“It’s like kooky,” I said, “only it rhymes with slutty.”
“What’s slutty?”
“It’s like ooky,” I said, “except it doesn’t rhyme with kooky. Why aren’t you eating your carrots?”
“You look funny.”
“I wear big bandages on my face every Thursday.”
“No suh.” Gabriella’s eyes grew wide and solemn. She had her mother’s big brown eyes. She also had her olive skin and wide mouth and dark hair. From me she’d gotten curls, a thin nose, and a love of silliness and wordplay.
“Why aren’t you eating your carrots?” I asked again.
“I don’t like carrots.”
“You did last week.”
“No suh.”
“Uh-huh.”
Angie put her fork down. “Don’t start this, the both of you. Do not.”
“No suh.”
“Uh-huh.”
“No suh.”
“Uh-huh. I got pictures.”
“No suh.”
“Uh-huh. I’ll get my camera.”
Angie reached for her wineglass. “Please?” She fixed me with eyes as huge as our daughter’s. “For me?”
I looked back at Gabriella. “Eat your carrots.”
“Okay.” Gabby dug a fork into one and plopped it in her mouth, chewed. Her face lit up around the chewing.
I raised my eyebrows at her.
“It’s good,” she said.
“Right?”
She speared another one and munched away.
Angie said, “I’ve been watching it for four years and I still don’t know how you do that.”
“Ancient Chinese secret.” Very slowly, I chewed a tiny chunk of chicken breast. “By the way, not sure what you’ve heard, but it’s kinda hard eating when you can’t use the left side of your mouth.”
“You know what’s funny?” Angie asked in a voice that suggested something wasn’t.
“I do not,” I assured her.
“Most private investigators don’t get kidnapped and assaulted.”
“The practice is rumored to be trending upward, however.”
She frowned and I could feel both of us trapped inside ourselves, not sure what to do with today’s violence. There was a time we would have been experts at it. She would have tossed me an ice pack on her way to the gym, expected me to be raring to get back to work by the time she got back. Those days were long gone, though, and today’s return to easy bloodshed drove us into our protective shells. Her shell is made of quiet fury and wary disconnection. Mine is made of humor and sarcasm. Together we resemble a comedian failing an anger-management class.
“It looks awful,” she said with a tenderness that surprised me.
“It only feels four or five times as bad as it looks. Really. I’m fine.”
“That’s the Percocet.”
“And the beer.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to mix the two.”
“I refuse to bow to conventional wisdom. I’m a decider. And I’ve decided I want to feel no pain.”
“How’s that working out?”
I toasted her with my beer. “Mission accomplished.”
“Daddy?”
“Yeah, sweetie?”
“I like trees.”
“I like trees, too, honey.”
“They’re tall.”
“They sure are.”
“Do you like all trees?”
“Every one.”
“Even short ones?”
“Sure, honey.”
“But why?” My daughter held her hands out, palms-up, a sign that she found this line of questioning of global importance and—lucky us—quite possibly endless.
Angie shot me a look that said: Welcome to my day.
• • •
For the last three years, I’d spent the days at work, or, as opportunities dwindled, trying to hustle up work. Three nights a week, I watched Gabby while Angie took classes. Christmas break was approaching, however, and Angie would take finals next week. After the New Year, she’d begin an internship with Blue Sky Learning Center, a nonprofit specializing in educating teens with Down syndrome. When that was finished, in May, she’d receive her master’s in applied sociology. But until then, we were a one-income family. More than one friend had suggested we move to the suburbs—homes were cheaper, schools were safer, property taxes and car insurance premiums were lower.
Angie and I grew up together in the city, though. We took to picket fences and split-level ranches like we took to shag carpeting and Ultimate Fighting. Which is to say, not so much. I once owned a nice car, but I’d sold it to start a college fund for Gabby, and now my beater Jeep sat in front of my house, without moving, for weeks at a time. I prefer subways—you pop down the hole on one side of the city, pop back up on the other side, and you never have to hit your horn, not once. I don’t like mowing lawns or trimming hedges or raking the mowed lawns or the hedge trimmings. I don’t like going to malls or eating in chain restaurants. In fact, the appeal of the suburban ideal—both in a general and a particular sense—escapes me.
I like the sound of jackhammers, the bleat of sirens in the night, twenty-four-hour diners, graffiti, coffee served in cardboard cups, steam exhaled through manhole covers, cobblestone, tabloid newspapers, the Citgo sign, someone yelling “Tax-i” on a cold night, corner boys, sidewalk art, Irish pubs, and guys named Sal.
Not much of which I can find in the suburbs, at least not to the degree I’ve grown accustomed to. And Angie is, if anything, worse.
So we decided to raise our child in the city. We bought a small house on a decent street. It has a tiny yard and it’s a short walk to a playground (short walk to a pretty hairy housing project, too, but that’s another matter). We know most of our neighbors and Gabriella can already name five subway stops on the Red Line, in order, a feat which fills her old man with bottomless pride.
“She asleep?” Angie looked up from her textbook as I came into the living room. She’d changed into sweats and one of my T-shirts, a white one from The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive tour. It swam on her, and I worried she wasn’t eating enough.
