Erica crossed the street back to her car and picked up a high intensity lamp at the pet store.
: : :
As she was installing it, Stephan Langston returned her call. He was on his way to California but checking phone messages. He was sorry, but he didn’t recall her name, what firm was she with?
She wasn’t with any firm, she told him.
Was she a journalist? Because if she was, he wasn’t speaking to the press.
When she assured him she wasn’t; he grew friendlier. When she reminded him of where they’d last met he said that Ethan had mentioned something about a hotel they liked in Jamaica. Was that was she was calling about? Because surely Ethan had told her, things had come up, he couldn’t get away.
“Well, no,” Erica said, taking a deep breath. “Remember that coke we shared in the bathroom? I was wondering if you could tell me where to buy some.”
He didn’t sound so friendly anymore, but he did give her the number of a guy named Anders. Her call waiting beeped, allowing her a graceful exit from the conversation.
It was Ethan, terribly distracted. He wouldn’t be home for at least another week. Problems. Meetings. A trip to California without mention of visiting his parents or sister Pauline or getting some surfing in.
“I’m bummed,” Erica said. “I miss you.”
“So am I, “ Ethan said. “This is not my idea, believe me. Gotta go. Talk to you later.”
She and the twins watched reruns of The Brady Bunch. While Erica’s face was turned, Sophia grabbed a Transformer toy and brought it to her lips. The head broke off, rolling to the back of her little pink mouth. Quickly, instinctively, Erica extracted it from her throat, then threw the Transformer into a bin on the wall unit. She placed the Legos and puzzles out of reach too. She’d clearly reached that stage of life with Sophia where nowhere in the house was safe. She put her in her playpen and sank back on the couch, closing her eyes, imagining running down a road with Jared, downhill, their speed steadily increasing, leaping, soaring through the landscape.
Someone tapped her on the head.
“Mommy, where are you? Pay attention.”
“Huh?” She raised herself up on her arms. Sophia was dumping all her toys out of the playpen.
“Mommy, we’re hungry,” said Jesse.
She pulled a bag of chicken nuggets out of the freezer. The stupid phone rang again.
“Are you sitting down?” Amelia asked.
“I’m making dinner.”
“You know Nick Stromboli?” she asked. “Housemates?”
“Of course I do, Erica thought. Get to the point.”
“Well, he got busted a couple hours ago. By the state narcotics commission or something. Apparently once they started looking into the immigration fraud, they discovered he was a coke dealer. Like, a big one. He had cash stuffed all over his house, in the mattresses, in his Tupperware, you wouldn’t believe it. I just heard it on the evening news.”
“Oh my God,” Erica said. She put her head in her hands, upending the plastic bag of breaded chicken.
“Rikki?” Amelia asked. Her voice sounded thin and distant.
“Yeah, sorry, I dropped chicken all over the floor.”
“Brilliant, Rikki. But you never know about people, do you? Nick seemed like such a dork. And Debbie told me he was a counselor at the Nassau Family Clinic.”
“Good grief,” Erica said. “Look, I’m sorry, but I have to pick up this chicken. It’s under the dishwasher.”
“One more thing,” said Amelia. “He had this notebook on him? A notebook that listed all these people he sold drugs to? All these people right in the neighborhood, big shots like lawyers and doctors and stuff. Of course, they’re not releasing any names, but I can’t believe you haven’t heard any of this. Don’t you listen to the news?”
“You’re my personal anchorwoman,” Erica said, both her eyebrows pulsing as if they had a mind of their own, her hand on the telephone slick with sweat. She carried it into the bathroom and shoved her little Ziploc baggie farther back in the cabinet, behind the Drano.
“Want to get together tomorrow morning for coffee?”
“I have to go to aerobics.”
“Are you sure you should be working out?” Amelia asked. “You sound congested. “Do you have a chest cold? One’s going around now, you know.”
