North of Boston (21 page)

“They're mine! They're
mine
!”

“I'm sorry, Noah. Yes, they are.”

“You're not telling me what's going on! What are those pictures of? Why won't you say? Why doesn't anyone tell me anything? Everyone has secrets, and nobody cares about
me
!”

“Oh, Noah. I do care. I care very much.” I want to hug him, but he's too angry. His eyes are burning, and his voice is hoarse from the deep place it's coming from.

“You don't! You don't, Pirio! You don't care about me!”

“Please, Noah.”

“Why won't you let me live with you? I can sleep on the couch. I'll clean up my stuff, and I'll be really quiet, I promise. I
promise
, Pirio!”

“Oh, Noah.” My eyes are brimming. “Oh, sweetheart.”

There's a silence, unearthly. His eyes are naked, full of hurt and hope. My stomach is twisting at the hard words I must say. “I'll always be your friend, Noah. And I hope you'll always be mine. I want us to be the very best of friends for as long as you want to be.”

He draws a sharp breath into his nose and holds it, his chest puffed out. Then with his entire arm he sweeps both cups of hot chocolate off the table. They smash against a lower cabinet and shatter. Broken porcelain in a spreading pool on the floor, spatters of chocolate everywhere.

In his eyes I see Thomasina's passion. And something solid, honest, and brave. Like Ned.

“I love you, Noah.” The words are out before I can stop them, the words I didn't want to say. And all the words that come after them—that
must
come after them if they are to be true and meaningful—are right there in my throat.

“Pirio, I love you, too.” Then he's in my arms, and we hug and rock together quietly.

I push his hair out of his eyes. “Noah, listen. I promise I'll take care of you if anything . . . ever . . . happens.”

There. It's done. The promise made. No going back.

He goes still and quiet, as if he didn't hear me. But I know he did.

A peace settles over us both.

That night, when he's asleep, I call Thomasina's cell phone. About twenty times. I leave five or six messages urging her to get back to me and reassuring her that Noah's fine. Finally I call the hotel. They've checked in under her name, which seems odd, until I realize she's probably paying. No one answers in her room, so I leave another message with the concierge.

I take Noah's phone into my bedroom and e-mail the photos to my computer and my iPhone. Then I delete them from his phone. Tomorrow I'll tell Noah what I did. I'll explain that I'll give the pictures back once I find out what they're of. Until then, we can't run the risk of Max finding them. I'll say I'm pretty sure that this is what his dad would want us to do. I hope Noah will be OK with that.

—

Close to dawn my cell vibrates with an audible buzz.

“Pirio, is that you?” Her voice is frail and distant.

“How's the roulette wheel treating you?” I say groggily.

“I'm not there anymore. I'm home.”

“You're home? When did you get back?”

“A few hours ago.”

Dread starts in. A few seconds is all it takes anymore. “What do you mean?”

“Is Noah sleeping?”

“Of course he's sleeping. It's five a.m. He's on the couch in the living room.”

“How's he doing?”

“Fine,” I say tersely. It's bad, the trouble she's in. “What's going on?”

A deep sigh, with a cry bubbling up from the center of it. “I fucked up. Real bad.”

I listen as she softly weeps. I feel angry, though I'm not sure why. And tired.

“Please, Pirio. I know what you're thinking.”

“Do you want to come over?”

“I don't want Noah to see me.” Again, the tiny voice, the stifled sob.

“Where's Max?”

“He fucked me over. Oh, Jesus, did he fuck me over.”

The pit of my stomach wants to crawl away from this conversation. The crown of my head wants to fly away. I'm thinking how warm my bed is, and how I'm not going to be in it again this morning.

“He's not with you, I take it.” She seems pretty sober now. Sick sober.

“If he was, I'd rip his heart out and shove it down his throat.”

This is where I start to lose it. Saccharine pity and vile sarcasm vie for control of me. The pity wants to cry out,
Oh, Thomasina, why do you keep doing this stupid shit to yourself? Like your life is one slow elevator ride to the bottom.
The sarcasm fills my mouth with no particular words, just the bitter taste of itself.

Wearily, I ask what happened, and Thomasina tells me her story. It is lengthy, convoluted, self-justifying, and probably partly false, since it's being assembled and packaged for my consumption after a fog of booze and the sour shock of humiliation. I want to resist being swept up in the drama—
just the facts, please, ma'am
—but I'm drawn in anyway. I still want to believe in her, still want to see her crawl out of her dark cave and win. Hope still trumps experience, though it's been battered pretty badly. This everlasting hope of mine may be friendship, or it may be denial.

