When they reached the surfing beach at Lahinch, Elliot managed to persuade his sister to join him in the water. The O’Briens had left out wet suits for the kids. Their fellow surfers seemed oblivious to the cold as they pulled on wet suits over their mottled skin. Oscar found it funny. They could just as easily have been taking in waves in California. The weather didn’t deter them any.
As the kids mucked about in the surf, Oscar sat on the seawall nursing a take-out Americano. Hazel wouldn’t sit with him, concerned she was too far away from the kids. She walked across the beach to where the sand was wet. And for a few moments he felt a stupid, irrational pang of jealousy toward his own children.
It was dark when they pulled back into the driveway at Curragower Falls. The weir was visible and the sound of spilling water came from the falls. A line of cars parked the whole way down the street and a somber line of people was making its way up the street past the house. As they gathered the soggy wet suits from the trunk, the church bells tolled.
“A funeral,” said Hazel, the Sunday papers under one arm and a wet suit in the other. “You guys, shower. Elliot first—then you, Jess.”
This was another drawback of a home-exchange holiday, thought Oscar. Sometimes the facilities were not what they had at home. They each had their own shower in Riverside Drive.
“Please, Mom, I want to go first,” said Jess.
“No, Jess. Elliot’s quick, at least. And when you’ve finished, I’m going to soak in the tub after all that driving. Then I’ll Skype the O’Briens to find out if everything’s okay with them.”
Oscar went upstairs to the kitchen. It struck him then that he didn’t really know what to do with himself. He missed his routine. He was missing the gym. He was missing his run in the park and his game of squash. He paced up and down the kitchen, going to the window and back. Outside, mourners were still making their way up the street. He heard the electric hum of the shower as he flicked through the CDs on the kitchen counter. The Doors, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Pink Floyd—The Wall—not his favorite, some Donna Summer. Some stuff there he approved of. There was a vinyl collection upstairs in the study. He should take a look. He wondered if the hotel on the bridge had leisure facilities. A swim might do the trick.
Wallop! Crash!!!
What the hell?
Heart pounding, Oscar went to investigate.
It had sounded like breaking glass.
“You stupid kid!”
“It’s all your fault. You’re a stupid freakin’ psycho!” Elliot was shouting at the open doorway of his sister’s bedroom.
“Hey, you guys!” Hazel appeared, wrapped in a towel.
“What is going on here?” said Oscar.
“It’s all her fault, Dad. She’s a bitch!”
“Whoa there, Elliot. You can cut that out for a start—what exactly did Jess do?” Oscar remained calm.
“I set up all the soldiers in my room and she just came in and walked right through them, knocking them all over. Deliberately.”
Oscar wondered how long it would be before something like this happened. Cooped up with Elliot, Jess was going to lash out sooner or later. It looked like he wasn’t the only one with cabin fever. There were tanks and soldiers everywhere.
“It was not deliberate,” said Jess, hands on her hips. “Mom, you wanna see what the little twerp did just now . . . he threw a freakin’ jeep at me and missed . . . and that really cool cast of the arm that was on the chest of drawers? The stupid twerp hit that instead.”
Hazel was already at the other side of Jess’s bed. Oscar followed her.
“What the . . . ?” said Hazel as she bent over the shattered plaster. “What on earth is this?”
The cast was indeed broken, shattered into white chunks all over the wooden floor. But that wasn’t what concerned Hazel. There, in what remained of the plaster mold, was a hammer. A hammer wrapped in a flowery pillowcase. And the flowery pillowcase was covered in what looked like blood.
Oscar tried to play the incident down. He told Hazel that staying in other folks’ homes you occasionally stumbled on stuff that seemed weird. As a very unsettled Hazel went off to get dressed, Oscar set to, collecting the broken plaster from the floor.
Later that night, in bed, Hazel whispered to him in the dark, “I know you think I’m making it up, Oscar. But there’s something strange going on in this house.”
“You’re imagining things, Hazel,” he said, turning over. He went to sleep to the sound of fireworks, wailing sirens, and a sound he hadn’t heard for many years. The sound of an animal screaming in pain.
