Later Read online

  “We’re good.”

  “No more tears, Jamie. Just sweet dreams and—”

  “Pleasant repose, all the bed and all the clothes,” I finished.

  “Yeah yeah yeah.” She kissed my forehead and left. Leaving the door open a little bit, as she always did.

  I didn’t want to tell her it wasn’t the funeral that had made me cry, and it wasn’t Mrs. Burkett, either, because she wasn’t scary. Most of them aren’t. But the bicycle man in Central Park scared the shit out of me. He was gooshy.

  5

  We were on the 86th Street Transverse, heading for Wave Hill in the Bronx, where one of my preschool friends was having a big birthday party. (“Talk about spoiling a kid rotten,” Mom said.) I had my present to give Lily in my lap. We went around a curve and saw a bunch of people standing in the street. The accident must have just happened. A man was lying half on the pavement and half on the sidewalk with a twisted-up bicycle beside him. Someone had put a jacket over his top half. His bottom half was wearing black bike shorts with red stripes up the sides, and a knee brace, and sneakers with blood all over them. It was on his socks and legs, too. We could hear approaching sirens.

  Standing next to him was the same man in the same bike shorts and knee brace. He had white hair with blood in it. His face was caved in right down the middle, I think maybe from where he hit the curb. His nose was like in two pieces and so was his mouth.

  Cars were stopping and my mother said, “Close your eyes.” It was the man lying on the ground she was looking at, of course.

  “He’s dead!” I started to cry. “That man is dead!”

  We stopped. We had to. Because of the other cars in front of us.

  “No, he’s not,” Mom said. “He’s asleep, that’s all. It’s what happens sometimes when someone gets banged hard. He’ll be fine. Now close your eyes.”

  I didn’t. The smashed-up man raised a hand and waved at me. They know when I see them. They always do.

  “His face is in two pieces!”

  Mom looked again to be sure, saw the man was covered down to his waist, and said, “Stop scaring yourself, Jamie. Just close your—”

  “He’s there!” I pointed. My finger was trembling. Everything was trembling. “Right there, standing next to himself!”

  That scared her. I could tell by the way her mouth got all tight. She laid on her horn with one hand. With the other she pushed the button that rolled down her window and started waving at the cars ahead of her. “Go!” she shouted. “Move! Stop staring at him, for Christ’s sake, this isn’t a fucking movie!”

  They did, except for the one right in front of her. That guy was leaning over and taking a picture with his phone. Mom pulled up and bumped his fender. He gave her the bird. My mother backed up and pulled into the other lane to go around. I wish I’d also given him the bird, but I was too freaked out.

  Mom barely missed a police car coming the other way and drove for the far side of the park as fast as she could. She was almost there when I unbuckled my seatbelt. Mom yelled at me not to do that but I did it anyway and buzzed down my window and kneeled on the seat and leaned out and blew groceries all down the side of the car. I couldn’t help it. When we got to the Central Park West side, Mom pulled over and wiped off my face with the sleeve of her blouse. She might have worn that blouse again, but if she did I don’t remember it.

  “God, Jamie. You’re white as a sheet.”

  “I couldn’t help it,” I said. “I never saw anyone like that before. There were bones sticking right out of his no-nose—” Then I ralphed again, but managed to get most of that one on the street instead of on our car. Plus there wasn’t as much.

  She stroked my neck, ignoring someone (maybe the man who gave us the finger) who honked at us and drove around our car. “Honey, that’s just your imagination. He was covered up.”

  “Not the one on the ground, the one standing beside him. He waved at me.”

  She stared at me for a long time, seemed like she was going to say something, then just buckled my seatbelt. “I think maybe we should skip the party. How does that sound to you?”

  “Good,” I said. “I don’t like Lily anyway. She sneaky-pinches me during Story Time.”

  We went home. Mom asked me if I could keep down a cup of cocoa and I said I could. We drank cocoa together in the living room. I still had Lily’s present. It was a little doll in a sailor suit. When I gave it to Lily the next week, instead of sneaky-pinching me, she gave me a kiss right on the mouth. I got teased about that and never minded a bit.

