The Face Thief (10 page)

Chapter Nineteen

T
he next morning, despite having slept terribly that night in his childhood bed, Potash was a guilty whirlwind. He raked the leaves out of his mother’s backyard drainage ditches; cleaned the oil off the garage floor where it had dripped from her ancient car. He inspected the rubber moldings of her windows, tightened the bolts on the banisters, mucked out the dishwasher, and in general, he believed, gave a good accounting of himself as a concerned, responsible firstborn son sprucing up and looking after his elderly mother.

With one terrible exception.

“So what happened, John?” she asked him that evening, landing on the very question he somehow thought his industry, his filial loyalty, his essential goodness would override. He was seated at the kitchen table while he watched her come toward him bearing a steaming tureen of soup, before sitting down in front of him, slowly, with the sense of moving many different parts into a kind of rough collaboration, and then staring at him, heavy-lidded.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“The same thing as when I asked you yesterday. You don’t seem yourself, is what. You wanna talk?”

“Well, Mom,” he said softly, deciding that a little bit of the truth, eyedroppered homeopathically into their conversation, couldn’t hurt, “I did have a little bit of a financial, uh, reversal.”

She began shaking her head slowly side to side. “Oof,” she said, “that’s terrible. And especially now. Bad investment?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“Does Anabella know?”

He smiled at her priorities. His mother was secretly convinced, he sometimes felt, that he didn’t deserve a woman as beautiful and openhearted as his new wife. She seemed perpetually in fear that Anabella would somehow discover the truth about him and show him the door.

“No, she doesn’t.”

“Well, that’s good. “

Potash stared silently into his lap, and then some surge of self-revulsion, some desire to make a clean breast of it, caused him to say, “But I lost a lot.”

“Really?” Her eyes sharpened. “And you can’t get it back?”

“Probably not, though I’m trying.”

“Well, so how much?” she asked, and that original strange tremor of self-revulsion, deepening rapidly, snatched the words out of his mouth.

“Most of my savings, along with a big chunk of Anabella’s too.”

She brought a hand to her lips and gave a weak, high little cry.

“No, God! And our nest egg?”

He nodded, miserable, while she slumped in her chair and became visibly smaller. Once, watching a rogue elephant shot on a game preserve, he’d seen how the impact of its death, in waves, finally reached the thoughtful old creature. Its initial response had been to grow older on the spot. His mother grew older.

“It’s impossible,” she said, reaching forward and loading a huge slab of butter onto her corn muffin.

“Mom, your cholesterol.”

“The hell with my cholesterol!”

She would at least loan him her disgust. She had emotions enough for the two of them, and refinement and profanity were the flip sides of her temperament.

“Goddamnit to hell!” she shouted in her raspy high voice.

Potash reached out to touch her reassuringly, but then he interrupted the gesture halfway and drew back his hand. “I know,” he said. “I feel like a complete idiot. No, that’s not what I feel. I feel . . . oh, who cares what I feel.”

“It’s a signal,” she was muttering to herself. “It’s a signal it’s all over. Otherwise, why? It makes no sense. Always something, and if not this, then that, and if not that, then the other, with no end in sight, ever.” She shut her eyes and began singing in a low voice, “Oh no, honey, tell me about the money, tell me about the money in the here and now.” Then she opened her eyes again. “Maybe I misheard. Say it again, but this time with a happy ending. Tell me it’s not true, John.”

“I wish it wasn’t so, Ma. But yes, it is.”

“Is it a woman thing?” she asked suddenly.

“What?”

She continued staring at him. “You heard me.”

“What are you talking about?”

By degrees, the natural warmth was leaving her face. A harsh, stony look was coming over her. “You’re a smart boy, and smart boys don’t usually lose everything unless they turn dumb, or a little birdie makes them that way.”

“Please.”

She cupped a hand to her large ear. “I didn’t hear you deny it.”

“Okay. I deny it.”

“How nice for you. You think I’m stupid?”

