by Paula Cox
“When a man is a danger not only to those around him—those who care about him and want to protect him—but also to himself, this is when it is necessary that we intervene and keep him from doing any more damage.”
Still no response.
When I think of Maya at this moment, under Theo’s cooing hand, I imagine the scene from Indiana Jones after Indiana’s been dropped into the pit of snakes, and is having a stare off with the cobra uncoiling in front of him.
“Do you think I’ve been cruel to poor Kit Holcomb? My lovely, what do you think of your father? Do you think he is a cruel man?”
The snake rears back its head and opens its glittering eyes a little wider. It gets smaller and looks less threatening, which is exactly how it wants to look before it strikes.
“I’ve done a cruel thing, perhaps. I’ve ended that boy’s life. And I will carry the knowledge of what I’ve done for the rest of my life, Maya. Every day I shall ask forgiveness for the bad things I’ve done and the good I’ve left undone, and forgiveness for the difficult places people put you in, and for the impossible things they ask of you. For the things you are forced to do because of the foolish actions of others. You know, Maya, because you are smart, that it is not a blatantly evil action we must fear. It is others’ unwillingness to act with strength and conviction that forces me to act with cruelty. Yes, I’ll call it that. I haven’t any problems naming something for what it is. I will take responsibility for every single one of my actions, Maya, because I have acted manfully, promptly, and strongly. I have done all I can, and it is to God alone I look for forgiveness. I know you hate me, Maya—as I hate myself. I ask you to pray for me nonetheless. Pray for your poor papa who has been saddled with such responsibility. Pray for me, Maya, my love.”
“Daddy,” Maya interrupts. The only thing she had said during the whole, unbearable spiel.
“Yes, darling?”
“Get the fuck out of my room.” She said it, she told me, manfully, promptly, and strongly, meeting the glittering eyes of the snake with the granite of her own.
“Get the fuck out and never come back.”
Theo got up silently and did just that. And for three weeks Maya sat in her room without hardly taking more than a few bites from the meals brought to her. Without seeing anyone, she thought about the life I’d forced her back into and how she could escape it forever.
Chapter 20
About this time our stories begin to take on a sort of mirror quality. I spend three weeks waiting in cars keeping a watch out for someone I’ve never even seen before, and Maya stays in her room keeping a watch out for someone she never wants to see again.
She listens to music, reads magazines, and ignores Theo whenever he comes upstairs to ask about her. After a few days, she’s even fallen into a rhythm and doesn’t mind at all staying caged up in her room if it means she can avoid her father. She’s been caged up all her life—only difference now is that she doesn’t have to look at her captor through her bars. It’s better than before, in some ways.
But only in some: not in all. She watches the snow come down outside her window. She thinks about taking a walk around the lake in the backyard and maybe even striking up a conversation with the old, Italian gardener who has been there all her life. She thinks about how nice it would be to see the greenhouse she hasn’t gone in for at least five years, and she even gets so far as to put on shoes before she sees one of her father’s goons doing his rounds and realizes she can’t. Any reminder of her father is a reminder of Kit. Any reminder of Kit is a reminder of all the other people her father’s killed as head of the Family, and a reminder of this is a rap on the cage she can’t escape from that makes her go dizzy.
She takes off her shoes and leans against her bed. Instead of putting on the TV, she goes on to Spotify and finds the album “Kind of Blue.” She plays it over and over again, watching the gray slush of snow pile down on the greenhouse that she’s no longer considering visiting, watching it make little holes in the lake, which the swans float over and peck at like it’s food. She likes the way the music makes her feel—thoughtful and sad and a little wise all at the same time. Each time the record finishes she gives it a few minutes before pressing the button and going back to start the whole thing over again from scratch, again and again, and again. It’s better than that bubble-gum pop they play in the clubs. It’s better than Bob Dylan. By the fifth time she’s played the full album she’s pretty sure it’s the best thing she’s ever listened to.
That’s when she realizes she misses me. Sitting at home and doing nothing for days and weeks on end was manageable before, as long as she didn’t have to see her father. But the music changes things. It reminds her of what she’s missing, of where she belongs, of an apartment complex a few hours up the road along the coastline. That’s the first place she needs to go to win her independence.
For the first time in three weeks, she asks herself: why not? Why shouldn’t she try to do something about it? She begins to ask herself questions about what she can do about it but the more she asks, the more hopeless the situation comes. Her father has her kept under lock and key. And supposing she got out anyway and found herself a car, she didn’t know how to drive, and the roads were covered with ice. It came down to a decision between risking her life trying to get out or wasting her life staying in. But having this option brings relief.
For all of two minutes, she considers her alternatives and then decides which was the better option. The forecast shows that later in the week higher temperatures are expected. And because there isn’t really that much snow accumulated on the streets, after a couple days of sun it should be more or less melted completely enough to allow her to escape. Sunrise Apartments—that was the destination. Maybe she was already thinking of coming to me at this point, but there’s no knowing for certain. There’s only the plan she’s at last set for herself.
