Virgin Territory (9 page)

“Can it wait till tomorrow?” I ask Doug.

“It’s okay,” Marie says to me quietly. She steadies herself by taking hold of the banister with one hand, and then, with the other, she grabs my arm. She seems to know what’s coming.

“I just telephoned over to Crestview,” he begins. “They told me you had no visitors yesterday. No one signed you out. Did you just walk out of there by yourself?”

“Yes,” she says, and her face brightens just a bit, as though she now remembers yesterday. “I just walked like Jesus over the water. I was like a miracle.”

“But how did you get over to the golf course?”

“I drove,” she says. “That’s right. I wanted to see what was going on at the golf course. I saw it on the news. So I got in my car and drove over there.”

I can tell that Doug doesn’t have the heart to break the news
to her that she no longer can drive. He had her license taken away three years ago because he said it wasn’t safe anymore for her to get behind the wheel. And he was right. She was always forgetting where she lived, and eventually Doug got tired of having to look for her along some highway and then making arrangements to have her Ford Escort towed back to the house. Then there was the incident with the dry cleaner; Doug had to pay a lot of money to replace their plate-glass window after Marie’s Escort backed into it. When she was moved into
the place
, Doug decided that there would be no going anywhere for Marie, not unless someone was with her.

I’m standing on the stairs looking down at Doug and hoping that he won’t force Marie to experience the loss of her Ford Escort all over again. Once was plenty.

“Get some sleep,” Doug says as he retreats into the living room.

The next morning, I’m stumbling around the kitchen, throwing open cupboards and drawers, feeling my way toward the cereal and the milk that I call my breakfast. I see a guy, a stranger, sitting quietly at the kitchen counter; he’s pouring over some papers that are spread out in front of him. He’s a dead ringer for Doug, except for the fact that his hair is combed flat and he’s wearing a collared shirt and actual shoes.

“Why aren’t you at work?” I ask him.

“I’m taking Marie back to
the place
. How come
you’re
not at work?”

“The club is closed today.”

“Closed?”

“Feldner is freaking out and doesn’t know what to do, so he shut it down until this thing blows over.”

Then Doug asks, “Has your grandmother mentioned anyone lately? I mean, anyone who might be taking her out of
the place
and driving her around?”

“Frankie Rey?” I suggest with a smirk.

“Yeah. Right,” he replies. “And I’m having lunch with Lady Gaga.”

Frankie Rey is Marie’s friend. She’s been talking about him on and off for years, and though I’d give my eye teeth to meet the guy, I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon. He’s imaginary. We believe that she’s assembled Frankie Rey from the bits and pieces of people she met while traveling around the world. For example, Frankie Rey was born in the country of Colombia, and when he was eighteen he became a
ladrón de tumbas
, a grave robber. He dug for gold and precious metals buried in the graves that were centuries old, and then he sold the stuff to local dealers for a profit.

“You’re kidding me, right?” Doug asked the first time she tried out this story on us.

“Oh, but he hasn’t done that for ages,” she informed us.
“Not since he moved to Florida and started working at the automotive place.”

I have a theory that Marie invented Frankie Rey to make her life seem more exciting. After traveling the world, Marie is forced to spend day after day in a minimum-security holding environment for the elderly, and that must seem pretty dull by comparison. Who can blame her? Everybody deserves a Frankie Rey. Sometimes when my life in Florida feels flat-lined dull, I think,
Too bad Frankie Rey isn’t real. He’d take me out of here. We’d go to South America and open up a hotel on the beach, where Marie could live and wander around without being a menace to the community. He’d teach me how to rob a grave, and we’d make more money than Doug ever dreamed of
. Like I said, everybody deserves a Frankie Rey.

“So what kind of trouble you up to this morning?” Doug asks me as I head out the door to meet my friends.

“I thought maybe I’d go into town with my AK-47 and mow down everyone in sight,” I say offhandedly.

“Sounds good,” he replies without looking up from his papers. “Just be back here in time for dinner.”

The Food Shack is a burger-and-fries joint located not far from the golf course. It’s a popular hangout not only for the faithful of the Blessed Virgin Mary but also for the local policemen, traffic cops, rubberneckers, and the army of TV and newspaper
reporters who are on top of the biggest story to hit Jupiter since Tiger Woods decided to build a house here.

Angela is pacing back and forth, talking into her cell phone, arranging her hair, and occasionally checking herself out in various reflective surfaces. I’m late, but when she looks up and spots me walking through the door, she pats the padded seat next to the place where she’s parked her stuff.

“Sit, sit,” Angela says. “I’ll be off the phone in two secs. It’s my mother. They still won’t let anyone onto the grounds of the golf course, and she’s thinking maybe we ought to move on from this town. You got any connections over there?”

“Not really,” I tell her. “I’m just a caddy. I could sneak her in, though.”

She gives me a shrug. I sit down and pretend to be listening to the conversation between Des and Crispy, who are nestled into the booth, but really I’m busy checking out Angela’s legs. Incredible to think that only a few months ago those legs couldn’t do squat, and now they’re as tanned and toned as a cheerleader’s.

“What do
you
think?” Desirée asks me.

“Uh? Think?” I mutter, trying to look as though I’ve been paying attention, but no one is fooled. “About what?”

“Don’t drag him into it,” says Crispy. “Just admit you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re repeating stuff you’ve heard in church.”

