Gone for Good (6 page)

It was. I looked behind me. Ralph sat with Dad and Lou Parley, downing a particularly messy sloppy joe, the cole slaw nestling in the corner of his lips. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry. But I couldn't. Mel was the oldest of us, three years older than Ken, five years my senior. When Julie was found dead, she ran away. That was the only way to put it. She upped with her new husband and baby and moved across the country. Most of the time I understood, but I still felt the anger of what I perceived as abandonment.

I thought again about the picture of Ken in my pocket and made a sudden decision. "I want to show you something."

I thought I saw Melissa wince, as if bracing for a blow, but that might have been projection. Her hair was pure

Suzy Homemaker, what with the suburban-blond frost and bouncy shoulder-length probably just the way Ralph liked it. It looked wrong to me, out of place on her.

We moved a little farther away until we were near the door leading to the garage. I looked back. I could still see my father and Ralph and Lou Parley.

I opened the door. Mel looked at me curiously but she followed. We stepped onto the cement of the chilly garage. The place was done up in Early American Fire Hazard. Rusted paint cans, moldy cardboard boxes, baseball bats, old wicker, tread less tires all strewn about as though there'd been an explosion. There were oil stains on the floor, and the dust made it all drab and faded gray and hard to breathe. A rope still hung from the ceiling. I remembered when my father had cleared out some space, attached a tennis ball to that rope so I could practice my baseball swing. I couldn't believe it was still there.

Melissa kept her eyes on me.

I wasn't sure how to do this.

"Sheila and I were going through Mom's things yesterday," I began.

Her eyes narrowed a little. I was about to start explaining, how we had sifted through her drawers and looked at the laminated birth announcements and that old program from when Mom played Mame in the Little Livingston production and how Sheila and I bathed ourselves in the old pictures remember the one with King Hussein, Mel? but none of that passed my lips.

Without saying another word, I reached into my pocket, plucked out the photograph, and held it up in front of her face.

It didn't take long. Melissa turned away as if the photo could scald her. She gulped a few deep breaths and stepped back. I moved toward her, but she held up a hand, halting me. When she looked up again, her face was a total blank. No surprise anymore. No anguish or joy either. Nothing.

I held it up again. This time she didn't blink.

"It's Ken," I said stupidly.

"I can see that, Will."

"That's the sum total of your reaction?"

"How would you like me to react?"

"He's alive. Mom knew it. She had this picture."

Silence.

"Mel?"

"He's alive," she said. "I heard you."

Her response or lack thereof left me speechless.

"Is there anything else?" Melissa asked.

"What… that's all you have to say?"

"What else is there to say, Will?"

"Oh, right, I forgot. You have to get back to Seattle."

"Yes."

She stepped away from me.

The anger resurfaced. "Tell me something, Mel. Did running away help?"

"I didn't run away."

"Bullshit," I said.

"Ralph got a job out there."

"Right."

"How dare you judge me?"

I flashed back to when the three of us played Marco Polo for hours in the motel pool near Cape Cod. I flashed back to the time Tony Bonoza spread rumors about Mel, how Ken's face had turned red when he'd heard, how he'd taken Bonoza on, even though he'd given up two years and twenty pounds.

"Ken is alive," I said again.

Her voice was a plea. "And what do you want me to do about it?"

"You act like it doesn't matter."

"I'm not sure it does."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Ken's not a part of our lives anymore."

"Speak for yourself."

"Fine, Will. He's not a part of my life anymore."

"He's your brother."

"Ken made his choices."

"And now what? he's dead to you?"

"Wouldn't it be better if he were?" She shook her head and closed her eyes. I waited. "Maybe I did run away, Will. But so did you. We had a choice. Our brother was either dead or a brutal killer. Either way, yes, he's dead to me."

I held up the picture again. "He doesn't have to be guilty, you know."

Melissa looked at me, and suddenly she was the older sister again. "Come on, Will. You know better."

"He defended us. When we were kids. He looked out for us. He loved us."

"And I loved him. But I also saw him for what he was. He was drawn to violence, Will. You know that. Yes, he stuck up for us. But don't you think part of that was because he enjoyed it? You know he was mixed up in something bad when he died."

"That doesn't make him a killer."

Melissa closed her eyes again. I could see her mining for some inner strength. "For crying out loud, Will, what was he doing that night?"

Our eyes met and held. I said nothing. A sudden chill blew across my heart.

