by Jodi Compton
When I didn’t move to get up, Tess said, “You’re from San Francisco; you must know how lovely North Beach is on Christmas Eve.”
“I’m not really from here,” I said, “and no, I haven’t been in North Beach at Christmas.”
“Then you should see it.”
That was how I ended up walking around North Beach on Christmas Eve with a mobster’s daughter. I was wearing lost-and-found motley, things Tess had sweet-talked the hotel staff into surrendering: a big fisherman’s sweater and brown wool trousers and leather ankle boots. Everything was slightly too big for me, but comfortable. Tess’s clothes wouldn’t have fit. I’d realized that she was inches shorter than she’d appeared in the projection booth. I supposed it was both my literal and psychological perspective on the situation that had made her seem taller.
Although it was Christmas Eve, Tess had assured me that many of the shops would be open until six for frantic last-minute purchases, both by traditional nonnas and non-Italian yuppies. And, she said, there would be a café or two open late.
As we walked, me navigating carefully in my slightly-too-large borrowed boots, Tess greeted and was greeted by people on the sidewalk. She seemed to invite the courtesy of passersby. They were clearly looking at her, not at me. She wished them Buon Natale, and something lovely and Italian happened to her voice when she did.
“People like you,” I said.
“You don’t,” she said mildly.
“That’s not exactly true,” I said. “It’s just that-”
I broke off then, because we were standing at the doorway to Café Puccini, and a pair of tourists, chatting in German, held the door for us to go in. We did.
At the counter, Tess ordered herself a cappuccino. I opened my mouth to second it, when she interrupted, speaking directly to the man behind the counter. “She’ll have a steamed milk.”
“A what?” I said.
To me, she said, “You haven’t had anything to eat or drink in over a day. You’re not starting with coffee.”
I thought of objecting but realized I didn’t feel legitimately indignant enough to do so.
She came back with two paper to-go cups, handed me mine, and then added a packet of raw sugar to hers. As she stirred it in, I sampled the milk cautiously.
“Is it okay?” Tess asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never had hot milk before, not even as a child.” I tried it again. “It doesn’t taste anything like cold milk.”
“It’s not supposed to,” she said.
“Listen, Miss D’Agostino-”
“Tess,” she said.
“Tess, what I was saying outside was, the past few months have not paid a good return on faith in my fellow man. And I really don’t know anything about you.”
She sealed a plastic lid onto her cup. “Would you like to?”
As we walked back toward the hotel, she told me her life story.
She was from a small Italian clan of fishermen in Bodega Bay, who later ran a bait-and-tackle shop on the water, with a small deli inside. Soon the deli was the heart of the business, with tourists and working fishermen alike coming in for espresso and cappuccino and her grandmother’s sandwiches and pasta salads. Her mother, Anna, worked at the store in her teenage years.
That was how she met Tony Skouras, who had a second home and moored a pleasure boat in Bodega Bay. He seemed like the perfect gentleman. Anna knew he was married, but she was young and swept away.
Skouras supported his illegitimate baby financially until Anna married a nice working man, a roofer. After that he sent several checks a year anyway, for extras, nice Christmas presents, and piano lessons. Teresa always knew the roofer wasn’t her real father, but she loved him. And when she met her biological father in her last year of high school, she was as charmed, in a very different way, as her mother had been. Skouras was mannerly and interested in her. He was willing to pay for whatever higher education Teresa could win through her grades and aptitude testing. She went to college back east, then to grad school in London. Tess, as she became known in England, stayed in touch with Skouras. She sent him notes and small gifts on holidays. Of course, she’d become aware of who this man really was, where his success in business came from. But like many middle-class civilians, she had a romanticized view of organized crime. She never stopped writing him notes and sending small gifts on holidays. She revered him.
“The truly ugly side of that, I didn’t see that for a long time,” she said. “My father made it possible for me to become who I am, and not just financially. I love my mother and her family, but they were simple people. None of them had any success in school, or much in business. It was my father who gave me my intellect. I wasn’t brilliant like Adrian, granted, but my mind… it was a good deal more than my stepfather could have given me.”
I realized I’d been thinking of her as Tony Skouras’s daughter, not Adrian Skouras’s half sister, but clearly that was equally true.
She added, “I briefly considered taking his last name, but my family in Bodega Bay… they were my home. I’m part of them.”
“Tess of the D’Agostinos.”
“Are you commonly this acerbic, or is it your way of making yourself feel unscathed after everything that’s happened?”
She’d nailed me. I lowered my face to my steamed milk. Actually, I’d decided I didn’t like it, and had been scoping for a trash can in which to discreetly deposit it behind Tess’s back, but now it made a good diversion.
She went on: “I know it’ll be particularly hard for you to sympathize, given what you’ve been through at my father’s hand, but an inheritance like that… your very genetic material, the stuff of who you are, that’s a big gift, and hard to reject outright.” She reconsidered. “I mean, it’s hard to reject outright the person who gave it to you, no matter what you’ve learned about his private life.”
“After last night,” I said, “do you think you’re any closer?”
