I clicked on it, held my breath, and read.
It was kind of a human-interest story, the kind they start running when they run out of stories about heroes and victims, a story meant to make you shake your head at the sad ironies of life.
Body pulled from wreckage . . . no identification . . . in a coma for several weeks . . . brain surgery . . . fingerprints revealed him to be . . . previously identified as dead . . . his car in hotel parking garage . . . hadn’t shown for sentencing . . . police spokesperson . . . prison infirmary . . .
I read it slowly, from beginning to the end. Then once more, making sure.
Anna’s insulin.
It was made from a pig’s pancreatic cells, which is the way all insulin used to be made. Until they figured out a way to make it synthetically in the laboratory. This was a fairly recent development; Anna had been using pig insulin since she’d gotten diabetes. When she’d tried the synthetic stuff, her numbers had strayed high and stayed there.
That happened sometimes, Dr. Baron had said. Some people responded better to the real stuff. So he’d kept her on it.
Even though they’d begun phasing it out — even though it was becoming very hard to get hold of. But there was no need to worry. There would always be some drugstores that carried it, he said.
I was talking to Jameel Farraday, a guidance counselor, in the school lunchroom.
Once a year, Jameel brought convicts from state prison into the school auditorium in an effort to scare George Washington Carver’s students straight. The convicts, some of whom had even grown up in the neighborhood, would talk about drugs, about the wrong choices they’d made, about life behind bars.
Then they’d take questions from the audience.
Ever kill anyone? one student asked an ex-junkie who had a scar running the entire length of his jawbone.
He said no, and the student body groaned.
“I’m thinking about having my class write letters to men in prison,” I said to Farraday. He was eating milky mashed potatoes and greasy chicken fingers.
“For what purpose?” he asked me.
“Well, kind of like the thing you do — but in writing. My kids can practice their penmanship, and these men can provide some life lessons, maybe.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I was wondering . . .”
“Yes?”
“I knew someone who ended up going to prison — from my old neighborhood. I thought I might start with him.”
“What did he do?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Drugs, I heard.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You have any idea how I could find out where he is?”
“You mean which prison?”
“Yes.”
Farraday shrugged. “I don’t know. I can ask my contact in Chicago Corrections, I guess.”
“Would you?”
“Sure. If I remember. Where’s he from?”
“New York.”
“Uh-huh. What’s his name?”
“Vasquez.”
“Vasquez?”
“Yes. Raul. Raul Vasquez.”
FIFTY-TWO
He knew where I was.
They’d pulled him half-dead from the rubble, but only half.
He was in a coma for weeks. They didn’t know who he was.
His car had been parked in the hotel lot. He hadn’t shown up at work. He was listed as dead.
They ran his fingerprints in a last-ditch effort to find out his name. Raul Vasquez. He had a “did not show” for sentencing for two counts of assault and battery and one for pandering.
He was transferred to a prison infirmary until he recovered sufficiently enough to be brought into Bronx Superior Court for sentencing.
This I knew from the article. The rest of it I imagined.
He’d sat there in prison. He’d thought and he’d remembered.
What Didi had told him. About my daughter. About the special pig insulin she needed to survive. Why pig insulin? She had asked me, remember? Like a concerned lover, instead of an extortionist wheedling the details out of me.
Vasquez sat there in prison and fumed. I was hiding from him. I was gone. But then he understood there was something I would have to do. No matter how carefully I was hiding, I would have to do this thing.
This is Mr. Widdoes. Is my insulin in?
How many drugstores must have said no. Must’ve said, Widdoes who?
But he kept going. He kept calling. He had all the time in the world. He had all the motivation necessary.
Maybe he started in New York. Then on to Pennsylvania. And so on.
One day, he’d reached Illinois.
Roxman’s Drugs.
And this time when he asked if his insulin was in, the druggist’s assistant didn’t say no.
He said not yet.
But it’ll be in Monday.
Two weeks after I’d talked to Jameel, he found me after class and handed me a sheet of paper.
“What’s this?” I said.
“Your guy,” he said. “But there’s three of them.”
“Three?”
“Yeah — three Raul Vasquezes. But if he’s from New York, I’d imagine he’s this one.” He pointed to the first name on the sheet. “I’d imagine he’s here.”
I lay upstairs in bed. I couldn’t sleep.
Kim was attuned to my nightly rhythms and knew without even looking that I was lying there wide awake and staring at the ceiling.
“What’s the matter, honey?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t tell her yet. I didn’t have the heart. We’d escaped from catastrophe once; we’d made a new life. We were happy. I couldn’t tell her that we hadn’t escaped after all. That the past was reaching out for us with icy fingers.
“Nothing,” I said.
I was thinking.
What was parole for a twelve-year sentence?
When would he be getting out?
He would come for me then — I knew that. For my family. And then he would do what he’d done to Winston and Sam Griffen and the man he’d pushed off the train in Lynbrook, Long Island, and God knows how many others.
That day he came to our home as a chimney cleaner.
I heard about a family that went to sleep and never woke up.
Yes, he would be coming for me.
Unless — I whispered it like a fervent prayer.
Unless I get to him first.
He didn’t know that I knew he was alive. He didn’t know that I knew he’d found me.
But what did that matter?
He was in prison. He was locked up.
To get to him, I would have to get inside Attica.
Now — how could I do that?
ATTICA
It was my last class.
I’d circled it in my calendar. I’d rehearsed it in dreams.
When I walked through the metal detector, a CO named Stewey said, “Last day, huh,” and I thought he looked almost despondent. Maybe people get used to the people they belittle, and who knows if they’ll ever find anyone as good again?
Before I went to my classroom, I stopped off in the COs lounge.
It was just a room with folding chairs and tables and a thirteen-inch TV usually tuned to Dukes of Hazzard reruns. The COs evidently had a thing for Daisy Duke — those high-cut shorts of hers, probably — because an old poster of her still hung on the wall. Someone had penciled in nipples on her white blouse.
I poured myself some coffee. I put powdered milk into my cup and stirred it with a plastic swizzle stick.