Joe Schreiber - Perry's killer playlist

“What’s that?”

“She’s wearing a bulletproof vest up there, saving her life, and the whole time it was the tumor that was killing her.”

He started to say something, and I turned my bad ear back toward him. When he saw me do that, he walked straight in front of me, blocking the TV set.

“Listen, Perry. Maybe we got off on the wrong foot. Maybe you got a rough lesson in gunboat diplomacy-who knows?” He shrugged. “That part I asked you before about her… I was just being polite. I already talked to the neurosurgeons. They said she’s in a coma.”

“Induced,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s an induced coma. It’s what they do to protect higher brain function during and immediately after major neurosurgery.”

“Somebody’s been reading his Wikipedia.”

I switched off the TV and looked at him. “Why are you here?”

“As a matter of fact…” He sighed and sat down next to me, plucking at the seams of his suit pants. “I want to help.”

“Unless you can give me back the hearing in my left ear or…”-I almost said “save my parents’ marriage”-“undo what happened here, you’re pretty useless to me.”

“I never said I wanted to help you personally,” Nolan said. “Although in this particular situation, I might be in the position to do so.” He opened his briefcase and took out a thick stack of official-looking documents, some of them in English, others in French. “Nobody knows how your little Lithuanian princess is going to come out of surgery, or if she’s going to come out at all. Even the docs say it’s too soon to tell. But one thing’s for sure: At the end of the day, somebody’s gonna get stuck with a hell of a hospital bill. We’re talking millions in rehab, all that shit. She’ll be in debt for the rest of her life.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “You can take care of that.”

“The agency could. Probably.” He was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. “In exchange for certain considerations.”

“Forget it,” I said.

“Easy, kid. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At this point we don’t even know if she’s going to make it. And if she does?” Another shrug. “She might not be able to shoot straight. But we’re willing to take that risk.”

“That’s big of you.”

“Hey, like I said, we do what we can. In any case, in the spirit of starting over, I want to just let you know, Uncle Sam’s got this one. Whatever it takes to get her back on her feet.” He grinned. “Alive and kicking, am I right?”

“Agent Nolan.”

“Yeah, kid?”

“And I mean this from the bottom of my heart-”

“Yeah?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

He snapped his briefcase shut and stood up.

“That’s not friendly, Perry.” His voice was cordial but just barely, as if every word was costing him a little bit of dignity. “I extended the hand of friendship and you just pissed on it.”

“Maybe I was just practicing some gunboat diplomacy.”

“Hey, no harm, no foul.” Now his grin was tighter, narrower, seeming to flatten out the broad planes of his face. “No matter who pays, we’re on her. You know that, right? If Zusane Zaksauskas does walk out of here, there’s not a place on this planet that she can hide from us. She’s ours for life.”

“Lucky her.”

He snorted and started for the door. What stopped him was the surgeon in scrubs and a mask and hairnet standing in the entryway. He glanced at Nolan, and then at me.

“Perry?” the doctor said.

I stood up, felt my heart vault upward into my throat. “Yes?”

“I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”

I stared at him, and Nolan stared at him, and I could feel the air molecules in the room fall absolutely motionless around us.

“We did everything we could,” the surgeon said, “but she never recovered consciousness after the operation. I am very sorry.”

Nolan sighed and shook his head, then looked back at me. “Sorry about that, kid. Like I said before, though, it’s probably for the best.”

After he left, the surgeon took off his mask and looked at me.

“I thought you told me you weren’t a doctor,” I said.

“What is your American saying?” Erich tapped his finger against his head. “‘I play one on TV’?”

“So Gobi…”

“The body seems to have mysteriously disappeared. Or soon will.”

“I take it you’ll be making the proper arrangements?”

“Ja,” Erich said. “Is already taken care of.”

The day after Gobija Zaksauskas was officially declared dead for the second time in her life, her remains whisked away from the hospital morgue by persons unknown, my mom and Annie and I flew back to the States. My dad stayed in Paris to catch a later flight. How much later remained to be seen. He didn’t tell us, and nobody asked.

Walking through customs at JFK, Mom stopped and looked at the Christmas tree in the international terminal.

“We missed Thanksgiving,” she said, in a funny voice, like she was just now realizing how far away we’d been. I knew how she felt. America sounded loud and frantic in my one good ear, people running, shouting, flights being announced in a barrage of noise and information. All around us, time had passed, and we’d been plunged right back into the flow again, trying to get our balance.

Then, like that, it was December.

Annie and I spent a lot of time at home over the next few weeks, going to movies, playing board games, wrapping Christmas presents, and downloading holiday music. Even the most normal, boring American things felt reassuring somehow, like they were anchoring us into place.

Nobody said much about my dad. I tried to say something once or twice to Annie about it, but she didn’t seem to want to talk, so I let it go. My mom said she didn’t care about getting a tree this year, so Annie and I went out and brought one home ourselves on top of the Volvo while she was at work. Norrie, Caleb, and Sasha came over and helped us decorate it, stringing popcorn and cranberries because Annie had always wanted to do that. We practiced some of the new material and even did a couple of Christmas songs with Annie singing the background vocals on “Santa Claus Is Back in Town.” Mom said it sounded nice, but it was in that distracted kind of voice that could have been referring to anything, or nothing at all. She was being too quiet, spending too much time alone, but there didn’t seem to be any way to mention it.

Two weeks after our arrival back in New York, Chow came home from Berkeley on Christmas break. He stopped by the house one night for pizza and eggnog. Naturally, he’d read about everything that happened with me and Gobi in Europe and couldn’t wait to talk about it-ever since we’d come home, it was all over the news and the Internet and everywhere else.

It was good to see him again, and we stayed up late into the night, talking by the fire. He told me that while they were home, he and his old high school flame were back together “on a temporary basis,” which as far as I could tell meant they’d started sleeping together until they had to go back to their respective colleges in January.

“What about you, dawg?” he said, looking over at the Christmas tree. “Another Christmas at home with your red lights and your blue balls?”

After everything that had happened, it was a pretty freaking insensitive thing to say, but I found myself laughing, and that felt good.

For a long time, I was afraid I’d forgotten how.

Then, two days before Christmas, my dad came home.

He called from the airport, and showed up at the house that night with a full beard and a bag of gifts like Santa except without the laughs. It was all very civil, very polite, and completely jarring. Mom stayed on her side of the couch, he stayed on his. At the end of the world’s most awkward conversation, he said goodbye, hugged me and Annie, and started back for his hotel.