28. Jeremiah
JEREMIAH
Chapter playlist:
Money for Nothing — Sultans
America the Beautiful — Leslie Odom Jr.
Iset the mug down on the kitchen island and look out at the backyard, at the pool I haven’t had the time to use yet, at a sky so clean and blue it looks like a movie.
October in Southern California. The locals call it "locals' summer," not too hot.
Not too cold. The tourists have gone home and taken the crowds with them, so a guy can show up to a beach on a Tuesday and have four hundred yards of sand to himself.
I’ve got the day off today. Fall camp wrapped, the season’s three games in, and Irvine is two and one, which is not nothing for a brand-new expansion team.
Coach runs a tighter room than Corpus Christi ever did, and I like it.
I like my teammates. I like the equipment staff who remember how I tape my sticks without being told twice.
It’s been an adjustment, learning how to vibe with a new roster, but it’s a good one.
I’m a little tired today. I could stay on this couch and play video games until my thumbs go numb. Or I could drive down to the beach and do absolutely nothing productive with sand between my toes.
Or I could think about her again, which is what I actually end up doing no matter which one I pick. I’ve been thinking about her nonstop for three months.
My cousins have been a good distraction.
Nate and Memo are closest to me here in Orange County.
Memo has a lot of responsibilities at the Abbey which gives him a little free time for a movie or ice cream every now and then, but I have lunch with Nate about once a week.
He’s in Laguna Beach, which is right down the coast from my house in Newport.
Nacho, Dante, Roman, and the rest of the wild cousins and tíos are a little further drive from me in LA.
But it’s still closer than family has been since I left home for college all those years ago.
My mother is a different story. Burbank isn’t far, geographically.
She still hasn’t driven down to Orange County once.
I went to one of her press events last month instead, stood next to her for eleven photos while she introduced me as “my son, the Olympian,” like she’d had anything to do with my success.
It made her happy. Or it made the headline happy. Hard to tell those apart with her.
She can’t hurt me anymore. I’ve said that to myself enough times now that I mostly believe it. I’m an adult now. I’ve put the past behind me. All forgiven. All forgotten.
Erica is the one I can’t talk myself into forgetting.
I haven’t heard from her since the night of the gala. It still lands somewhere between grief and dread every single morning, like my chest hasn’t gotten the memo that this is just what my life is now.
But I still check every day. I scan the internet for DC news searches. Robberies. Missing jewelry. Nothing, nothing, nothing, for months.
Until three weeks ago, I stumbled upon this article:
Recovered Nazi art and diamonds worth over $200 million, turned in anonymously.
Sources point to a vault at the Four Seasons in DC.
Removed sometime in July. The details stay vague on purpose, the article said, though plenty of people online were happy to speculate.
Vigilantes. Fortune hunters. Lots of comments joking to check on George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s whereabouts in July.
Then I went down the internet rabbit hole for the next few days. Every post and article was just variations of the other.
Three lost paintings hang in the Met now, one of the biggest Nazi-art recoveries in history. The diamonds believed to be Nazi loot, linked to descendants of a WW2 German general, now living in Argentina.
Argentina. The couple with German accents at the gala. From there, I began running my own personal inventory of every strange thing I noticed about my time with Erica. Nothing about that woman ever fully added up.
That time she just so happened to be at the Four Seasons, wearing a suit and tie.
Her hair was slicked back into a tight bun, and she kept looking over her shoulder.
I thought she was just being cute. How she said she had a “friend” staying at the hotel.
Zoe, pushing that housekeeping cart. Then there was that thing Erica said to me the last night I’d seen her.
“It’s already in motion. I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to.”
I know in my gut it was her.
I scoured the internet for America Armitage.
I searched her birthdate, did a reverse image search from pictures taken on the red carpet.
All that came up was one grainy yearbook photo from a high school in Brooklyn and nothing else, like she’d been erased on purpose.
Then, because apparently I have no self-preservation instinct where she’s concerned, I went further and found a six-year-old article about an attempted theft of the Friendship Jewel at the Bellenden Museum six years ago.
I need help.
I think about her every day, even doing mundane tasks, like going to the post office.
Or when I go to get frozen bananas on Balboa Island and think, she’d inhale three of these before I finished my first bite.
Or that record store in Laguna she would’ve had opinions about.
