Althea and Oliver (28 page)

“If it hadn't been for Cortés, those guys would have been stuck in Spain, laying bricks or breeding pigs. Instead they died in battle, their pockets filled with gold. And they gave you something to write about.”

“That's one way to look at it.”

“Don't forget your fedora.” Oliver hangs up. “She didn't go to New Mexico,” he tells Will. “She came to New York because I'm here, and I still am, so that means she must be, too.”

“Call him back. If you're right, then his kid's missing and he doesn't even know it.”

“She's not missing. She's around here somewhere.”

“She's not your misplaced fucking sock, Oliver.”

“I'll find her. If I find her, then she's not missing, she's with me.”

“It's been a month. Where are we supposed to start looking? Should we go back to the park and check under all the benches?” Will says.

“I thought you wanted to get back to the hospital and put it all on black.”

“I'm not going alone. What am I supposed to tell them—you heard a little gospel music and now you're off on a mission of mercy? They'll think I killed you and dumped your body in the river. Which I'm considering.”

“Thanks.”

Will arcs a foot across the sidewalk, making a blurry comma in the snow. “So? Where do we start?”

“What do you mean?”

Will buttons his jacket, adjusts his baseball cap, and rubs his frozen hands together. “If you want to find this girl, then come on. Let's do this. Let's go.”

• • •

Oliver is trying very hard not to think about his mother. Did she know by now that he was on the lam? Would she still be in North Carolina if she did? Nicky isn't much for sitting by a telephone waiting for news. She's more of a proactive type, although
proactive
in this case might simply mean showing up at the hospital and screaming at the staff. He hopes that prick of a doctor is getting the worst of it.

“You're doing this all wrong,” says Will, flagging down the waitress for another cup of coffee. They went into the first diner they saw in order to strategize. “You've got ten years' worth of clues. Imagine you're at home. Where would you look for her in Wilmington?”

“I never have to look for her. She lives down the block.”

“Use your imagination. If she wasn't at home, how would you find her?”

“I'd ask her dad.”

“You tried that. Think harder. Use your imagination,” Will repeats.

Oliver closes his eyes and pictures himself back home. The last time he'd woken up from an episode, he'd gone to Althea's house first, and only one place after that. “Coby's,” he says finally, reluctantly. “I would look for her at Coby's.”

“Is he a friend of hers?”

“More like a nemesis.”

“She has a nemesis?” Will looks impressed.

“He had something to do with her getting expelled.”

“Call him.”

“He's in North Carolina. What could he possibly know?”

“Nemeses know things.”

“This guy is not exactly Keyser Söze.”

“Just do it, ace.”

Oliver looks around the diner, where the inebriated revelers who struck out tonight are slowly sobering up over waffles and coffee and matzo ball soup. The people outside walking their dogs and buying their newspapers are beginning to outnumber those who have not yet gone to sleep, a sure sign that another night has given way to morning. They pay the check and go outside to find a pay phone. The weak December sun casts a pearly, blue-gray light over Avenue A, and Coby's phone is ringing in North Carolina.

“Yeah?” Coby answers, sleepy and irritated.

“It's Oliver.”

“McKinley. What's the good word?” There is a new nasal twang to Coby's voice.

“You sound different. You have a cold or something?”

“More like a deviated septum.”

“You broke your nose?”

“Someone broke it for me.”

This is welcome and surprising news. “Who?”

“I'll give you three guesses, but you're only gonna need one.”

“I think there'd be people lining up to do the job.”

“Maybe so, but we only know one with anger management issues.”

Oliver laughs. “Althea broke your nose? That explains so much.”

“And split my lip, and gave me two black eyes. Why do you think she got expelled? They don't kick you out of school just for cutting a few classes.”

“Atta girl. What did you do to make her so mad?”

“I don't think I'm the one who made her mad. You still up there in the Big Apple?”

Oliver winces.
The Big Apple.
“Yeah.”

“Then how do you not know all this? She went up there to find you, didn't she? Made some sort of pathetic last-ditch effort to get you to be her boyfriend?”

