The Odds (25 page)

“Just about everything. Over the years. Whatever swims in the Atlantic. I even lobster-trapped for a while.”

“You have a boat?”

“No. Always worked for other people. But I’m good at it, good at boats.”

The voice Laurie had used when she said “Chaaaaange the subject” was low, gravelly, provocative, an extreme version of her little sister’s voice. Very comical. She used it now for, “Did you get seasick?” She was a kid looking for a laugh.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Everybody, eat,” Meg said. “The food will get cold. You can talk, but eat, too.”

Safe subjects. He shouldn’t have said the truth about fishing. “Are your grades good? Probably are if you’re readers.”

“Yeah.”

“A’s and B’s?”

After an odd little silence, Joel said, “No B’s. Well, Laurie got one.”

Laurie swiped at Joel. “Asshole teacher is why.”

“It’s not a hard school,” Joel said.

“And what … what are you going to do with all that brain power? Besides figure out how to save my life?”

Meg said, “I think literature. My dad studied English, and I like it. I could be a teacher or a writer.”

“I’m going into medicine,” Joel said plainly.

“He always was,” Meg said. “He knew it at age three.”

Nick turned to Laurie. “What about you?”

“Not sure. Poet, architect, something fun.”

“Susannah?”

“Artist.”

“I saw you drawing.”

“I always draw.”

When dinner was over, including a small bowl of ice cream for each, Nick looked toward the windows where the pulled blinds were the sole reminder that things weren’t normal. The windows said: reality, danger. But he didn’t want to go upstairs yet.

“You can watch TV, it’s okay. Or practice walking.”

Meg started water running in the sink. Laurie carried dishes to the sideboard and fetched the cloth for drying. In moments, Joel was sweeping the floor. Susannah put things away.

He moved to the darkened living room and back to the kitchen, practicing moving fast, pretending not to notice they had an eye on him, pretending not to watch their smallest moves, all of them, as they went about whatever else they were doing.

   CHRISTIE IS IN BED FINALLY, Marina beside him, the children asleep. “Potocki’s getting a divorce. Probably.”

“No. Where did you hear that?”

“Greer.”

“I thought he and Judy were good.”

“I know.”

“Does Greer have anything to do with it?”

“I don’t know. Complicated, huh?”

   NICK GOES TO BED WHEN the kids do, sure he will fall asleep from sheer fatigue—he has gone up and down the steps ten times using one crutch and the banister—but it doesn’t happen.

How bad would it be to stay for a while longer? After all, he has no place to go.

After a while he puts on the light. Maybe if he chooses a spot halfway through the book on the side table, reading will put him to sleep.

Soon she is in the room.

“You have school tomorrow,” he says. “You couldn’t sleep either?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“We’ve had you here since Sunday.”

“Yes.”

“It’s Wednesday. I feel like I know you. I think I do. But when I ask myself, it turns out I hardly know anything about you. I want to know.”

“What in particular?”

“Everything. And no lies.”

“Everything? Why?”

“I want to help you.”

He can’t help smiling. She has her way of angling to be in the superior position. “Are you religious or something?”

“No. Not churchgoing, if that’s what you mean.”

“All that honesty stuff. That and you should be very angry about your situation, but you’re not and I want to know why. What is that all about, huh? Religion, I figured.”

“I’m angry.”

“You are?”

“A little, yes. Well, maybe I have a kind of belief in something. It would be hard to define it.”

“Never mind. Well. I’ve been in trouble before. Is that what you’re asking?”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“Everything. From the beginning. You were born where? Your mother and father were … who?”

“Ever hear of a town, Milton?”

“No, where is it?”

“Central Pennsylvania.”

“And that’s where you grew up?”

“Yep.”

“With your foster parents?”

“I had a mother for a while, but she bailed when I was young.”

Meg’s breath catches. “Like ours.” She seems almost excited by the idea.

“And I never had a father. Just the mother for a while, don’t remember her much. My grandmother told me my mother had problems with drugs and drink and that she never should have been a mother. But she was. She didn’t much like the job. And there I was. So I lived with my grandmother.”

