The Intruder (29 page)

So where is Jake anyway? She’s called the office at least twelve times today, but wasn’t even able to get Deborah. Just a voice mail recording. She wishes she could take back some of the messages she left. They’re too precise a record of the arc of her emotions—romantic in the morning, hopeful at noon, anxious by three, cranky by five, desperate and defiant by six: “All right! I’m just going to sit there and wait for you.”

Why hasn’t he called? Again she has the uncomfortable feeling that she doesn’t know him as well as she used to.

52

Step Number Eight: We made a list of all the people we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them.

After a day or two of searching and talking to old friends, John G. finally finds his ex-wife, Margo, coming out of a bar called the Holiday on St. Marks Place.

The past is the present and the present is the past. At first, he almost doesn’t recognize her. Back when they were married, Margo was a fresh-faced Irish girl with apple cheeks, yellow hair, and pistonlike legs. But now she’s thin and ghostly with white-painted fingernails. Her hair is dyed platinum and chopped at odd, vicious angles. And a voice at the back of John G.’s mind says,
She’s sick.

“Hey, babe,” she says casually, as if she’d been expecting him all along.

“Hey.”

“Come on, let’s blow.” The geeky-looking guy who came out of the bar with her tries to take her arm.

He has poodled-up platinum hair himself, razor-slim hips, and a black Misfits T-shirt. Pete Barnett from the old neighborhood. John heard his ex-wife started hanging around with him and doing heroin after they broke up.

“Lemme alone, will you, ya skank.” Margo shrugs him off. “I’m trying to talk to my husband.”

Pete pouts and rubs his chin against his shoulder, like a cat licking a wound.

Margo gives John a tired smile. “You look like hell, babe.”

“And you look . . .“John’s face goes on maneuvers, as he tries to think what to say. “You look the way you look.”

Even this late in the game, he can’t bring himself to lie to her.

“How you been?” she asks, hands on hips.

The long chase is over. Her two front teeth are missing. Something has been decided.

“I’ve been ... I don’t know. I’ve been doing a lot, I guess.” He’s not sure how else to explain the last few weeks. “I’ve been going to a lot of meetings lately. You know. NA.”

“The holy rollers.” She shares a smirk with Pete.

When he saw her teeth missing, John thought she might have stopped doing drugs, like he has. Now he knows she hasn’t.

“No, no, it’s good. It’s good. I’m learning a lotta good things in there.” John G. puts up his hands defensively. “Like I was looking at the—whaddycallem—the commandments. I mean, the steps. And there was one of them, it says, ‘You should try to make amendments to—’ ”

“Yeah, yeah, ‘We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends.’ “ She recites the words quickly and nonchalantly, as if she’s been to enough meetings in her time. “You’re leaving out that the next step says you shouldn’t bother doing it, if it would hurt somebody.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right.” He touches his beard, wishing he’d shaved and washed before seeing her tonight.

“So is that why you came looking for me? So you could make amends?”

“I was thinking maybe we could make them to each other.” He starts to reach for her wrist but he sees a red welt on it. “I mean, all this time, we been blaming each other for what happened. Maybe it wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

“You gonna tell me it’s God’s will? You back into all that Catholic shit too?” She looks like she’s about to hit him.

“No, no. I’m just saying we both thought Shar would be okay. Right? I mean, all this time I been thinking I could’ve saved her, or maybe you could’ve if things had been different, but maybe that’s not right...”

Margo turns her head away from him and looks out at the street. Her jawline is shiny where the bone is pressed against the skin.

“So maybe you know, we could kinda forgive each other,” he says.

“Well, it’s kind of late for all that.” She coughs. “See, I’m feeling kinda sick these days. I got the HIV virus, you know.”

Sunlight fading. The train plunging down. John’s legs go weak.

“Jesus, what happened?”

“I got it from stupid here.”

She glances over at Pete, sitting on a fire hydrant, screwing up his mouth bashfully. For some reason, he doesn’t appear as sick as Margo.

“Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.”

“Jesus didn’t have much to do with how he got it,” she says, keeping a beady unforgiving stare on Pete. “More like rusty needles and leaky rubbers.”