Long story short: Thomasina got tipsy, took ten thousand dollars out of her checking account to buy a silver Aphrodite dress and some cool accessories. She laid down the rest at a high-stakes poker table. Won, lost, won, lost. Walked away with roughly the same amount she started with in her slender satin clutch. Feeling pretty good about herself. No fool, her. Daddy's little gambling girl with her speedy microprocessor of a mind and just the right amount of moxie. At which point clever Max got her soused, slipped something in her drink that made her go all haywire. He had to practically carry her back to the room, where she passed out on the bed. When she woke up, the satin clutch was open on the dresser, only a lipstick inside. Max's clothes were gone from the closet. She called his cell. Turns out he was already back in Boston. Told her that she'd gambled away all her money in a blackout and gouged his face with her fingernails when he tried to drag her away from the table. Said she was a sick, dangerous woman and he never wanted to see her again.

I get out of bed and go into the kitchen quietly so as not to wake Noah. I still have the phone pressed to my ear, though there's nothing but alternating bursts of self-justification and self-pity coming from the other end. In truth, I'm relieved. It's only squandered money, not a hit-and-run or a drug arrest. I pour myself a glass of milk and take some mint Girl Scout cookies out of a box.

Thomasina clears her throat and asks if I want to know the truth.

“Yeah, sure.”
This ought to be good
. I bite off a piece of cookie.

“The bastard stole my money. I even checked under my fingernails to be sure, and there wasn't any flesh.”

I shake my head at this. An ingenious girl.

“Do you believe me?” she asks in a small but demanding voice.

I brush away some crumbs, sip the milk from its cool glass, and put it down on the kitchen table. Do I believe her? Thomasina is more than capable of gambling away ten thousand dollars in a blackout, or even just while decently stewed. If Max escaped with nothing more than a gouged face, he's lucky, considering what I know she can do. But Max is no angel either. He's been lying to her all along. If somehow in the course of whatever shady business he's involved in, he did develop genuine feelings for her, then he's stupid as shit, because what sane person would want to be with a woman who routinely vomits before breakfast? Unless, of course, she keeps you in booze and drugs and snazzy gambling duds. And if you married her, you'd have access to all the money her trust fund sends her monthly, half of which just accumulates in her account so that a ten-thousand-dollar withdrawal is no big deal. Fact is, Thomasina's always been begging the world to exploit her.

“Pirio? Are you there?”

“I'm thinking. I'll call you back.” I end the call and go out to check on Noah. He's sleeping on his side with light exhalations, dark eyelashes resting on pale cheeks. I return to my room, sit on the bed, drink the rest of the milk, eat the last cookie. I take a shower, get dressed, and call Thomasina back.

“What the hell do you expect me to do with all the fucking information you just gave me? I don't give a shit about your money or your stupid little affair! I'm sick of you fucking up. I've had it; I'm done. Goddamn it, Thomasina! Next time, call someone else!” I jab the end button and feel like hurling the phone against the wall.

It vibrates two seconds later. “OK, OK. I deserved that. You have every right to be mad. Please, go ahead, scream at me. Tell me I'm a worthless whore.”

“Why? So you can feel sorry for yourself and drown in more booze?”

“You hate me now, don't you? I've lost your friendship. You hate me now just like everyone else.”

I don't rise to the bait. I don't hate her. I can't. I just miss the old Thomasina, the one who seemed destined for something good.

“Don't withdraw, Pirio. That's what you always do. You get so cold, so distant. I feel like I'm being sent to Siberia. It's much worse than screaming. Please, yell and scream if you're mad. Pound the table, anything. I deserve to be abused.”

“Give Galahad some more time with you; I bet he'll step up.”

“That was cruel.”

“You had it coming. That and more.”

“You're the only person I can talk to.”

“Really? Where's Madame Jeanne?”

“I hate how sarcastic you get.”

“Me? Oh, right. Let's talk about me. First I'm cold. Now sarcastic. You'd think I was the one with the problem.”

“I'm sorry. I'll go to AA.”

“Fuck you will.”

“I will. I stopped drinking for ten days. I did it, and I can do it again. For Noah's sake.”

“Not for Noah. For
yourself
. Because you're fucking better than this, and you know it. You do it for yourself first.
Then
for Noah.”

“Yes, you're right. For me.” Her voice is small, trying out self-respect. A pause, then an attempt to backpedal. “I didn't really drink that much when I was at the poker table. Only a coup—”

“Oh, please. Stop right there. If you finish that sentence, I swear I'll never speak to you again.”

“Oh, God. I'm sorry. Can I come over?”

