by Lisa Tucker
“You never actually told this scientist you had a girlfriend,” Cassie pointed out. “You said you were starting a family. Perhaps there’s a way to tease out that distinction to maintain credibility?”
Ah, Cassie. Why hadn’t he married her? True, she was already married when she came to AD, and true, they didn’t love each other, but those were minor matters compared to their complete compatibility when trying to solve a messy problem. They were the real soul mates, not Ben and Bitchface. They’d certainly been together a hell of a lot longer.
He praised Cassie for her creative approach before admitting he doubted it would work. “I’ll have to keep thinking about it.” The cab had just pulled off on South Street. Almost home, but no chance of jumping into his own bed and falling asleep to CNBC’s comforting market talk and the pleasing green arrows for Astor-Denning on the simulated ticker tape.
Cassie said she’d keep thinking about it, too, even though she had to leave the office early because her kids were home. He thanked her again for handling Paris while he was in Japan and Jakarta and for dealing with the homeless-people robbery mess in the middle of everything.
“All I did was call the guard at your building. He assured me that everything was secured. Nothing to do.”
As Matthew flashed his security card and the lobby door opened, he gave thanks that he still had his apartment. At least he could take a nice long shit, which he’d needed to do since he’d arrived at Charles de Gaulle.
He was in the elevator when it occurred to him that asking an employee if she was pregnant, even in jest, might be considered a sexual harassment violation by the gestapo in HR. It made him nervous; not that Cassie would tell on him, of course, but that he was just realizing this. He prided himself on being aware of any rules he was about to break before he broke them. Which left only one conclusion: this sleep deprivation had turned him into a blithering idiot.
He opened the door to his apartment and came face-to-face with another problem. There they were (still!), the homeless kid and his sister, sitting at his dining room table, eating what looked to be his pasta puttanesca—the boy—and his Peking duck with dumplings—the little girl. He dropped his briefcase on the floor next to his suitcase, walked over, crossed his arms, and stared at them.
“Having a late lunch?” he said, and laughed because it struck him as just hilarious that all those tips to the security guard hadn’t done one bit of good.
The boy was tripping over himself to get up, but Matthew told him to sit still, and when he didn’t listen, Matthew put his hand on his shoulder and said, “Stay.” He wasn’t about to let them leave until he’d done a thorough search of his apartment.
“What are you going to do to us?”
“I don’t know.” Matthew’s legs were shaky; he had to sit down. He took the seat farthest away from the boy.
“Throw us out?” the kid said hopefully.
“That’s one idea. My other thought was to wring your lying little neck.”
“Ring,” the little girl said.
Matthew looked at her. “So she can talk.”
“She learned from your computer.”
“If you tell me you touched any of the data in my computer, I will kill you. I won’t go to jail, either. You see, I haven’t slept for seventy-two hours and I’ll just have my lawyers say I had a psychotic break.” He paused and gave the boy a mean smile. “I have very good lawyers.”
“I didn’t touch the computer,” the kid said, though he didn’t seem afraid. Why wasn’t he? Had Matthew’s ability to intimidate gone the way of his ability to think? The boy glanced at the computer. “It just started talking when I touched the desk.”
“That’s a language program. I planned to listen to it on my iPod, but then I forgot my iPod because your mother had stolen my wallet and—But of course you know all this. You were here eight days ago when I left.”
“I was going to leave, really, but then the computer was teaching Isabelle all these words and she even learned to walk by herself using your furniture. I’m sorry, Doctor Connelly.”
Matthew wondered how the kid knew his name, but he didn’t care enough to ask. He felt sleepy just watching them eat. Something about them looked different from last week, and then he realized what it was. The dirty boy wasn’t dirty anymore. The little girl looked even more beautiful now that she’d lost her chapped hands and cheeks. Even their clothes looked brighter, although in the boy’s case, this was yet another reason to be annoyed. The kid was wearing one of the Hopkins sweatshirts that Matthew wore when he went running. The sleeves were rolled up, and it hung down past his knees. There was also a red stain on the elbow, probably from the pasta he was eating.
“Made yourself quite at home, did you? Found my sweatshirt? Found the washer and dryer, too?”
The kid nodded.
“Treated my apartment exactly like you lived here?”
The boy nodded again, but he looked almost comically miserable.
“Live here,” Isabelle said, but her mouth was full of half-chewed dumplings and Matthew quickly turned away before he retched.
Live here, he thought. As if. But then he heard Cassie’s voice cutting through his angry fog: “You never actually told this scientist you had a girlfriend. You said you were starting a family.”
“No way,” he said aloud. “I’d rather throw myself in front of a bus.”
The boy said, “What?”
“Please,” Matthew said, “I’m having a private conversation with my assistant.”
The kid finally looked scared then, but Matthew ignored him.
“But,” Cassie reminded him, “we haven’t come up with any other options, and Thanksgiving is tomorrow.”
True, he thought, or said—he wasn’t sure. He stared at the wall for a minute, then he sighed and told Cassie, “Well, Amelia has always had this thing about orphans.”
“Me-la,” the little girl said.
