So, I assumed Yefim would call to change the meet at the last minute, but I still wanted to get a lay of the land in case he didn’t. I’d been to the Comcast Center at least two dozen times in my life. It was an outdoor amphitheater cut into the woods of Mansfield, Massachusetts. I’d seen Bowie open for Nine Inch Nails there. I’d seen Springsteen and Radiohead. A year back, I saw the National open for Green Day and thought I’d died and gone to alt-rock heaven. Which is to say, I knew the layout pretty well. The amphitheater was a bowl with a long, high slope running down to it, and lower, wider slopes curving around in gradual swirls, so that if you continued to walk in a circle one way, you would eventually run out of road at the amphitheater itself. And if you walked in a circle the other way, you would eventually reach the parking lot. They set up the T-shirt kiosks on these slopes alongside the beer booths and the booths for cotton candy, baked pretzels, and foot-long hot dogs.
Dre and I walked around for a bit as a hesitant snow fell in the gathering dusk. Flakes appeared in the darkening air like fireflies, then melted on contact with whatever they touched—a wooden booth, the ground, my nose. At one of the wooden booths near a stand of turnstiles, I looked right and left and realized Dre was no longer with me. I turned back and walked up one slope and then down another, following my faint footsteps on the dampening pavement. I saw where his broke off and I used the last one I could make out as an arrow. I was walking past the VIP box seats toward the stage when my phone rang.
“Hello.”
It was Amanda. “Where are you guys?”
“One could ask you the same thing.”
“My location doesn’t matter right now. I just got a call that they’ve changed the location of your meeting. What meeting is that, by the way?”
“We’re at the Comcast Center. Who called?”
“A guy with a thick Russian accent. Any other stupid questions? He said Yefim is having trouble getting through to your cell.”
“How’d the Russians get your number?”
“How’d they get yours?”
I didn’t have an answer for that one.
“The meeting’s changed to a train station,” she said.
“Which one?”
“Dodgeville.”
“Dodgeville?” I repeated. I vaguely remembered seeing the name on packages when I’d loaded trucks in college but I couldn’t have pointed it out on a map. “Where the hell’s that?”
“According to a map I’m looking at, go to 152 and head south. Not far. They said only one of you can leave the car with the cross. So you have the cross, I take it.”
“Dre does, yeah.”
“They said bring the cross or they’ll kill Sophie in front of you. Then they’ll kill you.”
“Where are—?”
She’d hung up.
I came to the bottom of the aisle, found Dre sitting on the edge of the stage, looking out at the seats.
“Meeting location’s been changed.”
He didn’t seem surprised. “That’s what you predicted.”
I shrugged.
“Must be great,” he said, “being right all the time.”
“That’s how I come off, uh?”
He stared at me. “People like you wear your self-righteousness like—”
“Don’t blame me because you fucked your life up. I don’t judge you for any of that.”
“Then what do you judge me for?”
“Trying to get into the pants of a sixteen-year-old.”
“In many cultures that’s considered normal.”
“Then move to one of those cultures. Here, it just means you’re a douche bag. You don’t like yourself? Don’t put it on me. You don’t like the way your life turned out? Welcome to the club.”
He looked out at the seats, suddenly wistful. “I played a pretty mean bass in this band I had in high school.”
I managed not to roll my eyes.
“All these things we could have been,” he said. “You know? But you gotta choose a path, so you choose it, and you find yourself exiting med school knowing only one thing for certain—that you’re going to be a subpar doctor. How do you embrace your own mediocrity? How do you accept that in any race, for the rest of your life, you’ll arrive with the back of the pack?”
I leaned against the stage with him and said nothing. It was quite the view—all those seats. Beyond it, the great lawn of general seating rising into the dark sky under gently falling snow. Most nights in July, it would be full. Twenty thousand people chanting and screaming and swaying, pumping their fists toward the sky. Who wouldn’t want to stand onstage and have that view?
On some minor level, I felt bad for Dre. He’d been told by someone—a mother, I assumed—that he was special. Probably told it every day of his life, even as the evidence mounted that it was a lie, however well-intentioned. And now here he was, first career in shambles, second career about to be, and probably unable to remember the last time he’d made it through a day without substance abuse.
“You know why I never had any qualms about brokering baby sales?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Because nobody knows nothing.” He looked over at me. “You think the state knows any better about placing kids? You think anyone does? We don’t know shit. And by we, I mean all of us. We all showed up at the same shitty semiformal and we hope that somehow everyone will buy that we are what we dressed up as. A few decades of this, and what happens? Nothing. Nothing happens. We learn nothing, we don’t change, and then we die. And the next generation of fakers takes our place. And that? That’s all there is.”
I clapped him on the back. “I see a future in self-help for you, Dre. We got to motor.”
“Where?”
“Railway station. Dodgeville.”
He hopped off the stage and followed me up the aisle.
“Quick question, Patrick.”
“What’s that?”
