“Crap. Caroline, can you grab my phone? See who it is?”
They were halfway down the awful hallway, and Caroline was carrying only a giant package of toilet paper. She dropped it in front of apartment 3 and made a face as she pulled out his phone.
“Weird, going into your big brother’s back pocket. Okay, the name on the screen says . . . who’s Shea Montgomery?”
If Byrne’s heart wasn’t already pounding from the hike up the stairs, carrying his weight in food and sundries, it pretty much jumped out of his chest at the sound of his sister saying Shea’s name. Of course a plastic bag strap chose that moment to break, and cans of green beans and soup rolled down the sloping hall.
“Oooo, she’s pretty,” Caroline crooned, dangling the phone in front of her face. It was the old Caroline, the happy one he remembered from their nights lying awake in the train car, making each other laugh away the teasing they’d both gotten at school that day. “You take photos of all your clients looking all come-hither?”
“Caroline!” He couldn’t drop the rest of the bags. Had to stumble, drunk-like, the rest of the way. He tapped the door with the toe of his shoe.
As he strained, his biceps muscles two seconds away from popping off his bones, Caroline peered harder at the phone. “Not just pretty. Gorgeous. This the woman Erik was talking about? Is she your girlfriend now?”
He’d taken that photo of Shea the morning after the first time she’d come to his place. From the neck up, you couldn’t tell that she only wore a bedsheet. Her pale hair was messy and wild and all around her face, down in the way he loved it. Her mouth was lipstick-free and her eyes these deep pools of blue. The morning sun was coming through his bedroom windows, and he’d wanted to capture the moment.
She didn’t look come-hither, just . . . stunning.
The phone stopped ringing.
Mom finally opened up the door and he waddled in, dropping the bags onto the linoleum, hoping he hadn’t cracked the eggs.
He whipped around to Caroline, holding out his hand for the phone. Of course she held it hostage.
His sister arched an eyebrow. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
In the ensuing pause, the chime went off to indicate Shea had left a message.
“Do you not know or something?” Caroline teased.
Byrne had to laugh. “Actually I don’t. We’ve never talked about it. But I guess she is. I like to think she is.”
“Well, that’s good news, J.P.,” Mom said from the floor, where she was picking through all her new food.
“Mom.” He cringed. “I’m thirty-five. I’m not talking about this in my parents’ kitchen.” He grabbed a giggling Caroline around the waist and snatched the phone from her hand. “I’ll put this stuff away in a minute. Just give me a sec.”
As he ducked out of the apartment, he even saw his dad grinning at him from where he sat in the armchair. So glad the slightly awkward moment could bring a bit of happiness to this sad, sad room.
Back out on the sidewalk, next to the pizza place window with the flickering neon sign, he looked at Shea’s photo for a long second before tapping the Call button. She picked up quickly, and he sank against the brick wall.
“How’s it going down there?” Her voice was soft and sympathetic, and he was really grateful she didn’t ask how he was.
“Better, now that I can talk to you. I feel very far away. From everything.”
She sighed. “Any news?”
“They’re letting me pay their bills for a couple of months. I just bought out Walmart and need to find a way to store it all in their place. I never want to see my brother again. My sister’s kid is cute as hell. I miss you.”
She gasped. And then he could tell she was smiling. He couldn’t really explain how he knew; he just did.
“It’s been less than twenty-four hours,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter. A lot can happen in that time.”
“True. Very true.”
He came away from the wall. “You say that like it means something.”
“Welllll. I did a lot of pondering today, and I—”
“Pondering, you say?”
“Yes, pondering. And I think that I’m going to take that thing with Whitten and Right Hemisphere. I mean, I’m at least going to sit down to a meeting with him, hear his ideas in detail. Throw out some of my own. We’ve got a meeting set for a few weeks from now.”
That made him incredibly happy for her. “You feel good about it?”
“Yeah, I do. It could extricate me from the Amber. It could give me money to put away for the distillery. There are possibilities.”
“And you’d have more time for kilts and those hideous bagpipes.”
She laughed. “Exactly.”
The following pause was filled with things he sensed she wanted to say. “What is it?” he asked.
“I just realized I feel awful for telling you this good stuff when you’re, well, you’re down there, feeling not so good.”
“Oh, believe me, when I’m down there I feel very good.”
“Byrne!”
He laughed, and it felt like it had been days and weeks since he’d done that. How did she always do that to him? This woman who he’d once sworn was made of ice?
“Tell me more,” he prompted. “About Whitten, what you’re thinking.”
“I think I’m excited. I’m a little scared, which tells me I’m probably headed down the right track.”
He took a deep, deep breath, nodding to no one. “That’s what I’ve always thought. I wouldn’t have gotten where I am without that kind of thinking. I wouldn’t have been able to help my family in this moment if I hadn’t thought that exact same thing so long ago, and if I hadn’t lived it every day since.”
“Really?”
“Leaving them, leaving South Carolina, scared the hell out of me. But I knew it was right. Just had to take that first step.”
