“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
“I’m fine. Really.”
But my voice cracked and I flinched when I clutched the manuscript with my scraped hands.
“It will just take a second.”
“But—”
He cut off my protest and pulled me into the same northeast elevator I normally used. At first I assumed he was taking me to my apartment. But when the elevator opened and we found ourselves in the common area, he didn’t stop at my door.
He guided me down the hall, pulling out a key to the apartment down the hall. “After you.”
The golden retriever was sitting in the foyer, panting with excitement. “Hey, Beau,” Max said.
I had no business going inside. I hadn’t a clue who he was, had never in the years I had lived there met the neighbors, a feat only possible in a New York City apartment building that thrived on privacy. For all I knew he was a crazed murderer. Though right that second a crazed anything sounded more appealing than having to face the letter that burned a hole in my satchel.
The thought brought me up short and I closed my eyes over a sudden bout of light-headedness.
“Careful,” Max said, catching my arm. “Steady there.”
Max set my things in the foyer, then guided me down a long hallway. My head cleared enough so that I began to feel a tad nervous about where exactly he was taking me. But then we stepped into a beautiful and bright kitchen filled with light, white tiles, and stainless steel. He tugged me over to a deep chef’s sink and turned on the water.
“I shouldn’t put you out. I can clean up at my apartment.”
Not that he listened. As soon as the water hit my palms I flinched.
“Scrapes like that burn like hell,” he said, grimacing along with me.
I started to pull back. “That should be good. Clean. Fine. No imminent danger of dying.”
“Keep at it. And use soap,” he instructed with what I can only call an amused smile, before he rummaged around in the pantry.
I had just finished soaping my palms when he returned with a bottle of rubbing alcohol, told me to open my hands, then poured.
I flinched again, though thankfully I didn’t make a noise.
“So you’re tougher than you look,” he said.
“I prefer biting bullets over painkillers,” I managed.
“I’m impressed. I prefer crying.”
This made me laugh, a choked sound of more misery than amusement, since a simple look at the guy made it doubtful he had ever cried in his life.
“Liar,” I said, but all I could think was that somehow I could breathe again.
Relief rushed through me as the heavy cloud pushed back completely. When he guided me to a chair at the kitchen table I went. Facing each other, he took my right hand and turned it palm up. “You’re going to hurt like hell tomorrow when the adrenaline wears off.”
“Are you some kind of doctor?”
“No. Not a doctor. But I’ve cleaned a wound or two in my day.”
I didn’t know who he was or anything about him. But there I sat. I remembered the thought that he could be dangerous. A murderer. Then he leaned over and pulled a box of bandages from a drawer.
“We’ll put one on the worst of it,” he said, then expertly dressed the deep scrape on the heel of my palm.
I raised my head to look at him with all the confusion I felt. “Hello Kitty?”
He laughed, though he sounded sheepish. “We only have two kinds of Band-Aids around here. Hello Kitty and Power Rangers.”
“You have children?”
He looked startled for a second. “No, not me.”
I heard the front door burst open, then feet racing toward the kitchen. “Uncle Max! Uncle Max! Where are you?”
Three young children who I might have seen before in the courtyard raced into the kitchen. The kids were clearly siblings, cute, well dressed. They looked surprisingly like their uncle. At the sight of me, they hurtled to a stop.
“Hey, guys,” Max said. “We got a lady in distress here.”
Eyes went wide and they came closer. The two boys, who appeared to be twins, inspected my scraped hands while the girl looked on with more than a little malice. She reminded me of Victoria.
“You live next door,” the girl accused.
A nanny of some foreign descent came in behind them, setting backpacks and whatnot in an alcove.
“Hello, Mr. Max,” she said. “They talk all the way home about you trip to museum.”
“Yay!” they chimed.
“Museum of Natural History,” Max told me with a shrug.
“To see the dinosaurs,” one of the boys added.
The little girl glared at me. “You’re not going, are you?”
“Katie.” Max’s voice was kind but stern. “Be nice.”
Her lower lip slipped out.
“I shouldn’t be here,” I said, leaping up. “My husband—”
I cut myself off. What would I have said? My husband wouldn’t approve?
“Thanks for the help,” I managed, backing down the hallway, then turning and all but running to the foyer, where I gathered my things.
When I straightened, Max stood in the arching entrance. He didn’t smile.
“I’m sorry about your loss,” he offered. “I haven’t been here that long, but my sister told me about your husband.”
Vaguely I remembered a condolence note from a neighbor, the embarrassment over never having introduced myself when they moved in.
“I should have said something sooner,” he said.
The sincerity on his face was genuine.
“Oh, yes, thank you,” I managed.
At my door I fumbled with the lock until I crashed inside, pressing my forehead to the inset of glass. When I turned around, Einstein was there, his velvety nose twitching as he sniffed the air, before he bared his teeth.
chapter nine
“Stop looking at me like that,” I snapped.
He growled.
Ignoring Einstein, the guy next door already forgotten, I forced myself to open the letter. It didn’t take more than a glance to confirm my suspicion. The Portmans were demanding a meeting regarding the property at One West Seventy-second Street.