Somehow the nearness to death has given her wit. He doesn’t recall her being like that before. Her face used to be softer and rounder. Now it’s all hard angles, sunken eyes, and high cheekbones.

John G. looks at the cracked sidewalk. The peddlers selling old porn magazines and incense sticks on the blankets nearby. Pete sitting on the hydrant, scratching his arms. The toast-colored lights and the fire escapes on the buildings across the street. Trying to find something that will give him purchase on the moment.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come see you before,” he says.

“Yeah, well ...” She gets distracted by the sound of a siren blocks away. “You didn’t know.”

Though a part of him is thinking she somehow got the disease that was intended for him.

“Still, I could’ve kept in touch . . .”

They should’ve stuck together. That’s what he wants to say.
They should’ve held on to each other. Stopped each other from falling after the baby was gone. Instead of floating away helplessly, like bodies separated in space.

“I kind of needed to try some new things,” she says, running her fingers over a thin patch of her spiky hair.

“You still think about Shar?”

“Only about once a minute.” She pushes her lips together and moves them up and down, erasing whatever else she was going to say.

“She was something, wasn’t she?”

A flicker of a smile at the edge of her mouth. The beginning of a memory—the baby lying on the bed between them? The first tricycle ride? Nothing she wants to share, though.

“You think we made her happy when she was around?” he asks.

She starts to meet his eyes, but the effort’s too much. “Yeah, I guess, we did.” She tries to make her voice sound dead. “She seemed like a happy little girl. But I guess all little girls seem happy.”

“You think she liked us?”

“She probably thought we were all right.”

He wants to reach out and take her in his arms. He needs the connection with her. But somehow she’s not ready to give it to him.

“I miss her, you know,” he says. “I miss everything. Remember how we were going to buy a house out in Woodlawn and start trying to have another kid? We almost had it. We almost had the dream.”

“ ‘Almost’ doesn’t mean a fucking thing, John. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

The harshness in her voice makes him step back. He’s starting to feel sorry that he sought her out.

Pete gets up from the fire hydrant and starts to wander off toward First Avenue, looking for his next fix. Margo follows him with her dying-sun eyes. A part of John wishes he were going with them to shoot up and let the chips fall where they may. But the rest of him wants to stay on this square of sidewalk.

“There’s just one other thing I wanted to ask you,” he says, trying to get her to linger another moment.

“What is it?”

“You think God was punishing us?”

Her features move apart and then come together. “How do you mean?”

“Like you said before. He’s supposed to have a reason for everything he does. You know? You went to Catholic school like I did. Don’t you wonder? Why would he give us our little girl and then take her away and then make you so sick? You think it’s his punishment for something we might’ve did?”

“John, look at me.” She shivers in the fall night and holds up her frail alabaster white arms in surrender. The red-and-purple blotches by her elbows and armpits look like stigmata to him.

“What?” He can barely look at her this way.

“Why would God have to punish us? We’re doing a pretty good job on our own.”

She turns in her torn green Converse sneakers and walks down the block, leaving him with sole responsibility for carrying on their daughter’s memory.

53

After ten hours, Jake is taken out of the holding cell without explanation and driven over to the Fifth Precinct for a lineup. The four other men include a rail-thin junkie in denims, a porky guy in a Rangers hockey jersey, a balding man in a striped muscle shirt, and an eighteen-year-old kid with long greasy hair and a runny nose. Perfect, thinks Jake, we could be quintuplets. The cops give each of them a card with a number on it. Jake gets number three and stands in the middle of the raised platform. He happens to look over to the left and see the duty sergeant instructing the two men next to him to hold their cards so their index fingers are pointing at Jake.

“Hey, sergeant, cut the shit,” he says. “You forget I’m an attorney?”

Jake is tired and confused, but he’s still a long way from giving up and letting the process roll over him. The sergeant leaves the room and bright lights snap on. Jake sees only harsh whiteness and feels the burning sensation on his retinas. From beyond the lights, he’s dimly aware of Venetian blinds being turned so someone in the next room can view the lineup.

