They were in the kitchen. Together. Just the two of them. Their fifteen-year-old, Julia, was somewhere in the Village, hopefully not getting a tattoo or a piercing. Cori, their eleven-year-old, was at a friend’s house, hopefully not getting a tattoo or a piercing. It was just Bliss and Rachel, husband and wife, sipping coffee, the way they’d started out almost twenty years before.
“You don’t think I can take it, do you?” Rachel said.
“It isn’t that,” Bliss said.
“Then what?”
“It’s just …” He trailed off.
A week earlier Rachel had announced she was finished with stand-up comedy. Three years doing the clubs had left her weary. She couldn’t deal with any more vodka-hazed hecklers trying to impress their dates; or the dentists in town for their conventions, hitting on her, inviting her for drinks at their hotel, offering her drug samples, a free cleaning; or, most painful of all, the young comics mistaking her for a waitress, asking Rachel to get them drinks between sets. Clint Eastwood was still interested in the development deal about her life—stand-up comic wife of a homicide detective—but she just couldn’t face the clubs anymore.
So Rachel proclaimed herself a writer of novels. Like the buffalo, his wife’s creative impulses needed vast areas for grazing.
“What kind of novel?” Bliss had asked, as if he didn’t know.
“About a homicide detective,” she said.
And now, here she was again pressuring Bliss to take her with him on a case, to let her ride in the car with him and his partner Ward, to stand next to the victim, get some blood on her hands.
“Let’s wait for ‘Take Your Wives to Work Day,’” he said.
“No,” she said. “Authenticity. That’s what I’m after. Details. The details are the most important part of a novel.”
“Who told you that?”
“Everybody knows that.”
“Details.”
“Yeah. Next case, I’m in the backseat.”
Bliss wanted to tell her that certain details are not worth knowing, like looking at a girl’s body on the floor of an abandoned building, her shirt bunched around her neck, her panties down at her ankles, her bare torso scarred, and suddenly your daughter’s face replaces the dead girl’s. Details like that can do permanent damage. He could attest to it.
“Sometimes the eyes on a corpse are black,” Bliss said. “And not from too much mascara. It’s the eyeballs themselves. Like a kid colored them in with crayons. Eight-ball eyes. It happens when someone gets shot in the back of the head.”
Instead of making her wary, she seemed emboldened.
“Eight-ball eyes,” she said, her voice giddy.
“Sometimes there is a mother by the body,” he continued, remembering this scene all too well. “A mother, just like you. And she’s begging me to make it go away—her son’s death. She grabs me by the arm, her fingers digging into my skin. Do something, she says. Please. It’s the ‘please’ that kills me. And I stand there helpless, trying to figure out why I can’t do it. Get the bullet out of the skull of her son and back inside the gun. Such a simple thing, and her agony will go away. I can make it go away. I’d be her hero. My photo will be by her bed. A place at Easter dinner forever saved for me. But I can’t do it.” He did his best Stanislavsky now, trying to get her to taste the fear. [quavering voice] “Please, the mother says, tears streaming down her cheeks [using his fingers to illustrate]. And I so much want to do it, [clenching fists] to put an end to her suffering [dramatic pause], but [opening hand, showing emptiness as symbol of failure] I can’t.”
He ended, waited for her to respond.
“I have to get my notebook,” she said. “I so need to write this down.”
He’d put his heart and soul into it, but it wasn’t enough.
Then the phone rang.
“If it’s Ward, I’m going with you,” she said.
It was Ward.
“Floater,” Ward said, his deep voice exuding its usual luxuriant calm.
Ward directed him to the bank of the East River, under the access ramp to the Harlem River Drive, near 128th Street.
“Be there soon, partner,” Bliss said, then hung up.
“So?” Rachel’s eyes were wide. There was no stopping her. In eighteen years of marriage, he’d never once succeeded. Why did he deal with homicides more easily than the needs of his wife? He wondered if the other detectives had the same problem. He’d bring it up at the next meeting of the Homicide Husbands Support Group. After the communal hug.
“Floater,” he said. “Usually they’re short a few facial features. Their stomachs are tidal pools, eels live in their lungs.”
Rachel reflected, going to that mysterious place where women go to make the big decisions. When she came back, her face was perky, alert, like a kid about to get on the ferris wheel.
“What shoes should I wear?” she said. “I mean, to a crime scene—flats or pumps?”
Clara arranged the towels in the guest bathroom, folding them lengthwise in thirds so the monograms faced out the way the Missus liked them. All the women Clara had cleaned for had their own idea of tidy—towels folded just so, china stacked just so, clothes arranged in drawers just so. Some wanted the socks tucked together in balls and some wanted only the tops folded over, the rest of the sock hanging down like a dog’s tongue on a hot day. We like the socks folded just so, Clara, the Missus said. Our children are used to it. And Clara had no doubt that if she didn’t fold the socks just so, she would lose her job.
Because God forbid the children’s socks should be folded differently than they were used to.
The Gelmans were the third family she’d worked for since coming to New York. She’d been with them for two months. She worked twelve-hour days, cleaning, shopping, making dinner. The Missus ate only minute portions of fresh fruit, steamed vegetables, and brown rice, as close to not eating as she could get. Sometimes she just had carrots. Still, Clara was the one who had to peel them and set the carrots on the gold-rimmed china. She wondered if someday the Missus would ask her to chew up her food like mother birds do, to reduce the strain on her delicate white teeth.
Clara filled the porcelain dish shaped like a large clam with tiny guest-bathroom soaps in the shape of seashells in the same pastel colors as the towels. Clara seriously doubted whether Mister Owen’s friends at the party that night would care how the towels were folded in the guest bathroom or if there were enough seashell soaps. She just hoped they got the toilet lid open in time before they vomited. They didn’t the last time Owen had a party. Not by a long shot.
Also at that party, the living room rug had been stained with red wine so badly it had to be thrown out, but not before the Missus had instructed Clara to spend an entire day lying on her stomach with a Q-tip and some industrial cleaning fluid in a futile attempt to clean each tuft individually. The next day, men were installing new carpeting.
“Clara!”
Mister Owen was calling her.
Mister Owen who, at seventeen, could not prepare a bowl of cereal himself, who didn’t aim when he peed.
“Clara!”
His voice made her shudder.
There was a younger brother, too. The famous one. Fortunately, he lived in Hollywood. One Gelman child was more than enough for her.
