“It’s not too late to call it off,” Waters said. “No one will think any less of you.”
“Do it,” Maureen said.
Waters nodded and the attendant pulled back the sheet, folding it gently over the dead girl’s collarbone. Maureen stepped to the gurney. Tanya. Absolutely and positively her. Tears flooded Maureen’s eyes, blurring her vision, but she had already seen what she needed to. Waters spoke from close behind her.
“Maureen, do you know this woman?”
“I do,” Maureen said. She took a deep breath. “Her name is Tanya Coscinelli.”
“How do you know her?” Waters asked.
“We worked together at the Narrows.” Maureen wiped her eyes with her wrists. “I saw her four, sometimes five nights a week, for over a year. I saw her yesterday. Alive.”
Maureen tilted her head back and blinked up at the bright overhead lamps. She looked back down at Tanya. It was mind-boggling. Amazing. Under the surgery-bright lights, Tanya’s every flaw should’ve lain obvious and exposed, but Maureen couldn’t find a single one. Even after drifting in the frigid harbor, even lifeless and laid out on a stretcher, her face brushed in blue and gray and violet, Tanya remained one of the most beautiful women Maureen had ever seen. Whole lot of good it had done her.
She fought the urge to touch Tanya’s cheek. Tanya, the dead girl, looked hard and unbreakable. Maureen, the live one, felt as if she might crack and shatter from the inside out. She touched her fingertips to her own cool, smooth cheek. Letting other people get their feelers and their fingers into the cracks, into the fissures and the fault lines on the inside, Maureen thought, that’s what brings you down in the end. Never forget that.
How close had she come, really, she wondered, to being the one on the gurney, her own face like stone, her devastated mother standing over her, saying, Yes, that’s my little girl, Maureen Evelyn Coughlin.
“Can you tell us anything else?” the attendant asked. He laid the sheet over Tanya’s face. The act, though necessary, struck Maureen as cruel, as if Tanya were being erased, dust-covered for storage like an old piece of useless furniture. Maureen wanted to punch him. “Her age?” he asked. “Her next of kin?”
“No,” Maureen said, choking on sobs. “No, I can’t. I can’t.”
“Take a minute,” Waters said. “Catch your breath. You’ll remember.”
“It’s not that I don’t remember,” Maureen said. Her tears fell on the shrouded body before her. “I never knew a single fucking meaningful thing about her.”
She felt Waters’s hand on her back. “It’s okay, Maureen. It’s okay.” And to the attendant, “We’re done here.”
“No it’s not,” Maureen said. “It’s not okay at all.” She looked up at Waters. “And we are not done. Not by a long shot.”
Later, reaching across the diner table, Maureen poked her fork into a soft mass of strawberry ice cream melting away atop a stack of waffles. Neither she nor Waters had eaten more than a few bites. I ought to be starving, she thought, but nothing at that moment seemed less attractive than eating. Her stomach was filled with concrete, with harbor water. She tossed her fork on the table, splattering Waters’s tie with pink dots.
“Sorry.”
Waters rubbed at the spots with a napkin. “Not the first time that’s happened. Forget it.” He cut one last slice of waffle and ice cream with his fork, ate it, and slid the plate to the table’s edge. “Maybe not my best idea, this meal.”
Maureen tilted her mug and looked down into the dregs of her hot cocoa. She pushed the mug aside. “It was a sweet idea. Thanks for trying.”
She edged down the bench, away from the spreading pool of sunlight beaming through the window beside her. Outside, the first sunny day the island had seen in weeks spilled over the street. Maureen wanted no part of it.
Cars, buses, and delivery trucks, every one filthy, the hard sun glinting off their windows, jammed Victory Boulevard. People in heavy coats and sunglasses, coffee in gloved hands, newspapers tucked under their arms, rushed by the diner, moving twice as fast as the traffic. Morning people. She’d heard they existed. Schoolgirls in uniform, arrogant seniors blowing off first period, Maureen figured, clustered at the corner bus stop, their bodies in constant restless motion like a fluttering band of nervous birds on a wire. They wore their plaid skirts hiked up to the hems of their puffy coats despite the cold. Watching them, Maureen tried not to think about the dead girl found in Valario’s bloody bed. Which school, which skirt, had she worn?
