James Grippando - Born to Run

Not until that moment-as she stared at the entrance to the Columbia bowling alley-had Paulette even considered the possibility that the locker might hold some kind of journalistic treasure. She’d promised her father to check it out and take whatever was inside the locker to the police. Knowing Chloe, she expected the locker to be empty. The girl just wasn’t well.

Two men with bowling bags passed her on the sidewalk, and Paulette followed them inside. It was a league night, lots of men dressed in baby blue shirts with short sleeves and their names stitched onto the pocket. Paulette was strangely reminded of her midwestern roots-the winter days of Ping-Pong after school in the basement and bowling on weekends. Chloe used to throw a fit when their father told her to use the bumpers to keep the ball out of the gutters. She had always insisted on competing straight up with her older sister.

Paulette walked past the counter toward the women’s lounge. The lockers were in a separate room adjacent to the bathroom. She double checked the number on the key and found locker 23 in the second row. She stepped toward it, inserted the key, and turned the handle. It opened. The butterflies returned; the locker wasn’t empty.

You never cease to surprise me, little sister.

Paulette took the expandable folder from the locker and went to the wooden bench in the center of the room. She untied the string and peeked inside. It contained notes, just as Chloe had explained in her letter. Some were handwritten. Others were typed. Paulette was certain that the handwritten notes would be utterly unintelligible. She took a closer look at the typewritten pages, which were stapled together and better organized. They appeared to be a rough draft of an article.

The first line was a grabber: When should a president no longer be president?

Paulette almost smiled. She read on.

In dark times, this country has asked that question before. The Keyes presidency, however, presents an entirely unique question in American history: When should a president never have become president in the first place?

Paulette’s adrenaline was pumping. She kept reading-couldn’t stop reading. By the fourth paragraph she had to put it down and catch her breath. She went right back to it, read some more, and instinctively brought the papers to her chest, as if to prevent her pounding heart from exploding.

My God, Chloe.

A wave of paranoia suddenly came over her-a taste of what her sister must have felt at the end of her life-and Paulette checked over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching. No one else was in the room. She gathered up the papers, stuffed them back into the file, and closed up the locker. Chloe’s notes were hers now. This story was too important to sit on the shelf inside some locker in a bowling alley. Someone had to run with this. She would do it for Chloe-maybe even give her a posthumous co-byline. All Paulette had to do was verify a few facts.

And then one way or another, this story would rock the White House to its political core.

The Greek found her with ease, just a train ride away.

She was living in an old Italian neighborhood in Queens, worked in an Italian bakery, and made the best cannoli outside of Palermo. She sang Italian songs while she worked and spoke in a perfect Sicilian dialect to her customers. The red, green, and white Italian flag hung in the window each morning, right beside the Sicilian coat of arms with its distinctive trinacria -three bent legs and three wheat ears around the winged head of Medusa. On some level, the Greek understood her connection to the old country. On another, he couldn’t comprehend the constant reminders.

It was as if the Sicilians had never raped her.

Without question, Sofia was the love of his life. Forty years hadn’t changed his feelings toward her. That one night in Cyprus, however, had changed everything else.

The express ride from a hotel rooftop without an elevator had left him unconscious for days and had landed him in traction for weeks. The sterile smell of white hospital linens was forever imbedded in his brain, and sometimes he could still feel the itch beneath the body cast. Sofia had taken him home in a wheelchair, but his life as an invalid was finished at their doorstep. Despite Sofia’s protestations, he had insisted on walking up the stairs to their second-story apartment under his own power. It took him almost ninety minutes, and the irony was not lost on him that this was his first journey up those steps since the Sicilians had rushed upstairs to throw him off the roof. He was exhausted, as much from the pain as from the effort. At the top, Sofia had taken him in her arms, and he made a promise to her and to himself. He would make himself stronger than ever, he would refuse to live his life on painkillers, and he would once again make sweet love to Sofia the way a man should make love to a beautiful woman. He’d started slowly with her, bringing his sense of touch back to life by exploring the curve of her neck, the soft wave of her long black hair, the smoothness of her skin. When he was ready for more, however, she pulled away. At first he thought it was the battered state of his body that had turned her off, the scars from the many surgeries that had put his broken bones back together.

“It’s not you,” she’d told him, and the way she looked away in shame, he knew immediately.

“The Sicilians. Did they-”

A weak, almost imperceptible nod of the head confirmed it.

Eight months later, his body was well on the mend. But the marriage was officially over.

The Greek had checked on her over the years, just out of curiosity, to see how she was doing. She’d married an American and moved to New York, where they opened Angelo’s Italian Bakery and worked side by side for more than three decades. The Greek respected her right to move on, even though his need to see her had at times been overwhelming. Every so often, he would give in and watch her from a distance-a glimpse of Sofia walking to the bus or raking leaves in the front yard. The Greek didn’t think of it as stalking, but Sofia never even knew he was there-except once. Two years earlier, he’d allowed himself to be seen. He was standing on the sidewalk in front of her house as she stepped outside to the mailbox. So many years had passed, but there is a way a man stands, a way he looks at a woman that endures over time and identifies him like a fingerprint. They didn’t say a word to each other, but their eyes met and held, and the silence between them spoke volumes. The feeling had been unlike any the Greek had ever felt, and the spell was broken only when Sofia’s husband called to her from inside the house. Even then, she hadn’t turned away immediately-but finally she did, and she disappeared inside the house. That minute or so between them wasn’t much in terms of time. But it had been enough to convince the Greek that the connection was still there, that his “once in a lifetime” was her “once in a lifetime,” too, even if she had settled down and remarried.

The Greek hadn’t returned since then. On some level, however, his memories of Sofia were at least part of the reason he’d kept himself in such amazing physical shape. The Russians breathing down his neck made him want to see her one last time. An Internet search at the library, just to see if she was still living in the same place, had turned up an obituary. Sofia’s husband was dead-and at that moment, the light had switched on.

Plan C was hatched.

The Greek would visit Sofia. He would tell her how he felt. And unless those eyes had lied to him two years earlier, she would help him. She would believe in him this time, forgetting or at least forgiving him for the fact that he was a man whose actions never lived up to the tenderness of his words or intentions. Sofia was his last hope.