The Dismantling (26 page)

He stepped back and tried to compose himself, to look sober and empathetic and penitent. He could smell cigarettes on his clothes, taste their ashy staleness in his mouth. Abruptly, before he was ready, Cheryl opened the door. Her face was thinner than he remembered, skin stretched tight over cheekbones like canvas over a frame.

“Wow,” she said. “You're somebody I never thought I would see again.”

“Cheryl.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Can we talk?”

“We are talking.”

“Inside, maybe?”

“How about out here.” She stepped out and closed the door behind her, sitting down at the top of the porch stairs. He sat next to her, unsure of how exactly to begin. The temperature was tumbling toward freezing; no sun, a chilly wind. Cheryl wore only a long-sleeved thermal shirt and jeans, but she didn't seem bothered by the cold. She sat perfectly still, looking out at the street, hands resting on her thighs. “Well?” she said.

“I wanted to say I'm very sorry about Lenny. Howard called to tell me.”

She nodded, still looking straight ahead. “Did he tell you where I was?”

He hesitated. “Not really.”

She glanced at him.

“All he said was that you were staying at a friend's. I found you myself. He doesn't know I'm here.” She nodded again, and he tried once more. “I wanted to tell you how sad I was to hear what happened. I know how difficult—”

“I'm not going to say anything, all right?” Her voice was bitter. “Your outfit or company or whatever is not something I'm going to talk about. What would be the point? It wasn't your fault. Not the hospital's either. You didn't need to come out here for that.”

“That's not why I came.”

“No? What, then? You want an invitation to the funeral? It's Sunday. Bring a flask. It's what Lenny would've wanted.”

“Cheryl, I saw it too.”

“Saw what?”

“What you asked me, at the train station. It wasn't just you. I saw it. He wasn't . . . He was just showing us what he knew we wanted to see.” He spoke quickly now, trying to get it all out. “But it wasn't what he was really feeling. You were right, and I saw it, and I said I didn't because I didn't want to believe it. I didn't want to get involved. So I lied.”

“You know what?” She leaned forward, hunching into herself. “I don't need you to tell me I was right. I knew that when Dani came running down the stairs, asking why Daddy was sleeping in a puddle of throw up.”

Simon swallowed. This was not unfolding as he'd imagined it. “I wanted to say I'm sorry. Sorry for making you think—”

“So this is for you, then?”

“What?”

She turned to face him, her eyes chips of blue ice. “How is this supposed to make me feel better about anything? You didn't owe me the truth back then, you weren't getting paid to be honest. You were free to turn away just like you did. But you heard Lenny killed himself and now you feel guilty. You think maybe if you'd said something, things might have been different. I might have—what?—demanded that Lenny see a psychiatrist again. Might have been more
vigilant
. I might not have left him in the house alone for a weekend. Is that it?”

“No, I—”

“You want to apologize, so you can say at least you're being honest now. Well, to be honest with
you
, I don't think things would've been any different if you'd said something. I doubt it would've been worth anything. Maybe, but probably not. What I am sure of is that you coming here and telling me this shit now is worth less than nothing.” She stood up. “You should leave.”

“Cheryl, I'm sorry. That's not how I meant it.”

“Everybody's sorry. Howard drove up here from Jersey when Lenny's body wasn't even cold to tell me how fucking sorry he was. Sorry that he didn't see it either—Lenny faking his happiness. I could tell Howard was more pissed off than sorry though. Because he'd tricked himself, he really believed in it. I wanted to believe in it too. I just never quite did. Now go.”

Simon stood up. “I shouldn't have come.”

“No, you shouldn't have. Especially since I already knew that you'd lied to me. I wasn't angry then—mostly I was just disappointed—because I understood why you did it. But I also understand why you're doing this now, and I
am
angry. Good-bye, Simon. Please don't come here again.”

She turned her back on him then and went inside the house.