Once upon a time, a million years ago, Maureen had taken the city bus to high school in one of those skirts, had stood huddled on a street corner with the other kids, her skirt rolled up high on her skinny legs. Some days there were twenty of them at that bus stop: chattering, griping, flirting. The girls preening, the boys strutting. Pretty much the same kids every school day for four years. Maureen realized she couldn’t say what had happened to any of those kids. She might be able to wrestle five names from her memory. What the hell have I been doing for the past eleven years? That girl who had died in Queens, Maureen wondered, what had Waters said her name was? The waitress came over and refilled Waters’s coffee cup. helen, her name tag said.
Maureen studied Helen’s face, the caked-on makeup around her eyes, her red, sticky lips set in a hard and phony grin. Only her body was at the table. Her mind was elsewhere, if not far. The next table, the register, the dish room. Behind the waitress’s eyes, Maureen could see the turning wheels, the listing and prioritizing of the next fifty things Helen had to do before her own next cup of coffee. I’ve been working, Maureen thought. That’s what I’ve been doing. One shift, a decade plus one year long.
When Helen met her eyes, Maureen looked down at the table, guilty over seeing not only her past in Helen’s face but a future that scared her.
“When they were really young,” Waters said, “I took my sons out to the aquarium on Coney Island. To see the belugas, the white whales. They looked into that tank the same way you looked out that window.”
“And how’s that?” Maureen asked.
“Like they couldn’t believe what they were seeing.”
“Morning isn’t new to me,” Maureen said. “But I usually see it as the end of the night, not the beginning of the day.”
“I know the feeling,” Waters said.
“You always work the night shift?”
“For a long time now.”
“You like it?”
Waters pushed out his bottom lip, shrugged. “Mostly. There’s more action at night, I guess. I don’t know. As long as I can remember it’s been more like one long shift with naps and meals mixed in.”
“I get the same feeling sometimes,” Maureen said, “though I don’t know how many more nights I have in me. I’ve been spinning my wheels forever. And my car is upside-down. At least you’re accomplishing something.”
“I have my doubts about that,” Waters said. “But I’ve never been able to sit around watching TV while men like Sebastian run free doing what they do. And there’s always one like him on the loose. At least one. No one’s found out yet how to shut down the machine that makes them.”
“When this is over,” Maureen said, “you should take a few days off, take your boys to the aquarium again. I bet they’d like that.”
Waters tugged at the crooked knot of his tie, rubbed his thumb at the ice cream spots. “I don’t think so.”
“Then take ’em to the zoo. That was my father’s thing, the Staten Island zoo. Twice a month, whenever the place was open.” She felt her face warming with memory, or maybe from the sunshine through the window. “You know those peacocks they let walk around? They were my favorite. I was always asking Dad if I could ride one.”
“I don’t think the boys and I will be going to the zoo, either.”
“And why not?” Maureen asked. “I bet you think your kids are too old for that stuff, but believe me, they’re not.”
“Because this trouble that you’re in will end for
you, and you’ll go back to your life. But the work never ends for me.”
“Your sons should be more important to you than your work.”
“That’s exactly what my wife used to say.”
“Maybe she was right.”
“Okay,” Waters said, leaning over the table. “How about I take today off?”
Maureen pulled her legs underneath her, sitting on her knees and leaning forward until she was almost nose to nose with Waters. “Do it. I dare you. I’ve made it this far. I can make it one more day.”
“That’s all Tanya was trying to do,” Waters said. “Make it one more day.”
Maureen unwound her legs and threw her arms over the back of the bench, looking away from Waters. “Ouch. Is it illegal to say fuck you to a cop?”
