Because It Is My Blood (6 page)

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

“You’ll have to explain that to me sometime.”

Simon Green’s laughter was drowned out by a sickening scream followed by an ominous thud. My head was thrust forward into the seat in front of me. There were more screams, and then the bus came to a stop. Simon Green grabbed my arm. “Anya, are you all right?”

My neck hurt a little but other than that, I felt fine. “What just happened?”

“We must have hit something,” Simon Green said in a dazed voice. I turned to look at him. There was a gash on his right temple where his glasses had pierced his skin. “Mr. Green, you’re bleeding!”

“Oh dear,” Simon Green said weakly.

I ordered him to hold his head back. Then I took off my jacket so that I could use it to sop up the blood.

“Everyone stay on the bus!” the driver barked. “There’s been an accident.”

Obviously. I looked out the window. In the middle of Madison Avenue, a girl of about my age was lying unconscious. Her limbs were contorted into catastrophic angles. The worst part was her head, which had nearly twisted off her neck. Only a small band of skin was keeping her from being decapitated.

“Simon,” I said. “I don’t think she’s going to live.”

Simon leaned over me to examine the scene. “Oh dear,” he whispered just before he passed out.

*   *   *

At the hospital, I waited while they examined Simon Green. The doctors determined that, aside from blood loss, there was nothing seriously wrong with him. They stitched up the gash on his temple. Because he had passed out, they were making him stay the night for observation.

I had called Mr. Kipling, who assured me he was on his way. Simon Green and I watched the news on his slate while we waited for Mr. Kipling to arrive. The lead story was about the bus accident. “In Midtown today, several were injured when a city bus bearing a Charles Delacroix campaign advertisement struck a pedestrian.”

“Ooh,” Simon Green said, “bad publicity. The Delacroix people must be furious.”

The news cut to a man-on-the-street interview. “The girl—she must have been sixteen, seventeen—she was crossing in the middle of the street when
boom
. And next I know, she’s lying there on the ground with her head nearly cut off. Poor thing. You can’t help but feel for the parents in cases like this.”

The reporter broke in. “The teenager was pronounced dead at the scene. The other injured passengers were taken to Mount Sinai Hospital. In an unusual coincidence, Anya Balanchine, the daughter of notorious crime boss Leonyd Balanchine, was also a passenger on the bus and is believed to be seriously injured.”

“That is so annoying!” I yelled at the screen. “I’m not injured. I’m fine!”

Simon Green shrugged.

“They have no right releasing my name,” I grumbled.

“Last spring, Anya Balanchine was arrested for the shooting of her own cousin, who had been trying to shoot Anya Balanchine’s boyfriend at the time, William Delacroix, the son of acting District Attorney Charles Delacroix.”

“His name is Win!” I objected.

“Although Charles Delacroix initially led in the polls, in the last month his major challenger, the Independent Party candidate, Bertha Sinclair, has narrowed the gap to five points. It’s too early to see how this latest incident will impact voters.”

“Like it’s his fault a bus with his picture on it hit that girl,” Simon Green commented.

A nurse knocked on the doorframe. “There’s a man here for you,” she said to me. “Is it okay if I let him in?”

“Yes, we’re expecting him.”

The nurse went to fetch Mr. Kipling.

I sat down on the side of Simon Green’s hospital bed. This whole day had been ridiculously frustrating and yet, I had to count my blessings. That girl had been my age and I’m sure she hadn’t woken up this morning thinking she was going to die. Blessing number nine: At least I haven’t been hit by a bus and decapitated. Despite everything, I started to laugh.

“What’s funny?” Simon Green asked.

“I’m just glad—” I started to say, and then Simon Green cut me off.

“Hey, that’s not Mr. Kipling!” he said.

I turned. Through the window in Simon Green’s hospital room, I saw Win. He was wearing his Trinity uniform. Win waved at me.

“I’ll only be a moment,” I said to Simon Green. I stood up, straightened my skirt, and went out to the hallway.

“You look pretty good for a gal who’s seriously injured,” Win greeted me. His voice was casual. “You wore that to your cousin’s wedding.”

I looked down at my jacket, which was stained with Simon Green’s blood. “I’ll never be able to wear it again.” It would not be the first (or the last) of my clothing to meet such an end. I offered him my hand to shake but he embraced me instead. It was a hard embrace, one that hurt my still sore neck, one that lasted too long. “I was on the bus but they got everything else wrong,” I said.

