“Mama,” I interrupted her, wanting her to stop. “Don’t. You’re going to have to say all of this again at your trial.”
“I don’t care,” she said angrily. “I don’t care what a jury finds me guilty of. You’re my daughter. You and Aaron are the only people in the whole world who matter to me. I need to know that you believe me. I would never steal. I knew we were in trouble, financially, but I didn’t know that those foundations were shells. Your father told me that he and Kenny and Brad had everything under control, and I believed him.”
“We had no right to live that way, Mama,” I scolded her. “I enjoyed every second of it, and you gave me and Aaron a wonderful childhood, but we had no right to live so well on the donations of poor people.”
Mama grew quiet. There were several armed guards on the other side of the wall with her, and she sat along a table in between other female inmates. On my side of the wall, I sat next to a guy who was talking to a female inmate who was presumably his wife, and to my right, two teenage kids were visiting their mother. Their visit was highly emotional and tears were already flowing, making any kind of privacy in my conversation with Mama pretty impossible. The clock was ticking. Our visit was only fifty minutes, and we’d already used up ten.
“Remember the night you called me from school, when I told you there were other people who might suffer because of this whole mess?” Mama asked me. “I wasn’t talking about donations, honey bun. I was talking about people like Paul and Anna and Margeurite. We supported those people. Your father’s sermons were their income. The donations were important, Grace, but not to sustain any kind of fabulous lifestyle for us. Your father, why, he’d walk away from that in a heartbeat if he thought the Lord was asking him to do so. But then what would happen to all of the people who have spent their lives working for us? Paul has diabetes and needs his health insurance. Anna has five of her grandchildren living with her, all under the age of ten. I didn’t want to go into details with you on this out of respect for them. It’s not easy working for a living and trying to make ends meet. Well, I guess you know that now for yourself maybe better than I ever did.”
“What do you mean? All of that fraud… it wasn’t to pay for Corvettes or private school?” I didn’t mean to sound like I was accusing her of lying, but it seemed like she was trying to convince herself of something that sounded nice, but wasn’t true.
“Some of it,” she said, swallowing hard. “Sure, some of it paid for those nice things. You build a business, it takes off, and then things that previously would have seemed frivolous or unnecessary start to seem important. You have a big house? Then suddenly you need a landscaping crew. And you could do without them, sure, but then who would be putting food on their tables at night? You hire camera crews to run a cable station, and that entire staff asks for high salaries, and then they’re driving fancy cars, and then it seems strange that they have a fancier car than the boss…”
She faded off, realizing that none of what she was saying was changing my hardened expression.
“Tell me about your life. I want to know what you’ve been up to.”
I told Mama selective details about life in Manhattan. I told her that I was taking classes at night, and that Aaron and I shared an apartment. I told her about the Chans, about Quian getting hit by a taxi, and about Aaron breaking his leg and spending his afternoons caring for Feng.
I saw her face soften at the mention of Aaron and Feng. Aaron was her favorite; that was no secret. She hadn’t asked why he hadn’t come to visit, and I didn’t offer up an explanation, either.
“His leg is OK?” she asked.
“It’s fine,” I assured her. “The cast came off a while ago.”
“Do you guys think you’ll stay in New York?” she asked. “My attorney tells me that after the trial I’ll most likely be reassigned to another federal prison. There’s a big one for women in Connecticut. It would mean the world to me if you could come visit. They’re saying I might get up to twelve years.”
“I think we’ll stay in New York,” I mused aloud, cutting her off. I couldn’t think about my pretty and sweet Mama behind bars for twelve years, even though I was mad at her. “We both have jobs there. My boyfriend is there. We have friends, we have a routine.”
She blinked in wonderment. “You’re awfully young to have a boyfriend, Grace. Let your brother’s mistakes be a lesson to you.”
I rolled my eyes, not caring if I was offending her. I couldn’t expect Mama or anyone else to understand what Felix and I had.
“Don’t worry about it,” I assured her. “He’s actually here, with me in Arizona He didn’t want me to fly alone.”
She looked even more troubled by the fact that this evil lothario had accompanied me to Phoenix, but there was nothing she could do about it. My parents had kind of relinquished their control over my life when they hadn’t pursued me and Aaron back in the fall.
“Listen, Grace, I know we don’t have much time left, and I also know it would be too much to ask of you to move back to Arizona until my trial. So there’s one thing I do want to ask of you, and please think about it carefully before you dismiss it.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that even if Aaron and I had wanted to move back to Arizona until the trial; that would have been impossible. We weren’t allowed to spend the night at the ranch, and Tony Michaels had to secure special paperwork for me to even set foot on the property to reclaim some of my personal belongings. A move back to the Phoenix area for us would have meant starting over again, new apartment, new jobs, new everything.
“Please consider going back to Treadwell. I dropped out of high school when I was seventeen and I have always regretted it. I know you’re studying for your GED and you’ve already got a job, but you’ll be eighteen soon enough and you’ll have your whole life ahead of you to work and live on your own.”
