The Goldfinch

  the hair out of my eyes. I was dead exhausted. “But we need to go now. Please.”

  “What, this minute?”

  “Yes. Do you need to go home and get anything?”

  “Tonight?”

  “I’m not kidding, Boris.” Arguing with him was making the panic rise again. “I can’t just sit around and wait—” The painting was a problem, I wasn’t sure how that was going to work, but once I got Boris out of the house I could figure something out. “Please, come on.”

  “Is State Care that bad in America?” said Boris doubtfully. “You make it seem like the cops.”

  “Are you coming with me? Yes or no?”

  “I need some time. I mean,” he said, following after me, “we can’t leave now! Really—I swear. Wait a little while. Give me a day! One day!”

  “Why?”

  He seemed nonplussed. “Well, I mean, because—”

  “Because—?”

  “Because—because I have to see Kotku! And—all kinds of things! Honest, you can’t leave tonight,” he repeated, when I said nothing. “Trust me. You’ll be sorry, I mean it. Come to my house! Wait till the morning to go!”

  “I can’t wait,” I said curtly, taking my half of the cash and heading back to my room.

  “Potter—” he followed after me.

  “Yes?”

  “There is something important I have to tell you.”

  “Boris,” I said, turning, “what the mother fuck. What is it?” I said, as we stood and stared at each other. “If you have something to say, go on and say it.”

  “Am afraid it will make you mad.”

  “What is it? What have you done?”

  Boris was silent, gnawing the side of his thumb.

  “Well, what?”

  He looked away. “You need to stay,” he said vaguely. “You’re making a mistake.”

  “Forget it,” I snapped, turning away again. “If you don’t want to come with me, don’t come, okay? But I can’t stand around here all night.”

  Boris—I thought—might ask what was in the pillowcase, particularly since it was so fat and weirdly shaped after my over-enthusiastic wrapping job. But when I un-taped it from the back of the headboard and put it in my overnight bag (along with my iPod, notebook, charger, Wind, Sand and Stars, some pictures of my mom, my toothbrush, and a change of clothes) he only scowled and said nothing. When I retrieved, from the back of my closet, my school blazer (too small for me, though it had been too big when my mother bought it) he nodded and said: “Good idea, that.”

  “What?”

  “Makes you look less homeless.”

  “It’s November,” I said. I’d only brought one warm sweater from New York; I put it in the bag and zipped it up. “It’s going to be cold.”

  Boris leaned insolently against the wall. “What will you do, then? Live on the street, railway station, where?”

  “I’ll call my friend I stayed with before.”

  “If they wanted you, those people, they’d have adopted you already.”

  “They couldn’t! How could they?”

  Boris folded his arms. “They didn’t want you, that family. You told me so yourself—lots of times. Also, you never hear from them.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, after a brief, confused pause. Only a few months before, Andy had sent me a long-ish (for him) email telling me about some stuff going on at school, a scandal with the tennis coach feeling up girls in our class, though that life was so far away that it was like reading about people I didn’t know.

  “Too many children?” said Boris, a bit smugly as it seemed. “Not enough room? Remember that bit? You said the mother and father were glad to see you go.”

  “Fuck off.” I was already getting a huge headache. What would I do if Social Services showed up and put me in the back of a car? Who—in Nevada—could I call? Mrs. Spear? The Playa? The fat model-store clerk who sold us model glue without the models?

  Boris followed me downstairs, where we were stopped in the middle of the living room by a tortured-looking Popper—who ran directly into our path, then sat and stared at us like he knew exactly what was going on.

  “Oh, fuck,” I said, putting down my bag. There was a silence.

  “Boris,” I said, “can’t you—”

  “No.”

  “Can’t Kotku—”

  “No.”

  “Well, fuck it,” I said, picking him up and tucking him under my arm. “I’m not leaving him here for her to lock up and starve.”

  “And where are you going?” said Boris, as I started for the front door.

  “Eh?”

  “Walking? To the airport?”

  “Wait,” I said, putting Popchik down. All at once I felt sick and like I might vomit red wine all over the carpet. “Will they take a dog on the plane?”

  “No,” said Boris ruthlessly, spitting out a chewed thumbnail.

  He was being an asshole; I wanted to punch him. “Okay then,” I said. “Maybe somebody at the airport will want him. Or, fuck it, I’ll take the train.”

  He was about to say something sarcastic, lips pursed in a way I knew well, but then—quite suddenly—his expression faltered; and I turned to see Xandra, wild-eyed, mascara-smeared, swaying on the landing at the top of the stairs.

