The Survivor Read online

  “I am so sorry to be here,” Nate said. “But I will help in any way I can and answer any questions.”

  The first reaction was often an unexpected one. Sean’s mouth tightened. “Who did you say you are again?”

  “Nate Overbay. I’m a Professional Crisis Responder.”

  The overblown title served to make up for the fact that he was not a social worker, a chaplain, or a paramedic. Though deployed by LAPD, he didn’t carry a badge and was not a sworn officer. When he first started nearly five years ago, a social-services team was supposed to go out every time, but budget cuts had whittled down the cast until he was the last man standing. Now, when he wasn’t available, death-notification service fell to whichever patrol officer drew the short straw. So Nate had done his best to be available for every call. To strive to better himself, to find one more way to diminish, however slightly, a family’s pain the next time around. He was not so dumb as to be unaware that he was trying again and again for personal redemption but not so smart as to figure out how to break the cycle.

  Erica’s voice fluttered, so fragile that Nate could barely make out the words: “This is a mistake. How can you be sure there wasn’t some mistake?”

  Nate had pulled the incident report, gone to the morgue to talk with the coroner, sat with Aiden and held his cold hand. To make sure he didn’t terrorize the wrong family, Nate had checked the driver’s license in Aiden’s wallet against the database in case the nineteen-year-old boy had been carrying a fake ID.

  “I’m certain,” Nate said. “Aiden was identified and pronounced dead at the hospital.”

  Experience had taught him that to overpower denial he needed to say to the bereaved, frequently and boldly, that the person had died. It had also taught him not to say that time heals all wounds, that he knew how they felt, that there was a reason for everything. He had learned when to pause, to let them breathe, when to lead and when to follow. But mostly he had learned to ignore everything he had learned, at a moment’s notice.

  Erica withdrew into herself, shoulders curling, chin dipping. Sean looked at her, his mouth downturning violently, almost a sob. “You’re the cops,” Sean said, his voice high, adrenalized. “He’s a kid. You couldn’t protect him from some idiot driver?”

  Nate said gently, “No.”

  Sean was standing again, jabbing a finger down at Nate. “You should’ve done something. Someone needs to fix this. This is your fault. Your fault.”

  Nate rose. “Okay.” He kept his hands out and his voice soft.

  “I’m gonna sue the fucking shit out of you, this city. I’m gonna…” Sean’s finger, inches from Nate’s face, began trembling violently. His face flushed, and then he was sobbing, rent-open cries, loose on his feet. Nate lifted an arm, and Sean grabbed him and sobbed into his shoulder, and Nate held him for five minutes and then ten, until Erica rose and led her husband with great care back to the couch. Sean sat, holding her hand, tears streaming as Nate answered their questions and told them what to do next, writing everything down since recollection would be foggy—directions to the morgue, police case number, direct line to the coroner’s office. He did all that, and then he shut up.

  Erica broke the silence. “But it’s so unfair. He’s our only child.” Finally she came apart, fist pressed to her mouth so hard that the skin went white.

  Heat swelled in Nate’s chest, and he looked down, the carpet blurring at his feet. Some responders believed they always had to be strong for the relatives, but Nate had found that the times his voice hitched or his eyes watered, family members had looked at him not with disdain but appreciation.

  Erica caught her breath again, blew her nose. “What a stupid thing to say.”

  “No,” Nate said.

  “Life isn’t fair, is it? Who gets to live. Who dies.”

  No.

  “I want to see him,” Erica said. “I want to see my boy. Where is he?”

  Sean lifted the printout that Nate had brought—the route from their front door to the morgue. He raised his red-rimmed eyes to Nate and said, “Thank you.”

  Nate nodded. “Is there anything you’d like to ask me? Anything you want me to do?”

  Shaking their heads, they rose to see him out.

  He always made the second-day call himself, since the last thing a family in crisis needed to see the morning after was a new face. When a piece of jewelry or a watch was released, he’d take it home and scrub off the dried blood before delivering it. He’d be one call away, their guide through the rough terrain. So he started to say what he always said next—that he’d check in with them again tomorrow.

