Shadows Still Remain (22 page)

When Aarons's voice drops off the line, O'Hara feels the need to be someplace cool and dark with a jukebox and a liquor license. The Indian woman at the front desk directs her to a Polish neighborhood of tidy single-family homes, where she parks in front of a tan brick tavern that looks like it was built to survive Armageddon. Inside it's as dark and dank and lovely as St. Patty's Cathedral, and Sinatra's slightly embarrassing cover of Petula Clark's “Downtown” wafts luxuriantly from an ancient Wurlitzer. Four for four, thinks O'Hara, like Jeter on a good day. With a pleasant lack of urgency she has not felt since the night McLain walked into the Seven, she sips her cold draft.

It's a good thing O'Hara isn't feeling rushed, because there's a fair amount to haul aboard. Starting with the most fundamental, Francesca Pena was not Francesca Pena. She was Francesca Coppalano and no more Puerto Rican than Bruno. She never watched her father waste away from AIDS because he's still alive, and when she arrived in Westfield, Massachusetts, for her first year of high school, she wasn't fleeing a Chicago barrio, simply moving from Beacon, New York. If a girl
wants to reinvent herself, the first year of high school is apparently the most propitious time to do it, since colleges and prep schools aren't particularly interested in anything earlier. She would have needed fake middle school transcripts for her first day in Westfield, but how much scrutiny are they going to attract? “You don't by any chance serve food?” O'Hara asks the barkeep halfway through her second draft. Ten minutes later, he places a beige plate, circa 1960, in front of her on the bar, and O'Hara sees her luck is holding. On it are three slices of dark rye, two fat blackened sausages, a mound of potato salad and a dollop of sharp mustard. Not until her plate has been wiped clean by her last crust of bread does she consider how what she's just learned might have helped push Tomlinson over the edge.

She remembers Tomlinson's reluctance to surrender Pena's application and her anxiousness to get it back. Had she too discovered Pena was a fraud? If so, O'Hara can appreciate her alarm. What if everyone found out that Tomlinson, with her Ethiopian sculptures carved out of dung and Romare Bearden print, couldn't tell a chica from the barrio from a brat from Putnam County? For someone whose career was based at least in part on the politics of race and whose unwritten job description was keeping it real, that could be a serious problem. But the possibility that Tomlinson was fooled to the end appeals to O'Hara even more. It would mean that despite all Tomlinson's worst intentions, the woman was truly color blind.

O'Hara doesn't order a third beer. Instead she leaves a twenty-dollar tip for her twelve-dollar tab and drives back
to the airport, where she watches travelers trapped between cities shuffle through the hushed limbo like zombies. With a two-hour wait for the next flight to New York, O'Hara buys a paper and camps out in Starbucks. There her mind circles back to Pena, and to her dismay she realizes that despite a truckload of revelations, she isn't an inch closer to understanding Pena and how she became who she was.

She recalls the wretched figure of Dominic Coppalano at the medical examiner's office and again at the memorial. What kind of father, she wonders, would let himself be expunged from family history to improve his daughter's chances of getting into college? Probably one so desperate to undo the undoable, he'd agree to anything.

After walking the equivalent of ten city blocks, O'Hara finds a screen listing departures. JetBlue's got a flight to Boston in forty minutes. If she catches it, she could be in Westfield tonight. Maybe with one last detour she could find out what the old man did to his daughter. Did he abuse her himself? Did he sell her to his friends just like Pena did with Consuela and Moreal? The gate is nearby and the line moves briskly enough for O'Hara to stand a chance, but as she nears the head of it, doubt, in the form of Kenny Aarons's voice, undermines her resolve.

“What the hell you doing, Dar?” he asks. “I thought we both agreed this was ancient history. Who cares what Dominic did to Francesca, and if by some chance you find out, are you then going to want to know what his old man did to him? You're a cop, remember, not a fucking social worker. Start un
raveling all this crap, you won't be done till you're back in the trees, swinging hand over hand with the chimps.”

Aarons's persuasive monologue is interrupted by a female voice from behind the counter. “Ma'am?” says an attendant. “Can I help you?”

“Yes,” says O'Hara after a pause. “Yes, you can.” And hands over her ticket and license.

O'Hara switches her flight, but not to Boston, and four hours later steps out of the terminal into a soft dusk. She has never been to this city before, but something in the air, simultaneously charged and laid-back, appeals to her immediately. She even likes the funky ten-year-old cabs lined up on the curb.

She slides into one, and on the way downtown, the radio plays a promo for an upcoming show at the rock-and-roll museum. She imagines a vast granite edifice like the Metropolitan Museum, but instead of Egyptian monuments and paintings by the masters, permanent exhibits for Aerosmith, Lynyrd Skynyrd and AC/DC and gives the new city huge props for that too. But soon the detached observations of a tourist are replaced by an unbearable tension, and by the time the cab pulls off the highway her palms are as sweaty as the guiltiest suspect's.

The cab winds through a neighborhood that resembles the Lower East Side on quaaludes. The twenty-something pedestrians move so languorously she can understand why there's a coffee shop on every corner. The cab drops her off at the address she keeps in her wallet, and she is buzzed into a scruffy six-story building. She rides the elevator to seven and knocks
on the door. After an excruciating wait, a tall young man with a full red beard and a freckled forehead opens the door, and O'Hara, who barely reches up to his chest, throws her arms around him and doesn't let go. The name of this startlingly handsome young man is Axl Rose O'Hara. Darlene O'Hara is his much too young mother. And like Entonces said, a mother has her rights.

Jacket photograph © Henry Haberman Collection/Images.com