  We looked at her, frozen. After what seemed like a centuries-long pause, she opened her mouth, closed it again, caught the railing to balance herself, and then said, in a rusty voice: “Did Larry leave his keys in the bank vault?”

  We gazed horrified for several more moments before we realized she was waiting for a reply. Her hair was like a haystack; she appeared completely disoriented and so unsteady it seemed she might topple down the steps.

  “Er, yes,” said Boris loudly. “I mean no.” And then, when she still stood there: “It’s all right. Go back to bed.”

  She mumbled something and—uncertain on her feet—staggered off. The two of us stood motionless for some moments. Then—quietly, the back of my neck prickling—I got my bag and slipped out the front door (my last sight of that house, and her, though I didn’t even take a last look round) and Boris and Popchik came out after me. Together, all three of us walked rapidly away from the house and down to the end of the street, Popchik’s toenails clicking on the pavement.

  “All right,” said Boris, in the humorous undertone he used when we had a close call at the supermarket. “Okay. Maybe not quite so much out-cold as I thought.”

  I was in a cold sweat, and the night air—though chilly—felt good. Off in the west, silent Frankenstein flashes of lightning twisted in the darkness.

  “Well, at least she’s not dead, eh?” He chuckled. “I was worried about her. Christ.”

  “Let me use your phone,” I said, elbowing on my jacket. “I need to call a car.”

  He fished in his pocket, and handed it to me. It was a disposable phone, the one he’d bought to keep tabs on Kotku.

  “No, keep it,” he said, holding his hands up when I tried to give it back to him after I’d made my call: Lucky Cab, 777-7777, the number plastered on every shifty-looking bus-stop bench in Vegas. Then he dug out the wad of money—his half of the take from Xandra—and tried to press it on me.

  “Forget it,” I said, glancing back anxiously at the house. I was afraid she might wake up again and come out in the street looking for us. “It’s yours.”

  “No! You might need it!”

  “I don’t want it,” I said, sticking my hands in my pockets to keep him from foisting it on me. “Anyway, you might need it yourself.”

  “Come on, Potter! I wish you wouldn’t go this moment.” He gestured down the street, at the rows of empty houses. “If you won’t come to my house—kip over there for a day or two! That brick house has furniture in it, even. I’ll bring you food if you want.”

  “Or, hey, I can call Domino’s,” I said, sticking the phone in my jacket pocket. “Since they deliver out here now and everything.”

  He winced. “Don’t be
angry.”

  “I’m not.” And, in truth, I wasn’t—only so disoriented I felt I might wake up and find I’d been sleeping with a book over my face.

  Boris, I realized, was looking up at the sky and humming to himself, a line from one of my mother’s Velvet Underground songs: But if you close the door… the night could last forever…

  “What about you?” I said, rubbing my eyes.

  “Eh?” he said, looking at me with a smile.

  “What’s up? Will I see you again?”

  “Maybe,” he said, in the same cheerful tone I imagined him using with Bami and Judy the barkeep’s wife in Karmeywallag and everyone else in his life he’d ever said goodbye to. “Who knows?”

  “Will you meet me in a day or two?”

  “Well—”

  “Join me later. Take a plane—you have the money. I’ll call you and tell you where I am. Don’t say no.”

  “Okay then,” said Boris, in the same cheerful voice. “I won’t say no.” But clearly, from his tone, he was saying no.

  I closed my eyes. “Oh God.” I was so tired I was reeling; I had to fight the urge to lie down on the ground, a physical undertow pulling me to the curb. When I opened my eyes, I saw Boris looking at me with concern.

  “Look at you,” he said. “Falling over, almost.” He reached in his pocket.

  “No, no, no,” I said, stepping back, when I saw what he had in his hand. “No way. Forget it.”

  “It’ll make you feel better!”

  “That’s what you said about the other stuff.” I wasn’t up for any more seaweed or singing stars. “Really, I don’t want any.”

  “But this is different. Completely different. It will sober you up. Clear your head—promise.”

  “Right.” A drug that sobered you up and cleared your head didn’t sound like Boris’s style at all, although he did seem a good bit more with-it than me.

  “Look at me,” he said reasonably. “Yes.” He knew he had me. “Am I raving? Frothing at mouth? No—only being helpful! Here,” he said, tapping some out on the back of his hand, “come on. Let me feed it to you.”

  I half expected it was a trick—that I would pass out on the spot and wake up who knew where, maybe in one of the empty houses across the street. But I was too tired to care, and maybe that would have been okay anyway. I leaned forward and allowed him to press one nostril closed with a fingertip. “There!” he said encouragingly. “Like this. Now, sniff.”

