Dragonfly

[DestinyLies]

Happy Ending!!!! Whatever you feel like Jax!

[inkspot]

Friday night was like a bad dream. Only, you wished it could be a bad dream, so you could wake up. Only, I couldn’t really sleep, so there was no waking up. On Saturday morning, I called my dad. I thought none of us had thought to call him and our step-mom the day before, but Phyllis had. Dad told me to come to his place, that they were just fixing breakfast, and I could join them. But I didn’t feel like it. I’d told Bruiser I’d meet him for coffee later ... only I didn’t want to go back to the Starbucks where we’d been Thursday morning. I didn’t really want to go back downtown at all. So we met at De Caf Bar about 11 a.m. He didn’t look like he’d slept anymore than I had.

He told me he’d talked to Jazz earlier, and they were going fishing the next morning, if Pete and I wanted to go. I didn’t know ... fishing is a mindless thing you can do to keep your mind off your troubles ... unless you’ve been on an extraordinary fishing trip with a guy who has now been murdered.

It was like that with everything — for the past year or so, everything I’d done had revolved around Torstein, and now there was nothing I knew to do that didn’t bring up vivid memories of him, just at the moment when I least wanted to think about him. What had he been trying to tell us? Ferdy’s question from Thursday morning was more real to me on Saturday than it had been then ... “What’s it all been for?” What had it all been for? We’d been enchanted by Torstein, and while he was with us, we felt our lives were worth something, that we were doing something worthwhile, maybe for he first time in our lives! Now he was dead.

Maggie called me around noon. She was crying on the phone. As best I could understand her, she said:

“Oh, Andy, Andy. Ferdy’s dead.”

“Ferdy’s dead?” I said, and the whole phrase really was in italics, I mean, Ferdy? “Why would Nikolai—”

“Not Nikoloai,” she said, trying to speak more clearly now, and more loudly, although I could tell she was still crying. “He killed himself! He’s dead, and he killed himself.”

God, that wasn’t what I wanted. I couldn’t forgive him, not so soon ... but I hadn’t wanted him dead.

I thought about what Torstein had told us, and I knew we’d failed already. He’d always said love. He’d always said forgive. What if any one of us had been strong enough to say to Ferdy, “It’s okay, man. You didn’t mean for this to happen”?

Would he still be dead? One dead guy had been enough. Had our failure to love just added to the body count?

I hung up the phone with Maggie, and told Bruiser what she’d said. He shrugged. I think maybe after losing Torstein, he was numb. I told Maggie where we were, and she said she would come, but she wanted to go by the park first. People were leaving memorials at the park, she said.

I know these days, when a celebrity dies, it’s the thing for the adoring public to leave memorials at his front door or wherever they think it’s appropriate — like all the wreaths and roses and teddy bears at Windsor Castle when Princess Diana passed away, or all the glitter and gloves people heaped in front of Michael Jackson’s rental home. I know it’s how people share their grief and pay tribute to the one they feel they’ve lost. But I could only think of a handful of people who had really, meaningfully lost Torstein, and I didn’t think any of them had been in the park this morning leaving a cross or a sympathy card or some kind of green doll’s coat as a tribute. I didn’t want to see that. I didn’t want anyone who had just followed Torstein around — or worse, just seen him on TV — acting as if they were grieving with me.

Looking back on that now, my irrational anger that other people actually felt bereaved (or acted bereaved!), I don’t even recognize myself. How could I have been so narrow-minded as to think that Torstein had to have stayed at your house or gone on a fishing trip with you in order for him to mean something to you? He hadn’t been mine, just my friend. What he’d had, what he’d said, it had touched people all over the city, certainly all over downtown. But at the moment it seemed to me another Selena scenario: now that he was dead, everyone was going to claim they’d been his biggest fans.

Everything had turned to rubbish for me.

