Long Way Down (4 page)

T
wo hours later, the Kid was asleep and I should have been. There was more I could have read, but I was standing in the kitchen, debating whether to go ahead and have that third drink or try to go to sleep without it. I upended the empty glass and put it in the sink.

There was a light knock at the front door, followed by the sound of a key in the lock. My father had a key. The building management had a key. And Skeli had a key.

“You’re up,” she said, as she glided through the doorway. Skeli was tall, right at the upper limit for a Rockette, a job she had held before she traded in her dance classes for graduate school and a doctorate in physical therapy. She had the kind of face that responded well to artfully applied makeup—she could be stunning when she worked at it. But I liked looking at her best when she looked as she did right then. Strong, intelligent, with laughing green eyes. And she still had great legs.

“This is a nice surprise,” I said, greeting her with a hug and a cheek kiss.

She shrugged off her long overcoat and draped it over a chair.
“The cab pulled up in front of my building and I couldn’t get out. I thought about climbing those stairs to that empty apartment and I just told the driver to take me here. Is it all right?”

“More than all right. Anytime. I’m happy to see you.”

She noticed the music. “What are we listening to?”

The Grateful Dead.
Dick’s Picks Volume 9
. Madison Square Garden. September 1990. They were still breaking in Vince Welnick on keyboards, but Bruce Hornsby was there pushing Garcia into jazzier realms, and Jerry was pushing right back. They had just finished a haunting version of Dylan’s “Queen Jane”
and were sliding into “Tennessee Jed.”

“The Dead. Want me to change it?” We agreed on so many things, music just didn’t happen to be one of them.

“No. How about we turn it down a touch?” She put her head to one side and smiled. “How’s the Kid?” Her voice was thin. Tired-sounding.

“Good,” I said, adjusting the volume. “A minor meltdown at bedtime, but he kept it together.”

“What set him off?”

I shook my head. “Aliens.”

She plopped down on the couch. “Is there any wine open?”

“That kind of day?” I went to the kitchen and opened the new wine cabinet, designed to keep expensive wines at exactly the proper temperature for all eternity. I was already feeling silly about it, as most of the wine we bought would have been just as happy in the door of the refrigerator. “Nothing open, but I’d be happy to uncork whatever you like.”

“Is there any of the Cloudy Bay left?” A New Zealand sauvignon blanc that had recently become her favorite white wine.

I opened a bottle and poured her a glass. Then I poured myself a tall glass of tap water and joined her on the couch.

“None for you?” she said.

“I’m already two drinks ahead of you.”

Her eyes gave a flicker of concern, but she said nothing. She sipped her wine. “Aaahh.”

“Want to talk about it?” I said.

She sipped some more, staring out the window at a cold and wet Broadway. “Not just yet.”

I put my glass down, knelt on the floor, and removed her high-heel boots. Then I massaged her feet, working her toes and the ball of each foot.

“How did you know?”

“Women’s shoes are nothing more than cleverly camouflaged torture devices.”

“I can’t always wear sensible shoes. I need to convey an image. Women clients come to me to get healthy so they can go back to wearing the kinds of shoes that caused their problems in the first place. It’s part of the business model.”

“You don’t have any clients yet.”

“I am visualizing my future success.”

“Don’t you have a chiropractor on staff? What does she say?”

“She recommends finding a nice man to rub my feet. Come here, sit with me.”

I did.

“With your arm around me,” she said.

I put my arm around her. She leaned into me and we kissed.

“Mmm.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I replied. I tasted the wine on her lips. “Nice wine.”

She sipped some more. “I’m beat. I’ve been going full-out six and seven days a week for months, switching hats every time I turn around. And today the contractor stopped avoiding my calls and I sat him down. We’re not going to be ready for January second. The carpenter is running a day or two behind, but that sets the
electrician back and he’s booked somewhere else the following week, and then blah blah blah, the plasterers, the painters, and we’re looking at the fifteenth.”

“Two full weeks?”

“It seems that the painters I have contracted don’t work Christmas week. They all go home to El Salvador and don’t come back until after the first.”

“Well, it’s only two weeks.”

“The ad copy reads January second. The flyers will all read January second.”

“They’re not printed yet. Change them.”

