“And Devin’s daddy has plenty of money,” I said. “Just like in the City.”
“Maybe he does,” Virginia said. “But Sandra owns twenty percent, and I own twenty.”
I wasn’t buying it. “Six months. You’ll last six months out there.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” she said. “I should’ve known you’d be a prick about this.”
“I’m being realistic,” I said. “What happened to playing lawyer? There’s better money in decaf lattes? What happens when that gets boring, too?”
She stepped between me and the briefcase. “They’re a firm specializing in small business, I’ll have you know. I took some temp work there. I thought I might learn a few things. In fact, I did.” She crossed her arms. “Learn any new drink recipes in the past six months?”
“You cut your hair for temp work?”
She ran her hand through it. I don’t think she even knew she was doing it. It may have been the only unself-conscious move I’d ever seen her make. “I cut my hair because I felt like it.”
“It was beautiful. I loved it.”
“It was in the way.”
We started walking again, a guarded distance between us. My temper subsided, and a few things started to add up. “We broke up six months ago.” I looked at her. “Which would be when Sandra left. Where did you get the money to buy into a business?”
“I’d been saving it,” she said, “for a while.”
“While we were living together?”
“Yes,” she said. She stopped walking.
I continued a few steps ahead then stopped, hands in my pockets. I could feel her eyes on my back. Fuck the walk. We should’ve gone down to the dock by the bridge, rented one of those little rowboats, and rowed out through the beer cans and oil swirls to the middle of that fake little lake. Then, when we got to this point in the conversation, I could’ve just slipped over the side and down to the lightless bottom. Could’ve just disappeared. I could do that now. I should just keep walking, through the trees. That wouldn’t work, though. I’d pop out onto the hospital parking lot in five minutes. Still, it had to be better than this. Then I heard her say my name. She was closer to me.
“You started this coffee shop shit before you and I ever even broke up,” I said.
I felt like such a dope. When she’d suddenly started letting me pick up the tab all the time, when she let me pick up a larger slice of the utilities, let me work extra shifts to do it, about a year before the end, I’d taken it to mean she was settling in, letting me look after her. Shit, I’d never looked after anyone but myself before her, and I’d considered the change progress. “How long before?” I asked.
“About a year.”
I turned on her. “What the fuck, Virginia? You were planning on leaving for a year and you didn’t have the spine to tell me? I’m not rich, it’s not much of an apartment.” I held out my hands, just in case she wanted to drop an answer into them.
“Exactly.” she said. “It wasn’t money, it wasn’t the apartment. I probably could’ve saved more, faster, on my own.” She blushed. She actually fucking blushed. “Without having to hide it from you.”
“You apparently had no fucking problem hiding things from me,” I said. “Did you, at any point, have any intention of asking me to go with you?”
“All the time. But something always held me back.”
“What?”
“The same thing that kept me there. The same thing that kept me from doing anything, going anywhere I talked about. You.”
“Me? I could’ve helped you,” I said, throwing my hands up. “Fuck, I did help you. I would’ve gone with you. I would’ve followed you anywhere.”
“Exactly.”
I took a step toward her. If she said that one more time, I was gonna lose my shit. Nothing about this was exact, no matter how neat and clean she had it all added up and justified in her head. It was a big fucking mess.
“You would’ve followed me,” she said, “eventually, maybe. If I did all the work, found the apartment, set it up, scoped out places for you to work. How often did we talk about getting a new apartment? How many times did you say you were sick of bartending? How often did we talk about getting married? And what happened? Nothing.”
“So I was supposed to do everything?” I asked. “You talked as much as I did. Things come up. We just never found the time. You gave up before we did.”
“I gave up,” she said, “because we were never going to find the time. I know I didn’t do anything, either. I know I never followed through. There was always something else to do. Another shift to work, another party to go to, another bunch of friends to catch up to. For a long time, that was enough. I never thought I’d find a man that could keep up with me. We always had so much fun. But we weren’t going anywhere together, we were just getting older.”
“Austin would’ve been different.”
“For a month,” she said. “If you ever got there. Think about it realistically. You would’ve just picked up and moved with me? No, you’d have to give Brian your two weeks, which would’ve turned into two months, then six months. I would’ve been stuck waiting for you, either here or there. I was sick of waiting.”
“So I’m loyal. You run out on me because I’m loyal?”
“You’re stuck,” she said. “There’s a difference.”
