We all sit for a moment, listing to the whoop-whoop of a police siren passing down below.
“Do you think you can live with that?” asks Boz.
A long moment passes among the three of us.
“I think we have to,” says Paul.
It’s then that my eyes fall on a picture I’ve been looking at all my life. It was hanging over Mike’s head as he sat at his desk as long as I’d been coming here. Paul, my father, Boz, and Mike all in the stern of a boat. Florida, I think it was. They’re holding a marlin, a big one, grinning ear to ear. My dad has a beer lifted at the camera, the water a glittering green all around them. That’s when I get it. The third man in the heist. Boz.
We have all made mistakes, done wrong. Boz, Mike, and Paul, police officers charged with the duty to protect and serve, organized the robbery of a drug dealer. Maybe Paul did it to help my father. Maybe he did it for some other reason. Boz and Mike were likely just greedy. Like most cops, they had an idea of who was good and who was bad in this world. And robbing a drug dealer to help another officer in trouble maybe didn’t seem like such a bad thing.
Paul had an affair with my mother, his best friend’s wife.
Even Mike didn’t know how bad things would get when he hired Didion and Beckham to get what he thought belonged to him.
I murdered a man in cold blood. I have taken to the streets, fancying myself a hero, a crime stopper, and there are more than a few people walking around this city with wounds that I have inflicted in the name of justice. But some people would just call me a vigilante, a thug no better than any other. Street justice is not justice, they might say.
Who’s right?
Paul turns, and his eyes fall on the picture I was looking at. When he turns back to me, he has his cop’s face on, blank, waiting, giving nothing.
“Can you live with it, Zoey?” asks Paul.
Boz and I lock eyes. “What choice do I have?” I ask.
After a moment, he gets up and moves toward the door. He turns and looks back at us.
“Hey, you heard about that girl they’re looking for? The vigilante. The one that they think killed Didion?”
“Helluva thing,” says Paul, putting his reading glasses on again. He turns back to the screen.
“They say she’s disappeared,” says Boz. “She hasn’t been around in a few months.”
I look at him and smile a little. I hear you, Boz. I get it. We all have to agree to live with, to let it go, or none of us can.
“Hope they never find her.”
“Me, too.”
? ? ?
LATER, I AM ALONE IN the school doing the glamorous work of washing towels and wiping down surfaces. The dojo is a sacred place and must be kept clean. The altar especially. For ours, I have chosen the laughing Buddha surrounded by children to remind me that this place is for turning kittens into dragons. As I wipe his shiny head, my phone starts to ring.
I look down and see that it’s Melba. When I pick up, she’s crying on the other end.
“Melba,” I say, alarmed. “What is it?”
“Do you know about this?” she asks. “Did you have something to do with it?”
My stomach hollows out. One of the girls? Something horrible that one of them did or was done to them.
“What is it?” I say, my throat tight. “Tell me.”
“I just heard from my attorney,” she says. Then she lets out a laugh. “The group home has received a donation of three hundred thousand dollars.”
Relief is a flood. I sink to my knees.
“Do you know what I can do for my girls with this money?” Melba asks, her voice joyous, a person who knows that the only true happiness in this life is doing for others. “Do you know how much it will help us?”
“That’s—so wonderful,” I say, even as my mind struggles for meaning, for understanding. “Do you know who sent it?”
“My lawyer said there was just a box of cash and a note on plain cardstock,” says Melba. “It just said: From one of the good guys.”
The world is a tilt-a-whirl, and I just barely hold on.
forty-five
Who brings her parents to a concert? No one except dorky only children (single children was the correct term because only implied paucity, according to her mother). Pathetic, single children whose parents were sadly laboring under the delusion that they were still half cool. Which they so were not.
Okay, even Raven had to admit that her parents looked pretty good—Claudia in a simple sheath dress with platform peep-toe red shoes, and Ayers in triple black with a nice Armani belt with a brushed nickel buckle. And they were happy. And Raven was—weirdly—happy. What had started as an extended sleepover, where Raven and Claudia were just staying with Ayers until Claudia got back on her feet, had turned into a formal announcement to Raven that they were getting back together and going to be a family again.
And it was good, and weird. Because her parents, in her memory, had never been together, always separated. And some of the games she’d gotten used to playing no longer worked. But she could live with it.
“So,” Piper gushed. “Is it official? Is Troy, like, your boyfriend?”
“Um, yeah,” said Troy, coming up behind them. “It’s official.”
“Yeah,” said Raven, leaning into him “It is.”
Claudia and Ayers promised to give them a “wide berth,” whatever that meant, but there was no way they were going to see Above & Beyond at the Beacon Theatre without chaperones. Raven’s parents had paid for the tickets, too, seating themselves a few rows behind Raven, Troy, Piper, and her maybe-boyfriend Todd, who Raven didn’t really like.
Claudia and Ayers were at the bar, pretending they didn’t know her, and Raven excused herself to go the bathroom, waiting on the predictably endless line that was always.
“Hey, Raven.”
She jumped a little. It had been a few months, but she was still jumpy, having bad dreams about being locked in a tunnel, about fires devouring their apartment building. She dreamt about that bag of money, which had disappeared again, and the hideous face of Rhett Beckham. She didn’t like her parents to go out at night, and so they didn’t. This was the first night out for all of them in a long time.
She didn’t recognize right away the guy standing in front of her, and then it slowly dawned. She felt a little flutter of nerves. That dark hair, those intense eyes. Andrew Cutter.
“I saw on Twitter that you had your test.”
She remembered that night, how mean he’d been to her. She talked to her mom about it, and Claudia had asked Raven to think about what Andrew’s experience might be. How angry he must be, how damaged. Raven thought about it, but she still hated him a little. He had dark circles under his eyes, looking a little more ragged out than she remembered him.
“I thought you unfollowed me,” she said.
“Twitter feeds are public.”
“Okay,” she said, not knowing what else to say. She wouldn’t have imagined he’d given her a second thought.