Since We Fell

by Dennis Lehane

  He straddled the chair beside her. “No, really. He told me the name Manfred goes back in the family a thousand years. Says every generation has to name one kid ‘Manfred’ and he, as he put it, drew the short straw.”

  “How well do you know him?”

  “Just met him once.”

  “But you know all that about him.”

  He shrugged. “People like talking to me. My father was the same.”

  “Who was your father?” She turned her chair toward him. “Your real father.”

  “Jamie Alden,” he said brightly. “People called him Lefty.”

  “Because he was left-handed?”

  He shook his head. “Because he never met a place or a person he wouldn’t leave. Left the army without telling them, left about twenty jobs, left three wives before my mother and two more after her. He’d pop back in and out of my life until he stuck up the wrong jeweler in Philadelphia. Guy was armed to the teeth and Lefty wasn’t a shooter anyway. Guy killed my dad.” He shrugged. “Live by the sword, die by the sword, I guess.”

  “When did this happen?”

  He looked up at the ceiling as he searched his memory. “While I was at Trinity.”

  “When you got kicked out?”

  He acknowledged her scoop of that little fact with a head cock and a small smile. Stayed that way for a moment, staring across the table, and eventually nodded. “Day after I found out he was dead, yeah, I kicked the shit out of Professor Nigel Rawlins.”

  “With a plunger.”

  “It was on hand.” He chuckled suddenly at the memory.

  “What?”

  “That,” he said, “was a good day.”

  She shook her head at him. “You got thrown out of acting school for assault.”

  He nodded. “And battery.”

  “How’s that a good day?”

  “I acted on my instinct. I knew what he was doing to Caleb was wrong, and I knew what I had to do was right. Nigel kept his job, might still be teaching second-rate method-acting tips to students right now, for all I know. But I’d bet my share of the seventy million, he’ll never treat another student like he treated Caleb or the victims who came before Caleb. Because he’s got it in the back of his head that one of the other students in his class might go all Psycho Brian Alden on him and face-fuck him with a plunger. What I did that day was exactly what I needed to do.”

  “And me?” she said after a bit.

  “What about you?”

  “I don’t act on my instincts. I don’t engage the world.”

  “Sure you do. You just fell out of practice. But now you’re back, babe.”

  “Don’t call me babe.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ve been running this mining scam for, what, four years?”

  He thought about it, did some math in his head. “About that, yeah.”

  “But how long have you pretended to be Brian Delacroix?”

  Something akin to shame found his face. “On and off for almost twenty years.”

  “Why?”

  He was quiet for a long time, turning the question over as if no one had ever thought to ask him before. “Back in Providence, I was at work one night at the pizza place when a coworker said, ‘Your double’s in the bar across the street.’ So I went over and, sure enough, there was Brian Delacroix with several guys like him, looked like they came from money, and a bunch of hot girls. Long story short, I hung around the bar long enough to figure out which coat was his and I stole it. It was a beautiful coat—black cashmere with blood—red lining. Every time I put it on, I felt . . .”—he searched for the word—“. . . substantial.” His gaze was that of a little boy lost in a shopping mall. “I couldn’t wear the coat much, not in Providence, too many chances I’d run across him, but once I got bounced from Trinity, I went to New York, and I started wearing that coat everywhere. If I needed to talk myself into a job, I wore it, and the job was mine. Saw a woman I liked, I put it on, and abracadabra, she ended up in my bed. I realized pretty quick that it wasn’t the coat per se. It was what I covered with it.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him.

  “The coat,” he explained, “hid my old man bailing on me and my drunk old lady, hid the Section 8 unit we lived in that always smelled a little bit of the dude who OD’d in it just before we moved in, hid all the shitty Christmases and the birthdays we never celebrated and the WIC checks and the power getting shut off and the drunk assholes who hung around my mother and how I’d probably just become one of those drunk assholes someday in the life of a woman just like my mother. I’d have the same nothing jobs and the same barroom stories and put some kids into the world I’d neglect until they grew up to hate me. But none of that was in my future when I put on that coat. I put that coat on and I wasn’t Brian Alden, I was Brian Delacroix. And being Brian Delacroix on his worst day always trumped being Brian Alden on his best.”