"Forget the murder, okay? What was Ken doing having sex with Julie Miller?"

Her words penetrated me, blossomed in my chest, big and cold. I couldn't breathe. My voice, when I finally found it, was tinny, faraway. "We'd been broken up for over a year."

"You telling me you were over her?"

"I… she was free. He was free. There was no reason "

"He betrayed you, Will. Face it already. At the very least, he slept with the woman you loved. What kind of brother does that?"

"We broke up," I said, floundering. "I held no claim to her."

"You loved her."

"That has nothing to do with it."

She wouldn't take her eyes off mine. "Now who's running away?"

I stumbled back and half collapsed onto the cement stairs. My face dropped into my hands. I put myself together a piece at a time. It took a while. "He's still our brother."

"So what do you want to do? Find him? Hand him over to the police? Help him keep hiding? What?"

I had no answer.

Melissa stepped over me and opened the door to head back into the den. "Will?"

I looked up at her.

"This isn't my life anymore. I'm sorry."

I saw her then as a teenager, lying on her bed, jabbering away, her hair over teased the smell of bubble gum in the air. Ken and I would sit on the floor of her room and roll our eyes. I remembered her body language. If Mel was lying on her belly, her feet kicking in the air, she was talking about boys and parties and that nonsense. But when she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling, well, that was for dreams. I thought about her dreams. I thought about how none of them had come true.

"I love you," I said.

And, as though she could see into my thoughts, Melissa started to cry.

We never forget our first love. Mine ended up being murdered.

Julie Miller and I met when her family moved onto Coddington Terrace during my freshman year at Livingston High. We started dating two years later. We went to the junior and senior proms. We were voted class couple. We were pretty much inseparable.

Our breakup was surprising only in its outright predictability. We went off to separate colleges, sure our commitment could stand the time and distance. It couldn't, though it hung on for longer than most. During our junior year, Julie called me on the phone and said that she wanted to see other people, that she'd already started dating a senior named I'm not kidding here Buck.

I should have gotten over it. I was young and this was hardly an unusual rite of passage. And I probably would have. Eventually. I mean, I dated. It was taking time, but I was starting to accept reality. Time and distance helped with that.

But then Julie died, and it seemed as though a part of my heart would never break free of her grip from the grave.

Until Sheila.

I didn't show the picture to my father.

I got back to my apartment at ten o'clock at night. Still empty, still stale, still foreign. No messages on the machine. If this was life without Sheila, I wanted no part of it.

The scrap of paper with her parents' Idaho phone number was still on the desk. What was the time difference in Idaho? One hour? Maybe two? I didn't remember. But that made it either eight or nine o'clock at night.

Not too late to call.

I collapsed into the chair and stared at the phone as if it'd tell me what to do. It didn't. I picked up the scrap of paper. When I'd told Sheila to call her parents, her face had lost all color. That had been yesterday. Just yesterday. I wondered what I should do and my first thought, my very first, was that I should ask my mother, that she would know the right answer.

A fresh wave of sadness pulled me under.

In the end, I knew that I had to act. I had to do something. And this, calling Sheila's parents, was all I could come up with.

A woman answered on the third ring. "Hello?"

I cleared my throat. "Mrs. Rogers?"

There was a pause. "Yes?"

"My name is Will Klein."

I waited, seeing if the name meant anything to her. If it did, she wasn't letting me know.

"I'm a friend of your daughter's."

"Which daughter?"

"Sheila," I said.

"I see," the woman said. "I understand she's been in New York."

"Yes," I said.

"Is that where you're calling from?"

"Yes."

"What can I do for you, Mr. Klein?"

That was a good question. I didn't really know myself, so I started with the obvious. "Do you have any idea where she is?"

"No."

"You haven't seen or spoken to her?"

In a tired voice, she said, "I haven't seen or spoken to Sheila in years."

I opened my mouth, closed it, tried to see a route to take, kept running into roadblocks. "Are you aware that she's missing?"

"The authorities have been in touch with us, yes."

I switched hands and brought the receiver up to my other ear. "Could you tell them anything useful?"

"Useful?"

"Do you have any idea where she might have gone? Where she'd run away to? A friend or a relative who might help?"

"Mr. Klein?"

"Yes."

"Sheila has not been a part of our life for a long time."

"Why not?"

I just blurted that out. I imagined a rebuke, of course, a big, fat none-of-your-business. But again she fell into silence. I tried to wait her out, but she was better at that than I. "It's just that" I could hear myself begin to stammer "she's a wonderful person."