Some children she had worked for were nice. Mister Owen was not one of these. He needed to spend a night on the sea in a leaking wooden boat pulling up fishing nets until his palms bled, the waves crashing over the side, filling his nose and mouth with acrid water, sending him reeling across the deck, only the iron grip of Clara’s grandfather saving him from disappearing forever into the wild, black sea.
Clara returned the rest of the soaps to their place under the sink, and headed wearily upstairs to the third floor of the Gelman townhouse, to Owen’s room.
She saw his hulking figure lying naked on his bed except for a small towel across his waist, sweating, breathing hard. He’d probably been working out, the weight machine in his room like some medieval torture device. Clara immediately turned to leave.
“Wait,” Mister Owen said. She stopped in the doorway, kept her eyes averted, the way she had when her grandfather would club a fish to death in the back of his boat. “You put the beer in the fridge, right?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And the vodka’s in the freezer?”
She nodded, inched a little further out of the room. But he wasn’t finished.
“My mother said you were some kind of a nurse or teacher back in the Philippines.”
“I was a teacher,” she said, angry she allowed herself to tell him anything.
“What’d you teach?”
“History,” she said.
“You could help me with my papers,” he said. “But I don’t think I’ll be writing anything about the Philippines.”
When was the French Revolution, Mister Owen? Who was Trotsky? What was the Marshall Plan?
She used to teach children this age. They would stand when she entered the classroom.
“Throw me a pair of boxers,” he said.
She stood there, not sure what to do. She could feel the humiliation coursing through her body, like getting stung by a jellyfish.
“What color, Mister Owen?”
“The plaid ones.”
“They’re in the laundry, Mister Owen,” she mumbled. She was close to tears, but held them back. She would die first before she would cry in front of him. But she knew that wasn’t true. Sending money home to the Philippines to take care of her own children was more important than any humiliation she suffered from this despicable boy.
“Then the red ones, Clara,” Owen said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
He’s enjoying this, she thought. She found the underwear in his drawer and carried them in her thumb and index finger like they were something foul. She dropped them on the bed.
She turned and left, so she wouldn’t have to see him changing.
She would go home now. She would sit on her couch surrounded by the framed photos of her own son and daughter. She would take them down from the wall and hold her children tightly in her arms.
Bliss drove under the Harlem River Drive toward the East River. This was no-man’s-land. The dirt road was strewn with cans and bottles, broken strollers, wrecked shopping carts, a burned mattress, urban flotsam that had floated across the currents of the city, washing up by the water’s edge.
Rachel sat next to him. Her silk shirt was open at the collar. He could see a little cleavage. His wife looked good. She smelled good. She might make the floater’s eyes pop out of his head. Literally.
A novelist.
“Do you even know how to type?” he asked her.
“Is the floater male or female?” she asked, ignoring him completely.
“The fish have usually been nibbling,” Bliss said, “so sometimes it’s hard to tell.”
“Floater,” he said. “They have their own racial profile. Their skin color is often merely conjecture.”
She wrote all this down.
Details.
“Shouldn’t you turn on the siren?” Rachel asked.
“Why?”
“You’re a detective.”
“The floater’s not going anywhere,” he said. “Decomposition tends to cut down on your appointments. He’ll wait. He won’t start eating without us. Not that it matters. Once you see him, you won’t feel like eating anyway.”
Rachel nodded. She wrote more stuff in her notebook. Then she put the pencil to her chin and thought a deep thought, then she wrote that down, too. Then she looked at him, made some writerly observation, wrote that down, and closed the notebook as if it was her most precious possession, or if not her most precious, then certainly more precious than Bliss, her moribund husband.
Why a writer? Why couldn’t Rachel get an overwhelming desire to dress up in a short, pleated, schoolgirl skirt and ask Bliss to help her with her homework? He wrote that down in his own notebook, a small dead-end alley in his head that had been covered with so many layers of plaint and remorse that the words had lost all sense of meaning, not even resembling words, rather the random scratches of an idiot. One day he’d let a Dominican kid loose inside his skull with a can of spray paint, let the kid cover up his brain with paeans to Sammy Sosa, wiping out everything else. Maybe it would set Bliss free.
“Isn’t the novel supposed to be dead?” he asked.
“It depends who you talk to.”
“What if I talked to people who read books? What would they say?”
“The siren,” she said, “does it ‘wail’ or does it ‘scream’?”
“Maybe it’s appropriate,” he said, “using a dead art form to write about dead people.”
Bliss maneuvered around several large holes and moguls to where the police cars were parked, identifying the scene of a homicide like a willow grove marks an underground stream.
He jammed on his brakes to avoid a sinkhole as big as a bassinet. This was one of the few dirt roads in New York City. The East Side ladies could bring their SUVs up here, navigating their Navigators around the holes and moguls, using their four-wheel drive for the first time, get some mud on their tires.
He parked and turned off the motor. He watched Rachel, like a kid at a parade, gaze at the uniformed officers milling around, the police divers, the photographer taking pictures, the M.E. bent over what he assumed was the corpse. Rachel was happy. She had gotten her way. Big surprise.
He envied her. It must be nice to just watch, he thought. To only have to watch. You didn’t have to put on latex gloves to type a novel for fear of picking up a virus; didn’t have to rub menthol under your nose while you mused over your characters because the smell of decomposing flesh might make you gag. Yes, in his next life he would come back as one of the watchers—gazing from the sidelines, observing with a cold eye. He’d muse. He’d write poetry and wear a beret and live in the Village with some young, raven-haired grad student with librarian glasses and a tattoo of Proust on her shoulder and they’d do some mutual musing, watching all the poor, hapless people who had to actually spend their days doing stuff, like being a cop.
He got out of the car and stood by the garbage-strewn bank of the East River, from whose swirling, fetid waters the floater had been pulled like a toy from last night’s bath.
“There are some rubber gloves in the glove compartment,” he said to Rachel.
“You should call it the ‘rubber glove compartment,’” she said.
“You can. In your book: Chapter One: The Rubber Glove Compartment.”
“Maybe I will.”
He joined Rachel on the other side of the car. She held her rubber gloves in one hand, her notebook in the other, finger wedged in the middle, ready to flip it open. It reminded Bliss of how he flipped the safety on his gun before entering a hairy situation.
Ward saw them, walked over.
“If it isn’t Ozzie and Harriet,” Ward said.
“This is Rachel,” Bliss said, adopting an overly officious tone while they were in earshot of the uniforms. He didn’t want anyone knowing she was his wife. “Rachel’s a writer, doing research for her novel. To make it more authentic.”
Ward shook her hand with mock formality; then leaned close to her ear.
