“A Caddy. What kind of Caddy?”
“A beauty. A silver ’67 Coupe de Ville with a black vinyl roof. They found it smashed up over in Midwood somewhere during the snowstorm. The insurance company took it as a total loss.”
I forced myself to answer calmly. “That’s a shame. Well, thanks again, Doc. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
No lie there. He had given me a lot to think about. That, and some answers.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
On the way over to visit my real girlfriend — the one in the coma, not the make-believe one whose period was two weeks late — I had a lot to chew on. I believed in coincidence more than the hand of God or fate or karma, but even I had my limits. There were just too many connections here to slough them off as mere coincidence. One thing was for damn sure: Bobby Friedman was, for some reason, the eye at the center of this storm. It seemed to me that all the new violence in my world somehow swirled around my best and oldest friend and I wanted to know why; I needed to know why. If he hadn’t shown up at 1055 Coney Island Avenue last night, I might not have seen Bobby as so central to what was happening; but he had shown up and with a set of keys.
No one is immune from willful ignorance. I wasn’t. I’d looked the other way and pretended not to see things: friends stealing, friends cheating on tests, friends cheating on their girlfriends. Guys are like that. I can’t explain it. Maybe it comes from playing team sports all our lives. It’s like we’re in some sort of club with a silent understanding that it’s always us against them. The “us” was constant. The “them” was situational. I don’t really know. What I did know was that this was different. I couldn’t ignore the fact that those keys Bobby had weren’t just any keys to just any building. There’d been a dead body in that building, the body of the man who’d beaten Mindy into a coma. They were keys to a building that burned to the ground a few hours after his visit. I wasn’t willing to ignore the fact that the Cadillac that nearly killed Bobby and me had been stolen off old man Bergman’s block. Bergman, the owner of the building that had burned down. It was impossible for me to ignore the fact that Bergman’s granddaughter was probably the person who’d torched her grandpa’s building, dead body et al. Sitting there in the hospital lobby, waiting the few minutes until visiting hours were to begin, I thought back to the fight I’d seen between grandfather and granddaughter. And as I reflected on what I’d witnessed, it struck me that I wasn’t the only man in Brooklyn who thought Susan Kasten, the quiet girl from my Romantic Poetry class, was guilty of arson. Grandpa seemed to think so too.
“Visiting hours have begun. No children under the age of twelve will be permitted on the upper floors. Please do not …” came the announcement over the loudspeaker.
I took the stairs to the third floor. I took them slowly as I was still aching pretty bad. Mindy’s parents were already in her room when I arrived.
“Moe, it’s wonderful. A miracle! Come look,” said Beatrice Weinstock, tugging at my arm. “She’s opened her eyes.”
My heart went from zero to sixty before I could take another breath. I could feel it thumping at the walls of my chest. In that instant, none of the rest of it mattered. None of it. Suddenly, I didn’t give a rat’s ass if Bobby was at the head of a Soviet spy network, the criminal mastermind behind a plot to rob the Federal Reserve bank, or both. And damn it if it wasn’t true: Mindy’s eyes were wide open.
“Hi, Min,” I whispered in her ear, kissed her cheek. I stroked her hair. “I love you. I love you. I love you. I’m sorry I never told you that before. I’m not sure if I even knew it. I love you.”
But she didn’t respond in any way. My thumping heart sank into my shoes. It occurred to me that her eyes weren’t seeing anything more than Pink Blotches’s dead eyes had seen the night before. When I snuck a peek at Herbie Weinstock, I saw that he had reached a similar conclusion.
“That’s wonderful,” I shouted to Mrs. Weinstock. “Wonderful. Listen, you guys stay here and enjoy the moment. I’ll be back later.”
Herbie nodded. I nodded back. There it was again, that guy thing, that silent understanding. It even crossed generations. Beatrice had already returned her focus to her daughter, willing Mindy to do more than open her eyes. I left them that way. Outside the door, I ran into Mindy’s doctor, Steven Curtis, a svelte and delicate man with piano fingers and the bedside manner of a wrecking ball. I’d had the displeasure of talking with the good doctor a few times. He wasn’t anything like Doc Mishkin. When Doc Mishkin told you the truth, no matter how harsh, you were comforted to know it. The truth from Curtis was a serrated edge. Trailing behind Dr. Curtis were five bright-eyed interns.
I blocked Curtis’s way. “Could I talk to you for a second?” I asked, my eyes letting him know there was only going to be one acceptable answer.
“Later, young man. As you no doubt see, I am doing rounds.”
“A second,” I repeated.
When he saw that I didn’t pray at his altar and I wasn’t moving an inch, he relented. “Very well.”
I stepped away from his pack and he followed.
“Her eyes are open,” I said.
“They do that sometimes. It isn’t necessarily significant.” He said they as if he’d been talking about heads of cabbage or fruit flies.
I put my face up close to his. “Well, do me a favor, Doc, don’t shit on her mom’s joy. She needs to believe Mindy will be okay, and if Min’s eyes being open gives her hope, let her have it. If you have to discuss the truth with the interns, ask Mindy’s parents to step outside or use terms they don’t understand. Okay?”
“Fine. Now, if you’ll excuse me …”
• • •
I found Lids in his bedroom in his parent’s apartment in Trump Village. Village, my ass. Trump Village bore about as much resemblance to the traditional sense of a village as an elephant to an oyster. It was a series of huge brick apartment buildings that soared twenty-plus stories over the streets of Brighton Beach and Coney Island. There are pictures in my high school yearbook of the buildings being constructed, their massive girders dwarfing the school. When Trump — none of us called it Trump Village — opened in ’64, the influx of the thousands of new families totally changed the nature of the neighborhood. The Lesters, Lids’s parents, had moved to here from the Bronx partially in the hope that their son might fit in better in Brooklyn. No such luck. Larry wouldn’t’ve fit in on the Starship Enterprise. He wasn’t a fitting-in type of guy.
His sad little parents were happy to see my face. For them, I guess I represented a connection to normalcy for their son in kind of the same way I represented a nonradical political connection to Mindy’s folks. Funny how I never thought of myself as normal. Does anyone ever consider himself normal? Would anyone want to? My brother Aaron, probably. At my age, I think he’d fancied himself as normal. It’s not like I minded Lids’s or Mindy’s parents seeing me the way they did. I didn’t feel any pressure from it. I liked making people feel better. I always had, though I’ve no clue where that ability came from. My dad maybe. Surely not from my mom. She was so persistently pessimistic that I don’t think she would have been shocked if one day the sun didn’t come up. She would just say, “I knew it. I knew it.”
Larry Lester was sitting in a chair, rocking, staring out the window at the elevated subway ten floors below. He did that. It helped him think and theorize, he used to say. His room hadn’t changed in the thirteen years I’d known the guy. I’m serious. It was like he’d died as a kid and his mother, grief-stricken by her son’s death, had preserved his room in museum condition. There were posters of Howdy Doody and Davy Crockett on his walls. Even mad genius drug dealers have their quirks. Larry had more than his share.
“Hey, Larry,” I said.
It was as if he hadn’t heard me. He just kept on rocking and staring. I waited another minute before trying again.