“If I don’t exercise, I’ll go crazy,” Erica said. “I really gotta get this chicken off the floor.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
When Erica worked as a nurse in South Boston, in the outpatient clinic, they sometimes brought in convicts from the nearby high-security prison for medical attention. They were leathery men, with track marks and scabs and hard eyes, who endured her with a weary tolerance as she clasped blood pressure cuffs on their arms or explained the protocol of diabetes treatment. They bore no relation to her friend Nick with his flabby stomach and soft hands, who, like her, still lived within a mile of his mother, on their manicured island, apart from the grime and chaos of the city.
She forced herself up from the bed the morning after Amelia’s call, wiping her sweaty palms against her mouthwash-stained nightgown. She woke up Jesse and Jake and gave them Cinnamon Toasties and orange juice, remembering to tuck their swimsuits and tennis rackets into their camp bags. She fed and changed Sophia and waited outside with the boys for the camp bus. Once the bus left, she loaded the dishwasher. She drove to the gym and did V-steps and A-steps and bicep curls, avoiding conversation with Lisa and Justine, and then drove home. There were no police at the door and no messages on the answering machine. She didn’t know what to do next. She called Anders. He agreed to meet her in an hour in a park off of Utopia Boulevard.
She drove south down Utopia Boulevard, passing a multitude of stoplights, body shops, sad-looking brick garden-apartment complexes with patches of limp pansies, and a lawn warehouse store she’d shopped at once. She found the intersection scribbled on the back of her shopping list and, after a fruitless several-block search for a space, parked Vince Volvo illegally in front of a fire hydrant.
A couple of young mothers watched their toddlers play in the dirt by a metal jungle gym that reminded her of the old-fashioned unsafe one she used to climb in elementary school. At one bench, a couple of old men played cards; on another, a homeless man snored under a ripped black blanket. She saw no one who might possibly be Anders. She double-checked Vince Volvo’s locked doors. The sky pressed in on her, ozone-yellow. She had a splitting headache.
After Erica walked Sophia’s stroller up and down the path between the playground and the benches numerous times, a skinny guy in his twenties, with tight jeans hugging his hips and a thick shock of straight dark hair, sidled up to her and asked her if she wanted any T-shirts. Startled, she shook her head no, and then got it. “You bet,” she said. “White.”
He didn’t smile. He handed her a bag; she handed him the money he’d requested over the phone: $300, way more than Nick. He seemed put off by Sophia and not particularly friendly. The whole interaction took no more than two minutes. She scrambled back to Vince and turned on the air-conditioning, even though it made the engine hesitate unnervingly, and blew through a few red lights as she motored down Utopia Boulevard back to the expressway.
Throughout the hot, empty middle of the day, Erica followed Sophia around. She circled the first floor of the house, hallway to kitchen to family room to living room and back to the hallway, meandered around the backyard; dodged duck poop at the town pond; climbed through the ladders and tubes of the West Meadow Elementary play structure. The parks were deserted: the children away at camp; their parents scampering about like hamsters on a wheel; everything suspended, about to crash and break.
The twins were eating macaroni and cheese for dinner, Erica hovering over them playing with a plate of salad, when Ethan called from California.
“I wanted you to h
ear from me, before you heard it on the news,” Ethan said.
“About Nick Stromboli?” she asked.
“Nick who? No. They’ve indicted several Grant Fishel executives on securities fraud. Insider trading. Manipulation of markets. All kinds of bullshit. I don’t know how far this is going to go.” Ethan mentioned several names, the only familiar one being Stephan Langston.
“I can make markets move,” Ethan had told her excitedly, a couple of years before, when the big money started coming. “It’s just a matter of figuring out the system. It’s just a matter of math and staying a step ahead of everybody else.”
The idea of markets moving had tickled Erica’s fancy. She pictured Pathmark growing legs and walking down Northern Boulevard. She didn’t mention this vision to Ethan; he would have thought her stupid and frivolous. He would have sat her down and explained the difference between the Dow Jones and the NASDAQ.
“This isn’t going to affect you in any way is it?” Erica asked.
