Part 5 (2/2)

”We happy few,” he said. ”You and me. It's time to b.u.m-rush the show. It's time to change the terms. It's going to require some bravery on your part.”

What was scary was how immediately all this came to him, when he hadn't even really known it was there: an urge for vengeance, sure, but vengeance against what? He used to be a leader. He'd never done what others his age were doing, he was always in too much of a hurry, and yet somehow that hurry, instead of bringing him the life he wanted, had marginalized him. Now all of a sudden the margin seemed like the only place to be. As for the kid, Adam could tell from the look of terror on his face that he was not wrong about him.

”I don't know what you're talking about,” the kid said, which was the right thing to say.

”Yes you do,” Adam said. ”I'm going to tell you something now. You don't need to do anything but hear it. Wisconsin Cryogenics. Can you remember that without writing it down?”

He nodded.

”Now, you can do with that what you will. If you like, it can just be my little gift to you. And that can be the end. But it doesn't have to be the end.”

They froze and watched a man and a woman, both holding martini gla.s.ses, stoop to walk under the stilled blades of a helicopter. Drunkenly they climbed inside. Music started up again within the s.h.i.+p.

”Give me a number,” Adam said. ”Not a work number, or a home number. Maybe like a girlfriend's cell. I'm going to contact you in about three weeks, okay? Three weeks. Then we'll either talk about the future or you can just hang up on me. My name is Adam.”

The kid was right with him. He whispered a number, and Adam recited it back. Once he had a number in his head he didn't forget it. ”One more thing,” Adam said. ”Give me the watch.”

The kid was confused but handed it over. Adam had a quick look at it: a gold Patek Philippe. He wasn't much into watches himself but he appreciated value. He pursed his lips respectfully, and then he threw it over the side.

Back at the table he found Cynthia sitting with Parker and Brennan and one or two of the others, all of whom were too drunk and needed to go home. Cynthia, still glowing from all the dancing, glared teasingly at him. ”Leave a lady hanging, why don't you,” she said. ”Where've you been, anyway?”

He told her he'd run into some old friends from Morgan. It was the easiest lie he'd ever told. Parker staggered around the table to say goodbye to her; he bent over with drunken gravitas and kissed her hand, and she laughed, and Adam thought how right she was: you couldn't just do nothing. It wasn't enough to trust in your future, you had to seize your future, pull it up out of the stream of time, and in doing so you separated yourself from the legions of pathetic, sullen yes-men who had faith in the world as a patrimony. That kind of meek belief in the ultimate justice of things was not in Adam's makeup. He'd give their children everything too, risk anything for them. He knew what he was risking. But it was all a test of your fitness anyway. The n.o.blest risks were the secret ones. Fortuna favet fortibus Fortuna favet fortibus.

Sanford talked a good game but he wasn't about to give up what was his except maybe in his will, just like all the other bloated old satyrs capering around on this big docked s.h.i.+p. As for Adam, when he was lying speechless in some hospital bed after his third coronary, everybody would think he was thinking about one thing, but he would be thinking about something else.

They finally found a new apartment, on East End, a long way from Dalton but bigger and better in so many other respects-not only would April and Jonas finally have their own rooms, there was a guest room also, and a patio and access to a pool-that even the kids gave in to the idea of uprooting pretty quickly. But the renovations Cynthia wanted took months longer than expected, and in the end they had to knock fifty thousand off the selling price of their own place in return for the buyer's agreement to delay the closing. It was a strange period, with about half their stuff packed away, calling the contractors for updates every afternoon, living like sub-letters in their own home. The kids lost their enthusiasm and started to complain remorsefully about having to move at all. They'd act out, Cynthia would get frustrated with them, and after one particularly trying weekend in this short-tempered limbo, Adam proposed to his wife that they go away somewhere for a few days, just the two of them. Couples they knew did that all the time, but when they stopped to think about it, they hadn't really done it themselves since April was born. He even offered to take Cynthia to Paris; he knew he probably wouldn't enjoy it that much himself, two flights across the Atlantic in three days, but he made the offer just to show her he was serious. Sitting on a beach someplace in the Caribbean was more their style, but in the end it didn't matter because there was no one to leave the kids with for that long. Cynthia couldn't think of anyone she knew or trusted well enough for that. Who, that little Barnard girl they hired, from Minnesota? It was a wonder she could survive a weekend in the city herself. It was true that the two of them didn't have parents who lived nearby, or whom you'd necessarily trust your kids with even if they were nearby. When Adam was a kid, his parents thought nothing of stas.h.i.+ng him and Conrad at some neighbor's place if they had plans, sometimes on the shortest of notice. But when Cyn asked him if he had any bright ideas for April and Jonas, he had to admit that he did not. As a family they were a little more of an island, for better or for worse, than he'd realized.

