The Black Widow (24 page)

He looks for familiar faces, painfully aware that he and Gaby were planning to visit their old lifeguard friends. It’s a tradition Ben repeats a few times every summer—sometimes with Gaby, back in the early years of their relationship and marriage, but always without her the past few years since Josh died.

He heard through the Internet grapevine that another bunch of the old crew has graduated to full-time real world jobs since last Labor Day and won’t be coming back. An all-new group of guards seem to occupy the chairs now, many of them college age, like the kid perched beneath the familiar orange umbrella where Ben himself had spent so many summer days.

Toned and tan, the kid wears the usual orange swim trunks and spins a whistle on a chain. His gaze is fixed intently on the water, apparently heedless of the gorgeous female guard in an orange tank suit who leans against the base of the stand, waiting to swap places with him.

But the kid knows she’s there. Ben is aware of his awareness, remembering how he used to sit high on that very tower like a king on a rickety wooden throne, noticing-but-not-noticing Gabriela below.

“Ben?” a female voice calls and his heart sinks. It lifts again when he turns to see a woman in an orange tank bathing suit—not his date—hurrying toward him.

“Stella. How’s it going?” He gives her a hug.

“Oh, you know . . . it’s going.”

Stella Kaplan is one of the lifeguards who started here the same summer as Ben and Gaby. When he first met her, with her sun-streaked long brown hair and toned, perfectly tanned body, he developed a fast crush on her. So did every other male guard. He and Stella harmlessly flirted all summer, and kissed a few times, but that was as far as it went. Then he connected with Gaby, and never looked back.

“It’s been a few years, hasn’t it?” she asks. “I wasn’t here last summer.”

That’s right. Remembering that according to the guard grapevine she’d been on leave then, having recently given birth to her first child, Ben asks about her daughter.

He smiles wistfully when Stella tells him she’s a handful, having recently started walking and getting into everything. But she abruptly curtails her account of her daughter’s harrowing and messy morning adventure involving a stool and a bowl of milk-soaked Cheerios. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to go on and on about my kid.”

“You aren’t going on and on.”

“No, but . . . I mean, I know it must be hard. I’m sorry,” she says again.

It is hard, always, hearing about other people’s kids and imagining what your own child would be like now, had he lived. But it’s hard, too, when you find yourself in stilted conversations in which people awkwardly tiptoe around your feelings.

Gaby understood that. They talked about it yesterday, before . . .

Before everything fell apart all over again. Crap.

“So how’s Gabriela?” Stella asks, clearly meaning to change to a more cheerful subject, and Ben nearly emits a bitter laugh at the irony.

“She’s fine,” is the simplest answer.

No one in the lifeguard network is aware that they’re not together anymore. Plus, Stella and Gaby were never really friends. Stella didn’t really pal around with any of the female guards. She was one of those girls the other girls didn’t seem to like.

Ben asks her about her husband, and is dismayed to hear that they separated right after Christmas.

“It was just too hard to hold it together once the baby came along. We never were a match made in heaven,” she tells Ben. “Not like you and Gaby. Or maybe we just aren’t as strong as you guys are. A lot of marriages can’t survive what you’ve been through, but look at you two, still together. You’re blessed, Ben, and you guys deserve it. You deserve more children, too. I hope it happens for you and Gaby.”

What do you say to that? You smile and you nod and you pretend everything is fine, and you’re pretty damned convincing, apparently.

“Well, I’ve got to get back to the chair,” Stella tells him. “Junie’s due for a break.”

“Junie’s here today?” Another blast from the past: Junior Cordero was a good friend of Ben’s back in the old days.

“A lot of people are here today. Junie, Miggs, Shakey, Bird Ass . . .”

“Yeah?” The well-worn nicknames bring back a barrage of bittersweet memories. “I’ve been keeping an eye out, but I haven’t seen anyone yet.”

“Only a couple of us are working, but a bunch of the old-timers are hanging out over by the Grotto. You should go over and say hi.”

“I will, in a while . . .”

“Want to walk down with me now and see Junie?”

“I will, later,” he lies again, and gives her another quick hug before she strides away.