“Our gabby Gabby took a breath during a discourse on trees—”
“Arghh.” Angie threw her head back against the couch cushion. “What’s with the trees?”
“—and promptly drifted off to sleep.” I dropped onto the couch beside her, took her hand in mine, gave it a kiss.
“Besides getting beat up,” she said, “did anything else happen today?”
“You mean with Duhamel-Standiford.”
“With them, yes.”
I took a deep breath. “I didn’t get a permanent job, no.”
“Shit!” She shouted it so loudly that I had to hold up a hand and she glanced in the direction of Gabby’s room and cringed.
“They said I shouldn’t have called Brandon Trescott names. They suggested I am uncouth and in need of an adjustment in my manners before I partake of their benefits program.”
“Shit,” she said, softer this time and with more despair than shock. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
We sat there for a bit. There was nothing much to say. We were getting numb to it, the fear, the weight of worry.
“I’ll leave school.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Yeah, I will. I can go back in—”
“You’re this close,” I said. “Finals next week, one internship, and then you’re bringing home the bacon by summer, at which point—”
“If I can even find a job.”
“—at which point, I can afford to freelance. You’re not packing it in this close to the finish line. You’re top of your class. You’ll find a job no problem.” I gave her a smile of confidence I didn’t feel. “We’ll make it work.”
She leaned back a bit to study my face again.
“Okay,” I said to change the subject, “lay into me.”
“About what?” All moc
k-innocence.
“We made a pact when we married that we were done with this shit.”
“We did.”
“No more violence, no more—”
“Patrick.” She took my hands in hers. “Just tell me what happened.”
I did.
When I finished, Angie said, “So the upshot is that in addition to not getting the job with Duhamel-Standiford, the world’s worst mother lost her child again, you didn’t agree to help, but someone mugged you, threatened you, and beat the shit out of you anyway. You’re out a hospital co-pay and a really nice laptop.”
“I know, right? I loved that thing. Weighed less than your wineglass. A smiley face popped on-screen and said, ‘Hello,’ every time I opened it up, too.”
“You’re pissed.”
“Yeah, I’m pissed.”
“But you’re not going to go into crusade mode just because you lost a laptop, am I right?”
“Did I mention the smiley face?”
“You can get yourself another computer with another smiley face.”
“With what money?”
There was no answer for that.
We sat quietly for a bit, her legs on my lap. I’d left Gabby’s bedroom door slightly ajar, and in the silence we could hear her breathing, the exhalations carrying a tiny whistle at their backs. The sound of her breathing reminded me, as it so often did, of how vulnerable she was. And how vulnerable we were because of how much we loved her. The fear—that something could happen to her at any moment, something I’d be helpless to stop—had become so omnipresent in my life that I sometimes pictured it growing, like a third arm, out of the center of my chest.
“Do you remember much of the day you got shot?” Angie asked, throwing another fun topic into the ring.
I tipped my hand back and forth. “Bits and pieces. I remember the noise.”
“No kidding, uh?” She smiled, her eyes going back to it. “It was loud down there—all those guns, the cement walls. Man.”
“Yeah.” I let loose a soft sigh.
“Your blood,” she said, “it just splattered the walls. You were out when the EMTs got there and I just remember looking at it. That was your blood—that was you—and it wasn’t in your body, where it belonged. It was all over the floor and all over the walls. You weren’t the white of a ghost, you were light blue, like your eyes. You were lying there but you were gone, you know? It was like you were already halfway to Heaven with your foot on the gas.”
I closed my eyes and raised my hand. I hated hearing about that day and she knew it.
“I know, I know,” she said. “I just want us both to remember why we got out of the rough-stuff business. It wasn’t just because you got shot. It was because we were junkies to it. We loved it. We still love it.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I was not put on this earth just to read Goodnight, Moon three times a day and have fifteen-minute discussions about sippy cups.”
“I know,” I said.
And I did. No one was less built to be a stay-at-home mom than Angie. It wasn’t that she wasn’t good at it—she was—it was that she had no desire to define herself by the role. But then she went back to school and the money got tight and it made the most sense to save on day care for a few months, so she could go to school nights and watch Gabby days. And just like that—gradually and then suddenly, as the man said—we found ourselves here.
“I’m going crazy at this.” Her eyes indicated the coloring books and toys on our living-room floor.
“I gather.”
“Bat-shit fucking crazy.”
“That would be the approved medical terminology, sure. You’re great at it.”
She rolled her eyes in my direction. “You’re sweet. But, baby? I might be doing a great job faking it, but I am faking it.”
“Isn’t every parent?”
She cocked her head at me with a grimace.
“No,” I said. “Really. Who in their right mind wants to have fourteen conversations about trees? Ever? Never mind in one twenty-four-hour period. That little girl, I adore her, but she’s an anarchist. She wakes us up whenever she feels like it, she thinks high-energy at seven in the morning is a positive, sometimes she screams for no reason, she decides on a second-to-second basis which foods she’ll eat and which she’ll fight you over, she puts her hands and face into truly disgusting places, and she’s attached to our hips for at least another fourteen years, if we’re lucky enough for a college we can’t afford to take her off our hands.”
