Rachel didn’t know whether she was being followed or not. Probably.
Didn’t matter. She had a plan.
She walked to the train station and took the Main/Bergen line. The train wasn’t crowded at this hour. She checked her surroundings, changed train cars twice. No one seemed to be following or watching her, but they could be good at their job.
She exited the train at Secaucus Junction and headed for the train into Penn Station in New York City. Pretty much everyone else on the train did the same. Again, she tried to keep an eye out, but no one seemed to be watching her.
Didn’t matter. She had a plan.
She walked the streets of Manhattan for the next forty-five minutes, winding her way through various midtown locations until she reached a high-rise on Park Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street where Hester Crimstein, her attorney, had told her to go. A young man was waiting for her. The young man didn’t ask Rachel her name. He just smiled and said, “Right this way.” The elevator door was already open. They went up to the fourth floor in silence. When the doors opened, the young man said, “It’s down the hall on the left.” He waited for her to exit and then led the way. She opened the door and went in. Another man stood by a sink.
“Have a seat,” the other man said.
She sat with her back to the sink. The man worked fast. He cut her hair short and dyed it a subtle red. No words were exchanged during the whole process. When he was done, the first man, the younger man, came back. He led Rachel back to the elevator. He pressed the button for G3, which, she assumed, was the third floor of the garage. In the elevator he handed her a car key and an envelope. The envelope had cash, a driver’s ID in the name of Rachel Anderson (her maiden name), two credit cards, a phone. The phone was some kind of clone. She could get normal calls or texts, but the FBI wouldn’t be able to track where she was. At least, that was how the young man explained it to her.
When they reached G3, the elevator doors slid open. “Parking spot forty-seven,” the young man said. “Drive safely.”
The car was a Honda Accord. It wasn’t stolen or a rental, and Hester had assured her that there was no way it could be traced to either of them. She checked the phone as she slid behind the wheel. David had just sent the pin drop.
Whoa.
She was surprised to see he was in Revere, not far from his old home. She wondered about that. Going home had not been part of the plan. In fact, David had been careful to stress the dangers in going anywhere familiar.
That meant something Hilde Winslow had told him brought him back to Revere.
Rachel didn’t get why, but she didn’t have to yet. She started up the car and drove north.
* * *
When Eddie gets off the phone, he tells me it’s going to be a few hours before the meet.
“You want to stay in my back room until then?” Eddie asks.
I shake my head and give him the number of my burner phone. “Can you call me when you know a time?”
“Sure.”
I thank him and start across the street. I know this neighborhood like the proverbial back of my hand. Things may change, but in places like this, not much. By the water, sure. There are new high-rises overlooking Revere Beach. But here, where I grew up, the row houses may have fresh paint jobs or aluminum siding or the occasional addition, but it’s all pretty much the same. A big part of my childhood was about cutting through every yard to save a step or avoid being seen or maybe it was just about adventure.
I am so close now to my father.
I realize the danger here. There is, I’m sure, a fairly massive manhunt for me. That may mean that they are watching my childhood home, where my father and aunt still reside. It makes sense. But as I noted before, the cops can’t be everywhere. They know that last night I was in New York City. Do they think I would come up to Revere from there? It would depend, I guess, on what Hilde Winslow has told them, but I would highly doubt she would confess to committing perjury during my trial.
I check all the angles as I duck into the backyards of my youth. I realize that surveillance doesn’t require a van parked in front of the house, but I see nothing indicating danger. I wonder whether it’s safe. I wonder whether this even makes sense. Taking a step back for a moment: What’s the point in seeing Dad and Aunt Sophie after all this time? Won’t my visit just upset them?
But I’m drawn to my old home. I am an escaped convict with a few hours to kill, and I want to see the people I love the most. Is that so strange? No. But my motive and focus remain locked on finding Matthew.
