The Starving Years

by Jordan Castillo Price

  Donahue, who was poking a PDA with a stylus, said, “Is that what they’re calling it now?”

  “Apparently so.” Collins turned back to Tim. “But what we’re looking to do is link it to Canaan Products specifically. Because who’s to say the chemical change didn’t start in the fertilizer, or the water.”

  Donahue strolled to a window and looked out over the street, scanning all the people gathered in front of the building. “Who’s to say they weren’t testing out a way to make it cheaper, and the changes caused some kind of freak side-effect?”

  Collins said, “Who’s to say management had no idea—and it was one of their science guys trying to sabotage the company?”

  Tim stared hard at Collins’ eyes. Even through the twin rectangles of reflected sunlight on the surface his glasses, Tim saw the sharpness of his gaze, and the confidence with which he maintained eye contact. He knew Tim knew.

  But was he going after Canaan, really? Or was he just trying to get Tim to incriminate himself?

  Are you going to take your most precious possession—your anonymity—and throw it all away? Why? To make a couple of strangers like you?

  “You’re right,” Tim said. “Who’s to say?”

  The agents didn’t stop him as he stood to leave, but their expressions did another subtle shift. Weariness. Disappointment. It was too bad, really…but since when did anyone think it was a fine idea to expose every last secret to complete strangers? It wasn’t as if Tim could really trust anyb—

  Wait, that’s not true.

  Joni hadn’t given him up. She could have. But she didn’t. And she and Tim weren’t all that close—in fact, they didn’t even particularly like each other.

  Someone had reported Tim, though. Not for hacking into Canaan Products’ mainframe, and thank God for that, but for authoring the Voice of Reason. Who? Who even knew the site was his? Javier? Nelson? (And, judging by their outburst in front of the Manhattan Minute guards, Randy and Marianne.) While it might be profoundly naive to trust his new friends, Tim found that he did. He felt safe with them, and connected, and yes, even loved, in a way he never had before. Not even with….

  What’s with that picture on your site? What are you trying to prove?

  Phil.

  Tim paused at the edge of the table and gripped the back of a chair, hard.

  The problem wasn’t that humanity in general couldn’t be trusted, as Javier seemed to think. The problem, in a nutshell, was that Phil was a creep.

  Collins said dryly, “Did you decide you have something to say, Mr. Foster?”

  Tim took a few deep breaths. Did he ever.

  He turned and looked at Agent Donahue, by the window. Donahue had never sat down, but not in that threatening way a person might do if they were trying to pull some kind of power play. He rolled his shoulders to re-settle his suit coat, then hitched his thumbs in his belt and shifted the waistband of his pants. He looked awkward, like maybe he would have liked to sit down, but he couldn’t, because his suit no longer fit him quite right.

  Because he’d recently put on so much weight.

  “Tell me something,” Tim said, and both agents went subtly still. “Did Canaan Products have my friend’s house blown up?”

  Collins and Donahue glanced at each other. “Is there a reason they might?” Donahue asked.

  Tim didn’t allow himself to be provoked into talking before he was damn well ready. He looked at Collins hard, until the younger agent shook his head and said, “As far as we can tell, no. Just a domino effect of emergency services being tied up and things spinning out of control.”

  Maybe that was for the best. Bobby’s grandmother was still dead. But it made the thing Tim had decided to do less about revenge, and more about simply doing what was right. He steeled himself, and he said, “It’s possible I might have a printout or two that I just happened to…find. Lying around. Somewhere.”

  “As far as we’re concerned,” Collins said, “anything you found that will expedite our investigation fell off the back of a truck.”

  Right. A truck that used to be a moving truck, parked down the block between a couple of SUVs. Tim guesstimated the number of reams he’d printed out in the DLR construction trailer. They should fit in the trunk of a mid-sized sedan…if the agents shifted any other gear they kept there to the back seat.

  Chapter 34

  Nelson adjusted the knot in his tie and backed up a few paces to check himself out in Tim’s bathroom mirror. He’d gone with Javier’s loaner blazer and he’d grudgingly strapped on the tie—but he’d opted for jeans, as he just couldn’t bring himself to wear “trousers.” The resulting image? Early-MTV rock legend, or douchebag professor? Maybe a little of each.

