B008J4PNHE EBOK (13 page)

“Oh. Hi.” It was the sleeping lady from the train, he realized.

“I’m Sandra. You must be Sammy, huh?” Sandra removed her sunglasses. She had prominent cheekbones, deep-set eyes. Something about her aspect recalled a tintype photograph he once saw in an antique shop. The picture had shown a pioneer woman in a wilted hat, posed holding a shovel; the woman’s hard, angular features and her expression, simultaneously stoic and dazed, had unnerved Sam. Sandra’s hair was a shade darker than the amber of the tintype, a muddy blond.

“Do I know you?” He wasn’t nervous; it was a public place, and she was a woman. She was also, he decided, pretty, sort of. All put together, her crazy clothes made a crazy kind of sense.

“I’m a friend of your daddy’s.”

Sam nodded. “Okay.” He gestured down the hall. “He’s over there at the nose.”

“I have a present for him. It’s a surprise. So happens I followed you boys all the way from Grand Central just to make it. Tricky me, huh? You mind if I give it to you to give to him, Sammy?”

“Ah, sure, I guess.”

From a pocket of her raincoat, she withdrew a crumpled pink gift bag. Sam walked to her, and Sandra handed it to him. Whatever was inside the bag was soft, probably fabric.

“Thanks a bunch. Hm. You know, from listening to Booth—I thought you’d be, I don’t know.
More,
somehow.” She opened her mouth wide and produced an odd croak. “I guess other people’s kids are always disappointing, though, huh?”

It took Sam a moment to identify Sandra’s croak as a laugh. To have
a peculiarly layered stranger in a fur hat judge him as lacking was an entirely new experience, so he did the easiest thing and concurred. “Uh-huh.”

“Sammy, Sammy.” She said his name as if he were a gooey-eyed kitten in a shoe box. “Your father’s really quite a man, isn’t he? You must be proud. Big movie star and everything that he is.”

“I’ve never seen any of his movies.”

“Probably best. They’re awful. Booth is the Zeus of awful. That’s why I like them, you know?”

“Uh-huh,” said Sam. Again he was just being polite, letting himself be borne along by the current of adult inquiry.

“What’s that? Some kind of toy?”

“It’s a Nukie. They’re guys, they survived a nuclear blast. This one’s got his arms and his legs switched around, see—” He held up the figure for her to see.

“Ugly.” Sandra slipped her sunglasses back on. “I suppose I was never much of a toys and games person. Chernobyl was a CIA operation, did you know that?”

“What?” He had never heard the word “Chernobyl” before.

But Sandra wasn’t interested in illuminating it for him. “So. What’s your mother like?”

“My mother?” His mother took care of him. He relied on her, and he admired her, and he trusted her. They went for walks together. He knew she listened to what he said because the questions she asked made sense. If there were other people around and Sam had forgotten to button up his fly, Allie would very casually say, “Oh, hey, kiddo, did you happen to remember to lock the door before we left home?” and he could fix himself without anyone noticing. Thin white streaks shot through her brown hair on either side, but her face was young. She was his mother. Without her, he’d be lost.

“Like anyone’s mom, I guess.”

“I bet you really love her, huh?” Before Sam could answer, Sandra continued brusquely, “Of course you do. Of course you do.” She grabbed the tongues of her raincoat’s belt and sharply knotted them.

Sam reconsidered his original observation: in her blue sunglasses and yellow raincoat, what Sandra actually resembled wasn’t a clown but some outlandish Saturday-morning cartoon spy. On the subject of spies,
how had she known that they would be passing through Grand Central Station?

He was about to ask when she said, “Don’t look at me like that. It’s rude.”

“What?” asked Sam.

The way her mouth twisted was like she was fighting it. Sandra inhaled. “Oh, you know. Like you’re trying to peek inside my head.” She turned and cut around a platform bearing a prop sled and disappeared, though once she was out of sight, Sam could still discern the clopping of her heels against the wood floor.

 ■ ■ ■ 

“What have you there, Snout Man? Loot?” A couple of minutes had elapsed, and Booth had finished and come over to the picket of cameras.

Sam had been concentrating on sliding his Nukie along the exhibit rail. The wadded pink gift bag was tucked in against his elbow, an afterthought.

“It’s not mine.” He extracted Sandra’s gift, a finger catching the single fastening of Scotch tape, ripping the pink gift bag, and a black swatch of cloth spilled onto the floor. Sam bent and picked up the lacy panties. He held them out to Booth. “It’s supposed to be for you.”