“Ride back with me,” he said. “I’ll show you stuff, make your novel a lot more authentic. Especially if you keep your rubber gloves on.”
“Sure,” Rachel said, smiling, flirting, Bliss thinking he used to get those smiles all the time.
Still holding Rachel’s hand, Ward led them toward the water and the floater.
Like the African kapok tree, floaters have their own ecosystem. The Museum of Natural History should make an exhibit, Bliss thought. The Floater. In the display case, a prostrate body in a permanent state of decomposition, the pus in perpetual leakage, ears flapping in the simulated plastic current. Hanging by invisible wires, the fat eels and worms and odd creatures that have mutated in the East River as a result of the toxins and general twisted New York karma that had seeped into the water—high-strung, anxious, angst-ridden fish with bags under their eyes, gills wrinkled with worry, swimming off with one of the floater’s fingers or toes in their greedy mouths, elated they’d gotten there ahead of the other fish, that they’d found a bargain. Bliss could be the museum guide, talking with the visiting fifth graders, pointing out the cracks in the cranium where the blunt object came in contact with the floater’s head, the frayed strands of rope that once tied the body to the cement blocks (heavy object of choice among those in corpse disposal). And what do you think, boys and girls, was the last thought that went through this person’s mind, wriggling and twisting helplessly as the cement pulled him down and the dirty water filled his lungs? Anyone have any ideas? Kids?
The police divers stood on the deck of the harbor patrol boat, peeling off their wet suits. That’s one duty Bliss couldn’t fathom. This wasn’t the Grand Caymans, after all. You weren’t diving for conch and lobster. If you went in the water, it was strictly to search for death. Hunting around in the semidarkness, the East River a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life. There was a reason this water was murky, Bliss thought. Whatever was on the bottom was not meant to be uncovered; it was supposed to remain hidden until it, too, liquefied and was absorbed into whatever version of fluid the East River consisted of. And besides the dangers of being in contact with the water, while the diver was looking for a body, there was the chance he could be hit on the head by a gun someone was tossing away, or a bag of bloody clothes, or even another body, tied to cement, sinking quickly and joining the biodiversity at the bottom of the river.
They moved closer to the river’s edge, where the floater was. Rachel started to slow down.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
“I’m fine,” she said.
We’ll see, Bliss thought.
Cardozo, the medical examiner, bent over the body like he was lining up a putt. He stood when he saw them. Cardozo was their jester. Whether they were in the dark basement of a decrepit brownstone in the Bronx or at the Plaza Hotel studying the crushed body of a jumper, Cardozo played the room. He was indomitable, always composed, no matter who was decomposing around him.
“Detective Bliss, my favorite Boy Scout,” Cardozo said. “Looking to earn a new badge today?”
“Cardozo,” Bliss said. They didn’t shake hands. No one shook hands at a crime scene. Hands shrouded in rubber belonged to the investigation, gathering clues, servicing the truth. At the crime scene, your hands were no longer your own. He wondered if Rachel noticed.
Bliss introduced her to Cardozo, saying nothing about her being his wife.
“She’s a writer,” Bliss said.
“Nancy Drew to your Hardy Boys,” he said. “How quaint.” Cardozo gestured to the body. “Well, I hope she likes Chinese food, because that’s what a lot of this guy looks like at this point. Mostly subgum chicken in white sauce. I’m afraid this guy’s fortune cookie came up on the grim side.”
The floater lay in the dirt. It looked out of place, like a floater out of water. It resembled a compost heap casually arranged in the shape of human being. Limbs loosely organized around the rotting hulk of the torso. Cardozo pointed to it with his toe.
“Howaya, pal,” Cardozo said to the body, “Give me some skin.” He turned to Rachel. “This is where the expression ‘How’s it hanging?’ comes from,” he said. “In case you were wondering.”
Rachel stared at the body. He knew what she was feeling—the sickness, forcing herself to deal with it, pushing past the revulsion, desperate not to look weak.
“He trusts you, Rachel,” Cardozo said, gesturing to the corpse. “He’s only just met you and already he’s opening up to you, spilling his guts.”
Rachel swallowed hard, then lifted her eyes to Cardozo.
“How long has he been dead?” she asked.
Cardozo’s face transformed into a mask of shocked dismay. “He’s dead?!” He turned to the corpse. “Oh My God, you’re right! Say, I’ll bet you’re a hell of a novelist, the way you interpreted his inner feelings like that.”
“Knock it off, Cardozo,” Ward said.
“Sorry. Actually, it’s a good question. Glad someone asked. I would say by the advanced state of decomposition that he stayed in the bath just a little too long. Maybe three or four months.”
“Any signs of trauma?” Bliss asked.
“There are only signs of trauma. What we need is a spot that doesn’t look like it should be served with chopsticks.”
“How about the cranium?”
“How about it?” Cardozo said, acting coy for Rachel’s sake.
“Any dings, dents, blows, bullet holes?” Bliss asked.
“The stuff that dreams are made of?” Cardozo shook his head. “This guy’s mind is like a sieve.” He dismissed himself from Bliss and zeroed in on Rachel, eager for the new audience. “These detectives, they always want magic. They think I can gaze on a corpse, put my hand on a too-poor piece of rotting flesh and tell them everything they need to know: cause of death, the weapon, the motive—vengeance, inheritance, double indemnity, drugs. Like all this is discreetly tattooed on the dead body’s skin and only I can decipher it—maps to missing evidence, X marks the spot.”
“We want justice,” Bliss said. “And if the murderer was waiting next to the dead body, doing a crossword puzzle until we arrived, his gun in a Ziploc, a confession typed and double-spaced, holding his own set of handcuffs and a stack of magazines to read in prison, then we wouldn’t need you, Cardozo. But the murderers don’t do that. So tell us, what do you see?”
Cardozo looked. For the moment, he saw nothing.
Then Rachel broke the silence.
“Hey, guys,” she said, “is that a belt?”
And they all looked down and there, wrapped loosely around the floater’s wasted waist, was the remnant of a belt and the dull metal of what was once the buckle.
And because Bliss had been so focused on Rachel, she was the one to notice the belt. Making Bliss look foolish. If the floater had any eyeballs left, they would have been rolling.
“Check those initials on the buckle,” she said to Cardozo. The medical examiner obeyed at once, just the way Bliss did when she instructed him to pick up an errant pair of his socks.
Cardozo bent closer. “‘F-H.’ Ring any bells?”
Before Bliss could say anything, Rachel said, “I bet that’s Felix Hernandez.”
“Who?” Cardozo said.
