“He was going to kill you,” she said. “Probably both of us. If not today, then eventually.”
“You lied to me.”
“Only after you said you weren’t going to do it the way I wanted to. The way we needed to.” She picked up a handful of bills and waved it at Simon. “It’s about $2,000, the cash he laid on top. He probably got the idea from a TV show or something, the trick’s so obvious. Anyway, you should take it. It’s all yours.”
“I don’t want it.”
She stared at him. “Come on, Simon.”
He shook his head. The money was contaminated: blood money, pure and simple.
“Here,” he said. “Let me see your foot.”
He cleaned out Maria’s wound and wrapped the foot before taking scissors to her sneaker and cutting out the tongue. He pried the bullet out of the sole with the pair of tweezers. She held out her hand and he dropped the bullet into her palm.
“I’m going to keep this,” she said. “String it on a necklace.”
She asked him what she should do to keep the wound from getting infected.
“Wash it out with hydrogen peroxide twice a day,” Simon said. “That’ll hurt like hell, but you have to do it. Cover the hole with gauze. Take ibuprofen for the inflammation. You still have your painkillers?” She nodded. “Use them when you have to. Keep taking your antibiotics too.” He paused. “What are you going to do, Maria? Where are you going to go?”
“Don’t you think it’s better if you don’t know that?”
“You shouldn’t have to do this alone. I don’t want to do this alone.”
“You don’t want to hang around me for too long. Didn’t I prove that already?” She closed her eyes. There was a long pause filled only by her jagged breathing. She grimaced as she shifted her wounded foot. “I’m glad you didn’t pull the trigger, Simon.”
“I thought you were disappointed in me.”
“For a moment, yeah, maybe I was. But I was wrong. I’d crossed that line already. I’d become that person. You didn’t have to.” She opened her eyes. “I’ve felt what it’s like to be powerless, and I am never going to let that happen to me again. I’ll do anything to fight that feeling. And I’ll tell you something else. Killing DaSilva was easier than killing Thomas, and DaSilva hadn’t even done anything to me yet. You understand?”
“Are you saying I should be afraid of you?”
“What I’m saying is that you can recover from this. You can get a job or go back to school, keep your head down and hope they never tie you to DaSilva’s mess. You can try to build a regular life—you still have that choice. I’ve already chosen a different way to live.”
“You can have a regular life too.” It was pointless to argue with her, he knew that, but he couldn’t fight the compulsion to do it anyway. “Move somewhere remote and private. Start fresh.”
She smiled gently, as though he were a child who needed to be cushioned from hard truths. “I don’t think it’s going to work out quite like that.”
Simon sat down on the bed. “I’ve wanted to ask you something.”
“So ask.”
“Did it help?”
“What?”
“Killing Thomas. Did it make you feel better?”
“It made me stop feeling worse. It made me feel like . . . an imbalance had been corrected.”
“I’m sorry you’ve suffered so much.” Simon lay back against the pillows next to her. “I don’t know what else I can say.”
“So am I.” She turned toward him. “Now I’m going to ask you something.” She reached over the edge of the bed, to his bag, and came up holding Amelia’s lockbox. “I know it’s private. But you asked me to bring this. It was the only thing you wanted from your apartment, so it made me wonder what’s inside. What you care about that much.”
Simon looked at the box. He didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll put it back. I guess it’s none of my business.”
“No. I’ll show you.” He spun the lock and opened the lid. “It’s a few of my sister’s things.”
The hemp bracelet, grayed and ragged, lay next to the red diary, both resting on top of the Venus flytrap drawing. The objects appeared small and sad, drained of their magic as he looked at them now in the presence of another person.
“Do you have a picture of her in there?”
“I don’t need to be reminded of what she looked like,” he said, hearing echoes of his father in his words.
Maria reached toward the box. “Can I?” He nodded, and she lifted the three objects out and placed them on top of the comforter, smoothing out the drafting paper. “She drew this?”
“Yeah. She wanted to get it tattooed on her back.”
Maria laughed, then covered her mouth. “I’m sorry.”
“I know, I know.” Simon found himself smiling. “She was fifteen, remember.”
Maria looked back down at the paper. “It’s a good drawing. I just wouldn’t want it on my body my whole life.” She brought it closer to the light. “What’s the flytrap?”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s the fairy, the Tinker Bell, right? So what’s the flytrap? Or who’s the flytrap?”
“I don’t think it’s a symbol. She probably just liked the way it looked.”
“You weren’t a teenage girl,” Maria said. “Believe me, it meant something.” She plucked the band that held the diary shut. “Is this her diary?”
“Yes.”
She moved as though to open it.
“Don’t do that,” Simon said. “Please.”
She stopped. “No, sorry, of course. It’s private.”
“I just think that if I haven’t read it, neither should anybody else.”
“You haven’t read it?”
“I’m afraid of what it might say about me.” He’d never articulated his reasons for not reading the diary before, but as soon as he spoke the words, he knew they were true.
“I’d never have the discipline. I’d be too curious.” Maria put the diary back into the box and lifted the hemp bracelet. “What’s the story behind this?”
