by Peter Craig
She interrupted him with kisses that sounded like determined sips at a scalding drink.
THIRTEEN
Late September, they stayed in a penthouse suite in Minneapolis, which overlooked a river and the torches of autumn trees. Downtown was arranged so that they could pass between buildings through enclosed skywalk bridges, like transparent tubes for hamsters, an entire city of sinuous walks under glass, from the fresh carpet to the food-court tiles, where along the paths there were bazaars of business clothes, luggage, and travel clocks. Kevin would scout out the best corner shops so that Colette could return in character, dressed in her tweed skirt, chiffon blouse, rolled hair framing a steely expression. As a peace offering, Jerry now let her open accounts on her own. She posed as a succession of eager young ladies pitted against condescending bankers: a timid farm girl with a new job in advertising, a cosmetology student from Winnipeg, the heiress to a chain of frozen-yogurt stands.
One account she set up jointly, for herself, as Esther Barrick, and her stepbrother, Douglas Herman. While sitting in the plush chair across the desk from the banker, Kevin became bored and distracted, wondering if there was some way to access the computers and divert electronic-funds transfers; and Colette, to his great displeasure, decided to pretend that he was autistic. “He doesn’t really hear us right now,” she said to the banker. “But I like to think he does in his own way. Honey? The account is in your name also, with me—Esther.”
“You’ll be the custodian of the account, ma’am. He won’t be able to access it until he’s eighteen.”
Irritated, Kevin stared at her devilish eyes.
“Honey? Eighteen. That’s just a little over two years. One, two. I don’t think he understands. He’s a whiz with binary code, but if you get beyond that, he just starts shrieking.”
Kevin was still pouting at dinner that night, as Colette and Jerry broke into fits of red-faced laugher. They dined at a French restaurant, celebrating the birthday on Jerry’s fake ID; and they had so firmly united to ridicule him that Kevin believed the fighting was over. There was a white tablecloth, a basket of fresh bread, four bottles of wine, Kevin’s cola in a burgundy glass, but no pancakes anywhere on the menu.
Jerry proposed the first toast—“To the Credit Card Fraud Act. No one is ever liable for more than fifty dollars.”
Kevin toasted the microchip; Jerry drank to the USA; Colette abstained. “Oh, go to Russia then,” said Jerry. “Fucking boycotter. To the best country on earth and their gazillion gold medals and the little rumproast gymnast who won it all. Here’s to check floats and preapproved credit, virgin plastic and the promotional toasters for every new account—Colette, you could make a stack of toast all the way to the moon.”
“Oh, Jerry—boy, are you loaded.”
After dinner, they strolled down a cobbled walk toward the parking garage, savoring a new chill in the air. Colette was wearing a cloche hat pulled low over her forehead, and Jerry became rowdy at the idea of her twirling in a circle and throwing it into the air. There was a hint of belligerence in his tone that sped Kevin’s strides and slowed Colette’s. Up ahead, beside a bench, Kevin waited, and he was amazed that this request had already escalated into an argument. Colette refused to be his “Mary” fantasy; and Jerry, talking in slurred jokes that verged on shouting, guiding her along with his wobbly shipmate’s walk, claimed his fantasy wasn’t that Mary anyway, but the black-and-white, apron-clad Mary.
“I know,” said Colette. “She isn’t in my repertoire.”
“Repertoire. Repertoire! Listen to you, for God’s sake. Come on. Throw your fucking hat in the air. Why won’t you ever do a single thing I ask? It’ll make me happy. Please. Pretty please with sugar and a big cherry on top.”
“Jerry, I don’t want to. It’s a good hat.”
“She’s worried about the hat! Oh Jesus, you are a princess.”
“Probably everybody that comes here throws their stupid hat in the air. It’s not funny, Jerry. It’s like going to Paris and wearing a beret with the Eiffel Tower on it.”
“Everything is a goddamned negotiation with you.”
“Now I wish Kevin’s alias was sixteen,” she said. “Jerry, don’t you ever find it troubling that your son can hot-wire a car, but he can’t drive it?”
