“You started using the horse drug as a veterinary student. You used it on Eileen Lavin. You literally fucked her out of a life.” Nikki paused and looked up at the bridge, crowded with cars under the crescent moon. “You also fucked me out of a mother. And you gave me a fucking monster for a father. When I was old enough, I went into computers just so I could trace my biological parents. I found out who my real mother was from the old baptismal records. My first adoptive mother told me the name of the church where I was baptized. I was the only girl baptized there the year I was born without a father’s name on the certificate. Once I had my mother’s name, Eileen Lavin’s father — my grandfather, that piece of sanctimonious dogshit — gave me her diaries. From them I found marvelous you. Times change. People don’t. Your hardwiring is the same. Crisscrossed, short-circuited. You’re fucking e-vil, doc. Twenty-five years later, you’re still taking girls my mother’s age out on your boat. Drugging them. Date raping them. Only now you’re more careful. You use a rubber. You shave your body. You pay for meals in cash. You wipe away all fingerprints. You leave no trace of anything. But you are still getting even with your mother, aren’t you? Before you tried to rape me, you even called me mama!”
“I never... hurt anybody,” he said. “I just fucked ’em, thass all.”
Nikki shoved him into a deck chair, pressed the button for the mechanical winch, and the anchor rose. She climbed to the fly deck and started the twin engines. When she was done here, she would simply steer the boat to the small fishing dock, hop off, and let the tide take The Dog’s Life back out into the dark bay. But first Nikki descended to the deck and packed up the picnic basket which she’d take with her, then washed the flute glass, filled the champagne bottle with water, and threw them into the bay. She used the Windex to wipe her fingerprints from everything she’d touched on board. She’d get rid of her sneakers before she got home, in case they left footprints.
Nikki led Dr. Sheridan, who was barely able to walk, to the edge of the aft deck. She opened the entry gate and looked him in his bleary eyes. “Do you know what today is?” she asked.
His head flopped like a bobble doll’s. “Shuuunday.”
“It’s the third Shuuunday of Juuuuune, assbag,” she said, mocking him. “That’s the day my mother, Eileen Lavin, jumped from this bridge twenty-five years ago.”
“Fuckin’ nutjob.” His voice sounded like it was coming out of a deep well.
She opened the gate. “Fuck you.”
“How... can joo do thish... to me?”
“Easy,” Nikki Lavin Sheridan replied, shrugging. “I have your blood in my veins.”
“Please...”
“Happy Father’s Day, Dad,” she said, and pushed him into the black water. She watched him flail and kick. The ketamine was paralyzing him. He tried to scream but his mouth filled with water, and Nikki watched Dr. George Sheridan slip into the same grave that had swallowed her mother under the Throgs Neck Bridge.
Golden venture
by Jill Eisenstadt
The Rockaways
He’s waiting for her to die, Rose knows. She’s no dummy. It’s June and her son, Paulie, is once again thinking about inheriting her house on Rockaway Beach.
“You’re getting up there,” is this year’s phraseology, as if turning eighty-five begins her ascent. Up and up, she’ll levitate a little higher each birthday, while Paul, Maureen, and the kids line up on the sand waving bye bye. Paulie’s latest brainstorm is to just move in now — this weekend. “We’ll take care of you,” he insists, somehow oblivious to the way this sounds.
“Maureen’s a doctor, after all. You’ll get to play with your grandkids. All the time!”
“Oh, they’d sure love the free baby-sitting...” Rose is telling her new Chinese friend, Li. “But at fourteen and ten? Those kids think I’m boring and smell weird. And I am. And I do! I’m no dummy!”
This strikes Rose as so hysterically funny that soon she’s collapsed in a stained dining room chair, cradling her arthritic elbow. Harboring an illegal alien is one of her first ever crimes (give or take a little parking on her late husband Vincent’s handicapped permit). She feels Sambuca giddy, puffy with pride. If Vin, may he rest in peace, could see Li lying here in his favorite shirt — the ivory one with black piping and breast pocket snaps — he’d surely be impressed. Donning their cowboy best, Vin and his buddies from the social club used to spend each Sunday morning riding around Belle Harbor on their mopeds. “The Good Guys” they called themselves, and went looking for good deeds to do. But Vin had never risen to this Robin Hood leveclass="underline" A good deed and a crime too!
“It was mostly his excuse to get out of church,” Rose adds and crosses herself; a reflex.
“Yesu Jidu!” Li suddenly claps from his spot beneath the dining room table, an awkward choice of seating conversation-wise but okay; maybe it’s cultural.
“Yesu Jidu?... Parla Inglese?” Maybe he’s dreaming with his eyes open. So weak and emaciated, it’s like taking care of a child again. Like Vin in the end. But this fellow can’t be much older than thirty. A large bruised head on a skeletal frame and wet-looking hair even now that it’s dried. In one hand he clutches a Ziploc bag containing a small roll of bills and a phone number written on a scrap of newsprint. With the other, he points a shaky finger at the iron crucifix from Calabria hung over Rose’s marble sideboard.
“Yesu Jidu,” he repeats. “Me!”
At last, Rose gets it. “You’re Jesus Christ! Well, no wonder we’re hitting it off!”
And not an hour ago, he was on his knees, in his undies, puking up the Atlantic Ocean all over her shower house.
For some reason, this cracks her up all over again.
When the helicopters whirred her awake, the phone was ringing too. Rose fumbled for her bifocals. Three a.m.
“Are all the doors locked?” Paulie panted. “Turn on the TV! There’s a boatload of illegal chinks out—!”
“Who taught you to talk like that?”
“I’m comin’ over.”
“Who said?”
“Don’t you get it? They’re washin’ up by — what?”
“What?”
“I heard something.”
“Helicopters?”
“Oh, Christ, Ma! Get up! Turn on the TV!”
It was easier to just push aside the window curtain. Yes, the giant metal insects were out there hovering. But that was not so unusual here on the shore where they’re often called in for drownings, drug traffickers, and big-wig airport transport. And what with that 120,000-pound dead whale that just washed up in Arverne Friday, the sky had been pocked with press copters all week. But this new swarm buzzed the other end of the beach, up near Riis Park, and seemed to be composed of police and Coast Guard choppers.
“Get Dad’s gun; I’ll feel better.”
“Paulie...”
“Get it, Ma, or they’ll be stormin’ our fuckin’ house.”
“Who taught you that language?” Our house.
“If you don’t get it, I’m comin’.”
So what choice did Rose have but to slowly unload herself from the bed? She’d never get back to sleep now anyhow. Instead of a robe, she preferred one of Paul’s old red surf-shop sweatshirts. Instead of slippers, flip-flops. Better to accommodate a hammer toe or two.