The Family Hightower (33 page)

“Did you?”

“No. Never. I only had to do it when something went wrong. Only when they were coming to hurt you.”

“How am I supposed to believe you?”

“Look,” Rufus says, “I've committed some real crimes, but not like your grandfather did. If any of them went to trial, I'd win.”

“Maybe. But you made sure they never went to trial.”

“Of course I did,” Rufus says. “I had to. Who would have taken care of you then?”

“You call what you did taking care of me?”

He can tell it hurts when he says it, but Rufus recovers fast. “We don't have time for this, Peter, not now,” he says. “There's a man coming to this house who's going to try to kill us. I can't have you anywhere near him, do you understand?” He wants Peter to interrupt him, but it doesn't happen, so he keeps going. “I know how to do this. But you have to get out of here. Do you hear me? Do you?”

Rufus looks just angry, but Peter knows better.

“I'm not leaving,” Peter says.

That's when Rufus's hand, the one on the cupboard handle, starts shaking. His shoulders follow. Then three sobs come out of him, quiet things, like he's in a theater and trying not to cough. He puts his other hand over his face. He still doesn't want Peter to see. Then he seems to make a decision and looks up at his son, tears rolling free down his cheeks.

“Why are you doing this to me?” he says.

And it all comes out of Peter, in a flash flood, all the years of anger and resentment, and none of the kindness. “Doing this to me?” he says. “Doing this to me? That's how it's always been with you. The things your family did to you, the things your brother did to you, the things my mom did to you, the things the world did to you. As if you're not responsible for any of it. You've spent your whole life, and all of mine, Dad, all of it, just running and running, faster than your fucking little legs can carry you, and what has it gotten you? Look where you are! Look! You don't have a friend in this whole damn country, and the only people in the world who care about you are so far away they can't help you when you need it. You haven't seen them in so long you don't know what they look like anymore. You took your family and broke it over your knee, and broke it again and again, and you'd rather die right now than try to fix any fucking little bit of it, the disaster you made of everyone you loved—”

“Don't you lecture me about my family,” Rufus says. “You don't know the first thing about my family.”

It comes out as a roar, and it makes Peter's voice catch in his throat. But he spits back.

“I know everything about it, Dad,” he says. “Everything. And it's my family too.”

Rufus is about to roar again, but doesn't. He just shakes his head, closes his eyes. Looks more exhausted than Peter has ever seen him.

“Sylvie told you?” he says.

“Yes,” Peter says. “She did.”

Outside it's gotten dark. The streetlamps are coming on.

“I was just trying to save you from all of that,” Rufus says. “Because what little is good in me, anything good I've ever done, is in you. We're all trapped, Peter. Me, Sylvie, Henry, Muriel, even Jackie. But you don't have to be.”

“Maybe after this I don't,” Peter says.

“I have a lot of trouble believing that,” Rufus says.

“Open the cupboard,” Peter says.

“No.”

“Open it.”

Inside are two pistols and a rifle, all loaded. Rufus looks at them for a long time. Then makes a decision. Gives his son the two pistols.
You've got ten rounds in each of them,
he says.
Wish I'd taught you how to shoot.
He takes the rifle for himself. The idea is that they'll stand a few feet from each other, facing wherever the hit man comes in—the front door, a window—and just empty their guns into the guy. They kill the lights and wait. They're like that for a couple hours, standing in the dark, shifting from foot to foot. Peter almost drops one of the guns once, imagines shooting Rufus by accident. A bullet right to the stomach, or the face, or the neck. Doing the assassin's work for him. If that happened, Peter thinks, he'd turn on the lights and tend to his dying father, then let the gunman finish the job when he arrived. He just wouldn't want to live with what he'd done. In that moment, his love for his father burns through all the anger, all the confusion, that's been driving him for years. He looks at the silhouette of his father, just across the room from him, and wants to tell him.
I love you, Dad. I love you so much.
But there's no time for that now, not even to whisper it. It could kill them both.

Close to midnight, they hear Holliday coming, through the front gate and into the walled yard. By the light of the streetlamps they see him through the windows, circling the house, figuring out what the best way in might be. He must decide that the windows aren't worth it, because he ends up back at the front door. Rufus and Peter hear him try the handle, give each other a nod, and then raise their guns.