“And she was nice?”

“Nice, yeah, kind of out of it, though. She was old, sickly. Then one day she died. So they came and hauled me to this farm where I had foster parents—no brothers and sisters, though, just the foster parents.”

“You didn’t like them?”

“They didn’t like me. It was mutual.”

“What was the matter with them?”

“You really want to know all this?” She nods emphatically. “You’re kind of like the social worker in prison. Okay, okay.” He hesitates. “Well, they had this farm. They worked pretty hard. They were religious. And mean. They looked okay on paper, but there was nothing … nice about them. They just wanted a worker on the farm. I worked, but no matter what I did, it was never right or good enough. I guess they were a little bit—” He touches a finger to his head. “That’s what I tell myself. So you think we have something that’s alike, huh? But I wasn’t a good kid, not like you. I got in trouble at school. I hated school. I got into fights, I skipped out when I could. I wasn’t some angel. You clear on that?”

“Okay.”

“What else do you want to know?”

“How you got in trouble after that. Who you’re afraid of.”

“Oh, man, that’s a long story.”

“That’s okay.”

“It’s late at night.”

“That’s okay, too. I like late at night.”

“You think you’re going to help me?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“You already have. You’ve been …” Shit. If he continues, he might cry. Stay away from the compliments, he reminds himself. When he talks soft, he becomes a puddle of mush. “There’s nothing else you can do for me. I bought trouble.”

She straightens herself, sets her jaw firmly. “You owe it to me to tell me. You do. All I ask is facts. We went out on a limb for you.”

“Because I was kind to you.”

“It seemed impossible not to. You were so scared. Of somebody.”

“Still am.”

“That’s what you owe me. How can we not know that?”

He takes a while to think about it and decides she’s right. There is something about her that pulls at him. She’s pretty enough, or is going to be, and he finds himself thinking about her when she isn’t there, like a man falling in love. He’s wondered what his life would have been if he’d met a version of her when he was a young boy. Different. Surely.

“I’m not so used to talking.”

“No fooling.” She laughs. “You want tea?”

“No tea. Booze. I want booze.”

“You drank all our cough syrup and mouthwash.”

“You noticed.”

“Of course. We don’t have anything more. I looked. I really searched. Do you need it to talk?”

“No.”

“Who are you afraid of?”

“A guy named Markovic. He did accounts or pretended to do accounts up at the pizza shop. He hired me. I owed him money, and he put me to work.”

Meg blows out a breath as if she’s whistling, but no sound comes out. “Markovic. How is it spelled?
M-a-r-k-o-v-i-c?
”

He nods.

“What’s his first name?”

“George. What are you up to? You aren’t going to do anything stupid, are you?”

“Nothing stupid, I promise. Just tell me how you got in trouble with him.”

“By being dumb.”

“I think about finding you up at the house, and I try to figure out what happened.”

The clock on the bureau is ticking. He fancies he can see time moving , inching forward. After a while words come to him. The silences between don’t seem to bother her. He tells her everything—Markovic mentioning cousins who had work, Markovic always being a big shot, then getting kids to sell drugs.

“But how did you come into it?” she presses.

He tells her about the forty thousand owed—well, thirty-eight now.

She whistles a long quiet whistle. “From drugs?”

When he admits to the gambling, less damning than drugs, she asks if he is addicted to gambling because a person can be addicted to that, too. There isn’t anyplace this kid doesn’t go, he thinks. She asks all over again about Carl, but he doesn’t have an answer. He doesn’t know what happened to him after that night, last Friday night, how could he know? Time keeps ticking, and he tells her his real name. “Kissel. Just a dumb farm country name.”

Her face is sorrowful, but she doesn’t flinch. She swings the questions to how, if the trouble happened as far away as Philadelphia, Markovic knew to conscript him?

“That’s a real long story.” The clock shows it’s almost three in the morning. She sees him looking at it.

“School doesn’t start until eight.”

“Hey.”

“I’ll be up all night wondering. You might as well keep telling me.”

“You like my stories?”

