Red, White and Dead Part 5

"Look, Iz, you don't have to explain it to me." He pulled my beer toward him. "I'm going to sit here and finish the rest of your beer and then I'm going home."

"And you're not going to call Lucy."

"Right," he said. Then, again, "right," as if he needed to convince himself.

I put Mayburn out of my mind when I saw Theo turn onto Eugenie Street, a tall figure, solid and dark with the streetlights behind him. I could see the outline of his muscled shoulders, the rounded dip and curl of his biceps. I pushed my sundress between my legs and closed them.

I waited until he was standing before me-looking down, his chin-length hair falling forward onto his face- then I said h.e.l.lo. I put my water down. He held out a hand and pulled me to my feet. He wrapped his arms around me and I thawed, curving myself around his abdomen, his chest, hugging him tight, surprised at the relief. The feeling was quickly followed by desire-shots of it, stinging through me, hitting my brain, my body.

Theo looked up at the building above us. "Are your neighbors home?"

I looked up with him. The lights were on in all three condos. "Yeah."

"Think they'll come downstairs?"

"Why?"

"You think they'll come downstairs?"

"No. My neighbors usually have to be up early. They both work." Unlike me.

Theo reached an arm out and pushed the front door, which I'd propped open with a rock. He kicked the rock away and pulled me into the stairwell, a place constantly too dark, a complaint I'd made more than once to the management company. But now, with the door shutting behind us, Theo pushing me against the wall, kissing me deeply, I didn't mind that the stairwell was shadowy and hot.

Desire turned into frantic craving. I kissed him back hard, threading my hands through his hair, hearing myself pant, gasp.

He lifted me up, legs around him, then pushed me back against the wall. I kissed him deeper, gulping at his mouth. I felt my body temp soar, my mind open.

"Should we go upstairs?" His words were m.u.f.fled by his mouth on my throat, my collarbone.

"No. No way." I yanked at the skirt of my sundress, pulling it up, and I wrapped my legs around him tighter.

7.

T he next morning, Theo was up by six and ready to leave ten minutes later, kissing me on my closed eyes, his soft hair brushing over my face.

"I've got to get to work," he said. "Bunch of meetings today." Theo had founded a Web design software company while he was in high school. He went to Stanford on a full-ride scholarship, but dropped out after a year. I'd been told he was making millions and millions now. We didn't much talk about work. Truly, we didn't talk much at all.

I pulled him toward me and kissed him, then we murmured our goodbyes. When he was gone, I lay in bed, eyes still closed, replaying the night. My bedroom felt thick with heat from the memories.

I fell back to sleep, and when I woke up at eight, my mind drifted to my dad. Or, should I say, to that man in the stairwell.

I called my brother. "How are you?"

"Nervous. I have to go into the radio station today to fill out paperwork and meet with the head producer."

"Don't be nervous. Everyone loves you."

He laughed. "Thanks, Iz, but c'mon, everyone loves me at a party. Everyone loves me at a bar. This is a job."

"It's so weird to hear you say the J word. You want to do this, right?"

"I do. I really do. I was up all night thinking about it."

"You were?" I couldn't hide the surprise in my voice. Charlie never stayed up all night-not to party, not to be bothered about girls, not to fret about anything. If Chicago were in the grips of a natural disaster, the city being swept into Lake Michigan by a violent, ma.s.sive tornado, Charlie would land in the lake, find something to use as a raft and lie down for the night, happy to let the jostling waves put him to sleep.

"You'll be fine," I said. I told him what I used to look for when I was searching for a new a.s.sistant. As I thought of working at the law firm and how I'd eventually hired my amazing a.s.sistant, Q, I felt rather misty-eyed about those days in a way I hadn't when going through them.

Then I asked Charlie about the book, the one our dad used to read to us. "Do you have it?" That book was one of the few objects that reminded me sharply of my dad and made me feel close to him, or the man he used to be. After the other night, I wanted that.

"I think I left it at Mom's house with a bunch of other books the last time I moved."

"Perfect." My mother had other books of my father's, too. Maybe looking at them would give me some sense of him, tell me something about him.

A pause. "Iz, be careful with all this."

"All what?" I threw back my sheets and stood up. The image that greeted me in the mirror over my dresser was comical. My long red hair was stringy in parts, extra curly in others, springing from my head and falling around my shoulders in crazed coils. My neck was splotchy from being kissed so many times. I tugged down a corner of the T-shirt I slept in. There was a red spot-a bite mark-on the top of my left breast. I'm scarred, I thought. And I was not unhappy about it.