  The door opened and Tuyet poked her head in. Nelson hadn’t bothered to lock it, and personal space had never been her strong suit. “Ready?” she said.

  “Yeah, just about.”

  “Hurry up. You make late.” With that pronouncement, she closed the door again.

  Nelson scrutinized the knot, then loosened it so it didn’t look quite so perfect, ran his fingers through his hair, and gave himself another once-over.

  Douchebag professor. For sure.

  While Nelson had never had much use for “centering” himself, the bathroom of Tim’s apartment was the only place other than the rusty fire escape where any of them could have a moment of solitude, so he allowed himself an extra few seconds of peace and a couple of deep breaths before he opened the door and launched himself back into the joyful chaos that was his life.

  Tuyet was telling Bao something Nelson didn’t quite catch in Vietnamese, mostly vowels. Though Bobby happened to be the world’s best kid, since bà ngoai was no longer there to keep him on the straight and narrow, Tuyet had stepped into the disciplinarian role. It took her about five minutes of nagging to achieve what her mother had accomplished in a single disapproving glance. But she was learning.

  Bobby said, “Uh-huh,” and slid a card across the kitchen counter to Tim, who tucked it into his hand with the utmost graveness. A fork sat between them, equidistant from each of their right hands, tines up. Most people played the game with spoons…but Bobby had been tickled when Tim suggested living dangerously. At least there weren’t any sharp knives in Tim’s bachelor pad, since a mean cup of coffee was the extent of his culinary skills.

  The memory surfaced of a knife tapping a worn wooden board—tick, tick, tick. Maybe they didn’t have a lot to say to each other, but even so, bà ngoai’s death had left a bigger hole in Nelson’s life than he ever would have anticipated.

  Tim slid a card to Bobby, who eased it into his hand. His poker face was amazing, for a twelve-year-old, but then his brow furrowed slightly. Tim broke first, cut his eyes to the fork. Bobby smirked, having faked Tim out, and discarded. Nelson wasn’t sure exactly how they’d finagled the action to allow them to play a three-person game with only two people, but however they improvised, both of them seemed to be playing by the same rules. Tim drew.

  His eyes darted to Bobby’s. He grabbed for the fork.

  Bobby was faster. Tim’s reach was double, but even so, Bobby snatched that fork out from under him, crowing with delight, while Tuyet told him in Vietnamese to keep the noise down—but only half-heartedly, as she stepped out of one pair of shoes and into another in an attempt to find the beaded flip-flops that were precisely right both for the occasion, and for her most recent pedicure.

  The kid’s palm must be full of tine-marks by now. Nelson smiled at the back of his head.

  The futon where Tuyet and Bobby slept was folded into its couch-shape, and a brown corduroy blazer with absurdly long sleeves was draped across the back. Corduroy. Maybe Tim did know how to be ironic, after all. He’d just been subtle about it.

  Tuyet tucked the shoes that didn’t make the cut into a tower of plastic bins that teetered in the corner behind Tim’s redundant servers, then grabbed the blazer off the futon and held it up for Tim to slide his arms in. “Let’s go,” s
he snapped.

  He hustled to obey. The way he towered over her had intimidated her…for maybe two seconds. Within a day of them all moving in, she’d ruled the roost.

  Once she had Tim put together, she spit-slicked one of Bobby’s cowlicks into place, then hustled them all out the door.

  The walk between the apartment and the old place should have seemed familiar. But with cranes and bulldozers and dumpsters dotting the part of Chinatown where he used to live, and especially with the temporary plywood-covered walkways meant to keep pedestrians from being brained by stray rubble while the damage was cleared and the building rebuilt, Nelson’s old street no longer felt like home.

  Mott Street was closed off today, not for construction, but for the memorial service. Eighteen people had died in the explosion. Many of them had probably given Nelson the stink-eye in the hallway as he staggered home with a guy he’d picked up at a pretentiously run-down gin mill. He wouldn’t have thought he would care, but it turned out he did. Not a huge surprise. Lately, it seemed like every emotion cut more deeply than he remembered.

