“What, you waiting for a maître d’ to seat you?”
Miguel frowned. “What’s a maiter dee?”
“Guy in a restaurant. Wears a tuxedo and takes you to your table.”
Miguel thought about the fast-food restaurants he used to eat in, some diners he’d been to. “Why can’t you find your own table?”
“Beats me. Rich folk like to have people do things for them, like show them to their table. Anyway, you gonna sit? ’Cause I’m happy to eat this by myself.”
Miguel walked slowly to the doorway, his eyes on the shadows behind the boy. He shot a quick glance behind him. They were only a few feet from the mouth of the alley, spitting distance to Fifth Street. If he had to run he figured he’d make it. He stepped closer to the doorway. When he was close enough to see no one lurking in the shadows, he shrugged his backpack off his shoulders, dropped it at his feet, and sat beside the boy.
“Got a name?” the kid asked.
“Sí, Miguel Ortiz.”
“Miguel would have been enough. I don’t need to know Ortiz. What, you want me to call you Mr. Ortiz?”
“Miguel’s fine.”
“That’s what I was saying. I’m Dario. Now let’s eat.”
Miguel had pegged it—half a cheeseburger and half a large fry. A good score. They tore the half cheeseburger in half again—Dario tearing and Miguel choosing his portion. Then they lined up the fries by length and each boy took every other one, starting with the longest and working toward the broken ones. They had seven apiece. Miguel tore the remaining odd fry in two and Dario eyed each half carefully before choosing his piece. Then they ate in relative silence—if you could call two undernourished kids eating their first meal in far too many hours, chomping away with their mouths open, silence.
When they were finished, Dario belched. “That felt good.”
“The burp or the food?” Miguel asked.
Dario looked at him like he was an idiot, then laughed. “Both. So, how long you been on the outside?”
“The outside? You mean on the streets?”
“Yeah.”
“You call it ‘the outside’ like convicts talk about life outside jail. Like life before the streets was prison.”
“It wasn’t for you?” Dario picked something from between two of his teeth and looked at it briefly before sucking it off the end of his finger. “I been on my own for a year.” He said it proudly.
“Almost two for me,” Miguel said.
Dario glanced sideways at Miguel.
“Yeah? What are you? Eleven?” the kid asked.
“Twelve.”
Dario nodded. “Two years on your own on the Philadelphia streets. Not bad. So what’s your story, Miguel? Why’d you bust out?”
Miguel turned away. He didn’t share this part of him with anyone. Then again, no one had ever asked before.
“Come on,” Dario said. “You think it’s something I never heard before?”
Miguel shrugged.
The other boy shook his head. “Whatever. I gotta get going. Nice dining with you.”
He stood. Miguel had spent nearly every night for the past two years alone. He was used to it. But maybe he didn’t have to. Maybe he’d found someone he could talk to, at least for one night. “Wait.”
Dario looked down at him, then sat again. Miguel looked away, down the dirty, litter-strewn alley, and, without looking back at Dario, he started talking. He talked about the night three years ago, the first night he woke to find his father kneeling beside his bed in the middle of the night, his face sad in the glow of the night-light beside Miguel’s bed. His father reached under the blanket and softly rubbed Miguel’s back. After a few minutes, he left. A few nights later, he was back. He came every few nights and he stroked Miguel’s back for longer each time. Sometimes his hand would brush against other places on Miguel’s body. His father called the visits “their little secret.” But Miguel wasn’t stupid. He’d heard whispered stories at school, stories that kids were too scared or ashamed to tell anyone but their best friends. But even best friends have trouble keeping secrets if they’re big enough, so Miguel knew things. And he knew where his father’s “little secret” would lead. So Miguel took precautions. After a few months, his father’s hands grew bolder and Miguel closed his eyes and wished things could go back to the way they’d been before. His life hadn’t exactly been happy, but at least there wasn’t this. One night, his father took Miguel’s hand and guided it. Afterward, when his father had gone back to his bedroom, Miguel ran to the bathroom and threw up. In the morning, his mother found him curled up on the floor in front of the toilet. She offered to let him stay home from school that day but when his father offered to take the day off work and stay with him, Miguel said he felt fine.
