31 Hours (13 page)

“Put it with the rest, now,” Sonny said.

Ruby tilted her head and looked at him, silent for a moment. Then she stood up and poured him a cup of the ginger tea that she always insisted he drink. She thought it protected him from infection. And truth was, despite the subway drafts and the viruses carried by commuters and other subway dwellers, he couldn’t remember last time he’d gotten sick. Ruby placed the tea before him, sat and leaned over the table. “Sonny,” she said, “you got quite a pile now. When are you going to use it to come in off the street?”

“Now, there’s the question,” said Leo, who hadn’t moved from the kitchen door.

Ruby ignored her husband. “Momma would like it to see you somewhere regular for the nights, somewhere warm-like,” she said.

“The irony never ceases to amaze me: I sell houses, and you’re homeless,” Leo said.

Ruby shot him a look over her shoulder but remained concentrated on Sonny, waiting for him to speak.

Sonny took a sip of the spicy tea before answering. Ruby made it strong, and it lit up his throat on the way down. “We already been down this crooked road, Ruby,” he said.

“I know, and I sat quiet on the question for a long time, but tonight, I gotta ask again, Sonny.”

Sonny thought back, must have been eight or ten years ago, when Ruby had insisted he see a head doctor, set up an appointment, and walked him to the office. She thought then that with a little mental health counseling, Sonny would choose to change his profession and lifestyle. He felt uncomfortable as soon as he stepped into that starchy office, but he walked up to the receptionist and announced, “I be doing this for Ruby.”

“Name, please,” the receptionist said.

“Sonny Hirt.” The receptionist, with a mole on right cheek and fingernails painted with a checked design, looked familiar. “I may know you,” he said. “You ever seen me on the subway?”

She glanced at him coolly. “Take a seat, Mr. Hirt. It’ll be a few minutes.”

He did sit then. He sat for about ten minutes, until that doctor’s waiting room began to feel like the principal’s office and he couldn’t stay anymore. Then he just walked out. He waited six months to go see Ruby again, to press home his point that she had to take him as he was.

“I got myself a home, Ruby,” Sonny said now. “Biggest home imaginable. Stretching through all five boroughs. I got places to sit and a bed comfortable enough, and . . . and I entertain a lot. . . .” He guffawed.

“If you got yourself a home, then why do you come here to shower?” Leo asked.

Ruby straightened up and turned fully toward her husband. “Leo,” she said, and there was a stripe of iron in her voice, “this is the anniversary of my momma’s death. Sonny and I are going to spend some time talking now. You’re welcome to sit with us, but you might be more comfortable seeing what’s on TV, the way you usually do.”

Leo shifted his weight without answering at first. “Guess you’re right,” he finally said.

She watched him leave and then turned back to Sonny. He saw more of Momma in her worn expression than he ever had before. “You know, I was sitting here looking at these pictures, all the way from when we were babies, Sonny, and seeing all the love in Momma’s face. You can see how proud she is. And then I wonder, what went wrong? What went wrong, Sonny?”

Sonny looked directly at her eyes, which were starting to fill, and he had to stop that or Leo might run in here and accuse Sonny of making his wife cry. It had happened like that before.

“Nothin’ wrong,” he said, though he knew that wasn’t enough to put an end to it.

“Oh, Sonny.” Ruby stroked the top of the kitchen table with her palm. “No matter how I’ve tried to change it, you’re living on the streets, and you know that would upset Momma. And me, I got a home and I got Leo, but . . . but it wasn’t what I was expecting.”

Sonny ran his finger around the rim of his cup. “I know you be holding these questions tight in your head—they’re good questions, Ruby, about the course of life and all,” he said. “But you got to remember. You got an everyday man. That’s something Momma didn’t have. And you got yourself what else we never did, when we were little. These walls
around you that you can count on. That ain’t nothing, so with all your worrying, don’t forget that. Remember all those times we had to be moving, a block over or to the end of the street, trying to make it in places that each one be feeling smaller and dirtier than the one before? Momma was always struggling. She’d be pleased and proud to see you not struggling, Ruby.”

“Not that way, at least,” she said.