“You did this whole thing behind my back, for a whole year,” I said. “You never gave me a chance.”
“I gave you a year’s worth of chances. A year to start coming home from work before dawn. To save some money. A year to call your sister and treat her like a brother should. Did you know, at one point, you didn’t fuck me sober for three months? Three goddamn months. What do you think that was like?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, “because you never told me. That’s so you, Virginia. You’d always rather keep score than speak up. You’d rather win than be happy. How can I know you’re unhappy if you don’t tell me?”
“If you loved me, really loved me like you said you did, you would’ve known.”
“That’s bullshit. How can I know what you’re feeling when you’re always hiding it? You put me through a test I didn’t even know I was taking, and then you leave me when I fail. It’s fucking cruel. It’s fucking cruel like this conversation. Why do I need to know all this? You could’ve told me yesterday on the phone you got a job in Austin. And I would’ve said good luck and that would’ve been that. But no, the whole world always has to know what Virginia feels, unless it might actually serve some fucking purpose.”
“I never told you the truth about why I left you,” she said.
“I figured that out.”
“I thought you might want to know,” she said. “I thought you might want to know that it wasn’t because I didn’t love you. In a way, I always will.”
“That’s rich. So this is all some big sacrifice for you. Is that how I’m supposed to feel about it now?” I snapped my fingers. “Just like that. Just because you say so. I should give you a big hug and wish you well and send you a Christmas card every year? Fuck that. Fuck you. You love me but you’re gonna do fuck all about it. What good does that do me?”
She tilted her head back in defiance but it didn’t hold. Her mouth worked on words, but they didn’t come out. Her head dropped and her shoulders shook with her refusal to cry. Even now, with absolutely nothing at stake, she held back. She seemed small, like a girl playing dress-up in mommy’s clothes. She looked like just another girl. I realized I’d gotten what I’d always wanted. I’d won, but all I felt was sick and ashamed. For me, for her. I would rather have lost. What did winning get me? She was still going. She had still left me behind, and conspired to do it. She’d go on to Austin and I’d still be here, here with all the rest of the trash.
She looked up at me, and I hated her. Hated her for losing. For not being tougher. I hated her for not staying the girl I remembered, for falling from the pedestal before I could push her off.
Then I walked away, completing the circle around the lake, heading for the bridge and the exit from the park, leaving her where she stood.
ELEVEN
I POINTED THE CAR INTO TRAFFIC AND FOLLOWED THE FLOW, drifting away from the park, from the high school, away from my parents’ house. I just floated wherever the green lights took me. I finally stopped when I hit the intersection of Elm and Bay Terrace, the northern edge of the island, and parked under a tree on the corner. Through the chain-link fence across the street separating the road and the docks, across the slate expanse of the bay, I could see the skyscrapers of Manhattan. I lit a cigarette, watched two dirty orange Staten Island ferry boats, squat and square, chug past each other through the water. Molly’s empty sky loomed over the southern tip of Manhattan.
I’d hardly thought about the Towers when they were there. Just the tallest among a faraway horizon of tall things looming in the distance, they were always just part of the larger picture. Now, in their absence, the Towers seemed more prominent than ever. Before that day, getting off the ferry, it had always been easy to separate the tourists from the New Yorkers. The tourists stopped and looked up as they left the terminal. The locals looked down, at their newspapers, their watches, their cell phones. I wondered how many New Yorkers snuck glances up at the sky now, at the hole in it, as if they couldn’t yet believe that what had stood there so large and so long was really gone. I wondered how many looked down at whatever was in their hands simply to still the impulse to look up. Either way, I figured they reacted more to the void left by the fall of the Towers than they ever had to their presence. I couldn’t remember if I had looked up or down the last time I crossed the water. It had been a long time.
And now, those Towers were nothing but remains and rubble scattered, of all places, across the Fresh Kills landfill. I couldn’t think of a more modest resting place for them. Fresh Kills was where the dump trucks went as The Pile was hauled away, in buckets at first, by hand. It was where cops and firemen searched the debris for identifiable scraps of bodies and lives. It was the final resting place for an uncounted number of people. Fresh Kills was where someone found Molly’s brother’s class ring. In a weird but very real way, the world’s largest landfill had become hallowed ground.
