Act of God (15 page)

Just as she dozed off, a fist commenced pounding on the window. The car owner’s unshaven face, lit by a streetlight, contorted and snarled behind the glass. “What the fuck!” When she sat up and he saw that she was female, and tiny, and very pretty, his expression switched from belligerent to disbelieving.

“I scream rape if you call police,” Ashley threatened as he opened the door with his key.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, holding his hands wide and taking a giant step back. “But you can’t sleep here.”

“So? I be car’s guard. Lock broken. You go nowhere anyway.”

He looked over the front seat headrest to her encampment below—the watches and purse and iPods.

“How long have you been here?”

“Why? You have weekly rate?”

“I need to use the car. You need to leave. Now.”

“Where going? Maybe I come.”

“I’m going to my girlfriend’s house upstate. It’s her car.”

Ashley packed her belongings like checkout time wasn’t
till noon. She dreaded going outside. The night air was blustery. All she had to keep warm was the beach blanket. She walked for blocks jiggling car door handles to see if one would open. Outside a grocery store, she stopped to calculate the risk of stealing dinner when she spotted Edith, the sister that Kat had told her was dead. Why would Kat have said she was dead? Probably to trick her into feeling sorry for her so that she would give Kat back the letters. Kat had only pretended to be her friend. The stout, gray-haired twin was paying for eight large bags of groceries when Vida’s super walked up to her at the register with one last item to buy, the wrapper of a chocolate bar he was finishing. She smiled at him. Even from twenty feet away, looking through a frosted shop window, Ashley recognized Kat’s big false teeth.

Keeping twenty paces behind, she followed them to a three-story clapboard house with steamy windows. Six cat silhouettes slept on the sills. It must be warm inside.

She stepped out of the shadows. “You still need Russian translator?”

“Give us a minute, Frank,” Kat told the super, who hauled in all eight bags of food, then shut the door with his foot.

Ashley felt hunger twist her intestines, like a bully twists a weakling’s arm.

“Why should I even talk to you?” Kat asked.

“I translate for food.”

“There’s nothing left to translate, Ashley. I had to burn the letters.”

“I sorry I steal gift card,” she said, casting her eyes down in contrition, though all she really felt was ravenousness.

“You were supposed to be my friend.”

“I punished. Man rob card from me anyway.”

“I would have shared the money,” Kat said, opening the
door wide enough for Ashley and her stuffed pillowcase to fit through. “Come on in, you look like you could use a hot meal.”

Once the warmth kissed her skin, she began shivering. The house smelled of cabbage and sausages. An old Polish woman was making dinner in the kitchen. Kat went to get her a cup of hot tea and a snack to hold her over until dinner. Alone in the living room, she wandered around. The walls smelled of fresh paint. The furniture looked new. The shelves had nothing on them, no photographs or knickknacks. When Kat returned, Ashley ate the bread and cheese so fast she forgot to taste it and drank the tea before it cooled, scalding her lips and tongue.

“You look skinny, Ashley. Where have you been?”

“God punish me big-time. I eat only ketchup and garbage. I live under boardwalk, like rat.”

“You lived on the beach?”

“First time see ocean.”

“Your first time? You’d never seen the ocean before? Oh, Ashley, the first time is primal.”

“No big deal,” Ashley said, but it wasn’t true. The first time she’d dipped her toe into the sea and felt its volatility and vastness, she realized all humans were
insignificuntskis,
but rather than that knowledge diminishing her, it made her less lonely.

“It must have been scary living under the boardwalk,” Kat said. “I know. I once had to sleep in a doorway.”

“I never scared.”

“Everybody is scared, Ashley. I’m scared something will happen to Frank. I’m scared whatever killed Edith is inside me. I’m scared my happiness will end.”

“Okay, maybe I scared a little.”

“Of what?”

She didn’t know how to translate
insignificuntski,
so she put it another way: “I scared I end back in Omsk.”

“Would that be so bad? Your parents are probably worried sick.”

“Probably sold bed day I go.”

“I ran off at your age. You can’t imagine how I worried my mother and Edith when I dropped out of college to follow the Grateful Dead.”