"You know Dad is dead, Iz," Charlie said. "Has been for a long time."

"There was no body."

"When you crash a helicopter into a huge lake, there's a good chance the body won't be recovered. Seriously, Iz, don't let being out of work and away from Sam make you nuts."

"I'm not nuts." I looked at that bite mark. "And right now I'm okay about Sam."

"I know. But, hey, learn from your brother. Use the time you have when you're out of work. Go have a gla.s.s of wine."

"It's 9 a.m."

"Exactly. You're already an hour late."

We hung up, and I walked to the kitchen, opened my fridge. I thought of Charlie's words and considered a half-full bottle of pinot grigio. The thought made me nauseous. Charlie and I were simply different. We'd always known that. No reason to take my unemployment and turn it into alcohol dependency.

An hour later, I was at my mom's. It was one of my mother's greatest pleasures to give or loan her children something, even something mundane, because it meant she was a part of our lives; it meant she was needed.

If I was, for example, on the phone with my mother and casually mentioned I needed lightbulbs, my mother would inevitably say, in a quick voice, which counted as excited for her, "I've got lightbulbs. What kind do you need? What wattage?" I would tell her that the hardware store was closer than her house, that I would get them there, and inevitably she would be disappointed.

So that morning, I called and asked if I could borrow a pair of earrings I liked and maybe a book.

"Of course!" she said quickly, before giving me a summary of the three books she'd finished in the last week.

When she opened her door, she was already showered and dressed for the day in a cream skirt and silver silk blouse. She hugged me. "Do you want me to make you some green tea?"

I held up my Starbucks cup. "Already got it."

"There are four pairs of earrings on the counter in the kitchen. Take all of them. Meanwhile, I have to help Spence with something." She stopped. "Oh, and take anything you want from the library."

I walked through her house to the library, a cozy, winter-hideaway room off the kitchen where none of us went in the summer. It was loaded with bookshelves and plump leather chairs. Although it had French doors that looked onto the back garden, they were partially obscured with yellow velvet drapes.

My mother had a desk in there, where she worked on her charity, an organization called the Victoria Project, which helped widowed women with children. A few stacks of paper sat on the desk, but it was the slow time of the year for the project, and so the library was as pristine as the rest of my mother's house. I drifted to her fiction section and perused some novels, but my eyes kept moving upward, to the shelf at the top right, the one above the autobiographies, the one that required a step stool to reach.

A wooden stool with two steps was tucked to the side of the shelves. I pulled it over and climbed the steps. I felt a little dizzy as I did so, part of me remembering climbing down the dark steps the other night, another part of me woozy with the sense of climbing now into the past.

These were my father's books. I easily found the one Charlie and I talked about. Poems & Prayers for the Very Young.

I took it off the shelf and stepped off the stool, drawing my fingers over the cover, over the drawing of the two children on the front. I felt flooded by snippets of recollection-my dad's hands opening that book; me, excitedly pointing to a poem I wanted to hear.

I flipped, reading the first lines. I wake in the morning early. And always, the very first thing...

What did my dad do first thing in the morning these days?

I chastised myself a little for asking the question. What were the chances that he was really alive? Was this something I'd concocted from the recesses of my mind to distract myself from the fact that my life was stuttering?

Yet here I was on a Tuesday morning, when I should have been working (or at least looking for work), idly perusing my mother's bookshelves, stepping back in time. Later, I told myself. Later I would look for a job, then I would sort through the night with Theo and what it meant, if anything. I would call Sam for the first time in weeks and see how he was doing, how we were doing.

I put the book down on my mother's desk and stepped back up on the stool. A few of my dad's textbooks were there, a couple of those novels he used to read and some historical books dealing with the history of Southern Italy and others on uprisings in Italy and Greece.

My father was half Italian on his mother's side, and he always had a taste for learning about his heritage. I opened the history books one by one, flipping through them. The pages were golden with age. I searched for notes my father might have made, pa.s.sages he might have underlined, but there was nothing like that.

I looked at a book about urban regeneration in Naples. I flipped through the pages the way I had with the other books. Again, no idle thoughts were scribbled into the margins, nothing that told me what my dad was thinking as he read the lines. But at the end, I found something sandwiched tight between the back cover and the last page. A newspaper clipping, dated February 1970.

The clipping was small, almost ashy to the touch, and like the book pages, it was yellowed. I unfolded it and read the headline. Thieves Kill Man at Sh.e.l.l Station.

