It won’t work, he thought. She’ll have a new one by now.
But he picked the phone up off the kitchen counter and dialed the number, then stood and listened to it ring and ring.
In the moments before sunrise, even the forgotten corners of Seattle took on a glow that suggested their best days were still ahead. Miri Ristani jogged past the silent hulk of the Brimstone Brewery, her breath fogging the crisp winter-morning air, her heart keeping rhythm with her feet as she ran. Four years earlier, when her wanderings had first washed her up on the proverbial shores of the haven that Seattle had become for her, the old Brimstone Brewery had been a brick eyesore of boarded windows and rusted pipes. Now it was being refurbished as a nightclub with upper floors dedicated to studio space for artists and musicians, just another way in which the passing days seemed to be scouring the rust off the face of the whole Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle. One of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, it was somehow also one of the newest. Its rebirth had not yet arrived, but it was gestating nicely.
Miri ran with a steady, even gait, breathing the winter air, understanding with every step that her friends were frustrated by these early-morning runs. Bad enough to be out alone so early in the summer months, they would say—had often said—but to run the streets of Seattle before dawn by herself, a woman alone, was just asking for trouble. She raced past a bagel shop, the smell of coffee spreading up and down the block, then crossed to the other side of the street to avoid roadwork. The storefronts were familiar territory to her by now, a florist, a karate school, a tiny Chinese restaurant, a Laundromat … and sprinkled among them, plenty of abandoned shops with soaped windows and drooping For Lease signs. The neighborhood might be improving in spite of the economy, but it still had a long way to go.
Still, she wasn’t afraid to be out in the dark alone. In the years since her high school graduation, Miri had walked far more dangerous streets and come through unscathed. Alone never bothered her. Alone, in fact, had become her sanctuary. Five years earlier she had hit the road, put Massachusetts behind her, and not stopped until she hit the Pacific Ocean, which seemed like it might be just far enough away from her mother in order for her to breathe.
On mornings like this, just breathing was enough.
As she rounded a corner past a pub that still reeked of last night’s beer, she saw the sun coming up over the tops of the buildings to the east. Its reflection flared in a hundred storefront windows and she felt as if she were entering some brilliant hall of mirrors. This early on a Sunday morning the only people on the street were workers headed home from the night shift and people like Miri, who knew that half the beauty had already spilled out of a day by the time nine o’clock rolled around.
She relished her isolation. Breathed it in. Blessed the spirit of winter.
Felt her cell phone buzz against her abdomen.
Just the vibration threw off her stride. She considering ignoring the call, but at half past seven on a Sunday morning it could only be something urgent, so she slipped the phone from its clip and glanced at the screen as she darted around a tree that grew up out of the sidewalk.
Call from … JAKE.
The contact listing on her phone didn’t have a last name for Jake, but she didn’t need clarification. There were other guys in her life with the same name but the rest of them needed modifiers, either last names or Jake-From-Philosophy or Jake-From-the-Gym or Jake-From-Oklahoma.
Miri held the vibrating phone by her hip as she ran on another half-dozen paces. The idea of talking to Jake opened up so many questions in her mind, little windows that offered views of parts of her heart she wasn’t sure she felt like seeing again. Six months had passed since she’d last spoken to Jake, six months since she’d had contact with anyone from home. This early in the morning he could only be calling about something terrible or something wonderful. He’d know she would be awake—if anyone truly knew her, Jake was that someone—but courtesy would keep him from dialing the phone unless it was urgent.
The dread that clutched at her nearly stopped her in her tracks but she managed to take a deep breath and keep going. She exhaled, phone still vibrating in her hand.
Maybe he’s getting married, she thought, calling to tell me he’s engaged.
But Miri didn’t think so. She thought it must have something to do with her mother, that the bitch-queen Angie Ristani had finally drunk herself to death or ended up in jail for slapping a cop or inadvertently killed one of the patients she was supposed to be nursing back to health. Miri hadn’t spoken to her mother in two years and had no interest in hearing about her now.
Not even if she’s dead. Not even if she’s dying, and needs you?
“Fuck,” Miri whispered.
She slowed her run, the rhythm of her heart now as off-kilter as her stride, and answered the call.
“Hello?” she said, coming to a halt.
Silence greeted her. The line sounded flat and empty. She glanced at her phone and saw that the call had ended. Jake had either given up or been shunted to voice mail. Breathing, feeling the winter chill creeping in now that her muscles were at rest, she watched the phone and waited for it to tell her there was a voice message. A full minute passed before she decided that Jake had simply hung up.
With a glance to make sure she wouldn’t bump into anyone, Miri started walking toward home. Her heart still beat its running rhythm and her arms and legs felt good, ready to work, but her phone seemed an anchor in her hand.
At the intersection with Carpenter Street she turned left instead of right, toward home. Four shifts a week, in between classes at the university and the tutoring she did to help pay for school, Miri worked at a café and performance space called Mocha, which would have been cooler if it hadn’t been across the street from a hair salon. There was nothing hipster about blue-haired old ladies.
