He brought me up to speed quickly about the worsening condition of my parents’ situation. Earlier that week, the federal prosecutor investigating my parents’ fraud case had succeeded in having their bank accounts frozen. My dad’s business empire was being scrutinized by the same agency in Washington, the Federal Trade Commission, as James Santangello’s, although he, unlike my dad, was being charged by the Southern District of New York’s Attorney General, which typically managed fraud that occurred on Wall St. My father’s fraud was unrelated to publically traded stock, so it was in a slightly different category. All of these details made my head ache.
“What does it mean that their assets have been frozen?” I asked, feeling childish and stupid.
“That the courts feel that there’s substantial evidence that The Church of the Spirit was committing fraudulent acts, and that they’re locking down bank accounts now so that if people who were ripped off seek legal action, that money can be restored to them,” Tony said.
I picked at the black fingernail polish on my nails. “But what does it mean for my parents?”
I was imagining them being out for a fancy dinner in Cordoba and my dad’s credit card being declined. I imagined Daddy making a joke about having to wash dishes to pay his bill and the waitresses looking uncomfortable.
Tony sat back in his rolling office chair and folded his hands over his middle-aged guy belly. “It means that for now, all of their money is inaccessible to them,” he explained. “Well, money that the government knows about. There’s always the possibility that your parents have money hidden in Swiss bank accounts or in the Cayman Islands. That’s precisely why people open accounts in locations like that. International laws protect privacy and make it a lot harder for our government to reclaim money from banks there.”
There was a knock on the door frame to Tony’s office and a very fashionable woman with auburn hair appeared. She wore a cashmere sweater dress in a fawn color with a chunky suede belt. I couldn’t fathom looking so chic at home on a boring Saturday morning.
“I’m heading into town to pick up bagels and dog food,” she announced in a musical New Zealand accent. “Grace, do you have a favorite kind of bagel?”
It had been so long since a stranger had referred to me as Grace that I was dumbfounded for a second.
“This is my wife, Joanne,” Tony said, introducing us.
“Nice to meet you,” I waved from the small couch in Tony’s office. “Pumpernickel, I guess.”
I got up off the couch to hand her a crinkly dollar from my pocket to cover the cost of my bagel. She waved my money away.
“I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” she told us.
“So,” I began, settling back into the seriousness of our conversation about my parents’ future. “What happens next?”
Tony avoided my eyes then, and cracked his laptop open on his desk. “Well, federal prosecutors are looking for your parents to try them properly. There’s already been a grand jury probe resulting in the initial indictment on evidence of fraud, so it’s not a matter of convicting them, it’s a matter of putting them on trial, sorting through the facts, indicting anyone from the church’s Board of Directors who may have played a role in the process, and then sentencing.”
My whole body felt cold and my legs felt numb. Everything had already been decided. Daddy’s battleship had been sunk and he hadn’t even been given a chance to say anything about it. It still felt like we were talking about someone else, not my dad. Not my dad who had taught me how to ride a bike without training wheels. Not my dad who knew all of the names of all of my dolls in my room when I was a little girl. Not my dad who used to kneel and pray with me every night in my room before bed.
“So, there is a strong likelihood that within the next six to twelve months, all of your parents’ assets will be liquidated, basically, so that any property is retained as cash. Your father, at least, will most certainly do some time and be fined. There’s also a strong probability that there will be civil cases brought up by people who were swindled, which is why the Feds are going to want a cash reserve of your parents’ property.”
My breath had grown short and I had sensed the return of the alarming pain of the knife beneath my rib cage that I had first experienced when Quian had been hit. I shifted uncomfortably on the sofa and pressed my hands to my sternum trying to ease it along.
“Are you all right?” Tony asked, observing my discomfort.
“What are they liquidating?” I dared to ask.
His tone became gentler. “I could request a list, but I would imagine your parents’ house in Phoenix, cars, jewelry, the private jet, the apartment in Switzerland, it’s all property of the Church. Real estate owned by the church, equipment used to operate the cable network…”
“What about the horses?” I asked, blinking away tears.
