Burning Blue (12 page)

“Total perv. Dude was always looking down my shirt. Besides, he quit.”

“You bummed him out because you’re smarter than he is. Hate when that happens.”

“He’s post-doc at Columbia. Nobody’s smarter than he is. I used to like chemistry. This is good, being in the car with you. Moving. Windows down. I don’t even mind the rain. I can breathe. Before, in the hall, I was heading for the doors, somebody taps my shoulder, and I did a face plant with my backpack covering my head.”

“Why do people find that shit funny?”

“No, she just wanted to tell me she was sorry about what happened. That girl in Dr. Schmidt’s the other day, with the cat’s ears hairdo? I forget her name.”

“Angela Sammick.”

“She wanted to apologize. For staring at me, you know?”

“More like gawking.”

“She wasn’t the first, believe me.”

“Hey, you and Dave, what were you guys fighting about that day?”

She frowned.

My phone vibrated. Starbucks Cherry, text:
Congratulations, you’ve won our deal of the week. Just for YOU, Jay Nazzaro, we’re holding a leftover day-old pistachio muffin. Please stop by to claim your prize.

Now I frowned.

“Girlfriend trouble?” Nicole said.

“Just plain old trouble trouble. Where are we headed, by the way?”

“To awesomeness. Trust me. She’ll knock you out.”

“Emma?” I said.

“Emma.”

The elevator doors opened. She flinched and checked to be sure the car was empty. We got in. “This was the best thing to come out of the pageant deal,” she said. “Getting hooked up with volunteering here. My mom came with me that first day, just to check it out, and now she’s here every afternoon. She comes to laugh.”

“Laugh?”
I could think of few things sadder than kids with cancer.

“You’ll see.”

The elevator made a bouncy stop on the second floor. The doors opened. Nicole held her breath. Nobody got on the elevator. The doors closed. The elevator rumbled upward.

“Hey, the pageant thing?” I said. “I don’t know. You don’t seem the type.”

“My mother asked me to try out. She was freaked that Dad would play hardball in the divorce settlement. She had me apply for every scholarship out there. My grandmother made my mom do it, and that was the way she got the money to go to Sarah Lawrence. Everybody loves to hate the girls because they’re pretty, but they’re also really smart and motivated to do great things, teach, go into politics, philanthropy. They’re big-hearted. We were sisters.”

“He’s being a dick about money, your father?”

She shook her head. “He’s the best. He never said anything about the pageant stuff, but I could tell he was bummed about it. He’s the quiet type. Low-key, conservative, don’t draw attention to yourself. He definitely has an eye for the ladies, though. Wait’ll you meet my mom.”

“Seriously?”

“Calm down, boy.”

“I saw her on the ’net, but only partially. That news clip. The reward money offer.”

We stopped at the sixth floor. The doors opened. A tall dude in a mechanic’s jumper was fixing a light. He did a double take on Nicole. She tensed and turned to hide her face. The doors closed. “Bet your dad has an eye for the ladies too,” she said.

Six years after my mother’s death, and my father was nowhere near getting over her. “Why do you say that?”

“Because you’re gorgeous. Therefore your mother must be gorgeous.”

“You’re insane.”

“You don’t like to talk about them, your parents. No response?”

I shrugged. “How many more floors?” I said.

“This one.” The elevator doors opened, and Nicole was a new person, totally relaxed. She knew all the nurses’ names as she led me down the hall. Anthropomorphized animals danced on the walls. A party clown with a therapy dog headed into a room. A boy, maybe six, hugged Nicole. His head was bandaged. “Mom was worried,” he said. “She kept saying she hoped you weren’t in a car accident.”

“We hit a little traffic,” Nicole said.

“And you couldn’t call to tell her that?”

“You sound like Mom.”

The kid grabbed my hands and used me as a swing. “We all call Nic’s mom Mom,” he said. Then, “Dude, wait!” He ditched us for the therapy dog. His sneakers lit up each time his heels hit the floor.

We turned into a room where a woman was sitting with a bunch of kids around a short table, teaching them to finger paint. Nicole would look almost exactly like her in twenty-five years. “I thought you were in an accident,” she said.

“Traffic.”

“And you couldn’t call to tell me that?” Nicole wasn’t kidding. Mrs. Castro may even have been as pretty as her daughter, but not as beautiful. She smiled warmly. “So
this
is Jay, bearer of broken umbrellas.” She balled her hands so she wouldn’t get paint on my back as she hugged me tightly. I was a little startled. She said to Nicole, “She’s waiting for you.”