Dario listened in silence. Miguel thought the story might have been familiar to him.
“A few days later, he came to my room again and locked the door behind him. He never did that before. When I saw his face, it was different. He looked mad. At me. Like I’d done something wrong. And I knew that would be the night. I just knew it. So when he came over to the bed, I said, ‘I think I know what you want tonight. It’s okay, Papa, just let me get out of bed. You sit down.’ So I got out of bed and he sat.”
Miguel fell silent for a moment. Dario waited.
“I knelt on the floor in front of him, reached under the bed, and grabbed the baseball bat I put there a few weeks earlier. And I hit him. Three, maybe four times.”
Dario’s eyes widened. “No shit?”
“No shit.”
“You kill him?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. But I really don’t think so. Anyway, I threw on some clothes, tossed some stuff in my backpack, and I got out of there.”
They sat quietly for a moment, each with his own thoughts.
“You ever go back?”
“Hell, no,” Miguel said. “Shit, I’m probably wanted by the cops, right? Beat my pops with a baseball bat? They’d send me to jail. At least juvie. Screw that.”
Dario obviously believed him, but Miguel was lying. He’d gone back. Two months on the streets had been hard, much harder than he had imagined. You couldn’t find food. No one let you use their bathrooms and you couldn’t find anywhere to go without worrying about someone seeing you. If you had to take a crap, you crouched behind a Dumpster and wiped your ass with newspaper. That got old really fast. And it seemed like people either ignored you entirely or chased you away from their doorways. Whatever stuff you had, no matter how little or broken or useless it was, there was somebody who wanted to take it from you. You slept with one eye open when you could sleep at all. And you always, always had to look over your shoulder. It was far worse than Miguel believed it would be. So two months after he’d dented his father’s head and bolted, he went back. He’d planned to beg for forgiveness. He knew he’d get a hell of a beating. Worse, he knew the nighttime visits would start again, and they would also be worse than he could imagine. But he went back anyway.
When he knocked on his apartment door, no one answered. He knocked on the door of the next apartment. A little old lady with a face like a raisin told him that the family next door moved out the month before. Miguel pounded on the landlord’s door and learned that they left no forwarding address.
And that was that. But Miguel left out the part about going back home.
“Shit,” Dario said.
Miguel shrugged.
“But you got balls, bro, popping your old man like that. Wish I had balls like that.”
Miguel shrugged again. “I can take care of myself.”
“Guess so.”
They sat quietly for a few minutes. Miguel was so used to being alone, being virtually invisible to the people around him, that he didn’t feel the need to fill the silence with talk. Dario seemed to share that trait. But then Dario said, “Not sure this is a good thing.”
Miguel followed his gaze to a man standing just inside the mouth of the alley. Beyond h
im, on the street, a black car with dark windows idled. The man was a bit taller than Miguel’s father, and a lot thicker, a lot stronger. He wore dark pants and a short-sleeved shirt. Despite the chilly fall evening, he wasn’t wearing a jacket. He had big arms.
“Come on,” Dario said quietly. “Let’s go back down the alley. It comes out behind a liquor store.”
Miguel thought about it. The man was getting closer. Miguel looked for a weapon in the guy’s hands, didn’t see one, then looked for the glint of a badge on his belt and didn’t see that either. Miguel could get to the length of pipe he kept in his backpack pretty quickly if he needed to. He practiced sometimes, like a gunslinger testing his draw. He was fast.
“What’s he gonna do?” Miguel said. “There’s two of us.”
“You bring your baseball bat? ’Cause he’s bigger than both of us put together.”
“We’re not doing anything wrong here. To hell with him.”
Miguel thought Dario might run, but the boy waited beside Miguel as the man stopped in front of them. He looked at them both, almost studying them.