Rufus fires as soon as the door opens, three times,
bang bang bang,
and the noise makes Peter jump. Half of the bullets in his first pistol go into the ceiling. He gets the gun under control half a second later, but it's way too late. Holliday's no idiot, and he opens the door in a crouch, so Rufus's shots are high, and now Holliday's low-slung shape lunges across the room, quiet and quick, like an animal hunting. Rufus gets off a fourth shot that also misses before Holliday collides with him, and then they're both on the floor. Peter can't see anything but he can hear it, the panting and grunting, the scrape of shoes. A chair screeches across the floor, an end table flips, crashes, and splinters. Then there's a metallic click and a long groan from his father, a shuffling, a slap.

“Dad,” Peter says.

“Shoot, for God's sake,” Rufus says.

“I can't see which one's you, Dad. I don't want to hurt you.”

“He's going to kill me. Just shoot.”

There's a growl, as if the assassin is turning to throw himself at Peter. Peter raises both pistols and empties them. It only takes a couple seconds but it seems to go on forever, the flashes from the barrels, the horrendous noise. When it's over, it's a lot quieter, except for the ringing in his ears. Rufus is saying something, but it takes Peter a couple times to hear it.
Turn on the lights.
He does.

And it's just like I've been telling you: There is blood everywhere. Peter didn't think so much could come from two people. It's all over the floor in a smeared puddle; in Peter's reeling brain, it's crawling up the furniture, flowing up the walls. The knife that Holliday used to gut Rufus is painted with it. And the two men on the floor are covered, soaked. Rufus is lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. He's lost an eye, and he's clutching his stomach; the blood is welling around his fingers. Peter hit him three times, twice in the left leg and once in the shoulder. Holliday is on his stomach, pushing himself across the floor. He can't use his legs; he has four bullet holes in his back.

“He's going for his gun,” Rufus says. Sure enough, there's a pistol by the front door; Holliday must have dropped it when he came in, his only real mistake.

“I'm out of bullets,” Peter says. His voice is pitched high. He's in shock, panicking.

“I'm not,” Rufus says, and nods toward the rifle on the floor. “There are four rounds left. You know what to do.”

“I can't,” Peter says.

“Yes you can.”

Holliday's almost to his gun.

“He'll kill you without thinking twice,” Rufus says. “And then me.”

Peter still can't move.

“Do it now,” Rufus says. “You've got it in you, I know you do. I'm sorry. Not everything I put in you is good, Peter.”

Holliday's fingers are a foot from his gun's handle. All at once, something goes dead in Peter. He drops the empty pistols, picks up the rifle. Takes five steps and plants his foot on Holliday's hand. Holliday looks up at him with rage. The hit man tries to make words but it just comes out as barking and yowling. Peter can see the blood-flecked spittle on the man's lips as he pushes the end of the rifle's barrel into Holliday's forehead and pulls the trigger, pulls and pulls. The last four bullets all pass through Holliday's head and empty it out. There are pieces of the man's brain sliding down his neck now, pieces of his skull on the floor, and the rifle's all out of bullets, but Peter keeps pulling the trigger until his father tells him to stop.
Good. Good. Enough. You're done.

The room is tilting and spinning. It smells like meat and burning metal. There is blood all around Peter's feet now, gore on his legs. A speck of something on his face. Something else in his hair. He wants to throw up. He wants to burn the house down. He wants to tear apart the body beneath him with his teeth until there's no man there, just the pieces of him. The eyes. The liver. The kidneys. The heart. Tear it all apart and then scream at the night sky, because he can't let in the words, any words, nothing that would make him think about what he's done. But then there's Rufus's voice, speaking like it did when Peter was little and scared, and his dad was the only thing in the world that made him feel safe.

“Easy there, Peter,” Rufus says. “Easy. That's my boy.”

 

 

Epilogue

 

 

The
authorities never quite piece the entire story together, even after everything Sylvie tells them. There are too many bureaucracies in the way. It's too hard for the agents in Cleveland to talk to the police in Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova; too hard for the police in those countries to talk to each other. And not enough people are left alive to tell them how everything they see is connected. The ones Sylvie's plan leaves breathing aren't talking enough. In Moldova the police have a pile of bodies they know belonged to the same organization, but the other names on their list—the ones who survived—are all missing. In Kiev, the Bentley's stolen before anyone can report it, and it takes the police a few days to find the Wolf and his driver. The detectives on the case still can't say what happened after they learn who the corpses are. It doesn't make any sense to them that the Wolf and his driver would kill each other, but they can't come up with any other explanation. And though the police think they know what happened to Madalina, they never find her.

