The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (33 page)

She is waiting for Joshua, Jessica says.

There is, according to DNA tests, no genetic link between Jessica and myself. Nevertheless, we are inseparable now. We speak on the phone every week. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, her children climb all over me and call me Uncle Josh.

The heart finds what it needs to find.

21. Thanksgiving

When Melanie arrives each November for Thanksgiving dinner, she brings a sweet potato and caramelized pecan casserole and a bottle of wine.

“You were too young to remember, Jess,” she says each time, “but that’s what I did for the last Thanksgiving on Long Island, before, you know . . .”

“I know, Mom.”

“Your father’s parents always came, and your grandmother had extremely strict rituals that had to be obeyed. The only nonkosher element was my casserole. It was the last time . . .”

“I know, Mom,” Jessica says, embracing her. “Mom, I want you to meet a friend of mine from Iowa.”

The name means nothing to Melanie, though the guest vaguely reminds her of someone she might once have known. “Have we met before?”

“Possibly,” he says.

She watches the way he cavorts on the carpet with the children, the way he plays cowboys and Indians from behind the sofa-fort and the circled wagons of cushions.

“You are very good with children,” she tells him.

Halfway through dinner, she asks, “Why do you keep staring at me?”

“I’m sorry,” he says, blushing and looking away. “I didn’t realize.”

“I think I missed your name.”

“That wasn’t my real name,” he says. “My real name is Joshua.”

Melanie goes very white and still. Her hands tremble. After some minutes she says quietly, “You are a very nice man, but you are not my son. Jessica, I think I’ll go upstairs and lie down for a while.”

Melanie drifts into sleep and uneasy dreaming. She is in a vast and confusing railway station, bigger than Grand Central, and it is essential that she not miss her train, yet every platform is blocked with
NO ENTRY
signs. Somehow she has wandered from the concourse into the lobby of a huge hotel—the Hyatt Regency, perhaps?—and there is a room she must find. Yet every elevator she takes will not stop at the floor she needs. She tries the floor above, the floor below, and frantically hunts for stairs, but they don’t exist. She walks miles of corridor, then begins running because time is almost up. She climbs out a window onto a fire escape which is moving the way an escalator moves, except that it moves very slowly and only goes down. It tips her into a back alley near the Midtown Tunnel and she descends into dark.

Vehicle headlights blind her.

She makes her way along a treacherous catwalk meant only for emergency workers.

She runs and runs and runs.

I will be lost forever, she thinks, but I will keep on going until I find my way home.

And then, suddenly, there is sunlight ahead and the tree tunnel of Main Street and puppies tethered to bike racks and she is inhaling the most glorious smell of fresh-baked bread. Without any effort on her part, she is inside Ryan’s, and through the window she can see the stroller.

She sees the van pulling up.

There is still time.

She rushes outside and scoops her babies into her arms.

“Thank God,” she tells Ryan, bursting back in through his doorway. “I’ve found my way home.”

Ryan cannot tell if she is sobbing or laughing, but he wraps all three of them in tissue and perfumes them with cinnamon and yeast.

Melanie covers Joshua and Jessica with kisses and whispers in Joshua’s ear, “We’ve found our way home and we’ll never leave again. I promise that this is where we’ll stay.”

RICHARD LANGE

FROM
Bull Men’s Fiction

I
F I HAD
money, I’d go to Mexico. Not Tijuana or Ensenada, but farther down, real Mexico. Get my ass out of L.A. There was this guy in the army, Marcos, who was from a little town on the coast called Mazunte. He said you could live pretty good there for practically nothing. Tacos were fifty cents, beers a buck.

“How do they feel about black folks?” I asked him.

“They don’t care about anything but the color of your money,” he said.

I already know how to speak enough Spanish to get by, how to ask for things and order food.
Por favor
and
muchas gracias.
The numbers to a hundred.

The Chinese family across the hall is always cooking in their room. I told Papa-san to cut it out, but he just stood there nodding and smiling with his little boy and little girl wrapped around his legs. The next day I saw Mama-san coming up the stairs with another bag of groceries, and this morning the whole floor smells like deep-fried fish heads again. I’m not an unreasonable man. I ignore that there are four of them living in a room meant for two, and I put up with the kids playing in the hall when I’m trying to sleep, but I’m not going to let them torch the building.

