by Paula Champa
He stared at me.
It was like the moment of bidding on the engine all over again. I had no idea what would happen, but I knew that if I didn’t act, the chance would be gone.
“If I hadn’t been looking for it,” I blurted, “I wouldn’t have met you.”
I leaned down to kiss him again, but the look of misery on his face prompted an instant retreat.
“I’m happy I could help, Beth. But right now I can’t make this a more personal situation.”
I didn’t know how that fit with what he had just said about our hearts. For the first time, I felt that we were speaking two different forms of English. But I could not avoid his meaning: There would be no romantic plot for us, that was clear.
“I should go,” he said.
“Do you have to get up early?”
“Tomorrow, for a meeting—I’m dreading it—with AG. But usually not so early.”
He smiled tightly.
At the sound of the engine starting, my mouth filled with wet cement.
“You didn’t have to drive up there with me this weekend,” I managed to say, each word hardening on my tongue.
“As I say, I was happy to help.”
A familiar desire to withdraw overwhelmed me. It was comfortable, but in a forlorn way, like sitting down by myself to a reheated dinner, as I would be doing after Emerson was gone. A twisting sensation wrenched my gut, like cylinders turning and tumbling, until a name shot through my mind. The car was starting to roll away when the shock of it freed my tongue.
“Wait—”
Miguel stopped the car.
I felt my cheeks growing hot. “I have to ask you something. Will you tell me the truth?”
“You just said you trusted me.”
“You mentioned someone a few minutes ago, your friend Lynford. Did I hear that right?”
“Yes.”
Was it possible? How many could there be?
I asked: “Do you mean the property developer—Lynford Webster—an American?”
Miguel seemed to brighten at the name. “Yes, he’s doing a lot of projects in Asia. Do you know him?”
“No. I mean, I’ve heard of him. Is he involved somehow in Beacon’s business, or in AG’s business?”
Miguel shifted the car into park. “Pardon?”
I walked over to where he was stopped.
“Mr. Webster. Do you work with him somehow, Miguel?”
“Oh. Not really, no.”
The sensation of heat sank and spread through my neck, chest and gut like the hot drops in a lava lamp. “So then, if you’re not doing business together—sorry, what did you say?—you’re friends?”
“Well, yes. I haven’t known him that long, but we’ve recently become quite close.”
“Why didn’t you tell us that earlier?”
“Who’s us?” he said with sudden annoyance.
The heat was concentrating in my gut now, bubbling there. “You’re close?” I asked. “What do you mean? Like, he spends time with you?”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “He’s mentoring me, I guess you could say. Not formally. It’s more like he supports me personally.”
“He spends time with you and mentors you?”
How could the same man be so absent from Emerson’s side?
“It’s like I’m the son he doesn’t have.”
“The son he doesn’t have? Did he say that?”
“More or less.”
I had to stop myself from reaching out and slapping his face. An improbable dream of my own may have furled and unfurled weakly around Miguel, but the anger I felt now was on Emerson’s behalf. It was as if Emerson were inside my head, dictating the words straight to my vocal cords.
“Or is he the father you didn’t have?”
Miguel lowered his eyes.
I leaned down to the window, fighting to control myself. “The rich father.”
He refused to look at me.
“I have no idea what your game is. But I was wrong. I don’t trust you. I don’t want to hear from you again.” I turned to leave. “Goodbye, Miguel.”
“Beth—you trusted me.”
Inside the hotel, I couldn’t wait for the elevator, and I ran up the stairway to my room. I stood for hours at the window overlooking Sunset, staring at the lights downtown. But instead of marveling at the wonders at my feet, it felt as if everything wonderful was receding from me.
After the first licks of dawn striped the sky and the city lights melted into the early haze, I got on a plane to return to Emerson, who was receding from me himself, hour by hour, even as I approached, receding into the mysterious realm that I knew without question would claim him.
17
THE BLADES OF A traffic helicopter cut the pale sky over lower Manhattan like a rotary fan in a hot parlor, sending a brief, useless breeze wafting up the Avenue of the Americas. In the cobblestone mews between Fifth Avenue and University Place, I stepped through a flood of spent rose petals, blown down from the trellises in surrender to the heat—a trail of pink, yellow and white like a bridal carpet leading me to a moment of truth.
In Dr. Albas’s office on University, where I had been summoned alone, she explained the choices Emerson faced. If he let himself bleed internally, it would be the most painless and humane choice he could make for himself. “He’ll fall asleep,” she said. “He’ll slip into a coma and go gently. But if he continues to insist on being transfused like we’ve been doing . . . I have to warn you, Beth. His body will go into a kind of trauma . . .”
