And West Is West Page 7

  CONNECTICUT RUNAWAY FOUND IN MIAMI BEACH

  Miami, Fla., Feb. 10, 1989—A 16-year-old missing for almost two months was detained by Dade County police after using a false ID to enter a popular Miami Beach nightclub. Parents of the girl flew to Miami where she was held in juvenile detention. The girl’s father credited both the Miami and Connecticut police for locating his daughter, commenting, “They worked together in exemplary fashion.” Interviewed by phone, Sgt. Ray Murak of the Monroe Police said he had met the family at the airport. “When a teen crosses the state line it really becomes a needle-in-a-haystack situation,” said Murak. “We got lucky. The girl is back home, tanned and healthy. She must have spent lots of time at the beach.”

  CRASH KILLS TEEN

  Trumbull, Conn., Mar. 7, 1990—A late-night crash killed 17-year-old Susan Leston of Monroe. Leston was speeding on the Merritt Parkway when her vehicle hit a bridge abutment. According to EMS officials the teen died instantly on the scene. Ray Murak, a sergeant with the Monroe Police, says the crash remains under investigation by the Connecticut State Police. A former student of the Ethel Walker School, Susan is survived by an infant daughter and her parents, Walter and Elizabeth.

  Ethan’s molars clench the inside of his cheek. “Read that part again.”

  “You mean the ‘Susan is survived by an infant daughter’ part?” Alex says.

  “It’s Zoe.”

  “Seems so. Here’s the court documents. Her grandparents adopted her after the crash.”

  “Christ.”

  “This is too fucking much,” Alex says. “Why didn’t they tell her?”

  “I don’t know, but now I’m the messenger.”

  “Yo, Eth. You can’t let her know any of this today, not on the day she’s burying her parents. I mean, her grandparents.”

  And maybe I shouldn’t ever tell her, Ethan thinks, running a mental Monte Carlo simulation on Zoe’s future—the two paths she might follow. In the one where she remains ignorant, the past recedes from her. In the other, the past alters her, becomes the focus of her energy, the source of regret, sorrow, and anger. Another response in this Monte Carlo would be to grab Leston’s folder from Alex and fling it out the window of the car. With all her family dead, does Zoe need to know that she’s lived her whole life without knowing who her parents were? Ethan punches the wheel with his palm as if it’s the doctor’s grinning face. “Why did the old man put this on me?”

  “Because he was too weak to do it himself,” Alex says.

  “Or because he was a son of a bitch.”

  “Man, I’ll bet that was all a front. I mean, look at you. People who don’t know you might mistake you for . . .”

  Ethan is half listening. He has just taken out his buzzing BlackBerry. “For what?”

  “For kind of a dick?”

  “Thanks. And fuck you, too.”

  “But you’re not. Not underneath. I’ll bet the old man identified with you.”

  “So you’re saying I resemble him.”

  “Just guessing. I never met him. But if he was a surgeon he had to be as focused on his work as you. Ethan! Look at the road!” he yells. “This is a day of mourning. I don’t want there to be another one next week for us.”

  “Sorry,” Ethan says. He had been reviewing the spate of text alerts on his BlackBerry. Palestinian rockets have just hit Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba and he’s sweating over his terrorism-response subprogram. Four months after he’d conceived it, it went live this week. Detached from the mainframe he is powerless to apply fixes. If Israel responds immediately, his absence from work could diminish the bank’s profits and affect his year-end bonus. Wars don’t happen every day and he’s responsible for capitalizing on them.

  THE OBERLUND FUNERAL Home is a gabled house with a parking lot full of older Mercedes, vehicles similar to Leston’s. Alex enters first.

  “Be prepared,” he whispers. Then Ethan sees what his friend has seen. At the far side of a great room stand two biers holding the Lestons’ coffins. Both lids are raised.

  “Is that necessary?” Ethan whispers, partly to Alex but mostly to himself. He doesn’t think Zoe would have asked for such a display. The open caskets must be by Leston’s request. Yet his daughter or, rather, his granddaughter—Ethan is still absorbing this new data—has chosen not to override that decision. While Alex hovers in the back, Ethan is drawn forward and finds himself in the short line to the biers. Bouquets of white, red, and yellow flowers hide the closed bottoms of the coffins.

