The Odds (29 page)

He pulled the covers off. “Let me look at you. Let me look again.”

“Pick something other than my thighs.”

“What’s wrong with your thighs?”

She kept dressing and he kept looking.

“Promise you won’t be sorry.”

“Oh, I don’t like promises. I’m not trying to be coy. I just got that gotta-go feeling.”

“I’ll walk you to your car.” He got out of bed and threw his clothes on in a hurry.

Hand on her arm, hand behind her back—oh, that flat-handed touch—he knew how to touch. Nothing tentative there. She felt herself tremble.

She fetched her bag from the first floor where she’d dropped it— gun in there, credentials.

He opened the front door quietly. He grimaced. “I have to go to a mediator early next week to figure out the rules. With Judy. You want to ask me anything?”

“No.”

It was nothing, probably just sex. Two tired, horny people.

She drove home and slipped into her garage and made her way up from the basement. Dutifully she brushed her teeth, washed her face. Sleep or stay up?

Stay up. She lay down, thinking.

How odd that she didn’t know herself. In seconds she was asleep.

   NICK HAD REQUESTED GROUND meat, so she brought a package of it and buns and cheese home from Doug’s Market. She got several compliments on how well she’d done at the register. She had twelve dollars in cash in her pocket and a promise of work tomorrow when the owners would set up grills and cook out on the street—ribs, chicken, hamburgers, hot dogs—as they did every Saturday in good weather. She was already imagining leftovers she might get to bring home.

Nick had patted out burgers and was turning them over. “Not that I would call this cooking,” he said, “but I can stand long enough to flip a burger.” He was improving fast now. He had gone up the steps using one crutch and the banister. In his eyes was the dream of going, being free.

He placed slices of cheese carefully on each burger. He put on the broiler and heated the buns. The younger kids watched fascinated, as if nobody had ever done anything so complex in their kitchen.

Meg knew she was always rushing around. She thought how attractive patience was even as she dipped to the basement and put in a load of laundry. In her head she calculated what she would earn tomorrow and what she needed to buy. She figured up what she could earn at the market full-time in summer. The astounding thing was, if they all kept at their jobs, if they got in a rent payment before the landlady got nervous, they could actually stay in the house and together. If Doug’s kept her on, she would make two hundred a week; Laurie and Joel together would make between fifty and a hundred a week; that was a thousand dollars a month. They’d be together through the summer. The school year would present other problems—work hours reduced. But maybe they could save between June and September.

She’d told Nick Thursday night when they talked, late, after the others went to bed, “People don’t need much. If they think about it, if they conserve.”

“You need clothes and shoes.”

“Well, yes.”

“You need movies.”

“Don’t need them. They’d be nice.”

“People need booze.”

She got angry for a moment. There he was, looking at his stupid cup of tea.

“Who I am,” he said, “is somebody who likes bars, back rooms, you know, seedy places, seedy people.”

“You
like
that? Why?”

“It feels right.”

“Things that feel familiar feel right,” she said sharply. “You need new experiences.”

“Like? You all, you mean. I admit it’s sweet. I admit that. Believe me, I’ve thought … all the things you’ve thought of. I’ve imagined. In a different set of circumstances … You understand.”

No matter what, he was going to leave. She’d gone to bed last night, drumming that into her head, angry with him. Today she couldn’t remember the anger.

When she came up from the basement, he was doing what Susannah had described, singing—three lines from something she didn’t recognize.

“Good voice,” Laurie said to Nick. “You carry a tune.”

Meg was about to ask him to sing again, but the phone was ringing. She turned the corner to hear Joel answering it. He was ashen and he was saying, “Yes.” Then “Yes.” Then “Just did.” And “No, we’re okay.”

Meg knew from the look on Joel’s face. “What did she say?” she asked him.

“She said she thought by now we would have turned ourselves in. I told her we didn’t.”

“How did she sound?” Meg whispered.

“Like herself.”

“What did she say
exactly
?”

“Just, how did we keep going? And I said, we just did.”

The two of them walked back into the kitchen.

