“Are you okay, young miss?” asked the man.
She looked at him. He was a stranger and yet vaguely familiar. Maybe someone she’d seen in the neighborhood, or the park, before. He was a middle-aged white man, tall and very slim, dressed in a dark suit, red tie, white shirt. There were faint stains on his shirt and his tie looked damp, as if he’d spilled something on it. He wore very dark sunglasses and an old-fashioned fedora. He smiled down at her.
“I—” she began, gagged again, took a breath, and gave it another try. “I’m fine. Thanks. Really, thanks. You saved me.”
“No,” he said mildly. “Not at all.”
“I’m serious. I … I guess I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
He released her and took a small step back, nodding to her protruding stomach. “Babies,” he said wistfully. “A blessing and a curse, am I right?”
Rain snorted. “You’re not wrong.”
She walked away, left the park, crossed the street at West Ninetieth and did not look back again. Her stomach ached from where the man had caught her. There was a sharp, deep sickness that hadn’t been there before, and the thought that being caught while falling had done some kind of damage stabbed her flesh with needles of ice.
When she reached the corner of Ninetieth and Columbus Avenue, Rain stopped and fumbled her cell phone out of her purse. She punched in a number and waited through four rings before it was answered.
“Mom,” she said in a hoarse, ragged voice, “I’ll sign the paper.”
It was then that her water broke.
… and it was at that part of the memory when Rain woke up from her dream and was back in the car driving through the storm.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rain stayed awake after that.
Even so, memories of that day, of the look on the monk’s face, of everything that happened seemed to crowd into the backseat with her.
She was about to ask where they were, but the car turned a corner and Rain realized they were on Forty-Second Street. The Port Authority Bus Terminal was up the street. Had she told the driver to take her here? She honestly couldn’t remember. The car drifted over to the curb, and the driver put it in park. Rain leaned forward to see how much the fare was but grunted in surprise because it was turned off.
“Um … is this some kind of flat fee thing,” she began, immediately defensive, “because I don’t—”
“No charge,” he said.
Rain narrowed her eyes. “What? Why?”
The driver half turned, and as Rain leaned forward to talk to him, she could see that he was disabled. From the abdomen up he was whole, but below that there were prosthetics and straps and levers to allow him to operate the gas and brakes with his left hand while he steered with his right. The mechanics were so comprehensive it looked like he’d been built into the car, or that it had been built around him. Rain had no idea how the man got out of the vehicle, or how he walked at all.
“Why are you giving me a free ride?” she demanded.
Alexander Stickley studied her for a three count. “Why not?” he asked, and then he smiled. There were more burn scars on his neck and face, and she could see a small square lump under his shirt over the man’s heart. Some kind of monitor or other medical device, probably. Whatever had happened to him had been terrible. Only his eyes and mouth seemed untouched. His eyes were dark but kind, and he had a nice smile. Warm. “You looked like you were having a bad day.”
“You didn’t have to stop for me in the first place, you know,” she said.
He shrugged.
“You didn’t have to do this,” she added, nodding to the zeroes on the trip meter.
“Most people don’t have to do most things, I guess,” he said. “Besides, I’ve had me some bad days, too.”
Rain nodded and dug into her purse for a few dollars to use as a tip, but when she offered the money, he shook his head.
“It’s all good,” he said.
“At least get yourself some coffee or something.…”
“Tell you what,” said the driver, reaching into his shirt pocket and producing a business card. “How ’bout you just call me if you ever need a ride again.”
“I usually don’t take cabs,” she said.
“Car service,” he corrected, then patted the steering wheel. “Me and the Red Rocket got nothing better to do, and we both like getting people to where they need to be.”
“‘Red Rocket’? I saw that painted on the fender.” She had to smile. “This doesn’t look like much of a rocket.”
He grinned. “She’ll fool you. She looks slow, but not when she wants to be fast. This ol’ girl can outrun sundown if she has to.”
That made Rain smile.
“So if you don’t need a ride,” said the driver, “give the card to a friend.”
Rain almost said that she didn’t have very many friends, but she already felt pathetic enough. The truth was that she had friends, but how many of them could afford to take cabs, either? The few friends she had went to the same Narcotics Anonymous meetings she did. They were like her, debris washed up on the shores of their own lives. Poetic, but also true.
She took the card.
All it had was a word and a phone number. She read the word aloud. “Sticks?”
“Oh, yeah. That’s what people call me.”
“Because of—” she began, her eyes flicking toward his metal braces. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
Sticks smiled and shook his head. “It’s all good. That’s not why they call me Sticks. I used to be a drummer. Wanted to be a drummer. I carried sticks with me all the time, and I’d bang on anything. Turns out you need talent, though, and I guess I didn’t get that gene. Got the nickname, though.”
“Okay, Sticks. Thanks.”
“Any time,” he said, and as she jerked open the door, he added, “Kind of tough to be out in the storm.”
Rain paused, catching something in his eye and something in his voice that made her think that his comment had nothing at all to do with the weather. They studied each other for a moment, then he nodded and she nodded back. Saying something in some kind of subliminal code Rain could not yet decipher, but which she knew was both true and important.