“Yes.”

A pause, a sigh. “I'm worried I can't do it, Pirio. I've tried so many times. And everyone hates me now. I hate myself. . . .”

The call ends while she's still talking, but I'm not the one who hangs up.

I sit at the kitchen table and wait for her.

When Thomasina's in her cups, she's ludicrously emotional. It's awful, of course, but not alarming. After all, it's only drunkenness. The condition she's in right now, though—this is different. This sick-sober-hungover state, when she's conscious of her bathos and sane enough to feel humiliated by it, when she needs forgiveness that she knows she doesn't deserve, when, desperate for clarity, she enlists her perfect logic to blame the entire world and understands full well that she is lying—this is when bad things can occur. I don't want to think about what those bad things are. I just hope she gets here soon so I can stop worrying and move on to being glad when she leaves. A paradox anyone can understand.

Noah appears in the doorway. Barefoot, skinny-limbed. Hungry, no doubt. More proof that I'm ill-suited to parenting is the fact that merely feeding a child three times a day seems like an onerous job to me.

I make toast and pour juice. While he's eating, we make up a story about a boy gnu. The plot involves fantastic characters and situations that I have a hard time keeping straight. Conventional me, I expect the story to end with the boy gnu getting rich as a sheik and marrying the best-looking girl gnu, but Noah steers the plot in a different direction. The gnu builds an enormous machine that can do “everything”—which mostly means of a lot of warfare and some mining. He draws it. It's got steel arms and legs, inlaid winches, antennae, and a square robotic head. A machine like that is a horror to me, but to Noah it's a pinnacle of evolution. He probably imagines himself inside it, inviolable.

Thomasina arrives with modest, downcast eyes, wearing her voluminous black cape. Noah gives her a happy hug and tells her excitedly about the anus of a civet cat. She smiles, pats his hair, doesn't say too much. I'll call her later to tell her about Max and Johnny and the pictures Ned sent to Noah's phone. Maybe it will console her to know that her former boyfriend really is a low-life scumbag.

We order Chinese, have it delivered, split the bill. Noah loves that it's Sunday morning, and we're not having breakfast food. Thomasina stuffs a fat wad of extra tip into the delighted delivery boy's hand. The gesture upsets me, but I don't bother wondering why.

I
've been standing in the cramped vestibule of 180 Salem Street for ten minutes, pressing the buzzer for number 4. Now it's just a matter of accepting the fact that he's not home. But I came all the way here, and I want to see him, badly. So I press again. Still no answer. His phone is no longer in service. If he got a new number, why hasn't he let me know? I pace the marble floor, unwilling to leave. The heavy glass door to the street shuts out sounds. Cars drift by soundlessly like fish in an aquarium. A watery image rises in my mind—of Russell Parnell being hauled through this foyer in the middle of the night, taken to a deserted lot behind an abandoned factory, bludgeoned to a pulp, and thrown into the harbor.

I jam my thumb onto the buzzer and lean into it as if the added pressure will make a difference. I press notes in Morse code gibberish—dash, dash, dot, dash, dot. A minute or so later, I calm down.

There are four filigree brass mailboxes set into the wall. They're so old that the edges of the letter slots are worn to dull gold from all the mail that's passed through them. I try to get two fingers inside the number 4 mailbox, predictably without luck. Irrational anger rises. Even his mailbox is denying me admittance. I press the side of my face against the wall and try to see diagonally inside the slot. What a ridiculous thing to do. I tear a piece of a Lost Cat poster off the wall, scribble my name on it, and stuff it into the mailbox. At least he'll know I was here.

On the way home I stop at Quincy Market and pick up a few things I need: warm socks, rubber-soled shoes, rain gear. Godiva chocolate and a short cigar. Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses. Leaving the store, I predict how quickly I will lose them, and go back for another pair. Then I hump my packages a few blocks west to a camera store on Tremont Street, where I select a Minolta SR-T 102 that fits like a small apple in the hollow of my hand. After talking to the salesclerk at length, I add an ultracompact, completely waterproof Kodak PlaySport, with full HD recording capability and a memory card so tiny you can stash it anywhere.

He calls that evening, to my relief, but not because he found the note. He took my advice and left the Salem Street apartment, preferring to avoid another run-in with Johnny and his gang. He changed his phone number, too. He's at an old rooming house in Charlestown, he says apologetically. Temporary shelter on short notice, no car required to get here, he explains. There's something charming about his slight embarrassment at his low-rent digs.

I tell him I talked to Caridad Jaeger. “She told me everything.”

A pause. “Can you come by tomorrow morning?”

