“He knows we’re here,” Grandma Rena says to Lucia. “How?”
“Probably guessed,” Lucia says. “Saw the bus, figured where else would they go.”
“I don’t believe this.”
They watch as Crea gets out of the SUV and stands in front of the bus, seeming to simply consider it. He stretches. She sees a gun in his waistband. It’s not big like Richie’s, but it looks pretty serious. Are there guns that don’t look serious? The one her mother was taken down with looked silly, and it still did what it did. Maybe she needs a gun when she gets where she’s going. Binghamton sounds like the kind of place you can score a gun, too. Like she’s actually going to make it there. If she does, it’s probably going to be without this briefcase full of money. She imagines a scenario where Crea comes on the bus and kills Grandma Rena and takes the briefcase but spares her because she’s a kid. That’s giving him a lot of credit.
Lucia stands up. As Crea moves closer to the bus, she notices the blood splattered on his tracksuit. It’s hard not to see. Other people are out walking their dogs and jogging and enjoying the morning, and here’s this killer. “We’re trapped,” Lucia says.
Adrienne didn’t teach Lucia much, but she did teach her to watch out for herself. Maybe Adrienne never realized just how much she emphasized that while Lucia was growing up. You witness something that doesn’t concern you, look the other way. Your friends are in trouble, you stay out of it and keep your own record clean. Trouble finds you, put yourself first and get out fast. At any cost.
Lucia can’t let Grandma Rena hold her back here. Her life is her first priority. The money is second. Though her life is this money now. What life is even possible without it?
She looks around for an emergency exit. She knows city buses have them in the roof and that the back windows push out. She’s never been on a bus like this, its seats reminding her of the casino rugs she’d seen in Atlantic City the two times she’d accompanied Adrienne and Richie there for concerts. She sees an escape hatch in the roof and wonders how she might hoist herself up to it.
“What are we gonna do?” Grandma Rena asks.
Lucia shrugs, as if she’s actually waiting for Grandma Rena’s decision.
Crea’s motioning through the glass for the driver to open up and let him in.
The driver’s agitated. He’s beeping the horn, saying, “Get the hell out of the way. Come on. We’ve got a schedule here.” He’s in drive now, actually inching up on Crea a little.
Lucia stands up on her seat.
“What are you doing?” Grandma Rena says.
Crea sees her over the tops of the seats and smiles. He takes out his gun and points it at the driver. People around the lake are watching with furious concern. Several have taken out their cells and are calling it in. Maybe Crea’s lost it. To do this so publicly. Maybe he wants a shootout with the cops. Maybe he’s got a death wish. Maybe he thinks he’s death-proof.
Lucia half-expects the driver to put the bus back in park, throw up his hands, open the door, and let Crea on board. But this guy—with a Celtic knot tat on his hand and hairy-ass ears—has brass balls to boot. He punches the gas. Crea dances back, almost dropping the gun, but then reaffirms that he’s got it and points it harder at the driver. Lucia reaches out to hang onto something but falls into her seat. The bus keeps moving, ramming the rear end of Crea’s SUV, forcing it out of the way. Crea is on the side of the bus now. The SUV is being pushed like a sad bumper car. Crea bangs on the side of the bus with his closed fist. The bus clears the SUV out of the way by turning it fully around. The driver’s voice booms over the speakers. “Hold on,” he says. The bus jerks forward. The passengers clap. They’re moving at a normal clip up Millpond Parkway now. Lucia looks out the window and tries to see Crea, but he must be behind the bus.
“Sorry about that inconvenience,” the driver says, as if they’ve just encountered a little splotch of traffic.
“I really can’t believe this,” Grandma Rena says.
Lucia exhales and checks to make sure the briefcase is still there on the floor. She pictures herself in a fancy hotel with a Jacuzzi. She pictures herself going down to the front desk and getting change for a hundred. And then she finds the vending machines nestled away in a nook by the pool and she buys a 3 Musketeers, a Snickers, and a can of Coke. She goes back to her room and puts on the Yankees and gets in the Jacuzzi and eats her chocolate bars and drinks her Coke and wonders about Walt Viscuso. When she’s done eating, she puts on a towel and smokes out the window. Grandma Rena is not in her fantasy. The hotel might be in Binghamton. It might be anywhere.