“Thanks,” she said.
“You take good care.”
She got out but paused before closing the door. “Do you still drum?”
“Not much anymore, no.”
“I used to dance. Before…”
“Before what?”
“Before life.”
Sticks considered for a moment, then nodded again.
The rain had slowed to a drizzle now, and she hurried over to the entrance, paused, turned, and waved to Sticks. He nodded, put his e-cigarette between his teeth, put the Red Rocket in gear, and drove slowly away.
“Safe,” she said once more. And then she shivered, because on some level buried down deep in the soil of her soul, Rain knew that she was not safe for anything but the moment. Safe was a word she didn’t really believe in. Not for a long time, and certainly not today. She looked up at the afternoon sky as the dark clouds parted and bright blue sparkled there, spilling clean light down on her. The day whispered to her that the storms were over and it was all going to be pretty.
She didn’t believe in that, either.
INTERLUDE ONE
NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS MEETING
St. Jude’s Catholic Church
Thirteen Months Ago
“Hi. My name is Rain, and I’m an addict.”
They all said, “Hi, Rain!”
Depending on the night, the place, the weather, the latest disaster on the news, or the content of what the last person shared, the tone of that response could vary. A lot. Usually the members of the meeting tried to sound cheerful, inviting, inclusive. Sometimes they sounded like a bunch of zombies. And there was a lot of room for variation in between. Tonight was a happy crowd.
Rain knew that some of it was because people liked to see someone like h
er get up and share. Because she was young; and because she was pretty, though in a mild and unchallenging way. A supporting character in a TV show way. Besides, no one in any of these chairs had a right to sneer, and they all knew it. Every single one of them had walked away from a train wreck of their own making. Failed marriages, failed attempts at college or school, failed relationships, failed expectations, failed lives. That they were here was a sign of hope but not proof of a cure. They were always going to be addicts. That was how it worked. No matter how many years they were clean, no matter how long since they last used, the hunger for it would be there. Rain knew that some of them had gone from four-year chips back to zero. Some never made it past six months before hitting reset.
Rain didn’t share that often, and when she did, sometimes it was a straight fifth-step of admitting to God—or whoever—to herself and to another person the exact nature of her wrongs. There was enough in that inventory for it to unfold in chapters over weeks. She never sugarcoated it. Not anymore. Not after her breakthrough during her fifth month clean of this current two-year run. That had been her big moment of telling the worst of it. The group had applauded her, and some of them were crying.
Tonight was different.
Tonight when she got up to share, it wasn’t exactly about the stuff she’d done wrong but about what might have been if she’d made a better choice. It was a ninth-step meeting, about trying to make amends to the people she hurt.
“I know that’s what we’re supposed to talk about,” she told the crowd, “but I can’t. And it’s not that I don’t want to make amends, I really, really do—but I can’t. The person I hurt most was my son.”
A couple of heads nodded. Those of the group who knew some of this story. Others leaned in, interested. Even the faces of the generic people on the inspirational posters on the walls seemed to be listening.
“You see,” said Rain, “when I was fifteen, I got pregnant. Nine years ago. First time having sex, too. I was on the pill because of my periods, and I thought that was good enough. They told me the pill was 99 percent effective. Go figure. My boyfriend was eighteen, and he was going off to fight in Iraq. He never got much of a chance to fight, but he died over there. I turned sixteen while I was pregnant, and because I was still a minor, because the baby’s father was dead, and because my mother convinced me that I was going to ruin my life if I kept the kid … I gave him up. Even with all that, I gave him a name. A secret name only I knew. One I whispered to him while he was still inside of me. One I only ever said aloud once, when I saw him for a split second before they took him away. He looked right at me. I know, newborns don’t see well and all that, blah blah blah. I’m telling you that he saw me. We had this moment, you know? And I whispered his name. Just that one time. Then they took him away.” She paused. “I mean … I let them take my baby away, and I never saw him again except in dreams or when I was high.”
The audience was silent, watching her.
“By the time my water broke, I’d convinced myself that giving him up was the only right thing to do, you know?” continued Rain. “I mean, I read all the pamphlets, went to the counseling sessions, heard the statistics, received the full pitch. A teenage girl who was never the sharpest knife in the drawer anyway couldn’t provide the right care for a baby. Right? Not like a married couple who couldn’t have kids but really wanted one. Even at sixteen I could do that kind of math. My mother hated the baby because it was something that created a kind of scandal, and she thought it would get in the way of me pursuing a career as the greatest dancer in the history of ballet. That was her damage. Complications from my birth screwed her out of her own ballerina agenda, and now here I was trashing my chances of her living through me. Mom never went through a sympathy phase or a supportive phase while I was pregnant. She went right for the ‘get rid of it’ and ‘get on with your life’ phase.”
The moderator, a fat black woman with orange hair, tried to catch Rain’s eye and maybe gently steer her back to the point of the ninth step, but Rain was already moving there.
“But,” said Rain, “I’m not here to talk about how I messed up my parents’ lives. That’s a different story for a different day. No, I wanted to talk about the one person I hurt who never had a chance to defend himself. Not my dad, and not poor soldier boy Noah.” She shook her head and fished for a tissue in her jeans pocket, found it, dabbed her eyes. “The person I hurt most is the person I can’t ever directly apologize to.”
