Backed Redux - Chapter 25

I fidgeted all morning but when lunchtime finally came, I found an empty office and started dialing, praying Christine would pick up. I couldn’t imagine a suitable voicemail message that would adequately convey what was going on. Hearing her voice again though only made me want to cry.

“Hey sis,” I said quietly.

“Oh my god!” she exclaimed. “What the hell? How are you?”

“I was doing pretty well until yesterday,” I said. I held the phone in one hand and rubbed my eyes with the other. It was the truth and if anyone was listening, it was ambiguous enough to apply to anything.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Nothing I can talk about yet,” I said. “But I need to know some things.”

“Okay, shoot” she said. “Just so you know though, I had some guy calling me looking for you.”
“That’s what I needed to know,” I said, loving that she could still read my mind. “Did he say who he was?”

“He said he was a friend and hadn’t been able to find you, that he was worried,” she said. “He wouldn’t tell me how he got my number though.”

“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“That I didn’t know where you were,” she said. “That last time I talked to you, you were all gaga over some guy you’d met on a dating site. I told him you were talking about running away with this guy, but I wasn’t even sure of his name. You know how flighty you are – always running off and doing this sort of thing.” She said this last bit with a laugh because we both knew it wasn’t true. I had never gotten into the whole internet dating scene nor would I trust someone I didn’t know blindly enough to do such a thing. But I knew Paul would have believed it.

“You are a godsend,” I said with a giant sigh of relief. “Did he buy it?”

“He seemed to,” she said. “And I haven’t heard from him since.”

“Can you go by my place sometime today? Just see what’s going on, if anything?” If there was police tape or other sort of presence at the building, I needed to know. Frightening as that possibility was, we needed to be ready to deal with it.

“Of course,” she said. “Anything you need, you know that. Are you in trouble? What happened to you? Where are you?”

I broke down. The one personI had always been able to count on was still there in unexpected and amazing ways. “I don’t know if I’m in trouble and I can’t tell you that yet,” I said. “I will call you again tomorrow though.”

I was a mess all afternoon, operating largely on autopilot and just hoping I didn’t screw anything up too badly. I got home and told Seth what I had found out. “I still doubt he’s actually involved the police,” he said. “Calling Christine was probably his only idea.   Her quick thinking may have saved the day.”

“She’s pretty amazing,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll get to meet her someday,” he said smiling. After dinner, Seth let me curl up next to him on the couch. I think we both needed each other’s comforting touch, romantic or not. We needed to be there for each other.

“This is all my fault,” I said quietly, gaining speed as I went. “I’m sorry – I know this is coming way too late and doesn’t begin to cover the magnitude. I know there’s nothing I can say to make up for all of it but – ”  

I looked up to find the kindest expression I’d seen yet on Seth. “You’re doing your part. You’ve been doing it,” he said. “This is not on you. This is all Paul.”

“But I started all this,” I protested. “If it weren’t for me –”

He put a hand to my lips. “Stop. You don’t need to convince me anymore.”

“But that’s what you really think, right?” I said. “You said it all the way to Nevada. And back. Now I can’t shake the fact that I set all this in motion.”   

Seth sighed heavily. “I’m not having this fight with you now. I was angry. Period. Not just at you.”
“It felt like it was all aimed at me,” I mumbled.

“Because you were there!” he shouted. “You were handy. Nothing more. But you didn’t make him steal the money. And you certainly didn’t make him run with it.”

“I thought you wanted me to take responsibility,” I said.

He shook his head. “I did – I still do. But there’s nothing else you can do now except let it go.”
I looked at him dubiously. “Have you let it go? Is this one of those I’m-over-it-so-you-should-be-too things?” He had to think on that one and was silent for a good minute before answering. “I’ve moved on. No, that’s not the same as being over it but I’m getting there.”

I approached my next question cautiously. “What does that mean for us?”

“It means I need to deal with him now. I’ve already dealt with you. Things are under control here,” he said.

His tone said that was the end of it. But I knew better. I knew the argument was only put on hold and would continue to resurface. The question was for how long. I had no control over that either. So I buried my head in his chest and counted the minutes, the hours, until I could call Christine back. It was an eternity. I loved hearing her voice but hated feeling like I was using her. I simply didn’t see an alternative. 
…
The next day was much of the same. I felt like I sleepwalked through the morning and returned to the same private office at lunch. “Me again,” I said when she answered.

“There’s nothing,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She explained that she had gone to the building and everything had looked normal from the outside. She got through the security door with someone else then snuck up to my apartment. “There’s a Notice of Sale sign on the door for next week but the door was unlocked,” she said. “It was pretty trashed inside, like someone was looking for something. Do you know what they could have been looking for, or the odds that they found it?”

“Did you see my phone or did they take that?” I asked.

“I didn’t see it,” she said. “Where would it have been?”

“Last time I saw it, it was on the dining room table,” I said. Left unsaid was that Paul had clearly found it and likely moved it. Worse, he might have taken it with him.
 