  Dr. Leston is looking distinguished in a gray suit. His full head of hair is immaculately coifed and brushed back from his forehead. Ethan lets his eyes wander down to Walter’s chest, which seems immense, artificially inflated. He wonders if the mortician hasn’t stuffed a Sunday Times under Walter’s shirt. And strangely, or so it seems to Ethan, a handkerchief sits folded in the dead man’s breast pocket. It’s as if Walter might take it out later to wipe his brow. Perhaps he will, for the doctor’s complexion is florid, full of the heat he showed when he’d tested Ethan by the fireplace in his study. Unnerved, Ethan sidles to the next coffin.

  Elizabeth, poor Elizabeth, is wearing the elegant gown she’d ruined on the night she’d met Ethan. Ethan comprehends that it must have been a favorite outfit. Then he is distracted by weird and pointless thoughts about the success of the gown’s dry cleaning, about whether Elizabeth will be wearing a soiled gown through eternity. But since he can’t see into the lower half of the coffin he focuses on Elizabeth’s disturbingly blank expression. Even in death she cannot escape the disease that was shutting down her brain. And Ethan cannot help but think that her husband did the right thing, served as her god of life and death. Beyond this, however, it is a little perverse for her murderer to be laid out in the same room. Then he remembers that human laws do not apply to the dead.

  A gap opens in the crowd and Ethan spies Zoe arm in arm with Alex almost as if this is a wedding ceremony and he is giving her away. Taller than Alex, Zoe seems elongated in her mourning dress, her calves look thin in their dark hose, her feet attenuated in black heels. It is as if he is looking at a painting of Zoe rendered with expressionistic exaggeration. Ethan thinks she resembles one of those generically anorexic but facially distinctive runway models that fashion designers prefer—the hollowness of her cheeks and the bumped ridge of her nose more pronounced than ever. Ethan does not think he has ever seen her so clearly. She is an actor spotlighted on a darkened stage.

  She smiles at him during the last instant of her approach and Ethan feels her cool cheek pressing his. It is not a kiss. “Hey,” she whispers into his ear as if he is the one needing comfort. And he does. Their faces are touching but all he can feel is the void of their separation. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you on the phone,” she says. “What my father did was his doing alone.”

  “But . . . maybe I could have done somethi—”

  Zoe cuts him off. “No.” She stands back and grasps his arms while looking into his eyes. He can feel her nails through his jacket. “No. You didn’t know him. I’m sorry he got you involved.”

  Then she turns away, called by an older couple who, in practiced routine, hug her tightly as if they are overaccustomed to attending the funerals of acquaintances. Ethan drifts backward and other mourners fill the space between Zoe and him. He finds it hard to breathe.

  “You look peaked, old man,” says Alex approaching Ethan from the side. “Zoe’s really handling this nightmare. She must be doing some good meds.”

  “What if she is? How else could she get through this?”

  “Hey, I’m not criticizing her,” says Alex. “I’m admiring her being chemically responsible. Me, if my old man pulled a trick like this, I’d be getting myself seriously fucked up on anything I could smoke, swallow, sniff, or shoot. By the way,” Alex whispers, jabbing an elbow into Ethan’s side, “Don’t gramps look pissed off as hell being stuck in that box?”

  “Yeah. Wouldn’t you?” Ethan says flatly. This is as much humor as
he can muster.

  Half an hour later the coffins are taken away and Ethan and Alex are in their BMW a few cars behind the hearse. There will be no church service. Because of the crowd Ethan and Alex must stand behind a mound of dirt covered by a blue tarp. Next to the coffins, floating on motorized straps over their respective graves, stands Zoe, head bowed and tearless. One of Leston’s former colleagues recites a final, secular sentiment, and then a thunderclap and raindrops send everyone back to their cars.

  By the time Ethan and Alex arrive at the Lestons’ home for the reception, they have driven through an eastward-moving downpour. The sky is clearing and the air is fresh with electrical charge. Beyond fields over which the farmhouse watches, a rainbow shimmers and mourners pause on the porch before going inside. There is talk by some that the rainbow is a sign that what has happened has been forgiven. Walter could not have planned a better moment.

