when feeling like a new man was possible. The best I could hope for was feeling like a retread and recently even that had become a pipe dream. I no longer got just tired. That ship done sailed. These days my exhaustion was profound as a Russian novel. Exhaustion for me was now a whole other state of being and last night had taken more out of me than I had to give. I wasn’t sure if this new state of being was simply my body giving me a preview of what I’d feel like once chemo and radiation kicked in or if it was preparing me for death. Death, I thought, had all sorts of potential for unpleasantness, especially if I was wrong about all those many things I didn’t believe in. What if the face of God was a sneering one and he was the type to say I told you so? What if he was just a universal hurt machine? Man, in either case, I was fucked.
Even last night as I lay on Carmella’s bathroom floor, I knew I wasn’t quite dead. I couldn’t imagine the departed could taste their own vomit or feel as though their kishkas were being torn apart from the inside out. Nope. I was pretty sure that sort of unpleasantness was reserved for the living, but as poorly as I felt, it was much better than I had at the kitchen table. The nausea was gone and my vision was no longer blurred at the edges. My view of the base of the toilet was crystal clear. I was weak, but my arms were no longer leaden and my legs seemed like they might once again support my full weight. I hadn’t been foolish enough to test them out. I was content to just lie there and enjoy the coolness of the tiles.
Eventually, I got around to showering and rinsing my mouth. There wasn’t enough mouthwash left in Carm’s medicine cabinet to fully rid me of that awful taste. There probably wasn’t enough in all of East New York to do that. I was feeling much better when I spit the last of the mouthwash into the sink, but the exhaustion had set in. It was the exhaustion, along with some other less savory symptoms, that had forced me to go to my doctor in the first place. I looked at myself in the mirror. I’d been doing that a lot lately. I looked old. I noticed my hand on my abdomen and turned away. I wrapped two big bath towels around me, and asked Carmella if I could lie down on the couch and just shut my eyes for a few minutes. A few minutes turned into a long deep sleep of forgotten dreams.
When I opened my eyes, the sun was just sending the tips of its fingers over the east end of Long Island. The birds were in full throat-the birds in Brooklyn sing like any other birds, except maybe a little louder, in order to be heard. The apartment itself was quiet and I found my clothes on the chair next to the couch. Carm had washed my shirt, briefs, and socks. She’d pressed my suit and sprayed it with that stuff that was supposed to pull the stink out of fabric. It had worked well enough. In a book or movie, I would have tiptoed to look in on Israel. I just left. I’d had enough pain for the time being.
Catching a cab on Atlantic Avenue at that hour had turned out to be easier than I thought it might be. The cabbie dropped me off in front of the Kythira Cafe. I could scarcely believe my eyes: my car was still there and there was no parking ticket wedged under the wiper blade. It’s something of a miracle to park your car on the street overnight in New York City without it getting towed or ticketed. I had a friend who worked in the city budget office who told me the city took in like five hundred million dollars a year from parking violations and towing fees. Nice, huh? Talk about predatory practices. Lions and crocodiles could take lessons from New York City meter maids.
Now more than the sun’s fingertips hovered in the cloudless blue skies over the County of Kings and the pain in my gut was back at the level I’d grown accustomed to. But there was no getting around it, last night had scared the shit out of me. I was afraid: mouth-dry, hands-shaking afraid. I’d felt many things since walking out of my oncologist’s office. Mostly anger. I suppose I accepted the diagnosis and filed the reality of it away somewhere. It was one thing to think about dying in the abstract, which is what I had been doing to hold it at bay. The holding my abdomen, the silent deals with the tumor, the waiting until after Sarah’s wedding to begin treatment: it was a kind of denial. The fact was I hadn’t faced it, not really. Last night changed that. There was going to be a lot of pain and suffering. Not all of it would be mine. I was glad Sarah had Paul and that she wouldn’t be here to watch me suffer in close-up. I was thinking about Sarah when I parked the car on Mermaid.
Fuqua actually smiled at me when I walked over to his desk.
“You are a stubborn man, Moe Prager.”
“I prefer persistent.”
He gestured to an empty chair. “Sit. What may I do for you on this glorious day?”
“I’d like to see Alta Conseco’s apartment or where her personal effects are stored.”
“ Porquoi? Why?”
“A feeling.”
“A feeling? What sort of feeling?”
“Did you pay any attention to the witness statements from the High Line Bistro?” I asked.
“Of course. You are referring to the alleged argument?”
It was my turn to smile at him. “Exactly.”
“It is my understanding from the detectives and the fire department investigators who interviewed both my victim and Maya Watson that they refused to discuss any aspect of that day other than to say they were there for lunch. And when I interviewed the Watson woman after my vic was killed, she once again refused to discuss the matter and denied there had been an argument. She stated only that she and Conseco were there for lunch.”
“Bullshit!”
“I agree. Bullshit. But if Watson did not cooperate after her friend and partner was murdered, she will not cooperate now.”
“Maybe not.”
“There is that persistence again, Mr. Prager. How will you get the Watson woman to talk with you?”
“Good question.”
“I am a detective. I am full of good questions.”
“It doesn’t add up,” I said. “There’s something obvious here that I can smell, but I just can’t see.”
He laughed. “Yes, a familiar feeling for me.”
“With this case?”
“With many cases, but with this one, very much.”
“That’s why I want to see Alta’s things. Maybe I will spot something.”
“It is a stretch, non?”
“ Mais oui,” I said, using the full extent of my junior high school French. “I think stretches are all that’s left to us, detective.”
“Of course the items Miss Conseco had on her person when she was murdered, we are still holding as evidence.”
“I understand.”
“Here,” he said, “let me write down her address for you.”
…
Essex Street between Liberty and Glenmore Avenues was no more than six or seven blocks away from Carmella’s house on Ashford Street. I had meant to ask Carmella about why she’d held onto her abuela’s house for so many years and why the upstairs apartment still looked pretty much unchanged after two decades. I seemed to have forgotten several things I had gone there meaning to ask. Someone once said that men get older but they never grow up. How true, because when I really thought about it, I hadn’t gone to Carmella’s to ask about Alta or about the house or anything like that. No matter how I might rationalize it away and regardless of the date on my birth certificate, alcohol had reduced me to nothing more than a drunk and horny teenage boy desperate to sleep with his old girlfriend. Men never get over rejection. Seeing Israel again had pretty much put a damper on any of my plans for conquest. The fainting and the puking didn’t much help.
Besides, in my heart I knew why Carmella hung on to the house. That house represented her last remaining connection to her family. Not the family she had voluntarily cut out of her life, the family that had so carelessly let a seven-year-old girl fall into the hands of a pedophile, the family that afterwards treated her as an object of shame and disgust, but the idealized family she’d created out of the dreams and memories of her life prior to Easter Sunday, 1972. I have often wondered how Carmella hadn’t torn herself completely apart given the powerful and contradictory nature of her feelings toward her family. I don’t think she ever stopped wanting to belong to them, but I know better than most there are walls that cannot be scaled and wounds so raw they never heal. As best as I could tell, Carmella had long ago come to terms with the abduction and days of abuse. She has never come to terms with how her family treated her in the aftermath.
