Moonlight Mile (25 page)

“So how soon after Timur died did Yefim find you?”

“It took him about six hours.”

“And?”

“And I asked him how he felt about having a boss so sloppy he’d send a moron like Timur to pick up something as priceless as the Belarus Cross. That got the wheels turning pretty quick.”

“So the plan was always to make Kirill desperate enough and embarrassed enough that a palace coup would look inevitable from the outside.”

“We refined it as time wore on, but that was the general objective. I got the baby and Sophie, Yefim got everything else.”

“And what about Sophie? What happens next for her?”

“Well, rehab for starters. And then maybe we’ll go visit her mom.”

“You mean Elaine?”

She nodded. “That’s her mom. It’s all about nurture, Patrick, not nature.”

“And what about your nurturer?”

“Beatrice?” She smiled. “Of course, I’m going to see Bea. Not tomorrow, but soon. She’s got to meet her grandniece. Don’t you worry about Bea. She never has to worry about anything for the rest of her life. I’ve already got a lawyer working on Uncle Lionel’s early release.” She sat back. “They’re going to be fine.”

I watched her for a bit, this almost-seventeen-year-old going on, what, eighty?

“You feel remorse about any of this?”

“Would that help you sleep? To know I feel remorse?” Amanda pulled one leg up on the bench and propped her chin on her knee and peered across the space between us. “For the record, I don’t have a hard heart. I just have a hard heart for ass-holes. You want crocodile tears, I don’t have them. For who—for Kenny and his rape jacket? Dre and his baby mill? For Kirill and his psycho-bitch wife? For Timur and—”

“What about yourself?” I said.

“Huh?”

“Yourself,” I repeated.

She stared back at me, her jaw working, but no sound leaving her mouth. After a time, her jaw stopped moving. “You know what Helene’s mother was?”

I shook my head.

“A gin-soaked mess,” she said. “She went to the same bar for twenty years to smoke and drink herself into an early grave. When she died, no one from the bar went to her funeral. Not because they didn’t like her, but because they’d never learned her last name.” Her eyes clouded for a moment, or it could have been the reflection of the river. “
Her
mother? Pretty much the same. Not a McCready woman I know of ever graduated high school. They all spent their lives dependent on men and bottles. So twenty-two years from now, when Claire’s going off to grad school, and we’re living in a house where roach-races aren’t our primary form of entertainment and the electric has
never
been shut off, and collection agencies don’t call every night at six? When
that’s
my life, then you can ask me how many regrets I have about my lost youth.” She pressed both palms together above her knee. Seen from a distance, she might have appeared to be praying. “Until then, though, if it’s okay with you? I’ll sleep like a baby.”

“Babies get up every couple hours and cry.”

Amanda gave me a gentle smile. “Then I’ll get up every couple hours and cry.”

We sat there for a few minutes with nothing to say to each other. We watched the river. We huddled into our separate coats. Then we both stood and walked back to the others.

• • •

Helene and Tadeo shifted in place by the front of the SUV, listless, in shock. Sophie held Claire and kept looking at Amanda like she was going to found a religion in her name.

Amanda took Claire from Sophie and looked at her motley crew. “Patrick is going to take off for public transportation. Say bye to him.”

I got three waves, Sophie’s accompanied by another apologetic smile.

Amanda said, “Tadeo, you said you’re over at Bromley-Heath, right?”

Tadeo said, “Yeah.”

“We’ll drop Tadeo first, then Helene. Sophie, you’re at the wheel. You’re sober, right?”

“I’m sober.”

“Okay, then. We’ve got to make one stop. There’s a Costco up Route 1 a couple miles. They got kids’ stuff.”

“This ain’t time to shop for toys,” Tadeo said. “Man, it’s Christmas Eve.”

She grimaced at him. “We’re not getting her toys. We’re getting her a car seat base and a car seat. Drive all the way back to the Berkshires without one? Damn, man.” She ran a hand over Claire’s fine brown hair. “What kind of mother do you think I am?”

• • •

I walked to the bus station. I took the bus to the subway. Took the subway to Logan Airport. I never saw Amanda again.

I met my wife and daughter in Terminal C of Logan. My daughter did not, as I’d always imagined she would at a moment such as this, run into my arms in slow motion. She hid behind her mother’s leg in one of her extremely rare shy moments and peeked at me. I came to her and kissed Angie until I felt a tug on my jeans and looked down to see Gabby peering up at me, her eyes still puffy from the nap she’d taken on the plane. She raised her arms.

“Up, Daddy?”

I picked her up. I kissed her cheek. She kissed mine. I kissed her other cheek and she kissed my other cheek. We leaned our foreheads together.

“Miss me?” I asked.

“I missed you, Daddy.”

“You said that with such formality. ‘I missed you, Daddy.’ Was your grandma teaching you how to be a proper lady?”

“She made me sit up straight.”

“Horrors.”

“All the time.”

“Even in bed?”

“Not in bed. Know why?”

“Why?”

“That would be silly.”

“It would,” I agreed.

“How long’s this cute-fest going to drag on?” Bubba appeared out of nowhere. He’s the size of a young rhino standing on its hind legs, so his gift for sneaking up on people never ceases to amaze me.

“Where were you?”

“I stashed something on the way in, so I had to pick it up on the way out.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t smuggle one through security.”

“Who says I didn’t?” He jerked his thumb at Angie. “This one has luggage issues.”

“One little bag,” Angie said, spreading her hands the length of a bread loaf. “And another little bag. I did some shopping yesterday.”

“To baggage claim,” I said.