  But then he remembered: For him there wouldn’t be a tomorrow.

  He paused on the porch, looking back at Erica and Sean, feeling that nagging sense of remorse. His mind moved to his best friend’s body outlined against a brilliant blast of white. His failure of will in the car outside Charles’s mother’s house. That night in the house, his daughter trying to hide beneath the bed, his wife looking on, a bruise rising on her cheek. So much unfinished business. So much he still owed.

  Since his diagnosis he’d done everything to spare Janie and Cielle any more trouble on his behalf. But maybe he owed them a final explanation before he punched out.

  “He was just here last week,” Erica said. “Standing where you’re standing right now. He was tying his shoes, and the phone rang.…” She gestured toward the teak bench, at that row of sneakers, Aiden’s beat-up Chuck Taylors waiting, one on its side. “I went to answer. Could be important, you know. A nail appointment.” She gave a disgusted little laugh. “You know the worst part?”

  Nate shook his head.

  “I never got to say good-bye.”

  Chapter 10

  For the whole ride, Nate alternated his gaze from the road to his rearview, searching for dark Town Cars with illegally tinted windows. After parking he sat, double-checking that no one had followed him, but also, he realized, stalling. It took all the courage he could muster to head up the walk of the beloved Santa Monica house. A corner brick at the base of the porch had come loose, and he paused to shove it with his heel back into alignment. Owning a house was a war of attrition. Sap holes in the gutters, birds’ nests in the chimney, dry rot in the window frames. Tears of rust hung beneath the house numbers and he thought of the time he would have cleaned them with pride. He knocked, and a moment later the door swung open.

  Pete looked out at him, doing his best to disguise his consternation. “Nate. Been a while.”

  “Right. Okay if I come in?”

  Pete looked unsure. “Hang on.” He leaned back. “Janie?”

  A moment later there she was. She wore a flare-waisted Spanish gauze blouse, bright orange to pick up the flecks in her eyes. Not that Nate noticed. Her thin eyebrows lifted, disappearing beneath the bangs of her pixie cut. “What are you doing here?”

  “I need to talk to you. And Cielle.”

  She raised her left hand to push a wisp of hair off her forehead, and he saw with great chagrin that her ring finger sported a diamond the size of a bran muffin. “It’s been nine months, Nate. Nine months. Women make babies in that time. Not a visit. Not a phone call.”

  “I know. I want to explain—”

  “And it’s not like you came by to see her frequently before then.”

  “That wasn’t just me. I would’ve loved nothing more than—”

  At once there was a clutter of claws scraping floorboards, and then Casper was there, nosing through Pete and Janie, losing his mind at the sight of Nate. A hundred ten pounds of Rhodesian ridgeback backing up in celebration, wiggling, thick tail smacking legs and walls, turning to shove his hind end into the nearest set of knees. “Off,” Pete said. “Off. Down, Casper. Off. Casper—”

  Nate said, “Sit.”

  Casper sat.

  Janie’s face was flushed, hiding the freckles. “Did you at least bring the divorce papers?”

  “They’re at home. Signed.”

  “Why d
idn’t you just bring them?”

  “It’s been an eventful day. That’s why I want to talk to you.” He took a breath, unsure where to begin. “Did you see the news today?”

  “No.”

  “There was a robbery this morning. At Wilshire and Ninth.”

  “I heard about it,” Janie said. “Radio.”

  “I was sort of in the middle of it.”

  Whatever she and Pete were expecting, it was not this. Janie’s expression softened with concern. The door creaked open, and Nate followed them in, Casper zigzagging underfoot like a patrol car slowing traffic. As they passed by the family room, Nate noted the new family portrait on the mantel—a trio, this time properly posed, with Pete replacing Nate. At the sight of the three glossy faces, he felt his last handhold at the cliff’s edge crumble.

  In the kitchen Nate perched on one of the stools that, in another life, he’d found at a garage sale, then sanded and repainted. He ran a thumb across the grain of the wood. Everything like a detail from a remembered dream.

  Janie said, “I’ll see if she’ll come down,” and headed upstairs.