So she waits. One day. Two days. Waiting now that she has a plan in place is much more difficult than waiting when all she was doing was waiting. She puts on more Miles Davis and thinks about texting me, but doesn’t. She misses me, but it doesn’t stop her from being mad. She can wait. She’s learned a lot recently about how to wait.
Friday. The sun peaks out. Sunday she’ll go. She’ll steal the keys from the guardroom to one of the Maseratis and just drive out with her daypack and some jewelry to sell and nothing else. Because she can’t drive, the keys don’t need to be hidden or even very carefully watched. A new life, she thinks as she lies down to sleep. A new beginning.
Saturday afternoon is bright as the day before it. She opens the door of her room for the first time in weeks, dodges down the main hallways like a ninja, and slips into the guardroom. She knows their schedules—patrolling the halls, the front of the house, the lakes, the gardens—and knows no one is expected back for at least a few hours. A piece of cake. She untangles the keys from a small ceramic jar sitting on the side table and drops them into her pocket. Twenty minutes after she’s left she’s back in her room. The cook knocks on her door and delivers her steamed lobster with buttered mashed potatoes and fresh asparagus. It’s the first time in three weeks that she’s been hungry.
When she’s finishing up, there’s another knock on her door. She doesn’t have time to say, “who is it?” or “come in” or “go away!” because her father has already poked his head in through the doorway. Maya’s heart sinks: he has found out about the Maserati.
There are two ways to play this situation. Either she admits what she’s done, and bursts into tears, or she acts like she doesn’t know anything and remains just as hostile as she’s ever been. She chooses the latter.
“What do you want?”
Theo closes the door behind him as quietly as he can, but there’s still a squeak of the hinges that makes him flinch. “Can a father not see his daughter without being interrogated?”
“Can a daughter not have five minutes alone in her own room without being interrupted?” This is a poorly constructed argument, and she
knows it; it doesn’t keep her from holding on to it with everything she has.
“It has been almost a month, Maya. You must come out at some point.”
She weighs her options, her possible responses, her witty ripostes, and decides to use none of them.
“I was hoping we could talk,” Theo continues on, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to bring up with you.”
He has been hiding his hands behind his back to keep them from her, but now he brings them forward, displaying for her a small, gleaming jewelry case. Patterns of golden leaves are etched on the surface, and the wood shines with a rich, dull gleam like brass. Maya’s eyes glitter with curiosity and interest, but she makes no move to take it. Her father opens the box and reveals a slender golden watch, blazing with diamonds and platinum.
“I’ve had this since your birthday, but with all that’s been happening recently I simply haven’t had the chance.”
“It’s beautiful.” Maya can’t help herself. “Thank you.”
Theo smiles, taking the watch from the case and unclasping it. “They put me on a waiting list to buy one, a little more than nine months ago,” he explains. “But I knew it would be worth the delay. Seeing it on you only makes me surer of it.”
For a moment, Maya’s anger is almost completely forgotten. She looks at the dazzling thing and seeing the stunning piece of art draped on her slender wrist, she’s reminded of the life of beautiful things she’s been shutting herself away from. She begins to regret it—the fancy places she and her father went to, the extravagant clothing, the servants and the guardsmen waiting on her beck and call, the simple fun she could have as long as she was having it within the boundaries of her father’s demands. And so on and so forth, all of it reflected in the gleaming crystal face of the new watch.
“Would you like to sit down, Maya?” Theo says with extreme kindness, taking the desk chair and holding it out for his daughter like one of his men would do.
Maya sits without taking her eyes away from her new jewelry.
“I know how you think of me and what I do,” he begins. “You’ve made it clear to me, my angel. Kirill’t think that for the past three weeks I’ve just been twiddling my thumbs.”
“I don’t think that.”
“That’s good. That’s very good.” His hand is trembling when it takes Maya’s. “I’ve played this conversation in my mind over and over again, and I still do not know how to say what I know I must say. Nevertheless, I will try. You see, my darling, I am a man of violence. It is not in my nature, but in my profession—yet understand that for years they have been one and the same. I cannot help it. I alone know what is required of me. I alone know the price of failure. If I am not a harsh taskmaster, then those I love will suffer. This is the burden of my knowledge, my darling.”
“You’ve said all of this before, Daddy.”
“Have I? Forgive me. I am old and preoccupied, and I repeat myself constantly.”
He hangs his head, rubbing Maya’s hand all the while. She becomes tender with her father and strokes his leathery skin, willing herself to forget the nebulae of blood on his hands or the countless other executions in the past that Kit’s murder has caused her to remember.
“It’s okay. I understand,” she says without really understanding what he was doing or why he was there. She just wants him to stop being so sad.
“I hope it is, my angel. You see, I am sick of killing. Your disgust has now become my disgust. I am tired of being feared and being strong. Do you know what my fondest wish is, my angel?”
