Don't Be Afraid (9 page)

Well, she knew how to make them pay attention. It hadn’t been just a threat to take her business elsewhere, either. Meredith was just about convinced that it was the realty office itself that was bringing her all this bad luck. Probably bad feng shui.

She dialed Amy Moran’s number. Again. It was easily the fourth time today that she’d gotten the woman’s voice mail. Was this woman ever working?

She heard the faint ring of the doorbell as she fought her way into a blush-pink lycra-and-spandex ensemble that made her look ten pounds thinner. She had the shirt over her head when a sudden voice made her jump.

“Amy Moran is here, ma’am.”

“Jesus, Gloria!”

The woman didn’t hear her. She was already making the bed, moving with the same slow efficiency with which she did everything else.

Amy Moran stood in the foyer examining a framed black-and-white photo of mountains, looking far more cool and collected than she had a right to with an unhappy client.

“Is this an Ansel Adams?” she said, looking up when she heard Meredith’s footsteps on the stairs.

“I have no idea,” Meredith said crisply. “Is the sign up in my yard?”

“It’ll be up later today. Four at the latest.”

“I want it up now.”

The realtor nodded. “I know, I’m sorry, but it’s been a very bad week—”

“Ms. Moran, I’m not interested in hearing another sob story—I want the
FOR SALE
sign in my yard and I want it now.”

“I’m afraid I can’t put it in for you. You need a hole digger to sink the wooden pole. I don’t carry a hole digger around in my trunk.”

Meredith thought she might truly choke with rage. “Is that what you came here to tell me?”

“No, I came to tell you that I’ve got two more showings arranged.”

“It’s about damn time. Who are they?”

“Um, I’m not sure . . .” the woman faltered, struggling to open her leather purse as if the answer was somehow mysteriously contained inside. Meredith didn’t bother to hide her annoyance.

“You’re not sure? Look, I don’t want my time wasted with people who aren’t serious buyers. Don’t you vet any of these people before showing them better properties? Why on earth should I put myself through so much for people who can’t even afford my house?”

Amy extracted a notebook and flipped through its pages. “One’s a neurosurgeon. He’s relocating with his family from Atlanta. Does he meet your criteria?”

The sarcasm was hidden. Just. Meredith longed to yank out the chignon, rip the wool suit and reduce this woman to tears. She had to settle for looking unimpressed.

“And the other one?”

“A lawyer.”

“Just a lawyer? What kind of law?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t ask her,” Amy snapped. “I do know that she works for one of the biggest firms in New York.”

“Oh. Well, that sounds good.” Things were definitely looking up. “When are the showings?”

“Friday.”

“And is the open house being advertised for tomorrow?”

“You’re not on the open house schedule for Sunday—”

“Oh, yes, I am. I made it very clear when I talked to Poppy that I expect another open house this Sunday.” Meredith tried to do the deep breathing she’d learned in her yoga class, massaging her temples to stave off the migraine she could feel beginning to pulse.

“Poppy didn’t mention that—”

“Then talk to Poppy. But I expect you here on Sunday and I expect to see it advertised, unlike last time.” Meredith checked her watch and saw that she now had all of five minutes to get to her spin class. Was it any wonder that she needed another Botox treatment only four months after the last one?

“I’ll try, Mrs. Chomsky, but—”

“Don’t try,” Meredith said, ushering the realtor ahead of her out the door. “Just do it.”

In his sleep, Mark returned to the same place over and over. One
A.M.
, near an intersection on the Lower East Side. There’s a call on the radio but it goes to static. Domestic dispute in an apartment building near the corner they’re staking out. Neighbors complaining about two men fighting.

“Probably some faggots,” Mark’s partner says and his laugh seems to echo, going on for a long time in the silence of the night.

“We’re on it,” Mark radios in. They step out of the Taurus, regulation unmarked, and scan the corner one more time. There are supposed to be some heroin sales going on here, but narcotics can’t be bothered with some penny-ante single sales. They sure as hell aren’t going to take one of their men off the smuggling case they’re about to crack to pull in homicide’s low-level drug dealer suspect in last week’s no-name, pull-from-the-river gangland killing.

So Mark and Tyson have been here for three nights waiting for action that never happens, the Taurus getting full of wrappers from Mickey D’s because Tyson has this thing for Quarter Pounders and he’s a big man with a big appetite.

The apartment’s a walk-up, naturally. They can hear the fighting before they get to the fifth floor. Loud shouting, male voices and the occasional sound of something shattering. They’re both sweating in the stifling heat of the stairwell and Tyson’s cursing as they take the last flight ’cause his knees haven’t been good since he played high school ball.

He pounds on the door when they get there, using his best Black Panther don’t-take-no-shit voice to tell the noisy fools that the police are there and they’d better open the fuck up. Dead silence. Tyson grins over his shoulder at Mark. They hear whispering and Tyson pounds again, demanding that they open up and open up now.

