Watch You Die (23 page)

As I walked, I gathered courage by pretending Joe did not exist. Instead, I thought of Hugo, pretending he was alive, narrating (silently) everything I saw so he could see it too.

Pizzeria on the corner, three outdoor tables, mother and toddler having lunch.

Hardware store with displays spilling onto the sidewalk.

Dress boutique: window decorated with pointy-toed shoes and oversized plasticky bracelets.

Vietnamese sandwich shop; bubble tea.

“What’s bubble tea?” Hugo – my inner-voice-Hugo – asked.

“Never heard of it until I came here.”

“Where are you?”

“Went traveling but I’m home now. On the Vineyard. In our house. With you.”

“Try not to travel without me again, unless you have to.”

“Nothing can make me go without you again.”

“I’ve missed you.”

“And I you.”

Bought myself some bubble tea to find out what it was: a sweet concoction with balls of tapioca on the bottom. Bubble tea. So now I knew.

“There is always something different to learn about,” my mother used to tell my father. “Get your mind out of the past. It’s an illusion. Get your mind into the present. Do something special. Learn something new.” My mother the optimist, despite it all.

A hobby
, she would urge; anything to get your mind off the past.

All my life, as a child of survivors, I knew I belonged to a special breed. We were neither here nor there, never allowed to be happy or allowed to be sad. Widowhood fit the same bill, I found, leaving you floating between two worlds: the one you had before and the one you still couldn’t imagine having next. Darkness and light, black and white, good and evil. Memories and new experiences were polar opposites requiring the same host: you. Your consciousness must entertain every possibility.

I hated those hours, that Thursday, with Nat at school. I missed him. Wanted his company. And reminded myself not to show him how badly I wanted his company.

I walked and walked, ready to encounter Joe at any turn. Pretended to be ready. Realized, the longer I stayed out, exposed, how foolish it was to pretend.
I
wanted to feel strong enough to face him, when my time came; and it would. I knew that with sudden clarity. My
time
could mean anything: indignity, capture, even death. I had to be ready.

The minute I was home, I called Courtney. “Will you still come with me to that stalking consultant?”

“Totally. Just tell me when.”

“I’ll call now and make an appointment, then I’ll let you know.”

“Great. Before you hang up …” I heard her shuffling papers, presumably on her desk, and pictured the newsroom with longing. “Got a rough preliminary on the bones: two males and a female. That’s all we know right now.”

“Ages?”

“Not yet. No ages, no time frame for how many years they’ve been there. That takes longer, they said.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Will do.”

I called the offices of MacDonald, Tierney and was put through to Jed Stevens, who listened to my situation and gave me an appointment for the very next afternoon. “We don’t like to postpone the initial consultation,” he told me in a voice that sounded too young for this kind of work. Still, I appreciated his efficiency. Time was of the essence and he knew it. Maybe he would be able to help. I noted the
appointment
along with the address in my calendar, then called Courtney with the details. She wanted to meet me at my house and take me, like a child, but I refused.

“Meet me there. Friday’s my day to have lunch with my mother.”

“You really think you should go back there?”

“She waits for me on Fridays. It’s on her schedule. The aides remind her all morning long.”

“Call them and tell them not to. She won’t know it’s Friday.”

“But I will. I’ve got to see her.”

“Just do yourself a favor. When you’re out there on your own, call Jesus first, tell him where you’ll be and when, OK? Can’t hurt to give him the particulars.”

I promised I would. And I did: calling him Friday morning to give him my itinerary for the day.

A police officer was standing outside the building on West End Avenue, posted there like a guard, and I had to wonder if Jess had somehow finagled this for me. I tried to get a look at his badge when I passed but couldn’t read his precinct number. His eyes flicked to me. I smiled. He nodded. And I decided I was safe, that the cop would wait right there until I came down and Joe would never get past him.

It was still a little early for lunch and I found my mother waiting in the common room where a game of bingo had just broken up. One man and four women crept and hobbled and caned their way past me when I came in, each eyeing me with interest as if I were a brand new face. I had met them all before and even knew most of their names but didn’t let on. I greeted them one at a time, introducing myself as Eva’s daughter.

