Money to Burn

40

“MICHAEL, IT’S ME.”

I thought I was emotionally up to speed with the fact that Ivy was alive, but hearing her voice on the phone blew me away. People sometimes describe these moments in their lives as “time standing still,” but that must have happened only in movies from Papa’s generation. The feeling was the complete opposite for me. It was hard to fathom how so much of our past could be resurrected in a split second. Just those few words-Michael, it’s me-triggered a flood of memories, instantly bringing back all the things I had feared I was forgetting. Her laugh. Her touch. Her kiss. Even the smallest details of our first phone conversation, our first date, our first naked adventure were compressed into that nanosecond of joy, scores of emotional threads unraveling at warp speed and on parallel tracks that led straight to my heart.

But the sense of urgency in her voice was unlike any I had ever heard.

“Where are you?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to say.

“I can’t tell you.”

I was in my car driving back to Manhattan and was ready to go wherever she was.

“Just listen, please,” she said. “We are in so much danger now that they know I’m alive. They might torture or even kill you to lure me out.”

“Who are they?”

“Just run!”

“Wait! I need to see you.”

“Michael, please!”

An eighteen-wheeler flew past me in the next lane and nearly took the ragtop of my Mini Cooper with it. Tiny cars and the Cross Bronx Expressway were not a happy marriage.

“If you won’t see me, then why did you come back?”

“You know why. I told you.”

Her response caught me by surprise. “When? How?”

“My first warning.”

“I never got any warning.”

She hesitated, and I sensed her fear.

“Michael, the first text message. Two weeks ago, right after I saw Mallory in that gay bar with another man.”

“What?”

“Are you saying you didn’t get the message that said ‘beware the naked bears’?”

Naked bears? “I didn’t get anything like that.”

“Shit!” she said, her tone even more urgent. “Then they must be intercepting your messages. They might even be listening right now! Michael, you have to run.”

“I have to see you!”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“Ivy, don’t do this to me!”

“Don’t let yourself end up like Chuck Bell. Run!”

“Ivy, please-”

A loud crack on the line stopped me cold. It sounded like a gunshot.

“Ivy?”

The line was dead. My heart was in my throat.

My God, Ivy!