Emily & Einstein (21 page)

I turned and bolted for the stairs.

*   *   *

Needing a distraction, basically from my life, I cajoled Jordan into going to Central Park. It was Saturday, the weather finally warming up. We ended up at the Boathouse for lunch. Since Einstein was with us, we sat outside and ordered burgers and fries from the café. Jordan leaned back in her chair, her face lifted to the sun. It was good to see my sister at ease, her laughter hinting at someone I didn’t really know beneath the confrontational surface.

Abruptly she leaned forward, a gleam in her eye. “Let’s rent one of those boats and row out on the lake.”

Central Park was a miniature world filled with wonders one would never guess could be found in a rectangle of trees and grassy lawns rolled out in the center of a city made of concrete and steel. There were the stone towers and crenellated battlements of Belvedere Castle high up on a granite hill overlooking the Turtle Pond and the open-air Delacorte Theatre that hosted Shakespeare in the Park. The lawn bowling and croquet courts. The century-old carousel. Even a meandering lake with rowboats and a gondolier.

For a second I could only stare at her. “Jordan, we have Einstein with us.” Even I heard how nervous I sounded.

“So what? We take Einstein. It’s just a rowboat. No big deal.”

Unfortunately, I had a very long memory. While my ocean incident had happened decades earlier, I hadn’t been in any body of water larger than a bathtub since.

Jordan stood, her expression devilish. “Come on, Em.”

“I don’t know—”

She pulled a fake sad face. “Emily, please, I’m trying here.”

I had to smile.

“Fair enough.” I stood, refusing to add fear to every other emotion that had rushed into my life recently. “Let’s rent a boat.”

Einstein didn’t look any more thrilled to board the tiny vessel than I was. But Jordan picked him up, giving him little choice. I stood on the dock telling myself to stop being ridiculous. It was a small, man-made lake that couldn’t be all that deep.

Jordan took the oars. I sat on the front bench, forcibly keeping my hands in my lap instead of clutching the sides. Einstein looked over the edge with a grimace of distaste.

Jordan laughed at us both.

We made our way out into the lake, the trees that were just beginning to bloom lining the shoreline like a pale green ruffle. Beyond the trees, the prewar apartment buildings on Central Park West rose up like sentinels. The Dakota, the San Remo with its twin beacons on top, and farther north just beyond the Natural History Museum, the Beresford with its three towers, standing like an emperor’s castle.

With each oar stroke through the water, Einstein became more relaxed, carefully making his way over my bench to the bow of the boat. He stood at the front, his head extended as he sniffed, breathing in.

“See, even Einstein is having fun now,” Jordan said, rowing.

Like my dog, I started to loosen up. “This was a good idea, Jordan.”

“Thank you. I have a good one every once in a while.”

I heard the sarcasm in her voice, but didn’t say anything. I tried to relax completely, take in the sun after a long northeastern winter of snow and overcast skies. “This is nice.”

I tipped my head back as Jordan had done at lunch, feeling the sun on my face. “How’s the job hunt with WomenFirst going?” I asked for no other reason than to make conversation.

She stopped rowing. When she didn’t say anything I opened my eyes.

“It’s not going so great,” she admitted. “Look, here’s the deal, I really need to borrow some money.”

I forgot about the sun and the boat, fought to keep the lid on the anger that still simmered beneath the surface.

“How much?” I asked carefully.

“A couple thousand.”

“A couple thousand!”

Einstein glanced at us and seemed to roll his eyes.

“I’ll pay you back! Though if you had bought my book I wouldn’t be broke. Since that didn’t work out I need a loan.”

“Loan? You haven’t repaid a dime in the four years I’ve been lending you money! I have tried to be patient. I have tried to be what you needed. What have I done wrong, Jordan? What can I do to make you see you’ve got to grow up?”

Her head fell back and she groaned up to the sky. “Nothing! There is nothing you can do because you aren’t my mother! It’s not your job to take care of me. It never was!”

We stared at each other in that little boat, the angry words echoing against the water as we both grew quiet.

“Someone had to,” I said, the words barely heard. “Our mother certainly didn’t.”

