Читать книгу Invisible Girl - Erica Orloff - Страница 10

Danny Malone felt around his mouth for the loose tooth. It was the last molar on the right, and if he moved his tongue against it, the thing wiggled, the unique, slightly salty taste of blood intensifying. He couldn’t use his right arm at all. He guessed that shoulder was dislocated. With his left hand, he felt his face and discovered it had the texture of raw hamburger meat.

He slumped over in the driver’s seat of his somewhat battered Lincoln Town Car. The pain was so bad he felt as if he were going to pass out. He looked up at the six-story red brick building and could see the light on in his sister’s apartment on the second floor. All he had to do was get up there. Just get to her, Danny. Like a penitent man on a pilgrimage, he thought only of reaching his Mecca. The one place where his world made a little sense.

All his life, Danny’s sister Maggie had fixed everything. He was older—by two years and change—but she was the one who kept out of trouble—and tried to keep him out of trouble. She was like their mother. After their mom had died, Maggie had been the one to retain the rituals, the Buddha, the crucifix. She was the one who made sure he and his father ate home-cooked meals and had clean clothes.

Danny’s head pounded and he struggled to focus. From the time they were little, Maggie would check out all his scrapes and bruises, surveying the damage. Once they were teens, and then adults, she would look for more serious scrapes. Like bullet holes and knife wounds.

She was like his other half. Anyone with a set of eyes could see they were related. They both had the same jet-black hair, which sometimes, in the right light, took on a bluish sheen, black eyes, slightly almond-shaped and exotic, and pale skin. He was well built, muscular, and had a pair of dimples that belied his toughness; she was delicate, with high cheekbones that carved out hollows beneath them, just like their mother, and hair that fell nearly to her ass. His nose had been broken twice, so it leaned a little to the left, but they were clearly siblings.

Danny opened the car door with his functional hand and climbed out, slamming the door behind himself. He looked up and down the street through the slits of his swollen eyelids. He turned up the collar of his army jacket—his father’s old one, threadbare, with an ancient maroon-brown stain of blood on the arm, either his father’s or a Vietcong’s. Danny knew if anyone saw his face, he’d scare the shit out of them, and they’d call the cops, so bending his head into the wind, he started toward his sister’s building.

Each step sending shock waves of pain through his body, he made it to the building’s heavy door and then up to the second floor and her apartment—2B. He fiddled with the lock, pulling the copy of her apartment key from his pocket.

Suddenly, the door flew open, a male voice shouted, “Freeze, asshole,” and a gun was pointed at his head. He saw Maggie, her beautiful face ashen by the sight of him. He pulled his collar down, letting her fully see his face—what was left of it. She screamed, and then Danny knew he could safely give in to the pain. He fell to the floor and let sweet oblivion overtake him.

Maggie knelt on the floor by her brother, oblivious to the blood that was smearing the flannel pajama bottoms she had just changed into. She took his head in her lap and cradled it, brushing a lock of blood-soaked hair from Danny’s face as she rocked ever so slightly.

Bobby Gonzalez shouted at her to get away. “You don’t know who this fucker is. Call 911. Jesus Christ!” He kept his gun drawn.

“No!” Maggie looked up at him, her chin quivering. “This is Danny.”

“Your brother?”

She nodded.

“Christ!” Bobby put his service revolver back in his ankle holster, his hands shaking from the adrenaline rush, and leaned down next to her. “He needs an ambulance.” Bobby put two fingers on Danny’s neck, feeling for a pulse, then reached for the cell phone at his waist.

“No.” Her voice was etched with panic. “No, no…Look…I don’t know why he’s in trouble, and I can’t really explain it all right now, but you have to trust me. I have to handle this here at home.”

“Handle this? Angel, we need to get him to a hospital and then find out who did this to him. You can’t take care of this. You’re in shock. Look, just stay calm and let me call an ambulance.”

Maggie recognized his “cop voice”—authoritative, soothing in an emergency, talking to her as if she were a child. “No…look, I’m begging you. Begging you. Please let me take care of this.”

“Here? Jesus, Maggie, what are you talking about?”

“I don’t have time for this, Bobby.” Her voice careened and changed to one hostile and strong, equally authoritative.

“Fuck! This has to do with your family shit.”