“Throw the hat! I bet I could go out and find any woman in this city, and she’d be happy to throw her hat in the air for me. All night. We would just stand here and she would do it over and over. She’d throw anything I wanted.”
“Good for you, Jerry. Then maybe she’ll throw herself off a bridge.”
In the car Jerry’s driving had the same syntax of drunken speech: abrupt stops, fitful accelerations, and gratuitous lane changes. Kevin jumped out at the hotel and waited by the bellhop stand. The car twitched, full of sealed wind. After an accidental honk, Colette stepped onto the pavement and smothered the second half of Jerry’s insult by slamming the door. “Do whatever you want!” she shouted, as if to the car itself, which hiccuped forward, fumed its engine, and squealed into a left turn past dark office buildings.
As Colette entered the hotel through the revolving door, Kevin slipped into the chamber alongside her and trapped them in place by spreading out his feet.
“Kevin, not now. I’m not in a good mood.”
“Listen to me. Colette. This is over. I’m watching the two of you and it’s breaking my heart. I’ve got a thousand dollars saved. We could leave right now, you and I, and we could turn it into ten thousand.”
Their collective breath was steaming the glass of the narrow compartment, and already there was a small crowd forming on both sides of the door. Colette wiped a strand of hair from her face and said, “Congratulations. That must be twice your weight in quarters.” He released the door and they raced out in different slaloming paths across the congested marble lobby.
He caught up with her by the gold-plated elevator doors, their wobbly reflections in the surface, and grabbed the arm of her pea coat. “Don’t ignore me, Colette.”
“A thousand dollars and ten thousand more,” she said with a sad quiver in her voice. “With all your studying, you have to know that a girl like me would need another zero on both of those numbers. Please don’t grab me. I hate being grabbed.”
The elevator doors opened and split their reflections down the middle, and on the inside they scooted to opposite sides to make room for a bellboy with a loaded cart of luggage. Staring up at the panel, they waited in silence for three floors.
Kevin said, “I’ll rob a bank if I have to.”
“It isn’t just about the money, Kevin. Please.”
He whispered, “I love you so much my teeth are numb.”
“See a dentist.”
“I’m dying, Colette.”
“Or a doctor.”
“I could rip off every room in this hotel to cover us.”
“Maybe a shrink.”
“I’ll just beat up this dude here and steal his uniform.”
The bellboy looked from side to side.
Colette sighed facetiously and said, “Oh, I’d do anything for a man in uniform.”
“All he ever does is cut you down, Colette.”
“And all you do is bother me.”
“That’s not true. If I’m bothering you, then why are you still here?”
“Because I’m not ready to pry open the escape hatch and leap down the elevator shaft. See—we’re here.” The car settled and the doors swung open, and as she strode out she turned to the bellhop and said, moving her head to meet his eyes past the closing accordion doors, “By the way, sir, it was all a joke.”
Kevin trailed her down the hall while she tried to speed up and lose him. Suddenly she kicked off her shoes and ran full speed away from him around the bend. He knew that in all his life he would never again find a woman who ran with such beautiful abandon, with those lean, strong legs and her unraveling hair. He caught her on the stairwell landing and held her tight against the railing. “I’ll hit the
fire alarm,” she said.
“No, you won’t.” He waited to catch his breath, then explained, “There’s a little white squirt of paint that comes out and it makes it easy—”
“Oh, shut up!” she said and started to cry. To his astonishment, she leaned forward into him and put her face against his shoulder. She sputtered in his arms, sniffled, and said, “Why do you have to take everything apart?”
“You’ll leave with me then. Tonight.”
She shook her head against him, either to say no or wipe her eyes.
“I can’t stand to think of him ever touching you again—”
“He doesn’t touch me anymore, Kevin. That’s the problem. He just yells at me.”
“We’ll pack our bags. We’ve got the money in our joint account too.”
“That’s nothing. That wouldn’t last half an hour. No, Kevin. Just hold me for a second. Please.”