She’s thinking of Pete the electrician now. She can’t believe girls have fathers like that. He probably would’ve missed his bus and gone home to get her his daughter’s shoes.
When the SUV zooms up next to them, its battered front end nosing against the side of the bus, Lucia looks down and locks eyes with Crea. Grandma Rena, panicked, stands up in the aisle.
“What does this psycho want?” the lady in the NYPD cap says. “He looks like a two-bit hood.”
“Maybe this is a terrorist attack,” a college girl wearing a SUNY Binghamton shirt says.
The bus driver is mumbling under his breath, and the sound he’s making is coming through the speakers. The road turns a bit. They’re headed for the intersection of 17M, which comes out in front of the diner. To the right of them is a park with swings and slides and an old warplane for kids to climb on.
Crea speeds up and cuts in front of the bus, causing the driver to whip the wheel sharply to the right. They go over the curb and through a log fence, slamming into the plane. Smoke rises up between the plane and the bus. Everyone’s rattled. Grandma Rena has lurched into the seatback in front of her. Lucia stands on her seat, briefcase in hand, and climbs over the empty seat next to the lady in the NYPD cap. She hops another couple of seats like this until she gets to an empty row and maneuvers into the aisle.
It’s taken Grandma Rena a minute to get her bearings, but she finally calls out to Lucia: “Where are you going?”
“Open the door!” Lucia says to the driver.
The driver has a hand on his neck. He’s straining to look out the window to see exactly what damage has been done to the front of the bus. “I’m so screwed,” he says.
“Open the door!” Lucia says again, stumbling to a stop next to him. She looks back. Grandma Rena is coming after her.
“I’m not. I don’t know where that whackjob is.”
Lucia saw the lever he pressed to close the door before, and she reaches down and jabs it forward.
“Hey, don’t do that,” the driver says.
The door opens with a wheeze. She skips down the steps and comes out on the wing of the plane. She looks around for Crea and sees him struggling out of the SUV back by the log fence, where he managed to screech to a stop.
Lucia jumps down off the plane and darts away across the park. She doesn’t look back. She’s running on grass now, ignoring the pain in her feet. At the far end of the park, beyond a merry-go-round and a teeter-totter, there’s a five-foot-tall chain link fence. Beyond that, more trees. She’s going to climb over the fence. She expects to hear a gunshot behind her. She wonders what it will feel like if she gets shot in the back. When she gets to the fence, she throws the briefcase over and then follows it. No shots. No looking back.
RENA
The bus crashes into the Korean War plane with a crunch of metal. Rena’s first thought is again about how consequences spread out. The town brought that plane to this spot who knows how many years ago. It’s a memorial, a shared space for people to meet and play and probably to meditate on sacrifice. And every choice she’s made over the last day has led to its near-destruction.
When she slams into the seat in front of her, she wonders if she’ll just bolt upright in bed and realize that this has all been some wild, illogical dream. She wants that, and she doesn’t. She certainly doesn’t want to be back alone in her house, doing dishes
, vacuuming dust bunnies out of corners, worrying about what needs to be fixed, ghosting after memories of Vic, waiting for her next lonely walk up to church.
But it’s all real. Crea is out there. She looks over at Lucia and doesn’t see a girl who’s afraid. She sees a girl who wants to survive. She wishes she was seeing a girl who needed her, who wanted to be taken care of. “Oh, Grandma,” she wishes Lucia would say, “what do we do now?” She wishes they could get back to her house somehow and she could cook for Lucia. Baked ziti. Braciole. Sausage and peppers. If Rena could just feed Lucia, she has no doubt the girl would stay with her and that they would be happy, as happy as they could be, like in a fairy tale.
Lucia stands and starts climbing over seats. Rena doesn’t register what’s going on at first. Then the horror of Lucia running away again hits her full force. She says something aloud, she’s not even sure what.
But Lucia opens the door and hops down onto the plane and from there to the ground and she legs it across the park, disappearing over a fence.
Rena drops the prepaid cell phone and then leans over to pick it up, putting it in her pocket. She’s lost the little paper with the number for Lucia’s phone. She searches all around for it under the seat. She can’t even remember if it was just sitting there on her knee. She should’ve been more careful. She’s sweating, choking on a hard breath.
