“Still in bed. She had a hard time falling asleep last night, according to Eunice.” Gia opened the front door. “Have a good game.”
Jack’s expression turned sour. “Sure.”
She watched him drive back to the corner and turn downtown on Sutton Place. She wondered what was going on in his mind; why the odd warning against drinking “anything strange.” Just to be sure, Gia went up to the second floor and checked through all the bottles on Grace’s vanity and in her bathroom closet. Everything had a brand name. Nothing like the unlabeled bottle Jack had found on Thursday.
She took two Advils and a long hot shower. The combination worked to ease her headache. By the time she’d dried off and dressed in plaid shorts and a blouse, Vicky was up and looking for breakfast.
“What do you feel like eating?” she asked as they passed the parlor on their way to the kitchen. She looked cute in her pink nightie and her fuzzy pink Dearfoams.
“Chocolate!”
“Vicky!”
“But it looks so good!” She pointed to where Eunice had set out a candy dish full of the Black Magic pieces.
“You know what it does to you.”
“But it would be delicious!”
“All right,” Gia said. “Have a piece. If you think a couple of bites in a couple of minutes is worth a whole day of swelling up and itching and feeling sick, go ahead and take one.”
Vicky looked up at her, and then at the chocolates. Gia held her breath, praying Vicky would make the right choice. If she chose the chocolate, Gia would have to stop her, but there was a chance she would use her head and refuse. Gia wanted to know which it would be. Those chocolates would be sitting there for days, a constant temptation to sneak one behind her mother’s back. But if Vicky could overcome the temptation now, on her own, Gia was sure she’d be able to resist for the rest of their stay.
“I think I’ll have an orange, Mom.”
Gia swept her up into her arms and swung her around.
“I’m so proud of you, Vicky! That was a very grown-up decision.”
“Well, what I’d really like is a chocolate-covered orange.”
Laughing, she led Vicky by the hand to the kitchen, feeling pretty good about her daughter and about herself as a mother.
3
Jack had the Lincoln Tunnel pretty much to himself. He passed the stripe that marked the border of New York and New Jersey, remembering how his brother and sister and he used to cheer whenever they crossed the line after spending a day in the city with their parents. It had always been a thrill then to be back in good ol’ New Jersey.
Those days were gone, along with the two-way toll collections. Now they charged you double to get into Manhattan and let you leave for nothing. And he didn’t cheer as he crossed the line.
He cruised out of the tunnel mouth, squinting into the sudden glare of the morning sun. The ramp made a nearly circular turn up to and through Union City, then down to the Meadowlands and the New Jersey Turnpike. Jack pushed his speed to 65 miles per hour and settled into the right lane. He was running a little late, but the last thing he wanted was to be stopped by a state cop.
The olfactory adventure began as the Turnpike wound its way through the swampy lowlands, past Port Newark and all the surrounding refineries and chemical plants. Smoke poured from stacks and torchlike flames roared from ten-story discharge towers. The odors encountered on the strip between Exits 16 and 12 were varied and uniformly noxious. Even on a Sunday morning.
But as the road drifted inland, the scenery gradually turned rural and hilly and sweet smelling. The farther south he drove, the further his thoughts were pulled into the past. Images streaked by with the mile markers: strange adventures in the Pine Barrens … Mr. Canelli and his lawn … early fix-it jobs around Burlington County during his late teens, usually involving vandals, always contracted sub rosa … starting Rutgers but keeping his repairs business going on the side … the first trips to New York to do fix-it work for relatives of former customers …
Tension began building in him after he passed Exit 7. Jack knew the reason: He was approaching the spot where his mother had been killed.
It was also the spot where he had—how had Kolabati put it?—“drawn the line between yourself and the rest of the human race.”
It had happened during his third year at Rutgers. A Sunday night in early January. Jack was on semester break, he and his parents driving south on the Turnpike after visiting his Aunt Doris in Hightstown; Jack had the back seat, his folks the front, Dad driving. Jack had offered to take the wheel, but his mother said the way he wove in and out of all those trucks made her nervous.
As he remembered it, he and his father had been discussing the upcoming Super Bowl while his mother watched the speedometer to make sure it didn’t stray too far over the limit. The easy, peaceful feeling that comes with a full stomach after a lazy winter afternoon spent with relatives was shattered as they cruised under an overpass.
With a crash like thunder and an impact that shook the car, the right half of the windshield exploded into countless flying, glittering fragments. He heard his father shout with surprise, his mother scream in pain, felt a blast of icy air rip through the car. His mother moaned and vomited.
As his father swerved the car to the side of the road, Jack jumped into the front seat and realized what had happened: A cinder block had crashed through the windshield and landed against his mother’s lower ribs and upper abdomen.
Jack didn’t know what to do. As he watched helplessly, his mother passed out and slumped forward. He shouted to get to the nearest hospital. His father drove like a demon, flooring the pedal, blowing the horn and blinking the headlights while Jack pushed his mother’s limp body back and pulled the cinder block off her. Then he removed his coat and wrapped it around her as protection against the cold gale whistling through the hole in the windshield.
