Life Expectancy

  When we arrived, we found our daughter sleeping. Always tired, she slept a lot these days. Too much.

  Though Annie didn’t know how close her mother had come to dying eleven months earlier, she knew the story of the cameo pendant, that it had survived an all-destroying fire, that her mother had worn it in the ICU. She had asked for it. She wore it now.

  My beautiful little Annie had withdrawn into a gray disguise of sallow skin and brittle hair. Her eyes were mascaraed with mortality, her lips pale. She looked tiny, birdlike, old.

  Neither magazines nor TV, nor the view from the window, had any interest for me. I could not stop staring at my little girl, seeing her in my mind’s eye as she had been and as she might be again.

  I was reluctant to look away from her or to leave the room, for fear that when I returned, I would not have Annie to look at anymore, only photographs as she had once been.

  Her indomitable spirit, her courage through these exhausting months of illness, pain, and decline, had been an inspiration to me. But I wanted more than inspiration. I wanted her—healed, healthy, full of life once more. My tomboy. My little bullshit-artist wannabe.

  My parents didn’t raise me to ask God for blessings or benefits. For guidance, yes. For the strength to do the right thing, yes. Not for a winning lottery number, not for love or health, or happiness. Prayer is not a gimme list; God isn’t Santa Claus.

  As they have taught me, I believe that without asking, we are given all we need. We must have the wit and wisdom to recognize the strengths and tools at our command, and find the courage to do what must be done.

  In this instance, however, we seemed to have done all that we humanly could. If her fate had been in the hands of God now, I would have rested more easily. But her fate seemed to be in the hands of Punchinello Beezo, and anxiety, like swarms of something winged, flew around and around in my stomach, fluttered in my bones.

  And so I prayed to God to give me back my tomboy, and asked Him to ensure that Punchinello did the right thing if even for the evil reason of buying Virgilio Vivacemente’s murder.

  Even God himself might need a fancy calculator to compute the mathematics of that morality.

  While I sat with Annie, immobilized by anxiety, Lorrie was all motion, making phone calls, coordinating things between the hospital and the penitentiary officials.

  When Annie was awake, we talked of many things, of cabbages and kings, of next year at Disney World and the year after in Hawaii, of learning to ski and bake, but never of now and here, never of the dark what-if.

  Her brow was warm to the touch, her delicate fingers cold. Her slender wrists had grown so slight that it seemed they might snap if she risked lifting a hand from the sheets.

  Philosophers and theologians had spent centuries debating the existence and the nature of Hell, but I knew there in the hospital that Hell existed and I could describe its streets. Hell is a child lost and the fear of never being reunited.

  Healthcare and prison bureaucrats proved extraordinarily helpful and expeditious. During the afternoon, Punchinello Beezo arrived in a prison van, handcuffed, fettered ankle to ankle, under the watchful eyes of two armed guards. I did not see him, only heard reports.

  Tests were done. They said he was a match.

  At six in the morning, the transplant would be performed.

  Midnight of this terrible day still lay hours away. He could change his mind before then—or escape.

  At 8:30, my father phoned from Snow Village to fulfill Grandpa Josef’s prediction in an unexpected fashion.

  After lying down for a nap before dinner, Weena had passed away peacefully in her sleep at the age of eighty-six.

  Lorrie drew me against my will into the corridor to share this news, lest Annie hear.

  For a while I sat in a chair in an empty hospital room, so Annie wouldn’t see my tears and become anxious that they were shed for her.

  On a cell phone, I called Mom, and we talked for a while about Grandma Rowena. You feel grief for a mother and a grandmother, of course, but when the life was very long and happy, and when the end came without pain or fear, it would almost be blasphemous to grieve too hard.

  “What surprises me,” my mother said, “is that she would go just before dinner. If she’d known what was going to happen, she wouldn’t have laid down for a nap until after we’d eaten.”

  Midnight came. And Thanksgiving morning.

  Considering that Annie’s deteriorating condition might have made her too weak for surgery in another day, the transplant procedure began none too soon at six o’clock.

  Punchinello didn’t welch.

  I visited him hours later in his room, where he was chained to his bed and watched over by a guard. The guard stepped into the hall to give us privacy.

  Although I knew well the nature of this beast, my voice broke with gratitude when I said, “Thank you.”

  He conjured that movie-hero smile, winked, and said, “No thanks necessary, bro. I’m looking forward to birthday cards, candy, mystery novels…and one snake-hearted aerialist tortured with red-hot pliers and dismembered alive. I mean, if it works for you to do it that way.”

  “Yeah, that sounds about right to me.”

  “I don’t want to cramp your creativity,” he assured me.

  “Don’t worry about me. What you want is all that matters.”

  “Maybe you could nail him to a wall before you really start on him,” Punchinello suggested.

  “Nails don’t hold in drywall. I better buy a stud finder.”

  He nodded. “Good idea. And before you start cutting off his fingers and hands and stuff, take his nose off. He’s a vain bastard, the great Beezo told me, very proud of his nose.”