He reaches into his pocket for his phone to check the time, remembers again that he doesn’t have it, and curses to himself.

Fitting that this day that was forecast to be “picture perfect” has turned out to be overcast. The water is an unappealing greenish gray and undoubtedly still chilly, but the air is warm and uncomfortably humid, and people are splashing around. He wishes he could dive in and swim to the distant shore in an effort to purge the malaise.

Watching a teenage couple laughing as they wade, hand in hand, into the chilly water, he thinks again of himself and Gaby, young and unencumbered.

Oh, hell. All he wants is to flee and put it behind him, all of it. But he can’t leave. He has a blind date, of all things.

Maybe this will turn out to be his lucky day and the woman won’t show up. Maybe he can just—

“Ben?”

Again, a female voice calls his name.

But this time it’s not an old friend. It’s a tall brunette, wearing sunglasses and a big hat: his date. Ben sighs inwardly.

So this isn’t his lucky day. Surprise, surprise.

Gaby isn’t sure exactly when—or how—she arrived at the questionable decision to confront Ben at the beach.

One minute she was furiously dumping the remains of her iced coffee down the drain and trying not to look at the vase filled with yellow roses, the next she was tripping over the cardboard box—Ben’s lifetime’s worth of memories—on her way to the closet.

Now she finds herself on a crosstown bus, the box on her lap and Ben’s cell phone in her pocket.

Staring out the window at the leafy landscape as the bus travels Central Park’s 79th Street Transverse in its route from Upper West Side to Upper East, she reminds herself that it’s time to reclaim that precious floor space now that she and Ben are most likely estranged for good. Not only that, but she has to get rid of the phone as soon as possible. Otherwise, she’ll be tempted to look at his texts again.

As the morning wore on into afternoon, she’d fought the urge to see whether anyone else has reached out to him since last night, or if there are any further clues to what he might have been saying about her to his friends and family.

As long as she has his phone in her possession, she’s going to be tempted to snoop.

If she were a different person, a vengeful person, she’d just throw it into the incinerator.

But I’m not vengeful . . .

Am I?

She hadn’t stopped to contemplate the idea as she was yanking on shorts and a T-shirt, shoving her feet into flip-flops, and pulling her hair back into a ponytail. She shoved Ben’s phone into her pocket along with her own, grabbed the box, and stormed out the door.

The bus slows, preparing to stop at Lexington Avenue. If she gets off here, she can walk a few blocks to get on the subway heading to the Bronx, where she’ll transfer to the bus that will take her to out to the beach. Or she can ride one block farther to Third Avenue, grab an uptown bus there, and then transfer to yet another bus in the Bronx. Either way, she’ll still have to lug this stuff around in the heat.

All of that just to find Ben at the beach, give him back his stuff—and, let’s face it, a piece of your mind.

In the heart of the suburbs, Cherry Street is lined with the kinds of houses Ivy used to picture when she imagined marrying Mr. Right and abandoning her urban studio apartment for a bucolic happily ever after.

Most of the homes she passes on her walk from the train station have front porches and shutters, garage basketball hoops and planters spilling over with summer flowers. There are strollers, tricycles, and puppies everywhere she looks. And there’s mulch, too—dark, rich bark mulch layering the garden beds and encircling the trunks of enormous trees whose branches cast dappled shade over the rooftops and pavement.

Cargo-short-wearing dads sponge suds over sports cars in driveways or ride atop fancy mowers more suited to meadows than meager patches of suburban lawn; super-trim or adorably pregnant moms in yoga pants and bouncy ponytails chat, holding paper cup lattes, while their children hit Wiffle balls or jump rope or create driveway chalk murals. Every so often they look up at the overcast sky—all of them, though not all at once—as though searching for storm clouds that might roll in and drown their perfect suburban weekend, washing away chalk masterpieces, rendering ponytails limp, spattering newly washed cars.

Ivy can’t help but think that it seems odd that Carlos’s date, Sofia, lives in this family-oriented neighborhood. Or does she?

She lied about her name; maybe she lied on her car registration, too.