American dead are grateful? “You follow dead people?”

“It was the name of a band. The point is you shouldn’t follow anyone but yourself. That was my mistake. You can do and be anyone you want.”

“Lady Gaga?”

“How about Ashley? After all, she didn’t exist until you made her up.”

Dinner was served in the kitchen, a communal bowl steaming on a table set for six. After Kat introduced her to everyone, Ashley sat on the only empty chair, at the table’s far end. Whenever her mother set a bowl of food before her and her siblings, eight forks clashed to get at the one piece of meat. With practiced adroitness, Ashley speared the largest sausage for herself before anyone else had a chance to pick up his fork. Only after she’d devoured half of it did she look up and see that the others were gaping at her, as if she were a wild animal.

“It’s been a while since Ashley had a home-cooked meal,” said Kat, breaking the silence by spearing an ample sausage herself.

“Guess who I saw yesterday?” said the lady with a black cat on her lap.

“Vida,” guessed the Polish cook. “Word is she’s working at a nearby gym.”

“Someone hired Mushroom Mary to work with the public?” asked her husband.

“Jimmy, the guy who owns the gym, told me she had to declare bankruptcy,” said Frank.

“I know I shouldn’t torture myself,” said Kat, “but sometimes I wonder how different it might have been if only she’d listened to Edith in time, but she claims she never heard Edith’s messages.”

“She heard them,” said Frank. “She’s an actress. Who ever heard of an actress not listening to her messages?”

“She says Edith’s death was nobody’s fault. An ‘act of God,’ she called it.”

Ashley ached to be part of the camaraderie, but no one paid attention to her. Her stomach was full, but she didn’t feel any less lonely in this warm kitchen than she did under the boardwalk. She speared a second sausage. Didn’t Kat promise her she could be anyone she wanted?

“I Vida’s houseguest,” she announced. “I there when mushroom found. I see Vida listen to messages. I hear Edith say something smell funny in basement.” In fact, hiding in Vida’s guest room closet, she’d heard nothing except her own pulse.

But she had everyone’s attention now.

“You saw her and you never told me?” asked Kat.

“I tell you now. She laugh when Edith leave message.”

“She laughed?” Kat looked as surprised as pained.

That night Ashley slept in a room on the ground floor, across from the Polish couple’s door. Other than a bed, the
only decor was an empty bureau and wire hangers in the closet. Kat had promised to buy her a new winter coat and boots tomorrow. She opened her pillowcase and removed the plastic laptop she’d been hauling around since her penthouse days. She set it on the bureau and squared it so that it sat dead center. Then she hung up the few rags she owned on the wire hangers.

She crawled under the covers. She hadn’t felt this safe and warm in weeks, but rather than it relaxing her, it made her more anxious. She looked at the moon through her curtainless window, the same moon she had slept under at the beach. She heard scratching at her door. She opened it, a cat slipped in. She tried to chase it out, but it hid under the bureau. She got back in bed, and the cat joined her. It settled on her chest, emitting a low-pitched vibrato, a feline lullaby that soothed her to sleep.

“Should I believe that girl?” Kat asked Frank as they got into bed that evening. Their room was on the third floor with a sitting area and a private bath. “I think she was so desperate to stay the night that she would have said or done anything. When I invited her in earlier, I wondered if I wasn’t inviting trouble. She stole from me, Frank, my last hundred dollars. But she looked so lost standing under the streetlight. Yes, she looked skinny and hungry and cold, too, but basically, she looked lonely. I wonder if I used to look that way to Edith when I just showed up uninvited at her door?”

She propped herself up on her elbow. Frank’s eyes were closed, but she knew he was listening. “You think Vida is evil like Gladys and Mrs. Syzmanski called her tonight?”

“Mrs. Syzmanski goes to Mass every morning and Gladys lights votive candles for her dead cats. They only know from good and evil.”

“You believe it was an act of God, Frank?”

“I used to get on my knees before every fight and pray for God to let me knock the lights out of my opponent. You know how God answered? He knocked out one of my lights.” He pointed to his blind one. “I say to hell with God.”

“You think Vida is responsible for Edith’s death?”