“That guy that’s been missing,” she said. “You know, the landlord wanted him out from that rent-controlled apartment and he wouldn’t go and then he disappeared.”
“I knew that,” Bliss said.
“It was all over the Post a few months …”
“I remember!” Bliss shouted. He had, after all, worked the case.
But the damage had been done.
“You should keep her around,” Cardozo said. “She realized this guy is dead and she figured out who he is.”
Bliss ignored Cardozo, wanted to ignore the whole thing.
“He have teeth enough to make an ID?” Bliss asked.
“I think he’s got the minimum.”
“See what you can do,” Bliss said.
Then he grabbed Rachel by the arm and walked her to the car. She started to apologize. Bliss cut her off.
“Don’t say anything.”
He knew they were watching: Cardozo, the divers, the police photographer, the uniforms, all looking at them, but mostly at her, at Rachel, his still-alluring wife. He’d forgotten just how alluring she was until he saw other men admiring her.
It would all be in her novel. He knew that. A year from now he’d be reading the manuscript and it would all be in there.
“They’re all staring at you,” he said.
She ran her fingers through her hair and put just a bit more wiggle in her walk.
“Well, then I’m glad I wore my heels to the crime scene,” she said. “Out of respect for the dead, of course.”
Rick Purdy stood outside Ben’s door, his hand resting on the knob that, he knew without trying, was locked from the inside. His son Ben was in there, getting ready for a party. Soon Ben would leave. Rick would say good-bye, receive no response.
His son had become a shadow, passing in and out of the doorways of his house.
That’s why Rick wanted to talk to Ben now. Just for a few minutes. Talk to him in some kind of meaningful way. Or if not meaningful, then maybe some banter. A little friendly banter. He’d settle for banter, because at least it acknowledged that Ben knew he was alive.
But Ben was inaccessible. Locked in his sanctuary. His son, but not his son. Rick turned the door knob. It didn’t move.
Consequences. That was the key. Repercussions. He’d read about it in magazine articles his wife Ellen had shoved in his face, as if it were a kind of punishment for peeing on the rug.
You don’t set limits for Ben, she told him, again and again. You don’t establish consequences. You need to read this article. This book. You have to speak with a therapist. Rick was floundering as a father. You have to speak with a therapist right away! Rick was failing. Rick was getting an F. F for father.
Rick picked at his nails.
Ellen hated it when he did that, picked or bit his nails. It reminded her of his weakness, of the fact that he never really accomplished anything on his own. If it weren’t for my father, we would be nowhere. They were nowhere. Just nowhere in a penthouse.
Rick directed the retail operation of Ellen’s father’s luggage business in the Northeast. Rick almost never left his office—which was just as well. Rick hated luggage. People buying luggage were traveling, had a destination. People buying luggage had plans, were excited about going somewhere.
Rick had no plans, no itineraries. Rick was merely in luggage.
In luggage.
He hadn’t thought of that before, but it was the perfect description of him. In luggage. Crammed in, packed tight, locked down, something that had to be taken along, dragged or carried by the person going somewhere, the one doing the actual traveling.
He picked at his cuticle.
He picked and picked and picked.
Rick wanted to break down the door to his son’s room. Run into it enough times with his shoulder so the wood buckled and the lock snapped. He knew he could do it. He’d done it so many times in his head, at night, lying in bed unable to sleep, thinking about his son.
His son, but no longer his son. A phantom.
Ben’s friends could come and go as they pleased. Like Owen. Owen only had to knock once and Ben’s door would open right up. But not for Rick.
So Rick had to break the door down.
But what would he do then? Standing in the doorway, his shoulder throbbing, what would he say? His son smirking, sitting on his bed smirking. Thinking about how he would tell his friends later, how his pathetically weird father broke down his door.
Rick backed away, retreated down the hall to the study, sat at his desk.
He had to come up with something to say.
After the wood cracked and buckled and he was standing face to face with his son, Rick had to think of what he would say.
And then he’d do it.
He’d break down the door.
He would.
Ben! he screamed. But the sound never left his head, just echoed there, like someone calling for help in a canyon in the middle of the desert, at night, and completely alone.
Ben!
Ben rang Owen’s bell again.
“B.D.F!” he shouted. “Open the door!”
In fourth grade they had read a book by Roald Dahl called The B.F.G.—the Big Friendly Giant. Now, years later, Ben had adapted the acronym to suit his friend—B.D.F., Big Dumb Fuck. Same as that book we read, Owen, about the giant. Owen didn’t realize the initials weren’t the same. Sometimes their friendship reminded Ben of the two guys in Of Mice and Men, which they read last year in English. Only unlike Lennie in the book, his friend Owen had been getting laid regularly since ninth grade.
He rang the bell again. “Clara!” Ben shouted. No answer. She’d probably quit already. Some kids liked to shoot squirrels with BB guns. Owen’s hobby was tormenting housekeepers. It was one of the few things he was actually good at it, the big dumb fuck. There was likely some support group back in the Philippines where all the housekeepers who had worked for the Gelmans would go and comfort each other, throw darts at Owen’s picture hanging on the wall.
Finally the door opened. Owen stood there in a pair of red boxers, muscles taut, shoulders wide, wearing his usual mawkish grin.
“Chantal like it when you have those on?” Ben asked.
“She likes it better when I have them off,” Owen said, putting extra emphasis on the word, so that Ben would be sure to know he was telling a joke. Then he gave his dumb laugh.
Ben walked in, then pushed the button on the side of the door so it would stay unlocked for the party.
“Good idea,” Owen said.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Ben said.
“Yeah,” Owen said. “C’mon. I have something to show you.”
Ben led the way. Owen followed. As usual.
“Check this out,” Owen said when they got to his room.
He turned on the TV and VCR. He hit “play.” It was a surveillance video. The Gelmans had recently installed security cameras. A few weeks ago, they had watched a video of Owen’s father coming home in the middle of the day with his secretary. Ben told Owen to hold on to it, save it for when he got himself in deep shit, like a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.
“This one stars yours truly,” the B.D.F. said, barely able to contain his toothy grin.
There were two cameras, one aimed at the front stoop, one at the backyard. The video cut between them about every ten seconds. A grainy black-and-white image appeared on the screen, Owen and Chantal in the backyard, sitting on the bench; cut to a shot of the front door of the house. Cut back to Owen and Chantal, kissing now.
Ben had a sense of where this was going.
“I don’t need to see this,” Ben said.
Owen let it play.
