Warren Lane Page 17

  Will leaned back and nodded.

  “Even if you could get past this,” the lawyer continued, “there’s still the smuggling. I’ve been talking with the team you hired for that case.” He shook his head and frowned. “Your illegal worker gave the government a statement about the shipments he unpacked. But even if he hadn’t, the Feds have enough other evidence to convict you. They found the fake passport in your desk. How do you think that looks? Why do you think you’re locked up right now instead of being out on bail? They know you’re a flight risk. And if you think the county prosecutor is aggressive on the murder charge, wait till you see how the Feds prosecute the smuggling case.”

  The lawyer leaned back and said, “Your other team wants to work on a plea deal on the smuggling charges.”

  “Why?” asked Will. “Why go down without a fight?”

  “Because if you get convicted in either case, you’ll be in prison for the rest of your life. The Feds will take back every penny you made from smuggling. They’re going to seize your business. They’ll make you pay for their investigation and for the prosecution if they can. Do you want to risk that? Do you really want to give up everything you’ve ever earned?”

  “No,” Will protested. “I don’t want to give those fuckers anything. I’m not going down without a fight.”

  “Will, you’re paying me to help you, and I’m trying to help you. You will lose, and you’ll leave Susan with nothing. Is that what you want? Does Susan deserve that? You have the chance to avoid one last crime here, to spare one last victim.”

  Will took a deep, shuddering breath and looked down at the floor. The lawyer watched him in silence. After a few moments, without looking up, Will asked in a desperate, breaking voice, “Where is Susan? Where is she?”

  “I don’t know, Will. No one knows.”

  Chapter 47

  In her sister’s tiny Manhattan apartment, Ella spent most of her days asleep on the lumpy foldout couch with the springs that popped when she rolled over. At night, she listened to the traffic in the streets, remembering things she could not bring herself to talk about, while her sister slept peacefully in the next room with her boyfriend.

  Anna, her ambitious, impatient, and perpetually over-caffeinated sister, had been unkind when she picked Ella up at JFK. “I had to borrow this car,” she said. “You know I don’t own a car. You can thank Jared when we get back.”

  Ella said nothing, and after several minutes of silence, Anna asked with undisguised annoyance, “Why are you so sullen? What the fuck happened to you? Why didn’t you fly back earlier, on the first ticket I bought you?”

  Ella turned away from the hostility she could not bear. She pushed her hair over the left side of her face to avoid her sister’s gaze and looked out the window.

  When they entered the apartment, Anna’s boyfriend Jared was on the couch watching television, eating from a Chinese take-out box. He wore a business suit with the tie loosened and the collar open. He stood and shook her hand when Anna introduced them.

  “Nice to finally meet you,” he said.

  Ella’s hand was limp, and she said a weak hello before excusing herself to go to the bathroom. The rims of her eyes were red and her head ached. From the bathroom, she heard Jared ask, “Is she OK?”

  “She just got what was coming to her,” her sister said. “And now she has to grow up. Everyone knew this was coming.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” said Anna, her voice devoid of sympathy. “She won’t talk.”

  Through the remainder of that summer, and into the first days of fall, Ella rarely left the apartment. When she did, she was overwhelmed by the bustle and noise of the street, and wanted only to crawl back into bed. Her lethargy and the cloud of gloom she brought to the apartment annoyed her sister. Sometimes just to get away from her, Anna slept at the noisy, dirty apartment Jared shared with two other men.

  Anna tried to get Ella to go out, in hopes of getting her to open up and socialize. But when they were out, Ella was quiet and withdrawn, and she drank heavily. Hoping to drink herself to sleep, she often ended the night crying in public. Her exasperated sister could only yell at her to get her life together.

  One night, Anna invited one of Jared’s work friends to join them for drinks. He and Ella got drunk, and the next morning she awoke beside him on the foldout bed. She didn’t remember having sex with him, but she overheard him say to Jared a few days later, “Oh, she’s not all that. She looks nice, but in bed, she’s a cold fish.”

  Ella didn’t leave the apartment for four days after that.

  Toward the end of September, Anna was going to work earlier and coming home later than Jared. In the mornings, Ella could feel Jared watching her from the little kitchen as she lay on the sofa bed. Whenever she showered and dressed in the tiny bathroom, he was sitting on the chair in the front room that had a view of the bathroom door. His eyes always seemed to catch her on the way out.

  One morning, while she was still in bed, he sat down next to her with his cup of coffee and asked, “So what happened? How did you wind up in California?”

  “Please don’t sit on my bed,” she said. Her back was to him, and she did not turn to face him.

  “I’m just trying to help. You have to talk to someone.”

  She made no response.

  He put his hand on her shoulder and rubbed it for a moment, then tried to roll her over.

  “Get your hands off of me!” she shouted. She flung his hand away, and he spilled his coffee on the bed.

  When Anna got home that evening and asked Ella about the stain, she told her what had happened.

