Breaking the Bank Read online

  “He’s a lawyer?”

  “Not just a lawyer. A partner.”

  “You’re on the outs with him, right?”

  “Right,” said Mia. “Well, I just want you to find someone who can help you.”

  “I know, Fred,” she said gently.

  ALONE IN HER room, Mia spied the blue velvet bag still lying on her blanket, and she shoved it as far under the bed as she could.

  Then she tried to settle down, but sleep just flat out refused to come. Fred’s last remark reminded her of her fruitless, harried day and the dozen phone calls she made, each more dead-ended and frustrating than the last. So the final result was that she still had no lawyer and she was behind on the manuscript. And what to make of the inscription on the locket. A hoax? A joke of some kind? But Solly Phelps had been so interested in it; was that because he had guessed something about its provenance? When she went back to the shop to replace the chain, she would ask about it. Maybe Mofchum could tell her more.

  The room was too hot, the pillow felt like it was filled with sawdust, her lower back was sore, and her head hurt where she had whacked it into the wall. She got up, cracked the window, and turned over once, twice, a third time. Then she gave the pillow a serious punch. It didn’t change anything, but the gesture made her feel better, at least for a minute.

  The sharp air from the open window was like a balm, and Mia turned her face toward it. Finally, finally, she felt herself starting to unwind. Closing her eyes, she remembered. Sixteen inches of snow, all the schools closed. She and Stuart wading through the thigh-high drifts to get to Central Park, the sled an inert and useless object dragging behind them. But once they arrived, positioned the stubborn thing at the crest of the hill, climbed on, and shot down like a comet, the sled, like the whole, wonderful, white world, came brilliantly alive, sprays of snow and ice-bright crystals rushing all around them. She could taste that ride, the stunning cold, the bite of the wind as it chapped her cheeks and lips and chin; she could taste it even now, thirty years later, and as she surrendered to sleep, she wished to God that she could have it back again.

  FIFTEEN

  THE JAIL CELL was a horrid little eight-by-eight cube, and the floor was filthy: obese dust bunnies under the metal beds that were bolted to the wall; a spreading gummy patch over by the stainless-steel toilet; grit crunching underfoot everywhere Mia stepped. It was also cold, a penetrating, invasive cold that seemed to travel up from her bare soles to her very core. Where were her shoes, anyway? How could she have lost them? All of her fear and disgust about actually being in jail were funneled into that question: Where, oh where were her shoes when she needed them most?

  She picked her way over to the bottom bunk; the top one was occupied by a small woman whose face was turned away from her. She was talking to herself very quietly, and she seemed to have taken a bath in booze; even from down here, Mia thought she could be in danger of a contact high. But at least she could pull her feet up and under her, which she did.

  How did she get here, anyway? She couldn’t remember. Maybe she was drunk, too, but she hadn’t been drinking—she was quite sure of that. Who brought her? The prizefighter, Costello? Her two boy toys with the rhyming names? Anyway, what about Mia’s rights? Her one phone call? She wanted to get up, rattle the bars—if she could stand to touch them, that is—and get a guard’s attention. But the floor. The floor! How was she going to navigate that?

  Then she had a brilliant idea. She unzipped and then lowered her jeans so that their flared bottoms covered her feet; if she shuffled along slowly, she would be able to reach the bars without actually having to have contact with the floor. Fortunately, her jacket was long enough tocover her butt, or most of it anyway. Of course she would have to get rid of the jeans the second she got out of here; she would burn them, that’s what she would do. Set them ablaze on the fire escape of her apartment and watch them turn to ash. This thought actually buoyed her a bit, and she accelerated her pace until she was almost at the bars when suddenly her left ankle was yanked out from under her and she fell, chin first, to the floor.

  Mia tasted blood—she must have bitten her lip—and something else vile that might have been fecal for all she knew. She wanted to boil her tongue. Using her hands for support, she tried to pull herself up, but her ankle felt as if it were caught on or even in something. She struggled, but the, the, thing was stronger. Reaching down, she tried to pry it off. It constricted even more tightly. Her fingers grazed something covered in scales and strangely animate, like the limb or body of a reptile. And in that instant, she heard a low but terrible sibilant sound, a menacing little hiss. She screamed, jolting herself awake.

