Derailed

FIFTY-TWO

He knew where I was.

They’d pulled him half-dead from the rubble, but only half.

He was in a coma for weeks. They didn’t know who he was.

His car had been parked in the hotel lot. He hadn’t shown up at work. He was listed as dead.

They ran his fingerprints in a last-ditch effort to find out his name. Raul Vasquez. He had a “did not show” for sentencing for two counts of assault and battery and one for pandering.

He was transferred to a prison infirmary until he recovered sufficiently enough to be brought into Bronx Superior Court for sentencing.

This I knew from the article. The rest of it I imagined.

He’d sat there in prison. He’d thought and he’d remembered.

What Didi had told him. About my daughter. About the special pig insulin she needed to survive. Why pig insulin? She had asked me, remember? Like a concerned lover, instead of an extortionist wheedling the details out of me.

Vasquez sat there in prison and fumed. I was hiding from him. I was gone. But then he understood there was something I would have to do. No matter how carefully I was hiding, I would have to do this thing.

This is Mr. Widdoes. Is my insulin in?

How many drugstores must have said no. Must’ve said, Widdoes who?

But he kept going. He kept calling. He had all the time in the world. He had all the motivation necessary.

Maybe he started in New York. Then on to Pennsylvania. And so on.

One day, he’d reached Illinois.

Roxman’s Drugs.

And this time when he asked if his insulin was in, the druggist’s assistant didn’t say no.

He said not yet.

But it’ll be in Monday.

Two weeks after I’d talked to Jameel, he found me after class and handed me a sheet of paper.

“What’s this?” I said.

“Your guy,” he said. “But there’s three of them.”

“Three?”

“Yeah — three Raul Vasquezes. But if he’s from New York, I’d imagine he’s this one.” He pointed to the first name on the sheet. “I’d imagine he’s here.”

I lay upstairs in bed. I couldn’t sleep.

Kim was attuned to my nightly rhythms and knew without even looking that I was lying there wide awake and staring at the ceiling.

“What’s the matter, honey?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

I couldn’t tell her yet. I didn’t have the heart. We’d escaped from catastrophe once; we’d made a new life. We were happy. I couldn’t tell her that we hadn’t escaped after all. That the past was reaching out for us with icy fingers.

“Nothing,” I said.

I was thinking.

What was parole for a twelve-year sentence?

When would he be getting out?

He would come for me then — I knew that. For my family. And then he would do what he’d done to Winston and Sam Griffen and the man he’d pushed off the train in Lynbrook, Long Island, and God knows how many others.

That day he came to our home as a chimney cleaner.

I heard about a family that went to sleep and never woke up.

Yes, he would be coming for me.

Unless — I whispered it like a fervent prayer.

Unless I get to him first.

He didn’t know that I knew he was alive. He didn’t know that I knew he’d found me.

But what did that matter?

He was in prison. He was locked up.

To get to him, I would have to get inside Attica.

Now — how could I do that?