Shifting in my seat and staring up at that space over Manhattan, I thought of my conversations that afternoon, of how much went on unseen, unknown in a given day. Virginia and her elaborate plans to move halfway across the country. Molly’s secret, ongoing mourning for her brother. Her continuing life of deception with David. She had met the man she would eventually leave me for at a party I had taken her to. I thought of my mother’s secret hideout, of my father and Mr. Fontana. My sister’s notebook and her struggle with food. My parents’ whole fucking marriage.
I realized nobody knew where I was, or what I was doing at that very moment. There were any number of things I could do on that corner that no one would ever see. If I had a gun in the car I could take potshots at passing traffic and drive away and I’d never be caught. I could get out of the car and drop my lit cigarette in my gas tank—just immolate myself along with everything in a hundred-foot radius. In the thirty seconds it would take to complete the act, four or five cars would speed down Bay Terrace, and not one driver would remember seeing a thing. Hell, someone shot my father in front of multiple witnesses, and no one could recall a single telling detail about it. Just yesterday, that had seemed so impossible to me. Sitting there in the car, staring across the water at the air left in place of three thousand lives, it made perfect sense to me now. I felt utterly stupid for ever thinking any different.
Someone had taken the time to plan my father’s murder. To pick the day and the time, to get the gun and the car, to load the gun. Did he sit and contemplate which gun in his arsenal to use? Did he get one just for this task? Did he gas up the car on the way to the deli? Go through the drive-thru at Burger King? Did anyone other than the guy planning it know it was about to happen? How many people had seen the guy, a murderer, on his way to the deli? Was someone sitting in a secret room somewhere, waiting for news the deed had been done? The murder had started happening hours, maybe days, before the fatal shots were actually fired, right in front of God only knows how many people and no one had known, or even suspected, a thing. I marveled that Waters had uncovered any leads at all.
I’d always considered myself a smart man. Street smart and well read, at least, if not overly educated. I’d always figured my years in the service industry, years spent woven into its elaborate fabric of people and personalities, had taught me more than most about both, and about life. What did a bartender do but educate the masses? What did he do but spin webs out of accumulated wisdom with a dirty rag tucked in his belt? I spat out the car window. It was all bullshit. If I’d spun anything, it was a cocoon of elaborate lies around myself that let me look in the mirror. Two days ago, I’d been pretty damn happy in that cocoon. Now everyone and everything around me pulled at the threads, letting the daylight in and burning my eyes. And it stung so bad, pissed me off so much, that I snapped and bit at everything around me, at every hand that reached in. And when they stopped reaching, when they got tired of the effort or sick from the poison, I’d be twice as angry.
When the patrol car parked behind me, its red-and-white lamps muted in the fading daylight, I set my hands at ten and two on the steering wheel. Someone had ratted me out, gotten sick of my shit—one of the kids from South Beach, one of the Costanzas, maybe even Val or Theo. Those sharp pains darted across my chest again. I squeezed so hard on the steering wheel my knuckles turned white. I hoped it was Purvis walking up to my car. Maybe then I could bully my way out of a night in jail. Then I thought maybe a cell, preferably one with padded walls, was just what I needed.
It wasn’t Purvis approaching; it was just some guy in a uniform. He tapped on the passenger-side window. I leaned across the seat and rolled it down.
“License, registration, and proof of insurance,” he said.
I handed everything over and waited while he frowned at my paperwork.
“This registration is expired,” he said.
“I’ve been real busy lately.”
He raised his eyebrows at me. “I can see that. Remove your sunglasses, please.”
I did. His frown got more dire. I guess I looked as bad as I felt. He handed me back my papers. “It expired six months ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just keep putting it off, and the time got away from me.” Cops love the truth; they hear it so rarely.
“Sir, step out of the car, please.”
I did.
“You can’t park here,” he said.
I looked around for the sign.
“You’re blocking a fire hydrant.”
I took his word for it. I hadn’t seen it when I pulled over.
“Anything in the car I should know about?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I said. “Old books, empty packs of cigarettes.”
He jerked his flashlight out of his belt. “Mind if I take a look?”
Of course I minded. “Go right ahead,” I said. It wasn’t like I had anywhere to be.
I reached into my jacket for my cigarettes. His face tightened. “Don’t reach into your pockets,” he snapped. So I put my hands over my head.
The cop pulled open all the doors, giving the inside of the car a cursory sweep with the flashlight. I was sure it was the mess of trash that deterred a closer inspection. I knew I looked too exhausted to really be up to no good. He hitched his flashlight back on his belt when he was done.
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