Because It Is My Blood

by Gabrielle Zevin

  I looked out the window. There was a park but no one was in it. I didn’t even know what part of town I was in. (Brooklyn, yes, but, readers, there are many parts of Brooklyn.) Where did Simon Green live? I’d been staying there almost a week and I hadn’t bothered to ask.

  I needed to go out. I borrowed a puffy coat from my host’s closet, making sure to pull the hood up. Since I didn’t have a key, I couldn’t lock the door, but what difference did it make? No one was going to rob a sixth-floor apartment. And even if they did, there was nothing worth taking. Simon Green’s apartment was notable if only for its curious lack of personal effects.

  I made my way down the flights of stairs.

  Outside it was even colder than when I had landed. The sky was gray and it looked like it might snow.

  I walked for maybe a half mile, up a hill and past bodegas and schoolchildren and vintage clothing stores and churches. No one noticed me. Finally, I arrived at the gates of a cemetery. Walk long enough in any direction and you’ll usually find one.

  The name on the gates was Green-Wood Cemetery, and though I hadn’t been there since Daddy’s funeral, I remembered that this was where the family plot was. My mother was buried here, too, and Nana, whose grave I still hadn’t visited. (Aside: This also solved the mystery of what part of Brooklyn Simon Green lived in—he lived in Sunset Park, where many of the Balanchines had lived before moving to the Upper East Side.)

  I made my way through the cemetery. I thought I remembered the general direction of the family plot, but I still had to backtrack a couple of times. Eventually, I realized I had no idea where I was going so I went to the information center. I typed Balanchine into the ancient computer and out popped a location on a map. I set out again. It was getting colder and grayer by the minute, and I didn’t have gloves and I wondered why I had even come.

  The plot was on the outer edge of the cemetery: five headstones and room for several more. Soon, my brother would join them here.

  Nana’s grave was the freshest. The stone was small and simple, and the inscription read BELOVED MOTHER, WIFE, AND GRANDMOTHER. I wondered who had written that. I kneeled, crossed myself, and then kissed the stone. Though the custom of leaving flowers at gravesides had fallen out of fashion, I’d seen pictures of it and I wished I’d brought some. Even a couple of Nana’s loathsome carnations. How else to say I was here? How else to say I am still thinking of you?

  My mother’s grave was next to Nana’s. Her stone was heart-shaped and read I AM MY BELOVED, AND MY BELOVED IS MINE. No mention of the children she had left behind. How little I had known her, and how little she had known me. Some weeds were growing around the edges of her grave. I took my machete out of its sheath and sliced them away.

  Daddy was behind my mother: ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE. Atop his headstone, someone had set three green sprigs of what looked like an herb. The sprigs, weighted by a small rock, were fresh and had obviously been placed there recently. I bent down to smell them. It was mint. I wondered what the mint meant and who had placed it there. Probably one of the men who had worked for Daddy.

  You might think me heartless, but I didn’t feel all that much at the sight of these graves. Tears were not forthcoming. Leo’s death, Imogen’s death, Theo’s shooting—I was wrung dry. The dead were the dead, and you could cry as much as you wanted, but they weren’t coming back. I closed my eyes and mumbled the halfhearted prayer of a fledgling cynic.

  When I got back to Simon Green’s place, he was waiting for me. “I thought you’d been killed,” he said.

  I shrugged. “I needed to get out.”

  “Did you go to see Win?”

  “Of course not. I took a walk.”

  “Well, we have to go,” Simon Green said. “We have a meeting with Bertha Sinclair, but we have to be downtown in twenty minutes. She’ll only talk to you in person.”

  I was wearing Simon Green’s coat and also his pants and his shirt, but there wasn’t time for me to change.

  We raced down the stairs and then we were in a car. At reasonably great expense, Simon Green had borrowed one in the wake of the shootings so that Natty and I could avoid public transportation.

  “Do you think there’ll be paparazzi?” I asked him.

  He said he hoped not but he wasn’t sure.

  “Do you think I’ll be sent immediately to Liberty?”

  “No. Mr. Kipling arranged with the Sinclair people for you to be under house arrest at least until Imogen’s funeral.”

  “Okay.” I leaned back in the seat.