“I can see that.”

“Why are you here?” I asked.

Win shook his head. “I was nearby when I heard about the accident. And I wanted to make sure you weren’t dying. We’re still friends, aren’t we, Anya?”

I didn’t know if we were friends. “Where’s your girlfriend?”

Win told me she was in the lobby.

“And she doesn’t mind that you’re here?”

“No, Allie knows that you are important to me.”

Allie.
The l’s replaced the n’s, and it was like I had never existed. “You shouldn’t be here,” I told him.

“Why?”

“Because…” I couldn’t make myself say all the reasons. Because we didn’t belong to each other anymore. Because it hurt me to be near him. Because I had promised his father. Because his father had the ability to make my life very difficult if I didn’t keep my promise.

“Anya, if you thought I was dying, wouldn’t you come?” Win asked.

I was still considering this question when Mr. Kipling arrived. Upon seeing Win, Mr. Kipling looked more than a little nonplussed. “Why are
you
here?” Mr. Kipling spat at him.

“I’m going now,” Win said.

“Be careful how you leave, son. The paparazzi have just arrived. They’re probably looking for a shot of an injured Anya Balanchine, but I bet they’d settle for a shot of the acting district attorney’s son. And you know what would really drive everyone mad with delight? A shot of you and Anya together.”

Win said that he had learned a secret way out of the hospital from when he’d stayed there last spring and that that was how he and Alison would go. “No one will ever know I was here.”

“Good. Do that. Now,” Mr. Kipling ordered. “Anya, I’m going to go see how Simon is doing but I don’t want you to go home without me. I should be there to shield you from the reporters.” Mr. Kipling went into Simon’s room.

“Well,” Win began once we were alone. He stood up straight and took my hand in both of his. “I am relieved that you are well,” he said in a strangely formal way.

“Um, okay. I am relieved that … you are relieved.”

He released my hand. As he turned away, he stumbled a bit over his cane. “I was hoping for a more elegant exit,” he said.

I smiled, reminding myself that I didn’t love him one bit, and then I went back into Simon Green’s room.

*   *   *

It was almost nine by the time Mr. Kipling and I were finally in the elevator and on our way out of the hospital. “I’ve got a car waiting for us. If there are any reporters still out there, let me do the talking,” Mr. Kipling said.

“There she is!”

There were probably only a handful of cameras, but the flashes were still blinding in the darkness.

“Anya, are you glad to be out of the hospital?” one of the reporters called.

Mr. Kipling walked in front of me. “Anya is happy to have escaped serious injury,” he said. “She’s had a very long day, folks, and she just wants to go home.” He led me by my elbow toward the curb, where the car was parked.

“Anya, Anya, how was Liberty?” another reporter yelled.

“Give us a quote about Charles Delacroix! Do you hold him accountable for the bus accident? Do you think he’ll win the election?”

Mr. Kipling had gotten into the car, and I was about to follow him when something stopped me. “Wait,” I said. “I do have something I want to say.”

“Anya,” Mr. Kipling whispered, “what in the world are you doing?”

“The girl who died today. She was my age,” I said. “She was crossing the street and then she was gone. I am sorry for her friends, her family, and especially her parents. It is a tragedy. I would hope that the fact that an infamous person was riding on the bus wouldn’t take away from that.”

I got into the car, then pulled the door shut.

Mr. Kipling patted me on the shoulder. “Well done, Annie. Your Father would be proud.”

When I got home, Imogen and Natty were waiting for me, and no small amount of tears was shed over my safe homecoming. I told them they were making too much of it, but it was nice to know that my absence had not gone without notice. It could not be denied that I had been worried over. I was missed. I was loved. Yes, I was loved. And in that, at least, I was blessed.

III

I RESUME MY EDUCATION;
MY PRAYERS ARE ANSWERED; MONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO ’ROUND

B
Y THE FOLLOWING MONDAY,
Charles Delacroix was down two points in the latest Quinnipiac polls, officially putting him in a dead heat with Bertha Sinclair, and I was still no closer to finding a school. Mr. Kipling and I discussed both these issues in our daily phone call. We kept the calls pretty short to manage costs, but their profligate regularity was a sign of just how worried about me Mr. Kipling was.