“Eva has a daughter!” Hettie leaned her brown-speckled arm on the wall to support herself as she turned to look at my mother, seated across the room, staring out her favorite window. “How nice for Eva.”

“I’m hungry,” the man said. Bald and stooped, he wore a pressed yellow shirt and his belt was cinched nearer his ribs than his hips. “They didn’t give us breakfast this morning.”

“You had oatmeal, Frank,” said Leah, who must have visited the hairdresser because her steel-hued hair had gone blue.

They left the room in a haze of confused chatter, one of them saying, “Who’s that woman?” having already forgotten.

Mom wore black slacks, one of the elastic-waisted pairs I’d bought her so she would be comfortable. Over it she wore a pink eyelet blouse, buttoned crooked, one collar dipping low on the left side. And she had on her pearls, presumably at the suggestion
of
one of the aides, as she was having company today.

I pulled up a chair beside her, settled in and took her bony hand in mine. It lay atop my palm with a lightness I wasn’t used to. Had she lost weight in the last week? It didn’t seem possible. She continued to look out the window, apparently not registering my presence. In profile, she
did
look gaunter, the hills and valleys of her face more pronounced. The sun shone directly on her, making her skin transparent, revealing tangles of veins beneath her eyes and the skeletal tip of her nose off which cartilage seemed now to drop instead of flow. Her eyes looked watery and unfocused as if she were looking far beyond the Hudson River landscape seamed with apartment buildings across the water on the New Jersey side. A sailboat floated up the river but she didn’t appear to see it. Was she asleep in her chair with her eyes open?

“Mom?”

Her fingers responded, thumb first – one two three four five – playing scales up and down my palm. She had studied piano as a child before …

“Marta, darling. We will practice
without
our instruments today.”

“Mom, it’s Darcy.”

“That’s it. We will keep our hands strong.”

“Your daughter.”

“We must pretend our clothing is clean.”

“
Darcy
.”

“Our shoes shined.” She giggled like a young girl. “That we have shoes at all!”

And I knew: my mother wasn’t here in this room with me. She wasn’t even my mother anymore.

“Dancing barefoot is how we’ll do it, when no one’s watching. Isadora Duncan did it, so why can’t we?” Her feet made small movements on the living room rug, shifting almost imperceptibly from side to side. And then she said in a voice so determined it took me by surprise: “We must keep ourselves moving, do you understand, Rose?”

Who were Marta and Rose?

“Those tears, no one can see them. So stop crying. It won’t help. Lara, give me your hand.”

In my mother’s eyes I saw the girls dancing together in an unlit barracks – they’d called them “blocks”, I recalled; my father had told me – during a rare moment when no one was watching. Eva, Marta, Rose and Lara forming a circle with held hands and moving their feet over a floor of hardened mud.

She began to hum a tune, one I recognized from my childhood. Once, when I’d asked her to tell me what it was called, she’d started to answer and then couldn’t remember.

“What’s the song called, Eva?” I asked her now.

“Dolly Bergheim, are you crazy?”

Eva, Marta, Rose, Lara and Dolly
. I understood now: these were her friends at the camp. She had never told me much about them. She had talked a little about the resourcefulness of the prisoner-children in finding ways to play however they could, always in secret. But never before had she named them. I only knew about Bertha, her one friend from back then who had survived.

“Sing the song for me, Eva.”

Her fingertips quickened on my palm. “I will
play
it for you.”

I could almost hear my childhood piano resound with music under her slight touch. She was playing it, as she used to: the song whose name she had claimed not to remember but which she knew perfectly well.

“What’s the song called, Eva?”

“Dolly, how can you not remember?”

“I do remember.”

“‘
Das Mädchen unter der Laterne
’.”

“The Girl Under the Lantern”. Easy enough for my rudimentary German to translate. The song Marlene Dietrich made famous as Lili Marlene – I recognized it now, knew why it had seemed so familiar. But my mother’s song was different, more elemental than Dietrich’s stylish rendition.

