by Harlan Coben
“So what’s wrong?” he asked.
“I didn’t say anything was wrong.”
Myron shook his head, disappointed. “And you a lawyer.”
“Setting a bad example?”
“It’s no wonder I never ran for higher office.”
She folded her hands on her lap. “We need to chat.”
Myron didn’t like the tone.
“But not here,” she added. “Let’s take a walk around the block.”
Myron nodded and they rose. Before they reached the door, his cell phone rang. Myron snatched it up with a speed that would have made Wyatt Earp step back. He put the phone to his ear and cleared his throat.
“MB SportsReps,” he said, silky-smooth, professional-like. “This is Myron Bolitar speaking.”
“Nice phone voice,” Esperanza said. “You sound like Billy Dee ordering two Colt 45s.”
Esperanza Diaz was his longtime assistant and now sports-agent partner at MB SportsReps (M for Myron, the B for Bolitar—for those keeping score).
“I was hoping you were Lamar,” he said.
“He hasn’t called yet?”
“Nope.”
He could almost see Esperanza frown. “We’re in deep doo-doo here,” she said.
“We’re not in deep doo-doo. We’re just sucking a little wind, that’s all.”
“Sucking a little wind,” Esperanza repeated. “Like Pavarotti running the Boston Marathon.”
“Good one,” Myron said.
“Thanks.”
Lamar Richardson was a power-hitting Golden Glove shortstop who’d just become a free agent—“free agent” being a phrase agents whisper in the same way a mufti might whisper “Praise Allah.” Lamar was shopping for new representation and had whittled his final list down to three agencies: two supersized conglomerates with enough office space to house a Price Club and the aforementioned pimple-on-the-buttocks but oh-so-personal MB SportsReps. Go, pimple-butt!
Myron watched his mother standing by the door. He switched ears and said, “Anything else?”
“You’ll never guess who called,” Esperanza said.
“Elle and Claudia demanding another ménage à trois?”
“Oooo, close.”
She would never just tell him. With his friends, everything was a TV game show. “How about a hint?” he said.
“One of your ex-lovers.”
He felt a jolt. “Jessica.”
Esperanza made a buzzing noise. “Sorry, wrong bitch.”
Myron was puzzled. He’d only had two long-term relationships in his life: Jessica on and off for the past thirteen years (now very off). And before that, well, you’d have to go back to …
“Emily Downing?”
Esperanza made a ding-ding noise.
A sudden image pierced his heart like a straight-blade. He saw Emily sitting on that threadbare couch in the frat basement, smiling that smile at him, her legs bent and tucked under her, wearing his high school varsity jacket that was several sizes too big, her gesturing hands slipping down and disappearing into the sleeves.
His mouth went dry. “What did she want?”
“Don’t know. But she said that she simply had to talk to you. She’s very breathy, you know. Like everything she says is a double entendre.”
With Emily, everything was.
“She good in the sack?” Esperanza asked.
Being an overly attractive bisexual, Esperanza viewed everyone as a potential sex partner. Myron wondered what that must be like, to have and thus weigh so many options, and then he decided to leave that road untraveled. Wise man.
“What did Emily say exactly?” Myron said.
“Nothing specific. She just spewed out a colorful assortment of breathy teasers: urgent, life-and-death, grave matters, etceteras, etceteras.”
“I don’t want to talk to her.”
“I didn’t think so. If she calls back, you want me to give her the runaround?”
“Please.”
“Más tarde then.”
He hung up as a second image whacked him like a surprise wave at the beach. Senior year at Duke. Emily so composed as she dumped the varsity jacket onto his bed and walked out. Not long after that, she married the man who’d ruin Myron’s life.
Deep breaths, he told himself. In and out. That’s it.
“Everything okay?” Mom asked.
“Fine.”
Mom shook her head again, disappointed.
“I’m not lying,” he said.
“Fine, right, sure, you always breathe like an obscene phone call. Listen, if you don’t want to tell your mother—”
“I don’t want to tell my mother.”
“Who raised you and …”
Myron tuned her out, as was his custom. She was digressing again, taking on a past life or something. It was something she did a lot. One minute she was thoroughly modern, an early feminist who marched alongside Gloria Steinem and became proof that—to quote her old T-shirt—A Woman’s Place Is in the House … and Senate. But at the sight of her son, her progressive attire slid to the floor and revealed the babushka-clad yenta beneath the burned bra. It made for an interesting childhood.
They headed out the front door. Myron kept his eyes on the For Sale sign as though it might suddenly brandish a gun. His mind flashed onto something he had never actually seen—the sunny day when Mom and Dad had arrived here for the first time, hand in hand, Mom’s belly swelling with child, both of them scared and exhilarated realizing that this cookie-cut three-bedroom split-level would be their life vessel, their SS American Dream. Now, like it or not, that journey was coming to an end. Forget that “close one door, open another” crap. That For Sale sign marked the end—the end of youth, of middle age, of a family, the universe of two people who’d started here and fought here and raised kids here and worked and carpooled and lived their lives here.