“I do. They make sense of you. Let me go make us a cup of tea.”

When she comes back with the tea, it’s after three. “Tell me.”

“I worked for a guy who ran a gas station when I was a kid, eighteen, and looking to get away from the farm. The guy was Markovic. I was a good worker, so he liked me. I thought, I found it, finally, some luck. But. I used to go to this one bar a lot. I got in a fight, a really bad fight, with people egging me on to kill this big bruiser who was after me, but I didn’t kill him and I survived it and afterwards I left town.”

“Why did the bruiser want to kill you?”

“Well, he got the wrong idea about me. He thought he could have a night with me. …”

“Oh, he was
interested
in you.”

“Right. I said no. He got mad. I was drinking. He grabbed at me, I swung back. Then it started.”

“So you left town.”

“I got out on the highway. Turn left or right, I told myself, just go. I turned left. What I mean is, I might have ended up in Pittsburgh. I ended up in Philly. It didn’t matter to me where. For a while, I worked construction. I started crossing over the state line on the weekends going to the gaming tables in New Jersey. I was having fun. I was kind of good at cards. Either that or I got lucky, made some money anyway. Started driving a nice car, got myself a better apartment. Found some tables in Philly, illegal ones. Then everything turned the other way. I lost the apartment, lost the car. Gave up construction and went out on the fishing boats.”

“So you stopped gambling.”

“No. No, I didn’t.”

“Did you get ahead again? Winning?”

“From time to time. I got married when I was twenty-seven. Things seemed okay for a while.”

He sees her breath catch again. She doesn’t like the marriage part of the story.

“You … didn’t call her when you were in trouble?”

“It lasted all of three years. I don’t even know where she is now.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m thirty-five. You really want to know this stuff?”

“Everything.”

“All Melanie wanted was my money. The divorce was ugly and I was angry after the split because she wiped me out. I went back to the tables with this idea I was going to make back what she took from me. I owed, I borrowed to pay what I owed. …”

“Robbing Peter to pay Paul,” she says quietly.

“Whatever. Old enough story. Then some guy shows up at my place with a gun and I had nothing to pay him back with. I mean nothing. I saw he was ready to shoot me, so I went for him. I got the gun away from him, and when the maniac was still coming at me, swinging one of my lamps at my head and then grabbing for the gun, I shot him. People heard the shot, called it in, I was arrested.”

“You didn’t run?”

“No, I was calling the police myself. I ended up in jail. The gaming people have the police in their pockets. That’s what I found out. I got seven years.”

She is shaking her head, like an old woman, shaking her head.

“What? What?”

“I feel sorry for you.”

“Why?”

“The gambling and drinking.”

“You want the truth? I like both things a lot.”

“Why?”

“They make me feel … right. Like I’m going to be okay.”

“Didn’t anybody ever tell you …”

“Oh, sure. I went to AA and GA in prison. I tried to get my head straight. I had good behavior on my side. The prison officials saw that and moved me to a place more central in the state.
There’s
where I ran into Marko again.”

“He was in prison?”

“He was just about to get out of prison when I came in. We talked and talked. He told me, ‘I’ll get you out of here. I know a lawyer who can do it.’ ”

“It worked?”

“Yeah, the guy got me out. Markovic fronted him the money. Forty thousand. I worked on the fishing boats to pay him back. I was making payments, halfway there. Lawyer kept telling me Marko wanted me to get in touch personally, that he had work for me. I kept never calling. I was on parole, and trying to stay clean.”

“Drinking?”

“Never could give that up. Gambling I gave up for a while, but then I went back to it. That’s when I got in trouble and owed another roughly twenty and finally called Markovic. I knew it was a mistake. He says, ‘All you need is some new ID and they can’t find you. You come to Pittsburgh, you work for me.’ ”

“You didn’t try to get away from him?”

“I felt kind of … like I was half-dreaming, like it wasn’t real. I told myself I’d work the dumb shop, whatever he told me to do, pay off my debt, and then I’d get out. But this kid Carl told me things I didn’t want to hear. I think it showed on me.”

“Things about Markovic?”