Or when I pass the Great Park on the freeway and think about taking her up on that big orange hot air balloon.
How they transform it into a jack-o’-lantern face for the month of October.
How, for the rest of my life, the Fourth of July will never be the same.
I finish my coffee. It’s cold now.
I need to get out of this house before I spend another day narrating my own heartbreak to an empty kitchen. I grab my keys off the hook by the garage door, then change my mind and head for the front instead. Maybe a walk will do me some good.
I open the door and every plan I had for the day flies out of my brain. For a second, I just stand there, not believing my eyes.
There’s a yellow Lamborghini parked crooked at my curb. It is… a very aggressive yellow. And Erica is leaning against the side like she’s been expecting me to walk out of my house any minute.
She looks better than anything I’ve built up in my head for three months, which is saying something, because I’ve built up a lot.
I don’t stop to think or decide anything. My legs just go.
“You’re here.”
I kiss her before she can answer, both hands finding her face like I need to confirm she’s real.
She kisses me back immediately, her hands fisting in my shirt and pulling me in like she’s been missing me just as long.
She’s leaning against the car, and I press her into it, one hand sliding to the small of her back, and every rational thought I’ve had since July evaporates.
“I thought I’d lost you,” I say against her mouth, and I don’t care how that sounds. “I thought that was it.”
“I’m sorry.” She says it between kisses, breathless, her fingers finding the back of my neck. “I’m here. I’m here.”
I kiss her jaw, her cheekbone, back to her mouth, and my heart is racing. Her hands are shaking a little, or mine are, I honestly can’t tell whose pulse I’m feeling anymore.
Then someone clears their throat behind me.
It doesn’t register the first time. Then they clear their throat again, this time louder and pointed.
I pull back. Erica’s lips are pink and her eyes are wide as she looks over my shoulder. There’s a middle-aged man standing on the sidewalk behind me with his arms crossed.
“Do you mind getting off my car?”
I look at Erica. Erica looks at me.
“This isn’t your car?” I say to her.
“I thought it was yours.”
We both start laughing at the same time, right there at the curb, and the man watches us like a father who’d caught his teenaged daughter kissing the school bad boy.
“Sorry, man.” I raise a hand at him. “I’ll pay to have it waxed.”
He runs a palm along the door panel, checking for scratches. “It’s all good. Just…” He looks at us. “Maybe less PDA next time?”
“You got it, neighbor.”
I get Erica inside before either of us can embarrass ourselves further.
“He was pretty chill,” she says once the door shuts behind us.
“It’s the perfect weather. Nobody’s uptight out here.” I glance at her. “Mostly.”
She’s already tipping her head back, taking in the vaulted ceiling, the curved staircase, the kind of house that looks bigger from the inside than the outside promised. I watch her circle slowly in the entryway.
“If I had a flashy car like that I wouldn’t park it on the street,” she says.
“What else would you do with your millions?”
“What millions? I’ve got twenty bucks in my checking account.”
“You’re telling me the art and the diamonds weren’t part of the Armitage Seven job?”
She squints at me. “The Armitage Seven?”
“It has a ring to it. There were seven of you, right?”
“I’m partial to the Precio Two.”
Something in my chest does a slow, stupid flip.
“You’re changing the subject.”
“Am I?”
“I read every article. Watched every news segment about the World War Two loot. Turning that in was the right thing to do.”
She shrugs, easy, like it’s nothing. “Wasn’t my call. My girls are morally pink.”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t keep some for yourself. A few diamonds. No one would be the wiser.”
“I didn’t want any of it. Plus, it’s hard to fence stuff like that.” She continues inside my house, looking around. “They did get a no-questions-asked finder’s fee, though.”
“A finder’s fee.”
“Yep. I raised my chickens right.”
“How much?” I’m too curious for my own good. Also, I’ve seen National Treasure. I was always a little peeved at the Nicolas Cage character when he didn’t even consult his partner before turning down a bigger sum.
“My lips are sealed.”
“Yeah?” I catch her by the waist. “Bring those lips over here, then.”
I kiss her until she’s laughing into it, until she finally tips her head back.
“Fine. Ten percent.”
I do the math out loud. “Ten percent of two hundred five million. Divided by six is…” I pause. “3.4 million each.”
“Give or take.” She lifts one shoulder.
“And you took none of it?”