  Simon Green patted me on the knee. “Don’t be scared, Annie.”

  I wasn’t. I felt a certain sense of relief knowing that I wouldn’t have to hide anymore.

  The DA’s office was in a part of downtown that I and everyone else in my family avoided—the whole area was dedicated to law enforcement. There weren’t any press on the steps, but a legalize-cacao rally was going on in front of the district attorney’s office. It was only about twelve people, but they were noisy enough.

  “There’ve been a lot of these lately,” Simon Green commented as he pulled up to the curb in front of Hogan Place. “I’ll drop you here. Mr. Kipling’s waiting for you in the lobby.”

  I pulled up the hood of Simon Green’s coat. “Why have there been a lot of pro-cacao rallies lately?”

  Simon Green shrugged. “Times change. And people are tired of chocolate being so scarce. Your cousin Mickey isn’t doing his job right. His dad’s sick, and he’s distracted. Good luck in there, Anya.” Simon Green reached over me to open the car door, and I got out.

  I pushed my way through the rally. “Take one,” said a girl with braids. She handed me a pamphlet. “Did you know that cacao has health benefits? The real reason it was banned was because of the cost of production.”

  I told her I had heard something about that.

  “If we didn’t have to rely on unscrupulous mobsters to supply us with chocolate, there would be no risks at all!”

  “Cacao now. Cacao now. Cacao now,” the throng chanted, and pumped their fists.

  I, the spawn of the unscrupulous mobsters, pushed my way through the madding crowd and into the lobby where Mr. Kipling was indeed waiting for me.

  “Quite a scene out there,” he said. He pulled down my hood, then kissed me on the forehead. We hadn’t seen each other since Liberty. “Annie, how are you, my dear?”

  I didn’t want to dwell on how I was because nothing good could come of that. “I’m eager to be through with this meeting. I’m eager to get on with things.”

  “Good,” Mr. Kipling said. “Let’s go in.”

  We gave our names at the desk, then took the elevator to the tenth floor. We gave our names again, then waited for what felt like forever in a nondescript lobby. Finally, an assistant escorted us into the office.

  Bertha Sinclair was alone. She was in her late forties and shorter than me. She had metal braces on her legs and they squeaked as she maneuvered across the room to shake my hand. “Anya Balanchine, fugitive—welcome,” she greeted me. “And you must be the persistent Mr. Kipling. Please, friends, have a seat.”

  She returned to her chair. Her knees didn’t bend very well, so she had to fall backward into it. I wondered what had happened to Bertha Sinclair.

  “So, prodigal daughter, your sister’s nanny is dead, your brother has disappeared, and you have returned to the Isle of Mannahatta and laid yourself at my door. Whatever shall I do with you? Your lawyer thinks you should be given probation and time served. What do you think, Anya? Wouldn’t that be a touch soft for a girl who shot someone and executed a jailbreak?”

  “In my opinion,” Mr. Kipling said, “Charles Delacroix had no right to return Anya to Liberty when he did. He was thinking of his campaign, not of what was in the public’s best interest. Although Anya was wrong to escape, she escaped from a situation that was essentially unjust.”

  Bertha Sinclair massaged her knee. “Yes,” she said. “I can’t say I disagree with you if what you�
�re essentially saying is that Charles Delacroix is an ambitious, arrogant prick.

  “Really,” Bertha Sinclair continued, “I should thank you, Anya. The luck of you being on that bus! My campaign staff and I beat that Anya-and-the-DA’s-son story until it was dead, dead, dead. The irony is, I doubt the public cared nearly as much as Charles Delacroix thought they cared. And, in my opinion, it wasn’t you but his misjudgment that cost him the election. Or, to put it another way, handed it to me.” Bertha Sinclair laughed. “So, here’s how I see it, friends. I don’t care about chocolate. I don’t care about Anya. I certainly don’t care about Charles Delacroix’s son.”

  “What do you care about?” I asked.

  “Good question. The child doesn’t speak much, but she does speak well. I care about my people and about doing what’s right for them.”

  That seemed terribly broad to me.

  “I care about getting reelected. And getting reelected takes many resources, Mr. Kipling.”

  Mr. Kipling nodded.