"You're more than a friend, aren't you, Mr. Klein?"

"Yes."

"The authorities. They mentioned that Sheila was living with a man. I assume they were talking about you?"

"We've been together about a year," I said.

"You sound as though you're worried about her."

"I am."

"You love her, then?"

"Very much."

"But she's never told you about her past."

I wasn't sure how to respond to that one, though the answer was obvious. "I'm trying to understand," I said.

"It's not like that," she said. "I don't even understand."

My neighbor picked now to blast his new stereo with quadraphonic speakers. The bass shook the wall. I was on the portable phone, so I moved toward the far end of the apartment.

"I want to help her," I said.

"Let me ask you something, Mr. Klein."

Her tone made my grip on the receiver tighten.

"The federal agent who came by," she went on. "He said they don't know anything about it."

"About what?" I asked.

"About Carly," Mrs. Rogers said. "About where she is."

I was confused. "Who's Carly?"

There was another long pause. "May I give you a word of advice, Mr. Klein?"

"Who's Carly?" I asked again.

"Get on with your life. Forget you ever knew my daughter."

And then she hung up.

I grabbed a Brooklyn Lager from the fridge and slid open the glass door. I stepped out onto what my Realtor had optimistically dubbed a "veranda." It was the approximate size of a baby crib. One person, perhaps two, if they stood very still, could stand on it at one time. There were, of course, no chairs, and being on the third floor, not much of a view. But it was air and night and I still liked it.

At night, New York is well lit and unreal, filled with a blue-black glow. This may be the city that never sleeps, but if my street was an indication, it could sneak in a serious nap. Parked cars sat crammed along the curb, bumper grinding bumper, seemingly jockeying for position long after their owners had abandoned them. Night sounds throbbed and hummed. I heard music. I heard clatter from the pizza place across the street. I heard the steady whooshing from the West Side Highway, gentle now, Manhattan 's lullaby.

My brain slipped into numb. I didn't know what was happening. I didn't know what to do next. My call to Sheila's mother raised more questions than it answered. Melissa's words still stung, but she'd raised an interesting point: Now that I knew Ken was alive, what was I prepared to do about it?

I wanted to find him, of course.

I wanted to find him very badly. But so what? Forget the fact that I wasn't a detective or up to the task. If Ken wanted to be found, he'd come to me. Searching him out could only lead to disaster.

And maybe I had another priority.

First my brother had run off. Now my lover vanishes into thin air. I frowned. It was a good thing I didn't have a dog.

I was raising the bottle to my lip when I noticed him.

He stood on the corner, maybe fifty yards from my building. He wore a trench coat and what might have been a fedora, his hands in his pockets. His face from this distance looked like a white orb shining against a dark backdrop, featureless and too round. I couldn't see his eyes, but I knew he was looking at me. I could feel it, the weight of his stare. It was palpable.

The man didn't move.

There weren't many pedestrians on the street, but the ones who were there, they, well, they moved. That was what New Yorkers did. They moved. They walked. They walked with purpose. Even when they stood for a light or passing car, they bounced, always at the ready. New Yorkers moved. There was no still in them.

But this man stood like stone. Staring at me. I blinked hard. He was still there. I turned away and then looked back. He was still there, unmoving. And one more thing.

Something about him was familiar.

I didn't want to take that too far. We were at a pretty good distance and it was nighttime and my vision is not the best, especially in streetlight. But the hair on the back of my neck rose like on an animal sensing terrible danger.

I decided to stare back, see how he reacted. He didn't move. I don't know how long we stood there like that. I could feel the blood leaving my fingertips. Cold settled in near the edges, but something at my center gathered strength. I didn't look away. And neither did the featureless face.

The phone rang.

I wrested my vision away. My watch said it was nearly eleven P.M. Late for a call. Without a backward glance, I stepped back inside and picked up the receiver.

Squares said, "Sleepy?"

"No."

"Want to take a ride?"

He was taking out the van tonight. "You learn something?"

"Meet me at the studio. Half an hour." He hung up. I walked back to the terrace and looked down. The man was gone.

