“The kids, they are working,” he said coolly, nodding Clyde back to the textile mountain. My brother flashed me an encouraging, slightly worried smile. Jimmy led me into the next room, a dormitory crammed with stale, unmade bunk beds that towered four high toward a black-painted ceiling. The windows were painted black, too, and the only light came from a dangling lampshade painted with rocking horses.
Jimmy sunk into a lower bunk, motioned me to do the same on a bed opposite. “You want to take the kid, I ain’t going to stop you,” he said. “I say he will be back to me here in a week.”
“This isn’t about Clyde. I mean, I think you are right. Clyde has to want to clean up.”
“You are smarter than some,” he said, nodding. He sighed. “Also, you know I love that kid. Clyde. He is what they call a good boy.” He smiled down at the floor. “He is nice-looking, too. My wife and I have only girls. Agata, she loves Clyde. We say a lot, too bad he is a fucking junkie. Because he could be somebody’s son.”
“Yes,” I said, nodding.
“So you are Clyde’s brother. What do you want?”
“What I want is, uh, a gun, just as a loaner, possibly.”
“Loan you a gun?” He grinned at me, resting his fat cheek in his hand. “Jesus Christ. What you gonna do, mister, rob a bank? What, you need money?”
I tried to steady my breathing, banish a manic sleep-deprived twitch in one eye. I needed this gangster to believe in me. “Actually, I’m going to break someone out of prison. Also, I need identification, passports. Maybe you know someone.”
He glanced up at me then, eyebrows raised. Leaned back, elbows on the bed. From the darkness between the bunks, over the small arc of his belly, he gazed at me appraisingly.
“I didn’t get your name,” he said at last.
“Frank Lundquist.”
“Frank Lundquist, you tell me why you want to do that.”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“Homer was a fucking Macedonian, Frank. A long story is no problem for a Macedonian.”
I ended up staying through dinner—fried rice from the bulletproofed Chinese on the corner—as Jimmy critiqued and honed my plan. I left profoundly impressed with his ingenuity. Back home, I crept into bed next to the cat. He mewled and stretched to show me his ugly tummy. I scratched it for a bit, then slept like a shipwrecked man washed ashore.
JIMMY’S WHITE VAN TRUNDLED FURTIVELY DOWN MY BLOCK AT 7 A.M. on Sunday. He had me ride shotgun. We sprinkled his minions and their wares across a desolate Manhattan, then, after dropping the last, a fragile-looking girl with a yoke of plush toys, in Washington Heights, he steered to a shabby little house near the Whitestone Bridge, a shop of sorts, specializing in impossible-to-trace weaponry smuggled from the former Yugoslavia. There he advised me on the purchase of a small Russian-made service revolver. And some ammunition.
“You won’t load it,” said Jimmy. “You won’t even need it, if you listen to me, no need, Frank.”
Then a crawl through midday traffic past LaGuardia to a white stucco bunker in East Elmhurst, a restaurant called Nove Skopje, if one were to believe the vinyl banner strung crookedly across its front. Inside, globes of bumpy amber glass dangled above deserted ranks of tables and chairs. Along one wall, a mural showed huge-bosomed peasant girls milking goats. I think they were goats, anyhow; they could have been dogs.
A young mustachioed man emerged from the kitchen, wiping his fingers on an apron that seemed to be smeared with engine grease. Jimmy spoke with him in their tongue-mangling language. The young man nodded. “Five thousand five hundred,” he said to me, with a heavy accent. “Two Canadian passports.”
“He is the best, this guy,” Jimmy said. “Rolex all the way. Last week he turned a very big-league Russian into a Mexican.”
The young man shrugged. “With big-league Russki you don’t fuck.”
Jimmy chuckled. “If you like your hands.”
His colleague turned to me. “We will take photos when you and the lady get here, I will give them to you the next hour. I see no problem.”
When I bid good-bye to Jimmy back at my building, he hugged me as if we were comrades. “You and your brother,” he said. “Two fine boys.”
By the way, I later checked: Homer was not Macedonian.
