storm wouldn’t have been approaching Florida and they wouldn’t have been in the house the night of the robbery. If she was lucky, she never would have gone with her friends to see Tone Def that night and met Xan, aka Johnny Long. Lying in the hospital bed, she ran through everything that had gone wrong in her life leading up to the nightmare in the bungalow in the Catskills, and she kept coming to the same conclusion: She’d been anything but lucky.
Although she’d been trying to avoid reading the newspapers and watching the news on TV, she knew that the media was calling her a hero, overglorifying everything she’d done. She’d just been trying to stay alive; how did that make her a hero?
While the media was praising her, they were blasting her father, calling him “Adam Bloom, the psycho therapist of Forest Hills.” They portrayed him as a crazed vigilante, who’d driven up to the Catskills to try to rescue his daughter, hell- bent on avenging the murder of his wife and restoring his own tarnished reputation. The media also criticized the police, particularly Detective Clements, for not pushing for a full mental evaluation of Dr. Bloom or revoking his gun license and for giving him the opportunity to go upstate on his own. Marissa enjoyed seeing Clements get attacked, and she agreed with what the media was saying about her father, too.
One day a couple of weeks after the shootings, Grandma Ann came to the hospital to visit and said, “You can’t blame your father forever. You can’t go through life with that kind of anger.”
Her grandmother looked worn and frail. Marissa was worried about her. “I really don’t want to talk about it anymore, Grandma.”
Marissa had been through two surgeries to remove the bullet and repair the deep tissue damage and several broken ribs, and she was still in severe pain, despite all of the painkillers they were giving her. “Your father loved you,” her grandmother said almost desperately. “He just wanted to do the right thing.”
“The right thing?” Marissa said. “He fucking shot me.”
“He was trying to save your life.”
“Yeah, and he did such a great job of it.”
“You’re alive, aren’t you?”
“No thanks to him.”
“He was scared, he panicked. And if he didn’t go up there that Xan, I mean Johnny, might’ve killed you.”
It had come out in the news that Xan had actually been a career criminal named Johnny Long. He’d grown up in the same orphanage as Carlos Sanchez, and the police believed that Johnny had been the second intruder in the robbery and that he’d killed Marissa’s mother and Gabriela. Marissa knew it was her fault for letting Xan into their lives, but everything else had been her father’s fault.
“I know what your father did was wrong,” her grandmother said, “but imagine, just imagine, what the last seconds of his life were like, how awful that must’ve been for him. He had to die, thinking he’d killed you, thinking he’d killed his daughter. That’s the last thing he thought, the last thing he saw…”
Her grandmother was sobbing. Marissa gave her a couple of minutes to get hold of herself, then said, “Look, I know it’s hard for you to accept, Grandma, but my father made a huge mistake, okay? I wish he’d been a better man, I really do. I wish I could defend him, I wish I could justify what he did, but I can’t. panic attack 323
He was a selfish asshole who went around like he was wearing a red cape and he didn’t care about me or my mother or anybody but himself. If he’d called the police they might’ve saved me and I might not’ve gotten shot, and if he’d called the police when our house got robbed maybe my mother would still be alive and I wouldn’t’ve had sex with that son of a bitch Johnny Long. Don’t you see? My father caused it all, and I don’t care what you say, I’ll never forgive him for that, ever.”
The day of Marissa’s discharge, Grandma Ann returned to the hospital. She looked extremely frail, like she’d lost ten, maybe fifteen pounds since Adam’s death.
“Are you okay, Grandma? I’m really worried about you.”
“I’m fine,” she said flatly. “Are you ready to go?”
The plan was for them to ride in a Town Car to the Mansfield Hotel in midtown, where Marissa had booked a suite. Marissa intended to never set foot inside the house in Forest Hills again. It was already up for sale, and at some point she’d arrange for someone to sell off all the furniture and clothes and move everything else into long- term storage. Her parents’ life insurance policies, the proceeds from the sale of the house, and their other assets would make her a multimillionaire. She didn’t know what she was going to do with her life, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to waste it working. She was planning to move to Prague after all of the financial details were worked out. She’d live there for a while and then maybe move to Paris or Barcelona or some other city. She just wanted to get away- from New York, from America, from everybody who’d ever heard of Adam Bloom. The thought of having to live the rest of her life as Adam Bloom’s daughter disgusted her so much that she’d already started doing the paperwork to legally change her last name to Stern. It was her mother’s maiden name and she thought it would be a nice tribute.
She got out of the bed and into a wheelchair. She could walk fine, but it was hospital policy that all patients, no matter what their condition, had to be wheeled out when they were discharged. The orderly wheeled her very slowly so Grandma Ann, next to them, could keep up.
At the hospital doors, Marissa stood and walked next to her grandmother toward where the Town Car was waiting at the curb.
Reporters rushed them. One of the loudest shouted, “Ms. Bloom, how does it feel to be a hero?”
Marissa stopped for a moment, glared at the guy, a little older than her, and said,“I’m not a hero, and my last name isn’t Bloom, it’s Stern. I’m Marissa Stern. You got that?”
They moved on toward the car. Now the reporters were shouting, “Ms. Stern! Ms. Stern! Ms. Stern!”
Marissa helped her grandmother in and then got in after her. As they drove off down Fifth Avenue, she could still hear the reporters screaming.
“I swear to God,” Marissa said, “I better not see the name Marissa Bloom in the papers tomorrow morning.”
Her grandmother, looking away, didn’t say anything.
acknowledgments
For their enormous impact on this novel and my career I’d like to thank Ken Bruen, Bret Easton Ells, Lee Child, Kristian Moliere, Shane McNeil, Charles Ardai, John David Coles, Sandy Starr, Brian DeFlore, Nick Harris, Marc Resnick, Sarah Lumnah, Andy Martin, Matthew Shear, Matthew Baldacci, and everyone at Minotaur Books.
Notes