“Either of you boys want a job?”
“Looks like you’re the one looking for a job, mister,” Dario said with more bravado than Miguel would have expected. “But you’re looking in the wrong place.”
The man nodded and slid his eyes over to Miguel.
“What about you? Wanna earn some money?”
“How much?”
Dario elbowed him in the ribs.
“More than you’ve ever seen.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Not ask questions. Do what you’re told.”
“How much money?”
“A lot, like I told you. Now, you interested or do I go find someone else, someone who wants to get a little bit rich tonight?”
Miguel hesitated. Dario nudged him again. “Come on, Miguel.”
The man waited. Miguel looked at the car, then back at the man.
“Suppose I go with you but change my mind?”
“Miguel, is it?” the man asked. “It’s a free country, Miguel.”
“You’re too smart for this,” Dario said.
“Tick tock, Miguel,” the man said. “What’s it gonna be?”
Miguel picked up his backpack, stood, and looked down at Dario. “I can take care of myself.”
He turned and followed the man out of the alley toward the waiting black car.
CHAPTER FIVE
ALICE HAD THE phone cradled between her shoulder and her ear. She was holding a sketchpad in place with her left hand and doodling absentmindedly with a pencil with her right. “He said no, Daniel. He wasn’t interested.”
“But I don’t get it. You’re so good, babe. Did he tell you why?”
She hesitated. How much should she say? “He liked my earlier stuff but said my later work lacked the same spark.”
There was silence on the line for a moment, then a muffled voice, like her husband had said something to someone with his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone.
“Daniel?” Alice said.
“I’m here,” he said quickly. “So, did he tell you why he said no?”
“I just told you —” She sighed. She shouldn’t have been surprised. “No, he didn’t. I assume I’m just not good enough.”
“Well maybe not, but keep working at it, honey. You’ll get there.”
Really, Daniel? That’s your response? Maybe I’m not good enough?
“I’m sorry,” he added. “I know it was important to you.”
She flipped the page on the pad and started doodling on the next one. He sounded sympathetic, he really did. But he also sounded distracted. She considered letting herself get annoyed but decided against it. He was working now. Well, he wasn’t exactly working. The trade show was over for the day, but Daniel was entertaining prospective clients at the hotel bar at the moment, before he treated them to an expensed dinner, followed by expensed drinks, followed by Daniel stumbling upstairs and sliding between hotel sheets to watch the ceiling spin until he dropped off to sleep. Daniel was one of the top pharmaceutical salesmen in the Northeast and, according to him, these kinds of evenings were vital to his business. So Alice probably should have waited until later to call him, or maybe even tomorrow, but Rappaport had called a little while ago with the bad news. He said that although Alice possessed talent, he had decided to give the final spot in his studio to another artist. Alice had sat down to cry but ultimately chose not to, opting instead for a brisk jog through the park in the crisp autumn air to allow her mind time to process the rejection. After a quick shower, she picked up the phone, wishing there were someone other than her husband she could call for a sympathetic ear. Her parents had been gone a while, she had no sisters or brothers, and her list of friends from college had thinned dramatically over the past few years. If only she’d made more friends here in the city. Or even one.
So she’d called Daniel. And she had to give him credit for answering his cell despite being in full schmooze mode.
“Alice?” he said. “I really should go back to the bar. You going to be okay?”
She sighed, doodled, nodded to herself, and said, “Yeah, of course. I’ll just work a bit harder on my painting. Really dig down and —”
She stopped talking when she heard the hand-on-the-phone-muffled-voice thing again. A moment later Daniel said, “Good, hon. Glad to hear you’re okay about it. I really need to get back in there, all right?”
“Okay. Any chance you’ll be home tomorrow?”
“Nah, I have to be here through tomorrow, then I think I should actually stay through the weekend too, try to steal a few clients on the back nine, then fly back on Monday morning.” She heard a burst of laughter over the line. “Listen, if I don’t get back in there, that asshole Tom’s going to poach my clients. I gotta run.”