I was listening. Going back to Treadwell was just about the last thing I ever wanted to do. But, I was listening.
“You don’t want to end up like me, Gracie. You don’t want to spend your whole life trusting other people’s recommendations because you don’t have any confidence in your own opinion. Your father and I set up trust funds for you and Aaron when you were little. They’re in your names, and they have nothing to do with church funding. That money is yours to spend however you want. You can’t touch it until you’re eighteen, but if you use it to pay for boarding school tuition, my attorney can arrange for some of it to be released early,” she said.
She was wiping tears out of the corners of her tired eyes. “Just think about it. Don’t grow up too fast. Don’t be in a race to the finish line.”
I rode True Heart all the way to the edge of our property at the fastest gallop he could manage. It was almost sunset, and Felix was poking along behind me at a slower pace on Telly, the older brown stallion that my brother used to ride. Our car was coming soon to take us back into Phoenix, where we had rented an apartment for the three days that we would be in town. I had wanted to ride True one last time, to tell him in my own voice, with my own hands on his delicate face, how much I loved him.
Paul had already been let go, as had all of our household staff. The Church of the Spirit was slowly being dismantled by the FTC, although Margeurite was still drifting around the property overseeing general maintenance to prevent the property from falling into disrepair while the government figured out what to do with it. The stables were temporarily being managed by a local service from a few towns over.
All of the horses had been sold, and strangely enough, True would be following me across the country to Easthampton, New York, the following week. He’d been bought by a buyer listed mysteriously on the purchase order as “Jeffries Industries, Inc.” which, much to my horror, was the name of Emma Jeffries’ dad’s company. If True Heart was basically going to become the horse of Emma Jeffries, I was pretty much going to die of jealousy. But at least I knew that True, and all of our horses, seemed to be going to ranches where th
ey would enjoy the same level of care that they had been given on our ranch. It was a very small comfort in the whole horrible mix of having to say goodbye to them.
I turned True around, and Felix and I faced the compound. Its stucco walls were copper in the rays of the setting sun, with mid-spring heat shimmering up from the ground. The sun would be down in a matter of minutes and the cold of the desert night would spread itself out across this property and creep into the empty house. It was Felix’s first time in the desert, and the heat when our plane had landed the day before in Phoenix had surprised him as much as the bone-chilling cold later that night. Felix had never left New York after the day he arrived there as a little boy, so our trip was a pretty big event for him. He was crazy about the lizards everywhere.
I knew, sitting atop True, that I was probably never going to be in that place, looking upon my childhood home, ever again. It was improbable that I would ever see True again after that day, and somehow knowing that this was our farewell ride made it easier than it would have been to leave Arizona with his future uncertain.
Strangely, in that moment, I felt homesick. The desert was no longer where I lived. I missed the sirens in the distance and clanging radiator of our apartment in Chinatown, the sounds of the Chans living their lives on the other side of my bedroom wall, the safety of the tight confines of our small apartment. In a perfect world, I would have picked and chosen elements of both halves of my life to keep, and I would have cobbled together a future with my horse, my beautiful bedroom in Arizona, my job at the Blue Phoenix, and Felix. But there is no such thing as a perfect world.
“This is a beautiful place,” Felix commented. “Thank you for bringing me here.”
Thank God for Felix, I thought to myself. The trip home would have been unbearable if I had been forced to take it alone. It tickled me to see Felix, with his tattooed arms, long lashes and dirty Converse, riding a horse. We must have both looked insane out on the desert plains riding horses, like the most displaced city people ever.
And then I realized… I actually was thanking God. All of the last five months of my life had seemed like a reckless undoing of everything I cherished. But looking back on them from the other side, it was easier to see how every heartbreak had resolved to create a new opportunity in my life. My brother had pulled me away from the way of life I knew at Treadwell, but I had discovered I had unlimited strength and courage in a tough city where I never would have dared to imagine I’d get by on my own. I had thought my friendship with Juliette had been destroyed, but I had found a soul mate in Jacinda. I had lost my job at Prekin, but had been granted an amazing opportunity – and national recognition as an artist – by Andy and Felix. Quian had almost lost her life, but her recovery had brought my brother back from his own dark place.
Hey God, I thought quickly, inhaling a deep lungful of sharply dry desert air to keep myself from crying. Thanks for everything being exactly as it is today.
True Heart neighed, signifying that he was ready to trot back to the stable for his dinner.
“Ready?” I asked Felix, who was a novice horseback rider. I had told him that if I had been brave enough to learn how to tattoo people, he could be brave enough to ride a horse.
“Ready,” he said.
“Let’s race!”
I kicked True into a gallop and let him run free, as fast as he wanted. These would be our last moments together. Stars were beginning to dot the violet twilight sky above, bringing night irreversibly upon us and bringing Felix and me two days closer to our return flight to New York. I tried not to be sad, for True’s sake, because he could always sense how I was feeling. Instead, I focused on the distance ahead of us. It was an evening I would always remember, but I would choose to remember it as a beginning, not an end.
