by Jon Michaud
IT WAS AFTER nine when he finally opened the side door and stepped into the kitchen of his home. It felt like he'd been away a long time.
His sister-in-law was in the kitchen, pouring tonic water into a tumbler. A bottle of vodka was on the table.
“Heeeere's Tommy!” she said, doing her best Ed McMahon. “What's cracking, my brother? Where you been? We was starting to get worried aboutchoo.”
“There were delays,” he said. “A train broke down in the tunnel.” He'd forgotten that Yunis was coming back, forgotten about all of that.
“Right. Come on, man. You can't fool me. You was stalling. I know it.” She lifted her glass and said, “Salud,” before knocking half the drink back.
Yunis looked browner than she had the day she left for Santo Domingo. Tanned and drunk, he thought, setting down his bag.
“How was your trip back?” he asked.
“The trip was fine,” she said. “It was the shit that went down after I got here that was the problem.” She glanced to her right, into the living room. Thomas followed her gaze and saw a large dark red stain on their couch—one of the new pieces of furniture they'd bought since moving to New Jersey. The shade of the floor lamp next to the couch was dented and torn.
“What the hell happened?” he asked.
“I'm gonna let my sister tell you,” she said.
“Where is Clara?” Thomas asked.
“She's at the hospital with Deysei.”
“The hospital?” said Thomas. “What happened? The baby?”
“Like I said, I'm going to let my sister tell you all about it.” Yunis looked at him—a challenging look. A look that said: That's right, bro, you missed some shit.
“What about Guillermo?”
“With his mami.” She took another drink from her glass. “All right, Tommy. I'm going downstairs to watch my shows. You wait up for your wife—I know she wants to talk to you.” She walked past him to the stairwell. “Peace, my brother.”
The kitchen, he noticed now that Yunis had gone, looked like it often did at the end of a party. Dirty dishes were arrayed on every surface and bore crumpled napkins, chicken bones, and congealed pools of gravy. On the stove, there was a pot of rice and a frying pan with an inch of oil in which two slivers of plátano were petrified. Dirty glasses abounded. The paper towel roll was empty, the tracks of adhesive on the cardboard tube like a non-winning result in a slot machine. In a roasting pan, half-hidden by tinfoil, was the carcass of a bird, the rib cage plucked almost clean. Thomas smelled adobo and garlic and vinegar. This is what the kitchen in Yunis's apartment used to be like when he went there. It had taken only a day for her to make their house into hers.
He climbed the stairs, slowly and quietly. He felt weary. He showered and got into bed, intending to read, but he fell asleep, and the next thing he knew, Clara was in the room with him. Without forewarning, her arrival felt like a dream.
She was wearing a white terry cloth bathrobe over her favorite sleeping outfit—pink pajama bottoms and a black tank top. She'd come home, showered, and changed without waking him. What time was it? He looked at the clock: 1:23. Clara saw that he was awake. She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled a piece of folded letter-sized paper out of the side table. She held it up to him. “Who is this?” she asked.
He took the page from her and looked at the slightly out-of-focus image of the front of Melissa's house. It took him a moment to realize that he was in the picture, holding a bunch of flowers, talking to Melissa. Fuck.
“That's me,” he said.
“I know that's you. Who is she?”
“What's going on? Why were you at the hospital? Is everything OK?”
“Who is she?”
“Come on, Clara.”
“Answer my question.”
“Did you have me followed?” he asked.
“No, I didn't have you followed.”
“How did you get this photograph, then?”
“Never mind how I got the photograph. Tell me who she is.”
“Her name is Melissa Epstein—I mean Melissa Logan.”
“You don't even know her name?”
“Logan is her maiden name.”
“So she's cheating on her husband, too?”
“No, he died.”
“Wait, so this was the ‘job’ you were doing over in Newstead?”
“It was a real job,” he said.
“I don't believe it. What a fool I am. And aren't those the same flowers you gave me a couple of weeks ago?” Clara asked.
“Yes.”
“So you gave me flowers that this bitch didn't want?”
“It's not like that.”
“Thomas. How could you do that to me?”
“I'm sorry,” he muttered.
“How long have you been fucking her?”
“I'm not fuck—it's over. It's over now.”
“How long did this go on?”
“Almost six months.”
“Six months?”
“It started right after I was laid off. Right after the miscarriage.”
“I can't believe it. You've ruined everything,” she said. “You've ruined it all. We were just about to get out of this shit and you've fucked it up.”
“It doesn't have to be over, Clara. Everything doesn't have to be ruined.”
“How could you have been sleeping with her for six months? What am I supposed to think? The next time something bad happens to us, you're going to go fucking some rich housewife again? I can't even believe you when you say it's over. How do I know you weren't with her the last few days? How do I know you were really on an interview, with your mother?”
“I was down in D.C.,” he said, indignantly.
“You've got no right to take that tone, Thomas. You have no idea what has been going on here.” At this point, she paused and looked at him. “You're not the only one who has been tempted. You're not the only one who has had opportunity.”
“What do you mean?”
“You think I haven't had my chances to screw around? You think Tito wouldn't have me back?”