He held her and smelled the salt of her tears, the smoke and lilac scent of her hair, and he felt the slowing pace of her breath and heartbeat beneath her dress. Then she pulled back and looked at him with a pink and softened face, raw newborn eyelids and a dampened mouth, and through leftover tears she faced him and said, “I need you right now. From the bottom of my heart, Kevin, I do need you. But if you have any sense at all, stop pressing me like this. I want you to come back to the room with me, and just be a human being. That’s it. Don’t say a word about stolen cards or master keys or anything like that. Just come back to the room and wait.”
“All right,” he said quietly. “Wait for what?”
“I don’t know, Kevin. For tomorrow, for your father to come back, for something in this fucking world to make sense. Just wait. And for once in your demented life, don’t ask so many questions. For me, if you love me, if you really honestly love me—then you have to shut up and do what I say.”
For the next two hours, they sat in her dark room and watched television, Colette prone on the bed, Kevin upright against the headboard. The news, the talk shows with sizzling applause, a late-night show of music videos, it all came and went like headlights in the rain.
“Should I be worried?” she asked. “About your father, I mean?”
“I’m not.”
The networks signed off with the national anthem and they moved to separate rooms, Kevin reclining on the couch, Colette pacing in her dark bedroom. He could tell that he had slept only by the crick in his neck and the changed taste in his mouth. Soon the gauze of the curtains seemed to glow faintly, and garbage trucks rattled outside.
“Kevin, honey. Wake up. It’s past five.”
“He probably went to breakfast.”
“Right. Okay. You’re the resident expert on that. I’m sorry. Go back to sleep.”
At the first hot light in the curtain ruffle, they took turns showering; ordered breakfast and ate the toast, the oranges, the buttermilk pancakes, but left the two domes of eggs standing on their minarets. They both wore terry-cloth robes. Colette whispered to herself over a crossword puzzle. To Kevin it felt like they were a somber married couple. Neither spoke. Silverware clanked and the thickening traffic honked outside like arrows of passing geese.
“It’s eleven,” she said. “Did you ever know him to be gone this long?”
“Maybe he was too drunk and got another room, closer to the bars.”
“If he did something to himself, I’m going to just kill him. I mean, torturing me is one thing, I’m getting used to that, but if he’s really hurt or in trouble, how the hell are we supposed to know? Okay—calm down. If he was arrested, he would call us.”
“No, he wouldn’t.”
“Yes, Kevin. He would too. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“If he got arrested he’d make sure we weren’t implicated in anything.”
“Don’t talk like that. It’s still early, we don’t know anything yet.”
The trembling quality of her voice made Kevin realize that his father truly might be in trouble, either smashed into a brick wall or arrested at dawn with a hooker and a bottle of Thunderbird. It simply hadn’t occurred to him before that his father could ever be in danger of anything. Jerry was the height of casual human ingenuity. He was a natural phenomenon, like sunlight or wind, and the notion that the man was somehow vulnerable seemed to change the texture of everything around them. The traffic moved haphazardly in the streets below; everyone on the hotel staff suspected them; the FBI was camped out in the office building across the street; and their lives could end, just like this, not with a flash, not in a glorious burst of fire, but with a confusing and surreal morning. Jerry could vanish like Colette’s mother—and they wouldn’t know for years what had happened. It could have been a pinch in a strip club, or a hobo who whacked him over the head with a plank.
They hit the phones. While Kevin tried motels, motor lodges, and the YMCA, using every alias he knew (even an old one from his dad’s construction days), Colette was across the suite talking to nightclub managers. By three o’clock the rooms were littered with torn pages of slashed numbers, but not a single lead. Colette came into his room and said, “Now I’m officially freaked out.”
“He’s going to be all right.”
By evening Colette had called the area hospitals, waiting on hold, painting her toenails. “Should I call the morgue?”
“Quit it with that. I’m going to make a list of police divisions.”
“He better be in the hospital. With a big concussion. Or liver poisoning. That’s how I feel right now.” She raised her chin, and spoke with a tight mouth. “His appendix better have ruptured at dawn, and he better be on his deathbed eating Jell-O through a straw, because if he’s not—”
“Stop it. We’ll find him.”
“I’m going to kill him with a salad fork.”
