Authors: Katia Lief
“Because you
are
a kid,” I said, emerging from the hallway’s shadow to join my two favorite (living) men.
I kissed Nat’s cheek, though he tried to avert it. Some days he let me kiss him and some days he didn’t but I always tried.
“Thanks, Rich.
“No problem. I’ll see you in the morning, kid.”
“Aren’t you coming in?” Nat turned to me: “That’s another thing. Like, you and Mr Stuart – so what? I know you’re dating. So like what’s the point of pretending you’re not?”
“You’re right, sweetie. We’re dating. But right now I have to talk to you alone.”
Nat’s eyes shifted between me and Rich. He had heard that tone in my voice, that
Mom’s got to have a word now
tone, and he didn’t like it.
“Mom, do you know how much homework I’ve
got
?”
“Thanks again, Rich,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.”
Before turning out the door, Rich’s eyes rested on me a moment in gentle and appreciated acknowledgement of what I now had to do: tell my son that his beloved cats were dead.
“Henry’s clothes fit you pretty well.” Though the jeans were an inch too short and the T-shirt bore the legend of a band that was
not
Nat’s ultimate favorite, he looked pretty good for a boy who had gone to the movies then stayed out all night and most of the next day.
“What’s up, Mom?”
“Let’s sit down.”
“Uh oh.”
In the living room, I patted the spot on the couch next to me but he chose to sit in a separate chair.
“Nat, I have some bad news.”
He took his eyes off me and settled them on the surface of the coffee table: three magazines, a handheld portable fan with one missing blade, a purple guitar pick, the coffee mug I’d been using all day, a book I had tried and failed to lose myself in.
Took his eyes off me
– eyes, attention, focus, heart – because we both knew that the last time I had spoken those words to him, about needing to talk, his father was dead.
“Grandma’s gone,” Nat said.
“No.”
Now his eyes flickered back, considered me a moment, fled again.
“Where’s Mitzi?” His favorite of the two. “She always comes running when I get home.”
“Sweetie … Mitzi and Ahab passed away.”
Lame words, is what they were. A useless explanation. As if they had dematerialized, evaporated,
passed away
out of the physical world, just like that.
Nat said nothing, just sat there, pretending not to have heard. But a shadow passed over his expression, a brief muscular contraction of pure grief. It came and went quickly, like the stab of an invisible blade that leaves no scar to map a deep wound. I
felt
his wound inside the muscle of my own heart, which was my soul, a mother’s soul housing all the echoing facets of both our lives. It all lived right there inside me and that brief contraction of agony that flitted across my son’s face opened a door to the darkest vault in my heart. He was hurt, and so I was hurt. Trying to be brave, he mustered stoicism; and so I cried for him. In a wavering voice, I tried to explain.
“It happened last night. That’s why I wanted you to stay at Henry’s. I didn’t want you to see them. It was …” I wished I hadn’t gone anywhere near a description of what it had been like.
“Why is my school picture gone, Mom?”
“What?”
“It’s not there. And there’s a big stain on the rug. And something kind of smells.”
“Nat—”
“I get it, OK? Joe fucking Coffin.
I get it
.”
A thousand explanations fled through my mind but nothing was the right thing to say to Nat. So finally I just said, “Yup.”
“How’d he do it? I mean, he killed them, right?”
I nodded and his face rose to mine, the beautiful tender face of this beloved man-boy who shared every element of my being and yet sat on the fine line between loving me back and refuting everything about me. He was that age and I’d always expected he’d rebel like every other kid –
but not now
.
“Poison. He fed them something with poison.”
“What kind?”
“They haven’t told me yet.”
“They? You mean, like, the cops were here last night and everything?”
“Yes. They’ve got the cats at a lab so they can find out exactly what it was.”
Nat’s face flushed and he stood, infuriated as the news of his pets’ deaths sank in. He paced, back and forth and back and forth, just as Hugo used to when he felt restless. Hugo had always paced when he talked on the phone, a habit that annoyed me but never seemed worth complaining about. I was glad
I
hadn’t. Now, as Nat paced with the same wiry lurches forwards and nervously angled redirections, propelling his legs from wall to wall, I kept still and waited. After a couple of minutes he came to a standstill and faced me.
