named Jesus, even if it is pronounced Hay-soos.
“I loved his dreads,” I said. “They were cool.”
“He called to tell me Liz lost her job.” Mom and Liz had been quits a long time by then, but Mom still looked sad. “She finally got caught transporting drugs. Quite a lot of heroin, Jesus says.”
It hit me hard. Liz hadn’t been good for my mother after awhile, and she sure as shit hadn’t been good for me, but it was still a bummer. I remembered her tickling me until I almost wet my pants, and sitting between her and Mom on the couch, all of us making stupid cracks about the shows, and the time she took me to the Bronx Zoo and bought me a cone of cotton candy bigger than my head. Also, don’t forget that she saved fifty or maybe even a hundred lives that would have been lost if Thumper’s last bomb had gone off. Her motivation might have been good or bad, but those lives were saved either way.
That overheard phrase from their last argument came to me. Serious weight, Mom had said. “She isn’t going to jail, is she?”
Mom said, “Well, she’s out on bail now, Jesus said, but in the end…I think there’s a good chance she will, honey.”
“Oh, fuck.” I thought of Liz in an orange jumpsuit, like the women in that Netflix show my mother sometimes watched.
She took my hand. “Right right right.”
54
It was two or three weeks later when Liz kidnapped me. You could say she did that the first time, with Therriault, but you could call that a “soft snatch.” This time it was the real deal. She didn’t force me into her car kicking and screaming, but she still forced me. Which makes it kidnapping as far as I’m concerned.
I was on the tennis team, and on my way home from a bunch of practice matches (which our coach called “heats,” for some dumb reason). I had my pack on my back and my tennis duffle in one hand. I was headed for the bus stop and saw a woman leaning against a beat-up Toyota and looking at her phone. I walked past without a second glance. It never occurred to me that this scrawny chick—straw-blonde hair blowing around the collar of an unzipped duffle coat, oversized gray sweatshirt, beat-up cowboy boots disappearing into baggy jeans—was my mom’s old friend. My mom’s old friend had favored tapered slacks in dark colors and low-cut silk blouses. My mom’s old friend wore her hair slicked back and pulled into a short stump of ponytail. My mom’s old friend had looked healthy.
“Hey, Champ, not even a howya doin for an old friend?”
I stopped and turned back. For a moment I still didn’t recognize her. Her face was bony and pale. There were blemishes, untouched by makeup, dotting her forehead. All the curves I’d admired—in a little-boy way, granted—were gone. The baggy sweatshirt beneath the coat showed only a hint of what had been generous breasts. At a guess, I’d say she was forty or even fifty pounds lighter and looked twenty years older.
“Liz?”
“None other.” She gave me a smile, then obscured it by wiping her nose with the heel of her hand. Strung out, I thought. She’s strung out.
“How are you?”
Maybe not the wisest question, but the only one I could think of under the circumstances. And I was careful to keep what I considered to be a safe distance from her, so I could outrun her if she tried anything weird. Which seemed like a possibility, because she looked weird. Not like actors pretending to be drug addicts on TV but like the real ones you saw from time to time, nodding out on park benches or in the doorways of abandoned buildings. I guess New York is a lot better than it used to be, but dopers are still an occasional part of the scenery.
“How do I look?” Then she laughed, but not in a happy way. “Don’t answer that. But hey, we did a mitzvah once upon a time, didn’t we? I deserved more credit for that than I got, but what the hell, we saved a bunch of lives.”
I thought of all I’d been through because of her. And it wasn’t just because of Therriault, either. She had fucked up my mom’s life, too. Liz Dutton had put us both through a bad time, and here she was again. A bad penny, turning up when you least expected it.