  “The Balanchines were good friends of this office once. And I imagine that they could be again.” At that moment, Bertha Sinclair took a tiny notepad out of her desk and scribbled something on it. She handed the note to Mr. Kipling. He looked at the paper. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that it was a number with at least four zeros, maybe more.

  “And what does this number buy us?” Mr. Kipling asked.

  “Friendship, Mr. Kipling.”

  “Specifically?”

  “Friends have to trust each other, don’t they?” She began writing another note on a sheet of paper. “I never understood why paper fell out of fashion. It’s so convenient to destroy. Put something down digitally and it’s viewable by everyone and exists forever. Or at least it has the illusion of forever, but it’s always potentially mutable. People had so much more freedom when there was paper. But that’s neither here nor there.” She set her pen on her desk and handed the second note to me:

  8 ds Liberty

  30 ds house arrest

  1 yr probation

  1 yr surrender passport

  I folded the paper in half before nodding my consent. Even if we were paying for it, this still seemed more than reasonable. I’d need to go to Japan at some point but I imagined that could be worked out later.

  “After you’re released from Liberty, I will give a press conference where I say that I am prepared to let bygones be bygones. I will ridicule the way Charles Delacroix handled your situation—let me tell you, I’ll enjoy that part very much. And then, as far as I’m concerned, that will be the end of it. You’ll have your life back. And we’ll all be friends for life unless you do something to irritate me.”

  I looked into Bertha Sinclair’s eyes. They were so brown they were almost black. It was tempting to say that her eyes were as black as her heart or some such nonsense, but I don’t believe that eye color is anything more than genetics. Still, there was no denying that the woman was corrupt. Daddy used to say that corrupt people were easy to deal with because they were consistent—you could, at the very least, count on them to be corrupt.

  “I’ll have someone arrange with Mr. Kipling when you’ll return to Liberty,” Bertha Sinclair said as we stood to leave.

  “I’d like to go now,” I heard myself say.

  Mr. Kipling stopped. “Anya, are you sure?”

  “Yes, Mr. Kipling.” I had not been afraid of Liberty. I had been afraid of being left there indefinitely. The sooner I went back, the sooner I could get on with sorting the rest of my life out, and I had quite a bit of sorting to do. “If I go back now, I’ll be out in time for Imogen’s funeral.”

  “I think that’s admirable,” Bertha Sinclair said. “I’ll escort you to Liberty myself if you’d like.”

  “The press will pick up the story if District Attorney Sinclair accompanies you,” Mr. Kipling warned me.

  “Yes, that’s the idea,” Bertha Sinclair said, rolling her dark, dark eyes. “Anya Balanchine has surrendered herself to me and, a week later, I show her leniency. It’s a big, beautiful show, Mr. Kipling, and quite the coup de théâtre for my office, no?” She turned to me. “We’ll go from here.”

  Mr. Kipling and I went to the lobby. When Bertha Sinclair was out of sight, I handed him my machete, which had still been attached to my (Simon Green’s) belt.

  “You brought this to the DA’s office?” Mr. Kipling was incredulous. “It’s lucky the city is too broke to fix those old metal detectors.”

  “I forgot I had it,” I assured him. “Take care of it. It’s my favorite souvenir of Mexico.”

  “Do you mind my asking if you’ve had opportunity to use this … Is it a machete?” He held it with two fingers, like it was a fouled diaper, before slipping it into his valise.

  “Yes, Mr. Kipling. In Mexico, it’s what they use to remove the cacao pods from the trees.”

  “That’s all you used it for?”

  “Mainly,” I told him. “Yes.”

  * * *

  “Anya Balanchine! Anya! Look over here! Anya, Anya, where have you been?” The crowd of paps waited to pounce on us at the Liberty Island Ferry.

  I had been instructed by Bertha Sinclair not to say anything, but I couldn’t help turning my head. I was relieved to hear my name again. I was hustled into the boat, and Bertha Sinclair stopped to talk to the media.

  Although she was a woman, Bertha Sinclair’s voice carried every bit as much as Charles Delacroix’s had, and from the boat, I could still hear her. “This afternoon, Anya Balanchine surrendered herself to me. I want it on the record that Ms. Balanchine’s surrender was completely voluntary. She’ll be detained at Liberty until we figure out what the best course of action is,” Bertha Sinclair boomed. “I’ll have an update for you all soon.”

