Chapter 8 - The Return to the Light
The black Mercedes was parked in the bus lane outside the terminal, its hazard lights flashing yellow against the wet asphalt of Eighth Avenue. A city bus honked as it swung past, its huge tires throwing a wall of dirty water against the car’s side panels, but the driver didn't move the vehicle.
Adrian opened the back door, and I got in, my red, white, and blue bag coming with me.
Julian was still in the front seat. He hadn't taken his coat off, but his tie was undone, the collar of his white shirt open three inches, revealing a small, dark mole near his collarbone that looked exactly like the one on my mother's neck.
He didn't turn around until the driver had cleared the intersection at Forty-Second Street.
"The house in Ohio is being sold to a conservation group tomorrow morning," Julian said, his gray eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror. His voice was still cold, but it didn't have that chiseled-ice edge anymore; it sounded tired—the kind of tired that doesn't go away with a night's sleep. "Arthur cleared the lien with the county bank at ten o'clock. We paid eighty-four thousand dollars to satisfy the second mortgage."
"I didn't ask you to do that," I said, holding the blue shark hat against my knee.
"The house is falling down, Autumn," Julian said, his hand moving to adjust the rearview mirror until he could see my face clearly. "The conservation group is going to plant oak trees where the garden was. It’s what our mother wanted. She wrote a letter to the trustees in 2012, before the sickness started. She asked for the yard to be left to the birds."
He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a small, old photograph—not the one from the beach, but a black-and-white picture of a young woman with dark hair, sitting on the steps of a limestone townhouse in New York, holding three small boys in matching winter coats.
"Christopher didn't go to Le Bernardin," Julian said softly. "He went to the storage vault in Long Island City. He spent three hours looking for the box with her old recipe books. He found the picture behind her marriage certificate."
The car didn't turn toward the Upper East Side. It went south, down toward Wall Street, where the buildings were high and dark, their glass tops lost in the low autumn clouds.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"To the exchange," Julian said, his fingers tapping against the leather of the steering wheel. "The quarterly meeting of the Song Trust is at nine tomorrow morning. There are four chairs at the table, Autumn. There have been three chairs since 1999. The board has been voting with a vacancy for twenty-seven years because the bylaws state that the maternal share cannot be liquidated without the presence of the daughter."
May you like
He turned his head around completely for the first time since I had walked into the precinct. His face looked older under the streetlights, the lines around his eyes deep, but his mouth was less straight than it had been before the fire.
"We don't need you to sign the release, sister," Julian said. "We need you to vote."
