“Yes.”

I asked my question.

51

When I got home, my mother was making salmon the way we like it, wrapped in wet paper towels and steamed in the microwave. You wouldn’t think anything so easy could taste good, but it does.

“Right on time,” she said. “There’s a bag-salad Caesar. Will you put it together for me?”

“Okay.” I got it out of the fridge—the icebox—and opened the bag.

“Don’t forget to wash it. The bag says it’s already been washed, but I never trust that. Use the colander.”

I got the colander, dumped in the lettuce, and used the sprayer. “I went to our old building,” I said. I wasn’t looking at her, I was concentrating on my job.

“I kind of thought you might. Was he there?”

“Yes. I asked him why his daughter never came to visit him and didn’t even come to the funeral.” I turned off the water. “She’s in a mental institution, Mom. He says she’ll be there for the rest of her life. She killed her baby, and then tried to kill herself.”

My mother was getting ready to put the salmon in the microwave, but she set it on the counter instead and plopped down on one of the stools. “Oh my God. Mona told me she was an assistant in a biology lab at Caltech. She seemed so proud.”

“Professor Burkett said she’s cata-whatsit.”

“Catatonic.”

“Yeah. That.”

My mother was looking down at our dinner-to-be, the salmon’s pink flesh kind of glimmering through its shroud of paper towels. She seemed to be thinking very deeply. Then the vertical line between her eyebrows smoothed out.

“So now we know something we probably shouldn’t. It’s done and can’t be undone. Everybody has secrets, Jamie. You’ll find that out for yourself in time.”

Thanks to Liz and Kenneth Therriault, I had found that out already, and I found out my mother’s secret, too.

Later.

52

Kenneth Therriault disappeared from the news, replaced by other monsters. And because he had stopped haunting me, he also disappeared from the forefront of my mind. As that fall chilled into winter, I still had a tendency to step back from the elevator doors when they opened, but by the time I turned fourteen, that little tic had disappeared.

I saw other dead people from time to time (and there were probably some I missed, since they looked like normal people unless they died of injuries or you got right up close). I’ll tell you about one, although it has nothing to do with my main story. He was a little boy no older than I had been on the day I saw Mrs. Burkett. He was standing on the divider that runs down the middle of Park Avenue, dressed in red shorts and a Star Wars tee-shirt. He was paper pale. His lips were blue. And I think he was trying to cry, although there were no tears. Because he looked vaguely familiar, I crossed the downtown side of Park and asked him what was wrong. You know, besides being dead.

“I can’t find my way home!”

“Do you know your address?”

“I live at 490 Second Avenue Apartment 16B.” He ran it off like a recording.

“Okay,” I said, “that’s pretty close. Come on, kid. I’ll take you there.”

It was a building called Kips Bay Court. When we got there, he just sat down on the curb. He wasn’t crying anymore, and he was starting to get that drifting-away look they all get. I didn’t like to leave him there, but I didn’t know what else to do. Before I left, I asked him his name and he said it was Richard Scarlatti. Then I knew where I’d seen him. His picture was on NY1. Some big boys drowned him in Swan Lake, which is in Central Park. Those boys all cried like blue fuck and said they had only been goofing around. Maybe that was true. Maybe I’ll understand all that stuff later, but actually I don’t think so.

53

By then we were doing well enough that I could have gone to a private school. My mother showed me brochures from the Dalton School and the Friends Seminary, but I chose to stay public and go to Roosevelt, home of the Mustangs. It was okay. Those were good years for Mom and me. She landed a super-big client who wrote stories about trolls and woods elves and noble guys who went on quests. I landed a girlfriend, sort of. Mary Lou Stein was kind of a goth intellectual in spite of her girl-next-door name and a huge cinephile. We went to the Angelika just about once every week and sat in the back row reading subtitles.

One day shortly after my birthday (I’d reached the grand old age of fifteen), Mom texted me and asked if I could drop by the agency office after school instead of going straight home—not a huge deal, she said, just some news she wanted to pass on in person.

When I got there she poured me a cup of coffee—unusual but not unheard-of by then—and asked if I remembered Jesus Hernandez. I told her I did. He had been Liz’s partner for a couple of years, and a couple of times Mom brought me along when she and Liz had meals with Detective Hernandez and his wife. That was quite awhile ago, but it’s hard to forget a six-foot-six detective named Jesus, even if it is pronounced Hay-soos.

“I loved his dreads,” I said. “They were cool.”

“He called to tell me Liz lost her job.” Mom and Liz had been quits a long time by then, but Mom still looked sad. “She finally got caught transporting drugs. Quite a lot of heroin, Jesus says.”

It hit me hard. Liz hadn’t been good for my mother after awhile, and she sure as shit hadn’t been good for me, but it was still a bummer. I remembered her tickling me until I almost wet my pants, and sitting between her and Mom on the couch, all of us making stupid cracks about the shows, and the time she took me to the Bronx Zoo and bought me a cone of cotton candy bigger than my head. Also, don’t forget that she saved fifty or maybe even a hundred lives that would have been lost if Thumper’s last bomb had gone off. Her motivation might have been good or bad, but those lives were saved either way.

That overheard phrase from their last argument came to me. Serious weight, Mom had said. “She isn’t going to jail, is she?”

Mom said, “Well, she’s out on bail now, Jesus said, but in the end…I think there’s a good chance she will, honey.”

“Oh, fuck.” I thought of Liz in an orange jumpsuit, like the women in that Netflix show my mother sometimes watched.

She took my hand. “Right right right.”

54

It was two or three weeks later when Liz kidnapped me. You could say she did that the first time, with Therriault, but you could call that a “soft snatch.” This time it was the real deal. She didn’t force me into her car kicking and screaming, but she still forced me. Which makes it kidnapping as far as I’m concerned.

I was on the tennis team, and on my way home from a bunch of practice matches (which our coach called “heats,” for some dumb reason). I had my pack on my back and my tennis duffle in one hand. I was headed for the bus stop and saw a woman leaning against a beat-up Toyota and looking at her phone. I walked past without a second glance. It never occurred to me that this scrawny chick—straw-blonde hair blowing around the collar of an unzipped duffle coat, oversized gray sweatshirt, beat-up cowboy boots disappearing into baggy jeans—was my mom’s old friend. My mom’s old friend had favored tapered slacks in dark colors and low-cut silk blouses. My mom’s old friend wore her hair slicked back and pulled into a short stump of ponytail. My mom’s old friend had looked healthy.