So they compromised: he got her to agree to spend one night in a hotel with him right there in Manhattan. Gina, the Barnard girl, who despite being in college never seemed to have weekend plans, consented to sleep over at their apartment. They told the kids they were going to Atlantic City, where it was very boring and there was gambling and children were not allowed. Then on Friday afternoon they checked into the Parker Meridien and called room service for oysters and a bottle of Absolut Citron and some ice. Adam had her out of her clothes almost before the waiter had left the room. She couldn't believe how much energy he brought to it. You might have thought he hadn't gotten laid in months, but G.o.d knew that wasn't true. For a couple with two young kids, they were at it pretty often. But she could see, if not quite understand, how badly he needed this particular encounter to be great. When he wasn't bending her legs back over her head, he was pulling her to the side of the bed so that her palms were on the floor. It was like some s.e.xual epic, like it was important that they outf.u.c.k everyone else in the hotel. Two hours later she was very sure that they had. She didn't have to fake it with him, mercifully, but seeing the way he was acting-how much he wanted to please her-she would have faked it for him if she had to.

He took a break and pulled a ten-dollar bottle of water out of the minibar. He drank it in front of the dark window, his chest still heaving; my G.o.d, Cynthia thought, he is so f.u.c.king gorgeous. She rolled over onto her stomach on the oversize bed. It was a long way from their wedding night, pa.s.sed out from fatigue in that kitschy little B and B in Pittsburgh; she surprised herself by even remembering it. But when you did remember it you had a hard time not feeling optimistic. Things had been getting better the last few months. Adam was doing really well. He'd started trading on the side, he said, and suddenly there was money for everything. They were going to Vail in February, and to the Caribbean in the spring. The new apartment was going to be amazing. Sanford's wife had asked her to join the Coalition for Public Schools. That had to be Adam's doing too, of course. And what he kept telling her all these months was absolutely right: you just needed to get out into the world a little more. She felt his fingers on her calf and turned around to see him smiling sweetly at her. ”Okay, shorty,” he said. ”Break time's over.”

He kept telling her how much he loved her, and she would turn her face away when he said it for fear she would start crying. He came again and went directly to the bathroom: ”Just checking for a defibrillator,” he said. The door closed. Cynthia lay staring at the ceiling; after a minute she rolled to the edge of the bed and walked somewhat stiffly to the chair by the window where she'd dropped her bag. The room was huge, with a stunning view from the foot of Central Park. Cynthia thought she might even be able to see their apartment from there, but they weren't quite high up enough. No voice mail on her phone, but in her bag she found three tightly folded pieces of lined paper-notes to her that Jonas must have slipped in there just before they left the apartment. The first two said ”Love U” and ”Miss U,” and the third one said, ”R U winning?”

She was still looking at them when Adam came up behind her. She was worried he'd be angry at her, but of course he wasn't. He was perfect. ”Maybe,” he said, and kissed her neck, ”we should just head home.”

They called Gina from the sidewalk outside the hotel so she wouldn't panic when she heard their key in the door. Adam took her downstairs to put her in a cab; Cynthia slipped off her shoes and went into the kids' bedroom. Jonas was sleeping on his stomach as he always did, the covers kicked off, one palm flat against the mattress as if it were a pane of gla.s.s. She sat on the floor, against the wall across from his bed. In the dark the room was a comforting weave of long shadows, from the dresser, from the window frame, from the rolling backpack full of April's schoolbooks that sat beside the door. She held her breath for a moment until she made out their own.

It made sense, she supposed, that the kids were a little nervous about moving into a new place, and a little nostalgic too. Everything that had ever happened to them had happened here. But she was flat faking it when she pretended to share their feelings about saying goodbye to this apartment. She never thought this was going to be their last home. To tell the truth she didn't think the next one would be their last either. It was a vaguely shameful thing to admit. But there was always that moment when you fell out of love with a place, when you looked it over and asked yourself if it was so unimprovable that you wouldn't mind if you died there. Once that thought lodged itself in your head, forget it, it was over.