“Cute,” Matthew said. He wasn’t being sarcastic; he was assessing the situation. They were cute as far as kids go, even the boy. Certainly a thousand times cuter than he’d been on the bridge.
His eyes were so heavy that he kept seeing double—four kids, which would suck a lot more than these two. Danny, the boy, had even managed to keep the place relatively clean. The girl dropped half the food before it reached her mouth, but the drops hit a carefully placed garbage bag on the floor. Which struck Matthew as a rather ingenious solution, but maybe it only seemed ingenious in his current state.
He heard himself talking. “What if I told you that you could stay here tonight and tomorrow? I assume you’d agree to that.”
“Why would you let us stay?” the kid said, narrowing his eyes.
“Because I’m having people over tomorrow and I’m in the absurd position of needing to convince them I’m starting a family. You two could play the role of my about-to-be adopted children.”
“So you need us to lie for you,” the kid said. “What would we get out of the deal?”
“Other than avoiding being arrested? Other than not being thrown on the street?”
“Yeah,” the kid said. “What else?”
The boy had nerve. Matthew enjoyed negotiations, but this seemed ridiculous. “What do you want? Some toy? Money?”
“I want to have one of the Astor-Denning cures. You know, from the commercial.”
“The one that ends with ‘Expect your next miracle from Astor-Denning’?”
“Yeah.”
Matthew smiled. “I was on the approval committee for that. In fact, I had to fight for it inside my company even though the ad agency clearly believed it was the best candidate. But why listen to the ad people? We only pay them millions for their expertise.” Most of the other people on the committee had been nervous old-school types who worried obsessively about liability. They’d spent an infuriating hour just discussing the word expect.
“Okay.” The boy coughed. “So, can my mom have the next miracle?”
His
exhaustion must have drastically lowered his serotonin level. How else to explain that the kid’s request made him drop his head on the table in despair?
Finally, and with difficulty, he lifted his throbbing head and looked at the boy. “The only thing you want—the only thing in the world—is help for your mom?”
He nodded.
“Aren’t you forgetting that she left you and your sister here and never came back? What if I’d really been a pervert or a serial killer? What if I was about to get out the knives and torture you both right now?”
Still no fear from the kid, and then it hit Matthew why. Dr. Connelly. Everyone trusts a doctor. He’d used this fact a thousand times, but it never stopped surprising him. Even a street kid would think he was perfectly safe in a doctor’s house.
“I want my mom to have a cure.”
“We don’t have a cure for addiction. Sorry.”
The boy thought for a minute. “You can send her to Changes, then.”
“How the hell do you know about Changes?” It was an upscale rehab in Florida; Matthew knew the director very well. In the last year alone, Changes had received more than a million dollars from AD’s community outreach program. The place had an excellent reputation; Matthew had sent one of the Galvenar investigators there after the guy was caught stealing morphine. That guy was a disaster at running a clinical trial, but a very well-known neurologist, and very cooperative. He’d signed on to the results paper sight unseen, and the weight of his name got the paper accepted by one of the most prestigious medical journals in the country.
“My mom and her friends always talk about it. I wasn’t sure if it was real, but it is, right? And they keep you for thirty days? It really works?”
“It can. If you have forty thousand dollars.” Matthew wasn’t sure how much it cost, but this sounded about right. Jerome Drossman, the director, had handled the Galvenar investigator off the books, as a personal favor.
“Oh.” The kid fell silent and Matthew fell into a stupor. What seemed like a year later, the boy said, “Isabelle has to go to the bathroom.”
“That’s why she’s kicking my table leg? Fine, go before she has an accident.”
The kid lifted her off the phone books and started to carry her off, but the little girl went nuts. “Down, Danny. Down!” He put her down and she toddled in the direction of the guest room, but she didn’t pee on the floor and she didn’t touch any furniture, thank god. Her hands were covered in duck sauce.
While they were in the bathroom, Cassie, the real Cassie, called to say she had an idea. “I’ve just been googling international adoption. I think we could put together convincing-looking documents to show that you’re in the process of getting approved for one or more children from Africa. It’s a very hot thing to do right now, despite the Madonna situation.”
“Very good thinking,” he said, “but unfortunately the meddling girlfriend in this case has some big moral objection to removing children from their native environment.”
No doubt if Amelia didn’t have this attitude, she would have already adopted a pack of third-world kids for herself. She’d wanted to be a mother for a very long time. Back when they’d lived together, she couldn’t take the Pill and her period was so erratic that they’d had to worry every few months about pregnancy; or, to be precise, he’d worried, while she’d positively glowed at the thought. Of course he’d told her that he was ready and even happy about it, but when her period started and she got over the tears, he convinced her that they should keep using the diaphragm and wait a little longer. At least get married first, so their baby would have all the benefits of having a dad with a good job and insurance.
It struck him that Ben hadn’t said a word about marrying Amelia, but it had to have been an oversight. True, Ben had refused to marry Karen or any of the others—even when they dumped him over the issue—but this was different. Amelia was having his kid.
