thirty-six
monday, april 28

I woke up the next morning feeling energized. In the past few days, we’d made an enormous amount of progress, and I felt like my contributions had made a difference. Frank and Charlie were headed to Bob’s house in search of his personal computer. With my finished sketch of Cheryl Goldberg, Harry would have a hard time denying that the woman spotted at his office door was his cousin’s wife. Small cracks, Frank said, would lead to big breaks. We also had a witness, the tuba lady, who could place Harry on site the night the warehouse had been emptied. Finally, we had a good feeling that the doughy man was represented in the diorama, and assuming Bob had labeled the dolls as we suspected, the doughy man’s name most likely started with an L. Most importantly, I had remembered that the skinny jeans woman had black hair.

I dug through my closet and came up with a backpack that I stuffed with my sketchbook, some pencils, a water bottle, and a jar of peach jelly. I tiptoed out the front door to the barn, retrieved my bicycle, and pedaled south on Shore Road, where I made a quick right into the neighborhood of Laurel Hollow. It was a lovely area. On a map it mirrored Cold Spring Harbor like the matching wings of a butterfly. Laurel Hollow’s nearest neighbor was the Sound View labs, and many of the homes in the area belonged to doctors and researchers associated with the famous laboratory. As I neared my destination, oncoming traffic picked up, but that was to be expected since it was seven a.m. on a Monday morning.

About halfway through the maze of streets, including two or three wrong turns, I stopped in front of a grand Colonial with carved columns supporting a circular-roofed portico. Map in hand, I stared at the circle mark I had made last night after Googling Dr. Carolyn Corey’s home address. Getting a glimpse of Dr. Corey on her way to work was just the type of move that would piss off Frank, but I couldn’t resist the temptation. Clearly, I couldn’t wait until tomorrow when Frank was scheduled to see Dr. Corey.

There was a shiny BMW in Dr. Corey’s driveway and a wooden play set in the back yard. I looked around the neighborhood and realized I was insanely exposed. If my purpose was to get a peek at Dr. Corey, standing without purpose in the middle of the street would trigger a phone call to the police by an observant neighbor. With my luck, Cheski would be on call and actually arrest me. Truth be told, I had no intention of spying on Dr. Corey; I simply wanted to see the woman responsible for sending my fertilized embryo to its final destination.

I buried my head in my map, which I figured would buy me a few minutes posing as a lost biker. Just when I had memorized every esoteric symbol on my map, Dr. Corey’s across-the-street-neighbors, a suited couple with travel coffee mugs, shuffled out to their own BMW. As soon as the neighbors backed out, I cycled down their driveway and pulled my bike behind an overgrown azalea bush. My hiding spot had an unobstructed view of Dr. Corey’s house.

By 7:45 a.m., I still sat in a pile of dirt picking sticky azalea blossoms off my shorts. For all I knew, Dr. Corey had delivered a baby in the middle of the night and wasn’t even home yet. I rose to stretch my legs when a beat-up Honda Civic pulled up in front of Dr. Corey’s house. I scrambled forward through the bushes to get a better look. Three women got out of the car. One of the women opened the trunk and took out a vacuum cleaner. In my new position, closer to the street, my only cover was the neighbor’s mailbox.

The woman emptying the trunk instinctively turned in my direction. “CeCe!”

“Norma?” It was my mother’s housekeeper. “What are you doing here?”

Norma hurried across the street and shoved me farther back into the bushes. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she repeated over and over until I felt like slapping her across the face. “I tell you later.”

“When later?”

“Come to the side door when you see the car leave.”

I waited patiently while Norma, and the two other cleaning women entered Dr. Corey’s house. A few minutes passed, and Dr. Corey came outside with two adorable girls who looked to be about two and four years old. A year ago, I would never have been able to guess a child’s age, but my excessive sketching had honed my age-detection skills. Both girls had thick, dark hair and medium skin—unlike their mother, whose face was the map of Ireland. It was brief, but I got a good look at Dr. Corey. Harmless, was the first word that came to mind. By all accounts, she was patient with her children and took the time to listen to one of the girls tell what seemed to be a meandering story. She strapped each girl into their car seat and through the back window of the car, I could see her tenderly kiss her daughters. Darn, I thought. Why can’t she have a witch’s nose with a mole the size of quarter on her chin? Or a glass eye and a limp?