When Maggie came, she gave me and Bruiser both a big hug. She was so fair-skinned, she looked like Snow White in general (but for the auburn hair). Today, you could tell she had been crying, and not sleeping, because there were dark circles, like a lavender thumbprint, in the delicate hollow under each eye. Her normally pale skin looked on the verge of gray. She asked about Pete; everyone was worried about him. She told me she was conflicted about Ferdy — she’d been angry with him, but she hadn’t wanted him to die. We told her what he’ said to us at the crypt, how Torstein was just supposed to get beat up and goaded into taking some action, going on television ... It sounded so stupid. Could he really have been so blind?!

That made Maggie cry again, and I remembered Pete telling me that I was terrible at comforting women. I’d tried to learn something about it from Torstein, but I was still not very good at it. At least this time I put my arm around Maggie’s shoulder .

When she stopped crying, she said someone had made a beautiful chalk drawing of the dragonfly coat in the center square of Patriots Park, and people had brought flowers and cards and left them there. Ariel Prince had been there, she said, recording new footage for her retrospective on Torstein. She’d done two news pieces on him, and this was sure to be a beautiful cap to them. The plan had worked out for her, either way.

Maggie said Len had taken Angel and Sully to the shore for the day, to try to get Angel’s mind off her grief. Caroline had actually called her parents for the first time in 10 years, and asked them if she could come home and bring her son. They’d never even seen their grandson.

“Jack called me and said everyone is invited to go fishing tomorrow. Fishing!” She snorted.

“I’m going,” I said. “Why not? Get out of the city. You should come. Bring Van and Sully. We need the break.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I’m not getting up at dark-thirty though.”

“Aren’t you?” Bruiser said. “I was up at dark-thirty this morning.”

“Yah,” she said. “Maybe I will. But I want to visit the grave again. I keep thinking: this isn’t real. He can’t be dead. How could he be? He was more alive than any of us. Maybe if I go there, and see the crypt again, I’ll believe it. Angel wants to go, too.”

[DestinyLies]

It reminds me of Chase!!!!! Good though, as always.

[inkspot]

While we were sitting there at De Caf Bar, pretending to drink our java, Maggie trying not to start crying again, a man we didn’t know approached our table. Had Torstein been with us, he would have jumped up and taken the man by the hand, offered him a seat at the table, asked him what troubled him. He did look troubled: his face was pale, his eyes red-rimmed, his hair was a bit wild. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a while. He was dressed nicely in a rather overdone tan sport-coat that verged on mustard color, and the hair that wasn’t falling into his eyes was caught into a ponytail at the back of his head. Not the usual homeless guy who might ask to join us in hope of a hand-out if Torstein were there.

We all just looked up at him as he stood there, and he didn’t speak. He wasn’t — one of us, I guess you could say, we didn’t know him — and yet he stared at us with this kind of intensity that made it seem as if perhaps he knew us, or really badly wanted to. Maggie recovered her manners first, and said, “Won’t you join us?”

It was a thin greeting compared with the one he might have gotten from Torstein, but we were all so dazed, I think, we didn’t mind about that.

The man sat down, set his cup of coffee on the table, looked at it for a few seconds, glanced around the table at us, and finally said:

“Who was he?”

“Who was who?” Bruiser asked.

“The green coat,” he choked out. “Who was he?”

“Torstein,” Maggie said. “His name was Torstein.”

“But, who was he?” the man asked again.

“A friend of ours,” I said. “Did you know him?”

“I was there,” he said quietly.

“You were ... where?” Bruiser asked.

“There. I was there when they killed him.”

I think I flinched. Bruiser’s face blanched. Maggie’s face had already been milky, so no more blood could drain out of it. And yet, there was a reaction. The bright intensity of her blue-eyed gaze seemed to lock on the face of this man. Why would he come here and tell us this? Now that we were wholly caught up in staring at him, it was easy to imagine who he was, one of Nikolai’s lieutenants, maybe — that explained the loud coat, the curly ponytail, his overall appearance of being ex-gun-runner euro trash. But it didn’t explain why he would have stayed up all night in apparent anxiety and sought us out this morning.

“What do you mean?” Maggie said. “How could you have been there?”

