The Dismantling (17 page)

“Uh-oh,” she said. “Now the wind's going to blow me right off.”

“Stop it.” He approached her slowly, his sneakers slipping on the ice. A strong gust of wind really did blow then, whipping her hair across her face. She put her foot back down, but still she stood there, defiant.

He should have backed away. He should have backed away and stepped off the groyne and let her know that she wasn't being told to do anything. Instead, he stepped toward her. He stepped toward her, and he offered her his hand. The taunting smile disappeared from her face. “Get away from me,” she said. She took a few steps backward.

“Amelia, please.”

She shook her head. “Get away. I'll come down when I want to.”

He took another step toward her. She stepped back quickly, her heel slipping on a patch of ice. She stumbled and one of her feet missed the concrete strip, plunging into a space between two of the stones. Her leg buckled, her ankle trapped at a peculiar angle, and as she tried to wrench herself free, Simon heard a pop, a dry cracking noise, like a twig snapping under a heavy boot. She cried out and reached for her ankle—an involuntary motion, a reflex—and the momentum of her reaching pitched her forward onto the rocks. Her foot popped free, but she wasn't able to find any grip on the icy stones and she slid into the water.

He rushed to the edge of the concrete and looked down. She was there, at the base of the groyne, five feet below him, hanging on to rocks slick with algae, barely holding her head above the waves. He'd been surfing in his thick winter wetsuit just a few days before; he knew how cold the water was. He knew water that cold feels like lead. It squeezes the air out of your lungs. It doesn't want you living in it. One of Amelia's hands slipped off the rocks, and her head went under. Somehow she pulled herself back up long enough to scream his name. But still he didn't move to help her. He was frozen. Panic seized his muscles, paralyzing him. All of this took about five seconds. Then a wave slammed into the groyne, and she was pulled away from the rocks and sucked under. Her head reappeared a few yards away, a shiny blot against the dark water. Finally he scrambled down the rocks and dove in.

The cold was like an iron bar slamming into his head. His jacket filled with water and he struggled free of it, trying to keep Amelia's bobbing head in sight. A line of whitewater rushed over him, and when he surfaced again, he didn't see her. He swam as hard as he could, his heavy clothes pulling him down. The water was pitch-black. He felt the rip running alongside the groyne pull him away from the beach. He screamed her name, and a blast of spray filled his mouth. Lifted by a swell, he saw the flash of her hair out near the tip of the groyne. The rip ran along the flank of the groyne, then bent around the end into deeper water. That was where she was being taken. He thrashed his way out, trying to stay near the rocks without being smashed into them. He tried to keep his eyes on her head, but he kept losing her in the chop. He finally reached the tip of the groyne and grabbed on to one of the outermost rocks. He braced against the current, raised himself up onto the rock. The ocean stretched out in front of him, black and cold and empty. He was shadowed from the lights of the boardwalk; the darkness was total. He screamed her name. Nothing. His body was shaking violently. His vision kept contracting and expanding, as though his pupils were beating with his heart. He held on to the rock, his hands numb and bloody. He screamed until his throat was raw. His grip started to loosen as a warmth began to spread through his limbs. He was still aware enough to recognize this as the beginnings of hypothermia. He stopped screaming. He felt sleepy, distracted. He used the last of his concentration and strength to haul himself up over the rocks and onto the concrete. He lay there, his cheek pressed against a patch of ice. He recognized that the ice was cold, that he should move, but these facts didn't seem to directly concern him.

Then he heard something. It was his name. Ragged, blown to bits by the wind, but he heard it. He dragged himself up and looked out into the ocean. He stared long enough for the black water to start pulsing in front of him, to take on weird curves and bulges. He yelled for Amelia, but his voice was gone. He didn't hear her again.

He didn't remember much about getting from the end of the groyne back to the house. It was as though he blacked out and then found himself standing at the front door. He trembled so violently he could barely grasp the knob. She was gone. There was simply no way to survive in water that cold.