  Awake! Thank the living God! She palpated the quilt, the mattress, her own face, filmed over by a slight coating of sweat. Her ankle was tingling, but that, she realized, was from a lack of circulation; she must have been sleeping in some weird position. What a dream. What a horrible dream.

  “You okay?” Fred stood in the doorway to the room, scratching the back of his head. “I thought I heard you scream.”

  “You did,” she said. “I was having a nightmare.”

  “Want to tell Uncle Fred about it?” He came over and sat at the foot of her bed.

  “No,” she said, closing her eyes again. “I don’t.”

  “All right then,” he said. “How about some breakfast? New College Inn? My treat.”

  Mia sat up and opened her eyes. Lloyd never would have taken no for an answer. He would have hounded her until she told him every last detail about what she’d dreamed, and then he’d have spent the next thirty minutes analyzing it. Fred’s easy willingness to let it drop was positively liberating—imagine being with a man who didn’t want to probe and pick through every single aspect of your existence. Who didn’t live with a metaphoric microscope hanging from his neck. She scooted down along the bed and gently put her arms around his neck.

  “Breakfast,” she said, “sounds great.”

  They dressed, rounded up the girls, and headed for the diner on the corner of Union Street and Fourth Avenue. It was not crowded, and within a minute of their being seated, the waitress appeared with coffee. Mia drained her cup right away and then looked around, hoping to catch the waitress’s eye so she could get a refill. Between sex with Fred, who was wrapped in some sort of honeymoon-like postcoital bliss this morning, and that god-awful dream, Mia was ready to go back to sleep.

  “I’ll have the pancakes, please,” said Kyra, when the waitress appeared again to take their order.

  “The same for me,” said Eden, snapping the menu shut. Fred ordered what to Mia sounded like a massive quantity of manly type fare: fried eggs, hash browns, toast, and sausage. Mia, suddenly in sync with Eden’s vegetarian stance, was revolted at the thought of it.

  “Just the coffee will be fine for me,” she said. Maybe she could avoid looking in his direction when the sausage arrived.

  “You’re not hungry?” Fred said, his tone threaded with worry. “Yeah, what’s up with that, Mom?” said Eden. “You should have something to eat.” How ironic was that, Mia thought. Eden coaxing her to eat. The waitress waited, pen poised above her pad.

  “All right. I’ll have an English muffin. Lightly toasted.” Could she take a nap? Right here at the table? But the food arrived quickly enough, and she was able to deflect the attention away from her eating—or rather not eating—and pretty soon they were done.

  The four of them stood in front of Mia’s building, saying goodbye; Fred had his motorcycle parked around the corner. The two girls gave each other big, dramatic hugs, while Mia and Fred confined themselves to chaste pecks on the cheek.

  “Fred and Kyra are so-o-o awesome,” Eden said as she accompanied Mia into their building. “Can we do that again sometime?”

  “We’ll see,” said Mia as they mounted the stairs. As she climbed, she had to press her hands against her stomach. All that coffee—and lousy it was, too—was now sloshing and roiling around inside her.

 
“Mom, where did Fred sleep last night?” Eden asked abruptly. “In the living room. On the air mattress.”

  “Oh.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I wanted to know if he was your boyfriend.”

  “Well,” stalled Mia. “He is a friend. A good friend.” God, but she needed some Pepto Bismol. “Would you like it if he were my boyfriend?”

  “Yes!” Eden answered without hesitation. “Daddy has a girlfriend, so it seems only fair.”

  Mia pondered the wisdom of that for a few seconds, and then Eden, apparently done with this topic, asked if she could run up and see if Luisa was home.

  AS SOON AS she was gone, Mia heard the sound of a door opening, and there, facing her, was Mr. Ortiz with his dog.

  “Hi,” she said weakly, not wanting to stop and talk. “Señora Saul,” he said. “May I speak to you, please?”

  “Of course,” she said, trying to seem as friendly as she could, given the acid that was corroding her ileum. “What’s up?”

  “It’s about the police.” He stepped closer and lowered his voice to a whisper. The dog trembled.