  Almost instantly, I did feel better. It was like a miracle. “Wow,” I said, pinching my nose against the sharp, pleasant sting.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” He was already tapping out some more. “Here, other nose. Don’t breathe out. Okay, now.”

  Everything seemed brighter and clearer, including Boris himself.

  “What did I tell you?” He was taking more for himself now. “Aren’t you sorry you don’t listen?”

  “You’re going to sell this stuff, god,” I said, looking up at the sky. “Why?”

  “It’s worth a lot, actually. Few thousand of dollars.”

  “That little bit?”

  “Not that little! This is a lot of grams—twenty, maybe more. Could make a fortune if I divide up small and sell to girls like K. T. Bearman.”

  “You know K. T. Bearman?” Katie Bearman, who was a year ahead of us, had her own car—a black convertible—and was so far removed from our social scale she might as well have been a movie star.

  “Sure. Skye, KT, Jessica, all those girls. Anyway—” he offered me the vial again—“I can buy Kotku that keyboard she wants now. No more money worries.”

  We went back and forth a few times until I began to feel much more optimistic about the future and things in general. And as we stood rubbing our noses and jabbering in the street, Popper looking up at us curiously, the wonderfulness of New York seemed right on the tip of my tongue, an evanescence possible to convey. “I mean, it’s great,” I said. The words were spiraling and tumbling out of me. “Really, you have to come. We can go to Brighton Beach—that’s where all the Russians hang out. Well, I’ve never been there. But the train goes there—it’s the last stop on the line. There’s a big Russian community, restaurants with smoked fish and sturgeon roe. My mother and I always talked about going out there to eat one day, this jeweler she worked with told her the good places to go, but we never did. It’s supposed to be great. Also, I mean—I have money for school—you can go to my school. No—you totally can. I have a scholarship. Well, I did. But the guy said as long as the money in my fund was used for education—it could be anybody’s education. Not just mine. There’s more than enough for both of us. Though, I mean, public school, the public schools are good in New York, I know people there, public school’s fine with me.”

  I was still babbling when Boris said: “Potter.” Before I could answer him he put both hands on my face and kissed me on the mouth. And while I stood blinking—it was over almost before I knew what had happened—he picked up Popper under the forelegs and kissed him too, in midair, smack on the tip of his nose.

  Then he handed him to me. “Your car’s over there,” he said, giving him one last ruffle on the head. And—sure enough—when I turned, a town car was creeping up the other side of the street, surveying the addresses.

  We stood looking at each other—me breathing hard, completely stunned.

  “Good luck,” said Boris. “I won’t forget you.” Then he patted Popper on the head. “Bye, Popchyk. Look after him, will you?” he said to me.

  Later—in the cab, and afterward—I would replay that moment, and marvel that I’d waved and walked away quite so casually. Why hadn’t I grabbed his arm and begged him one last time to get in the car, come on, fuck it Boris, just like skipping school, we’ll be eating breakfast over cornfields when the sun comes up? I knew him well enough to know that if you asked him the right way, at the right moment, he would do almost anything; and in the very act of turning away I knew he would have run after me and hopped in the car laughing if I’d asked one last time.

  But I didn’t. And, in truth, it was maybe better that I didn’t—I say that now, though it was something I regretted bitterly for a while. More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I’d stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I’d never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street—which was, of course, I love you.

  xx.

  I WAS SO TIRED that the drugs didn’t last long, at least not the feel-good part. The cab driver—a transplanted New Yorker from the sound of him—immediately sussed out something was wrong and tried to give me a card for the National Runaway switchboard, which I refused to take. When I asked him to drive me to the train station (not even knowing if there was a train in Vegas—surely there had to be), he shook his head and said: “You know, don’t you, Specs, they don’t take dogs on Amtrak?”

  “They don’t?” I said, my heart sinking.

  “The plane—maybe, I don’t know.” He was a young-ish guy, a fast talker, baby-faced, slightly overweight, in a T-shirt that said PENN AND TELLER: LIVE AT THE RIO. “You’ll have to have a crate, or something. Maybe the bus is your best bet. But they don’t let kids under a certain age ride without parental permission.”

  “I told you! My dad died! His girlfriend is sending me to my family back east.”

  “Well, hey, you don’t have anything to worry about then, do you?”