She could still see that tiny, pink face. Those eyes, so awake. Dylan. The name meant “ray of hope” or “ray of light,” and that’s what he had been for her. The only ray of light in the growing darkness of her life. Dylan. The only hope she knew.
“I only saw my baby for a moment,” said Rain, “and then he was gone.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The drizzle had stopped, and there was the slightest hint of blue up there, though shifting curtains of clouds were trying to hide it.
Once she got home, Rain opened her door with great caution and whistled for Bug, who came running like a bullet, jumping and wagging and whining and nearly turning herself inside out. Still in the hallway, Rain reached in to snatch the leash off the hook beside the door, pulled the door shut, and went downstairs with Bug. She wasn’t ready to face her apartment yet.
Her neighborhood was in no way scenic. There were brownstones, there were a few grubby stores, there were abandoned apartment buildings, there were crack houses, there were empty lots. There wasn’t a spot of green anywhere except weeds sneaking up through cracks in the concrete or plastic bags fluttering eternally from telephone wires.
Rain and Bug passed a little old Japanese man pasting handbills on the windows of closed businesses. He was crooked and withered, wearing a sweatshirt that was too big for him, ugly khakis, socks, and sandals. He glanced at her and then away, and for a moment she thought she recognized him. Two different partial memories played tug-of-war in her head. Wasn’t there a Japanese guy living in Joplin’s building? She thought there was and maybe this was him, but she’d never had a good look at the guy, and he kept his face away as he worked as if he didn’t want her to see his face now.
The other memory was an older one of the monk in Central Park. But that man had been about forty, and this man looked ancient. Not the same guy, she decided, but there was a quality about him that triggered this encounter to that older one. Bug wagged her crooked tail at the man and gave a happy yap.
“Hi,” said Rain.
The man stiffened but did not look at her. Embarrassed? Shy? She couldn’t tell. She studied the handbill he’d posted. It was the same as others she’d seen all over the neighborhood.
Gomen’nasai
“What’s that mean?”
The man’s body began to tremble and his shoulders hitched.
“Gomen’nasai,” he said, then he gathered up his handbills and tape and ran away. Not walked. Ran. Rain stood watching him, totally nonplussed.
Overhead, the sky was filled with dark birds that circled and circled. There was no blue up there anymore. Feeling depressed and confused, Rain turned and walked back to her building.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Alyson Creighton-Thomas sat alone in her a big Central Park West apartment designed for a family.
Her husband, Bryce, was not home. He didn’t come home very much anymore, and when he did, it was when Alyson was scheduled to be out. She knew he’d been there by what clothes were missing or by what mail was gone from the desk in the study. There was never a note from him. They had gotten past the note phase, and long past the texting phase. Now they were ghosts haunting the apartment where they once lived as husband and wife.
Across the living room, past the lovely furniture and the acres of white carpet, the TV screen swirled with motion even though the sound was turned all the way down. Alyson watched a group of children stand at a stretching bar under the stern eye of a matronly ballet teacher. She watched as the children performed onstage for clapping
parents. She watched as a small, slender, dark-haired girl ran across the stage and leaped into the air, one leg leading, the other following along a perfect horizontal line, executing the grand jeté with fluid grace, then landing, turning, rising up on the tip of her pointe shoe, twirling and twirling. Then another leap, an emboîté, then a powerful entrechat, and another. On and on.
The DVD was eight hours long, and she was midway through her second watching this weekend. Her five hundredth since her daughter had started going to meetings. The five thousandth since that fucking baby was born. That wretched, squealing, worthless piece-of-shit baby. That bastard. That fucking bastard.
Vodka was her wingman and her confessor. Pills of so many useful kinds were there to show her the way to the end of each day. A Xanax or a Zoloft or an Amytal were Sherpas that would guide her from couch to bed and back to couch.
When her phone rang, she almost didn’t answer, because she seldom did that anymore. It was the house phone, and it wasn’t near the couch. Getting up meant finding her cane, which had fallen down out of sight between couch and side table. It meant struggling up, something that embarrassed her even when she was alone. She let it ring through, not willing to spend the coin of effort.
The caller left a message, and the landline base station had a speaker function. She sat and listened to Mr. Alan Javers complain to her that he had tried to do Alyson a favor by agreeing to interview her daughter. “But she blew off the interview and then has the audacity to come in a day late. Frankly, Alyson, my receptionist said that Lorraine looked—and I’m quoting here—‘kind of out of it and didn’t know what day it was.’ I mean, I’m all for helping you out, and I genuinely appreciate the business you’ve sent my way over the years, but…”
There was more, but Alyson stopped listening.
Kind of out of it and didn’t know what day it was.
The words seemed to be repeated in her head but by a different voice. An old and familiar voice. One that always spoke the hard truths to her from the shadows of her mind. She’s using again. A week ago, Alyson would have been on the phone, cane or not, to screech at her daughter for falling off the wagon. A month ago, she’d have demanded that Rain go in for tests. Six months ago, she would have already started the paperwork for another trip to rehab.