Vertigo - John Fetto

It didn’t make sense. First they told Johanna that Russell was dead, a victim of a brutal murder, his body burned beyond recognition. They even gave her a small box of ash, saying that’s all that was left of him. And now they’re telling her he’s alive, that’s he’s been alive all these months since that terrible day, out playing soldier or something in Central America. All this she could barely move, he was out saving himself, doing what he liked, a thousand miles away. It wasn’t the same person. It couldn’t be the same person, but they just kept repeating that they’d made this mistake, asking her questions about where he might be right now as if she’d know when she didn’t even know he was alive.

“I don’t know,” she told them, but the Customs Agent and the Reporter pressed her to think, remember, some detail that would clue them in what Russell was doing now. She didn’t know, but she should there weathering the storm of their questions, as if she were back at the hospital talking to anxious parent with three babies of ventilators, trying to keep her balance, because that was her job, she was supposed to stay calm, centered, in the middle of someone else’s crisis, but this was happening to her, this was her crisis. Hawley wasn’t dead, but he let her believe he was dead, which means he was gone in a whole different way. He wasn’t with her because he couldn’t, because he was murdered, he wasn’t with her, because he’d rather be somewhere else, someplace away from her. And that realization made the floor tilt and waver, as if a silent earthquake had shook the foundations of her life, and for just a moment she thought she would fall over. So when they stopped their yapping, when they stopped tossing their questions and waited for her answer, all she said was, “I need to sit down.”