Exiled (A Madame X Novel) Page 12

  “Each of the things in the box your father made me, and gave to me on the anniversary of the day he asked me to marry him. He got down on one knee and held up the key to me, holding it in both hands like he was a knight and I was his queen.”

  “And you said yes?”

  Mama laughs. “Well, of course, silly girl! We had you, didn’t we?” She closes the lid, turns the key to lock the box, and then holds the key on her palm. “This key, mija, it is worth more to me than anything else in the whole world, except your papa and you.”

  She hands me the key, and this time I look at it more carefully.

  It is just a brass key, plain, burnished, simple. There is but one simple set of teeth on the stem, rounded, old, worn. The bow of the key, where one holds it to turn it in the lock, it is the most beautiful part of the key. It is a circle, but within the circle is an ornate flower blossom, symmetrical, four petals at the four compass points of the circle, connected by delicate filigree, at the center a knotwork design.

  “I don’t think there are many women in the world who can say they have the literal, physical key to their husband’s heart on a ribbon between their breasts, mija. Which makes me the luckiest woman in the world, because your father’s heart . . . it is what makes my own continue to beat every single day.”

  * * *

  I jerk my hand away, gasping.

  The memory sears me, sits heavy in my heart. God, the love my mother had for my father . . . it is staggering.

  And this key, the ornate, diamond-encrusted thing on the pedestal, it reminds me of that key. Obviously so, because it sparked such a powerful memory merely by touching it.

  Logan lifts the necklace in his hands, moves to stand behind me. I feel my mother, in that moment, I feel the way she would move, if my father were to fasten a necklace around her throat. She would gather her thick hair, black as raven’s wings, in her hands, drape it over one shoulder, tilt her head forward. Papa would fasten the catch with his thick but nimble fingers, and then he would gather Mama’s hair in his hands, and she would lean back against him, look up at him, craning her neck to peer into his eyes.

  My hair is too short to gather into my hands, to drape over my shoulder, but I feel Logan behind me, feel his fingers working to fasten the clasp. And I am my mother in that moment, leaning back against the man I love, twisting my head up to look into Logan’s face, feeling the love in his eyes.

  Logan accepts a little hand mirror, and I look at the key, hanging just so between my breasts. It is a beautiful thing, the key. Made of platinum and white gold, with hundreds of tiny diamonds lining each side from bow to stem. The petals of the flower within the bow are each large teardrop diamonds, and the center of the blossom is a stunning square yellow diamond.

  Logan spins me in place. His eyes ask the question.

  “This, Logan. Please?” I wish I could explain the meaning, but I cannot. Not yet. I need a moment or two to process the memory, to internalize it.

  I just need a moment alone with the memory, before I share it.

  I hear Logan speaking to the clerk. The price staggers me—twenty-two thousand dollars. I expect him to haggle, at least, but Logan pays it without a squabble, handing the woman a card to swipe, signing a slip, and then he’s guiding me outside.

  I lift the key, gaze at it. “I’m sorry, Logan, I didn’t know it would cost that much.”

  He laughs. “Are you kidding? I’m glad you found something you like.” He tips my chin up so I’m looking into his one bright blue eye. “I have money, Isabel. Plenty. More than plenty. You could shop for weeks and not put a dent in it. So don’t apologize.”

  “All right. I just was shocked when she told you the price.”

  “It means something to you?” He says it somewhere between a statement and a question.

  I nod. “Yes. I . . . remembered something else.”

  “You don’t have to share it, if you’re not ready, Is. I’ll never pry, okay? I’m just happy you’re not only making new memories with me, but getting old ones back too.”

  I am near tears. Blink them back. “I don’t know how to thank you, Logan. For the necklace, but also for—today. The ferry ride, getting a few memories back. I cannot tell you what it means to me.”

  “That’s thanks enough, Isabel. I love you. Anything I can do, I will.” He shrugs. “But honestly, it just seems like luck, sort of, you know? I wasn’t setting out to get you your memories back, since there’s no way to know what will or won’t trigger something.”

