It’s Christmas in Denver
Some of the lights were out in the enormous underground area parking beneath the Wedgwood and its sister apartment buildings, the Royal Doulton and the Lenox, now known in the neighborhood—thanks to some burned-out neon—as The Royal Doult and The nox. A few of the garage lights were always out, another strategy to discourage people who didn’t know about the place from getting out of their cars and going into the buildings, but tonight there were more out than usual, and the huge space stretched away to darkness on three of its four sides, so even if I’d been on the lookout there wouldn’t have been much to see.
I’d been mildly careful all the way home, just out of habit, and now I sat in the car for a few minutes, listening to the engine tick as it cooled, waiting for movement that I wouldn’t be able to see anyway.
It was all exactly as automatic as it sounds. First, I wasn’t actually worried about a threat; the only person on whose hate list I was guaranteed a place was Vlad, and wherever he was, I was certain that his body temperature was plummeting. Second, I didn’t really give a damn if someone took a crack at me. I probably would have welcomed it: Look, a diversion. Something to do.
The muted pops of Brando’s gun as he dispatched Vlad were still echoing in my skull, driving away the afterglow both of Morris Stempel’s miracle and the light in the faces I’d seen in the shelters where the Edgerton thieves had shared their holiday loot. It all seemed like years ago.
As vile a specimen as Vlad had been, being shot into hamburger in a parking lot on Christmas Eve was, I thought, a little stiff. And I’d been a participant, whether I pulled the trigger or not. It felt to me like I lived in a toxic zone where such things could and did happen, that I was responsible for choosing the life that put me there, and that some of the spiritual mud from Vlad’s execution had inevitably splashed on me and stained me. Again. When I could have been in a warm, well-lighted room, decorating a tree. With a family.
I thought briefly about counting my blessings, usually my go-to spirit raiser, but it seemed like too much effort. What I really wanted was to be a bear in a warm, dry cave with a lot of cozy leaves on top of me and pounds of fat beneath my skin to live on while I waited out the winter, dreaming bear dreams of blackberries and unguarded apple trees and really slow deer.
The bear thing comes on me from time to time. It’s never a good sign.
My sigh was heavy enough to fog my windshield. Seeing my malaise condense on the glass in front of me was more than I could take, so I got out of the car and popped the trunk.
There they were, all the presents I’d bought with Louie and, later, with Anime and Lilli. None of them was wrapped, of course, and I had forgotten to buy more paper and ribbon, so I’d either have to go back out to an all-night drug store and pay through the nose for being such a schlump or improvise some kind of wrapping. I wouldn’t have gone back out again to be blessed personally by the Pope, so improvisation it was.
In California, the war against shopping bags has trained all of us to drive around with a trunk full of empty bags, so at least I didn’t have to juggle all the stuff. I jammed it into a Trader Joe’s bag and a big old leather tote, and some of the good feelings that had gone into finding and buying that stuff rubbed off on me. As I handled each one I remembered why I’d chosen it, or why Anime and Lilli had, and how I felt about the person for whom I’d bought it. I was especially pleased with the two willowware saucers for my mother; she’s never cared much about material things, and this was the kind of gift she appreciated most, one that couldn’t have been bought for anyone else. Getting them had also given me a chance to make an oblique apology to poor old Will, who was, after all, just another harmless con man who’d found an edge he could use against the world. I’d been feeling a little guilty about the way I’d flattened him.
By the time I pushed the button to bring the creaking elevator, my spirits had lifted to the point where I’d mentally selected half a dozen shirts I could cut up to wrap the smaller gifts. I stopped on the lobby floor to give the Korean security guards a couple hundred bucks to divide up with the guys on the day shift and then rode the rest of the way up, my spirits ascending as I did. And then I got off on the third floor, and the reality of the empty apartment hit me across the face with a wet fish. Up and down, up and down. Maybe, I thought, I should give up the apartment and live in the elevator.
It usually takes three keys to open the door, but when I got to the third, the deadlock, it was already open. I paused for a moment, feeling a little prickle on the back of my neck. I never forget to lock it. But then I remembered that Ronnie had been the last person to leave, and she sometimes did forget, so I opened the door and went in.
I had reached for the light switch before I registered the pale light coming from the living room.
Carrying the tote bags as quietly as I could, I crossed the entryway into the hall, past the library, which was dark, and into the living room, my favorite, with its angular art deco windows and the view of downtown.
And there she was.
She was looking up at me, her head down and her fine gold hair hanging over her brow and framing her face. The coffee table had been pushed aside to let her sit on the floor with her back against the couch. A wobbly candle flame emitted shivers of light on the table beside her, where I also saw a bottle of white wine. No glass. Scattered in front of her were several small presents in various stages of being wrapped. None was finished, and they had an air that suggested they’d been abandoned. She leaned forward and swept them aside with her forearm and then kicked one halfway across the room.
I said, “How are you?”
“Almost drunk,” she said. “On the way to drunk.”
“Want company?”
She pushed her lower lip out and drew it in again. Then she rubbed her face with an open hand, refocused on me, and said, “I thought you’d never ask.” Then, with no apparent transition, she began to cry.
