Chapter Thirty
MAXIMO COULD FIND ANYONE. It was, in its way, the whole engine of his life.
A man with his money and his contacts could locate a debtor in Zurich, a witness who didn't want witnessing, a single container lost somewhere across an ocean.
Never in his life had he needed a thing he couldn't put his hands on.
He needed her. And she was gone.
He started with the hospitals because a transplant patient couldn't simply vanish, not really, not without the medicine that kept the borrowed heart from turning on her.
He made the calls himself, which was the first thing that would have told anyone who knew him how far past saving he'd gone.
Maximo, who had people for everything, sat at his own desk in the dark with a phone to his ear and a hold-line playing him tinny music, saying please to receptionists, spelling her name, a stranger with no right to ask.
But the records that would have told him where she'd gone were the one kind of door his money wouldn't open, sealed off behind laws written exactly to protect people from men like him.
They told him only the single thing they'd tell any stranger with no standing. No recipient by her name had died.
Alive, then. Somewhere. Taking her pills at a counter he would never get to stand at, in a kitchen he would never get to hear her sing in.
He tried the shelters because she was broke and proud and had left with two small suitcases and no cushion under her at all.
The casting offices too, the temp agencies, the diner with the dumplings, every callback room she'd ever laughed her way into.
He tried her mother, who took his call and his money both and offered him, in exchange, the information that she and Jassy weren't close, and had he thought to try the girl's friends.
As if a mother should ever have to ask a stranger that about her own child.
There were no friends. That was the part that took him apart on the floor.
She had let him learn her entire noisy life by living inside it, and the terrible thing under all the noise was that before him she had been almost entirely alone, and now she'd gone back to it on purpose, and she'd done it for no reason but to stop taking up room in his.
For two years he had guarded a locked door so nothing could ever get in and cost him again.
He understood now, far too late to spend the knowing on anything, that he had bricked up the wrong wall in the wrong place.
The thing he couldn't survive the loss of had never once been behind that door.
It had been out here the whole time, sitting on his kitchen floor laughing until it cried, filling every silent room he owned with a noise he hadn't known he was starving for.
And he had put it out on the curb himself and called the putting-out honor.
The man who could find anything sat in a home gone silent the old way, the dead way, and made himself say the true thing, since there was no one left to say it to.
He had been handed a whole life. He hadn't lost it the way he lost Mary, to the dark, with no say in the matter.
This one he had given away on purpose, and there was no container lost across any ocean that he wanted back a fraction as badly.