His mother vomited once more—this time all blood, splattering the dashboard and what was left of the windshield. As he held her, Jack could feel her growing cold, could sense the life slipping out of her. He knew she was bleeding internally, but there was nothing he could do about it. He screamed at his father to hurry, but he was already driving as fast as he could without losing control of the car.
She was in deep shock by the time they got her to the emergency room. She died on the way to surgery: a lacerated liver and a ruptured spleen. She’d exsanguinated into her abdominal cavity.
The incalculable grief. The interminable wake and funeral. And afterward, questions: Who? Why? The police didn’t know and doubted very much that they would ever find out. It was common for kids to go up on the overpass at night and drop things through the cyclone fencing onto the cars streaming by below. By the time an incident was reported, the culprits were long gone. The State Police response to any and all appeals from Jack and his father was a helpless shrug.
His father withdrew: The senselessness of the tragedy had thrown him into a sort of emotional catatonia in which he appeared to function normally but felt absolutely nothing.
Jack’s response was something else: cold, nerveless, consuming rage. He was faced with a new kind of fix-it job. He knew where it had happened. He knew how. All he had to do was find out who.
He would do nothing else, think of nothing else, until that job was done.
And eventually it was done.
A decade and a half … a lifetime ago. Yet as he approached that overpass he felt his throat constrict. He could almost see a cinder block falling … tumbling toward the windshield … crashing through in a blizzard of glass fragments … crushing him. Then he was under and in shadow, and for an instant it was nighttime and snowing, and hanging off the other side of the overpass he saw a limp, battered body dangling from a rope tied to its feet, swinging and spinning crazily. Then it was gone and he was back in the August sun again.
He shivered. He hated New Jersey.
4
Jack got off at Exit 5. He took 541 through Mount Holly and
continued south on the two-lane blacktop through towns that were little more than groups of buildings clustered along a stretch of road like a crowd around an accident. The spaces between were all open cultivated field. Fresh produce stands advertising Jersey Beefsteak tomatoes dotted the roadside. He reminded himself to pick up a basketful for Abe on the way back.
He passed through Lumberton, a name that always conjured up ponderous images of morbidly obese people waddling in and out of oversized stores and houses. Next came Fostertown, which should have been populated by a horde of homeless runny-nosed waifs, but wasn’t.
Finally Johnson, NJ, on the edge of the fabled Jersey Pine Barrens.
And then he was turning the corner by what had been Mr. Canelli’s house. Canelli had died and the new owner must have been trying to save water, because the lawn had burned to a uniform shade of pale brown. He pulled into the driveway of the three-bedroom ranch in which he, his brother, and his sister had all grown up, turned off the car, and sat a moment wishing he were someplace else.
No sense in delaying the inevitable, so he got out and walked up to the door. Dad pushed it open just as he reached it.
“Jack!” He thrust out his hand. “You had me worried. Thought you’d forgotten.”
His father was a tall, thin, balding man tanned a dark brown from daily workouts on the local tennis courts. His beakish nose was pink and peeling from sunburn, and the age spots on his forehead had multiplied and coalesced since the last time Jack had visited. But his grip was firm and his blue eyes bright behind the steel-rimmed glasses as Jack shook hands with him.
“Only a few minutes late.”
Dad reached down and picked up his tennis racquet from where it had been leaning against the door molding. “Yeah, but I reserved a court so we could warm up a little before the match.” He closed the door behind him. “Let’s take your car. You remember where the courts are?”
“Of course.”
As he slid into the front seat, Dad glanced around the interior of the Corvair. He touched the dice, either to see if they were fuzzy or if they were real.
“You really drive around in this?”
“Sure. Why?”
“It’s…”
“Unsafe at Any Speed?”
“Yeah. That too.”
“Best car I ever owned.”
Jack pushed the little lever in the far left of the dashboard into reverse and pulled out of the driveway.
For a couple of blocks they made inconsequential small talk about the weather, and how smoothly Jack’s decades-old car was running, and the traffic on the Turnpike. Jack tried to keep the conversation on neutral ground. They hadn’t had much to say to each other since Jack dropped out of college all those years ago.
“How’s business?”
Dad smiled. “Great. You’ve been buying any of those stocks I told you about?”
“I bought two thousand of Arizona Petrol at one-and-an-eighth. It was up to four last time I looked.”
“Closed at four-and-a-quarter on Friday. Hold onto it.”
“Okay. Just let me know when to dump it.”
A lie. Jack couldn’t own stock. He needed a Social Security number for that. No broker would open an account for him without it. So he lied to his father about following his stock tips and looked up the NASDAQ listings every so often to see how his imaginary investments were doing.
They were all doing well. Dad had a knack for finding low-priced, out-of-the-way OTC stocks that were undervalued. He’d buy a few thousand shares, watch the price double, triple, or quadruple, then sell off and find another. He’d done so well at it over the years that he quit his accounting job to spend his mornings wheeling and dealing. He was happy. He was living by his wits and seemed to love it, looking more relaxed than Jack could ever remember.
“If I come up with something better, I’ll let you know. Then you can parlay your AriPet earnings into even more. By the way, did you buy the stock through a personal account or your IRA?”
