by Zhanna Slor
Right as I get the note back in its place, Tristan pulls on my arm. “Time to go,” he says. He drags me forward and pushes me toward the door. Not the front door, where we first came in, but a side door that leads to a laundry room and then opens into the garage. From behind us, I am pretty sure I hear a woman shout: “Oh my goddddddd! Where’s my wallet!” Another voice shouts, “I bet it was that shady-looking elf!”
When I hear this, my knees become so weak I think I might fall over. But I don’t have time to fall over, because Tristan is pressing the garage door button and breaking into a run, still holding my hand. I follow him blindly, skirting the edge of the house back toward the bushes where we’d left our bikes. Just as we’re mounting the seats, three or four girls begin pouring out the front door, pointing in our direction. But they are drunk, and we are fast. We are already pedaling. Their shouts disintegrate into the cold winter air. We don’t slow down till we’ve biked several miles down Lake Drive, back into Milwaukee, where we belong.
ANNA
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CHAPTER THIRTY
It’s my idea to break into the mansion in Shorewood. Between the calendar and the notes I discovered on the fridge, I am pretty sure that the place is unoccupied, except for the two days a week that the only child of whoever owns the place arrives to feed the cat. Tristan thinks it’s too risky, but he says he is open to convincing. It takes me a few tries, but eventually, I persuade him to bike up to Shorewood with me and watch the place around midday so I can show him it’s okay. We park our bikes across the street, in the thick enclave of dead trees that line the other side of the road.
“What are we looking at?” he asks me.
“You’ll see,” I tell him. I lean my bike against a dead tree and sit down on a dry patch of leaves. “Sit down. It might be a while.”
“Okay, lady. You’re the boss.” Tristan sits and we both light cigarettes, watching the smoke blend into the clouds of air coming out of our mouths. It’s not as cold as the night we came for the party, but it’s not far above twenty degrees. “What’s going on with that half-sister of yours?” he asks. He puts sister in air quotes. “Have you heard from her?”
“Yeah. She keeps asking me to take that DNA test.”
“Are you going to?”
“I don’t see how it would help her or my dad,” I shrug. “It’s not enough to get her to Israel.”
“Hm.”
I poke him in the side. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“What, Tristan? Tell me.”
“I just…I can’t see her letting it go,” he says.
“Maybe not,” I admit. I take another long inhale. “It’s getting kind of annoying actually. Now that I don’t have a computer, I can only check my accounts at the desktop at Bremen, and it’s not like I have all the time in the world to go there.”
“So you’re ignoring her,” he says. He starts shaking his head. “I told you not to do that.”
“I have more pressing issues. Like where are we going to live?” A white van slows down in front of the house next to the mansion. I perk up. “There! Watch this!”
“I know you don’t believe me, but this girl is conning you,” Tristan says, keeping his gaze on the road.
I roll my eyes. “You think everyone is conning everyone.” I point ahead. “Are you seeing this?”
“Everyone is conning everyone. In some way or another,” Tristan says. But he follows my gaze across the street. Right as I’d suspected, the mail van skips the mansion and continues to the next building, another multi-level brick home with a balcony, and a matching large white fence wrapping around its lawn.
“What does that prove?” he asks me. We both watch as the postman sticks his hand out of his window and deposits a stack of papers into the box at the end of the driveway—I’m reminded again that we are no longer in the city, where the mailboxes are by the front door and require post office employees to walk through every kind of weather Wisconsin has to throw at them.
“They have a mail hold,” I explain. “It was the same thing yesterday.”
“Maybe they didn’t have mail yesterday,” he says. He takes off his hat and itches his thick head of hair, then begins to make a series of little jumps into the air. Now that we’ve been off the bikes for a while, the sweat we accumulated biking is making it feel even colder. I pedal my feet up and down, trying to get the feeling back in my toes, but I’m wearing a pair of ripped converse shoes, so it does no good. I may as well be wearing nothing at all.
“I checked the nearby mailboxes; everyone got the same coupons from Sendik’s yesterday. Plus, like I said: I heard someone at the party say they were in Greece.”
Tristan stops staring at the mail truck and turns to give me a look I still have to get used to seeing: one of awe. “Your brain is sexy,” he says, lifting his eyebrows. Will I ever get tired of hearing this phrase? My whole life it has felt like my brain has been a nuisance. My peers either get jealous or don’t fully understand my meaning or intentions, my parents use it as an anchor to force me into an education I don’t want. It definitely didn’t please my teachers to have their assignments questioned and analyzed.
Tristan blows into his hands then crosses his arms across his chest. “But what if the kid comes over unexpectedly?”
“Then we climb out the window,” I say, pointing at the row of windows on the first floor. In addition to the bottom windows, there are more the next flight up. “Or jump,” I add, pointing at one of the patio couches, a teal and brown one with clear plastic over it.
“All right,” Tristan shrugs. I thought it would take more convincing, but Tristan has a bad back. Sleeping on an actual bed appeals to him more than the danger of it scares him. Once I found myself asking him how he’s been managing on-and-off homelessness all these years with a bad back and turned to find him miming a needle to the arm. That put an end to the questions for a while. I didn’t like that he had the same answer to every one. His past filled me with awe but it also scared me.