Cut to the backyard, Chantal unzipping Owen’s fly. Cut to the front door. Cut to the backyard, Chantal maneuvering Owen’s cock out of his pants. Cut to the front door.
“I said I don’t want to see this!” Ben ripped the remote out of Owen’s hand and turned it off. Owen grabbed it back and they started wrestling. Owen could have crushed him in a second, but he let Ben pin him, the way he usually did. Ben squeezed Owen’s thick wrist, digging his thumb hard into the pressure point until Owen’s hand opened and the remote fell on to the rug.
Ben got up. Owen rubbed his wrist.
“What’s your problem?” Owen asked.
“Nothing,” Ben said. “Maybe I’m jealous.”
“Yeah?”
Ben didn’t let on whether he was joking or not. He wanted Chantal so bad. It pained him every time he thought about her with the B.D.F.
But tonight he had a plan. He put his hand in his pocket, found the small vial filled with white powder. Magic powder. A pinch in a girl’s drink and you get the thing you’re dreaming about. One little pinch takes a girl down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. It’s where they want to go anyway, right? Isn’t it where everyone wants to go? Wonderland?
The doorbell rang.
“You should get it,” Ben said.
“You get it,” Owen said.
“It’s your party.”
For some reason this seemed very funny. They both cracked up. The bell rang again.
They walked down the two flights through the empty house to the front door. Ben opened it.
Standing there on the stoop, a cigarette in his mouth, was the last person Ben wanted to see, Billy Dix. Behind Billy was his friend T-Bone.
“Ben Purdy,” Billy Dix said, smiling, the cigarette bobbing between his lips. “Just the man I’m looking for.”
Ben didn’t say anything. Ben owed Billy Dix some money for some drugs. Not a lot, but enough. He knew T-Bone was staring at him, hoping Ben would start something. T-Bone was always hoping someone would start something.
Billy Dix took a deep drag from the cigarette and flicked it over the railing.
“I hear your friend Owen’s having a party,” Billy Dix said to him. “Aren’t you going to invite us in?”
Finished with the floater, his wife in the car buried in her notebook, Bliss took a moment alone by the water’s edge. The sun was starting to go down. A cool breeze came across the water. Bliss had a clammy feeling, as though he was taking a bath in tub full of the East River, getting more soiled instead of clean.
Ward came over, stood next to him.
“Felix is back,” Bliss said.
“As the song says, There’s got to be a morning after.”
And Felix was the toothless slattern he now found sharing his pillow in the cruel light of dawn.
Behind him, Bliss heard the distinctive sound of the body bag being zippered shut. Cardozo had a name for it. “Wrap this one up to go,” he said. Bliss had to hand it to the guy—keeping a sense of humor in the face of what was often faceless. He wondered if Cardozo did yoga.
A tugboat passed by, pushing a barge the size of a football field packed with yesterday’s garbage. A dull, dusky smell accompanied it. The evening sun was glistening on the black plastic bags mounded like a sinister chocolate icing. It was only about twenty yards away.
“If we each grab an end of the body bag,” Bliss said, “we could toss Felix onto the barge.”
Felix would be dumped somewhere far away, wherever they took the garbage now that the Fresh Kills landfill was closed (and seeing how long Felix had been dead, Fresh Kills wasn’t the proper place for him, anyway). He’d be buried along with the other bags under a ton of waste. And that would be that.
“We’re homicide,” Ward said. “Not sanitation.”
“It’s still waste management,” Bliss said.
Waste of life, waste of time, a wasting of his soul.
The barge headed out under the Triborough Bridge to the harbor—another lost opportunity.
“You okay, Lenny?” his partner asked.
“I thought we were done with Felix.”
“We’ll reinterview. Go over the leads again.” Ward said.
“There are no leads.”
“We know it’s a homicide now.”
“We knew it was homicide then. We just didn’t have a body.”
“What else can we do?”
“Once I visited Cori’s second grade class,” he said. “It was Dad’s Show and Tell Day. I brought in my handcuffs, my badge, a spent Uzi cartridge from that shooting on 112th Street.”
“I remember. Uzi cartridges everywhere,” Ward said, “like rice after a wedding.”
“I told the kids some stories,” he said. “I let them hold the nightstick I used back when I was in uniform.”
“I remember that stick.”
“Cori said all the kids agreed I was the coolest dad. The other dads brought in boring stuff—X rays, law books, floor plans of skyscrapers, genuine stock certificates. But Cori’s teacher said I was probably the bravest. She said Cori should be proud of me.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I don’t know. I’m thinking maybe being one of the boring dads might not be so bad. Sitting behind a desk instead of dealing with floaters before dinner.”
“That could be the title of your memoirs. Floaters Before Dinner: A Life in Homicide.”
He turned away from his partner, looked out over the water. There was supposed to be solace in a river as it flowed out to the sea. Didn’t poets write about it?
Just a few yards away, by the water’s edge, a father and son were fishing, using surf casting rods to send chunks of bait into the swift current of the East River. Bliss couldn’t help thinking working homicide was much the same, waiting for a bite, day after day, hoping for a nibble, yet knowing that whatever they pulled from the water would be unclean, unnatural, and much better off left where it was.
Chantal was with her friend Julia in the cab on the way to the party.
“Owen wants me to let him do it tonight. It’s his birthday. He wants it to be his birthday present.”
Chantal started laughing.
“Or taking him out for a sundae? Hot fudge.”
“Stop,” she said, catching her breath. She and Julia used to laugh all the time. They only had to look at each other and laughter happened.
Not so much anymore. Not since Owen.
Chantal could hear the party as soon as she and Julia got out of the cab. Blink 182 was playing through an open window. She recognized a couple of kids smoking on the front stoop, beer cans tucked behind their backs.
“Hey,” she said as they walked up to the front door.
“Hey, Chantal, Julia,” came the unison response. Chantal rang the bell.
“It’s open,” one of the kids on the stoop said.
Chantal turned the knob and walked inside. Julia followed. In the foyer was a huge blow-up of Owen’s brother Holden on the cover of Seventeen.
The lights were low; the smell of pot hung in the air.
Then Ben, Owen’s best friend, descended the staircase wearing what must have been Owen’s mother’s fur coat—inside out, the mink next to his body, dressed only his boxers.
“Come into my lair,” he said, spreading his arms wide. He reminded Chantal of one of the demented creatures in The Island of Dr. Moreau—half man, half beast. “Come into my furry lair.” He wrapped the coat around Chantal, drawing her into the fur. He knelt down in front of her.
“Let me kiss the ring,” he said, putting his lips up to her belly button, pierced with a silver ring. “Ah, your holiness—no pun intended—bless me.”
