Twisted River (4 page)

Fergus and Izzy looked up from their late-night pizza. Fergus looked mildly curious and Izzy bored and disinterested. According to Kate, she'd hardly spoken a word all day.

The anticipation was written all over Kate's face. “I'm telling you now, because it's only a few months and you've got to start saving your pocket money.”

The kids got precious little pocket money, but Mannix knew that this would all be part of the fun.

“Yeah?” Slight interest from Izzy now.

“You, Fergus, and Dad and I are going on a special holiday during the October school holidays this year.”

That certainly grabbed Fergus's attention.

“On holiday? Where?” he asked, separating two slices of pizza stuck together with strands of cheese glue.

“We're off to the Big Apple!”

Fergus's jaw dropped, as did one of the pizza slices.

“New York?” came Izzy's high-pitched query. “You're joking us—New York?
The
New York?”

“Yes, Izzy,
the
New York.”

Mannix reveled in his wife's delight at imparting such momentous news to the kids. He reveled further at Izzy's incredulity and glee.

“Oh my God, oh my God, I don't believe it, oh my God . . .” she kept repeating.

Fergus was speechless.

“Well, Soldier, what do you think?” asked Mannix.

“Absolute class. Awesome.” Fergus looked stunned. “This is just the best day ever. Thank you, Mum. Thank you, Dad.” He was grinning broadly now. Mannix's soul felt warm.

Pizza in hand, Fergus rushed at the two of them, hugging them tightly. He was not given to easy displays of affection. Mannix thought if he or Kate had had any misgivings about spending her nest egg, they were mightily dispelled now.

“So, my little soldier, when you go in to school tomorrow, you can tell everyone in your class how you are going to be on top of the Empire State Building in the October holidays.”

“You bet,” said Fergus, pushing his glasses back up his nose with a cheesy hand.

“Frankie Flynn included,” Kate added, giving Fergus a knowing look.

“Dunno 'bout that, Mum . . .” Fergus looked dubious.

“Why ever not?” asked Kate.

“Frankie didn't come to school today.”

“Oh . . . is that right?” said Kate.

“Yeah, they said he was in hospital all night. His arm's all banjaxed. Someone attacked him last night. Nobody knows when he'll be back.”

Fergus picked off the onion from the last slice of pizza and then looked at his mother as he grinned. “So you see, Mum, it's been the very best day ever.”

RIVERSIDE DRIVE, MANHATTAN

EARLY SEPTEMBER

H
azel winced at her reflection in the mirror. It hurt like hell when she touched there above the cheekbone. With her finger, she patted, searching gently at the back of her head. Where was it again?

“Ouch . . .”
She'd found it. That hurt like hell too. The size of a conker, they would say at home in Ireland. Only this was not a glossy-coated chestnut but a bulbous contusion above the base of her skull. She hadn't been able to sleep on her back—even if she'd felt like sleeping.

She had wondered about going to the emergency room at Weill Cornell but this would be the second time in as many months. She didn't need the attention—or the incident reports. And anyway, some of those guys played squash with Oscar.

It was 6:15
A
.
M
.
, still quiet, as she hovered over the twin sinks in their en suite bathroom. Oscar always allowed her these few quiet moments to herself. The penchant for the double sink had always mystified her. After all, who really wanted to perform their morning ablutions side by side, one shaving, another gargling, or spitting toothpaste into the adjacent drain? Maybe in the first flush of a relationship or a marriage. Neither of which applied to Hazel and Oscar.

Leaning over the marble bowl, she edged closer to the mirror.
Blood bursts flecked her eye white, and the eyelid had swollen a mix of red and purple. The whole of her left eye socket was swollen, giving it a reptilian quality. Raising her fringe, she saw how the jagged gash his ring had made was crusting over. The fringe hid that, at least.

Brushing her teeth was agony, her jaw still aching and bruised from where she'd hit the wall. She opened her mouth as wide as she could and moved her jaw from side to side. It felt stiff. Even her neck felt sore as she bent to spit the spearmint saliva from her mouth. As she straightened up, a shadow fell across the room.

“Oscar.”

She wasn't sure if she'd mouthed it or said it. His tall, wiry frame filled the doorway. The way things had been left, she wasn't sure if he was still mad.

“Hazel . . .” He looked at her face, shaking his head. “Let me hug you, my poor, poor Hazel.”

She had her answer. He wasn't mad anymore.
As she stood immobile, Oscar moved behind her, circled her waist, and dropped his head into the crook of her neck—a gesture of submission. Her nostrils filled with the smell of him, the musk of his gray-white hair, his slept-in T-shirt, and the faint odor of stale coffee.

“What has become of us?” he asked of their reflections in the mirror.

“Don't,” she whispered, worried at the emotion that threatened to well up.

“Please, Oscar, don't.” She bit her lip.

