The Last Flight(23)

Mr. Cosatino, the old man who’d lived there since the beginning of time, had been so much easier. They’d only spoken once, last year when she’d paid him cash to purchase her half of the duplex. She wondered what happened to him, whether he got sick or if he died. One day he was there, the next day, he was gone. And now this woman, with her friendly smiles and eye contact.

Eva left the bookshelf pushed aside and took the stairs two at a time, up to her home office. A tiny room overlooking the front yard, it wasn’t used by Eva for much except paying bills and storing her cold-weather coats. But she’d decorated it like the rest of the house—warm tones of yellow and red that were a far cry from the institutional gray walls of the group home she’d grown up in. She’d picked each piece—the pine desk, the deep red rug, the small table and lamp that sat under the window—as an antidote to the coldness that had embedded itself inside of her as a child.

She settled in front of her laptop, pulling up the Singaporean bank log-in page, and entered her account information by memory. She was diligent about checking her balances, watching the number steadily increase over the past twelve years, going from five figures to six figures to a comfortable seven. The financial district in San Francisco was filled with handsome men who knew how to bend the law to suit their purposes, and it had been easy to find a tax attorney who was willing to set up a fake LLC, who knew which banks abroad would look the other way and not ask too many questions, and who could help her funnel her illegal income somewhere safe.

At some point, she was going to have to stop. No one could do this forever. And when that time came, she’d buy a plane ticket to somewhere far away and simply disappear. She’d leave everything behind. The house. Her things. Her clothes. Dex and Fish. She’d shed this life like an old skin, emerging newer. Better. She’d done it before, and she would do it again.

*

When the pills were ready, she popped them from their molds and into separate bags. She wrapped the ones for Dex in blue paper, tied a ribbon around them, and drove to the park in North Berkeley where they were supposed to meet. She’d learned over the years how to be invisible. How to slip between the layers of the outside world, just a woman on a walk or meeting a friend in the park with a beautifully wrapped present. This wasn’t a hard job, if you were smart. And Eva had always been smarter than most.

She found him sitting at a picnic table overlooking a small, dingy play area. Young kids were scattered across the equipment, each minded by a parent or nanny. Eva paused, still outside of Dex’s line of sight, and watched the kids. That might have been her, if her mother had been a different person. Maybe she would have brought Eva to a park like this to blow off steam after school or to kill a few hours on a weekend. Over the years, Eva had searched her memory for an image, any memory at all from the short time she lived with her birth family, but her first two years were blank.

As a child, Eva had imagined them so many times and in so many ways, the images almost seemed like real memories. Her mother, with long blond hair, looking over her shoulder at Eva, laughing. Her grandparents, old and frail, worried about their wild daughter, scraping their pennies together to pay for another trip to rehab. A quiet family with a big problem. She tried to feel something for them, but she felt removed, like an unplugged lamp. There was no power behind it. No connection. No light.

But mothers and daughters always caught Eva’s eye, snagging her attention like a sharp fingernail, scraping her in places that should have healed over long ago.

She knew only two things about her mother: her name was Rachel Ann James, and she had been an addict. The information had arrived unexpectedly in a letter from Sister Bernadette in Eva’s sophomore year of college. The page had been filled with her precise cursive, so familiar it had lifted her up and carried her back in time to the girl she’d once been.

It had felt like an intrusion, the answers to questions she’d long since given up asking, suddenly landing in her mailbox. Just when she was beginning to feel like she might be able to rise above who she’d always been.

Eva had no idea where that letter was now. Tossed into a box or buried in a drawer. It was easier to pretend that part of her life had never existed, just a few short miles away in San Francisco, that she had instead emerged, fully formed, the day she started at Berkeley.

*

She tore her eyes away from the kids and walked the final few yards to where Dex sat.

“Happy birthday,” she said, handing him the package of pills.

He smiled and tucked it inside his coat. “You shouldn’t have.”

She sat next to him on the bench, and together they watched the kids play—jumping from the slide, chasing each other around the swings—always lingering for a little while, just two friends enjoying the sunshine. Dex’s mantra so many years ago now their routine—You only look like a drug dealer if you behave like one.

“I did my first solo deal at this park,” Eva said, pointing toward the parking lot. “When I got here, there were two police cars parked at the curb, the officers standing next to them, as if they were waiting for me.”

Dex turned to face her. “What did you do?”

Eva thought back to that day, how scared she’d been, how her pulse had raced and her breath shortened when she’d seen them, in full uniform, all guns and billy clubs and shiny badges. “I remembered what you told me, about how I had to walk with confidence, how I had to keep my eyes straight ahead and not hesitate.”