by Kyra Davis
But Micah makes that decision for me.
“What are your plans for Travis?” he asks after a moment of silence.
“He’s just my employer.”
“Hmm, does he know you know me?”
“He knows I worked in one of your bars.”
“Yes, but only for about a week.”
“He doesn’t know that detail.”
A plate of ravioli is placed in front of me and my wineglass is filled with white wine. Micah nods his approval to the waitress. “I always ask for my wine to be poured just as the food arrives. Wine’s supposed to be a complement. If you want to get fucked-up before dinner you should stick with tequila.”
Again I giggle and shake my head as I eagerly dig into my ravioli.
“I spoke to Andreea today,” Micah says as he sips his wine. “She says hello.”
It’s not a passing comment. I shift uncomfortably in my chair. I’ve never actually been introduced to Andreea, but I’ve heard about her.
I’ve dreamed about her too.
“She’s doing well,” Micah adds. “She’s getting married.”
“Anyone you know?” I ask as I sink my fork back into the pasta.
“Of course, I introduced them. He’s my lawyer. It’s perfect, really. He walks the straight and narrow, but he’s familiar with my world. He’s not shocked by it, and he’s never going to say a word about anything to anyone. And I can protect him, and her, if it ever comes to it. I can keep them both close.”
“You know, she may not want you to keep her that close. She’s an adult, not a child.”
“She was legally an adult when she got herself locked up too. Adults are just as idiotic as children, and frequently just as dependent. Sometimes I think the only difference between the two groups is that kids have legitimate excuses for their ignorance while adults just invent them.”
I smile and nod my agreement. The white wine in my glass is reflecting the light perfectly, making the color as warm as the room. I’ve always preferred the shadows of dimly lit restaurants. The hints of mystery found in a flickering candle put me at ease. I don’t live in the light. I don’t know what to do with it.
“Your mother had such an influence on her,” Micah continues as he twirls his own linguine around his fork. “Andreea may be blood, but she’s just not cut out for my line of work, and my brother certainly didn’t raise her for it. But when I tried to set her straight she wouldn’t listen. But your mother? She was able to get through to her. All those college courses she convinced Andreea to take while she was in the pen . . . Andreea’s got her degree now and everything. I’ll always be grateful for that.”
I take a sip of my wine and glance toward the windows.
“I think your mum needed Andreea too, since you had stopped visiting her by then . . .”
“We’ve already talked about this,” I say irritably. I finish my wine and reach for the bottle, but Micah takes hold of it first and with a patient smile refills my glass.
“I’ve brought it up before,” he says, “but we’ve never actually talked about it. You’ve never wanted to.”
“Yes,” I say coolly. “Some things never change.”
“Now Andreea, she’s been talking about it a lot lately,” Micah adds, ignoring my comment as he carefully puts the bottle back into the bucket. “Must be because we’re coming up on the anniversary of your mum’s death.”
I don’t say a word as I scrape my nails back and forth against my leg.
“Andreea says you thought your mother was guilty. Do you still think that?”
“She was innocent,” I snap.
“That’s what Andreea says. But that’s not what you always believed.”
It’s not a question, so I don’t bother to create an answer.
“It shouldn’t matter, you know,” he says. “Guilty or innocent, she was still your blood. If she did kill that guy, well, maybe she had her reasons, or maybe she just made a mistake. But even if she was guilty of taking a life she was still responsible for giving life to you.”
“All right.” I put my utensils down on my plate and lean back in my chair. “But just so we’re clear, she didn’t kill Nick. She wasn’t a murderer.”
Micah nods, accepting this. “So you think your mum took the blame for someone else’s crime?”
I grit my teeth and reach for my wineglass.
“If that’s true . . . that would mean that you believed the cops over your own mum.”
Again I don’t answer.
“Is that why you don’t fear death, Sweet? Because you think you don’t deserve life, not really?”
I smile as I swallow more wine. “I wasn’t aware that you moonlighted as a shrink. Am I being charged for this bullshit?”
Micah breaks out laughing. It’s a full-throated laugh and it almost makes me smile . . . But the subject of our conversation is too sour for me to enjoy the sweetness of this little moment. I finish my second glass of wine and allow Micah to pour me another.
“It doesn’t really matter if any of us deserve to live or die, Sweet. I don’t know if any of us deserve all this.” He gestures around him at the world at large. “But we all owe our lives to our parents. When we don’t at least fight for those few extra days, months, years, hours . . . When we give up on life, we’re reneging on our greatest debt. If there’s one rule I live by, one that I’ve spent my life enforcing, it’s that you never, ever renege on a debt. If you do . . . well, sometimes you have to pay with your life. But in your case?” He lifts his barely touched wineglass and holds it up to the light. “In your case you pay by living.”
I shake my head, let my eyes wander the room, looking for celebrities among the überchic Tribeca crowd. “You’re a study in contradictions, Micah.”
“And you’re a liar, Sweet.”
My eyes snap back to him, my heart suddenly beating hard against my chest.
“Why are you working for Travis Gable?”