Releasing her, he took a step back.

“You're not going in today, Hazel? Are you? Tell me you're not going in.” There was an edge to his voice.

But she had to do this. No matter what he said. She just had to.

“I must,” she said quietly, examining her palette of eye shadow. Should she accentuate the purple or mask it?

“You can't go into a classroom looking like . . . like . . .” He faltered.

Funny that underneath it all, Oscar was conservative, cared what people thought. Something to do with his Anglo-Saxon heritage, perhaps?

“And you think I'm going to look so very different to the students I try to teach, do you?” she ventured—more bravely now. Taking the job at the Impact School, she knew she was heading for a challenging environment. But sometimes she just felt like an extra on the set of a war movie.

“I really don't get why you're being this stubborn, Hazel.” His voice was firm, in control again.

She was beginning to wonder herself. She'd always thought of her stubbornness as a virtue, but it was looking increasingly likely it could as easily be her undoing. Hazel was always loath to admit defeat. She wanted to make things work. To turn things around. But she didn't want to argue again, to push him again. What Oscar wanted was for her to get a publishing job like she'd had before, to work in Manhattan and not trek off into “that ghetto” every day.

“Are you going to answer me?”

His arms still circled her, his breath hot against her neck. There was a tenderness now but underneath she sensed that lurking anger. She was trapped.

“Mom . . . my cell—have you seen it?”

Elliot shuffled into the bedroom, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Hazel heaved an inward sigh of relief. Oscar was careful never to argue in front of the kids. Defeated now, he let her go and swung around to ruffle his son's pale blond hair, blocking Hazel from Elliot's view—as if he couldn't stomach his child seeing her like this.

“Good morning, sleepy head!” He mussed up Elliot's pageboy hair. But that didn't distract Elliot.

“Holy cow! Mom! What happened?”
Elliot was perfectly awake now, eyes darting from Hazel to Oscar, looking for an explanation. Oscar opened his mouth to make an excuse but Hazel was there before him.

“A drunk on the subway,” she said quickly, just the way she'd rehearsed. “That's all, Elliot. Looks worse than it feels.” She chanced a smile through the lies. A shooting pain seared down her jaw.

Elliot looked at his dad.

“Thought you said the subway was safe. That Bloomberg used to take it every day when he was mayor.”

“The subway is safe, son. But I can't guarantee it one hundred percent. It's certainly safer now than when I was a kid.”

Elliot's face dropped. His father had told him something that appeared to be untrue. Poor Elliot. He idolized his father and Hazel was always reluctant to say anything to fracture that childhood faith.

“Whoa, Mom!! Look at you. What the hell happened?”
Jess had joined them now, showered and uniformed, and, for once, interested in someone other than herself.

“Mom was attacked by some drunk on the subway,” Elliot chipped in.

“For real?” Jess assessed the situation. “What did the cops have to say about it?” She flicked her hair. Jess's reaction to the assault seemed detached. Hazel could feel hurt but she knew that Jess was a slow burner. Sympathy would come later.

“No need for the police. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, Jess. It won't happen again.” Hazel had made this promise before, but this time she really meant it. Oscar was fiddling with his electric razor, avoiding her gaze.

“Jeez, Mom, you seem fairly chilled about all of this,” said Jess.

“Enough, Jess,” said Oscar. “Go see if Celine has put a pancake mix in the fridge and get started on breakfast. We have this under control.”

Hazel wasn't chilled. She was in shock. It had been the sheer surprise of it. The force of the blow had stunned her, the depth of anger had left her reeling.

“Go on, then, guys . . .” Oscar shooed the kids out of the bedroom.

He turned to Hazel. “Celine still does that, right? Leave a pancake mix in the fridge?”

“Yeah, she still does that,” Hazel answered mechanically.

Celine was their part-time nanny who came in afternoons for the children after school.

“You're determined to go in, then?”

“Please, Oscar . . .” She looked at him, almost pleading.

“Okay, then, Hazel, have it your way, but don't say I didn't warn you.”

 • • • 

Riding down the elevator, Hazel tried to avoid looking at her reflection by following the paths of the spidery white veins in the marble floor tiles. As residents from lower floors joined the car, she took out her cell and pretended to read.

“Good morning, Mrs. Harvey, how you doin' today?”

Sidney Du Bois, the doorman, was upbeat as always. Hazel had long since given up on trying to get him to call her by her first name. He too liked to be addressed as plain Du Bois.

“Fine, thank you, Du Bois.” She turned her head to the side as if to admire the flower arrangement on the stand. Just four more strides to the door.

“The children just about missed the school bus this morning, Mrs. Harvey. But I shouted at the driver to wait.”

“Thank you, Du Bois.” She looked at him now.

What could she do? It would have been rude not to.