Not the kind of reasoning you could share with kids that age, obviously. Jonas had already gone through a brief obsession with death, when he was just three. Cynthia was never sure what triggered it-probably some story she'd read to him, though she couldn't think which one-but one day he was just aware of death, and he had trouble grasping some of its basic tenets. To him it amounted to being paralyzed, eyes open, inside a coffin, forever. The absence of consciousness was literally unimaginable. He believed the dead could still see, for instance-it was just too dark for them to see anything. Distinctions like that were not anything Cynthia wanted to get into with him.

She tried what she could think of. She had him pull out his toy cash register. ”How many days until your birthday?” she said.

”Fifty-six,” Jonas said, who knew this because he asked about it every day.

”And is that a little or a lot?”

”A lot lot !” !”

She thought a moment, then punched some figures into the beeping cash register. ”This is how many days until you're Grandma Morey's age,” she said. ”And even Grandma isn't dying anytime soon.” Her own mother was older than Adam's, but she didn't use Grandma Ruth as an example because Jonas hadn't seen her in so long Cynthia thought she might not seem sufficiently real. She turned the numbers toward him.

”Wow!” he said. But she should have known that wouldn't work: at that age, any number over one hundred was the same in his mind, and anyway to tell a child that he shouldn't be afraid of something yet yet was no kind of advice at all. was no kind of advice at all.

”It's all a part of nature,” she said another time. ”Every living thing is born, and grows, and dies. Every single animal and plant and bird and flower and tree. It's what's called,” she said, hating herself, ”the circle of life.”

”So you'll die? And Daddy? And April? When?”

”No,” she said, panicking. ”Mommy and Daddy are not going to die. You don't even need to worry about that. Just put that thought right out of your head.” She pantomimed plucking a bad thought out of her own head and sniffing it and throwing it away, which made him laugh, and then she let him watch TV.

”He'll move on,” Adam had said. ”He's three. Something else interesting will come along and b.u.mp it right out of his head. I remember going through a phase like that when I was around his age.”

”You did? What did your mother tell you?”

He thought. ”I have absolutely no memory of it.”

”So you recall asking the question. It's just that your mother said nothing worth remembering.”

He nodded.

”Well, there you have it,” Cynthia said.

Then one day the preschool called; they had her come pick Jonas up early because after snack time he had just started crying. He wouldn't discuss what was bothering him. Probably just tired, the teacher said with that slightly lunatic patience you wanted in a preschool teacher, but all the same maybe she ought to come and get him.

She took him home in a cab, stroking his hair and kissing the top of his head, not asking any questions. She was trying to soothe herself as much as him. Who is this boy? she said to herself. Why is there no one to help me? How am I supposed to know what to do?

When they walked in the front door, she said, ”We have to go get April in about an hour. You want a snack and I'll read to you?”

”Mommy?” he said. ”I don't want to die because when you're dead you can't talk or get up and I'll miss you.”

And here she learned a lesson about desperation and the ways in which a parent could sometimes rely on it. ”Come here,” she said. He sat on her lap. She told him that he was a big boy and it was time for the truth. The truth was that no one knows what happens after we die, because we can't talk to dead people and dead people can't talk to us. But some people have some ideas about what might happen. Some people believe in an idea called reincarnation, where when one life ends there's a little rest time and then you get to come back and live again; not the same exact life, though, and maybe not even the same kind of life-maybe you came back as an eagle, or a dog. In fact, maybe this life, right now, wasn't even his first one: maybe he'd been a dinosaur, so long ago that he'd forgotten. (She could feel his little arms relaxing.) Another idea, which a whole lot of people believed in, was called heaven. Heaven was a place that depended on your wishes: the place in life when you'd felt safest and happiest and most comfortable, heaven was that place for you all the time, forever.

”A nice warm house,” Jonas said, ”with you and Daddy.”

He left his sister out of it, Cynthia noticed, but she had let that go. It was a little rite of pa.s.sage for her, a confidence builder, a lesson in love's resources even when there was nothing in particular you yourself believed in.

3.

