Andrew Gross - The Blue Zone

Who the hell are you, Daddy?

Who?

The watcher stood high on the shore. He sat on the hood of his car, his binoculars trained on the river. He focused on the girl.

He had followed her many times-had seen her take out her striped blue craft in the early-morning mist. Always the same time. Seven A.M., Wednesdays and Saturdays. The same route. Llueva o truene . Rain or shine.

Not so smart, chica. He chewed on a wad of tobacco leaf in his cheek. The river can be dangerous.

Bad things can happen out there to a pretty girl like you.

She was strong, the watcher thought, impressed. In a way he admired her. She always pushed herself very hard. He liked how she always took it home in the final meters like a champion. She put her heart into it. The watcher chuckled to himself. She could lick most guys.

He watched her pull up to the pier and stow her oars and hoist the sleek craft up onto the landing. She shook the sweat and the salt of the river from her hair.

Es bonita. In a way he hoped he would never have to do anything to her or cause her harm. He liked watching her. He tossed the binoculars on the seat of the Escalade, next to the TEC-9.

But if he had to, qué lástima. …He tucked a large gold cross and chain into his shirt.

She should know better than anybody. The river is a dangerous place.

Kate remained at home that night. Greg was doing a last late-night rotation at the ER for a while. He promised he would change his schedule so he could be with her at nights. That was when Kate felt the most alone.

She tried her best to fill the time by working on her thesis, Trypanosoma cruzi and the Molecular Strategies of Intercellular Pathogens Interacting with Their Host Cells. Trypanosoma were parasites that blocked the fusion of lysosomes in the plasma membrane, which aided cell repair. Pretty ponderous, Kate knew, and unreadable-unless you happened to be among the fourteen people in the world who actually were turned on by lysosomal exocytosis.

Which tonight Kate wasn’t. She pushed her glasses up on her forehead and turned off the computer.

The doubts about her father kept intruding. What to believe. Whom to trust. Was he dead or alive? This was the man she had lived with her whole life-whom she respected and adored, who raised her, shaped her values, who was there for her. Now she had no idea just who that man was.

Something flashed in her mind. Kate got up and went over to the old Irish armoire they had found at a flea market and where they now kept the TV. She knelt, opening the bottom drawer. Tucked way in the back, under an old Brown sweatshirt and a stack of manuals and magazines, she found what she’d buried there.

The envelope of photos and mementos she’d found in her parents’ dresser more than a year before.

Kate never quite had the heart to look through it.

She shut the drawer and took the envelope over to the couch, curling up against the cushions. She slid the contents out onto the antique trunk that acted as their coffee table.

It was a lot of old stuff she’d never seen before. Her father’s things. A few snapshots of him and Sharon when they were back in college. The late sixties, straggly long hair and all. A couple of gemological certificates. The program from his NYU graduation in 1969.

Some other things that went back much further than that.

Kate had never seen any of this before.

Letters to his mother, Rosa, in an early, barely discernible scrawl. From summer camp. From some early travels. Kate realized she didn’t know very much about her father’s past. His early years had always been a blur.

His mother had come from Spain. Kate knew virtually nothing about her grandfather. He had died in Spain when Ben was young. A car accident or something. In Seville. There was a large Jewish community there.

Out of the pile, Kate pulled a dog-eared black-and-white snapshot of a handsome woman in a stylish hat, standing, holding the arm of a slight man in a homburg in front of a café. Maybe back in Spain.

She was sure she was staring at her grandfather.

Kate smiled. Rosa was beautiful. Dark, European-looking, and proud. All Kate knew about her was that she had a love of music and art.

And she found others. One was of Rosa on horseback in the country, wearing an old-fashioned leather riding jacket and boots, her hair in braids. And another, on a streetcar, in a city Kate didn’t recognize, holding an infant whom Kate recognized as her father. She traced the familiar lines in his infant face. Her lines…It almost brought tears to her eyes, tears of joy. Why had these been hidden? They were fascinating. She was finding a family history here, a family she never knew.

Kate stared closely at the undeveloped face of the man who had raised her. Which was easier to accept, she asked herself, that he was dead somewhere, murdered for a betrayal? Or that he was alive ? Hiding out somewhere, having abandoned his family. And having committed this terrible crime.

Kate shuffled the photos and old letters into a pile. Outside, there was a government agent in an unmarked car, protecting her. Maybe Ben had gone to meet Margaret Seymour. Maybe there was something he’d needed to talk to her about. But he didn’t kill her. Kate knew her father. She could look at these photos and see it in his face.

She was sure.

Kate started to stuff everything back inside the envelope. As she did, one last photo from the bottom of the pile dropped out.

It was a small, faded snapshot of her father as a teenager. Like one from an old Kodak. He had his arm around the shoulder of another man Kate didn’t recognize, a few years older. She couldn’t help but fix on the resemblance.

They were standing in front of a large wooden gate. It looked like the entrance to a country estate, or maybe an old estancia, a ranch, mountains in the background. There was writing on the back: Carmenes. 1967. That would have made him about eighteen.

Carmenes… Where was that? Spain ?

Kate flipped the photo back over. There was a name above the gate in the background. She tried to make it out-wooden letters, partially obscured, hard to read. She pulled it closer and squinted.

Her blood turned to ice.

She fixed on it again, sounding out the almost illegible name. This can’t be… She ran over to the desk. They kept a magnifying loupe there. She pulled open the top drawer. She found the loupe and cleared off the desk, her heart racing now. She pressed the magnifier to the photo and looked into it and stared.

Not at the two men in the foreground, but breathless, in total disbelief, above them.

At the name on the gate.

An urge to vomit rose up in Kate. It shook every bone in her body. She stared closely at her father’s youthful face-at the man who would one day raise her. In that moment she realized she didn’t know him. She had never known him. Or what he might be capable of. Or what he might have done.

The name on the gate above her father was MERCADO.

Even in darkness the man behind the wheel noticed the terrain changing. The flatlands of Indiana and Ohio were well behind him now. The interstate wound through the rising valleys of the Pennsylvania hill country. Heading east.

Only a few hours more…

The driver flicked on the radio, fighting off fatigue. He’d been driving so many hours now he’d lost count. He pushed the speed-search through the static of late-night talk shows and country-music stations until he found an oldies station that pleased him. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” was playing.