No, he did not. She’d never been anyone’s dupe. She’d married a man she loved and dutifully stood by his side as they marched in old-fashioned lockstep through a world whose shocks and distortions they could never have foreseen. And now that she was at the end of the line, she wanted, justifiably, to have some peace.

Instead, he’d come creeping around with his wheedling needs, his heartstring-tickling bullshit. And furthermore, astonishingly, she was right. It
was
a sex thing, in the broadest terms.

Potash looked away from her, to the bow windows where the great-great-grandchildren of the same birds that had accompanied his earliest boyhood memories skipped and fussed in the branches, tweeting with the same brainless, ever-fresh gusto as ever.

“And the police?” she asked.

“Nothing there,” he said to the window, grateful for a conversational avenue leading away from himself. “I made calls, but the police quickly passed me to people at the FBI. The word I got back is that, yes, they can send their fraud units into action and build a case, but the chances of recovery of my, uh, assets, are, in the words of the articles I’ve read, ‘disappointingly small.’ However, I’ve hired a private investigator.”

He looked into her face for consolation but saw nothing there.

“But you had lots of money, John.”

“I know.”

“I mean, lots of money, ours and your own. You were doing so very well.”

There it was again: the square, settled certainty that had been part of the birthright of her generation. If you had something, you kept ahold of it: whether it was savings, a house or a spouse.

“Yes,” he said.

Again a long sigh. He knew that one day he’d hear that same gravelly outflow of breath, with no intake following it, and she’d be gone, vanished with astonishing totality—the entire person down to the tiniest grains simply whisked away into the void. A week, a month from now, a year if he were lucky. The mystery of his human origins thereby sealed forever shut, and the directional wind of life picking up speed toward his own oblivion.

“Mom,” he said softly.

On the plane ride over, he had briefly entertained the wild idea of asking her to do a reverse mortgage on her house, thereby freeing up a few hundred thousand dollars for him and his brother to divide. This was grotesque and unseemly. It smelled bad in his own nose. But aloft in the suspended enclosure of the plane, it had briefly seemed reasonable.

“John,” she said simply in response, and he saw the real, undeniable pain in her face, and his own heart misgave him for even thinking such a thing. He was looking for succor; he was hoping she might extend a protective canopy over his exposed head as she had so many times during his childhood and prevent the inclemencies of life from drumming him senseless. But to ask her to rescue him at her advanced age, and in his state of looming bankruptcy and confusion—it was beyond dishonorable. It was unthinkable.

On the spot, inventing clumsily, he said, “But the good news is that Anabella’s brother has these ancient bonds, these old munis that he never cashed in, and he’s giving us a bridge loan. I’m telling you all this now because, well, I needed to get it off my chest and clear my conscience, you know?”

“John,” she repeated in the identical intonation, clearly disbelieving him, and then, saying nothing more, she began to eat. He smiled, feeling sick to his stomach, and ladled himself a bowl of soup and raised a spoonful to his mouth. It was astonishingly good.

Chapter Twenty

T
he rehab center was like a hospital minus all the cold medical bits. The corridors were sunnier, the smells were gentler, the sounds were softer, and the rooms weren’t filled with beaked and horrible machinery for removing parts of you. Instead, there were large, high-ceilinged spaces with mats on their floors as thick as puddings, along with piles of stretchy bright rubber bands that many of the elderly residents pulled with their knees and the dwindled chicken wings of their arms. There were shower chairs with too many armrests for putting you in and wheeling you into the shower if your legs didn’t work; heat rooms, cold rooms, weight rooms and gym rooms; rooms with plunge baths, and rooms piled full of bolsters and foam wedges like gardens of geometrical clouds.

The problem was that the staff of the facility was
so
nice, and
so
eager to help, and looked at you with
such
emotions of sympathy and understanding, that it was all she could do not to drive a plastic fork into their eyes. It was coming back, oh yes it was, and one thing coming with it was the feeling that the worst people were frequently the nicest, and if that were the case, then she was among some of the very worst people on earth.