 • • • 

S
IMON
pressed his forehead to the train window. Bare trees blurred into a brown strip above which the sky hung heavily, thick, bulbous gray clouds laced with black veins. It was only the first week of November, but the prediction was for snow, the earliest in the season Simon could ever remember. He'd felt the temperature drop as he waited on the platform, the bottom falling out of the air. It had been stupid to come, stupid to think Cheryl would want to hear his apology. He'd realized she was right, of course: he'd come to talk to her, not for her sake, but for his own. Even though his apology had been genuine, it was also pointless, a shortcut to an absolution she'd justifiably refused to grant. If he took her at her word, he could at least steal some consolation from the fact that speaking the truth in the first place would have changed nothing. He couldn't imagine how horrible it must have been to live in the same house, to sleep in the same bed, with a husband you knew was pretending all the time, a man who wore a happy mask and voiced happy words when you knew he meant none of it, no matter how much you wanted him to. To suspect that something terrible might be coming, and not be able to do anything about it.

His train pulled into Penn Station at quarter to three, and he headed straight for the Health Solutions office. He wanted to page DaSilva, to find out what was happening at Cabrera; if it was bad news, he didn't want to have to talk about it in front of Maria. As he let himself into the lobby and rode the elevator up, he thought of her waiting alone in the Roosevelt Island apartment. How much longer was she going to tolerate hanging around? Wasn't it likely that as soon as she healed, she'd simply cut her losses and disappear, leave New York, take the cash and wash her hands of DaSilva and Health Solutions and the whole gnarled mess, him included? Yet if things really went sour—if Lenny's transplant came under more intense scrutiny, if the story didn't simply disappear as they all hoped it would—would DaSilva just let her leave like that? Wouldn't he come after her, wherever she went, to find her before somebody else did? Still, even if this was true, what could Simon do about it?

He unlocked the office door and stepped inside, and then he stopped, for a moment not quite understanding what he saw. The office had been stripped. The computer was gone; the shelves were empty, all the files missing. He squatted down behind the desk: the safe was gone as well. The room had been emptied of everything except its furniture and the ashtray overflowing, on the windowsill, with crushed butts. Even the phone had been removed.

Simon paged Peter to his cell phone and sat behind the desk, smoking, fighting off a wave of panic, his mind animating and then quickly discarding scenario after scenario. He waited and then paged DaSilva again, adding “9-1-1” to the end of his number. Still nothing. He felt another sick lurch of anxiety roll and pitch his body.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
He considered calling DaSilva's cell phone directly, but then he quickly decided against it. Maybe it was better if he didn't know Simon had visited the office. DaSilva had stripped the place without telling him; perhaps this had simply been an oversight, but what if it was intentional? Why would DaSilva freeze him out now? He stubbed out his last butt and locked the office behind him. He needed to get back to Maria; she deserved to know what he'd found, and anyway, he'd left her alone long enough.

Down on the street, he hurried past the subway entrance—he didn't want to miss a call while underground—and continued on to the tram station. Finally snow started to come down, the flakes weightless and fine as powdered sugar. He climbed the concrete stairs and stood waiting on the dock, watching the revolutions of the giant blue-painted gear that winched the tram. Either somebody had already started to piece the whole chain together—from Lenny to Crewes to Maria to Health Solutions—or DaSilva had cleared the office out of an abundance of caution, a kind of paranoiac spasm. But why hadn't he contacted Simon? The tram car slipped into its berth and disgorged its few passengers. Simon secured a spot against one of the Plexiglas windows facing north before the car pulled out of the station, gliding along its cable, over the ledge and into the air. It was barely four o'clock and the sun was already starting to set, its eerie, volcanic glow lighting scalloped black clouds from below. Snowflakes were pushed and pulled by the wind, a strong gust drawing a curtain of white across the car before just as swiftly tugging it away.