• • •

It was Logan, so they changed the baggage carousel location twice, and we trekked back and forth through the claim area. Then we stood with a bunch of other people, everyone jostling to get closest to the belt, and watched as nothing happened. The belt didn’t move. The little siren light didn’t spin. The clarion bell that announced incoming luggage didn’t sound.

Gabby sat on my shoulders and tugged at my hair and occasionally my ears. Angie held my arm a little tighter than usual. Bubba wandered over to the newsstand and next thing we knew he was chatting up the cashier, leaning into the counter and actually smiling. The cashier was toffee-skinned and in her mid-thirties. She was small and thin but even from a distance she had the look of someone who could kick some major ass if pissed off. Under Bubba’s attentions, though, she lost five years in her face and began to match him smile for smile.

“What do you think they’re talking about?” Angie said.

“Weaponry.”

“Speaking of which, you really threw it in the Charles?”

“I did.”

“That’s littering.”

I nodded. “But I’m a big recycler, so I’m allowed the occasional eco-sin.”

She squeezed my arm and put her head to my chest for a moment. I held her tight with one arm. The other was deployed keeping my daughter safe on my shoulders.

“You shouldn’t litter,” Gabby said, her upside-down face suddenly an inch from mine.

“No, I shouldn’t.”

“So, why did you?”

“Sometimes,” I said, “people make mistakes.”

That must have satisfied her, because her face rose back up from mine and she returned to playing with my hair.

“So what happened?” Angie said.

“After I talked to you? Not too much.”

“Where’s Amanda?”

“Beats me.”

“Boy,” she said, “you risk your life to find her and then you just let her go?”

“Pretty much.”

“Some detective.”

“Ex-detective,” I said. “Ex.”

• • •

On the ride back from the
AIRPORT
, the girls razzed Bubba about flirting with the cashier. Her name, we learned, was Anita, and she was from Ecuador. She lived in East Boston with two children, no husband, and a dog. Her mother lived with her.

“That’s scary,” I said.

“I dunno,” Bubba said, “those old Ecuadorans can cook, man.”

“You’re already thinking about dinner with the parents?” Angie said. “Dang. You name your first child yet?”

Gabby squealed at that. “Uncle Bubba’s getting married.”

“Uncle Bubba’s not getting married. Uncle Bubba just got some digits. That’s it.”

Angie said, “You’ll have somebody to play with, Gabby.”

“I’m not having a kid,” Bubba said.

“And dress up.”

“How many times do I—?”

“Can I babysit her, too?” Gabby said.

“Can she babysit her?” Angie asked Bubba. “Once she’s old enough, of course?”

Bubba caught my eyes in the rearview. “Make them stop.”

“You can’t make them
stop,
” I said. “Man, have you guys met?”

We emerged from the Ted Williams Tunnel onto 93 South.

Angie sang, “Bub-ba and A-ni-ta sit-ting in a tree,” and my daughter joined in, “K-I-S-S-I-N-G . . .”

“If I gave you my piece,” Bubba asked, “would you shoot me?”

“Sure,” I said. “Hand it up.”

We came out of the dark of the tunnel into the late-afternoon traffic as the girls sang and clapped their hands to the beat. Traffic was light, because it was Christmas Eve and most people had either not gone to work or had left early. The sky was purple tin. A few flakes of snow fell, but not enough to accumulate. My daughter squealed again and both Bubba and I winced. It’s not an attractive sound, that. It’s high-pitched and it enters your ear canals like hot glass. No matter how much I love my daughter, I will never love her squealing.

Or maybe I will.

Maybe I do.

Driving south on 93, I realized, once and for all, that I love the things that chafe. The things that fill me with stress so total I can’t remember when a block of it didn’t rest on top of my heart. I love what, if broken, can’t be repaired. What, if lost, can’t be replaced.

I love my burdens.

For the first time in my life, I pitied my father. It was such a strange sensation that I allowed the car to drift over the white lines for a moment before I made a correction. My father was never lucky; his rage and hatred and all-consuming narcissism—all of it unfathomable, even now, twenty-five years after his death—had robbed him of his family. If I’d squealed like Gabriella in the back of a car, my father would have backhanded me. Twice. Or he would have pulled the car to the side of the road and climbed back there to give me a beating. Same with my sister. And when we weren’t around, my mother. Because of this, he died alone. He’d demeaned my mother into an early grave, my sister refused to return to Boston when he was terminally ill, and when, at the hour of his death, he’d reached across the hospital bed for me, I let his hand hang in the air until it fell to the sheets and his pupils turned to marble.

My father never loved his burdens because my father never loved anything.

I’m a deeply flawed man who loves a deeply flawed woman and we gave birth to a beautiful child who, I fear sometimes, may never stop talking. Or squealing. My best friend is a borderline psychotic who has more sins on his ledger than whole street gangs and some governments. And yet . . .

We left the expressway at Columbia Road as the day finished furling up into a sky which was now the color of plum skin. The snow kept falling weakly, as if it couldn’t commit. We turned left on Dot Avenue as lights came on in the three-deckers and the bars and the senior citizens’ home and the corner stores. I’d like to say I found a sublime beauty in it all, but I didn’t.

And yet.

And yet, this life we’d built filled our car.

I saw our street in the distance, and I didn’t want to pull up in front of our house and let this moment empty from the car. I wanted to keep driving. I wanted everything to stay exactly as it was right now.

But I did turn.

When we got out of the car, Gabby grabbed Bubba’s hand and led him toward the house so she could take him down to the cellar. Last year we’d answered her incessant queries about how Santa could enter a house with no chimney by assuring her that in Dorchester, he came through the cellar. So she’d enlisted Bubba to help her lay out the milk and cookies.

“Beer, too,” Bubba said as they reached the house. “He likes beer. And he doesn’t turn his nose up at vodka.”