“I’m sorry,” Waters said. “That was uncalled for. The truth is, I haven’t seen my sons in thirty years. When my wife left, she took the boys with her. I’ve never heard word one from any of them. I’m sure my wife told them I was dead, or a monster, if she told them about me at all. They were probably too young to remember I even existed.” He raised his coffee cup, talked into it. “Better that way. That’s what I tell myself.”
Maureen knew she couldn’t add up the time she’d devoted to her father’s imaginary life. Was her situation better or worse, she wondered, than inventing lives for kids you never knew? You’d think it was a luxury playing God on behalf of the ones you loved. But even when her imaginings were at their most generous, their most merciful, even when she’d convinced herself she understood why he left, in her dreams her father got sick, got hurt, got old, and died, again and again, from accidents or disease. She was sure Waters had played out a thousand lives each for his sons: some good, some bad, none of them real.
“For the record,” Maureen said, “your ex is a bitch.”
Waters held up his hand. “She did what she thought was best.”
“Best?” Maureen asked. “It wasn’t best for anyone but her, leaving you without your kids, leaving those boys without a father.”
“I’m sure they had a father. It just wasn’t me.”
“Tell me you looked for them.”
“I did. For a long time.”
“And then you gave up?”
“Some people who don’t want to be found have good reasons. Reasons that should be accepted.”
“But you never went out looking for someone else,” Maureen said. “Never tried starting over. Another wife. Another family.”
“I never consciously ruled it out,” Waters said. “And I certainly never set out to make myself a martyr, but, no, I guess I never tried real hard to start over. I missed my kids. I still think about them, try to imagine them. But after a while the job takes over. I met some women, had some fun, but nothing stuck. I fell into a rhythm with the job that I’ve never stepped out of, and I can’t say I regret it. It is what it is. The sadness lingers, from what I lost. I got a bum shoulder from playing football, it hurts when it snows, but otherwise it’s fine; the pain is like that. But I can’t say I’m unhappy, or that—aside from those first few months after they left—I ever was. I don’t know what that says about me, but there it is.”
Maureen stared at him for a long time. “And you believe this shit you tell yourself?”
“Most days,” Waters said, flashing a quick grin. He looked away from her, raising his arm, waving for the bill. “I gotta get moving. I got work to do.”
Maureen stretched out her legs under the table, shrinking inside her coat. “So what do we tell ourselves about Tanya?”
“I’m stuck with the truth on that one.” He paused as the waitress swept by and dropped the bill. “I was too slow to save her.”
Waters slipped his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, his gaze floating over the diner. “I hate saying this, but Tanya’s no ordinary victim. Her death gets me a lot more weight to throw around. It’ll unlock more manpower, more resources. And you became a lot more important, Maureen, when Tanya died. You’re a big-time witness in two homicide cases, now.”
“Hooray for me,” Maureen said. “I’m finally somebody.”
Waters had a point about Tanya; she knew that. Once Tanya’s gorgeous face hit the next day’s papers, if not that evening’s news, the public outrage would put serious pressure on the cops. Dead drug dealers, dead hookers and addicts, dead poor people? That was life in the big city, a back-page story. But Tanya would be front-page news. They’d move a ton of papers selling poor drug-addled Tanya as a murdered all-American girl, a serious American tragedy. Forget the front page, Tanya was satellite-ready national news. The TV would run a heartbreaker of a high school yearbook shot. The whole NYPD would be foaming at the mouth hunting her killer, seething for their chance to reap Tanya’s vengeance.
And it wasn’t lost on Maureen that if Tanya’s homicide brought down Sebastian, Tanya might end up saving Maureen’s life, more than enough payback for the original betrayal. But Waters’s comment stirred up one thought that Maureen couldn’t deny. Tanya was worth more to both Waters and Sebastian dead than alive. No, not true, Maureen thought. There was one crucial, absolute difference. If he could have, Waters would’ve kept Tanya among the living. Sebastian was the problem. She had to remember that.
“What happened to Tanya,” Maureen said, “is not your fault.”
