“Of course we did. But they wouldn’t talk. Which is why I’m talking to you.”
“What do you want to know?”
Eddie pauses. “What I’m about to ask you—I’m aware it’s sensitive. I’m aware you might not want to discuss it. But I’m asking you to try. Like I said: we haven’t found much. Sure, this woman isn’t registered, but we’re not gonna charge her for that. What we’re interested in is the fact that we’ve linked her to a number of deaths. Suicides.”
It’s so simple, so instantaneous, the body’s response: Daniel’s hunger is gone. He could vomit.
“Now, we’ve found no direct, causal relationship,” says Eddie. “These are people who’ve gone to see her two, ten, sometimes twenty years earlier. But there are several of them—five, including your sister. Which is enough to make you wonder.” He folds his hands and leans toward Daniel. “So here’s what I want to know. I want to know if she said anything—did anything—to push you in that direction. Or if she did it to Klara.”
“Not to me. I told her what I wanted from her, and she gave it to me. It was transactional. I didn’t get the sense she cared what I did with the information once I left.” There’s a crawling feeling on his neck, many-legged and swift, like a centipede, though when Daniel uses his index finger to probe beneath his shirt collar, he feels nothing. It occurs to him that Eddie has not mentioned whether this is a conversation or an interview. “As for Klara, I’m not sure. She never told me she felt pressured. But she was different to begin with.”
“Different how?”
“She was vulnerable. A little unstable. Susceptible, I guess. Which may have been something she was born with—or maybe it developed over time.” Daniel pushes his food away. He doesn’t want to look at the squid’s mantle, sliced in perfect rings, or the arms curling inward. “I know what I told you after the memorial: I thought it was a very strange coincidence, the fact that this fortune teller predicted Klara’s death. But I was distraught. I wasn’t thinking clearly. Yes, the fortune teller was right, but only because Klara chose to believe her. There’s no mystery in that.”
Daniel pauses. He feels deeply uneasy, though it takes him a moment to identify why.
“On the other hand,” Daniel adds, “if you do think this woman had something to do with it—if we entertain the thought of that very slim chance—then frankly, I blame myself. I was the one who heard about her. I was the one who dragged my siblings to that apartment.”
“Daniel. You can’t blame yourself.” Eddie’s hand is poised above the notebook, but his brow softens with compassion. “You doing that is like blaming our man Jim for going to see Rosa. You doing that, it’s blaming the victim. It can’t have been easy on you, either, going to this woman at such a young age. Hearing when she says you’re gonna die.”
Daniel has not forgotten his date—the twenty-fourth of November, this year—but neither has he given it credence. Most of the people he knows who died young were the unlucky recipients of hellish diagnoses: AIDS, like Simon, or an untreatable cancer. Just two weeks ago, Daniel had his annual physical. On the way there, he felt rattled, but afterward he was embarrassed for having let the superstition of it get to him. Apart from a bit of weight gain and borderline elevated cholesterol, he was in excellent health.
“Sure,” he says. “I was a kid; it was an unpleasant experience. But I shook it off a long time ago.”
“And what if Klara couldn’t?” asks Eddie, jabbing his index finger in emphasis. “This is what scammers do: they go after whoever’s most vulnerable. Look—this susceptibility you’re talking about? Think of it like a gene. The fortune teller may have been the environmental factor that triggered it. Or maybe she noticed it in Klara. Maybe she preyed on it.”
“Maybe,” echoes Daniel, but he bristles. He realizes that Eddie likely invoked a medical metaphor to appeal to Daniel’s expertise, but the idea sounds pseudoscientific and the effort feels condescending. What does Eddie know about gene expression, much less Klara’s phenotype? Eddie is better off sticking to what he does best. Daniel would not tell him how to run an interrogation.
“And what about your brother?” Eddie glances down at his notes. “He died in ’82, didn’t he? Did the fortune teller predict that?”
Something about Eddie’s gesture—the brief peek at the open folder, enough to suggest he had to look to find the date but too short to actually do it—irritates Daniel more. He has no doubt that Eddie knows the year of Simon’s death, as well as a host of other things about Simon—things Daniel surely doesn’t.