“I don’t know if God or the oil spill or the Chinese wallboard brought the supermold, but no matter, Vida should
of returned Edith’s calls right away. She owes you an apology. Maybe she owes us all an apology.”

“Can you legally make someone apologize?” Kat asked Stanley over the phone the next morning after she explained to him how her former landlady had contributed to Edith’s death.

“I don’t want to be discouraging, Katherine, but a wrongful death suit can drag on for years. In the end, the only ones to get rich are the lawyers.”

“It’s not about the money. I just want an apology.”

“An apology is an admission of guilt, and her insurance company might not like that. If human negligence contributed in any way to the infestation, they could be out tens of millions. They have a vested interest in proving that the mold was an act of God.”

“Maybe the mold was an act of God, but Edith’s death wasn’t. She might have gotten out in time if only Vida had listened to her.”

“Have you tried just asking her for an apology?”

“She claims she never heard the warnings Edith left on her answering machine, but I don’t believe her.”

“If you’re sure about forgoing monetary damages and all you’re seeking is an apology, there’s a fairly modern trend these days called ‘restorative justice.’ It’s not a litigious procedure so the insurance company needn’t get involved. But it is a legal action. The offender—in this case your landlady—must go on public record to take full responsibility for his or her wrongdoings and offer an apology. It seems to give the victims a sense of fairness and closure.”

“Would I have to forgive her?”

“That would be entirely up to you.”

“Consider yourself served,” said the stocky leather-clad man waiting for Vida outside the gym at six a.m. Mystified, Vida accepted the envelope as the man took off on a motorcycle.

Before breaking the seal, she read the name on the return address: Price, Bloodworth, Flom, Mead & Van Doren, LLC. She’d never heard of the law firm, but those names alone sounded foreboding.

Dear Ms. Vida Cebu,

This letter concerns the unfortunate death of Edith Glasser from an ischemic stroke caused by fungal pneumonia contracted during her lawful residence in your apartment building. My client and the sister of the deceased, Katherine Glasser, is prepared to forgo a lawsuit seeking damages on the condition that you acknowledge your role in failing to take reasonable and practical measures to mitigate the damage that the infestation of toxic mold was causing to the well-being of the occupants. The pathology report leaves no room for doubt that inhalation of spoor was the principal factor in her death. In lieu of a lawsuit for damages and in release of all claims against you for wrongful death, my client seeks a written apology.

This apology must demonstrate to my client your acknowledgment of culpability and your heartfelt regret for failing to take action. Failure to provide this written apology within fourteen days of the receipt of this letter will result in a revocation of the offer and litigation will commence soon after.

I strongly urge you to review this letter with your own counsel.

Sincerely,

Stanley Flom

Senior Partner

After she opened the gym, she called Virginia. “What do you make of this?”

“Vida, I haven’t practiced law in ten years.”

“Maybe I should just go ahead and apologize. The poor woman lost her twin sister.”

“The question is what exactly are you apologizing for? Or more to the point, what does she imagine you’re apologizing for?”

“That I didn’t find out about the mold in time. Her sister called me to complain about a smell in the basement and I didn’t return her call right away. It was the same week I had that squatter camping in my guest room closet. By the time I was shown the first mushroom by the police, it was too late to do anything. I had to flee with only the clothes on my back, too.”

“Why don’t you explain that to her? Don’t admit to any blame, but make sure your condolences sound heartfelt. Maybe she just needs someone to say they’re sorry for her sister’s death. A twin, it must be so hard. Just make sure you read me the letter beforehand.”

The gym began filling up with regulars. The first to arrive every morning was an intense young man slathered in Bengay; then came the breast-augmented hedge fund manager who walked the treadmill while shouting into her cell as if her voice had to carry twelve thousand miles on its own power to reach her partner in Hong Kong; then came the saddest client of all, the chubby boy who never seemed to lose weight. His routine consisted solely of squats.

No actor can make a life’s work out of self-exhibition without some colossal need to be noticed. Vida’s morning workout, if you will, was to exercise a kind of hypnotic power over one of the regulars and get them to look up and notice her without her doing anything to attract their attention. It wasn’t acting, but it was as close as this job got.