I had returned from Los Angeles to find Emerson subdued. Surprisingly so. I wondered if it was because the chase that had animated him so much in the previous weeks had come to an end. It worried me enough to grill the healthcare workers about anything he’d said or done while I was away, until Dr. Albas explained that she’d already told Emerson the same thing she’d told me. Zandra and Brian thought Emerson was weighing his choices. They reported that he’d kept his morphine suppressed intentionally again, so he could be clear-headed enough to follow the action as I called in from California. Now that I was back, his meds had been set at inflated levels to ease his discomfort, and he was doped out. In fact, he spoke little about our recent adventure beyond answering some questions I had about shipping the engine back to New York, apparently content to know that the restored car would soon be part of his collections. Infuriatingly, it was something I’d witnessed often after he acquired a photograph: He immediately lost interest in it.
“Let’s go see the engine,” I suggested to him one afternoon, when it would still have been possible, with some difficulty, for him to be escorted out for an hour or so. By then, the engine had been removed from the Russells’ Beacon and shipped from California, and Nate, the manager at the Perry Street garage, was supposed to have it with the chassis somewhere, with the mechanics who were reuniting the two parts. I never asked where, because Emerson refused to go.
“I just went to L.A. I don’t want to leave this apartment,” he said, closing his eyes on any further debate.
I could not deny he was failing. By my observation, the elevated doses of morphine now operated like a bullet train, carrying him straight from wakefulness to dreaming. In his bedroom, propped up against the pillows, he moved his head from side to side like any other commuter—arms up, bent at the elbows—though he was not holding a newspaper, not holding anything, except in his own mind. Something of great interest to him. He held his fingers at chin level as if he were making a goalpost. He was not exactly asleep, and definitely not awake. He was seeing something, experiencing some kind of chimera.
Morpheus. Poppy to morphine. He was practicing the sleep of death, springing up and down on the silver cord, deliriously tired, while his brain went on sampling input from the outside: passing voices, doors opening and closing, the contractors upstairs working on the neighbor’s kitchen . . . Like his books turning into medical supplies, one day of living equated to so little now: the phone ringing, my clogs clomping up
and down the floorboards, Zandra’s afternoon talk shows and the garbage trucks rolling through the Village with their brakes in a perpetual squeal.
I sat on the bed by his feet and wondered if his mind registered where he was, suspended between states, perhaps already moving between them. Death was a slide show projected into a sunny room. It was there the whole time.
When Zandra brought in Emerson’s breakfast the next morning, he informed us that his sleep had been plagued by nightmares.
“Like what?” I asked, curious to know if I was sharing dreams with him, along with his emotions and stomach pains.
“I remember a little bit of one,” he began hesitantly. “I woke up thinking I had to get ready for work. Then, you know—I don’t work anymore.”
He looked bewildered.
“You can always go to your office, Emerson.”
“I know that now. But it ruined my whole day.”
His lawyer arrived later that morning. Their meeting was brief, and as the day went on, Emerson couldn’t settle into one position for more than ten minutes at a time. He hung his head miserably while Zandra and I sat on either side of the bed, rubbing his back.
“Do you want me to call him?” I offered.
“Who?” Emerson asked.
I paused, not sure how much I should say in front of Zandra. “He might be back from Asia.”
“Press harder on the left,” he commanded.
“I could leave a message.”
“No.”
“What if I asked Laurel—”
“Just rub my back.”
“I hate to see you in pain,” I said.
He shifted his hips, clenching his teeth with discomfort. “I’m wearing you out.”
“No, only Zandra and Brian and the others.”
Zandra reached over the bed and gave me a shove, but Emerson didn’t laugh.
He bared his teeth and made a move to stand up, then settled back against the pillows. “Beth, I just keep thinking: What if? What if this? What if that? Is everything ending?”
“I don’t believe it is.”
“If I believed what you told me . . .” He turned to Zandra. “You know, the morphine doesn’t erase everything.”
He slept for a while, and for the first time since I’d returned from California, I had the opportunity to reflect on my behavior toward Hélène. Emerson had convinced me that she was our enemy, but now that he’d won, I could not stop thinking about the message to her on the engine. Emerson would not be beside me for much longer. The race had been a useful distraction for him, and he was presumably making the car more collectible by reuniting the original pieces, but this exercise was now drained of all enthusiasm. In the end, the engine and the car would have to go to someone.
“Have you decided what you’re doing with the Beacon?” I asked him that evening, wondering if its fate was among the things he had discussed with his lawyer, Bruce Kingston, earlier in the day.
His posture deflated in the bed, just as it had when the taxi driver had reached the end of the circuit at Gray Hill. He seemed to stall on the question.
“No?” I asked.
He gave me a curious smile and shook his head.
At this, I decided to be up-front with him. “I didn’t tell you this earlier—”
He looked up at me, alarmed. “Didn’t tell me what?”
“When I was in California—”
“Did something happen with Miguel?”
I shook my head.
“You haven’t said a word about him since you got back. Are you still in touch with him?”
“We found what you wanted,” I said, feigning nonchalance. “There’s no reason for me to be in touch with him.”
He sank lower in the bed.
“Listen,” I said, “there was something written on that engine when I saw it. Besides the numbers and things.”
He stared at me, waiting for me to continue.
“It was a message to Hélène.”
I paused.
