In the Age of Love and Chocolate (21 page)

Pain … for a long time, that was all I could think about. The person known as Anya Balanchine had been replaced with a body that hurt. I was a throbbing, aching, monstrous, cranky ball. It did not make me pleasant to be around, I am sure. (I am not what you would call an upbeat person to start with.)

As I was afraid of slipping and falling, I stayed indoors a lot that winter.

I took up reading.

I played chess with Mr. Delacroix.

I began to feel ever so slightly better. I even considered turning on my slate, but I decided against it. In my current condition, I did not wish to hear from Win. I did however speak to Theo, Mouse, and Scarlet on the phone. Sometimes, Scarlet would put Felix on the line. He wasn’t that great a conversationalist, but I liked talking to him anyway. At the very least, he never asked me how I was feeling.

“What’s going on, kid?” I said.

What was going on was that my three-year-old godson had a girlfriend. Her name was Ruby, and she was an older woman—four. She’d proposed marriage, but he wasn’t sure he was ready. She was nice most of the time, but boy, could she be bossy. He wasn’t entirely sure, but he suspected he might have been tricked into marrying her already. There had been an ambiguous incident involving a kiss in a coat cubby and what had been either the loan or the gift of a can of clay. As he somewhat lacked for vocabulary, this story took about an hour to tell, but it was fine. I had time.

And then, because the world is relentless this way, it was spring.

The sakura trees on Yuji’s estate bloomed, the ground thawed, and I began to fear falling less. There were even signs of life in my dead foot, and I could more or less make myself end up where I wanted to go, though it took a million years.

I sometimes walked the path to the pond where I had been attacked. The trip that had taken me less than five minutes a half dozen months ago now took me forty. The fish were still alive. The blood had been scoured away. There was no evidence that I had killed someone there and had almost been killed myself. The world is relentless in this way, too.

More often than not, Mr. Delacroix came with me. Still, we did not speak much of business, which is what we had always spoken of before. Instead, we talked of our families: his son, his wife, my childhood, his childhood, my mother, my father, my siblings, my nana. He had been orphaned when he was young. His father, who had been in coffee, had killed himself when the Rimbaud laws went into effect. He was adopted when he was twelve by a wealthy family, fell in love with a girl at fifteen—his ex-wife, Win’s mother. He was heartbroken over the divorce and he loved his wife still, though he accepted that he was at fault and held out little hope that there would be a happy ending in his future.

“Was it the club?” I asked him. “Is that why you divorced?”

“No, Anya. It was much more than that. It was years of neglect and bad choices on my part. You have a thousand chances to make something right. That’s a heck of a lot of chances, by the way. But they do run out eventually.”

*   *   *

Mr. Delacroix encouraged me to venture from Yuji’s estate, even for an afternoon, but I was reluctant. I preferred hobbling around where no one could see me. “Some day you’ll have to leave here,” he said.

I tried not to think about that.

The second to last Sunday in April, Mr. Delacroix insisted we go out. “I have a reason you can’t argue with.”

“I doubt that,” I said. “I can argue with anything.”

“Have you forgotten what today is?”

Nothing came to mind.

“It’s Easter,” he said. “The day even lapsed Catholics like you and me manage to darken the church’s door. I see you are more lapsed than I thought.”

I was beyond lapsed. What I truly believed was that I was beyond redemption. Since the last time I’d gone to Mass with Scarlet and Felix, I’d killed a person. There was no point in believing in Heaven if you were certain the only place you could end up was Hell. “Mr. Delacroix, you can’t have found a Catholic church in Osaka.”

“There are Catholics everywhere, Anya.”

“I’m surprised you even go on Easter,” I said.

“You mean because I am so evil, I suppose. But sinners especially deserve their annual portion of redemption, don’t you think?”

The courtyard had granite statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Both had Japanese features. Usually, Jesus reminded me of Theo, but in Osaka, he looked more like Yuji Ono.

The liturgy was the same as it was in New York—mostly Latin, though the English parts were in Japanese. It was not hard for me to follow. I knew what was being said, and I knew when to nod my assent, whether I meant it or not.

I found myself thinking of Sophia Bitter.