  I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the ride. The fact of my father’s death had not yet sunk in, and every now and then, the lights zipping past on the highway brought it back in a sick rush. An accident. At least in New York we hadn’t had to worry about drunk driving—the great fear was that he would fall in front of a car or be stabbed for his wallet, lurching out of some dive bar at three a.m. What would happen to his body? I’d scattered my mother’s ashes in Central Park, though apparently there was a regulation against it;
one evening while it was getting dark, I’d walked with Andy to a deserted area on the west side of the Pond and—while Andy kept a lookout—dumped the urn. What had disturbed me far more than the actual scattering of the remains was that the urn had been packed in shredded pieces of porno classifieds: SOAPY ASIAN BABES and WET HOT ORGASMS were two random phrases that had caught my eye as the gray powder, the color of moon rock, caught and spun in the May twilight.

  Then there were lights, and the car stopped. “Okay, Specs,” said my driver, turning with his arm along the back seat. We were in the parking lot of the Greyhound station. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Theo,” I said, without thinking, and immediately was sorry.

  “All right, Theo. J.P.” He reached across the back seat to shake my hand. “You want to take my advice about something?”

  “Sure,” I said, quailing a bit. Even with everything else that was going on, and there was quite a lot, I felt incredibly uncomfortable that this guy had probably seen Boris kissing me in the street.

  “None of my business, but you’re going to need something to put Fluffy there in.”

  “Sorry?”

  He nodded at my bag. “Will he fit in that?”

  “Umm—”

  “You’re probably going to have to check that bag, anyway. It might be too big for you to carry aboard—they’ll stow it underneath. It’s not like the plane.”

  “I—” This was too much to think about. “I don’t have anything.”

  “Hang on. Let me check in my office back here.” He got up, went around to the trunk, and returned with a large canvas shopping bag from a health food store that said The Greening of America.

  “If I were you,” he said, “I’d go in and buy the ticket without Fluffy Boy. Leave him out here with me, just in case, okay?”

  My new pal had been right about not riding Greyhound without an Unaccompanied Child form signed by a parent—and there were other restrictions for kids as well. The clerk at the window—a wan Chicana with scraped-back hair—began in a monotone to go down the long baleful list of them. No Transfers. No Journeys of Longer than Five Hours in Duration. Unless the person named on the Unaccompanied Child Form showed up to meet me, with positive identification, I would be released into the custody of Child Protective Services or to local law enforcement officials in the city of my destination.

  “But—”

  “All children under fifteen. No exceptions.”

  “But I’m not under fifteen,” I said, floundering to produce my official-looking state-issued New York ID. “I am fifteen. Look.” Enrique—envisioning perhaps the likelihood of my having to go into what he called The System—had taken me to be photographed for it shortly after my mother died; and though I’d resented it at the time, Big Brother’s far-reaching claw (“Wow, your very own bar code,” Andy had said, looking at it curiously), now I was thankful he’d had the foresight to carry me downtown and register me like a second-hand motor vehicle. Numbly, like a refugee, I waited under the sleazy fluorescents as the clerk looked at the card at a number of different angles and in different lights, at length finding it genuine.

  “Fifteen,” she said suspiciously, handing it back to me.

  “Right.” I knew I didn’t look my age. There was, I realized, no question of being up-front about Popper since a big sign by the desk said in red letters NO DOGS, CATS, BIRDS, RODENTS, REPTILES, OR OTHER ANIMALS WILL BE TRANSPORTED.

  As for the bus itself, I was in luck: there was a 1:45 a.m. with connections to New York departing the station in fifteen minutes. As the machine spat out my ticket with a mechanical smack, I stood in a daze wondering what the hell to do about Popper. Walking outside, I was half-hoping my cab driver had driven off—perhaps having whisked Popper away to some more loving and secure home—but instead I found him drinking a can of Red Bull and talking on his cell phone, Popper nowhere in sight. He got off his call when he saw me standing there. “What do you think?”

  “Where is he?” Groggily, I looked in the back seat. “What’d you do with him?”

  He laughed. “Now you don’t and… now you do!” With a flourish, he removed the messily-folded copy of USA Today from the canvas bag on the front seat beside him; and there, settled contentedly in a cardboard box at the bottom of the bag, crunching on some potato chips, was Popper.

  “Misdirection,” he said. “The box fills out the bag so it doesn’t look dog-shaped and gives him a little more room to move around. And the newspaper—perfect prop. Covers him up, makes the bag look full, doesn’t add any weight.”

  “Do you think it’ll be all right?”

  “Well, I mean, he’s such a little guy—what, five pounds, six? Is he quiet?”

  I looked at him doubtfully, curled at the bottom of the box. “Not always.”