  As they neared the turn off Canal Street, Tuyet was talking to one of her girlfriends from church on her cell, and Bobby had just belted Tim in the arm and said, “Punch bug blue.” Funny, that Tuyet and Bobby would be okay today, and Nelson would be the one in a funk. Or maybe acting like everything was same-old, same-old was just the way they were coping.

  Because it couldn’t be anything other than an act. Nothing was the same.

  Pedestrian traffic grew thick as they turned onto Mott, and then Nelson spotted the camera crews. Not many, compared to the mob that had accosted him outside the Manhattan Minute studios. But a few.

  Javier peeled out of the crowd as they approached, tucking his press pass into his pocket. He fell into step beside Nelson and said, “You’re wearing jeans.”

  “I heard they make my butt look good.”

  “That’s beside the point.” Javier’s pinkie brushed the side of Nelson’s hand as they walked. “Are you avoiding Randy?”

  “No.” Nelson considered the unreturned messages on his phone. Probably.

  “Because he’s pestering me now. Why don’t you want the speaking engagements he’s trying to arrange?”

  “There’s plenty of other food science nerds who’d be happy to explain the hydrogen-carbon chain to John Q. Public.”

  “They don’t want some other scientist. They want you.”

  Nelson groaned and rolled his eyes.

  “What’s the real reason?”

  Nelson considered hedging…but, hey. If Javier let Nelson see his freaky eye whenever they did the horizontal mambo, it wouldn’t kill Nelson to ’fess up. “This whole ‘honorarium’ thing makes me feel like a complete and utter tool.”

  “Which is why Randy is handling it for you. These organizations have budgets set up for their speakers. There’s no reason for you to feel guilty about taking the money.”

  A producer from one of the news crews spotted Nelson as he approached the checkpoint and showed his license to the cops who were trying to keep rubberneckers out and let grieving family in. The cop took an inordinate amount of time squinting at the address, until Nelson said, “They’re all with me,” and indicated Tuyet and Bao along with Tim and Javier. Including a couple of Asian faces in the group seemed to do the trick. The cop handed Nelson’s license back and waved them through, and they slipped past the barricade before the press caught up with them. Most of the time Nelson was willing to mug for the cameras—he’d distilled what he knew about the current manna situation down to a few easy-to-digest sound bites that the media never seemed to tire of him regurgitating—but not today.

  Javier ushered Nelson through a gap in the crowd, then steered Tim toward it with a hand to the lower back. Once they were through the barricade, the crowd thinned. The sidewalk in front of his old building was cleaner than it had ever been before, which was surreal, but the plywood buttress keeping the damage contained was already covered with graffiti. Tuyet and Bobby veered away to talk to a family with a daughter Bobby’s age who’d lived in the apartment above them, and Nelson scoped out a place to stand where a lamp post would block him from the mechanical eyes of the cameras beyond the barricade.

  “Is that Marianne?” Javier asked.

  Tim craned his neck and looked over the tops of the heads of the people around him. “It is.” He waved, and looked like he was just about to call to her—but then a glance at the eighteen wreaths lined up in front of the souvenir shop made him reconsider raising his voice. He settled on getting her attention by waving more vigorously.

  Once Marianne had made it through the checkpoint, she waved back—and Tim gasped.

  Javier said, “What is it?”

  “Did you see her…uh….” Tim blushed.

  “What?” Nelson prompted.

  “Back at Manhattan Minute, I’d just figured she was trying to be a distraction.”

  Nelson wondered what had become of the chartreuse hat. “And?”

  “It’s just that…right now, when she waved, she looked like she might actually be…” he dropped his voice and whispered, “pregnant.”

  Nelson snuck a look through the crowd. That whole day was a blindingly bright serotonin blur…but remembering the spongy feel of her foot swelled up like a water balloon as he salved and wrapped the blisters, it would make a hell of a lot of sense. And then there was the frequency of her bathroom breaks. He watched her stop and give her condolences to Tuyet. Now that she wasn’t wearing a bunch of oversized, hand-me-down outfits, maybe he could indeed spot a baby bump.

  “She is,” Javier said, in that Javier-way of his, and that was that.