  STANDING NEAR THE mantel of the Lestons’ dark fireplace, Ethan recalls Elizabeth Leston’s sad attempt to entertain him the previous July, not quite four months before. Alex’s discussion with Zoe, however, is within earshot and it pulls him into the present.

  “It’s ten by sixteen. The biggest I’ve attempted so far . . .”

  Alex is deliberately talking about things other than the funeral, reminding Zoe about all the tomorrows that remain to the living. It is time, he is saying, to begin to turn away from the dead.

  “That’s great, Alex,” Zoe says, but seems unreceptive. She holds her arms tightly against herself.

  Then the man standing at the other end of the fireplace addresses Ethan. The man offers him his hand. “Hi, Hal Stanhope. And you must be a friend of Zoe’s.”

  “Ethan Winter,” Ethan says, grasping the man’s humid flesh. “Zoe and I used to live together,” he corrects.

  “Oh?” Stanhope sounds disappointed. A peer of the Leston’s, he had probably come of age in the fifties. But his disapproval of premarital cohabitation seems as much based on snobbishness as antique morality. That Stanhope, like Leston, boasts a luxuriant head of hair gives Ethan another reason to dislike him. Ethan, at least, has an advantage in height. “Perhaps you and Zoe will be getting back together now,” Stanhope says ingenuously.

  Why would you say that? Ethan wants to ask. But Stanhope’s dull eyes indicate his annoyance would be wasted. Witless old turd, Ethan thinks. And then an older woman with an unnaturally taut face and bouffant hair comes to his side. She’s carrying an hors d’oeuvres plate and from it Stanhope picks up a cracker spread with liverwurst. “My wife and waitress,” Stanhope says. “Tracy, Ethan, and vice versa.”

  “Then you’re a friend of Zoe’s,” Mrs. Stanhope says. She offers Ethan her hand, which unlike her husband’s is a dry bundle of twigs.

  “I was just telling your husband I once lived with Zoe.”

  “The Zoe I know is a delicate child,” Hal says.

  “We’ve known her since she was three,” Tracy adds.

  Ethan’s brain engages. “That must have been when the Lestons moved here.”

  “Weren’t they from Hartford?” Stanhope asks his wife.

  “No. It was Danbury. Or Waterbury. Or was that just where Walter practiced surgery? Anyway they lived or he worked in some ‘bury’ out west.”

  “Don’t you mean east, in Connecticut?” Hal says.

  The Stanhopes impress Ethan as fonts of misinformation. Despite this, he keeps steering the discussion toward Zoe’s past. “Why do you say Zoe’s delicate?” The Zoe Ethan knows is independent and unsentimental, at least about him.

  “Zoe had emotional troubles as a kid,” Stanhope says. “They got her straightened out though.”

  “Valium. Lithium,” Tracy Stanhope lists before reconsidering. Her indiscretion flusters her. “Elizabeth and I used to talk.”

  “Our kids never went on the stuff,” Stanhope says.

  “Children weren’t prescribed those drugs so much when ours were growing up,” Tracy says. “Plus we were lucky. We had boys. It’s all in the cards.”

  “And your astrological sign,” adds Stanhope.

  “Oh please, Hal,” says Tracy, though she seems happy for the opening. “Don’t start making fun of my hobby again.” Tracy looks at Ethan. “Still, Zoe is a Libra and it really shows. She puts on a good front but really keeps her cards close.”

  “Guess Ethan’s sign,” Stanhope tells his wife. “No, let me.”

  “Hal is actually quite good at this,” Tracy says. “But he doesn’t take his ability seriously. Imagine, he even refuses to use the stars for stock tips.”

  “After the past few years I may start,” says Stanhope. “I can’t do any worse.” Then, eyeing Ethan, he bursts out, “I’ll bet a hundred dollars you’re a Virgo.” Ethan finds this judgment vaguely insulting. “Wouldn’t you say Ethan’s a Virgo, dear?” he asks his wife.

  “He is rather quiet,” says Tracy.

  Ethan sips down his vodka and licks his lips, which are going numb. “Pisces,” he says, although he is a Virgo.

  “I knew it,” says Tracy. “I was thinking Pisces.”

  Ethan fixates on his empty glass. “Refill time,” he tells the Stanhopes and lurches away.