Her gaze went to my bandaged hand. She said, “When I walked into that room… Hailey, I never saw anything like that before.”
“You seemed very calm.”
“I was acting,” she said. “I didn’t feel it.”
“How did you know where we were, anyhow?”
“My father was lucid in the hospital, between the first and second heart attack,” Tess said. “He must have suspected he didn’t have much time, and he was unusually honest with me. About the baby, everything that was going on. I think he hoped I’d understand, that I’d see that this was about family, about our line continuing.”
That brought up an interesting point: “You’re his daughter, and you’re obviously young enough to have children. Why didn’t he hold out hope that you’d give him an heir?”
Tess smiled, a private, interior smile, and lifted a shoulder. “I’m thirty-two and never married,” she said. “I suppose he’d simply given up on that option.” She paused. “At any rate, I knew the overall situation because of my father, and then Mr. Costa was able to tell me where they’d taken you, because Joe Laska had been keeping him apprised.”
Babyface. Joseph Laska. I filed that name away for future reference. “Are you really thinking of taking over your father’s businesses?”
“I’m considering it.”
“Tough line.”
“I know,” she said.
“What about you, what are your plans?” she said. “If you don’t mind my asking. I’ll understand if you still don’t feel comfortable enough with me to have me know where you are.”
“Miss D’Agostino-”
“Tess,” she corrected again.
“I’ve learned something from all this,” I said. “I’m not the kind of person who can hide much of anywhere. I have a birthmark on my face and a nickname in Latin tattooed on my back, and now”-I held up my hand-“only nine fingers. Not to mention, my fingerprints are on record and my DNA is in the Pentagon’s battlefield registry. For good or bad, I’ve got to live my life out in th
e open.”
“The battlefield registry?” she echoed. “You’re a veteran? At your age?”
“I was at West Point.”
“And then what?”
“I left.”
“That’s obviously not the whole truth, Hailey. A West Point cadet represents a substantial financial investment by the U.S. government. They don’t just let you walk away from that.”
“No,” I told her. “They told me to walk away.”
“Why?” she asked. “Oh, I see it on your face already: It’s another story you’re not ready to tell me.”
“Don’t take it personally,” I said. “I don’t tell anyone.”
We had reached the Fairmont but stopped outside, as if the conversation was too important to carry inside among other people and their light and noise.
“I’m just trying to understand you,” she said. “I meant what I said earlier. When I walked into that theater, I’ve never seen anyone behaving the way you did before.”
“I wasn’t behaving any particular way. I was being held down on a table.”
“Don’t be flippant,” she said. “You went to great lengths, and let yourself be tortured, for the son of two dead strangers. You weren’t even saving the boy’s life; he was in no physical danger from my father. You nearly died to preserve his moral and spiritual welfare.”
“But I didn’t die,” I said. “Look, I don’t know if I can explain my behavior in a way you can understand. Have you read the Book of Jonah?”
“Jonah?” she repeated, her brown-gray gaze curious on my face.
“Yeah,” I said. “Even if you have, read it again. That’s the best I can do.”
epilogue
DECEMBER 26
Two days later, I was up on the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a bright morning, December cool. I wasn’t looking for jumpers. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be up on the bridge, looking for jumpers, again. Tomorrow I was going home.
If I’d cared to make a list of the things I’d lost in the past six months, suffice it to say it would be extensive. Every piece of paper that documented my identity-driver’s license, passport, even my birth certificate. Two guns, the Airweight and the SIG. Two cars, one of which I didn’t even own. And, of course, my finger.
What hurt most was the loss of the things I’d asked Shay to get for me, the Wheelock’s with my birth certificate and my only photo of my father tucked inside, my unworn red dress, my West Point class ring. On Christmas night, I’d gone back to get them, only to find the room bare except for the furniture it’d had when I moved in.
That had been too bad, really. Not just for me, but for Shay. If only I’d found the stuff I’d gone back there for, I could have let his betrayal slide. As it was, I’d had to pay him a visit.
Christmas night was a good time for a break-in: quiet and dark, half the houses on any given street standing empty, police patrols few and far between because of skeleton-crew staffing. I’d taken my time with a crowbar on Shay’s back door.
The crowbar had also helped Shay to be cooperative and forthcoming when he’d come in around eleven from wherever he’d had Christmas dinner. Conveniently, he’d been alone, or at least he’d thought he was alone until he flipped on the lights.
Nothing he had to say had surprised me much. They’d paid him fifteen thousand dollars to give me up. Shay insisted that Babyface had told him I’d walk away from the situation; that I’d owed a lot of money, and they were just going to slap me around some.
“Bullshit,” I’d said. “You cleaned out my room. You knew I was never coming back.”
I’d heard it before but never really believed it, that there were people like Shay in the world, who looked good and acted normal but had necrotic tissue where their conscience should have been. I understood Babyface and his crew; what they had done to me was their job, and I was nobody to them. Shay was different. He’d known me, even if we hadn’t been close, and I’d certainly done nothing to earn anything like animosity from him. Shay had simply wanted the money and he would have believed anything they’d told him to get it.
It wasn’t really a hell of a lot of money, not for a human life. “Frankly,” I’d told him last night, “I would have held out for more.”
I didn’t very often have an opportunity to give full rein, without remorse, to the rage that sometimes seized me. Last night had been a rare exception.
Blood makes the grass grow.
He was fine, he’d heal. Me, I hadn’t left empty-handed. Shay had kept my cadet sword; no one throws something like that in a Dumpster. And the balance of the Skouras money, a little more than thirteen thousand dollars, had been stashed in a flour canister in the pantry.
Already, ten thousand was on its way to CJ, the repayment of my debt. The rest was starting-over money, already covering the inexpensive Powell Street motel room I was staying in, and the Greyhound ticket I’d bought.
Tomorrow I was going home. I would spend New Year’s Eve in L.A., probably with CJ.
My cell rang and, for once, I answered it without even looking to see who was calling.
“Hailey Cain,” I said.
“Hailey, good morning.”
“Tess,” I said. “What’s up?”
“You sound like you’re somewhere outdoors.”
“I’m on the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“What are you doing up there?” she asked.
“Just making some plans.”
“And what have you concluded?”
“I’m going home.”
“I thought San Francisco was your home,” she said.
“No,” I said. “L.A. is.”
“I see,” she said. Then: “Hailey, there are very good doctors up here.”
When she said it, I had two conflicting thoughts at once. First, that I couldn’t have heard her properly; second, that I knew I had.
She said, “I found out why you left West Point. It puts a great deal of your behavior in context.”
“Reading Jonah might have done the same thing,” I said.
“I did that, too,” she said. “Jonah inexplicably fails to feel fear when it’s clearly called for. His actions show no regard for consequences.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s behavior very consistent with having a tumor in the amygdala region of the brain, the center of fear, rage, and aggression. Patients sometimes go off into unexplained fits of anger. Others aren’t afraid even when the situation calls for it.”
“Yeah.”
“And it would make a person, even one otherwise in the bloom of physical health, unfit to serve as an officer in the United States Army.”
“Yes, it would,” I agreed.
It was so funny, looking back… In my yearling and cow years, and into my final year, I had been so proud of my reputation for being hard to scare. In the boxing ring, jumping out of planes… other cadets used to ask me, Why aren’t you scared? They’d thought it was because I was brave. I had been content to believe that, too. No one saw it as a problem.
That I even got diagnosed was a fluke. The tumor was so small yet that I was nearly asymptomatic. But one day, in my firstie year, I was helping plebes learn to rappel. They were going down a bluff, and I was too close to the edge, sitting on my heels, and my ankle turned the wrong way and I fell. That was it.
The only injury I had from it was a broken wrist, but they checked me out pretty thoroughly, including an MRI for head injury. When the results came back, my company tactical officer came in with the doctor. My TAC said, There’s nothing from the fall, you’re going to be fine out of that. There’d been an unusual tone to his voice.
Out of that, sir?
The doc saw something else he’d like to biopsy.
All right. When?
The doctor and my TAC had exchanged glances, and the doctor said, You do understand that when I say biopsy, I mean we’re looking for cancer, right?
I guess so, yeah, I’d said.
My TAC gave the doctor a hell of a
look, and the doc said, That’s fairly typical for this region, the amygdala. Patients understand that something frightening is going on, but there’s no emotional weight attached to it. He’d seemed a little excited, like he was seeing something rare.
It was so goddammed stupid. I could have stood in Michie Stadium with my graduating class. I could have been a second lieutenant for a brief time, at least, if only I hadn’t been diagnosed. Meaning if I hadn’t fallen, meaning if I hadn’t been so close to the edge of that bluff. Which I wouldn’t have been if my fear hadn’t been suppressed. It was like the goddamned tumor wanted to be found, had pushed me into unmasking it.
That was the thing Serena and I did at the Beverly Center, the thing the rest of the world wouldn’t have understood: We had bought our funeral dresses. Me because of the tumor, her because of la vida. She’d chosen a white silk sheath, making up for the wedding she was already sure she’d never have. I’d chosen a scarlet party dress, to spite Julianne, who’d always told me that red lit up my birthmark.
“Hailey? Are you there?” Tess said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m here.”
“It’s inoperable, I take it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not just location, but proximity to blood vessels and other such things… I tuned out after hearing the word inoperable. I said, Doc, I’ll take your word for it.”
“What’s your prognosis?” Tess asked.
“It could be years, and I could be healthy for most of those. Tumors aren’t necessarily a day bigger with every day that passes. The tumor could stay at its size for a while, then one day it’ll get curious: ‘I wonder what it’s like in that region of the brain? I think I’ll spread on over there and find out.’”
“And it’s never occurred to you to walk into UCSF Medical Center and see what they might be able to do for you? They have an excellent neurology department.”
“So does UCLA.”
“But there might be a much higher class of work for you up here,” Tess said. “I’m leaning toward taking over my father’s businesses rather than selling. I could use a lieutenant who never knew my father and his ways of doing things, a lieutenant who I know can respect a woman, and who is, for all intents and purposes, fearless.”
