The Dismantling (23 page)

“Because I've seen it. Somebody gets greedy or panics. They try to catch everybody else by surprise.”

“Seen it where?”

“It doesn't matter where. The scam changes, but people's behavior doesn't.” Maria gave him a hard look, and he thought he'd just glimpsed another facet of her composite self: the scrapper, the fighter. The survivor. “Don't be the guy waiting around, trusting that the system's going to work,” she said. “You need to take control. You need to do something.”

“DaSilva's not going to panic, okay? It's not his style.”

She shook her head in annoyance, as though he were completely missing the point. “How long are you going to do this job, Simon?”

“It wasn't supposed to be a long-term solution.”

“That's not an answer.”

“I'm only two, maybe three, deals short of paying DaSilva back my loan.” As soon as he said it, he knew this was an irrelevant statement, borderline ridiculous.

“Wait, you owe him money?” Maria looked genuinely surprised for the first time during the conversation.

“I . . .” He was suddenly embarrassed. How could he have put himself into such a position? It had seemed so simple at the time, so logical. His shoulders slumped. “Yeah. I owe him money.”

“And you'd start work on another deal?” She stared at him. “After everything? Are you fucking kidding?”

“No, you're right. Of course, you're right.” Simon rubbed his eyes. “I'll quit when this is over. When you're safe. When nobody's looking for you anymore.”

“Will he let you go?”

“I don't know.” He looked away. “I guess we'll find out.”

T
HAT
night, Simon took Maria on a walk around the island, circling past the lighthouse and then south along the eastern river promenade. Maria, stir-crazy and still fuming, wore a hooded sweatshirt pulled tight over her head to hide her face, a gesture that Simon thought shaded into the paranoid. They passed under the bridge, the cavernous sound of traffic rumbling overhead, and when they came out on the other side, there was Cabrera, the sooty main building genuflecting to the blue-green glass of the transplant wing. On the far side of the hospital's parking lot, a single fisherman cast over the railing into the glossy black river, a bucket of bait at his feet. Beyond Cabrera, they cut across a large hillocky field, an expanse of dirt and grass littered with colossal pieces of construction equipment. They took a gravel path hemmed in by low trees and emerged onto a narrow spit of dirt strewn with weeds, plastic trash, blocks of broken concrete. The spit rested low, only a few feet above the waterline, a rusted metal ladder descending into the murky water. They sat at the top of the ladder, their feet hanging out over the edge. The river flowed by, the incoming tide pushing up from New York Harbor to part around the island. Simon looked out over the water to his right, at the blank-faced towers of Tudor City. South, down the barrel of the river, the three bridges to Brooklyn hung like Christmas lights strung across the expanse. They sat together in the half dark, the glow of Manhattan on one side, Queens on the other.

Earlier in the evening, Simon had paged DaSilva to his cell phone. When the call came, he stepped into the stairwell and told Peter that Maria had returned with him to the Roosevelt Island apartment. DaSilva ordered Simon to keep her there, under his watch. He'd been even more curt with Simon than usual, as though every word were costing him money, as though he'd reached some rarified level of tension beyond the expression of speech. “How are things at Cabrera?” Simon had asked. “Difficult,” DaSilva had said, and then he'd hung up.

“It's beautiful,” Maria said quietly now.

“It'll be different soon though.” Simon gestured behind them. “That field? With all the equipment on it? They're going to turn this whole end of the island into a manicured park. Level it off, plant some grass, a few clusters of trees. This spit here”—he kicked the rusted ladder—“it'll be long gone.”

They fell silent, the only sounds the river lapping at the concrete under their feet and the distant hum of traffic on the FDR. The night was cold, and Maria hunched deeper into her sweatshirt, her face disappearing within the hood.

“I keep thinking about Lenny,” she said. “Can you imagine how hopeless he'd have to feel to do something like that? How worthless?”

“I can
imagine
,” Simon said, “but that's all I can do. I haven't been there, you know? I've been low, but not that low.” And it was true: even in his darkest moments after Amelia's drowning, he'd never truly wanted to die. He could thank Michael for the idea that suffering was something to be endured, not avoided, a concept his father had taught by example.

“Yeah. I'd be lying if I said I've never thought about it. But probably everybody thinks about it at some point.” She turned away from Simon, looking downriver toward the three twinkling bridges. “Big difference between thinking and doing.”

