We Are Here (28 page)

David’s parents had died in a car accident while he was living in New York City, a flashback he very seldom referred to in his personal narrative. He’d told Talia about it one afternoon because it was similar to what had happened to the guy she used to go out with. Dawn knew about it, of course. Otherwise, if the subject came up—around an inquiry as to whether he was seeing family at Thanksgiving, for example—he’d explain the situation and weather the inevitable sympathy, not volunteering the information that both his parents had been shit-faced drunk at the time, his father moreover high, and they’d been lucky not to take out an innocent family who’d happened to be driving late along the same highway.

His parents’ car had gone off the road and smacked into a tree, and that was that. After their death he’d gone home from New York, sold the house and almost everything in it. He’d wandered the country for two years before settling on Rockbridge after meeting and falling in love with Dawn. He’d opened one of the storage boxes when they’d moved into this house—hence his mother’s pottery piece downstairs—and then resealed it and never thought about it or the other two again. Reopening them now did not help his mood. He missed his parents, of course. He had loved them. His father’s battered typewriter didn’t bring him back, however, nor the brooch his mother had been wearing the night of the crash. A pair of their cocktail glasses did, sort of, but not in a good way.

His impulse was to seal the boxes back up again and either heft them up into the attic or take them down to the dump. He knew the former wouldn’t play with Dawn, however—she was not someone who tolerated things merely being stowed; it was a miracle they’d lasted this long in the spare room—and the latter didn’t seem right.

You can’t throw the past away. You have to integrate it into your life or else it sits there just beyond the edge of your vision, dust-gathering, rotting.

The fact that you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s gone.

After forty minutes he’d given up and left the house, but walking wasn’t helping either. His mind was still full of magnets. He knew Maj and the man’s relationship to David’s life was something he needed to work out—or at least
remember
. He couldn’t do that and it scared him.

He knew he ought to talk to Dawn about it, too. He didn’t want to sound crazy, however, especially with the news they’d had. The second reason was … harder to put his finger on. The situation made him feel vulnerable and exposed. It felt like a sleeping dog that should be let lie forever. Maybe even fed a little doctored steak, just to make sure.

He slowed as he came in view of Roast Me, considering an afternoon coffee. He couldn’t face talking to Talia about her book, however. What you create is like a person, as is the process itself. Talking to someone who’s succeeding in writing when you’re not is like hearing them describe just how much great and experimental sex they’re having with your partner.

He could lie, maybe, saying he’d got to the end of the book and it was great—but then she’d ask him about the climax or something else he’d be supposed to know, and the lie would be exposed.

He got caught out. Talia wasn’t inside, for once, but stomping around clearing cups off the benches built into the window. Without running across the road, he couldn’t avoid her.

“Hey,” she said. Her smile was brief and her voice quiet. She did not ask him about his word count. In fact, that single word of greeting appeared to be all.

“I haven’t had a chance to read any more of your book,” David said, disconcerted. “Been busy.”

“No problemo.”

Concerned she might be pissed at him, he checked her face. It was blank. Uncharacteristically so. Usually Talia’s weather was right there for everyone to read.

“I’m still loving it. I definitely think you’ve got something.”

She straightened, several cups in each large hand, and blew a strand of hair off her hot face. “That’s great, David. Thank you.”

“Are you … okay?”

“Sure. Why?”

“I don’t know. You just seem …”

Every time he’d seen Talia she’d been extremely Talia-like. Today she wasn’t. She seemed older. Old, in fact.

She glanced down the street. When she looked back, it was if something had changed, as if—as when he’d first offered to read her manuscript—many years and an accretion of events had been sanded off her face. “Where do people go, do you think?”

“Go?”

“When they die.”

David shrugged. “No idea. Why?”

“I just figured you might have a take. Because of, you know.”

David knew she meant his parents, but had never given the matter any thought. He said so.