  “It’s not luck, Logan. It’s you. You . . .” I have to think hard about what I’m trying to say. “You’re bringing me to life.”

  He touches the key where it rests between my breasts. “Aside from what it obviously triggered for you, it’s apropos, you know? Because I don’t feel like I’m bringing you to life, I’m just . . . opening doors for you. Unlocking the life that was already there, so you can live it.”

  He takes my hand, and we walk for a while. Finally, while in line in the Godiva store, picking out chocolates, I feel ready to share the memory.

  So I tell it to him as I remembered it, and I can recite my mother’s words verbatim.

  When I’m done, Logan and I are outside again, munching on truffles. Logan is quiet a few beats, and then he laughs softly, shakes his head. “Goddamn, that was smooth. Your pops had moves, Is. He literally proposed to her with the key to his heart? That’s romance right there, man.” He bends close to me, licks chocolate off the corner of my mouth, and then kisses me. “I can’t promise I’ll be able to come up with anything that romantic, but I’ll sure as hell try.”

  “I don’t think anyone could live up to the standard my father set in that regard, Logan. And I don’t need you to try. Just be you. Love me, and that will always be so much more than enough.”

  He tugs me flush against him, his palm warm and strong against my spine. “You make it easy to love you.”

  “I nearly got you killed. I cost you your eye. How does that count as easy?”

  “Men have fought wars over the love of a woman, Isabel. And trust me when I say you’re the kind of woman wars are fought for.”

  It’s easier to shop after that. He follows me from store to store, sometimes suggesting we go into a certain one. I buy dresses, skirts, tops, shoes, everything wildly expensive. Logan never bats an eye. I’ve been keeping a loose tally, and if my math is correct, we surpassed a hundred thousand dollars quite a while ago. Logan is heavily laden with bags, half a dozen in each hand, a huge one hanging off his shoulder.

  I take pity on him, though he’s not uttered one word of complaint, and indeed, he seems to be actively enjoying watching me splurge.

  “I think I’ve spent enough of your money, Logan. Let’s take this stuff home.”

  He glances at his watch. “Sounds good to me. We’ve got to get changed for dinner and the show anyway.”

  We catch another Uber home. Set the bags down, sort through them, pick an outfit for tonight, strip for the shower . . . and up on the counter, beneath Logan, which has us running late for our dinner reservation. Not that I mind.

  Dinner is a fancy affair at an upscale place somewhere in what Logan tells me is Hell’s Kitchen. I don’t recall the name, or the cross streets. I don’t really care, not today. I’m all about the experience, letting Logan take care of the details. I follow him on foot from our home to the nearest subway station for my first subway ride. It is a revelatory experience, sitting in the inward-facing seats, holding on to the bar, watching the wide variety of people. Old, young, white, black, brown, Asian, rich, poor, clean, dirty, self-absorbed, alert. There is nothing connecting any of them—any of us—except this moment on this train.

  We are ascending the stairs to street level now. I wind my fingers through Logan’s and share a slice of my thoughts. “When I lived in the condo in Caleb’s tower, there would be many, many h
ours of my life that were just utterly . . . empty. One can only read for so long, you know? One of my only pastimes was to look out the window and watch the people coming and going. There was never any lack of passersby, so I could stand at that window for hours, just watching them go past. I would imagine lives for them, create entire stories about them. I still do it, sometimes. If I’m having trouble processing my emotions, or I’m just overwhelmed, I’ll end up people-watching, and imagining stories for them. I would create these elaborate histories for the strangers walking under my window, I think, because I had no history of my own.”

  Logan nods. “There’s a word that sort of encapsulates that idea: sonder. It’s the realization or understanding that each person passing by you or sitting next to you on the train or whatever, that everyone has their own life, their own complex network of friends and relatives, their own stories. I picture each person having a thread that follows them, and it’s a tangled, knotted, interwoven thread with a million individual skeins, but if you could follow that thread, it would eventually, somehow, intersect with yours. Sometimes it’s just that individual moment, where you and that person occupy the same space for a single heartbeat, and other times that person might be more intimately connected to you in a way you’d never have imagined.”

