I drive us home. She sleeps most of the way, her head at an uncomfortable angle against the windshield. I move her to my shoulder. She doesn’t even murmur. But at some predetermined moment, close to the house, she pulls herself upright, gasps, and says: “The brakes, Dev.”
A figure darts across the road a moment later. I wouldn’t have seen him if not for Pea’s warning.
Which she had given one second before the figure—the boy—actually came into view. I swerve, squeal to a stop, turn to stare at her.
“Pea—”
She just shakes her head. Alvin has stopped too, like a deer in the road, but relaxes when he recognizes us.
“You came from Hudson?” he asks when I roll down the window. “You saw Craver? He tell you why he set me up like that?”
“I left him with your mother,” I say, “but I don’t know what she’ll be able to do. He seemed determined to blame you. I think you should get the hell out of town, Alvin.”
The boy shakes his head. His hair is damp despite the clear, brisk day. It sprays a pair of drops on my arm. “Can’t leave my folks,” he says. “This ain’t their fault.”
“They should leave too,” I say. “Before the bank forces them out.”
He sticks his jaw out. “I’m going to Craver, if he’s talking he might as well talk to me. Tell me to my face why he lied like that. I didn’t do shit to nobody. I don’t deserve this.”
“You did plenty of shit to plenty of somebodies, kid,” Pea says, with a smile at once ironic and fond. “But no, you don’t deserve this. Dev’s right. Leave town. Find our friend Walter in the city and you might just make it.”
“I don’t want to make it! I want it to be right. What good are these hands, if I can’t even make this one thing right?”
Pea turns away abruptly. Alvin looks at me. “I don’t want to end up like your angel.”
I sit up. Angry, yes, but also a little sick. “What do you mean?”
“Glorious,” he says, “but damned.”
“And what the devil would you know of—”
“I’ve got to get myself right first,” he says to Phyllis, who only watches him through lidded eyes. “Then I’ll know what to do. How to be worthy of them.”
He looks down, so earnest that I could shake him.
“Come by when you want, Alvin,” Pea says. Her forehead is shiny with sweat, but the hand I hold is cold. “I’ll make a plate for you.”
He shakes his head. “Thank you, Miss Phyllis. Angel. But from now on…”
Pea smiles. “Cast me away from you, then, sweet boy. I hope it does you some good. I hope you can do what I never could.”
Two days later she really does faint. She slides to the floor in the kitchen and bruises her hip. “Pea,” I say, “why don’t we go to a doctor?”
“It’s nothing, I’m fine.”
“But—”
“I’ll be more careful. Trust me, Dev. You don’t need to worry.”
Her smile is a warning. But sometimes I am brave enough for her.
“If you know what’s wrong, then tell me.”
“You don’t—this is my business, Dev.”
“Don’t I get to worry?”
“Sure you do. Hell, I could give you lessons. But you don’t get to bother me with it.”
“Pea, I love—”
“What was that phone call about a month ago? What did Walter take care of for you?”
She waits. And sometimes I am not nearly brave enough.
“Well, then,” she says after a minute fat with silence. But then she adds, “I never told you that Alvin had been coming around, either.”
We look at each other and then rest our heads together, gently.
“I knew about that anyway.”
“I knew that you knew, baby, isn’t that the strangest? I never even had to tell you.”
13
Trent Sullivan had up and dusted. That’s what Finn was saying, anyway. I was worried enough to hunt him down. I went to the Pelican when Pea wasn’t there—she was starting to wonder about my interest in her world. She didn’t suspect the truth. No, she worried that I wanted in. I tried to imagine my shape beneath her fingertips.
A junior private eye, not doing as well as he’d like. Feet on the right side of the law and a gaze straying down the horizon. We had been breathing with the other’s lungs, sleeping in the other’s skin, soaking sheets in the other’s sweat for two months. I loved her the way Sita loved Rama. A god’s love. A saint’s love. But we were mortals, with hearts of wax and joints of ash. We had touched the other’s smallest, hidden self, but we could only see them blurred, through murky water. I thought I saw her more clearly than she saw me.
But not enough, in the end. Not nearly.
Red Man sat down beside me at the bar. He had put his hand on my shoulder. He told the barman to make me a drink.
“Dry martini, Mitch,” he said. “Fine by you, Dev?”
I nodded. It felt natural. Relaxed. He didn’t threaten me. Not that I could feel. My throat still felt as tight as a bent straw.
“You know my name,” I said.
“Course I do, Dev. Our best girl is dizzy for you. It’s only natural for us to take an interest.”
I nodded again. I should have anticipated this. He had never so much as glanced at me and I was a rookie fool for thinking that meant he wasn’t looking.
“And what’s yours?” My strained, far-off voice again.
I was thinking of that gentle shot in the basement. I was thinking of how he had breathed, after. He had closed his eyes.
“What’s my what, Dev?”
“Name?”
Now he laughed. Short, genuinely surprised. “You know it.”
“I know what they call you.” Mitch gave me that drink and backed off like he’d pulled a grenade pin. I forced a large swallow past the bend in my throat. “I was wondering if you call yourself something different.”
The man by my side