“When did you think about it?” Simon said.

She turned back toward him. “You're asking what was my lowest moment?”

“I guess so.”

She snorted out a laugh. “Take your pick. There's a whole fucking banquet of misery to choose from.” She touched her stomach. “I'm sick of it. Sick of being miserable. Sick of being the victim. I'm done with that forever.”

“You're not just talking about the surgeries. About getting ill.”

“No.”

“What happened to you, Maria?” He spoke softly, as though she wouldn't notice the seriousness of the question if he asked it gently enough.

She seemed to retreat even deeper within the hood, and he was afraid that he'd pushed too far, that she was going to shut him down again. Instead, she said, “What are you supposed to do when something bad happens to you? You're supposed to
process
it.
Understand
it. Right? You're supposed to work through your feelings, as if thinking about something terrible over and over and over again will make you feel any better about it. It's an idiotic idea. But I can tell you that avoiding the thing doesn't work either. You can't forget something just because you wish it hadn't happened.” She paused. “You know all about that too, don't you? With Amelia.”

“Yes.”

“You keep reliving the night she drowned, right? You wonder if you'd done something differently that night, maybe she'd still be alive. And you know what? Maybe she would be. But that doesn't matter now. It's not your fault. You didn't
want
her to die. It was a tragedy, an accident. There's nobody to blame.”
If you only knew
, he thought. “But what if there were?” she continued. “What if there was one person who caused your pain? One person who deliberately hurt you?”

“Who? Who are you talking about?”

She pulled back her hood and looked at him, her eyes searching his face for—what? He tried to show her what she needed to see, which in practice meant holding his face very still, as though he were having an X-ray taken.

“I don't know how to talk about this,” she said.

“Can you try?”

She shook her head and looked away.

“Wait,” he said, desperate not to lose her. “Please. You can trust me. I would never tell anybody.” He gave her a rueful smile. “And even if I wanted to, you know I don't have anyone to tell.”

She returned the smile. “That I believe.”

“I want to understand you,” he said. “Please let me try.”

She stared at him, her eyes dark and shadowed. Weighing, judging. “If I tell you this,” she finally said, “I'm going to start at the beginning. I want you to listen until I'm finished before you say anything. All right? Can you do that?”

“Yeah.” He was suddenly nervous, as though he could somehow fail at the simple act of listening. “I can do that.”

“All right.” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again she seemed nearly in a trance, speaking as though her words were already fully formed and she was simply reciting them, delivering something that had been crafted long before.

“I told you my mother died when I was thirteen,” she said. “That's true. I also told you I don't know who my father is. That's also true. Of course, I asked my mother about him, and she said she could give me a name if that's what I really wanted. But she didn't know where he was and she wouldn't help me find him. She said I'd be better off never knowing him, and even though she was maybe not the most reliable narrator of her own life, I believed her about this. So for thirteen years it was just the two of us. I don't remember how old I was when I realized she was an addict. I guess I realized it before I knew the word ‘addict,' before I understood why she passed out on the couch at eight o'clock every night—you could set your watch to it—or why it always seemed like she was talking to me from deep inside a plastic bubble. It was pills, painkillers. Before I was born, she preferred to get drunk, at least according to her. But I was a difficult birth, didn't want to come out, and they ended up performing a cesarean. She was in a lot of pain afterward, so they did what overworked doctors do—they gave her a prescription, and she basically kept refilling that prescription for the next thirteen years.

“She definitely
was
an addict, but I still don't like using that word to talk about her. Not because I'm ashamed, but because I've seen addiction a lot since then and I know what it can look like. Or at least I know what most people picture when I say that word. They picture squalor. Filth. Some shitty house with a bunch of junkies sitting around on duct-taped couches, shooting up at noon on a Tuesday. And, yeah, I've seen it like that—it just wasn't like that with us. She kept her job right to the end. Our house was small and rented, and the neighborhood wasn't great, but inside it was clean. It was a home. She might have passed out every night at eight, but she was up and going by six the next morning. Getting me ready for school, getting herself to work. Things changed some in the last two years, when she switched out her Vicodin for oxy, or really in the last few months, when she started crushing the oxy. Here's a rule: if you're snorting or injecting something, it's going to catch up with you soon enough. Something I learned when I was a kid but forgot about for a few years there.”