“My job,” he said. “It’s my job. I was in charge.”

“Do you mean to say you killed him?” Bruiser said, and I could see his knuckles as white as his face as he gripped the edge of the table. Maggie’s small hand reached across and covered the back of his.

“No, I didn’t do it, not personally,” the man said. “But my guys did.”

I thought he would begin to tell us that it was his job, that if he hadn’t, someone else would have, that working for a mobster you had to follow orders or die. But he didn’t. He just sat there, staring at his coffee cup.

“So what do you want?” Bruiser said. It amazed me that he and I were still sitting here with this guy and not knocking the top of his freaking head off. Maybe if Pete had been there ... but then it occurred to me, what had happened to Ferdy, as much as we might think he deserved it, had hurt Bruiser the same way it had me. We felt like, no matter what Ferdy had done, he had still been one of us, and he’d deserved better from us. We hadn’t been able to give him what he needed, and he’d killed himself. I think we both felt that was enough blood on our hands. So we waited for this man to tell us what his problem was.

“Nikolai wanted it to be bloody,” he finally said. “My guys know how to do the job. He wanted it to be a message, like the thing with the Dunker. He doesn’t want people making trouble for him. He wanted you all to know ...”

“You can skip that part,” Maggie said. “Just tell us why you’re here.”

“He knew he was going to die, and he knew it was going to be brutal,” the man said. “And he didn’t say anything, and he didn’t do anything. He didn’t fight us. He reached into his jacket, at one point, and my guys drew down on him — we thought he was going for a gun, you know. But he pulled out a bag of sunflower seeds. He offered the guys some sunflower seeds.”

I could see it all as he described it. I knew he was telling the truth.

“The guys, they thought this was hysterical, and they were laughing about it, like what kind of an idiot offers a snack to the people that are about to murder him? These guys that do this kind of work, they’re not the most intelligent people in the world, and they don’t live in a very emotionally healthy place.”

This caused me to stare again at the man. What kind of talk was that for a mobster, a thug? He looked fit, and he wasn’t a small man in stature, but he didn’t look like hired muscle, not brawny like our Bruiser. Maybe that’s how he got to be in the position he was in — not a trigger guy, but a captain, say. Because of his brains. I still had my doubts about his emotional health, though.

If there’d been a choice, I would have preferred not to hear his story. But I couldn’t turn away from it.

“It didn’t strike me as an idiot trying to buy off his antagonists with sunflower seeds,” he went on, still staring at his hands around the cup. “It struck me, the way he did it, the look on his face, the confidence in his eyes ... It struck me like someone with some trick up his sleeve, some vital bit of knowledge that we didn’t have. His eyes locked onto mine, and he said, ‘Mateo, take some seeds’.”

He stopped again, and finally looked up from his coffee cup to look each one of us in the eyes. We waited ... I don’t think we thought there would ever be an end to waiting now. Torstein was gone. And we were all just waiting now. But this guy, Mateo was his name, he seemed to be waiting for us, too — waiting for us to fill in the blanks and understand what he was trying to tell us. But so far he had only revealed what we might have imagined: Torstein had offered some strangers sunflower seeds.

Mateo’s eyebrows wrinkled, his whole forehead wrinkled, and his face seemed to question us, to beg us to make some response, to explain something. Finally Maggie said, “Did you take some?”

“Yes!” He huffed his reply out in a sort of quiet exclamation. “I did.”

[DestinyLies]

awwwwww cool...love the description.

[inkspot]

He stopped again. I didn’t think we’d ever get the story out of him.

“So you took some sunflower seeds ...” Bruiser urged him on.

“That’s all,” he said. “But when I did, the way he looked at me, he smiled at me. He wasn’t stupid. He knew what was about to happen. But he smiled at me, and he said, ‘It’s all right. No one can take my life from me unless I lay it down. But now, Mateo, what will you do from now on?’ And I ...”

He paused again. I wanted to scream at him, Oh for God’s sake, just tell your story!

But I didn’t. I waited. Maggie waited. Bruiser waited.