“Not that way,” he agreed. He took another sip of her tea and then went on, “And about me, well, I’m the happiest guy in the world.”

She laughed. “In the
world
, is it?”

“I got somethin’ to judge that by, too, Ruby, ’cause every day I see hundreds of people. You know how it is with me: I can walk into a place and feel a body. I walk in here and feel you wanting for more with Leo, for instance. With them folks brushing by me, or reaching to put a coin in my hand, I’m feeling some of the same. They all be longing for something. A steady diet of longing, Ruby, well, that drives a person to the needle or the gun. Me, looks like from the outside I got less, but I’m not
longing
for more, and there’s a freedom in that. I don’t know why, and I’m not trying to brag on it. But I’m free in a way Momma never was, and I think she’d be full glad for it. For me, it’s still a plenty good life.”

“Listen to you,” Ruby said, and her face was a bit lighter now, as if her cheekbones had risen half an inch and the skin beneath them had magically tightened. “Talking the way you do, like a subway philosopher.” She reached out to tug playfully on his right ear. “You know, you could have gotten married, quite a few times.”

He grinned at her. “You saying it’s too late now?”

Ruby laughed. “Lord, no. We clean you up a bit, maybe a blue silk tie, and you’re still a catch.” Then she gestured out the kitchen window. “Stay here tonight at least. It’s bitter cold out there.”

He glanced toward the kitchen door, which led to the living room and its sound of the television’s canned laughter. Ruby followed his gaze.

“Oh, him,” she said. “He don’t understand, Sonny. Don’t let him worry you.”

For a moment, Sonny considered spending the night on Ruby’s couch, resting his head on a real pillow. He’d taken her up on the offer a few times over the years. The night he got rolled in the Times Square station, for instance. They sliced his neck near the jawline, yanked back his arm, and bloodied his eye for the love of about twenty-two bucks. He made it to Ruby’s and spent close to a week on her couch. He was certainly thankful for Ruby. But tonight he felt loaded with optimism and ready to go.

“Leaving my earnings with you, Ruby, it’s saving me a pile of worry,” he said, “and I’m thinking I’ll likely be back with more tomorrow night, because tomorrow’s going to be another good day for Mr. Sonny. I feel it. But now I’m thinking, with your blessing, I’ll just be getting a shower and shoving on.”

Ruby looked down at her hands and straightened her fingers as if studying her nails. “Even though it’s Momma’s anniversary?” she asked.

“Even so.”

She shook her head, but when she met his gaze, she was smiling softly. “You’re a hardheaded man,” she said. “I’ll go get you a fresh towel.” At the kitchen door, she turned back to him. “Thank you, Sonny,” she said. “For coming tonight. Wouldn’t have been the same without you.”

“Ruby,” he said, full of tenderness. There weren’t many around to praise Sonny for meeting family obligations. He clenched his fist lightly, kissed the top of it, and blew it in the direction of his sister.

NEW YORK: 6:25 P.M.
MECCA: 2:25 A.M.

Jake had been consumed by trying to figure out exactly how to present the facts to Carol so she wouldn’t get too upset and they could logically discuss what to do next, and because of this he hadn’t given a thought to what it might feel like to be standing outside his old building until he was there. It was odd that in all this time, she’d never moved and even odder to think that he could have continued coming here every evening after work forever. In that case, this would just be an evening like any other instead of an evening that marked the first time he’d been here in, what? Fifteen years? In this other, no-divorce reality, they might be upstairs watching the news together, having already talked through what to do about Jonas, or they might be bumping hips in the kitchen, making a cheese-and-mushroom omelet to share.

Probably romanticized visions, all, but how could he be anything but romantic standing in front of the building that had contained him during the most hopeful days of his life? The name over the buzzer still combined hers and his. Carol Meitzner. She’d never changed it back to her maiden name, and that moved him in a way that he suspected it probably should not. She would say even noticing was a sign of his self-involvement, but she was still the only woman he’d ever given his name to—or ever would, he suspected now—and he had to admit he felt pleased that she’d kept it. He thought about ringing the buzzer in their
code pattern: three short and one long. That game had enabled them to skip the step of pressing the intercom button and calling, “Yes?” Before Jonas, it allowed one to greet the other naked, if they wanted, because the unspoken rule was that you used the code only if you were coming up alone.