Twice a day, she was scheduled to do an hour or two of therapy. Her physical therapy was all about balance, and her therapist was a little bouncing ball of a man named Nino. Under his direction, she tried—and failed—to hop like a frog, or stand on one foot and attempted to raise her other leg until it was parallel to the floor. She walked wobbling in a circle wearing special ankle weights and a weighted vest while watching the city turn in the opposite direction outside the window, many floors below. In another series of lessons she spent time on memory and cognition, rowing her mind up and down sequences of numbers, filling in the blanks, reading out loud, or doing word associations.

Too often, in the downtime when she didn’t have to do anything, and would have been happy merely to lie in bed with the past walking across her mind, Dan France was there. He was there a lot. He wore casual clothes and a permanent smile, like a plaque. He looked at her with a melting look that was clearly his idea of what cute was. He was used to being admired. He was used to being listened to. At least he was handsome. But did he know how obvious he was?

Then, one day, he tried to kiss her. She saw it coming like a sailboat over the horizon line. She sat in a chair in her room while he put his hands on her shoulders and raised himself up on his toes and gave her his warmest smile and bent over at the waist to lean in close.

On the television above her bed, tuned to the closed-circuit view of the rehab underground parking garage, cars, like silverfish, darted regularly in and out of open spaces.

“What,” she said.

She knew exactly what. The kiss would be the opener for the doggishly attentive Dan France, and a day, a week or a month afterward, he would clumsily fold his forepaws over her shoulders and then push his red, wet erection back and forth between her legs until it foamed over. He’d snarl and snap and bite her neck in his excitement and then lick her cheek when he was done.

“You,” he said, doing abashed.

“What about me?”

“I’m digging you.”

“Well, I’m feeling dug.”

“How does that feel?”

“Better than a sock in the head.”

“I think you’re wonderful.”

“Thanks,” she said, stifling a tiny yawn.

“Margot?” He stood back up.

“Yup?” A speech, instead of a kiss. She hoped it wouldn’t be a long one. Dan France was capable of floating lengthy air-deadeners at the drop of a hat.

“I thought,” he said, “that it would be important that we get some stuff squared away.”
Now he squatted down in front of her.
“ ’Cause you see,” he said, “the gaps in the paper trail our people have collected on you are odd. I’m hoping they’re not part of a deliberate pattern.”

“Pattern?” Her eyes drifted back up to the TV set and the curvetting car-bugs. “How?”

Reaching behind him, he grabbed a chair one-handed and pulled it squealing toward him and sat down.

“Listen,” he said, “is there anything you want to tell me?”

Her boredom was deepening.

“As in?” she asked.

“Anything,” he said. “Anything at all?”

“I don’t know. That I wish I was out of here? That the memory rehab stuff drives me nuts? That I wish I had been a fashion designer?”

“Fashion designer?”

“I always loved clothes.”

“Well, what did you end up doing instead?”

“What?”

“What was the job you ended up doing in life, Margot?”

“You’re the one with the answers, you tell me.”

“Well, that’s my point. Your paper trail is kinda unusual.”

“So shoot me, Dan.”

“No, I mean
very
unusual.”

She looked at him directly, a measuring glance.
“What are you trying to say?”

“Simply this.” He leaned closer, and she was again struck by the sheer mass of him. “Our internal reporting people did a workup of you, following your Social Security records, your mailing addresses, your various driver’s licenses and registration addresses and your tax returns. You seem to have had a fairly regular life as a college student and afterward. Paying your taxes, moving on up in life. At a certain point we have you going from Northampton to New York City. You get a job at a magazine called”—he looked down and riffled through his papers—“
Cachet.
”

“Yes,” she said, stifling the urge to yawn again, stronger this time. “That rings a bell.”

“But here’s the thing, Margot.”

Her face was still held in the tension of a suppressed yawn when he said slowly, “After your stint at
Cachet,
you continue paying rent and utilities for your apartment, but for the rest, your paper trail, which is to say you, simply disappears into thin air.”