  While we were drinking our cocoa (she might have put a little something extra in hers), Mom said, “I promised myself when I was pregnant that I’d never lie to my kid, so here goes. Yeah, that guy was probably dead.” She paused. “No, he was dead. I don’t think even a bike helmet would have saved him, and I didn’t see one.”

  No, he wasn’t wearing a helmet. Because if he’d been wearing it when he got hit (it was a taxi that did it, we found out), he would have been wearing it as he stood beside his body. They’re always wearing what they had on when they died.

  “But you only imagined you saw his face, honey. You couldn’t have. Someone covered him up with a jacket. Someone very kind.”

  “He was wearing a tee-shirt with a lighthouse on it,” I said. Then I thought of something else. It was only a little bit cheery, but after something like that, I guess you take what you can get. “At least he was pretty old.”

  “Why do you say that?” She was looking at me oddly. Looking back on it, I think that was when she started to believe, at least a little bit.

  “His hair was white. Except for the parts with the blood in it, that is.”

  I started to cry again. My mother hugged me and rocked me and I went to sleep while she was doing it. I tell you what, there’s nothing like having a mother around when you’re thinking of scary shit.

  We got the Times delivered to our door. My mother usually read it at the table in her bathrobe while we ate breakfast, but the day after the Central Park man she was reading one of her manuscripts instead. When breakfast was over, she told me to get dressed and maybe we’d ride the Circle Line, so it must have been a Saturday. I remember thinking it was the first weekend the Central Park man was dead in. That made it real all over again.

  I did what she said, but first I went into her bedroom while she was in the shower. The newspaper was on the bed, open to the page where they put dead folks who are famous enough for the Times. The picture of the Central Park man was there. His name was Robert Harrison. At four I was already reading at a third-grade level, my mother was very proud of that, and there were no tough words in the headline of the story, which was all I read: CEO OF LIGHTHOUSE FOUNDATION DIES IN TRAFFIC ACCIDENT.

  I saw a few more dead people after that—the saying about how in life we are in death is truer than most people know—and sometimes I said something to Mom, but mostly I didn’t because I could see it upset her. It wasn’t until Mrs. Burkett died and Mom found her rings in the closet that we really talked about it again.

  That night after she left my room I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep, and if I did I would dream about the Central Park man with his split-open face and bones sticking out of his nose, or about my mother in her coffin, but also sitting on the steps to the pulpit, where only I could see her. But so far as I can remember, I didn’t dream about anything. I got up the next morning feeling good, and Mom was feeling good, and we joked around like we sometimes did, and she stuck my turkey on the fridge and then put a big smackeroo on it, which made me giggle, and she walked me to school, and Mrs. Tate told us about dinosaurs, and life went on for two years in the good ways it usually did. Until, that is, everything fell apart.

  6

  When Mom realized how bad things were, I heard her talking to Anne Staley, her editor friend, about Uncle Harry on the phone. Mom said, “He was soft even before he went soft. I realize that now.”

  At six I wouldn’t have had a clue. But
by then I was eight going on nine, and I understood, at least partly. She was talking about the mess her brother had gotten himself—and her—into even before the early-onset Alzheimer’s carried off his brains like a thief in the night.

  I agreed with her, of course; she was my mother, and it was us against the world, a team of two. I hated Uncle Harry for the jam we were in. It wasn’t until later, when I was twelve or maybe even fourteen, that I realized my mother was also partly to blame. She might have been able to get out while there was still time, probably could have, but she didn’t. Like Uncle Harry, who founded the Conklin Literary Agency, she knew a lot about books but not enough about money.

  She even got two warnings. One was from her friend Liz Dutton. Liz was an NYPD detective, and a great fan of Regis Thomas’s Roanoke series. Mom met her at a launch party for one of those books, and they clicked. Which turned out to be not so good. I’ll get to it, but for now I’ll just say that Liz told my mother that the Mackenzie Fund was too good to be true. This might have been around the time Mrs. Burkett died, I’m not sure about that, but I know it was before the fall of 2008, when the economy went belly-up. Including our part of it.

