The Exiled (23 page)

H
e lay on the futon in his cabin, fully clothed, watching an eighties sitcom about an English butler running an American family. The cravings had turned frequent and immediate, as though he'd copped that morning and needed a new fix to keep the old one alive. He was done tricking himself—he wanted to get high.

He muted the television, pulled his laptop from the side table. He called up a search engine, typed in
Ella Ferguson,
hit Return.

There were hundreds, maybe thousands of Ella Fergusons out there. He added the words
Brooklyn,
then
New York City,
then
granddaughter of police captain.
His Ella began to emerge from the rest. Page by page, he pieced together a bio. She was an accomplished eighteen-year-old. She'd finished top of her class at Stuyvesant High School, spoke French, played the piano well enough to have placed in a national competition. During her first year at Columbia, she'd cofounded the Just-Us Club, a group of students involved, under the tutelage of a senior faculty member, in securing new trials for inmates who had been railroaded the first time around. There was a photo of them all standing on a lawn under a bright sun, eighteen students total, an equal mix of boys and girls, every one of them smiling as though they'd overturned a life sentence that morning. Raney hunted the image for a resemblance to Sophia, but the picture was taken from a distance, the faces obscured by glare.

So Ella had inherited her mother's penchant for social justice. The aging Ferguson must be preparing to turn in his grave. Had Ella founded the club to spite him? Was he that kind of presence in her life? Imagining an antagonism between them gave Raney some small pleasure, though this pleasure in turn made him feel small. Pitting Ella against her grandfather would do nothing to bring back the years Raney had missed. It wouldn't give Ella a father.

But then she didn't seem to need one. The comparison between Ella and Luisa Gonzalez had been false from the start. Yes, what happened to Luisa could happen to anyone's daughter, but there was a difference between a long shot and a near certainty. To pretend otherwise was to diminish Luisa's brief life while grossly exaggerating his own importance.

Oscar Grant had been right: Raney was too late. Were he to turn up now, he'd only disrupt Ella's life at exactly the wrong moment. Bay meant well, but whether or not Raney needed his daughter had nothing to do with whether she needed him.

He was on the road before the sun came up. He bought a combo meal at a truck stop, thought of Dunham cutting up blow on his dashboard, remembered the beating they'd given each other that night in the warehouse. Dunham, lover of music and the sweet science. Raney felt the violence of those days clinging to him, felt his own capacity for violence unabated. He was more like Dunham than Bay. He understood this now. To be good, even to wish to be good, he had to remain vigilant, had to keep a few steps ahead of himself. Stone had seen it in him. Sophia and her father, too.

He took out five hundred dollars from an ATM, rolled the bills into a tight ball and tucked them in the glove compartment. He pulled onto the highway, headed for Albuquerque.

The crew was back up and running at the Courtside Apartments. Raney parked in a resident's spot at the far end of the lot and watched them work. Their operation was cautious, exact. Teenage spotters roamed the top-floor breezeway. Foot soldiers drank soda and played backgammon in the central courtyard. No one sat or stood more than a few feet from an exit; everyone had a role to play: collect the money, fetch the product, make the handoff. The Albuquerque PD must have been riding them hard since Grant's poison hit the street.

He took the bills from the glove compartment, divided them between his pockets. Once and only once, he told himself. Under the stars, in his rocking chair by the creek. A quick respite. A chance to regroup. But he knew he'd brought too much cash for that to be true.

He caught one of the spotters eyeballing him, thought maybe the kid would send a scout. He waited, but nobody came. He opened his car door, put one foot on the pavement, pulled it back in. He started the engine, switched it off. When civilians walked by, he pretended to be reading a map.

His phone rang. He dug it out of his pocket, saw
CLARA REMLER
slide across the screen. He pressed Talk, held the receiver to his chest. He felt ashamed but couldn't say why.

“Are you there?”

“Yes,” he said. “I'm here.”

Quiet. Then:

“Where is here these days?”

“Albuquerque. Just for the morning. What about you?”

“I'm in Alamosa.”

“Colorado?”

“Southern. I'm teaching at a charter school.”

“Good for you.”

He almost said:
Mavis would be proud.

“It's temporary,” she said. “I'm covering a maternity leave.”

“How does Daniel like it?”

“He keeps asking for Mrs. Hardin. And for you.”

Another pause.

“You're angry with me, aren't you?” she said.

“I'd have no right to be.”

“You'd have every right. You know you would.”

“No,” he said. “I'm not angry with you. I'd have done the same thing. I mean, if I were you and you were me. What I told you—”

“That has nothing to do with it, Wes.”

“Of course it does. There's no need to pretend.”

“I'm not pretending,” she said. “I'm a runner. I told you, I always have been.”

“You had no choice this time.”

He watched money exchange hands in the courtyard. A lanky kid with close-cropped hair disappeared into a basement apartment.

“I've been thinking about you,” Clara said.

“Yeah?”

“I've been wondering if there could be something more between us. I mean something more than the way we met.”

“And?”

“I think there could be.”

He let it hang there.

“I want to see you again,” she said. “I know it's a lot to ask.”

A muscular twentysomething in a tank top and cutoffs came walking slowly toward Raney's car, hands in his pockets. The kids on the breezeway leaned over the railing.

“It isn't,” he said. “It isn't a lot.”

He turned the key in the ignition, backed up, headed for the main road. The foot soldier watched him go.

“You're driving,” Clara said. “It's a bad time. We could talk later.”

“No,” he said. “It's all right. I want to see you, too.”

“Yeah?”

“How far is Alamosa from Albuquerque?”

“You mean tonight?”

“I had a lousy evening planned. I'm glad to get out of it.”

“Flattering,” she said.

“That's not what I meant. Are you free?”

“I'm free. I'll have Daniel.”

“So how far?”

“Depends on how fast you drive.”

Christopher Charles is the pseudonym of Chris Narozny, author of the novel
Jonah Man
. Narozny received an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD from the University of Denver. He has lived in Normandy, Paris, and Brooklyn and currently resides in Denver with his wife, the author Nina Shope.

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