The question confuses me. Why the interest in my new job with Travis? I’ve never discussed the Gables with Micah. I’ve thought about it, many times. Micah became a regular visitor of my mother’s after he realized that she was guiding his niece in a direction that he approved of. He had made promises to her about being there for me if I needed him. On my birthday and Christmas he always gave me a few grand to help keep me afloat. I know who Micah is. I know what he does to people, and there have been many nights when I lie in bed fantasizing about what he could do to the Gables. But then I want to be the one to throw the knockout punch. I want that satisfaction more than I want anything else in this world.
Besides, Micah’s unpredictable and he can’t be controlled. I know he’s sincere about the importance he puts on debts. But the debt he seems to think he owes my mother is flimsy and unsubstantial. If he were to help me with the Gables, not only would that debt be paid, but I would owe him.
I like Micah, I really do. But I don’t want to be in debt to a mob boss. And while I don’t worry about getting myself killed, I do worry about pain.
Micah acknowledges my silence with a nod. “Just tell me this, then,” he says, cocking his head to the side. “Should I be investing my money with HGVB right now or not?”
I smile wanly. “I think you could find safer investments.”
Again Micah laughs, softer this time. “You’re a tricky one. All right, but just remember, you abandoned your mum when she needed you. You can only make up for that by living the life she wanted you to lead.”
“Really,” I say flatly. “Are you living the life your mother wanted you to lead?”
“My mother wanted me to be KGB. What I do now is a step up.”
“How is everything?” a chipper voice says, and both Micah and I look up at the same time at the waitress who is smiling down at us, her blond hair cut pixie style to frame her face.
Micah gestures to our plates, indicating that we’re done. “I believe we’re ready for cognac.” His eyes twinkle as he adds, “Nothing better th
an getting fucked-up on digestifs.”
I smile and try to look relaxed, but memories are coursing through my veins, making my skin itch and my soul ache.
It’s memories that push me to finish off the last of the wine and rush through my cognac, hoping and praying that I can find amnesia at the bottom of a glass.
chapter seven
I leave the restaurant alone, insisting that I can catch a cab home.
I’m a little drunk, just not drunk enough. I think about that man . . . that depressed drunk who asked me to serve him at Ivan’s only a week ago. All he had wanted was a kind of nonprescription morphine and I had denied him. Lander hadn’t, though. Lander gave him the means to further his self-destruction.
I would pay for that form of kindness right now.
I wander around lower Manhattan, glaring at the Manhattanites in their deceptively casual clothes. As if a cotton T-shirt could distract from a two-thousand-dollar purse or a four-thousand-dollar hair weave. As if their excesses were details rather than the main attraction. It didn’t used to be like this. All these chic restaurants and expensive boutiques that offer to sell you a bohemian look for the cost of a car—it’s all relatively new. Once there were warehouses here, and real bohemians, unpublished writers and struggling dancers. There were drug addicts trying to ride their high to an artistic breakthrough. There was a coarseness that reminded people of what New York was really about.
Evolve or die—that’s always what they tell you. Adjustment and assimilation are the mechanisms of survival.
But I wonder as I walk unsteadily through the pedestrians, do we ever really change? Or do we just cover up the parts of ourselves that don’t fit in anymore? Look at these buildings—warehouses converted to lofts. If you look closely you can see what they are underneath the new packaging. The bones of the city are what they’ve always been. New York has dyed her hair and put on a new coat. But she’s still the same city.
I turn down Cortlandt Alley and there it is, the real New York, hiding in the shadows behind the polished storefronts. This alley is different from so many of the others. It spans three blocks and has but one streetlamp for its entire length. Scaffolding that’s older than me lines some of the buildings, but for the most part it’s just bricks and concrete. I run my fingers along the buildings as I walk into the alley’s depths, squinting at the iron shutters bolted to the windows. They’re not there for effect. They were constructed to stop the spread of fires that terrorized the textile factories once housed here. And as I continue to walk, I can also make out artfully rendered graffiti and drunkenly scrawled gang tags. Traces of a forgotten past and a repudiated present can be found scattered throughout this place. I understand it. In so many ways it’s a reflection of me.
I keep walking, moving a little farther from the honking horns and boisterous laughter of the street. I discovered this place when I was thirteen, two years after I had abandoned my mother.
I keep walking into the darkness, hoping it will blind me to my own mistakes. But . . .
I had been so young. My mother had been sleeping with a married man. She sought to destroy a family, and then they told me that when she didn’t get her way she killed the man she loved. To my unworldly mind, every sin was a gateway to another. So my mother had cheated . . . and that sin led to the sin of murder. It was a simple, well-packaged idea. One that was so easy for a ten-year-old to understand and accept.
My mother was the only family I had. She had been my world, my teacher, my comforter, and my role model. When the boys teased me at school about my bookwormish tendencies or the frilly dresses I insisted on wearing, I would run home and she would kiss the tears away. When I was with her she made me feel safe. She had been the only person on this earth who loved me. And when the hardships of poverty had crushed down on us, her love had been enough to keep me smiling. It was enough to keep me believing in the richness of our possibilities.