Maybe for one minute, maybe two. That’s a long time to wait in silence for someone to continue telling a story. He gulped, and then he said:

“I’ve killed people before. My line of work that’s how you get noticed. I don’t have any fairy tale notions that there’s no blood on my hands, and I’m not squeamish about it.”

OK, that part of the story, I could have done without, but I guess he wanted to impress on us what a tough guy he was, or had been, anyway.

“But when he said that, when he smiled, I felt like he knew me, and he loved me, despite what I was, even knowing what I was. And when he said that, when he asked me what I was going to do from now on ... I couldn’t take it. I ran away. I gave the order, and I left the room, and I heard the boys get started, and then it was like my life caved in on me. How could I go on doing what I do, after he looked at me like that? I couldn’t go to sleep after that. I could always see his face when he handed me those sunflower seeds, it’s burned on my eyeballs now. I couldn’t stay at work. After the job was done, I just left, and I haven’t been back. I don’t know what to do now. I thought you could help me.”

He looked around at us again, desperate.

“What do I do now? That’s what he asked me. What would I do from now on?”

He hadn’t killed Torstein, but he hadn’t saved him, either. He’d given the order! Now he came to us to ask what to do? All I could think was: why don’t you do what Ferdy did? But then, as soon as I thought it, I wanted to un-think it, because it had killed me what Ferdy did.

Bruiser reached over and put his hand on Mateo’s shoulder.

“If you’re asking, what would Torstein have told you to do, if you hadn’t killed him, he would say that love is always the answer to every question.”

Mateo looked at him, that desperation shining in his eyes, and said, “What does that mean? How does that work?”

“That’s the part you have to figure out for yourself, I guess,” Bruiser said. “I used to work in Nikolai’s organization, too. I understand what violence and intimidation can do, but I’m only just learning now what love can do.”

Maggie gave a tentative half-smile to Bruiser. She said to Mateo, “We had a friend, Ferdy. He was the one who lured Torstein into the garage so your guys could capture him. Yesterday, he felt so bad about what he’d done, he killed himself. What he didn’t understand was, that was the last thing Torstein would have wanted. Torstein would have wanted Ferdy to forgive himself, and he would have wanted us to forgive Ferdy.”

Tears were seeping out of her eyes. She reached for Mateo’s hand and squeezed it, but she couldn’t say more. When she opened her mouth to speak again, the words didn’t come. More tears did. I realized it was up to me to finish what she’d begun, but I didn’t know if I could. Honestly I didn’t know. Torstein made forgiveness, love and mercy look easy. But I’m only human. What had he been?

I cleared my throat and said, “I don’t know what Torstein would have told you to do, if he were here. But I do know what he would have told Maggie and Bruiser and me. He would have said that he loved you, and he wants us to love you. We screwed up with Ferdy, but we won’t let you get away. If you’re looking for forgiveness, that’s ours to give, because Torstein made it ours.”

He pushed the coffee cup away, and laid his head down, pillowed on his arms on the table. He heaved a huge sigh of relief. And I think he said, “It’s a start.”

Bruiser said, “We’re a man down with Ferdy gone anyway, brother. Why don’t you stick with us? We’ll square it with the other guys.”

“Yes,” Maggie said. “Why don’t you come fishing with us tomorrow?”

[DestinyLies]

Awwww love it Jax!

[inkspot]

That Sunday morning, it was Easter. That meant nothing to me. My dreams were dead. I’d told Jack and Jazz that Pete and I would come fishing, and that I thought the girls were coming, too, Maggie, Caroline and Marigold. I didn’t tell them about Mateo. I figured I’d introduce him when we got there. Jazz told me Franz and Tawny were coming, and that Angel was bringing Sully, too. Len, he’d been called back to work — some crisis at the rehab — but he would be back, he’d promised Angel, by the time we got back from fishing in the evening.

Maggie and Angel and Caroline had gone to the cemetery early.

They wanted to see the grave again, for it to be real.

I didn’t care if I never saw that place again.