I waited until Dr. Corey drove slowly away before scurrying across the street to the side door.

Norma waited for me. “I’m sorry,” she repeated.

“I get it,” I said. “You’re sorry.”

“Really, I’m sorry,” she said again.

“Why would you be sorry?” I asked. Wasn’t that supposed to be my line? I wondered why I didn’t feel more guilty hiding out in a stranger’s driveway to spy on a doctor I had never met.

“How did you find out?” Norma said, opening the door for me as I followed her inside Dr. Corey’s house. “I should listen to your mother. She said you were the smart one. Did you follow me?”

I tilted my head. This didn’t made sense. Why did Norma think I had followed her, and why the hell was she so dreadfully sorry? She seemed to think I understood, but I was completely lost. I decided to go along with her misinformation to see where it took me.

“At first I wasn’t sure it was you,” I said, “but then I began to wonder …”

“See, I knew I should say no to your father.”

My father? The same one who’d been in exile for the past year since he’d been accused of facilitating my brother’s murder? This was too weird even for me to bluff my way through. I hadn’t seen or heard from my father since the trial six months ago, and although he ultimately did not take the fall for my brother’s death, the shame had forced my dad out of town. I had no idea where my father had relocated. All I knew is that my mother’s bills got paid. Of course, I hadn’t made a single attempt to find him, and my mother hadn’t been back in the land of the sober long enough to really question this arrangement.

If I had to guess, I’d say my father was in Europe. He had always enjoyed the finer things in life, as if he considered himself royalty. For this reason, I’d imagined him strolling through Bruges or sipping coffee in the south of France. It had been a convenient dream from which I sensed I was about to wake.

“Norma, can we sit and talk?”

The house, a cookie cutter version of every other upscale Long Island McMansion, had the requisite marble countertops, stainless-steel appliances, and enough tech equipment to blow a circuit breaker or two. It was unimpressive in its sameness. It was, however, exceptionally clean, and that was Norma’s handiwork. It concerned me that she’d had contact with my father, and although I didn’t truly know where her loyalties lay, her affection for my mother had seemed genuine in the past. I hoped this was still true, because I couldn’t keep up this charade much longer.

“I didn’t follow you,” I admitted. “I was just riding for exercise when I saw you.”

Norma seemed confused by my explanation. “Just riding?” she asked.

I nodded, and she went back to unloading the dishwasher. I walked over to a corkboard covered with family photos and studied the pictures. “Do you work here?” I asked.

“I’m mooning, and I’m so sorry.”

“I think you mean moonlighting.” The drinking glasses clinked at her touch. My visit had made her nervous. “Did my father get you this job?”

“Ohh,” Norma groaned. “He called me when your mother went to rehab. He still pays me for your house, but he pays me more every week to come here. How can I say no to good money?”

I wasn’t sure it was good money, but I kept that to myself.

The kitchen was in the back of the Colonial. From the table I could see straight down the center hall, through the windows lining the front door, and across the street to my bicycle, which, despite my attempt to hide, was in full view. It wasn’t just my bicycle that stuck out like a sore thumb. My father’s motivation to place Norma in this job was an oversized red flag.

“Has my father been here?”

Norma nodded. Her guilt crushed her, but there was nothing I could say to make her feel better. She likely needed the money, but she also knew this arrangement my father had orchestrated wasn’t kosher. My guess is that fear played a factor too. I watched Norma fiddle with the spray attachment at the kitchen sink. I figured this would be a bad time to introduce her to the financial benefits of Freeganism as a form of self-sufficiency.

“He came in the house?”

“Yes.”

“What did he do?”

“Same thing as you. He looked at the pictures on the board.”