In Cleveland, Agent Easton and Agent Guarino feel played, hard; they had one of the bigger criminals on their beat in their hands and let her go, and now all they have are the burnt-out bones of a mansion on the shore of Lake Erie, a missing person in the form of Curly Potapenko, a body they can't identify but know isn't Curly, and a long series of money transfers that go all over Eastern Europe; even after they see that it spreads across what used to be the Wolf's organization, they still don't know why. They interview everyone they can think of, starting with Sylvie's family.
I had no idea Sylvie was involved in anything,
Muriel says, and means it. Henry knows a little more.
I always knew she'd gotten into something,
he tells them.
I never imagined it was so bad.
The agents move on to her small group of friends, people she grew up with and hasn't seen in years. They make the rounds of the few organized criminals they know are left. It all gets them nowhere. Then there's just one small nagging question after another.
How long do you think she'd planned it for?
Easton will ask Guarino in the car four months later, as they're driving to the West Side to investigate a case that has nothing to do with the White Lady.
How did she keep all of it from her family?
Guarino will ask Easton six months later in the elevator. They'll be talking about it for the rest of their careers, and they'll never close the case.

Their only consolation is the trial of Peter Henry Hightower—Petey—which the newspapers turn into a regional sensation as soon as he's extradited from Romania to the United States. It's his second trial, after all, and plenty of people remember him from the first one, because the teenage Petey looked every bit like what he was then, a criminal who was also beyond privileged. A lot of the news programs like to run the pictures side by side, of Petey on the stand in
1986
and
1995
, to show just how little has changed, to let people at home be their own judge and jury.
They should have put him away when they had the chance,
goes the general opinion. It helps when the reporters learn what the cops know, that what Petey was involved in is connected to the fire on the lake and his aunt's disappearance. There's the persistent rumor that Sylvie had a lot more going on than she ever let on, but there aren't enough details out there to put together a real story, and it fuels a hundred conspiracy theories, some of them more complicated and sordid than the truth. The worst of them involves every crime you could think of, including incest, a hint that the aunt slept with her nephew, or that some of the Hightower grandkids have siblings for parents. There isn't even circumstantial evidence for any of that, of course, but the details they have are lurid enough, and inconclusive enough, that they seem to point to only the most heinous crimes. Which is true—the crimes are heinous—but not the way that Americans are used to thinking. They make it into a soap opera. This is real life.

And Petey's trial is much narrower than that. The good evidence the prosecution has against him amounts to drug dealing and money laundering, the things he confesses to. They can't connect him to the crimes that made the laundering necessary because Petey doesn't know what he was laundering money for, or what he was investing in. They can't attach him to the Wolf with anything besides the information Sylvie gave the FBI, and for the defense, it's too easy to make Sylvie an incredible source. Petey ends up sentenced to twelve years in a state facility, which he serves in full. His scandalized mother, who two months before wanted nothing more in life but to see him, won't talk to him for the first three of them, except to lecture him. She visits him in prison just to vent.
Do you know what you've done to this entire family?
she says.
Do you know what people are saying about us?
It's awful, Petey, just awful.
Then, when he tries to defend himself, she tells him to zip it and walks off. But during the fourth year, all Muriel's anger burns off. She stops visiting Petey for a few months because she's not ready to apologize, but then she does. When he gets out of prison, they let him come home. He gets a job working in a gas station convenience store by the highway, on the edge of Tremont, near the cemetery where his grandfather is buried. The owner knows who he is and feels sorry for him, starts him off shelving inventory and after almost a year lets him near the cash register. He has that job for a few decades. Over the years, a handful of people get up the nerve to ask him what really happened, what he was involved in over in Ukraine. What happened to Curly. Whether his aunt died in the house fire or is still out there somewhere. He tells them that everything he knows was in his confession and came out in the trial, that he never knew what the criminals in Ukraine were doing with the money, that he doesn't know what happened to Curly or his aunt. He always tells the truth, and nobody ever believes him. And for the rest of his life, he can't go a week without seeing someone who reminds him of Madalina.