“Let’s head out,” Tristan says. “I want to come back tomorrow to make sure the mailman skips the house again.”
The following day, he gets his confirmation, and around sunset, we park our bikes in a small cluster of trees behind the house and get to work finding a way into the back door. Normally, in Milwaukee, I’d be wary of neighbors, but a house in a suburb is—for once—an ideal location. The houses are spread out, and since people in the suburbs love to pretend they’re in nature, a burst of trees and wild vines or flowers extend between almost every yard. Standing next to the back door, we survey the landscape to the left and right of the raised deck, and are relieved to find you really can’t see anything but trees. Plus, it’s now dark, and there are no streetlights anywhere close by. All we have to guide us is the half-moon in the sky and a pocket flashlight attached to Tristan’s keys. There is the problem of actually getting into the house, though. Tristan starts looking under pots and rocks near the patio door.
“Most people hide a spare key somewhere,” he explains. I had assumed we would go through a window, but this is a better idea, I have to admit. Except that there are a lot of places to look. The patio is adorned with an array of knickknacks and potted plants, trees, flowers. “Try the front door. Under the mat.”
I stumble over the paved pathway in total darkness, grazing the brick of the house with my hand for balance, until I reach the front of the house. I expect a long exploration to commence but I find the key almost right away, under a turtle statue next to the welcome mat. I find my way back to the patio, where Tristan is still bent over, looking, and hand him the key. He grins at me.
“Nice job, Nancy Drew,” he says, opening the back door. I am half expecting someone to catch us as we enter the house, but the place is empty, as I had thought. I reach for the light switch and the giant chandelier in the foyer flickers on, illuminating the perfect wood floors, oriental rugs, and grand staircase. Some
one must have come to clean it after the party, too, because the place is spotless; not an empty beer can to be found.
The second we put our bags down, an alarm begins beeping.
“Shit,” Tristan says, picking up his bag again. “I told you this is a bad idea.”
I hold up a finger. Without a word, I turn to look at the walls on either side of the door. I locate the alarm system pad next to the front door and type in the numbers I saw written down on the fridge: 1416. The alarm shuts off. Tristan looks at me with awe.
“Soon you’ll be better at this than I am,” he says.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I just notice things.”
“What do you think makes a good criminal?” he jokes. He puts his bag down on the floor, and lifts mine off my back and places that on the floor too. Then he carries me into a bedroom, a different one than the one we’d discovered at the party, and drops me on the bed like we’re newlyweds. This one is a huge king size with a tufted royal blue headboard and sheets so soft they feel like silk. They probably are silk, I later realize. It’s nicer than a hotel room. The bed is made military style, not a crease or unfolded edge. Tristan pulls off the comforter in one grand sweep and places me inside.
“Did I mention how sexy your brain is?”
“Only every day.” He kisses me again, and for a while, I forget about everything.
Afterward we both take showers at the same time—there are four showers on the first floor alone—and luxuriate on one of the couches watching bad TV for the rest of the day. I find a stash of wine in the basement and by the second night we’ve made quite a dent. We don’t dare venture outside, other than to smoke in the closed garage, enjoying the warmth and luxury of furniture that probably costs more than my parents’ entire home. We drink and watch TV and take tons of showers and sleep, as if we are on vacation. The following day is Friday, however—which means we will need to be out before dawn, since there is no way of knowing when the student will come by to feed the cat. I spend several hours beforehand cleaning, a sad attempt to make it look like no one has been there since the party. I don’t think I do a very good job. I’ve always been good about organizing and keeping things neat, but I almost never mop or wipe counters and keep imagining I am missing something that must be right out of sight. Margot was always getting mad at me that my room was spotless but I never remembered to wash my dishes, and didn’t know where the broom was. But Tristan tells me it looks great, so I choose to believe him.
After helping myself to coffee from the automatic espresso machine in the kitchen, I find Tristan in one of the bedrooms, counting cash. “How much money do we have?” I ask.
He doesn’t look up. “Almost five hundred dollars. Those frat boys really love to carry cash on them. I bet they were planning to score some coke or E for that party.”
I let out a little whistle. Despite spending half my life living in a middle-class home, I’ve never seen that much money at once. Between the house and Tristan and the cash, I’m feeling pretty good right now. I’m feeling better than before my life got derailed, somehow. It makes me wonder: What’s the point of following all the rules, when people still find ways to make you feel bad? Better to just do what you want and not listen to anyone. There is a freedom to making all of your own decisions, whether or not they are good or bad, that cannot be explained without real life experience. Had I known all of that, I might have made some changes far sooner. “Nice. Should we spring for a hotel?”
Tristan still doesn’t look up, just deposits the envelope into his bag.
“Not with this,” he says. He stands up, shoving the envelope into his back pocket. “You ready to go?”
I nod. “You go first, so I can set the alarm again. So as not to arouse any suspicion.” I bite my lip, looking at his back pocket, the envelope still in there. “Where are you sending that money?”
He shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it.”
“But…” I pause, feeling nervous suddenly. “I thought that was both of ours.”
“You’ll get your half. I promise,” he says. He reaches into the envelope and takes out two twenties, handing them to me. “Here, that’ll hold you over for now.” Then he grabs our bags and heads out the back door without further explanation.
We don’t talk for the entire bike ride, and when we arrive back in Riverwest, Tristan says he has an errand to run and leaves me by the door of Bremen Café, alone. “I’ll be back in a couple hours,” he says, then disappears down Bremen, towards Humboldt Avenue.
I lock up my bike and head inside, using the cash Tristan gave me to buy a breakfast bagel with eggs and cheese, a pack of cigarettes, and another coffee. Then, since I have nothing better to do, I sit down at the desktop computer near the side entrance to use the Internet. Bremen has two desktop computers with internet that any customer can use. Most people own laptops, and this will likely become redundant enough to remove within a year or two, but for now it’s a lifesaver, since I left all my things at my parents’ house and haven’t returned since.
I begin by looking for an apartment sublease; but there is nothing in my price range of almost no money, not even one with the five hundred dollars Tristan disappeared with, so next I begin searching jobs on Craigslist. Sure, I had stolen one wallet, and broken into someone’s home. But I’m not intending to continue going to parties and stealing wallets. Surely I could find a job, at least a temporary one till I figure out what my next move is. It wouldn’t even have to be in Milwaukee necessarily. It could be in Chicago. The Greyhound to Chicago is only ten dollars. I could swing that. The problem is that after an hour of searching, I don’t find anything I am qualified for that doesn’t pay minimum wage or sound horribly soul-killing. The closest thing to real money would be cleaning apartments, and even that is only $12 an hour to start. I even check if anyone needs Russian or English tutoring, but there’s not much demand for foreign language skills in Milwaukee. Only a couple of ads requesting Chinese lessons.
I take a break from this depressing endeavor and head to MySpace.
Ignoring the several apologetic and concerned messages I’ve received from Margot, I open a second browser window and login to my Facebook. I want to check in with Zoya. But Zoya’s accounts on both Facebook and MySpace have been deactivated. Strangely this doesn’t sound any alarm bells in my head. I figure there must be some kind of technical issue on her end. But then I log in to my university email.
In between some notices from UWM about my lack of securing payment for the next semester resulting in my temporary suspension from school, there are a few new emails from Zoya. The first one is dated yesterday.
“Hey, sistreechka,” it says. “I don’t appreciate the ‘cold shoulder,’ as they say in America. We are running out of time.”
The following email is less nice. I will spare you the colorful language. The basic summary of it is that if my dad doesn’t take the DNA test and acknowledge her as a daughter for her Israeli immigration application, Zoya would sue him for eighteen years of child support. I don’t know if that’s legal—or an option—here in the US, but my first reaction is only that it doesn’t sound like her to write something like this. I should have expected it, but I’m still in total shock. This isn’t what we agreed to. Even if she didn’t have a chance of winning, it would destroy his marriage, and possibly his whole life. I scroll down the end of the page, my heart in my throat.
“We can avoid all this if you just have him sign the attached letter acknowledging he’s my father. Of course, if he sends me $5,000 for moving expenses, I can be convinced to let it go. Or you can send it; I really don’t care. But I will not be ignored any more. If I don’t get either the signed letter or the money within one month of this email, I will tell everybody what your family has done to me. Including your mother. And a lawyer. Then we can let the court decide how much money I am owed.”
This message, so different in tone than her previous correspondence to me, sends a s
hiver through my spine. Tristan was right. Zoya had been conning me. Was that whole mix-up with the DNA test a lie? Our friendship? Was that too a lie? I reach into my new pack of cigarettes and light one, hoping it will soothe my spirits, which had been so high before, in the cloud of seclusion I’d created. That’s all gone now. Where had Tristan gone with our money? What does Zoya intend to do? I can’t let her destroy my parents’ lives. Not when the whole thing is my fault. I’d been duped, not my dad. I would need to get her the money somehow, I realize. And that much money in so little time? I couldn’t exactly go the legal route. I would need to use my overactive brain to get us out of this mess without any more people being hurt. I sit there and smoke and think for what feels like a very long time. I consider all the ads I saw on Craigslist, and everything Tristan has told me about his past, and an idea starts to form in my mind. With a sigh, I click on the email and open a new message to reply.
“Zoya. Leave my parents alone. I will get you the money.”
ANNA
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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I know from the calendar in the Shorewood mansion that whoever lives there will return in a matter of days, and I have no other leads of places to sleep, so after the first home I “clean,” a nice condo in Bayside, I tell Tristan we need to find a better solution. This is when I discover Tristan already has an apartment. Turns out the place he told me about when we first met, where he was staying with friends, was really only one friend, a bartender named Chris who was leaving town for the entire month of January. Tristan said we could have been staying there the entire time, but that it was more fun to see what I came up with. I found this revelation bothersome, but chose to ignore it, because I was so relieved.