  TRACY STANHOPE, WASHING the few dirty plates the caterers missed, talks about Salvador Dalí with a solicitous Alex, who is unloading the Leston’s dishwasher from its last run. Ethan has been rearranging the salvaged party food to fit the refrigerator. Zoe has been attending to the departing mourners as if each needs the brand of her personal farewell. Perhaps this is justified. Many of these aged people, her grandparents’ friends, she will likely never see again.

  Finally, the rest of the house goes quiet. Ethan goes to find Zoe, and through the living room windows he sees movement on the porch and glimpses her from behind, her back long and slender. She is standing beside a swaying glider, on which Hal Stanhope sits. Both are facing the descending sun. A white puff blooms around Zoe and Ethan is astonished to see that she is smoking a cigarette. They have been apart for only four months, yet she is utterly strange to him.

  Has he never before paid her such close attention? Had he only seen in her what he expected to see? Sometimes her kisses tasted metallic; he thought it was her diet but now determines that this might have been the aftereffects of secret cigarettes. Or a mood stabilizer. Lithium? How much had she kept from him? Or was it that he had never allowed her the space to open up?

  “Hey,” she says, turning as he squeaks through the porch’s screen door. “Thanks for cleaning up.” Smoke exits her nostrils in plumes. Her eyes seem heavily made up. Then he realizes they are shadowed from weariness.

  “That a new habit?” Ethan inquires of the cigarette, unable to stop himself.

  She flicks the butt into the driveway and sparks skitter. Dusk is arriving. “You heading back to the city soon?” she asks, and Ethan is duly reprimanded. She is shooing him home like the rest of the mourners.

  “Will you be all right? Alone up here.”

  “We’re next door,” says Stanhope. “If Zoe needs anything she just has to cross the yard.”

  “That’s good,” Ethan says, annoyed by the squeaking of the glider chain.

  “Thank you both,” Zoe says. “I’ll be fine. I won’t have time to brood on things if that’s your worry. I’ve plenty to do. Cleaning up. Putting the house on the market. Financial stuff. My father left neat piles in his study. His lawyer is coming tomorrow to go through them with me.

  “Speaking of which,” Zoe says to Ethan, “those documents my father brought you, did you bring them up?”

  Ethan thinks. He could give Zoe the folder without discussing its contents. After which he can go back to his financial modeling, his relationship with Yahvi. He will have abandoned Zoe decisively and perhaps this will kill his longing for the life he might have had with her.

  “I forgot them,” Ethan says.

  Zoe nods. Does she think this is his ploy to see her again?

  “Why don’t I just send them to you?” h
e says.

  CHAPTER 11

  Nevada

  DISORIENTED HIKER FOUND NEAR HIGHWAY

  Pahrump, Nev., Nov. 2, 2012—A truck driver taking a rest stop on Route 373 rescued a hiker who had been wandering the Amargosa Desert for two days. Jessica Aldridge, a 24-year-old former Air Force technical sergeant, stated that she became disoriented after running out of water in the Funeral Mountains. Aldridge, found partially disrobed, was initially thought to be the victim of an assault. Investigators now speculate Aldridge removed some of her clothing after suffering heat stroke. She is recovering from dehydration and sunburn at the Pettis Memorial VA Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.

  CHAPTER 12

  California

  The man working the counter has a braided beard and baggy eyes. When Jessica comes into his shop he is leaning over a newspaper spread on a display case of piercing jewelry—tongue rings, studs, ear gauges. After a friendly glance he returns to his perusing and Jessica heads to the wall to examine samples of roses and butterflies and dragons and tribal marks, none of which interest her. But there are also photographs—of elaborately scarified arms, of a man’s back imprinted with action cartoon panels, of a bald woman inked from head to toe in jungle flora. Through a beaded curtain at the back comes a mechanical buzz mingled with mumbles that sound like a dental patient attempting speech.

  “Oh, keep quiet,” a woman’s voice orders from the other side of the beads. The man’s mumbling declines to a whimper.

  “Ain’t usually that bad,” the man at the counter says. “She’s doing a mouth.” He pushes up from the newspaper and rises to his full, sad-eyed height, which is over six feet. He is wearing jeans and an armless leather vest—the better to advertise his tattoos, many of which resemble oversized Asian calligraphy. He settles onto a walker and shuffles out from behind the counter. “Considering a tat?”