The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  When Rufus hears Peter’s voice on the other side of the metal gate to the house, his heart fills, almost cracks under the pressure. He rushes to the gate and opens it, expecting that it won’t be his boy, because he can’t get his hopes up too much. But it’s him, it’s his son. He’s covered in a thin layer of light dust, on his skin, in his hair, and he’s been wearing the same clothes for two days. He looks so good. The father can still see the kid he knew in him, and he’s so proud of the parts of him that he doesn’t recognize at first, the man that Peter’s becoming. Rufus can’t even speak; he just opens his arms.

  “I’ve been here for hours, looking for you,” Peter says.

  “Come in, come in,” Rufus says. He wants to hug his son so much, but doesn’t know how. “Are you hungry?” he says.

  “No, I just ate.”

  “Why did you do that? You know I always have food.”

  That’s not true, Peter wants to say, but decides it’s a little hurtful, and keeps it to himself.

  “Bad timing, I guess,” Peter says.

  They come into the house. Peter throws his backpack down.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Rufus says. “It’s so good to see you. Tell me how you are. How long are you staying for?”

  “Dad, we need to talk.”

  “Do you need work? It’s fine if you do, I know a reporter in town if you still want to do that. Maybe he can throw some work your way. If not, I also know—”

  “Dad. Dad. We need to talk about your family.”

  Now it’s Rufus who sits down.

  “Oh,” he says. He runs his fingers through his hair and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, his face looks like he hasn’t slept for a week. Then, in a tone of voice Peter’s never heard in him: “What’s happened now?”

  And Peter begins to talk, telling his own story. For the first time in his life.

  Chapter 18

  Sylvie’s on the steps of the house, looking into the garden. Two suitcases are next to her, a floral pattern on them that went out of style decades ago; they belonged to her mother. Behind her, in the threshold to the house, there’s a man on his knees, attaching wires to the lock.

  “Almost done here,” he says. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” she says. She doesn’t bother turning around to say it.

  “What if your sister comes by?”

  “She doesn’t have a key,” Sylvie says, “and besides, that door hasn’t been locked in thirty years.”

  “What if someone else comes by?”

  “Nobody comes by,” she says.

  The man looks at her and shakes his head. “All right,” he says, “all right. This is the last one.” There are wires all over the first floor of the house now. “I’m going to close this up. You have everything you need?”

  Mmm hmm, he thinks he hears her say. She’s just looking into the garden, going back through the years. There’s the memory of Joe Rizzi standing there with his hand on Muriel’s throat. But so many more better memories. Her wedding on the back lawn, the lights down to the water. Her whole family together, all of them who were alive. It was the last time that happened, though none of them knew it then. Her years of marriage, quiet, peaceful, to a good man. Then years of her own quiet contentment, pushing her fingers into the soil, planting flowers. And further back into her childhood, of she and Rufus, far enough away from the house that they thought no one could see them, telling each other secrets. She understands why Rufus took off, understands even more why he never came back. There’s never been anything for him here, nothing he wants. But she’s missed him every day since he left. It still surprises her that the feeling is so strong, after all that she’s become since they saw each other.

  The man finishes his work, puts his tools away. Gets up. Checks three times that he has everything he came with, his tools, his wallet, his car keys.

  “You sure you have everything?” he says.

  “Yes,” Sylvie says.

  “Want to take a look around?”

  “I already did.”

  Amazing, he thinks. “All right,” he says, though he doesn’t sound convinced. He’s careful closing the door, gives the lock time to settle into position.

  “Ready?” he says.

  Sylvie turns her head to look at him. Picks up a suitcase in each hand.

  “Let’s go,” she says.

  New Canaan, Connecticut. Henry’s phone rings at two-thirty in the morning. The phone’s on his nightstand, and he picks it up halfway through the first ring. He turns to look at Holly, again, to make sure she’s still asleep. Then cups his hand over the receiver and whispers into it.

  “Hello?”

  “Henry, it’s Muriel.”

  “Just a minute, okay?”

  He gets out of bed, goes to his office, picks up the phone, and leaves it on his desk. Goes back to his bedroom and hangs up the phone in there. Walks back to his office. His phones are old, even for 1995; they still have cords on them, and he’s willing to fight about it with anyone who decides to bring it up. Aren’t you tired of just standing in the kitchen to talk on the phone? an acquaintance in New Canaan says. On a cordless phone, you can talk anywhere in the house. No you can’t, Henry says. The unpredictable static on cordless phones irritates him, even as the businessman in him admires the cordless phone companies for convincing people to pay more for technology that doesn’t work as well as what they already had. He’s heard that cell phones are even worse—you can’t hear on the phones very well, the person you’re calling can’t hear you very well either, and the phones drop calls without warning—but he knows they’ll take off in just a couple years, whether they iron out the kinks or not.

  “Muriel, it’s late,” Henry says. It’s awkward. He hasn’t known how to talk to her for years, and he wishes he did.