I pull on some pants and head downstairs. The elevator is broken, so it’s four flights on foot. The elevator’s always broken, or the toilet, or the sink. Roaches like you wouldn’t believe too. The hotel was built in 1928, and nobody’s done anything to it since. Why should they? There’s just a bunch of poor niggers living here, Chinamen and wetbacks, dope fiends and drunks. Hell, I’m sure the men with the money are on their knees every night praying this heap falls down so they can collect on the insurance and put up something new.

The first person I see when I hit the lobby—the first person who sees me—is Alan. I call him Youngblood. He’s the boy who sweeps the floors and hoses off the sidewalk.

“Hey, D, morning, D,” he says, bouncing off the couch and coming at me. “Gimme a dollar, man. I’m hungry as a motherfucker.”

I raise my hand to shut him up, walk right past him. I don’t have time for his hustle today.

“They’re cooking up there again,” I say to the man at the desk, yell at him through the bulletproof glass. He’s Chinese too, and every month so are more of the tenants. I know what’s going on, don’t think I don’t.

“Okay, I talk to them,” the man says, barely looking up from his phone.

“It’s a safety hazard,” I say.

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” he says.

“Yeah, yeah, okay to you,” I say. “Next time I’m calling the fire department.”

Youngblood is waiting for me when I finish. He’s so skinny he uses one hand to hold up his jeans when he walks. Got fuzz in his hair, boogers in the corners of his eyes, and smells like he hasn’t bathed in a week. That’s what dope’ll do to you.

“Come on, D, slide me a dollar, and I’ll give you this,” he says.

He holds out his hand. There’s a little silver disk in his palm, smaller than a dime.

“What is it?” I say.

“It’s a battery, for a watch,” he says.

“And what am I supposed to do with it?”

“Come on, D, be cool.”

Right then the front door opens, and three dudes come gliding in, the light so bright behind them they look like they’re stepping out of the sun. I know two of them: J Bone, who stays down the hall from me, and his homeboy Dallas. A couple of grown-up crack babies, crazy as hell. The third one, the tall, good-looking kid in the suit and shiny shoes, is a stranger. He has an air about him like he doesn’t belong down here, like he ought to be pulling that suitcase through an airport in Vegas or Miami. He moves and laughs like a high roller, a player, the kind of brother you feel good just standing next to.

He and his boys walk across the lobby, goofing on each other. When they get to the stairs, the player stops and says, “You mean I got to carry my shit up four floors?”

“I’ll get it for you,” J Bone says. “No problem.”

The Chinaman at the desk buzzes them through the gate, and up they go, their boisterousness lingering for a minute like a pretty girl’s perfume.

“Who was that?” I say, mostly to myself.

“That’s J Bone’s cousin,” Youngblood says. “Fresh outta County.”

Trouble. Come looking for me again.

The old man asks if I know anything about computers. He’s sitting in his office in back, jabbing at the keys of the laptop his son bought him to use for inventory but that the old man mainly plays solitaire on. He picks the thing up and sets it down hard on his desk as if trying to smack some sense into it.

“Everything’s stuck,” he says.

“Can’t help you there, boss,” I say. “I was out of school before they started teaching that stuff.”

I’m up front in the showroom. I’ve been the security guard here for six years now, ten to six, Tuesday through Saturday. It’s just me and the old man, day after day, killing time in the smallest jewelry store in the district, where he’s lucky to buzz in ten customers a week. If I was eighty-two years old and had his money, I wouldn’t be running out my string here, but his wife’s dead, and his friends have moved away, and the world keeps changing so fast that I guess this is all he has left to anchor him, his trade, the last thing he knows by heart.

I get up out of my chair—he doesn’t care if I sit when nobody’s in the store—and tuck in my uniform. Every so often I like to stretch my legs with a stroll around the showroom. The old man keeps the display cases looking nice, dusts the rings and bracelets and watches every day, wipes down the glass. I test him now and then by leaving a thumbprint somewhere, and it’s always gone the next morning.