They walked up the street. Leaves were piled along the curb, the surest sign of suburban autumn, while leaf blowers shattered the still air like helicopters over Saigon. Myron took the inside track so his path would skim the piles’ edges. The dead leaves crackled under his sneakers and he liked that. He wasn’t sure why.
“Your father spoke to you,” Mom said, half-question. “About what happened to him.”
Myron felt his stomach tense up. He veered deeper into the leaves, lifting his legs high and crunching louder. “Yes.”
“What did he say exactly?” Mom asked.
“That he’d had chest pains while I was in the Caribbean.”
The Kaufman house had always been yellow, but the new family had painted it white. It looked wrong with the new color, out of place. Some homes had gone the aluminum-siding route, while others had built on additions, bumping out the kitchens and master bedrooms. The young family who’d moved into the Miller home had gotten rid of the Millers’ trademark overflowing flower boxes. The new owners of the Davis place had ripped out those wonderful shrubs Bob Davis had worked on every weekend. It all reminded Myron of an invading army ripping down the flags of the conquered.
“He didn’t want to tell you,” Mom said. “You know your father. He still feels he has to protect you.”
Myron nodded, stayed in the leaves.
Then she said, “It was more than chest pains.”
Myron stopped.
“It was a full-blown coronary,” she went on, not meeting his eyes. “He was in intensive care for three days.” She started blinking. “The artery was almost entirely blocked.”
Myron felt his throat close.
“It’s changed him. I know how much you love him, but you have to accept that.”
“Accept what?”
Her voice was gentle and firm. “That your father is getting older. That I’m getting older.”
He thought about it. “I’m trying,” he said.
“But?”
“But I see that For Sale sign—”
“Wood and bricks and nails, Myron.”
“What?”
/> She waded through the leaves and took hold of his elbow. “Listen to me. You mope around here like we’re sitting shiva, but that house is not your childhood. It isn’t a part of your family. It doesn’t breathe or think or care. It’s just wood and bricks and nails.”
“You’ve lived there for almost thirty-five years.”
“So?”
He turned away, kept walking.
“Your father wants to be honest with you,” she said, “but you’re not making it any easier.”
“Why? What did I do?”
She shook her head, looked up into the sky as though willing divine inspiration, continued walking. Myron stayed by her side. She snaked her arm under his elbow and leaned against him.
“You were always a terrific athlete,” she said. “Not like your father. Truth be told, your father was a spaz.”
“I know this,” Myron said.
“Right. You know this because your father never pretended to be something he wasn’t. He let you see him as human—vulnerable even. And it had a strange effect on you. You worshipped him all the more. You turned him into something almost mythical.”
Myron thought about it, didn’t argue. He shrugged and said, “I love him.”
“I know, sweetheart. But he’s just a man. A good man. But now he’s getting old and he’s scared. Your father always wanted you to see him as human. But he doesn’t want you to see him scared.”
Myron kept his head down. There are certain things you cannot picture your parents doing—having sex being the classic example. Most people cannot—probably should not even try to—picture their parents in flagrante delicto. But right now Myron was trying to conjure up another taboo image, one of his father sitting alone in the dark, hand on his chest, scared, and the sight, while achievable, was aching, unbearable. When he spoke again, his voice was thick. “So what should I do?”
“Accept the changes. Your father is retiring. He’s worked his whole life and like most moronically macho men of his era, his self-worth is wrapped up in his job. So he’s having a tough time. He’s not the same. You’re not the same. Your relationship is shifting and neither one of you likes change.”
Myron stayed silent, waiting for more.
“Reach out to him a little,” Mom said. “He’s carried you your whole life. He won’t ask, but now it’s his turn.”
When they turned the final corner, Myron saw the Mercedes parked in front of the For Sale sign. He wondered for a moment if it was a realtor showing the house. His father stood in the front yard chatting with a woman. Dad was gesturing wildly and smiling. Looking at his father’s face—the rough skin that always seemed in need of a shave, the prominent nose Dad used to “nose punch” him during their giggling fun-fights, the heavy-lidded eyes à la Victor Mature and Dean Martin, the wispy hairs of gray that held on stubbornly after the thick black had fled—Myron felt a hand reach in and tweak his heart.
Dad caught his eye and waved. “Look who stopped by!” he shouted.
Emily Downing turned around and gave him a tight smile. Myron looked back at her and said nothing. Fifty minutes had passed. Ten more until the heel crushed the tomato.
2
Too much history. His parents made themselves scarce. For all their almost legendary butting in, they both had the uncanny ability to trample full tilt through the Isle of Nosiness without tripping any gone-too-far mines. They quietly disappeared into the house.
Emily tried a smile, but it just wasn’t happening. “Well, well, well,” she said when they were alone. “If it isn’t the good one I let get away.”
“You used that line last time I saw you.”
“Did I?”