After a second, her mouth opened to say something. But the words were lost when the boat suddenly rocked. I heard a splash, saw Jordan’s eyes go wide.

“Freakin’ A! Einstein just went over.”

I leaped up from the bench, the boat heaving, and leaned over just in time to see his little head go under.

“Einstein!”

“Emily, he’s a dog. He’ll be fine.”

“He is not fine! He’s sinking!”

The boat wobbled as Jordan came forward to look over the edge. “Man, he really is.”

“Help!” I yelled. But there were no other boats close by.

“Man,” Jordan repeated, her voice uncertain, young.

I thought I was going to be sick. It didn’t matter that it was a small lake, not deep. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t the ocean and that I was now an adult. I had never learned to swim.

Fear clutched at me as I lifted my legs over the side.

“What are you doing, Em?”

The boat tipped precariously as I inched my butt closer to the edge.

“Come on, Emily, you can’t go in there. No telling what kind of crap is in that water. Just give E some time. He’ll come back up. Remember, he’s a dog! And dogs can swim!”

But I wasn’t listening. I heaved my body over the side, the boat nearly capsizing, my head going under as I fought back a scream.

einstein

chapter twenty-two

A surprised woof rushed out of me as I hit the water.

On the bow, standing on a pile of extra life jackets, I had realized this was my chance. I waited, poised to leap, but I made the mistake of looking down. The water was thick with mire and no doubt crawling with germs. Vertigo hit me hard, my stomach clenched. I was too afraid to jump. Which depressed me even more, and in turn sent me over the edge. Literally.

“Damn it!” I barked on the way over the side, praying I didn’t have the ability or strength to swim, at least for very long.

The bite of cold took my breath away. Surprise made me gasp, my mouth opening on a gush of water. The sting of algae burned my lungs as I choked. The instinct rose to fight, but I clamped it down and let my body sink. I sighed in relief that soon it would be over.

It didn’t take long before I hit the bottom. The water was cloudy, making it hard to see more than eerie outlines of whatever lay below. My paws hit things on the bottom. Discarded rope or tree branches, I couldn’t tell, though I hardly cared as my legs settled into the debris.

I heard the shouting above, muffled even to my ears, distant. Jordan angry. Emily trying not to panic. They were fighting. Always fighting. Wasn’t life too short to fight? I had made mistakes in my life as Sandy, but I had never wasted time fighting with people. If I was unhappy, I didn’t go to the place of anger and frustration. I walked away. When someone phoned to apologize, I didn’t take their call.

That was something else I had done wrong.

The thought came out of nowhere, crystal clear, impossible to ignore.

It was too late to think about that or anything else as the soft dimness of water and a resolve to die surrounded me. But then my body twitched, something in me trying to push up from the bottom.

Don’t do it,
I willed myself. This was my chance.

But my body fought with my mind. Did I really want to end what was left of my life, end it in a Central Park lake steps from the home I loved?

Yes,
I told myself.

But the primal part of me took over. I let out a scream, my legs and paws completely tangled. I thrashed and kicked, squirmed violently, just as I had done with the cereal box on my head. But I couldn’t get free of whatever held me.

The water was even colder at the bottom, sapping whatever strength my thrashing hadn’t already used up. As quickly as it started, I couldn’t do it anymore. I knew I needed to keep trying, but I couldn’t. My mind grew foggy, thoughts becoming disjointed. I felt more than comprehended the thrashing of someone else next to me, the screaming underwater, the struggle to pull me up. I sensed more than saw that it was Emily, fighting against the debris with everything she was worth.

When we finally broke the surface, she gasped and sobbed as other boats rowed toward us, helping us out of the water. Jordan hung over the side, grabbing onto Emily. I was upset and ashamed, and miserable over my realization.

I didn’t want to die. Not as Sandy. Not even as Einstein. Though where, I wondered, did that leave me?

chapter twenty-three

The kitchen was dark, the only light streaming in from the windows overlooking the inner courtyard. I hardly remembered getting home, Emily cleaning me up, holding me tight, her face tucked into my neck as if my brush with death had broken the last of her strength.

