by Billy Taylor
I followed Claire into the woods, and we were immediately swallowed up by shadows. Leaves and spiderwebs tickled our faces, and the trees and bushes seemed closer than they had just moments before. We followed a trail of pine needles and dappled moonlight until the trees parted and we came to a small lake. Tiny clouds floated over the surface of the water, and I half expected to see a glowing fairy or a chain saw–wielding psychopath flitting about. We found a log by the edge of the water and sat down to take it all in. Claire removed her shoes and as she slipped her feet into the water asked, “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“I showed you mine, now you show me yours.”
“Excuse me?”
“I told you about my father and Miss DeMarco. What’s your family’s deep, dark secret?”
My family has nothing but deep, dark secrets, I wanted to reply. Instead I said, “I don’t have a family.”
“What do you mean? Everybody has a family.”
“My parents died when I was a kid, and I got passed around by relatives until I came here.”
“That’s terrible.”
“I don’t know, I kind of like it here.”
“Not that part, the before-you-came-here part.”
“I guess,” I said with a shrug. “It was a long time ago, and I really don’t like to talk about it.”
The lie rolled off my tongue like it always did, except this time it left a strange taste in my mouth. I turned to Claire, and as our eyes met I felt a strange desire to—Was it, tell the truth? This made no sense. Yes, I had run away to Wheaton to become an honest person, but that didn’t mean I wanted to stand up in the middle of the dining hall and tell the world my life story.
“I’m so sorry about your family,” she said.
“It was a long time ago.”
We talked through the night with the chapel bell reminding us—every hour on the hour—of how long we’d been together and how little time we had left. Finally, when the bell struck seven I said, “Ugh, I have to be at work in, like, twenty minutes.”
“You have to go to work this morning? For how long?”
“Just three hours.”
“If I had known that I wouldn’t have kept you out all night.”
“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t have traded this night for all the breakfast shifts in China.”
We walked back to campus, and with each step it felt like I was being pulled from a dream and dropped back into reality.
Plus, I still hadn’t kissed Claire.
I had wanted to kiss her from the moment our eyes met on the infirmary steps, but I didn’t want to appear overly aggressive or presumptuous. Worse than that, I didn’t want to try and kiss Claire and have her turn away. That would have been a nightmare. But Claire had spent the night with me, and that had to mean something, right? And what if she wanted me to kiss her, and I didn’t? Would she think I wasn’t interested in her? Or that I was dating someone else? Or that I was gay?
Damn, I thought. I’ve had an easier time breaking into apartments than this.
We reached the edge of the woods, and I could see the chapel spire looming ahead of us. If I didn’t kiss Claire now, I told myself, I might not ever have the opportunity again.
“Hey, you,” I said, walking up beside her.
“Yes?”
“I just wanted to . . .”
“What?”
“This,” I said, and kissed her.
I kept waiting for her to pull away, or kick me in the crotch, or scream, but she didn’t do any of those things, so I raised my hand and touched her cheek with the back of my fingers. I know you’re not supposed to open your eyes during moments like this, but I couldn’t help myself. Not surprisingly, Claire was even more beautiful up close. Her cheeks, her eyebrows, even her earlobes were glorious.
Then the kiss was over, and Claire stepped back to look at me. She had this huge smile on her face and for a split second I was terrified she was going to start laughing. Instead she turned around and said, “See you around, Cam Smith.”
“See you around,” I replied
Claire walked away, and I stood there feeling both with her and alone.
See you around, Cam Smith.
What did she mean by that? I wondered. Was she brushing me off? Or did she really want to see me again?
I was too nervous, and tired, and exhilarated to tell. So I raced to the cafeteria and took my place on the serving line with the memory of Claire’s kiss still claiming possession of my lips.
• • •
They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but it was my least favorite shift to work. Not only did you have to get there super early, but the food was boring and almost everyone there was grumpy. It was even worse after my night with Claire. My wrist throbbed like crazy, and I was so tired from lack of sleep that I almost passed out at the steam table. Lucky for me there were only two choices on the menu which gave me a fifty percent chance of getting it right.
“Oatmeal or eggs?” I mumbled over and over again. “Oatmeal or eggs?”
“Hi, Cam.”
I looked up and Claire was standing in front of me. She had changed her clothes, her hair was wet, and she looked even more beautiful than the night before.
“Hey.”
“Which of these mouthwatering selections do you recommend?”
“That’s a tough one. The oatmeal is bad, and the eggs are even worse. On the bright side, no one’s died of food poisoning yet.”
“When you put it that way, I think I’ll try the oatmeal.”
“An excellent choice.” I spooned some mush into her bowl and said, “How are you feeling, by the way?”
“Good. Tired. But good.” She smiled to let me know that she meant it.
“Me too.”
“Want to go to Cassidy’s for lunch when you’re done?” she asked.
Cassidy’s was a diner in town where all the cool kids went to eat. If Claire took me there, it was the equivalent of a front page headline in the Weekly Wheatonian announcing we were a couple.
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Great, I’ll swing by your room at eleven.”
Claire walked away, and I exhaled.