Yet I believed them when they told me that with one violent act she had taken all that away. My feelings about it at the time were ridiculously simple:
She abandoned me.
And that was a betrayal.
The alley stretches out in front of me. The name of a now-defunct business is painted in white on a dirty glass window. You can barely make out the lettering in the dim lighting, but it’s there—these ghosts of the past are always there when you take the time to look.
By twelve I was skipping school. I lashed out at any foster family stupid enough to take me in. When they gave up on me, I took satisfaction in it, allowing their rejection to reinforce my rapidly forming worldview. I threw away the moral teachings that my mother had handed down to me, feeling that every good word she had uttered was now corrupted. I didn’t stop reading, but when I opened a book I did it in secret, under the covers with a flashlight, hiding my intellectual curiosity the way other kids hide alcohol and drugs.
When I turned thirteen . . . well, that’s when I started dating. I made it my mission to only choose boys my mother would hate, letting them touch me in forbidden places just to make a point.
I did occasionally visit her—usually because one of my series of foster parents insisted. I would sit across from her, picking at my nail polish as she tried to give me parental advice under the eyes of her keepers, guards who were amused and appreciative of the disrespect I paid to their prisoner.
I called my mother a whore once, and the guard later gave me a lollipop.
I feel my phone vibrate in my purse and I take it out to see Lander’s name across the screen. He wants to know where I am.
I’m lost.
I type the words carefully and examine the way they glow, adding another faint light to the dark. And then I erase the letters, one by one until the screen is blank.
My mother seemed to age five years between every visit. Her shoulders slumped, her head drooped. Eventually she stopped offering me advice on boys and school and life. We would sit in silence, both of us thinking about how it used to be, our nostalgia breeding bitterness rather than sentimentality.
I look at my cell phone again. Cortlandt Alley, I write. If you can find it you can have me.
So coy, so insincere. As if any man could have me, as if there was a “me” to have.
I get to the end of the first block and am once again confronted with the hustle and bustle of the street lined with whitewashed chain stores that have eaten away at New York like an invasive species. Quickly I make my way through the pretenders and cross the street, slipping back into the alley, into the darkness.
As a teen I moved from party to party, dabbling in vice. I took hits of Molly at raves and then further dulled my addled mind with the monotonous beat of the electronic music. I had sex with pretty boys who had bad tempers. Sometimes they were my age, sometimes older. It didn’t matter. The sex itself wasn’t all that enjoyable, but the destruction was. My teachers and various foster families told me I was falling apart, but I didn’t think so. To say I was falling apart would be to imply that what was happening to me was somehow accidental. As if I had dropped a glass I was trying to polish. My world wasn’t falling apart; I was tearing it apart. I had control. I had found outlets for my anger and my pain.
I knew my mother loved me, and I knew that anything loved by a woman as duplicitous and evil as her couldn’t be worth much.
I knew what I was doing.
The memories surround me as my heels continue to click against the pavement. I pause briefly in front of a rusted loading dock, corrupted by neglect.
School had been easy for me. I aced all my tests from English to math to social studies. Part of me didn’t want to, but I couldn’t resist answering questions I knew the answers to. I read my textbooks and I understood my lessons, but I rarely did my homework, which was enough to keep my grades down and prevent me from being loved by any of my teachers. And I continued to hide my love of books. Books filled with history, fantasy, and politics—I adored them all . . . I loved escaping into other people’s worlds,
other people’s dramas, other people’s minds. But the only ones who knew about my passion were the local librarians, who delighted in giving me their recommendations but never bothered to learn my name. They liked books better than people too.
I kick aside a discarded beer can as I consider the littered path that’s led me to this point in my life.
Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, my foster family took me to see their son perform a one-man show. I remember sitting in that tiny theater listening to their son launch into one pointless tirade after another. To this day, one-man shows annoy me.
But that night, as I sat in the audience, it occurred to me that there was a parallel between this fledgling actor and me. This college kid was verbally beating himself up in his one-man show. But me? I was fighting a one-woman war.
I was all alone on my little battlefield and I was killing . . .
. . . and I was dying.
Ahead of me is a single lightbulb mounted on the wall under a folded-up fire escape. I stand in front of it, noting how it casts a welcoming light on the gang insignias scrawled beneath it.
I look down to the end of the alley and see a man walking toward me. I recognize the gait. It’s Lander.
I step out of the light.
The first time I saw Lander was on TV, testifying at my mother’s trial. I was ten, he was almost twenty-one.
The second time was by accident and I wasn’t quite seventeen. I saw him outside HGVB Bank. I had been living in a shelter for homeless teens for almost three months and, coincidentally, I had been working at a used bookstore near the bank’s offices. I was saving up my pennies, even performing a little better in school. I was looking for new ways to survive.
When I saw him that time he was standing with his father and Sean White. They were all jovial and appeared to be very close.
At that moment my mind started to spin.
I knew Lander from the trial.