He pushed into the house, screaming hoarsely for his father; wild-eyed, shivering, a broken messenger bearing the news that the life they'd known as a family was over.

Lying now in his bedroom, ten stories above the East River, he experienced again his fatal paralysis. Those five seconds had expanded over seven years into a private eternity of self-loathing, his own secret monument to failure. His father, the police, the people of Rockaway Park—they thought him brave to plunge into the frigid Atlantic, to risk his life thrashing through the greedy waves after Amelia. Huddled under blankets in the precinct house, he'd told the cops that he'd gone looking for his sister and found her alone on the beach. That they'd climbed onto the groyne to goof off in the wind and spray; she'd slipped and fallen into the ocean, and he'd dove immediately after her. And it was true that once he hit the water, he'd used every last reserve of his strength to rescue her, and it hadn't been enough. But if he hadn't frozen—if he'd flung himself over the edge the instant her ankle popped free—could he have saved her then? There was no way he could be sure. It had been dark and very cold; he'd been a jittery mess. But, still, he thought he could have done it. He thought he could have saved her, and the thought killed him anew every day.

M
ARIA
shivered as they made their way from Abraham to South Tenth the next morning. She walked with her arms folded tightly across her chest, her chin tucked into her collar. Her hair was greasy and lank, her skin oily. She was breathing heavily by the time they reached her building, and she leaned on Simon as they climbed the stairs.

Simon had slipped the keys back under the insole of her Chuck Taylor moments after Rudich had shown him into her hospital room. She'd been eating breakfast, or at least staring down at the breakfast tray, rubbery orange eggs its centerpiece, ringed by pallid fruit salad and a carton of chocolate milk. Without looking up, she'd tilted the tray toward him: “Any takers?” He'd laughed as he moved the sneakers and bag of clothes back to the floor, shielding the action with his body, hoping she wouldn't notice as he jammed the keys under the sneaker's insole. When he sat in the chair and turned around, she was still staring down into the microwaved egg patty, poking at it with her plastic fork as though it might wriggle to life and scramble, lizard-like, off the tray.

She hadn't wanted him to accompany her home. After he'd signed her out of the hospital, she'd tried, exhausted and woozy from the morphine, to convince him to leave her outside on Lee Avenue. He told her he wasn't going anywhere else until he'd seen her safely inside her apartment; if she wanted to get rid of him, they might as well start walking. She'd crossed her arms and stared him down, trying, he thought, to summon the strength to argue. But she was too weak and tired and sick, and finally she slumped against the wall of the hospital and nodded in resigned agreement.

Now he was doing his best to convey the impression that this was the first he'd seen of her building, of her dispiriting apartment. She unlocked and shouldered open the door. Inside, she headed straight for the bedroom, reappearing a moment later.

“At least it's still there,” she muttered.

“What?”

She shook her head with a little flick of irritation. “Nothing.”

Simon realized she must be talking about the safe. “What are you going to do now?”

“Probably stick my head in the sink and wash my hair. It feels like somebody poured a bowl of Crisco on my head.”

“I mean, what about tomorrow?” he said. “Next week, next month—what's your plan?”

She looked around the empty room. “Maybe buy some furniture?”

“Tell me why you're not going back to LA.”

“I'm sick of the traffic.”

“Maria, please.”

“I'm sorry I had to lie to you. But it wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't gotten sick, and that wasn't my fault.”

“But
why
did you lie?”

“I don't have to tell you that.”

“All right. All right.” Simon fingered a dent in the shoddy plaster wall. “So you were just going to skip out on the follow-up care?”

“I felt all right at first. Yeah, I was tired, I was in pain, but I figured that was normal. The fever, everything with the leak . . . How was I supposed to see that coming?”

“There was probably a slight tear from the surgery. Then you aggravated it somehow, and it ruptured.”

She narrowed her eyes. “So it's my fault?”

“That's not what . . .” He shook his head, exasperated. “No. But you're going to need follow-up care now. You can agree to that, right?” She hesitated. “Maria, come on.” She looked away, nodded. “I have a doctor who will be discreet, but you have to promise you'll go see her.”

