The Kidnapped Bride, Barry Rachin [android based ebook reader TXT] 📗

"Mrs. Snyder's downstairs in the living room and wishes to speak to you." Standing just outside her daughter's bedroom, Paige Bryant's mother wore a constipated expression as though the somber woman waiting below was more intruder than guest.

"About what?" Paige Bryant had never passed more than a half-dozen words with Phyllis Snyder who lived two streets over. Sometimes she visited the bank where Paige worked, but a year earlier the girl had been promoted to the loan department and had few dealings with regular customers

"Norman’s been acting weird, emotionally unbalanced, and she thought…" Paige's mother never bother to finish the sentence. Norman Snyder, class valedictorian and president of the Brandenburg High School scholastic honor society, could have been a lawyer, brain surgeon, nuclear physicist or anything else that sparked his prodigious intellect, but following graduation the nerdy teen flashed and went up in acrid smoke. Failure to launch was the operative term. Accepted to a half dozen Ivy League colleges, he attended none. Rumor had it the boy was washing dishes for minimum wage at Ryan's diner, had no friends, no social life. When his parents went ballistic over his cataclysmic descent into mediocrity, Norman quietly moved out of the five-bedroom house and into a sardine can of an efficiency apartment in a rooming house just outside of town. "Have Mrs. Snyder come upstairs," Paige suggested.

Her mother went off and a moment later Paige heard the creaking of the risers as the heavyset woman trudged to the second floor landing. Phyllis Snyder, a dour-faced woman with a hook nose and saccharine smile that didn't quite mesh with her lugubrious disposition, lumbered into the room. "I see you at the bank," she remarked absently, her almond eyes flitting distractedly about the tidy bedroom. "How's that going?"

"Fine." For a fleeting moment, the thought occurred to Paige that Mrs. Snyder might want her to find an entry level position at the bank for her discombobulated son, but the woman quickly laid that unnecessary fear to rest.

"Maybe you heard, Norm ain't doing so hot these days." She made a sniffing sound and rubbed her longish nose. Paige held her tongue. Better to wait her out, let the woman play her hand. Somebody always needed something. At the bank it was a loan to cover a spiffy new car or maybe a mortgage for a bigger house than the absurd behemoth they already owned. Enough was never enough. "Look, here's the deal," the middle-aged woman threw formality out the window, "I need someone with a head on her shoulders to talk horse sense with Norman. His brains got all muddled what with all the crazy books he reads and that god-awful German poetry."

"Norman speaks German?"

"No, not a word," Mrs. Snyder clarified. Reaching into her purse, she withdrew a scrap of paper and handed it to Paige. "He reads this mystical gibberish in translation and then the poor boy doesn't know which end is up anymore." She began to cry, making horrible snuffling sounds, her pendulous lower lip quivering under the burden of grief.

Paige laid the sheet on the bed without looking at it. "You brought me something that belongs to Norman with neither his knowledge nor consent."

Mrs. Snyder slumped down on the edge of the bed and shrugged dismissively. "It's just some lame-ass poem by Rilke that he downloaded off the goddamn internet."

Paige lowered her eyes and read silently.

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
And another man, who remains inside his own house
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.
Rainer Maria Rilke

"So what the hell is a church that stands somewhere in the East?" Mrs. Snyder fumed. "It's a lot of malarkey, right?" The woman rose and began pacing the room, getting more agitated by the minute. "I mean, who reads this sappy shit?"

Sometimes a man… sometimes a Noooorman…

Paige's brain was beginning to spin out of control, to free associate in perverse and unimaginable ways. Phyllis Snyder had that deleterious effect, but she opted not to share that bit of miscellany with the distraught woman. "The church in the East," Paige replied diplomatically, "probably refers to some spiritual quest or Holy Grail."

"My son's washing dishes in a greasy spoon. The Holy Grail don't figure in the grand scheme of things." When there was no immediate reply, the woman added. "In recent weeks, the boy's become morbidly depressed… mentally unstable. He's turned his back on all his friends from high school."

"And now he goes away, disappears for days at a time." Mrs. Snyder jutted her flabby lower lip in a theatrical scowl. "I say, 'Norman, I tried to reach you a dozen times over the weekend. Where the hell were you?'"

"And?"

"He says he traveled north."

North - what did that signify? North to Chelsea, which was a crummy handful of miles beyond Boston on route one, still further north to New Hampshire or Vermont, north to the polar latitudes?

"So what do you want from me, Mrs. Snyder?"

"The few times your name came up during high school, Norman always had flattering things to say about you. If he wasn't so painfully shy and tongue-tied, Norm might have…" The woman cut herself short, abruptly sallying off in another direction. "Maybe you could drop by the diner after work and give the poor boy some moral encouragement… lift his broken spirits."

Paige felt overwhelmed. With her gloom-and-doom pronouncements, Phyllis Snyder was a blight, an emotional pestilence; she sucked every molecule of nourishing oxygen from the air. "I'll go by after work tomorrow."