“Everyone, please, remain calm!” the driver says.
Remain calm? How on earth is she supposed to remain calm?
Out the window, Rena sees Crea moving toward the bus. The gun is out. She doesn’t think he’s noticed Lucia’s escape. There’s a blue smear of cops behind him. Crea’s yelling about the money. He’s got a little hitch in his step.
The window muffles the sounds from outside. Crea’s voice, the sirens, the cops shouting for him to put the gun down. A female officer leading the charge. She’s got both hands on her gun. She’s about ten feet behind Crea.
Rena sees that Wolfstein and Mo are in the crowd that’s gathered. She didn’t get them killed. What a relief. There’s that, at least.
Her eyes go back to Crea. He’s looking right at her. He lifts the gun. He’s going to shoot her through the glass. Maybe it’s what needs to be. Maybe heaven. Maybe Adrienne. Maybe Vic. Maybe. Her mind a scatter of maybes.
The female officer’s voice fills the moment, muted as it is. “Put the fucking gun down!”
Crea doesn’t listen.
She fires and hits Crea in the back. It’s a pleasure to watch him fall. Morning light seems to fold over him. Blue edged with pink and purple. Rena notices hills and mountains around them for the first time. She’s been totally blind to them. She doesn’t know anything about these hills and mountains. She knows they’re there now. She’s thinking about Vic and Adrienne. She’s happy Crea’s been shot in the back by a cop. She hopes he’s dead. She feels alive.
He is dead. Even though he’s not technically dead yet. Rena gets off the bus and knows it almost immediately. The cops are gathered around him. Crea is laughing and choking and gasping for air, and the laughter, sinister and defiant, makes the cops madder. They’re in no rush to get an ambulance to him. The officer who shot him is off to the side, her head in her hands.
The driver leads Rena and the other passengers out past the collapsed log fence.
Distracted, Rena forgets to scan the woods beyond the park for Lucia. Where will she go? What will she do? She’ll come back. She has to.
A tap on Rena’s shoulder. She turns and finds Wolfstein and Mo standing there. They’re both smoking cigarettes. Wolfstein has a newspaper folded under her arm and is holding her bag. She hugs Rena. “Where’s the kid?” Wolfstein asks.
“I don’t know,” Rena says, shaking her head. “She ran off again.”
“You want to tell someone? Get the cops looking for her?”
“I don’t know. I should. But she obviously doesn’t want to be with me.”
“She doesn’t know what she wants.”
Three cops come over and talk to them. They’re happy because word is that the cop who got shot is going to make it. Rena asks what happened. Wolfstein and Mo tell her about Falsetti and Fitzgerald. They point to the officer who shot Crea and identify her as Fitzgerald. Wolfstein explains how they met these other three cops over at the station when Crea was after them. Wolfstein’s handing out cigarettes. One cop offers to share his pint of peach schnapps, and both Wolfstein and Mo take professional nips. An officer in uniform named Gold brings them over to the swing set and tells them to stay put, they’re going to need statements, and then he goes off to consult with some plainclothes cops.
They sit there on the swings, not moving. Wolfstein’s bag is on the ground at her side, her Daily News set on top of it. Rena thinks about Lucia. Wolfstein and Mo finish their cigarettes and butt them out in the sand under their feet. They light two more and ask Rena if she wants one, insisting it’ll help. She says no.
“We didn’t tell the cops about Lucia and the money,” Wolfstein says. “I wanted to leave that decision to you. I mean, they might piece it together. People saw her. She’s memorable as hell, barefoot kid with a briefcase.”
“I know,” Rena says.
“She’s her own girl. A tough cookie. That’s not a bad thing. It helps in this world to be tough.”
“Richie’s dead?”
Wolfstein shrugs. “We left him in the Eldorado. He was on the way to dead, I think. The cops say Crea clobbered Enzio at a rest stop off the Palisades. Guy from the Bronx is up here prying around. Detective Pescarelli. He’s gonna want to talk to us.”
“I’m sure.”
