Brooklyn Graves (3 page)

And that was how I learned Dima had died.

Alex and Chris have been friends since first grade. Natalya, his mother, was the secretary in the upper-school office. And Dima was the chief school custodian, handyman, friend to everyone in the school community, a vigorous man in his forties who could fix anything, build anything. I had a sudden picture of him walking the school roof to repair a leak.

One part of my mind said he could not possibly be dead, just like that, that it was impossible, but another part said, “You know better. You know better than most.”

“That's all? There was no more information?” A stupid thing to say to these grieving girls; my mouth was moving on autopilot.

The girls all shook their heads, solemnly. Then one of them said, “But you know, it felt all day like there was something. Didn't it? Teachers looked weird and, I don't know, it just felt like there is more that they aren't telling us. Something they don't want us to know, right?”

“It wouldn't be helpful to spread stories like that, Heather.” I hoped I'd said it gently. “I know you are all very upset, but wait until someone really knows the facts.”

“Wait, wait, I have a text.” Melanie turned the annoying tune off and consulted her phone. “Dan. Alex's best friend.”

She turned even paler and passed her phone around. Each girl gasped as she read it.

I was last. “Alex's dad killed. Not accident. More later.”

Chapter Two

I had to blink and read it a second time and then a third. It was the girls' sobbing again that brought me back to the moment.

I was shaking right down to my damp, worn-out loafers, but I was the grown-up here.

“Come on, girls.” I kept my arm around Chris. “We can't talk here on the street. Hot chocolate?”

“Thank you, but…” All the girls had plans. School activities had been cancelled, but there were other responsibilities—babysitting, lab notes to do together, allergist appointment.

“Chris, honey, I'm going to skip out on work and go home. I just need to go back for a few minutes. Do you want to wait?”

She was blinking back tears. “I'll go home with Mel and see you later.” They walked off, supportive arms around each other's shoulders.

Everyone at the school knew Natalya and Dima. Their school jobs made it possible to send their son to this excellent—and expensive—private school. Russian immigrants, they lived for their only child's future. This would affect the school world in ways I could not even imagine.

I returned to my cubicle in a fog, collected some items, and sent a terse message to Eliot that I was taking off for the rest of the day. I wanted a stiff drink, and the chance to dial my mind all the way down to “off.” I resolved to think about Dima and his family when I knew something. I would not let it take over all my thoughts right now.

Of course that didn't work out.

We had become acquainted years ago. Our children were best friends when they still wore nametags for class outings. And we became friends as parents, perhaps because I was almost as lost in this world as they were. Our children were scholarship kids in a rich kids' school.

I could not forget that Alex and Chris now had another bond: young people whose fathers had died. And I would have to reach out to Natalya soon. As I drove home, a giant headache was forming behind my eyes.

I told myself I had work to do. I was falling behind. I only worked at the museum part-time, with the rest of my week supposedly devoted to writing my dissertation on urban history. I was examining the effects of new immigration on old neighborhoods and comparing changes from overseas immigration to changes from gentrification. It was the old yet always current story of life in Brooklyn.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I lived in a neighborhood that was the perfect laboratory for it. The heart of Park Slope had been the height of elegance when new, with mansions on the park and modest homes at the edges. Then it deteriorated badly in the post-World War II decades. Later it was rediscovered, rebuilt, and gentrified to a fare-thee-well, with chic restaurants replacing the bars where old men drank beer at eleven in the morning. It had been through all the cycles.

I, myself, am not a gentrifier. Not even close. My shabby house is at the still-kind-of-gritty, not-really-renovated end of the neighborhood—a long way from the official historic district and out of zoning for the excellent public schools.

I'm a kind of immigrant, though, even if my trip was nothing compared to Natalya and Dima's. My home turf was a completely different Brooklyn, only a few miles away but another world, where a trip to Manhattan was a twice-a-year excursion; college was a short bus ride away, just like high school; moms stayed at home if they could and dads were cops or cab drivers; and most people married and settled down around the corner from their parents. I was happy with that life. too, until I had to move away from those memories and build new ones.

Sometimes I feel a bit like a stranger in a strange land, but my daughter has no other memories. She takes the subway with her friends to Manhattan concerts, has been eating dim sum with chopsticks since she was six, and knows how to order ballet tickets. She doesn't think twice about it. And living where we do, she also doesn't think twice about families with different languages, different colors—even in one family—or families with adopted children or with two moms, or two dads.

