Everyone’s a couple years older, but just like our building, still pretty much the same, I realize with relief. Selena and Maggie are on the faded orange couch going over some kind of magazine, their shifting weights making the plastic cover crackle every now and then. Gabe is on the floor working on some kind of homework in front of the TV. Yeah, I’m going to have to break that habit now. My brother is smart—always was. If any of us can go to college, it’s him.
The door shuts behind me with a loud creak, and almost immediately, the bustle of the room stops. Selena and Maggie are actually quiet for once in their lives, and Gabe pops up, his eyes big in his thin, horsey little face. His gaze alights on me, and a second later he’s up and off the floor, launching his skinny body across the room.
“Nico!” he shouts as he throws himself at me.
And I laugh. For the first time in two years, I laugh out loud as my sisters also clamber off the couch to squeeze the life out of me. I am covered by my siblings, with the first touch in a long time that’s not angry. I am overcome by the smells of home: the rice floating out of the tiny kitchen, the flowery scent of Selena’s cheap perfume, the dusty musk of bodies that sleep too close together. But I squeeze them all, because fuck if it doesn’t feel good to see them. People who don’t hate me. People who aren’t indifferent to me. My family.
“When did you get back?”
“Did you see how big I grew? I’m almost as tall as Selena now!”
“You got huge!”
“Did you know Maggie’s got a boyfriend?”
Suddenly they’re all throwing questions and comments at me as we push and laugh, my sisters looking me up and down like a piece of meat, Gabe flexing his tiny muscles while he prods at mine. I’m happy for the first time in years. I’ve seen them all a few times, when Alba took them up to visit. Selena and Maggie came for my birthday last year; Gabe always wanted to visit at Christmas. But the trip to Tryon is costly and long. It’s been months, almost a year. It feels so good to see them, no matter how annoying they used to be. God damn it feels fuckin’ good to laugh.
“Nico?”
Her voice, that voice I’ve only heard over a scratchy phone connection every Sunday, cuts through the room like a knife. Everyone goes silent, and my brother and sisters fall off me like the skin of an onion, breaking a natural path from me to the kitchen. My mother stands in the doorway, winding a dishtowel tightly around her hand.
She looks the same as I last saw her when we said goodbye in the courtroom. Young, too young to have three teenagers and a ten-year-old, her oldest—me—almost grown. Small and sturdy, with dark skin the color of coffee with just a touch of milk. Big, almost black eyes that she gave to all of her kids, fringed with thick lashes. Bristly dark hair threaded with gray, pulled into a small, tight knot at the base of her neck. The same grubby apron I’ve seen all my life covers the hand-me-down clothes she gets from Alba.
“Hola, mami,” I whisper, lapsing into the Spanish I’ve barely spoken in two years. The feel of it on my tongue is strange and familiar at the same time. “I’m home.”
She blinks, and I see the wet of tears cloud her big eyes. The sight of it almost makes me tear up too. My mother doesn’t cry. This is a woman who has seen some rough shit in her life, way worse than this building, this neighborhood. This is a woman who was smuggled across the Caribbean in a raft when she was two and orphaned in the process. Who has worked her ass off her entire life to make sure her kids don’t have to go through the things she did, and who didn’t even cry when her oldest son fucked up and was taken away in handcuffs.
But now I’m back. And it’s my mother’s face, crumpling the way it does, that finally breaks through this shell I’ve built over the past two years.
“Ven pa’ca.”
She gestures hurriedly, and in a second, I’ve dropped my bag, wrapped her in my arms, and pulled her close. She smells the same: like air freshener and rice and wool sweaters. Her tears come––I can feel them on my shoulder. She shakes. I’m surprised. I don’t remember her being this small.
“Ay, nene,” she says into my rough t-shirt, over and over again in Spanish. “Papito Nico.” My baby boy.
“I’m home, mami,” I tell her in a low voice, more than once so she’ll remember. Or maybe it’s so I’ll remember. “I’m home.”
