Something made him certain the young man was about to propose. Go for it, he thought. Before it’s too late.
“I’ve decided it’s time,” the young man said.
“I’m ready too.” The girl’s eyes were shining.
Where’s the ring? Sterling wondered.
“We’ll move in together for six months and see how it works out.”
The young woman looked blissful. “I’m so happy,” she whispered.
Shaking his head, Sterling turned away. That was never an option in my time, he told himself. Somewhat discouraged, he walked to the railing overlooking the ice-skating rink and looked down. The music was just ending, and skaters were heading for the exit. He saw one little girl give a final twirl. She’s very good, he thought admiringly.
A moment later she looked up, and he could see that she was trying to blink back tears. Their eyes locked. Does she see me? Sterling wondered. He couldn’t be sure, but he was certain that she had sensed his presence, and that she needed him. As he watched her slowly skate off the ice, her shoulders drooping noticeably, he knew with certainty that she was the one he had been sent to help.
He watched as she changed into her shoes and then headed up the stairs from the rink. He momentarily lost her in the crowd, but then caught up with her just as she was boarding a van marked MADISON VILLAGE SCHOOLS that was waiting on Forty-ninth Street. So that’s where they were going, he thought-Long Island. He heard the teacher call his new little charge Marissa. Obviously the youngest student in the group, she went straight to the back and sat alone in the last seat. Quickly becoming comfortable in the knowledge that no one could see him, he followed the little girl onto the van and slid into the seat across the aisle from her. She glanced in his direction several times, as if she somehow were aware that he was there.
Sterling settled back. He was on his way. He looked over at Marissa, who had leaned against the window and closed her eyes. What was weighing so heavily on that little girl’s heart? Who was she thinking about?
He couldn’t wait to see what was going on in her home.
“I can’t believe it. Another Christmas with Mama so many miles away.” Eddie Badgett was close to tears. “I miss my homeland. I miss my mama. I want to see her.”
His ruddy face dissolved in grief. He ran his thick fingers through his plentiful grizzled hair.
The Yuletide season had thrown Eddie into a blue funk that all his worldly wealth, accumulated through loan-sharking and pyramid schemes, could not erase.
He was speaking to his brother Junior, who, at fifty-four, was three years younger. Junior had been named for their father, who had spent most of his sons’ lives incarcerated in a dank prison cell in Wallonia, a tiny country bordering Albania.
The brothers were in the room their pricey decorator had grandly dubbed the library, and which he had filled with books that neither one of them had any intention of reading.
The Badgetts’ mansion, set on twelve acres on Long Island’s North Shore gold coast, was a tribute to the ability of the brothers to separate other human beings from their hard-earned assets.
Their lawyer, Charlie Santoli, was with them in the library, seated at the ornate marble table, his briefcase beside him, an open file in front of him.
Santoli, a small, neat, sixtyish man with the unfortunate tendency to complete his daily toilette with a substantial quantity of Manly Elegance cologne, eyed the brothers with his usual combination of disdain and fear.
It frequently occurred to him that in appearance the pair resembled a bowling ball and a baseball bat. Eddie was short, squat, rounded, hard. Junior was tall, lean, powerful. And sinister-he could chill a room with his smile or even the grin he considered ingratiating.
Charlie’s mouth was dry. It was his unhappy duty to tell the brothers that he’d been unable to get another postponement of their trial for racketeering, loan-sharking, arson, and attempted murder. Which meant that Billy Campbell, the handsome, thirty-year-old, climbing-the-charts rock singer, and his glamorous mother, aging cabaret singer and popular restaurant owner Nor Kelly, would be whisked out of hiding and brought to federal court. Their testimony would put Eddie and Junior in prison cells that they could cover with pictures of Mama, because they’d never lay eyes on her again. But Santoli knew that, even from prison, they would manage to make sure that Billy Campbell never sang another note, and that his mother, Nor Kelly, never welcomed another patron to her restaurant.
“You’re too scared to talk to us,” Junior barked. “But you’d better start. We’re all ears.”
“Yeah,” Eddie echoed, as he dabbed his eyes and blew his nose, “we’re all ears.”
Madison Village was a few exits past Syosset on the Long Island Expressway.
At the school parking lot, Sterling followed Marissa off the van. Wet snowflakes swirled around them. A guy in his late thirties, with thinning sandy hair-tall, lanky, the kind Sterling ’s mother would describe as “a long drink of water”-called to Marissa and waved vigorously.
“Over here, honey pie. Hurry. No hat on? You’ll catch a cold.”
Sterling heard Marissa groan as she ran toward a beige sedan parked in the midst of a half- dozen vehicles that looked to Sterling more like trucks than cars. He had noticed a lot of this kind of vehicle on the highway. He shrugged. Just another change in the last forty-six years.
Marissa said, “Hi, Roy,” as she hopped into the front seat. Sterling squeezed himself into the back between two tiny seats that were obviously for very small children. What will they think of next? Sterling wondered. When I was a toddler, my mother used to drive with me in her lap and let me help her steer.
“How’s our little Olympic skater?” Roy asked Marissa. Sterling could tell he was trying his best to be pleasant, but Marissa wasn’t having any of it.
“Good,” she replied without a trace of enthusiasm.
Who is this guy? Sterling wondered. It can’t be her father. Maybe an uncle? The mother’s boyfriend?
“Fasten your seat belt, princess,” Roy cautioned in a too-cheery voice.
Honey pie? Princess? Olympic skater? This guy is embarrassing, Sterling thought.
Give me a break, Marissa sighed.
Startled, Sterling looked for Roy ’s reaction. There was none. Roy was staring straight ahead, paying rapt attention to the road. His hands were wrapped tightly around the steering wheel, and he was driving ten miles below the speed limit.
I could skate home faster, Marissa moaned.
Sterling was inordinately pleased to realize that he not only had the power to make himself visible to her on demand, but when he tuned in, he could read her thoughts as well. The Heavenly Council was obviously making certain tools and powers available to him, but leaving it up to him to discover their extent. They certainly weren’t going to make it easy for him.
He leaned back, aware that even though he was not there in the flesh, he nonetheless felt crowded and uncomfortable. He had had much the same reaction when he’d bumped into the woman at the skating rink.
The rest of the seven-minute ride home was spent mostly in silence, except for the radio, which was tuned to a station playing particularly bland music.
Marissa remembered the time she had switched the station in Daddy’s car to the one that played this stuff. He had said, “You’re kidding! Haven’t I given you any taste in music?”
“This is the station Roy listens to!” Marissa had cried triumphantly. They had laughed together.
“How your mother went from me to him I’ll never know,” Daddy had marveled.
So that’s it, Sterling thought. Roy is her stepfather. But where’s her father, and why, now that she’s thought about him, is she both sad and angry?
“ Roy went to pick her up. They should be here any minute, but I don’t think she’ll want to talk to you, Billy. I’ve tried to explain that it isn’t your fault that you and Nor have to stay away for a while, but she isn’t buying it.” Denise Ward was on her cordless phone, talking to Marissa’s father, her ex-husband, and trying to keep