  Uncle Harry used to play racquetball at some fancy club near Pier 90, where the big boats dock. One of the friends he played with was a Broadway producer who told him about the Mackenzie Fund. The friend called it a license to coin money, and Uncle Harry took him seriously about that. Why wouldn’t he? The friend had produced like a bazillion musicals that ran on Broadway for a bazillion years, plus also all over the country, and the royalties just poured in. (I knew exactly what royalties were—I was a literary agent’s kid.)

  Uncle Harry checked it out, talked to some big bug who worked for the Fund (although not to James Mackenzie himself, because Uncle Harry was just a small bug in the great scheme of things), and put in a bunch of money. The returns were so good that he put in more. And more. When he got the Alzheimer’s—and he went downhill really fast—my mother took over all the accounts, and she not only stuck with the Mackenzie Fund, she put even more money into it.

  Monty Grisham, the lawyer who helped with contracts back then, not only told her not to put in more, he told her to get out while the getting was good. That was the other warning she got, and not long after she took over the Conklin Agency. He also said that if a thing looked too good to be true, it probably was.

  I’m telling you everything I found out in little driblets and drablets—like that overheard conversation between Mom and her editor pal. I’m sure you get that, and I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that the Mackenzie Fund was actually a big fat Ponzi scheme. The way it worked was Mackenzie and his merry band of thieves took in mega-millions and paid back big percentage returns while skimming off most of the investment dough. They kept it going by roping in new investors, telling each one how special he or she was because only a select few were allowed into the Fund. The select few, it turned out, were thousands, everyone from Broadway producers to wealthy widows who stopped being wealthy almost overnight.

  A scheme like that depends on investors being happy with their returns and not only leaving their initial investments in the Fund but putting in more. It worked okay for awhile, but when the economy crashed in 2008, almost everybody in the Fund asked for their money back and the money wasn’t there. Mackenzie was a piker compared to Madoff, the king of Ponzi schemes, but he gave old Bern a run for his money; after taking in over twenty billion dollars, all he had in the Mackenzie accounts was a measly fifteen million. He went to jail, which was satisfying, but as Mom sometimes said, “Grits ain’t groceries and revenge don’t pay the bills.”

  “We’re okay, we’re okay,” she told me when Mackenzie started showing up on all the news channels and in the Times. “Don’t worry, Jamie.” But the circles under her eyes said that she was plenty worried, and she had plenty of reasons to be.

  Here’s more of what I found out later: Mom only had about two hundred grand in assets she could put her hands on, and that included the insurance policies on her and me. What she had on the liability side of the ledger, you don’t want to know. Just remember our apartment was on Park Avenue, the agency office was on Madison Avenue, and the extended care home where Uncle Harry was living (“If you can call that living,” I can hear my mother adding) was in Pound Ridge, which is about as expensive as it sounds.

  Closing the office on Madison was Mom’s first move. After that she worked out of the Palace on Park, at least for awhile. She paid some rent in advance by cashing in those insurance policies I mentioned, including her brother’s, but that would only last eight or ten months. She rented Uncle Harry’s place in Speonk. She sold the Range Rover (“We don’t really need a car in the city anyway, Jamie,” she said) and a bunch of first edition books, including a signed Thomas Wolfe of Look Homeward, Angel. She cried over that one and said she didn’t get half of what it was worth, because the rare book market was also in the toilet, thanks to a bunch of sellers as desperate for cash as she was. Our Andrew Wyeth painting went, too. And every day she cursed James Mackenzie for the thieving, money-grubbing, motherfucking, cock-sucking, bleeding hemorrhoid on legs that he was. Sometimes she also cursed Uncle Harry, saying he’d be living behind a garbage dumpster by the end of the year and it would serve him right. And, to be fair, later on she cursed herself for not listening to Liz and Monty.

