intention of letting her down, of letting her go. I am going to return her life to her, wrap it up and hand it over like a present. I am going to give her a second chance—or in her case, a tenth.

  As if I spoke these words to her, I notice her soften. Her shoulders drop and she does a full-body sigh that suggests relief. I’m not sure what she’s thinking, but I’m afraid to ask, to open my mouth and potentially offer up a less convincing version of her future.

  Melody makes a subtle comment about how different we are, yet how amusing it is that we’re running together. I laugh and agree, but suggest we aren’t different at all.

  I say we’re nearly identical.

  After a long pause, Melody twists in her seat to face me better, says, “Come again?”

  I look at her, read the seriousness in her expression. “You really think you and I are so different?”

  She squints like the sun is over my shoulder. “Yeah, I think we’re totally different. I’m trapped. I have to be whatever they tell me to be, stuck in a life with jobs where no one notices I exist, but you’re free—free to do and be whatever you want to be.”

  I immediately recall those moments in the bookstore at Johns Hopkins and how convinced I was—still am—that we only have so much control over our destinies. I think for a minute to articulate my point.

  “How often do you think I’m watched by the cops or the feds?” I ask. “If I get a citation for jaywalking, they’ll be on me in a heartbeat, trying to get me to flip on someone in my family. I can’t go anywhere without being noticed—and I’m a pretty stand-up guy by comparison. But that’s irrelevant. I’ll never be rid of the Bovaro tag, might as well have it tattooed on my forehead. I will always be viewed as a criminal or a criminal-in-training. At a minimum, I’ll always be viewed as someone with information on other criminals.”

  “Do you? Have information on other criminals?”

  I barely have enough space to store it all. “Sure. I mean, didn’t you know the details of what your dad did for a living?” I regret bringing up her father—in the past tense, no less.

  “I guess I see your point, but we’re still very different. You can do whatever you want with your life. Nothing is keeping you suppressed, forcing you out of the realm of possibility.”

  “You think I can be a United States congressman?”

  “Okay, well—”

  “How about a world-class surgeon? Trust your prostate to the son of Anthony Bovaro?”

  “I don’t have a pros—”

  “How ’bout an FBI agent? Think I’d be well received at the academy? Ooh, how about a stockbroker? Want to put your financial investments in the hands of a Bovaro?”

  She stops trying to answer.

  “How about a disc jockey?” I continue. “Musician? Professor? I can’t even be a Little League coach.”

  When I glance over at Melody, she catches my eye and smiles. I turn back to the road. “Maybe we are alike,” she says, then very softly as though only to herself, “Maybe that’s why I feel I have this connection with you.”

  I almost ask her to repeat herself, but I’m afraid to, afraid I misheard or that she’ll deny having said it at all.

  Then the rationalization begins, that the feelings I’m starting to have toward her are not wrong, and—you know, big deal—what could be the harm in trying to hold her hand? Had she kept that sentence to herself, my hands would have remained where they were—ten and two—but two just lost its grip. I reach over and gently take her hand in mine. She looks down and I fear she might pull it away, but instead she takes her other hand and places it on top, capturing mine. The warmth of her palms sends a wave of pleasure through my veins and into my brain like a shot of morphine. I understand, I do: None of her prior protectors cared about her—cared about her like a father or a husband. That kiss she popped on Sean’s cheek in Cape Charles? She wanted some signal he felt passionate about caring for her, that it was more than his job, that he was following something other than the command of a superior. I kno
w I should pull my hand away, retract the notion. But: like a shot of morphine.

  Neither of us looks at one another. We speak not a word for miles.

  On our approach to Baltimore, we share vignettes of our family life, begin with guarded generalities and progress to specific embarrassments and disasters of the relative ways we’ve been forced to live. She confesses how vulnerable she felt as a little girl moving from school to school, how hard it was to make friends, and how she gave up on trying, on putting in the effort to vet and build relationships when she knew she would leave them behind at any moment, and how isolation became as great a comfort as her reliance upon math. I confess how I so desperately wanted to leave behind the lifestyle I was born into: how first I tried to stand out by excelling in my studies, achieving grades never recorded on my brothers’ report cards; how I briefly considered the path of the priesthood until admitting to myself that I was marred by a lack of discipline and an incapacity to forgive; how I tried so diligently to find a course of study and career that could have no possible benefit to my family’s corrupt operations, how I attended culinary school, how I broke free, and how I returned to my own prison by using my restaurant to launder a large percentage of the money that comes to the Bovaro organization. We pass stories back and forth for the remainder of our time on the freeway. No discussion of murder ever occurs. No doubt we’d love to forget all about it—her far more than I—but getting to know each other turned out to be an unexpected pleasure, her voice in response to mine as sweet and reassuring as a hymn.

  The Baltimore skyline comes into view and the particular shapes of the tallest buildings, their erratic rise and fall across the smoggy horizon, are now as familiar as my reflection in the mirror. Baltimore has become a temporary second home. I take the exit that brings us to the feet of the city, winds us down toward the Inner Harbor.

  Melody never asks what I’m doing or where we’re going. I can’t tell if she has an inherent trust in me or if she’s come to let everyone else make the decisions for so long that she’s unsure of the proper way to integrate her opinion. I suppose, then, I shouldn’t tell her I’m crafting this plan on the fly.