Pete surprised me by getting up that morning and saying he would go fishing. He’d been in bed practically the entire time since the funeral. If you could call it a funeral. I didn’t know how to reach him, but I understood how he felt. What he’d always relied on — his own strength and power — had failed him in the clutch. He didn’t think there was anything left for him. He said he might as well go fishing. It was one thing he still knew how to do.

And that’s what it felt like. Since the day we’d sold the fish market, we’d lived this extraordinary life on the high wire, learning to laugh and love and dance and up there. Then, on Friday afternoon, we’d all tumbled off the tightrope and came crashing back into reality. Time to get back to real life. Time to go fishing.

When I introduced Mateo to Pete, Jazz and Jack on the dock, they didn’t ask any questions. They just shook hands and said he was welcome to come fishing. There would be 12 adults on the boat counting Mateo plus the two boys ... I tried to think back to the summer, the last time we’d been out on the water together, and who all had been there. We’d been so happy just to be together. And we’d had such good luck that day.

A far cry from this gray morning.

We were waiting for the girls on the dock. They pulled up in Maggie’s car, and the three ladies climbed out looking rather ... happy ... all things considered.

Maggie dashed up to Pete, grabbed the front of his shirt to pull his face down toward her, and nearly shouted at him, “Pete — he’s all right! He’s all right, and he’s coming to find you. He said, ‘Go tell Pete and the guys that I’m coming.’ Everything is going to be okay.” She grinned at him with idiot satisfaction, while the rest of us stared at her, bewildered.

“We went to the grave!” Marigold cried out, sounding every bit as happy and rejuvenated as Maggie. “But he’s not there — he’s not in the grave. Because he’s not dead!”

Sully and Van had climbed out of the car, too, and they were doing a little two-step that Torstein had taught them sometime in the spring. They were laughing and dancing.

“You are all freaking nuts,” Pete said.

“No we are not,” Caroline said. “We saw him. We spoke to him! He told Maggie to tell you that he’s all right, and he’ll find you soon. Right, Angel?”

Angel just stood there, beaming at us, saying nothing. It was as if she had a secret so potent, so powerful, to speak it would diminish it.

“What are you talking about?” Phyllis said. “What on earth do you mean?” I could tell what she was thinking. She was thinking they’d gotten into someone’s happy pills.

Maggie let go of Pete’s shirt-front, threw her arms around Phyllis and said, “Torstein’s alive! We saw him — we went to the grave, and the crypt was all demolished, and the casket was lying open on its side, and there was nobody in it.”

“No body in it!” Marigold echoed, sounding slightly hysterical. She giggled at her own joke and then joined the boys in their little line dance.

“Oh, God,” Jack said. You could tell he was daring to hope that somehow what Torstein had said was true, and he’d found a way to come back to us. I just feared that Nikolai’s goons had come back to do something worse to the body than they’d already done.

“C’mon,” Jack said. “Let’s go, let’s go see.”

He sped off toward the street and his car, Pete running hard beside him and Jazz following along.

Bruiser and I grabbed Phyllis and pulled her into Bruiser’s car with us and Mateo while Pete, Jazz and Jack piled into Jack’s car. As we dashed away, we heard Maggie calling to Mateo, “You didn’t kill him after all!” I was left to wonder what anyone else who heard it would think ... I hadn’t told them how Mateo came to be with us that morning.

It was still early morning, the sun had only just risen. Easter or no, the streets were empty, and we sped all the way to Green Lawn. The cars screeched into empty parking spaces and we ran full-out to the crypt.
Maggie was right. It was demolished. The heavy marble door had been splintered like an explosion. The east-facing wall looked like it had imploded, and the casket had been blown off it’s pedestal, laid on its side, open, empty.

“What the devil?” Pete said. “What the devil hapened?”

“What have they done with him?” Jazz said, touching the lining of the coffin where his head had laid.

“He said he’d come back,” Jack said. “He said he’d find us!”

“It’s not possible, Jack,” I said. “It’s not possible he could come back...”