Chapter 19
“Girl, you know I’m going to come visit you,” Jacinda said, blotting her eyes with Kleenex as she sat on the corner of my bed.
It was the first day of May. Aaron and I had just renewed our lease on our Baxter St. apartment for another year, and I had finally bitten the bullet and purchased a bed frame, mattress and box springs with some of my extra commissions from custom designs. Even though I had made the difficult decision to go back to Treadwell, I saw no reason to keep sleeping on the floor when I came back to New York on weekends.
“There won’t be time to visit!” I exclaimed. “I’ll be home every weekend and back for the whole summer in just five weeks.”
Felix was sitting silently on the pink beanbag chair we had put in the corner of my room. It was my favorite spot in the apartment, because if I sat on it, I could see the graffiti painting of his parents just beyond my window pane.
I couldn’t explain why I had decided to go back to Treadwell to finish my sophomore year. Jacinda and I had just passed our GED a few days before. Technically, I was a high school graduate with a full-time job and five outstanding orders for custom tattoo designs. I had a boyfriend and an apartment in New York and no burning desire to subject myself to the criticisms of the Treadwell population again.
But it was important to Mama, and I could understand why. I had agreed to go back and finish at least sophomore year, and then try to figure out whether or not to go back in the fall. Aaron had decided to stay in New York but take advantage of the trust fund by transferring to a private high school for boys in Manhattan. He was loathe to take money from our parents for anything, but his desire to be a pediatrician was what ultimately convinced him to finish high school. He would have difficulty getting into the kind of college that would qualify him for medical school without a high school diploma. But St. John’s was out of the question. And with Tony’s help, he had started the process of legally changing his name to Eric Martin.
“I still don’t understand why you gotta finish high school in Massachusetts when you already finished it here,” Jacinda complained. “You rich people and your fancy ways.”
“I’m not rich,” I reminded her. “Not anymore.”
I had repacked my suitcase for school, the same one that had come with me to Colombia in the fall, for my return trip. Not surprisingly, I had little more to put it in it than I had brought with me other than two pairs of jeans and the running shoes from my brother. Even after I had started making an impressive amount of money at the tattoo shop, buying clothes hadn’t been much of a priority. The administrative staff at Treadwell had been surprisingly cool about me registering for the last five weeks of classes. I was going to be behind, of course, which sucked. I was resuming my fall semester classes right where I had left off… barely scraping by in Spanish II, plodding through biology, suffering through trig.
The whole notion of waking up the next morning in the Colgate dorm instead of in my own bedroom on Baxter St. was pretty depressing. I hadn’t reached out to Kate Callahan or Giovanna Pasquasi or anyone to tell them I was coming back. But I was committing to it, at least for five weeks, at Felix’s insistence.
“Look, you have an opportunity here to get a diploma from one of the best schools in the country,” he had told me. “You have to pursue that. If you really hate it, we can figure out another solution over the summer. But if you pass up this chance just to waste your time in New York with me, you’re going to hate me.”
“I would never hate you,” I told him.
But he had made up his mind, and that was it. I thought about him standing over his mother and making her get out of bed and get dressed in the weeks following his father’s death. Felix was a catalyst in all of our lives. He made things happen.
Felix, Aaron, and Jacinda accompanied me on the subway to Penn Station to catch my train. Penn Station always smelled terrible, like buttery soft pretzels and popcorn and exhaust fumes and body odor. It was hectic and loud, and not exactly the most romantic place to say farewells.
“Be good,” Aaron warned me with a smile as he hugged me goodbye.
“Don’t wreck the apartment before I get back on Friday night,” I warned him.
“Y
ou better text me as soon as you get there, and send me pictures,” Jacinda said, embracing me. I knew it was only five days that I would be gone before I came back, but I was going to miss her terribly. She had quit her job at Timmy’s after passing the GED and Joao had made her a senior stylist as he had promised he would. Her dream had come true. She was on her way.
When it was my turn to hug Felix goodbye, we looked at each other speechlessly for a moment, unmoving, until Jacinda rolled her eyes and roared, “Oh, for real? I don’t need to see any public displays of affection. Let’s go.”
She motioned for Aaron to follow her over to the Sbarro stand nearby to get a slice of pizza.
Felix took both of my hands in his. “Don’t fall in love with anyone else.”
“Felix, I’ll be back on Friday evening,” I said. “There aren’t even any other boys at my school. It is unlikely that I will speak to a single boy other than you between now and when I get back.”
Felix smiled, but I knew he had meant what he said. For some crazy reason, he was under the impression that I was in high demand among other guys. Suddenly, going back to Treadwell – even just for five days, never mind five weeks – seemed like a downright terrible idea. I didn’t want to be away from him at all, ever.
“Now that we’re here, I just don’t want to go,” I said with a frog in my throat. “Can’t we just go home?”
Felix shook his head. “You have to go back to school. You have to figure out if this life is really what you want now that you have options. I don’t want to hold you back.”
“This is what I want,” I said, my eyes filling with tears. “I don’t have to go back to Treadwell to decide that.”
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