The Deed (33 page)

As they shot past the semi, Amanda astutely laid off the useless brakes and resumed speed, now safe in the other lane.

“Holy
shit,
” said Amanda. “Sorry about—”

“Pull over,” Jason mumbled, head between his knees.

“No, we’re okay now.”

“Could you please just
fucking
pull over?” said Jason, catching the note of real fear in his own voice.

Amanda eased the car onto the shoulder; before it rolled to a halt, Jason was already unlatching the door and hopping out. Seconds later, he was leaning over a guardrail, violently puking.

He stood there for what seemed like hours, feeling the rain pelt the back of his head and run around to his chin, where it dripped onto the roadside mess he’d left for some lucky dog.

“You okay?” she called tentatively from the car, and he realized he’d left the door open; he kicked it shut without turning.

A few moments later, a discreet wipe of mouth on sleeve, and he was ready to face the car’s interior again. “I’m sorry about that,” he said, pulling in and closing the door. “That wasn’t a critique of your driving.”

“Oh, my God, don’t apologize. I nearly got you killed.”

“I get queasy in cars sometimes,” he explained.

She put the car in gear and pulled back onto the highway with exaggerated slowness. “That’s fine.”

“No it’s not, it’s stupid.”

“Lots of people get carsick,” Amanda offered halfheartedly.

He shook his head. “It’s not carsickness,” he said. “It’s…I don’t know what it is. It’s like my stomach’s empty, and it’s trying to suck the rest of my body in. Do you ever have fear like that?” He ran his fingers over his scalp, brushing back his newly slicked hair. “I just sort of suddenly become hyperconscious of the fact that I’m hurtling at sixty miles an hour down the road, and that there are other cars racing just as fast toward me, and there’s nothing between us but—”

“Hey,” she said, before he could finish. “Hey, you okay?”

A nod. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“I’m really sorry I did that to you,” she said.

He smiled weakly, wondered whether she’d already put two and two together. He realized he was tossing around clues because he wanted to talk about it, because he was monumentally sick and tired of keeping it all to himself all the time.

“Where did it happen?” she asked politely.

He felt fear knot up in his chest. “Do we have to talk about this?”

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

But, of course, they did.

Jason didn’t speak for a long time, tried to watch the road and think logically about what he wanted to say. But each passing moment of silent anticipation lent more and more weight to the revelation to come, and so in the end he just started talking, let the words escape like fireflies out of a jar, thought after disconnected thought.

Losing his parents had been a terrible blow; losing them at the same time had been incomprehensible. He’d never really been able to grieve for them separately, couldn’t extricate their charred hands from each other in his mind. Even now, it was still hard for him to picture them separately.

“Isn’t that strange?” he wondered. “I have lots of memories of each of them separately, of course. But my memories are like photographs. I can’t picture them solo without drawing on a specific memory. Whenever I’m trying to imagine them just…just
being
there, as themselves, they’re always together.”

Encouraged by a long pause, Amanda spoke cautiously. “Well, there’s a kind of beauty to that.”

He shrugged. “It’s not very satisfying. I want to be able to miss just my dad. To dream about walking by a river with him, or playing catch. And then I want to imagine hanging out with my mom, and talking about things. They should still be individuals. They should be people.”

“Maybe it’s a way of shielding yourself,” she suggested. “Like, if they’re together, it’s not as bad, somehow. For them. They’ve got each other—you know?”

“No, no,” he protested. “It makes the whole thing too surreal. It’s just…just loss. I can’t reconcile it.” He was staring out the windshield, watching the wipers battle the remains of the rain. “Two people should never die at the same time. Death’s too enormous a concept to be multiplied.”

“I totally agree with that.”

“It paralyzed me for a long time, I guess,” he acknowledged. “I still, today, don’t feel really compelled to do anything. Succeed, or whatever. Even make basic choices. House or apartment? Cable or satellite?”

“Please, I can’t even—”

“And yet, at the same time,” he interrupted, to steamroll over her well-intentioned attempt to empathize, “I feel like I’m hitting that stage of my life where I really, really need to get my shit together and figure out what it is I need to do. What I
want
to do. Who I am.”

Amanda changed lanes with deliberate, penitent caution, and Jason became distracted, losing his line of thought. When she broke the silence herself, the words seemed wholly disconnected from everything that had gone before.

“Do you think maybe,” she ventured carefully, “maybe you’re worried that if you start doing what
you
want, you’ll be betraying them somehow…leaving them behind?”

The rain had dwindled to a light sprinkle now, and the Manhattan skyline splayed across the horizon ahead of them, deceptively distant and golden in the afternoon sun, like a postcard propped casually against the sky.

“Or should I just keep my big fat mouth shut?”

“Let’s just keep driving,” he replied.

UPPER EAST SIDE
, 5:30
P.M.

“It’s kind of a mess,” Amanda warned.

“Holy fucking Christ,” said Jason, in the doorway, truly astonished.