My heart is full, like a cup that’s been bone-dry for years, set out in a rain. And then, just as quickly, it’s emptied again, kicked over as a shadow falls across me and my mother.
“Nico,” he says.
Some things do change. My shoulders tense. His voice isn’t as deep as I remember.
“Good to have you back, man.”
I release Ma and look up. Like hers, the eyes of David Esteban Martin Sanchez—names I’ll never forget because of the way he used to make me repeat them in time with his belt buckle—haven’t changed. They are deep brown with flecks of gray. It’s a dull steel that doesn’t cut through the room, but saws, over and over again.
He seems smaller than before, even though he still has about three inches on me. A native New Yorker from the South Bronx, David has always talked about this city like it belongs to him more than anyone else. He’s not my dad, who cut out before I was even born. Not even my stepdad, since my mother can’t get married. David is Gabe’s father, and the dude who keeps coming back to this family for the last ten years like a bad cough we can’t get rid of.
Memories start popping off in my head, like a camera flash that’s stuck. Gabe crying in the corner. David with his fist lightly curled. Eyes like murder as he chased my mother into the bedroom with a folded belt. The screams the door could never block out.
Two years ago, he had at least eight inches on me and fifty pounds. Two years ago, I might have flinched under his sharp gaze, knowing that when I spoke up, he’d turn those fists, that belt, on me. But now I’ve dealt with enough shit that David’s fists and belt don’t scare me anymore. I look at him straight on, and this time, he’s the one who looks away first.
“That’s right,” I say. For the first time, I’m aware of just how low my voice has become. “I’m back.”
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The Other Man
An Excerpt
“Can you walk a bit, doll?” I asked as Nina hurried on a gray cashmere coat. “Might warm us up. I need a bite to eat after all that wine.”
“I—yes, I could eat. Somewhere close, though?” She looked at her feet. “I’m so sorry, but I’m afraid these shoes weren’t made for long treks.”
“Don’t ever apologize for those shoes.”
I was rewarded with another mild blush and a murmur of something like, “I’m glad you like them.” I took Nina’s hand, and for a split second, the cold disappeared as a shock of heat passed through my fingertips. Jesus, Mary, this was some kind of electricity.
Nina started as if she’d felt it too. Her bright eyes found mine, then drifted to my lips. For a moment, I considered kissing her. I’d wanted to for hours at that point, and I was pretty sure she wanted it as well. But she had a skittish quality that reminded me of the stray cats by my house, like if I took a step too soon, she’d bolt.
Instead, I raised her hand to examine it. Her skin was so fair, almost translucent. I could practically see her pulse moving. Slowly, I pressed a kiss over the lace of veins that crisscrossed just below her knuckles.
When I dropped our hands, she had her other one pressed to her shirt, as if to hold her heart in place. I couldn’t blame her. One brief touch, and mine was practically jumping out of my chest.
“You all right there, beautiful?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes, I—I just thought…”
I cocked my head. “You thought what?”
She blinked, looking a bit embarrassed. “I thought you were going to kiss me.”
I knew it.
I shrugged. “I thought about it. But I figured I’d be a gentleman and wait until you asked.”
At that, am
usement danced over her glossy features. “A gentleman from the Bronx,” she murmured.
Her. It was always her.
But Nina Astor was a damn mirage, to the point where I wondered if she had been real at all.
Two months after the night that changed my life, I was searching for a ghost.
It was time to accept it.
Nina Astor didn’t exist.
The rain was really starting to rap on the brim of my hat by the time I reached Jane and Eric’s brownstone on West Seventy-Sixth Street. I pressed the buzzer and faced the security camera. It took a few minutes—Eric and Jane had a team set up downstairs to vet any visitors. A few minutes later, the door buzzed open.
“Hey, Tony.”
The security head nodded at me as I jogged up to the fourth floor. The whole place was a giant construction mess. Eric had recently bought out the building and was having it restored to a regular house for the two of them. I sniffed. Some house. It made my little brick place in Red Hook look like a storage shed.
