24. Mike
MIKE
Istare at my screens. Make six trades.
I almost clicked the wrong button twice.
I pick up the phone.
I dial Janet's number.
It rings twice. Voicemail.
I stare at the screen.
I dial again.
The number you have reached is not accepting calls at this time.
There it is.
I set the phone face down on the counter and finish the bourbon in one pull. Pour another. Don't drink it.
She blocked me.
I knew she would. Doesn't make it land any softer.
I go back to my screens.
My phone flashes, and I grab it immediately.
It's not her.
It's a text from Carla. We're picking Ryan up tomorrow at 1 pm.
We're parked outside the gate twenty minutes before he comes through.
My brother walks out of Coxsackie Correctional in a leather jacket that's a size too big and squints at the daylight.
He sees Carla, and something crosses his face that I haven't seen in five years.
He looks like a kid for about half a second.
Carla hits him hard; he stumbles. He laughs. Hugs her back with both arms and closes his eyes over her shoulder. I stand by the car and let them have it.
When he pulls back, he looks at me.
He grabs my hand and pulls me in. One of those half-hugs that turns into something real, whether you want it to or not. He smells like industrial soap and something I don't have a word for. Five years of somewhere I've never been.
"Thank you. I owe you."
"We're good," I say.
He looks at my Range Rover like he's deciding if he wants to buy it.
"Let's get out of here," he says.
We climb in.
"Sit in the front," my mother says. "Sit next to your brother."
He does.
I pull away from the curb. I watch him turn and look back as Coxsackie gets smaller behind us.
He talks the whole way back.
I expected that. Ryan has always filled space. In Queens, it was noise — music, people, deals moving through the apartment.
Ryan tells us about waiting.
Not days.
Years.
"The first year, you're counting months. Then you're counting parole boards. Then you're counting birthdays you missed. Eventually you stop counting because it doesn't matter."
Nobody says anything.
"You sit in a cell and think about five years from now. Then ten years. You realize people outside are getting married. Having kids. Buying houses. Everybody's life keeps moving, and yours doesn't."
He looks out the window.
"You know what prison is? It's waking up every morning and finding out the calendar's lying. It says Tuesday. Wednesday, Thursday. But it's the same day. Every day for the next twenty years."
My mother asks him how he got through it.
"You build little futures."
"What's that mean?"
"You tell yourself, next summer. Next hearing. Next appeal. Next lawyer. Next year. You keep moving the finish line because if you stop, that's when you think this is your life."
He rubs his hands together.
"The worst part isn't losing five years. It's sitting there with nothing but time to think about the people who put you there."
The car is quiet.
"Every day I thought about Janet Graham and Frank Liu."
My mother shifts in her seat.
He stares through the windshield.
"I'd think about what they were doing. Where they were eating. Whether they were sleeping good at night. Whether they ever thought about me sitting in that cell."
He laughs once.
"They got to move on. I didn't."
Nobody speaks.
"You know what five years gives you?"
"What?" I ask.
"Time."
"Time for what?"
He turns toward me.
"To decide what you're going to do when you get out."
The prison is gone now.
Ryan keeps looking in the mirror anyway.
"What are you going to do?" Carla asks.
"You know, Ma, you think you know, but I realized that the decisions you make on the inside of the wall are not the same as the ones on the outside. It all just changed."
Carla touches his arm from the back seat.
I drive and listen.
My mother made lasagna.
Ryan walks through the house slowly and touches things — the counter, the window frame, the faucet handle — like he's checking they're real.
We eat. Ryan eats like a man who's been waiting for it.
My mother keeps refilling his plate.
For a while, it's almost normal. Ryan puts his fork down and looks at me.
"Elliot says the bar hearing is in a couple of weeks."
I eat. "Are you going?"
"Oh yeah," Ryan says. "You should come too."
"Why?"
"Fuck with her for old times’ sake."
I keep my voice even. "I'll pass."
"Why's that?"
"I have more important shit to do than sit in court and watch that."
"What was it like being with her?" Ryan asks.
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean. What was she like?"
"This is what you want to know?"
"I want to know," he says.
"I did what I had to do."
Ryan laughs.
Carla nods. "You should go to court. I want her to see us all together."
"Frank Liu too," Ryan says. "Elliot's going after both of them. She's not getting away with it, Mike." He picks his fork back up. "Five years. She took five years."
"I agree."
Carla refills his glass.
After dinner, Ryan wants to go out.
"Let's go to the club," he says.
We go outside in front of the house. He looks around. The old neighborhood. Down the block there are two kids riding bicycles.
"A lot of dreams and plans, huh?"
"Yeah."
"It's almost pointless to make plans. It just turns on you."
We get in the car.
"Let's see some tits."
"The girls in my club may not be the kind of women you like."
"I like all kinds. I don't discriminate. What are they like? Classy?"
"They have careers if that's what you mean. Wall Street professionals."
"Pros not hoes," he laughs. "Janet must have fit right in."
Nocturne on a Thursday night is the version I'm most proud of. The right crowd. Money in the booths, a few tables of women who came downtown for something better than a sports bar, the bar itself lit warm and the music low enough that you can still have a conversation.
Ryan steps inside and stops.
He takes it in slowly. The booths. The bar. The bottles lined up behind the glass. The people.
"This is yours," he says.
"All of it."
He nods. Something moves across his face that I can't read. Pride, maybe. Something else underneath it.
Nico appears at my shoulder the way he always does. Quiet, precise, reading the room before anyone's said a word.
"Ryan," I say. "This is Nico Reyes. He runs security. We served together."
Ryan looks at him. Nico looks back.
They shake hands.
"Welcome home."
We take a booth. Ryan orders top-shelf without looking at the menu and leans back and watches the room the way I've seen him watch rooms his whole life. Measuring. Calculating. Figuring out what's what and who's who and where the angles are.
I think about what Nico would say about that if I asked him.
I don't ask. Because I know.
We drink for an hour. Ryan leans across the table.
"I need to get laid."
"I can't help you with that."
He looks at Nico. "Mr. Security?" he says.
"Not in here," Nico answers.
"You guys believe that? No whores in here?"
"Nope," Nico says.
"You want me to prove it?"
"Don't fuck around in here."
"Mike." He grins. The Ryan grin. The one that used to mean trouble when we were seventeen and still means exactly that. "I'm going to go find some pussy. You coming?"
"I have to stay here and work." I take five hundred cash from my wallet and hand it to him. "Have a good time."
"Thanks bro."
He finishes his drink. Slides out of the booth. Claps me on the shoulder hard, it lands like a message.
"Nico, it's a pleasure. We'll meet again."
"Take care," Nico says.
He's gone. Threading through the crowd toward the door without looking back.
I sit in the booth alone.
Nico doesn't say anything right away. The music moves through the room. Someone at the bar laughs too loud.
"Well," Nico says.
"Don't."
"I'm not saying anything."
"Good."
"Cause you already know."
I don't answer.
"Hey. I thought you broke up with that girl?"
"Janet? Why?"
"She came by."
"Janet was here?"
"She stood across the street down the block. She didn't know it but I clocked her."