“We have to bury them, Mom.” I heard the tears form in his voice before they arrived in his eyes.
“Yes, we do. But it’s going to have to wait.”
Nat crumpled into my arms, sobbing, and I held him. He cried for a long time, releasing long-held agonies scraped open by these new losses. I knew that this trembling boy flung against my body sometimes cried alone in his bed at night. I’d heard him. If he hadn’t cried, I would have worried. I knew how important it was because I myself had been that child, alone in a bed whose warmth had turned cold, whose gravity had transformed into freefall, in a room whose shifting nighttime ceiling-shadows had gone from soothing to perilous: more change in the alignment of elements outside your control, portents of more dreaded loss. A child
must
mourn a lost loved one, must pass through the intolerable pain until it becomes bearable. I welcomed Nat’s tears as much as I detested the reasons for his pain. Held him. After he breathed a deep, long sigh, I spoke.
“We can go away.”
He nodded. “Can we go back home?”
“Probably not a good idea. Joe’s from there, too.”
His face screwed up and I soothed him by running a fingertip along his forehead like I used to when he was a baby.
“Where?” he asked.
“Someplace really far, but someplace where you can go to school.”
“So it has to be this country?”
“No. Some countries have American schools. We’ve never been to Paris.”
“How about England?” His favorite band was British; good enough incentive in a thirteen-year-old mind. “I mean, they speak English there. I could go to any school.”
“Maybe. I’ll look into it. It’ll take a few days to figure out, OK? Can you hold tight and not tell anyone about this conversation?”
He nodded. A successful escape would depend on total secrecy.
“What about Mr Stuart? Maybe he could come with us?”
“That’s sweet, but he’s got his daughter here and he has his job.”
“So what? I can tell you guys are really into each other. It’s kind of obvious.”
“Clara’s kind of into him too, don’t you think?”
He considered that. Nodded.
“Rich will understand,” I said, as if I really believed it. He
would
understand. But it would break
his
heart, and mine, when I left. Then I thought about my mother. How could I leave her just when she was slipping away? I would have to visit her before we left, explain, and hope she somehow understood.
On Tuesday morning, as I got ready to leave for the License Division, the phone rang. It was Elliot, his frazzled voice conjuring an image of his face: round, earnest, thin lips not uplifted in their usual smile.
“Please tell me you heard from Courtney,” he said.
“I haven’t. She didn’t come in again?”
“No one knows where she is. A pair of detectives was here this morning, asking questions. Her parents filed a missing persons. No one’s seen her since Saturday morning after her last story came out. This story has gotten way out of hand.”
“Which is exactly why it’s important.”
“I agree, and Overly’s more gung-ho about this than I’ve ever seen him. We’re staying with it, I just don’t want to see—”
Anyone else go missing or dead?
“How’s your situation, Darcy? Any chance you can come back to work?”
“Joe Coffin got in here two nights ago and killed my cats.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“I’ve turned my apartment into a fortress.”
“Wow. OK, so it’s worse.”
“I’d say so.”
If my tone sounds flippant
, I wanted to say but didn’t, couldn’t,
it’s because I’ve made some decisions: I’m getting a gun and getting out of Dodge. Courtney would be proud
.
“Darcy, we’re staying behind you. When all this blows over, you’re back in the newsroom. OK?”
“Thanks, Elliot.” I was crying now, just a little, but sucked it back in the hope of maintaining some professionalism – an impulse that almost made me laugh as I cried.
“I’ve got three reporters working the bones story with Stan now.”
“Is Courtney’s disappearance being connected to Abe Starkman’s murder?”
“Not yet. But we all expect to see it head in that direction. Don’t you?”
“I hope not – but yes.”
But not until this conversation had that awful possibility really hit home: that Courtney had gotten caught up in a power struggle between the city and the mob, just as Abe had, fatally. All because he had blown the whistle about the bones. And because I couldn’t let it go. Because Courtney got dragged into it. Because we just had to know who the bones belonged to in some self-righteous crusade to rescue the dead from obscurity.