He suddenly didn’t want Maria looking at these objects anymore, didn’t want her touching them. He felt foolish, ignorant, secreting these things around like fetishes. “It was just her bracelet, that’s all.”
Maria read his irritation and returned the bracelet to the box. He reached over, closed the lid, and spun the lock.
He lay back on the pillows and stared up at the ceiling. “We shouldn’t have done that,” he said softly. “DaSilva. How could we have done that?”
“He was never going to let us go.”
“We don’t know if that’s true.”
“Yes,” Maria said firmly. “He deserved it.”
“Nobody deserves that.”
“Better him than us, Simon.”
How could he argue with that? And yet Simon’s own potential death seemed to him an abstract concept next to the blunt facts of DaSilva’s blown-out temple, his sightless eyes, all that heavy, dead-white flesh anchored, forever inanimate, to the wet sand. The equivalency didn’t seem equal, or fair.
• • •
MARIA Campos exited his life at 7:13 the next morning. He looked at the clock the moment the door closed behind her, as though fixing the exact minute in his mind would mean something. She wouldn’t let him take her downstairs; she didn’t want them to be seen leaving the hotel together. This was the first move in the game of her disappearance, and she would make it alone. He sat on the bed and waited until all traces of her presence had dissipated, until he could feel nothing remaining of her in the room.
As she was leaving, she’d turned to him in the doorway and said, “What we did to DaSilva, it only exists in our minds. Do you understand?” He’d shaken his head that he d
idn’t. “Only we know exactly what happened,” she said. “Everybody else will just be guessing. The truth lives and dies inside our heads. Okay?” He nodded. She was telling him to keep his mouth shut, and, of course, he would. “I’m sorry,” he said, “for everything you’ve had to do.” She leaned in. “You’ll survive this,” she whispered. She smiled at him, the gray tooth flickering, dark eyes shining, and then she’d turned and walked to the elevator and didn’t look back.
He got up from the bed, took the elevator to the lobby, paid their bill in cash, and went down into the garage under the hotel. Katherine’s RAV4 was still parked where he’d left it the night before, a filthy snow- and salt-spattered incrimination. He started up the car one last time and pulled out onto Jamaica Avenue. He drove slowly, on local streets, to the nearest A train station, a mile or two away. Thick black clouds had rolled in again overnight and it was bitterly cold. Traffic was sparse, and he made it to Liberty and Lefferts in under ten minutes. He parked the car around the corner from the station, on a quiet residential block. A few figures hurried down the street, hunched inside puffy jackets, and nobody paid him any attention as he hauled his duffel bag out of the backseat, left the car, and walked to the subway station.
As he waited for the train on the elevated platform, he took his cell phone out of his jacket pocket. He’d charged it overnight, but he was only looking at his messages for the first time now. He found a text from DaSilva, from the night he and Maria had driven to Montauk. He read it with the sensation of plunging down a well, the bottom falling out from under him: “Where the fuck did you go? Call me.” He deleted the text, his fingers shaking.
The only new voice mail was from Howard Crewes. Simon pressed the phone against his ear and, hunching against the wind and the clatter of the tracks, listened to Howard’s message.
“Shit, Simon.” Crewes spoke in a voice almost comically fatigued, like that of a healthy man calling in sick to work. “How could you go see Cheryl like that? I’m sure she was pretty damn clear, but in case you didn’t understand: do not contact her again. Get it? You and Cheryl, you’ve never met, never spoken, nothing. Same thing with you and me now. I just want to forget this ever happened.” There was a pause before Crewes finished: “Maybe I’m being naive, but I’m praying it all ends here. I just hope you weren’t lying about that girl. I hope she really is someplace where they never find her.”
Simon erased the message. He didn’t know what DaSilva’s death would mean for Crewes and Cheryl. Probably it would help them. Without Simon and DaSilva, the hospital was never going to find Maria; any worries about the money Crewes had paid her could probably end there. Simon felt sorry for Howard, all the man’s best intentions in ruins, but he couldn’t do any more for him now. Crewes was right: from this point forward, they’d never known each other.
He peered down the tracks: still no sign of his train.
He wondered what Katherine Peel would do when she found out DaSilva had been killed. She might assume the murder was somehow connected to Simon, but what would she do about it then? He knew how important medical school was to her, how ambitious and stubborn she was. Was she really going to risk derailing all that by going to the police with what she knew about DaSilva’s scam? Wouldn’t she rather just leave it alone? Her car though—the kid at the Montauk motel had seen it, maybe somebody at the Best Western as well. If she were reunited with the RAV4, she might be dragged into things whether she wanted to be or not.
Simon ran down the platform stairs and around the corner to the block where he’d parked the thing. It was right there, of course, exactly as he’d left it. He still had the keys in his pocket, and he unlocked it, rummaging through the glove box until he found Katherine’s registration and insurance. He shoved the papers into his bag—he’d shred them later, at his father’s house—along with her cell phone, and then he hunted around the cluttered trunk until he found a small screwdriver. He looked around the block: there was nobody to see him. Quickly, he removed the license plates and stuffed them into his bag too. He locked the car again and forced himself to walk slowly and calmly back to the train station. They’d eventually be able to link Katherine to the RAV4’s VIN, but he figured she would be smart enough to say the car had been stolen. He tossed the car keys and her cell phone into one garbage can and his own phone into another, and then he trotted up the stairs, a Rockaway-bound A train pulling into the station just as he reached the platform.
