“Sammy. I…” She finds herself overcome and struggles to find the words. “It’s been a long time.”
“Yes. It has.”
“I mean…I know you were on your way here ten days ago. The FBI visited me.”
“I figured they would.”
“Are you going to be cryptic? Do I have to pull information out of you?”
“You’re still funny, Annie.”
“I’m not really joking.”
Suddenly, Sammy moves toward her. He awkwardly places his hands on her shoulders and they stand like that for a moment. Then he steps an inch closer to embrace her. Annie stiffens and pulls back, but Sammy clasps onto her firmly. Finally, she lets down her guard and hugs him back. They hold each other for a while.
“You look good,” Sammy says. “Almost the same.”
“So do you.” She lies too. “Hardly different.”
“Ah, looks are deceiving. My health is not so good.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Annie disengages herself.
“Yes, blood pressure, cholesterol—you name it.”
“And, you’re in trouble too.”
“I guess we both are,” he says.
“You know, I lived my life in trouble, up to a point. I was always in trouble when I was a girl. That awful feeling returns in an instant. Like putting on a pair of old slippers that molded long ago to your feet.”
“The comfort of discomfort.”
“You still sound like Confucius.” She smiles and shakes her head. “But yes. When I got older, I learned about family systems. We end up repeating what we don’t understand. Until we finally do. You want a drink?”
“Do you have any mint tea?” Sammy asks.
“Helen?” she raises her voice, but not by much.
“Yes, Mrs. Ford?” Helen appears in a flash. Surely, she was listening at the door.
“Would you make us a pot of mint tea?” Annie turns back to Sammy. “Sit down.”
Taking her offer of a seat at the opposite end of the sofa, Sammy looks out at the water. He and Annie remain that way for a few minutes, taking in the panorama—fishing boats and sailboats in the foreground, immense shipping vessels crossing the background—a view that always and never changes.
“Susan would have liked this.” Annie gestures at the vista.
“Yes,” Sammy replies. “She would have.”
“I picture her here. I picture her living my life. Well, living the life I made for her.”
“I imagine that is not helpful, Annie.”
They lapse into silence, side by side, together with Susan’s ghost. Helen returns with the tea tray and Annie busies herself with pouring.
“Honey?”
“No, thank you. Blood sugar.”
Annie passes a cup to Sammy and pours one for herself.
“You have done well,” Sammy says.
“Yes.”
“Tell me about your husband.”
“Jack? He died five years ago. Another ghost I live with.”
“Good man?”
“Yes, Sammy, he was a very good man. What about you? Have
you married?”
“No.”
“You would have made a good husband.”
“I don’t believe I would have made a good husband to anyone.”
Annie sets down her cup and studies him. She has not seen this man in decades, and yet some things about him haven’t changed: there is a resigned quality to the way he carries himself—a capitulation to fate—as if he has always believed his destiny was beyond his control. She clears her throat. “We need to talk.”
“Yes, that’s why I came.”
“I think it’s better if we get out of here.” She rises. “Let’s walk.”
“All right.” Sammy sets his cup next to hers.
Annie goes to a kitchen drawer and, bypassing the double lead, selects two single leashes. She connects the dogs and hands one to Sammy. She steers them to the right at the end of her drive and leads them two houses down, to take the turn onto Lighthouse Road.
The skies have clouded over and look ominous to the northeast. Best not to stray too far.
For thirty-five years—and perhaps longer, if she’s honest—Annie has lived her life behind a mask, methodically closing an enfilade of interior doors, one after the other, until she is not sure she knows the way back. As they walk, she wonders if this is true of Sammy, as well. Is he like her, unable to find the breadcrumb trail that leads home? Did he, too, almost come to believe his own lies?
“Last time I saw you, you were headed to New York,” Sammy says.
They arrive at the end of the road, where it opens onto the green sweep of lawn stretching to the lighthouse. The Atlantic crashes against the rocks and seawall to the left. The calmer waters of the bay gently roll up to the beach of Napatree and the houses with their own seawalls to the right.
Annie leans down and unleashes her dogs, allowing them to run freely.
Darker clouds roll across the sky. Fog is closing in over the point. The lighthouse, immediately in front of them, assumes an unreal appearance, its edges beginning to blur and its light beams to refract through the airborne water droplets of the approaching weather. The mournful sound of the foghorn is next to them now. For the second time this week, Annie thinks of the hymn to lost sailors.
“Yes. I went to New York. I got a job as a receptionist. I put my head down and moved forward.
“A few months after I arrived, there was a transit strike. Early spring of nineteen eighty, but it was very cold. I lived on the Upper West Side, near the Hudson River. I walked to work every day in tennis shoes—in a sea of people in suits and tennis shoes walking for miles to work. And, at night, coming back across Ninety-fifth Street, from Broadway to Riverside Drive, I walked down that concrete canyon into the frigid blast from the river.
“All the windows of my apartment faced a brick wall. My roommate made coffee in a Melitta carafe. The one that looks like an hourglass and you boil water on the stove and pour it through a filter. When she left for work in the morning, she put the whole thing in the refrigerator. So, every other day, we drank yesterday’s coffee. That was my life: tennis shoes, the freezing walk, the brick wall view, old coffee.”
