Just Fall (16 page)

“Were you ever…was there ever another man?”

The answer is flat, final. “Why?” A single word chiming with defiant resignation.

Lou’s eyes widen as she takes Ellie’s stock. “You, my poor girl, are a romantic. Even when it’s clear you have some powerful trouble going on in your life. How to reconcile that? Or maybe you’re just a damn fool.”

Maybe she is.

The door to the room slams open.

The men holding guns are all too familiar to Ellie, the man from the wedding, Quinn, and the gold-toothed taxi driver from earlier.

Lou struggles to her feet, yelling, “Hey!”

Gold Tooth grabs a batik cushion and covers Lou’s face. The barrel of his gun presses into the cushion and fires. A muffled bang.

Lou topples back, blood trickling slowly from the neat little hole in the center of her forehead. Gold Tooth drops the pillow and a few blood-smudged feathers float onto the bed. Ellie recoils from the gore of spattered brains and blood as Lou’s head lurches forward. She whimpers.

Quinn smacks Ellie across the face, a sharp, stinging blow that splits her lip. She tastes blood.

“You have not followed instructions,” he says, as he hits her once again.

“You’re still you, aren’t you?”

Ellie and Rob sat across from each other on the bed in the Imperial Suite at the St. Regis. Their honeymoon suite. The complimentary bottle of champagne the hotel had provided lay sweating in a bucket of melted ice on the nightstand, untouched. “Of course I am,” he answered.

Rob had just told her about killing his stepfather. He watched her face as she struggled to process. He debated continuing with his story but knew there was no time to wait. Quinn would not be a patient man tonight; Quinn never had been patient. She touched his bruised and swollen eye with her fingertip. Traced the split of his lip and the purple bruise bursting on his jaw. He thought he saw something like relief cross her face, but surely he must have misread that.

“But it was self-defense, right? And you were a minor? So what happened to you? Afterward?” Ellie’s eyes were full of questions.

“Well, this is where things get tricky. Do you remember the day you took me to see your park for the first time?” Rob asked Ellie.

“Of course.”

“That man outside. Spencer. He did know me.” Rob continued, urgent and soft. “Do you remember after, when we went home?”

Ellie nodded. The intensity of their sex that day was something she would never forget.

“Spencer…he is from my life, but from a whole other life.”

Rob continued his story. After leaving Spencer’s, scared and certain he would be looked for at bus or train stations, Rob walked for six straight mind-numbing days before he began to hitch rides. He was too dazed to think; he just needed to move. He drifted from town to town, finally seeking anonymity in the relatively large city of Cleveland. The money Spencer had given him didn’t last long. For twenty-nine months, he lived on the streets. He endured days of frigid cold and nights of icy despair, the swelter of August days when his sweat and angry tears commingled, brisk fall mornings with their promise of a change for the better (a change that never came), soft April evenings racked with loneliness. He begged for change, scrounged Dumpsters behind restaurants for food, and occasionally picked up day laborer work, welcoming the harsh soreness in his muscles that meant he was bulking up. He got beaten up twice, one a mugging right after he got paid cash for a grueling day loading bricks, the other the sport of a gang of homeless kids he looked at the wrong way. Soon after that, he picked a fight with a hopped-up crackhead that left his victim bloody and broken and left Rob both exhilarated and soul-sick.

Rob grew hard in a way he never expected, but also in a way he began to relish. For the first time, he could rely on himself. Fuck anyone and everyone else. He liked how street-smart he became. He liked also that if he cleaned up a little, he could still twist a stuffy maître d’ around his little finger. He dined and dashed on a few occasions. Once, when he was caught on his way out the door, he spun a compelling tale about having been meant to meet his estranged father, who paid the bills but who had once again stood him up. The restaurant bought him his dinner that night. Emboldened by his success, he used that particular ruse a number of times, the thrill of putting the con over even more enjoyable than the delicious food it netted him. He began playing other angles. He filched clothes from expensive shops and resold them on the street, and, he admitted, hooked up with girls whom he played for a place to stay before disappearing on them, along with any cash he could wrangle and easily disposable electronics or jewelry. He blew most of the cash he netted on drugs (pharmaceuticals mostly, a callback to the days of stealing Vicodin).