“I always assumed they went up to heaven,” she said. “Or maybe … maybe if there
was
no heaven, then they just stopped, bang, that’s the end of it. Or if there
was
anything left, some kernel that doesn’t die or fade away because the body starts to rot, then maybe that part was locked away in what’s left, under the earth. In the bones and stuff.”

David wasn’t sure what he could say. He didn’t know what she might be hoping for.

“But maybe that’s
not
it, huh? Maybe they
do
go somewhere, just not heaven. Or hell, I guess. Maybe it’s such a big
thing
, death, that you can wind up out of sync with where you used to be. Like getting thrown clean out through the windshield of a car. But bigger than that. Getting thrown so hard that you wind up miles and miles away.” She glanced at him. “You think?”

“Could be,” David said. It felt weak, but she didn’t seem to be listening to his contribution anyway.

“Saw George this morning,” she went on, blindsiding him. “He’s having a hard time. He’s still sure he saw someone on the road through the forest, and he gave the guy a lift into town and that he vanished when they got here. Weird, huh? Like bringing a ghost home.”

David opened his mouth—this
was
something he could contribute to, even if it’d just be the same gentle dismissal he’d given before—but he hesitated, as he finally put two and two together.

The hitchhiker was Maj, of course—Maj on his way to visit him. It must have been.

Talia mistook his silence. “But that’s just friend-of-a-friend bullshit, right?” she said, and laughed—looking like herself again. “Anyway, stop bugging me, asshole. There’s people waiting inside. I must repair to the counter, my wonders to perform.”

She kicked the door and strode back into the coffee shop, bellowing to the people in line that she was coming already; stop your fucking whining for the love of God.

David walked away quickly.

Meanwhile, fresh back from school and sitting in the kitchen, Dawn decided she simply could not face marking any more homework. She was finding it hard to focus. Could be hormones, she supposed. Could also be …

She looked up.

Directly above the kitchen was the spare room—the soon-to-be-nursery. She’d done everything she could, everything possible without David going through his boxes. Until he’d dispersed their contents she couldn’t put dust sheets down properly, and that meant she couldn’t repaint the room. She knew he was only being slow because he was trying to concentrate on the new book, and understood that meant he had to look inward and found it hard to maintain hooks into the real world. His “Eddie Moscone” phase, she called it, after one of the kids in her class. That was fine, and understandable.

But she wanted
to get on
.

It occurred to her that perhaps she could go up and take a look through his boxes. Make easy calls on what he’d want to keep and what he would not. He’d likely want most of it—he had few enough mementoes of his childhood. Weirdly little, in her view, but she was a constitutional hoarder who occasionally took herself in hand. David was the opposite. He seemed to have left his past behind like yesterday’s rain.

Going through the boxes would take only fifteen minutes. If she couldn’t help, she couldn’t help. But if she could presort them into little piles for him, it might finally get the thing done.

Plus … it would be a good excuse not to sit getting frustrated about how tough some kids found it to work out what you had left if you took a nickel and six cents away from a quarter, for the love of God.

She made herself a cup of herbal tea and cheerfully took it upstairs.

It wasn’t hard to find Reinhart. Something that might give patrons of the world’s restaurants pause for thought, did they but know, is that the staff in the places they drop so much cash in are often one step from the criminal fraternity. Not through character—there are plenty of cooks, waiters, and bar staff whose moral fiber would stand favorable comparison with normal citizens, and walk all over that of the average banker or CEO. There’s a degree of recreational drug use, however, and some of the people washing pans and dishes are doing so because their record makes it hard for them to do much else. A lot of the restaurant business happens at night, too, and that’s always tended to be when the bad guys ply their ancient trades, or spend time propping up the kind of bars where kitchen workers may also go after work.

Bottom line is, I asked some questions and this led me on to other people in other bars, where I asked more questions, and pretty soon I knew where to go.

It wasn’t hard to find him, and I probably should have given that more thought at the time, but I did not.

