Richard Price - The Whites

“Carmen, listen to me, the killers were the killers.”

“Billy, don’t.”

“They’re the ones who had the guns.”

“Billy, I’m begging you…”

“Carmen, you were a kid, fifteen, you said so yourself.”

“The cops came to our door later that day, doing a canvass of the building, nobody could figure out why this basically no trouble to anyone boy was executed. And when they came to our apartment I hid in the bathroom while they talked to my mother, and when they left I told her that I saw the killers, I talked to them, and first she turned white, then, without even giving me two minutes to pack or say goodbye to my brother, she dragged me out of the apartment and into a cab for Port Authority, and put me on a bus to live with my father in Atlanta. And when I was down there I heard that Milton and Edgar killed the guys that killed their brother, then later I heard that Edgar was killed in return, and that their mother died soon after, and now, now Milton’s gone.”

“He’s gone? He was here to kill you.”

“And now you understand why.”

“Carmen, how many lives have you saved in that hospital. How many people are still walking the earth because of you.”

“So, whatever the law thinks of me, and it doesn’t think anything of me at all about this, I know what I did.”

Billy’s impulse was to once again try to defend her from herself, but he finally accepted the fact that all he’d be doing was causing her more pain.

“So,” she said after a long moment, “you tell me about Pavlicek, about Yasmeen, about Jimmy Whelan, what they did and why. But I’ve got more souls to answer for than any of them, and I live with that every day. I see the Ramos family every day, I say I’m sorry to them so many times in my head from morning to night it’s like I have a chemical disorder.”

Billy finally, cautiously, lay down next to her.

“I know you want to give me absolution, Billy, but you don’t have that power. I wish you did.” Then: “But at least now you know.”

Too early the next morning, Billy found himself sitting alone at the kitchen table, staring out the window at the askew backboard in the driveway, his coffee as cold as a pond. Immediately after unloading to him about her part in the destruction of the Ramos family, Carmen had proceeded to pass out, was still passed out, Billy checking the wall clock, fifteen hours later. He couldn’t count the times he’d seen that in murderers who’d finally owned up to what they had done — straight back to the cell and their first peaceful sleep in weeks, months, years. You couldn’t wake them with grenades.

His phone rang — Redman — Billy killing it directly.

The day before, Yasmeen and Whelan had tried to call him too. If he had picked up for either of them, his guess then was, the conversation would center strictly on asking how his family was doing. For them to ask where he was at in regards to turning them in, so soon after what he’d been through, would have been a grievous error in judgment on their part and they’d know that. Nonetheless, the seven-day grace period he had given them to get ahead of their situations was more than half over, but as far as he knew not one of them had even walked into a lawyer’s office yet, let alone stepped into a precinct with a story to tell. His take was that they were all banking on the trauma, hoping that in the aftermath of what had happened to him and his family he would be thrown into such a state of emotional chaos that he would no longer have the time, the brain cells, or the heart to follow through on his own ultimatum.

Hearing the thump of his father’s New York Times landing on the porch, Billy opened the door and saw a Chevy Tahoe sitting silently at the foot of his driveway, Yasmeen staring out at him through the windshield.

At least she knew enough not to come to the door.

Billy walked down the driveway, taking his coffee with him, and settled into the passenger seat without a word.

She had barely brushed her hair and was wearing nothing more than a heavy sweater thrown over pajamas, the first time he’d seen her without the Tibetan coat in months.

“Hey, I called you so many times, you didn’t answer, I just had to come by.”

Billy looked at his watch: five forty-five a.m.

“I know, I’m sorry, I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I just want to know how everybody’s holding up.”

“We’ll get through.”

“I can’t imagine, that must have been such a nightmare for you.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“No, I understand,” she said quickly. “I understand. I should go home,” running her palms along the top of her steering wheel but making no move to start up the car.

She had no more driven up here to ask after his family than she had come for the latest NBA scores, the musk of her anguish growing so intense that he had to crack his window.

“Sorry,” she said, “I just ran out of the house.”

“This picture,” Billy tapping the laminated photo of her daughters that hung from the neck of her rearview mirror, “was that always there? Or did you just put it up this morning?”

“No,” she said faintly, “that’s just my girls, you know.”

The first oriole of the season caught his eye, a dash of bright against the early spring drab.

“Just my girls,” she murmured, looking off.

He removed the photo from its bead chain, flipped it into her lap. “You see them? What the hell were you thinking?”

“It was do what I did or go kill myself. Better a mother in Bedford Hills than in a grave.”

“I can’t hear this shit,” he said, reaching for the door handle.

Yasmeen grabbed his hand. “You don’t think I know what I did?” she warbled. “You think I didn’t know how I’d be after that? But at least I’m alive. It was me or him.”

“Which him.”

“What?”

“Cortez or Bannion.”

“I didn’t go near Cortez,” she said.

“So, clean hands on that one, right?”

Up on the porch, Milton Ramos was leaning against the front door at an impossibly low angle, his rigid body inches from the ground, Billy taking him in and then lifting his eyes to the bedroom window, to Carmen up there desperately trying to exorcize her history via hibernation.

And all he wanted to do right now was join her.

All he wanted to do right now was to be free of himself, free of all the bodies, and tend to his family.

“What happened to your coat,” he said his gaze still fixed on the window.

“What? I burned it.”

“Just as well.”

“What do you mean?” she said quietly.

“I mean, next time you buy a jacket, take a girlfriend.”

“Billy, say what you mean,” Yasmeen tilting toward him now, as taut as a bird.

Billy took a sip of the cold coffee, then opening his door, tossed the rest onto the driveway.

“You know,” he said, “sometimes when I draw a slow night and I can duck out early, I’d be coming around that curve right about now, sliding for home.”

“Billy, please…”

“Sitting out here like this?” he said. “It’s like I’m waiting for myself to show up.”

“Fucking Billy,” Yasmeen blurted as she keyed the ignition. “Fucking Billy.”

The unexpected blast of Mariah Carey coming through the car speakers made her scream.

Enough.

“You get a lawyer yet?” he said, turning off the radio.

“There’s a guy,” she said sullenly. “I’m going to see him today.”

“Save your money,” he said, finally stepping out of the car.

“What?”

But she knew what, Yasmeen clamping a hand across her mouth like a muzzle, the tears running over her knuckles.

“And do your crying at home.”