I bent over, my fists braced on my knees, the letter crumpled in my hand.
“Sandy promised me this apartment,” I whispered.
Einstein cocked his head.
“He did.”
The dog ruffed then walked away.
My love of the apartment and my need for a place where I belonged was easy enough to understand. The piece that I couldn’t explain to anyone was the persistent sense that I needed to be here because at any second my husband was going to burst through the door. “Honey, I’m home!” All I had to do was be here, be patient … which meant I had to find a way to prove what he promised.
“Okay,” I told myself, “you can do this.”
Earlier I had searched Sandy’s desk in the library and his bed stand in our room and had found nothing pertaining to the apartment. The only place left to look was in his suite upstairs, a place I very much wanted to avoid since being there only reminded me of the reason I was now allowed access to Sandy’s private space.
The hallways on the eighth floor were simpler than those on the lower levels since back in the day the upper reaches had been utilitarian. Sandy’s suite consisted of four small rooms tucked into the eaves, creating a cozy office, sitting room, and library along with a bath and kitchenette which hadn’t been redone in decades.
Einstein followed me up the stairs, stopping in the doorway, seeming to assess my intent. For a second I stood in the middle of the room, taking in a cashmere sweater that hung on the back of a chair, a water glass that sat on the windowsill, as if proving that Sandy had just stepped out for a second.
He’s coming back, I thought as I buried my face in the soft folds of the sweater.
My eyes burned and I nearly left, but the letter
from Sandy’s estate lawyer made that impossible.
I got to work and went through Sandy’s desk, then the nooks and crannies that had always been a mystery, looking for a new will or even scribbled notes, something, anything that proved his intent to deed me the apartment. I forgot about Einstein, forgot about order and organization and the careful sequence of measured steps that had kept me together. Something rose up in me, something dark, and I started whipping open cabinets, upending boxes. But found nothing.
“Damn it,” I gasped, making Einstein yelp and leap out of the way when I knocked over a painting that leaned against the wall.
I was unprepared when I found the journals.
I had heard my mother talk about a line in the sand that separates before from after. It always seemed to me that nothing could be that definitive. Now I wasn’t not so sure.
Einstein and I stared at the beautiful matching volumes bound in rich blue leather. They had been carefully hidden behind the painting. When I pulled out the first journal, the dog growled. When I traced the delicate gold inlays along the edges and spine, he barked. When I started to read, he snapped at me.
Moving away from him, I lowered myself to the threadbare carpet. I delved into page after page of my husband’s writings, words mixed with photos of a man I hadn’t known. He wrote about his dreams, the different things he had tried to achieve in his life, all of it coming to a head when he decided to run the New York City Marathon.
Over the years, I had learned about the skiing mishap that had shattered his leg, but I had never gotten the sense that he had lost something of himself. As I read the details of how he planned to run the marathon, the daily planner of the mileage he put in toward his goal, the weight training, the meals he ate to build strength and muscle, I started sensing just how much he had believed he lost.
It was difficult putting together the man in the journals who wrote about losing a dream with the larger-than-life one I married. Was it possible that one race could mean so much? Or had he lost more than a single dream? More than that, how hadn’t I known about it?
The unease I woke with that morning returned and grew as Einstein continued to pace. Foreboding began to tick inside me as I read, my chest tightening, pain starting behind my eyes. When I picked up the last journal Einstein leaped forward and tried to nose it out of my hands. I pushed him away and opened the cover, then felt the sharp sting of blood rushing to my face.
She was tall. Hot. The sex was amazing.
He wasn’t writing about us.
I heard the deep moan before I realized that it came from me. I told myself to stop reading, to leave. Get up. Throw the journals away. What possible good could come from reading this now?
I turned to the next page.
The women didn’t start the first year we were married, or even the next. But several months after our second anniversary everything changed.
Einstein continued his low growl. I ignored him, afraid if I moved at all I would be sick.
It wasn’t the actual women my husband wrote about that hurt the most. It was the way he wrote about them. The desire. The longing. As an editor, I recognized the moment when intensity came back into his writing. For months before the women returned to his life the entries had been lifeless, colored by frustration. The women had filled his mind, the sex spelled out in simple sentences that made heat burn across my skin. But on top of embarrassment came a wracking stab of what I realized was anger that leapfrogged over all my suppressed grief.
“Bastard,” I hissed, gasping for breath. I threw the journal, nearly hitting Einstein who scrambled out of the way.
“You lied!”
Screaming into my hands, I shook, before I grabbed up one of the journals and started ripping—pages, the spine, desecrating a book, someone’s words, the very things that had always meant the most to me. “Damn you!” I cried.
I tore and cursed, throwing the pieces into the room, the shredded pages drifting down like confetti at a ticker-tape parade in lower Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes. But Sandy wasn’t a hero, not to himself, not to me either, I realized, no matter how much he had wanted to be one. And with that thought, the anger shifted to something else.
I crumpled over onto the floor, the side of my face pressed against the worn wool rug. “I believed in you,” I whispered. “I believed in us.”