It was in what you’re supposed to call Clinton these days but will always be Hell’s Kitchen to anyone but realtors. You don’t have to look hard to find vestiges of the pregentrified voice of the area—you can’t just line a couple blocks with bistros and expect everything else to disappear. The restaurant was called ‘. Yes, apostrophe. According to their website, this reflected the executive chef’s belief that something was missing from contemporary American cuisine. Personally, I suspected it meant something was missing from the chef’s brain, but he certainly didn’t lack patrons. From the sidewalk you could see the place was full even on a Wednesday at lunchtime. Everybody looked very nice, and they sat in a space that was light and airy and dotted with round tables accented with linen and single white blooms in delicate little vases in the center. Staff buzzed around in gray slacks and lilac shirts and none of them looked like they’d been within shouting distance of illegal in their life. One of the guys in the kitchen had, though, and he’d told me to look for a table in the middle.

Reinhart sat with two other men. You could tell it was a business meeting and that the other guys were legit. Both wore charcoal suits, though one had removed his jacket to reveal a pale blue shirt. Reinhart was talking in a sober, considered fashion. He looked tamped down, certainly compared to the man I’d seen in the church a couple of nights before.

He finished his presentation. The men nodded, looked at one another, lips pouted, as if whatever proposal had just been made was very hard to argue with.

Reinhart sat back, wiping his mouth with his napkin. Then he looked up and saw me. I took this as my cue to walk in off the street. A woman in a smart pantsuit tried to intercept me, but she was not hard to avoid.

I stood over the table. “Good food?”

Reinhart looked up. “Very good,” he said. “The vongole is superb. I take lunch here almost every day. But … I suppose you knew that.”

“Correct,” I said, keeping my voice low so as not to impact on the eating pleasure of other diners, or cause anyone to call the cops just yet. Pantsuit had retreated to her podium but was keeping an eye on me. “A creature of habit. That means either you’re dumb or very confident. Unless you got someone at a table somewhere in the room? If so, they’re kind of slow to their feet.”

I made a show of looking around, though of course I’d done so before I walked in. I’m not a total fool. There had been no male onetops nor pairs of serious-looking guys casting casual glances across the room. “I guess not. Which means either you
are
dumb, or you don’t believe someone would have the balls.”

“You still look familiar,” Reinhart said, as if I were background music. “Just can’t work out where from.”

I tried not to clench my fists. “I’m going to become
very
familiar if you don’t listen. Last night you had a conversation on the street with a friend of mine.”

Reinhart glanced apologetically at his lunch companions. “Are you the boyfriend? That makes sense. Two people popping up in my business, turns out they’re together. A pair of problems. I should have figured that out. Maybe I am dumb after all.”

“Nah,” I said. “Don’t think so. What do
you
think?” I asked his companions. “He seem stupid to you?”

One looked away. The other stared at the remains of his veal parmigiana as if wondering whether he should have ordered something else.

“Me neither,” I said. “So here’s the thing, Reinhart. Come near her again and I’ll hurt you.
Threaten
her and that will be the end of you. Understand?”

He looked at me with vague interest, as if trying to work out what language I was speaking in.

“Whatever your business with this man, I’d walk away,” I told the guy with the veal. “But finish your food first. Someone worked hard on that.”

The encounter did not leave me feeling good. I hadn’t understood how angry I was until confronted with Reinhart, and I’d done nothing but embarrass both him and me. People do not like being embarrassed, most of all men like him. Or me—especially when I’ve done it to myself.

I hailed a cab with no destination in mind, but after a few blocks told the driver to take me down to Chelsea. I got out on 16th, but instead of going to the church went straight to the house next door and rang the buzzer.

“Who is it?”

“John Henderson.”

There was a pause. “And?”

“I’d like to talk to you.”

“I’m afraid I’m busy right now.”

“Then I apologize for the inconvenience. But I just lit a fire under a man and I need you to explain to me what I’ve done.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Reinhart,” I said.

There was a pause, and then a click.