I could still see her face when I’d plunged that machete through her heart.

I could smell the scent of her blood mixed with mine.

If given the chance, I would kill her again.

So I probably wouldn’t be going to Heaven. No amount of church or confession could fix me anymore. The Easter service was lovely though. I was glad to have gone.

We both decided to skip confession. Who even knew if the priest spoke English?

“Do you feel renewed?” Mr. Delacroix asked me on the way out.

“I feel the same,” I said. I wanted to ask him if he’d ever killed anyone, but I doubted that he had. “When I was sixteen, I used to feel like I was so bad. I went to confession constantly. I always felt like I was failing someone. My grandmother, my brother. And I had bad thoughts about my parents. And of course, the usual impure thoughts that teenage girls are wont to have—nothing that awful. But in the years since, I’ve actually sinned, Mr. Delacroix. And I can’t help but laugh at that girl who thought she was so terrible. She’d done nothing. Except maybe having been born to the wrong family in the wrong city in the wrong year.”

He stopped walking. “Even now, what have you done really?”

“I’m not going to list everything.” I paused. “I killed a woman.”

“In self-defense.”

“But still, I wanted to be alive more than I wanted her to be alive. Wouldn’t a truly good person have let herself die by that koi pond?”

“No.”

“But even if that is true, it wasn’t like I was blameless. She didn’t choose me at random. She chose me because she perceived that I had stolen something from her. And I probably had.”

“The guilt is pointless, Anya. Remember: you are as good as you are tomorrow.”

“You can’t honestly believe that?”

“I have to,” he said.

*   *   *

One day toward the end of April, I asked him, “Mr. Delacroix, why are you still here? You must have business in the States. When we left, you were discussing a run for mayor.”

“My plans changed,” he said. “It hasn’t been ruled out.”

We had arrived at the pond, and he helped me to the bench.

“You know, perhaps, that I had a daughter once?”

“Win’s sister, who died.”

“She did. She was very pretty, like you. She was sharp-tongued, like me. And also like you. Jane and I had her when we were young, still in high school, but luckily Jane’s parents had money so it did not affect our lives as dramatically as it might have in the absence of money. My daughter got sick. It was exhausting for everyone. My ex-wife, my son. Alexa fought very hard for a bit over a year, and then she died. My family was not the same. I could no longer be at home. I did things I’m not proud of. I forced them to move to New York City so that I could take the job in the district attorney’s office. I thought it might be a fresh start, but it wasn’t. I could not bear to be with my wife or my son because it made me too unhappy.”

“That is a very sad story,” I said.

“Would you like it to get even sadder?”

“No. My heart is damaged. It probably can’t take such a narrative.”

“My son, in the year 2082, moves to New York City, and within a week of starting a brand-new school, within a week of what was meant to be our fresh start, he manages to fall in love with a girl who is a ringer for his dead sister. Not particularly in looks, but in behavior, in manner. She has that rare kind of sturdiness that even grown women rarely have. If the boy notices this, he never mentions it, seems blissfully unaware. But the first time I meet her, I am shocked.”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“I am very good at concealing what I am feeling.”

“Like me.”

“Like you. And I have questioned the motivations for my behavior when you and my son got together. And lately, in my old age, I have even come to regret it.”

“You? Regrets?”

“A few. And so it is 2087, and I find myself with a second chance. Theo was willing to come to Osaka, but I wanted to do it myself. Helping you has felt redemptive to me. It was a redemption I did not even think I had a right to hope for.”

“Because I remind you of your daughter?”

“That, yes. But because of yourself, too. You are in my life. I called you my colleague, but you were right to say you were my friend. I felt as if the whole world had given up on me after I lost that election, but you, who had every reason to be cruel to me, had not. Do you remember what you said to me?”

I did. “I said I hadn’t counted you out. You’d been such an enormous annoyance to me. How could I have counted you out? I was being nice, by the way,” I said.

“Be that as it may, it came at a time when very few people were being nice to me, and, well, your friendship in the years since has meant more to me than perhaps I can even express. I am a hard person to know. And so I am here because I must be here. I am here because I know what you are like. I know that you wouldn’t have asked for the help you needed. You’re a proud, stubborn thing and I could not leave you in a foreign country, broken and alone. Long ago, you did me a good turn, and despite what you or the world might think of me, I pay my debts.”

