A counter ran along the wall next to the gym entrance, and behind it was a guy about my age whose torso bulged in a light sweatshirt with the word Veterans’ across the front. Ex-light heavyweight, from the look of him. He gave me the once-over as I approached and was not impressed: I had the wrong look, the wrong body type, and I was a stranger besides.
He said, “Do something?” in a voice like rocks being shaken in a can. Hit in the throat hard enough once, I thought, to damage his windpipe and vocal chords.
“Zeke Mayjack around?”
“Who wants him?”
I told him who. The name didn’t impress him, either.
“I don’t know you,” he said. “Zeke know you?”
“No. I’m a friend of a friend.”
“Yeah?”
“Nick Kinsella.”
Nothing changed in his face, but he said, “Zeke ain’t here.”
“Expect him any time soon?”
Shrug. “He comes and goes.”
“Best time to catch him is when?”
“He comes and goes, like I told you.”
“Any idea where he might be now?”
“No.”
And if he knew where Zeke Mayjack lived, he wouldn’t tell me. I asked, “How about Jackie Spoons? He around?”
“Who?”
“Jackie Spoons.”
“Never heard of him.”
Yeah, I thought, just like you never hard of Marciano or Ali. But there was nothing to be gained in pushing it. Kinsella’s name was good enough for an introduction to Mayjack, but I’d have to go through Mayjack to get to Jackie Spoons. That told me something about Jackie’s standing at the Veterans’: hands-off unless you were known to the staff and cleared for an audience. Money, fear? That combination, and also the closed-circle attitude you found in old clubs like this one. Whatever else Jackie Spoons was, he was also one of their gym rats.
Nothing else for me here right now. I could hang around and wait for Mayjack, but it could turn into a long wait, and I was not up to it. It was already six o’clock, and I was tired of the urban jungle, tired of walking the edges. Enough for today.
I thought about going to my flat in Pacific Heights, as I had told Kerry I might do. The flat, which I had occupied on a rent-controlled lease for more than three decades, had been a good place to live when I was single, a good place to hole up in sad, bad times then and since. Most of my pulp magazine collection was there, and a lot of my other long-time possessions. Since I’d gotten settled into marriage, though, it had begun to feel less and less like home, and I did not go there nearly as often. Maybe the time had come to give it up, move the pulps to the condo and the rest of my stuff into storage. I hadn’t been able to take that step yet, but I had the sense that I would be ready to before much longer. I felt it again now because I did not really want to go to the flat tonight, did not really want to be alone there or anywhere.
Home was the condo, home was Kerry and Emily. I went home.
12
Emily hugged me fiercely when I walked in, but afterward she withdrew again into her self-protective shell. She was very quiet during dinner, ate almost nothing, refused desert, and went straight to her room.
Kerry had been demonstrative enough at the table, trying to draw Emily out, but she grew quiet when we were alone. There was something she wanted to say to me, only she was not quite ready to say it. Just as well. I could guess what it was and I was not quite ready to hear it.
We cleaned up and then sat in the living room and made desultory conversation. Not about where I’d been or what I’d been doing all day; she didn’t ask and I didn’t volunteer any information. That was something else I was not yet ready to discuss. The main topic was Cybil. Kerry and her mother had had a long phone talk about what had happened, and Cybil had offered to take Emily for a few days until things “calmed down.” Kerry thought it might be a good idea; I didn’t. Cybil was eighty and lived in a seniors’ complex, but that wasn’t the main reason I objected. The kid had been displaced enough in the past year. It wouldn’t do her or us any good if she were uprooted in the midst of a new crisis. She had to learn to deal with life’s calamities large and small, not to run or hide from them, and sheltering her was not the way for the lesson to be taught.
So we hashed it out, and Kerry finally agreed with me. But then she said, “I think you’d better talk to her about last night. I tried, but I can’t get through to her. It has to come from you.”
“Now, tonight?”
“Right now. She knows we almost lost you. She was there; she saw the way you looked... she’s not dealing with it very well.”
None of us are, I thought. And you were there, too, babe. I said, “Maybe I’d better. Get it out into the open.”
“It would be best.”
For us, too. But I didn’t say it.
I went and knocked on Emily’s door and put my head inside. She was in bed, propped up against the pillows, Shameless curled and purring beside her, one of her dozen or so stuffed animals — a grinning Garfield — clutched against her chest. All the lights were on: overheads and bedside lamp in there, ceiling and vanity lights in the adjoining bathroom.
“Okay if I come in?”
“Yes.”
I shut the door and sat at the foot of her bed. “Kind of bright in here, kiddo. Too much light for sleeping.”
“I can’t sleep. I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Bad dreams.”
“What kind of bad dreams?”
“Ugly... the ugly kind. I don’t want to talk about them.”
“You might feel better if you did.”
“No.” She grimaced, put her hand on Shameless as if for warmth and comfort. He licked her finger, purred louder. “I think there’s something wrong with me,” she said.
“Wrong? Don’t you feel well?”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean with me, the person I am.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, honey. Why would you think that?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Everybody keeps dying,” she said. “Everybody I care about. Dad, Mom... everybody.”
I could feel her pain; it was my pain, too. I said, “I’m still here. I didn’t die last night.”
“You almost did. When I came in that house and saw you... all the blood... I thought you were going to. That’s the first thing I thought.” A shudder went through her. “I’m still afraid you’re going to.”
Dead man walking.
Click. Click.
I kept it out of my face, or tried to. She was looking at me the way a kid can sometimes, penetratingly and with a depth of intuition and understanding no adult can match. She knows, I thought. She’s known all along.
What I said to her now was more important than anything I’d ever said to her. No simplistic, homespun philosophy of the sort I’d dished out at the zoo on Friday; something with heft and meaning and impact. I framed it in my head, found a way to begin, and plunged in.
“You must think you’re pretty special, Emily.”
“I’m not special—”
“Powerful, too. A special, powerful little girl.”
“I don’t think that. I’m not.”
“As special and powerful as God. A kind of god yourself.”
The words shocked her, as I’d intended them to. She sat upright, her face all rounded O’s — eyes, mouth, flared nostrils. “That’s not true!”