“I don’t have any idea. He never told us what she said to him. But my brother was always going to do exactly what he wanted. He was a gay man who lived in San Francisco in the eighties and contracted AIDS. To me, that seems pretty damn clear.”
“All right.” Eddie keeps his wrists on the table but lifts his fingers and palms. A gesture of appeasement: the edge in Daniel’s voice was not lost on him. “I appreciate what you’ve given me. And if anything else comes to mind”—he passes a business card across the table—“you have my number.”
Eddie stands and closes his folder, tapping it once on the table to level the papers inside. He tucks the folder into his briefcase and slings his jacket over one shoulder.
“Hey, I looked you up,” he says. “Saw you’re still working with our troops.”
“That’s right,” says Daniel, but then his throat becomes plugged, and he finds himself unable to go on.
“Good stuff,” says Eddie on his way out, clapping Daniel on the back with the genial encouragement of a Little League coach. “Keep it up.”
• • •
Daniel walks briskly to his car and departs with a lurch. He feels both wired and drained; he didn’t realize how disturbing it would be to revisit the story of the woman in such detail, or to hear the scope of her family’s transgressions. It’s so painful to contemplate the deaths of his siblings that Daniel has done it only in isolation: lying awake while Mira sleeps or driving home from work in winter, the road lit by headlights, the radio rattling in the background.
What he told Eddie is true: he doesn’t buy the fortune teller’s claims. He believes in bad choices; he believes in bad luck. And yet the memory of the woman on Hester Street is like a miniscule needle in his stomach, something he swallowed long ago and which floats, undetectable, except for moments when he moves a certain way and feels a prick.
He’s never told Mira. She grew up in Berkeley, the studious child of musicians—her father Christian, her mother Jewish—who produced interfaith songs for children. Mira loves her parents, but she can’t bear to listen to “Oy to the World” or “Little Drummer Mensch,” and she has little patience for New Age institutions. It’s no wonder she gravitated toward Judaism: she likes its intellectualism and morality, its lawfulness.
Before they married, Daniel thought she would find the story of the fortune teller childish. He didn’t want to drive her away. After Klara’s death, he longed to share it, but again, he did not. This time, he feared Mira’s brow would furrow with concern—a tiny, delicate v, like a goose sure of its direction. He feared she would see in him an alignment with Klara: her eccentricity, her lack of reason. Even her illness. And he was not aligned with Klara—this much Daniel knew. There was no reason to make Mira think so.
23.
Raj and Ruby are coming for Thanksgiving. On Friday, Raj e-mailed Daniel and agreed.
They’ll arrive on Tuesday, two days before the holiday, so Daniel and Mira spend the weekend preparing. They wash the linens in the guest room and set up the fold-out in Daniel’s study. They clean the house: Mira the kitchen and living room, Daniel the bedrooms and bathrooms, Gertie the dining room. They go to Rhinebeck to buy produce at Breezy Hill Orchard and cheeses at Grand Cru. Before they drive back across the river to Kingston, they stop at Bella Vita for a centerpiece with tulips and pomegranates and apricot-colored rose
s. Daniel carries it back to the car. Against the dim November sky, the flowers seem to glow.
• • •
The doorbell rings two hours early, while Mira is teaching and Gertie is taking a nap. Daniel scrambles downstairs, still in his Binghamton T-shirt and furry moccasins, cursing himself for not having changed. Through the peephole: a man and a girl, or not a girl—a teenager, nearly as tall as her father. Daniel pulls the door open. It’s drizzling outside; a stream of droplets rests on Ruby’s lustrous, copper-black mane.
“Raj,” Daniel says. “And Rubina.”
Instantly, he feels self-conscious for resorting to her full name, a name listed on her birth certificate and rarely, to his knowledge, used since. But she appears so changed, looking not like the child he remembers but like an adult he’s never met, that what came to him was the equally adult, never-met name: Rubina.
“Hi,” says Ruby. She wears a fuchsia velour sweat suit tucked into knee-high Ugg boots. When she smiles, she looks so much like Klara that Daniel nearly winces.
“Daniel,” says Raj, stepping forward to shake his hand. “It’s good to see you.”
