Water from Stone - a Novel (5 page)

As she does on most Dream mornings, Mar by-passes the shower and moves down to the kitchen for caffeine. Picasso, her yellow Lab, plods after her.

Mar pushes her flower mugs aside and reaches for the Mars-Black mug she associates with The Dream, fills it with water, and nukes it. Adding two heaping teaspoons of instant coffee, she makes the usual promises to herself that tomorrow she’ll quit and settle for the green tea that won’t irritate the ulcers that attack her whenever The Dream starts up again.

“You done?” she calls out the back door to the dog, who appears offended that her morning romp in the snow is so short.

With her coffee in hand, Mar climbs the two flights of stairs to the third-floor attic that is her studio. When she bought the house four years before, she had picture windows put in and skylights so that the large, open space is filled with natural light. She sets the coffee down next to a plush, paint-spackled armchair and moves to the larger of her two easels. The canvas is forty-eight inches high by sixty inches long. She began the painting several days before and is still not sure whether to keep it or to gesso over it and begin again. Up close, the landscape looks good, the dusty, adobe-colored plains with flat-top mesas in the background look realistic. The rust-colored sky screams desolate. She returns to the arm chair, curls up and stares at the painting. Her intention had been to paint a herd of wild horses racing across the foreground. Looking at it now, though, she wonders if she should just leave it as a landscape. She’ll get more for the painting if she adds the horses, and she could use the money, but doing so feels more like work than pleasure. She sips her coffee and tries to dredge up a bit of enthusiasm for the project. She tells herself that she doesn’t have to like it because the painting is not going to be hanging in her house. But, it will have her name on it. Mar thinks about this.
Do I care?
she asks herself. And that, of course, is her problem.

Years before, she had been a successful artist. Her paintings had sold for thousands of dollars and, by the time she’d graduated from high school, she’d had a following of collectors. Art was in her genes. The only child of a nature illustrator and a sculptress, Mar was an art prodigy. She painted under-water scenes and was often compared to Wyland, though she preferred to paint the abundant life of a coral reef while he was more famous for his paintings of whales and dolphins. That all ended with Joaquin’s death while they were on their honeymoon in the Virgin Islands. Since then, she has been unable to paint the ocean, has not even owned a tube of blue paint. Now she paints mountains and deserts, wide open plains and dry washes, cowboys and Indians. And horses.

“I hate horses,” she tells Picasso. The dog thumps her tail.

When she was seven, the ocean gave Joaquin to Mar. At least that is how she has always seen it. Her father, widowed when Mar was just a baby, kept her with him whenever she wasn’t in school. Most days they tooled around the mangroves in their 13-foot Boston Whaler looking for wildlife to sketch. That morning they’d been sketching birds off the Key Deer Refuge when a ramshackle wooden boat had rounded into view. No more than thirty feet long and a third as wide, the boat had a small wheelhouse aft but nothing more to cover the forty-plus people who crowded her deck. The single engine was straining and thick black smoke trailed behind it. She was listing badly to port and riding too low in the water. Don Bloom set his sketch pad down.

“Maryann,” Don had said to Mar, “put your drawing away. That boat’s going over.”

By the time they neared the boat, it was taking on water. Panicked people were screaming and pushing each other out of the way to get to the wheelhouse. A number of people had fallen into the water and were flailing around.

“Why don’t they swim?” Mar screamed to her father.

“They don’t know how,” he’d answered. “Honey, help them into the boat, but be careful you don’t get pulled in.” He set the outboard to idle. “When the boat’s full, take them to shore and get back here as quick as you can, OK?”

“Where are you going?” she’d asked, fear constricting her throat.

“I gotta help them, honey.” And Don dove into the water.

That day, they’d saved thirty-seven people. Five were never found. One of those they’d saved was a nine-year-old boy named Joaquin. His father, a doctor, had been prohibited by the Castro government from leaving the island and so he and his wife, sensing that life in Cuba was going to become increasingly difficult, had made the decision to escape. While most of the refugees Mar and her father had helped that day made their ways to Miami and beyond, Joaquin’s family had stayed in the Keys and no one was surprised when, years later, Joaquin and Mar, as he called her, were married.

***

The phone rings, breaking through her reverie. She stretches out behind her and blindly snatches the cordless unit from its cradle, her eyes still focused on the painting.