Chantal put her hands on Ben’s head.
“Bless you, my child,” she said.
“What are you wasting your time with Owen for, when you could be with me?” he said. “Don’t you know I love you?” He stuck out his tongue and buried it in her stomach.
“Cut it out,” she said, and playfully pushed him away.
“But I love you, Chantal,” he said.
Julia grabbed her arm, started pulling her toward the front door.
“Let’s go,” Julia said.
“We only just got here,” Chantal said.
“Stay, oh fair Chantal!” Ben moaned.
“Then at least let’s go upstairs,” Julia said.
Julia led her up the steps. Chantal looked back to see Ben still on his knees, his arms reaching up, like he was praying.
“I love you, Chantal!” he cried.
Then Julia yanked her around the banister and into the living room on the second floor.
When Julia and Chantal were out of sight, Ben rushed into the kitchen to make them drinks. He put them on a little tray, but before heading upstairs, he ducked into the bathroom and locked the door. He moved the fake clamshell with the stupid shell soaps and rested the glasses on the sink. He carefully measured a pinch of the powder into each drink, stirring them until the powder disappeared.
One for Chantal and one for Julia.
Cheers, ladies.
Then Ben would just sit back and let the fun begin.
The fur felt smooth against his skin. People should walk around with fur next to them all the time. Maybe some people did. Later, he might try laying the coat on the bed when he was screwing Julia. Or Chantal. He wasn’t sure which. He’d have to see how things developed. Maybe he could get some play from both of them. You never knew what could happen, once they got to Wonderland.
Bliss sat on the living room couch listening to “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the MGs with his twelve-year-old daughter Cori. Julia had left already to go to some party. Rachel was at the comedy club. Her last set ever, she said, now that she was a novelist.
Cori probably should have been in bed, but since they were home alone, Bliss was breaking rules. As many rules as he could.
“Another soda, Sweetie?”
“Two was enough,” she said.
“Let me know.”
“Is that his real name?” she asked. “Booker T.?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s he play?”
“The organ. That’s Steve Cropper on guitar.”
Cori nodded. “He’s good. Funky.”
This was no casual session, but an integral part of his calculated scheme to protect Cori from listening to pop music. The plan was to inundate her with classic blues and soul which, like a vaccine, would fight off any kind of Top Forty infection. So far it was working. Cori preferred Aretha to Britney, the Coasters to ’N Sync. She knew all the words to Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour.” Bliss only had a few cc’s of James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone left before he felt his treatment was complete.
Let her listen to what she wants, Rachel had said. But he’d done that with Julia and the results were devastating. One whining Joni Mitchell wannabe after another. Like they all came from some island, like a place Gulliver landed on his travels—a country where all the women carried guitars and sang in self-important contraltos about what they did that morning and everyone worshiped them. He wondered if the tickets to their concerts had little white strings attached to them.
Bliss was determined that Cori wasn’t going to be corrupted.
“Nice groove,” Cori said.
“Down home,” said Bliss. “Classic Memphis soul.”
“It’s getting late, Dad. Mom said …”
“It’s okay.”
“I just don’t want you getting in trouble.”
“It’s okay. Really.”
When Bliss first thought about having kids, he dreamed of moments like this, sitting on the couch playing one record after another (CDs hadn’t been on the scene when he first had the dream); the two of them just listening, not saying anything, just tapping their toes. The moment had never been right with Julia. But Cori had responded, and with Rachel preoccupied with her comedy, Bliss had more time to shape and mold Cori into the kind of cool, hep chick he had in mind.
“I wish Julia was here,” Cori said.
“When she’s home, you fight. When she’s gone, you miss her.”
“Tell me about it.” He hit the remote and changed the CD. Aaron Neville’s ethereal tenor filled the room.
If you wa-a-a-ant
Something to play with
Go and find yourself a toy …
“Aaron Neville, man, no one can sing like him.”
“That’s a boy?”
“Yeah. With arms like tree trunks. Tattoos and everything.”
“Weird.”
“But beautiful.”
“Did Mom ask Julia to get me a picture of Holden Gelman tonight?”
“The boy on TV?”
“Yup. That’s where the party is and I wanted Julia to get me a picture.”
“Maybe Mom told her.”
“I never got to hear Mom perform.” Cori said. “And now she’s not doing comedy anymore.”
“You’re too young.”
“Did it ever bug you that she made fun of you?”
“She doesn’t make fun.”
“She makes jokes. About your job. I know that much.”
“What I do, being a detective, sometimes it’s dangerous. People like to laugh at things that are dangerous. They need to. That’s why so many comics do routines about flying. It’s something everyone gets nervous about. Scared. So they laugh.”
“Do you get scared?”
“What about when you’re looking for bad guys?”
“No. Not then, either.”
“Because you’re tough, right, Daddy?
He nodded. He thought about Felix’s decomposing corpse, how it didn’t bother him, how death hardly ever bothered him anymore. Maybe that’s what he should really be scared of.
Then Cori did this thing, she put her hand up in front of her, fingers spread open, like she was a mime doing the old invisible wall trick. And Bliss lightly pressed his fingertips up to hers. They stayed that way, their hands meeting together in a gentle touch and they listened to Aaron Neville on the living room couch.
Tell it like it is
Don’t be ashamed
Let your conscience be your guide.
“I love you, Cori,” Bliss said. It just came out.
“I love you, too, Dad. Even though you lied to me.”
“About what?”
“About not being scared.”
Chantal and Julia walked through the second floor, looking for Owen. A couple was making out feverishly on the couch, his hand under her shirt. A group of three girls were dancing together. A cluster of kids hovered by an open window passing a joint around. Julia recognized most of them from school.
But then a boy she didn’t know began staring at Chantal. There was an unsettling stillness about him. He took a drink from a bottle of vodka. He turned to the boy next to him, someone else she didn’t know, said something, then he looked at her again.
The boy walked over and stood directly in front of her, studying her, like she was behind glass.
“I’m Billy Dix,” he said.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” Julia said. But Chantal knew Julia just wanted to get away from these boys. Sometimes she wondered if Julia even liked boys. “You coming, Chantal?”
Billy Dix kept her fixed in his gaze.
“You’re Chantal, right?” he asked.
She gave a furtive nod. Where was Owen? It was supposed to be the two of them together. His birthday. This wasn’t the kind of party she expected.
“Ben told me all about you,” Billy Dix said.
“You know Ben?” she said.