  She does too. “I’m sorry to be calling you. I’m so sorry. But I can’t sleep, Henry. I can’t get Sylvie on the phone. It’s been a couple days. First Petey and now Sylvie. Henry, what’s going on?”

  Henry forces himself to wake up, because he needs to make sure he doesn’t misstep. “I don’t know,” he says. “But I’m sure they’ll both turn up somewhere.”

  There’s a long pause on the other end of the line. He can hear how his sister’s breathing; she’s nervous, excited, angry. Something. I wasn’t convincing enough, he thinks.

  “Is that all you have to say?” she says.

  “What else can I say? I don’t know any more than you do.”

  “Is that true, Henry? Is that really true?”

  See, he and Sylvie have been lying to Muriel for years. She doesn’t know that Sylvie’s still involved, the way their father was involved; in 1985, when Muriel asks Henry how it is that Sylvie can still maintain the house, and Henry can’t dodge the question anymore, he gives Muriel the answer he and Sylvie cooked up years before: Sylvie gave Henry the money left over from Rufus’s share—after the house was covered—and asked him to be very aggressive in investing it, to try to make some big money. So I did, Henry tells Sylvie then, and we had some excellent years. Sure, the late seventies were a little touch and go. But the past few years have been exceptional, very good years for Sylvie. Then Henry says what he’s almost sure will end the conversation. You know, you could get in on it, too, if you wanted. It appeals to the hippie left over in Muriel, the one who gave birth to Petey on the bus outside of the hospital, who still holds a profitable activity at arm’s length like it’s a piece of rotten chicken, because she can’t get her mind off wondering who’s getting exploited to give her what she has. And it works. Oh, no, Muriel says. You know I’m not interested in that kind of thing. She never asks again, and Sylvie and Henry never tell her anything. Every couple years they’ve talked about it, and while they can’t deny that they enjoy keeping a secret from their sister a little bit, they’ve als
o agreed that it’s for her protection. Muriel’s got too big a mouth to know what’s going on, they say. Like mother, like son.

  But now, maybe because they’re nearing the end, the end of the game, it looks to Henry like the whole thing’s been flipped on its head. That the longer Muriel’s in the dark, the more in danger she is, because the fire that Sylvie’s starting is going to spread everywhere, and Muriel needs to know it’s coming. If he keeps the lies going, he’ll read about Muriel next in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, an awful, inexplicable murder. Maybe of the rest of her family, too, and whoever else happens to be around. He wishes he could talk to Sylvie right now, to get her agreement on what he’s about to do, but he knows she’s made herself unreachable. Here’s hoping I don’t fuck up everything, Sylvie, he thinks.

  “Is it really true?” Muriel says again. He hasn’t answered her yet.

  “All right, Muriel,” Henry says. “No. No, it’s not true.”

  He can tell she’s surprised before she starts talking.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” Henry says; and then he tells her everything, pretty much from the beginning. It takes about an hour and a half. Muriel says oh my God a lot, and I don’t believe you, and how could you have kept all this from me, and, at first, wait until I tell my husband, until Henry says he’ll stop talking right now if she breathes a word of it to anyone. There’s some crying. But by the end she knows just what kind of trouble her son is in, what kind of person Henry and Rufus and Sylvie have always been. How much she and her family are in danger.

  “What do you expect me to do with all this?” she says. She sounds almost like a teenager again, Henry thinks. Just before the boyfriend and the bus.

  “I don’t know, Muriel,” Henry says. “Just be careful.”

  “How do I know when I’m safe?”

  Her voice is so small that Henry spares her his real answer: The truth is that you’ve never been safe. He thinks about it a second longer.

  “I’ll call you when everything’s okay. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. And Muriel? I’m sorry we kept all this from you.”

  “I know you are,” she says.

  “Look, don’t act hurt. We’ve always just been trying to protect you.”

  “I know you have.”

  She’s too angry for Henry to get anywhere right now, and he knows that what he’s saying sounds too much like self-justification to work anyway.

  “All right,” Henry says. “Take care of yourself, all right?”

  “All right.”

  “And I really will call you, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  He sleeps for another two hours. Holly gets up and can tell it’s been a rough night for him. Makes him a cup of coffee. He sits for a while at the window in his kitchen, scanning the woods, the driveway, the road. The cars passing by. He’s waiting for one of them to stop, and for three men to get out who aren’t going to be scared off by anything. Who aren’t going to leave until what they’ve been paid to do is done.

  “Holly?” he says. “How do you feel about going into the city for a little bit? Like five nights or so?”

  “That’s a great idea,” Holly says. “We haven’t done that in so long. When should we do it?”

  “Today,” Henry says.

  “What?”

  “Why not?” he says. “Who’s going to stop us?”

  She smiles, walks over behind him, and puts her arms around him. Kisses the top of his head. Sounds like fun, she says. A lot of fun. He smiles back. Wonders when he’ll have to tell her everything, too, and whether she’ll still be around when he’s done.