Mrs. Snyder reached out tentatively and squeezed her hand. "You're a kind-hearted soul." Without another word she retreated to the doorway and lumbered back down the stairs.

*****

At six-fifteen the following afternoon, Paige wandered into Ryan's Diner, took a seat at the counter and ordered coffee. A moment passed and Norman came bustling through the door from the kitchen with a plastic rack full of clean water glasses. Noticing the girl, he hurried over.

"Hi,Paige. How you doing?" The boy stood on the far side of the counter grinning good-naturedly. He had grown a full beard and let his wavy blond hair cascade down over his ears. He could have passed for a West Coast beachcomber or hippy with mystical affinities or an ax murderer. "I heard you got a plum job over at the bank."

"In the loan department," Paige stumbled over several words as though she suffered a speech impediment. "Got bumped up from head teller last August."

"Well that's just great!" In no great hurry to stack the glasses, Norman rested his fists on the countertop.

Earlier in the day, Paige had rehearsed several equally distasteful strategies for finessing the encounter. She would open with innocuous pleasantries. Once the conversation hit a snag, she would cut her loses and disappear out the door. Properly understood, the visit was nothing more than an empty formality, a bit of misplaced altruism foisted on her by a manipulative, blatantly neurotic and over-protective mother. Mrs. Snyder had resorted to emotional subterfuge, whining and wheedling until Paige agreed to do her bidding. But Norman wasn't morbidly depressed or emotionally unhinged! His sour-pickle-of-a-mother duped the girl into doing her bidding. "Actually, I'm here under false pretenses," Paige blurted.

"Excuse me?"

"I came under your mother's auspices, to talk you off the ledge… a mission of mercy to save you from a horrible fate."

She hadn't intended to say anything of the sort. Norman rolled his eyes. "Mother came to see you?" Paige nodded. "I'm so sorry! You're the fifth sacrificial lamb." Norman reached out and patted her wrist, a reassuring gesture. His expression turned reflective. "Look, I go on break in ten minutes, if you don't mind waiting around."

"I came here expressly to see you," Paige reminded him. Norman cracked a boyish grin and went off to unload the drinking glasses.

*****

"In answer to you unspoken question," Norman noted, "I'm not quite sure what I'm doing bussing tables, scrubbing dirty pots and pans. Think of it as a rite of passage."

"To a church somewhere in the East."

"Yes, something of the sort." Norman didn't seem the least bit ruffled by the literary allusion. "What with the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the trillion dollar debt, ten percent unemployment and gridlock in congress, America's falling to pieces."

"You were the smartest kid in high school. We need people like you to set things right."

Norman shook his shaggy head. "Eggheads like me only muck things up… make a calamity ten times worse."

"And scrubbing pots and pans… how does that make sense?"

"Sometimes doing nothing can be proactive." His tone remained cordial if a tad flippant. "Say, what are you doing next weekend?"

"Why do you ask?"

"I'm going north on a little adventure Friday afternoon and was wondering if you'd like to join me."

There was nothing salacious in his tone or body language. It was the indefinite, murky, unsettling and ill-defined 'north' that put Paige's nerves on edge. "Where exactly north?"

"Scarborough, Maine. It's on the ocean just over the line from Old Orchard Beach and the boardwalk. I walk the beaches and contemplate my navel among other things."

"It's the middle of November, a week before Thanksgiving. Isn't it freezing up there?"

"Brisk… maybe a bit chilly," he countered. "But on the plus side, room rates are dirt cheap and coastal Maine is especially scenic this time of year."

"No, but thanks for the invite."

Behind the counter, a waitress was gesturing frantically. She needed Norman to finesse a five-gallon milk carton into the chrome dispenser. "If you have a change of heart, here's my cell number." He scribbled the digits on a napkin and headed back to work.

*****

A week passed. Paige had all but forgotten about her clandestine visit to Ryan's Diner. In the kitchen the telephone clattered. "It's Mrs. Snyder," Paige's mother yelled up the stairs.

"Aw, shit!" Paige blew out her cheeks. She counted to ten and did a couple deep breathing exercises to compose herself before reaching for the phone.

"Well?" The tone was belligerent - borderline confrontational, as though the woman had expected Paige to fax a twenty-page, confidential report as soon as she had returned from the diner.

"I met with Norman last Thursday and can assure you he's not the least bit distraught about his personal situation."

"Well, he ought to be, considering what that boy put me through these past few years." The sarcasm was palpable. Without skipping a beat, the woman demanded, "So tell me what he said."

"No, certainly not! I don't appreciate cloak and dagger intrigue or being blackmailed into becoming your surrogate. Goodbye, Mrs. Snyder." She hung up the phone and promptly burst into tears.

"Your fingers are shaking something awful." Mrs. Bryant pulled her daughter close and bussed her cheek, quickly rubbing the wetness away with the heel of her hand.. "In the future when that witch calls, I'll simply tell her you're not available."