• • •
WIND cutting across Jamaica Bay. Whitecaps slapping against the base of the tracks. White line of sky pressed thin between black clouds and black water. On Beach 116th, snowbanks worn down to icy gray nubs. An upended trash bin spilling Styrofoam cups and soda cans onto the sidewalk. The pizza parlor, the shuttered surf shop, the fogged windows of Derry Hills. At his house on Beach 113th, a single yellow lamp glowing in his father’s bedroom.
As he climbed the stairs to the porch, a shadow moved behind the glass. The kitchen light switched on, and Simon saw his father backlit—a cutout, an absence. Then Michael turned toward the light, and he looked exactly like what he was: a middle-aged man who lived alone, tidying his kitchen.
Simon didn’t wait any longer. He crossed the porch and knocked on the door.
• • •
Michael didn’t ask Simon where he’d been, why he’d skipped their dinner earlier in the week without explanation, why he hadn’t returned any of his messages. Instead, he pulled his son inside the house, sat him down at the kitchen table, and made him breakfast: fried eggs and sweet Italian sausage and white toast. He poured the last of the carafe’s coffee—weak and slightly burnt, just like always—into a mug, set it on the table, and leaned against the counter to watch Simon eat. Simon knew it must be obvious he was in some kind of trouble, and for once he was immensely grateful for his father’s circumspection. After Simon finished his breakfast—devouring every last scrap of food, his body abruptly realizing it hadn’t been fed in almost twenty-four hours—Michael retrieved the bottle of Jameson from the sideboard and poured them each a tumbler, two fingers, no ice. It wasn’t yet ten in the morning, but neither of them much cared.
Where do you start? How do you begin to be honest when there are still so many truths you cannot afford to reveal? Simon wanted to tell his father how Amelia drowned—the real story, leaving out nothing, not their argument, not his spying, not his shameful moment of paralysis before he jumped in after her—but he thought his actions would seem so alien, so inexplicable, that he wanted first to build a bridge, to give that night context and meaning, to show where both he and Amelia were coming from when they arrived together on that beach. He first needed his father to understand how it felt when Simon realized that Amelia was going to grow up to hate him. If Michael could understand this, maybe he would be able to one day understand what had eventually followed from it, how those few seconds of hesitation on the groyne had colored the balance of Simon’s life, insinuating themselves into every calibration of self, all those countless subconscious adjustments to his own understanding of who he was; how those few seconds had made him out into a coward, a failure; how a sense of inadequacy had become the imperative force in his psyche, a kind of perverse lodestar guiding him into the embrace of its darker cousins, shame and guilt.
There was no direct causative line from any one point in Simon’s life to the horrible scene on the beach in Montauk, to the fact that he was now, in all but the most literal reading of events, a murderer. But there was a course to be mapped nonetheless, a chain, no matter how tangled, that bound the Simon who had pointed a gun at DaSilva’s head to his younger and more innocent self. If he couldn’t ever explain where the course had ultimately led—and he couldn’t; he would forever protect Maria with his silence—at least he might help his father understand who he had become and how he might now change, if it was still possible, into someone better.
“Want more?” Michael nodded at Simon’s plate.
Michael swirled his whiskey. “You want to tell me why you’re stressed?”
“Not really. Not yet anyway.” Simon paused. “Right now I want to talk about Amelia.”
Michael shifted almost imperceptibly in his chair, like an antenna recalibrating to better receive some distant, obscure signal. “I’m listening.”
“Remember when you asked me to watch over her, right after we moved out here?” Simon said. “I took what you said very seriously.”
“I know you did.”
“Yeah, and that was mostly because you were telling me to do something I already thought I should be doing. I thought she needed my help and that I wasn’t giving her enough of it. But I was wrong,” Simon said. “What she needed was for me to start letting go, not to hold on any tighter.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself.”
“You don’t know that,” Simon said sharply. He took a breath. “I’m sorry. I just . . . I never really listened to her. That was the problem. Taking care of her—even when she didn’t want me to—it gave me a purpose. I did it for me more than I did it for her.” He finished his whiskey. “Even back then, I realized I was always going to disappoint her. Over and over and over again. The harder I tried not to, the worse it would be. I knew this, and yet still I refused to accept it.”
“You were doing the best you could.” Michael looked steadily at his son. “I could see that.”
“It wasn’t right. It wasn’t good enough.”
“Sometimes it’s not going to be, and that’s just the way it is.” His father stubbed out his cigarette. “I obviously know all about that.”
Silence then, interrupted only by the rasp of Michael striking a match, the crackle of the new cigarette catching.
“Dad, listen to me,” Simon suddenly blurted out. “I dropped out of med school, okay? I’ve been lying to you. It’s been almost a year already.”
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