Harlan Coben - Gone for Good

The phone rang.

I wrested my vision away. My watch said it was nearly eleven P.M. Late for a call. Without a backward glance, I stepped back inside and picked up the receiver.

Squares said, "Sleepy?"

"No."

"Want to take a ride?"

He was taking out the van tonight. "You learn something?"

"Meet me at the studio. Half an hour." He hung up. I walked back to the terrace and looked down. The man was gone.

The yoga school was simply called Squares. I made fun of it, of course. Squares had become one word, like Cher or Fabio. The school, studio, whatever you want to call it, was located in a six-story walk-up on University Place off Union Square. The beginnings had been humble. The school had toiled in happy obscurity. Then a certain celebrity, a major pop star you know too well, "discovered" Squares. She told her friends. A few months later, Cosmo picked it up. Then Elle. Somewhere along the line, a big infomercial company asked Squares to do a video. Squares, a firm believer in selling out, delivered the goods. The Yoga Squared Workout the name is copyrighted took off. Hey, Squares even shaved on the day they taped.

The rest was history.

Suddenly, no Manhattan or Hamptons social event could deem itself "a happening" without everyone's favorite fitness guru. Squares turned down most invitations, but he quickly learned how to network. He rarely had time to teach anymore. If you want to take any of the classes, even ones taught by his most junior students, the wait list is at least two months. He charges twenty-five dollars per class. He has four studios. The smallest holds fifty students. The largest close to two hundred. He has twenty-four teachers who rotate in and out. As I approached the school now, it was eleven-thirty at night and three classes were still in session.

Do the math.

In the elevator I started hearing the painful strains of sitar music blending with the lapping of cascading water falls, a mingling of sounds I find about as soothing as a cat hit with a stun gun. The gift shop greets you first, filled with incense and books and lotions and tapes and videos and CD-ROMs and DVDs and crystals and beads and ponchos and tie-dye. Behind the counter were two anorexic twenty something-year-olds dressed in black, their entire personas reeking of granola. Forever young. Just wait. One male, one female, though it wasn't easy to tell which was which. Their voices were even and just this side of patronizing maitre d's at a trendy new restaurant. Their body piercings and there were lots of them were filled with silver and turquoise.

"Hi," I said.

"Please remove your shoes," Probably Male said.

"Right."

I slipped them off.

"And you are?" Probably Female asked.

"Here to see Squares. I'm Will Klein."

The name meant nothing to them. Must be new. "Do you have an appointment with Yogi Squares?"

"Yogi Squares?" I repeated.

They stared at me.

"Tell me," I said. "Is Yogi Squares smarter than the average Squares?"

No laughter from the kiddies. Big surprise. She typed something into the computer terminal. They both frowned at the monitor. He picked up the phone and dialed. The sitar music blared. I felt a whopper headache brewing.

"Will?"

A wonderfully leotard-clad Wanda swept into the room, head high, clavicle prominent, eyes taking in everything. She was Squares's lead teacher and lover. They'd been together for three years now. Said leotard was lavender and oh-so-right. Wanda was a bold vision tall, long-limbed, and lithe, achingly beautiful, and black. Yes, black. The irony did not escape those of us who knew Squares's pardon the pun checkered past.

She wrapped her arms around me, her embrace as warm as wood smoke. I wished it would last forever.

"How are you, Will?" she said softly.

"Better."

She pulled back, those eyes searching for the lie. She'd been to my mother's funeral. She and Squares had no secrets. Squares and I had no secrets. Like an algebra proof using the communicative property, you could thus deduce that she and I had no secrets.

"He's finishing up a class," she said. "Pranayama breathing."

I nodded.

She tilted her head as though she'd just thought of something. "Do you have a second before you go?" Her voice aimed for casual but couldn't quite get there.

"Sure," I said.

She padded Wanda was too graceful to merely walk down the corridor. I followed, my eyes level with her swanlike neck. We passed a fountain so large and ornate I wanted to toss a penny in it. I peeked in one of the studios. Total silence, save heavy breathing. It looked like a movie set. Gorgeous people I don't know how Squares found so many gorgeous people packed side by side in warrior pose, faces serenely blank, legs spread, hands out, front knees at a ninety-degree angle.

The office Wanda shared with Squares was on the right. She lowered herself onto a chair as though it were made of Styrofoam and crossed her legs into a lotus. I sat across from her in a more conventional style. She didn't speak for a few moments. Her eyes closed and I could see her willing herself to relax. I waited.

"I didn't tell you this," she said.

"Okay."

"I'm pregnant."

"Hey, that's great." I started to rise to offer up a congratulatory hug.

"Squares isn't handling it well."

I stopped. "What do you mean?"

"He's freaking out."

"How?"

"You didn't know, right?"

"Right."

"He tells you everything, Will. He's known for a week." I saw her point.

"He probably didn't want to say anything," I said, "what with my mother and all."

She looked at me hard and said, "Don't do that."

"Yeah, sorry."

Her eyes skittered away from mine. The cool facade. There were cracks there now. "I expected him to be happy."

"He wasn't?"

"I think he wants me to" she seemed out of words "end it."

That knocked me back a step. "He said that?"

"He hasn't said anything. He's working the van extra nights. He's taking on more classes."

"He's avoiding you."

"Yes."

The office door opened without knocking. Squares leaned his unshaven mug into the doorway. He gave Wanda a cursory smile. She turned away. Squares gave me the thumb. "Let's rock and roll."

We didn't speak until we were safely ensconced in the van.

Squares said, "She told you."

It was a statement, not a question, so I didn't bother confirming or denying.

He put the key in the ignition. "We're not talking about it," he said.

Another statement that required no response.

The Covenant House van heads straight into the bowels. Many of our kids come to our doors. Many others are rescued in this van. The job of outreach is to connect with the community's seedy underbelly meet the runaway kids, the street urchins, the ones too often referred to as the "throwaways." A kid living on the street is a bit like and please pardon the analogy here a weed. The longer he's on the street, the harder it is to pull him out by the root.

We lose a lot of these kids. More than we save. And forget the weed analogy. It's stupid because it implies that we're getting rid of something bad and preserving something good. In fact, it's just the opposite. Try this instead: The street is more like a cancer. Early screening and preventive treatment is the key to long-term survival.

Not much better, but you get the gist.

"The feds exaggerated," Squares said.

"How so?"

"Sheila's record."

"Goon."

"The arrests. They were all a long time ago. You want to hear this?"

"Yes."

We started driving deep into the gloom. The city's hooker hangouts are fluid. Often you'll find them near the Lincoln Tunnel or Javits Center, but lately the cops have been cracking down. More cleanup. So the hookers flowed south to the meat-packing district on 18tt Street and the far west side. Tonight the hookers were out in force.