  “The police?” How did he know? Mia felt both exposed and shamed.

  “I know that they came. Two nights ago.” When Mia didn’t say anything, he added, “I don’t sleep well, and when I heard the noise in the hall . . .”

  “Yes, they were here,” Mia said tiredly. He already knew. What was the point of trying to pretend? “But everything’s all right, Mr. Ortiz. You don’t have to worry.”

  “Because if there is anything, anything at all I could do for you, Señora Saul”—he said, as if she had not spoken—”you have only to ask.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Ortiz,” said Mia, his kindness momentarily overriding the pain in her stomach. “Thank you very much.”

  “If at any time you need a witness for your character, you call me, yes?”

  He stroked the dog, which rested its dark snout against his chest. “I really appreciate it, Mr. Ortiz. I hope it won’t come to that.”

  “There’s one more thing . . .”

  “Yes?” She still needed that antacid, though the pain was definitely more manageable now.

  “The money.”

  Jesus. Did he know about the bill, too? Did everyone know everything about her these days? She felt as if she were living in a glass house and had been too self-absorbed and preoccupied to notice.

  “The night you slipped the bills under the door . . . I was awake then, too, so I heard the noise. When I went to look, I saw your door closing.”

  “You caught me,” Mia said. “I want to thank you for that, Señora Saul. You are a very special person. So special that I had to tell someone.”

  “You did?” she asked. “Yes, I mentioned it to Señora Ovalle when I saw her the next day. She sometimes brings me food from the restaurant. So I now know that you gave her money, too.”

  Señora Ovalle? Restaurant? Then she understood: Luisa’s mother.

  The leftovers were from McDonald’s, though Mia thought that calling the place a restaurant was a major stretch.

  “It’s okay,” she told him. “I wanted to do it. My pleasure, in fact.” Which was, Mia reflected, the truth. Use it well. She was trying. Mia went inside and headed straight for the medicine chest. Hadn’t she seen Pepto Bismol when the police were here? Right behind the RID and the lice comb? She found it and guzzled the thick, pink liquid right from the bottle.

  MONDAY MORNING MIA made sure she got to the office early. She had to hustle, what with her wasted day on Friday and all the work she now had piled up on her desk. But it turned out to be a day punctured by a half-dozen small and irritating distractions. A baby-shower breakfast for the very pregnant art director, some major screwup with the computer system, a meeting she had totally forgotten about.

  The call came while she was at the meeting; Mia could see the editorial director glare at her when the phone beeped and Mia fumbled quickly to turn it off. But not before she saw the name and number on the tiny screen: Feinberg, Schrank, Liebowitz, and Saul. Stuart. Well, he was going to have to wait. She turned off the phone and stuffed it down, way down, into her bag. The meeting was mercifully brief, and Mia, sufficiently glutted by the bagel and sticky buns she had consumed at the shower, decided to spend lunch at her desk. She turned the phone back on to vibrate, and as soon as she did, she could feel it humming, like some -thing set to explode. It was Stuart again, and this time she took his call.

  “Are you stalking me?” she asked. “Are you avoiding me?” he shot back. “I’m not avoiding you.”

  “Mia, this is me, Stuart. I know you, remember? And I know when you’re avoiding me.”

  “All right then. So I’m avoiding you. Can you blame me?”

  “Look, I’m sorry about Thanksgiving. But I’ve been trying to call ever since; I can never get you.”

  Mia said nothing, but picked up a red editing pencil and began stabbing the point into a pad of Post-it notes.

  “Mia? You there?”

  “I’m here,” she said. “I just felt really attacked. By everyone: you, Mom, Gail. But most of all by you.”

  “I’m sorry it seemed that way. We were worried. We’re still worried. Lloyd told me he had another phone call from Frobisher. Did you know that Eden’s refusing to do her math? She says math is useless so she’s boycotting—her word—the subject. She’s encouraging other kids in the class to do the same thing.”

  “No one told me!”

  “That’s my whole point. The teacher doesn’t feel like she’s getting the support from you that she needs; she’s turning to Lloyd.”