They had met in the library freshman year at Duke. Emily had been bigger then, a bit fleshier, though not in a bad way, and the years had definitely slimmed her down and toned her up, though again not in a bad way. But the visual whammy was still there. Emily wasn’t so much pretty as, to quote SuperFly, foxy. Hot. Sizzlingly so. As a young coed, she’d had long, kinky hair that always had that just-did-the-nasty muss to it, a crooked smile that could knock a movie up a rating, and a subconsciously undulating body that continuously flickered out the word sex like an old movie projector. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t beautiful; beauty had little to do with it, in fact. This was an innate thing; Emily couldn’t turn it off if she donned a muumuu and put roadkill on her head.
The weird thing was, they were both virgins when they met, somehow missing the perhaps overblown sexual revolution of the seventies and early eighties. Myron always believed that the revolution was mostly hype or, at the very least, that it didn’t seep past the brick façades of suburban high schools. But then again, he was pretty good at self-rationalization. More likely, it was his fault—if you could consider not being promiscuous a fault. He’d always been attracted to the “nice” girls, even in high school. Casual affairs never interested him. Every girl he met was gauged as a potential life partner, a soul mate, an undying love, as though every relationship should be a Carpenters song.
But with Emily it had been complete sexual exploration and discovery. They learned from each other in stuttering, though achingly blissful, steps. Even now, as much as he detested her very being, he could still feel the tightening, could still recall the way his nerve endings would sing and surge when they were in bed. Or the back of a car. Or a movie theater or a library or once even during a poly sci lecture on Hobbes’s Leviathan. While he may have yearned to be a Carpenters man, his first long-term relationship had ended up more like something off Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell album—hot, heavy, sweaty, fast, the whole “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
Still, there had to have been more to it. He and Emily had lasted three years. He had loved her, and she’d been the first to break his heart.
“There a coffee bar near here?” she asked.
“A Starbucks,” Myron said.
“I’ll drive.”
“I don’t want to go with you, Emily.”
She gave him the smile. “Lost my charms, have I?”
“They lost their effect on me a long time ago.” Half lie.
She shifted her hips. Myron watched, thinking about what Esperanza had said. It wasn’t just her voice or her words—even her movements ended up a double entendre. “It’s important, Myron.”
“Not to me.”
“You don’t even know—”
“It doesn’t matter, Emily. You’re the past. So is your husband—”
“My ex-husband. I divorced him, remember? And I never knew what he did to you.”
“Right,” Myron said. “You were just the cause.”
She looked at him. “It’s not that simple. You know that.”
He nodded. She was right, of course. “I always knew why I did it,” Myron said. “I was being a competitive dumbass who wanted to get one up on Greg. But why you?”
Emily shook her head. The old hair would have flown side to side, ending up half covering her face. Her new coif was shorter and more stylized, but his mind’s eye still saw the kinky flow. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said.
“Guess not,” he said, “but I’ve always been curious.”
“We both had too much to drink.”
“Simple as that?”
“Yes.”
Myron made a face. “Lame,” he said.
“Maybe it was just about sex,” she said.
“A purely physical act?”
“Maybe.”
“The night before you married someone else?”
She looked at him. “It was dumb, okay?”
“You say so.”
“And maybe I was scared,” she said.
“Of getting married?”
“Of marrying the wrong man.”
Myron shook his head. “Jesus, you’re shameless.”
Emily was about to say more, but she stopped as though her last reserves had suddenly been zapped away. He wanted her gone, but with ex-loves there is also a pulling sadness. The
re before you stands the true road untraveled, the lifetime what-if, the embodiment of a totally alternate life if things had gone a little different. He had absolutely no interest in her anymore, yet her words still drew out his old self, wounds and all.
“It was fourteen years ago,” she said softly. “Don’t you think it’s time we moved on?”
He thought about what that “purely physical” night had cost him. Everything, maybe. His lifelong dream, for sure. “You’re right,” he said, turning away. “Please leave.”
“I need your help.”
He shook his head. “As you said, time to move on.”
“Just have coffee with me. With an old friend.”
He wanted to say no, but the past had too strong a pull. He nodded, afraid to speak. They drove in silence to Starbucks and ordered their complicated coffees from an artist-wannabe barista with more attitude than the guy who works at the local record store. They added whatever condiments at the little stand, playing a game of Twister by reaching across one another for the nonfat milk or Equal. They sat down in metal chairs with too-low backs. The sound system was playing reggae music, a CD entitled Jamaican Me Crazy.
Emily crossed her legs and took a sip. “Have you ever heard of Fanconi anemia?”
Interesting opening gambit. “No.”
“It’s an inherited anemia that leads to bone marrow failure. It weakens your chromosomes.”
Myron waited.
“Are you familiar with bone marrow transplants?”
Strange line of questioning, but he decided to play it straight. “A little. A friend of mine had leukemia and needed a transplant. They had a marrow drive at the temple. We all went down and got tested.”
“When you say ‘we all’—”
“Mom, Dad, my whole family. I think Win went too.”
She tilted her head. “How is Win?”
“The same.”
“Sorry to hear that,” she said. “When we were at Duke, he used to listen to us making love, didn’t he?”
“Only when we pulled down the shade so he couldn’t watch.”
She laughed. “He never liked me.”
“You were his favorite.”
