“Yes . . . ?”
“You said something once. About us, about being a parent. I wonder if you even remember it?”
“What did I say?”
“You said”—she closed her eyes now, trying to conjure up the exact words—“that it was like making deposits. ”
“Deposits? I don’t remember . . .”
“Anna was three or four, somewhere around there, and you’d taken her someplace she wanted to go — the zoo, I think. Just you and her, because I was sick. I don’t think you were feeling so hot yourself — I think I’d caught your cold. And you just wanted to stay home and lie down on the couch and watch football all day, but Anna pestered you and you gave in and took her. You don’t remember?”
I did remember now, vaguely, anyway. A Sunday long ago at the Bronx Zoo. Anna and I had fed the elephants.
“Yes, I remember the day.”
“When you came back, I thanked you. I knew you were feeling shitty and you didn’t really want to go. It wasn’t a big thing, but I remember being really happy that you did it.”
Deanna was looking right at me now — directly at me, as if she were searching for something missing. I wanted to say, I'm here, Deanna. I never left.
“You said something to me. You said that every day with Anna, every good moment you spent with her, was like a deposit. A deposit in a bank. If you made enough of them, if you diligently kept putting money away in that account, then when she was older and on her own, she’d be rich enough to get by. Rich with memories, I guess. I thought it was kind of sappy. I thought it was kind of brilliant. She’s going to need dialysis soon,” Deanna said.
“No, Deanna.” All thought of zoos and elephants, of Lucinda and Vasquez, immediately disappeared.
“Dr. Baron did some tests. Her kidneys are failing — one of them is barely there at all. Very soon our daughter is going to have to be strapped up to a machine three times a week so she can stay alive. That’s what he said.”
“When?”
“What does it matter? It’s going to happen, that’s all.”
Then Deanna was crying.
I remembered wondering not too far back if Deanna was all cried out. But then I’d learned differently — that day in the garden. And now.
“I think you were right, Charles.”
“What . . . Deanna . . . how do you mean?”
“I think we did okay with her. I think we gave her a very nice bank account. I think we never forgot to put something in. Never. Not once.”
I felt something itchy under my eyes, something hot and wet on both cheeks.
“I’m sorry, Charles,” she said. “I never closed my eyes to what was going to happen. But I did in a way. Because I wouldn’t let you talk about it. I didn’t want to hear it said out loud. I’m so sorry. I think that was wrong now.”
“Deanna . . . I . . .”
“I think we should talk about it. I think we should talk about what a remarkable daughter we have, for as long as we have her. I think that’s very important.”
And somehow, in some magical and unexplained way, we ended up in each other’s arms.
When we stopped crying, when we finally disentangled and sat across from each other, holding hands and staring out the window into the black-as-ink night, I thought that Deanna was about to ask me to come home now. I could almost see her forming the words.
I deliberately broke the mood; I got up and said it was time to leave, to go back to Forest Hills.
I couldn’t come home. Not now. Not yet.
Something had just been made clear to me. Crystal clear.
I had unfinished business to take care of.
I was out of one job, fine. Now I had another one. An even more important one.
I had to get Anna’s other bank account back.
Somehow I had to find them.
Somehow I needed to get back my money.
THIRTY-FOUR
It was impossible to miss Lucinda’s legs.
I hadn’t missed them that first morning on the train.
And I didn’t miss them now when I saw them emerging out of the morning crowd at Penn Station. Striding forward from a sea of denim, serge, and English wool — sleek and sexy and belonging solely to her.
Her and that man.
I’d been waiting to see them for days. I’d taken the 5:30 into Penn each morning. I’d planted myself at approximately the same spot I’d seen them the last time. I’d diligently stood guard. When the morning crowd dissipated and they didn’t show up, I’d walked from one end of the station to the other.
I’d done this day after day.
I’d told myself it was my only chance. I’d crossed my fingers and said my prayers.
But now that I’d spotted them, I had trouble looking at them.
I felt naked and vulnerable and scared.
I couldn’t help looking at that man, for instance, and seeing myself. Once at an office friend’s bachelor party, I’d turned away from the nubile young stripper in a gold lamé thong just long enough to see everyone else staring at her and thought with sudden dismay: I look like them.
This man was so evidently besotted with Lucinda — or whoever she was. He kept grabbing for her hand and gazing lovingly into her eyes.
I hadn’t been wrong about who he was. She was playing him just as she’d once played me. He was next.
How pathetic, I thought. How pitiable.
How exactly like I’d been.
When I’d looked into the picture frame that day in the candy store, I’d asked myself what it was that had made me such a target. But only briefly. Because I knew the answer. In the cold light of day, it was so easy to see just how much I’d been asking for it. For something. Anything. Anything at all to come rescue me from me.
I’d spent a lot of time replaying all the moments I’d spent with her, too, my rescuer. Only now remembering them just a little differently from before. Running them back and forth and back in my head, the way, in the days before computer editing systems, I used to have to run strips of celluloid through Moviolas until they frayed and split. I had to patch them with tape again and again and again, until the images formed actual cracks and nearly disintegrated into dust. Take the first time I met Lucinda. Here, I’ll take care of it, she’d said sweetly on the train that day, but when I looked closely now, I could already see ugly fissures crisscrossing her face as she offered a ten-dollar bill to the pissed-off conductor.
She’d picked me that day.
Lucinda and the man had worked their way over to the open coffee shop, where they sold fat-free peach muffins and doughy bagels. The man ordered coffees, and they stood elbow to elbow across a small table. Steam sometimes obscured their faces.
I kept my back to them. I flipped through newsstand magazines and peeked. I was worried about her seeing me, but less worried than I might have been.
My face had changed.
It had happened gradually, bit by bit. I’d lost weight. As my life seemed to implode, my appetite had lessened, waned, disappeared. My clothes began to hang on me. When Barry Lenge administered the coup de grâce and sent me into the ranks of the unemployed, I’d stopped shaving, too. My goatee had become a beard. A few days ago, I’d looked into the bathroom mirror and seen the kind of face you see in hostage dramas staring back. That haunted-looking overseas government official who’s finally been released after months of dark captivity. I looked like that.
Only I was still a hostage.
I kept peeking now.
It became hard watching them without actually being able to go over and confront them. Because now, in addition to feeling scared and naked and vulnerable, I felt angry. It welled up in me like sudden nausea. The kind of anger I’d up to this point reserved solely for God — on those days I believed in God and on the days I didn’t — for Anna’s disease. The kind of anger that caused me to clench my hands into fists and imagine landing them in Vasquez’s face. And hers.