 • • • 

O
n the Roosevelt Island side, Simon exited the tram with about a dozen other passengers. The group dispersed, most heading north with Simon, past the diminutive Episcopalian church and on toward the apartment complexes that crowded the upper half of the island. The snow fell steadily now, January muscling into the beginning of November. Businesses were closing early for the night, the street emptying out according to the island's own suburban-minded clock. Once Simon passed the last of the commercial blocks, the foot traffic thinned even further. He continued alone past the tennis courts and baseball diamond, reaching the point where Main Street bent west toward the river, and he saw parked there, at the mouth of the walking path that led to his apartment building, a mud-spattered gray RAV4, its engine running and lights off. The car was familiar to Simon, but he hadn't yet placed it by the time the driver's door opened and a woman bundled in a heavy winter parka stepped out to meet him, raising her hand, her glossy black hair blowing across her face.

“Katherine?”

He hadn't spoken to Katherine Peel since a few weeks after starting with DaSilva. He'd had the sense that she didn't want to know too much about what he was doing for Health Solutions, that ever since she'd stopped helping Peter, she'd deliberately maintained a degree of ignorance about Simon and his activities and that this ignorance was, for her, a kind of protection. There was also the shameful matter of his behavior in the anatomy lab, as well as the clumsy, supremely inebriated pass he'd made in her apartment—not to mention the larger shame of simply dropping out of medical school—and so, with a mild, nagging sense of guilt, he'd let their friendship slip away. He felt happy to see her now, even though he suspected he wasn't going to like why she was here.

“Simon.” She smiled at him. “It's nice to see you.”

“Yeah, you too.” He glanced up at his apartment building, the tower enveloped in blowing snow, and pictured Maria waiting inside the apartment. “So . . . what's going on?”

She laughed. “You mean, what the hell am I doing here?” She tugged on his elbow. “Come on, get in the car and I'll tell you. It's freezing out here. Crazy fucking weather.”

He hesitated. “There's somebody upstairs waiting for me.”

“Yeah, I know. She'll be fine.”

He stared at her. “What do you mean, you know?”

She sighed. “Please, Simon. Just get in and we'll talk.” She watched as he stood, paralyzed, gazing up at the apartment building. “I'm trying to help you,” she said, her voice firmer now. “We don't have a lot of time. Please.”

He turned away from the building and climbed into the car. Katherine had cranked the heat, and snow melted from his hair and eyebrows, icy runoff soaking his collar. She put the car into gear and rolled them slowly down Main Street, away from his apartment.

“Where are we going?”

She glanced over at him. “The Bronx.”

He took out his cell phone and started to dial the number to his apartment's phone.

“No,” Katherine said sharply. “Not yet.”

“I need to tell Maria—”

“I said not yet. Put the phone away.”

Simon jammed it back into his pocket. “Jesus, Katherine, what is this? What are we doing?”

“Saving your ass.” She leaned forward, squinting into the swirling snow. “Peter called me. Cabrera's launched an internal investigation into Leonard Pellegrini's transplant. They're in full fucking crisis mode over there, and they want to talk to Maria. Peter's stalling them, but he probably can't for much longer, and now a guy from the
Post
is sniffing around the story, digging and asking questions and working the administrators into a frenzy. This investigation can't know that you exist, obviously. Peter's still stuck at Cabrera right now, or else he'd be doing this himself.”

“Doing what?”

“I told you. Protecting you.” She swung the RAV4 onto the tiny Roosevelt Island Bridge and then gunned it north onto Vernon Boulevard.

“Protecting me from what?”

“You need to get out of the city, Simon. It's not just the hospital. If a reporter presses Howard Crewes, or maybe Pellegrini's wife, what's her name—”

“Cheryl.”

“Yeah. If they're pressed hard enough, they're going to crack. They'll name you, and then you're fucked.”

Simon shook his head. “I don't think so. I saw her today, and—”

“
What?
” Katherine turned to stare at him. “You saw her? Where?”

“I went to find her on Long Island,” he said. “I wanted to see how she was dealing with all this.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Katherine stomped on the accelerator, the car's tires chewing up the pasty, grimy snow. “You can't have anything to do with these people anymore. Come on, Simon, you must realize that.”