“
“We’re at the Comcast Center. Who called?”
“A guy with a thick Russian accent. Any other stupid questions? He said Yefim is having trouble getting through to your cell.”
“How’d the Russians get your number?”
“How’d they get
I didn’t have an answer for that one.
“The meeting’s changed to a train station,” she said.
“Which one?”
“Dodgeville.”
“Dodgeville?” I repeated. I vaguely remembered seeing the name on packages when I’d loaded trucks in college but I couldn’t have pointed it out on a map. “Where the hell’s that?”
“According to a map I’m looking at, go to 152 and head south. Not far. They said only one of you can leave the car with the cross. So you have the cross, I take it.”
“Dre does, yeah.”
“They said bring the cross or they’ll kill Sophie in front of you. Then they’ll kill you.”
“Where are-?”
She’d hung up.
I came to the bottom of the aisle, found Dre sitting on the edge of the stage, looking out at the seats.
“Meeting location’s been changed.”
He didn’t seem surprised. “That’s what you predicted.”
I shrugged.
“Must be great,” he said, “being right all the time.”
“That’s how I come off, uh?”
He stared at me. “People like you wear your self-righteousness like-”
“Don’t blame me because you fucked your life up. I don’t judge you for any of that.”
“Then what do you judge me for?”
“Trying to get into the pants of a sixteen-year-old.”
“In many cultures that’s considered normal.”
“Then move to one of those cultures. Here, it just means you’re a douche bag. You don’t like yourself? Don’t put it on me. You don’t like the way your life turned out? Welcome to the club.”
He looked out at the seats, suddenly wistful. “I played a pretty mean bass in this band I had in high school.”
I managed not to roll my eyes.
“All these things we could have been,” he said. “You know? But you gotta choose a path, so you choose it, and you find yourself exiting med school knowing only one thing for certain-that you’re going to be a subpar doctor. How do you embrace your own mediocrity? How do you accept that in any race, for the rest of your life, you’ll arrive with the back of the pack?”
I leaned against the stage with him and said nothing. It was quite the view-all those seats. Beyond it, the great lawn of general seating rising into the dark sky under gently falling snow. Most nights in July, it would be full. Twenty thousand people chanting and screaming and swaying, pumping their fists toward the sky. Who wouldn’t want to stand onstage and have that view?
On some minor level, I felt bad for Dre. He’d been told by someone-a mother, I assumed-that he was special. Probably told it every day of his life, even as the evidence mounted that it was a lie, however well-intentioned. And now here he was, first career in shambles, second career about to be, and probably unable to remember the last time he’d made it through a day without substance abuse.
“You know why I never had any qualms about brokering baby sales?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Because nobody knows nothing.” He looked over at me. “You think the state knows any better about placing kids? You think anyone does? We don’t know shit. And by we, I mean all of us. We all showed up at the same shitty semiformal and we hope that somehow everyone will buy that we are what we dressed up as. A few decades of this, and what happens? Nothing. Nothing happens. We learn nothing, we don’t change, and then we die. And the next generation of fakers takes our place. And that? That’s all there is.”
I clapped him on the back. “I see a future in self-help for you, Dre. We got to motor.”
“Where?”
“Railway station. Dodgeville.”
He hopped off the stage and followed me up the aisle.
“Quick question, Patrick.”
“What’s that?”
“Where the fuck’s Dodgeville?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dodgeville, as it turned out, was one of those towns so small I’d always thought it was just an extension of another town-in this case, South Attleboro. As far as I could tell, it didn’t even have a traffic light, just one stop sign about six miles from the Rhode Island border. Idling there, I saw an RR sign to my left. So I turned left off Route 152, and after a few hundred yards, the train station appeared, as if dropped there, in an otherwise uninterrupted stretch of woodlands. The tracks ran straight into the forest-just a hard line that vanished into cowls of red maple. We pulled into the parking lot. Other than the tracks and the platform, there wasn’t much to see-no stationhouse to protect against December’s bite, no Coke machines or bathrooms. A couple of newspaper stands by the entrance stairs. Deep woods on the far side of the tracks. On the near side, the platform on the same level as the rails, and the parking lot we’d pulled into, which was lit with sallow white light, the snow spinning like moths under the bulbs.
My phone vibrated. I opened the text:
One of you bring cross to platform. One of you stay in car.
Dre had craned his head to look at the message. Before I could reach for my door, he’d reached for his and was out of the car.
“I got this,” he said. “I got this.”
“No, you-”
But he walked away from the car and out of the parking lot. He climbed the short steps to the platform and stood in the center. From where he stood, a strip of hard black rubber fringed in bright yellow paint extended across the track.
He stood there for a bit as the snow fell harder. He took two or three steps to the right, then four or five to the left, then back to the right again.
I saw the light before he did. It was a circle of yellow bouncing in the woods, a flashlight beam. It rose, then fell and rose halfway back up again before it slid left, then right. It made the same movement a second time-the sign of the cross-and this time Dre’s head turned toward it and locked on. He raised one hand. He waved. The light stopped moving. Just hovered in the woods directly across from Dre, waiting.
I rolled down my window.
I heard Dre say, “No worries,” and cross the tracks. The snow grew thicker, some of the flakes starting to resemble bolls of cotton.
Dre entered the woods. I lost sight of him. The flashlight beam vanished.
I reached for my door, but my cell vibrated again.
Stay in the car.