“Where the fuck’s Dodgeville?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dodgeville, as it turned out, was one of those towns so small I’d always thought it was just an extension of another town—in this case, South Attleboro. As far as I could tell, it didn’t even have a traffic light, just one stop sign about six miles from the Rhode Island border. Idling there, I saw an RR sign to my left. So I turned left off Route 152, and after a few hundred yards, the train station appeared, as if dropped there, in an otherwise uninterrupted stretch of woodlands. The tracks ran straight into the forest—just a hard line that vanished into cowls of red maple. We pulled into the parking lot. Other than the tracks and the platform, there wasn’t much to see—no stationhouse to protect against December’s bite, no Coke machines or bathrooms. A couple of newspaper stands by the entrance stairs. Deep woods on the far side of the tracks. On the near side, the platform on the same level as the rails, and the parking lot we’d pulled into, which was lit with sallow white light, the snow spinning like moths under the bulbs.
My phone vibrated. I opened the text:
One of you bring cross to platform. One of you stay in car.
Dre had craned his head to look at the message. Before I could reach for my door, he’d reached for his and was out of the car.
“I got this,” he said. “I got this.”
“No, you—”
But he walked away from the car and out of the parking lot. He climbed the short steps to the platform and stood in the center. From where he stood, a strip of hard black rubber fringed in bright yellow paint extended across the track.
He stood there for a bit as the snow fell harder. He took two or three steps to the right, then four or five to the left, then back to the right again.
I saw the light before he did. It was a circle of yellow bouncing in the woods, a flashlight beam. It rose, then fell and rose halfway back up again before it slid left, then right. It made the same movement a second time—the sign of the cross—and this time Dre’s head turned toward it and locked on. He raised one hand. He waved.
The light stopped moving. Just hovered in the woods directly across from Dre, waiting.
I rolled down my window.
I heard Dre say, “No worries,” and cross the tracks. The snow grew thicker, some of the flakes starting to resemble bolls of cotton.
Dre entered the woods. I lost sight of him. The flashlight beam vanished.
I reached for my door, but my cell vibrated again.
Stay in the car.
I kept the phone open on my lap and waited. It wouldn’t be much of a task to simply hit Dre over the head, take the cross, and disappear into the woods with Sophie, the cross, and my peace of mind. My left hand clenched the door handle. I flexed the fingers, relaxed. Ten seconds later, I found myself clenching the handle again.
The cell phone screen lit up:
Patience, patience.
In the woods, the yellow light reappeared. It hovered, steady, about three feet off the ground.
My cell vibrated, but it wasn’t a text this time, it was an incoming call from a restricted number.
“Hello.”
“Hey, my . . .” Yefim’s voice dropped out for a second. “ . . . you at?”
“What?”
“I said where . . . ?”
The phone went dead in my ear.
I heard something thunk into the gravel on the near side of the platform. I peered out the windshield, but I couldn’t see anything, with the hood of the Saab in the way. I kept looking anyway, because that’s what you do. I gave the wipers a quick flick on and off and sloughed off the snow. A few seconds later, Dre appeared at the same spot in the woods where he’d vanished. He was moving fast. He was alone.
My phone vibrated. I heard a horn. I looked down and saw RESTRICTED NUMBER on my screen.
“Hello?”
“Where you?”
“Yefim?”
The windshield vanished behind a cloak of mud. The Saab shook so hard the dashboard rattled. The seat shimmied beneath me. An empty coffee cup tipped out of the cup holder and fell to the floor mat on the passenger side.
“Patrick? . . . you go . . . I no . . . stage.”
I flicked on the wipers. The mud swept right and left, thinner than mud, I realized, as an Acela blew through the station. “Yefim? You keep dropping out.”
“Can . . . hear . . . guy?”
I got out of the car because I couldn’t see Dre anymore, noticed my hood was speckled with whatever had hit my windshield.
“I can hear you now. Can you hear me?”
Dre wasn’t on the platform.
He was nowhere.
“I . . . fuck . . .”
The connection died. I flipped my phone closed, looked left and right down the platform. No Dre.
I turned back around and looked down the line of cars beside my own. There were six of them, spread out, but I saw the same liquid splashed across their hoods and windshields under the weak white lights. The Acela had vanished into the trees, going the kind of fast you thought only jets could go. The wet cars and wet platform glistened with something besides melting snow.
I turned my head, looked at the platform, turned again, looked at the cars.
Dre wasn’t anywhere.
Because Dre was everywhere.
• • •
I found a flashlight and two plastic supermarket bags in the trunk of Dre’s car. I put the bags over my shoes and used the handles to tie knots around my ankles. Then I walked through the blood to the platform. I found one of his shoes down the track, tucked into the inside of the rail. I found what could have been an ear a few feet farther down on the platform. Or it could have been part of a nose. Apparently, an Acela going top-speed didn’t run you over; it blew you up.
On my walk back up the tracks, I spotted a shoulder between the track and the woods. That was the last of Dre I ever saw.
I went to the spot where he’d entered and exited the woods. I shone my flashlight in there, but all I could see were dark trees with clumps of leaves pooled at their bases. I could have gone in farther, but (a) I don’t like woods; and (b) I was running out of time. The Acela passed through Mansfield station, three miles up, and there was a chance someone would spot blood on the front of it or along the side.
