City on Fire (52 page)

As afternoon turned to night, newspaper sections accumulated like geologic deposits on the floor beside him. The breathing machine breathed. The heart monitor monitored. Other nurses came in and out; the bed went up and down; the fluid bag running into her arm was empty, full, empty. The goal was leave-taking: less immersion, not more. But the patient under the sheet was somehow a comfort. He tried to imagine what Sherri was up to at this hour, on the far side of the deep-rock harbor. Sure, she had friends, tennis, her part-time job at the library, but when was the last time she’d lunched with a friend? Or lifted a racket? He stayed here, perhaps, because in the sad fact of the dying girl on the motorized bed beside him he felt closer to Sherri’s loneliness than he had yesterday on the arm of her chair. Her in her little box of light on that island, him in his box on this one. For a moment, he thought he sensed, beneath the visible world, some blind infrastructure connecting the two of them, or the three of them, and connecting them to still others. People he hadn’t even met.

And you wanted to make a suspect from this circle of connection, the acquaintances or acquaintances of acquaintances from whom a perp nine times out of ten emerged. You still hadn’t ruled out the black kid who found her, for example, despite what you may have let him believe. (One of the private-school coworkers Pulaski had discreetly approached described the guy as a little eccentric. Though another said she thought he was working on a novel, which explained a lot.) Or you wanted to make the father, a Sicilian with a damaged hand and a tendency to say as little as he could get away with. The vanished mother. The mother’s lover. Whoever it was who’d been leaving those flowers. A DD-5, that was the form you used, a complaint follow-up. You filled them out in triplicate. The problem was that the DD-5, with its blanks for facts, left out everything else. Like intuition. Like feeling. Like the question of just how far these connections extended. Richard Groskoph. Mercer Goodman. “Dr.” Zig Zigler, who when he wasn’t filling the airwaves with the depredations of the business class was now ranting about virgin sacrifice and the monsters in the Park. All these threads, like the ley-lines he’d read about in his Time-Life history books, converging on the Cicciaro girl, who lay there unaware, a glass-coffined beauty whose kingdom was in ruins. But of course, this was true of everybody; who didn’t exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories? At the center of forces, circuits, relays Pulaski could sit like this all evening and not be able to make connect. Which meant the shooting was meaningless. A chance encounter. Just one of those things. And he had promised (hadn’t he?) to do his best to get free of it.

Or so he was thinking when he noticed for the first time the shadow on the back of her neck, trapped against the pillow. To touch her would have broken some unstated rule, but then he realized he could just move the pillow itself, and her head flopped sideways—he shuddered—revealing a black tattoo an inch in diameter just below where the gauze had been cut away. It looked to him like an icon, goggles and spiky hair. Familiar, somehow. Why? Because it was the same image he’d seen on the paper he’d found in the pocket of those bluejeans in the Park.

41

WHEN REGAN RETURNED TO THE APARTMENT, the only light in the living room was the TV, and Mrs. Santos was in a wooden chair she’d dragged in from the kitchen, using her knitting needles to transmit her silent judgment: it was after dark, a mother should be home with her babies, not staying late after work. Then again, she was the only sitter in Brooklyn Heights Regan could actually afford. Keith may have thought she was living the life of Riley over here, but short of reclaiming stewardship of the kids’ trust funds, it was hard to make rent and tuition and insurance premiums, even with the child support checks. Asking Mrs. Santos to stay through dinner tonight had meant packing her own lunch for work for a week. And times must have been tight for Mrs. Santos, too; Regan had left ten dollars to order pizzas, but there was evidence—ketchupy plates, the smell of grease in the air—that the old woman had pocketed the money and found things in the fridge to whip together burgers. “The kids are in their rooms?” Regan asked, from the doorway. Sí, yes, said Mrs. Santos. “Would you mind sticking around until nine, then?” She was about to explain—she could just squeeze in a quick run—but if Mrs. Santos saw the leather couch as self-indulgent, what would she think about recreational jogging?

