by Jon Michaud
“Please!” he said, more plaintively. “Please, Mommy.” He was about to cry.
“No, Wyatt. I'm sorry.”
“But I want to see the train tonight,” he said, his voice cracking. “I want to! The Super Chief is my best friend.”
“I thought I was your best friend.”
“You and the Super Chief are my best friend, Mommy. Please?”
“Wyatt and I should get going.” She stood and carried some of the dishes into the kitchen.
“No, Mommy, no!” said Wyatt, running into Tito's room and slamming the door.
“Why don't you stay?” said Tito. He'd followed her into the kitchen and had unintentionally trapped her against the counter. “We could watch a movie. My parents have the pay-per-view on the box.” He set down the bowl he was carrying and reached toward her, touching her bare elbow.
She flinched—no more than a spasm of the shoulders—and shook her head. “It's late,” she said. “And I should really get Wyatt to bed. Thank you for the food.”
THE NEXT MORNING, he was eating breakfast when Tamsin knocked on the door. He'd been up late watching pornos on the channel he never got to watch when his parents were around. They were like potato chips, those pornos. Brazilian Gang-bang, volume 1? Why not. Volume 2? OK. . . . Volume 3? Sure, just one more. . . . Volume 4? This is the last one. Next thing you knew it was three-thirty in the morning and you were watching volume 8.
“Hi,” said Tamsin. “Are you still OK for today? You look beat.” She was dressed like a teacher again, but this time Tito felt like her hired help.
“I'm fine,” he said.
“I better get going, then,” she said. “Here.” She set the booster seat down and handed him a knapsack.
“Right,” said Tito.
“Wyatt, you be good, do you hear me? Tito has a nice day planned for you.”
“Yes, Mommy,” said Wyatt, also looking a little sleepy. “Bye.”
She kissed her son and left.
Tito let the kid play with the Lionel while he got himself together. Then they went out to the car. An hour later, he parked at the Newark Airport rail station, and they took escalators to the upper level to wait for the monorail. A guard was waiting there, a black guy younger than Tito, wearing a uniform that was too large for him, the tips of his fingers almost lost in the cuffs. Tito sensed the guard looking at him, dwelling on the disparity between his brown skin and nappy hair and the kid's pale face and blond thatch. Wyatt could not stop jumping up and down while holding on to Tito's hand.
“Monorail! Monorail!” Wyatt chanted.
The train slid smoothly into the station as if on ice, and Wyatt stopped jumping. He rubbed his hands together and said, “Heh-heh-heh,” like a cartoon villain. It was the first time Tito had heard him do that, but not the first time the kid had surprised him with some expression or gesture. He was constantly coming up with strange turns of phrase and exclamations. One day, on the 2, Wyatt turned to Tito and said, “Are you kidding me?” Another time, Wyatt refused to get off a train. Tito picked him up and the boy said, “Oh, so that's how you're going to play it, eh?” Wyatt had his own fantasy life filled with trains, cars, and superheroes who never lost in their struggles against the bad guys.
They rode the monorail for more than an hour, gliding back and forth among the terminals and long-term parking garages in the driverless, air-conditioned glass pods. Their companions on the little train replaced themselves every two or three stops. There were the pilots, looking like viceroys in their epaulets and gilt-cuffed splendor, the flight attendants, sexy and exotic in their airline colors, talking and laughing in strange languages. There were family groups returning from vacations, people who'd come to meet their beloveds. As every group departed, Tito felt that he and Wyatt had been left behind, that when they got back to the city everyone would be gone.
Finally, Wyatt said he was hungry. They got off at terminal A, amid a dozen members of an Italian sports team, all wearing matching blue tracksuits with white stripes, carrying identical Adidas duffel bags. In that crowd, he managed to lose sight of Wyatt. The athletes piled into the cars and the doors closed and the monorail pulled out of the station.
“Wyatt?” he said, too softly to be heard by anyone but himself.