“Oh, no, no, no,” I said, dropping the bags of gifts, and by the time I was on the fifth or sixth no I was on my knees in front of her, and she put her arms around my neck and made deep, heartbroken whuffing sounds, interspersed with the sniffs of someone who needs badly to blow her nose. I hugged her again, got up, and said, “Hang on,” and when I came back I had a whole roll of toilet paper in my hand. She took it even before I’d finished kneeling, spooled about a yard’s worth around her hand, and scrubbed at her face. Then she blew her nose hard enough to turn herself inside out, wadded the paper up, and tossed it over her shoulder onto the couch. She said, “Surprise.”
“It is a surprise. I’d say I’m happy, but it’s hard for me to be happy when you’re not.”
“Gimme the wine,” she said, and I handed her the bottle, which was about three-quarters empty. She upended it into her mouth, knocked back a couple of inches, and put it on the table, which, judging from the force with which the bottle hit it, was about an inch higher than she’d thought it was. She looked past me at the room and then back at me. She said, “Trenton.”
“Trenton,” I said, and I could feel the pulse bumping away at the side of my throat.
“Open one of them,” she said fiercely. “Any one. They’re not really wrapped anyway.”
I took the nearest one. When I picked it up the paper fell away, and I was holding a box that said First Steps on the side. I opened it to see a tiny pair of shoes.
“I don’t even know,” she said, and then she stopped and blinked a couple of times, cleared her throat, and said, “how big his feet are now. I don’t know how tall he is now. I don’t know”—she was blinking again, rapidly—“whether his hair is still blond.” She closed her eyes for a long moment, and I watched a tear track its way down her left cheek. “I don’t know what color my own baby’s hair is.” And then she was sobbing full out and I had her in my arms although she barely seemed to register it until she finally rested her forehead, hotter than I’d expected it to be, against my neck.
I waited until it passed and said, “What’s his name?”
“Eric. Eric. He’s almost two.”
“His father has him?”
“Yes. And he told me I’d never see him, never see my own baby, again.”
“Who is he?”
“Eric Rossi. Doctor Eric Rossi. You’ll enjoy this. My baby is a junior.”
It was easy to identify the black thing blooming inside of me as homicide. “What’s he got? I mean, to keep you from taking the child and telling him to go fuck himself?”
“The Jersey mob,” she said. “The whole bunch of them. And don’t suggest anything silly or heroic because all you’ll do is get yourself killed.”
“He’s a doctor? Like a medical doctor?”
“He’s their doctor. He’s the man, as they say, for all of it. From a bullet to a childbirth.”
“And.”
“I was going to go back. When I phoned you, I was going to go back, just to drop off these, these presents. Just to see—just to see him. And he said, he said if I ever came through his gates no one would see me again.” She looked down at her lap and nodded twice, decisively. “And he could do it. There are a dozen people who’d kill me for him. Pop, no problem, and I’m in the foundation of some building in Atlantic City.”
“Okay,” I said. “Not now, nothing now, all right? But in the next few months, Ronnie, I’ll bring you your child.”
“You can’t.”
“I can.”
“How?”
“I’ll steal him. That’s what I do, I steal things. Does he know you’re in California?”
“No. He . . . he, umm.” She shook her head and fell silent. Reached for the bottle.
I intercepted her hand and put it against my cheek. She didn’t pull away. I said, “We don’t need to talk about this now. We’ve got lots of time to talk about it. But I promise you, here and now, a Christmas promise: I will bring you your baby.”
“You can’t,” she said again.
“Here’s what I want for Christmas,” I said. “I want you to stop saying I can’t. I won’t do anything that you don’t know about, but I’m telling you, if I can find a way to get that child out of the house, even for five minutes, even in someone else’s charge, I can make him disappear forever, as far as your ex is concerned.”
“How?”
“I know someone,” I said. “I met her recently. A specialist. I think you’d like her.”
“It’s not going to work.”
“Here’s the deal,” I said. “It won’t be next week or the week after that, or maybe even in the first six months of the new year, but I promise you that every day that passes, you’ll be one day closer to seeing him again. To being with him.”
She was looking past me, at the hallway I’d come in through, but after a long moment, she nodded. “We won’t talk about it.”
“Not until it starts to happen.” A few seconds slipped by without making any noise. I said, “We’re invited to Louie’s for Christmas dinner.”
Ronnie said, “That’s sweet. But we’ll have to live through Christmas Day first.”
“We’ll survive it together,” I said
She brought both hands up to the sides of her face and pressed so hard that her hands shook. Then she interlaced her fingers and let her hands drop into her lap. “I have a present for you.”
“And I have one, no, two for you.”
“In that pile over there?” She lifted her chin in the direction of the spill of bags on the floor.
“That’s where they are.”
She nodded, looking at the bags, and rolled her shoulders. Then she shook her head, as though to clear it. “Not wrapped,” she said.
“No. I’m not very good at this.”
“I have paper,” she said. “I have lots of paper.”
“Well, then. Looks like we’re in business.”
“Partners,” she said. “What time is it?”
“A little after eleven.”
“My, my.” She put her arms around my neck. “That means it’s Christmas in Denver. Let’s get to work on this stuff.”