“What is it, Daddy?”
“I wish for the sounds of small feet running up and down the hallways, and for screams of joy from my grandchildren to come from the gardens. I want to hold them in my lap and read them Pinocchio—the same as I read to you—and I want them never to ask me what I did as a young man so that I will not have the pain of having to lie to them. This is what I think of every night, my angel. Doesn’t it sound nice?”
“Yes,” Maya says thoughtfully. “I guess it does.”
“Peace and tranquility. Peace, and the freedom to die a boring old man when my hair is gone, and my legs are too brittle to stand on.”
He’s so passionate, and he sounds so sincere when he talks that Maya’s eyes begin to water up, and she has to turn away, so her father doesn’t see. He sees anyway but turns and sniffs his nose loudly to pretend otherwise. Theo takes her hand with more force. Her tears have given him all the motivation he needs.
“You’re not going to die anytime soon, Daddy,” Maya says, a little frantically. She’s forgotten all about the stolen car keys or the plan to drive out to Sunrise Apartments. She’s even forgotten about missing me. “Why are you talking this way to me? Why now? What has happened?”
“Nothing, my angel. I really ought not to say that. I didn’t mean to worry you—and there’s nothing to worry about. The only thing that’s happened is good news. A way for us to end the violence, to start a new life. Everything that we’ve wished and dreamt for, my darling.”
His grasp becomes firmer. Maya forgets the watch and concentrates on her father. She knows that with the way he’s talking and with what he’s promising she ought to be excited but more than anything else, she’s suspicious.
“What are you talking about?”
“The answer to our problems, my darling. A way for us to rest and stop worrying about what will happen in the future.”
He’s talking to her like she’s a little girl: a little girl who doesn’t know better than to believe that cure-all answers drop from the sky into the laps of bad men. And she’s not so ignorant as to believe that in the three weeks since she hasn’t seen him, her father has gone from being anything other than a bad man.
She takes her hand away from his. Theo notices her change of mood and looks at her with renewed tenderness.
“Why are you afraid, my darling?”
“I’m not afraid. I want to know what has happened and you’re not telling me.”
Theo sighs and looks into his daughter’s eyes. He finds them more cold and impassive than before he gave her the watch. His bribe hasn’t worked—now he’s got to admit the truth.
“Mattias has been asking about you.”
“About what?”
“About you.”
The seconds drift down like the slow-moving snow. Then, the realization hits Maya like an unexpected snow bank. The watch, it goes without saying, is completely forgotten.
“You’ve got to be shitting me.”
“He’s a good man, Maya. Honorable, rich, and well-protected. He’s a good man and a moral man.”
“A ‘good and moral man.’ Who the hell are you talking about? Not the guy who makes his living by killing people? Not the guy whose son and I fucked when we were seventeen?” she spits.
“You don’t know what he’s gone through, Maya. What any of us have gone through. You don’t know the choices he’s had to face.”
“Who the hell do you think you are? Who the hell do you think I am? Is this the fucking eighteenth century to you? Do you honestly expect you can just pawn me off like this—like a fucking whore?”
She’s never been so angry in her life. Her fingers fumble over the platinum strap of the watch trying to rip it off but her nails are too long, and she can’t get it. Theo watches her thrashing hands with sadness and pity.
“He’s a good man, Maya. You’ll see that in time.”
“Get the fuck away from me,” she snaps. Amazingly, he stands up and makes his way to the door.
“You’ll see, my angel,” he says.
“I hope you die.” And she means it, too. The rage she felt when her father murdered Kit has returned, but now it’s amplified with something more than just disgust or horror. She knows this isn’t any idle scheming on Theo’s part. He really does expect her to marry Mattias Kroll and draw their two forces together. No—not expects. He knows it, either through her own eventual free will or through force. And it would be a mista
ke to believe that he would not use force on his own daughter if there were a possibility of a greater good for the Family.
Theo’s spent his lifetimes and countless others building up his business and establishing himself. He has had too much experience to trust anyone but himself to accomplish anything. His daughter means the world to him, but only in so far as their interests align. That had just been made perfectly clear.
Maya sits on her bed and cries for an hour. At the end of the hour, she is ready: her suitcase has been packed for a week. The keys are in her jeans pocket. She puts on her peacoat, her green hat, her scarf, and makes herself into a dark little bundle. At seven o’clock when the guard is at dinner, and there’s no chance of accidentally running into her father, she drops the suitcase from her balcony and follows it down into the snow bank behind the bushes in the front yard. The Maserati is in the garage to her right, facing the front circle that rounds its way around the front entrance.
A separate, smaller key on her ring of house keys opens the garage. She’s been watching Youtube videos for a week, learning the rudiments of driving. It’s not really all that hard, she realizes. Gas, brakes, lights, turn signals, and keeping your shit: mix them all together, and there’s your secret.