Another monorail had come in and was disgorging its passengers on the other side of the platform. He felt the tendons behind his elbows and knees twang with panic. A woodpecker was trying to hammer its way out of his throat. Could the kid really have gotten back on the train with the Italians? He remembered how Wyatt had dashed aboard the Acela that afternoon in Penn Station. The second monorail pulled out and everyone dispersed, leaving only Tito and the guard on the platform, facing each other like gunfighters. Tito started walking toward the guard, toward a miserable showdown, alibis cranking through his mind. I don't know how it happened. He was right there. He's usually a good kid—ding!
The bell for the elevator rang like an alarm. The doors slid open and Wyatt sauntered out onto the platform with a smile on his face. “Tío!” he said. “I rode the elevator by myself!”
TAMSIN WAS IN the apartment when they got back from the airport. Tito had held Wyatt's hand the rest of the time they were in the terminal and in the parking lot—held his hand, clutched his shirt, given him a piggyback ride, anything to maintain physical contact with him. Those moments of total terror on the platform completely undid him. He didn't scold the kid, didn't yell at him or give him the guilt trip. He just hugged him and took him down to the food court for some lunch, a sense of gratitude and relief welling up within him. What a cataclysm he had averted. He was still holding Wyatt's hand as they entered the apartment.
“Did you see the monorail?” said Tamsin.
“Yes!” said Wyatt. “Heh-heh-heh.”
Tamsin looked at Tito and raised her eyebrows as if to ask, Did you teach him that? Tito shook his head. “We had a great time,” he said. “We rode that thing forever. We saw a lot of airplanes, too, right Wyatt?”
“The planes were coming in for a landing!”
“That's great, you guys,” said Tamsin. “Well, guess what? I had a pretty amazing day, too. I talked to your daddy this afternoon, Wyatt.”
“Daddy?” said Wyatt.
“Yes. He says he's almost finished with his work. He should be here in two weeks!”
“Daddy's coming?” said Wyatt again.
“Yes, Daddy's coming.”
“Yay!” said Wyatt.
“I want to see Daddy!”
“Me, too!” said Tamsin.
“I want to see Daddy!”
“Me, too!”
And they both laughed.
“Wow, that's wonderful,” said Tito. “You must be really happy.”
“You have no idea,” said Tamsin. “It is such a relief. And you can have your days off again,” she said. “I can't thank you enough. You don't know how bad I've felt about imposing on you like that.”
“It was nothing,” said Tito. “He's a good kid. He really is.”
“Do you want to stay for dinner?” she asked. “I was going to order some pizza.”
“That's all right, I've still got all that food my mom left me.”
WHEN HIS PARENTS returned a few days later, Tito was able to tell his mother that he'd broken it off with the blanquita. She nodded and patted him on the shoulder, as if he had just made his bed for the first time. And then she told him that Jasmina was getting married—to a sugar heir, or something. She raised her eye-brows as if to say, See? She was ready. And you blew it. Sugar heir was probably an exaggeration, but it irked him. “She was looking for someone to spoil her,” he said.
Having had the real thing—a real child to pamper—the formerly rich fantasy life into which he had retreated after each of his breakups suddenly felt tepid. He sat at the kitchen table eating meals with his mother and father and he could not imagine that a wife was sitting in the empty chair, could not imagine promising dessert to his son if only he ate his vegetables, could not ima
gine the house in the suburbs where he lived.
Tito had come to know Tamsin's routine so well that he was able to avoid her for a while. There were no more knocks on the door, no more DHL packages to deliver. He didn't ask if she needed him to look after Wyatt the following Wednesday; he picked up an extra shift at work. Everybody thought he was crazy.
Two weeks later, the husband—Josh—showed up. Tito saw them in the playground, the husband pushing Wyatt on a swing. Tito skulked along the perimeter fence, feeling an immense sense of failure and exclusion. A few days later there was the inevitable encounter. Four's a Crowd. The reunited family unit emerged from the building's front door as he was on his way up the steps. No way to pretend he hadn't seen them, nowhere to hide.
“Tío!” cried Wyatt, who was being carried piggyback by his father.