[DestinyLies]

ooooooooooooohhhhhhhh!!!!!!!! awesome as always Jax...very detailed and.."suspensive"

[inkspot]

We drove back to the docks. Tawny and Franz had arrived, and Maggie and the other ladies had told them what they’d seen, the demolished crypt, the empty casket, the vision of Torstein who told them he would find us later today.

“Not a vision,” Angel said. “He was there. We touched him.”

“Yah,” Sully said. “Van thought he was a ghost.”

“I did not,” Van said.

“But he wasn’t. He was real.”

Pete confirmed the scene at the cemetery, but said, “We didn’t see him. We didn’t see anything.”

Our new friend, Mateo, was following along with us like someone in a dream. I could see that he wanted Torstein to be alive, of all the murders he’d done or ordered done, I knew this was the one he would most like to undo. But how could it be possible? How could they have seen Torstein today after the battered and bloody corpse we’d seen on Friday?

“He’s alive,” Maggie said. “You will see.”

Franz shook his head. Clearly he didn’t believe it.

“Let’s go fishing,” he said.

Jack powered up the engines. Jazz cast off the lines. We set out to sea.

The sun was rising over the city behind us as we chugged out into the open water. We were facing gray seas just beginning to color pale pink and orange where the first rays of morning lit them up. But that sunrise was behind us, and we were looking, and heading, west and slightly south — the girls, Van and Sully were standing at the rail on the bow, smiling and laughing, Mari and the boys still dancing, the chilly wind causing them not so much as a goose bump, so contented and happy they seemed. Jack had joined them, making them tell him again and again what they had seen.

Mateo, Pete and I were with Phyllis and Bruiser in the wheelhouse, Jazz was in the captain’s chair.

Maggie worked her way back to the wheelhouse and said, “The funny thing was his jacket.”

None of us were going to bite. We didn’t believe it, couldn’t bear to believe it, and then have our outlandish hopes dashed.

“His jacket wasn’t green. It was sort of tan, golden you could say. Somehow, it was even more becoming ...”

“Did he tell you, did he really tell you to find me, Pete?” Pete asked. “Or did he just say, ‘Go tell the guys’?”

I tried to keep my jaw from dropping. Could Pete really think there was some possibility it wasn’t just Maggie’s imagination? Did he really think she had talked to Torstein, alive?

“I told you!” Maggie said. “He said go tell Pete and the guys. He wanted you to know, specifically, Pete, that he was coming.”

Pete had been looking gray ever since those thugs beat us up in the parking garage, but now he positively blanched. I couldn’t figure it — on the wild, wacky chance that what Maggie said could possibly be true in this world, it would be good news! It would be the best possible news. And yet Pete looked like he was scared to death that it might, in fact, be so.

“Dear God,” he murmured, and sat down on one of benches that ran around the inside of the wheelhouse. Mateo was already seated on one, slumped a little bit, staring straight ahead, clearly dazed by the notion that perhaps Torstein wasn’t dead.

“Pete, it won’t matter,” Phyllis said. “Don’t you see, if he’s alive, then everything is all right! Nothing else matters as long as he’s alive.”

Pete leaned over and put his head in his hands. Phyllis sat beside him and put her arm around his shoulder. I still couldn’t figure what was happening. I didn’t think what Maggie was telling us could be true, but even if somehow Pete thought it was, his reaction was off.

Jazz said, “We were all there, Pete, Jack and me, and Andy. None of us stopped them. None of us saved him. If he told Maggie he’s coming to find us, he’s not going to blame us.”

“None of you swore you’d protect him, either,” Pete muttered into his hands. “None of you told that stinking Waverling that you didn’t even know him!”

“Pete, it doesn’t matter,” said a strange, new voice in the wheelhouse. We’d been joined by a gorgeous guy in a shining golden coat. Where he came from, I can’t say. How long he’d been there, I don’t know. He was not very tall and built like Torstein, sort of muscular, but lithe — he even had Torstein’s straight, black hair and hooked nose. Come to think of it, he even had the shining blue eyes and dazzling smile.