“Recognize any of them?” he hears the sergeant ask. Someone’s left the intercom on so he can hear some of the conversation in the other room.

There’s a low mumble in response but Jake can’t pick out any
of the words. He’d half expected to hear Philip’s voice indicting him, but this is someone else.

“Number two, step forward,” the sergeant orders.

The porky guy in the hockey shirt steps up to the light with a sleepy bored look. His nonchalant stance suggests he’d just as soon be here as anywhere else.

“All right, step back. Number three, come forward.”

Jake steps into the light, squinting and trying to pick out a familiar silhouette behind the blinds. But all he can see is someone short standing beside the sergeant.

“Yeah, that’s the guy,” a hoarse, weary voice says. “I’da known him anywhere.”

54

By ten o’clock, the restaurant crowd has started to thin out. Dana takes her credit card back from the waiter, signs the bill, and starts to rise.

“Nice to see you.” She waves to Roberta and Jeffrey, realizing she’s had too much to drink.

On unsteady heels, she heads for the door and a night alone with her son in the big house.

55

Beam me up, Scottie.”

John G. and six other people are sitting around a horizontal door, smoking crack in an abandoned tenement on Sixth Street. A squat, they call it. The front entrance is a sheet of aluminum and the only piece of furniture besides the fallen door is a burnt mattress in the kitchen.

Something about seeing Margo tonight has sent him scurrying for the pipe.

“You say something?” The bony black woman sitting cross-legged on the floor next to him is playing absently with a yellow Bic lighter.

“I said, ‘Beam me up.’ “John raises the pipe to his lips, anticipating.

Her eyes flash at him. “Only if you can tell me what page the Gorn is on in the
Book of Tek.”

“Excuse me?”

“No, excuse me!”

“Look, just gimme a light, will you?”

“Only if you can tell me the page in the
Book of Tek,”
she repeats with pedantic emphasis.

“Bitch, I don’t know the
Book of Tek. ”

“Then you can’t be getting high in my house. This is my rules. You have to cite a page before you can see Scottie.”

John sighs and looks at a hunk of plaster lying on the rug. It’s hardly worth the effort of coming here. After not smoking rock for a couple of weeks, he thought he’d enjoy getting high again. But he just feels edgy and irritable. Like he might go off at any minute.

“All right,” he says. “Page two twenty-eight.”

“What verse?”

He looks up at the bare bulb on the ceiling and makes a tired horse noise. “I don’t know. Verse seventeen.”

“What line?”

He stands, barely resisting the urge to throw the glass stem at her. “All right, the hell with you, you Uhura-lookin’ bitch. Fuck the Gorn. I’ve about had it with this shit.”

“Don’t you be talking nasty to me,” she says, pointing a filthy four-inch fingernail at him. “This is my house.”

Is this why he’s survived? Is this the reason he’s outlived his child and will outlive the woman he loved? So he can argue with some skanked-out crack whore about the
Book of Tek?

It’s not right. It’s not doing justice to their memory.

He takes the woman’s wire-thin arm and checks her watch. It’s half past eleven. He’s been away from the Interfaith Volunteers Center for almost twelve hours. He still has a half hour to make it back for the curfew and he doesn’t want to get thrown out on the street again.

He gives the woman her stem back and starts to walk out.

Beam me up Scottie. There’s no intelligent life here.

56

Judge Arthur Sand has a walleye on the left, which makes it appear that he’s looking at both the defendant and counsel when he’s glaring down from the bench.

“Mr. Schiff,” he says, looking at the empty space next to Jake. “Who are you representing here today?”

“Myself, Your Honor. I’m being arraigned here today.”

It’s roughly twenty-four hours since his arrest. Some get swifter justice, some get slower. Susan Hoffman gathers her papers and goes to join Jake before Judge Sand as the clerk calls the case.

“Your Honor, I’m counsel here today,” she says. “I don’t think it’s wise for Mr. Schiff to be addressing the court at this juncture.”

The judge looks flustered, as if he’s already displeased with Jake for upsetting the delicate moral universe in his courtroom.