When Daniel last saw Raj, he looked anemically handsome, like a street dog: sharp chin, sharp cheekbones, slant of nose. Now he is trim and healthy, his upper body toned beneath a hooded cashmere sweater. His hair is neatly clipped. There’s a comb of gray at his temples, but his face has fewer wrinkles than Daniel’s. He holds a juice of an unappealing, green-brown color.
“And you,” says Daniel. “Come on in. Gertie’s sleeping and Mira’s teaching, but they’ll both be here soon. Can I get you something to drink?”
“I’d love a glass of water,” Raj says.
He pulls a silver Tumi suitcase through the doorway. Ruby has a Louis Vuitton duffel bag. She turns to hitch it onto one shoulder. Across the back of her sweatpants are two words, encrusted in rhinestones: Juicy, in elaborate capitals, and in smaller, less-eye-catching capitals, Couture.
“You sure?” asks Daniel, closing the door. “I have a great Barolo in the garage.”
Why is he trying to impress Raj? To make up for his schlubby T-shirt and moccasins? He’s already thinking of what he’ll cook for breakfast tomorrow morning: a frittata, perhaps, with fontina and what’s left of the heirloom tomatoes.
“Oh,” says Raj. “No need. But thank you.”
“It’s no hassle.” Suddenly, Daniel is desperate for a drink. “It’s just languishing down there, waiting for a time like this.”
“Really,” says Raj. “I’m fine. But feel free.”
A pause as their eyes meet, and Daniel understands: Raj doesn’t drink. A large silver watch slides down on Raj’s wrist.
“Of course,” says Daniel. “Water, then. And let’s get you settled. The guest room has a queen bed, and there’s a fold-out in my office. We’ve set up both.”
Ruby has been typing something on a skinny, pink flip phone—that Motorola Razr all the teenagers have—but now she snaps it shut. “Dad’ll take the fold-out.”
“Incorrect,” says Raj.
“And I’ll have a glass of the Barolo,” she adds.
“Wrong again,” Raj says.
Ruby slits her eyes and smirks, but when Raj raises his eyebrows, Ruby’s smirk becomes a real smile.
“Silly old Dad,” she says, following Daniel to the office. “Spoilsport old Dad. Spoilsport Daddy longlegs.”
• • •
The next morning, a Wednesday, Daniel wakes at ten. He curses. He hears the shower in the master bathroom—Mira—and hopes Raj and Ruby have slept in, too. Shocking to Daniel, how late they were up, even more shocking how well it went—a leisurely, two-hour dinner with his mother, his wife, his brother-in-law, and his niece, as if such a thing were normal for them, followed by chocolates and tea in the living room. Daniel broke out the Barolo after all, and even Gertie trundled to bed after eleven.
Daniel stayed up even later. His desktop computer is in the office, where Ruby was sleeping. Mira was in bed, too, so Daniel took the opportunity to retrieve her laptop from the bedside table and carry it into the master bathroom.
The Louis Vuitton suitcase sparked his curiosity. Most designer brands mean nothing to him, but he recognized those iconic brown and tan letters. Raj’s watch, too, was clearly expensive. And the cashmere hoodie: who wears such a thing? So Daniel investigated. He knew they were doing well—in 2003, when Roy Horn was mauled by one of the duo’s white tigers, Ruby and Raj replaced Siegfried and Roy as the Mirage’s main act—but what he learned via Google astounded him. Their home, a gated, all-white estate, has been profiled in Luxury Las Vegas and Architectural Digest. The gates are marked with an ornate RC and open onto a mile-long driveway that leads to thirty acres of interconnected mansions and walkways. There’s a meditation center, a movie theater, and an animal habitat where black swans and ostriches can be visited for a hefty entrance fee. For Ruby’s thirteenth birthday, Raj bought her a Shetland pony, a rather overfed specimen named Krystal with whom Ruby posed for the teen magazine Bossy—Ruby’s arms slung around the pony’s neck, her dark mane lying atop Krystal’s blond one. In the article, a pdf of which Daniel found online, Bossy identifies Ruby as the youngest millionaire in Las Vegas.