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY I CROSSED YET ANOTHER LINE WITH M. THE professional code I had lived by, had even prided myself on, felt abstract and distant now. A set of laws for a dead civilization.
But first we simply talked, as per normal. About her friend April, which scraped my heart. About the visit with her father, and an associate who might leverage the governor. For me, this fired a complex sequence of emotions: clemency would be a solution for her, but clemency would spirit her away.
Then she whispered, “I can’t.” She bowed her head. “I can’t accept a favor from that man,” she said. “I’d rather choose another way.”
I admit it. It’s problematic, of course. But the truth. My mental engine flooded at this, flooded with a rush of gladness. So. She saw it, too: at bottom, my proposal was an act of idealism.
“I am so afraid, though,” said M.
“The plan is all worked out now, and it’s simple and I know it will go well.”
“But do you know why you are doing this?” She raised her gaze, studying me. “I mean, are you entirely sure about it? Because I don’t have anything to lose, you know. You do.”
“Not as much as you think.”
A long minute of scrutiny. “What if it works and then I ditch you? You must have thought of that.”
“I’m acting on faith.”
The corners of her mouth turned down. Rueful, maybe. “What if I take the pills and they don’t find me? What if they’re late on count? I’m dead.”
“You have to time it right, M. Set it up like we planned. The pills won’t kill you for five, six hours. You’ve got a fine window.” I smiled reassuringly.
She bit her nail, gazed at me. “I don’t know,” she said, speaking slower, softer. “Maybe I need to bloom where I’m planted.”
I nodded.
“I could do some good here. Find some meaning for myself. And then, maybe that pardon . . .”
I made some noncommittal noise. Restless, up out of my chair. Pacing, just a bit. I rounded the desk and stopped in front of her. “I can take care of you.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Of course!” I grabbed both her hands, half kneeling. “Of course you can, and you will.” I tugged on her then, powered by a surge of tenderness and urgency, tugged her straight into my arms. At first she was everywhere tensed but then she started to melt into me; I felt the softness travel right down between the blades of her shoulders and along her spine and I imagine my heart sounded thunderous, rebounding all over the cage of my chest.
Everything had become momentous.
“Freeing you will make things better,” I murmured into her warm hair.
“I am at a loss,” she said.
The silky solidity of her. “In a week, you could be living far away from here.” I felt her nodding against my shirt front. I lifted her face to mine. Kissed her. Then she pulled away from me, hair mussed, face faintly pinkened
“Whatever you decide, I’ll respect your choice,” I said. “Shrinks have a saying: choice is power.”
“Choice is power,” she whispered. Then moved toward the door.
I followed her. Before she turned the knob, I put a hand on her wrist. “It’s all set, M. From now on, I’m just waiting for the call. You’ll set things in motion.”
She regarded me. “Your name definitely rings a bell,” she said. “I do wish I remembered more.”
“You will,” I said.
18
December 1999
Orion’s Belt looked more like a tiara, crowning the ancient willow tree at the far end of the gravel lot. How clear the night was, and how dark in the place where she sat waiting. The stars meant business that night behind the firehous
e in Candora, New York. They shone as if they meant to burn themselves out by morning.
Miranda sat in the car telling herself to relax, trying to comfort herself with a careful stocktaking of her surroundings. In the parking lot, long black puddles shivered with starlight. A single frog croaked from the weedy fringe of the gravel; she guessed there might be a little stream running back there, a little gully. Dumpster, stack of three tires. Weak June breezes tickling the old royal willow.
How did she come to be here. How could she have allowed him to bring her to this moment.
The frog fell silent. Best explanation she could summon: some serious malfunction. Something had gone wrong in the workings of her soul.
And it had gone wrong far in time and space from any whispering star-crowned willow tree.
Some place freezing cold under a pale sky.
Don’t you cry. Don’t you dare cry now. Way too late.
The engine hummed obediently, the car nestled close to the cinder-block wall, the rear wall of the one-story firehouse. Light fell across the car’s hood from a small window cut into the blank metal door through which Duncan would come. Yellow light, cheerful light. It made a parallelogram on the hood of the white rental car.