Living on the streets required survival skills, and he learned them and honed them, but he had always been smart and he wanted more. He began to think he needed some way to come out of hiding and get more of a “real life,” whatever the fuck that meant. His first step was to clean up. Withdrawal, well, let’s not talk about it; it wasn’t pretty. But when it was over, he was even more motivated to get off the streets.

He was over eighteen by now, too old for social services or youth shelters, and they asked too many questions anyway. The homeless shelters where he occasionally crashed were scary places, filled with the desperate and mentally ill, so he tried to stay away unless it was really frigid or wet outside. But on one rainy, miserable autumn night, Rob had reluctantly taken refuge at a shelter, and without warning, things suddenly shifted. There was a guy at the shelter, P.J., a little younger than Rob. Despite the fact that his parents had kicked this kid out of the house at fourteen, P.J. had a vibrancy to him, life in his eyes, swagger and hustle. They ate navy bean soup and smoked cigarettes together, swapping lies.

P.J. told Rob he knew of a place that was hiring. The work wasn’t glamorous or easy; it was with a moving company. P.J. had started there a couple of months before, and the work was hard, but the pay was steady. He was hoping to have enough together to rent his own place pretty soon. The guy who owned the company had been homeless once too, and had taken it upon himself to hire homeless kids who needed a break. If Rob wanted, P.J. would take him over there tomorrow when he went to work.

Rob wanted. P.J. introduced him and Rob got a job. Cash payment. Backbreaking work, but Rob got stronger and stronger. His body transformed, he became ripped, a man, no longer a boy. Earning his own money and providing for himself made his mind and spirit stronger too. Finally he had enough money together to lease a crappy studio apartment. It was a shithole, but it was his shithole.

He and P.J. became friends. Rob liked his boss, Matthew Walsh, a no-bullshit guy with a tough exterior and a big heart. Matt didn’t talk much about what his life had been like before he got to the place where he owned a business, or why he felt compelled to help the kids who were society’s detritus, but he was quietly empathetic to Rob and all of his employees. Rob liked it this way. He felt understood, grateful for the opportunity, but not compelled to volunteer much information about his own life either.

Soon, the past began to fade. Rob worked hard, humping boxes and furniture. Ate a lot of ramen noodles. Occasionally, he went out with the boys from work and drank himself stupid. But not that often. He knew he couldn’t really chance being stupid. P.J. hooked him up with a guy who got him a fake ID. Suddenly he was Vincent Murphy, age twenty-two. Sometimes he forgot he had ever been anyone else.

Here Rob paused. Then he confessed to Ellie this was the first of many identities he had acquired and discarded along the way before he became Rob Beauman and came to New York. He watched as the importance of this registered on Ellie. There was no Rob Beauman. The man she had married was a fiction.

Gradually, he and Matt became real friends too, if that was the right way to describe it. It was really more like Matt became his mentor, a kind of surrogate father for the kid who had killed his surrogate father. Matt took him to ball games, they went bowling; he treated Rob to a fancy steak dinner. Rob began to confide in Matt a little about where he had come from (not the details of his stepfather’s death or his mother’s crippling insecurity, but enough that Matt began to see Rob’s intelligence and potential). As their relationship grew, Rob also confided he had dreams. Plans. Matt told Rob he saw a bit of himself in him. If he had done it, escaped the streets, so could Rob. Rob began to think he might be able to build a life worth living.

One day he got a call from Matt to come in early; there was something he wanted to talk about. Matt sounded serious and Rob was nervous. He racked his brain. Had he fucked something up? Was he getting fired? His heart raced as he entered through the moving office’s loading bay. The place was shadowy and quiet. He made his way back to Matt’s office.