“Uh … the IRA.”
Another lie. Jack couldn’t have an IRA account either. Sometimes he wearied of lying to everybody, especially people he should be able to trust.
“Good! When you don’t think you’ll be holding them long enough to qualify for capital gains, use the IRA.”
He knew what his father was up to. Dad figured that as an appliance repairman Jack would wind up depending on Social Security after he retired, and nobody could live off that. He was trying to help his prodigal son build up a nest egg for his old age.
They pulled into the lot by the two municipal courts. Both were occupied.
“Guess we’re out of luck.”
Dad waved a slip of paper. “No worry. This says court two is reserved for us between ten and eleven.”
While Jack fished in the back seat for his new racquet and the can of balls, his father went over to the couple who now occupied court two. The fellow was grumpily packing up their gear as Jack arrived. The girl—she looked to be about nineteen—glared at him as she sipped from a half-pint container of chocolate milk.
“Guess it’s who you know instead of who got here first.”
Jack tried a friendly smile. “No. Just who thinks ahead and gets a reservation.”
She shrugged. “It’s a rich man’s sport. Should’ve known better than to try to take it up.”
“Let’s not turn this into a class war, shall we?”
“Who? Me?” she said with an innocent smile. “I wouldn’t think of it.”
With that she poured the rest of her chocolate milk onto the court just behind the baseline.
Jack set his teeth and turned his back on her. What he really wanted to do was see if she could swallow a tennis racquet. He relaxed a little as he began to rally with his father. Jack’s tennis game had long since stabilized at a level of mediocrity he felt he could live with.
He was feeling fit today; he liked the balance of the racquet, the way the ball came off the strings, but the knowledge that there was a puddle of souring chocolate milk somewhere behind him on the asphalt rippled his concentration.
“You’re taking your eye off the ball!” Dad called from the other end of the court after Jack’s third wild shot in a row.
I know!
The last thing he needed now was a tennis lesson. He concentrated fully on the next ball, backpedaling, watching it all the way up to his racquet strings. He threw his body into the forehand shot, giving it as much topspin as he could to make it go low over the net and kick when it bounced. Suddenly his right foot was slipping. He went down in a spray of warm chocolate milk.
Across the net, his father returned the ball with a drop shot that rolled dead two feet from the service line. He looked at Jack and began to laugh.
It was going to be a very long day.
5
Kolabati paced the apartment, clutching the empty bottle that had once held the rakoshi elixir, waiting for Kusum. Again and again her mind ranged over the sequence of events last night. First, her brother disappeared from the reception; then the rakosh odor at Jack’s apartment and the eyes he said he’d seen. There had to be a link between Kusum and the rakoshi. And she was determined to find it. But first she had to find Kusum and keep track of him. Where did he go at night?
The morning wore on. By noon, when she had begun to fear he would not show up at all, she heard the sound of his key in the door.
Kusum entered, looking tired and preoccupied. He glanced up and saw her.
“Bati. I thought you’d be with your American lover.”
“I’ve been waiting all morning for you.”
“Why? Have you thought of a new way to torment me since last night?”
This wasn’t going the way Kolabati wanted. She’d planned a rational discussion with her brother. To this end, she’d dressed in a long-sleeved, high-collared white blouse and baggy white slacks.
“No one has tormented you,” she said with a small smile and a placating tone. “At least not intention
ally.”
He made a guttural sound. “I sincerely doubt that.”
“The world is changing. I’ve learned to change with it. So must you.”
“Certain things never change.”
He started toward his room. Kolabati had to stop him before he locked himself away in there.
“That is true. I have one of those unchanging things in my hand.”
Kusum stopped and looked at her. She held up the bottle, watching his face closely. His expression registered nothing but puzzlement. If he recognized the bottle, he hid it well.
“I’m in no mood for games, Bati.”
“I assure you, my brother, this is no game.” She removed the top and held the bottle out to him. “Tell me if you recognize the odor.”
Kusum took the bottle and held it under his long nose. His eyes widened.
“This cannot be! It’s impossible!”
“You can’t deny the testament of your senses.”
He glared at her. “First you embarrass me, now you try to make a fool of me as well!”
“It was in Jack’s apartment last night!”
Kusum held it up to his nose again. Shaking his head, he went to an overstuffed couch nearby and sank into it.
“I don’t understand this,” he said in a tired voice.
Kolabati seated herself opposite him. “Of course you do.”
His head snapped up, his eyes challenging her. “Are you calling me a liar?”
Kolabati looked away. Rakoshi were in New York. Kusum was in New York. She could imagine no circumstances under which these two facts could exist independently of each other. Yet she sensed that now was not the right time to let Kusum know how certain she was of his involvement. He was already on guard. Any more signs of suspicion on her part and he would shut her out completely.
“What am I supposed to think?” she told him. “Are we not Keepers? The only Keepers?”
“But you saw the egg. How can you doubt me?”
She heard a note of pleading in his voice, of a man who wanted very much to be believed. He was so convincing. Kolabati was sorely tempted to take his word.