Maggie nodded, wincing a second at Bobby’s anger. “Stop being a cop for a minute and be my friend. Help me.” She looked up into his face. His eyes were so dark, she couldn’t see the pupils for the irises, and she watched him clench and unclench his jaw, then pass his hands through his hair. He paced back and forth a few times. Finally, his anger seemed to be replaced with worry.

“Maggie, what kind of trouble is your brother in? What kind of trouble are you in?”

“Please…We can talk more when he’s in better shape. I need boiling water. I have a sewing kit in my bedroom closet. Gauze and tape in my bathroom closet. I…think there’s an Ace bandage in there. Towels. Um…Shit…um, I need rubbing alcohol. Neosporin.” She tried to picture her medicine cabinet, mentally scanning each shelf from left to right, to see what she had that could help Danny. “Oh, and there’s a bottle of Tylenol No. 3, top shelf, medicine cabinet. I need that and some applesauce and two spoons.”

Bobby looked at her. “You’re serious about this.”

“Look, please just do what I ask and I swear I’ll tell you everything later.”

He hesitated, then finally stood and walked past her and Danny. Maggie heard Bobby rummaging through closets and the medicine cabinet, slamming doors, spilling things onto the floor, hurrying. He returned with most of what she asked for and then went to boil water in her small kitchen.

Maggie looked down at Danny, who was unconscious. She wondered if kitchen-table stitches were anything like riding a bicycle, that once you learned how to do them, you never forgot. It wasn’t all that different from sewing cloth. And the Malone men were never ones to worry about leaving a scar. She told herself it would all come back to her.

She was fourteen, and after Jimmy Malone had locked up the bar, he called upstairs to their apartment. She answered on the first ring.

“Mags?”

“Yeah, Daddy?”

“I need you to come down to the bar. Danny’s doing some things for me…won’t be home until late.”

Things. Maggie knew that could mean anything from driving out with Uncle Con to New Jersey to bury something, to hiding money in a hole in the wall behind the toilet where there was a loose tile. It also meant not asking questions.

“Be right down.”

The Twilight bar was in Hell’s Kitchen, which itself was bound by the Hudson River. Eventually, if you walked west, you’d hit the water, as black and ugly and foul-smelling as it was. When she was very little, she’d imagined the Hudson River as the sea, mystical and grand, carrying the scent of fresh water and the sounds of sails whipping into the wind. But she was older now and realized it was just the dirty, brown Hudson. Hell’s Kitchen’s other border, depending on who you asked, was Eighth. Either way, it was a haven for the Westies and addicts, and the streets were harsh. But Maggie had never felt unsafe. She knew everyone in a thirty-block radius was aware of her father’s power in the small jungle of their neighborhood. He’d fought two tours in Vietnam, and some people said he’d flown for the CIA in Laos. Or maybe it wasn’t for the CIA, but for some shadowy arm of the government that had condoned paying him $10,000 cash each month back in 1973. Maybe he’d flown for Air America. That was the rumor, at least, and she had no reason to doubt it, collecting small clues like a hungry bird snatched up bread crumbs. She stored the information away in her mind, hoping to one day understand all that her father was. After he’d come back from Laos, some of the money—from whoever had paid it to him—had gone to buying the bar.

Maggie’s teeth chattered. Her father’s mysteries always made her nervous. He was the antithesis of what she remembered of her mother. Where she embodied the rituals of incense and quiet and candles, her father and Uncle Con immersed themselves in the never-spoken threat of violence—not against her or Danny or her mother when she’d been alive, but against anyone who dared to even breathe on them. Maggie pulled a sweatshirt over her head and looked around her bedroom. The far wall was lined with shelves on which perched at least a hundred Buddhas, maybe more. Some had been her mother’s, some her father had bought her in Chinatown. And some, she knew, came from faraway places in Asia from before she was born. On the opposite wall was a crucifix, a pretty wooden one with a pewter Jesus. On her dresser were the spilled secrets of a teenage girl—hair clips, lip gloss she had just been allowed to start wearing, earrings and rings and fortune-cookie promises of good luck and prosperity, movie stubs and cutout pictures of movie stars she planned to stick on her bulletin board.

She took a deep breath to settle her nerves and left her bedroom and then the apartment, locking the door behind herself. She descended the metal staircase to the back entrance of the bar, the scent of beer as familiar to her as her own name, as her reflection in the mirror.

Maggie walked through the back of the bar and then made her way to the cluttered office, where she assumed her father would be waiting for her. He was, though he was slumped over his desk. He looked up, with effort, as she came in the door.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, even as she saw the wet crimson stain on the back of his shirt.