JONAS WOKE UP FIRST-he could tell by listening-with the shutters open facing the sea. No sound but the rain turning to mist on the stones of the patio. It often rained in the first hour of the morning, as if considerately, to get it out of the way early in case the Moreys or the rest of the island's inhabitants might have had anything planned. Not that there was much to plan, even if you were so inclined. Another walk on the beach, maybe, or another ride across the harbor to Scilly Cay to eat a lobster. That was the genius of the place, as far as Jonas was concerned: wasted time. You needed that in order to properly value, and to gauge the insanity of, your regimented life back home, where sometimes that first minute of brain activity after waking generated so much anxiety that you'd have to get out of bed just to stop thinking. Then again, Anguilla itself was starting to feel a bit like home by now. Twice a year-Christmas break and spring break-for four years. That kind of fidelity was unprecedented. His father must have found something he liked here, since it was the only place they'd ever visited that he had expressed any desire to go back to. Maybe when Jonas was his father's age, and someone used the word ”home” in his hearing, Anguilla would be one place he'd think of. Probably not, though. They rented the same Greek-style villa here every time, even though his parents surely could have afforded to buy it. At least Jonas thought so. It wasn't always easy to tell what they couldn't afford anymore.

April was in the bedroom right behind his head, with her friend Robin from school, and the very thought of Robin lent Jonas's thoughts an instant and somewhat humiliating focus. He put his ear to the wall even though the two girls would not be awake for a couple of hours. They were sleeping in the same king-size bed, because they liked it that way, and this provoked Jonas in ways he almost resented. His mom had urged him to invite a friend on this trip too, but he didn't really have any friends.h.i.+ps that intense; there were the guys in his band, but frankly they were better off taking a little break from one another. Robin was tall and thin and long-haired, like all of April's nasty school friends really, but she was also on the lacrosse team and knew who Gram Parsons was and turned red when she laughed and was nice to him, and not just when his parents were in the room either. He sublimated a lot of his feelings toward her into a sentimental appreciation of her as a tragic figure, because her own home life was so bad. Her father was a partner at White & Case and they were over-the-top rich-plenty rich enough to take their own family trip to Anguilla for Christmas, or anywhere else in the world, if they could stand being around one another that long-but the mother was bipolar, or so he'd heard his own mother say, and Robin's father either couldn't acknowledge that kind of defect or else just chose not to make the requisite sacrifices to deal with it. Robin had been spending a lot of nights with the Moreys back in New York lately, sometimes on short notice. When she was with them and the phone rang, Jonas had been instructed not to answer it until April or their mom had a chance to screen the incoming number. Robin had an older brother who didn't always come home at night anymore either, though n.o.body knew where he went instead.

The sadness of it all did nothing to diminish his urge to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e, and this was a perfect opportunity, but then Jonas's eye fell on the Gibson electric guitar he had received two days ago for Christmas, on its stand in the corner of the bedroom. His feelings for it were as pa.s.sionate as for any object he had ever owned. Indian rosewood neck, humbucker pickups: he'd coveted it for so long that he was in the weird position, Christmas-gift-wise, of knowing exactly how much it had cost. His amp was back in New York but the guitar came with a pair of wireless headphones, so he could jam away without bothering anyone else. He got out of bed, put on a t-s.h.i.+rt, and sat on the couch by the gla.s.s doors with the guitar in his lap. The rain was already letting up, and the sky was brightening in great slabs of blue and white. He heard a door open downstairs and footsteps on the patio, but at this hour it could only be Simon laying the table. He decided he'd work on mastering the opening lick from ”One Way Out” until his dad appeared on the beach for his morning swim. He clapped the headphones on; an hour later, when he saw Adam winding his way down the whitewashed steps toward the calm ocean below the house, he unplugged and went downstairs to tell Simon what he wanted for breakfast.

Adam walked into the mild surf until the dropoff came, and then he turned and floated, with his toes sticking out of the water, and stared up at the villa. The water on the island's bay end was impossibly warm. A cargo s.h.i.+p was pa.s.sing to the north of him, toward the open Atlantic, and he watched it for a while but there was no way to track its progress. Even the plume of smoke trailing behind it was as still as a painting. He swam back and forth for a while, but when he paused the salt water held him up easily and so he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, female figures were moving back and forth on the patio, and he walked out of the surf, grabbed the towel that Simon had hung on the beach chair for him, and headed back up the stairs.

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