“Oh yeah,” Billy Dix said. “Ben and I are good pals. We go way back.” Billy Dix put his hand on her shoulder.
“Oh,” she said.
“Speak of the devil,” Billy Dix said.
She eased out from under his hand and turned to see Ben coming toward them, still in the fur coat. He carried a tray with two drinks.
“Where’s Julia?” he asked.
“She’ll be right back,” Chantal said.
“I hope so. Here’s yours.”
Chantal took big gulp of the vodka and orange juice. She needed it. She wasn’t sure anymore that she wanted to let Owen do it tonight. He should be there, now, with her, his arm around her shoulder, so she could look into his eyes instead of those of this freaky stranger.
“Upstairs,” Ben said. “He’ll come down for you when he’s ready, he said.”
She took another drink. Billy Dix was watching her the whole time, staring at her breasts, not even trying to hide it.
“Nice,” he said.
Julia came back. Ben handed her a drink. She took a tiny sip. She never drank much.
“Not thirsty?” Ben said.
Julia ignored him. “You ready to go, Chantal?” she asked.
Then Chantal heard a voice that made her smile.
“Chantal’s not going anywhere before she dances with me.”
It was Malcolm Marcoux. Even though he was a senior, he had taken a liking to Chantal. He told her she reminded him of some French actress in some French movie Chantal had never heard of. Malcom was improbably handsome. Everyone in school knew he was gay, except Malcolm himself.
“Hey, Malcolm,” Chantal said.
Ben and Billy looked disgusted.
Someone put on some disco. Malcolm let out a whoop. “It’s Hustle time!”
She finished the rest of her drink and happily let Malcolm whisk her away. He was a great dancer. Instantly they were twirling around the room.
Ben and Billy Dix stood together, staring at her. Once, when they moved close, she heard Ben’s voice.
“Fucking faggot.”
He said it loud enough for Malcolm to hear, but Malcolm never stopped, never looked over, as if Ben wasn’t even there.
* * *
Bliss lay in bed next to his wife, waiting for the front door to open and his daughter to walk in. It was almost 12:30. Still a half-hour left before curfew.
This whole curfew thing was new to him. Bliss didn’t have a curfew growing up. The concept hadn’t occurred to his parents. His mother would stroke his cheek before he went out, not saying anything, just touching him tenderly, perhaps fearing she might not see him again. There were a couple of kids in the neighborhood who didn’t make it back from a Saturday night, arrested after robbing a store or mugging someone. Or both. Others wound up wrapping their cars around telephone poles. Be careful, Lenny, her eyes would say. My only son.
His father, the cop, offered him words of caution, some fatherly advice. Don’t come home dead, Lenny, his father would say. I don’t want to be working your fucking case tomorrow.
He wondered what he would do if Julia didn’t come home before her curfew. Wondered how he’d handle it if it got to be three in the morning and she still wasn’t back, Bliss still lying there in bed, eyes bugging out of his head with worry. Would he go to the party and pick her up, barge in, his badge out, combing the apartment for his daughter—calling her name, embarrassing her for the rest of her life? And what if he found her in the arms of a boy, her tongue in his mouth, his tongue in hers? And what if they had gone further? What would he do if they were lying together in bed, the boy on top of her …
He flung off the covers and got out of bed, going to the kitchen for a beer, trying to drive the image out of his head, the boy on top of Julia and what Bliss would do to him, this poor, pimply fifteen-year-old who dared invade the sanctity of Detective Lenny Bliss’s daughter.
He sat at the table, drank one beer, then opened another. He wasn’t sure if he was up to this daughter thing. He wondered if it was too late to get her into Spence or one of the other all-girl schools. He wondered if there was a Jewish equivalent of a nunnery. If not, he could start one.
He finished the beer, dragged himself down the hall back to bed, knowing sleep would not come easily.
“Chantal.”
She thought she heard someone calling her.
It must have been Owen. She hadn’t seen him yet, she was so busy dancing.
She followed the voice upstairs. On the way, she suddenly felt dizzy. She had to lean against the wall to keep from falling. She loved him. She really did. But she didn’t want to do it tonight. Didn’t feel like it now. Maybe in the morning. She could stay with him. They could spend the whole night together in each other’s arms and then make love in the morning, like the couple in the pregnancy tester commercial.
“Chantal.”
He seemed far away, like he was calling to her across huge dunes, the sound distorted by swirling winds.
“Chantal.”
Now his voice was right in front of her. Surprise.
She walked in. Darkness. Candles.
Cool, Chantal thought. She took the last sip of the vodka and orange juice Ben had given her and set it down on the table, only there was no table so the glass fell on the floor. It made her laugh.
He was curled up in bed, turned away from her, doing something to make the bed wavy, like she was seeing it through waves of shimmering heat. Wavy bed. Wavy wavy bed. She giggled.
“Hi,” he said in a whisper, like they were in the library.
“Shhhhh,” she whispered back. “No talking in the library.” Her voice sounded strange, like it wasn’t her own. She wasn’t even sure she was talking out loud or if these were just thoughts.
“It’s my birthday,” he said.
“I know.”
“Close the door,” he said.
She turned. Or maybe she stood still and the room turned. Her hand found the door and she shoved it closed. She turned back to the bed, but someone had moved the bed and it wasn’t where it was just a second ago. It was like a game. Now it was on the other side of the room, so she went there.
She wanted to tell Owen about her idea. That they would spend the whole night together just holding each other.
“Take off your shirt,” he said.
She could do that, she guessed. She crossed her arms and grabbed on to the bottom of her shirt and lifted it up, but her arms somehow got tangled and the shirt was stuck in front of her face. It was kind of funny, stuck inside her own shirt, like being a little kid. She tried again and this time it came off.
“Come into bed,” he whispered.
She did. He didn’t have any clothes on. His body was warm. She grabbed him and rested her head by his shoulder and closed her eyes. This is nice, she thought. She drifted off to sleep. But then she was on her side and his arms were around her.
“It’s my birthday,” he said.
He started kissing her, kissing her all over, burying his mouth in her neck. It tickled and she began to laugh but someone was already laughing for her, someone on the other side of the room laughing. I love you, he said, his mouth close to her ear. It made her smile hearing him say it. I love you, Chantal. Finally saying it. She was floating in the air. But also she was under water. In the air and under water at the same time.