“Stop trying to fix it,” she said with the slightest touch of impatience. “I’m just upset. You don’t have to fix me.”

I sipped my water. “Sorry. I couldn’t fix you, anyway. You’re already perfect.”

She snorted a laugh. “You’re right. I forgot for a minute. I must be tired.”

I gave her shoulder a squeeze. A half hug.

“How was your day?” she asked after a pause.

“Virgil has something interesting for me to do. I’ll know more on Monday. Maybe earlier.”

“Nothing scary?”

“I don’t see how. It’s something to do with insider trading.”

We both drank and watched the flicker of lights down Broadway, distorted by the rain into metallic streaks of red and yellow and white.

“You know,” I said, “there could be a positive side to this delay. We could go away. Someplace warm. With sun.”

She gave a soft chuckle. “And rum drinks.”

“Painkillers.”

“Can we bring Heather? So you get a break?”

“I’ll talk to her on Monday.”

“And Jane?” Heather’s partner and soul mate. Jane taught women’s studies at City College and sometimes did stand-up at one of the downtown clubs. I found her a little intimidating but very funny.

“Do they share a room?” I asked.

Skeli laughed lightly. “Of course. And so do we.”

“So, you agree? It’s decided? I can find some place and make plans? You’re in?”

She buried her face in my chest. “I don’t know. I can’t talk about this now. You can’t go away, anyway.”

A technicality. I needed permission to go away—from my latest overworked, underpaid, and much distracted parole officer, who would look at my record over the last year and a half, and the FBI letters in my file regarding my frequent invaluable assistance to them, and rubber-stamp just about any request for travel. But I didn’t push it. I could make the arrangements and present them to Skeli when all she would have to do is pack a bag.

“Not to worry,” I said. “Another glass?”

She shook her head and frowned in thought.

“Looks serious,” I said. “You sure you don’t want to let some of those bad thoughts out? They might do some damage, you keep them locked up like that.”

I earned a rueful smile. “I’m exactly where I’ve dreamed of being for the past four years. My own clinic, run the way I want. And I’m grateful, really, to you and your friends for making it possible.”

Virgil Becker and an old friend named Paddy Gallagher had joined with me to provide Skeli her start-up funds.

“Investors. We plan on sitting back and spending all our time counting the money you’ll be making for us.”

“Somehow, I don’t see any of you three just sitting back.”

“I spent two years sitting back as a guest of the federal prison system. That was enough sitting back for the next forty years.”

“But now that all this is coming together, I’m looking at everything else in my life and thinking I want more. Or something else. It’s like the closer I get to what I want, the more I want.”

“Just a bad day?”

“I am woman. I am strong. I eat bad days for breakfast and spit out the seeds.”

“Nerves? Opening-night jitters?”

She shook her hair down over her face and forced a small shudder. “Suddenly, I hate my apartment. The only nice thing anyone could say about it is that it’s big. I could fit a family of eight in there and we’d hardly ever run into each other, but it smells like onions, and half the outlets don’t work, and when it rains, the light fixture in the kitchen fills up with water and I have to get the stepladder out of the closet and . . . God, I sound like such a whiner. What is the matter with me?”

“You can’t get the landlord to take care of any of those things?”

“My landlord, as you well know, is my ex-husband and a shit. I think he only pays for heating the building because he’s afraid of Mrs. Berliner down on two.”

“She is a force to be reckoned with.”

“And I know only crazy people give up three-bedroom apartments on One-hundred-tenth Street, even if it is the only unrenovated building on the block.”

“This is New York. Real estate is our religion.”

“But I need something else. Something more.”

“Move in here,” I said for possibly the thirty or fortieth time.

She sighed. “You are sweet.” She kissed me. “This is your apartment. It is becoming, slowly, also the Kid’s apartment. But to me, this is where I live out of a leather tote bag.”

My one-bedroom with alcove was over a thousand square feet, huge by New York standards, and more than adequate for the Kid and me. We both had privacy when we needed it, and plenty of
room for my music and the Kid’s toy cars. But a third person—a female person, with makeup in the bathroom, shoes on the closet floor, and, in Skeli’s case, having lived in a sprawling three-bedroom on Cathedral Parkway for the past ten years, an expectation of a certain level of privacy that would be unmatched in our apartment—was a fond impossibility.

