His whole life, he’d had good luck. Hadn’t he?
“Well aren’t you the luckiest boy!” his mother said to him in August 1987, shaking him for joy when he found a twenty-dollar bill not once but twice in a single month. He remembered the moment because what she said felt so true. Of all boys, he’d been chosen. Ordained. Picked by fortune. Two twenties, just three weeks apart. What were the chances? There were dozens of kids his age who biked around town all day, but he was the only one who’d spotted that folded bill on the grass beside the bandstand, and then, on a different Friday, another, folded almost exactly the same way, on the sidewalk outside Buster Brown. His father asked him if he mugged two different people or the same guy twice.
His mother told him to put the money in his sock drawer for a rainy day, but he was afraid if he kept it she’d get ideas about spending it on something practical. So instead of waiting around for her to tell him he was in charge of buying his own notebooks and pencils that school year, he marched every kid in the neighborhood up to Two Scoops and bought a round of ice creams. Siblings tagged along, which he hadn’t expected or calculated. He didn’t want to leave anyone out, so he ended up pedaling full speed back to his house to beg his mother for $1.75 or else he didn’t know what would happen. She said no at first, let it be a lesson to him, what a fool, treating the entire neighborhood when his father was busting his hump and the propane tank needed filling. But the kids had already started licking their cones! He couldn’t exactly return them! “You’re joking,” his mother said, furious, peeling two dollars from the fold that lived in the blue cookie tin over the fridge.
“You mean to tell me you got one, too?” she said to him not fifteen minutes later, when he came cruising down the dead center of the block on his BMX, the soggy end of a cone in his hand.
“Well, I wasn’t going to leave myself out!” he said. “It was my money.”
“And sprinkles?” she said, eyeing his T-shirt.
He shrugged.
Another time, when he was even younger, the Gephardts went to the Jersey Shore for a few days. They usually rented a house in the Catskills for a long weekend every summer—Malcolm and Mary played with the kids of their parents’ friends from the Bronx, while the adults played cards and told loud stories that ended up with drinks rocking off tables and glasses shattering on the floor. But his dad had struck up a friendship with a guy who owned a motel in Margate, on the Jersey Shore, and Malcolm overheard him tell his mother that he liked that it was close to Atlantic City in case he got bored sitting on the beach. On their third day there, Malcolm woke up very early, odd to have his entire family sleeping in the same room, so he decided to go for a swim despite the warning sign outside the manager’s office, despite his mother’s cautioning that the ocean was not the town pool. The motel’s floating dock looked so close, hardly a risk, and he’d watched people swim back and forth the previous afternoon. If it really was rough he could always turn around. He wasn’t scared at the time, but since then the feeling he had that day sometimes returned to him without warning: having to fight for a full breath, feeling his body pulled by some mysterious force, glancing at where he’d come from and then ahead at where he was going, unable to decide whether to push forward or go back, and all the while knowing that the longer he took to choose the more precious energy he wasted.
* * *
The landline in the bar rang, cutting through the silence and jolting him back to the present. Malcolm staggered up from his arrangement of chairs and pressed his palm to his chest to stop his heart from pounding.
* * *
“And what did you decide?” Jess asked, when he first told her the ocean story. That vacation was the only time he could remember his father wearing a bathing suit. His sister was embarrassed because the bathing suit was almost the exact same color as their father’s skin, and from far away he looked naked. Jess laughed, said her father must have had the same one, said she remembered wanting to die the one and only time he came to the town pool. They were in bed, somewhat new to each other still, the windows wide open, a humid summer afternoon. They’d been lying there for hours, telling stories about growing up. Jess’s family had had less than the Gephardts. There were ways to tell. Which sports a kid played. Whether a kid had birthday parties at McDonald’s or whether all the photos were of their siblings crammed around their own kitchen table, a defrosted Sara Lee in the tinfoil pan. Her family wasn’t poor, Jess was always quick to say. There were a lot of kids who had less.
Something about the smell of a storm in the air made him remember that swim he took at ten or eleven years old.
“What happened? Did you end up swimming to the dock or did you turn back?”
“Neither,” Malcolm said. An old man zoomed up to him in a motorboat, reached out a hand, and heaved Malcolm on board. He scolded him over the buzz of the motor until they reached shore.
Back at the beach, the man bought him a fountain soda from the crab shack, told him to use his head.
“So I lived, plus I got a soda,” he bragged to Jess.
“But you didn’t have to make a choice,” Jess said, and seemed troubled.
He never understood why that was such a thing for her. He was rescued because he was always going to be rescued, was his point, and by that logic had never really been in danger. She seemed to consider it a sign of something else, and only now, in the silence of the bar, the ringing phone calling attention to the silence, did her point move into slightly clearer focus. He was surprised he slept that deeply. He was surprised he slept at all.
The sound of the boat was almost identical to the noise of the generator running in the alley beside the bar all night, and Malcolm’s brain made the link out of the most delicate filament, where it became briefly incandescent and then broke. It must have run out of gas at some point just before dawn. The heater was cold to the touch.
By the phone’s third ring he’d shaken off every dark thought and was in work mode, all business. He slipped through the swinging door quickly, to keep the warm air trapped in the kitchen, and the cold of the main room felt like stepping outside. He’d taken off his boots to sleep, and the feel of the hex mat under his socks was like a massage. Who could be calling the landline? Jess. Patrick. His mother. He should have checked on his mother on Saturday. Now it was Monday. He hoped she had enough wood stacked beside the slider on her deck. He hoped she hadn’t had to wade through the snow to the pile in the backyard. What if she slipped and fell out there? He had to get over there as soon as he could.
“Half Moon,” he said when he picked up, in the same harried tone as always, as if there were a dozen hands reaching for him.
“Malcolm Gephardt?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Yeah?”
It was an officer from the local police department, but he didn’t catch her name. She and her partner had been by his house already, trying to track him down. They wanted to ask him a few questions about a patron. Would he still be there in ten minutes if they came by?
When the police cruiser pulled up, he expected Rob Waggoner to be one of the two officers, but instead it was Jackie Becker with an officer he didn’t recognize. Jackie was the youngest sister of a friend of his from high school. She used to come to their baseball games and run after the foul balls. Whenever he spoke to her back then, she would blush a deep violet. He hadn’t seen her in years. She and her partner were both in uniform and both looked exhausted.
“Hey, Jackie,” Malcolm said. “Was that you on the phone? You should have said.”
“Hi, Malcolm.” She smiled. “I wasn’t sure you’d remember me.”
“I thought you worked in the city. How’s Tom? Still down in DC?”