At seven o’clock, when the sky was dark, Colette sat quietly by the window with her bare feet pressed against the glass. Kevin stayed under a single light in the bedroom amid torn papers, calling motels in the suburbs, working until he glimpsed the somber look on her face reflected in the glass.
“Listen,” he called out. “I’m going to take my board and go look for him. I can cover half the city, I swear to God.”
“When does your offer expire, Kevin?”
“What offer?”
She made a frustrated kissing sound and replied, “We can leave tonight. Anywhere I want to go.”
“Colette, listen—it lasts forever. But let’s make sure he’s okay first. I just can’t stop thinking he got arrested or fell in a manhole or something. That doesn’t change anything.”
“You don’t have to explain, Kevin. I don’t think we’re in any state to fly off to Cancun anyway. Maybe someday. We’ll go look at the departure screen and treat it like a buffet. Pick whatever looks good.”
Kevin clutched his skateboard over his chest and exhaled. “I’ll try the drunk tanks—”
“You’re going to do what you have to do. We’re mercenaries, Kevin, and let’s just not pretend otherwise. Just for future reference, don’t use words like love anymore. It’s a very sensitive word and it wears out quickly. Romeo barely says it, but John Hinckley filled up a whole journal with it. To put it in your terms, it’s a currency that’s pretty easily devalued.”
“Colette, I’m just going to go look for him. That’s all. He could be bleeding to death in an alley, and even if he’s a jerk to you—he’s still my father.”
“Pretty soon you’re saying it whenever you hang up the phone or whenever you leave. It turns into an apology. Then it’s an excuse. Some assholes want it to be a bulletproof vest: don’t hate me, I love you. But mostly it just means—more. More, more—give me something more. A couple years from now, when you’re on your own completely, if you really fall in love, if it really comes to that—and I pity you if it ever does—you have to look right down into the black of her eyes, right down into the emptiness in there, and feel everything, absolutely everything she needs, and you have to be willing to drown in it, Kevin. You
’d have to want to be crushed, buried alive. Because that’s what real love feels like—choking. They used to bury women in their wedding dresses, you know. I thought it was because all those husbands were too cheap to spring for another gown, but now it makes sense: love is your first foot in the grave. That’s why the second most abused word is forever.”
Kevin sat down on the arm of the couch, still hugging his skateboard. Outside there was a flurry of sirens and ambulances, followed by rustling pigeons off a nearby ledge.
She said, “I’m not going to lie to you, Kevin. In some perfect hypothetical world, if you were older and your father wasn’t in the picture and I was less screwed up, then maybe you and I would be some kind of fairy tale. But I’ve been sitting here telling you exactly who I am, and you haven’t put down the skateboard. Maybe you can’t sleep, maybe your teeth are numb, maybe your head’s in the clouds. But you need your father more than you need me. Go find him.”
FOURTEEN
At ten-thirty that night Jerry returned to the room: sunburned, in a giant pair of pants, with his hands up for surrender. He thought his story was a riot, and seemed mildly puzzled when Colette refused to look at him from the bed. Late last night he had driven out to a lake with a case of beer and drunk it while he sat on the hood, overlooking the water. He had passed out in the backseat until the upholstery heated with sunlight, then rose around noon to find a secluded spot to “do some business” in the trees. Not twenty minutes later the car had been towed, with his bag and wallet, his pants and shoes, twenty-two discarded beer cans and a roach in the ashtray.
Penniless, in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, with only his wits and some useless car keys, he took to the challenge like a hustler’s chess problem. For hours he traipsed through the woods in his underwear—“like some Bigfoot documentary”—until he found the clothesline of a campsite, where he stole pants and a damp pair of canvas sneakers. He walked miles back into downtown, avoiding the highway patrol, until he was too hungry to continue. He stopped at a diner, where he ate practically everything on the menu. When the check came, he claimed to have left his wallet in the car. He gave the keys to the hostess as a show of good faith, and set off again to find the hotel. “Luckily you had the room key, Colette. Otherwise the cops would have been here by now. We’ll need another car though—fast.”