It had begun to rain so he helped me off the bench. He offered me his arm and I took it. The path was slick with moisture, and it was hard for my damaged foot to negotiate.

“You’re doing much better,” he said. “Just go slow.”

“I have no choice but to go slow.”

“It is nearly summer, Anya. You are much better than you were, and the business with the Light Bars is about concluded. I think we should both return to New York.”

I did not reply for a moment. The world that I had left, with its stairs and buses and boys and plots and gangsters, seemed too much to even consider.

“What is it?” Mr. Delacroix asked.

“Mr. Delacroix, if I tell you something, will you promise not to judge me? I feel weak saying this but I am scared to go back. The city is so difficult to manage. I do feel better, but I know I will never be the same. I don’t want to face the Family or the people in the business, and I do not feel strong enough to go back to my life yet.”

He nodded. I thought he would tell me not to be scared, but he didn’t. “You have been terribly hurt, I can understand why you might feel that way. Let me think of a plan.”

“I didn’t mean that you had to do anything about it. I only wanted to say how I was feeling.”

“Anya, if you tell me a problem, I will try my best to fix it.”

*   *   *

The next day, he proposed a solution. “My ex-wife, Ms. Rothschild, has a farm outside Albany, in a town called Niskayuna. You might remember that she is a farmer by trade?”

I did. Win used to help her out. The first time I met him, I remembered thinking that his hands didn’t look like a city boy’s.

“The farm is incredibly peaceful. And Jane would be delighted to host you and your sister for the summer. You could rest up, relieved from the burden of city life. I will visit you when I am able. And then at the end of the summer, you’ll go back to New York City a new woman, I feel quite sure.”

“And she isn’t angry with me because of the club?”

“That was years ago, and she blames me, not you, for anything that might have happened. She was always appalled by my behavior where you were concerned, as you have probably guessed. If you’re worried about Win being there, I believe he’s undertaking a premed program in Boston. He won’t be in Niskayuna for more than a couple of days at the end of August, at the most.”

“Good.” I was in no condition to see him.

“So you’ll go?”

“I will,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to get out of the city for the summer.”

“Have you never gone away?” he asked.

“One year, I came close to going to Teen Crime Scene Summer, a program for budding criminologists in Washington, DC, but I struck a deal with the acting district attorney that landed me at Liberty Children’s instead.”

“I imagine the experience was character-building for you.”

“Oh, it was. Enormously.” I rolled my eyes. “Though I have had no shortage of character-building experiences in my life.”

“At this point,” he said, “I think we can safely consider your character built.”

XXII

I EXPERIENCE THE SUMMER LIFE; EAT A STRAWBERRY; LEARN TO SWIM

T
HE HOUSE IN NISKAYUNA
was white with gray shutters. In the back was a deck, and the Mohawk River streamed pleasantly by. To the side was farmland—I could see peach trees, corn, cucumbers, and tomatoes. The place looked like summer to me, but not the kind of summer I had ever known. Summer as I had imagined other, more fortunate people lived it.

Ms. Rothschild greeted me with a hug followed immediately by an expression of concern. “Oh my dear, you are nothing but bones.”

I knew it was true. At my last doctor’s appointment, I had weighed less than I had at twelve years old. I was skinny like someone with a disease.

“Looking at you, I want to cry. What may I feed you?”

“I’m not hungry,” I said. The truth was, I had lost my appetite since I’d been injured.

“Charlie,” she said to her ex-husband, “this situation won’t do.” She turned to me. “What are your favorite foods?”

“I’m not sure I have any,” I said.

She looked at me with an appalled expression. “Anya, you
must
have a favorite food. Please, explain. What did your mother make for you?”

“At home, you know, my parents died when I was pretty young, and my nana was sick, and I was responsible for the meals, so I basically made whatever came out of a box or a bag. I’m not that into food, and I guess, um, that’s why I’ve kind of quit eating. It doesn’t seem worth the bother. For a while I liked
mole
, but now it kind of has bad associations.” I was rambling.