A tall man, very pale, leaned casually against Matt’s battered desk. Gaunt but ropy, with the coiled energy of a snake. Close-cropped hair. Powerful hands. Rob could see the hint of a tattoo, two bony skeleton feet on his inner wrist, emerging from the cuff of his butter-soft leather jacket. The stranger’s eyes were so dark they looked black; if eyes were the windows to the soul, this man had sold his soul to the devil for chump change a long time ago.

He introduced himself as Quinn, Rob told Ellie, with an acknowledging nod at the man hovering just a few feet away from the bedroom suite in which they now sat.

Matt was behind his desk, his usual easygoing demeanor gone; he rocked in his swivel chair and drummed nervously on its arm with a pencil.

Rob looked back and forth between the two men, waiting, on edge. Finally the tall man began to speak.

He told Rob that he had been looking for him for a long time. Then he proceeded to recount details about Rob’s past life: the name of his grandparents’ estate, the names of the elite schools Rob had attended prior to his stepfather’s “unfortunate death.”

Rob listened, shock radiating through his body. He had thought this past dead and buried, any connective tissue to his old life ruthlessly snipped. He had not used his real name for years. He was physically transformed; a muscular young man had replaced the scrawny teen. He had bleached his hair and grown a goatee. He had tried to make himself into a new person; he believed he had succeeded.

In his calm, controlled voice, Quinn explained the reason for his search. “I know this will come as a shock, but I’m your father, your biological father.”

Shock was an understatement. Rob had of course spun numerous fantasies about his biological father (what fatherless boy doesn’t?), daydreams in which his father was a CIA operative or a race car driver or a rock star. But this stranger emanated danger, the thin-skinned threat of effortlessly ignited violence Rob recognized instantly from having lived with his stepfather all those years.

Matt interjected, asking Rob if anything this man said rang true.

Rob swallowed nervously; he couldn’t speak. The information was all correct. Could this man be his father? What did it mean if he was? Quinn hadn’t directly said that Rob’s stepfather had died at his hand, but he had danced close enough to the edge. Something in his eyes when he spoke about it (a hint of merriment perhaps?) made Rob fearful.

What did this man know? What did he want? How had he found him? Why now? Rob cast an uneasy glance at Matt. He wanted to keep his job; he wanted Matt to like him. What would Matt do if he learned Rob was a wanted man?

As if he had heard the questions Rob was too stunned to ask, Quinn continued. He had always wanted to know his son, he said. Rob’s mother’s family had put a stop to his attempts. But after Rob had disappeared, Quinn no longer had to breach that gate.

“How did you find me?” Rob demanded.

“I have resources” was Quinn’s reply. Quinn smiled, but it was not a smile that reached his eyes.

There was an uneasy silence as Rob struggled to absorb this. Matt placed himself protectively between Rob and Quinn and suggested that Quinn leave his number and give Rob a little time to think things through.

Quinn replied that that was not an option. He wanted his son to come with him now. Hearing the word “son” sent Rob’s stomach lurching. Matt settled his bulky body more firmly in front of Rob. Once again he suggested Quinn leave.

Then Quinn casually shrugged off his soft leather jacket. He moved swiftly, a hard sucker punch into Matt’s gut that sent him reeling. Matt cried out in pain and toppled back into his chair, his hands clasped protectively, tears streaming. Quinn seized a box cutter, then tipped back Matt’s head. Matt’s wail of shock and agony as Quinn sliced off his lower lip echoed in the cavernous space.

Rob stopped here and took a breath, needing to see how Ellie was taking this. She averted her eyes, wouldn’t look at him.

“Ellie, it’s been agonizing, having secrets from you, that’s why I started telling you—”

Ellie interrupted, angry. “You think casually mentioning you’ve killed people in the
middle
of our
wedding
was the way to handle this?”