Smoke

by Lisa Unger

  “I was a soldier. I was one of three women; they needed us. We could go where men sometimes couldn’t. We aroused less suspicion. But you’re right, they chose me for the job because they knew Rhames trusted me.”

  “And how did you feel about him? Killing a man who’d helped you in friendship.”

  “I didn’t feel anything. We weren’t trained to feel; not in that context. It was a job and I completed it-or so I thought.”

  “But part of you was glad, right?” asked Lily. “That the only person who wasn’t personally invested in keeping your secrets was dead?”

  “No,” said Monica, shaking her head vigorously. “No. It never entered my mind.”

  “Must be nice to operate without a conscience, Mom,” said Lily, keeping cold eyes on her mother. Monica just sat there, taking her hits. She deserved Lily’s anger and her judgment, and Monica knew it.

  “Oh, and there’s more,” said Lily, moving into the room from the doorway where she’d been standing. “Did she get to the best part?”

  Lydia shook her head. She wanted to reach for Lily but she was a bottle rocket, fuse sizzling; Lydia wasn’t sure when she was going to blow.

  “Simon Graves was not my father; Tim Samuels was. But I was never allowed to know that because to reveal it would be to undermine the memory altering they did on Mickey. So because of all their lies and all the black, terrible things they did, I never knew he was my father. Isn’t that sick?”

  They were all silent for a second, the air electric with Lily’s rage.

  “This is what happens to you when you fuck with Trevor Rhames,” said Monica, to no one in particular. “He cores you, destroys you from the inside out.”

  Lily looked at her mother with undisguised hatred. “But he can only do that if there’s an empty space inside you, someplace dark where he can get his hooks in.”

  Monica nodded, looked away from her daughter, to Lydia, and then into the space above her head. She leaned back into the couch. “I thought he was dead,” she said pointlessly.

  Lily released a disgusted breath but didn’t say anything.

  “So what kind of deal did Tim make with Rhames?” Lydia asked Monica.

  “I really don’t know. He called me that night,” said Monica, tearing. “He told me that he’d made everything right and that Lily would be home soon. That was the last time I spoke to him.”

  “I don’t think he made his deal with Rhames,” said Lily, leaning against the wall. She seemed cool, dispassionate suddenly, and Lydia thought she was in some kind of shock. “I think he made the deal with Mickey.”

  “Why do you say that?” asked Lydia.

  “Because it’s so perfect. It’s like poetic justice. My parents’ infidelity so wrecked Simon Graves that he ended his life; Mickey wanted Tim’s life to end the same way. It’s childish, like a child’s tantrum. Only this child is grown and gone mad, with the help of my parents and Trevor Rhames.”

  They’d created a honeycomb of lies and deceptions, Tim and Monica Samuels, and tried to build their life upon it, thought Lydia. And all these years, Trevor Rhames had just been waiting to put his boot through it.

  Thirty-Four

  The water was painfully cold but she stood ankle deep in it, her jeans rolled up, her feet bare, and looked back at the house just as she’d done a hundred, a thousand times. The sea was moody gray with high, forceful waves and thick whitecaps; it just barely seemed to be containing its anger. Or maybe she was just projecting.

  She tried to imagine other people living in that house, other people laughing, crying, fighting, putting their keys in the door and turning the lock to come home. She tried to imagine another little girl sleeping in her room, getting ready for her first day of school, her first slumber party, her prom. She’d always hoped to get married at this house. But she guessed it was a little dream to lose compared to everything else she’d lost. Her brother, her father, even her mother through her various betrayals now just seemed like a stranger to Lily, someone she could not understand and was not sure whether she could forgive.

  When her mother delivered the news that Tim Samuels was her father, it didn’t even come as a surprise. Hadn’t she always known it on a cellular level? She might have been able to forgive them for that. After all, she’d always thought of him as her father; he’d loved her and raised her well. Biology didn’t matter all that much, did it?