I feel safe as I hit the backyards between Thornton and Highland. The homes, mostly multi-dwellings, were stacked close together so that you never really knew where your property ended and the next one started. That had led to some interesting battles over the years. When I was fourteen, the Siegelmans claimed that Mr. Crestin’s garden went over the property line, and so they wanted some of Crestin’s award-winning tomatoes. I pass by that disputed border right now and reach Mrs. Bordio’s place. Mrs. Bordio lived there with her son Pat, who had what we used to call a lazy eye. They moved out in the early 2000s, and the place looks well cared for by the new owners. Mr. Bordio, Pat’s father, died before my time, in Vietnam, and the yard was always overgrown. My old man finally set up a rotating schedule where the men in the neighborhood took turns mowing her lawn. Mrs. Bordio repaid the men with her homemade peanut brittle. Mr. Ruskin—I’m walking past his place now—had spent an entire summer building an enormous pizza oven out of brick and concrete. It’s still there, of course, even though the Ruskins moved out in 2007. If a tornado ever took out this neighborhood, that oven would be the only thing left standing.
Up ahead I can see the back of my childhood home.
The shrubbery is thicker here. One of my earliest memories—I must have been three or four—is my dad and Uncle Philip building a swing set in the yard. Adam and I watched our dads in awe. It was a hot day and mostly I remember the way my dad would pick up a bottle of Bud and bring it to his lips. He’d take a deep sip, lower it, notice me watching, wink.
And of course, I remember my high school girlfriend Cheryl.
As I make my way closer to my home, my strongest memory is a sacrilegious one involving the tent that Mr. Diamond put up every year to celebrate Sukkot. A sukkah tent, if you will, is normally a hut-like structure made out of twigs and branches with no roof. You keep it outside. That’s a must. I don’t remember all the religious details anymore. The guys in prison are oddly the most religious I’ve ever met. I do not fit into that camp.
Anyway, the Diamonds’ sukkah was a step above everyone else’s in the neighborhood. It was a large tent with rich color and Hebrew lettering, and when Cheryl and I were seventeen years old, late on a cool October evening, we sneaked into the Diamonds’ sukkah tent and lost our virginities.
Yep. Just like that.
I can’t help but smile and wince at the memory.
Man, I loved Cheryl.
I’d had a crush on her since her family moved onto Shirley Avenue when we were in eighth grade, but it wasn’t until right before junior prom that Cheryl reciprocated at all, and even then, we’d end up going to the prom as “friends.” You know the deal. We were in similar friend groups and neither of us had anyone to go with. We ended up making out that night, in her case more out of boredom than anything else.
That’s when we became a couple.
I lean against the tree in the Diamonds’ old backyard. Cheryl and I had been good for so long. We had a brief breakup in college. That was more my doing than hers. Everyone told us that we were too young to settle down and never experiment with anyone else. We gave it a try, but for me no one else measured up. We got engaged our senior year of college, but we promised ourselves no marriage until Cheryl finished med school. We stuck to that plan. Then we got married and she got the residency of her dreams and then, following on this smooth, predictable, happy streak, we decided to have kids.
This is where things went wrong for us.
Cheryl—or should I say we?—couldn’t get pregnant.
If you’ve had fertility issues, you know the stress and strain. Cheryl and I both wanted kids. Badly. It had been a given. We wanted four. That was our plan. We had agreed to that. But we tried for months and months and nothing happened. When you want to get pregnant, it seems as though everyone else in the world—the worst people, the most undeserving people, the people who don’t even want children—are all getting pregnant. Everyone is getting pregnant but you.
We visited a specialist who ran tests and more tests and discovered the culprit was me. Yes, we all know that it’s “no one’s fault,” that you’re in this together, that it doesn’t make you less of a man yada yada yada, but discovering that my sperm count was too low to have children messed with my head in an awful way. I know better now, I guess. I know about toxic masculinity and all that, but when you grow up the way I did, in a place like this, a man has certain jobs and responsibilities and if he can’t even get his own wife pregnant, well, what kind of man is that?
I felt shame. Dumb, I know. But your feelings don’t know from dumb.