“I'll go. I understand you can't have me getting sick again.”

He heard the sarcasm. “You make it sound like it's impossible I would actually care if you did.”

“You'd care because it would make things inconvenient for your job. I'm not trying to be melodramatic. It's just the truth.”

“I mean personally care.”

She raised her chin and looked at him. “So, do you?”

He met her gaze. “I'm here, aren't I?”

“You sure you're not here because your partner told you to be?”

“What partner?”

“You know who I'm talking about,” she said. “The coordinator. Peter DaSilva. There's no other way you could've known I was at Abraham. You have to be working with somebody inside the hospital system or none of this would be possible. And I think it's him.”

“That's your theory?”

“Shouldn't we start being honest with each other? If you really do care?”

“You haven't told me anything, Maria.”

“Somebody has to start.” She paused, then said, “All right. I'll tell you what I'm planning to do here. I'm planning to work. Hostessing at a restaurant. I put an application in at a place on Smith Street, before all this shit with the bile leak happened.”

“You have $150,000 in cash, and you're going to stand at a desk and take reservations?”

“I'm not stupid. I know that money's not going to last, and it's all I have. I came here to start a life, and life means work. Or at least this life will.”

“This city's a bad place to save money.”

“But a good place to open a restaurant someday. That's what this money's going toward. The Mexican food here sucks as bad as I heard it would—maybe I can help fix that. Look, I've worked in bars and diners and coffee shops since I was seventeen. If I haven't figured them out by now, it's my own fault.” She paused. “Your turn.”

He hesitated.
Fuck it.
“Okay,” he said. “I work for DaSilva. Health Solutions, it's his company. It's just the two of us. He hired me to do all the interfacing with clients. He handles everything in the hospital.” Maria nodded, clearly unsurprised. He felt his switching of allegiances, from DaSilva to Maria, slot into place with an internally audible click, and he wondered, his mouth suddenly dry, if he'd made a terrible error. “I'm trusting you, Maria. Please don't make me regret it.”

 • • • 

H
E
came by again the next day. She let him in, anxiousness rippling beneath her placid, opiated surface. He felt bonded to her by his confession about DaSilva, as though by so recklessly and flagrantly violating the rules of his job, he'd somehow linked their fates, strengthened the connective tissue of his responsibility toward her; as though, perhaps, by telling her, he'd sought to facilitate exactly this strengthening. The apartment was hot and dry, steam hissing angrily through the radiators. The skin of her face gave off a waxy sheen, as though she'd smeared it with a layer of Vaseline. She wore a ribbed white tank top, and he could see the bandages on her abdomen through the top's thin cotton as she pulled a sweater over her head.

He helped her down the stairs and out onto the street. Waiting for them at the curb was a black Lincoln Town Car commissioned into the service of Taxi Internacional. The driver sipped coffee and placidly absorbed the squawking of his Bluetooth earpiece as they sped over the Williamsburg Bridge and onto the FDR, eventually drawing even with Roosevelt Island.

“There's the hospital.” Maria pointed at a flashing sliver of Cabrera's turquoise glass. “I could live without ever seeing that place again.”

She fell silent as the car swung off the Drive, turning into the Manhattan streets. The driver pulled up in front of a white-brick residential building around the corner from a large private hospital complex. The doctor's office was on the ground floor, off to the side of the lobby. Simon paid the driver and followed Maria out of the car. She made it halfway across the sidewalk, then abruptly stopped, wavering, as though overwhelmed by the motion and noise of the street.

“Are you all right?”

“I'll be fine.” She squeezed his arm. “I'll call you when I'm out.”

He killed an hour at a diner around the corner, picking at a BLT and downing cups of watery coffee. He pictured her in the examination room, sitting on the edge of a table in her paper gown, legs nervously crossed at the ankle. He saw the long, two-pronged, puckered incision, the laparoscopic scars off to the left side, three pink dime-sized punctures. He saw the safe on the floor of her closet, squat and dense, pictured the stacks of banded bills inside.

