the warrior and you had the guru, you had the whole package, they were hard and they were straight and they were fast. Wicked. Even after so many nights on the road, they seemed a little amazed that they were here. They were amazed, and they were grateful, and they soaked their shirts. Those who followed them from town to town witnessed a slight but perceptible maturity of sound, a compression. They responded to one another; they began to breathe together. The singer went, “One, two, three, go!” And the band did.
Eighteen
For fifteen years, every letter that Ravi Milan received was from his son. If the address was handwritten, or the sender’s name unfamiliar, or if the letter was forwarded from the post office, Ravi maintained a hope, until the seal was broken, that the contents of the envelope would lead him to Edward. The letter he’d retrieved from the mailbox that June evening, postmarked New York, New York, had been no different, but he had never imagined that the news, when he finally received it, would be of his son’s death.
This letter had been followed rapidly by two others, to which Ravi had made his swift, somber, and increasingly concise replies. Then came a short period of silence. By the time he heard from Johnny again, by phone, he had been able, for some hours of the day, to put Edward out of his mind. He had a new wife to distract him, and her two lunatic Pomeranians, and the hibiscus hedge they were putting in, and, at the office, countless cases involving other people’s doomed families, including the divorce of a couple who, after spending months torturing Ravi’s answering machine with details of the other’s affairs, cocaine binges, and shopping sprees, decided that they wanted to remarry. He had all but forgotten that, in his last letter to the boy, in his grief-stricken desire to keep his son in his life, he’d written, “If you ever find yourself in Miami, I hope you’ll call.”
He recognized Johnny—no longer a boy, but a full-grown man—as soon as he entered the restaurant. Ravi was unfashionably early and was already nearing the bottom of his first Manhattan. Should he have invited him over to the house instead? He’d worried that his decision to forgo a tie was too casual—with his navy blazer, he’d chosen his gold anchor cuff links—but Johnny was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, like an American film actor from the fifties. He was also wearing earrings and an eye-catching assortment of tattoos, but there was no doubt in Ravi’s mind: he was the little boy he had loved for a short time, and had sheltered in his home, before Bonnie Michaels had run off with him and with their son.
“I thought even vegetarians ate fish these days,” Ravi said once they had dispensed with their hellos and their orders. He’d chosen a seafood place on the bay, with tanks of lobsters and rafters cobwebbed with fishing nets.
“Not this one,” Johnny said, but his smile was meant to reassure. Ravi could tell already he was a good kid. Tattoos or no, Bonnie or no, he’d done well for himself.
“So, tell me about this rock band,” Ravi said, as though Johnny were his stepson, and they were meeting for their weekly meal together. They had a lifetime to catch up on, but the conversation had settled on the present. Neither one of them seemed anxious to overturn the facts of Edward’s life and death, which had already been exhumed, examined, and buried again during their brief exchange of letters. Johnny had written that Edward—Johnny called him Teddy, an infantile name—had died of a drug overdose. This just after Bonnie—who now called herself Beatrice McNicholas—had left the town they were living in, Lintonburg, Vermont, which had followed six or seven other hamlets of similar camouflage. And this just after Johnny, in response to Edward’s questions about his father, had threatened to help find him, sending Bonnie running again. The fact that his son had wanted to know him was a sour comfort, like the taste of a red wine turned to vinegar.
In a manila envelope, Ravi had sent Johnny the mementos, carefully copied on the office machine, that had lived in a shoe box for so many years. HOUSEKEEPER SNATCHES SON? from the local section of the Herald, the question mark that had embittered Ravi more than any epithet; police reports detailing the search for the missing child Edward Michaels; and