The crowds were never large, maybe fifteen hundred people on a good evening. But all the hot, muggy evenings were very good, regardless of how many people came to watch. The fastballs only came in about eighty miles per hour, plenty fast if you were forty-one years old and trying to get the bat around on one of them. On those all-too-rare occasions when you slapped the ball with good wood you strained every tendon charging for first. Occasionally you even surprised yourself and beat the throw.
That summer now seemed like a dream time. Liarakos could still smell the sweat, still feel the earth under his spikes, still see the ball leave the bat and float toward him as he charged it. Even then he knew he was living a fantasy, the sublime pinnacle of his life. The sun and the sweat and the laughter of his teammates …
Someone was shaking him. “Daddy. Wake up. Daddy.”
The lights were on. “Huh?”
It was Susanna, his twelve-year-old. “Daddy, it’s Mommy. She’s locked herself in the upstairs bathroom and won’t come out.”
Thanos Liarakos uncoiled and rushed from the room. Through the living room and the guests staring, up the stairs two at a time with Susanna in her nightie running behind him, trying to keep up.
He tried the handle on the door. Locked! He pounded on the door with his fists. “Elizabeth? Elizabeth, can you hear me?”
Nothing.
Not again! Please God, not again!
“Elizabeth, if you don’t open this door now, I’m going to break it down.”
Susanna and her younger sister were standing there in the hallway, watching. They were sobbing.
“You girls go to your room. Do as I say.” They went.
He kicked at the door. The girls were standing in their doorway, watching and crying. He braced himself against the wall and smashed at the door with his right foot. It splintered. Another kick and the lock gave.
She was on the floor. A trace of white powder around her nostrils. Some powder on the counter. A rolled-up dollar bill clutched in her hand. Her eyes unfocused, the pupils huge. Her heart going like a racehorse.
Damn!
“Where did you get it, Elizabeth? Who gave you the cocaine?”
He shook her vigorously. Her eyes swam.
“Can you hear me, woman? Who gave you the coke?”
“Jeff, uhh, Jeffer …”
He lowered her to the floor and went to the girls’ bedroom. “Susanna, call an ambulance. Dial nine-one-one. Your mother’s sick.”
The child was crying freely. He held her at arm’s length and stared into her face. “Can you do this?”
She nodded and wiped at her tears.
“Good girl. Dial nine-one-one and give them our address and tell them to send an ambulance.”
Down the hall past the bathroom to the staircase, and down them two at a time. T. Jefferson Brody was standing by the far wall.
Brody put up his hands as Liarakos charged at him. “Now, Thanos—”
“Get outta my house, you son of a bitch.” He hit him with all he had. Brody went down and two men grabbed Liarakos’ arms.
“Out! All you people get out!” He jerked his arms free. “Party’s over. Everybody get the fuck outta my house.”
He gestured toward Brody, who was sitting on the floor rubbing his jaw. “Drag this piece of dog shit out with you or I’ll kill him.”
CHAPTER SIX
At six o’clock the alarm rang beside Thanos Liarakos’ bed. He silenced it and rolled out. He had been asleep less than an hour. He had gotten home from the hospital at three a.m., checked on the kids and the maid, who had graciously agreed to return and spend the night when he called her at midnight. The lady and the kids were all asleep in the same bed. Tired as he was, Liarakos couldn’t sleep. The last time he remembered glancing at the clock it had been almost five a.m.
He showered and shaved and dressed. In the kitchen he wrote a note for the kids:
Your Mom is okay. She is in the hospital and was asleep when I left her. You may stay home from school with Maria today if you wish.
I love you both,
Dad
When he backed the car out of the garage there was a television reporter and a cameraman at the end of the driveway, on the sidewalk. They shouted questions at him as he backed down the drive right at them. Two cameramen. One refused to get out of the way. Liarakos kept the car creeping backward. The reporter, a woman, held a microphone against the driver’s window glass and shouted: “Is Aldana threatening Americans? Is he sane? How much money has he paid you?”
She expected no answers in this theater of the absurd, Liarakos knew. Asking rhetorical questions was the whole show. This was award-winning television journalism.
The rear bumper lightly contacted the camera tripod. Then the man moved.
Liarakos kept the car drifting backward into the street, flipped the transmission into drive, and accelerated away.
The morning was overcast and gloomy. A wind drove the dry brown leaves along the streets in waves. Here and there whirlwinds built little columns of leaves that spun crazily for a few seconds in the gray half light, then flowed on.
His wife was still asleep. The blinds were closed and the lights off in her private room. Still wearing his topcoat, Thanos Liarakos sank into the padded visitor’s chair.
In a few moments his breathing rhythm matched hers. He felt himself relaxing and drifting and didn’t fight it.
He had been in his late thirties when he realized that he could see his entire life, all of it, as if he were a detached observer and his life were a play that he had seen several times before. The whole of it was being acted out before him daily, scene by scene. Yet he knew how it had been and how it would have to be.
Staring at his face in the mirror as he shaved every morning, he could see how the lines would deepen, how the jowls would continue to sag, how the hair would gray and thin. He stared at a face not young and soon to be old.
In nursing homes, he knew, a portion of the daily routine for the elderly is reminiscence therapy. The staff encourages the fragile people waiting to die to look back, to savor the events in their life as if they were great feats woven into a tapestry to instruct generations yet unborn.
Thanos Liarakos was seeing it as it would be, looking back while he was still living it. All his achievements and accomplishments that he had previously thought so important shrank mercilessly from the vantage of this curious double perspective. Court victories lost their sweetness and disasters lost their sting. He had found a way to live with life, or perhaps a merciful God had given him the way. Whichever. Only the perspective mattered.
Drifting now, half asleep, Liarakos swirled the colored glass inside his kaleidoscope of past and future, looking for the pattern. His father had stepped off the boat from Greece with fifty dollars in his pocket and one extra shirt, and parlayed that into five submarine sandwich shops which had sent three sons through college. His mother had raised the sons while his father worked twelve to fifteen hours a day. Those bittersweet days were irretrievably gone. They were as far from the present as the day Odysseus sacked the stronghold on the proud height of Troy. Yet when he talked to his mother he was listening to a voice from the past that would soon be lost to him. So soon, so soon, he would be standing by her grave and his father’s grave, remembering, feeling the life escaping like a handful of sand flowing through his fingers. So he tolerated her diatribes and cherished her.
His daughters — they were his offerings to the human race, to the future and its infinite potential, to God and whatever great and incomprehensible thing He had in mind for the human species. The girls were not special, not gifted — they were just people. They and their children would work and love and marry and have children, long after Thanos Liarakos and the Greek of the sandwich shop were dust. So he loved them desperately.