“It sounds like you were punishing yourself.”
“Well.” Annie walks to the seawall on the Atlantic side, closer to the rough ocean. “I would have been justified.”
She pauses to get a bead on her dogs, now tentatively stepping out onto the big rocks on the bayside.
“Calpurnia! Pliny! Come here!” She waits. Then she calls out a single word, “Cookie!”
At that, both dogs turn and run back to her at a gallop. She produces two dog treats from her pocket. “Magic bullet.”
Annie goes on with her story. “It took all of that for me to pull myself together. Every bit of it. That summer, Frankie, the drugs, the accident, Susan’s death, the long, dreary years in New York. I did the crash dummy version of growing up. Never took a graceful step in my life.”
“What happened with Susan’s father?”
Annie lets out a sigh. “He died within the year. I heard that he spent those months in a coma. I think—I pray—he never missed his daughter.” She and Sammy both spend a moment on that prayer.
Annie continues, “His lawyer had predeceased him, so my conversations were with a junior partner who’d never met Susan. You’d set up the documents so well that I was able to sign the papers long distance. I had the proper ID to get a notary to sign off on everything.
“The house was sold. The contents were sold separately by one of those tag sale companies. The estate was settled. Susan was the sole beneficiary. It wasn’t much, but it gave me a cushion in those early years. I pinched myself every day for a couple years after that, not really believing I’d sailed through it all. Jumping every time the phone rang.”
“Forged papers were always my forté,” Sammy says with a degree of rueful pride.
“
Well, that’s certainly among the crimes I could be charged with. But Sammy, how are you walking away? Last I heard you were in FBI custody. Now you’re here at the beach and about to travel abroad?”
Sammy, who had been facing the ocean, turns back to her. “Things are not always what they seem.”
“You still talk like a fortune cookie. Anyway, look at us. We recognized each other. And Sherry knew me. She knew me right away.” Annie decides not to mention Johnny Buscemi.
“Was she your friend?” Sammy asks. “The FBI agents asked me about her, but I don’t remember her.”
“God, no! She hated me and Susan. After all these years. ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’ Who said that? Was it Hamlet?”
“I don’t know. Macbeth?”
“Well, there’s your proof. I’m not actually Susan or I would have known who said that.”
“Yes.” Sammy turns back to the sea, the wind blowing his once black hair, now splashed with silver, off his face. “Susan would have known.”
51
Time: 6:45 p.m.
The air grows leaden. The rain holds off still, but it is coming. Soon, the clouds will burst. The heat of the day shifts in a moment and cold drafts blow in from the ocean.
Sammy and Annie stand at the Atlantic sea wall. They face the old Harkness house. The pop star’s guards, in bright yellow slickers, can be seen at lookout points atop the cliff wall, ever vigilant for stalkers. Farther down is the Ocean House, also in yellow, its enormous form resembling a giant Victorian lady in a summer dress.
“Tornado weather,” Annie says. “That’s what we call this in Michigan. When the day goes from hot to cold in an instant. Usually the sky is green, though. This sky is rather black.”
“Do you think we should go back?”
“Are you nervous, Sammy? Scared of a little rain?”
“You want to stand here in the rain, so be it.”
Annie spins to face him. “I want to know why you were coming to see me the first time. What did you want from me, Sammy? I haven’t seen you for thirty-five years. Why now?”
“That’s what I came here today to explain. Don’t you want to go inside?”
“No, I don’t want to go inside! I want you to tell me right here, right now.”
“Fine, I’ll tell you now.” Sammy resigns himself to the force of her will. “I was coming to ask you for money. I guess that part is obvious. I got myself into a situation that I wanted to get out of and the only way out that I could see required money.”
“How did you know how to find me?”
“Come on, Annie. I already knew you started out as Susan Bentley. It wasn’t hard to connect a few dots.”
Annie turns back to the ocean. The surf is rising. A few intrepid souls in wet suits mount their boards to ride the waves crashing into East Beach. The Ocean House beach attendants run to and fro, folding up lounge chairs, collapsing umbrellas, battening the hatches before the storm.
“What have you gotten yourself into?”
“I can’t really say.”
“You expect me to give you money and you’re not going to tell me what for?”
“The situation has changed since I came here two weeks ago. I’m no longer asking you for anything. Someone is waiting for me right now. This person will pick me up shortly at your house to take me to the airport. I need to go back to Iraq. My window of opportunity, as they say, has closed.”
“I can’t even follow this.”
“You’re not meant to follow it.”
“You’ve just ruined my life, Sammy! A life I’ve spent years constructing!” Annie doesn’t come up for air. “You put me on that plane to New York. You sent me off into the unknown. You never tried to find me in the sixteen years when I was alone. And now you’re here? And the FBI is all over me? What the hell is this? What’s going on?”
“That was not my intention. Remember, I saved your life once. I was coming to you to ask you to help me save mine. Damn it, Annie! I lost as much as you did back then!”
Annie takes a moment to digest what Sammy has just said.
“I’m sorry. I’m not the same self-involved twit you used to know. I really have changed. You got me started on that change in that apartment in Southfield.” She reaches her hand out to him. “Remember?”