  “Oh, I don’t believe that,” Anna said. “You’re making that up.”

  “I would never make up something like that. He’s always looking at me, Anna. You have to get away from him. He’s not right for you.”

  Anna’s anger and resentment toward her sister exploded. “He does not look at you! You wish he would look at you! He told me you walk around the apartment in your underwear to provoke him.”

  “What? That’s not true! I would never do that.”

  “Why would he lie, Ella? Why would he lie? That’s exactly the kind of thing you’d do.”

  “No, Anna,” Ella said, her voice weakening to a whimper. “I wouldn’t.”

  “You’re pathetic. And I’m sick of looking after you,” Anna said bitterly. “I’m sick of seeing you mess up. You had talent in everything you ever tried, but you always walked away before it got too hard. Before you could fuck it up. You were a dancer, and a good one, until you quit. You were an A student, but you didn’t go on to law school. Well, guess what, Ella? This is your life, and you fucked it up, and you can’t just walk away this time.

  “Whatever happened while you were slutting around California finally woke you up, didn’t it? And what did you learn? That you just wasted the last three years of your life! And now you’re going to have be a grown up, like me and everybody else. Don’t you ever touch Jared, you fucking slut! I don’t want you in this apartment anymore.”

  Anna slammed the door of her bedroom while Ella sobbed on the couch.

  In her dreams that night, she kept catching glimpses of Ready among the crowds of the city. She ran and ran, but she couldn’t find him.

  Chapter 48

  Ready’s room in the rehab facility looked like a small college dorm room, with a narrow single bed, a small desk and chair, and a window overlooking a grassy field. Ready lay on his side facing the wall, running his fingers over the pale-yellow paint of the cinder blocks. He spent much of his free time studying the rough surface of this wall. The texture resembled an orange peel.

  During this quiet time between meetings each afternoon, some variation of the same dialog ran through his mind.

  Why did I choose to live? I don’t know. I’ll have to find out as I go.


  Why did Susan let me into her world? I don’t know. Did she have a choice?

  Why did Ella latch onto me the way she did? I don’t know.

  Why did I latch on to her? She accepted me. She believed in me more than I believed in myself. And she was lovely. Everything in her was lovely. She made the world around her beautiful.

  What did I see in her? The promise of happiness. Joy. Beauty. Love.

  Did I believe in those things? I believed in her.

  Where is she now? I don’t know.

  Where is Susan? I don’t know.

  Will I ever know? I don’t know.

  What are my triggers? The bar. The sight of the bottle, or of someone drinking. Stress and bad times. Happiness and good times.

  Will life be just a dead level from now on? Will there be any joy? Who are you kidding? There was no joy in drinking. Not in those last few years. It was just an illusion I clung to.

  So what will life be like going forward? Maybe the same as before, but without the confusion and poor judgment. Without the bed spins and the hangovers, the vomiting, the shame and self-hatred, and the nights I can’t remember. That’s already an improvement. Even if nothing else changes, the absence of those things means everything has changed.

  What do I need to avoid? My whole former life. The bars, the people, the hours and days of doing nothing.

  Which is the drink that will undo me? The first. That’s the only one you have to say no to. Every day that you say no to that one, you win. And from here on out, life is a series of days. You must live each one with purpose, with attention, with presence, and mindfulness and gratitude.

  Are you up to the challenge? Yes. I will always do my best. Always.

  Where is Susan? God, I hope she’s OK.

  Where is Ella?

  Ella, where are you?

  Chapter 49

  After the long drive to Palm Desert, Susan rested for three days and then traveled east to Saratoga Springs, New York, where she spent the next three months in the home of her last living relative, her father’s sister in law.

  She was happy to have the full breadth of the continent between herself and Will. They were separate people now, with separate fates. On some level, she had been mourning the death of the marriage for almost a year before she decided to hire a detective. Her grief had finally broken, like a fever, that night at Ready’s, and with each passing week she felt a little better.

  Her lawyer called every few days with news. Will’s lawyer was pushing him toward a guilty plea on the murder charges. The federal government was close to indicting him on charges of smuggling, tax evasion, money laundering and distribution of counterfeit drugs. They would take from him every penny they could get. There would be little left for her when it was over.

  She didn’t care about any of this. She felt a mixture of pity and disgust for Will. He’d been a slave to his appetites and desires, and willfully blind to the suffering his selfishness had caused.

  The only person she wanted to talk to was Ready, but she couldn’t find him. Many nights, she dreamed they were walking together through dark woods, talking as they went, drawing closer until they were holding hands, neither one knowing where they were headed. They came upon a wall that marked the forest’s end. He helped her over, and on the other side she found a place of warmth and light.

  The first few times she had this dream, she felt such intense emotion upon entering into the light that she awoke immediately. In later weeks, as the dream repeated, she explored the new land. Then the dream changed again. She would return to the wall to look for Ready, only to find he had never made it over. This version of the dream left her with an emotional hangover that lasted for days.