“Yes, probably the horses,” Tony said. “It won’t be any time soon, but there are usually auctions in situations like this.”
True Heart was going to be sold. I hated my father in that moment. If I had been nostalgic about him the moment I had entered Tony’s house that morning, any warm feelings had abandoned me when I realized the full extent of how my parents’ bad decisions were going to impact my own life. I couldn’t allow my thoughts to drift to who True’s new owners would be, if they would love him like I did, what would happen to Paul… any of that while I was still at Tony’s. I was on the verge of losing it.
Our conversation turned to my brother, and I stated that there was simply no way he was going to go to Arizona. Tony suggested that I write a letter to the judge on my brother’s behalf, explaining my side of the story. This seemed to me like my only option under the circumstances for keeping my brother out of immediate trouble without tricking him into doing things he had already said he didn’t want to do.
Tony helped me draft the letter on his laptop, printed it out, and gave me a stamped envelope. He also suggested that if Aaron would be open to it, he’d take him to the community medical center in Hoboken, where one of his college buddies was a doctor, to have the cast sawed off.
“No strings attached,” Tony assured me. “If his leg hasn’t healed properly he could be facing surgery and months of physical therapy. It’ll take an hour of his life to just deal with it once and for all.”
Joanne returned, as promised, with bagels, and we sat around the kitchen table, eating. I made the observation that Tony and Joanne did not have any kids, only a rescued Italian greyhound named Mario who gnawed on a rawhide bone in the corner. It was kind of weird. I, for one, thought Tony would have made a pretty cool dad.
“So, there are a few investigators who have been working on your dad’s case who have reached out to me for assistance in finding your parents,” Tony told me. “They know I’ve been following your dad’s case since the initial fraud inquiry began, and that I have some contacts within The Church of the Spirit.”
I froze up again. I knew he was going to ask for my help, and although I had told myself all the way to New Jersey on the Path train that I was going to tell him that I just couldn’t do that to Mama and Daddy, I felt my resolve draining from me.
“I’m not going to pressure you to do anything you don’t want to do. But I do want you to understand that if your parents turn themselves in and cooperate, it’s going to look a lot better for them than if they have to be extradited. That whole process could take years, it’s a waste of tax-payer money, and to put it simply: judges hate that crap.”
I chewed my bagel in silence, looking at my plate.
“I think I know where they are,” I admitted. “But I’d rather reach out to my mom and ask her to do the right thing than tell the investigators where to find them.”
Tony and Joanne exchanged knowing glances. As soon as I’d said I would reach out to my mom, I knew I had to do it.
On the 13 of the month, Mr. Shin from apartment 1C came upstairs and knocked on our door to find out where our rent was. My brother told me about the un
pleasant visit when I arrived home from work at two in the morning. Mr. Shin was in his fifties and barely spoke any English. Aaron had told him we’d leave a check on his door on the 15 of the month, but he said he didn’t think Mr. Shin understood, and continued yelling anyway. I prayed that Mr. Shin had no way to really get in touch with John in San Francisco to scold him for renting to irresponsible losers such as ourselves. I had legitimate reason to fear that I was going to come home one night before the 15 to find Aaron out in the street, waiting for me. There was nothing I could do to get our rent in order faster; asking Andy for an advance when he had gone out of his way so far to give me a job and train me would have been too humiliating.
Felix had given me a guidebook to help me prepare for the state tattoo licensing exam. I was studying it earnestly even though I wasn’t 100% sure I could ever tattoo things into people’s skin on a daily basis. Late one night in mid-January when the store had been quiet all day, Felix loaded a seven-liner needle grouping into a needle bar for me, explaining in detail how the needles themselves were chosen based on the type of line desired by the artist. For steady black lines, it was important to use a tight needle grouping. For shading in pictures, the artist would use a loose needle grouping. I thought this was going to be the first of a series of little introductory courses to tattooing. I was wrong.