  * * *

  It was my fourth time at Liberty in less than a year and a half. Mrs. Cobrawick was gone, replaced by Miss Harkness, who wore athletic shorts all day long and in all weathers it seemed. Miss Harkness had no interest in celebrity, by which I mean my infamy. This made her an improvement over Mrs. Cobrawick. Mouse had also left—I wondered if she had ever gone to see Simon Green—so I had a bunk to myself and no one to eat with in the cafeteria. The length of my stay was too short to bother with making new friends.

  The Thursday before my scheduled release, I was sitting at a half-empty table in the back of the cafeteria when Rinko sat down across from me. Rinko was alone, and sans henchwomen, she looked smaller somehow.

  “Anya Balanchine,” Rinko greeted me. “Mind if I join you?”

  I shrugged, and she set her tray down.

  “Clover and Pelham both left just before you came. I’m outta here next month.”

  “What did you do anyway?”

  Rinko shrugged. “Nothing worse than you. I got in a fight with some dumb beyotch at my school. She started it, but I beat her until she was in a coma. So, like, whatever. I defended myself. I didn’t know she’d end up in a coma.” She paused. “You know, we’re not that different.” She flipped her shiny black hair over her shoulders.

  We were different. I had never beaten anyone into unconsciousness. “How so?”

  She lowered her voice. “I’m from coffee people.”

  “Oh.”

  “Makes you tough,” she continued. “If someone crosses me, I’m gonna defend myself. You’re the same way.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You shot your cousin, didn’t you?” Rinko asked.

  “I had to.”

  “And I had to do what I had to do.” She leaned across the table and lowered her voice. “You look all sweet and innocent, but I know it’s just a front. Rumor has it you sliced off someone’s hand with a machete.”

  I tried to keep my face neutral. No one in the States knew what had happened in Mexico. “Who told you that?”

  Rinko ate a scoop of mashed potatoes. “I know people.”

  “What you heard … It isn’t true,” I lied. Part of me wanted to ask who exa
ctly she knew, but I didn’t want to give myself away to a person I had never particularly liked or found trustworthy.

  Rinko shrugged. “I’m not gonna tell anyone, if that’s what you’re worried about. Not my business.”

  “Why did you sit here today?”

  “I’ve always believed that you and I should be friends. Someday, you might want to know someone who knows something about coffee. And someday, I might want to know someone who knows a thing or two about chocolate.” She waved her hand around the cafeteria. “The rest of these kids … They’ll go home, and maybe they’ll be all reformed and crap. But you and me, we’re stuck in it. We were born in it, and we’re in it for life.”

  A bell rang, which meant it was time for us to return to afternoon exercises.

  I was about to pick up my tray to put on the conveyor belt when Rinko intercepted it. “I’m going that way anyway,” she said. “Be seeing you, Anya.”

  * * *

  On Saturday morning, I was released. I had worried that something would happen to make our deal go bad, but Mr. Kipling made the campaign contribution and the corrupt Bertha Sinclair kept her word. I took the boat back from Liberty, and Mr. Kipling was waiting for me at the dock. “So you’re prepared, there’s quite a crowd wanting to hear from Bertha Sinclair,” Mr. Kipling informed me.

  “Will I need to say anything?”

  “Just smile at the appropriate times.”

  I took a deep breath and approached Bertha Sinclair, who shook my hand. “Good morning, Anya.” She turned to face the press who had gathered. “As you know, Anya Balanchine surrendered herself to me a week ago. I’ve had these past eight days to reflect on the matter and”—she paused as if she hadn’t known exactly what she would do the whole time—“I don’t wish to cast aspersions on my predecessor but I think the way he handled Ms. Balanchine’s situation was atrocious. Whether the initial sentence she received was just or unjust, my predecessor had no business returning Anya Balanchine to Liberty last fall. That move was politics, pure and simple, and in my opinion, everything that happened after should be forgiven. Unlike my predecessor, I think there is law and then there is justice. I want you to know that your district attorney is more interested in justice. A new administration is a good time for new beginnings. This is why I’ve decided to release Anya Balanchine, this daughter of Mannahatta, from Liberty, time served.”