Two minutes later, Eric opened the door, clearly just off work himself in the remains of another impeccably tailored suit. Takes one to know one, I suppose. Just because I was a civil servant didn’t mean I had to look like one. But there was a big difference. I bought my Armani threads from my sister’s secondhand shop uptown. Eric probably had his made custom, brand fuckin’ new.
Still, he wasn’t flashy the way you’d expect someone worth several billion dollars to be. As far as I knew, he had worked hard to hide the fact for a long time. I’d heard the stories, of course, of how Eric de Vries had walked away from his birthright. Gone to law school, like me. Started his own firm in Boston, only to be lured back to New York to save his family’s fortune. But I could have saved the guy a decade and told him he wasn’t ever going to be anything other than the head of a powerful family. Money has a funny way of weaving into people’s DNA. You can’t hide that kind of breeding.
“Hey,” I said as I followed Eric inside. “I was on my way uptown and thought I would drop in. I, uh, have some news.”
“That so?” Eric shook my hand. “Need a glass of wine to tell it?”
“It is after five o’clock.” I nodded toward the couch where Jane was sitting. “Hey, Jane.”
Eric went to get us all drinks in the kitchen without another word. I’d been here enough to where my unannounced visits weren’t much of a surprise anymore. For the same reason that Leona and I usually spoke in veiled terms, I made these updates in person.
Jane got up from the couch to greet me after I took off my trench coat and hung it with my hat.
“Hey, you,” she said. “Been a minute.”
“You’re looking good,” I told her honestly.
And it was true. When Eric had brought Jane home from Korea, she’d been completely traumatized, much too thin and ghostly. Now the color in her cheeks had returned, along with her trademark cat-eye glasses and penchant for needling her husband. We had the latter in common. I didn’t linger as she gave me a kiss on the cheek—as much fun as it was to rile Eric, I knew all too well how protective he could be over his wife’s affections. It was only last Thanksgiving that he had tried to clock me over the turkey for offering her a hug.
That, thankfully, seemed to be firmly in the past as Eric joined Jane and me by the flickering fire, delivering us both red wine while he stayed with vodka.
“Damn.” I wasn’t well-versed in French wines, generally preferring Italian, but I knew Eric only bought the best. “This is why I really come here. What is this, a Margaux?”
Eric nodded, though Jane shrugged.
I chuckled. “You don’t know?” I asked her.
“This one has the fancy tastes. I’d probably just bring home Three-Buck Chuck every night, but Eric thinks he’s allergic to it.”
I grimaced at the idea. I didn’t have the cash to drink one of the best wines in the world like house grog, but I was with Eric on this one. I appreciated the life people like the de Vrieses led. The perfectly tailored clothes. The spacious, yet comfortable home. The best food. The best wine. The best of everything.
“Nice work if you can get it,” as they say. And if you can, why the fuck not?
“I just don’t see the point of drinking garbage,” Eric was saying while he played with his wife’s dark hair.
“Why, my dear Rockefeller,” Jane teased. “What a charmingly privileged thing to say. Leave the swill to the slums, is that right?”
In a split second, Eric’s expression went from casually opaque to completely transparent. I’d seen it before. It was their ongoing act—Jane would say things that would purposefully get under Eric’s skin until his implacable facade broke. And when it did, she obviously relished the consequences.
The hand in Jane’s hair tightened, and the atmosphere in the room crackled. Eric growled something in his wife’s ear that made her turn just a few shades lighter red than the wine in her glass. He looked just as fierce as ever, but it was clear by her expression that whatever threat he’d just made was something Jane was more than happy to receive.
I shifted in my seat. Fuck, maybe I’d blown Caitlyn off too early. I could call her now. Meet up at a hotel on the East Side. Anything to scratch that goddamn itch.
And yet, I also knew that whatever charge had just passed between them wasn’t just about sex. I knew it because for one night, I had felt it too. Something happens when two souls join the same way bodies do. Nina Astor and I had given each other everything we had that night. For the first and only time in my life, I’d been completely naked with a woman and allowed her to do the same to me.