“Tito?” said Thomas. “What's this with Tito all of a sudden? The guy you loved so much you aborted his baby?”
“I don't know,” said Clara. She looked utterly confused and utterly despondent. “Sometimes I think I should have kept that baby.”
“If you had kept it, we would never have met. You said that yourself.”
“Well, maybe my life would have been better. Different, but better.”
“Guillermo would never have been born. How is that a better life?”
“I would have had another child. Maybe two.”
“We still can,” said Thomas. “We can still do it. I'm ready.”
“How am I supposed to believe that after what you just told me. I don't know what to think of you anymore, Thomas.”
“Clara, please.”
“Look what I went and picked up,” she said. She held up a white paper bag with a blue stork on the outside. She dumped the contents onto the bed. Vials of medicine, syringes, needles, cotton swabs. “I was ready to start. I've been waiting so long for this.”
“Come on, Clara,” he said, and reached for the gap in her robe, hoping to pull her toward him in an embrace. And she did come closer to him, but not to kiss him—to strike him across the face with her open hand.
“Get the fuck out of here,” she said.
“Clara—”
“No! I said get out!”
Tito
The path into the forested section of the park was illuminated by old-fashioned lampposts that were meant to look like Victorian gas lamps but actually contained modern halogen bulbs. About one in three had been vandalized, their glass faces shattered with rocks, creating areas of darkness on the path. As he stumbled along the walkway of hexagonal cobblestones, taking sips from his bottle, Tito was not seeing the park as it was—darkened, cooling, ominously tranquil. Instead, what he saw was the park as it existed in his imaginat
ion—a place of wonders, the park where he and Clara had spent their Friday afternoons more than fifteen years before. The sacred locations, like the stations of the cross, were arrayed on the map in his brain, and he intended to visit them all on his way to his destination. Just up here, where the path wound out of view of the ball fields and apartment buildings, was where he had first taken her hand. That was on their third date, the week after he had kissed her the first time. A little farther along, on a bench near an outcrop of stone, was where he had undone a single button of her blouse and reached in, his hand slipping under the cup of her bra, her nipple squeezed between his thumb and the knuckle of his forefinger. His hand had stayed there for a good fifteen minutes while they'd kissed, getting sweaty, his shoulder cramping from the weird angle in which he'd had to position his arm to reach in through the narrow opening. Then they heard a man walking his dog approaching along the path. Trying to withdraw his hand from Clara's breast, Tito found that it had become stuck. She had to dip into the opening, peel his palm away, and button herself up just before the dog walker came around the outcrop to find them both laughing. Kids.
Farther along, the path passed under the mouth of the Indian cave. As they worked their way deeper into the forest and deeper into each other's clothes, they were heading for that cave, where Tito hoped they would be able to have a little privacy, where they would not have to worry about people walking their dogs. Still, there were risks. The cave was reputedly the haunt of savage bums and violent drug users. It was also where several of his classmates claimed to have lost their virginity. As he and Clara approached the cave, they saw someone standing by the mouth: a teenager neither of them recognized, his head swiveling, on the lookout.
“Wait,” said Clara, grabbing him by the elbow and pulling him back under the cover of the trees. They stepped off the path and watched the sentry as he looked nervously about, now and then glancing over his shoulder back into the cave.
“What do you think is going on?” she asked.
“Maybe they're in there smoking crack,” said Tito.
“Or planning a robbery.”
Neither, it turned out. After a few minutes, another teenage boy emerged from within the cave, holding the hand of an even younger girl. From this distance, she looked thirteen or fourteen, though she was dressed like someone older, in a short skirt and thin-strapped top.
“Oh, God,” said Clara. “They were taking turns with her.”
Tito understood that his hopes for the afternoon had been spoiled. They would not be going into that cave now. Not today. “Let's go over to the benches,” he said. “The ones with the view.”
“Yeah,” said Clara. “I don't want to go in there.”
They backtracked and took a different fork of the path to a little promontory with two benches and a waist-high railing overlooking the Hudson Bridge, the Metro North railroad tracks, the Palisades of New Jersey, the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, and the inlet to the Inwood lagoon. They sat on one of the benches, a warm breeze rising up off the water and blowing in their faces.
“I've never been here before,” said Clara. “This is better than that cave.”
He was glad he'd suggested it. He kissed her. “What do you like about it?” he asked.
“I don't feel like I'm in New York anymore. I could be anywhere. Europe. Africa.” She looked out over the river. “Where would you go if you could go anywhere right now?”
“Nowhere,” he said. “I'd stay right here, because that's where you are.”
She smiled at him and took his hand. “That's sweet, Tito.”
“I mean it,” he said. “Where would you go, if you could go anywhere right now?”
“Back to my grandparents' ranchito in D.R.,” she said. “Back home.”
THE SHORE OF Inwood lagoon was, supposedly, where the Dutch had purchased Manhattan from the Indians. In the lamplit late-summer night, as Tito wandered through the trees, he imagined a little band of these Dutchmen in their billowy pantaloons and iron helmets sweating as they took their first walk around Inwood, surveying the wilderness they had just acquired for a few trinkets, wary of the wilderness and the savages they'd just done business with. They felt tired, exasperated, but also a little giddy, elbowing each other and pointing, expansive with new acquisitions and a sense of missions being fulfilled. Tito had seen the same expressions, the same gestures, on the faces of Dominicans coming through the international arrivals gate at Newark or JFK when he'd waited for his parents to return from their annual vacations home—trepidation and possibilities, the end of a long journey and the start of another.