  Ready never answered his phone, and eventually his number was cut off. Susan spent half an hour one day on Google Maps, trying to reconstruct the journey she had taken to the red-roofed house where she and Ready had made love. In a satellite view of Santa Barbara, she picked out what she thought was the house. She switched to street view and got the address. Then she wrote letters by hand and mailed them.

  Warren,

  I’m in Saratoga Springs, New York.

  My parents brought me here for Thanksgiving when I five. The ground was white, the skies were grey, and the trees were bare. Coming from San Diego, I had never seen such a landscape. I cried for twenty minutes after we arrived. When my father asked me what was wrong, I asked why all the trees were dead. He said, “The leaves will come back in spring.” I didn’t know what that meant. How could something dead come back to life?

  At night, when the soft snow crusted over and crunched beneath our feet, the sky was black and clear, and I saw more stars than I had ever seen before. I told my father that the more I looked, the more appeared. He said, “That’s because your eyes are adjusting to the dark.” I said, “No, it’s because I’m looking harder. When they know how bad you want to see them, then they show themselves.”

  I asked him why there were so many stars, more than any person could ever count, and he said they were there so we would ask questions just like that, and so we’d know we were part of something bigger than the littered floor of suffering on which our lives play out.

  I’ve been thinking a lot since I got here. Meditating, really. My marriage was a mistake. I took the wrong road, but somehow, it led me to the right place.

  All my life, I was looking for a love that would never leave me. It was there all along, within me and around me, but in the darkness and confusion of my life, I couldn’t see it. On this side of the wall, I see it in everything. I feel it everywhere. There is such a surfeit of love in me now, it overflows and could feed so many souls, but there is no one here to share it with.

  I can’t believe how lush this place is in summer. I can’t believe these are the same dead trees that made me cry all those years ago. The only thing that troubles me now is the thought that you’re still back there in the dark.

  Warren, please call and let me know you’re OK.

  I’ll find you when I go back. One way or another, I will. I want to bring you into this world you helped me find.

  Love, Susan

  Chapter 50

  Ready left rehab after four weeks. Two weeks later, he stood next to Omar in an elevator. It was early October now, three months since Susan and Ella went away. Omar removed the panel of buttons next to the elevator door, and the two of them inspected the wiring.

  “See, now, these go back to the main controller. On this type of elevator, just about the only time you ever have to pull this off is when one of the buttons breaks. You know, people get impatient and they start mashin’ the buttons, and they crack.”

  Ready looked out the door of the elevator with a glum expression.

  “Hey, man, you payin’ attention?” Omar asked.

  “No,” said Ready.

  “I’m tryin’ to do you a favor here. If you learn this stuff and you pass the test, you can have yourself a decent job.”

  Ready looked morosely at the panel.

  “Come on, man, how long did you last waitin’ tables?” Omar asked.

  “One day.”

  “You gotta get a real job. It’s time to grow up. You ain’t doin’ yourself no favors by puttin’ it off.”

  “I know,” Ready said with a sigh.

  “I’m tryin’ to show you this shit, and you’re acting like you just don’t care.”

  “I hate to say it,” Ready said, shaking his head sadly, “but I don’t care. I don’t really care about anything.”

  “Then get the fuck out of here, OK?” Omar snapped. “Go back to your boat and do whatever you do in there. I’m sick of wastin’ my time on you.”

  Ready walked out of the elevator without saying a word.

  Chapter 51

  While Ready was walking away from Omar, Ella sat in a leather chair in an office in
Manhattan. Behind a desk, a thin high-strung woman in her fifties examined a folder full of photographs. The only thing visible through the window behind her was another building, full of other people like her.

  “Do you have anything more recent?” the woman asked.

  “Those are only nine months old,” Ella said.

  “But you don’t look like this anymore,” the woman said. “You have a brightness in these photos. Like sunshine. I don’t see that in you now. You look...eclipsed.”

  “I was out of modeling for a while,” Ella said. “I went away.”

  “Your former agency told me you left without warning. They couldn’t reach you. Did you run off after some man?”

  Ella nodded.

  “And he broke your heart,” the woman said. “And now you need to support yourself again.”

  “There are kinder ways to tell that story,” Ella said softly.

  “But you don’t have the same spunk you had here. You don’t have that brightness in your eyes. You’re not smiling.” The woman closed the folder. “Look, you’re a catalog model. You have that wholesome face that retailers like. You don’t have the exotic edge that the fashion houses want. The best I can get you is more catalog work, but you have to smile. That sad face won’t sell any bathing suits.”

  “I know.”

  “And you cannot run off on me. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me you won’t run off.”

  “I won’t,” Ella said. “I’m done with all that.”

  “And you will always be reachable. When I call you, you will answer.”

  “I will,” Ella said.

  “OK. I’m sorry to be such a bitch. I want to take you on, but I don’t want to get burned. How long have you been back in New York?”

  “Almost three months.”

  “And is this the first agency you’ve contacted?”