See you around, Cam Smith.
So Claire did want to see me again! I was stunned. Claire dated upper classmen, and I was just this little mouse who scurried around the edges of campus. But not only did Claire want to see me again, she wanted to do it in public. This was major. As I stood there slinging oatmeal and eggs I thought about our night together and how, for the first time in forever, I hadn’t been worried about my family, my grades, or even my future. No, none of that mattered because being with Claire made me feel like an actual human being instead of someone who was only pretending to be.
Maybe I wasn’t a little mouse after all.
13
“SEE HIM?” MY MOTHER ASKED, POINTING TO A SKINNY kid walking beside an old woman in a black dress.
“Yes?”
“That’s Tony. He’s been here three times for drug addiction. The first time he was only thirteen years old. That woman he’s with is his grandmother. She’s a saint.”
I stared at the guy. He seemed normal except, like every patient there, he moved with what I had begun calling the “Shady Oaks Shuffle.”
“Do they have a lot of that here?” I asked, attempting to bring up the pharmacy in my mother’s medicine cabinet. “Drug addicts, I mean?”
“The Shady Oaks Rehab clinic is one of the best in the state and has had lots of famous patients.”
“They told you this?”
“No, but you hear things.”
We were sitting in a white wooden gazebo about a hundred yards from the O’Neil Pavilion. There was a cool breeze in the air, a picturesque sunset over my shoulder, a
nd a dog barking in the distance. It was a perfect winter’s day, and I had a hard time reconciling the beautiful surroundings with the not-so-beautiful fact that I’d been dragged back into O’Rourkes’ World of Crime. I closed my eyes and wondered how long it would be before I was hijacking beer trucks and stealing lumber from construction sites.
“Did Wonderful talk to you about the job?”
I opened my eyes and said, “You know about it?”
“Of course I do. It was my idea.”
I bit my lip and sighed. Was there anyone in my family who wasn’t involved in this clown show?
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I’m not sure yet. So far, I’ve only heard the broad strokes.”
“Which are?”
“That we’re scamming some old guy who wants us to kill an ex-mobster for him.”
“That’s it in a nutshell. Just remember not to say anything stupid when you meet the mark.”
“No way,” I said, shooting to my feet. “I already told Uncle Wonderful that I’m strictly backup on this deal. I’m not meeting anybody outside the family, especially not the mark.”
“That’s going to be a little tricky,” she said in a low voice.
“Why?”
“Because here he comes.”
I turned and saw an old man in a velour tracksuit hobbling toward us on a pair of wooden canes. He looked harmless enough, although harmless people rarely ask you to kill a guy for them.
“Do you mind if I use the other bench?” he asked when he reached the bottom step of the gazebo.
“Of course not,” my mother said. “Sal, this is my son, Skip.”
“Visiting from college?” he asked.
“Prep school, actually.”
“That’s a lot better than me. I never made it past the fifth grade.” He climbed onto the gazebo and stuck out his hand. “Sal DeNunsio.”
“Skip O’Rourke.” We shook, and I noticed that the knuckles on his hand were covered with scars. Nasty ones.
“Sal’s a friend of mine from years ago,” my mother said. “I almost had a heart attack when I found out he was living at the Williams Pavilion.”
“The Williams Pavilion?” I asked, already knowing the answer. “What’s that?”
“The hospital’s geriatric residence,” my mother said.
“That’s right,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not crazy, just old.”
“You seem in pretty good shape to me,” I said.
“You ever heard of a fighter having a glass jaw?”
“Sure.”
“I got two glass hips. After the second one went, I sold my place and moved here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Smartest thing I ever did,” he said. “But hey, you folks were talking, and I interrupted. I’ll just sit here quietly and read my Racing Form.”
“Got any hot tips?” I asked.
“Yeah, study hard and go to college.”
“I mean with the horses,” I said with a laugh.
He unfolded the paper and put on a pair of reading glasses. “Right now I’m trying to choose between Sandy’s Pride and Road Runner in the fifth at Aqueduct. What do you think?”
“I don’t know much about horses, but the Road Runner always beat the Coyote on television.”
Mr. DeNunsio pulled a pencil from behind his ear and scribbled something in the paper. “Then Road Runner it is.”
In the distance a couple of orderlies were starting to wheel the older patients inside and I said, “It’s almost time to go.”
“You’re leaving?” my mother asked, snapping back to reality. “Why? When will you be back?”
I heard the panic in her voice and took her hand. “It’s okay, Ma. It’s just that visiting hours are almost over. I’ll be back again in the morning.”
“Whew, I thought you meant you were going back to school.”
“No, I’ll be here through New Year’s.”
“Good, you had me scared there for a second.”
It was upsetting to see my mother acting so fragile. She had always been the tough one in the family, and it was her example that gave me the strength to run away in the first place. As much as I wanted to get back to Wheaton and Claire, a small part of me felt an obligation to stay on Long Island and help my mother get well. If she was actually sick, that is. I couldn’t tell, and between all my guilt and skepticism I thought my head was going to spin right off my shoulders.
