“You know. Kira Chang. From syndication, or whatever it is. She called while you were taking Francie back to the tennis club. I gave her the cell phone number.”
“Thanks. She did.” Silence, the kind that had to be filled. “Some minor screwup-I’ll take care of it in the morning.”
The furnace switched back on, ran for a while, went silent. Anne was silent, too. The headache started behind Ned’s right eye, where it always did, but this time spread deeper than ever before. Deeper and sharper. What the fuck am I doing? he thought. What the fuck am I doing?
“Ned?” Anne said quietly, and then a little louder, “Ned?”
He was asleep.
Anne slipped out of bed. Having gone to bed naked in preparation for sex with Ned, she put on the long sweatshirt she usually slept in and went downstairs. She didn’t turn on any lights, didn’t need them, knew her own house. Through the kitchen, through the door that led to the garage, a single-car garage where Ned’s car, the later model, had precedence over hers. Anne switched on the garage light, and there was his car. She walked around it, saw just that: his car. All the tires seemed the same, none noticeably flat. What was she looking for? She didn’t know.
Anne opened the driver’s-side door, popped the trunk, where the spare was. She looked inside, saw his roof rack, kayak paddle, a bag of rock salt, a bouquet of flowers-irises, still fresh. The spare lay under the floor mat. She unsnapped the snaps, rolled it back. On top lay the tools-jack, crank, lug wrench-all still sealed in factory plastic. Beneath the tools she found the instructions, also sealed in plastic, and under them was the spare. It had never touched pavement: the manufacturer’s label was still stuck to the treads. That didn’t mean it wasn’t flat, or hadn’t been flat earlier that night. Anne moved to lift it off but couldn’t. It was bolted in place. The bolt had to be loosened first, and the wrench had never been used. So no one had ever removed the tire to try it out.
Anne ran her hand over the spare, prodded it, punched it softly with her fist. It seemed as rounded and firm as the others, but she really couldn’t tell. She stood over the trunk, gazing down inside, gazing at the roof rack, the kayak paddle, the rock salt, the irises, the tools, the spare. Anne had never been good at solving puzzles, had hated math, didn’t like crosswords, was always nervous when people started playing games like Botticelli. She knew what she was seeing had to add up to something, but she couldn’t make it happen. Then she noticed a road map wedged between the spare tire and the wheel well. She tugged it out.
A road map of New Hampshire. So? She unfolded it. Just a New Hampshire road map, territory very familiar to her. She ran her eye over some of the spots-Tuckerman’s Ravine, Franconia Notch, Wildcat, Waterville Valley, Lake Winnipesaukee. Some time passed before she spotted the little red X on a tiny island in the middle of the Merrimack River.
A red X. Meaning? Anne had no idea. But her next thought gave it some: Kira Chang. She closed the trunk, leaving the irises to die.
18
A pretty girl got on the bus in Bridgeport, just after dawn. The only empty seat was on the aisle beside Whitey, so she took that, might have taken it anyway, he thought, catching the way she checked out his leather jacket from the corner of her eye. It was a cool jacket, no doubt about that, the coolest article of clothing he’d ever owned. He’d also bought himself a pair of cowboy boots from his first week’s salary, made in Korea, but very cool as well, black with silver stitching and thick heels that must have made him at least six-four. And he still had two hundred dollars and change left over, plus what remained of his gate money. Yeah, babe, he thought, giving her another look, check me out.
A pretty girl, but kind of cheap-looking: spiky hair, lots of earrings, and-as she shrugged herself out of her coat-a little snake tattoo coiling up from her cleavage. Whitey got hard right away. There was a bathroom at the back of the bus. Was it possible to get her behind that door and fuck her brains out? Things like that happened. He remembered that exact scene from one of Rey’s videos, except it took place on a plane, not a bus. The girl on the plane had made the first move, dangling her long red fingernails in the guy’s lap.
This girl didn’t do that. Neither did she have long red fingernails; hers were unpainted and bitten to the quick. Whitey made himself interesting by staring out the window for a while, like a guy having deep thoughts, then sat back and glanced at her as if noticing her for the first time, and if she happened to glance back and see how built he was under the leather jacket or even better the bulge in his pants, they’d be on their way. But she didn’t.
“Where you headed?” he said at last.
“Providence.”
He nodded. “Rhode Island,” he said. Nothing else came to mind. A few miles went by. “Just passing through?” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Providence. Just passing through?”
“I go to Brown.”
Brown-what the hell was that? He thought back, all the way back to his high school days on the ice.
“The college?” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Brown. The college.”
“Yes.”
Now they were getting somewhere. He noticed that her neck wasn’t completely clean. Necks-where had he heard that if you squeezed a woman’s neck while she was coming she had a better orgasm? Why not just say to her: Hey, ever hear about this neck thing? And then they’d be in the bathroom at the back of the bus, trying it out. He licked his lips a couple of times, getting ready to say it.
The girl took out a book, some kind of art book. She opened it to a picture, one of those pictures any kid could do, just a bunch of rectangles, and stared at it. He squinted at the title, Entrance to Green. There wasn’t even any green in it, for Christ’s sake. She took out a pencil and wrote in the margin, Anuszkiewicz: geometric recession counterbalanced by tonal shift-cool? warm. His hard-on went away.
She studied the art book the rest of the way, gazing at one bullshit picture after another. Whitey stole sidelong peeks at the coiled snake rising and falling in its soft, springy lair as she breathed. Only as the bus was pulling into Providence station did Whitey get an idea. It’s the recovery of stolen objects. Paintings, for example. Why hadn’t he thought of that earlier? The girl gathered her things and started up the aisle. “I’m in the art business myself,” he called after her. She didn’t seem to hear. He thought of the steel-tipped pole he’d left behind, and that snake, rising and falling on her breast.
Whitey got off the bus in Boston. He’d been there once before to play in a tournament at the Garden, but all he remembered was eating oysters, the first and only time he’d ever tasted them, horrible slimy things that were supposed to make you horny but hadn’t; he’d puked in the locker room that evening, and they’d lost to one of the big Catholic schools, the way they always did. So he had to ask some loser on the street, “Hey. Where’s the Garden?”
“Ain’t no more Garden, pal. Where you been? It’s the Fleet.”
“Huh?”
“Fleet Center, now. But the same location. What you do, you-”
“The Public Garden,” said Whitey, realizing his mistake. The man looked at him funny but gave him the directions. The Garden, gone. For a few blocks that pissed Whitey off, more than pissed him off, reminding him of the big percentage they’d cut out of his life. But after a while he began to see the bright side. If Gardens could come and go, then anything was possible, and that included a big score.
Whitey followed the directions, soon found himself walking on a street lined with fancy shops, their windows full of Christmas displays. He saw a leather jacket, a lot like his, went closer: identical to his, right down to those little V — shaped upturns on the chest seams. He checked the name of the shop-Newbury Leather-then took off his own jacket to examine the label. It had been cut out. He stood there wondering about that until he felt the cold, noticed that snow was falling. He hadn’t seen snow since they’d sent him down south. Whitey gazed straight up into the sky. From that angle the snowflakes were black against the cloud cover. He’d grown up in snow and never