“Tomorrow after work,” I say, remembering my job.

—

It's an enormous old home, formerly spacious and elegant, now cut up, sectioned off, and beaten down, like a Moscow mansion the Bolsheviks took over. The manager wears a yellow turban, sits inside a little room behind a barred window. He's working a crossword with a stub of pencil while a talk show host excoriates pompously from an old television set. I'm about to speak to him when a figure appears in my peripheral vision. It's Parnell, moving quietly as a cat. He leads me wordlessly out the back door, across a parking lot, to a diner down the street. We slide into a booth at the back. Sticky red vinyl, the tears covered with duct tape. There are a couple of beefy guys at the counter, and an Asian woman in a red wool coat. The waitress comes, takes our order for two coffees, and shuffles away.

First thing Parnell says is that he bought a handgun. Slides it under his pillow at night, straps it to his ankle during the day. He says it's a .38-caliber Colt Mustang with an overall length of about five inches. With a loaded magazine, it weighs less than a pound. He gives a bland shrug to acknowledge that these details aren't really important; he's just making conversation. But there's a new edge to him: a stubble of beard darkens the lower half of his face, and there's a wild look in his eyes. He's out of his depth, and he knows it.

Curious, I ask if I can see the gun.

He tips his head, and I go horizontal on the vinyl bench. Under the table, he's pulled up his pant leg. The gun is black and silver and so small it looks like a toy.

I sit up. I want to say,
Don't worry so much. I know John Oster. He's not a killer. Asshole, yes. Fucked-up crazy man, yes. Into bad moonlighting gigs chasing whales on the North Atlantic like Ahab, yes. But not a killer.
That's what I want to say. But I don't know if it's true.

The waitress brings our coffee. We both take it black, so there's nothing to do with our three good hands. My eyes stray to Parnell's left-hand fingers curling around his porcelain mug. It's almost too intimate to look at this part of him. A hand with living fingers, a hand that can touch. I tear one sugar packet, then another.

“We need evidence,” I say.

He doesn't balk at the plural pronoun, but doesn't carry it forward either. “Yeah, I know. But how do I get it? That's where I'm stuck. I need places and dates. Everything, all the players, the whole story. I got nothing so far.”

“Somebody has to get on board the
Sea Wolf
.”

“I thought of that. But they know me now.” He doesn't add that his hand would disqualify him in any case.

“I'll go.”

“What? You?”

“Why not?” I push the spilled sugar into a little mound.

He looks stiff and embarrassed. “You're not a fisherman.”

“I lobstered, didn't I? I think I'm ready for bigger prey.” I try to sweep the mound of sugar into my hand, but most of it falls on the floor.

“They'd never let you on.”

“Sure they would. There are some women on the boats.”

“You don't have any skills.” A cool glitter in his eye. He thinks he has me on this one.

“I can cook.” Sort of. “And processing can't be that hard.”

“Come on. Why would your friend there, this John guy, agree to take you on his secret voyages?”

“I'm an old friend. He likes me. We go way back.”

Parnell scoffs. “That's not enough.”

“It will be when I add that I know what's going on. I'll say Ned spilled the whole story to Thomasina before he died, and she finally broke down and told me. Johnny'll have no trouble believing that Thomasina would blurt out Ned's secrets. I'll tell him I want to go whale hunting because I'm bored and need some excitement in my life. He'll have no trouble believing that either. Come to think of it, I already told him I wanted to get back to fishing as a way of conquering my posttraumatic stress disorder. But he won't be questioning any of this too deeply, believe me. When I said he likes me, I meant he likes me
a lot
. In fact, I'm pretty sure he'll grab any excuse to take me along.”

Parnell's eyes flicker shrewdly as he considers the merits of my idea. “If you're wrong?”

“I'm not. Johnny has no reason to suspect me. I've been through it all in my head a hundred times.”

Glancing out the window at the sunny morning and the busy street, I flash on an image of the guy at the Bank of America Pavilion, the tan car parked near the café on Beacon. But I never saw that guy again; the tan car was driverless when I walked by, and didn't follow me. Nerves, that's all it was. Creeping, creeped-out uneasiness. The same feeling I had walking around Jamaica Pond with Mrs. Smith, only there wasn't even a particular car or person to be suspicious of that night.

I turn back to Parnell and state what neither of us wants to say. “If he did suspect me, he'd take me along anyway, just to keep me from talking to the wrong people.”

Parnell pushes his mug away roughly. “So you'd be trapped on a boat with a guy who wants to get rid of you.” He leaves the rest unsaid.