On the subway back to Grand Central, Sam recounted the meeting—Sandra’s “surprise,” her questions, how she had made a face at him before she turned and left.

“Damned odd,” said his father. This time, instead of standing up and holding a strap, he hunched on the plastic bench beside his son. “Lunatic woman. Pointless gesture. Makes no sense at all.” Booth stared fixedly at the spattered, rubbery surface of the train floor. He shook his head and patted the boy’s knee. He told Sam to push the whole thing from his mind. “Must have been a lunatic, handing out rags like that.”

“Okay.” Though it had been unusual, and he hadn’t liked the way she had sneered at him, Sam’s primary feeling was one of sleepy satisfaction. The trip he had dreaded had turned out okay. His father had behaved. Orson Welles’s nose had been pretty good. On the Metro-North, Sam fell asleep and dreamed about cameras that crept around on their tripods like spiders but were harmless as dodos. Booth shook him awake.

The Hudson was white, shining. Sam shut his eyes and shifted away.

“Perhaps you’d better not say anything to your mother about that lunatic woman, Samuel. I would hate to worry her.”

“Okay,” said Sam. “I won’t.”

“Excellent. Loose lips sink ships,” said Booth. “And we won’t mention anything to her about you trying to steal the nose mold, either.”

Sam opened his eyes. “Huh?”

Booth leaned forward to gaze past Sam, out the window at the shimmering water. “Already erased it from my mind, Samuel.”

His protest emerged in a dry-mouthed squeak. “But I never said that! I didn’t want to steal anything!”

“Yes, you did.” Booth’s gaze remained focused on the water. His beard was tinted auburn by the reflected light. “But now it’s gone. Forgotten. The record has been scrubbed. It’s not even secret because it never was.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

“Oh, Booth. You awful fat man.” Sandra whooped. “He says he loves me. He says he wants to make a film with me. He promises to give me orgasms. So many lies. Lies stacked on top of lies.”

Three years later, at New York Presbyterian Hospital on the morning after Mina’s birth, an older Sam Dolan found himself in the presence of his father and his father’s new wife. Allie had chauffeured him to the city to meet his new sister. Although by then he was well enough acquainted with his stepmother—wannabe actress, professional dogwalker, perhaps not a full-fledged madwoman but, without a doubt, some genus of cuckoo—Sam was nonetheless barely thirteen, no less a virgin than he had been at ten, and mortified by the sexual reference. When it came to Sandra, he sometimes almost felt sorry for his father.

As the two went back and forth, he cradled his newborn sibling against his chest.

“Your stepmother is a dreadfully unhappy woman, Samuel.” Booth, a mountain of tweed wedged into the cup of a plastic chair, sat beside his wife’s hospital bed. A crumpled procedure mask bloomed from the breast pocket of his shirt. They held hands.

“Your father is right. I am dreadfully unhappy. And,” she said, “it’s his fault.”

Booth smiled warmly from his wooly, iron-patched beard. “But by this angry womb we have been granted a beautiful daughter, and for that I am thankful.”

Sam proposed to take Mina for a walk.

“Darling, I will ask you please to never characterize my womb again,” he heard Sandra say before he shut the heavy hospital door.

Sam moved down the hallway with Mina. He’d never held a baby before and was surprised by how little there was to it. She was about the size of a loaf of bread. Her eyes were that unearthly newborn blue, and shiny, like rock candy. She gaped at him.

“I’ve been where you are now,” Sam told the baby. “My experience may be of some benefit to you. I’m very sympathetic. But I’ll be honest: it’s going to be frustrating.”

As if in acknowledgment, Mina blinked.

Allie poked her head around the corner at the end of the hall. “All clear?”

He delivered the baby to his mother’s arms. “Oh, goodness,” said Allie. “Look at you, sweetie. Does your dad do good work or what?”

Allie and Booth had, after everything, remained friends. It made Sam want to hurl bricks through windows.

His mother dipped her nose to Mina’s face and made kissing sounds. “And what is this we have here? What is this?”

“A baby. I’m pretty sure it’s a baby,” said Sam.

“You’ve met your big brother, Sam? Your big brother who is always going to be there for you? How great is that?” Allie made more kissy noises at Mina. “And don’t you be fooled by all the silliness. He can be serious if the need arises.”