The yoga school was simply called Squares. I made fun of it, of course. Squares had become one word, like Cher or Fabio. The school, studio, whatever you want to call it, was located in a six-story walk-up on University Place off Union Square. The beginnings had been humble. The school had toiled in happy obscurity. Then a certain celebrity, a major pop star you know too well, "discovered" Squares. She told her friends. A few months later, Cosmo picked it up. Then Elle. Somewhere along the line, a big infomercial company asked Squares to do a video. Squares, a firm believer in selling out, delivered the goods. The Yoga Squared Workout the name is copyrighted took off. Hey, Squares even shaved on the day they taped.

The rest was history.

Suddenly, no Manhattan or Hamptons social event could deem itself "a happening" without everyone's favorite fitness guru. Squares turned down most invitations, but he quickly learned how to network. He rarely had time to teach anymore. If you want to take any of the classes, even ones taught by his most junior students, the wait list is at least two months. He charges twenty-five dollars per class. He has four studios. The smallest holds fifty students. The largest close to two hundred. He has twenty-four teachers who rotate in and out. As I approached the school now, it was eleven-thirty at night and three classes were still in session.

Do the math.

In the elevator I started hearing the painful strains of sitar music blending with the lapping of cascading water falls, a mingling of sounds I find about as soothing as a cat hit with a stun gun. The gift shop greets you first, filled with incense and books and lotions and tapes and videos and CD-ROMs and DVDs and crystals and beads and ponchos and tie-dye. Behind the counter were two anorexic twenty something-year-olds dressed in black, their entire personas reeking of granola. Forever young. Just wait. One male, one female, though it wasn't easy to tell which was which. Their voices were even and just this side of patronizing maitre d's at a trendy new restaurant. Their body piercings and there were lots of them were filled with silver and turquoise.

"Hi," I said.

"Please remove your shoes," Probably Male said.

"Right."

I slipped them off.

"And you are?" Probably Female asked.

"Here to see Squares. I'm Will Klein."

The name meant nothing to them. Must be new. "Do you have an appointment with Yogi Squares?"

"Yogi Squares?" I repeated.

They stared at me.

"Tell me," I said. "Is Yogi Squares smarter than the average Squares?"

No laughter from the kiddies. Big surprise. She typed something into the computer terminal. They both frowned at the monitor. He picked up the phone and dialed. The sitar music blared. I felt a whopper headache brewing.

"Will?"

A wonderfully leotard-clad Wanda swept into the room, head high, clavicle prominent, eyes taking in everything. She was Squares's lead teacher and lover. They'd been together for three years now. Said leotard was lavender and oh-so-right. Wanda was a bold vision tall, long-limbed, and lithe, achingly beautiful, and black. Yes, black. The irony did not escape those of us who knew Squares's pardon the pun checkered past.

She wrapped her arms around me, her embrace as warm as wood smoke. I wished it would last forever.

"How are you, Will?" she said softly.

"Better."

She pulled back, those eyes searching for the lie. She'd been to my mother's funeral. She and Squares had no secrets. Squares and I had no secrets. Like an algebra proof using the communicative property, you could thus deduce that she and I had no secrets.

"He's finishing up a class," she said. "Pranayama breathing."

I nodded.

She tilted her head as though she'd just thought of something. "Do you have a second before you go?" Her voice aimed for casual but couldn't quite get there.

"Sure," I said.

She padded Wanda was too graceful to merely walk down the corridor. I followed, my eyes level with her swanlike neck. We passed a fountain so large and ornate I wanted to toss a penny in it. I peeked in one of the studios. Total silence, save heavy breathing. It looked like a movie set. Gorgeous people I don't know how Squares found so many gorgeous people packed side by side in warrior pose, faces serenely blank, legs spread, hands out, front knees at a ninety-degree angle.

The office Wanda shared with Squares was on the right. She lowered herself onto a chair as though it were made of Styrofoam and crossed her legs into a lotus. I sat across from her in a more conventional style. She didn't speak for a few moments. Her eyes closed and I could see her willing herself to relax. I waited.

"I didn't tell you this," she said.

"Okay."

"I'm pregnant."

"Hey, that's great." I started to rise to offer up a congratulatory hug.

"Squares isn't handling it well."

I stopped. "What do you mean?"

"He's freaking out."

"How?"

"You didn't know, right?"

"Right."

"He tells you everything, Will. He's known for a week." I saw her point.

"He probably didn't want to say anything," I said, "what with my mother and all."

She looked at me hard and said, "Don't do that."

"Yeah, sorry."

Her eyes skittered away from mine. The cool facade. There were cracks there now. "I expected him to be happy."

"He wasn't?"