Still, she loved Mocha and the friends she’d made while working there. Right now she wanted coffee as much for warmth as for the companionship it would bring. Most of the time she preferred being alone, felt her soul expand in isolation, her understanding of the world growing. But not today.
Swearing quietly, she glanced at her phone and went to the Recent Calls screen. Her thumb hovered over JAKE. She didn’t have to call him back—if it was something important he would call again—but her heart held a certain amount of guilt where Jake Schapiro was concerned. When she’d left Coventry, she’d left him as well. Sometimes she felt like it was good to be rid of him, healthy to put behind her a relationship that had been poisoned by mutual grief more than a decade before. Other times she missed him and resented him for being the one person from Coventry she hadn’t been able to forget.
The phone buzzed in her hand.
This time she didn’t hesitate.
“It’s awful early,” she said, glancing ahead at the welcoming sight of the stylized, steaming coffee cup on the sign in front of Mocha, a block away. “Tell me it’s good news.”
No sound came through the phone. Even the telltale hollowness of an open line was absent. The call was just as flat and dead as the first one had been. Must be dropping calls, she thought, and was about to hit the red button to end the call when someone spoke.
“Miri.”
She froze, phone clutched to her ear. The Mocha sign seemed a thousand miles away. Winter seemed to sense an opening, sliding into the space between clothing and flesh and then somehow between flesh and bone. When she inhaled, she felt the frost in her lungs.
The voice did not belong to Jake.
“Miri, honey?”
Impossible.
“Daddy?”
Niko Ristani had wandered off in a blizzard in search of help and ended up frozen to death. Her father had been dead twelve years, but there could be no question—it was his voice on the phone.
“Come home, Miri. I need you here. Jake and Allie need you, too.”
The February morning had made her skin so cold that her hot tears stung her face.
�
��Daddy,” she whispered, staring at the Mocha sign ahead but feeling as if the ground had suddenly slanted, as if she had slipped sideways out of the world. “Is it really you?”
“The storm is coming back to Coventry, Miri. Everyone we loved is in danger. I want to help them but the only way I can do that is through you.”
A hiss of static burst from the phone, a wail and shush that might have been interference or might have been wind and ice.
“I don’t understand,” she said softly. “What kind of—”
“Miri,” he said, his voice almost lost in the static.
The line went dead. Numb, not breathing, she looked at the phone. Two words were on the screen—CALL FAILED—but there were two other words echoing in her mind, the last words she thought she had made out amid that hiss before the call had been cut off.
Come home.
ELEVEN
The lunchtime crowd that Sunday at The Vault could have been charitably described as thin. The plows had finished up their work in midmorning and the sun had done a perfect job of melting whatever ice remained on the roads. The temperature had risen above forty degrees—warm for February—and narrow little streams of snowmelt ran along the drifts and into sewer gratings. The warm-up would not last very long, especially with a more troubling storm just days away, but for the moment Coventry was a winter wonderland. People should have been out taking advantage of it, but there were fewer than fifteen customers inside The Vault.
Halfway through playing an obscure old tune by The National, TJ glanced at the clock. He hit a wrong note and sang over it, hoping nobody noticed. The hands of the clock were crawling toward one P.M. and he knew Ella must be thinking the same thing he was—where were the Faithful? They never used the phrase at the restaurant, but at home that was how they always referred to the people who rolled in between twelve and one, after the eleven o’clock Mass had gotten out. Without the Faithful, there wasn’t much point in opening for lunch on Sundays.
As he sang and played he glanced around the restaurant again. He spotted Mrs. Bridges and Mr. McFarland, a pair of single oldsters who had become regulars for Sunday lunch. At their age, he figured, they didn’t call each other boyfriend and girlfriend, but Ella had told him they’d both lost spouses to cancer and seemed to have a very nice thing going on Sundays—Mass, and then lunch at The Vault. Their presence reassured him that there hadn’t been some church boycott of the restaurant, but that was cold comfort.
He finished the song to a smattering of polite applause from the table nearest the corner where he always set up. Everyone else in the place seemed to think the music must be coming from speakers somewhere. Up until the economy had bottomed out, Ella had done a robust Sunday-brunch business. Sometimes TJ had played and at other times he had arranged for various local musicians to come in. Jazz, blues, folk, and holiday music when the Christmas season rolled around. But people without jobs didn’t go out for Sunday brunch and that wasn’t going to change even if Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston got out of their graves to serenade them over Belgian waffles.
TJ glanced around and spotted his coffee on top of his amplifier. What the hell he’d been thinking by leaving it there he had no idea, but he retrieved it and took a sip. It had cooled too much to taste very good but he took another long sip anyway, then set the mug on the floor.
When he looked up, Grace had appeared beside him. She leaned against the wall, sipping pink lemonade and looking as adorable as always in black boots, leggings, a green top, and a white down vest with a faux-fur fringe on the hood. At home she still seemed like his little girl but out in public she liked to adopt a more sophisticated air. If this was what eleven years old brought, the idea of fifteen terrified him.
“Hi, sweetie,” he said, strumming the guitar and adjusting the tuning. “Did you have lunch?”