Then he took his shirt off, and turned on our small electric shaver.
“Shave my left shoulder blade,” he instructed me, as he sat down on the client chair in his own studio.
“Felix!” I exclaimed. “I can’t tattoo you!”
“How else are you going to learn?” he asked with a huge smile.
“What if I mess up? You’re going to have to walk around with that forever.”
Felix shrugged. “If it’s from you, I won’t mind. Everyone messes up when they’re first starting out.”
He showed me how to place the needle round into the tube, slid the eye of the needle through the machine, and demonstrated how to tighten all the screws on the needle to hold it in place. He pressed the button on the needle to make sure it sounded like it was operating correctly, and slightly adjusted the power supply to increase the voltage.
I cleaned off his shoulder with antiseptic, and positioned a stencil of a simple lightning bolt design carefully on his shoulder blade as he told me what to do. When I peeled it back, I was delighted to find a perfect replica left behind to serve as my guide. I ignored annoying thoughts in my brain of the lightning bolt that had struck my father as a boy.
It was totally weird to be standing so close to Felix with his shirt off. So close that as he looked over his shoulder to watch what I was doing as best he could, his eyelashes brushed against my forearm and gave me a chill. I felt weird seeing his bare chest and back. He had a little patch of hair on his chest that surprised me, and his back was skinny; I could count the bumpy vertebrae of his spine. I was grateful to be wearing thick rubber gloves; if I had been gripping the bare skin of his shoulder while I worked, I would surely have immediately made a mistake with the needle.
The whole process was terrifying as I ran the needle over his shoulder blade, tracing the lightning bolt outlines. I could feel what was becoming a familiar and unwelcome physical sensation, that shortness of breath and jabbing pain under my ribs, and I fought to drive it out of my mind. I tried to focus completely on what I was doing, and when I was finally done, I exhaled deeply with relief.
“You did a great job,” Felix assured me, looking over his shoulder in a mirror to examine my work.
Once I put the machine down on the counter, I couldn’t suppress the urge to step out into the hallway and acknowledge the excruciating pain in my sternum any longer. I bolted into the hallway. I leaned against the wall in the cool, fluorescently-lit hallway lined with framed photos of some of our artists’ work, fully aware now that the armpits of my t-shirt were soaked with nervous sweat from the tattooing process. I pressed my hands against my sternum, trying to rub the jabbing pain away.
“Hey,” Felix said standing in the doorway to his studio, sounding concerned. “It’s OK, Gigi. I was always really nervous at first, too. But you did it!”
“It’s not the tattoo,” I blurted.
I hadn’t realized that it wasn’t the buzz of the needle or my fear of inking a mess on Felix’s shoulder that had been the cause of the sharp pain in my chest until I had gotten outside of the claustrophobia-inducing studio. It had been my physical proximity to Felix. He had spent the night on New Year’s in our apartment, but so did Jacinda; all four of us including my brother had passed out in the living room in a big pile. He hadn’t pressured me at all for our relationship to advance physically, but I feared that request was coming.
And I was terrified.
“Then, what?” he asked, reaching out for my hand.
I knew that Smokestack was still with a client in the studio next to Felix’s, probably overhearing everything we were saying, so I stepped back into the studio with Felix and lowered my voice.
“I’m scared,” I said. “Of you. I’ve never been with a boy before. And my parents raised me to believe it’s right to wait until marriage. I think that’s what I want.”
Completely unfazed by what I had just confessed, Felix pressed gauze to the fresh tattoo on his shoulder and held it there with his right hand while he put his left hand on my shoulder.
“I don’t want to do anything you don’t want to do,” he told me. “If I do anything that makes you uncomfortable, you have to tell me, and I’ll stop. And that applies to everything. If you don’t want to be a tattoo artist, you just have to tell me. I thought it would be an easy way for us to get to be together every day, and you’re good at it. Not very many people are.”