Thinking about Chris brought me back to Alex to Natalya to Dima. That was when I gave up on work and curled up under my down comforter, thinking about my friend and what she was feeling right now.

I woke when I heard Chris' backpack hit the floor downstairs.

“Chris?” I was confused. How long had I slept? “I'm up here, honey.”

She came clattering up the stairs and into the dark room, flipping on the light as she did. She opened one of the built-in shutters, too, folding it back into its slot, but the light from outside was dim.

“Chris? Is it night? How late is it?”

“Nope, it's dark because it's pouring again. But it is dinnertime. Aren't you getting up?'

“Oh. Sure. Let me go splash some water on my face.” I hugged her as I went past. “I am so glad you're here.”

She hugged back briefly, in that teenage way of not wanting to show she needed one.

I returned with my eyes wide open and my brain almost back on. “Ok. Let's warm up some chicken soup for supper and then tell me what's going on.”

It was canned soup with leftover supermarket barbecue chicken added—I have no time for making homemade soups—but the comforting smells filled the kitchen anyway.

“Is there news from Alex?”

“No.”

“Or Natalya?”

She shook her head. “That assembly at school tomorrow? I guess they'll tell us more then.”

To each of the two steaming bowls on the kitchen counter, I added a fluffy dumpling, a matzo ball—right out of the freezer, but filling and familiar. We ate in silence. I could tell Chris wanted to talk, and I waited.

“What was it like?” She was looking into her soup bowl, chasing down a slice of carrot. “I want to know what it's like for Alex.”

My mom “Danger” light went on. This felt like thin ice.

“What do you mean?”

“Mom, you know. When my own father…”

She doesn't remember. She was three. We were too young to have a baby, too poor, and too stupid to be anything but happy. She was a honeymoon baby and I was twenty-four when he was killed.

If she was asking, I had to answer her. It had been a long time since she asked me. Much as I wanted to run far away, maybe we were both ready. Anyway, ready or not, I had to answer her.

“He was a firefighter, a dangerous job. We talked about that when he started, but he loved being active and we knew a desk job just was not for him. Then he went and died so stupidly, hit by a drunk driver while he was riding his bike.”

Chris nodded. She knew this part.

“I remember, it was a beautiful day, and I said, ‘Sure, go for a ride. Enjoy your day off.' Later, I felt like ‘how could the sun still be shining?'”

“Mom, we don't have to, if you can't…”

“I'm okay.” If I wasn't I had to be a mom now and fake it. “The police came to the door and told me there was an accident. I kind of fell apart and I remember being embarrassed, but they were used to that. My friend down the hall came for you and they took me to the hospital. And they didn't tell me, but from the way they looked, I guessed he was already gone, and I was right. I saw him, and touched him but it…it wasn't him.”

I had to stop.

“And then?”

“You know, after that it's kind of a blur. Soon his parents were there, and my parents, and I went back to Grandma and Grandpa's house with them. Really, I was in shock for a long time. You know I wasn't even ten years older than you are now.”

Chris was silent for a long time before the next question. “Where was I?”

“Someone brought you over there. They had a bed for you in their house, and we just stayed for a while. Quite a while.”

“It's different for Alex, I guess. I mean he knows everything that's happening. I don't even remember when I had a father. Did I even know something happened?”

“Yes and no. We could not really explain it to you, but you knew everything was different, and you had your tantrums. You knew your daddy wasn't there and you didn't understand where he had gone.”

I could not tell her about the times, when I thought I would actually, literally, die of the grief. And how, when she was an inconsolable three-year-old wailing, “I want Daddy! I want Daddy!” I did not know how I could go on.

Another long silence, and then, “That will be something I will always share with Alex, isn't it? Missing fathers?”

I held her hands for both our sakes. “You might want to think about how to be a good friend right now.”

She nodded, withdrew her hands, and went upstairs without another word.

Me, I was exhausted both physically and mentally. This day felt endless. Yet my mind was jumping all over, and I found myself wandering from living room to kitchen, peering into the refrigerator and then closing it, picking up the phone and putting it down again. I had twelve people on speed dial; I didn't feel like talking to any of them. I didn't know what I wanted.