“Well,” Ethan said. “Well. It involves a lot of people I know. That I’ve worked with. I’m sure they’re going to want to question me.”
“Is that what the meetings in California are about?” Erica scraped uneaten noodles into the garbage.
“Well. Yes and no. Events have overtaken us, if you know what I mean. Listen, Erica, I have to go. I’ll call back when I can. I just wanted you to know. Is everyone all right? All the kids all right?”
“Yeah, sure,” said Erica. “Dylan is playing a magician in the summer performance at Whispering Wind.””
“Cool,” Ethan said. “Take care, okay? Don’t worry.”
New York was closing in on both of them like an iron claw. And even though the boys needed baths, and the diaper pail needed emptying and the clean dishes needed to be unloaded from the dishwasher and replaced with dirty ones, Erica paced around the kitchen, watching Sophia gurgle in her swing and a butterfly land on the zinnias outside the kitchen window.
The phone rang.
“Rikki, I just heard the news about Grant Fishel. Is it going to affect Ethan?” Debbie gushed concern, but Erica also detected a faint tone of satisfied suspicion. Debbie had always thought Ethan’s income was too mysterious in origin and too generous in amount to be trusted.
“No, no, it’s got nothing to do with his department.” Erica’s phone beeped. “Oops, I gotta go. Call-waiting.”
“Hey, Mrs. Richards, great news!” Ashley announced cheerily.
“Great news?”
“Jared’s address! I was at group therapy, and this kid Hayden, he was at the Pritima Center until two weeks ago, and he started talking about it. Usually people who’ve been there don’t talk about it. It’s like they’re under a conspiracy of silence, you know?”
“What did he say?”
“Well, he said it’s really horrible. They take these long hikes, out into the country, where it’s really hot, and they don’t bring nearly enough water or anything to eat, and they have to go to the bathroom in the woods. They don’t bring toilet paper. You have to use leaves. And they have to do these farm chores. They make everyone work like slaves. He said he passed out once, and he lost a ton of weight, and he’s still feeling really weak, and his parents are thinking of suing them.”
“But what about Jared?”
“Well, yeah. They weren’t in the same group, but he saw him on some of the hikes and at meals. He said the food is awful, all greasy, and that Jared looked real skinny and kinda sick. But, and this is the point, Mrs. Richards, I asked him, ‘Say, where is this Pritima Center?’ and he said that was confidential information, but then he cornered me while we were waiting for our parents in the parking lot, and he told me! It’s in a town called Burkittsville, South Carolina!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Anonymity might seem an alien concept when you lived in the same neighborhood where you’d grown up, surrounded by people you’d known your whole life, but the fact was, all anyone noticed was surfaces. Did your eyes look bleary, had you put on any weight, did you add a new bathroom on your house, did you sound congested? All you needed to do was put up the thinnest of veneers, and no one dared peek behind. You didn’t need to be a good liar. Just a consistent one.
Ashley didn’t have any problem getting away. Her mother wouldn’t pose a problem because she had left on a weeklong yoga retreat in the Berkshires with her new boyfriend, leaving Ashley to rattle around in their six-thousand-square-foot contemporary house in Old Westbury. Erica’s parents were zipping around their house like twittering birds, packing and repacking their overstuffed suitcases. Their flight to Amsterdam left Saturday morning.
Debbie and Ron were visiting their boring friends in Albany, planning a stop at an outlet mall along the way. She’d called to ask Erica to pick up the newspaper. “They’ve sold WBEZ to some giant conglomerate,” Debbie said. “Ron’s scared he might get laid off.”
“Most likely he won’t,” Erica said. Debbie and Ron’s troubles seemed very small. “Say, I meant to tell you I’m going to the Hamptons this weekend. Some friends of Ethan’s from work invited us to their summer rental.”
“Sounds ritzy,” Debbie said. “Some of his Wall Street buddies, huh? Even with the Grant Fishel trouble?”
“It’s overblown,” Erica reassured her.
