by G. M. Ford
Mickey understood. Back in the day, a man had the right to rule his castle with an iron fist.
“He had big hands,” Vince continued. “Liked to use them, too.” He gave it a minute to sink in. Then finished with, “Nobody should have to live with that shit.”
“No. They shouldn’t,” Mickey said.
“Those girls of his—the Royster girls . . .”
Mickey nodded.
“He makes them shower with him,” Vince said.
Mickey nearly groaned out loud. “Don’t tell me that shit, man,” he muttered.
“You want to hear what he likes to do with his fingers?”
Mickey showed his hands in surrender.
“It’s one of those places in life where if you can do something about it, you do.”
Vince sat forward and placed his hands flat on the desk. Nice little visual metaphor for I’m going to level with you. “I’ve got nothing to hide, Mickey.”
“So how come so many of your old man’s leg-breakers are still around?”
“They’re family, Mickey. What am I going to do? Put them out with the trash?” He made a face. “They keep things in order out on the island. Handle other odd jobs for me.” He smiled. “Leg-breaking for my old man didn’t come with a 401k plan.”
“We’ve got a couple of dead PIs down at the morgue,” Mickey said.
Vince spread his hands. “Shit happens,” he said. “I’m guessing they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Just the price of doing business?”
“I hear you’re not married anymore,” Vince said, before Mickey could pose another question.
“That’s something of an understatement,” Mickey replied.
“She was a nice girl,” Vince reminisced.
“Too nice for me.”
“Found her another nice girl.”
Suddenly desperate to change the subject, Mickey asked, “So you—you never . . .”
“Got married?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m gay.” Vince said it like he was sharing the time of day.
“No shit” probably wasn’t the PC response, but it fell out of Mickey’s mouth anyway. He threw a furtive glance back at the office door. “Your mama . . .”
“Mama’s always known,” Vince said.
Mickey adopted his best conspiratorial tone. “But not your old man.”
Vince chuckled. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”
Mickey nodded. “Yeah—he was probably a bit old-school,” he allowed.
“How you dealing with your wife leaving you for another woman?” Vince asked.
By this time, Mickey had worked up a thousand off-the-rack answers to the question, but for reasons unknown blurted out, “It’s made a pretty good dent in me.”
“Imagine it would,” Vince said.
“Funny how some things sometimes turn out to be a lot more complicated than you ever imagined.”
“How so?”
“Well,” Mickey said, “you know, way back when, I was one of those schmucks who thought sex was really simple. You know—flange A seemed to fit nicely into grommet B, and, far as I was concerned, that’s all there was to it. And now it turns out things aren’t that simple at all—that some people identify as—as—something other than what their plumbing parts say they are. Or something like that.” He had Vince’s undivided attention. “Whole thing confuses the shit out of me, to tell you the truth,” he admitted.
“Me too,” Vince said.
Mickey suddenly felt like he was breathing mud. Like if he didn’t get some fresh air he was going pass out. Vince picked up on it from across the room.
“Is there anything else?” he asked. “I’ve got some calls to make.”
Mickey took the hint and got to his feet. “No,” he said. “Thanks for your time. Nice seeing you again. It really was.”
Vince agreed and then hopped to his feet. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you out.”
Vince walked Mickey out onto the porch, then reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a business card. A phone number was handwritten on the back of the card. “That’s my private number,” he said. “You come up with something to keep those girls away from that asshole father of theirs—you know, something where I might be able to help—you be sure to let me know.”
Mickey said he would.
“You’ll say goodbye to your mom for me?” Mickey said.
“You bet.”
Harold Thurmond was a lot younger than Grace had expected. And Mexican. Grace’s alarm bell began to clang. About the time they started talking a million bucks cash, you had to figure it was going to have to be somebody old enough to have come up with that much money. This was a scruffy fellow, hadn’t seen thirty yet. His clothes, his shoes—none of it said he could come up with change for a twenty.
He was sitting at the round table over by the window, drinking a latte. His hair looked like he hadn’t quite settled on an adult cut yet and was still getting by with the standard part-on-the-side grammar school special. He started to push himself to his feet when Grace walked in the door, but stopped midstoop when Grace shook her head and motioned him back down.
Instead of joining him at the table, Grace walked over to the service counter, took her time getting herself a glass of ice water, and then wandered over. She pulled out the other chair and sat down. He had big watery eyes like a cocker spaniel.
“Thanks for coming,” he said.
“I need to be honest with you, Mr. Thurmond,” Grace began.
His face sank. “Please,” he said anyway.
“I’m sorry my mother brought you all the way here, but this isn’t a good time for me.” She looked around the inside of the coffee shop and then took a sip of her water. “I just lost somebody.”
“Lost?” He looked confused. “You mean . . . you didn’t . . . to . . .”
“He killed himself,” crossed her lips before it ever crossed her mind.