Because we were all terrified of death
.
Was that it? Were we that afraid of the inevitable
oblivion
of death? Would assigning names and histories to the bones strengthen us? These people would never be brought back to life, no matter what we did or how many government bureaucrats and ambitious reporters were lost in the effort.
Hugo would never be brought back to life.
Nor would my father. Nor would the millions of others whose cruel deaths had preceded his in spirit and in bodies upon bodies, piles and piles and piles of bones.
What was one more?
he must have thought as he jumped, flew, into that beckoning void that promised the relief of total amnesia.
Why hadn’t I been smart enough to thank Abe for the information and advise him to leave the dead buried? How could I – the widow of a car-smashed husband, the child of Holocaust survivors – not have recognized violent death for the snake pit it was? Why hadn’t I run as fast as I could away from it? Why had I assumed that the bones belonged to people whose families needed to know what happened and who would welcome the reopening of that wound?
“You’re
idealists
,” my mother had said when I announced that Hugo and I were moving to the Vineyard, that he planned to open a law practice specializing in environmental protection.
Idealists
– spoken by a true cynic like it was a dirty word.
At the age of thirty-nine, hadn’t I learned anything?
But then again … then again … if Joe hadn’t posted that fifteen-second video clip of Abe talking to me at the empty lot, he would not have been identified as the leak. He would not have died. The gun thief would not have been assigned a murder. And possibly, probably, Courtney would be sitting at her desk right now pounding out a follow-up with her perfectly manicured fingertips.
I set the alarm and locked up behind me. It would be the first time I’d walked outside alone since going to work Wednesday morning, the day Joe attacked me in front of the
Times. Joe
. How I loathed him. Walking swiftly up Wyckoff Street, turning onto Smith in the direction of the F train, I turned around three times hoping to find him trotting right behind me like a little dog.
Joe
. This time I wouldn’t run. I’d face him, I’d scream bloody murder, but I wouldn’t run.
CHAPTER 11
NEARLY AT THE
subway entrance, a red minivan swerved to a stop and honked its horn. I kept moving. It honked again and I turned around. A woman with bouncy black hair and a bright smile was waving me toward her window.
It was Angela, Jess’s wife. Angela Maria Cortez Ramirez. I turned on a dime and went to talk to her.
“Angela – nice to see you.”
“Get in,” she said.
I must have stared at her.
Get in?
Seeing that she’d need to convince me, she leaned closer and whispered, “I’ve got a gun for you. Cancel wherever you’re going because I’m taking you to the West Side Range.”
I got in and as soon as I’d slammed shut the passenger door she zoomed off, turning and turning
again
to redirect us toward the Brooklyn Bridge.
“What’s the West Side Range?”
“This morning at ten they got their ‘New to Shooting’ class. It’s just once a week and I don’t want you to miss it. Firearms training, it’s what you gotta have to use the thing. I’m loaning you my own personal weapon until you don’t need it anymore.” We entered the bridge ramp and then drove onto the bridge itself, traveling between the swooping cables that defined the New York skyline. “Jess told me about your problem.”
“He said I shouldn’t have a gun.”
“Said the same to me but the thing is you gotta think for yourself. You’re the one who’s in it, not him. My husband’s
the best
but he never had to get followed day and night by some freak who wanted to … Never mind. Open my purse and take a look. It’s a .45 handgun, fits right in your palm.”
I unsnapped her large brown leather purse and there, along with a checkbook, a bulging wallet, at least three pens, a hairbrush, a cell phone and a crumb-encrusted pacifier … was a little black gun.
“Don’t take it out. That you can do after we get there. I already called and signed you up. Just one thing: today you’re me, OK? See that envelope?”
White, unlabeled, on the bottom of her purse beneath the gun.
“That’s my permit. You gotta show that and
borrow
my ID and stuff or they’ll only let you shoot with a rifle. But you don’t wanna rifle. Trust me. You want this baby.”
“Have you ever used it?”
“Threatened Jess with it a coupla times!” She winked. “No, never had to. But I like to know I’m ready just in case.”