On her way to change, Regan noticed Will’s door was closed. She opened it to find her son face-down on the floor, perpendicular to another boy, his new friend Ken. She wanted to like him because he lived on the block and Will needed friends, and because Ken was Japanese, and a Yankees fan, but the kid was so damn secretive, or, more charitably, oblivious to adult authority. In his presence, Will became secretive, too. The second she’d come in, they’d whisked their cards and dice into the shadows under their chests. They’d taken up some kind of game about magic—wizards, hobbits, stuff like that. Eldritch Realms, it was called. Mothers were, it went without saying, non grata. “What are you guys up to?”

“Nothing,” Will said.

“Hello, Ken.”

She couldn’t tell if Ken mumbled a response or not. It was odd: his mother, at the park, was always so friendly now. Regan decided to see and raise his ruse of not seeing her.

“Well, whatever you’re doing, honey, I wish you’d include your sister.”

“Mom,” Will said, without looking up. “You. Are. Embarrassing. Me.”

“This isn’t the easiest time for her.”

“Do you not see I have a friend here?” he said.

“It’s after eight. Maybe it’s time Ken went home.”

That was all it took for the boy to scramble to his feet, flash a hand at Will, and, eyes hidden by the brim of his ballcap, zoom past her into the hallway. “Bye, Mrs. Santos!” The front door clicked shut. She waited for Will to say something, but he just lay there in his own cap—the Mets, Keith’s team—staring at her ankles. When she left him, he was adding Ken’s cards and dice to the pile under his chest, like a dragon smothering his hoard.

By now, Regan knew herself to be the worst mother in the world—it was the very crest of the wave of guilt she’d been riding for the last three hours—but she was afraid that if she didn’t run tonight, she would resort to some other, less innocent set of penalties. These must have been more obvious than she’d thought, too, even before the crisis became overt, or what had Keith meant by giving her a pair of running shoes for her thirty-fifth birthday, telling her it would be good for her health? She’d been slow to admit it, but he was right. Most people lost weight when they started training for a marathon. Since Regan had taken it up, not long after New Year’s, she had gained four pounds, according to the bathroom scale. There were times when she’d even felt capable of living without a bathroom scale.

With the running shoes on, she felt like that again, freer. She streaked down the Promenade toward the glowing arms of the bridge. Breath. Breath. Breath. Breath. Like Lamaze. She wondered, was it just the divorce that was eating at her kids? That sense of abandonment she’d been warned was unavoidable? Or was that the damage of junior year, twenty years ago, still making her see herself as bigger in the minds of others than she really was? At least part of what was bothering Will was his grandfather. Upon returning from Keith’s last weekend, he’d asked her to explain the difference between a grand jury and a regular one. He knew her work was to make Grandpa’s company look as good as possible, so when she told him everything was going to be fine, did he assume she was just doing her job?

She began to climb the bridge now, blood humming in her head. Thoughts of work became thoughts of Andrew West, who was the real reason she’d been late getting home. He’d been tactful in his choice of restaurant. The casual décor, maracas and other mariachi trinkets, the anonymity of the neighborhood, had set her at ease. Who could possibly want to fool around after Mexican food? But when, post-appetizers, she’d broached the question of how they might shore up Daddy’s position in his talks with the U.S. Attorney, he’d told her she deserved a break from thinking about work all the time. He took a long drink from his margarita, then squinted and rubbed his forehead. “Ice-cream headache.”

She’d been titrating wine into her own system by the milliliter. She needed her wits about her.

“So, do you like music?” he asked, once he’d stopped squinting.

“Doesn’t everyone?” It came off as defensive, glib, and she could already feel herself shrinking. How ridiculous she must look in this windowless restaurant with this beautiful … well, kid. “I used to think I’d be in Broadway musicals when I grew up. I remember dragging my dad to see My Fair Lady.” She told him how Daddy had ended up crying, he laughed so hard. Daddy wasn’t much of a laugher, even then.

“And do you dance?” he asked.

“Why? Do you?”