  Pete finished washing romaine leaves in the farmhouse sink, set them aside, and dried his hands on his Wharton School sweatshirt. Pete was a widower, an intrinsically decent guy, and a former neighbor whom Nate and Janie had known in passing. He had made a lot of money in commercial real estate, and when he’d moved in here a few months ago, he’d cut a check to finish off the mortgage, an act of generosity that Nate still resented. Nate might have been struggling with that bank note, but at least it had been his. Even when he and Janie had separated about three years ago, it had given him comfort to know he was keeping a roof over the head of his daughter and the woman he still wildly, ineffectually loved. Over Janie’s objections he’d sent 70 percent of each modest paycheck to her until she stopped cashing every other one to make sure he kept some money for himself. Pete’s arrival had dissolved the last sure way Nate had known to help his family. Since then he and Pete had harbored an affectionate dislike for each other. Back in the months after Pete’s wife passed, Nate remembered walking Casper by his house and seeing him inside, eating dinner alone at that big dining table, and no matter how much Nate wanted to hate him now for sleeping with his wife and raising his daughter, he just couldn’t bring himself to get there in full.

  Nate sat on his former stool and fussed with the neat stack of mail before him. Brokerage statements, Vanity Fair, a Lexus service reminder—all the accoutrements of a robust, prosperous life. They had added a wine fridge beneath the microwave.

  “One of the bricks on the porch is loose,” Nate announced to the silence.

  Pete laid the romaine leaves side by side on a paper towel. “How am I supposed to reply, Nate? I say it’s no big deal, I’m insulting you. I say I’ll fix it, you’ll get pissed off since you think it’s still your porch.”

  Nate wanted to say, It is still my porch. I rebuilt it with my own two hands. I leveled the form, poured the concrete base, used a toothpick to scrape the mortar from beneath my fingernails. Instead he said nothing. He had lost the right to have opinions here.

  Pete distributed the romaine across three plates, setting fewer spears on the last. By way of explanation, he said uncomfortably, “We’re trying to help her with her weight.”

  At a loss as to how to respond to that, Nate lined up the mail nervously and smacked the envelope edges straight on the marble slab. Two tickets fell out—Turandot at the Ahmanson Theatre. Nate lifted them to the yellow light. “Opera?”

  “To celebrate our engagement. You saw the ring?”

  “No,” Nate said, “I didn’t notice.”

  Janie entered, and he looked hopefully past her, but no Cielle. His disappointed gaze returned to the tickets. She took note of his expression. “What?”

  Nate’s mouth moved instinctively before he could stop it. “You hate opera,” he told her.

  Janie halted by the stove. “Huh?”

  Pete paused from chopping. “It was a surprise.”

  “Oh,” Nate said. “Oops. But she hates opera. You hate opera.”

  Janie’s smile did not quite reach her eyes. “Not really,” she told Pete.

  “There is no ‘not really,’” Nate said. “This is opera. There are two camps. You either love opera. Or you hate opera. There is no Switzerland when it comes to opera.”

  Janie’s head whipped over to him. He showed his palms.

  Pete looked confused and a touch disappointed. “You really don’t like opera? I’m sure I can find someone to give the tickets to if you—”

  “Look,” she said, resting a hand on the small of Pete’s back, “can we maybe not have this discussion right now, honey?”

  Constantly with the pet names, as though they were afraid if they didn’t label each other at the end of every sentence, they might find themselves estranged.

  Nate said, “Where’s my daughter?”

  “She doesn’t want to see you,” Janie said.

  The words like a slap. It took him a moment to recover. “Why not?”

  Pete said, “She’s probably afraid you’ll disappoint her again.”

  “Don’t take yourself so seriously, Pete,” Nate said. “No one else does.”

  Janie was studying him, furrows texturing her forehead. It wasn’t so much his words, he realized, as his tone that had caught her attention. She seemed less angry than mystified. “What’s gotten into you, Nate?”