• • •
On the drive home the thought of robbing Mr. DeNunsio began to gnaw at me. This wasn’t going to be like ripping off a department store, or scamming some faceless bureaucracy. Mr. DeNunsio was a real human being with thoughts, hopes, and desires, and how would I have liked it if a couple of knuckleheads stole my life’s savings? Granted, I would have never asked a couple of knuckleheads to kill a man for me, but I’m sure Mr. DeNunsio had his reasons. Either way, the job stank and I wanted to get as far away from it as possible.
Think, I told myself. There has to be some way to get out of this thing. Uncle Wonderful might have had connections at the Wheaton financial aid office, but he wasn’t God.
Then it hit me: my car. The Mustang was registered in my name—or at least one of them—and if I sold it, the proceeds would not only make up for my scholarship, but give me a head start on Princeton. My desperation vanished, and I drove to the nearest Ford dealership where I was delighted to see that a new GT cost over thirty thousand dollars. Considering there were less than two hundred miles on mine, I could easily clear twenty grand on the deal. Life was looking up.
Or was it?
That car was a gift from your mother, I reminded myself. A big one, too. And if ripping off Mr. DeNunsio was cruel and heartless, selling my Mustang while my mother was possibly suicidal was not only cruel and heartless, but karmically bankrupt.
Except I didn’t believe in karma. I believed in working hard and doing the exact opposite of everything I was taught growing up. And that’s exactly what selling my Mustang would allow me to do. It might not have been the gift my mother had intended, but it was the best thing she could have done for me—whether she liked it or not.
I was exhausted from spending the previous night on the bathroom floor, but when I got home I couldn’t sleep. All I could think about was going back to school and escaping my family permanently. The only hitch in this plan was whether the Mustang was paid for or not, and before I knew what I was doing I was tearing the house apart searching for the title.
My first stops were to my mother’s usual hiding places: under the sink, on top of the refrigerator, and in the empty mayonnaise jar in the pantry. I found nothing. Either she had gotten more ingenious in her old age, or she had nothing to hide—both of which I found impossible to believe. Next, I checked all her secondary spots: inside the toilet tank, under the rugs, and behind the dresser in the bedroom. Still nothing. I was about to call it a night when I spotted a piece of loose molding beneath her nightstand. I pulled it free, and in a spot where the Sheetrock didn’t quite meet the floor, I spied some metal that looked like the bottom of a document box. Bingo. As I reached down to pull away the Sheetrock my weasel senses began to tingle, and it occurred to me that the plaster work was much better than my mother could have done on her own. This meant someone else knew about the box, and that I should probably cover my tracks.
I went into the kitchen and came back with a steak knife. A matte knife would have been better, but I took my time and cut around the Sheetrock until it pulled free and the box tumbled to the floor. There was nothing special about the box except that it was locked, and I didn’t have the key. I could have wasted more time searching for it, but I figured the odds of me finding the key were slim to nothing. At this point your average weasel would have put the box back and hired a guy to make a fake title. Except I wasn’t your aver
age weasel; I was an O’Rourke. Something in that box was important, and I needed to find out what it was.
I picked up the box and threw it on the floor. Nothing happened. I tried again and got the same results. By my sixth attempt, I should have accepted that this was not the best way to open a sealed document box, but I was tired, cranky, and growing more frustrated by the second. I threw the box down one last time and, for lack of a better idea, carried it to the garage and wedged it under a rear tire of my Mustang. I cranked the engine and backed up until I heard a pop. Success. I pried open the box and found a passport, birth certificate, and driver’s license all made out to someone named Dolores Spencer. I had never met Dolores Spencer, but she bore an uncanny resemblance to my mother.
Why? Because Dolores Spencer was my mother’s good name. She had never told me this, of course, but the paperwork said it all. It was something else, too—leverage. I hoped it would never come to it, but if my family made a move against me I now had a bargaining chip. I turned the box upside down and a shower of wallet candy fell to the floor. In addition to the license and passport, there were credit cards, a Social Security card, and membership cards for AAA and AARP. All were slightly worn and all were up to date. It was the best fake identity I had ever seen, and I was impressed by my mother’s thoroughness.
“If only you could use your powers for good,” I said aloud.
I thumbed through the rest of the paperwork, but the title for the Mustang wasn’t there. On to Plan B and finding someone who could print up a bogus title. As I put the paperwork back in the box I spotted the date on Dolores Spencer’s driver’s license. It was three months old—as was her AAA card and both her credit cards. This made absolutely no sense. Why? Because a person who applies for an AAA card isn’t thinking about killing herself. Not in a million years.
A person who applies for an AAA card is thinking about going somewhere.
14
THE PLAN WAS TO MEET AT THE OLIVE GARDEN AT EIGHT o’clock. I picked up Vinny at seven thirty and got there ten minutes early. Roy picked up Jackie and got there twenty minutes late. This gave Vinny and me half an hour to watch as every bar stool, table, and drink coaster in the restaurant got taken. By the time Roy and Jackie arrived there was a twenty minute wait, and I was so hungry my stomach was starting to digest itself.