“Hey, little man!” he called, and reached up to give Wyatt a high five, which was enthusiastically returned. At least the kid remembered him. Tamsin, looking like someone without an umbrella on a rainy day, held her husband's arm. “Hi there,” she said.
“You must be Tito,” said the husband, who was large and handsome in a shambling, unkempt way.
“Yes,” he said, and they shook hands.
“Wyatt talks about you nonstop. Sounds like he had a great time with you.”
“We just rode some trains. It was nothing.”
“Well, thanks for taking such good care of my boy—and my wife, I might add.”
“No problem,” said Tito, looking over at Tamsin, who was looking down at the sidewalk.
“So, you guys heading out?”
“We're getting dinner,” said Tamsin.
“Would you like to join us?” asked the husband, apparently sincerely.
“No,” said Tito. “No thanks. I bet my Moms has something waiting for me.”
Moms. Talking to an educated white dude—a dimeloologist—and he says Moms. He wanted to kill himself.
“See you round,” said Josh.
“Bye!” said Wyatt.
SINCE THE HUSBAND'S arrival, Tamsin had started running every evening. Tito saw her bare legs go past the basement window, a pair of skimpy shorts and a sports bra the only things covering her. He wondered now if he should have told her about the murder of the Barnard girl earlier in the year. She, too, had been a jogger, and it was on one of her runs through the most remote part of the park that she had been killed, her body mutilated and left near the Hudson Bridge toll plaza. No arrests had been made in the case, which meant that the murderer was still at large. For a month or so after the killing, there had been a significantly increased police presence in the park. A mobile command center was stationed on Seaman Avenue near the Emerson Playground. Mounted officers patrolled the trails. Female runners no longer went alone into the forested parts of the park. They went in groups during daylight hours or kept to the paths that were out in the open—in plain view of everyone. But as the months had gone by and a second murder had not occurred, the police found better things to do. The mobile command center vanished. The mounted officers returned south. The groups of runners dissipated back to their single units, running at all hours. Each day that passed without a crime emboldened them further. The fact that there had been no followup murder led Tito to believe that the Barnard girl had been killed in a crime of passion. A stalker or a spurned boyfriend had done it, he felt sure.
In the waning weeks of the summer, he, too, returned to the park, taking after-dinner walks with a bag of stale bread. Feeding the ducks by the lagoon, he saw Tamsin go by, heading into the forested part of the park to the west. Half an hour later, she returned, coming back down to the ballfields and waterside paths from the trees, running at a very fast clip, pushing herself. Tito wore sunglasses and a ball cap, kept his back to her, crouching by the ducks on the banks of the inlet.
THE NEXT DAY, he found a good spot, below the trail and screened by a fallen branch, where he would be able to see her coming without being seen himself. He sat there in the humid evening dampness, waiting for her. He had no weapon. He had no plan. He just wanted to see her, perhaps talk to her. Maybe that was all he needed—to be able to talk to her, just the two of them. In his mind's eye, he saw it all unfolding, the dream-life version: Her struggling against him as he pulled her off the path into the deep forest down by the toll plaza. Old growth they called it. He felt the slippery sweat on her neck, her muted attempts to scream through the gag.
He sat behind the fallen branch and watched her come down the trail, alone, and as she drew nearer, he began to weep. It surprised him completely and a sob escaped from his mouth.
She stopped. “Who's there?” she called.
He stifled his sobs and exhaled silently through his mouth.
“Who's there?” she called again.
He did not reply. A tear slid down his cheek.
She called out one last time in a hesitant, frightened voice: “Is anyone there?” And then she turned and ran back the way she had come.
Within a week, Tito moved out of his parents' apartment.