“Do you think it was the bus?” I asked.

“That and—you won’t like hearing this, Anya—the fact that you were on the bus allowed the Sinclair people to dredge up the old story about you and Charles Delacroix and his son. There are some people who think your sentence to Liberty was too light and showed favoritism, and the Sinclair campaign is playing right into that.”

“Too light? Obviously they’ve never stayed there,” I quipped.

“True, true.”

“You know, Simon likes him. Charles Delacroix, I mean.”

Mr. Kipling laughed. “Yes, I think my young colleague has a bit of a crush. Ever since he talked to him last September to arrange your release from Liberty.

“Anya, I hope you won’t think this is an invasion of your privacy, but I had a question I wanted to ask you.” He inhaled. “Why was Win at the hospital?”

I told him I had no idea.

“If you’re still with him, as your attorney, that’s something I should know.”

“Mr. Kipling,” I said, “Win has a new girlfriend, though I do think he has the tragically misguided idea that we should still be friends.” I told him about Alison Wheeler and how they had rekindled a romance while working on Charles Delacroix’s campaign.

“I am sorry, Anya, but I can’t pretend to be anything but relieved.”

I had wrapped the phone cord around my wrist. My hand was starting to turn white for lack of blood.

“Onward! Let’s talk schools,” Mr. Kipling said brightly.

“Did you find something?”

“No, but I had an idea I wanted to run by you. What would you think of homeschooling?”

“Homeschooling?” I repeated.

“Yes, you’d finish up your senior year at home. We’d hire a tutor or
tutors
even. You’d still take your college entrance exams…” Mr. Kipling rambled on about homeschooling, but I had stopped listening. Wasn’t homeschooling for the socially maladjusted? The outcasts? But then, I suppose I was well on my way to being both. “So?” Mr. Kipling said.

“Kind of feels like giving up,” I replied after a pause.

“Not giving up. Just a little retreat until we can come up with something better.”

“Well, on a positive note, I guess I’d graduate top of my class.”

“That’s the spirit, Annie.”

Mr. Kipling and I said goodbye and then I hung up the phone. It was only ten in the morning, and I had nothing to do for the rest of the day except to wait for Natty to come home. I couldn’t help but think of Leo after he’d lost his job last year. Was this how he had felt? Forgotten, discarded, outcast?

I missed my brother.

Natty and I hadn’t made it to church on Sunday, so, lacking other plans, I decided to go.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, the church Natty and I went to was St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I loved the place even if it was falling apart. I’d seen pictures of it from one hundred years ago, back when it still had turrets and there hadn’t been a hole in the ceiling. But I was fond of that hole actually. I liked to be able to see the sky when I was praying.

I put some money in the basket for the campaign to restore St. Patrick’s and went into the nave. The kind of people in a church in a decaying city in the middle of a Monday morning were a pretty sad lot—aged, homeless. I was the only teenage girl there.

I sat down in a pew and crossed myself.

I said my usual prayers for my mother and father in Heaven. I asked God to watch over Leo in Japan. I thanked Him that I had been able to keep us safe to this point.

And then I asked for something for myself. “Please,” I whispered, “let me figure out a way to graduate on time.” I knew it was kind of a silly thing to want, considering the more complex problems in my life and in the world in general. For the record, I also thought it was cheap to use prayer in this way—God wasn’t Santa Claus. But I had sacrificed a lot and well, the heart wanted what it wanted, and sometimes what the heart wanted was to walk down the aisle at its high school graduation.

When I got back from church, the phone was ringing.

“This is Mr. Rose. I’m the school secretary at Holy Trinity. I’d like to talk to Anya Balanchine.”

So Trinity had finally hired a new school secretary. That had only taken two years. “This is she.”

“The headmaster requests an audience with you tomorrow morning at nine. Are you free?”

“What is this about?” I asked. It could, for instance, have been something to do with my little sister.

“Headmaster prefers to discuss the details in person.”

*   *   *

I did not tell Natty or Scarlet about my meeting nor did I wear my Trinity uniform. I did not want to presume what I so desperately hoped—that somehow, somehow, the administrative board at Holy Trinity had revised their decision, that they were taking pity on me and were allowing me to return for my senior year.