Kate
RIVERSIDE DRIVE
“Well, blow me . . .” Mannix let out a low whistle. “Come and get a load of this, Kate.”
“What?” She swung her legs out of the bed. She’d just woken up.
“Oh, man, you’ve got to see this dude . . . I could tell he was a prick from his owner profile.” Mannix was standing in front of an open wardrobe door.
“How do you mean?” Kate hadn’t noticed anything untoward on the home-exchange Web site.
“That photo of him posing in those tight bicycle shorts and that spray-on Lycra top.”
“Well, you go round in tight rowing gear . . .”
“I don’t have a fucking wardrobe like this guy—look at it!”
Kate shuffled over the soft carpet, hugging her T-shirt tight. Behind the dark louvered door was an extensive rack of crisply ironed shirts. It was no hotchpotch arrangement. Like colors hung together in their individual colorways. Above that were neatly folded, soft-colored sweaters and T-shirts. But what had really caught Mannix’s eye was the collection of shoes. The sheer number of shoes was staggering. There must have been at least eighty to a hundred pairs, all neatly housed in pigeonholes.
Kate picked up a pointy brown-laced pair. She turned them over. Italian. She guessed as much. There were all kinds of sports shoes, runners, and golfing studs. The formal shoes were all pristine and shining.
“Christ alive!” Mannix said, laughing. “This dude’s got it all!”
Kate thought back to the ten or so well-worn shirts hanging in their shared wardrobe at home. Tidy, but probably unironed. And as for shoes—Mannix had a few pairs under the bed. They’d all been heeled and soled in the last year.
“Some of these have never even been worn . . .” He hunkered down and pulled a cardboard box out of its cubbyhole.
“Leave it, Mannix.”
It was one thing going through clothing on display, but rummaging about in boxes, even if they were only shoe boxes—that didn’t feel right. But Mannix had already taken off the lid.
“Nope,” said Mannix. “This one ain’t shoes . . .”
He stood up, cardboard box in hand, the lid half-perched on top.
Kate stepped closer to Mannix, about to lean her palm against the scar across his back. She pulled back quickly without touching, remembering she was still half angry with him.
“Fuck me! Look at that kid, Kate. The lad’s a bit of a porker, isn’t he?”
Mannix held up a fading black-and-white photograph.
“Can I see?”
In the photo, two kids stood in front of a very large tree, a Christmas tree. The chubby little girl was dressed in a nurse’s uniform. She clutched a first-aid box to her chest. A boy stood next to her in a cowboy hat, a gun slotted into his holster, his dark waistcoat about to pop, straining at the buttons. He was extremely overweight, obese, in fact. The little nurse was smiling. The cowboy sullen. Kate turned the photo over. Someone had written OSCAR AND HELEN, CHRISTMAS in capital letters on the back.
“This one’s worse,” said Mannix, picking another photo from the pile. “At least poor fatty had his clothes on in the other one . . .”
It was a color photo this time, showing the same two children. This time they were sitting on the steps
of a porch outside a pale-blue clapboard house. The little boy was in bathing togs, clutching a plastic bucket on his knees. The bucket hid some of the rolls of belly fat. The little girl wore a polka-dot sundress. Her arm was draped around her brother. The inscription on the back was in the same hand. OSCAR AND HELEN, SAG HARBOR, SUMMER VACATION.
“Come on, Mannix, that’s enough. Put them back,” said Kate.
There was something sad about both photos.
• • •
Whoopi Goldberg’s voice came over all warm and earthy in the darkened planetarium. Kate glanced along the row to see if the kids were enjoying the show. They were enthralled. Kate felt proud of Fergus, delighted at his patience about the delayed visit to the Empire State. A wave of tenderness washed over her as she watched his little upturned face, his mouth open, brilliant galactic explosions reflected in his glasses. Then, for a second or two, her eyes came to rest on Mannix. Kate sighed and looked away, trying to concentrate on the show.