Yefim, I could assume, had long since left and taken Sophie and the cross with him.
I walked back across the tracks and at first I didn’t compute what I saw there. Part of me understood it enough to hold the flashlight beam in place, but the other half of me couldn’t make sense of it.
I bent by the gravel between the tracks and the fence that rimmed the parking lot. I’d heard a thunk as it landed, as someone, for who knew what reason, tossed it from the woods to the other side of the tracks. And Dre had come rushing out after it and stepped into the path of over six hundred tons of steel traveling 160 miles an hour.
The Belarus Cross.
I pinched the top left corner of it and lifted it out of the gravel. It was speckled with evaporating snow that revealed it was as bloody as the windshields in the parking lot, as bloody as the platform and the trees and the stairs I descended to Dre’s car. I popped the trunk and sat on the edge and removed the plastic bags and placed them in a third plastic bag. I found a rag in the trunk, and I used it to wipe off the cross as best I could. I tossed the rag into the plastic bag and tied off the handles. I took the bag and the cross up front with me and placed them on the passenger seat and got the hell out of Dodgeville.
Chapter Twenty-Three
There was only one pediatrician in a fifteen-mile radius of Becket, a Dr. Chimilewski, two towns over in Huntington. When Amanda pulled up in front of the office at ten the next morning, I stayed where I was and let her go inside and keep her appointment. I sat in Dre’s car and replayed the conversation I’d had with Yefim on my way out of Dodgeville. He’d called me minutes after I left the train station and nothing we’d discussed made any sense yet.
When Amanda came out twenty minutes later, I was waiting with a cardboard cup of coffee that I offered to her. “I guessed cream, no sugar.”
“I can’t drink coffee,” she said. “It aggravates my ulcer. But thanks for the thought.”
She clicked the remote on her car to unlock the doors and came around me with the baby in the car seat. I opened the door for her.
“You can’t have an ulcer. You’re sixteen years old.”
She snapped the car seat into its base in the backseat. “Tell that to my ulcer. I’ve had it since I was thirteen.”
I stepped back as she closed the door on Claire.
“She okay?”
She looked through the window at the baby. “Yeah. She’s just got that rash. No cause. They said it’ll go away, just like Angie said. They said babies get rashes.”
“Hard, though, right? All these things that could be real health scares turn out to be absolutely nothing, but you never know so you got to get it checked out.”
She gave me a small and weary smile. “I keep thinking they’re going to throw me out next time.”
“They don’t throw you out for being too careful about your child.”
“No, but they tell jokes about you, I’m sure.”
“Let ’em tell jokes.”
She walked around to the driver’s side, looked over the roof at me. “You can follow or just meet me back at the house. I’m not running anywhere.”
“I’ve noticed.”
I turned to walk toward Dre’s Saab.
“Where’s Dre?”
I turned back to her, met her eyes. “He didn’t make it.”
“He . . .” She cocked her head slightly. “The Russians?”
I said nothing. I held her gaze. I looked for something in her eyes that would tell me, one way or another, which side she was playing in this. Or was it all sides?
“Patrick?” she said.
“I’ll see you back at the house.”
• • •
In the kitchen, she made green tea for herself and brought the cup and small pot out to t
he dining room with her. Claire sat in her car seat in the center of the dining-room table. She’d fallen into a deep sleep in the car and Amanda told me she’d learned no good came from pulling her out of the car seat and moving her to the bassinet once they were inside. It was just as easy and just as safe to leave her where she slept.
“Angie get back all right?”
“Yeah. She arrived in Savannah at midnight. Got to her mother’s by half-past.”
“She doesn’t strike me as someone from the South.”
“She’s not. Her mother remarried in her sixties. Her husband lived in Savannah. He passed about ten years ago. By then, her mother was in love with the place.”
She placed her teapot on a coaster and sat at the table. “So what happened at the train station?”
I sat across from her. “First tell me how we ended up at the train station.”
“What? I got a call and they said the meeting site was changed.”
“Who called you?”
“It could have been Pavel, could have been this other one they call Spartak. Actually, now that I think of it, it did sound more like him. He’s got a higher voice than the others. But then what do I know for sure?” She shrugged. “They all sound pretty much the same.”
“And Spartak or whoever said . . .”
“He said something like, ‘We no like Comcast Center. Tell them meet at Dodgeville Station, half hour.’ ”
“But why call you?”
She sipped her tea. “I don’t know. Maybe Yefim lost your—”
I shook my head. “Yefim never made that call.”
“He had Spartak make it.”
“No, he didn’t. Yefim was waiting at the Comcast Center when Dre got himself vaporized by an Acela.”
The teacup froze halfway to her mouth. “You want to repeat that one?”
“Dre got hit by a train going so fast that it liquefied him. There’s probably a forensics team out there right now, bagging up the Dre scraps. But they’re little scraps, I assure you.”
Moonlight Mile Page 21