  “All right, but if there’s anything more you want, I better start taking notes.”

  “That’s everything.” He sighed. “Gosh, I sure wish I could be there with you.”

  “Wouldn’t that be wonderful,” I said.

  Annie came through the surgery as smoothly as a hot-air balloon sailing, sailing.

  Unlike its donor, the kidney was neither crazy nor evil, and it was such an ideal match for his niece that not one serious post-operative complication arose.

  Annie lived. Annie bloomed.

  These days, she charms, she shines, she dazzles, as ever she did before the cancer dragged her down.

  Only one of the five days—April 16, 2005—remained ahead of me. Life would seem strange thereafter, with no dreaded dates on the calendar, the future unclouded by grim expectations. Assuming that I survived.

  PART SIX

  * * *

  I AM MOONLIGHT WALKING, THE LOVE OF EVERY WOMAN, THE ENVY OF EVERY MAN

  63

  * * *

  Between baking cakes and taking additional instruction in the use of a handgun, between perfecting my recipe for chestnut-chocolate terrine and negotiating murder-for-hire contracts with insane kidney donors, I wrote the previous sixty-two chapters of this book during the year preceding the fifth of Grandpa Josef’s five dates.

  I’m not entirely sure why I felt compelled to write.

  To the best of my knowledge, no pastry chef has ever had a memoir on the New York Times bestseller list. Celebrity tell-alls, hate-mongering political tracts, diet revelations about how to lose weight eating nothing but butter, and self-help books about getting filthy rich by adapting the code of the Samurai to business dealings seem to be what is wanted by contemporary readers.

  Ego has not motivated me. If by some miracle the book were to be a success, everyone would still think that I am biggish for my size, a lummox. I am not a James, and if I wrote an entire library full of books, I still would not be one. I was born a Jimmy, and I will be a Jimmy when they lay me in my grave.

  In part I wrote the book to tell my children how they got here, through what stormy seas, past what dangerous shoals. I want them to know what family means—and what it doesn’t. I want them to know how loved they were, in case I don’t live long enough to tell
each of them a hundred thousand times.

  In part I wrote it for my wife, to be sure she will know that without her, I might as well have died back there on the first of the five days. Each of us has his or her destiny, but sometimes two destinies twine, becoming so tightly braided that if Fate cuts one, she must cut both.

  Also I wrote this to explain life to myself. The mystery. The humor, dark and light, that is the warp and weft of the weave. The absurdity. The terror. The hope. The joy, the grief. The God we never see except by indirection.

  In this I have failed. I am less than four months short of my thirty-first birthday, have endured much, have piled up all these words, yet I can explain life no better now than I could have done when Charlene Coleman spared me the fate of Punchinello.

  I can’t explain the why of life, the patterns of its unfolding. I can’t explain it—but, oh, how I love it.

  And then, after seventeen months of peace and happiness, came the morning of the fifth day, April 16.

  We were prepared in all the ways that experience had taught us to prepare, but we also knew that we could not properly prepare at all. The design can be imagined but not truly foreseen.

  Because we lived by baker’s hours and didn’t want our kids to live by a different schedule, they were home-schooled. Their classes started at two o’clock in the morning and ended at eight, whereafter they had breakfast with us, played in sun or snow, and went to bed.

  Their usual school was the table in the dining room, with occasional field trips to the table in the kitchen. Their mother served as their teacher, and served them well.

  Annie had celebrated her seventh birthday the past January, with a kidney-shaped cake. In a few months, Lucy would be six, while Andy confidently cruised toward five. They loved learning and were demon students in the best sense of the adjective.

  As usual on my special days, I stayed home from work. If I had thought it would have done any good to tether crocodiles around the house and board up all the windows, I would have done so. Instead, I helped the kids with their lessons for a while, then prepared breakfast.

  We were at the kitchen table, halfway through our waffles with strawberries, when the doorbell rang.

  Lucy went directly to the phone, put her hand on the receiver, and prepared to dial 911.

  Annie took the car keys from the pegboard, opened the door between the kitchen and the laundry room, and opened the door between the laundry room and the garage, preparing the route for an escape by wheels.

  Andy hurried into the half bath off the kitchen to pee, so he would then be ready for flight.

  After accompanying me as far as the archway between the dining room and the living room, Lorrie gave me a quick kiss.

  The doorbell rang again.

  “It’s midmonth, so it’s probably just the newspaper boy,” I said.

  “Right.”

  Less in honor of the day than to conceal a shoulder holster, I was wearing a handsome tweed sport coat. In the foyer, I slipped a hand under the coat.

  Through the tall French window beside the door, I could see the visitor on the porch. He smiled at me and held forth a silver box tied with red ribbon.

  He appeared to be about ten years old, handsome, with jet-black hair and green eyes. His trimly tailored pants were of a metallic-silver material; the red silk shirt had sequined silver buttons. Over the shirt he wore a sparkling silver jacket with silver-and-red buttons in a spiral pattern.