“Bye, hon,” she said, though it was possible she said it into a broken connection.
She finished off her doodle and crossed to the fridge for a caffeine-free Diet Coke. She looked out her fifth-floor window—which came with the rest of the Central Park East apartment Daniel had inherited from his parents—down at the park. So green down there, still green, though many of the leaves on the trees were on their way to turning scarlet and goldenrod.
She hadn’t told Daniel even close to everything. He’d been too busy. But would she have told him everything even if she’d had the time? No, she realized, she wouldn’t have. She certainly wouldn’t have mentioned the mysterious boy who seemed to be stalking her creative landscape. It was just too strange. She hadn’t begun to understand that, wasn’t sure if she ever would, but she knew for a fact that Daniel wouldn’t. Not left-brained Daniel. He’d think she was crazy, even if she had her artwork to support her claims. Hell, he might have been right, who knows? But she wasn’t ready to talk about this. Not yet, anyway.
She also didn’t tell Daniel—would almost certainly never tell him—that the moment they’d moved from Vermont to New York City was the moment Alice had lost her artistic spark. That wasn’t his fault. To many artists coming from a rural background like hers, moving to the big city would be like being born again. She could imagine those artists who had known nothing but life in the slow lane, in small towns, painting simple, bucolic scenes, sketching trees and birdhouses and old couples holding hands and sun-dappled meadows and lonely rowboats bobbing on lonely lakes and kids swinging crazily from tire swings in the woods…she could imagine their creativity exploding at the dizzying, dazzling sights the city offered. She simply wasn’t one of those artists. She hadn’t known until she’d moved to New York that she just wasn’t a city person. She didn’t hate it. It simply wasn’t her.
But it was Daniel. She’d known that when they started dating at the University of Vermont. She’d known that when she looked down at him, kneeling in front of her in the school library, diamond ring in hand, waiting for her to say yes, which she did without hesitation. She’d known he planned to move back t
o New York and that she’d go with him.
What Alice hadn’t known was how the distance would affect her friendships. Most of the women and men she’d become close to at school stayed in Vermont or New Hampshire or maybe Massachusetts. They lived close enough to each other to get together on weekends, flip burgers on backyard grills, gather around someone’s big-screen TV for the latest big game. While her friends had each other to talk to, and to see, and to talk to about seeing each other, they just seemed to lose time for Alice. She tried to stay in touch, but it grew harder each year. She didn’t blame them, but it saddened her.
What also saddened Alice was how little she cared for city life. She’d thought she might find it exciting. She was wrong. The hard angles of the buildings, the chaos of sounds, the pace of life, the vaguely unpleasant taste of the air. The people were okay, most of the ones she interacted with, anyway—the stay-at-home mothers in the park, the people she met at the gym, those she ran into in art galleries and museums and various stores. But she never really connected with any of them. She wasn’t sure she knew how. To some people, that kind of thing was easy. It never had been for Alice. At school, thrown into the same classes, struggling to survive side by side in the foxholes of college life, clinging to each other for support in study groups, it wasn’t hard to develop bonds. It was more difficult for Alice out in the real world, in the big city.
She didn’t blame Daniel for any of this. He’d asked and she’d said yes, and that was that. Besides, she’d never told him how…unhappy wasn’t the right word…how uncontent she was. For all he knew, she enjoyed their life. He sure did. He was successful, had a pretty and attentive wife, plenty of friends to play squash and go to Yankees games with. He never complained about their sex life, though he also never asked if she enjoyed it. If he did, she’d have lied and said it was wonderful. And she used to feel that way, but not for a few years now. A bigger question was whether she still loved him. If he asked that, again, she would have said yes. She wasn’t sure if that would have been a lie or not. She certainly didn’t feel for him what she used to. She thought that it was possible, just possible, that she only liked him these days. She didn’t think there was necessarily anything wrong with that. But it certainly added to her uncontentedness.
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