“Hey, girl, what you up to?”

“Shirley! How are you? What’s up?”

“Not much in the wider sense of the world, but things’re looking up in your life.”

“Why? What’s going on? You’re not calling me at seven in the morning to give me another sob story, are you?” she asks her best friend. “By the way, did you call about half an hour ago?”

“I sure did, honey, and yes, I am calling you about that, but it’s your sweet apple pie ass that’s gonna beg me for a change. Girl, you ain’t got it in you to say no to this one.” And Shirley, her voice saturated with glee, begins to cackle.

Mar makes a face, regretting answering the phone, and runs a hand through her hair. Her fingers become entangled in the unruly mess and she tucks the phone under her chin and tries to work the snarl free. “Don’t start that Jamaican jive shit on me, please,” she begs. “It’s too bloody early.”

Shirley’s laughter grows louder, “I know, sugar, I know.”

Mar gives up on her hair and reaches for her coffee instead. The woman is a nuisance. “OK,” she sighs, “what’ve you got?”

Shirley, perhaps sensing a change in Mar’s resistance, maybe a little slippage in her armor, drops the Jamaican accent and moves in for the kill. “Little girl. About four or five months. It’s hard to say. She doesn’t appear to be well nourished, so she could be a little older. We’ve had her for a couple of days down at Memorial. Otherwise healthy, though there are a couple more tests we’re waiting for the results on.”

“Such as?” Mar asks and immediately regrets giving Shirley an in.

“You know, the usual. AIDS, HIV, Hepatitis…” Shirley’s voice trails off.

“And what are the chances of those?” Yawning, Mar rubs her tired eyes and notes that the throbbing in her left temple is easing. Just a little.

Shirley’s voice drops further, “
Mmmm
, fair to middlin'. It looks like her mom was a druggie.” And now, as though sensing that she’s lost precious ground, she rushes on to try to make up for it, “But, you know that doesn’t mean the kid’s infected, or even that the mother was. It’s just a precaution. The doctors think she’s in good health, results pending of course.”

“And the mom? Where is she?”

“Dead. The police found her a couple of days ago, arm tied off, a needle sticking out of it. A neighbor heard the kid crying and it finally occurred to him to call the police. He said he thought it was normal, babies cry and all that. Of course, he’s no prize himself.”

“What about relatives? Any clue?” In spite of herself, Mar’s curiosity begins to get the best of her. She takes a slug of coffee, settles back into the chair and prepares to sit awhile.

“None that we can find. The people in her building are not your Joe-Good-Citizens, all eager to help. What we’ve gathered is that she and her daughter have been there a couple of months. They came from California – following a band, or something. Anyway, that’s the story. She had a job in a local head shop. They let her bring the baby to work, said she was an angel, never cried or anything.”

“So what are we looking at? Short term? Long term? What?”

Shirley pauses long enough that Mar, all the way across town, feels herself being weighed and knows that Shirley has to be thinking about Max and wondering whether Mar Delgado is stable enough to handle another child. Mar presses the phone into her stomach and smacks her head with her palm. One time, two times, three times, clonk, clonk, clonk, when will it end? Shirley has a right to doubt her, but still. She puts the phone back to her ear and bites her lip, determined not to speak.

“Mar, I’m sorry, I really don’t know. The mother was a drifter and we don’t have much on her. We haven’t found any I.D., nothing I’d vouch for anyway, and she pretty much kept to herself. We think the head shop was paying her under the table and, if so, there won’t be any Social Security numbers we can follow up on. She’s been in town at least four months, though, and everyone I’ve spoken with so far says she was a great mother. Except for the little drug problem, that is.”

“But, time-wise, what kind of commitment are you looking for?”

“I’m open, I just don’t know. We could find a relative in a week, a month. It could take years, who knows? You’ve been there before, you know how this works.”

“Yeah, I know,” Mar’s voice is filled with misery. She knows the emptiness of losing someone and she doesn’t think her heart can take another blow.

“Honey, we’re not asking that you become a mother to this kid,” Shirley seems to intuit her thoughts. “We just need to find a temporary home for her until we can sort things out. It probably won’t take too long and, in any case, I wouldn’t put you in that kind of position.”

“Yeah, I know,” Mar sighs. “Alright, look, can I have some time to think about this?”

