It took two days of her pretty much sleeping around the clock before she was prepared to answer the question, Carmen announcing her readiness on the third afternoon by coming downstairs in a long plain white nightgown, silently drinking two cups of coffee, then inviting him back upstairs.
Once they were inside the semi-darkened bedroom, Carmen immediately slipped back under the covers. But Billy, intuiting that she might need some breathing room for whatever was to come, opted for the lone chair, lugging it across the room from its spot beneath the far window to the side of the bed.
“When I was fifteen,” she began, “I would’ve done anything, anything to have Rudy Ramos like me, just like me. You have no idea what I thought of myself back then. My father was so rotten, such a lousy human being, and my mother was his dishrag. Then my father left her for another woman and moved to Atlanta. Which was good, I thought, because now it would get better between us, but she just, overnight, turned into this sour old widow. I would be like, ‘Mommy, be happy, you’re free,’ but no, she just, ‘Who’d want me now,’ I mean, she was good-looking, thirty-seven years old, but she shut herself down, started yelling at me and Victor nonstop over nothing, anything, just never let up . . .”
Despite the marathon hours she had spent recuperating in this room, Billy thought he had never seen her look so exhausted, her eyes like swollen almonds beneath half-mast lids.
“And I knew Rudy, Little Man everybody called him, from the building and from school, not ‘knew him,’ he was a year ahead of me, but . . . And I didn’t think about him all that much, then one day I just did and I couldn’t stop, it was like I had suffered a stroke, but I was nothing to him, just some ghost of a girl who lived where he lived and went to Monroe . . . He was a big deal on the basketball team, and between games and practices he’d hardly ever leave school before five o’clock, and a lot of those days I’d find things to do in the after-school program so I could go home when he did. I mean, I was so fucked up that I wouldn’t even walk on the same side of the street as him, but I’d always manage to enter the building when he did so we’d go up the stairs at the same time, and I hated that I lived one flight below him because if I lived on his floor or the one higher then that would be one more flight I’d have to be near him, just day after day like that, agonizing over how maybe tomorrow I should walk in front of him instead of behind him, behind him instead of in front of him . . . And his bedroom was right above mine, 3F and 4F, and I’d hear him walking around above my head and sometimes he’d be doing himself, and the bedsprings would creak and I’d lay down in my own bed and . . .”
“Whoa, whoa.”
“Billy, please, let me tell you.”
“Carmen, I can’t hear this.”
“Why? You’re the man I love, the father of my children, and I’m telling you things about me that I never could before.”
“OK, OK, Jesus.”
“What, are you jealous? He’s been dead more than twenty years.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Billy scoffed, thinking, She’s been cheating on me with this kid, walking around with him in her head since the day they met.
Then as quick as the feeling had come down on him it lifted, Billy recognizing that what was really getting to him was not jealousy but the realization that if he hung in for this right now, that baffling and invisible dragon he’d been protecting her from all these years might finally begin to take on form and he might not to be able to handle its appearance.
“Are you angry at me?” she said. “Do you want me to stop? I’ll stop, I will, just tell me to.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he repeated.
“I’m serious, Billy, I will.”
“I’m serious, too,” he said, then forced himself to add, “I want to hear it all.”
For a long moment, she looked at him like the liar he was, then carried on.
“It took me maybe two months before I had the courage to say something to him, even just bullshit, and I decided this one day, I was going to say, ‘Your sweater’s so fly.’ I thought about saying ‘so tight,’ ‘so dope,’ ‘so gangsta,’ ‘ill,’ ‘phat,’ ‘snap,’ ‘the bomb,’ ‘da bomb,’ but I liked ‘fly’ the best, and at lunch I finally went up to him in the cafeteria, but instead of saying, ‘Your sweater’s so fly,’ I was nervous and I said, ‘My sweater’s so fly,’ and the kids at his table heard it and they all started laughing, and he was, he said, ‘Your sweater’s so fly?’ but looking at them not at me, ‘I’m happy for you,’ still looking at them, like to get their approval, and in that moment when he looked at them instead of me, with that stupid grin on his face? I saw him for what he was, a self-centered immature boy with a little bit of a cruel streak. But I had been in love, so the realization hit me like a train . . . I don’t know if I felt like I actually hated him? But God, did he put a hole in my chest that day.”
Carlos came into the room, climbed into bed, curled into Carmen’s side, and quickly fell asleep. Although his son still hadn’t said a word about the other day, he’d been sleeping, since then, almost as much as his mother.
“Later, after school, I saw him go into our building and I didn’t want to go inside, I didn’t want to walk up the stairs with him, didn’t want to be in my room and hear his creaky bed over my head, so I just sat on the stoop remembering his face when he said that, ‘Your sweater’s so fly?’ not even giving me the consideration of eye contact. And I’m just sitting there like that, feeling more and more humiliated, more and more like an invisible nothing, and then at one point I looked up and I saw these two guys coming towards our building, and the way they were carrying themselves made me nervous. Hoodies, sunglasses on a cloudy day, hands in pockets, they looked like surveillance photos of themselves, and then they stopped a few feet away, had a conversation, then one of them came up to me, says, ‘Where’s Eric Franco live at, what apartment,’ and I knew, everybody in the building knew, Eric Franco dealt coke, but these guys didn’t look like they were there to score, they looked like trouble.”