Then she heard a thud. Another thud. Two dead sounds, full of finality. She sat for a long time, her heart pounding so hard it threatened to break free of her body and go bouncing down the length of the lot and into the weeds and the trees, to live down there among the frogs. Nothing happened. No one came bursting out of the door. Duncan.
She stepped out of the car. She peered into the square of yellow light, the window cut in the metal. She saw a gray steel desk, shelves spilling papers, stacks of orange traffic cones, a set of mops, a row of hooks hung with Day-Glo yellow helmets. She saw a leg, in denim, and a foot in a scuffed brown boot. The foot was twitching.
She hauled open the heavy door and rushed in. Then she saw the gun. Resting on the corner of the desk, like a paperweight, like a souvenir, the black pistol she had seen back in the motel room for the first time—was it just twenty minutes ago? Twenty minutes, twenty years, whenever, whatever.
She picked it up. She held the gun instinctively. She’d seen this her whole life; everyone has. Finger on the trigger. Point the gun.
The gun started to shake in her hand.
THREE DAYS AFTER HER LAST-EVER SESSION WITH FRANK LUNDQUIST, winter rain poured from the sky, shreds of silver hanging from the eaves of Building 2A&B. At rec time, everyone was herded to the gym. Miranda retreated to the bleachers by the wall, beneath the giant painted rainbow and a shiny American flag.
Lu plopped down on the bench in front of her, panting a bit from a handball match. “Hi, Mimischka,” she said. “Where are you all the time these days? I never see you.”
“I’m around,” said Miranda. “I’m just not feeling so sociable.”
“What’s social, you can’t talk to your friend?” Lu bent over, brushing an invisible smudge from her pristine white tennis shoes. A gold bracelet slid from beneath the sleeve of her sweater, heart charm dangling from a chain. Miranda stared at it.
Lu noticed her gaze and smiled wide-eyed. “Yes. She gave it to me before she died, sweet April.”
Miranda blinked at the thing, disbelieving. “So she knew she was going to die, you think?” She couldn’t help being hurt that April would make such a gesture toward Lu rather than her.
“Who knows? She was a funny person sometimes.” Lu twisted the bracelet farther down on her wrist, regarded it thoughtfully. “Not bad,” she said, turning the charm this way and that. “Eighteen carat, I think, but very nice.”
The heart lay with its back side faceup in Lu’s palm. The inscription had been sanded away. Miranda felt her insides go icy.
“I will order a necklace from QVC to match. You heard they now have cable on D Unit?” Lu stood and looked down on Miranda with her most beguiling grin. “We need to hang around like girlfriends, Mimi. You come visit me tomorrow, okay? I will do your nails, your polish is all chipped.”
She laid a light hand on Miranda’s head. “You are a wonderful thing, you know how I love you, right?”
Miranda forced herself to smile. “Right.”
Lu jogged to the far corner of the gymnasium. To Dorcas Watkins, bouncing a blue handball, watching her approach with an expectant look on her face. They talked intently, sending the little ball between them in halfhearted bounce passes. With the usual ferocious combat being waged beneath the hoops and the hip-hop babbling on the boom box at the COs station, no one could hear what they might be saying. Miranda observed them for a long while.
Finally, flipping the ball to Dorcas with a nod, Lu walked to the exit of the gym. A tall CO unlocked the door and ushered her out. When he turned to lock it behind him, Miranda saw his face, framed for an elastic moment in the door’s oblong window. Jerrold Liverwell.
VERWIRRT. THE WORD CAME BACK TO HER FROM HIGH SCHOOL GERMAN. She’d forgotten most of her lessons, but she remembered this. Verwirrt: completely confused, baffled, but with a touch of panic, a whiff of menace in the air. Alarmed, afraid, but not knowing exactly why.
She took her place in line as the ladies were herded out of the gym and back to their units. There was the usual pushing and elbowing and cackles and complaints, but Miranda was more or less oblivious. Trying to process what she had just seen.