“I won some trophies in high school,” he said. Then: “I’m only kidding.” But he did know this little disco where they could go. After dessert, of course—“They have the most amazing flan here.” Now her knees throbbed. She’d reached the summit of the bridge’s pedestrian walkway, a couple hundred feet above water, but if she couldn’t make it the whole mile without giving up, how was she ever going to manage twenty-six and change? Luckily, there was gravity to carry her downhill toward Manhattan. The city doubled in the water below her. Like those two images of the South Bronx. Before and After. Despite her expanded powers, there was still an awful lot she didn’t know about the company that bore her name. She didn’t even know, really, the first thing about the stranger she was thinking of letting into her bed: where Andrew West had worked before, to whom he reported now … For all she knew, he could have been hired by Amory to keep an eye on her, compromise her—who could say how far the Demon Brother’s reach extended?—though Andrew had been nothing but kind, and Dr. Altschul would have pointed here to a pattern of self-sabotage.

“Andrew,” she’d said matter-of-factly, as the dinner plates were cleared. “I’m worried I’ve misled you. My husband and I only just separated, and what I really need now, more than anything, is a friend.”

He didn’t fight back. The gleaming teeth that had probably never seen a cavity, the sculpted hands that absently twirled the air, searching for the squash racket he’d left back in Webster Groves … they could have slipped into a janitor’s closet for seven minutes of heaven or parted and never seen each other again, or anything in between, and Andrew West would have been just fine. And the fact that he carried it so lightly shook her. Stupid! How could she have thought this meant anything to him? After some coffee and more small-talk, he’d kissed her chastely on the cheek and closed the door to the cab.

At the foot of the bridge, she slowed to a trot. The leafless trees of the park behind City Hall beckoned like black hands. She longed to stop for a minute and take a breather, but she didn’t dare; a park at night, even one this small, was no place for a woman alone. And that was what time had finally made out of Regan. A woman alone. She saw again the yellow police tape stretched across the end of her father’s block, turning white in the New Year’s snow. The white sheet being fed into the ambulance. To be minding your own business, immersed in the mess of your life, and then for it all to go black. This was what religion had been for, supposedly, a place to put your fears about whether there was anything beyond that black. She wished someone else were here right now. To be honest—and it killed her—she wished Keith were here right now.

But she let the shadows chase her back onto the bridge. At speed, the lights of the cars on the lower level blurred and disappeared. The water below was a great erasure mark. There was only her breathing and the rhythm of her feet on the pavement. She could have been jogging home to the old place, an intact marriage, undamaged kids, except. Except there was no Manhattan anymore. She was Brooklyn-bound.

In the living room, Mrs. Santos sat in her hard chair watching Telly Savalas watch a building burn on Kojak. The lights here were still off, and the interaction of the yellow overspill from the foyer and the blue flicker of the TV gave this, the theoretical center of the home, a bleak and migrainous aspect. Regan advanced into the room, digging in her purse for money, glancing over at Kojak’s enormous lolly because sometimes she didn’t feel comfortable looking Mrs. Santos in the eye. “You didn’t let them watch this, did you? Because Will’s so curious about everything, and I’m not sure he’s old enough …” She realized she’d insulted Mrs. Santos, but she couldn’t apologize without altering a power dynamic that was already—face it—fucked. Besides, her homework from therapy this week was to stop apologizing so much.

Mrs. Santos continued to knit. “A man calls for you while you are out.”

Regan’s pulse was still up, tympani in her chest. “Did he leave a message?”

“No, just a name.” Regan was completely in her power now.

“Well, do you remember what it was?”

Mrs. Santos smiled to herself, in private triumph. “We do not have this name in my country. Merced, is something like this. But the family name, I remember. Is Buen hombre. Good man.”

42

THE NIGHT OF, or the evening of the day of the Night Of, Mercer stripped off the necktie and Oxford-cloth shirt of his teaching costume and sprawled prone on the bed, hoping sleep would make the hours between five and eight pass quickly. His eyes stayed open, though. The days were getting longer again; this time a week ago, he wouldn’t have been able to make out much of the portrait tacked to the wall, save maybe for a mitre-shaped tangle of hair. Now those eyes that were not quite William’s seemed to accuse him. He turned the other way, to face the window and the beaded curtain that hid the rest of the loft. Out there, futon and armchair had been drawn together, in an angle open toward the door. And there was a place of honor for William, too, a fraying nylon beach chair Mercer had found up on the roof—which, for all he knew, belonged to William, anyway.