Carlos started to talk in his sleep, nonsense words addressed to his brother. Billy was deaf to it, but Carmen waited until her son was finished before going on.
“But instead of giving them his apartment, 5C . . . I don’t remember consciously thinking about what could happen if I said 4F? But that’s what came out of my mouth.”
Billy stood up.
“Where are you going?”
“What? Nowhere.”
“You’re leaving?” Carmen saying it like, leaving her.
“No, I was just stretching,” he said idiotically.
“Can you sit down?”
“I’m down,” he said, “I’m right here.”
He began to reach for her hand, then withdrew, sensing that whatever she needed right now, physical contact was not on the list.
“I don’t know if I really heard the gunshot from the fourth floor or just imagined that I did—I don’t see how I could have, it was a .22 handgun going off inside a six-story building, but all of a sudden I felt this, this gripping sensation inside my chest, and a minute or two later those two came back out of the building the same way they went in, not rushed, looking around without seeming to be. And after they walked past me they stopped and had another one of those side-mouth conversations, and I knew they were discussing what to do about me, the witness . . . I was staring at the ground, I could no more run at that moment than I could fly, I was totally theirs whatever they wanted to do with me, but when I finally managed to raise my head they were gone.”
“Carm . . .”
“What happened was that they rang the bell and when Rudy opened the door they shot him through the eye and the bullet went into his brain.”
“Carmen . . .”
“But I killed him. Nobody could tell me different. I knew what I knew before I knew it . . . ‘4F,’ I said.”
“Carmen, listen to me, the killers were the killers.”
“Billy, don’t.”
“They’re the ones who had the guns.”
“Billy, I’m begging you . . .”
“Carmen, you were a kid, fifteen, you said so yourself.”
“The cops came to our door later that day, doing a canvass of the building, nobody could figure out why this basically no trouble to anyone boy was executed. And when they came to our apartment I hid in the bathroom while they talked to my mother, and when they left I told her that I saw the killers, I talked to them, and first she turned white, then, without even giving me two minutes to pack or say goodbye to my brother, she dragged me out of the apartment and into a cab for Port Authority, and put me on a bus to live with my father in Atlanta. And when I was down there I heard that Milton and Edgar killed the guys that killed their brother, then later I heard that Edgar was killed in return, and that their mother died soon after, and now, now Milton’s gone.”
“He’s gone? He was here to kill you.”
“And now you understand why.”
“Carmen, how many lives have you saved in that hospital. How many people are still walking the earth because of you.”
“So, whatever the law thinks of me, and it doesn’t think anything of me at all about this, I know what I did.”
Billy’s impulse was to once again try to defend her from herself, but he finally accepted the fact that all he’d be doing was causing her more pain.
“So,” she said after a long moment, “you tell me about Pavlicek, about Yasmeen, about Jimmy Whelan, what they did and why. But I’ve got more souls to answer for than any of them, and I live with that every day. I see the Ramos family every day, I say I’m sorry to them so many times in my head from morning to night it’s like I have a chemical disorder.”
Billy finally, cautiously, lay down next to her.
“I know you want to give me absolution, Billy, but you don’t have that power. I wish you did.” Then: “But at least now you know.”
Too early the next morning, Billy found himself sitting alone at the kitchen table, staring out the window at the askew backboard in the driveway, his coffee as cold as a pond. Immediately after unloading to him about her part in the destruction of the Ramos family, Carmen had proceeded to pass out, was still passed out, Billy checking the wall clock, fifteen hours later. He couldn’t count the times he’d seen that in murderers who’d finally owned up to what they had done—straight back to the cell and their first peaceful sleep in weeks, months, years. You couldn’t wake them with grenades.
His phone rang—Redman—Billy killing it directly.
The day before, Yasmeen and Whelan had tried to call him too. If he had picked up for either of them, his guess then was, the conversation would center strictly on asking how his family was doing. For them to ask where he was at in regards to turning them in, so soon after what he’d been through, would have been a grievous error in judgment on their part and they’d know that. Nonetheless, the seven-day grace period he had given them to get ahead of their situations was more than half over, but as far as he knew not one of them had even walked into a lawyer’s office yet, let alone stepped into a precinct with a story to tell. His take was that they were all banking on the trauma, hoping that in the aftermath of what had happened to him and his family he would be thrown into such a state of emotional chaos that he would no longer have the time, the brain cells, or the heart to follow through on his own ultimatum.
Hearing the thump of his father’s New York Times landing on the porch, Billy opened the door and saw a Chevy Tahoe sitting silently at the foot of his driveway, Yasmeen staring out at him through the windshield.