“So we’ll move,” I said.

“You love your apartment,” she said with a one-armed hug.

“I do.”

“And you can’t make the Kid move. He’d hate it.”

Life is change. The Kid was learning that, but at a glacial pace. And until I was sure he was ready, she was right. “So, maybe not right away. But we can think about it, can’t we? We can look. Maybe there’s something opening up here in the building.”

She was quiet again for so long that I checked to see that she hadn’t fallen asleep. “I know what it is,” she said.

“You’re tired. You’re disappointed about delaying your opening. Your feet hurt.”

“All that
and
 . . .” She paused briefly. “I want to have a baby.”

I forced my arm to stay around her shoulders. It wanted to retract, or wither and fall off. I managed to keep my mouth shut.

She waited just long enough to realize that I wasn’t going to say anything. “You just shut down on me. I know I’m scaring you, but I can’t have you shutting down on me.”

I hugged her again. “Sorry. I’m with you. You were saying . . .”

“I’m thirty-nine. Too old already. I never thought I’d be saying this, but this is really what I want.”

I didn’t say anything to Skeli for a long time. I was already questioning my abilities as a father. The Kid was more than a handful—he was three or four handfuls. And I knew the figures. One child in fifty was diagnosed as on the spectrum by the time they reached high school. One in eighty-eight diagnosed by elementary level.
That left a lot of children misdiagnosed, or ignored, or merely undiagnosed and unhappy for years. And I knew that the incidence increased with the age of the parents at conception. Especially for fathers over forty-five. I was forty-six. And I also knew that the incidence increased exponentially for second and third children when there was an older sibling on the spectrum.

“You sure you want me to be a part of this?” I said.

She hugged me again. She’d read the same articles I had. She knew what she was asking.

“You’re the trader. Would you take a bet like that? I can’t do the math, you can. What if the odds were one in ten? Or one in two? What would you do?”

The day that Angie brought our child home from the hospital, I was up to my eyeballs in a mountain of trades all designed to hide a series of other fake trades. I built a monumental tower of false profits that finally toppled, sending me to jail. In all that time, I failed my son miserably. I failed Angie, too, but for that I take no blame. She paved her own road to hell—and it was a four-lane superhighway.

But now I was making myself into the Kid’s father. I thought of the way he wriggled and twisted when he wanted to be squeezed, the way we said our hellos and good-byes by sniffing each other’s hands, and the way he had once given Skeli a full lecture on the subject of the old Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, punctuating his delivery with a cry for ketchup, which moments later ended up in her hair.

I had never regretted taking the Kid into my life after Angie abandoned him to an attic room in Beauville, Louisiana. But it had not been easy. On one level, I knew that he was as responsible for my salvation as I was for his rescue, but each day was a trial. Not
each
day. Most days. But I wouldn’t change a thing.

“We’re going to need a bigger apartment,” I said.

V
irgil called Sunday morning. My father and Estrella had just picked up the Kid for a trip to the Museum of Natural History—my father was convinced that my son could become fascinated with dinosaurs. I had my doubts. They didn’t have wheels. I was enjoying a second cup of tea and working my way through the
Times
.

“I just got off the phone with the
Journal
. They wanted to know if I had any comment on the story. They’re running it front page tomorrow.”

“On Haley?”

“He’s being called to testify before a grand jury next week.”

“Moving the timeline up quite a bit. They must be ready to roll on him.”

“If he’s arrested, there’s no going back. We need to head this off immediately.”

“What did you tell the
Journal
?”

“‘No comment.’ I’ll give an exclusive to the
News of the World
before I talk to those bloodsuckers.”

The
Journal
still took every opportunity offered to remind the world of Virgil’s father’s crimes.

“What have you been able to come up with so far?” he continued.

“Aside from basic research on Haley, I’m having dinner tonight with someone who’s an expert on insider trading. That ought to give me everything I need on the subject, then I’ll be ready for Haley himself.”

“Check in with me tomorrow morning. I’ll contact the board and ask them to give you all the assistance they can. I’ve already spoken with Haley. You can meet with him out on the Island, late morning.” He rattled off the name and number of Haley’s secretary. “She’ll give you directions.”

“I’m on it,” I said.