Maria paused. Simon pictured the pile of red powder on Katherine Peel's coffee table, and he felt an echo of the slow sweetness of that drug, whatever it had been, spreading through his veins. It would be easy, he knew, to want that sweetness every day, to depend upon it until it didn't matter if you wanted it anymore or not.

“My mother OD'd on a Monday,” Maria said. “She was off work for some reason, and I guess she was celebrating. I spent a week at a youth shelter, and by the next Monday they'd placed me in a foster home. I was officially a ward of the state. They couldn't find my father. Maybe he's dead too, who knows. My grandparents didn't want to take care of me, and I don't blame them. They lived in East Texas—still do, I think—and they were both sick and barely getting by already without a teenager to deal with. There was nobody else. So I went into the system.

“The first family didn't work out. Neither did the second or the third. When I was sixteen, I was taken in by the Dreesons. They'd never had a foster kid before, and God knows why they took me on, a sixteen-year-old punk. Maybe Mrs. Dreeson was bored and wanted a girl around, somebody to talk with about, you know, womanly things or whatever. If that was it, I'm sure she was sorely disappointed. Anyway, they weren't so bad, the parents, just regular middle-class Southern California people trying to get through life without the whole thing collapsing on their heads. And I liked San Gabriel fine. It felt like a real neighborhood. People knowing each other's business, but in a good way. I even got along all right in the high school there.”

She stopped again. Simon nodded in what he hoped was an encouraging way. She chewed her lip for a moment, and when she resumed speaking her voice was flattened out even further, emptied entirely of inflection and emotion. She would be a conduit for her story now—a neutral medium—and nothing more.

 • • • 

T
he problem, she continued, was the Dreesons' biological son, Thomas. He was a year older than Maria, a gangly kid obsessed with his dirt bike, which was perpetually half-dismantled in the family garage. At first, he seemed excited to have Maria around. And why not? He was a bored seventeen-year-old kid—bored with his parents, his neighborhood, his school, his life—a high school senior treading water until he could get the hell away from home. And here, suddenly, was a girl with dyed purple hair, a pierced nose, and a safety-pinned Circle Jerks hoodie, sleeping in the spare bedroom down the hall. Here, suddenly, was a badass younger sister—or at least that was the role into which he first cast her.

She'd lived in San Gabriel for two months when he showed her where his parents kept their petty cash. He waved her into the master bedroom, a shadowy, musky space she'd been told was off-limits. This was during the drowsy late-afternoon hours between the end of school and the Dreesons' return home from work. Thomas hadn't bothered to turn on the lights, and he stood, stoop shouldered, in the murk, his hand resting on his parents' dresser.

“Listen, M.,” he said, “you keep lifting cigs from Chet's place and he's gonna bust you.”

“I'm not stealing—”

“Save it. First off, I've seen you doing it. Second, Chet already knows. I had to tell him to chill and let me talk to you before he called the cops.”

Was it true? Maria thought she'd been smooth at the newsstand, palming the packs while Chet—she hadn't known his name until then, the stringy white guy with the ponytail and tobacco-stained fingers—bent to the register to make change for some deliberately convoluted transaction, like a handful of pennies and nickels for a candy bar. The open-air newsstand was the only place she could pull it off, since the cigarettes were right out there with the magazines instead of barricaded behind the counter like in every other store. If the guy—Chet—had seen what she was doing, wouldn't he have stopped her on the spot? Why would he wait to talk it over with Thomas? Or maybe Chet hadn't seen anything, and Thomas had told him about it himself. But, then, how did Thomas know what she'd been up to?

“They don't give you any spending money, do they?” Thomas shook his head at such gross injustice. “Never gave me shit either.” She didn't think this was true—she'd seen all the gadgets in his room, the PlayStation, the TV, the stereo—but she didn't say anything. “Anyway, I thought I'd let you in on a little secret, being that you're my new sister and all.” He opened the bottom drawer of the dresser and beckoned her over. In the drawer was a simple metal cash box with a three-digit combination. “Combo's one, two, three,” he said. “No joke.” He opened the box. Inside was a jumble of bills, mostly fives and ones. “Rainy day cash,” he said. “Car wash, carton of milk, et cetera. You know how they have that old-person thing about using a credit card for a small purchase? Anyway, they have no idea how much is in here. You take ten bucks for a couple packs of smokes every week, they'll never know.”