  “Sonder. I like that word.”

  By this time, we’re at the restaurant, where we’re told it will be a bit of an additional wait, as we’re a few minutes late for our reservation. Logan leans close to the hostess, an attractive young woman wearing a dress that reveals more than it covers, has a brief whispered conversation that also involves a surreptitiously passed bribe. I don’t know what he said or how much he bribed the hostess, but it clearly worked, since she leads us to an empty table immediately.

  When we’re seated and Logan has ordered us a bottle of wine, I question him about it. “What did you say to the hostess? And how much did you bribe her to get us this table?”

  Logan laughs. “Oh, I didn’t bribe her. I just showed her my business card.” He slides one out of his wallet and hands it to me. It bears his name, a cell phone number, an e-mail address, and nothing else.

  “So? I don’t understand.”

  He taps at the bottom of the menu: Owned and operated by Ryder Enterprises, LLC. “This was the very first business I started, when I moved to New York getting out of prison. I figured a restaurant was a safe bet for an ex-con, right? As long as the food and the service is good, the environment quiet and the atmosphere pleasant, the clientele won’t care whether or not the owner has an arrest record.”

  “So you own this restaurant?”

  He shrugs. “Yeah. I actually worked as the manager for the first year it was open, too. I had limited capital, and I didn’t want to blow it all right off the bat. So I took it slow. Got directly involved, made sure this place was stable, made sure I personally hired a quality manager, good waitstaff, a great head chef. Once I was sure this place would turn a profit, I started sniffing around for my next venture, but I stayed involved here still, more as the owner than the manager, at that point. Now, with all the other shit I’ve got going on, I’m rarely here, but I figure since I own the place, I might as well take advantage of it, right?”

  “I thought you sold off businesses once they were turning a profit?”

  He shakes his head. “Not all of them. One of the most important things as an entrepreneur is to make sure you always have multiple streams of income. Never rely solely on one venture, if you can help it. Diversify, diversify, diversify. So I’ve kept ownership of . . . oh, a dozen or so various enterprises. This place, a chain of auto parts stores out in the Midwest, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, that region. There’s a security firm for B-list celebs out in Hollywood, um . . . God, it’s hard to remember them all. I don’t have anything to do with the day-to-day running of ninety-nine-point-nine percent of them. They’re all owned under the overall umbrella of Ryder Enterprises, which is, basically, a management corporation. I’ve got a whole staff of efficiency experts, transparency officers, troubleshooters, sales account managers, shit like that. Unless there’s a major, major problem, I just file the taxes and rake in the profit. Oh, there’s a chain of cinemas down south, small-town, single-screen sorts of places. Um, a couple different gas station franchises, three—no, four, luxury car dealerships, one here in Manhattan, one in Atlanta, one in San Diego, and . . . shit, where’s the last one? Seattle.”

  I wrinkle my brow as I sip my wine, the one half glass I’m allowing myself. “I thought you flipped other businesses? I’m confused again. What is it you actually do, Logan?”

  This gets me a laugh. “After I got out of prison, I had a decent chunk of start-up capital stashed down in the Bahamas, one of those private, offshore, numbered accounts. I’d been siphoning my income there via a complicated network of transfers while I was working for Caleb. Security, you know? I needed to know, if something went wrong, that I’d have some cash to start over. Well, good thing I did that, because obviously, something went wrong and I had to start over. And I started over by starting small. This was a floundering restaurant when I bought it. It was a sushi place, I think, and not a great one. So I gutted it, remodeled the interior, gave it a new identity. Upscale, a simple but elegant menu, efficiently run, good service. I sank maybe a quarter of my capital into this place between the purchase and the remodel, but it started turning me a decent profit within three years. It was stable and climbing toward the black by the end of the first year, though, so I knew I was good to start looking for my next endeavor, which was the car dealership here in Manhattan: BMW, Lexus, and Range Rover. High initial cost, but quick returns.” He searches my face. “Am I boring you?”