It stings to learn that Will was right, that loathsome Coby could still be a source of information. “Did she confide that to you before or after she gave you a concussion?”

“She didn't confide shit. But I don't think she went all the way to New York just to learn the fine art of Dumpster diving and serving food to the homeless. Not when she's got two vegan gurus right here at home. She went up there for you. That's the only reason she ever does fucking anything.”

“So that's where she is? With Bread and Roses?” For some reason this is the last thing Oliver expected to hear—that Althea had taken shelter with other people somewhere.

“Wait, you don't even know where she is?”

“Did you think I called just to hear your voice? She tried to visit me in the hospital when I was sick. I've been trying to find her since I woke up. Thanks. You've been very helpful.”

Coby groans. “Oh, fuck everything. Fuck you, too.”

Talking to Coby over the phone, being spared the sight of his smug little face—rearranged though it may be now—makes it possible for Oliver to pity him, sounding all nasal and lovelorn like he does. “If she didn't tell you where she was, how did you know?”

“The Brooklyn Bread and Roses kids called Valerie and asked a bunch of questions. Did she know Al”—
Al?
What?
Oliver stops pitying Coby—“why did she leave town. They wanted to know if she was someone they'd want sleeping on their couch. Valerie said she was, but she asked me if I had a different opinion.”

“And you said no?”

“I'm not about to get her booted. It sounds like they like her. It sounds like she's making friends. Of course, now you and your dimples are going to walk in and shit all over it, but that's on you.”

“I'm sorry you've been so deprived of the pleasure of her company,” Oliver says dryly.

Coby snorts. “Yeah, it's been a real fucking pleasure. Do the three of us a favor and let her off the hook once and for all. Set her straight. Minty Fresh told me they stood on your porch when you were leaving and asked for your help and you didn't even care that she was in trouble. Why don't you tell her that when you two have your magical reunion?”

“I was on my way to the airport so I could check myself into the goddamn hospital. I wasn't in the mood to deal with her shit.”

“No, fuck you—
fuck you
, McKinley. You strung her along and you broke her heart, and now you're going to swoop in and be her hero and that's fucking tremendous, I'm sure it'll put a real smile on her face, because for five minutes she'll think that it's all finally going to shake out the way she wants. But sooner or later you're going to end up back in the same place because it's never going to shake out the way she wants with you. And you should tell her that before things start to get too cinematic.”

Oliver clamps the phone tighter to his face, as if it will help him get his point across. “Don't do that, don't talk about us like you know us. And don't act like if it weren't for me Althea would realize you're the greaser stooge of her dreams, because you are not. You are not some misunderstood Bukowski character, and if she rattled your cage hard enough to get thrown out of school, then it sounds like she's got the right idea about you after all.”

“The best things about Althea are the things that you can't stand,” Coby barrels on, as if he hasn't heard. “You're like a blank piece of paper, and she can color you any way she wants. You know why you won't just let this thing go? Because you need her to dictate your next move. You need her to push so you know when to pull. I might not be the stooge of her dreams, but when she pushes I push back, and broken nose or not, I'll say this about Althea: She doesn't always need to know what's going to happen next. Sometimes she likes it better when she doesn't. But go ahead, call Val, she's got the address. And when you see Althea, you tell her I said no hard feelings.”

All of Oliver's satisfaction and annoyance disappears as he listens to Coby speak about Althea with an authority and intimacy that scares the living shit out of him. Halloween night, after the show at Lucky's, he had seen them off in a corner of the parking lot, smoking cigarettes and talking in a way that would have made them appear, to the uneducated eye, like a couple, and he finally had an idea of how he and Althea must have looked. Something had happened after that, something that had nothing to do with him, and he's not sure he even wants to know what it was, but he still hates that he doesn't. “Seriously. What did you do to her?”

“Nothing she didn't beg me for,” Coby says, and hangs up.

“What did the nemesis say?” Will asks.

“You were right. Nemeses know things.”