What did I tell you? What did I tell you about those O’Briens? All those O’Briens are the same. Like their father before them. Like all their uncles. Every whole one of them the same, to a man. Oh, shut up, Mam, she said to the voice in her head.
She’d decided last night as she pretended to sleep. Kate wasn’t going to think about Mannix’s disturbing confession. Not on holiday. There was a welcome otherworldliness about being in New York, so far away from home. As if the real world didn’t matter. They were safe here, far across the ocean. Safe from bullies. Safe from the Flynns and the Bolgers. Safe from mortgage worries and phone calls from the bank. Safe from Spike and all the mayhem that followed him.
For the rest of this week, at least, she was going to bury her head in the sand and live for the moment. She might even let Mannix make love to her. Last night, he hadn’t dared to slide as much as a hairy leg anywhere near her. Pity that. She’d been looking forward to some intimacy, but the stupid idiot had gone and spoiled it all.
Withholding sex was risky. She’d learned that to her cost. She remembered back to the beginning of the year and yet another argument about money. Things were tight and she’d pleaded with Mannix to get Spike to return the money they’d lent him five years ago.
Predictably, when that didn’t work out, she tried giving Mannix the cold shoulder. But matters soon escalated, and before she knew it, five months had slipped away without so much as a cuddle. Reluctantly, she came to understand what her single friend Rosie in the Art School meant by not minding being left on the shelf, as long as she was taken down and given a good dusting every now and then.
Kate had become fearful then that a rift had opened up that might not heal. Yet somehow they’d arrived where they were now, with ground to make up, but happier. It was their common bond with Fergus that had pulled them back together. So for the next few days she was going to pretend that all was well. She was going to ignore what Mannix told her last night. And she was going to pretend the guy she’d married was just a regular guy.
She stole another look at Mannix. What was he up to now? And then she realized. The electronic glow was a giveaway. He was texting. She wouldn’t get annoyed. But she felt unnerved. Mannix was usually a laid-back guy. When he was uneasy, it made Kate uneasy too. He looked up and, realizing he was being watched, let his hand fall to the side. He smiled innocently, teeth pearl-white in the dim light of the planetarium. She found herself smiling back. Oh, he was smooth, this man of hers.
The kids pronounced the show as “awesome,” and they were all in for a big surprise as they left the museum.
Snow!
It was snowing outside. It wasn’t even November and fat flakes of snow filled the sky. Foamy white flurries fell on the trees in Central Park—trees still thick with leaves. Pedestrians caught by surprise hailed cabs and scurried for cover.
“This is so cool,” said Fergus.
“I don’t know about that,” said Kate. They’d planned on having lunch somewhere in Central Park and Kate had wanted to see the Boathouse restaurant. The snow had changed all that.
“How about we get a cab to the Museum of Modern Art? We could get some lunch there . . .”
Her suggestion was met with blank faces.
“How about Abercrombie on Fifth Avenue?” said Izzy, not expecting her suggestion to fly.
“You know what? Let’s go for it!” said Kate.
Hell, the child had put in a rough year. So what if Kate thought it a criminal use of time? It would make Izzy happy.
• • •
Back out on Fifth Avenue after a torturous hour in Abercrombie, Kate was glad of the bracing air and the smell of toasting chestnuts. There was something disturbing about the physically perfect shop assistants in there. She’d allowed the kids to buy a T-shirt and a sweatshirt each. The snow had stopped falling and what lay on the street was wet and slushy. Mannix marched ahead with the kids, who were merrily swinging their shopping bags.
They were headed for Times Square and the Hard Rock Café. The plan was to eat early, and hopefully by the time they got back to the apartment, Du Bois would have managed to get them tickets for War Horse at Lincoln Center. Fergus had read the novel with his special needs teacher and it had struck a chord with him. When Hazel Harvey mentioned to Kate that Du Bois had a contact for discounted theater tickets, she had been delighted. They certainly couldn’t afford to pay full price.
“Hang on, Mannix . . . You guys!” Kate called to them to come back.