  It was all the rest of it. Her parents’ awful past, what they did to Mickey, what Mickey became as a result of that. That Trevor Rhames was free. Those were the things that were killing her inside. Angry tears spilled down her face and she felt like she had a rock in her throat where the injustice sat, impossible to swallow and digest.

  Her mother stepped out through the French doors and leaned against the railing, gave her a wave that meant, “Come in. It’s too cold out here.” But Lily turned her back. Her mother was collecting photographs and knickknacks, the detritus of their ruined lives, putting them in boxes. Lily wanted no part of anything like that. She’d only come to say good-bye to her home, her father, and the little girl who used to love them both. She would cut it all loose, let the ocean take it and start again.

  She turned around again to look at her mother. But she was gone. On the balcony, there was a man. He had close-cropped, bleached-blond hair, wore a pair of black jeans and a hooded gray sweatshirt. She frowned, felt her heart lurch. Then she started to run toward the house as the man turned and walked inside. The sand slowed her progress as she ran with all her strength. Finally, she reached the wooded walkway and pounded toward the balcony. She flew up the stairs.

  Inside her mother sat on the chintz couch weeping, and beside her stood her brother, changed in every way, his appearance, his aura, but still her brother. She didn’t know whether to punch him or embrace him. She threw herself at him in some combination of those things, screaming at him in a voice she barely recognized.

  “You bastard,” she yelled. “You fucker.”

  He held onto her and let her pound on him with her fists. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” She just kept saying it over and over, like the words could hurt him the way he’d hurt her, like they were blades she could throw at him. Finally, exhausted, she slumped against him, felt his arms around her. She heard Lydia Strong’s words in her head.

  “Lily, I think he’ll come to you. He loves you and he won’t be able to live with himself without trying to make you understand why he did what he did. He’ll come for your forgiveness.”

  She’d thought about it and knew Lydia was right.

  “And when he does?” she’d asked.

  What makes you think he’ll come today?” Jeffrey asked.

  Where they sat in the Kompressor on the bluff, they could see Lily Samuels standing on the beach.

  “The closing on the house is tomorrow; they have personal items they want to retrieve,” said Lydia, staring at the ocean. “It seems like a good day for contrition.”

  Christian Striker sat in the backseat. “He’d be crazy to come back.”

  “I think it’s safe to assume he’s crazy, Striker,” said Lydia. She caught his ice blue eyes in the rearview mirror and smiled.

  “Look,” said Jeffrey. “She’s running. She’s running toward the house.”

  Just then Lydia’s cell phone rang.

  They killed my father,” Mickey said to Lily while she was still in his arms.

  “And you killed mine,” she whispered.

  “I didn’t kill him. He killed himself.”

  The irony of his own words was completely lost on him. She pulled away from him and looked into his eyes. He looked a little unhinged, a little vacant.

  “Mickey,” she said softly. “Your father committed suicide. No one killed him.”

  “Their actions, their betrayal killed him,” he said, waving a disgusted hand at their mother.

  “You father was unwell, Mickey,” Monica said softly. “He abused me. He abused you-”

  “Don’t do t
hat,” Mickey screamed. “Don’t tell lies to make what you did okay. You betrayed him, you tampered with my mind-my mind.”

  Monica stood and reached for him. “We wanted you to forget, to move on and live a happy life. We didn’t want the ghost of that day haunting you.”

  He pushed her away and she landed on the couch, put her head in her hands. “Get away from me,” he yelled. “Stay away.”

  “You’re acting like a child, Mickey,” said Lily. “Grow up.”

  He looked at her in surprise. The wind wailed outside and the smell of salt was strong in the air. The door stood open and the room was growing cold.

  “You burned the house down, okay,” she said, spreading her arms. “Figuratively speaking, anyway. You’ve avenged your father; you’ve ruined your mother. You got everything you wanted, right? What I don’t get is-why me? I’ve never done anything but love you.”

  He looked as his feet, then up into her eyes. She saw shame and a pouty, childish anger there. She wanted to slap his face.