Emma was in bed, asleep. She was maybe ten or so. A vaporizer puffed white smoke.

“Em?” Nicole tickled the girl’s foot.

An oxygen cannula tied into her nose. She was pale with dark circles under her eyes. I didn’t see any signs that she was breathing.

“Oh my god,” Nicole said. She shook the girl. “Em? Em!”

The girl grabbed Nicole and tickled her.

“
Not
funny, miss,” Nicole said. “This is my friend Jay. Jay, this is my totally obnoxious friend Emma.”

“Yo,” Emma said. She gave me a high pound with a shaky fist. Then to Nicole: “He
is
a hottie.” Back to me: “So how does that make you feel, that my ridiculously beautiful girl here thinks you’re hot?”

“My experience is that girls often confuse hot with tall.”

Emma grabbed my hand. Hers was tiny in mine and trembling and a little blue. “I like him, Nic. Like the vampire in the movie, the good one. I love vampires.”

“We all do,” I said.

“I like to scare myself stupid.”

“Me too.”

“Mom’s gonna use the umbrella in one of her sculptures.” She winked at me.

“How old are you?” I said.

She made her voice deep with a British accent: “Veddy, veddy
old
.”

“Stop flirting for five seconds and tell us what trouble you were up to today,” Nicole said.

“Wrote a poem for you. The assignment was: Find a small treasure and offer a gratitude for living in a free country. I wrote it this morning, before the rain.” Emma flipped up her laptop screen. “‘I look out my perfectly crooked window blinds and see freedom of an immaculate sort. The tops of the pines tickle into a wilderness of blue and white, and all I need now is red. And what do you know, I have it here, this heart-shaped Valentine’s box Kevin Connelly gave me but last year. Sweet candy is this America.’”

Nicole kissed the girl’s forehead and turned to me. “See?” she said. Then to Emma: “You were eating raspberry sherbet.”

“That mind-reading thing? Annoying.”

“It’s all over your face.” Nicole took Emma to the bathroom.

“I have your father’s book,” Mrs. Castro said.

“You and like three other people,” I said.

“It was a best seller, at least in art history circles.”

“Must’ve been before I was born.”

“It was, actually. It’s a definitive text, you know? I met him once.”

“Seriously?”

“Briefly. At a show he was covering. We didn’t get a chance to speak. My husband saw to that.” Her eyes were glazing over. “He and your father had words.”

“My father hit on you?”

“No, no, of course not. They were arguing about one of the paintings. Rafael can be a bit insecure, and maybe your dad had a little too much wine, and . . . You know what, Jay? It was a long, long time ago. I shouldn’t have brought it up. Really, sweetheart, it was nothing more than a little tiff. Don’t mention this to Nicole, all right? She gets mad at me when I talk about her father behind his back, and she’s right to do so. Secret kept?”

“I’ll let my father know you liked the book.”

She smiled, but sadly. She nodded toward the bathroom. Nicole had left the door open. She and Emma were in a tickle fight at the sink. Nicole had an amazingly cool laugh, loud, nothing fake about it.

“Isn’t it just awful?” Mrs. Castro said. “She was so beautiful.”

“Because I don’t want you driving at this hour,” Mrs. Castro said. We were crossing the atrium that led to the parking lot. “It’s not you, Nicole—”

“It’s the other people on the road, I know, I know.”

“With the glare?” Mrs. Castro said. “It’s impossible for
anybody
to see.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t drive either,” Nicole said.

“You’re not supposed to be driving without an adult in the car anyway, especially after dark.”

“Everybody—”

“You’re not everybody. Are we really fighting about this?”

“What about the car?” Nicole said.

“I’ll come back later with Sylvia. Jay, we’ll drive you home.”

“That’s okay, it’s the exact opposite direction.”

“What’s with you two? Here’s how it works: Mom says, you do, everybody’s life is so much easier, see? We’ll grab a bite at the diner on the way.” She stroked my hair. “I love his hair,” she said to Nicole. “So soft.”

“I know. I hate him. He doesn’t even put anything in it.”

“I want to braid it.”

“Just one long one, though,” Nicole said. “Right down the back.”

“Yes, Snoop braids would be too much.”

“Listen to you, getting all Snoop,” Nicole said.

“Hello, Snoop is my age. Drop it like it’s
hawt,
drop it like it like it’s
hawt.
”

“Oh my god, Mom, stop!”

I was trying to remember when Nicole had touched my hair. Must have been while I was recovering from the seizure at the stables.

“Call your mother, Jay,” Mrs. Castro said. “Let her know you’re eating with us.”