  Mia silently continued her stabbing motions until the pencil snapped and she stared at it stupidly, like she couldn’t figure out how

  that had happened.

  “Listen, the welfare of your daughter is at stake, and you’re in major denial.”

  “Denial? Me?”

  “Yeah. You. Didn’t you promise Mom that you’d bring her out there after Christmas?”

  “Yes,” she said, tossing the ruined pencil into a wastebasket under the desk.

  “So? Have you made the reservation?”

  “I will, Stu. I really will.”

  “So you say. But then you don’t follow through.” He made a loud, exasperated noise. “I know you can’t see it, Mia, but I just want to help you.”

  “Really?”

  “What do you mean ‘really’? Of course I do.”

  “I need some legal advice then.” There, she said it. If she was going to endure this conversation, she might as well get some useful information out of it.

  “Advice? Maybe you should talk to Charlie Ellis.”

  “This isn’t about the divorce,” said Mia. Charlie Ellis, an old law-school buddy of Stuart’s, had represented Mia when she and Lloyd split up.

  “Oh? Is it a landlord-tenant kind of thing then? I could find you someone to talk to if that’s what you need—”

  “No, it’s not the landlord,” interrupted Mia. “So then what is it?”

  “Uh . . . it’s . . . a criminal issue. Drug-related. But not for me. It’s for a friend.”

  “Jesus, Mia, what have you gotten yourself into now?”

  “I told you: it’s not me. It’s a friend.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe that? Don’t kid a kidder, okay?” He sounded so superior that Mia wished he was standing in front of her so she could dig her hands into his hair and pull, hard, the way she used to when they were kids. “I’ll find you someone, and it’ll be someone good. But we’re going to do a little exchange of goods and services here: I’m going to get you the phone number and not ask too many questions—yet—and you are going to book that flight. And I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.”

  “All right,” she said, sullenly. “Stop sounding so persecuted. I told you: I want to help. We all do. Even Gail, though God knows why, after the way you’ve treated her.”

  The way she treated Gail? There were no words, n
o words at all. “I’ll make that reservation,” she said, suddenly desperate to end the conversation. “But I’m at work now. I’ve got to go.”

  When she got off the phone, she felt rattled, like she had taken a ride in a cement mixer. She checked her watch; it was not even one o’clock yet. She could still go for a quick walk outside, clear her mind, before tackling that stack on the desk. Grabbing her coat and bag, she was out of the building in minutes, glad she hadn’t run into anyone on the elevator.

  The street was crowded; Manhattan at lunchtime was always crowded. But the packed sidewalks felt good. That was one of the things she loved about New York, how you could lose yourself so easily, just slip into the stream and shove off. She began to walk, long strides, downtown, toward Union Square.

  It was a cold, bright day, with a hard blue sky and no clouds. She stopped at a vendor’s stall and bought a brown knitted hat flecked with tiny bits of red, burnt orange, and teal blue. Not her typical sort of purchase, but she was suddenly fed up with her overwhelmingly black wardrobe. The hat was warm and soft besides, and she felt better having it on. She wasn’t hungry, but when she passed the greenmarket, in full swing, she stopped for a cup of hot cider.

  It was nothing like the cider Fred had made, but it was warm in her hand, and for now that was enough.

  She walked more slowly now because she didn’t want to slosh the cider, so she had the time to notice a skinny black man with a luminous white Afro who stood on the corner of Eighteenth Street, singing. He had a clear, haunting falsetto, and Mia paused to listen.

  So take a good look at my face

  You’ll see my smile looks out of place

  His voice scaled up, up, and up again, hitting the highest notes with an astonishing sweetness. The small knot of people standing around him burst into applause when he had finished, and several put money in the pink plastic pail set up on the sidewalk.

  Mia was too overcome to move for a second. Then she remembered that she had one of the bills, the special, not-to-be-mixed-with-the-other-bills one from the machine, squirreled away in the recesses of her bag. It was a hundred, too. Perfect. Use it well, she said to herself before depositing it in the pail. Most of the crowd had moved on now, so the man picked up the pail and began sifting through his haul. His fingers reached the hundred, and, after looking down, he looked up at Mia with a dazed, wonder-filled smile.