“Oh . . . sorry.”
Grace didn’t say anything. Half a dozen high school kids burst through the doors, shattering the silence in a hormonal wave of shoves and shouts. Grace and Mr. Thurmond watched as the kids acted like kids, ordering coffee and pastries, bantering, permeating the place with their youthful energy. They were still roughhousing when they finally migrated back outside, leaving strained silence bobbing in their wake.
“Thurmond’s not your name, is it?” Grace said.
He looked down at the table and shook his head. When he looked back up, he was beginning to get teary. “Please,” he said in a low voice. “You got to help me. I got no place else to go. My wife . . . she’s . . .”
“What’s your name?” Grace asked.
“Roberto,” he said.
“Roberto what?”
“Roberto Salazar.”
“Was that your wife’s medical chart that you sent?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I just changed the name.”
Grace spread her hands. “So why all the subterfuge?”
“The what?”
“Why all the lies and shit?”
“I thought . . . you know . . . if you saw a name like mine . . . you know . . . you’d think I was just was some LA beaner or something. I figured . . . you know . . .”
“I know,” Grace said. “Money talks.”
He got to his feet. “I’ll go . . . I’m sorry I . . .”
“Sit down,” Grace said. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you.”
Roberto eased back into his chair.
“I just need you to understand something.”
He ran a sleeve across his nose.
“Most people come into a situation like this thinking it’s either black or white. That either I can help them or I can’t. But that’s not how it
is. That’s one of the things that I’ve learned over the past few years. Helping someone back to this world has a number of outcomes that I never envisioned when I started.”
“Like what?”
“Like not everybody wants to come back.”
This was the hard part for most people. This was the place where they were forced to come to grips with the fact that the stories they’d been telling themselves—stories about their own lives and how it was they’d come to find themselves at this juncture—that those precious, oft-told tales could well bear little or no resemblance to reality.
So she gave it a couple of seconds to sink in and then, out of kindness, took the edge off it for him. “Most people leave this plane of consciousness during periods of great stress and chaos. That’s the last thing they remember. Being here with us . . . they associate it with pain and suffering, and would rather stay where they are. From what I’ve observed, and from what my mother’s told me, it’s a hard place to leave.”
“But . . . you can bring them back.”
She shook her head. “Actually . . . they bring themselves back. They make a decision that what they had before is better than what they have now, and decide to return.”
“I’m sure my Sophia would like to return.”
“Everyone always is,” Grace said. “Everyone’s sure their loved one is just itching to get back to this reality.” She pinned his eyes with hers. Leaned forward. “Lots of the time . . . it’s not true. They’d prefer to stay where they are. Turns out we don’t know the people in our lives nearly as well as we’d like to think we do.”
Roberto didn’t say anything for a moment. “So what you’re telling me is . . .”
“What I’m telling you is that it works both ways. Some people want to stay where they are. Others really want to return. They have things they feel they need to finish. Love affairs they want to play out. Children they want to see grow up. But mostly, they have things they feel they’ve left undone. Things they regret. Things they’d like to do over. Finding one of those is the key. Everybody has things they wish had turned out differently. If you can find one of those, they’ll generally come with you.”
“How can I . . .” he stammered.
“You can’t,” Grace snapped. “That’s the rub. The world they come back to is not the one they remember.” He had that “deer in the headlights” look, so Grace kept talking. “You know,” she said. “Like when you have a long-term goal and you picture what it’s going to be like when you get there . . . and you use that picture to keep you going, and then when you finally get there, it doesn’t look a bit like you imagined it was going to.”
He nodded. “Sophia was . . .”
“I’ve read her file,” Grace said quickly. “There’s not much there.”
Grace looked out over his head. It had started to rain again. Shards of windblown water began to tick against the front window. “The young man who killed himself . . .” she began. “Joseph hadn’t really made up his mind. I can feel that now. Part of him wanted to stay and part of him wanted to come back to us.” She folded her arms across her chest.
“Things were messy. I had to hurry.” Grace didn’t like the sound of what she was saying, so she clamped her jaw shut and just sat there.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” she said finally. “I should have left him where he was, until he decided for himself.”
“Can you help me?” Roberto asked.
“I can’t promise that,” Grace said. “Every case is different. On paper, your wife probably ought to have come around by now.” Grace shrugged. “She hasn’t. We have no idea why that’s so, but it is.”
“But you will try?”
Grace thought it over. She had every reason to turn him down, but, for some reason, felt her resolve beginning to wane. It was the money thing. Every time she thought about refusing, she saw her mother’s face. Saw Eve sitting in her chair with that self-satisfied smirk. Heard her say it was money that made the world go round.
“I’ll need to spend a couple hours alone with your wife. Uninterrupted hours. I’ll know more after that.”
He sat up straight in the seat. “Tell me what to do.”