"I think he wants me to" she seemed out of words "end it."

That knocked me back a step. "He said that?"

"He hasn't said anything. He's working the van extra nights. He's taking on more classes."

"He's avoiding you."

"Yes."

The office door opened without knocking. Squares leaned his unshaven mug into the doorway. He gave Wanda a cursory smile. She turned away. Squares gave me the thumb. "Let's rock and roll."

We didn't speak until we were safely ensconced in the van.

Squares said, "She told you."

It was a statement, not a question, so I didn't bother confirming or denying.

He put the key in the ignition. "We're not talking about it," he said.

Another statement that required no response.

The Covenant House van heads straight into the bowels. Many of our kids come to our doors. Many others are rescued in this van. The job of outreach is to connect with the community's seedy underbelly meet the runaway kids, the street urchins, the ones too often referred to as the "throwaways." A kid living on the street is a bit like and please pardon the analogy here a weed. The longer he's on the street, the harder it is to pull him out by the root.

We lose a lot of these kids. More than we save. And forget the weed analogy. It's stupid because it implies that we're getting rid of something bad and preserving something good. In fact, it's just the opposite. Try this instead: The street is more like a cancer. Early screening and preventive treatment is the key to long-term survival.

Not much better, but you get the gist.

"The feds exaggerated," Squares said.

"How so?"

"Sheila's record."

"Goon."

"The arrests. They were all a long time ago. You want to hear this?"

"Yes."

We started driving deep into the gloom. The city's hooker hangouts are fluid. Often you'll find them near the Lincoln Tunnel or Javits Center, but lately the cops have been cracking down. More cleanup. So the hookers flowed south to the meat-packing district on 18tt Street and the far west side. Tonight the hookers were out in force.

Squares gestured with his head. "Sheila could have been any one of them."

"She worked the street?"

"A runaway from the Midwest. Got off the bus and straight into the life."

I'd seen it too many times to shock me. But this wasn't a stranger or street kid at the end of her rope. This was the most amazing woman I had ever known.

"A long time ago," Squares said as though reading my thoughts. "Her first arrest was age sixteen."

"Prostitution?"

He nodded. "Three more like that in the next eighteen months, working, according to her file, for a pimp named Louis Castman. Last time she was carrying two ounces and a knife. They tried to bust her for both dealing and armed robbery, but it got kicked."

I looked out the window. The night had turned gray, washed out. You see so much bad on these streets. We work hard to stop some of it. I know we succeed. I know we turn lives around. But I know that what happens here, in the vibrant cesspool of night, never leaves them. The damage is done. You may work around it. You may go on. But the damage is permanent.

"What are you afraid of?" I asked him.

"We're not talking about it."

"You love her. She loves you."

"And she's black."

I turned to him and waited. I know that he didn't mean the obvious by this. He was not being racist. But it's like I told you. The damage is permanent. I had seen the tension between them. It wasn't nearly as powerful as the love, but it was there.

"You love her," I repeated.

He kept driving.

"Maybe that was part of the initial attraction," I said. "But she's not your redemption anymore. You're in love with her."

"Will?"

"Yeah?"

"Enough."

Squares suddenly veered the van to the right. Headlights splashed over the children of the night. They didn't scatter like rats under the onslaught. They, in fact, stared mutely, barely blinking. Squares narrowed his eyes, spotted his prey, and pulled to a stop.

We got out in silence. The children looked at us with dead eyes. I remembered a line of Fantine's in Les Miserables the musical version, I don't know if it's in the book: "Don't they know they're making love to what's already dead?"

There were girls and boys and cross-dressers and transsexuals. I have seen every known perversion out here, though and I'm sure I'll get accused of sexism here I don't think I've ever seen a female customer. I'm not saying that women never buy sex. I'm sure they do. But they don't seem to cruise the streets to do it. The street customers, the Johns, are always men. They may want a buxom woman or a skinny one, young, old, straight, kinky to unfathomable levels, big men, little boys, animals, whatever. Some may even have a woman with them, dragging a girlfriend or wife into the fray. But the customers trolling these byways are men.

Despite all the talk about unfathomable kink, these men for the most part come here to purchase a certain… act, if you will. Something performed on them, one that can easily take place in a parked car. It makes sense for both, when you think about it. Convenience, for one thing. You don't need the expense and time of finding a room. Your concern about sexually transmitted diseases, while still there, is lessened. Pregnancy is not an issue. You don't need to fully undress……