I didn’t want to get into the whole thing about my mom or the fact that my dad was gone for the week. I pulled my phone and texted
Grabbing dinner w a friend
and sent it to my Gmail. I smiled at Mrs. Castro. She put her arm around me and said, “Thanks.” She was walking between Nicole and me, her arms over our backs. “Put your arm over my shoulder,” she said. “Now shorten your stride.”

“Just do it,” Nicole said. “Now look.” She nodded at our feet. The three of us were walking in step.

“I don’t get it,” I said, but they both laughed. And then they stopped laughing when we came to the exit. They scanned the parking lot, and then we hurried to Mrs. Castro’s Mercedes.

Mrs. Castro paid the check, and then she and Nicole headed for the bathroom. Just as I was about to step outside, I saw Shane Puglisi’s battered old Honda in the back of the parking lot. The car was empty. I scanned the lot for Puglisi but didn’t see him. I doubled back through the diner to the fire exit and crossed the alarm wires to fry the circuit. I’d forgotten my pocketknife, but out back I found an old-fashioned glass soda bottle in a recycle rack. I wrapped it in wet cardboard I pulled from the Dumpster. I cracked the bottle until the neck was a short sharp point. I tucked it point up under the right front wheel of Puglisi’s Honda with the point between the tire seams. If I’d had more time, I would have just let the air out of the tire. On the way back in, I told a waitress the fire alarm door was broken. “How do you know?” she said.

“I went through it, and the alarm didn’t go off.”

Mrs. Castro and Nicole were waiting for me by the register. They were laughing and talking in low voices until they saw me, and then they stopped talking but kept laughing.

“He’s outside,” I said. “The photographer dude.”

Now they stopped laughing. They followed me out the back way. Two waitresses were checking out the door. The one I’d talked to said to the other, “See?”

Puglisi was out front, his eyes on the entrance. He didn’t see us coming around the side of the building as we headed for Mrs. Castro’s Mercedes.

“Nicole!” somebody behind us said. We spun into the camera flash. It was Puglisi’s partner Meyers, the dude who acted like he was trying to pick up Nicole in CVS. We hurried for the car, bunching around Nicole.

“Show it to us, Nicole,” a third dude yelled from Nicole’s blind side, jumping up from between two parked cars with another camera flash.

Puglisi was in on it now too. The three of them circled us and clicked away. Mrs. Castro reached into her bag and pulled what appeared to be a foot-long club. She swung it, and it extended into a reflective silver umbrella. We clustered behind it as we pushed forward for the Mercedes.

“How bad is the burn, Nicole?”

“What about the eye? Did they have to take it out?”

They were right on top of us but careful not to touch us, because, I would find out later, any physical contact was considered assault.

Puglisi’s telephoto lens was in Nicole’s face as Mrs. Castro opened the car door and pushed Nicole into the back. “What’s your boyfriend’s name?” Puglisi said.

“I’m not her boyfriend,
Shane.
I’m her bodyguard.”

The three of them laughed at that.

“How are things down at 14-98 34th Avenue?” I said. That was Puglisi’s address.

“Things at 14-98 are fabulous.” He kept right on clicking away.

I grabbed his camera and smashed it on the pavement.

“Seriously, dude?” Puglisi said. “Fuck you.” He pulled another camera from his pocket. The flashes were messing with me. I was dizzy.

“Get into the car, Jay,” Mrs. Castro said.

“Jay, is it?” Puglisi said. One of his crew, the CVS dude, ran for Puglisi’s Honda.

We were pulling out of the lot when Mrs. Castro said, “Call the police, Jay. Tell them we’re being followed.”

“I don’t think we have to worry about that.” I looked back toward the diner. The three of them were around the car, in the middle of the lot, checking out the flat tire. Puglisi laughed and waved to me, his hand going from five fingers to one.

I turned to Nicole with a smile. She was shaking.

“You can just drop me here,” I said.

“Absolutely not,” Mrs. Castro said. “What’s the address?”

I didn’t want them seeing where I lived. Once in a while people hung out in the lot and smoked weed and drank and yelled and fought. It wasn’t that bad really, but coming from Brandywine Heights, they would have thought it was pretty low-life. “I have to get milk anyway.” We’d come to a red light. I opened the door and got out.

“Call me,” Nicole said.

“Jay?” her mom said. “Thank you.”

Somebody honked. The light had turned green. I nodded bye and headed into the 7-Eleven. My phone buzzed with a text. The caller ID stopped me mid-stride: Angela Sammick. The text said:
We need to talk.