Hell to Pay

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Jeremy does, and is glad to see that at least the interior door is closed and locked.

  He presses the intercom button for apartment 2B, and after a few moments, a male voice answers with an unintelligible word.

  “Jeremy Cavalon from the Bruckner Center to see Mr. Purtell.”

  Another unintelligible word, and then the door buzzes open, admitting him.

  He finds himself in a dark hallway—worn linoleum, ancient-looking umbrella stroller folded and propped at the foot of the steep staircase. He can hear the Kinks’ “Father Christmas” playing behind one of the closed doors down the hall.

  In any other setting, he might appreciate it. In this one, the lyrical irony is grimly depressing.

  He climbs the stairs. At the top of the flight, he finds the stout, elderly resident of 2B waiting in the open doorway of his apartment. He’s wearing a green plaid flannel shirt beneath a red cardigan sweater that has a moth hole on the sleeve and is at least a size too small, the buttons straining to close over his stomach. What’s left of his white hair is combed over his bald spot, and he’s clean-shaven, though he missed a few spots of gray beard. Clearly, he’s made an effort for this visit—and his expression is wary, indicating he knows what’s at stake.

  “Mr. Purtell? I’m Jeremy. I work with your grandson at the group home.”

  “Dylan is a good boy.”

  “He is a good boy. And he wants to come live with you.”

  “I want him here.”

  If only it were that simple, Jeremy thinks, as the man escorts him over the threshold into a tiny apartment that smells strongly of cleaning fluid. The carpet and furniture are threadbare and the television is enormous—not new, high-tech enormous, but hopelessly outdated enormous. Enormous enough that there’s plenty of room on top for a small plastic crèche.

  In one corner of the room sits an artificial Christmas tree, missing a couple of branches and more than a few nylon “needles.”

  Following Jeremy’s gaze, Mr. Purtell says, “I’ll light that on Christmas, if Dylan’s here.”

  Jeremy, comprehending in that one sentence that the man can’t afford the added electricity it would take to plug in the tree every night, nods and smiles.

  “Have a seat.” Mr. Purtell gestures at the sagging couch. “It folds out into a bed,” he adds proudly. “That’s where Dylan will sleep. Can I get you something? Some Pepsi?”

  Jeremy, who rarely drinks soda, let alone at nine-thirty in the morning, smiles and nods, grasping how important it is to Mr. Purtell that he accept his hospitality.

  He so wants his grandson here with him. With Dylan’s father long gone and his mother—Mr. Purtell’s daughter—jailed on drug charges, the old man has so little to offer the boy, other than love.

  But sometimes, Jeremy thinks, lowering himself onto the lumpy couch, love is more than enough.

  When her phone rings, Lucy is sitting at her desk gobbling down a chicken wrap she bought from the deli adjacent to her office building’s lobby. It’s far from her favorite place for lunch, but it’ll do in a pinch.

  This is quite a pinch—she’s got ten minutes to eat it before she goes into a meeting.

  There was a time when she’d have skipped lunch altogether on a busy day. Not anymore. She even managed to work in all the key food groups: protein, dairy, whole grain, vegetables, fruit, chocolate . . .

  Yes, chocolate. A very important food group, as far as Lucy is concerned. She couldn’t resist picking up a small Kit Kat along with the apple she bought for dessert.

  She picks up the phone. “Lucy Cavalon.”

  “You know, it’s funny,” a familiar voice greets her, “but I still always expect you to say ‘Lucy Walsh.’ ”

  “Too bad I don’t have caller ID at work,” she tells her brother, “or I’d answer with my maiden name just for you.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll get used to it.”

  “You think? It’s been years since I got married.”

  “Maybe you’ll always be little Lucy Walsh to me.”

  Happy to hear the teasing tone in his voice, she returns, “That’s big Lucy Walsh to you, little brother. So what’s up? Why are you calling me at work?”

  “I actually left you a message last night and you never called back.”

  “I never got a message from you.”