  He looked as if he were in training to be an Elvis impersonator.

  If ten-year-old boys were coming around to kill me, I might as well die and get it over with. I certainly wasn’t going to shoot a little boy, regardless of his intentions.

  When I opened the door, he asked, “Jimmy Tock?”

  “That’s me.”

  Holding out the box, smiling like a band mascot marching at the head of a Happiness Day parade, he said, “For you!”

  “I don’t want it.”

  The smile widened. “But it’s for you!”

  “No thanks.”

  The smile faltered. “From me to you!”

  “It isn’t from you. Who sent you with this?”

  The smile collapsed. “Mister, for God’s sake, take the freakin’ box. If I have to go back to the car with it, he’ll beat the shit out of me.”

  At the curb stood a sparkling silver Mercedes limousine with red racing stripes and tinted windows.

  “Who?” I asked. “Who will beat you?”

  Instead of going pale, the boy’s olive complexion turned taupe. “This is taking too long. He’s going to want to know what we talked about. I’m not supposed to chat with you. Why are you doing this to me? Why do you hate me? Why are you being so mean?”

  I accepted the box.

  At once the boy broke into the band-mascot smile, saluted me, and said, “Prepare to be enchanted!”

  No need to brood about where I’d heard that phrase before.

  He turned on his heel—literally swiveled 180 degrees as smoothly as a pivot hinge—and crossed the porch to the stairs.

  I noticed that he was wearing peculiar shoes, similar to ballet slippers, supple with thin soft soles. They were red.

  With uncanny grace, he descended the steps and seemed to float rather than walk to the Mercedes. He got in the back of the limo and closed the door.

  I couldn’t get a glimpse of the driver or any other passengers.

  The limousine drove away, and I took the gift-wrapped bomb into the house.

  64

  * * *

  Sparkling, intriguing, the box stood on the kitchen table.

  I didn’t actually believe it was a bomb, but Annie and Lucy were certain that it could be nothing else.

  With smirky disdain for his sisters’ powers of threat analysis, Andy said, “It’s not a bomb. It’s somebody’s head cut off and stuffed in a box with a clue in his teeth.”

  No one could ever doubt that he was Weena’s great-grandson by temperament if not by blood.

  “That’s stupid,” Annie said. “A clue to what?”

  “To a mystery.”

  “What mystery?”

  “The mystery of who sent the head, dummy.”

  Annie sighed with theatrical exasperation and said, “If the guy who sent the head wants us to figure who sent it, why doesn’t he just write his name on the thing?”

  “On what thing?” Andy asked.

  “On the thing, whatever it is, that’s between the teeth of the stupid head,” Annie clarified.

  Solemnly, Lucy said, “If there’s a head, I’m gonna barf.”

  “There’s not a head in the box, sweetcakes,” Lorrie promised. “And there’s no bomb, either. They don’t deliver bombs in flashy silver-and-red limousines.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Andy asked.

  “Nobody doesn’t,” Annie said.

  Lorrie got a pair of scissors from a kitchen drawer and snipped the red ribbon.

  Studying the box, I figured it was just about the perfect size to hold a head. Or a basketball. If I had to bet on one or the other, I’d put my money on the head.

  As I was about to lift the lid from the box, Annie and Lucy put their hands over their ears. They were concerned more about the noise of an explosion than about the shrapnel.

  Under the lid was a layer of folded white gift-wrapping tissue.

  Having climbed onto a chair, kneeling there to get a better view, Andy warned me as I reached for the tissue paper, “Could be snakes.”

  Instead of snakes, packed into the box were banded packets of twenty-dollar bills.

  “Wow, we’re rich!” Andy declared.

  “This isn’t our money,” Lorrie said.

  “Then whose is it?” Annie wondered.

  “I don’t know,” Lorrie said, “but it’s bad money, for sure, and we can’t keep it. I can smell the evil on it.”

  Sniffing at the treasure, Andy said, “I don’t smell nothin’.”

  “All I smell is Andy’s beans from yes
terday dinner,” Annie announced.

  “Maybe it could be my money,” Lucy suggested.

  “Not as long as I’m your mother.”

  Together, the five of us took all the money out of the box and piled it on the table so we could smell it better.

  There were twenty-five packets of twenty-dollar bills. Each packet contained a hundred bills. Fifty thousand bucks.

  The box also contained an envelope. From the envelope, Lorrie extracted a plain white card with handwriting on one side.

  She read the card and said, “Hmmm.”

  When she passed the card to me, the six eyes of three children followed it with intense interest.

  Never before had I seen handwriting as meticulously scripted as this. The letters were bold, elegantly formed, flowing as precisely as if a machine had penned them: Please accept this as a token of my esteem and as proof of my sincerity. I request the honor of a most cordial meeting with you at seven o’clock this evening at the Halloway Farm. The precise location will be obvious upon your arrival.

  The note was signed Vivacemente.

  “This,” I told the kids, “is evil money. I’m going to put it back into the