She arranged for the twins to spend the weekend with loyal Lisa, who chattered excitedly about an idea she had for starting a dog-friendly bed and breakfast. “I can’t bear the thought of going away without Penny and a lot of the girls in my spaniel club feel the same way,” she enthused. “So where are you going?”
“I’m visiting some coworkers of Ethan’s in the Hamptons.”
“You’re not!” Lisa’s transparent voice dripped with envy. “Tell me more.”
“I met them at that Don Johnson party, they’ve got a big house overlooking the beach, in, I don’t know, Amagansett? I gotta check the address.”
She enhanced the Amagansett story when Justine called, describing a ten thousand square foot beachfront Spanish-style hacienda with a firepit. It served as a good way to change the subject when Justine inquired about Ethan and Grant Fishel and, when that didn’t get anywhere, yammered on about Nick. “I haven’t fired Needa yet,” she said. “I think she’s legal. I don’t ask. But I’m wondering if my plastic surgeon, you know, Carl Donsky? Is one of his coke customers? He gives these wild parties, not that I’ve been to one—but he strikes me as the cokehead type.”
“I’ve never met him,” Erica said.
“Well, have a super time,” Justine said. “I want to know every detail.”
Erica could not sleep. At three in the morning she began throwing items willy-nilly in Vince’s backseat.
She remembered how she used to swing higher than even the boys at West Meadow Elementary, pumping until her legs came parallel with the top bar, till the whole metal frame tipped back and the concrete bases rocked in their sockets. She kept trying to swing above the bar, all the way around, but as hard as she pumped, she could never break past that level spot, sandwiched flat between the sky and the blacktop.
One day she challenged Debbie to a swinging match, which shouldn’t have even been a fair contest, given that she was seven and Debbie almost twelve. They hit the top point, and the concrete base rocked back extra far because there were two of them. “Whee,” said Erica, giving just a little extra push and raising her legs high in the air. Her toes touched the edge of the bar. The swingset creaked and shook.
“Rikki, stop!” Debbie shouted.
Erica pushed harder and took her hands off the chain. “Look, Debbie, no hands. You try it.”
“Stop, Rikki. I mean it.” A high note of panic entered Debbie’s voice.
“Chicken, chicken!” Erica flapped her hands in the air like a bird.
“I’ll tell Mom,” Debbie said, but she let go of the chains, looking
down as she did so, sliding out of her seat, screaming all the way down to the blacktop, which was concrete then, no bark dust to cushion her fall. Mrs. Sheldon from down the block was playing with her toddler on the seesaw; she called an ambulance. By the time the ambulance came, Debbie was sitting up and screaming, her elbow bent out at an unnatural angle. She’d broken her elbow socket in two places. The elbow had to get put back together with metal pins that were still there to this day.
“Rikki made me do it,” Debbie told her mother, who believed her without question, banning Erica from the playground for six long antsy months. Everyone signed Debbie’s cast. She got a $200 playhouse and chose the ice cream flavor every time they went to the supermarket, inevitably a gag-worthy butter pecan.
If Erica could have flown through the air and caught Debbie, she would have, but she wasn’t a bird, just a little girl, and it took so long for her swing to slow and come to the ground. Debbie stopped and looked down—that was the problem. Only then did she slip. Even at seven Erica knew never to look down. You look straight ahead and keep on swinging.
: : :
Ashley waited for Erica at Pathmark, by the shopping carts. Her hair was freshly frosted and curled around her ears. She wore big silver hoop earrings, jean cutoffs, and a blue top that initially appeared worn and faded but upon closer observation was actually washed silk. Before she climbed into Erica’s car, she stubbed out a cigarette on the sidewalk. She stuffed a small backpack, covered in embroidered flowers and butterflies, under her legs.
“I know I shouldn’t smoke,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it.” Erica turned around, handing Sophia her pacifier. She was kvetchy this morning, pulling at her ear, slightly warm.
Wrong Highway Page 22