  Pete leaned over the counter toward Nate. “Cielle is my responsibility now, too. And you can have all the smart-ass quips you want, but I’m gonna do right by her. Which—if you actually took a second to think—is probably what you want instead of some asshole stepdad who doesn’t give a shit about her.”

  Nate thought about those abysmal first months after the separation. How on day four the sight of a girl riding her father’s shoulders had nailed him to the pavement outside a grocery store. How one desperate night Janie had let him in just so he could sit in the darkness of his daughter’s room and listen to the faint whistle of her breath as she slept. How Cielle, standing in the dim light of his tiny one-bedroom, had clumsily declared, “It’s too hard when I see you and then you’re gone.” Then, a few visits later: “Sometimes it’s easier when the person who leaves just leaves for good.” And how, even though it gutted him, he’d given her more space and more space until their weekly dinner became monthly, then quarterly. And how after the diagnosis he’d torn himself away from her and Janie altogether, not wanting them to have to suffer anything with him, whether out of love, guilt, or obligation. Fair or not, he wanted to weaponize all that pain and loss and aim it right through Pete’s gallant face, but instead he looked at Janie and screwed his jaw shut.

  Casper lifted his square, Scooby-Doo head and compassionately took in Nate’s discomfort. He wasn’t an animal so much as a human in a dog suit.

  Janie said, “You’re bleeding.”

  He peered over his shoulder and saw where a crimson seam blotted the undershirt. “I’m okay.”

  She wet a hand towel, carried it over, and lifted his shirt in the back. Pete and Nate made an effort to avoid eye contact.

  “Nice stitch work,” she said, dabbing at the edges of the wound. He relaxed a bit under her touch. “The bank robbery,” she reminded him.

  Before he could speak, Cielle appeared in the doorway.

  She still carried thirty or so extra pounds, though her fullness didn’t detract from her beauty. Those dark brown irises, almost black. Long bowed lashes framing her eyes, rendering eyeliner or mascara superfluous. Raven locks twisting this way and that, now streaked with maroon. Everything about her appearance, from the goth-girl highlights to the baggy charcoal sweater with torn thumbholes in the sleeves, seemed too angry for a fifteen-year-old girl. Or perhaps right on target. He’d forgotten how long ninth months was in the life cycle of a teenager.

  “What’s with the undershirt, Nate?” she asked.

  “Show some respect,
Cielle,” Janie said. “Call him Dad.”

  “It’s from the hospital,” Nate said. “I got stabbed during a bank robbery.”

  Janie took in a clump of air.

  “And I shot the robbers. Well, most of them.”

  Pete lowered his hands to the counter, and Janie’s hands stopped moving on Nate’s back, but Cielle didn’t miss a beat. “Were any of them named Jason Hensley?”

  “… No.”

  “Then I don’t care.”

  “Who’s Jason Hensley?”

  “My shithead boyfriend. Who thinks that buying a new guitar is more important than taking me to Magic Mountain as was promised for our three-month anniversary.”

  “Cielle,” Janie said. “I love you, honey. And I know that in your fifteen-year-old brain, boy troubles are equivalent to your father’s getting stabbed in a bank robbery, but can we please focus on him right now?”

  “You don’t actually believe him, do you?”

  Pete said, “Whatever you want to think about your father, Cielle, he’s not a liar.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Fine. Go ahead.”

  Nate walked them through the official version, leaving out the almost suicide and the threats that Number Six had leveled at him in the vault. When he finished, Cielle’s mouth was popped open, exposing a wad of fluorescent gum.

  “Aren’t you worried?” Janie asked. “That they’ll come after you? I mean, you killed five men. They have to have … I don’t know, associates.”

  Nate thought about that tattooed hand curled through the gap in the Town Car’s window, pinching off the cigarette between the fingers without so much as a flinch. Just slow, steady pressure, suffocating the flame. Nate tapped his palm to his pocket, felt the comforting weight of the pill bottle against his thigh. His exit plan. “I’m not concerned about it,” he answered.

  Cielle: “So you just came to…?”

  “I wanted to tell you before you heard about it somewhere else,” he said. “And … um…” There was no good transition. “I’m sick. Too.”