The Deed (41 page)

He allowed a smirk as he crossed the room toward the kitchen, map in hand.

Shutting down computer and printer, Amanda swiveled in the chair and pressed the fluffy, clean sweatshirt into her face, drinking in the freshness. He reentered and caught her in the act.

“It’s clean,” he claimed.

“It’s ridiculously clean,” she said. “Your mother would be proud.”

NEW YORK HARBOR
, 6:00
A.M.

A cold dawn was breaking over Brooklyn as the ferry plowed through the choppy harbor. The ship’s rapid passage accentuated a biting sea breeze that had sent most of the passengers scuttling below, view or no view. But Amanda and Jason walked around the upper deck, braving the chill and the light spray for the unthinkably majestic panorama.

Behind them, the World Trade Center’s looming twin towers formed the southern bookend of the famous Manhattan skyline, thick and tall like the very legs of Atlas, stubbornly refusing to recede in the distance as the ferry chugged along. A clockwise tour of the upper deck revealed first Brooklyn, hazed to the east, then a flat and deserted-looking Governor’s Island floating in the foreground to the southeast, and beyond it, the long sweep of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, connecting Brooklyn and Long Island with Staten Island, funny uncle of the five boroughs. And dead ahead, to the south by southwest, stood a tiny green statue, expanding ever so slowly in their sights.

“This is where it all started,” said Amanda, momentarily ignoring her wind-whipped printouts, fifteen or twenty pages of all you could ever want to know about the Statue of Liberty, clutched in one hand.

Jason nodded. He’d been thinking the same thing, picturing that unimaginably momentous point of first contact between the Europeans and the natives, the collision of worlds. What must those first tall ships have looked like to the barefoot natives standing agape on the shore?

Seagulls keened in the air above, chasing one another’s vapor trails across the steely sky.

“So what’s the deal with the cigarettes?” Jason wondered.

She shrugged. “You mean why do I smoke?”

“No, I do not.”

Amanda broke into a grin and reached into her bag for a pack of smokes. “Okay, Jason, but this is very personal and symbolic, so keep your amazing wit in check, please.” As she spoke, she drew out two cigarettes, replaced the pack, and pulled out a lighter, all with the one hand, fingers in constant, fluid magician motion. “It’s to honor the path not taken, whenever I make a choice,” she explained, carefully resting her elbows on the gunwale.

“Every time my father flips a coin,” she continued, “he throws the coin away. The idea is that every significant decision you make really means closing off all doors but one. We make these choices all our lives, and every time, we radically limit our billions of possible futures. You can still be a great businessman, Jason, but you can never be a rock star or an Olympic athlete or say something to your parents—those paths are no longer open to you.

“There’s no way around it, but it’s hard. People like to keep their options open. But you can’t get anything done that way—you just become Hamlet. So to be at peace with my choices, I try to take that one moment to acknowledge and respect all those other possibilities”—here she took a drag from the cigarette she’d lit and held the other in front of his eyes—“and then repudiate them forever in one blow, like this.” The cigarette tumbled, end over end, into the harbor.

“No regrets,” said Jason, nodding.

“That’s it,” replied Amanda.

“So what’d you just decide?”

She drew in a deep drag of the remaining cigarette, but ignored him. “That’s about the only thing I took away from my father,” she went on. “And I’ve never told anybody what I just told you,” she continued.

He closed his eyes and nodded serenely, enjoying the intimacy.

“Now will you leave me alone about it?” she said with a smirk.

He laughed. “Well, Amanda, you can’t just do a very odd public thing and expect not to be asked about it,” he replied. “Imagine if I put a slice of cheese on my head every time I got irritated, say.”

“Don’t push it, Jason. I can still turn around and go home.”

He smiled. “Can you?”

She fell silent, watching the waves, and he instantly regretted his reply; his mouth was driving him into danger again. He and Amanda had clearly entered some heightened state of awareness where everything was charged with meaning, and he wondered if he’d ever break through that particular wall, and find her where she walked when she walked alone. In the truest sense, for entirely different reasons, neither of them could ever go home. Was that the only thing bonding them, after all? He had to wonder.

“Thar she blows,” said Amanda, and he followed her pointing finger.

The Statue of Liberty stood, torch arm upswept in the world’s most famous welcome, greenly gracing her tiny island, with all the New World at her back. Already, even at this distance, she looked massive, stately, and permanent.

“She’s huge,” said Amanda.

“You’re used to seeing her as a six-inch paperweight, that’s all.”

“Guess so. Jason, I…there’s something I want you to know,” she continued, not looking up. “My dad didn’t want any kids. I was an accident. But my mom did, and I think she…I don’t know…
sprung
me on him, I guess. I believe he never touched her again.”

It was such a bolt out of the blue, Jason didn’t remotely know how to respond. “Did your mom tell you that?” he asked lamely, feeling an intense pressure to say
something.

“Yes,” she said. “I can’t believe she really thought about what it would mean to me, knowing.”

“Well, I’m very glad you told me,” he said, putting up a hand to cup her cheek.