The apartment was quiet, and after I sniffed, I knew Emily and Jordan were home and asleep. I curled back into the towels, but I yelped when that strange electricity I had come to recognize shot through me.

“It’s about time you noticed I was here,” the old man said, coming out of the pantry with a plate of cookies. “You sleep like the dead.”

“Perhaps because
I am
dead.”

“Sarcasm is unbecoming.”

“So you keep saying.”

“True. And truer still is the fact that you’re a real pain in the backside, let me tell you.”

He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, a white suit, and carried a cane. “I’ve got another case going. A Southerner,” he explained. “In Kentucky.”

“You look like Mark Twain. Or that fried-chicken guy.”

He smiled, taking a double chocolate chocolate-chip cookie and popping it in his mouth. “You’ve got to love such simple pleasures. Do you have any milk?”

He didn’t wait for me to answer. He walked over to the refrigerator, pulled out a carton of one-percent, and found a glass in the cabinet.

I laid there for a while longer. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I said out loud what I had finally come to understand.

“It’s over for me, isn’t it?”

The old man glanced across the room mid-chew. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not getting my body back.”

He shrugged. “Probably not.”

My head swam. It didn’t matter that at some level I had suspected the truth; hearing the words spoken out loud felt like a kick in the teeth. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“You’re a smart guy, Alexander, and we both know you had already figured it out. That’s always the way with people—truth staring them in the face but unwilling to accept it.” He ate another cookie quietly. “But,” he added, “even if I had spelled it out you wouldn’t have believed me. You weren’t ready or willing to accept it yet. You’d just have gotten all worked up.”

“Worked up!” I barked. “Of course, I’d get worked up. And since you seem to know every thought I have in this blasted head, you knew what I was thinking. You let me go on believing it was possible anyway.”

He shrugged again. “Alexander, anything is possible. Miracles happen all the time. Who am I to say that you can’t make it happen? Truth is, it still could happen. But
could
and
likely
are two very different kettles of fish, especially when you’ve proved again and again that you’re as pigheaded as you are hardheaded.” He snorted. “That tree incident had to hurt.”

Of course he knew about that.

“Yep,” he confirmed, “the bus, the tree, the pills. The boat. Though rest assured, you just might have finished the job in the lake had Emily not saved you—again, I might add—when you’re the one who is supposed to be saving her.” He shook his head. “Emily doesn’t know how to swim. Pure adrenaline got her down there. Which was a good darned thing since neither one of us needs you killing poor old Einstein on top of everything else. Being a murderer is far worse than having mindless, and let me say, stupid, affairs.”

The affairs.

I had never intended to stray. For those first two years I ignored my mother’s constant case against my wife and remained charmed by Emily and everything she did. When my wife wasn’t working on some publishing project that she was excited about, she worked with great care on the apartment. The place was always in some state of renovation with sawdust on the floors, paint and tile samples covering her kitchen desk.

At first I had loved that she was making us a home. But then something happened, a shift, cracks I thought I had covered over with cement opening back up.

When the first hints of my dissatisfaction surfaced, I remember walking through the front door one evening to the smell of paint, the sound of outdated ’70s and ’80s music, and my wife singing off-key, unworried who might hear. I realized the combination that had enchanted me before had begun to wear.

The minute she heard me, she dropped whatever she was doing and raced through the apartment, pulling off her paint smock and tossing it aside as she threw her arms around my waist, burrowing her face into my chest.

“What happened to ‘Honey, I’m home’?” She laughed, tipping her head back to look at me.

I breathed a sigh of relief when her unwavering love took the edge off my dissatisfaction.

“Bad day for cogs in the wheel?” she teased, not letting go.

“Yes,” I sighed, putting my arms around her, “the cogs are on the verge of revolt. I would walk out but I have no other skills. I only seem to be good at making money.” That should have been a good thing, at least for my father, but I hadn’t been good at finding companies to grow and make bigger, then eventually sell to even larger companies at a handsome profit. No, I was only good at searching out the entities that were failing, businesses that were susceptible to takeover, then tearing them apart and parceling them off like car parts sold out of a chop shop in a seedy section of Staten Island.