  The confession seemed to exhaust him and embarrass him in equal measure. After looking at the wainscoting along the wall for a bit, he sighed and glanced over at the papers his sister had signed. He turned one of them upside down on the table. “The trick to forging a signature is to see it as a shape, not a signature. Try to duplicate the shape.”

  “But then it’ll be upside down.”

  “Oh, right, I wouldn’t have thought of that. We might as well quit then.”

  She elbowed him. “Shut up.”

  “Ooof.” He rubbed his rib cage. “I’ll teach you how to do it right side up, once you master upside down. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough.” She put her pen to the page.

  In the spare bedroom, she could hear him on the other side of the wall, first as he turned back and forth in the bed, and then as he began to snore. So she knew he was on his back then, which is when he snored, never when he was on his side. It also meant his mouth would be open. Typically, she’d nudge him—gently, it never took much—and he would turn on his side. She pictured herself doing so now but that would mean climbing in bed with him, and she didn’t trust herself to do that and stay clothed.

  On one hand, this was the definition of insanity—her life could end tomorrow or even tonight because of this man. No other reason. He’d unleashed demons from their basement cages who would not stop until she was dead or in prison. So to feel a sexual pull toward him was batshit.

  But, looked upon another way, her life could end tomorrow or even tonight, and that knowledge opened up every pore and receptor she had. It transformed and sharpened everything she saw, smelled, felt. She could hear the ping of water moving through the pipes and smell metal in the river and hear rodents scuttle along the foundation. Her flesh felt as if it had been freshly slathered over her body this morning. She bet if she tried to guess the thread count of these sheets she’d come close, and her blood raced through her veins like a train moving across a desert at night. She closed her eyes and imagined waking as she had once, in the first months of their relationship, to find his head buried between her thighs and his tongue and lips moving softly, ever so softly, along her folds, which were already as wet as the bath she’d been taking in her dream. When she’d come that morning she kicked her left heel into his hip so hard she left a bruise. He grasped the fresh injury, still working the kinks out of his jaw, looking so silly but so sexy at the same time, and she was giggling and still trembling from the orgasm, still, in fact, receiving small electric aftershocks as she apologized. She didn’t even wipe herself off his mouth before she kissed him, and once she started kissing him, she couldn’t stop until she had to take a gulp of air, a big ravenous gasp of it. He’d refer to that kiss over the years, say it was the best he’d ever had, that she climbed so far into him with that kiss he could feel her swimming in the darkness of himself. And after she’d brought him to climax and they lay in the wreckage of the bed with stupid grins and sweaty brows, she wondered aloud if sex was its own mini life cycle.

  “How so?” he asked.

  “Well, it starts with a
thought or a tingle but something small and then it grows.”

  He looked down at himself. “Or shrinks.”

  “Well, yeah, after. But for the sake of my argument, it grows and grows and builds in power and then there’s the explosion and after that a kind of death or dying, a diminishing of expectation, and usually you close your eyes and lose consciousness.”

  She opened her eyes now in the strange bed and assumed the reason she was contemplating sex with a man she currently hated was because of her proximity to death. And even though her rage at him was as close to the surface as her top layer of skin, she had to tamp down the urge to slide out of this bed, pad barefoot around the corner into his room, and wake him the way he’d woken her that morning.

  Then she realized it wasn’t sex she wanted. Not at all. It wasn’t even touch.

  She walked down the hall and let herself into his room. His breathing changed as she closed the door softly behind her. She knew he’d woken and was trying to adjust his eyes to the darkness as she removed her T-shirt and underwear and left them at the door. She climbed onto the bed, but did so in the opposite direction, her back to the footboard, her feet up by his elbow.

  “Can you see me?” she said.

  “Mostly.” He placed a hand on the top of her foot but otherwise didn’t move.

  “I need you to see me. That’s all I want, nothing else right now.”