“We'd better hurry and find her, then.” Will's grin fades, and all evidence of gleeful mischief vanishes from his face. He looks at Oliver with a painful seriousness. “I'm starting to get pretty tired.”

MATILDA WAKES ALTHEA
by snatching back her quilt and throwing open the kitchen curtains. “Rise up, Gemini!” She claps briskly.

“Don't clap at me,” Althea mumbles.

“Get up, you foxy fucking bitch.” Althea doesn't move.
“Now!”
Matilda yells. “Today is going to be the greatest day of our lives.” She says this every morning that she doesn't have a hangover.

Althea fixes herself a cup of coffee and follows Matilda upstairs for their morning cigarette-in-the-bathroom ritual. Ethan is on his way from the shower to his room, wearing only a towel around his waist, dripping all over the floor. He isn't scrawny like Althea thought he would be, although he's so pale, he's practically luminescent. Without asking, he takes Althea's mug and drinks half its contents before returning it.

“Thanks,” he says. She watches the muscles in his back as he walks away.

“I know,” Matilda says when they're safely in the bathroom with the shower running. “His body is like a hidden treasure. Once in a while I do his laundry so I can shrink all his T-shirts.”

“I wasn't looking at his—”

“Sure you weren't.”

Matilda has her back against the tub; Althea's is against the door. Their legs are outstretched, bare feet nearly meeting in the middle. Heat radiates from the moldy baseboards. Matilda points her toes at Althea, who does the same, until the grimy tips touch.

“So today's the day, right? You excited?” Althea asks.

“Yup. Today's the day.”

Though New Year's Eve is not until tomorrow, friends of the Warriors are slated to begin arriving sometime that afternoon for their legendary annual New Year's Eve party, the Champagne Derby. The derby starts with a trip to the liquor store and the purchase of every kind of sparkling wine cheaper than eight bucks. It inevitably concludes with profuse vomiting and abject misery, but the time in between is said to be a party so fierce, so robust, like a conveyor belt of laughter and good feeling that delivers fun to every individual faster than fun can be processed by the human brain, that it is worth even the most brutal physical punishment the following day.

Christmas had been quiet, almost nonexistent, the house's residents making grudging pilgrimages back to their respective families. Matilda invited Althea to go with her, back to Queens, but she had demurred, insisting she would be glad to have the house to herself for the first time. Instead, Althea found the place unbearable—eerily quiet and claustrophobic, like the cracked walls and filth were closing in on her, even Mr. Business hiding in a closet somewhere. She called Garth to wish him a merry Christmas, inventing a list of presents she'd received from Alice and a recent trip to the hot springs. She was so lonely she called Alice, but there was no answer in Taos.

After that, she made a command decision: She took the subway into Manhattan by herself for the first time and went to an all-ages show at ABC No Rio, hoping to find relief pressed up against a stage, covered in the sweat of strangers and dodging their fists and elbows, but the show was strangely unsatisfying, too sparsely attended for a decent mosh pit to form, a handful of straight-edge boys with shaved heads menacing other members of the audience.

New Year's, she's been assured, will have a real sense of occasion. “It makes up for Christmas,” Gregory had promised her.

“I feel weird,” Althea says.

“Why?”

“I'm not going to know anyone.”

“Don't be an idiot. You didn't know us a month ago, either.”

“Sounds so strange when you say it like that.”

“How is it? First New Year's away from home? Away from Oliver?” Matilda asks.

“I don't know.”

“I bet we could find you someone to kiss at midnight. If you're interested.”

“I'm not.” She leans her head back and closes her eyes, listening to the shower pound the dirty tub. “Can we go down to the boardwalk?”

“I wish. I've got to make vegan baked ziti for a dozen people who are going to be here in a few hours.”

“You know you love it.”

“I do.”

“Then why don't you seem more excited?”