“But that old life was killing us.”
“It was.”
“I miss it so much,” she said. “That old life that was killing us.”
“Me, too. One thing I learned today, though, is that I’ve turned into a bit of a pussy.”
She smiled. “You have, uh?”
I nodded.
She cocked her head at me. “You were never that tough to begin with.”
“I know,” I said, “so imagine what a lightweight I am now.”
“Shit,” she said, “I just love the hell out of you sometimes.”
“Love you, too.”
She slid her legs back and forth across my thighs. “But you really want your laptop back, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“You’re going to go get it back, aren’t you?”
“The thought had occurred to me.”
She nodded. “On one condition.”
I hadn’t expected her to agree with me. And the small part of me that had sure hadn’t expected it this quickly. I sat up, as attentive and obsequious as an Irish setter. “Name it.”
“Take Bubba.”
Bubba wasn’t only the ideal wingman on this because he was built like a bank-vault door and had not even a passing acquaintance with fear. (Truly. He once asked me what the emotion felt like. He was also baffled by the whole empathy concept.) No, what made him particularly ideal for this evening’s festivities was that he’d spent the last several years diversifying his business to include black-market health care. It started as a simple investment—he’d bankrolled a doctor who’d recently lost his license and wanted to set up a practice servicing the kind of people who couldn’t report their bullet wounds, knife wounds, head wounds, and broken bones to hospitals. One, of course, needs drugs for such patients, and Bubba was forced to find a supply for illegal “legal” drugs. This supply came from Canada, and even with all the post-9/11 noise about increased border control, Bubba got dozens of thirty-gallon bags of pills delivered every month. Thus far, he hadn’t lost a load. If an insurance company refused to cover a drug or if the pharmaceutical companies priced the drug out of wallet-range of working- and lower-class folk in the neighborhoods, street whispers usually led the patient to one of Bubba’s network of bartenders, florists, lunch-cart drivers, or corner-store cashiers. Pretty soon anyone living off the health-care grid or near the edge of it owed a debt to Bubba. He was no Robin Hood—he cleared a profit. But he was no Pfizer, either—his profit was in the fair range of 15 to 20 percent, not in the anal-rape range of 1,000 percent.
Using Bubba’s people in the homeless community, it took us about twenty minutes to identify a guy who matched the description of the guy who stole my laptop.
“You mean Webster?” the dishwasher at a soup kitchen in Fields Corner said.
“The little black kid from ’90s TV?” Bubba said. “Why would we be looking for him?”
“Nah, man, I most definitely do not mean the little black kid from ’90s TV. We in the oh-tens now, or ain’t you heard?” The dishwasher scowled. “Webster’s a white boy, on the small side, got a beard.”
I said, “That’s the Webster we’re looking for.”
“Don’t know if it’s his first name or last, but he cribbed up at a place on Sydney round—”
“No, he blew out of there today.”
Another scowl. For a dishwasher, he was kind of prickly. “Place on Sydney up by Savin Hill Ave.?”
“No, I was thinking of the other e
nd, the place by Crescent.”
“You ain’t thinking then. You ain’t know shit. Clear? So just shush it, boy.”
“Yeah,” Bubba said, “just shush it, boy.”
I wasn’t close enough to kick him, so I shut up.
“Yeah, the place he staying is at the end of Sydney. Where it meet Bay Street? There. Second floor, yellow house, got one of them AC units in the window stopped working during Reagan, look like it gonna fall out on someone’s head.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Little black kid from ’90s TV,” he said to Bubba. “Man, if I wasn’t fifty-nine and a half years old? I’d profoundly whoop your ass over that shit.”
Chapter Seven
Where Sydney Street crosses Savin Hill Avenue, it becomes Bay Street and sits on top of a subway tunnel. About every five minutes, the whole block shudders as a train rumbles beneath it. Bubba and I had sat through five of these shudders so far, which meant we’d been sitting in Bubba’s Escalade for nearly half an hour.
Bubba does not do sitting still very well. It reminds him too much of group homes and orphanages and prisons, places he’s called home for roughly half his time on earth. He’d already fiddled with the GPS—punching in random addresses in random cities to see if Amarillo, Texas, had a Groin Street or Toronto sent tourists traipsing along Rogowski Avenue. When he exhausted the entertainment value of searching for nonexistent streets in cities he never intended to visit, he played with the satellite radio, rarely landing on a station for more than thirty seconds before he’d let loose a half-sigh, half-snort and change the channel. After a while, he dug a bottle of Polish potato vodka out from under the seat and took a swig.
He offered me the bottle. I declined. He shrugged and took another pull. “Let’s just kick the door in.”
“We don’t even know if he’s in there.”
“Let’s just do it anyway.”
“And if he comes home while we’re in there, sees his door kicked down and takes off running, what do we do then?”
“Shoot him from the window.”
I looked over at him. He peered up at the second story of the condemned three-decker where Webster allegedly lived. His deranged cherub’s face was serene, a look it usually got when it contemplated violence.
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