  “You were the only thing they really loved,” he said with a shrug. “Their marriage went to shit. They thought I was dead, and they were about to lose all their money; Tim thought he might possibly go to jail, and they were still standing. It was only when Tim thought he’d lost you that he started to unravel, that he started bargaining with his life.”

  She thought about it a second.

  “So that was the deal you made. He ended his life and you spared mine.”

  “He came to see us; he wanted to deal. He said if we killed him and made it look like an accident, that there would be insurance money. His cash and assets would cover his debt to the IRS and he knew he could get Mom to hand over the insurance money if it meant your life. He wanted to buy you back.”

  “But it was never about money,” said Lily.

  He shook his head. “I have money, Lily. I always have. I just wanted him to look down the barrel of that gun and see what my father saw: hopelessness, despair, the end of a life badly lived. I wanted him to die with all his sins and failings staring back at him from that cold metal eye. Just like my father. And I wanted her to be left with nothing. That was the deal, not some paltry insurance payout.”

  “And he agreed.”

  “As long as I promised to let you go when the deed was done.”

  “How did he know you’d keep your word?”

  “He knew I loved you. That was the only thing we ever had in common. We both loved you so much.”

  Lily sank to the couch, feeling suddenly like her own legs couldn’t hold her. Monica wept quietly beside her.

  “How did Rhames find you?”

  “He always knew where we were. He was watching for years, waiting.”

  He sighed, paced the room for a second.

  “He came to see me when Body Armor went on the market. He was just in my apartment one night when I came home. I was terrified, thought he was some kind of maniac. But he knew things about us, about our life, about Monica and Tim. He knew everything. And then he helped me to retrieve my memories. Memories he had helped to erase.”

  “That’s when you quit your job and moved to Riverdale, opened No Doze.”

  He nodded. “I wanted to tell you but I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

  She let out a little laugh. “You’re right about that.”

  “That’s why I distanced myself from you.”

  “You staged everything: the suicide, the journals.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t believe I could kill myself. And I knew you’d come looking for answers. And you did. We always have known each other so well.” He came to kneel beside her but she stood and walked away.

  “Who was that in the car? Who died there that night?”

  Mickey closed his eyes. “I don’t know who,” he said, looking away from her. He walked over beside her and they both stared out at the surf. “Rhames took care of that. He made sure the face was unrecognizable, put him in some of my clothes, and staged the scene to look just like my father’s suicide. My fingerprints weren’t on record anywhere. There was no sign of foul play, so there was no investigation to be worried about DNA evidence. Just to be sure, they scrubbed my apartment clean and left traces of his DNA-hair in the brush, saliva on the toothbrush. Unless the police got creative and cross-referenced the DNA with Monica’s, the police would assume what was in the apartment belonged to me and if it matched the corpse, they’d consider that a positive ID. It never came to that. I left instructions in my will that I wanted to be cremated right away, my ashes scattered out there.” He nodded toward the shore and Lily remembered the day vividly as one of the worst of her life. “Whoever it was, he’s gone,” he said.

  She felt a black hole open in her chest, a supernova that sucked all the hope and happiness out of her spirit. She’d never felt so angry and alone. Her mother wept on the couch, but Lily felt nothing but a kind of distant pity for her. She wondered if she’d ever feel anything else again. She was about to tell him what he’d done to her. She opened her mouth but he raised a finger and put it to his lips. He cocked his head, lifting an ear to the air. After a second, he smiled. She heard it, too, and held his eyes.

  “Oh, Lily,” he said, with a sad shake of his head. “You didn’t.”

  She removed the cell phone from her pocket and held it up for him to see.

  “I love you, Mickey. I really do. But you have to answer for the things you’ve done. I’m sorry.”

  He backed away from her slowly, shaking his head. The front door burst open and police officers entered clad in Kevlar vests, guns drawn. She saw Lydia and Jeffrey behind them, followed by another lean man with light blond hair who Lily thought she remembered as Striker. The air was still and they stood silent for a second; the moment seemed frozen where any outcome was possible. Then Mickey took a revolver from the pocket of his baggy jeans and smiled at his sister.