Then he moved on top of her, using his knees to spread her legs apart, which was okay because her pants were on, but then she felt a sharp pain in her vagina and she realized somehow her pants weren’t on and he was inside her and she knew she should be afraid, that she should push him off her, but that Chantal, the one who was terrified, that Chantal seemed far away, behind thick glass, thick frosted glass, just a hazy silhouette of a little girl trying to get someone’s attention, flapping her arms, banging on the glass, trying to get someone’s attention. The glass was way too thick but still the little girl tried to tell someone that something was horribly wrong. Who was she trying to warn, Chantal wondered, this poor girl pitifully banging on the glass like that?
Chantal closed her eyes and drifted away, wondering what the girl behind the thick glass could possibly have to say to her that was so important?
Bliss woke up with a start. He checked the clock. 3:18. He got out of bed and looked in Julia’s room. It was empty. He checked the sofa. Both bathrooms. She wasn’t there.
Her friend Chantal’s number was posted in the kitchen. He called. No answer.
He remembered where Cori said the party was, the kid with the brother on TV, and looked the number up in the school directory. He called, got an answering machine.
He should go back to bed, he thought. He hit redial, got the machine again.
It was 3:18. His daughter should be home.
He wrote down the address. He threw on some pants and a sweatshirt and put on his sneakers without bothering to hunt down some socks. He stuck his gun into the back of his pants and headed out the door.
There was no traffic going across the park and he was on the East Side in minutes. He found the address, a townhouse off Park Avenue.
Bliss took the front steps two at a time and rang the bell. Nothing. He rang again. No one came. He tried the knob. It turned. He went inside.
“Hello,” he called out. “I’m Julia’s father.”
No answer. An eerie silence.
“Hello?!”
It seemed over. Nothing left but the distinctive smell of cigarettes, beer, and pot.
A few hours ago, Julia was here. Having fun. Laughing. Talking about stuff that was important to her. Flirting. Dancing. Commiserating. Being alive. Being very much alive. The real Julia. Full of feeling and vitality. It wasn’t fair that he couldn’t see any of that. As Dad, he only got the sardonic Julia. The jaded, weary Julia. Why didn’t he get the laughing Julia? Where was the justice in that?
It was his fault. He didn’t get her listening to Aretha early enough. Didn’t blast Brother Ray singing “Hit the Road, Jack” into her crib, Otis doing “Try a Little Tenderness” as her lullaby. He had only himself to blame.
Something, some kind of animal was lying on the floor. It took him a moment to realize it was a fur coat. He headed toward the back of the house, not sure where to start, only knowing he wanted to find Julia before he went upstairs, where he assumed the bedrooms were.
He did not want to find her in one of the bedrooms.
The house was like the scene of some natural disaster, some plague that wiped out everyone at the party, then caused their bodies to disintegrate. Like Pompeii. Evidence of the chaos was everywhere. Ashtrays, plastic cups, planters filled with cigarette butts. Bowls of chips, half-eaten sandwiches, nuts, and popcorn littered the floor. This was some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Now it looked as if squatters were living here.
Julia wasn’t in the library, curled up in one of the leather chairs with a book, some dusty old volume, Great Expectations, which she started and couldn’t put down. Oh, hi, Daddy. Is the party over? I was just reading about Mrs. Haversham. No, that was too much to ask for. On the floor, an oddly shaped bottle, one of those expensive single malt Scotches. Empty. Daddy wasn’t going to be happy.
He walked back to the hallway. He would have to look further.
He went up one flight.
He felt a twinge of pain in his hands and realized his fists were clenched tight. This was a foolish venture. Unnatural. He shouldn’t be there. But he wanted to find his daughter. What was unnatural about that?
She probably went to a friend’s. Chantal’s house. She must have gone there, put on their pajamas, made hot cocoa, and watched reruns of Bewitched.
Then he went up one more flight, to the bedrooms.
“Hello. Julia’s father. Police.”
“Hello.”
He pushed on. He opened the first bedroom door, just a crack. From the dim glow of the streetlight through the window he could see a boy in his bed. Alone. Trophies on the dresser, clothes on the floor. Batman on the bedspread. Sleeping alone. Good.
In the other room, another boy. Also alone. Very good.
What would he have done had he found Julia in there?
He took the stairs two at a time to the top floor, to the parent’s bedroom, the blankets twisted as if people had been wrestling. Oh, but they weren’t wrestling. Teen lust running rampant. Reefer Madness!
He should be looking for clues. He was a detective. From the shards of residue he would piece together some kind of story, a likely scenario, recreate the party in its entirety and figure out what happened to his daughter, why she wasn’t home.
But he wasn’t sure where to start. There was so much chaos. And where were the parents?
He went back downstairs. Julia wasn’t in the house. There was nothing more he could do. He went out the way he came, feeling more unsettled than when he arrived. He knew if he wasn’t a cop he wouldn’t be acting this way—Julia’s father, Julia’s police. But he had seen too much. His wasn’t some abstract sense of evil, the “bad things” that happened to “other people.” His knowledge was firsthand, and that hand might be bloody, might be missing fingers, might be frozen in death begging for mercy that would never be granted.
He drove back home. He called Chantal again. Still no answer. He got out of his clothes and grabbed another beer from the fridge to drink in bed in bed, hoping sleep would claim him for a little while.
As he was walking to his room, Cori’s door opened and Julia emerged in her pajamas, staring at him, her father and protector, in his tired boxers, holding a half-finished beer.
She didn’t say anything by way of a greeting.
“When’d you get home?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Hours ago.” She yawned. “I was being quiet. I thought you were sleeping.”
“How was the party?” he asked. “You drink a lot or a little?”
“Nice try, Dad,” she said. “I only stayed about ten minutes.”
“Oh.”
“It was stupid,” she said. “When I got back, Cori was up. She had a nightmare. About you. That you were behind a wall calling for help but she couldn’t help you because the wall was too high.”
“I know that wall,” he said.
“I stayed with her for a while. I guess I fell asleep.”
Bliss nodded, scratched his belly, realized what he was doing, then stopped. Good thing he hadn’t scratched his nuts.
“I’m going to go to the bathroom now,” she said. “Then I’m going back to bed.”
“Okay,” he said.
She stood there a moment longer, perhaps waiting for her father to say something wise. He thought for a moment about telling her where he’d just come from, but that would have been too reckless, even for him.
She sighed and walked past him down the hall, but just before she went in the bathroom, she stopped and turned.
“Good night, Lady Bliss,” she said.
He smiled. Once he told her that his favorite jazz player of all time, Lester Young, called people he cared about “Lady,” his own unique term of respect. It was where Billie Holiday got her nickname “Lady Day.”
He watched her close the bathroom door. He took a long swig of his beer and thought that maybe his daughter might just love him after all.