“Who was that?” Nick asked, seeing their faces. He was taking the burgers out of the frying pan.

“Alison,” Joel said.

“Aha! Maybe she misses you.”

Laurie said, “We don’t miss her.”

“I don’t know … she might be planning to turn us in—long distance.”

Laurie said, “I’ll kill her.”

Meg said, “Don’t talk like that.”

“I will,” Laurie said. “Honest to God.”

Susannah looked thoughtful. They all sat down at the table, because Nick was serving up the burgers.

After supper, since it was Friday, they were allowed a long night of watching television. Laurie and Joel played chess. Meg combed Susannah’s hair. All the while she worried that Alison might make the phone call that would end all this with a call to the authorities.

They were all awake when the news came on. They weren’t paying particular attention until they heard the anchorwoman say, “Nick Banks.”

Nobody spoke.

All of them stared at the TV. There was a short silent clip of the woman detective talking.

Next they heard, “in connection with a homicide a week ago on the city’s North Side. Police would like to talk to this man, who they believe may have been hurt during the killing.” Behind the anchorwoman was a police sketch of Nick. The drawing looked enough like him that nobody wanted to speak.

“They’re after me,” he said finally when the clip was finished.

“But,” Meg said, “if you listen to the phrasing, it seems like they might understand what really happened. They might just want to talk.”

“You don’t get how police are.”

“The woman detective on the TV is the same one I told you I saw up at the pizza shop.”

“I met her once. She was on this case before it became a case.”

“Why was she after you
then
?”

He shook his head. “Well, I tried to believe she just wanted to talk to me. Then I thought she was after me because I was … supposed to be in Philadelphia. Parole,” he said, nodding at Meg, who knew the details. “But she was Homicide, and she was asking about a kid who died.”

“Well, now that your picture is out there, it’s actually safer here. It’s just us. For a while. We can think this out.”

The others murmured agreement.

“No. No. I have to go. That’s the message. I have to go.” He was clearly crazy again, running already, his thoughts all jangled.

“Let him go, then,” Laurie said angrily. “People make stupid decisions all the time.”

The rest of the news seemed silly, insignificant.

For a while after the kids went upstairs to bed, they could hear the television below. “If it came down to it and I got him to turn himself in, and it got us into trouble, would you hold it against me?” Meg asked them.

“Yes,” Laurie said, but she used an inflection that suggested,
not really
.

Joel said he wanted to think about it. Susannah said a quiet no.

After Meg had got the others to sleep, she visited Nick, who was still downstairs. “If you want me to call … If you want to turn yourself in, we’ll take whatever comes to us. We understand what it means.”

“Thank you. No. Just no.”

“Make sure you sleep on it. We’re all sleeping on it.”

Back in her room, it was as if she could hear his heart still pounding.

Before she left for work in the morning, when Nick was downstairs showing Laurie how to make pancakes, she slipped the twelve dollars she had earned into her father’s wallet sitting on the bedside table in Nick’s room.

   MAC COULD HEAR HIS FATHER moving around downstairs. Bull in the house. Bellowing. That was how he thought of the man. His father was not yelling at the moment, but even when he wasn’t yelling, you could hear the yelling. Every time MacKensie thought of those big muscular shoulders and the head inclined forward, he thought of a bull. He’d made a drawing of his father like that once, when he was eight, nine years old. The teach said it was a sin to make a cartoon of your parents, but that the drawing, the artwork, was good.

MacKensie slipped the earphones of his headset over his ears and pressed the PLAY button. He listened to an old song he liked. “I just don’t give a fuuuuuck.” It was funny. “I don’t give a fuuuuuck,” he sang along.

“You awake?” his father called. The voice came through his door and past his earphones.

He didn’t answer.

After a while, he reached under the mattress and brought out the stamp bag he had stored there. Power X 3, one of three bags left in his personal stock. Almost without thinking, he opened the bag, wet his finger, took a taste. He sat up carefully. Then, trying not to creak the bedsprings, he leaned way over and extracted spoon, syringe, lighter, rubber strap from under the mattress, everything he needed.