  “Drop it, Samuels. Right now,” yelled one of the plainclothes officers, edging closer.

  But Mickey lifted the gun to his temple quickly and pulled the trigger. Lily wasn’t sure what was louder, the blast of the gun or the sound of her wailing her brother’s name.

  Thirty-Five

  He reclined on the pool chaise, a nice fruity Merlot in one hand, a fat Cuban in the other. The sun was red and bloated, low in the sky. He waited for the cheers that would rise up from the bar overlooking the ocean when the sun dipped below the horizon. He’d never understood this, why the tourists cheered for the setting sun. To cheer the end of a day, the inevitable approach of death seemed so stupid to him. But then people were stupid. He’d made a fortune off that stupidity and he figured he shouldn’t knock it but be grateful for it instead.

  The bar was far below his balcony on the edge of the cliff and by the time the cheers reached him, they’d be almost indistinguishable from the cries of the gulls floating over the blue-green waters of the Caribbean. He closed his eyes and lifted the cigar to his lips, let the last rays of the day touch the skin on his face. In the palm tree across the bluff some wild parrots bickered with each other. The smell of his cigar and the salt air mingled oddly but not unpleasantly. Then it grew dark too quickly.

  He opened his eyes and a bulky shadow stood before him, muscle clad in black. The sun behind him, his face was shaded in darkness. But Trevor Rhames didn’t need to see his face to recognize the man before him.

  “Hello, mate.” The thick Australian accent drew out the last syllable and Rhames could hear the smile in his voice. “Grimm sends his regards.”

  The sun sunk below the horizon line then and the cheering of the crowd below rose up into the air.

  Thirty-Six

  Lydia knew from her father’s letters that Estrellita Tavernier, called Este by her family and friends, thought about being a writer when she was young but decided that she wanted to teach elementary school instead. She had the same blue-black hair that Lydia had-which was odd since their father had been fair. But her dark hair was the only thing she and Lydia
shared. Este’s face was soft and round, a light happiness and mischief dancing in her dark brown eyes. Her skin was a soft café au lait; she was petite but round about the bottom and chest. The effect was a robust and feminine prettiness, a youthful aura. There was none of the hardness to her features or to her aura that Lydia knew herself to possess. All her hardness, she guessed, had come from her mother.

  Lydia watched her like a stalker from the corner, as Este corralled a group of bundled-up little munchkins on an East Village schoolyard. Lydia wore black jeans and a three-quarter-length leather jacket, belted at the waist, a newspaper tucked under her arm. She leaned against a lamppost and felt the cold metal seep through the thin layers she wore. Her bare hands and cheeks were pink and painful from the cold. She thought about leaving. She wasn’t sure what she could say to Este; she wasn’t sure if she had anything to say at all.

  For three years, Lydia’s half-sister had been teaching second grade about ten minutes from the Great Jones Street loft. The thought of this filled her with a kind of longing regret. It was a feeling that had settled in her bloodstream since the opening of the box left to her by her father and the letters her grandmother had kept shut in a drawer for most of Lydia’s life.

  Lydia walked up to the chain-link fence and laced her fingers through the links. She stood waiting for Este to notice her and finally she did. She looked at Lydia lightly, with an uncertain half-smile. Lydia had the idea that Este would know her and after a moment of blankness, recognition warmed her features. She walked slowly toward the fence, then did something that made Lydia’s heart jump. She laced her fingers over Lydia’s through the fence. Lydia could smell the peppermint on her breath, the light floral scent of her perfume.

  It was in that moment that Lydia felt a wave of grief for Arthur James Tavernier and the little girl who’d grown up without him. She felt grief, too, for the smiling, joyous woman Lydia saw in the photographs her father had left her, a woman Lydia recognized as her mother but whom she’d never known.