Why didn’t Daniel know all this? Is it that he didn’t want to? He’s avoided reading about Ruby and Raj’s act, mostly because it makes him think about the disaster of their last meeting and the guilt he feels about his distance from them. Now he couldn’t help but rethink the previous night. Daniel and Mira purchased their house in 1990, when they couldn’t afford Cornwall-on-Hudson or Rhinebeck and still believed Kingston was up-and-coming. Daniel imagined Raj and Ruby driving into town, expecting a historical site—Kingston was once the capital of New York—and finding a city still struggling to right itself after the closure of the IBM factory that employed seven thousand residents. He saw them pass the abandoned technology center and Main Street, fallen into shabby disrepair. How must they have regarded the fold-out cot in Daniel’s office and the expensive cheese—the former an embarrassment, the latter an attempt to make up for it?
He could not bear to contemplate his return to work on Monday, and what might happen if he holds his ground when it comes to the waivers. Days earlier, he submitted a request to review his case with the local Area Defense Counsel, a military attorney who provides representation for accused service members. He knows that Mira is right—it’s best to be aware of what options he has to defend himself—but the request alone was humiliating. Without a job, who would he be? Someone who sat on a bath mat with his back against the toilet, reading about his brother-in-law’s solarium, he thought—an image terrible enough to force him to bed, so that he could fall asleep and stop seeing it.
Now he dresses nicely and hurries downstairs. Raj and Ruby sit at the kitchen counter, sipping orange juice and eating omelets.
“Crap,” says Daniel. “I’m sorry. I wanted to cook for you.”
“Nothing to apologize for.” Raj is freshly showered, wearing another expensive-looking sweater—sage green this time—and a pair of dark jeans. “We rattled around.”
“We always get up early,” says Ruby.
“Ruby’s school starts at seven thirty,” Raj says.
“Except on performance days,” Ruby says. “On performance days, we sleep late.”
“Oh?” says Daniel. Coffee will help. Mira usually has it ready for him, but today, the pot is empty. “Why’s that?”
“Because we’re out so late. Till one, sometimes. Or later,” Ruby says. “On those days, we homeschool.”
She’s still in her pajamas: SpongeBob SquarePants scrubs and a white tank top with a pink bra underneath. The effect is disconcerting—the childish pants and the tank, which isn’t tight, exactly, but still shows more than Daniel expected to see.
“Oh,” he says again. “That sounds complicated.”
> “See?” asks Ruby, turning to Raj.
“It’s not complicated,” Raj says. “School days, early. Performance days, late.”
“Have you seen my mother?” asks Daniel.
“Yup,” says Ruby. “She was up early, too. We had coffee together. Then she went to Tai Chi.” She puts her fork down with a clatter. “Hey, do you have a juicer?”
“A juicer?” asks Daniel.
“Yeah. Dad and I found this in the fridge”—Ruby lifts her glass; orange juice sloshes precariously close to the rim—“but we prefer to make our own.”
“I’m afraid we don’t,” says Daniel. “Have a juicer.”
“That’s okay,” Ruby chirps. She spears a folded corner of omelet. “So, what kind of stuff do you guys like to have for breakfast?”
She’s only making conversation, Daniel knows, but he’s having trouble keeping up. What’s more, the coffee machine isn’t turning on. He’s filled the filter with grounds, poured the water in, and flicked the switch that starts the brewing process, but the little red light remains off.
“I’m not much for breakfast, actually,” he says. “Usually, I just bring a mug of coffee to work.”
Soft padding of feet on the stairwell, and Mira sweeps into the kitchen. Her hair, shiny and freshly blown out, lifts like a wing.
“Good morning,” she says.
“Morning,” says Raj.
“Morning,” says Ruby. She turns back to Daniel. “Why aren’t you at work today?”
“The plug, sweetheart,” says Mira. She crosses behind him, touching the small of his back, and plugs the machine into the wall. The red light comes on immediately.
“It’s the day before Thanksgiving, Roo,” says Raj. “No one’s at work.”
“Oh,” says Ruby. “Right.” Another corner of omelet. She’s eating her way in, leaving a thick, stacked blob of central toppings. “You’re a doctor, aren’t you?”
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