Matilda sighs. “New Year's is our holiday. It's like the Christmas you have with your friends, the family you pick. So once a year everyone comes in from out of town and we hang out for days, and that's how it feels, it feels like we're family, like we've all thrown in our lots together and it'll always be like this. Of course, then it's over and the thing I look forward to all year is finished and it's just winter and there's nothing to be excited about until springtime. But for a couple of days, you know, it's pretty great.” Matilda brushes the hair from her eyes. “I do hope this weather changes, though. The sunrise on New Year's Day is one harsh fucking mistress. Easier to handle when it's overcast.”

Pulling her knees to her chest, Althea balls herself up like a napkin. “Cheer up,” she says. “Today is going to be the greatest day of our lives.”

• • •

In the kitchen, Ethan is paging cautiously through her sketchbook, which Althea thought was safely tucked between the couch and the wall. Pouring herself another cup of coffee, she makes like she doesn't care, eats a fistful of granola over the sink, and watches everyone else building some kind of sculpture out of empty beer cans in the backyard.

“You know I write stories,” Ethan says, stating it like a fact, like something she was actually supposed to have known. She waits. “They're not really stories. They're like outlines? For comic books? Or graphic novels? Me and Dennis were supposed to work on one together, but he bailed.” Althea stares into the sink. A single soggy carrot peel lingers in the drain. “I had most of the characters worked out, some of the story.”

“Aren't you supposed to serve in the park today?” she finally says.

“I am. And you're coming with me.”

“I am?”

“Unless you're busy? Or have other plans?”

So Althea layers as best she can, in a T-shirt under a thermal under her filthy, falling-apart sweatshirt under her puffy vest. She puts on two pairs of socks and meets Ethan in the front hallway, where he is wearing one tennis shoe and pawing through the pile for its mate.

“You should tie the laces together when you take them off,” she says, holding up her united combat boots. “That way they don't get separated.”

“You're not going to be warm enough in that.”

“This is what I've got.”

Ethan rolls his eyes. “Of course.”

“Don't give me your put-upon face, okay? I'm not complaining.”

“Come on.” He takes her elbow and steers her toward the staircase.

She follows, hesitating in the doorway of the room he shares with Gregory. There are books everywhere, leaning against the walls in unstable-looking towers and stacked up on the dresser and the windowsill. It smells like lemons and clean laundry, not the sweaty boy socks Althea expected, although the can of air freshener on the nightstand implies that this is not achieved naturally. Mr. Business, curled up on the pillow in a small furry comma, meows at the intruders through squinty green eyes. The covers are thrown back on the bed, exposing the imprint of Ethan's body on the sheets. Something about it is uncomfortably intimate, and Althea looks away.

He rummages around in a plastic bin on the closet floor until he finds a green knit hat with earflaps and matching mittens that unsnap to reveal fingerless gloves. The hat and mittens have eyes. He hands them to her. “Is that supposed to be a frog?” Althea asks.

“Matilda gave these to me as a joke.” She pulls on the frog ensemble, and Ethan goes back to rooting in the closet. He emerges again, this time with a scuffed black trench coat. “It's not real leather,” he says. “It's just some piece of crap I found at a thrift store, but Matilda lined the inside with fleece.”

Slipping it on, Althea gets a big whiff of the fake leather, and the scent reminds her so much of the couch in her basement at home that she can't speak for fear of crying. It isn't homesickness or longing so much as it is a painfully tactile reminder that it had all actually happened, she had wrestled with Oliver on that stupid couch and slept on it after he left her and shared meals on it with her father while watching
Jurassic Park
and trying not to contemplate the mess she'd made of everything. All of that had been before. That's what kills her. She had a before, and now she's in the after, and it wrenches her heart inside her chest that such a break has been made and she doesn't even want to go back.

“Are you okay?”

Showing Ethan any weakness would surely be a major tactical error, so she sacks up and breathes through her mouth. “I bet I look ridiculous.”

“But in a good way.”

• • •

The park is empty. They set up their table in the middle of the vast expanse of white as the wind whips hollowly around them. Althea stations herself behind the collard greens, stamping her feet to keep some feeling in her toes. Ethan reads
V for Vendetta
and ignores her.