  “I feel like the grasshopper who played all summer instead of working,” she said to me one night. January or February of 2009, I think. By then Liz was staying over sometimes, but not that night. That might have been the first time I noticed there were threads of gray in my mom’s pretty red hair. Or maybe I remember because she started to cry and it was my turn to comfort her, even though I was just a little kid and didn’t really know how to do it.

  That summer we moved out of the Palace on Park and into a much smaller place on Tenth Avenue. “Not a dump,” Mom said, “and the price is right.” Also: “I’ll be damned if I’ll move out of the city. That would be waving the white flag. I’d start losing clients.”

  The agency moved with us, of course. The office was in what I suppose would have been my bedroom if things hadn’t been so fucking dire. My room was an alcove adjacent to the kitchen. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but at least it smelled good. I think it used to be the pantry.

  She moved Uncle Harry to a facility in Bayonne. The less said about that place the better. The only good thing about it, I suppose, was that poor old Uncle Harry didn’t know where he was, anyway; he would have pissed his pants just as much if he’d been in the Beverly Hilton.

  Other things I remember about 2009 and 2010: My mother stopped getting her hair done. She stopped lunching with friends and only lunched with clients of the agency if she really had to (because she was the one who always got stuck with the check). She didn’t buy many new clothes, and the ones she did buy were from discount stores. And she started drinking more wine. A lot more. There were nights when she and her friend Liz—the Regis Thomas fan and detective I told you about—would get pretty soused together. The next day Mom would be red-eyed and snappy, puttering around in her office in her pajamas. Sometimes she’d sing, “Crappy days are here again, the skies are fucking drear again.” On those days it was a relief to go to school. A public school, of course; my private school days were over, thanks to James Mackenzie.

  There were a few rays of light in all that gloom. The rare book market might have been in the shithouse, but people were reading regular books again—novels to escape and self-help books because, let’s face it, in 2009 and ’10, a lot of people needed to help themselves. Mom was always a big mystery reader, and she had been building up that part of the Conklin stable ever since taking over for Uncle Harry. She had ten or maybe even a dozen mystery authors. They weren’t big-ticket guys and gals, but their fifteen percent brought in enough to pay the rent and keep the lights on in our new place.

  Plus, there was Jane Reynolds, a librarian from North Caro
lina. Her novel, a mystery titled Dead Red, came in over the transom, and Mom just raved about it. There was an auction for who would get to publish it. All the big companies took part, and the rights ended up selling for two million dollars. Three hundred thousand of those scoots were ours, and my mother began to smile again.

  “It will be a long time before we get back to Park Avenue,” she said, “and we’ve got a lot of climbing to do before we get out of the hole Uncle Harry dug for us, but we just might make it.”

  “I don’t want to go back to Park Avenue anyway,” I said. “I like it here.”

  She smiled and hugged me. “You’re my little love.” She held me at arms’ length and studied me. “Not so little anymore, either. Do you know what I’m hoping, kiddo?”

  I shook my head.

  “That Jane Reynolds turns out to be a book-a-year babe. And that the movie of Dead Red gets made. Even if neither of those things happen, there’s good old Regis Thomas and his Roanoke Saga. He’s the jewel in our crown.”

  Only Dead Red turned out to be like a final flash of sunlight before a big storm moves in. The movie never got made, and the publishers who bid on the book got it wrong, as they sometimes do. The book flopped, which didn’t hurt us financially—the money was paid—but other stuff happened and that three hundred grand vanished like dust in the wind.

  First, Mom’s wisdom teeth went to hell and got infected. She had to have them all pulled. That was bad. Then Uncle Harry, troublesome Uncle Harry, still not fifty years old, tripped in the Bayonne care facility and fractured his skull. That was a lot worse.

  Mom talked to the lawyer who helped her with book contracts (and took a healthy bite of our agency fee for his trouble). He recommended another lawyer who specialized in liability and negligence suits. That lawyer said we had a good case, and maybe we did, but before the case got anywhere near a courtroom, the Bayonne facility declared bankruptcy. The only one who made money out of that was the fancy slip-and-fall lawyer, who banked just shy of forty thousand dollars.