Chapter Forty-four
It was after midnight when Judy finally left the federal building in downtown Philly, turning left and walking down a chilly Chestnut Street. It had rained again, leaving the asphalt a shiny black and the sidewalk slick. Gutters flowed with rainwater, cigarette butts, and other debris. There was almost no traffic except a white Septa bus that rambled by empty, going her way, but Judy didn’t try to catch it. She wanted to walk home, to clear her mind.
She shoved her hands in her pockets, heading home, head down. She and Daniella had met with the top brass at the FBI, DEA, and ICE, and Daniella had given the government plenty of good information. They had succeeded, with the help of an immigration lawyer, in securing an S-visa for Daniella, which was a special visa given to confidential informants, the so-called “snitch visa.” They also got a deal to protect Daniella’s mother and older sister, still living in Mexico, and the three of them were already on their way to their respective safe houses.
Judy passed the Constitution Center on her left and the Liberty Bell on her right, sights that usually gave her a lift, but not tonight. She supposed, at some level, she had gotten justice for Iris, with the killers now dead and the government on its way to making a case against the rest of the conspirators. She had even learned the reason they had killed Iris, but she felt an emptiness inside that she hadn’t anticipated.
She walked down the dark street and crossed into Old City, where all the stores were closed and the shops dark. She thought of the horrors she had witnessed, the loss of poor Domingo, and she felt a wave of sadness sweep over her. Somehow listening to the litany of names that Daniella had given the authorities made her feel even worse, and she wondered if justice was possible in a world full of profoundly evil and damaged human beings, in a veritable universe of damage.
Judy found herself in her apartment without even realizing it, having let herself in from the key in the lockbox that the landlord required them to keep there, for the fire department. She flicked on the light, closed the door behind her, and set the key on the sidetable, with a little clink. She didn’t bother to check her mail.
She looked around for her mother, or her aunt or whatever, but nobody was downstairs. Her mother had probably gone upstairs to sleep. Of course Frank wasn’t home, and Judy tried not to focus on how empty the apartment seemed without him. Penny bounded over, then plopped her butt on the hardwood and started scratching her ear with her back leg, signaling that the fleas were back.
“Hey, girl,” Judy said to the dog, petting her. “Can you wait on that walk? I need a shower.”
Penny trotted behind as Judy climbed the stairs quietly, so as not to wake up her mother. But when she got to the second floor, she looked down the hall and noticed the bedroom door was open. Her mother slept with the door closed, so Judy tiptoed to the bedroom, peeked inside the room, and could tell in the streetlight from the windows that the bed was empty. She flicked on the overhead light, and her mother wasn’t there.
Judy reached for her pocket to get her cell phone, then remembered her cell phone was gone. She still had a landline on the nightstand next to her bed, so she went over, picked up the receiver, and heard the telltale signal that she had messages. She barely remembered how to retrieve them, but she hit the right numbers, then deleted a series of junk calls until she got a message from her mother.
“Honey,” her mother said, her tone uncharacteristically tentative. “I’m going to be staying at the hospital tonight. They said I’m allowed, and Barb and I both thought you might like to see Frank, after the hell you’ve been through. We feel just terrible about displacing him, and when Barb gets discharged tomorrow, she wants to go home to recuperate, instead of the apartment. We both love you, very much. I hope things went well with Daniella, and I’ll keep my cell phone on if you want to talk. Good night.”
Judy hung up the phone, shaking her head. She turned away from the bed and started to leave the room, then she did a double-take, realizing what she had just seen. She backed up to her closet and looked at it again, but she had been right the first time. The closet door had been rolled back to expose Frank’s side of the closet, but his clothes were gone, including the hangers, leaving an empty hole. The sweaters, sweatshirts, and T-shirts that he used to jam into the shelves above his clothes were gone, too. She looked down and she could see the floorboards on his side of the closet, which had been covered for as long as she could remember by his pungent jumble of sneakers, loafers, and slide flip-flops. Frank must’ve come to the apartment today and moved out.
It was over.
Judy blinked, surprised, though she shouldn’t have been. Frank wasn’t the kind of man to drag things out, and she knew she had hurt him. Her mouth went dry. Something about his being gone seemed inconceivable, though she had willed it to happen. She found herself shaking her head. She crossed to their dresser and pulled out his drawer, which started with the fourth, but it was empty. She closed it and went to the fifth drawer, opening it even though she knew what she’d find, like a psycho ex on autopilot.
She left the drawer hanging open, straightened up, and looked around, seeing a bedroom she barely recognized, now that she started noticing things. Frank’s framed photos and favorite Oakley sunglasses were missing from the top of the dresser, and his series of black kettlebells in graduated weights were no longer lined up against the wall, where she used to trip over them. In place of the Frank-things were her mother’s things—a pump bottle of Cetaphil hand lotion, a small green jar of La Mer eye cream, and an old-school folding travel clock by the bed—and her Aunt Barb’s things—the compression bras she’d bought at the mastectomy boutique, a large-size Ziploc bag of medication in brown plastic bottles, and a stack of mystery novels.
Judy scanned the room, which struck her as a total mess, strewn with debris, damage of its own kind. She couldn’t help but see it as a mirror of her life, in matching disarray, with Frank gone and her mother and aunt jumbled together, the lines between the two women blurred, their respective roles impossible to delineate, much less define. Mother and aunt, aunt and mother, both women seemed to be occupying the same place at the same time, which everyone knew was impossible, most especially Mother Nature.
Judy turned away, left the bedroom, and walked stiffly to the bathroom, with the dog at her heels. She flipped on the light switch and avoided looking in the mirror because she didn’t want to play match-the-facial-feature again. She reached inside the shower and turned on the faucet, trying not to think another thought or feel another emotion. She undressed while she waited for the water to warm up, shedding her borrowed sweatclothes, which Penny came over to sniff avidly.
Judy stepped naked into the shower, letting the warm water run over her cuts and bruises, feeling it wash away the manure and the ashes, cleansing her of the blood and the grime, and she didn’t know when she started crying, but she was pretty sure she would never, ever stop.