“No one's coming today,” she says after half an hour. “Why don't we just pack up and go home?”

“That's not how it works.”

“What's the point of standing here in the cold if no one's going to show up?”

“The point is to be consistent. That's how people know we'll be here when they need us.”

Althea sinks into a crouch and starts making a small round pile of snow. “Tell me about this comic book of yours,” she says.

“What do you know about diamonds?”

“I know they're all in a vault at De Beers and they're not really worth anything.”

“How do you know about that?” he says.

Althea is annoyed by his surprise. “I don't want to shock the hell out of you, but we have books in North Carolina, too.”

Ethan opens his mouth to say something nasty, she can tell by his expression, but he changes his mind and starts over. “So I had this idea to do a story about a heist. About a bunch of thieves who boost all the diamonds from De Beers. Not because they want to fence them, but because they want to give them away. Destroy their value, destroy the monopoly.”

“How would they do it?”

“It would have to be an inside job.”

Without looking up, she agrees. “And you'd need a pretty principled bunch of criminals to steal all those diamonds and just give them away.” Unsnapping the tops of her mittens to free her fingers, she molds a set of back legs, then carves away the snow on the sides to make the frog's belly more defined.

“Well, that's the thing,” says Ethan. “They would all be tempted. That's the point. They're ordinary people. But eventually they would all realize they had the chance to really do something good, instead of just getting fat and rich.”

“When I first heard the story, I didn't think the guy at the top was fat and smug. I imagined”—she pauses, reaching back to that day in the hallway with Valerie—“I imagined him tall. With a pocket watch. And lonely. Sneaking down into the vault at night to look at his diamonds.”

Ethan produces a wet sound of derision from the back of his throat. “Please.”

“You read too many comic books,” she says, rounding out the frog's back and giving more arch to the neck. “The diabolical archvillain, the guy rubbing his hands together, the guy who loves being so evil? That guy doesn't really exist. Nobody ever thinks they're the bad guy. I know that whole Robin Hood thing has a lot of appeal, but it's a little too easy, don't you think?”

“So you think it's a bad idea,” Ethan says.

“I just think it shouldn't be so simple. What if the guy at the top was your inside man? What if
he
decided to get rid of all the diamonds? Maybe something happens and he thinks he doesn't deserve them anymore. But he can't just disband the empire. So he has to make it look like a heist.”

“A redemption story. Interesting. Is that a frog?”

Carefully fashioning two tiny snowballs for eyes, she affixes them to either side of the head. “It doesn't look right.”

“Here.” Squatting beside her, Ethan bites the tip of his glove and wriggles his hand free. “He needs toes.”

Althea watches the vapor clouds of Ethan's breath as he adds webbed feet to the hind legs. The very tip of his earlobe is exposed below his black knit cap. His pale neck has turned bright red above the place where it disappears into his scarf. She can see the snowy park reflected in the lenses of his glasses, and behind them his blue-gray eyes, which never stray from the ground.

“It's five toes in the back, not three,” she says, correcting him. “And four in the front.”

“Are you sure?”

“We dissected frogs in biology last year.”

“Excuse me?” someone says behind them.

They're interrupted by a man with long hair plaited into two dark shiny braids. He's wearing a Mexican blanket poncho-style. A taxidermied crow sits on his shoulder.

Ethan leaps up. “Sorry about that,” he says.

Althea spoons the collard greens onto a plate; Ethan serves the carrots and fake turkey.

“Look out for him,” the man says, gesturing to the bird. “He used to be alive.”

Surprisingly, Ethan engages him as he eats and allows the man—Gray Wolf, he calls himself—to deliver a lengthy dissertation on his ex-wife and former career as a studio recording artist. He's about to launch into his history with the Hells Angels—“Once you're a Hells Angel, you're a Hells Angel for life, trust me, you wouldn't want to die by my hands”—when he stops himself. “But that's a conversation for another time,” he says, nodding toward Althea. “Not fit for talking about in front of a lady.”

“Some other time, then,” says Ethan.