“Listen, Rena,” Wolfstein says. “There’s no saying sorry enough about what happened to Adrienne. Things lined up that way. Bobby. Richie. Crea. Enzio.” She shakes her head. “We all make bad decisions. We all make mistakes. Get in messes. Look over there. That bus you were on, how it crashed into that plane.”
“That plane’s a big fucking deal here,” Mo says.
“That bus crashed into that big-deal plane, and they’re both still there. Plane’s got its wings. The bus is a tank. Maybe it needs, what? A new grille? Some new suspension parts? I don’t know. Point is, we’re all like that all the time. We’re all unfinished wreckage. Whatever’s not dead is fixable. You and Lucia, you’re not dead. You’ve been surrounded by some bad things, that’s true. But you’ve still got life. You’re a righteous woman, and I’m your pal.”
All the fear and pain in Rena loosens up for a second.
Wolfstein holds up her Daily News. “Look at this,” she says, flipping to page four. “Skip the article about the Silver Beach fiasco. It’s no good. But I read here”—she points hard at an article on the bottom half of the page—“how this eighty-six-year-old woman in Queens tried to knock off a jewelry store. She’s been robbing jewelry stores and banks for sixty fucking years. She got caught this time. Ninth time she’s been caught in her career. She did a five-year stretch in prison once. Another two years here, three years there, six months over here. Persistence, Rena. We never give up. We can’t.”
The cops are headed over to talk to them. Officer Gold again, and a man she guesses to be Detective Pescarelli from the Bronx. Rena looks up just then at the glare on the windows of the diner across the road. She feels the phone in her pocket and wishes she hadn’t lost the other number.
RICHIE
Richie’s still got some fight in him. He sputters blood from his lips. He feels the glass on him. He’s looking up at the dome light of his Eldorado and then at the back windshield. He’s pushing against the seat, trying to tell himself to move his hands, to curl his fingers. He can see himself sitting up. He can see himself climbing into the front and driving off. But he just can’t make himself do it. There are voices outside. Women. Men. The breeze. Does the breeze have a voice? He blinks his eyes. He says Adrienne’s name. He keeps his eyes closed. Squeezed tight like that, he sees only little neon bolts.
Memories come crashing in. The d
ay he got the car. Driving around with Vic. Leaning over to kiss Adrienne, Lucia in the back seat. Driving his mother to church. Parked on a gravel path at his father’s funeral. Going through the carwash on Eighteenth Avenue. The night, no shit, he gave Steven Seagal a ride to Peter Luger. They’d been filming Out for Justice in the neighborhood. Seagal had been hooked up with Vic somehow. Vic put Richie on Seagal detail. The big fuck was quiet the whole time in the Eldorado. It was like having a regular nobody in the passenger seat, little grunts and groans, no sentences. Pulling teeth trying to get a conversation going. The worst thing about Seagal was he thought he was Pesci or De Niro or some shit. Guy was a joke. Which is why Vic, who had stars in his eyes for the Goodfellas guys, had pawned Seagal off on Richie.
Women other than Adrienne had been in the car with him, too. Angela Di Pietro was the best of them. Tongue ring. Lots of bracelets. Hair dyed blond. Tattoo of her grandmother on her arm. Richie remembers tracing his finger over her grandmother’s face because Angela was always wearing sleeveless blouses. The art was good. She’d had the work done at some famous joint in Queens.
He’s amazed that this is what it’s really like. Bleeding, close to croaking, he’s seeing scenes from his life, remembering faces. Now, he swears, there’s even the smell of fresh bread in the car.
He just wants to get up and get behind the wheel one last time. He wants his foot on the gas, his hands on the wheel. He could, he’d drive the thing off a cliff. Go up in flames. Like Thelma and Louise, but he’s both of them and a dumb-piece-of-shit guy instead of a tough broad. He likes that movie. Susan Sarandon. He’s at death’s door, now he’s thinking of Susan Sarandon. What was that one where she’s washing herself with lemons or whatever? Burt Reynolds is watching from his window. Not Burt Reynolds. Burt Lancaster. Atlantic City, that’s it. Then there was Pretty Baby. He remembers she’s a whore in that one and she’s breastfeeding a baby. Not a bad note to go out on, truth be told. Thinking about Susan Sarandon’s knockers. There was that, after all. That was a small joy.
A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself Page 22