  “Sort of, yes,” I admit. “I’m not a businesswoman.”

  “Okay, short version, then.” He takes a swallow of wine, pauses so we can order our dinner, and then starts over. “I started out buying businesses, anything I could find that I could afford and that I thought would turn a quick profit. Once I’d gotten my investment back from each business I bought, I would invest in another. And meanwhile, each business would be turning me a profit, increasing the cushion between my investment and my income. I would invest, restructure if necessary, get involved to make sure it was running, and then I’d move on to the next venture after I was sure the company could run without me. I did a lot of traveling in those early years. I was an independent business owner, essentially, and that was it. But after a few years, my income was enough and my diversity of businesses broad enough that I figured it’d be safe to let that spread of companies be my stability, so I set up Ryder Enterprises, the management company, to run them without my input. And then I started doing what I do now, which is what you saw, what I’ve told you about—flipping corporations. Mostly stocks, tech, investment, securities analytics, high-dollar, white-collar sorts of stuff. See, there are millions of businesses out there, thousands just here in New York. And at any given time, there are always some that are barely making it. I buy them up at a bottom-dollar price, since they’re about to go under, and then I either jigger things internally so they’ll start turning a profit, or I disassemble them and transfer their accounts to a different company, usually one I own, which I then sell at a profit. You ever see Pretty Woman? I’m kind of like Richard Gere’s character in that movie, just . . . hopefully less of a dick than he was.”

  “What about the people who work for the businesses when you tear them apart?”

  “Well, that’s what sets me apart. I always make sure there’s somewhere for everyone to land. I’ve got a whole team dedicated to referrals, connecting employees to headhunters, things like that.”

  “So this restaurant, the gas stations, and the movie theaters, you just own them?”

  “Right. They’re income stability. So even if I make a colossal blunder, make a bad investment and lose a shitload of money, the Ryder Enterprises spread of companies can sustain me in comfort.” He
bobs his head side to side. “Can sustain us in comfort, I mean.”

  I expect Logan to have our bill comped, since he owns the restaurant, but instead he pays it and leaves a rather significant tip for the waitress, who I don’t think had any idea she was serving the owner.

  And then a long walk block after block back to the theater district. We take our seats just as the house lights are lowered.

  The show is . . . unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Bursting with energy, music that soars and sweeps and hints at the Middle Eastern origins of the story. The dancing! The singing! It’s all too much, and I want to sing and dance with them. The Genie, especially, is a delight, such wild, joyous, frenetic energy, presence that dominates the stage, the whole theater.

  I am raving as we leave the theater, chattering more than I think I have since I woke up from the coma. Logan is listening, attentive, but seems content to let me talk, to merely enjoy this admittedly rare bout of effusiveness from me.

  It is past ten o’clock now, but the city is still manic, bustling. Lights flash and blink, voices rise in a pleasing din. A policeman on a huge black horse trots past, watchful, alert. The crowd of people leaving the theaters takes over the streets, so the cars trying to ply their way from one avenue to another must inch slowly between the gaggles of theatergoers. I chatter about my favorite songs, about the Genie, about how fun the show was, how Logan has to take me to see as many shows as he can spare the time for.

  All the while, Logan has my hand and is taking us somewhere specific.

  To a place in the heart of the theater district called Junior’s. It is crammed with people, every table occupied, and the hostesses are telling people it’s a twenty- to thirty-minute wait minimum. Logan puts his name in and then finds me a seat, stands in front of me. I’ve run out of words by this time, though, and now we’re quiet.

  But I like this, too, that we can sit together in silence, content to merely be.

  It seems Junior’s is famous for its cheesecake, and Logan doesn’t have to ask me twice to convince me to order a piece of chocolate cheesecake. Which, when it arrives with Logan’s coffee and my tea, is mammoth. More cheesecake than I think any one person should be able to eat all at once; that is my thought when it arrives, at least. But yet by the time I’ve set down my fork, I’ve eaten very nearly the whole thing.