They were unaware that they’d walked past a famous landmark from their favorite Home Alone movie. They’d passed by an opening to Rockefeller Center. Kate had noticed the row of flags in front of a skyscraper and thought it looked familiar. On first glance there was little evidence of skaters, but as they drew closer to the central square, they spotted the pockets of hardy skaters on the rectangle of ice. How deceiving television could be, thought Kate. The ice rink had a cozy, almost intimate feel and was not at all on the scale she had imagined.
“So, guys, this is where young Kevin found his mother,” Kate declared.
“This is it?” said Izzy.
“Sure is. Look, over there is where the huge Christmas tree was. We’re too early in the season for the Christmas tree. Just one second, stay there,” said Kate, and she quickly snapped the three of them.
Twenty minutes later they found themselves outside the Hard Rock Café in the gaudy quarter that was Times Square. It seemed strangely lifeless in the daylight. Like fireworks on an inky sky, it needed night to kick it into life.
“I’m bloody starving,” announced Mannix. “I’d eat the arse off a Christian brother.”
“Mannix!” said Kate.
Fergus and Izzy giggled.
They all tucked into burgers, Fergus removing only some of the “alien” gherkins and tomatoes from his burger bun. By the time they finished their meal and got outside again, darkness had fallen. Harsh and garish lights exploded from every angle.
“Feck it anyway,” said Mannix looking up at a flashing alert.
“What is it?” asked Kate, alarmed.
“Shares are down today . . .”
“What shares?”
“Exactly . . .” He laughed ruefully.
Kate smiled and slipped her hand in his. The kids walked ahead, looking for a subway sign.
Out of nowhere, a guy with a long overcoat approached the kids, doing a grapevine dance routine alongside. Mannix tensed. The guy forced a CD into Izzy’s palm and dark spots of embarrassment stained her cheeks.
“Only five dollars to you, sweet cheeks! It’s got some cool beats. What do you say now? C’mon. It’s wholly Justin Bieber approved . . .” He shoved his face closer to Izzy’s.
“Lay off!” Mannix shouted at the guy. “She’s only a kid. Fuck off, pick on someone else . . .”
“Hey, chill, no panic, bro . . .”
And just a
s quickly he pranced off, swooping on someone else.
“That was a little aggressive, you don’t know what he could have done,” ventured Kate.
“That stuff really annoys me, Kate. Don’t worry, I can handle myself.” He looked at Fergus. “I could take a guy like that anytime, isn’t that right, Soldier?”
Fergus looked up at his hero. Kate had no doubt that Mannix could do just that.
Half an hour later they climbed the steps at the Verdi Square subway station. Kate had wondered just how safe the subway was. From what she’d read, Ed Koch’s zero tolerance policy had worked a treat on cleaning up the transport system. She was happy to find it was a surprisingly easy journey, from buying the MetroCard at the vending booth to finding the right platform and train.
• • •
“You get caught up in this crazy snowstorm?” asked Du Bois.
“We were indoors mainly,” said Kate, “but we could certainly do with a change of footwear.”
“I’ve got news for you,” he said, grinning. “My buddy’s got four tickets for the Lincoln. Four good seats as well.” Du Bois handed them a thick white envelope.
“Thanks a million,” said Mannix. “Now, what does that come in at, Mr. Du Bois? I’d like to fix up with you.” Mannix reached for his wallet.
“Nothing at all, sir. Lenny owes me a favor. Just you go and make sure you all enjoy yourselves.”
“Are you sure?” said Kate.
“Sure.” Du Bois smiled again. “Oh, before I forget . . .” Suddenly his face clouded over. “This arrived for Mrs. Harvey.”
He placed a small paper carrier bag on the marble counter.
“It’s a personal item that Mrs. Harvey left behind at a local diner. My sister is a waitress there and she dropped by with it earlier.”
The paper bag had Duane Reade lettering. Duane Reade was a chain of drugstores, wasn’t it? Du Bois pushed the bag toward Kate. “Maybe you can take it up to the apartment? Or I can hold on to it here until Mrs. Harvey returns, if you prefer?” He pulled the bag back toward him as if unsure.
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