Possibilities. He'd come in here to complete the tour of this sacred walkway and then throw himself off the Hudson Bridge or jump from one of the cliffs over the river. That had been his plan, but now, in the park, he had the sense that he'd walked right out of the world, the sense that he existed in some kind of purgatory unconnected to time and place, that his meeting with Clara might not have happened yet and that he could still do something to stop her, that, if he went back far enough, he might be able to prevent her from leaving. There was no telling where this path might lead him—to the jungles of Peru, to Shangrila, or even to the ranchito in the Dominican Republic that Clara had wanted to get back to.
He kept going along the route that he and Clara had walked that afternoon when he had wanted to take her to the cave, eager to see what might happen. He had never had a chance to show off all the stuff he'd learned about Inwood. They were always too busy kissing and feeling each other up. There wasn't time to talk history. He took a sip from the bottle. If he turned left here, he would descend out of the trees and emerge onto the grassy bank that led to the Payson Street entrance opposite Clara's old house. The house had changed over the years since Clara's father's murder. It was owned by a family of Jamaicans now. They had gotten to work right away, fixing the place up. It was unrecognizable, restored, a house anyone would want to live in. The restoration had been a sad thing for him to watch—the slow eradication of one of the landmarks on the map in his brain.
But Tito did not go that way. He continued on, going west and north, toward the river, into the deepest part of the park, where the trees were the thickest and the sounds from the city all but lost, except for the wash of traffic on the Hudson Parkway, a white noise that seemed to further remove the park from reality. He walked on, a sense of urgency gathering around him.
Behind him there was a noise, a metallic, mechanical grinding. It was approaching quickly, like a swarm of steel-winged hornets. Through the trees, he saw a single beam of a light. Then, more lights—not hornets, but lighting bugs. Around the bend they came, a succession of riders on mountain bikes, the cleated tires thrumming the path, the lubricated shriek of their cranks rising to a crescendo. Before he could fully register their speed, they were upon him. “On your left!” the first of them shouted as Tito jumped to the edge of the path. They went by him too quickly to count—four or five or six, looking insectlike in their tight black pants and their lurid, clingy tops, the vented helmets glistening exoskeletally in the lamplight. “Whoo-eee!” said the last as they went around the corner and were lost once again in the trees, buzzing toward some bikers' hive deep in the forest.
Tito's heart was pounding so hard that his neck and biceps quivered. He felt feverish, overstimulated. He took a drink. Holding up the bottle, he saw that he'd downed more than half of it.
“Breathe,” he said aloud. “Just breathe.”
Once, in his early days with Cruz Brothers, when he was still on the trucks, still lifting heavy things all day long, he had come close to hyperventilating. He and another grunt, a fat, sweaty Puerto Rican kid named Cleber (pronounced clever, to everyone's undying amusement), were taking an antique dresser up the stairwell of an elevatorless prewar building on St. Nicholas. The apartment was on the sixth floor and they'd already made countless trips, everything carried up by hand. Idiotic with exhaustion, endorphins, and falling blood sugar, Tito had started laughing between
the third and fourth floors of their climb. He was leading, which was harder on the back but also safer should one of them lose their grip or their footing—an occurrence that was increasingly likely as the day wore on and fatigue came into play. He'd lost count, even then in his early years with Cruz Brothers, of the number of broken fingers, sprained ankles, dislocated shoulders, black eyes, fat lips, and unexpected dental dislodgements he'd witnessed. He had a sense that something bad was going to happen on this ascent of the stairwell. The dresser, even without its drawers, was heavy. About halfway up the fourth flight, he and Cleber against all common sense had started shouting out comparisons, trying to one-up each other.
“This thing's heavier than a fucking piano.”
“Heavier than Ozzie Cruz after a night at the all-you-can-eat buffet.”
“Heavier than Ozzie Cruz's wife after a night at the all-you-can-eat buffet.”
“Heavier than Ozzie Cruz's mami after a night at the all-you-can-eat buffet.”
“Heavier than my cojones.”
“Heavier than a goddamn matrimonio obligao,” said Cleber. Heavier than an arranged marriage. It was something Tito's father often said when hauling garbage out to the curb and, in that moment, it seemed like the funniest thing he had ever heard.
“Stop laughing!” said Cleber. “You gonna drop this mother-fucker on me.”
That only made Tito laugh even harder.
“I'm serious. Cut that shit out.”
“Matrimonio,” rasped Tito between guffaws. “Obligao!” Cleber was right. He was laughing so hard, he couldn't hold the damn thing. It was impossible to lift heavy objects when you were laughing. Guys on the trucks were forever trying to get each other to drop stuff by cracking jokes. If Tito let go now, the dresser would rumble and bounce down the stairs, squishing Cleber like a water balloon under a brick.