“Nice of you to say,” Waters said. He didn’t sound convinced. He lifted his rump, reaching for his wallet. Maureen snatched the bill off the table. She dug some cash from her bag, held out her arm.
Helen grabbed the bill and the cash and stared at Maureen as if there was a mistake. She snapped her gum. “Change?”
“I don’t believe in it,” Maureen said. “That’s all you.”
21
Maureen followed Waters out the door and into the blinding, painful sunlight. She stuck close to him; he was like a rock in the middle of a river; pedestrians flowed around him on both sides. With the traffic bunched as thick as the people, the air hung heavy and rank from exhaust. The schoolgirls were gone. At the intersection, the lead car hesitated a split second at the green light. Four other drivers leaned on their horns. The bleating sliced jagged-edged through Maureen’s brain.
She followed Waters around the back of the diner to the parking lot. The building muffled the street noise and Maureen’s headache eased. When she got back to Molly’s, she intended to sleep through the rest of the morning and maybe the afternoon, too.
Waters stopped at his car but didn’t unlock the doors. He leaned against the trunk, crossing his arms. Maureen mimicked Waters’s stance against the car. Maybe we look like partners, she thought. She imagined a gold badge of her own hanging around her neck. She could live with being taken for a cop. It’d be a step up from what she felt she usually got, especially these past few days. And if she had that shield, she’d be going on the hunt instead of back into hiding.
“I think you should avoid Cargo for the time being,” Waters said.
Maureen hung her head. Jesus, couldn’t she feel good for five minutes? “You said Cargo was safe.”
“What happened to Tanya means Cargo is compromised,” Waters said. “We were supposed to find her at that drop-off. As a threat to you, like breaking into your place and leaving the MetroCards, only worse. Sebastian could’ve easily put her where we’d never have found her. He knows you’ve been hiding out at Cargo. He might have someone on the inside. Any ideas?”
Maureen rubbed her arms. Tracy from Cargo came to mind. A younger Tanya in training, maybe? Had Sebastian found a way to get his claws into her? Maureen had trouble seeing it. Tracy had spine and smarts that Tanya had never possessed. Someone else? Sebastian’s sexual appetite was unisex. A guy? A dishwasher or bar back? Every joint in the world had at least one crazy crackhead dude on the roster. Who was it at Cargo? Half the staff had probably turned over since she’d quit. Be that as it may, she couldn’t imagine anyone fooling John.
“I can’t see it,” Maureen said. “John runs a tigh
t ship, doesn’t miss a trick. He’s the one to ask.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Say that’s true about Tanya being a warning,” Maureen said. “Why put her in the water? Why not leave her…somewhere else in the area?”
“The water washes away evidence. He can tell us he did it and cover his tracks at the same time. Sebastian’s a lot of things, but he’s not stupid.”
“He had her under his thumb. Tanya did everything he said.”
“Scared as she was,” Waters said, “killing her was the only absolute guarantee she doesn’t ever talk. He’s probably started looking at you the same way. You scare him, Maureen. A lot.”
“What, me? Nobody is afraid of me. You gotta be kidding.”
“You’re the last one left who knows about him and Dennis. You saw him with Dennis, and then Dennis is dead. You saw him with Tanya the day she died. On top of that, from that first night forward everything he’s told you to do, you’ve defied him. How often do you think that happens to a man like him? You think he handles that well?”
“Jesus. I’m sorry I asked.”
“I wouldn’t tell you the truth,” Waters said, stepping closer to her, “if I didn’t think you could take it. Bullshit gets us nowhere. We have to trust each other.”
He reached out for her shoulder. She flinched, pulling away. Was this it? she thought. The moment Sebastian had promised? The time when Waters put his hands on her? She turned away, watching Waters through loose strands of her hair, ashamed of letting Sebastian’s sickness into her brain for even a moment. Waters stepped back, lowering his arm. Maureen watched his huge hand drift to his side. He curled it briefly into a fist before opening it again. The gray insides of his knuckles were dry and cracked, the palm pink in the center. She looked up at him, moving her hair from her face.
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