“I need an answer today. Preferably this morning. Otherwise, I’ve got to find another foster home for her.”

“Yeah, OK. Look, let me drink my coffee, take a shower, think about it.” She pauses as a plausible excuse occurs to her. “Listen, I don’t even have a crib or anything…”

“That’s not the issue. You know that.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. BUT….”

“Yeah, but. Just call me, alright? Say by eleven?”

Mar glances at the wall clock and calculates how long she can put off making the decision. “By noon. I promise.”

“OK, baby, I’m counting on you. So is this little girl.”

“You know what, Shirl? You can kiss my butt.” Mar clicks off the phone. The painting, she decides, is awful. Horses will help. But it is not figuring out what to do with the painting that makes her smile. It’s the thought of having a baby in the house. Mar tries to temper her enthusiasm, to keep it from becoming so big that it envelops her and eats her alive. Like it had with Max.

Five

Jack.

The jangle of the phone reaches through the fog. Strange. It hasn’t rung in days. Jack pulls his gaze back from the window. “Yes, Robert?”

“There’s a Mr. Colomanos here to see you, sir,” the doorman says.

“Oh.” Jack’s eyes move to his watch and he notes that the morning has, in fact, long passed. “Thanks. Please let him up.”

Sy Colomanos is somewhere in his fifties. Fit, but for the slight paunch, he wears his sparse hair just short of balding, no sweeping it over the top and gluing it down with spray for Sy. He wouldn’t put up with that kind of shit and that is just one of the many things that Jack has always respected about the man. But now he reaches out tiredly and takes Sy’s outstretched hand. “Sy. Thanks for coming.” Jack leads the private investigator to the living room and watches as Sy takes in the charts and whiteboards that cover the walls. “Take a seat,” he says, waving at the sofa. “Get comfortable.” The manners, ingrained since childhood, are rusty on his tongue. “Uh, do you want anything to drink? Coffee maybe?”

“Nah, thanks, I’m OK. How you doin’, Jack?”

How is he doing? Jack bites off a laugh. Now there’s a question. His eyes return to the window, as if the answer lies somewhere along the dreary skyline. There is a weight about the city in February. The invigorating crispness of the cold just doesn’t do well in Manhattan, where the deep ravines created by block after block of tall buildings cause the wind to build upon itself as it tunnels through without escape. A gentle breeze can whip into a shearing knife in the winter streets. Lindsey had liked the cold, had liked the rawness of it. She’d pile on clothes and drag him out for a walk, her cheeks turning a brilliant red, her laughter egging him on, the two of them feeling like they were the only people left in the world.

“Jack?”

Sy’s voice brings Jack back to the present. He rubs at the raw skin of his eyelids and then looks up at his old friend. “Sorry. I was just thinking about how Lindsey liked winter…” His voice chokes on her name, catches as he tries to hide behind a forced cough. “Fuck,” he finishes, and takes a deep breath.

Sy nods and Jack knows he understands. Sy would know. Early in their relationship, Lindsey had taken a liking to the solid detective, had taken to calling him when Jack was too wrapped up in work to come home, too busy with a case to give her the attention she deserved. “He’s so lonely,” she’d once told him. “He’s all tough on the outside, but inside he’s a marshmallow.” Jack doesn’t know about the marshmallow part, but he can buy the bit about Sy being lonely. Leaping ahead twenty years, the same length of time that Sy has been a widower, will he be the guy that some lonely wife calls to walk with her when her husband is too busy to pay her any attention? To try out a new restaurant, take in a movie? The crushing weight of every second wasted bears down on him and Jack swears again.

Sy’s eyes find his. “You want me to look for the baby?” he asks.

Jack pushes out of the chair he’d settled into. It is like that lately, up, down, up, down. Nothing makes sense anymore. Not sitting, not standing, not eating. Some people, when confronted by disaster, rise to the occasion, actually make something positive out of it. Not Jack. The double blow of losing Lindsey and then Mia is just too crushing for him to handle. He spends a lot of days lost in the fog. “I can’t believe it’s been six months,” he says. “Lindsey’d kill me if she knew.”

“Yeah, well, the cops’ve been following up on it pretty strong. It’s not like no one’s been looking.” But though Sy is an adroit liar, Jack hears the emptiness in his words. People go missing all the time in New York, hundreds at a time. The cops have more than enough to handle.