He loved the silence that followed, because it was filled with her breathing.
“Any word on that land?” she asked.
He gazed down the totally deserted main avenue, where a lone streetlight directed no traffic whatsoever. “Not since that odd email. I’m going to go do the pushy, obnoxious thing and stop by their offices on Monday.”
“But you said there might be movement on it, right?”
“Yeah, that’s what they said. Or hinted at. I’m taking that as license to do a drop-in, wave my checkbook around if I have to.”
“You have a checkbook?”
“A virtual one. Can I wave my phone? Does that have the same effect?” She laughed, and so he felt compelled to say, “I love your laugh.” And then, before she could reply, “I should go. My parents and sister were way too interested in the fact that your picture popped up when you called. I’m afraid I had to tell them about you.”
“And what did you say?”
“That I hoped you were my girlfriend.”
“Well, I am, if you’re my boyfriend. My older boyfriend by two years.”
“I knew there was a reason I was feeling guilty and awkward at your parents’ house.”
Another sigh. “Call me when you get back, okay?”
He turned and slowly lifted his eyes to his parents’ window, desperately wanting to get them out of that apartment. Out of this town, this state. “I may call you before that. I can’t promise anything, though.”
“Whenever you want. I’m here. Or at the Amber. But I run the place so it’s not like I can’t pick up the phone or anything.”
“Okay. Bye.”
I think I love you.
“Bye,” she said, breathy and lovely, and in his imagination she said those three words back.
* * *
But six days later, Byrne returned to New York without the land.
His decade-lo
ng dream lay dead and buried in a South Carolina tobacco field, there was still no sign of the brother who’d ruined everything, and he had no fucking land.
Because the land, it turned out, wasn’t actually for sale, and there were no plans for it to enter the public market.
He’d gone into the company office, as promised, only to find out that there had never truly been movement. The threat to sell had been some sort of internal politics bullshit. Byrne tried to make a counteroffer, but it was useless.
Byrne got it. The situation was business. But this time it was business to them and personal to him, and it hurt in a way he’d never experienced before. He thought of Shea, how she liked to keep those clear lines between the two worlds, and how she hated when they got smudged.
He settled deep into the airplane seat and sipped vodka the whole flight back from Atlanta. Didn’t matter that it was midmorning. Two of those little bottles, splashed with soda. The buzz stuck with him as he deplaned and retrieved his bag. It followed him to the taxi stand and rode along with him in the whining, rattling cab as it crawled from LaGuardia into the Upper East Side. It made the city a little blurry, a little bit easier to take.
He’d called New York home for almost a decade now, but was it?
At least his parents and Caroline were situated for a while. At least they’d allowed him to help temporarily, even though they’d refused—again—to let him move them somewhere else. To let him take care of them.
At least he was coming back to Shea.
It had been days since they’d spoken. After the disappointment about the land, he couldn’t bring himself to call her. Couldn’t force himself to do anything but be with his family, playing cards or shopping or taking Baby K to the park or helping Caroline organize her shithole of a house while Paul sprawled on the couch doing nothing.
They’d never known about his dream to get back that land—and now they never would—but Shea did. Byrne had no idea what he was going to tell her. His heartbreak was almost too great to voice. But she would ask and he would have to open up to her. Before, there had been such great hope, a reason to keep putting on those clothes every day. Now? Now what?
For the first time since leaving for Boston, he felt hopeless. Dreamless.
His body ached all over like he’d just finished the hardest rugby match of his life, one in which he’d played the entire time at a hundred percent and they still lost by fifty. He could actually sense gray hairs poking their way to the surface.
He entered the lobby of his building in a daze. It took two tries to press the button up to his floor because he was just so drained. As he exited the elevator, the hallway with the plush carpeting seemed as ugly and long as the one leading to his parents’ place.
Byrne inserted the key into the lock of his front door, thinking dismissively that it felt a little odd, a little loose. In the foyer, he unceremoniously dropped his suitcase and tossed his keys onto the little table underneath the wall mirror. He must’ve been really out of it, because the keys completely missed the table and clattered to the tile. Odd, considering he’d been doing the same thing every day for years. Whatever.
He wandered half-blind down the hall and into the main room. Frances must have pulled the drapes to keep out the sun, and the place was remarkably dark for morning. With him gone, there’d been nothing for her to do, so he’d given her the week off with pay. She’d probably been grateful to not have to lug his suits to and from the cleaners, to not have to grocery shop. What a dumb thing for him to think about now, but it was literally all the space he had left in his brain.
He flicked on a couple of light switches. The cans in the kitchen came on, as well as the lamp that sat on the long table just behind the couch. Only the lamp wasn’t on the table anymore. It was lying in pieces on the floor, the shade askew, the circuitry keeping the bulb alive.
It threw a sickly, dying light on the war zone that was his living room. His heart punched out of his chest.
His entire apartment was destroyed.