But if he used the code, she might discover how tightly he still clung to old dreams, and consider him pathetic. Or
he
might discover she’d forgotten it, which would feel—just wrong.

Whatever. It was too cold to be out here musing, so he leaned on the buzzer, waited a second, and then gave it a last short tap for good measure.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” Jake said, and she buzzed him in.

It remained a nice building, well maintained, he noticed as he got into the elevator and pushed the button for the eleventh floor. The aroma of spaghetti sauce clung to the elevator just as it had when he’d lived here.

She was waiting for him in the hallway when the elevator door opened. Still slender, with hair that hung to her shoulders. He took in these details even though he knew what she looked like—Jonas showed him photographs every so often.

“I kept thinking you’d call,” she said. “Was he there?”

“No. Can I come in?”

She waved her hand.

Inside the door, he pulled off his coat and dropped it on a tan leather easy chair he’d never seen before. She had the same bookcase, but otherwise, everything was different, including the artwork on the wall. One was a photograph of a woman in a green dress flying an orange kite. Another was a terracotta-colored painting of a form that looked
vaguely like Buddha. He walked into the kitchen and reached up into the cabinet where they used to keep the coffee cups. They were still there. He took down a cup he recognized, off-white with a lavender flower painted on the side.

“Can I help you to something?” she said pointedly.

“Well, if you still keep the tea over there,” he said, pointing to the narrow, built-in cabinet, “I can probably help myself.”

“That may be more familiarity than I want.” She opened the cabinet he’d pointed to and pulled out three boxes—Earl Gray, green, and chamomile—for him to choose from. She set them on the kitchen table. He filled his cup with water and put it in the microwave. In the corner of the countertop, she still had the metal teapot they used to take with them when they went camping. She had stuck some dried flowers in it.

She followed his gaze but didn’t comment on the teapot. “Okay, Jake. What did you find out?”

“There was no answer on any of his phones or at the door,” he said. “I buzzed the landlord’s apartment, and there was no answer there, either. Finally I found someone in the damn building, a girl who is a personal trainer and knows Jonas, at least a little bit. We talked for a while until she was convinced I was okay and really Jonas’s dad, and then she told me the landlord was at his brother’s house on East 8th, helping fix up an apartment. She didn’t know exactly where, but she said the corner of 8th and 63rd, so I went there and rang a few bells, God, it was cold—”

“Jake,” she said. “Jonas. This is about Jonas.”

“Yeah. I found the guy, finally. He didn’t want to stop what he was doing to go let me into Jonas’s apartment, but he finally agreed to send his nephew with me and—” He broke off. This was where it would
start to get tricky, he knew, so he took the cup out of the microwave and added a bag of green tea.

“Go ahead,” Carol said.

“Let’s go sit in the living room,” Jake said.

“Does this really have to be orchestrated?” Carol asked, but she followed him into the living room. He noticed she took the chair across from the couch so there was no chance he could sit close enough to touch her.

“So he let me in,” he said, sitting on the couch. “And the room was neat—very neat, actually, for Jonas. The bed was made and all the clothes were put away and the dishes clean. It looked like he’d gotten ready for company—or maybe just for a visit from you.” He smiled and took a sip of tea.

“So it didn’t look like he’d been there?”

“The room smelled kind of stale, so I think maybe he hadn’t been there in a couple days, but that’s only a guess.” He set down his tea and leaned back. “My best bet remains that he’s found himself a new girlfriend who lives in a nicer apartment than his.”

“I want to call the police,” Carol said.

“Wait a minute.” Jake held up one hand. “There’s a little more. I looked around some. I searched on his desk and found a few things. First of all, paperwork from NYU. He’s not enrolled this semester, Carol. I guess he was too late filling out some forms?”

“What? What’s he been doing all day, then? And why did he lie to me?”

“They said he could enroll next semester, so we’ll make sure he follows through. The part that bothered me, though, Carol,” and here he paused again, “is that neither of you told me he went to Pakistan.”

Carol shook her head. “What are you talking about?”

“I found a ticket stub for a flight to Pakistan.”