  “But she lives alone in that little studio by NYU,” Tim said. “What about the father?”

  When Javier spoke again, there was a chill to his voice. “There is no father.”

  “Oh my God.” Tim stared, anguished. He wore his heart on his sleeve, no doubt about it. Maybe while he’d been tickling Nelson’s neck every night with his long stubble (or short beard), his sensitivity had been wearing away Nelson’s hipster ennui, too. Because Marianne’s predicament plucked at Nelson’s heartstrings as poignantly as Tuyet’s had over twelve years ago.

  Some kids from the church circulated through the crowd, passing out cheap fake flowers to the attendees. Nelson took the flower and twirled it between his thumb and forefinger. A bit of paper, a bit of wire. Maybe the souvenir shop had been looking for somewhere to unload them.

  The parents of one of the children who’d died in the fire dashed over to the wreath with the kid’s last school portrait duct-taped to the center and wired their flowers to the greenery. Right away, all the other mourners tried to get in on the act, crowding the sidewalk. Nelson watched, but he didn’t approach. There’d be time to honor Mai, once everyone else was done jockeying for position.

  At a nearby podium, an older white woman in a dark suit noted the rush toward the wreaths, and shuffled index cards while she waited for a better moment to address the survivors. “Who’s that?” Tim said.

  Javier, who apparently knew everything (in four different languages, even) said, “Deputy Mayor.”

  Nelson wondered idly if she was a deputy, why she wasn’t wearing a big tin badge. But even he knew better than to say something so facetious just then.

  “So she needs a mark,” Tim said.

  Nelson suspected he wasn’t talking about the Deputy Mayor.

  “Yes.” Javier knew. Of course.

  “I’m giving her mine.”

  Both Javier and Nelson looked up sharply. Tim crossed his arms and stared back as if he was daring them to challenge him. Javier didn’t, not out loud, but there was no mistaking his displeasure when his eyebrow drew down like that. He was just looking out for Tim—Nelson understood that—but, hey. It was Tim’s mark to do with what he pleased. Just because a decision was made impulsively didn’t necessarily make it a bad one. Nelson cuffed Tim lightly in the Punch Bug arm and said
, “Awesome. You won’t regret it.”

  “Make sure someone’s standing behind her when you tell her,” Javier said. “She’s liable to faint when she hears she’ll be carrying on the Voice of Reason line.”

  Nelson looked for a sign of amusement, and maybe he saw a slight quirk at the unscarred corner of Javier’s mouth. Maybe. His deadpan delivery was twice as inscrutable as Bobby’s poker face.

  The crowd around the wreaths thinned as some of the mourners let their family members escort them off to the side, to weep. Most of the immigrants in the building had seen enough tragedy in their lives that they were able to avoid big public displays of grief. But the sorrow of so many of them seemed harder to bear, as if by their proximity they were compounding the burden rather than sharing it. Especially now, with the loss so fresh.

  “At least most of them still have their children,” Javier said.

  Nelson couldn’t imagine how he’d cope if Bobby was of the unlucky kids being rehabilitated up at Bellevue. “And everyone thought they were being so backward by cooking their traditional food.”

  The microphone at the podium gave a squeal of feedback as it went live, and the Deputy Mayor hooked a strand of hair out of the corner of her mouth as the wind wreaked havoc with her hairdo and made rumbling noises in the microphone. “Can everyone hear me?” she asked the crowd, all of whom looked back at her blankly. Figuring no news was good news, she squared her shoulders, glanced down at her index cards, and began. “To the loved ones of all who have been lost in the recent tragedy, I join you in remembering and honoring these fellow New Yorkers….”

  A few mourners stepped back from their family member’s wreath, opening a direct line of sight between Nelson and his family’s wreath, and suddenly he felt Mai’s eyes on him as if she’d been staring him down the whole time. It was a strange photograph. She’d never liked having her picture taken, but Bobby had used Nelson’s phone to snap a surprise shot of her less than a week before she died. She stood in the cramped kitchen that was now a pile of rubble in a landfill in New Jersey, hair stuck to her forehead in damp tendrils. She was probably boiling some shrimp bodies just out of frame in a big, steaming pot. She looked surprised. Vulnerable.