Amanda’s was a good-size apartment by New York’s shoe-box standards, but the space was fatally compromised by the clutter. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined most of the walls, spread haphazardly with vertical, horizontal, and spread-open stacks of books in a ragged riot. The comic disarray played itself out on every horizontal surface, from couch to floor to fish tank; it was as if the apartment itself were composed entirely of books, with the occasional laundry bag and empty juice bottle thrown in for spice or contrast.

“So this is kind of a tornado-versus-the-Library-of-Congress decorating scheme going on here.”

“Whatever,” she said, discreetly snatching up a bra on her way out of the room. “You want a Coke?”

The apartment was roughly square, with archways leading out from either side and the entry door in the middle of a third wall. Amanda had disappeared into one of these arches, apparently the kitchenette; the other was dark, and he crossed toward it, stepping gingerly around the flotsam, to satisfy his curiosity.

He’d expected a bedroom, but found instead a small stretch of hallway, where stood a little table just inside a rather ornate pair of French doors opening out onto an amazing little half rooftop, an unexpected open space she’d cluttered, predictably, with all manner of plants. Flowers, ferns, and even small trees, in a hodgepodge of pots, were drinking in the steady rain that spattered the Astro Turf.

“This is cool, Amanda,” he called to the kitchen. “I dig your roof.”

The hiss of a bottle opening, the clink and gurgle of carbonated liquid drowning ice cubes. “Open the doors,” she suggested.

He followed her suggestion and instantly the smell of the rain billowed into the apartment with a cool rooftop breeze.

“Here,” she said, suddenly beside him.

“Very cool,” he reiterated, accepting the soda and sitting down at the little drop-leaf table. “You’ve got your own secret garden.”

“It’s a big bonus,” she agreed. “This is a corner apartment; the layout’s kind of strange.”

“Yeah, I was wondering where your bedroom is.”

She took a sip, peering at him over the rim. “Don’t get cocky.”

By six o’clock the sky was already darkening. They decided to work on the puzzle until hunger or exasperation overtook them, then either make dinner from the fridge or order in, as the mood took them. A poor excuse for a plan by Jason’s standards, but it was all Amanda would agree to be held to, here on her own turf.

She cleared a place for them both on the couch, then a space for the parchment poem and her mom’s translation on a rickety-looking wooden coffee table. As he seated himself, she headed to one wall of the room and began cherry-picking individual books she hoped would help their cause.

“Here’s one problem,” said Jason. “Any place we’d have access to is also accessible to twenty million other people a day.”

“And yet it hasn’t been found,” said Amanda. He didn’t say anything, and she paused in her search to look at him. “Remember, we have to assume it hasn’t been found, or we’ve got nothing.”

“There’s a proof of God’s existence that goes something like that.”

“I know you think it’s stupid,” said Amanda in a patronizing tone. “Just remember, Jason: Two weeks ago you were secure in a rational little world, plugging away at that horrible megacompany and hoping that someday, somehow, things were going to get better. All you had to do was widen your perception a little, and look what’s happened to your life.”

“Well, no,” he protested. “I think it’s the reality that’s remarkable here, not my perception of it. Amanda, you’ve gotta admit stumbling onto a four-hundred-year-old deed is pretty unique.” His own tone sounded antagonistic in his ears, and a warning bell went off in his head. This was how he got himself in trouble, by succumbing to his natural inclination to argue without regard for consequence. He determined to reel it in a bit.

But this time, at least, she was up to the challenge. “Is this really unimaginably unique for you?” she said. “Is the world such a dull place? Maybe the quarters clinking together in your pocket were bag mates in a bank twenty years ago. Maybe the author of this book,” she continued, thrusting a tome at him from across the room, “taught geometry to my grandfather. I think coincidence is a basic building block of the universe, that it’s no accident that the veins on a leaf look the same as the branches of its tree, or the tributaries of a river. Whenever we come across a really mysterious phenomenon we’re blown away, we see the hand of God in it. But that’s just the busy lives we lead, blinding us little by little to the truly mind-blowing complexity of the world.”

He was impressed. “Okay,” he conceded with a smile, stealing a glimpse at her slacks tightening around her exquisite ass as she plumped down triumphantly beside him. “Then let’s do this for real. If the deed still exists, then it necessarily must also be hidden really well. Not just where it can’t be found, but where it won’t even be noticed.”

“That’s the spirit,” said Amanda. “All we’re assuming, really, is competence on the part of the hiders of the deed. And some luck.”

“A lot of luck,” he added, as a parting shot. They both looked over the translation again without speaking, and several minutes passed.

Announcing that she was going to get a couple of notebooks, Amanda rose and disappeared into the kitchen—
why the kitchen?
—and his eyes expertly tracked the fluid motion of her body as it passed. Critically, he eyed the fold-out couch beneath him, surreptitiously testing the bounce.

She glided back into the room and dropped a pair of half-used yellow legal pads between them. “Let’s do it,” she enjoined, innocently stoking his impure thoughts. Silently, they read together: