Living Proof

by Kira Peikoff

  “All of our supplies are on hand there, too,” Emily added. “Every drug and emergency tool that we need for surgery. It would be impossible to move it all.”

  “Plus we’d still have to get rid of Dopp afterwards,” Sam grumbled.

  Megan looked dejected, and Arianna shot her a resigned look; she had known from the start that there was no way to get around using the clinic.

  “First, let’s figure out where to go,” Emily said. “There has to be someplace where we can blend in, especially in a city with nine million people!”

  “You could be on to something,” Arianna mused. “The best place to hide might be in plain sight.”

  “Like a different part of the city,” Megan said. “Another borough, maybe.”

  Sam cleared his throat, and then gave a long sigh.

  “What?” Arianna prompted.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s not in another borough. But almost.”

  “What is?”

  He looked both apologetic and uncomfortable. “I never told you this, but I still own an apartment in Harlem. On 123rd and Amsterdam. It was where I lived with my wife when I was teaching at Columbia.”

  Arianna opened her mouth. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  He shrugged, reddening. “I—” He cleared his throat again. “Well, all of her things were there, and I meant to clear them out, but it was just—I just never … and then somehow I got in the habit of going up there … and it became impossible to move anything.…”

  The group looked at him with sympathy, and he scowled. “I’m fine.”

  “Have you gone recently?” Arianna asked gently.

  “Not for a few years.”

  “How big is it?” Megan asked.

  “A one bedroom. First floor in the back of a dirty old town house.”

  “I bet it’s worth a fortune now.”

  He shrugged as if the thought had never entered his mind.

  “It sounds fine for us,” Emily murmured. “If you’re okay with that.”

  He nodded listlessly. “But I don’t think it’s livable.”

  “Because her stuff’s still there?”

  “Yeah.” He looked down at his hands; ropy veins crisscrossed wrinkles like a contoured map. “Anyway, I have to stay in the lab all week.”

  “I have an idea,” Megan said. “Sam, it’s your call, but I’m used to going and inspecting old properties, and it would be a cinch for me to get the place set up, so you don’t have to deal with it. If you’ll let me?”

  He looked relieved. “Fine.”

  “But I’ll have to get rid of stuff,” she added.

  “Just do it,” he muttered. “It’s about time.”

  “Thank you so much, both of you,” Arianna said, meeting their gazes. She hoped that her expression could convey the depth of her gratitude that words could not.

  “We can’t stay there forever, though,” Emily said. “They’ll be looking for us.…”

  “It’ll be fine for a little while,” Arianna said. “We can probably hold out there until things settle down, and then we’ll have to think about—about leaving the country.”

  Megan looked as if she wanted to cry.

  “I’m all for it,” Sam said. “Let’s get the hell out of here and go somewhere where we can live in peace. Canada?”

  “It is the closest,” Emily said. “We could get fake passports and just slip over the border.…”

  Arianna felt too overwhelmed to take in the idea of being a forced fugitive, of leaving the only city she had ever called home. “Let’s go back for a second,” she said. “We still have so much to work out first.”

  Dr. Ericson cleared his throat. “Like how we’re going to get up to this apartment, and how to get Dopp off your back long enough to do everything.”

  “Too bad none of us have cars,” Emily said. “And finding a cab would be too unreliable. Plus what about GPS tracking? We have to be careful about that.”

  “I could rent a car for the night,” Megan said softly. “It’s cheap and they wouldn’t know to trace it to any of you. Then after the transfer, I could drive you there and drop you off and then return the car.”

  “Perfect!” Arianna exclaimed, and then remembered to lower her voice. “God, Meg, I should pay you for all this. What would we do without you?”

  “Don’t be crazy,” Megan responded. “I know you’d do the same for me.”

  “Okay,” Dr. Ericson said. “So what about Dopp? We’re looking at about forty-five minutes to an hour for the transfer.”

  Arianna felt her relief dissipate just as quickly as it had come. “That’s a long time.”

  “And if he sees you go into the clinic after hours,” Dr. Ericson said, “won’t he want to follow you inside?”

  “I know. But I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

  “What about Trent?” Megan asked.

  “What about him?” Arianna demanded, feeling heat in her cheeks.

  “He has access to Dopp.”

  “So?”

  “So don’t you think we could use his help?”

  “I knew it was going to come down to this,” Arianna said. “But how am I supposed to face him?”

  “He’s a traitor,” Sam spat.

  “Well, in a way he is, and in a way he isn’t,” Megan said. “If it weren’t for him warning you about the crackdown, you would not be sitting here right now.”

  “But I just don’t know how I can bring myself to talk to him. It’s worse than a breakup. It’s like I never knew him to begin with.”

  “Be practical, Arianna.” Megan shifted on the couch and gave her a severe look. “He might be the only person who can help us. And it seems as if he was only trying to protect you.”

  “Are you defending him?”

  “I’m just saying I can understand what happened. I know you, and I know that you would have cut him off long ago. And then he wouldn’t have been able to help you at all. It’s too bad, but he had to lie.”

  “No one has to lie,” Sam snapped. “It’s a choice.”

  Megan frowned at him and then looked back at Arianna. “Look, I understand why you’re mad and hurt, but would it have hurt you more if he’d told you the truth a month ago?”

  Arianna sighed, wishing she could get up and pace. Yet the lower half of her body remained as inert as her desire to face Trent. Just before the group arrived, she had ignored a text message from him. But what troubled her more—what she had not dared to announce—was that a tingling sensation, the specter of paralysis, had begun in her forearms.

  “I’m tired,” she mumbled.

  “You should take a nap,” Dr. Ericson said. “Definitely conserve your energy as much as possible before Friday.”

  “And take the day to think,” Emily added.

  “But not much longer,” Megan said.

  Arianna nodded, grimly wondering where she would be in a week: Sam’s old apartment? A prison cell?

  Her deathbed?

  TWENTY

  Dopp felt cramped. His long legs were sprawled across the empty passenger seat, with his feet pressing up against the door and his knees bent. His head rested against the tinted window and slid down the glass at intervals. In between the two front seats was a digital dashboard with the radio interceptor and speakers, and on the glove compartment lay a solar-powered laptop. Attached to his belt, in a holster, was his tougher-than-steel pistol, for when the time came to make an arrest.

  But until that moment came, Dopp dreaded his twelve-hour stretches in this vehicle, and it had been only two days. Two completely fruitless days. As much as he turned up the radio interceptor to full volume, listened and prayed, he was privy to nothing but blaring television programs, routine calls for food delivery, and updates on Arianna’s health, as friends called to ask how she was feeling.

  Last night, Sunday, she had spoken to Trent for the first time all weekend. Their brief exchange came through the car’s speakers:

  “Hi,” she had sa
id.

  “Hey!” came Trent’s eager voice. “I miss you. How are you feeling?”

  “Not well. I’ve been sleeping for days. I don’t think I can see you tonight.”

  “Oh.” Pause. “Okay. Well, I hope you feel better. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Okay. Thanks. Bye.”

  That was all. So much for her “sister’s baby,” Dopp thought. If anything was true, it was that this woman’s existence was pathetic; she had hardly any visitors, unless the Chinese deliveryman counted. Neither Jed nor Banks had reported a single phone call during their overnight shifts. Arianna had slept or watched television the whole weekend, never once leaving her apartment—never going to church, despite the fervency she had once asserted to Trent. Simply another lie confirmed, Dopp thought. Not that he expected her to be religious, but he found it stunning that she would use something so sacrosanct as a pretext for her own misdeeds.

  Nights he was spending at the Washington Square Hotel, a third-rate place that was desirable only because of its proximity to Arianna’s building. It was strange to have his own bed, especially one with uneven springs and a synthetic comforter that felt inadequate, like a one-armed hug. The sheets resembled wax paper, and as he tossed over them, he thought of Abby, Ethan, and Joanie, and of the child to come. What he was doing here was for them, he thought; everything always was, even if they hated him for it. And above all, it was for God. To rectify the damage he had done all those years ago, in whatever way possible. It seemed he could always be doing more, trying harder, praying longer. As Dopp drifted to sleep, he thought that if only he could see this mission through to the end, it might somehow, at last, be enough.…

  Now, Monday morning, he was back on duty, putting in a third shift at the familiar curb; the car was parked along the last straight section before the sidewalk curved in and wound along the circular driveway to Arianna’s building. A hedge of thorny-looking bushes lined the curved sidewalks on either side of the building, forming a half circle of shrubbery. Dopp pulled the car forward just enough to peer around the bushes and keep his eye on the front door, about thirty feet away. At any moment, he knew she would be leaving for the clinic.

  Dopp concentrated on the glass lobby door to distract himself from guilt over the severance notices he had sent out that morning. Of the three least important employees he let go, only one really hurt him, and that was Mark—his good old loyal driver. But how could Dopp justify keeping him on the payroll now?

  The glass door opened and closed with frustrating regularity as residents left for work, briefcases in hand, overcoats buttoned to their chins. And then one man held the door open for several seconds, and a woman in a wheelchair passed through. Dopp recognized her mane of black hair, but her face had changed since that Christmas dinner. Protruding from a sallow sheath of skin were two eye sockets, cheekbones, a nose. It was the cast of her familiar bone structure, lacking tissue and color and warmth.

  Dopp bolted upright, swinging his feet to the floor, his right foot hovering over the gas pedal. Arianna moved swiftly, hunched forward, with her chin tucked into a navy blue shawl, and her gaze fixed on the sidewalk. She wound along the sidewalk’s curve until she reached the street and made a right, turning her back to Dopp. He watched her chair pass under the Washington Square Arch and recede into the park, toward her clinic at the opposite end.

  Once she was fully across and out of sight, Dopp drove around the perimeter of the park and stopped on a side street a block away from the clinic, knowing that the radio interceptor would cover a range of up to two hundred feet. Soon Arianna’s voice came crisply through the car’s speakers as she greeted patients in the waiting room, and then introduced herself to the new inspector that Dopp had assigned to take Banks’s position. Dopp reclined, pushing down the lever on the chair’s left side, trying to find a comfortable position for the next eight hours. The chair hummed just as he heard another vibration coming from the glove compartment.

  It was his cell phone. His heart kicked.

  No, he thought. Please, God, not now. Recently, Joanie had been complaining of cramps in her lower abdomen, but the doctor assured her it was only a false alarm. Dopp yanked open the glove compartment and seized his phone. But instead of his wife’s name, he saw a strange number blinking on the display, one with a 518 area code—Albany.

  “Hello?”

  “Dopp, it’s Windra.”

  “Oh, hi,” he drawled with relief. “How are you?”

  “Listen, I can’t talk long, but I wanted to tell you the news before it gets out. First, though, you got the warrant?”

  “Yes, thanks to you. We’re on her 24/7. Shouldn’t take long now.”

  “Good, because the lieutenant governor is going to be sworn in tomorrow morning, and then we’re getting right to the budget.”

  “What? Already? What about Vance and the investigation?”

  “That’s why I called. The results just came in. He’ll be resigning in a press conference later today.”

  * * *

  Trent rose from the chair in his office and closed the door. The only good thing about being confined to this place was the fact that Dopp wasn’t here anymore. No chance of him bursting in now. Trent looked at his watch: it was just after 9 A.M., so he knew Arianna must have already arrived at the clinic. Their short, awkward conversation on the phone had only increased his desire to talk to her, to really talk to her—and to discover where their relationship stood after two days of distance. Whether it was on a bridge or a precipice or free-falling, he did not know, but he was desperate to find out.

  He called her office phone, knowing that at least his side of the conversation would be private, since an inspector would surely be sitting with her.

  “Arianna Drake,” she droned.

  “It’s me. Don’t hang up,” he said, and held his breath. “You there?”

  “How can I help you?” she asked stiffly.

  “I just want to know how you’re doing,” he said. “And how you’re feeling about everything. I know you can’t talk, but just tell me in a word.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what? Talk? Or talk to me?”

  “Both.”

  “I’m sorry. But I can’t stand this! I miss you like crazy.”

  She coughed. “Well, sir, if there’s nothing else I can do for you—”

  “Let me see you tonight.”

  “No.”

  Trent paused; her tone was inarguable.

  “Fine,” he said. “But I still have to call you later on your cell. He needs to hear us talking normally. Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he replied, but the line was already dead.

  * * *

  By Wednesday morning, Arianna was more exhausted—both emotionally and physically—than she had ever been in her life. She was sleeping thirteen hours a night, and still struggled to consciousness when her alarm clock beeped. Always, in her dreams, she could walk, and always, in the morning, she woke to a half-lifeless body. It was enough to make her want to pound sensation into her legs—even pain would be a victory. Someday I will feel it, she told herself during random moments: brushing her teeth or dragging herself into her wheelchair or sitting at her desk in front of the new, equally hostile inspector.

  She felt mechanical most of the time, as she played it cool in front of him, and on the phone to Trent, and as she passed Dopp’s shark-gray car, pretending not to notice it. During these minutes, her mind was nothing but a receptacle that held a single number—how many days until the transfer. This awareness had become as innate as her body’s need for water; she never had to stop and think to know if she was thirsty, or to know how much time was left until Friday night. It stood now at two and a half days.

  Even spurts of nostalgia had been coming on less and less. She hardly recognized the clinic anymore as her own, and her apartment was just a familiar space. It was privacy and peace she craved, and each day her eagerness to flee grew. Especially now th
at she was sitting at her desk across from the new inspector, a skinny, fifty-something man whose mouth appeared to permanently taste sourness. He wore the requisite gold cross pin, at least two inches long lest it go unnoticed on his lapel. In its sheen, Arianna could see the reflection of her own pupil. Her lid hung tiredly over her eye, whose usual bright blue seemed gray.

  The inspector reached up to stroke the pin. On his face was the hint of a smirk. “You like it?” he asked.

  She looked away, at her computer. Fuck you, she thought. If she ever decided to make small talk with him, that would be the gist of it.

  Her office phone rang sharply and jolted her.

  “Arianna Drake,” she answered, hoping it was not a professional call. Everyone in the group knew that her office line was not bugged, and called it to speak privately to her.

  “Hey,” came Megan’s quiet voice.

  Arianna tried not to display any relief. “Hi, how can I help you?”

  “So Sam’s old apartment is cool now,” Megan said. “I cleared out a bunch of junk. His wife’s entire wardrobe was still in the closet, filled with mothballs. But I threw everything out. It’s still pretty dusty but livable enough. A bit small for four people, but the two rooms are decently sized. I’ll put in a few air mattresses and a bunch of dry food. And I just got off the phone with the electric and cable companies, so that should be up and running on Friday.”

  “So nice to hear from you,” Arianna remarked. “I just love to hear from former patients. And how is little James?”

  Megan continued softly, her tone unchanged. “What I need now are everyone’s suitcases, because I doubt there’ll be enough room when we’re all in the car. So I’m going to call Sam and tell him to drop his off at your apartment later today after you get off work. First I’ll make a stop at the Ericsons’ place down in TriBeCa tonight to get their stuff, then I’ll stop at your place and get yours and Sam’s, and then I’ll schlep everything uptown so it will be ready and waiting in the apartment. Okay?”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “And please, please, tell me you’ve made progress with Trent.”

  Arianna cleared her throat.