“I don’t know hon,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You didn’t know to look for it. Did it look like anything was taken or missing?”
“It was kinda hard to tell,” she said. “And I left everything the way I found it.”

“Did you lock the door behind you?”

“No, I didn’t want there to be any sign that anyone had been there – should I have?” she asked. I had an idea then. I had no idea if it would matter, but I knew I would feel safer if Christine had the phone rather than Paul or the authorities.

“Can you go back and look closer, maybe check for the phone?” I asked. “I don’t know what he could have possibly taken, but I need more details if you can get them.”

“Are you coming back?” she asked.

“I have to go,” I said. “But has that guy called you anymore? Did he give you a name?”

“I haven’t heard from him and he called himself Paul,” she said.

“Perfect, thanks,” I said. “Oh, if you go back and the phone is there, could you take it with you? And lock the door?” She agreed. I hung up near tears again. There were so many “one more things” I wanted to tell her, so much I wanted to confess but there simply wasn’t time.

I didn’t know if it mattered who had my phone. Any other contacts in there would have less information than Christine did, and I didn’t keep addresses in my phone. Everyone I saw, or wanted to see, I knew where they lived. Or I looked up directions online when I needed to. But I didn’t like the thought of Paul harassing anyone, either. If Christine got it, no one would be able to prove that she did and as the door had been left unlocked, there was no reason some random person couldn’t have wandered in and taken a nearly new phone that was just sitting around.

That night, I was online when Christine updated her status to say, “Phone was lost but now is found.” I knew she had meant it for me. I hit “Like” and told Seth about it.

“I wish you would have talked to me before having her go back there,” he said. “Because if the place is up for sale now, it doesn’t really matter who has the phone.”

“I don’t understand why Paul didn’t just take it,” I said.

“Same reason I didn’t,” he said. “He didn’t want to be bothered with it. It would have to be reactivated at this point so why go to the trouble of someone tracing its signal and thinking he was you because he had it?”

“So there was no point in having her go back?” I asked.

Seth shrugged. “Not really, but it’s useful to know the place is finally being sold.”

I told him how surprised I was that anything was still there at all. “I thought it would have been cleared out months ago,” I said.

“In this economy, it can take at least six months for a mortgage company to move on an abandoned property,” he said. “It’s a lot of paperwork for them and they’re overworked as it is.”

I nodded. Apparently, I could have stopped paying altogether and had more time than I thought before getting kicked out. This didn’t make me feel any better about what I’d done and the mess we were now in. I just couldn’t get rid of the guilt. I hated how ineffective I felt, despite my efforts, and how little control I had over what happened next.

Suddenly our power exchange, our dynamic, felt more like role playing. I’d surrounded myself with others who played the same roles and we told ourselves it was more than just a game, that it was our lives. But in the end, what did it matter whether I was allowed on the furniture or the dishes were done at night, when our literal lives might be at stake? What was the point? Just because our rules were important to us didn’t mean they had any effect on the rest of the world. Life outside carried on no matter what.

Nothing mattered except getting Paul off our backs. And Christine’s.

“Will it ever feel like this is over?” I asked. It sounded melodramatic to my own ears but I also didn’t think I was overstating the potential danger to us.

“I think we will be looking over our shoulders for a while,” Seth said.

“Do you think he’d try to hurt Christine?”

“I suppose it’s possible that he’d figure out a way to get her address from her cell number, but I wouldn’t give him that much credit,” he said.

“As I recall, she uses a P.O. box as her mailing address anyway,” I answered.

“Then no, I don’t know how he could find her and he’s not the violent type anyway,” Seth said. “She also sounds like someone who can take care of herself.”

“She is,” I said.

“As long as she has the phone, she should leave it off completely, even if there’s no service to it anymore” he said. Crap. I hadn’t thought of that. I went back online and sent her a private message. “Don’t use the phone – it’s useless anyway.”

She wrote back a minute later. “It was destroyed in an accident.”

“Accident?? Are you okay?” I wrote back, trying to feign shock and concern though I was pretty sure there was no reason for either.

“Yep, just dropped it and accidentally ran over it with the truck. Just call me Grace.”

It was an old joke between us, a nickname her father had given her, but one that worked incredibly well here. If anyone ever saw the messages, there was nothing about them that would look unusual. “Just take care of you,” I wrote back.

“Always. And ditto,” she replied.

Weeks passed with no more word from Paul and nothing from Christine to indicate that she had heard from him again either.  But I couldn’t let it go.

I knew Paul was out there somewhere. He was out there, and he could be anywhere.  Further, he was looking for us. I felt like we were being hunted. I went to work but largely refused to go anywhere else. I went into hiding and searched Christine’s profile vigilantly for coded messages. She often went days without posting, however, and that always worried me.  But there was no other way to keep track of what was going on back home.
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Needless to say, any plans I had hoped to make with Chloe and Justin were put on hold. Indefinitely.