But this is where the BMW’s license plate is registered, according to Ivy’s online search—a paid search she charged to her American Express card, along with this morning’s train ticket. That’s the only card she has that isn’t maxed out, because there’s no monthly limit. You just have to pay it off in full every month.

Which she won’t be able to do.

But at least she has over a month to worry about it.

Right now all she has to worry about is finding Carlos.

Still . . .
here
?

It doesn’t seem likely.

Maybe Mutton Chops back at the parking garage got the car wrong—by accident, or deliberately. The BMW in question wasn’t registered to a woman named Sofia; its owner was listed as a Carmen Rodriguez in Vanderwaal, up in Westchester County.

Assuming that was Sofia’s real name, Ivy had immediately looked for Carmen Rodriguez online, using Google and the InTune Web site. But the name is far too common—with wide variations in spelling—to have yielded anything useful, even when she added the Cherry Street address that accompanied the license plate registration.

According to real estate records, the house is owned by someone named Alex Jones and has been for many years. But that doesn’t mean Carmen isn’t a tenant there.

There was nothing to do, Ivy realized, but visit in person and hope that Carmen herself answers the door, and that she’ll turn out to be the brunette who called herself Sofia on InTune.

What if she does?

What if she doesn’t?

Ivy hasn’t managed to think that far ahead, though she’s had plenty of time during the long walk from the commuter train station. She’s spent most of it trying to piece together scenarios for what might have happened to Carlos that Friday night.

If Mutton Chops was telling the truth about Carlos being inebriated when he and his date drove away, any number of disasters could have unfolded.

What if he died of alcohol poisoning, or choked on his own vomit, and the woman got scared and covered it up?

Or what if it was drugs, and not alcohol—the kind of drugs the health teacher used to warn kids about when she was in school, where you could become dangerously addicted by just trying it one time? Maybe that’s what happened, and now he’s living on the streets, in search of a fix . . .

Or maybe he spent the night with his date, fell in love with her, and they ran off together—a possibility that had entered Ivy’s mind long before the police officers paid her a visit, and seems only slightly less tragic, all things considered, than the one where Carlos is a street junkie.

He was supposed to be her own Mr. Right. Maybe he still can be. Maybe, if she can just find him, he’ll realize she loved him enough to come looking for him. Maybe the two of them can move to a neighborhood just like this one. Maybe it’s not too late for her fairy-tale ending after all.

Checking the addresses—49 . . . 47 . . . 45—she realizes that she’s almost reached Carmen Rodriguez’s house. It’s an even number, 42, which means it’s on the opposite side of the street. As she crosses, she notices a woman watching from the porch of number 45.

That’s reassuring. If Carmen Rodriguez turns out to be some kind of crazed psycho serial killer, she’s not going to try anything at her own front door in broad daylight under the neighbor’s watchful gaze. And Ivy doesn’t intend to cross the threshold into the house. If, after talking to the woman, she believes she knows something about what happened to Carlos, then she’ll have to go to the police.

Even if it means risking your job?

She thinks of her overdue mortgage, and the maxed-out credit cards, and the latest Amex charges she can’t afford.

Nothing has changed. She can’t lose her job. Maybe there’s some other way . . .

“Peter, it’s Gabriela—on Ben’s phone, obviously. Somehow I wound up with it last night and . . . and I want to get it back to him, but I don’t know where to find him. I thought I could maybe leave it with you or with his doorman if you tell me where his building is, but . . . you’re not picking up. Okay, never mind.”

Standing on the corner of Third Avenue and 79th Street with the box on the sidewalk between her feet, Gaby disconnects the call and toys with Ben’s phone.

She’d jumped off the crosstown bus and called Peter on a whim. As much as she dreaded the thought of talking to him, had he answered the phone, her dilemma would have been solved.

Now her only option is to continue the journey to Orchard Beach.

Not your only option. You can always lug all this stuff back home. Or throw it into that garbage can.

She eyes the one on the corner, close enough to touch.

No. She might be furious . . . but she’s not cruel.

Hearing the unmistakable whoosh from a bus’s air brakes, she turns to see the Bronx-bound BxM7 coming up the avenue.