“I do too know what I’m talking about,” she says, practically
spitting the words at him. “It means just what it says. It means to turn the other cheek.”

“Wrong,” Crispy says in a singsong voice.

“Then what?” she wants to know.

“During the time of Jesus, Jews were second-class citizens—slaves, really. And there was a law on the books that allowed Roman soldiers to slap a Jewish person, but only with the back of his hand.”

“This was an actual law?” Des asks.

And here he demonstrates. He’s the Roman, and I’m the Jew. He raises his right hand and slowly, very slowly, with his knuckles facing away from him, traces a path from his left shoulder to my right cheek. He’s totally showing off, but no one calls him on it.

“Boom. What Jesus was
actually
saying? If a Roman slaps you, you should offer him your
other
cheek, your
left
cheek. That way the Roman guy is forced to deal with you like an equal, with a closed fist. He actually has to punch you man to man.”

Crispy demonstrates again, but this time his right hand is bunched into a hard ball of bone and headed slo-mo for the left side of my jaw.

“Boom. It was a brilliant strategy. This is civil disobedience, people. Not some namby-pamby, hit-me-one-more-time crap.”

“Where’d you learn all that?” I ask him.

Angela sidles into the booth beside me, and once she’s settled I can feel her hip bone pressing against mine. I’m having trouble breathing.

“Just something I picked up,” Crispy replies, and then he disappears behind the cover of his sunglasses, where no one can read his expression. Even though we can’t prove what he says, it sounds credible enough.

Desirée’s phone blings a text message, and she says, “I gotta meet my mom at the golf course after lunch, so we ought to get going if we’re going.”

“Where we going?” I ask.

They all exchange a conspiratorial look.

“Well, we had this idea,” Angela begins. “Y’see, we don’t get to hang out at home so much these days.”

“In fact, not at all,” Crispy interjects.

“Laundromats, diners, motels, Internet cafés—but never home,” Angela continues. “And right about now I’d give my whole allowance if I could just take a bath in an actual tub with real bubbles.”

“We’re not going to steal anything,” Desirée insists. “Nothing like that. We just want to hang out in someone’s house, watch some high-def TV, maybe eat a sandwich. No one will even know we were there.”

“You mean break into someone’s house?” I ask, trying to keep my eyes from bugging out of my skull and my voice down to a whisper. “Here? In Jupiter? Are you nuts?”

“Well,” Crispy announces, “there’s always
your
house.”

“No,” I say. “That’s not going to happen. My dad doesn’t let me have people in when he’s not there.” And that’s the truth.
He’s always reminding me that it’s Marie’s house and we have to respect her rights even though she doesn’t live there anymore and wouldn’t know the difference.

Angela leans in so close to me I can smell the sweetness of her lip gloss and feel her warm breath on my cheek. I watch her mouth move as she says, “(a) Want something” and “(b) Take a risk.” I imagine the two of us lying in a great big California king bed, making out, and maybe going all the way.

Then she turns to Des and Crispy and says, “What do you guys think? I mean, about Alex. You think he’s up for his first Virgin Club challenge? Breaking and entering.”

The girls hustle themselves into the ladies’ room, leaving Crispy and me alone. There’s definitely excitement in the air, but it also feels a lot like fear. We could get in a lot of trouble, but the adrenaline that’s pumping through my bloodstream is trying to convince me that this would make me a hero in everybody’s eyes, so go for it.

Crispy and I step outside to hang on the hot pavement. I try to act as though we’re not a couple of juvenile delinquents with a plan that involves breaking and entering, but my leg is shaking like a flipped coin that won’t settle.

“Are you sure about this?” I ask him.

“No,” he replies as he nervously picks lint out of his pants pocket and sends the little bits of white fluff falling to the ground like fake snow at a Christmas pageant. “Are you?”

Neither of us can say no to Angela, and we both know it.

“Impressive, that stuff about Roman law,” I say to Crispy. “You made it up, right?”

“No. It’s for real. My mom did her dissertation on first-century Roman law. She wrote about its impact on the New Testament. She’s kind of an expert on the subject. Now she’s doing research on a book about the Blessed Virgin appearing in places like Jupiter. I’m here because … well, she had this idea that she and I needed to do some serious mother-son bonding.”

“How’s that going?”

“You seen her lately?” he asks, giving the statement an ironic lift. When I don’t respond, he adds, “Right.”

More snow from his pocket, and then …

“And what’s your story? I mean, for real.”

I give him the 411 on my life. I mention the fact that I once lived in Manhattan and also that my mother has been dead for years. He wants to know if I was in New York on 9/11.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “But we weren’t allowed to go back to our house. No one was. It was weird. They said it was because of security issues and health concerns and all that. But when we finally were allowed to go home, I saw why they’d been keeping us away. It was pretty bad. All that ash had gotten into everything, every corner. I don’t remember much, but I’ll never forget the sight of my home that first day back. The whole place was covered in white dust. Looked like a ghost of itself.”

I decide not to tell him the other part of the story, the part
about how Kat died of ovarian cancer on the night of September 10, 2001, at 8:45 p.m. He wouldn’t be able to make sense of the fact that at the moment when the first plane struck the first tower, Kat’s body was already cold, lying uptown at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, waiting to be transferred to the funeral home on 14th Street, where she would be cremated and turned into a pile of ash and poured into an urn.