“I think I’m getting a migraine,” he said to Cassie, and then described the hideous pain on the left side of his face that hadn’t been touched by any of the over-the-counter meds he’d tried. The kids were out of the bathroom. Isabelle was stumbling around like a tiny astronaut; Danny was just standing near the wall, clearly depressed.
“Is it possible when I’ve never had one before?”
Cassie had migraines. She said it was possible; she also didn’t say a word about him being the one who went to medical school. “Do you want me to bring over some Imitrex? If it’s a migraine, that’s probably the only thing that will work.”
“What about your kids?”
“Gerald is home now, too. I don’t mind. We could brainstorm about the problem.”
Gerald? Oh, right, her husband. Normally, Matthew would have said thanks, but no. He was always careful not to take advantage of Cassie’s unwavering loyalty. But in this case, he saw a distinct benefit to getting a second opinion before he proceeded. It was such a crazy scheme—and so entirely unlike him—that he had to make sure his stupidity wasn’t leading him to do something that was, well, stupid.
When he hung up, he decided to go to the bathroom (finally!) and then lie down for a while. Cassie lived way out in the suburbs near AD; it would be at least an hour before she arrived.
He was looking around his desk for something to read when he noticed that the boy was packing up his garbage bag. And he’d replaced Matthew’s sweatshirt with one of his own raggedy shirts.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Home.”
“You don’t have a home.” Matthew paused. “Do you?”
“Not like this, but yeah.”
“Not like this meaning what? No heat, no water, no lights? A crack house?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Why would you want to go to a place like that when I just told you I’m thinking of letting you stay here?”
“But you won’t help my mom.”
“Fuck your mom, what about her?” He pointed at the little girl, who was grinning at something invisible on the floor. A speck of dust? “She’s happy here.”
Danny didn’t answer, but Matthew suspected that the kid was afraid his mom was shooting up all the money she’d stolen and that somehow if he was there, he could stop her, or at least slow her down. It was stupid, but not surprising. He’d thought the same thing about his dad’s drinking.
“Look, what if I say I’ll consider sending your mom to Changes?”
“For real?” the kid said.
“Yes,” Matthew said. He didn’t mean it, but he really needed to get to the bathroom. He grabbed the first journal on the stack, Current Enzyme Inhibition , which was so reliably dull he just might fall asleep on the toilet. “Stay put until Cassie gets here. It shouldn’t be more than an hour or so. Let me do a few things.”
“Sure,” the boy said happily. “We can wait that long, I guess.”
“How nice,” Matthew muttered, but he kept himself from cursing about the unfairness of it all, that they’d lived in his house for eight days and now he had to negotiate with this kid for an additional hour.
The bathroom was fairly clean, with the notable exception of his soap. At least twenty bars were unwrapped and strewn around the room. Just being kids, he thought, like he actually knew why kids would do something so pointless. He’d have to ask Cassie about that, too.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lucky Trash
When the woman knocked on the door, Dr. Connelly had been shut up in his bedroom for a long time, more than an hour. Danny figured he’d fallen asleep, since he’d kept saying how tired he was—and he looked it, too, like his trip had turned him into a zombie. The knock was soft, but the man heard it somehow because he was out of the bedroom and moving to the door so quickly that Isabelle fell over. She wasn’t hurt; she clapped her hands like something exciting was about to happen. Danny felt sorry for her when the woman, Cassie, walked in without even noticing Isabelle’s enormous welcome grin. Cassie didn’t say hello to Danny, either, but h
e didn’t care. He just wanted to listen and find out if they were going to help his mom.
He’d threatened to leave so the guy would take him seriously, but while Dr. Connelly was in the bedroom, he’d realized that he was ready to go home. He was worried about his mom; he had to be sure she was all right. It would be hard to take Isabelle away from here, but it was going to happen in a few days either way.
For several minutes Dr. Connelly and Cassie talked about the failure of the security guard to throw them out last week. Cassie blamed herself, but Dr. Connelly said it wasn’t her fault; she couldn’t have known the guard was a slacker. “But I should have followed up,” Cassie said. “I feel terrible that you came home to this.”
Danny couldn’t tell how old Cassie was. She looked a lot older than Dr. Connelly, but maybe it was because she was sitting up so straight and her face didn’t give away any emotion. Dr. Connelly, on the other hand, looked freaked-out. He’d taken off his tie and untucked his shirt in the bedroom and now he was pacing around the apartment in his socks. Isabelle was hugging her elephant, watching him. Danny was standing near the window, a few feet down from the table where Cassie was sitting. She’d just opened her purse and taken out a pill bottle.
“Thanks.” Dr. Connelly took the pill she handed him and swallowed it without water. “The pain is hideous. The worst headache I’ve ever had.”
“Isn’t that something you should have checked out?”
He shrugged. “It’s an early symptom of a brain aneurysm, but in my case, I think it’s from insomnia. I haven’t slept since Jakarta.”
“At all?”
“I ran out of Ativan, thanks to their thieving mother. At this point, I think I’ve gone over some kind of threshold. I couldn’t even sleep on the plane or while I was waiting for you.”