Clara
The day after Yunis's departure for the Dominican Republic, Clara went back to work. She was a solo librarian, which meant that she was the director, middle manager, and lackey for Singer and Watkins's little research center, a glass-walled sanctum of legal volumes, reference texts, Formica carrels, and computer terminals where lawyers occasionally holed up as much to escape their secretaries and their ringing phones as to conduct research. Mostly though, Clara passed her days there in seclusion, fielding requests by e-mail and voicemail, dispensing information through the wires, organizing her collection, as if preparing for a surprise inspection from Mrs. Molloy. Because she worked by herself, there was no one to cover for her when she took a day off and, inevitably, even in August, she returned to find her desk covered with rubber-banded bundles of envelopes, her in-box chockablock with unread e-mail, and the voicemail light pulsing on her phone. Today was no different. She gathered the heap of paper mail into a plastic postal service bin and stashed it under her desk. She would look at it after lunch. Logging in, she went through her e-mail, making notes and prioritizing the requests—partners always first unless one of the associates absolutely needed something yesterday. She also tried to weed out the no-brainers, the queries that were beneath her, where the lawyers were just being lazy. These she forwarded to the appropriate secretary to handle, sometimes with terse instructions about where to find the information. She occupied a curious place in the firm's hierarchy, below the lawyers, but above the secretaries, and off to the side of everyone else. She was simultaneously indispensable and easily forgotten: praised upon the completion of a project, but always the first to have her budget cut when there was a fiscal crunch. Lately, she'd been under pressure to lower the cost of the firm's Lexis and Westlaw bills, and she had, with the help of one of the partners, renegotiated contracts with both, saving the firm nearly fifty thousand dollars a year. Any chance she'd see some of that savings in the form of a bonus? Dream on. Teaching the lawyers how to search more efficiently on their own would have saved the firm even more than the contractual nit-picking she and the partner had engaged in, but the lawyers felt that their time was at a premium: They were too busy to take such a seminar, even if it would save them time down the road.
Before Clara had finished opening all the unread messages in her inbox, Lauren Wakefield, a fifth-year associate and one of Clara's best friends at the firm, appeared in the library. She was a petite blond fireplug who wore suits in solid colors and heels that made the muscles of her calves look as hard and defined as a Tour de France cyclist's.
“How was your day off?” she said. “How'd it go with your sister?”
Clara rolled her eyes. “Crazy,” she said. “Lots of family drama. How was it here?”
“It's always a little nuts when you're not around,” said Lauren. “Everyone acts as if they suddenly forgot how to use Martindale or Lexis.”
“I know. You should see some
of the requests I got.” Clara laughed.
“So, you want to get some lunch later?” Lauren asked.
“Sure,” said Clara. It was good to be back at work, she realized, work, where she knew how to answer the questions that came to her. That was the pleasure of librarianship—finding answers, solving problems, sending people away happy. The problems in her private life seemed harder to solve. There were no databases or reference books to help her figure those things out.
CLARA HAD BEEN born in the town of La Isabela, not far from Santo Domingo. When she was three, her parents left the Dominican Republic to seek their fortunes in New York. Clara stayed behind in the care of her abuelo and abuela. New York, for her, was a distant and mysterious place, like heaven or the moon. From New York, money sometimes made its way to La Isabela. From New York there was sometimes a letter. Now and then, a relative would visit from New York with word of her parents and, maybe, a gift.
She and her grandparents lived in a three-room wooden farm-house with a galvanized steel roof and no glass in the windows—only shutters to keep the winds out during hurricane season. This was the house where her mother had grown up; from this house her mother had gone out one night and met her father at a dance. In this house, a little more than a year later, Clara had been born. The farm grew bananas and mangos. There were a few cows and a pen of pigs down the hill behind the house. There were chickens and a manic, jealous rooster that her grandfather had named Fidel.
Her father reappeared at the farm one day when Clara was six. Her grandmother was in town at the botanica and her grandfather was in the fields working. Clara was outside the house, killing salamanders. She picked them up by the tail and whipped their heads against the wall. Whap! went their little heads. Sometimes she had to do it more than once to kill them. When the salamander was dead, she tossed it into the grass for the dogs. Years later, returning to visit the farm from New York, the sight of a salamander would make her scream.
A man came walking down from the road toward the house. He wore new clothes and shiny shoes. He was tall and thin. He seemed familiar, but she did not recognize him right away. “Clara, mi amor,” he said.