My restless eyes fell on the daypack I carry to work and school, then on the books about Tiffany I had been given that afternoon. Funny how long ago it seemed now. Not so funny, really.

Sometimes, when nothing else makes sense, work is the anchor. I had to learn that lesson a long time ago, so I pulled out the books and notebooks and curled up on the couch, prepared to spend an hour or two tightly focused on learning something new about Tiffany. It didn't matter what—anything that would be, one, useful for my work and, two, not at all related to my real life. I would work for an hour, clear my head, and with luck, unwind enough to fall asleep.

Instead, I got lost in Tiffany's time and place, turn-of-the-last-century New York, when a woman daring to take part in the new bicycling craze had to manage ankle-length skirts, when the opening of the first subway line had the entire city excited, and young Teddy Roosevelt was running for governor. Women still couldn't vote, and yet, I learned, there was a whole team of women working for Tiffany, living independently and making art. They were the “New Women” of a century ago. I couldn't stop reading and I couldn't wait to dig into our just-found collection of letters to see if the previously unknown Maude Cooper was one of them.

Hours later, I woke up on the couch, facedown on the open books and my head full of glowing stained-glass flowers and young women in Gibson Girl shirtwaists and enormous hats trimmed with glowing flowers and feathers. But in my dreams, they all seemed to be walking around a glowing stained-glass cemetery.

Chris was gently shaking me.

“Wake up. Why are you here? “

“Why are you here? Middle of the night? Why are you up?”

Her face was white in the lamplight.

“It's almost morning. Alex sent a note to all his friends.”

She handed me the phone. The message wasn't in text-speak but written out.

“Up all night. Can't sleep. Dad shot. We found him on our lawn yesterday AM.”

I dropped the phone as if it burned. I could not make my mind process this horrifying piece of news. I grew up around cops, and anyone who's ever watched a cop show on TV would have the same thought: This looks like an ugly message from some very ugly people. How could that possibly be about Dima, who was the nicest man and a straight arrow if there ever was one?

What could I possibly say to Chris about this? Nothing this evil had ever touched her life. Then I saw she was not looking to me. She was madly texting, so her friends were up, too, looking to each other for some measure of comfort.

Gray light was reaching into the house, so it was already dawn. No point in going back to bed. I made a pot of coffee and even poured a mug for Chris. This was no ordinary morning. I found pancake mix way in the back of a cupboard and threw together a stack of them.

She was ready for school early instead of the usual mad rush, and Melanie stopped by to walk to the subway together. I was awake now, and two mugs of coffee insured I would not go back to sleep. I might as well go to work early too.

***

Before I left home I had an e-mail from a Ryan Ames with the subject line “Dr. Thomas Flint assistant.” I briefly considered a quick delete, followed by a claim that it had never arrived. I did not want to deal with any of this today.

Nope, I knew I had to be a grown-up.

It said “Professor Flint wants us to meet as soon as possible to begin working on the information you discussed. I will be at the museum at noon sharp today.”

Oh, I could hardly wait. He sounded as arrogant as his boss. What if I did not work that day? What if I had other plans? Or—heaven forbid—other responsibilities?

He was there on the museum steps when I went down to look for him. From inside the long hall, he actually looked kind of scary, not in Flint's “I know everything, you peasant,” style, but more in an “avoid him late at night on a dark street” style. He was tall and thin, with a long black raincoat heavily decorated with looping chains. Part of his head was shaved and tattooed and I flinched just thinking of the pain involved. Not only would I avoid him on a dark street, I certainly would not want my daughter to know him.

Then I opened the door and he said hello in a voice that was scarcely louder than a whisper. It was extra muted because he was looking at the ground. When he looked up I was surprised to see the timid expression in his eyes. I couldn't match it with either his boss' arrogance or the macho swagger of his own appearance. He looked exactly like a child who hoped you would like him but wasn't expecting you to.

I smiled and he smiled back. He looked relieved. Let's say I was confused. I hid it well by escorting him into my tiny cubicle and clearing some books stacked on the one extra chair.

“I understand that you are Dr. Flint's assistant, but what does that mean, exactly? And did he tell you what he expects you to do here?” My computer powered on and I added, “Ah, let's see if he sent me anything. He said he would.”