I stared without seeing, the shock and denial I had been living with since Sandy’s accident finally ripped away. Finding the journals forced me to face what I hadn’t wanted to admit. My husband was dead. He wasn’t going to burst through the front door. But the truth was, my denial had been about more than my husband’s death. The pages forced me to admit what deep down I had already known but had refused to see, what I had wanted most to deny. In the months before the accident, things between us had been falling apart.
How was it possible I hadn’t been willing to admit that fact, even to myself? How had I, Emily Barlow, refused to accept a truth that had been staring me in the face?
But right then none of that mattered. What left me weak with defeat was that if Sandy was dead, not coming back, then I would never get the chance to fix what was wrong.
Call me foolish, call me an embarrassment to everything my mother stood for, but during the months before Sandy died, I hadn’t been able to let go of the image of the man who had made love to me as if he were afraid when he opened his eyes I wouldn’t be there. It was that man I loved, that man I hadn’t wanted to accept was gone.
Even before he died.
einstein
chapter ten
Just so we’re clear, it’s not my fault that Emily Barlow, tiny warrior with a heart of gold, finally fell apart.
And even if I might possibly have played a minor role in her unfortunate communing with the Persian carpet in my private study, isn’t it shallow, not to mention uncharitable, to pass out blame like single malt scotch and Cuban cigars at a private men’s club?
Frustrated, I shook, my dog tags jangling. Not that Emily noticed. Gingerly, I stepped through the journals and shredded pages to get a better look at my wife who lay in a mess on the floor. She wasn’t dead, I determined, but I had to admit this couldn’t be good.
“Old man!”
I didn’t actually expect him to show up, so when a bolt of electricity shot through me and suddenly I wasn’t alone, I woofed in surprise.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I said, despite the fact that I wasn’t Catholic. “You scared me to death.”
The old man snorted at me. Yes, snorted.
His longish white hair was the same, but this time he wore a vest of delicately linked chain mail over a snowy white shirt with high ruffled collar and buckskin trousers. I looked him up and down then snorted right back at him. I can’t swear to it, but he might have blushed.
Grumbling something under his breath, he got down on his hands and knees in front of Emily to get a better look. She stirred, her eyes opening, but I could tell she didn’t see him.
“She’s a wreck,” he said.
“Just so we’re clear, it isn’t my fault.”
“So you’ve been telling yourself.”
My little body shuddered when I huffed, irritation racing down my wiry little back. “It’s rude to read someone else’s thoughts.”
“Consider it a downside of the job.”
Hmmm. “Speaking of which, what exactly is your job?”
“Think of me as … a triage specialist.”
“Interesting. I take it you think I’m worth saving. Though really, as a dog?”
“You were a dog of a man. I thought it might do you good to reverse the situation.”
I was indignant. And quite frankly, a little hurt. I knew plenty of people far more selfish than me. I dealt with them every day, and as far as I knew, none of them had been turned into a dog.
“Listen here, I’ve learned my lesson. Man as dog. Dog as man. Poetic justice. I get it. Now put me back in my body.”
Not that he replied.
Just like that, he was gone.
“Hey,” I called out.
A second later I heard someone in the kitchen.
I scurried down the stairs and found him whipping up dinner. “Oh, thank you. I’m starved.”
He scowled at me. “This isn’t for you. It’s for Emily. I’m worried about her.”
Had I still been a Homo sapiens with better jaw capabilities, my mouth would have fallen open. “You’re concerned about Emily when I’m the one mucking around as a canine, a half-dead one, at that? One who nearly got euthanized?”
He muttered something that sounded like a curse.
“No question about it,” he said, “I completely underestimated you. It never occurred to me that you would find a way to ruin being adopted. You could have proved you were worthy by helping that family. But no, you had to go and growl at the little girl.”
“You set that up?”
“Of course.”
My neural pathways were firing so fast I felt dizzy. “Then how did Emily end up bringing me home if you had some other plan?”
He hesitated, looked a little peckish. “I don’t really know. When things went awry, I was wracking my brain for how to get you out of that muddle. I even started to step in, but then she burst through the door. Saved your hide. Saved both our hides, truth be told.” He sighed, almost dreamily, his pale gray eyes starting to shine like glitter. “What never ceases to amaze me is how it always works out, despite what I plan. Emily’s the one who needs help. I should have realized that. And how better to prove you’re worthy than for you to help the very woman you hurt?”
Some sort of emotion of an uncomfortable nature flared inside me. Since I wasn’t one to muck about in feelings, I disregarded it. “Fine, as I said, just put me back in my body. Then I can take care of everything.”
“Alexander, this is the deal you made. Before anything else happens, you have to help Emily and prove you’re not completely selfish, not to mention, worthy. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t change that. You’ve got to see this through.”
I braced my legs against the floor, my little body shaking with anger. “And if I don’t?”
His eyes narrowed and his jaw set. He gave the bottom edge of the chain mail a sharp tug. “Then you’ll fade away. To nothing. That’s how it works.”
Emily and Einstein Page 8