He softens and takes her hand in his. “Yes. I remember.”
52
Friday, September 21, 1979
Suburban Detroit
By the fifteenth day in hiding, Annie’s physical condition had dramatically improved. Her emotional state was a different matter. She cried all the time. She, the stoic of her family, now wept at the break of an egg.
She knew that Sammy cried too. She saw him sometimes, when he thought he was alone, gazing out the window with tears running down his cheeks. They didn’t gush, like a full-blown sob, they just coursed slowly along his smooth, olive skin, until they dropped onto his shirt. He never made a motion to wipe them. Perhaps, he thought if he did that, she would notice. Sammy’s anguish disturbed her even more than her own. In all her life, she had never seen a man cry.
They stumbled toward a rhythm and stabbed at a semblance of normalcy. All days revolved around the news shows that, more than two weeks after the shootout, had not ceased to feature that lurid story. Obsessively, Annie and Sammy watched, searching for a key to the door out of the apartment in Southfield.
“Sammy!” Annie called from the kitchen, a small, tiled alcove off of the living room.
Sammy padded in from the bedroom, pulling a shirt over his head. “I must have fallen asleep.” He sniffed the air. “What’s that smell?”
“That smell,” Annie announced as she carried water glasses to the coffee table, where she had already set out placemats, “is dinner. I really hope you like it!”
“Ah. I’m sure it will be delicious.”
“It’s almost ready. I just wanted you to be here when I take it out of the oven. I hate for food to get cold.”
“My mother is the same way.” Sammy plopped on the sofa.
“Is your mom a good cook?” A seed of doubt was entering Annie’s mind as she walked back with silverware and napkins.
“My mother is the best cook in the world.” Annie deflated as soon as he said it. “Well, I should qualify. My mother is the best Chaldean cook. We eat a very different type of food from you Americans. Dolmas and kibbeh and baba ghannouj.”
“I’ve had food like that in Greektown.”
“Right. So, you know what I mean. But my mother’s cooking is better than anything you’ve had there.”
Before Annie could call it off, the little egg timer rang. She scurried back to the oven and pulled out a steaming casserole, which she heaped on two plates.
“Well. Voilà.” She set the plates before them. “I’m practicing my French while I practice my cooking. That’s a lotta practice!”
“Thank you for dinner, Annie. Merci.”
“Oh. You’re welcome.” She sat beside him and held up her water glass. “Well. Here’s to the Hindu who does what he kin do way up in those mountains where he must make his skin do!”
Sammy choked on his water. “What did you just say?”
“Just a toast my grandma taught me.”
“Your grandmother sounds like an interesting woman.”
“She’s just a normal grandma.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
Annie and Sammy lifted the plates to their knees and turned to face the television. Sammy picked up a fork and a knife, European-style, and prepared his first bite. Annie just used a fork. Detroit-style.
“Mmm.” Sammy chewed. “Wow. What is this?”
“Well, I remembered this casserole that everyone makes with green beans, and mushroom soup and these little fried onions. We don’t have green beans, so I substituted baked beans. And we don’t have mushroom soup, so I thought beef barley was close. And we don’t really have fried onions, so I thought Fritos would have the right crunchy contrast.” Sh
e watched him. “You don’t like it, do you?”
“No. I mean yes! You really got the crunchy part right. And the flavors are very…flavorful.”
“It’s okay, Sammy. I’m eating the same thing.” Annie plunked her plate on the coffee table. She took Sammy’s from him, as well. “It’s terrible. The whole thing. It’s not gonna work. I’m not gonna be able to do this. Sammy, I just don’t get why I have to pretend to be Susan!”
“Annie, we’ve talked about all this.”
“I know but it just seems so crazy! No one, no one, no one will ever believe I’m Susan! What? You think if I trot out the word, voilà, every once in a while, I suddenly turn into Grace Kelly?”
“Look, I know it seems like a lot. But let’s review what happened. You were witness to a very serious event. Many people were killed. But not everyone who was there is dead. There were a number of survivors. Johnny Buscemi is alive. As is Officer Daniel Ravello. I don’t know how familiar you are with those two men, but they are extremely powerful and dangerous characters.”
“I know Johnny. He’s a bad guy.”
“That’s an understatement. He’s not just involved in drugs. And that cop is both his protector and his enforcer. There are rumors that Buscemi is politically connected and may run for office.”
“But, how could he? He’s a criminal!”
“I’m not from this country. But, where I’m from it happens all the time. Do you think Mr. Buscemi—should he win an election, with that flunky cop Ravello at his side—do you think he’d like to know that you’re out there? Knowing what you know about him. Knowing you could identify him as a drug dealer. Not to mention his presence at Frankie’s house the night so many people were murdered.”
“But I wouldn’t say anything!”
“Annie. Listen to yourself. Do you really think that anyone would believe you? You couldn’t even control yourself with your boyfriend.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say!”
“I just mean that you have a reputation for being hot-headed. You’re not seen as a stable girl. You’re perceived to be…well, to use a great deal of cocaine.”
Finding Mrs. Ford Page 21