“I don’t know why I did,” she said, looking genuinely disturbed. “I think I feel—unlucky. Like we’re fading away, or something.”

He brought up his other hand, held her face tenderly. “Hey, Amanda,” he said, soothingly. “Don’t think that. Do you want to do this a different day? Even if it’s there, the freakin’ thing’s sat there for a hundred years, it’ll—”

But she was shaking her head. “Nope, nope. You were right; we have to know now. It would just burn me up inside.” She thought of something, riffled through the pages for a moment, and put her finger on a passage from one of the sheets.

“‘Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,’” she quoted. “‘I lift my lamp beside the golden door.’”

Before the blunt prow of their ship, the Statue of Liberty slowly grew and grew until it towered over the sea and the island, blocking out everything else.

LIBERTY ISLAND
, 6:20
A.M.

They disembarked to the screeching of scrap-hungry seagulls, and let themselves be borne by the crowd, many of whom were already jockeying for line position with a quick trot, out onto the great plaza at the base of the statue’s massive pedestal. Two ragged lines of tourists, hilarious in their plumage, already stretched a hundred yards or more from the base: one line to ride the elevators to the base of the statue, the other, longer one for the athletes who’d determined to brave the circular iron stairway all the way up to Liberty’s crown. Jason found comfort in the queue. Measuring as it did the exact distance between himself and his future, its extravagant length let him breathe easy. He let his eyes drift again of their own accord to the statue towering above them, dwarfed from this angle by its seven-story pedestal. Layers upon layers of cold, windowless stonework gave the whole affair the distinct look of a mausoleum—the final resting place of liberty, if his calculations were correct. The looming physical symbol did not hurt his faith in his theory one bit.

“Check this out,” said Amanda, excitedly reading from one of her pages. “The entire arm, torch and all, was put on display all over the country as a publicity stunt to raise money to build this pedestal.”

Jason nodded, intrigued. “Cool. All kinds of opportunity to sneak something inside.”

“No question,” she replied, eyeing him curiously.

He looked over at her, then glanced up along the statue’s majestic height again.

“So what happens to us, Jason?” she wondered.

He shrugged; it was a big question. “If it’s there? I have no idea. I haven’t thought it through beyond that point. It’s still too
out there
to think about. A fairly massive party, I guess.”

She smiled wanly. “Actually, I meant what happens if it
isn’t
there.”

“Oh,” he said. “Wow. I really don’t know. I don’t think I could just go back to the drawing board again.”

She shrugged. “It’d be a major blow,” she conceded, and, thankfully, left it at that.

At seven o’clock, the doors opened and the line surged forward with a liquid bolt of adrenaline.

Twenty minutes later, Jason and Amanda had oozed with the crowd into the main room of the pedestal, a large square chamber chockablock with small artifacts, wall plaques, and photos detailing the building of the statue and other historical trivia.

“This way,” said Jason, tugging her hand toward the stairs, up which the main body of tourists was already flowing.

“Wait, Jason—look at that,” she said in a worried tone, pointing across the room to the right.

Jason’s following gaze met with an arresting surprise: the top half of the torch, green and massive and unmistakable. He wrinkled his brow; this didn’t make sense. They wandered over warily, like dogs investigating an unfamiliar odor.

He was amazed by how small the torch was, less than twenty feet across. No more than a dozen or so people could stand comfortably on its balcony. The flame, a cloudy orange glass crosshatched by a bright green, overly thick grid of copper bands, splayed out in a crazily horizontal limbo dance: Liberty buffeted by gale-force winds.

“This is the original,” Amanda whispered, reading the plaque beneath it as the crowd flowed around them. “It was corroding. They put up a new one with an updated lighting system in 1985.”

He tore his gaze away from the hypnotic torch itself and watched Amanda take a few steps around the railing, eyes glued to the flame, as thoroughly hypnotized by the sight as he. “It could be right
there,
” she continued.

“I’m going to guess no,” replied Jason after a moment. “The top of the torch was always designed to be a high-traffic area—the deed would have been safer in the arm, on the way up.”

“But everyone who made it here had to climb the arm first.”

“True, but people are
moving
on a ladder,” he reminded her. “Fifty-four rungs, remember? They’re not standing around catching their breath and looking for something to do. Plus it’s in the dark. That’s where I’d have put it, anyway.”

“We’re in wild-speculation land here, aren’t we?”

He shrugged. “Search here if you want—I’m going up.”

They climbed and climbed, joining the heaving mob in a relentless circular cattle drive to the top. The clatter of footfalls on iron reverberated through the structure in constant cacophany; Jason, feeling hemmed in and claustrophobic, felt the echoes as physical vibrations, bat-radar warnings of walls creeping closer.

The tourists craned their necks as they rose, staring up through the iron-mesh floor treads, eyes straining for the observation platform and journey’s end. Jason and Amanda alone, it seemed, turned their gaze perpetually toward the outside of the stairs. The winding had him hopelessly turned around, and he knew he’d have no idea on which side the arm would appear until he saw it.