“Hey. You awake in there?”

The door was locked, but he was worried the sound of the rapper in his ears somehow carried out the door. He heard his father’s footsteps retreat. Do it in the house with his father right there. That felt goooood.

Half. Half for later. He prepared it all slowly, so slowly, he got another call from his father before he was finished. He wanted it so badly, yet made himself be slow and
controlled
. Strong.

He prepared his arm and shot up. It was good, good, good. Too good. He almost couldn’t find the energy to put the needle and tubing away. But he did it. Then he lay there. He didn’t want to move. Or for anything to interrupt his beautiful day. Sex, music, money, everything would come to him, he could feel the luck now.

“You awake yet? I got things I need for you to do.”

He didn’t answer right away. It was still okay, still okay.

An hour and a half later, he got up.

While Mac was eating a bowl of cereal, his father hit him on the side of the head with something, some kitchen implement, yelling, “Son of a bitch. Don’t you ever stay in your room when I call you.”

“You cut me. I’m bleeding.”

“So’s my heart. Go get a Band-Aid. Don’t be a pussy or I’ll hit you again.” Then his father gave him a list of things to do.

After Mac swept a couple of floors, he looked for his moment and ducked out of the house. He was thinking, if Carl was around, it just might very well be somewhere close. That’s the way people were; they didn’t go far. He decided to just walk and look. He started up toward the house that now had police tape on it—his place no longer. He fingered the cut on his forehead where his father had hit him.

Hopeless, his father was hopeless. Why did he ever think it could be different at all? He had gone to the bathroom, cleaned up his wound a little, but hurried out of the house to see if he could give K what he wanted. He felt sick walking up the hill. His head hurt. That’s when he thought he saw Carl. Then the vision disappeared. He even walked up to and around the yard where he thought he’d seen someone … Carl. Nothing, just a boarded-up house. With his ear to the door, he tried to hear if there was any sound inside.

He turned himself around and walked over to Zero’s house, where he knocked a couple of times before he roused his friend. Zero answered the door, yawning.

“You wouldn’t believe who I saw.”

“Who?”

“Money in our pockets. Carl. Come with me.”

“I don’t think I want to mess with it. I mean, something bad might happen, right? Let’s go down my basement.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“Out. Come on, hurry.”

They shot up and got to feeling good enough that all they wanted to do was climb up to the first floor and watch television, slack-jawed, for a while.

Mac said to Zero, “I just want to find out. That’s all.”

Zero said, “Better we don’t mess with it.” He looked mellow; he was leaning back on the sofa, smiling. “We wouldn’t be here, wasn’t for him.”

“Every time I reup, K asks me about Carl. He wants him.”

“Worried about him …”

“No. You don’t get it. Worried he’ll
flip
. He almost said it. Worried he’ll flip. Where would that leave us?”

“Right,” Zero said, but now he was nervous again. “Better to just leave it alone.”

“He’s found another place. If he’s not selling anymore, what’s he do in there, huh?”

“You don’t know for sure he’s in there.”

“He’s been missing over a week. Let’s go see.”

“Not me. If we don’t see, we don’t have to say nothing.”

“You’re going with me.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Oh, yeah. Don’t shake your head.” Mac felt happy, excited, to be doing something, for all along he kept feeling there was something to be done, something to figure out and solve finally. He ran his hands through his hair and, in doing so, remembered his hair. “You think I ought to let the roots come out like this or do the blond again?”

“I don’t know. I liked the blond.”

“Okay. Let’s go. I can’t just sit here wondering.”

“Just tell Markovic where you seen him, then.”

“I just want to be sure before I say.”

“Shit.”

They left Zero’s place. Ten minutes later they arrived at the fire-damaged house Mac was looking for. They skittered around the back quickly, looked this way and that; then Zero tried the door.

“It’s not going to be fucking open,” Mac whispered, swatting Zero. He put his head to the door. “I thought I heard something. Wait. A radio or something. It stopped. He’s in there, all right.”