“Her name was engraved on it, along with some words. In Italian. It said, ‘I remember.’”
I waited for this to sink in.
“I remember,” Emerson said.
It was unclear whether he was repeating what I’d just said or he recalled the inscription himself.
“What do you remember?”
With visible effort, he pulled himself up a little and held out his right hand to me.
“Beth, will you do me a favor, please, and take a look at this hangnail?”
“You can’t have a hangnail. You have the most well-cared-for hands in Manhattan.”
I sat on his bed and squared his fingers to examine them: tiny, like a child’s, tinged an unhappy shade of yellow. I had barely begun to examine them when he squeezed my hands insistently between both of his. Then I knew there were no hangnails.
He turned to Maria-Sylvana, who’d started her shift by unpacking a box of syringes. “Would you please make me a snack?”
“The usual?” she asked agreeably.
“With a little extra butter, please.”
She went off to the kitchen and I sat with him, perplexed, holding his hands as gently as I could. I hated the look in his eyes, a look of desperation mixed with a trace of the adolescent scowl I had detected on the steps of the 42nd Street library—a skepticism that was unwilling to be reassured. I wondered how long he had known he would share his mother’s fate. I wondered if he had ever been in love . . .
These were not new thoughts. They were things I had asked myself many times, but he was my employer, and I did not know how to form the questions. The last thing I wanted to do was upset him. More than anything, I wished he would have peace.
He squeezed my hands again, his grip stronger than I would have thought possible.
“Beth?” he asked when we were alone in the room.
“Yes?”
I waited to hear his final pronouncement on the fate of the Beacon.
“I can choose my own afterlife?”
It took me a second to register the change of subject, and then I realized he was referring to our conversation weeks earlier. I was immensely relieved to see the hope in his eyes. I considered answering him as he often answered me: with a book. I could go out to the hallway and find his volumes on Plato, and read to him what the philosopher had articulated on that topic at the end of his Republic. I could pull out other books—countless books—detailing every established belief on the subject: doctrines from India, traditions from ancient Egypt and other parts of Africa, religious teachings about resurrection and the afterlife stretching back for civilizations. But I sensed he no longer had the patience for such a recital, and I could not risk it.
“Well, what do you think all the belief systems represent?” I asked. “There are all kinds of ways to express the same truths.”
He looked away, his hands still in mine. “I guess . . .”
“Is there some afterlife you would want?”
“I guess I thought it would be the Beacon. That I would go there.”
I nodded.
“But that won’t happen. I don’t want that to happen, anyway.”
“Emerson—”
He interrupted me. “I want to tell you something. First of all, I never drove that car before.”
“The Beacon?”
“No. Horace’s car. At the track that day. Because I would have warned you.”
I was too surprised to speak.
His hands grasped mine more tightly now, wringing them miserably in his own. “I see that scar on your leg that you’re always trying to hide, and I think, Why didn’t I warn her?”
“Forget about that. It doesn’t matter.”
“But I know now—it won’t be the cave, or the Beacon. Do you see?”
I shook my head.
“Where I’ll go,” he insisted. “It’s the scar. That’s where I’m going, after Omega.”
With his hands gripping mine, I sat speechless. The scar he spoke of
was within reach of both of us, but I never thought to show it to him or to reach for it myself. Not because it would have seemed foolish, indulging someone whose mind was addled by morphine. And not because I felt—as I felt later—that those three inches of skin would make for a barren heaven. After all, I had asked him to consider every possibility. And what was a scar, if not a gateway?
No, I kept still because I sensed something of that first euphoric pain I had experienced at the track that day so many years before. As Emerson went silent and stared at me, I felt an exquisite horror, as if his words were not just an idle wish or a morphine dream, but the proposal of a spiritual possession every bit as sincere as that red-hot metal had been.
“Yes,” I said finally, because there was nothing else to say.
It was only when Maria-Sylvana returned with his tiny helping of macaroni and cheese that I managed to look away from his triumphant gaze.
He released my hands long enough to feed himself—four or five baby spoonfuls—but he insisted I stay beside him to hold the bowl. It sat between us in my hands like a cup sealing our pact as I watched him chew slowly, slowly . . . My eyes were closing with exhaustion when I felt the abrupt sensation of something crashing into my jaw.
“Thank you,” he rasped through lips caked with orange cheese.
I scraped a clot of orange off my face, stunned that he had managed to make full contact with a kiss, even if it was on the side of my chin. Without another word, he leaned back against the pillows, and the morphine promptly shuttled him to sleep.
An early-morning breeze had come up after rain—cool and sweet, laced with the soft smell of mud from the streets running down to the Hudson. I retreated to the guest room, where I lay awake until the sky began to grow light, and then I gave up on sleeping. That must have been when I slept.
When Brian woke me up just after 11 A.M., Emerson was gone.
18
WE FOUND HIS pajama top abandoned on the fax machine in the office. A fax had come through in the night—legal papers. I collected them from the floor and dropped them onto his desk. The top left-hand drawer was open and Emerson’s wallet was gone.