Cheryl and I tried and failed at IVF three times. The strain between us grew. Every conversation was about having a baby or worse, when we tried not to let it consume us—we’d been told that sometimes if you just relax, it magically happens—it became the figurative elephant not only in the room but in the bed. That elephant never left us.
Cheryl was great about it.
Or so I thought.
She never blamed me, but being an idiot with self-esteem issues, I let my imagination run wild. She is looking at me differently, I thought. She is looking at me and finding me wanting. She is looking at other men—virile, fertile men—and wondering how she ended up with such a dud.
It almost destroyed us.
Then we got some good news. One of my dad’s old Revere buddies was a general practitioner in New Hampshire. Dr. Schenker told me that he’d had the same issue and got cured with varicocele surgery. I don’t want to go into the details and you don’t want me to, but in short, you remove swollen veins inside the scrotum. Long story short: It worked. Suddenly my sperm count soared past normal.
Four months later, Cheryl was pregnant with Matthew.
It was all good again.
Except it wasn’t.
The years of infertility hell had played havoc with us and our relationship, but once Matthew was born, I thought that it would be behind us. And it was. Until I found out that while saying all the right things to me, Cheryl had gone behind my back and visited another fertility clinic to look into donor sperm. She hadn’t gone through with it. That’s what she kept reminding me. She explained it so clearly—she had been desperate not just to have a baby but to put us both out of this purgatory and so for a moment, a brief stupid moment, she considered getting donor sperm, something she knew that I would never agree to, and not telling me.
It was, she admitted, an awful thing to even consider. She apologized profusely. But I didn’t accept the apology. Not at first anyway. I was hurt. Her actions played into all my stupid insecurities and so then I lashed out. She had broken my trust—and I compounded the issue by handling it badly.
Through the back window of my family home, I see movement. I move behind a shrub, and when I see my aunt Sophie enter and sit down alone at the kitchen table, my heart bursts. She wears a blue formless housedress. Her back is hunched. Her hair is in bobby pins but some wisps have escaped and dangle in her face. A potpourri of emotions course through me. Aunt Sophie. My wondrous, generous, kind, fierce aunt who raised me from the time my mom died of cancer. She looks weary, spent, old before her time. Life had sucked away that vitality. Or had it been my father’s illness?
Or me?
Aunt Sophie always believed in me. Others caved. But never, ever Sophie.
I am not sure how to handle this, but I find myself tentatively approaching the back window. She has the radio on. Sophie always loved playing music in the kitchen. Classic rock. Of course, it might not be a radio anymore. It might be an Alexa or some other kind of speaker device. I can hear Pat Benatar belt out that we are young, heartache to heartache. Sophie had loved Pat Benatar and Stevie Nicks and Chrissie Hynde and Joan Jett. I creep up the back porch steps and without thinking about it, I lightly rap my knuckles on the window.
Sophie looks up and sees me.
I expect her to be startled or confused or—at the very least—thrown off by my sudden appearance. I expect some kind of understandable hesitancy, even for a moment or two, but with Aunt Sophie, there is none of that. She has always meant unconditional and ferocious love, and that’s all I’m seeing here. She jumps up and beelines straight for the back door. Her face is already a sun shower—bright smile, wet tears on her cheeks. She flings open the door, looks left and right in a protective way that tweaks my heart, and says, “Get in here.”
I listen. Of course. I flash back to the days my dad would come home late from a night shift and wonder where I was, and Aunt Sophie would make up an excuse and sneak me in through this back door so he wouldn’t know. I step inside and close the door. She hugs me. She feels smaller now, frailer. I’m afraid at first to squeeze too tight, but she’ll have none of that.
I want to hold back, stay upright and focused, to not give in to the emotion of the moment, but I don’t stand a chance. Not with Aunt Sophie. Not with an Aunt Sophie hug. I feel my knees buckle and maybe I let out a small cry, but this frail woman of towering strength holds me up.
“It’s going to be okay,” she tells me.
And I believe her.