At least she knew enough not to come to the door.
Billy walked down the driveway, taking his coffee with him, and settled into the passenger seat without a word.
She had barely brushed her hair and was wearing nothing more than a heavy sweater thrown over pajamas, the first time he’d seen her without the Tibetan coat in months.
“Hey, I called you so many times, you didn’t answer, I just had to come by.”
Billy looked at his watch: five forty-five a.m.
“I know, I’m sorry, I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I just want to know how everybody’s holding up.”
“We’ll get through.”
“I can’t imagine, that must have been such a nightmare for you.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“No, I understand,” she said quickly. “I understand. I should go home,” running her palms along the top of her steering wheel but making no move to start up the car.
She had no more driven up here to ask after his family than she had come for the latest NBA scores, the musk of her anguish growing so intense that he had to crack his window.
“Sorry,” she said, “I just ran out of the house.”
“This picture,” Billy tapping the laminated photo of her daughters that hung from the neck of her rearview mirror, “was that always there? Or did you just put it up this morning?”
“No,” she said faintly, “that’s just my girls, you know.”
The first oriole of the season caught his eye, a dash of bright against the early spring drab.
“Just my girls,” she murmured, looking off.
He removed the photo from its bead chain, flipped it into her lap. “You see them? What the hell were you thinking?”
“It was do what I did or go kill myself. Better a mother in Bedford Hills than in a grave.”
“I can’t hear this shit,” he said, reaching for the door handle.
Yasmeen grabbed his hand. “You don’t think I know what I did?” she warbled. “You think I didn’t know how I’d be after that? But at least I’m alive. It was me or him.”
“Which him.”
“What?”
“Cortez or Bannion.”
“I didn’t go near Cortez,” she said.
“So, clean hands on that one, right?”
Up on the porch, Milton Ramos was leaning against the front door at an impossibly low angle, his rigid body inches from the ground, Billy taking him in and then lifting his eyes to the bedroom window, to Carmen up there desperately trying to exorcize her history via hibernation.
And all he wanted to do right now was join her.
All he wanted to do right now was to be free of himself, free of all the bodies, and tend to his family.
“What happened to your coat,” he said his gaze still fixed on the window.
“What? I burned it.”
“Just as well.”
“What do you mean?” she said quietly.
“I mean, next time you buy a jacket, take a girlfriend.”
“Billy, say what you mean,” Yasmeen tilting toward him now, as taut as a bird.
Billy took a sip of the cold coffee, then opening his door, tossed the rest onto the driveway.
“You know,” he said, “sometimes when I draw a slow night and I can duck out early, I’d be coming around that curve right about now, sliding for home.”
“Billy, please . . .”
“Sitting out here like this?” he said. “It’s like I’m waiting for myself to show up.”
“Fucking Billy,” Yasmeen blurted as she keyed the ignition. “Fucking Billy.”
The unexpected blast of Mariah Carey coming through the car speakers made her scream.
Enough.
“You get a lawyer yet?” he said, turning off the radio.
“There’s a guy,” she said sullenly. “I’m going to see him today.”
“Save your money,” he said, finally stepping out of the car.
“What?”
But she knew what, Yasmeen clamping a hand across her mouth like a muzzle, the tears running over her knuckles.
“And do your crying at home.”
Carmen stumbled into the kitchen an hour later, her face a blur.
“How long was I out for?”
“Long enough.”
“Then why am I still so exhausted?” she said, wandering over to pour herself some coffee.
“I heard Victor’s going home tomorrow,” he said.
“He is.”
“Does he know?”
“About Milton?”
“About you,” he said.
“Me? No. I couldn’t ever tell him.”
“Well, maybe you can now.”
“Now I need to.”
“Just wait a little while until he settles in with the babies.”
“Of course,” she said. “Of course.”
“Yasmeen drove up this morning.”
“This morning?” Lowering herself into the chair next to his. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“She stayed in her car.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“And?”
“And it’s over,” he said.
“Over. What do you mean, ‘over.’” Then: “With just her or all of them?”
Billy shrugged.
They sat in silence for a while, Carmen joining him in looking out at the backyard.
“I’m glad,” she finally said. “Thank you.”
He wanted to say that he didn’t do it for her, but who knew.
Milton Ramos reappeared, this time sitting on the living room couch, immobile yet full of murderous despair.
Well, Billy told himself, what did you expect.
And if Carmen hadn’t seen him yet, she’d see him soon enough.
“I think I got up too early,” he said.
“Me too,” she said, reaching for, but missing, his hand. “Let’s go back to bed.”
The call from Stacey Taylor came a week later.
“I need to tell you something.”
“What’s that.”
“Have breakfast with me. It’s a long story.”
“Give me the headline.”
“Just have breakfast with me,” she said. “You’ll be glad you did.”
“You said that the last time.”
“This time I mean it.”
“I have a therapy session at two.”
“Physical?”
“Family.”
“Where.”
“West Forties.”
“Then come after.”