Then reality intruded. He knew where he was. He knew why. Understood that eighteen hours had come and gone and his wife either was or wasn’t alive. He shut his eyes and dug his head into the mattress in an effort to get back to sleep.
He couldn’t.
He felt suddenly wide-awake, infused with the energy of the seriously panicked. He turned one way, then another. He got a pillow from the closet; lay back and closed his eyes again. No dice. His mind couldn’t stop racing.
Hello, Arias, nice to see you. How’ve you been?
Buenas noches, Pablo.
Galina, good to see you again.
He pictured Joanna too, locked up in that room. His wife, his warrior princess.
After an hour he gave up.
It was dead quiet, the time of the night when it seemed he might be the only one on earth.
Don’t be silly. The darkness can’t hurt you, his father used to say to him as he lay shivering under the covers.
Hard to believe that was true. After all, Paul had been assured that other things wouldn’t hurt him, only to find out differently. Cancer, for instance, which he’d been told was nothing much, even though it had already reduced his mom to the human skeleton he’d discovered lying on her bed, before it killed her just three days past his eleventh birthday. His father was distant, and not home much. His mom was the nurturer in the family. He’d resorted to serious and constant prayer on her behalf. When she succumbed anyway, when the family priest fastened onto his hand as his mom—not his mom, her body—was brought down the stairs draped in a white sheet, he’d secretly renounced his belief in a higher deity. He’d embraced the cool logic of numbers. He’d carefully constructed a universe of structure and compliance. Where probabilities and ratios were your friends. Where you could statistically calibrate the odds of bad things happening to you, then take comfort in them.
It wasn’t by chance that he’d gravitated to a career whose sole purpose was controlling risk.
In actuary-speak: reducing the likelihood of undesirable events.
His risk management skills seemed to be lacking these days.
He rolled out of bed and stood on his bare feet. The wooden floor felt cool and ancient. There was no television in the room, no radio.
He needed a diversion, something to keep his mind off things. Something to read.
He tiptoed down the staircase, but it still protested with creaks and groans. Having no idea where the hall lights were, he had to feel his way along from banister to wall.
He finally made it into Miles’ office, where after some fumbling around he discovered the light switch just inside the door.
Click.
He shuffled over to the bookshelves. Okay, light reading was in order here. He seemed to be out of luck. The shelves contained the kind of books you might expect in the office of a lawyer. Law books, a veritable glut of them: thick, leather-bound, and singularly uninviting. There were a few other books there but nothing that looked particularly enticing. A Jewish Bible with a cracked, peeling binding. The Kabbalah—whatever that was. A biography of David Ben-Gurion. A wafer-thin volume titled The Story of Ruth.
It won by default.
He could use a good story. The story of anything. But when he pulled it out, not without some difficulty since it was wedged between New York Estate Statutes and Principles of Trial Law, a stack of papers fell out.
Paul reached down to scoop them up.
Letters, old ones by the look of them. Sickly yellow to off-white.
Dear Dad, Daddy, Pop, Father, the first letter began.
One of the video-game players from upstairs. Writing from summer camp maybe?
He felt like a voyeur, an intruder into the Goldstein family history. It made him think of his own family—or lack of one.
He felt a sudden and overwhelming sadness, mixed in with something he clearly recognized as jealousy. Miles was lucky. He had a wife who wasn’t sitting in Colombia under armed guard. Two children who dutifully wrote him from camp, delighting in using every existing term for father.
Paul would’ve been happy with one.
Dear Dad, Daddy, Pop, Father: Remember when you took me to the zoo and you left me there?
Miles had taken his boys to camp and one of them was registering his unhappiness. Reminding his dad of another time he’d been taken somewhere and left behind. Momentarily separated in the crowd of monkey watchers while Miles went off to purchase some cotton candy. Paul was creating his own version of the Goldstein family history—what familyless people do to pass the time.
He might’ve continued in this inventive mode if it weren’t for a sudden sharp sound at the door. One of Miles’ boys, standing there in blue pajamas rubbing his half-open eyes against the glare. He looked about fourteen, Paul thought—that gangly, awkward age between childhood and teen. The boy’s legs were too long for his body; the faintest fuzz covered his upper lip like a lipstick stain.
“I heard someone on the stairs,” the boy said.
If Paul had felt voyeuristic before, he now felt embarrassed. Caught red-handed reading personal letters between son and father. As if it were perfectly okay, as if he had the right to.
“I pulled the book out, and they fell out,” Paul said lamely.
The boy shrugged.
Paul slipped them back into the book, wedged it back onto the shelf.
“Well,” Paul said, “back to sleep.”
The boy nodded and turned as Paul shut the light and followed him out. They trudged up the stairs together.
“Did you go to summer camp?” Paul asked him.
“Huh?” The boy was still half asleep.
“Summer camp? When you were younger?” Paul said.
“Uh-huh,” the boy answered sleepily. “Camp Beth-Shemel in the Catskills. It sucked.”
“Yeah,” Paul said, “I didn’t like sleepaway camp either.” Paul had been sent to camp the summer his mom died.
At the top of the stairs Paul said good night and went back to his room, where it took another two hours before he actually fell asleep.
BY THE TIME PAUL WOKE, IT WAS MIDMORNING AND MILES WAS GONE.
“He left for work hours ago,” Mrs. Goldstein told him. “He said to please make yourself comfortable. So please”—she smiled shyly—“make yourself comfortable. He’ll call you later.”
He’d found Mrs. Goldstein in the kitchen after he’d put his shoes and socks on and ventured downstairs. One of Miles’ boys was at the table reading a comic book—Spider-Man Wreaks Vengeance. This was Miles’ other son—he looked about two years younger than his brother.
“Hello, I’m Paul,” he said to the boy.
The boy mumbled hi without looking up.
Mrs. Goldstein sighed. “Tell him your name. When someone introduces themselves, you introduce yourself back.”
The boy looked up and rolled his eyes. “David,” he said, then immediately dived back into the adventures of a boy who introduced himself by entrapping and hanging you upside down in his sticky web.
Mrs. Goldstein was still wearing her wig, but this time Paul noticed a tuft of her own hair peeking out of one side. It seemed thick and dark, and Paul suddenly understood it wasn’t cancer, but religion, that dictated she cover her head.
“Would you like some coffee, Mr. Breidbart?”
“Paul. Please.”
“Please you want some coffee, or please call you Paul?”