“Nothin’,” he said, winking at her, his face sweaty and ashen. “I just need you to do me a favor, baby girl, and dig this stupid thing out of my shoulder, out of my back.”

“What stupid thing?”

“A bullet. I’d do it myself if I could reach, but I can’t.”

Maggie felt queasy, not because he’d been shot, but from the idea of sticking a knife, tweezers, anything, into a hole in someone’s flesh, let alone her father’s.

“Daddy…” she said in a whisper, laden with the question, there in the way she spoke his name, do I have to?

“I can’t ask Danny. He’s doing something for me. And I can’t get Uncle Con on the phone. Please, I’m asking you. I’m starting to run a fever, and I’ve got to get it out of me. I’ll talk you through it. Piece of cake. You’re a Malone.”

Maggie nodded. “Are you going to be okay?”

“I promise. And you know I never promise unless I can deliver the goods. Please, baby.”

She breathed deeply, not sure if she would pass out or not. “I’m going to get me a drink.”

“Sure. Get me one, too.”

Maggie went out to the bar and pulled down a bottle of scotch. She took two fat water tumblers and set them on the bar. She hated scotch. Although her father had let her and Danny drink beer since they were small, she never drank anything uglier than peppermint schnapps. But she wanted something powerful and nasty. She poured two generous scotches as if she were pouring water. She took one and downed it in a few gulps, fighting the retching feeling in her throat and gut, emitting an audible gag. She put the tumbler on the bar and literally shook her shoulders and head, trying to keep the vile liquid inside her. Then she refilled her glass and brought it along with her father’s drink into the office.

A first-aid kit was open and his shirt was off. The kit looked like an army-issue one, and she imagined it had come home from Vietnam with him, long before she had even been born.

“Thanks, darlin’,” he said, taking the scotch from her and downing it without shivering or even making a face.

Maggie stood behind him, staring at the bullet wound. Its edges were clean, and it looked deep. She could only see dark red blood, but she knew that in the hole, layers of skin gave way to muscle and below that bone. Steadying herself, she peered into the hole of flesh and blood, smelling the bitterness of burned skin, again feeling a violent convulsion in her stomach.

On her father’s desk was a scalpel. A real scalpel, not a knife. She didn’t ask where he’d gotten it or why he had it. She never asked about anything. Not about the loaded gun that always sat on his nightstand, or about the occasional 2:00 a. m. visitor, men with whispered secrets and file folders and photographs. Next to the scalpel was a pair of very long tweezers with pointed ends.

“Okay, Maggie,” he said as he handed the scalpel to her. “Now, the scalpel is really sharp, so don’t cut yourself. Just poke this into the hole and dig out the bullet a little. Use the tweezers when you can finally see it. Get all of it. Make sure of that. If it’s hit bone, you’ll have to dig more.”

She gritted her teeth, hands shaking. Gingerly, she entered the back of his shoulder with just the very tip of the scalpel, feeling as if she were going to throw up.

“Honey, don’t be afraid to hurt me. I’ve taken way worse.” He laughed. “Ain’t nothin’ to an old soldier like me.”

By now, the scotch was having its effect. Feeling as though she were in a dream, watching someone else stick a scalpel into the wound, she dug deeper, blood oozing from the hole and dripping in small rivulets mixed with sweat down his back. She finally saw the bullet’s gray-black color. She switched tools, and Maggie’s tweezers emerged minutes later with the bullet, which she scooped into her hand and then placed on the desk. Her father visibly relaxed, his back tense from effort of steeling himself against the pain.

“Now the stitches.”

He talked Maggie through cleaning the wound with peroxide, which sizzled and bubbled. Then she sewed the edges of the wound, packing gauze into it, and then covered it with a large square piece of gauze, and finally she taped all around it.

When she was done, her father turned around. He had the solid jaw of a soldier. His eyes were a peculiar blue-green, nothing like his children’s. His hair was a dark shade of brown, speckled with a little gray. Freckles scattered across his nose and deep lines surrounded his eyes, from squinting, he’d told her once, as he’d marched in the sun. His body was still as taut as when he’d been in the service, with rock-like biceps covered in tattoos, and then the old scar from the war. She had pictures upstairs of him in the grassy fields of Vietnam, a youthful soldier, but still something about him, an air of toughness, that came through even in the grainy photographs. He looked nothing like Danny and her. They would always look, to strangers, like adopted children, their features so much their mother’s.