Chapter
18
The cops had been over and through his place for the past few hours. The doorman had been questioned and questioned, but he’d seen nothing, had nearly cried with disappointment over this happening to Byrne. The security footage showed no one suspicious or out of place coming in the front doors.
Which meant it had been some kind of inside job, with the perpetrator coming in through the service entrance or the garbage chute. Something like that.
Byrne stood near the kitchen island, gazing with detached numbness at the slashed couch, the shattered coffee table glass, the shredded books. The kitchen floor was a pile of broken dishes and glasses.
Every article of clothing in his closet had some kind of jagged hole or rip. Byrne’s own serrated bread knife lay in one of his torn shoes.
The only shirt that hadn’t been touched was the purple Italian one. It was still rolled into a tight ball under a pillow near the headboard, where it had been left after he’d peeled it away from Shea’s body in what now felt like an eternity ago. He pulled it out and brought it with him back to the kitchen.
A female cop, the one in charge, came into the apartment, her short legs stepping over the suitcase where he’d left it in the foyer. She approached him with a grim face, and though she addressed him, she scanned the disaster.
“A recently hired maintenance guy with a criminal background that he hid from the building owners took a pretty huge bribe from a stranger who said he wanted to surprise his girlfriend who lived here. Maintenance guy said the man was charming and young, late twenties maybe, dark hair. Gave him close to a thousand dollars for access. Fingerprints are all over this place and we’ve sent them off to the lab. We should have a name shortly.”
Byrne’s stare traveled to the shattered coffee table. Then his eyes gravitated to the bookshelves where the books he and Caroline had loved were now in shreds. Then to the framed Boston College and Wharton diplomas that had been ripped from his office wall and smashed to bits.
“Pretty sure I already know the name,” he told the cop, the words hurting his throat.
She turned to him, removing her hat and managing to look both frustrated, pissed off, and impressed all at the same time. “How come you didn’t say anything to me before?”
“Because I didn’t see it. I mean, I saw it, but I think I was just in shock over the whole thing. I just now pieced it all together.”
“See what?”
He pointed to the coffee table. Once a large square of mahogany wood covered by a thick slab of frosted glass, it was now in tiny pieces, the rug underneath peppered with shards. The green toy train engine sat right in the middle, as though someone had lifted it up high and slammed the metal thing down into the glass . . . and then had gone through the apartment taking every other piece of the train—the coal car, the cow car, the caboose—and tossed them together in the mess.
Everything else in the apartment had been destroyed where it stood. But the train had been gathered and pulverized all in one place. To make sure they were seen together.
“That,” Byrne told the cop. “When those prints come back, I can already tell you they’ll belong to Alex Byrne. My brother.”
* * *
Much later in the day, Byrne wheeled the same suitcase he’d brought to South Carolina back out of his apartment. The only difference was that he’d added a couple of things: the crumpled purple shirt and the green engine.
The toy was unrecognizable now. The whole side had been bashed in, the wheels unturnable, like Alex had held it in his hand and smashed the thing down repeatedly on the edge of a table. Or stamped on it with big, thick boots.
Byrne would’ve given just about anything to be out on a rugby field just then. Not in practice, not going nowhere on a treadmill, not lifting weights, but powering across the grass with another guy’s mug in his face and all Byrn
e’s muscles focusing on the attack.
Instead he pulled the suitcase to the curb, stuck his hand out, and waited for a cab to swerve over.
The other hand pulled his phone out of his pocket and pushed the button to call Shea.
“Long time, no talk,” she said, chuckling upon answering. The sound of a cash register chimed in the background. “Are you home?”
Home. That concept seemed even more foggy now that everything he owned was in tatters.
“I’m in New York, yeah.”
“I’ve been thinking about you, wondering how you’ve been.”
The way those words made him shiver confused him even more.
“What’re you doing now?” she asked.
“I’m, ah, heading to a hotel.”
“Why?”
His heart jackhammered and his breath came up short. “Because while I was gone my brother broke into my apartment and destroyed it. It’s crawling with cops.”
She gasped. “Oh my God. Byrne, I . . . holy shit. You’re not going to a hotel. Come stay with me. Please.”
A cab finally swung next to the curb and Byrne opened the door. “I don’t know—”
“I insist. Don’t be alone right now. The thought of you staying in a hotel when I’m right here . . .”
He was torn. He desperately wanted to see her, to hold her, to just sink into her—and he didn’t even mean sexually—but he was balancing on a very fine edge, and he had no idea which way his mood was going to go.
“You can stay as long as you like,” she said. “I’m at the corner bodega right now, but I’ll be home in a few minutes.”
“Yo!” shouted the cabbie as he rotated in his seat to glare at Byrne. “You gettin’ in or not?”
Byrne couldn’t guarantee that the fury he was feeling wouldn’t be taken out on an innocent hotel room à la a nineteen-seventies rock star, so he said to Shea, “Is this what it takes to finally get an invitation to your place?”
The Good Chase Page 25