“How about this: We pretend this never happened,” I suggested.

She nodded.

“Except for one thing,” I added. “For my mother’s sake, you need to let me know when my father contacts you, and I promise you won’t get fired.” The last part was a lie. I couldn’t protect Norma from my father.

Norma frowned as she rinsed out the coffee maker. “Okay, I do it for your mother.”

Back outside, I retrieved my bicycle from the neighbor’s yard and started to pedal toward my final destination. I got what I’d come for: a firsthand look at Dr. Carolyn Corey. I also got a bit more than I intended. I could have biked cross-country and still not found the time to solve the new problem I had just created for myself. How was I supposed to tell Frank that my father had found Norma a job working at Dr. Corey’s house without revealing that I had been spying on Dr. Corey? I couldn’t ignore what I had discovered; it highlighted that Dr. Corey was on my father’s radar, and that seemed like a very bad turn of events. Frank, of course, would be too savvy to buy my “biking for exercise” story. I wrestled with the idea of telling Frank that Norma had a come-to-Jesus moment and voluntarily told me about the arrangement, but then Frank would want to speak to Norma, and I was sure she’d unravel under his scrutiny.

I passed the Cold Spring Harbor train station and congratulated myself on never succumbing to the drudgery of a daily job. I considered a detour by the platform to see if the bagel guy had thrown out any day-olds, but it was unnecessary. Norma had packed a snack for me from Dr. Corey’s kitchen. Instead of stopping, I pressed on, biking up and down hills that looked an awful lot flatter on my map.

About twenty minutes into my ride, I turned into a neighborhood I had never been in before. The houses weren’t on par with Dr. Corey’s, but the streets were nicely laid out with quaint Cape Cod–style homes, many of which had been renovated and expanded over the years. I rode as far into the neighborhood as I could in search of a public path at the end of a cul-de-sac, as indicated on my map. I found the path easily and rode through the woods until the path became too bumpy, forcing me to walk along side my bike.

There were a few splits in the trail that required left or right decisions, but before long I spotted the roofline of the recycling center. I leaned my bike against a tree and climbed up a few branches. From my perch, I had an aerial view of the path that connected the recycling center to the neighborhood I had entered. One thing that struck me was the lack of options or exits the path allowed. Although there were turnoffs and forks, all roads led either to the neighborhood where I had entered or to the recycling center. I wondered if the skinny jean woman had a car. Was it possible she saw Bob being threatened by the doughy man, got scared, and ran toward the woods to avoid detection? Maybe she retrieved her car later. Or was it possible she arrived and departed on foot? If she had left by the path, she may have had a car parked in the neighborhood I had just ridden through. That would make sense, since she seemed to be on foot the day I saw her at Bob’s house. The other possibility was that she made her way to the main road. From there, she might have been able to hitch a ride … except that no one bums a ride in the suburbs, even Freegans.

I rummaged through my backpack and tore the wrapping off an organic fruit bar courtesy of Norma. I washed it down with a child’s juice box. What a waste of individual wrapping, I thought. Doesn’t anyone drink from a reusable glass anymore? The bendy straw was so thin that the sucking started to give me a headache. My squeaky slurping caught the attention of a dog, who found his way to my tree and proceeded to bark incessantly.

“Hey,” the dog’s owner apologized when he caught up. “He doesn’t bite.”

I climbed down the tree to greet the man and his dog. Not that I had much of a choice, but I allowed the dog to slobber all over the last bite of my fruit bar. It tasted horrible anyway and that’s coming from someone who eats out of a Dumpster.

“What were you doing in the tree?” the man asked. “Are you lost?”

“A bit. I wanted to see if there were other ways out.”

“One way in and one way out.”

I pointed back to the neighborhood. “Do you live over there?”

“I do,” the man said. “First house at the end of the path. It’s really convenient with the dog.”

I patted the dog on the rump and climbed back on my bike. “Do you think I’ll see anyone else today?”

“Nah, not during the workday. In the late afternoon, you get teenagers. But that’s it.”