  “Okay.”

  She took a minute to compose herself. She didn’t have a firm grasp on what she was doing here, only that it was mandatory in some way. Essential. “I told you about Widdy.”

  “The girl in Haiti, yeah.”

  “The one I got killed.”

  “You didn’t—”

  “I got her killed. I didn’t kill her myself,” Rachel said, “but she was right—if I’d let them take her four, even two hours, earlier, they wouldn’t have been as crazed. They might have let her live.”

  “What kind of life, though?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” She took a deep breath, felt the warmth of his hand as he stroked her foot. “Don’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “Caress me.”

  He stopped. But he kept his hand there as she’d hoped he might.

  “I told you that she wanted to go to them and I talked her out of it but later they found her.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “And where was I during that?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out for a bit. “You never told me,” he said eventually. “I always assumed you two got separated somehow.”

  “We were never separated. Not until the end anyway. I was right by her side when they found her.”

  “So . . . ?” He sat up slightly.

  She cleared her throat. “The leader of the . . . pack, no other word for them, was Josué Dacelus. He’s actually quite the crime kingpin there these days, or so I’ve heard, but back then he was just a young thug.” She looked across the bed at her husband as the night rattled the window casings in the old house. “They found us just before sunup. They pulled Widdy from me. I fought, but they pushed me to the ground and spit on me. They stomped on my back and punched me in the head several times. And Widdy wasn’t screaming, she was just crying, the way a girl that age would cry over a dead pet, you know? A hamster, say. I remember thinking that’s what a girl should be crying over at eleven. And I tried to stop them again, but, man, it just infuriated them. I might have been a white woman with press credentials and that made raping and killing me a far riskier proposition than raping and killing Haitian girls and Haitian ex-nuns, but they were ready to throw that caution to the wind if I kept it up. I’m looking at Widdy as they’re pulling her away. And Josué Dacelus slides the barrel of his filthy .45 into my mouth and he moves it back and forth and in and out over my tongue and my teeth like a cock and he says, ‘Would you like to be good? Or would you like to live?’”

  For a moment, she couldn’t go on. She just sat there with the tears falling on her body.

  “Jesus,” Brian whispered. “You know you couldn’t have—”

  “He made me say it.”

  “What?”

  She nodded. “He pulled the gun from my mouth and he made me look at her as the men dragged her off and he made me say the words.” She wiped her cheeks and pushed the hair out of her face in the same motion. “I. Would. Like. To. Live.” She lowered her head, let the hair fall back in her face. “And I said them out loud.”

  When she raised her head a minute or two later, Brian hadn’t moved.

  “I wanted to tell you that for some reason,” she said. “Some reason I haven’t figured out yet.”

  She slid her foot out of his hand and got off the bed. He watched her put her underwear and T-shirt back on. The last thing she heard as she left the room was his voice as he whispered, “Thank you.”

  33

  THE BANK

  The baby’s crying woke her.

  It was just after sunup. She went down the hall as the cries lessened and found Haya removing Annabelle’s diaper on a changing table beside a crib. Brian or Caleb had even thought to hang a mobile above the crib and paint the walls pink. Haya wore a Green Day concert T-shirt Rachel recognized as Caleb’s over a pair of plaid men’s boxer shorts. Judging by the dishevelment of the bedsheets, Haya had tossed and turned through the night. She dropped the soiled diaper and wipes into a plastic bag at her feet and pulled a fresh diaper from a shelf below the table.

  Rachel retrieved the bag. “I’ll throw it away.”

  Haya gave no indication she’d heard her as she placed the fresh diaper on Annabelle.

  Annabelle looked at her mother and then over at Rachel and kept looking at her with her warm dark eyes.

  Haya said, “Do women in America keep . . . secrets from their husbands?”

  “Some do,” Rachel said. “Do women in Japan?”

  “I do not know,” she said with her usual stop-and-start cadence. And then, quite smoothly: “Probably because I’ve never been to Japan.”

  A wholly transformed Haya stared back at Rachel suddenly, a Haya marinated in cunning and curdled wisdom.