When the door opens, and it seems to open in slow motion, Mark is behind Tyson, backing him up. The door swings open and there’s that unmistakable
pop
, Mark swears he hears that
pop
, and Tyson clutches his chest and drops, all in one motion. Mark shouts his name and then the figure in the doorway swings his way, arm rising in his direction, something dark in the hand—

Mark woke with a gasp, ambulance sirens ringing in his head. Only they were real and he stumbled out of bed and was halfway to the door when the sirens faded into the distance.

He was sweating, even though the temperature had dropped to freezing, and he stripped off his T-shirt and mopped his face with it before heading out to the bathroom across the hall. It was dark, but there in the light socket next to the mirrored cabinet was the same night-light he’d grown up with, a small plastic crucifix, the Jesus figure glowing. His mother had brought it home from a retreat years before and it had been in this small bathroom ever since. Unless it broke, it would probably stay here forever because his parents seemed to think that you needed divine intervention in every single room in the house.

He pissed and washed his hands and then splashed cool water over his face, trying not to think about the dream, not to see Tyson falling, that arm raised in his direction.

A small tap at the door startled him. Mark hastily turned off the water. His mother stood outside the bathroom, huddled in a red fleece robe that he’d given her for Christmas the year before.

“I heard the water,” she whispered. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry, I woke you—especially on your night off.”

He found it hard to meet her eyes when she looked at him with such a knowing expression.

“Are you hungry? Come on in the kitchen and I can make you something to eat.”

“No. Thanks, Mom, but I think I’ll just head back to bed.”

But she tugged his arm with her small hand, ushering him along to the kitchen. “I’ve got just the thing to help you sleep.”

She switched on the light in the small kitchen and pushed him toward the table. “Sit. I’ll do this.”

“Mom, I’ve got to be up in a few hours.”

“Yes, yes.” She had her back to him, fussing at the stove and opening the fridge to fetch something she poured into a saucepan.

“Tell me that’s not warm milk.”

“It always helped you fall back to sleep after nightmares. Do you remember?”

“I’m not sure you’ve noticed, but I’m not ten anymore.”

“So? You still have nightmares, don’t you?” She shot another knowing look over her shoulder.

“I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“We’ve covered that,” she said in a deep growl that was such a perfect imitation of his pre-stroke father that Mark burst out laughing.

His mother smiled. “Hush, you’ll wake your dad.” She brought two mugs of milk to the table and then fetched the bear-shaped bottle of honey.

“I’d prefer a shot of whiskey,” he said, reaching for the honey and drizzling it into his mug.

“The last thing you need is more liquor.”

Mark blushed. “I haven’t been drinking that much.”

“Oh? Is this what you did in the city? Every night out to the bars?”

His blush deepened and he avoided her gaze, relentlessly stirring the milk. “I’m a grown man.”

“Who’s still my son. I want to know what’s going on with you.”

“Nothing’s going on with me.”

“You’re out until all hours drinking. I heard you crying out in your sleep. You look tired and run-down.”

Mark scowled at the milk and took a small sip.

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“You’re so far from fine that I’m not sure you even remember what the word means.”

“Don’t you have enough to deal with? I’m not one of your patients.”

The smack of his mother’s hand on the table startled him. “Jesus, you made me burn my mouth.”

“Do you need some ice?”

“No, it’s okay.”

“How about some water?”

“No, I’m fine. I mean, I think I’m fine, but I’m not sure I remember what that word even means.”

“Smart mouth.”

They smiled at each other and for a few minutes there was just companionable silence. Why it happened in that silence, Mark didn’t know, but all at once his eyes filled and spilled over and he was crying. It wasn’t a few dignified tears either, but real crying with long, ragged-sounding sobs.

Mark turned in his seat, swiping at his eyes and struggling to contain himself. Then he felt her hand on his head, softly stroking. When she pressed gently, he let his head fall forward against her and allowed himself to be held.

 

 

The clock said four
A.M.
Amy was wide awake, lying alone in the dark in the spacious cavern of the bed they’d once shared together, thinking of Chris. Out of habit, out of desire for what wasn’t, she still slept on what had always been her side of the bed, though lately she’d begun creeping toward the middle. It was here, in the quiet of the night, that she missed him the most. The irony was that sex, which had been at the heart of her troubles with Chris, was also the only thing that had worked perfectly for them.

She’d been angrier with him than with any person she’d ever known and still, even at the height of whatever fight they’d been having, she could fall into bed with him. Of course, that was exactly what he was doing with everybody else, and that was the problem.

“He chases anything in a skirt.” She’d heard an adult use that expression when she was growing up and thought they were talking about a neighbor’s German shepherd. She’d always been naïve.

When she looked back at her first meeting with Chris, all the signs had been there. They met at a frat party she’d been dragged to by a friend and he’d been attending with another girl.

“Don’t you like parties?” he’d asked, finding her nursing a beer in the kitchen and examining the photos someone had stuck to the dirty fridge with alphabet magnets. He’d smiled at her, his trademark boyish grin, the charm kicking in automatically because she was a girl, because she was there, because he could never resist the challenge of having a female focus her attention on him.