She played and hummed and finally sang, her frail
voice
warbling in German until suddenly she broke her own spell:

“Dolly – quiet!”

Her eyes snapped shut and her face seemed to cave in. Head tilted down, chin lowered in submission, she bowed to a memory I couldn’t fathom.

And she was gone. Alive, technically, but
gone
.

I sat with her for a while longer, her hand on mine, studying the dry softness of her skin. Sensing the remains of her meager presence beside me. Then I closed my eyes and concentrated, willing my love to cross the membrane of history that separated us. I wanted her to know that I existed, that I was living proof of her survival, that I was
right here
. But if she was aware of me at all, I couldn’t tell.

“Mom,” I whispered, hoping that somehow she could hear me. “I need you.”

Silence.

Finally, I released her hand, lay it gently on her lap where it curled into a fist, and left early for my afternoon appointment with Jed Stevens.

CHAPTER 9

THE THREAT ASSESSMENT
company Courtney had found for me operated out of a brownstone on East 83rd Street. On the outside it looked like an average Manhattan townhouse with its staid brown façade, tall windows under carved lintels and oversized Italianate flower pot planted with an autumn-bronze chrysanthemum. The firm’s only signage, distinguishing it on an otherwise residential block, was a tiny plague by its door:
MACDONALD, TIERNEY
.

Courtney was waiting outside when I arrived. She must have had a meeting earlier in the day because she was smartly dressed in what appeared to be new fall clothes: a short skirt (matching jacket flung over her arm) of lightweight tweed that captured the reds, browns, oranges and yellows of a fading summer, a sheer peach-hued blouse over a brown camisole, and
a
pair of brown patent-leather high heels. No one else I knew could make a business suit so sexy. She wore large gold hoop earrings and her brilliant hair flowed down her back. When I got out of the taxi she walked over, kissed my cheek, took my arm and led me inside.

We both paused in awe when we stepped through the door into the reception area. The renovated interior was a cubist interpretation of bright, open spaces, startling at first encounter, then intensely pleasing. The standard twenty-five by forty foot brownstone layout had been reinvented with glass walls and interior balconies that carved the space into a series of light boxes.

We told the receptionist that we had an appointment with Jed Stevens, whom she buzzed to announce us before leading us up two flights of stairs. We were put into a small conference room whose walls of frosted glass created an intimate, private space beneath a flush of sun from a skylight. A white laptop sat neatly closed at the head of the table.

Jed Stevens appeared moments later, carrying a glossy blue folder emblazoned with the company name. My first thought was:
He’s twelve
. Then I saw that he couldn’t be twelve because his sculpted – and when you really looked at it
gorgeous
– face was sandpapery with fashionable stubble. He wore a
well
-cut crown of golden hair, and a fine web of crow’s feet radiated from his baby-blue eyes. I gave him twenty-five, twenty-eight tops. If he was even thirty, he should market his genes. He looked far too dashing, in his designer suit and lilac tie, to be capable of tackling my kind of problem.

His voice had sounded young on the phone and in person it concerned me even more. But we were here and it seemed reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt. Courtney, seated beside me at the narrow conference table, glued her eyes to the Adonis now at the head of the table, opening the laptop. She liked him, I could tell. I had only ever seen her work her wiles on men she pretended to like; this could be interesting.

Jed opened the introductions by sliding the blue folder across the table to Courtney, who sat with her back straight, legs crossed and pink-glossed lips smiling.

“It’s nice to meet you, though I’m sorry it has to be under these circumstances.” A greeting he had presumably spoken many times in this very conference room, but did he always deliver it to the wrong woman? And should I have been surprised that he would assume that Courtney, so irresistible-looking, was his new stalking client?

“
I’m
Darcy.”

His eyes shifted and settled on me. He maintained
his
smile though it stiffened into something vaguely pretentious and discomfiting, as if he was thinking:
you’re
the woman some loser can’t live without?

“I’m Darcy’s friend,” Courtney said. “I came to keep her company.”