  “Yeah, that’s because I’m a total idiot.”

  “Who can argue with that kind of logic?”

  “Seriously, I left a message on your old number in White Plains,” Ryan tells her. “I thought I was dialing the cell. The voice mail picked up, by the way, so I didn’t realize—didn’t you guys disconnect the phone when you moved?”

  “We did, but the voice mail there will work until the end of the month. I’ll give you the new number at Sylvie’s apartment.”

  “Don’t give it to me now. I’m at work and if I write it down I might lose it.”

  Her brother’s lack of basic organizational skills never ceases to frustrate Lucy.

  But then, that’s just Ryan. He’ll never change.

  “If you need me, it’s best to just call my cell anyway,” she tells him. “And please don’t lose this number, because it’s unlisted.”

  She crumples the remains of her wrap—a sliver of cheese, some stray avocado and chicken chunks—in the cellophane it came in and tosses it into the garbage can beneath her desk. Immediately, she regrets it. By about four o’clock, the smell is going to get to her. Her nose has been as sensitive as her stomach these last few days.

  Another good sign.

  Ryan clears his throat. “Listen, are you going to be home later?”

  “You mean later, after work? Yeah. Why? Want to meet for dinner?”

  Until recently, she and Ryan had a standing weekly Thursday dinner date near Grand Central before catching their separate trains back to Westchester—just the two of them, since Jeremy always works late coaching for the youth basketball league on Thursdays.

  The weekly dinners fell off right around the time Lucy and Jeremy got the eviction notice—which coincided not only with his grandmother’s death, but with Ryan meeting Phoenix.

  Lucy can’t remember who canceled the first Thursday, or the second—or why she and her brother seem to have assumed, from there on in, that their weekly dates were history. Maybe because they’re no longer living in the same area. Or because there’s a special woman in his life now.

  All she knows is that she really misses seeing him. There are very few people in this world who get where she’s coming from. Ryan is one of them.

  “Actually,” he says, “I thought maybe I could come over and see your new apartment.”

  “That would be great. Are you bringing Phoenix?”

  The answer is a prompt, terse “No.”

  “She’s more than welcome.”

  “Thanks, but . . . she’s busy.”

  “What about Christmas Eve? Did you ask her about—”

  “Lu, I have to run. I’ll see you at six-thirty, okay?”

  Lucy hangs up the phone, checks her watch, and notes that she has time to eat her apple or her chocolate bar, but not both.

  Suddenly, though, she’s lost her appetite for either.

  Why doesn’t Ryan want me to meet his girlfriend?

  Is it about me, or is it about her?

  Enraged, she shuts down the computer with an abrupt click of the mouse, then picks up the loaf of Italian bread she’d been eating and stands to pace the herringbone hardwood floors.

  She’s seen enough. More than enough.

  She tears off a chunk of bread with her teeth, chews, swallows.

  It was just as she suspected: Richard Jollston has a huge following on the Web. She never even heard of the man until today, when she happened to catch his appearance on one of those morning programs.


  Fury swept over her when she realized what he was talking about: the Bridgebury quake.

  Chaplain Gideon started in immediately, telling her what she had to do, shouting so loudly that she could barely make sense of what Richard Jollston was saying.

  But she heard him say he’d had a biblical vision about the earthquake—her earthquake—and that he now had thousands of followers.

  When she plugged his name into the search engine, she was appalled at what came up.

  The man is being hailed as a phenomenon. He’s written a book trumpeting this vision and now he’s right here in New York City, promoting it.

  Who does he think he is?

  And who do they—his followers—think he is? The messiah?

  “He must be stopped,” Chaplain Gideon tells her.

  She takes another savage bite of the bread.

  “He will be stopped. I’ll stop him,” she whispers, Jeremy and Lucy Cavalon—and Lucy’s idiot brother, Ryan, too—momentarily forgotten.

  Chapter Four

  “Well, it’s about time!” Lucy exclaims, opening the door to Ryan.