Amy sighed and rolled to her other side, trying to forget the way it felt when he’d moved toward her, extending one arm to rest on the fridge so that he was almost touching her shoulder, his head ducking down, ostensibly looking at the photos. She could smell the citrus shampoo he used on his sunshine hair and see the tiny freckle on one earlobe.

The other girl, his date, found them like that, announcing her arrival with a fake cough and a pissed-off sounding, “Chris?”

She should have known then, watching him in action. Seeing how swiftly he moved, turning that smile on the other girl and taking her in his arms as if she were a meal he’d been waiting for. “Baby,” he’d said, just loud enough for Amy to hear. “Baby, where’ve you been? I’ve been looking for you.”

Warning bells should’ve sounded, but they didn’t because she was naïve and because that was part of Chris’s charm. Instead, she’d wished that she were that girl in his arms. She’d felt that desire flash through her, a tingling sensation that reached up inside her and shook her to her core. She thought it was the sign that she’d met her one true love and not that he had some unique ability to tickle a woman’s G-spot without even touching her.

When Amy saw him on campus the next day, she thought it was a happy accident of fate. When she went to bed with him the following week, she thought they’d both been briefly overcome by passion. When she married him the summer after graduation, she thought it was funny when he stumbled over the word “fidelity.”

She was six months pregnant with Emma when she got her wake-up call. Chris worked late nights, the golden boy of the Manhattan firm where his uncle was a senior partner. They lived in a small, but modernized apartment in Brooklyn in a good building. It was affordable only because it was rent-stabilized and they had help from their parents, and she was still working at the gallery in SoHo and spending evenings and weekends trying to work on her own portfolio.

It was summertime and they had a single air-conditioning unit in their bedroom. She was trying to find a comfortable spot on the lumpy mattress, looking through some photos she’d taken of barges on the East River and trying to ignore the kickboxing going on in her stomach. When the phone rang, she had to waddle into the other room to answer it.

“Is Chris there?” A breathy, giggly, little-girl-in-a-big-girl’s-body voice.

She was curious, but not alarmed. Not yet. “He’s not here right now. May I take a message?”

“Oh. No, I’m sure he’ll be here soon. Thanks!”

Click
. She’d rung off before Amy could ask where “here” was. She paused, wondering if it was a wrong number, just a weird coincidence that the person calling had been looking for a Chris. Then she hit the redial.

“Hi!” Breathy voice again, sounding happy. Conversation in the background, the sound of glasses clinking.

“Hi, you just called my number? You were looking for Chris?”

“Yeah?”

“Chris Moran?”

“Yeah. Listen, is he coming or not?”

“Where?”

“What?”

“Where is he supposed to meet you?”

“Longfellow’s on Ninth. Who is this?”

“Who are you?”

A pause and then she heard a whispered, “Oh, shit.” The phone clicked quietly off.

She rang again and this time no one answered, not then and not the next two times she called. She took the phone with her back to bed and stared at the photos of barges until they blurred into black-and-white pixels. At two
A.M.
she heard Chris’s key in the door. She didn’t call out. She didn’t say anything, listening to the sounds of him taking off his jacket, peeing, brushing his teeth and slowly undressing in the tiny hallway, leaving his clothes in a neat pile on a chair, something he always did so he wouldn’t wake her up when he came home.

“Whoa, baby, you’re up late.” He looked startled, the self-assurance gone just for a split second, but then the smile was back. He sank down on the bed next to her, resting a hand on her belly. “What’s wrong, is Sprout giving you trouble?”

“Sprout” was for the baby growing inside whose sex they’d been dying to find out but decided not to at the ultrasound a week before. Amy had been ecstatic that day and unable to sleep that night because her baby was healthy and whole and beautiful.

“Where were you?”

“Have you been missing me? I’m so sorry, baby, but it’s this case. It’s killer.”

He’d stripped down to his boxers, but she found herself sniffing him anyway. Could she detect another scent? She leaned toward him and he laughed.

“Oh, I see.” His hand snaked down and rubbed her mound through the thin nightgown. “Have I been neglecting you?”

There was shame at feeling herself aroused by him. “Did you make it to Longfellow’s?”

The hand stilled, but just for a moment. He brought his mouth down to her thighs, licking up the insides, long, slow strokes of his tongue inching closer and closer to the part of her that always responded to his attention.

She arched toward him automatically, but realized it and stopped, filled with a sudden rage at him for being so manipulative, at her for being so easily manipulated.

Arching her right thigh, she caught him hard in the jaw. “Get off!”

“Ow! What the fuck?” He was stunned, kneeling there in bed beside her, holding his hand to his cheek with a wounded expression. She found she didn’t care.

“I know you were at Longfellow’s, Chris. What I’d like to know is who the woman is that you were meeting.”

He was going to lie. She watched it on his face and wondered how she could have been fooled for so long. He must have seen her expression because he sighed, a long drawn-out sound of defeat.

“She’s just a woman I met at a bar. A nobody.”

The first thought she’d had was to wonder if that’s how he’d referred to her back in college. Who was that girl in the kitchen? Oh, just a nobody.