“Pot pie,” Grace replied, her nostrils flaring in distaste. “It’s dreadful.”
“You love the pot pie,” he said, bristling a bit. She’d been behaving oddly since breakfast. “I hope you didn’t say that to your mother.”
Grace fixed a disapproving frown upon him. “Of course not. That would be rude.”
“Good. I don’t know what’s gotten into you today, but—”
“Why do you do this?”
A shiver passed through him. He couldn’t have said why, but he certainly didn’t like the way she looked at him.
“Do what?”
He knew he ought to be playing another song, but it wasn’t as if the dozen people in the restaurant were paying much attention.
Grace gestured toward empty tables. “This. I just don’t know why you bother.”
“Hey. That’s enough of that.” He clicked off his microphone and gave her a withering look. “You know exactly why I’m here.”
“Enlighten me.”
Enlighten her? He wanted to slap her face. If he had been the kind of man who would ever strike a child, he’d have done just that. On the other hand, he couldn’t deny that in the middle of his anger was a tiny spot of pride. What eleven-year-old used the word enlighten in a sentence? Grace could probably even spell it properly. Had Ella had that kind of vocabulary in the fourth grade? TJ surely hadn’t.
He took her arm, not hard enough to hurt but firmly enough to let her know he meant business. Her lips made a thin line but she did not complain or try to pull away as he drew her nearer, lowering his voice to a whisper.
“I get it, okay?” he said. “Things have been tense. Maybe your mom and I have been at each other’s throats a little, but we love each other and we love you. If we’re fighting, that doesn’t mean you have to choose sides and it damn well doesn’t mean you have to act out to get attention.”
“I’m not acting out.”
“You’re being rude and condescending to your parents and you’re only eleven years old. That’s not okay. Wouldn’t be okay if you were twenty or forty, either. We’re doing our best for you and for us as a family.”
TJ glanced around to make sure no one had taken an interest in the whispers being traded in the corner. “They’re lean times, kid, but not so lean that you didn’t get the whole outfit you’ve got on for Christmas. I’m here playing because live music is something we can offer that most local restaurants can’t afford right now. We can’t afford to have anyone else do it, so here I am.”
“It’s supposed to bring in customers,” Grace said, her eyes gleaming in the sunlight coming in the window behind them, the same rich chocolate brown as her mother’s.
“Exactly,” TJ said.
“Does it seem to you that it’s working?” the little girl said, sighing as if she were a teacher about to give up on her student.
TJ flinched. Another ripple went through him but this wasn’t anger; it felt more like embarrassment. He worked his jaw, tamping down the urge to snap at her.
“We’re doing everything we know how to do,” he whispered. “It’ll turn around.”
The Vault had cut back its hours so that it was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays and open for lunch only on the weekends. The landlord had cut the rent considerably, knowing that the chances of getting another restaurant into the space in difficult times were slim.
“Will it?” Grace asked, sipping her pink lemonade.
“I just said it would,” TJ barked.
A clink of silverware brought him around. He blinked and saw that half-a-dozen heads had turned and some of the customers were observing them now. He swore inwardly. Most of these people were regulars. They couldn’t afford to scare even one of them away.
“Listen,” he said, bending to get his coffee mug. “Do me a favor, all right? Go and get your dad a fresh cup of coffee.”
He held the cup out to her. For a moment Grace looked at it with disdain that bordered on a sneer and then, reluctantly, she took it from him with her free hand.
“Sure,” she said, starting to turn away.
TJ clicked his microphone back on.
“But … Dad?”
“She doesn’t appreciate it,” Grace said, tossing her head to get her hair out of her eyes. “You realize that, don’t you? You’re like the band that kept playing while the Titanic went down. You’re doing all you can to keep her dream alive, but she never spares a moment to wonder what happened to your dreams.”
The microphone probably hadn’t picked up what Grace had said, but it would catch his voice for sure. It took him a second or two of numb astonishment to react, and then he reached up to click the mic off again, but Grace was already walking away.
“This place is doomed,” she said.
She smiled, then, but it didn’t reach her eyes. They were grim and knowing, not cruel but brutally cold.
That is not an eleven-year-old, he thought. And then he gave a dry, humorless laugh, knowing that must be what every parent thought at one point or another.
As he started into another song, his anger turned to worry. The ugliness between him and Ella had begun to tear their daughter up inside. What she’d said had some truth in it, and that hurt, but it hurt far worse for him to think of what they were doing to her childhood.
Something had to change, for Grace’s sake. He hoped that his marriage could be healed, but he thought the status quo would be even worse for Grace’s psyche than divorce.
He watched his daughter go up to the bar and offer up his coffee mug for a refill. Leaning against the bar, back arched in a confident, almost defiant pose, she looked over at him and gave a little shrug and toss of her head, as if to say, Sorry, Dad, it’s just tough love. When the bartender, Herbie, had poured a fresh cup of coffee, Grace touched his hand and mouthed a thank-you. Everything about the gesture—the look in her eyes, the way she stood, the small, knowing, confident smile—gave off the aura of a grown woman, not a child.
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