“Yeah. But I don't think that's going to happen, and I don't see any other options.” I know exactly what the risks are. My heart has fairly stopped at the prospect of becoming, once again, a lost human speck on the surface of the ocean, my waving arms visible for a little while, then gone. I vividly remember how black it is underwater, how unearthly cold. In fact, nothing terrifies me more than the thought of what Parnell is suggesting. Yet I can't stop thinking about being on the
Sea Wolf
, can't run away from it like a saner person might. Ever since the collision, I've harbored the stubborn conviction that there's more out there on the ocean for me to do, and the feeling's grown stronger every day. Something deep inside me is pushing me back to the sea.

“You told me yourself this guy is dangerous,” Parnell is saying sternly. His sternness feels sweet.

“Anyway, I have pictures.”

“Pictures?”

I pull out my phone and start pulling up the photos. “One of Johnny's friends, a guy named Max, broke into my apartment. I'm pretty sure he was looking for some pictures Ned sent to his son's phone just before he died. Max didn't find the phone, but I did, later. Nobody but me and Noah, and now you, know that the pictures were taken off Noah's phone and stored on my computer and my phone. Look. These three photos were taken on a beach somewhere.”

I slide my phone across the table.

He hunches over and stares like he's going blind. “Where is this? What are those things?”

“I have no idea.”

“What about the other two pictures?”

“Same. I'll send them to your phone now. Johnny doesn't need to know that I haven't got a clue what they're of. And this way, if I don't come back, you can publish them when
you
figure them out!”

Parnell shakes his head at my misplaced enthusiasms. His lips are pursed and pouty. He looks like a scruffy boy unfairly barred from Little League, who has to watch the girls' game instead. He gives me his new number and stares moodily at the screen on his phone until my message appears in his inbox.

“Oh, and another thing—Ned gave Noah a piece of whalebone and told him that he'd been hunting whales.”

Parnell's eyes spark with the first excitement he's shown today. “OK, now we've got something: Rizzo thought taking rich guys whale hunting was fun and games for a while. Then something changed his mind, and he tried to get out of it. Dustin Hall didn't like that. He had Jaeger to please, and couldn't afford a leak. He probably tried to convince Rizzo to stay. Maybe Rizzo threatened to go to the authorities or maybe not. In any case, Hall gave him the
Molly Jones
to buy his silence and then killed him in it.”

“I'm with you up until the last part.”

“All right,” he says briskly. “We'll leave that an open question for now.”

“They're all open questions.”

“You're really going, aren't you?” He's thunderstruck, but knows me well enough at this point.

Suddenly we've run out of things to talk about. I realize that I don't want to say good-bye. I'd like to spend another hour or two with him, walking in a park somewhere, having the kind of easy, wandering conversation people have when they're getting to know each other. But I can't think about that.

“You ought to leave before me so we're not seen together on the street,” I say.

He glares and abruptly, wordlessly, complies.

The minute he's gone, I wish I hadn't sent him away. His coffee cup is still half full. And I'm alone. Why am I so often alone? But I can't think about that either.

I motion to the waitress. Order the turkey plate special with extra cranberry sauce and gravy. The Asian woman gets up and starts buttoning her red coat. Now there's only one beefy guy at the counter. I didn't see the other one leave, which bothers me. I have to start paying better attention to these things. To everything.

—

A dark, hushed lounge on the first floor of a hotel. Little candle flames flickering on low tables. No music, thick carpeting, a perfect indoor temperature of about sixty-eight degrees. A handful of men and women in dark suits are scattered about, sipping after-work cocktails. An upscale watering hole in the heart of the financial district is about the last place you'd expect to find the Oyster Man. Maybe that's why he picked it.

His red hair fades to auburn in this light. He's wearing clean jeans, a tucked-in black T-shirt, and a leather belt. This is how he dresses up. A nylon jacket is laid neatly across the arm of an adjoining chair. He's got a grip on a bottle of Amstel Light.

“Watching the weight,” he explains when he sees me glancing at it. His face reddens as he hears himself. So middle-aged. Has he become a bore? Have the diapers, the mac-and-cheese, the skateboards in the hallway killed his manly swagger? He leans back into the cushioned chair. Gives half a smile, and crosses one leg over his knee. Says he's glad I called. But this time he doesn't mean it. He's blinking too much, and his face is stiff.

My gut tells me I ought to turn around immediately and head right back through the hotel's ritzy doors. But I sit down and hear myself smoothly ordering a glass of sparkling water from the waitress. Maybe I'm just too stubborn to heed my gut's warning. I've got one hand to play, and I'm going to play it. Game is on.