After leaving her the prior afternoon, he'd returned to the Health Solutions office and paged DaSilva. The desk phone rang just before dark, caller ID placing the number somewhere in the Bronx. On the line, DaSilva's voice competed with the thrum and bustle of street traffic as he asked for a report.

Simon told him that Maria still refused to provide an explanation for lying to them.

“Just stay on her,” DaSilva said. “Maybe she'll let something slip.” He coughed wetly into the receiver. “Is she talking about this with anybody?”

“I don't think so,” Simon said. “I think she's very alone right now. Very isolated.”

“All right,” DaSilva said. An elevated train clattered by somewhere behind him. “At least we have that going for us.”

On the ride back to South Williamsburg, Maria was quiet, staring out the window. The doctor had palpated her abdomen, drawn blood, taken her to the hospital next door to run her through the chattering tube of an MRI machine. The doctor found no further complications; she advised rest and patience and asked no questions. She wrote Maria additional prescriptions for painkillers and antibiotics and gave her a small bottle of vitamin E oil to rub into the scars. It was all basically good news, or at least not bad news, but Maria didn't seem particularly encouraged. Simon let her be; she didn't owe him cheerfulness. He dropped her off on South Tenth and told her he'd be back to check on her soon. “If you want to,” she said, nodding, her thoughts far away.

 • • • 

H
e returned to her apartment the next night, following both DaSilva's mandate and his own impulses. She'd ordered a flat-screen television and a couch off the internet, and they'd been delivered that morning. On the muted TV screen, flashbulbs pelted a pouty-lipped pregnant woman as she walked down the front steps of a hotel. Maria sat on one end of the couch, her hands resting lightly on her lower abdomen. Simon sat down at the other end, unpacking the contents of a take-out bag from a kosher taqueria on Driggs.

“How are you doing today?”

“You're looking at it,” she said. “Couch. TV. Bed. I can walk about two blocks before I feel like I'm going to throw up.”

He spread the plastic bag on the cushion between them and unwrapped the foil-covered tacos. “It's going to take time.” The words sounded lame, but he didn't know what else to tell her, and anyway it was the truth.

“You're not stuck here alone all day. I can't e-mail anybody. I can't call anybody. I've started talking to the fucking television.”

“Why can't you call anybody?” He hadn't yet pressed her any further on her reasons for abandoning Los Angeles, but that didn't mean he'd forgotten about everything he'd found on her computer—the e-mails, the death certificate, her macabre collection of photographs.

“Number one,” Maria said, “I threw away my phone. Number two, almost nobody back home knows I'm here, and I want to keep it that way.”

“Can you tell me why?”

“I just . . . I had to leave. I'm sorry, Simon. I can't tell you anything more than that.”

“If it was just about leaving California, then why did you come here? Why New York?”

“The idea of New York came later. The idea of the money came first. Money is freedom. In case you didn't already know that.” She paused. “You have to understand. I'm not trying to
permanently
disappear. I didn't change my name. I didn't fake my own death or anything. The idea was only to get away from LA and get my hands on some money. I'd move here, work at a restaurant, build a life.” She took a bite of a taco,
bistec
juice dripping down her chin. She made a face. “See, this is why I need to open a Mexican joint.”

He decided to abandon his questioning for now. “Come on, these are pretty good.”

“Yeah, you definitely haven't been to LA, have you?” She took another bite and grimaced as she chewed.

“The incisions are hurting?”

“It's the newer ones,” she said. “When I twist too fast it's like somebody's stabbing me with a piece of broken glass.” She looked down at her abdomen. “The last of the stitches were supposed to dissolve by yesterday.”

“Is it leaking?”

“I don't know.”

“Have you looked at it?”

“No. It . . . I'm too freaked out.”

“When do you see the doctor next?”

“Wednesday.”

“Maria.” He tried not to sound too reproving. “You should look.”

“I don't know what I'd be looking for.”

“I could look at it. Or is that . . .”

“What?”

“I don't know. Too private.”