Another game I play to pass the time, I’ll watch the people walking past outside and bet myself whether the next one’ll be black or Mexican, a man or a woman, wearing a hat or not, things like that. Or I’ll lean my chair back as far as it’ll go, see how long I can balance on the rear legs. The old man doesn’t like that one, always yells, “Stop fidgeting. You make me nervous.” And I’ve also learned to kind of sleep with my eyes open and my head up, half in this world, half in the other.

I walk over to the door and look outside. It’s a hot day, and folks are keeping to the shade where they can. Some are waiting for a bus across the street, in front of the music store that blasts that
oom pah pah oom pah pah
all day long. Next to that’s a McDonald’s, then a bridal shop, then a big jewelry store with signs in the windows saying
COMPRAMOS ORO
,
WE BUY GOLD
.

A kid ducks into our doorway to get out of the sun. He’s yelling into his phone in Spanish and doesn’t see me standing on the other side of the glass, close enough I can count the pimples on his chin.

“Por que?”
he says. That’s “Why?” or sometimes “Because.”
“Por que? Por que?”

When he feels my eyes on him, he flinches, startled. I chuckle as he moves out to the curb. He glances over his shoulder a couple times like I’m something he’s still not sure of.

“Is it too cold in here?” the old man shouts.

He’s short already, but hunched over like he is these days, he’s practically a midget. Got about ten white hairs left on his head, ears as big as a goddamn monkey’s, and those kind of thick glasses that make your eyes look like they belong to someone else.

“You want me to dial it down?” I say.

“What about you? Are you cold?” he says.

“Don’t worry about me,” I say.

Irving Mandelbaum. I call him Mr. M or Boss. He’s taken to using a cane lately, if he’s going any distance, and I had to call 911 a while back when I found him facedown on the office floor. It was just a fainting spell, but I still worry.

“Five degrees then,” he says. “If you don’t mind.”

I adjust the thermostat and return to my chair. When I’m sure Mr. M is in the office, I rock back and get myself balanced. My world record is three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

I’ve been living in the hotel a while now. Before that it was someplace worse, over on Fifth. Someplace where you had crackheads and hypes puking in the hallways and OD-ing in the bathrooms we shared. Someplace where you had women knocking on your door at all hours, asking could they suck your dick for five dollars. It was barely better than being on the street, which is where I ended up after my release from Lancaster. Hell, it was barely better than Lancaster.

A Mexican died in the room next to mine while I was living there. I was the one who found him, and how I figured it out was the smell. I was doing janitorial work in those days, getting home at dawn and sleeping all morning, or trying to anyway. At first the odor was just a tickle in my nostrils, but then I started to taste something in the air that made me gag if I breathed too deeply. I didn’t think anything of it because it was the middle of summer and there was no air conditioning and half the time the showers were broken. To put it plainly, everybody stunk in that place. I went out and bought a couple of rose-scented deodorizers and set them next to my bed.

A couple of days later I was walking to my room when something strange on the floor in front of 316 caught my eye. I bent down for a closer look and one second later almost fell over trying to get up again. What it was was three fat maggots, all swole up like overcooked rice. I got down on my hands and knees and pressed my cheek to the floor to see under the door, and more maggots wriggled on the carpet inside the room, dancing around the dead man they’d sprung from.

Nobody would tell me how the guy died, but they said it was so hot in the room during the time he lay in there that he exploded. It took a special crew in white coveralls and rebreathers two days to clean up the mess, and even then the smell never quite went away. It was one of the happiest days of my life when I moved from there.

J Bone’s cousin, the player from the lobby, is laughing at me. His name is Leon. I’m not trying to be funny, but the man is high, so everything makes him laugh.

It’s 6:30 in the afternoon outside. In here, with the tinfoil covering the windows, it might as well be midnight. I suspect time isn’t the main thing on the minds of Leon and Bone and the two girls passing a blunt on the bed. They’ve been at it for hours already and seem to be planning on keeping the party going way past what’s wise.