  Chapter 19

  Sylvie’s fire starts—at last, at last—in three different places. The tinder’s driest in the parts of the Wolf’s organization where the money’s the biggest and the regard for life the least. The organ harvesters, the ones who do the cutting, are a crew of borderline psychopaths; if they didn’t start out that way, the job has done it to them. It’s a hell of a thing, that the work is so brutal, so inhuman, and the pay is so high. When some of them walk around Chisinau now, they find out that they can’t turn it off. The woman in the green dress standing on the corner, her arm in the air, waving at a friend across the street. The man smiling behind the counter at the pharmacy. The children balancing on the edges of the steps in the central park. For the organ harvesters that the work has changed forever, all those people have prices floating over their heads, dotted lines drawn on their bodies where the incisions would be. Some of them then play the entire scenario in their heads. The screaming, the hasty operation. The disposal of the body. They wonder how big that kid’s heart is, how much it would weigh in their hands. The ones who enjoy the work wonder how the rape before the operation would be. They’re told not to do it—don’t damage the merchandise, their commander tells them—but some of them can’t seem to resist. I don’t damage the parts they want, they think to themselves. It’s maybe their final, hideous self-justification, the last one put on a pile of flawed rationales and moral dodges that led them deeper and deeper into the work. My family needs the money. There’s no hope for these people anyway. Someone else might do the same to me. It’s a rough world. If any of them had the chance to survive it, to get out of the trade, some of them would end up in mental institutions. Some of them would commit suicide. Most of them would just drift away, become feral people. Then they’d get what’s coming to them. They’d starve to death, or be hit by a car, or get shot trying to do something they shouldn’t be doing. How could they ever return to society after breaking every trust, almost every taboo? Why would anyone want them?

  So when Sylvie’s message trickles through the Wolf’s organization, the organ harvesters don’t need to see the police. The suspicion—some of it kindled by corrupt policemen who get the message through official channels and tip off the criminals, just like Sylvie hoped—is enough. It spreads from the bottom up. On one branch of the organization, there are two kidnappers. One of them gets Sylvie’s note about his colleague and contacts his boss, a doctor who can harvest organs, offering him a quarter of the ransom money, though he tells the doctor it’s half. He then suggests that he and the doctor split the proceeds from the partner’s parts. The doctor agrees and tells him where he and the other kidnapper should meet him. They cook up an excuse about needing to meet to work out some financial details, and the kidnapper’s satisfied, goes and picks up his partner. But the doctor, having also gotten one of Sylvie’s messages, has already ratted on the kidnapper and tells his boss to meet in the same place so they can harvest both the kidnappers’ organs and sell them. I don’t like to do the actual killing, the doctor says. I’m not very good at it. The doctor can almost hear his boss shrug over the phone. Leave that to me. So the kidnappers, the doctor, and the doctor’s boss all meet in a cinderblock building that used to be an auto garage at the edge of a tiny town near Orhei. Everyone’s smiling. They all think they’re going to make some easy money.

  It happens fast. The first kidnapper strangles the second one as soon as they walk in the door and the doctor gives the nod. The doctor and the kidnapper put the corpse on the table while the boss gets a set of coolers from the back of his car. The doctor’s a quick worker; the organs are on ice fast. Then the boss walks over to the kidnapper who’s still alive and, without any warning at all, shoots him in the side of the head. The boss is a real professional: The bullet goes in one ear and out the other, without touching those valuable eyes. Then the boss helps the doctor get the second body onto the table and goes to get another set of coolers from his car. The doctor’s about halfway done when he gets back. The boss stands behind him, looks him up and down. It’s too bad I don’t know how to do the operations, the boss thinks. Then I could mak
e some real money off this whole thing. As soon as the doctor has all the organs in the second cooler, the boss shoots him twice, before the doctor has time to turn around. Now the boss has a situation he knows what to do with. He hacks the bodies into small pieces so he can put them in garbage bags he can carry himself. It ends up being a lot of garbage bags and it takes the boss all night to get rid of them. But he does it. By then it’s almost dawn and he doesn’t smell very good. He goes home and changes his clothes. Calls his superior to tell him what happened. His superior congratulates him and says they should get together to celebrate. Of course, the superior then kills the boss. For the next two and a half days, this keeps going right up to the guy below Mercedes, who by then knows what’s going on inside the organization and kills the man below him just because he doesn’t need the aggravation. Then off he goes with a big wad of cash, to Vladivostok, he thinks, where the money can last a long time and no one will know who he is. But he won’t be there for more than a month before someone else kills him, not for who he is—the killer has no idea who he is—but for the money he’s got. On this branch of the Wolf’s organization, the destruction is so complete that you might call Sylvie the right hand of God, even though Sylvie’s no angel, at all, and she’s doing what she’s doing just to save her family. Maybe this is what they mean by mysterious ways.