I began to read the text and flinched when I saw the name of the victim-Kelvin McNeil. Suddenly, I remembered my dad talking to me one night, telling me a story, but this one wasn't from a book. It was about his own deceased father, the one who would never meet his grandkids.

You would have called him Grandpa Kelvin, he'd said, and he was a great man. He loved your grandmother very much. He always said the best thing he did was marry her.

Grandma O? I asked.

My father had nodded, smiled. Grandma O was Oriana, my dad's mom. She lived in Phoenix, having moved out there from the East Coast when it was still a desert and not a suburb. Because of the distance, I only saw her about once a year. She'd died in a car accident a month before my father.

I got down from the step stool, held the article closer and read it.

Kelvin McNeil, it said, had pulled his vehicle, a 1969 F100 truck, into a Sh.e.l.l Station. Five minutes later, a neighbor screamed from an apartment next door. Police arrived at the scene and found McNeil lying dead beside his truck, the victim of a stabbing to his chest and abdomen, his wallet stolen. The keys were still in the ignition.

8.

D ez Romano watched Michael DeSanto pace his office.

"We've gone over this," Michael said, "but there's got to be something I'm missing, you know?"

Dez decided to say nothing.

Michael kept pacing. "When my wife met her last year, she said her name was Isabel Bristol. She said she was a lawyer who moved here from L.A."

"Did you have someone check the California Bar records?"

"Yeah. No one with that name."

Dez reached forward to his desk and picked up a program from the Naples opera house, which he'd gotten on his trip there two weeks ago. The opera had been Puccini's Turandot. He leafed through the program, remembering the heat in the opera house, the women waving fans in front of their faces, the swell of the orchestra's music, the lone, clear note of the alto that cut through the heat and made everyone think of no one but her.

Michael kept pacing, kept talking about the redhead. Even though he was out on bail for the money laundering he'd done for Dez and the Camorra, the case, from what Dez had heard, was nearly lock solid. Michael would most likely be heading to a federal pen for something like ten years. Dez's source had also told him that although the authorities could prove Michael had been laundering funds for a company in the suburbs called Advent Corporation, they couldn't tie the ownership of the company to Dez or anyone in the Camorra. The attorneys Dez had originally paid to structure Advent Corporation had charged him astronomically, but they'd been worth every penny.

As far as Dez could tell, it was only Michael, and his word, that could bring Dez down, and so Dez wanted to keep Michael as happy as possible, until he could pat him on the shoulder and tell him he'd see him after prison. He had promised Michael that he would always have a job with him, a place in Dez's system, and a h.e.l.l of a lot of money when he got out. And Michael was happy to be a cog in the wheel.

So now Dez watched Michael stalk and talk in front of his desk. It was tough to take Michael's energy. Dez tuned him out. He was thinking of that alto, and yes, he was thinking of the redhead. In fact, he'd been thinking of little but her since Sunday night when he'd first seen her at the bar, her head dipped down toward her cell phone, her face grimacing at what she read there, the way the purple silk of her dress had slipped down one shoulder. At that moment, she struck him as exactly the kind of woman he wanted now that he was divorced. She looked educated, well brought up. But she also looked like a h.e.l.l of a lot of fun.

And he'd been right. Dinner was a blast. And a turn-on.

But s.e.x wasn't why he was thinking about her now. No, not at all. Another emotion drove his thoughts, one just as primal, but much more violent.

9.

"W hat was dad working on when he died?"

My mother turned from the kitchen counter, where she was collecting her cell phone, putting it in her purse. Since I'd come out of her library, she had been talking about Spence, how it was so funny that sometimes he couldn't seem to dress himself. I hadn't known how to segue into the topic again, so I just blurted it out.

My mom c.o.c.ked her head. I watched her intently for her reaction, not wanting to upset her, but she just blinked a few times, shook her head a little as if she was surprised, and said, "Why these questions all of a sudden?"

I was sitting on a tall chair at the island. "I don't know. I've just been thinking about him, I guess."

She turned back to her purse. "It makes sense, I suppose."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you're at a transition point in your life, a time when you can go one way or another, and it's usually at those times that we look back and try to make some sense of it all, see if we've done the right things, if we've ended up with the right people. And we remember people who aren't with us anymore."

"Is that what you do? I mean, do you think about whether you ended up with the right people, wonder if you did the right things?"

My mother turned around again and looked at me. She put her hands on the counter behind her and leaned back.