  “What do you mean ‘it’s about time’?” He gives her a brief hug as he crosses the threshold. “I told you I’d be here at six-thirty. I’m ten minutes early.”

  “Five,” she corrects in that efficient big-sister way, and he rolls his eyes in that annoyed kid-brother way.

  “What I meant,” she says, “is that it’s about time you came to see the new place.”

  “Haven’t you only lived here a couple of days?”

  “Yeah, but you work right in the neighborhood. I thought you’d pop over before now.”

  “I’ve been busy. So have you.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “When are you not busy?” His dark eyebrows rise above the wire frames of his glasses, and she can’t help but smile.

  “Good point. I’ve definitely been busy.”

  Beneath his open overcoat, Ryan is wearing a dark blue suit and a patterned tie that doesn’t quite work with his striped shirt.

  “Where’s Jeremy?” he asks.

  “Still at work, coaching basketball. It’s Thursday, remember? Game night?”

  “Oh yeah. I forgot.”

  She holds out her hand for his overcoat as he shrugs out of it. He gives it to her, and she sees a tear in the lining. Typical Ryan. He always manages to look thrown together, even now.

  Somehow, she’d thought having a woman in his life might have changed him.

  For a split second, Lucy finds herself remembering how she’d insisted that Jeremy get a new suit for the funeral, and thinking that Ryan’s girlfriend shouldn’t let him go around in a shabby coat and a shirt and tie that don’t match.

  Okay, that’s ridiculous.

  This isn’t the fifties. Ryan is a grown man. He should be perfectly capable of taking care of himself.

  He should be—and he probably is—but he doesn’t do it.

  And that’s his own fault, not the fault of his girlfriend.

  His fault, and Mom’s. As far as Lucy’s concerned, their mother enabled him, so disturbed by her son’s newfound insecurities, so eager to see him heal, so fearful of seeing him fall, that she made sure he always had a safety net—usually her own outstretched arms.

  Her coddling didn’t do Ryan any favors.

  Then again, who am I to judge? Maybe I’ll be the same way with my own son or daughter.

  Somehow, though, Lucy doubts it. She has little patience for people who let things happen to them, as opposed to making them happen.

  She and Jeremy are planning to raise a strong, self-sufficient child capable of withstanding anything life hurls his or her way. Just like Mommy and Daddy.

  “So how are you feeling?” Ryan asks her.

  “Pregnant. How about you?”

  “Not pregnant.” He grins, and for a moment, Lucy glimpses a flash of the impish kid brother he’d once been.

  All of their lives—hers and Ryan’s, Mom’s and Sadie’s—had been altered by what happened to them fifteen years ago. But Ryan changed more than any of them.

  Sadie—she had her share of troubles. But through it all, her personality never changed. She was always the same kid: stubborn, precocious, introspective.

  Not Ryan. He changed drastically. Long gone is the carefree boy he’d once been. Riddled with self-doubt, old before his time, he’s been struggling for years now to maintain the most basic elements in life; things that once came readily to him: friendships, romance, intellectual and physical health . . .

  Sometimes, Lucy is so frustrated by her brother’s inability to get his life together that—despite being critical of their mother’s Ryan-smothering—her own protective instinct kicks in. She finds herself wanting to do it all for him, to take charge of his life and run it as efficiently as she has her own. Not that he’d dream of letting her.

  Close as they’ve been over the years, Ryan has built an impenetrable wall around himself. When he was a kid, before their lives fell apart, he wore his heart on his sleeve; these days, most of the time, she has no idea what he’s thinking. Scary, because she knows he’s more connected to her than to anyone else in this world . . .

  Well, he was, anyway. Now, presumably, Ryan’s girlfriend is his closest confidante. Lucy only hopes the mystery woman treats her brother as well as he deserves to be treated.

  “So, are you going to show me around?” he asks expectantly.

  “Sure, come on in.”

  “This is a great building.”

  “Yeah . . . a lot of famous people have lived here.”

  “Such as . . . ?”

