Richard Price - The Whites

“Exactly.”

Billy looked to Richard, hoping that he could help cool out his friends, and saw that the anger in his eyes was beginning to give way to exhaustion and sorrow. Reaching through the scrum, Billy took his arm and steered him to a second couch, directly opposite his wife.

“He’ll be all right,” Billy said.

“How do you know?”

“You know how I know? I’ll tell you how I know.” Billy hesitated, then: “The nurses’ station. If Victor was in any kind of touch-and-go situation, all those nurses over there, they’d of been throwing our crowd a lot of looks by now, trying to figure out how to handle us in case things turn out bad. And I’m just not picking up that vibe from them, so relax.”

It was total bullshit, but it seemed to do the job, Richard faintly nodding, then sliding back deeper into the cushions. Nurses: Billy stole another peek at his wife, not six feet away from them but still so pulled into herself that he doubted she had heard one word of his nonsense.

“So when are the twins coming?” he asked Richard.

“What?”

“When are…”

“Ten days,” he said, then, sitting up: “Jesus.”

“I’ll come over,” Carmen said dully. Raising her eyes to him, she added, “Every day.”

Leaving his wife and Richard behind, Billy went along with everyone else to the 8–0. Once there, unable to bear withholding information about the family nightmare any longer, he took Bobby Cardozo aside.

“I need to talk to you about something.”

“About what, the gay thing?” Cardozo whispered. “I said the guy didn’t look gay. What the fuck, it was a compliment.”

Billy’s cell rang — Carmen — Billy stepping away from Cardozo to take the call.

“Hey,” her voice as flatlined as it was when he left her.

“What’s going on?”

“He’s out of surgery. It went OK.”

“Good. Excellent.”

“I’m sleeping here tonight,” she said.

“OK.”

“I need you to do me a favor. When you get home make up a bag with some clothes and my meds. You know which ones?”

“The Traz and the Cymbalta.”

“The Traz and the Abilify.”

“When did you go on Abilify?”

“Can you just do it for me? Give it to Millie, let her take your car, punch in the address on the GPS for her, and send her over.”

“All right, I’ll be home in about two hours.”

“Thank you.”

“Carmen, what’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?”

“I mean besides. You’ve been in a trance for days.”

The silence on the other end was so absolute that Billy thought she had hung up on him.

“Hello?”

“Just, not now, OK?” she said, then added, “I’m sorry,” sounding like she meant it.

Billy found Cardozo pulling up mug shots on a desk monitor.

“This kid here?” he said, tapping a shave-headed teenager with a wandering eye. “He’s a stone skull-cracker. Pipes, rebar, a golf club one time. Told me that he didn’t like guns because they could get you in trouble.”

“Just hold off on all that for a bit,” Billy said, pulling up a chair. “You need to hear this.”

It took close to half an hour for him to lay it all out: the accosting of his son, the abduction of his father, the red assault on his porch, the entire systematic and now expanded tormenting of his family.

“I don’t see it,” Cardozo said. “With all the three-legged meat eaters we got running around this precinct? I’m shopping local.”

Yasmeen rang him at home as he was sorting through Carmen’s side of the medicine chest.

“You called me yesterday?” she said.

“I did?” Then, remembering the world as it was before this morning: “Yeah, I did.”

“What’s going on?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Again?”

“Just…”

“Jesus, I talk to you more than my husband. What are you trying to do, get back with me?”

“Right.”

“Just say, we’ll get a room.”

“Cut it out.”

“With how stressed I am? No shit, let’s go.”

“I seriously need to talk to you.”

“You don’t even have to kiss me.”

“Where are you going to be today,” Billy said. “I’ll come to you.”

“Redman’s nuts. I shot Eric Cortez? Are you on drugs?”

They were sitting on a bench overlooking the playground in Riverdale where Yasmeen’s younger daughter, Simone, was trying to master double Dutch with some other girls.

“You know what? I don’t like to talk about people, but since he’s already talking about me? I think Redman’s smoking his own product.”

“What product,” Billy shielding his eyes from the unfamiliar midday sun.

“Embalming fluid. Dipping his cigarettes in that shit. It’s like eating your brain with an ice cream scoop.”

“Redman doesn’t smoke.”

“Then maybe you’re doing dip. What the fuck, I shot Eric Cortez?”

Billy sat with his arms draped along the top slat of the bench, listening to the kids behind the mesh fence shrieking as if they were about to be butchered.

“You’re drinking like you want to kill yourself, Yasmeen, why is that.”

“Because I already said to you I’m going through life changes and I’m depressed. I confessed to you about that. I confided in you about that. And now you’re going to use it to accuse me of some bullshit like this? Who do you think you are?”

Billy slumped forward on the bench, his head in his hands. “Tell me again about your night sweats, how you wake up thinking you’re all bloody, how someone’s going to hurt your kids,” his voice monotone with gloom.

Yasmeen sat there for a moment, her lower face flexing and bulging as if her mouth was stuffed with marbles.

“I tell you what,” she said, getting to her feet, “here’s what you do. You go to your good buddy in Brooklyn Narcotics and share your, your findings with him, you tell him all about me fucking up the Del Pino investigation, you tell him all about my nightmares and my drinking, you tell him how Cortez being brain-shot just about makes me wet, and then you let him come for me, how’s that.”

Yasmeen went to the fence, collected her protesting daughter, then walked past him on her way out of the park. “You’re like some stranger to me, you know that?”

And then she was gone, Billy sitting there, thinking, So are you. Thinking, So are you all.

After a busted four-hour sleep and a tasteless dinner Billy found himself watching a football game on NFL Classics, his sons in full peewee league gear, cleats to helmets, seated on either side of him. They were all strung out, Billy over everything and the kids just because they had — no, they were — exquisite antennae when it came to in-house agitation.

The game, from 2012, was a great New York Giants come-from-behind victory, 41–34 over Tampa Bay, but when watching these old games, Billy never told his boys the final score in advance; it would be like telling a joke punch line first. Tonight, unfortunately, that meant subjecting them to three Eli Manning second-quarter interceptions with no hope in sight; by the second pick, Carlos began to cry, which got Declan, also on the verge of tears, throwing a punch and hurting his hand on his younger brother’s helmet, and before Billy could intervene they were both wailing like paid mourners while blindly trading shots across the bow of his gut.

“What are you hitting him for?” he squawked at Declan. Then, turning to Carlos: “What you crying for?”

Neither kid had the words or the self-control to stop belting the other, which resulted in him pushing them off to the far sides of the couch.

“Everybody stop hitting and crying, all right? Just, please, OK?”