“My pleasure, Mrs. Harvey,” he said slowly, his expression hardly changing.

Du Bois—efficient, polite, and unfailingly discreet. By far the best doorman on the Upper West Side. She exited the air-conditioned lobby and stepped out onto the sidewalk, into the growing heat of the September morning.

She almost wished the season would change in that ridiculously schizophrenic way that summer could become winter overnight in this part of the world. She felt vulnerable in her light cotton blouse and linen pants. She'd have much preferred to hide under layers of coats and hoods, but there were probably weeks of hot, steaming, sticky weather left to go.

As she turned the corner at West Seventy-fifth Street and made her way the few blocks toward the Seventy-second Street subway station, she passed an assortment of smartly dressed office workers, joggers on their way to Riverside Park, and clusters of old ladies harnessed to poodlish-looking dogs on their way to the dog run. She found it hard to imagine herself old and retired in Manhattan, much
less in a procession of elderly ladies looking after their pooches. It was convivial, healthy, and had a lot to commend it, but she just couldn't picture herself in that situation.

They'd retire out to Long Island, just like Oscar's parents had done—at least that's what Oscar had always planned. When Jack and Estelle Harvey had moved out to live in their second home in Sag Harbor, Oscar and Hazel had moved into their Riverside Apartment. But all that had changed now. Changed utterly.

As she came to the canopy-covered piles of fruit outside the Fairway market, she stopped and hovered over the oranges and lemons, inhaling their citrus aroma. She often stopped to pick up a bag of fruit for the day, but today she hadn't even managed breakfast. She couldn't imagine having an appetite anytime soon. She waited for the lights at the crosswalk. Across the road, a line of people had started to form outside the Beacon Theatre. A chat show host was performing there tonight. When they'd first moved to Riverside Drive, she and Oscar regularly went to the Beacon or to Lincoln Center, reveling in all the district had to offer. Oscar's sister, Helen, or Celine would stay over with the kids, and in a way it almost felt like a second honeymoon.

As she stood staring trancelike at the
DON
'
T
WALK
signal, she remembered her first meeting with Oscar, at the opera in Verona. The vast jaws of the arena breathing out the heat of the day, bats and swallows crossing the paths of powerful spotlights. Armies of tourists clambering up and down stone steps. The smell of cooking dough wafting in from pizzerias. The orchestra tuning up. Dignitaries entering the arena on the red carpet. And she remembered a large man panting beside her, his breathing labored, sweating for Italy.

She thought he might easily have a heart attack, collapse, and flatten her. As the corpulent man swayed in the heat, on her other side, a voice said in her ear, “How you doing there?”

She turned around and looked into those eyes for the first time. Such crystal blue. She remembered the squareness of his jaw, his easy charm. His confidence. Oscar had shifted position to make more room for her. He called a nearby attendant and bought two fans and
two red cushions. One each. The stone steps were far too uncomfortable, he said, she'd never last, she had to trust him. And she had.

“Move it, lady!”

She hadn't noticed the signal change. Gathering her thoughts, she walked across briskly and made her way down the subway station at Verdi Square. The train pulled up just as she made it to the platform. She was thankful that there had been only one flight of stairs, unlike the tube from her London days, when descending countless assortments of stairs and elevators into the bowels of the earth made her feel claustrophobic.

All the seats in the car were taken. As she raised her arm to reach for the pole, an elderly man made as if to offer up his seat. She nodded her head to signal that she was fine. Good Lord! How distressed must she look for an old man to offer up his seat? Suddenly, it felt as if everyone in the car were staring at her. Rather than gawk at her reflection in the darkened window, she concentrated on a tiny pebble that rolled around on the grimy floor, breathing through her mouth and trying to ignore the smells of sweat and feet.

Six stops later, the seat next to her was vacated and she shimmied in next to a bald man in a tie and short sleeves. He was reading the
Wall Street Journal
. As he scrolled through the pages on his tablet, a flashing ad caught her eye—a Discover Ireland tourist ad. She smiled. The collage of images might have been updated but it was the selfsame palette of photos over the decades—dusted off and recycled to show green fields, smiling faces, sheer cliff faces, and the ubiquitous pints of Guinness. “Come to Ireland for the craic,” it invited. No mention, of course, of the empty coffers or the IMF being in town.

As the train swayed and shuddered, she shut her eyes, allowing the briefly glimpsed electronic images to take her on a journey back to Ireland. It was fifteen years since she'd left, not long after her mother's funeral, her sense of family blown away, disintegrated. She felt as fragile now as she did then. She remembered walking down that pathway from the house on O'Callaghan Strand, realizing that she was an orphan. The river was full that day, threatening to break
its banks. She remembered getting into the taxi and looking over her shoulder one last time at the
FOR SALE
sign staked at the entrance. She had closed the door on one life and entered another.

 • • •