  “You’re not Japanese?”

  “I’m from fucking San Pedro,” Haya whispered, eyes on the doorway behind Rachel.

  Rachel went to the door and closed it. “Then why are you . . . ?”

  Haya exhaled so hard her lips flapped. “Caleb was a mark. I knew he was a con man the day I met him. So I was always stunned he never picked up on my bullshit.”

  “How did you meet? We all suspected like a mail-order bride thing.”

  She shook her head. “I was a hooker. He was my john. The woman who ran the escort service would always tell someone who’d never been with me that I’d only been in the country three weeks, I was very new at the business, etc.” Haya shrugged. She lifted Annabelle off the changing table and gave the baby her left breast. “Drove the price up. So Caleb shows up and right away it doesn’t make sense—he was too good looking to pay for it. Unless he was into violence or severe kink and he wasn’t. Not even close. Straight missionary style, very tender. Second time he came around, he talked after about how I was the perfect girl for him—knew my place, knew my role, didn’t speak the language.” She smiled ruefully. “He said, ‘Haya, you can’t understand me, but I could fall in love with you.’ I looked at his watch, his suit, and I said, ‘Love?’ Gave him a real searching, lost-child look, pointed between me and him, and said, ‘I love.’” She stroked her baby’s head and watched her suckle. “He bought it. Two months later he paid the owner of the service a hundred grand to steal me away. I’ve been watching and listening as him and Brian put this scam together ever since.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “Because I want my end.”

  “I don’t have anything to—”

  “Is Caleb dead?”

  “No,” Rachel said with the empha
sis of someone who was almost offended by the absurdity of the question.

  “Well, I don’t believe you,” Haya said. “So, here’s the thing—if you two run on me, I will drop a dime on you before you can ever get near an airport. And I won’t just tell the cops. I’ll reach out to Cotter-McCann. And they will find you and they will fist-fuck you in the ass until you die.”

  Rachel believed her. “Again, why tell me?”

  “Because Brian would take his chances if he knew. He rolls dice. You, though, you’re not that suicidal.”

  No? Rachel thought. You shoulda seen me yesterday.

  “I’m telling you because you’ll make sure he comes back for me.” She indicated the baby. “For us.”

  Haya was back in character when she asked Brian if Caleb was alive or not as Brian went over the game plan for what to do if anyone came calling while they were out.

  Brian lied to her as Rachel had. “No. He’s fine.” Then he asked Haya, “Which shade do you pull?”

  “The orange,” she said. “In . . .” She pointed.

  “The pantry,” Brian said.

  “The pantry,” she repeated.

  “And when do you pull it down?”

  “When you . . . text.”

  Brian nodded. He reached his hand across the kitchen table. “Haya? It’s gonna be all right.”

  Haya stared back at him. She said nothing.

  Cumberland Savings and Loan was, as advertised, a family-owned business with a history in Providence County, Rhode Island. The strip mall that abutted it had been, until the late 1980s, farmland. Most every bit of land in Johnston, Rhode Island, had once been farmland, and that’s who the Thorp family had originally gone into the banking business to serve—the farmers. Now the strip malls were overtaking the farms, Panera had replaced the produce stands, and the farmers’ sons had long since declined a seat on the tractor in favor of a cubicle in an industrial park and a split-level ranch with travertine countertops.

  The Panera was doing a bang-up business, judging by the number of cars out front. The bank, on the other hand, had fewer cars when she pulled into its lot at nine-thirty in the morning. She counted eleven cars in the lot. Two were close to the front door in designated spots—a black Tesla in the “Bank President” spot, a white Toyota Avalon in the “Cumberland S&L Employee of the Month” spot. The Tesla gave her pause—when Brian had described Manfred Thorp she’d pictured a doughy suburban yokel in a butterscotch sport coat and a cornflower tie, maybe with man boobs and a double chin. But the Tesla didn’t fit that image. She scratched her nose to obscure her lips from anyone who could be watching. “Manfred drives a Tesla?”