  “Such as Rachmaninoff and Toscanini, Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, Sarah Bernhardt and moi,” Lucy tells Ryan, in a perfect imitation of Jeremy’s lovably narcissistic grandmother, who once said exactly that.

  Will she ever think of this place—this palace, really—as home? For the last few days she’s been more or less tiptoeing around, feeling as though prowling through someone else’s house—or perhaps some after-hours museum is more like it.

  “Prepare yourself to be wowed.” She leads her brother through the circular foyer into the hall. “I can say that without bragging because I had nothing to do with any of this. It’s all Sylvie.”

  “I believe it. Hey, how come that window is frosted over?” Ryan points to an opaque pane on the wall.

  “It’s an air shaft. Some of the apartments are built around them. My mother-in-law said people would open the pane in the summer to get a cross breeze years ago, before there was air-conditioning. Except Sylvie never did because she thought roaches would crawl in from the neighbors’ apartments.”

  “Nice.” Ryan tugs at the window and it raises easily, bringing in a gust of cold December wind. “You really should keep this locked.”

  “I thought it was.”

  He lowers it again and runs his fingertips over the wooden sill. “It doesn’t even have a lock, see? But you can tell there used to be one. I wonder why Sylvie took it off?”

  “I have no idea, but at least no one can get in. We’re way above the street.”

  “Unless they want to creep along the ledge from one of the other apartments, like the roaches.” Ryan raises the window again and together, they peer out. “It’s like being inside a big chimney.”

  “Yeah, one with a hundred windows lining it.”

  “Have you met any of your neighbors yet?”

  “Not exactly. One of them dropped off cookies the day we moved in, but I don’t even know who it was.” Lucy shivers. “I’m freezing. Come on. I’ll show you the rest of the place.”

  Ryan closes the air shaft and she leads him through the living room and dining room, knowing she sounds like a museum docent as she points out some of Sylvie’s more fabulous artwork and antiques.


  Lucy and Jeremy’s own belongings—books, electronic equipment, a few knickknacks—seem out of place amid the grandeur. Still, she stubbornly persisted in unpacking and displaying it all in an effort to make the apartment seem homier.

  “I feel like we should be tiptoeing around and whispering,” Ryan comments as she leads the way back to the kitchen after showing him the whole place—all two thousand square feet of it. “It’s so quiet here. You can’t hear any noise from the hall or the street. I don’t even feel like I’m in New York.”

  “Yeah, I know. The apartments are supposed to be soundproof. I guess it takes some getting used to. I kind of miss noise.”

  “You know, you guys could have moved in with me.” It’s not the first time he’s made the offer, pointing out that she has as much right to live in their childhood home as he does.

  “Thanks, but it would be a little crowded once Mom and Sam get back from Florida, and Sadie and Max are home from college . . .” And once I have the baby. “Anyway, the commute would be a lot longer from Glenhaven Park. This place is fine—for now. Even if it is a little . . .”

  “Stuffy?” Ryan supplies.

  “Exactly.”

  “I just want to know who’s going to keep this place clean. Dusting all this stuff would take an entire day.”

  “I know. Sylvie had a housekeeper, but Jeremy and I can’t afford one. I guess we’ll just have to live with dust and cobwebs for a while.”

  In the kitchen, she offers him a Corona, which he accepts, and Lucy wishes she could have one, too.

  Never a heavy drinker, she did used to enjoy an occasional beer after work with Jeremy, or happy hour at La Margarita with her friend Robyn, whom she’s seeing there tomorrow night.

  But she won’t be drinking margaritas. It’s been over a year since she’s touched a drop of alcohol, having spent that time either pregnant, trying to get pregnant, or recovering from a lost pregnancy.

  Abstinence is the least of her worries at the moment. Still, every once in a while, after a particularly hard day at work, she wouldn’t mind something stronger than tea.

  She puts the kettle on and opens one of the custom cherry cupboards, taking out a clear glass mug. Then she measures loose tea from the tin into a strainer.