“I’m sure you left a pretty scar.” He winked at her. “A new one that I’ll always know you fixed up.”

“Are you going to tell me what happened, Daddy?”

“Nope. I’ll tell you what, though…Did I ever explain why I named this place the Twilight?”

“About a hundred times.”

“I know. I just like that story.”

“I still like hearing it.”

“Well, then. It was because in Vietnam, twilight was beautiful. I mean, we were in a shit hole of mosquitoes and humidity, but that sky turning orange and pink sometimes, it was…humbling. And off in the distance, it’s like you’d hear fireworks. Of course, it wasn’t fireworks. It was war. I used to watch the burst of flames rising up from the treetops.

“For pilots, twilight can be dangerous. Sort of that world between night and day. Between heaven and hell. I didn’t think I could feel that aware, every muscle twitching. And one twilight, we’d landed near this village. It seemed okay. Peaceful. I waded through the swamp, and me and my guys, we walked toward some huts, and I saw a girl carrying a basket. She was the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my whole life. And in that second, in that minute, my whole world changed. Vietnam went from being a place I hated to being the place where the person I loved was from. When I finally got back to America, I bought this place and named it after my alive time, when I realized I never wanted to live so much as when I saw her. Twilight. When the sky was pink.”

“I wish I knew you then,” Maggie whispered. She wished she knew him now. He was her father, but he was a stranger.

“I remember the day you came home from the hospital. I was alive then.” He shrugged his shoulder a bit, moving it around. “This is gonna be a bitch tomorrow.”

“Sure is.” She grew silent for a minute. They both did. “Okay then,” she said softly. “I’m going back upstairs.”

“Thanks, kiddo. You really came through for me. I love you, bright eyes.”

“Love you, too.”

She left the office and grabbed the bottle of scotch off of the bar, taking it with her to their apartment. As soon as she got up there, she ran to the bathroom and threw up, the scotch burning her throat a second time as it seared her on its way out. She leaned her elbows on the toilet seat and felt her lids fill with tears, but she refused to cry. She stood and washed her face in the sink. The hole in her father’s shoulder kept coming into her mind. She left the bathroom, took the bottle of scotch and put it on the dining-room table. She fetched a mug from the kitchen and began drinking, forcing herself to keep it down, drinking the hole of flesh away. That night was the first time Maggie ever drank herself into a blackout.

“You’re making me nervous,” Maggie snapped at Bobby, who leaned over her and was staring at her handiwork, occasionally offering advice.

“How did you learn to do that?”

“It’s like riding a bicycle.”

“Sure it is. Only you would use that analogy.”

Danny’s face now vaguely resembled Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. Black thread wove crookedly through loose skin, but she had closed up the slice in his cheek, cleaned off the blood and sewn up the cut above his eye—it was deep and ran through the eyebrow. She bandaged his arm, hoping perhaps it wasn’t a break, but setting it as best she could. She had tried to jam the dislocated shoulder back into place the way she’d seen her uncle Con do once for her father.

She applied a warm washcloth over and over again to Danny’s face, slowly easing off the caked blood. She cleaned along his hairline and wiped his hair. He looked better than when she’d first seen him. Swollen, turning an eggplant-purple, but with some of Danny’s “luck o’ the Irish and blessings of Buddha,” as their mother used to say, he’d still have a semi-beautiful face when it was all healed.

Maggie mashed some Tylenol No. 3 into the applesauce and roused her brother enough to feed him three tablets. Then, with Bobby’s help, she got him onto the mattress they’d taken from her pull-out couch and had placed on the floor.

“Now we watch him,” she whispered, getting up from her makeshift operating room.

“Your hands are shaking.”

“The first time I did this, I had half a bottle of scotch in me. Actually, the second and third time I did this, I had scotch in me.”

“Drinking wouldn’t have made this night any easier.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Look, Maggie, I just watched you stitch up a man on your living-room floor like you work in a fucking MASH unit. I’m part of this whether you like it or not.”

She sat down on the love seat, and Bobby took the chair opposite her.

“I’m sorry, Bobby.”

“Don’t be sorry. How about telling me the truth? Let’s start with that.”

“Truth depends on who you talk to. But I know I owe you as much.”

Maggie looked down at her hands and tried to decide where to begin.