“I feel left out.” For the course of the screening, Mina had been directed to wear noise-blocking headphones and sit facing away from the screen. She had arranged herself Indian-style on the editing room floor and begun to sort through a folder of head shots that Sam had taken of the actors wearing their different looks.

“Sorry, pumpkin,” said Tom.

Sam pulled lightly on her ponytail. “It’s for your own good, hon. This movie could definitely stunt your growth. Also your sense of drama, characterization, and pacing.”

She began to arrange the head shots into various piles. Messily blond,
dressed in an ensemble of various pinks, his sister also wore a domino mask, à la Zorro. “I don’t know what you’re saying. With the headphones, everything you say is ‘Meh-meh-meh’ in here. ‘Meh-meh-meh.’ That’s all I get.”

The head shots seemed to keep her occupied. Except for the squeak of her markers against the gloss of the photographs, once the movie started, Mina fell absolutely silent and, Sam predicted to himself, would stay that way for the ninety-three-minute running time. Such a display of calm might have been unnerving in other children her age, but his sister possessed a preternatural focus. Though only recently turned nine, Mina often evinced the grim determination of someone who faces a daily traffic jam on the way to work. Her character and her obvious intelligence intrigued him, and intimidated him a bit, too. Why was she wearing a Zorro mask? Little girls didn’t care about Zorro, did they? He was never quite sure how to handle Mina.

Sam shifted his attention to Tom. For the first fifteen or so minutes of the film, he observed the older man closely—until his godfather gave him a sidelong glance, accompanied by a throat clearing.

Sam kept his eyes forward after that but had a sense that Tom was enjoying himself. He laughed frequently—a kind of hiccupping grumble that originated deep in his throat—and during Roger’s transaction with Merlin, Tom was even moved to cry out, “Don’t do that!”

INT. FERRER MEMORIAL LIBRARY—BASEMENT LEVEL FIVE RESTROOM

Roger crouches to push a bottle of antibacterial hand cleanser under the stall door.

CUT TO:

INSIDE THE STALL: Merlin, seated on the lid of the toilet, glances up from his copy of
The Economist
. He sees the bottle of hand cleanser.

MERLIN

What’s this?

ROGER

Hand cleanser. I thought you might like some.

MERLIN

You did, huh? Well, I’m in here. It’s occupied.

ROGER

I really have to go.

MERLIN

You’ll just have wait your turn. I’m going to be a while. I ate Peruvian last night. And some Haitian. And some of whatever that stuff is they eat in Seattle. It was a buffet-type situation. Anything you want, pretty much.

ROGER

I like Jamaican.

MERLIN

Yeah, I ate some of that, too.

ROGER

How long are you going to be? Ten minutes?

MERLIN

Better make it fifteen. I got a major case of the turds.

ROGER

Great. But don’t forget to scrub your hands.

MERLIN

Oh.

(beat)

Yeah.

Merlin picks up the hand cleanser. He removes the lid from the toilet tank, drops the bottle inside. He rifles around, finds a bag of joints, picks out two. Then he puts them down the back of his pants, inside his underwear, and appears to clench them between his buttocks.

He unclenches his buttocks, removes the joints, smells them, makes a face at the stink, and rolls the drugs under the stall door.

ROGER (O.S.)

Come on. Put ’em in a Baggie or something.

A couple of crumpled bills bounce under the door.

MERLIN

Leave me alone. I’m in here.

Tom’s laughter was contagious. Sam had watched the scene at least three dozen times, but he found himself laughing, too.

 ■ ■ ■ 

He knew better than to put too much stock into his godfather’s reaction. It could never be overlooked that Tom’s favorite film was the execrable
Forrest Gump,
that story of a mentally handicapped man who continually finds himself at the fulcrum of history and, due to dumb luck and the goodness of his heart, inevitably influences these moments and the people he encounters for the better. Even Booth, usually among popular entertainment’s stoutest defenders, had voiced his horror at the film’s intimation that simplemindedness was a virtue, and its catchphrase, “life is like a box of chocolates.”

“I have known a few mentally challenged people in my day,” Sam had heard his father explain to Tom, “and I would be the last one to seek to cast aspersion on their characters. But their lives are very, very hard. Good luck does not rain down on them. It is not just one splendid adventure after another for the mentally challenged. Most people don’t want to look at them, let alone assist them or befriend them. Robin Wright doesn’t fuck them. Life is rarely a box of chocolates for them—it is far more often a box of turds.”