“Where is she now?” Grace asked.
He hesitated. “She’s in private care,” he said finally.
“Where?” Grace pressed.
“Here,” he said. “In the city.”
He looked down, and suddenly Grace was sure. She could feel it. He was scared of something. Or maybe someone. Whatever it was had put the fear of God in him. This was a man tiptoeing along the edge of terror. “Okay,” she said.
He looked up. “So you’ll . . . you’ll still . . .”
“I’ll try,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said, getting to his feet. “For my wife too. She’d want me to . . .”
Grace tapped the table. “Right here. Tomorrow night. Nine p.m.”
Mickey Dolan stepped out into the living area and looked around. The place was a mess.
Somebody ought to clean this joint up, he thought, and laughed.
Over on the couch, the Macy’s bag he’d gotten from Joan lay propped up against a pillow. His heart sank at the sight of that much paperwork. He immediately decided he was therefore entitled to consolation, so he padded into the kitchen, where he rummaged around until he found a clean glass in the cupboard, and poured himself four fingers of Bushmills Malt.
His old man had been strictly a Jameson’s man, and never would have approved of dropping better than a C-note for a bottle of booze, but the way Mickey figured it, this was America; every generation had a right to do a little better than the generation before.
He swirled the dark liquid in the glass as he walked back over to the couch and sat down beside the Macy’s bag. He could smell the twenty-one years the whiskey had spent lounging in bourbon barrels and sherry casks.
He poured some of the elixir into his mouth. Took his time swallowing, milking every bit of its smooth, old malt flavor, before letting it trickle slowly down his throat.
He turned on the lamp, set the whiskey glass on the end table, then pulled one of the files out of the bag and flipped it open.
The label said: Linda Karston. Several yellowing newspaper articles tumbled out onto the couch. Mickey picked up the nearest one. “It’s a Miracle!” read the headline. Seems a local woman, who’d been in a semi-vegetative state for the better part of a year and a half as a result of a New Year’s Eve car accident, had suddenly and inexplicably awakened from her trauma-induced stupor.
Medical authorities, it seemed, were as surprised as everyone else. No one, regardless of medical specialty, could provide a plausible explanation for her sudden awakening, other than noting that sometimes, in cases such as this, miracles happened. Quite naturally, her family was overjoyed, and thanking any number of deities for their loved one’s seemingly miraculous return.
Mickey went through the rest of the file, one page at a time. Birth certificate, high school diploma, the whole ball of wax. No mention of Grace Pressman or Silver Angels. Linda Karston had been thirty-one years old at the time of the accident. She’d worked at her family’s dry cleaning establishment and been a member of the local Presbyterian church choir. The last thing in the file was a copy of her death certificate. According to the Macon County, Georgia, Coroner’s Office, Linda died of ovarian cancer four years and four months after her miraculous awakening.
Mickey made a mental note to check for death certificates before taking on the rest of the folder. Way he figured it, the dead were likely to be of less assistance to his inquiry than were the living. No offense intended, of course.
Another sip. Another life. No death certificate. Andrew Wright suffered a massive stroke three days after his fiftieth birthday, and slipped into what his doctor described as an unresponsive state, where he remained for the next sevent
een months.
And so on and so on. It was nearly 1:30 a.m. Mickey worked his way through five more files. All five people were still alive and leading presumably productive lives in various and sundry locations around the country. No mention whatsoever of Grace Pressman, or angels of any kind.
Until, of course, he came upon Eve Pressman’s file. Five and a half years ago this month. The one that started it all. Mickey sorted through the collection of articles, laying them out on the coffee table in chronological order.
They’d gotten a lot of national press. The story had a certain Hollywood quality about it, so naturally the network vultures had gnawed the carcass right down to the bone . . . and then some.
Rehashed a lot of ancient history, way back to Eve’s husband throwing her down a flight of concrete stairs. How she’d severed her spine on the way down and how her seventeen-year-old daughter Grace, enraged at the sight of her mother’s broken body lying on the landing below, had hauled off and crushed hubby’s head with an aluminum softball bat. Hit him six or eight times, according to the county medical examiner. Beat his head to mush, Mickey thought, if you read between the lines.
Then on to the triple tragedy of the Pressman family, with the stepfather dead, the mother lying paralyzed and comatose in a local hospital, and the beautiful young albino daughter convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to eighteen months in the state juvenile facility in Farmington. A cautionary tale of a family torn apart by violence.
Fast forward . . . twenty-one months later. The stepfather’s still dead. Mom’s still comatose. The daughter has paid her debt to society and now spends her days sitting dutifully by her mother’s bedside. Cue the violins . . . because, you see, the poor girl has no place else to go. The house has been repossessed by this time, and being a convicted felon has made getting a job nearly impossible, so the young Grace divides her time between foraging university libraries for medical books and sitting by her mother’s bedside.