Now that it was over, I admitted, the tattooing had been kind of cool. I would have enjoyed it more if it had been one of my own designs, but Felix had wanted me to start with something really easy.
“I like tattooing,” I attempted to say, but ended up whispering. I didn’t know why, but my throat felt like it was going to close up and I was going to start crying.
“Sometimes I push people too hard. When my father died, my mom wouldn’t get out of bed for like, a month. Finally, when it got to be ridiculous, I had to make her. I had to make her get dressed and do laundry and put butter on toast. My older brother had already moved out. He didn’t see any of this,” Felix said, now facing me, but still pressing the gauze to his shoulder. “Then I had to do it with Kyrill. He wanted to drop out of school and work at our cousin’s auto body shop. I had to make him go to classes every morning. I had to call his principal and make sure he wasn’t lying to me about going. I don’t want to be in the habit of making people do things, but I might be doing that to you and not even realize it.”
“You’re not, Felix,” I assured him. In fact, if he had been making me go about the business of my life, I would have probably appreciated it. I was tired of making my own decisions. I wanted someone else to take the wheel for a while.
“Look, Gigi. You’re my future,” Felix said. “Maybe I’ll sound like a hopeless dreamer for saying this, but I want us to be together forever. I want us to have our own art studio and gallery in New York and spend every day together creating art. When we go our separate ways after work every night, I have to promise myself it will only be a few more hours until we’re together again. When I close my eyes, I can see this future. It’s so real, Gigi.”
Now the tears were falling down my cheeks. I hoped my nose wouldn’t start bleeding. I could see this future, too. It was like he had just drawn outlines around all of these intangible hopes that I had for my own adult life that I hadn’t been brave enough to imagine in the last few months. This future wasn’t anything like how I had pictured my life as a grown-up when I was a little girl and wanted to be a graphic designer at my dad’s magazine. What Felix was describing seemed not only perfect, but achievable. It was within reach. It could be ours, no matter what else happened in my life. Even a
ll of the horrible things going on that Felix didn’t know about couldn’t put this dream at risk.
“I want that, too,” I told him.
“So don’t worry about sex,” he said. “I’m not in a hurry for that. There’s no reason for me to be in a hurry when I’m looking right at the girl I want to be with for the rest of my life.”
Never, ever in a million restless nights in my dorm room at Treadwell, staring up at the ceiling and wondering if I would ever find a boyfriend, did I imagine I would find a boy on the face of this planet as perfect for me as Felix.
“One of these days, however, I really hope you’ll tell me what’s going on in your life,” he said, playing with my fingers and looking at our entwined hands. “When you’re ready. You can trust me.”
“I will,” I promised.
That was January 15. When I arrived back at our building, I taped the cashier’s check I had obtained at the bank earlier that day for eighteen hundred dollars to Mr. Shin’s front door and hoped that we would never have to worry about paying rent late again. I stared at that envelope with hatred and admiration before I marched up the stairs to my apartment. I had paid the rent. All by myself. Maybe it was late, but it was still an accomplishment.
On January 17, I made a point of waking up early and watching the morning news. It was the morning that Heather and her parents would be arriving at the Supreme Court in Arizona. I had forgotten about the time difference between Arizona and New York, and grew irritable that we only had two channels and neither had aired any major news stories by lunchtime when the court proceedings would presumably have been starting out West.
I was edgy all day, wondering if I was going to come home from work to find that my brother had been carried away by agents who somehow had known where we were hiding out this whole time. I had promised myself that after this court date, I would figure out what I wanted to say to Mama and Daddy and e-mail them. I had told Aaron about their assets being frozen, but I had told him that I had read it in the Wall Street Journal and not that I had seen Tony Michaels again. He seemed unconcerned, even when I added that True Heart and our other horses were most likely going to be sold at auction, along with our house, Daddy’s cars, our bedroom furniture, and everything else we had grown up with.
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