I’d been cut open. And so fucking deep.
Do you believe in love at first sight?
Not until I saw you.
There was no going back after that. Unfortunately, it also meant nothing else could replace it once it was lost.
I shook my head. I’d already been down that rabbit hole too many times today alone. Right now, I needed to focus on the two very real people in this room who needed my help.
“So, what’s up?” Eric pulled me out of my daydream. “What’s the news?”
And into something worse.
“Well, I’m afraid it’s not very good. I got a call from my friend at the CIA. They, um, are declining to prosecute. They won’t be sending anything to the DOJ.”
“What?”
Eric exploded off the couch, nearly tossing Jane to the floor. She barely saved her wineglass, but looked too crestfallen to reply.
“What the fuck happened?” Eric demanded. “We practically gift-wrapped that indictment for them!”
I waited while he continued to spout. Jane’s normal air of mischief had completely shuttered while she toyed with her wedding rings, still loose around her fingers.
“Look,” I said once Eric had calmed down. “We’ve talked about this. You know as well as I do that the current administration is basically in Carson’s pockets. A pardon was always a possibility. Now it’s just…a reality, I guess. Unless he’s prosecuted here. At the state level.”
“We should take it to the press,” Eric said. “I’ll give an interview to the Times. Try his ass in the court of public opinion. Isn’t that how they got that campaign manager indicted in 2017? Where’s the fucking accountability?”
“I’d wait on that for a minute,” I said. “There’s another way to go. One that won’t give away your hand.”
“Like murder?” Eric muttered.
Jane elbowed him in the ribs.
To be honest, I couldn’t really blame Eric for the joke. If it had been the love of my life targeted in this way (Nina’s face again appeared in the back of my mind), I’d have probably taken my Marine-issued Beretta to the streets a long time ago.
“Kidding,” Eric said with a long drink of his vodka. “Sort of.”
“Look, maybe the feds aren’t prosecuting, but the Brooklyn DA sure as hell is,” I continued.
I proceeded to outline—vaguely—how my boss i
ntended to pick off the people surrounding John Carson, mafia-style. The Brooklyn DA’s office had been going after New York’s worst gangsters for over a hundred years. We had a process. You go after the small fish first. You cut off the whale’s food supply. And then, when he comes down to find out where his chow went, you swoop in with the net.
Maybe Carson could buy off the feds, but he didn’t have any leverage with my boss or me. We just needed the right crime. The right confession. The right jurisdiction.
I didn’t mention the file that Tiana had sent this afternoon. I wasn’t really supposed to be discussing the details with them anyway; I only wanted to give them a little peace of mind when I could. They deserved at least that much.
Eric, though, had his own ideas. Stage a secret meeting of their so-called “society.” Lure the whale into the net instead of waiting for him to swim buy.
Jane wasn’t having it.
“No,” she snapped. “He’ll know what you’re doing. He’s thought one step ahead of you this whole time. Eric, he will know.”
Eric just stared at her, clearly getting his argument together. I wasn’t sure where I stood.
On the one hand, I was plenty interested in investigating the Janus society. From the outside, it sounded like a rich-boys’ club that also sounded an awful lot like the mafia. Its members met in defunct graveyards, smuggled booze and other goods, and in general took pleasure in fucking with regular people. If Eric wanted to give me the goods, I wouldn’t argue. Especially since getting a list of members wouldn’t just help the case—it would probably make my career.
On the other hand, I understood Jane’s trepidation. It wasn’t the safest plan when both she and Eric had already been abducted by these assholes.
Before he could answer, however, the buzzer announced another visitor.
“We’re not done,” Eric said on his way to the call button. “Yeah?”
“Mrs. Gardner is here.” Tony’s voice vibrated through the fuzzy speaker.
“Oh? Sure, send her up.” Eric unlocked the door. “This should only take a minute, Zola. It’s just my cousin. She’s been a huge help with all of this shit.”
Bad Idea- The Complete Collection Page 113