“You ladies gonna act like children or you gonna act like ladies?” bellowed Beryl Carmona as her group flowed through the unit door. “You decide, you decide.” Miranda drifted down the long passageway to her room. The polished floor reflecting stripes of fluorescent lights, the walls punched with precisely spaced doorways, the cinder blocks: everything converged on a single vanishing point.
She entered her cell, sat on her bed, tried to think things through. Verwirrt.
She turned and gazed up at the rectangle of sky, seeking comfort there as she had so many times. But the sleet continued, the window showed only a gray frizz like a broken TV.
Looking around her cell then, seeing everything as if for the first time: the peeling metal, the concrete, the smudged plastic curtain. All down the block, the stink of drugstore perfumes and powerful hair products, the mildew-infused steam from the hygiene room, the smell of onions from the kitchen. And the voices, scolding, murmuring, screeching, humming, coming from everywhere, filling all the empty space and time with their dissatisfaction and boredom and grief.
She stayed for a long while like this and her thoughts passed, many of them. She tracked them, as if watching planes winging from horizon to horizon.
Frank Lundquist, who was waiting on the call. His embrace, which had awakened more in her than she might have imagined. He waited even this very second for the phone to ring in his apartment. She could picture the place, the hand-me-down sofas and chairs, the bumpy old Upper West Side walls encrusted with decades of paint.
But no. These were the memories of Gillian’s apartment. The snow-silenced night of that birthday party.
Miranda. You need to be a different person now. Different, not the same. Not the same as you were, that snow-smothered night. Not the same as you were, through that black tunnel of love, lust, whatever in the days and months that followed. The corridor that led to Candora.
Candora was the last time you followed a plan not your own. A plan by a man.
Be different, not the same.
Miranda eased the privacy curtain down across the front of her cell. She took her yellow robe off its white plastic hanger, folded the robe, and placed it on the floor. Lowering herself to her bed, she held the hanger in her lap and peeled the little piece of tape away that held it together where it had once been split. The tape came away.
The pills had to be destroyed. She would smash them, then flush the dust.
She shook the hanger. No pills came.
She peered into the tubular space inside the plastic. Empty. Gone.
THE 6 P.M. COUNT BEGAN. SHE COULD HEAR CARMONA COMING UP THE passagew
ay, calling the ladies to stand at the front of their cells, joking and haranguing as she counted. Miranda did as required, staring out into the passageway.
She bid farewell to Frank Lundquist, still waiting on her call. His unassuming manner, his troubled-sea eyes. Willing to risk everything to save her, to empty his life of everything in hopes of refilling it with her.
She never actually bought in to his preposterous plan. Not really. She knew it would break down, one way or another along the line.
And, even more sadly, she bid farewell to the Frank-Lundquist-manufactured version of Miranda Greene. His was not inmate 0068-N-97, not a debased nonentity in state-issued yellows. Instead: Miranda. Worthy of love, worth risking everything for, a valuable woman aged thirty-two years, grown from a good-hearted, well-raised girl of cherry lip gloss and calico patches. She had grown more than a little fond of Frank Lundquist’s Miranda. A bit addicted, perhaps.
But now she would manufacture her version. Or remanufacture, because of course, she’d already made and lived her own Miranda once.
Though maybe she never really had.
In any case. Work on that appeal. Stop transgressing. Map your own route, then drive it. Alone.
“Moore, count. Get up.” Carmona was in front of the cell opposite now. As usual, Weavy was lain out in her bed. She invariably conked after dinner; the woman slept quiet and solid, an old eroded landform on the thin cot, collapsing into sleep as the sun went down like some preindustrial being. Miranda had often marveled at it: Weavy must have racked up eighteen hours a day for the whole time she’d been inside. “Moore,” bellowed Carmona. “Up! Now!”
No sign of movement. A poisonous thought seeped into Miranda’s mind through some needle-thin brain chasm.
Carmona hoisted the ring of keys from the chain at her hip and stuck one into the lock on Weavy’s gate. She swung it wide and strode into the cell, kicking aside sheets of sandpaper. Weavy lay facing the wall, Carmona took hold of her shoulder and shook it. “Dammit, woman, you deaf?”
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