For Henry, hundreds of miles away and at arm's length, the trial and fallout are easy to bear. He's mentioned a couple times in an article—
most of Hightower's family are still in Cleveland, although he has an uncle who lives in Connecticut and another uncle who lives abroad—
which gets back to him at work. He's on the phone for business, and right at the end, the person he's talking to can't help himself.
Is that your nephew in that Cleveland trial?
Henry sighs.
Yes, it is.
This happens about five times before he develops his stock answer.
You'd never have seen it coming if you saw him when he was a kid. He was a little angel.
Lets the person he's talking to tack on the moral to the story, button the whole thing up with a cliché.
Funny how things work out. It's always the quiet ones. I guess you never know.
It's a good trick; it seems to give the other person what they need, and it lets Henry make a quick exit.
Uh-huh.
That's all he has to say, and it's over. But he means what he says, too. His mind always goes back to Sylvie's wedding in
1974
, on the lawn of the house where they grew up, the strings of lights in the white tents shining off the bells of the horns in the band. How happy Sylvie looked in Michael Rizzi's arms. They knew something no one else did. The two Peters, one of them in his little suit, dancing with his aunts, the other one trying to climb the tent poles, racing down to the lake and back again. What he said to Rufus then:
You really need to stay in touch more.
If Henry stays long enough in his memories, it starts to hurt.
Just because you have a shitty home life, it doesn't mean you have to make our home life shitty too.
He's a pretty happy man, now. He still has Holly, and the older he gets, the more he'll wonder what he did to deserve her. But he didn't treat Alex's mother very well. They haven't spoken in so long, maybe never will again. He doesn't see Alex even close to as often as he wants to. And he doesn't know where Rufus and Sylvie are. The truth is that he would do anything to bring them all back together, his brother and sisters and all their children, to be the paterfamilias that his father was, without the crimes he committed. Maybe, he thinks, he could be the kind of man Peter Henry Hightower would have been if things had been different. He could do it, he thinks. He could buy the big house they'd need, and his mind is still sharp, more than up to the job of making sure he knows where everyone is, making sure they're all safe. Once everything was all together, he could keep it together. But he doesn't know how to get it there, doesn't know how to start, and years later, he resigns himself to knowing that he never will.

But you could say it happens anyway, even if Henry doesn't see it. Because why tell a story if you can't make a point? What was the point of all that violence otherwise? During Petey's trial, being in the center of the storm is more than Muriel can bear, because for a while she's famous. There are reporters camped outside her house. People recognize her when she goes downtown. On Euclid Avenue, two people standing on the other side of the street can't stop looking at her. One points and turns to the other; they nod and keep staring, as if she can't see them, as if she's an animal in a zoo. She hates all of it, and at first, she takes it out on her son. The fights between them remind her of her childhood, make her wonder if it's genetic, the willingness and the ability to cut deep, to say things that hurt, a lot. But then she realizes that all she really needs is an escape. If Sylvie were there, she would visit her. Instead, she visits Jackie. She doesn't care by then that the couple of reporters who follow her might think she's checking herself into a psychiatric hospital. She's just there to see her sister.

“Hi, Muriel,” Jackie says. “You look different somehow.” It's because Muriel's older. She hasn't seen Jackie in a few years, though Jackie doesn't seem to know that it's been that long. Muriel doesn't know whether that's because of Jackie's condition or because anyone would lose track of time in a place like that. She won't get to the bottom of it one way or the other, and doesn't try.

“Yes,” Muriel says. “But you look as beautiful as always.”

Jackie smiles, big and broad. “Where's Uncle Stefan?”

Stefan's been gone for seven years; he dies at eighty-five in
1988
, of a heart attack, in the kitchen of that same house in Tremont, which he stays in long after most of the people he knows have moved out to Parma. But they all come back for his funeral, just like his brother thought they would. Muriel doesn't remember the service very well, but the memory of the party afterward is as sharp as ever. The drinking. The jokes. The stories. As close to Mykhaylo's funeral, a proper Tremont send-off, as any of them will ever go to. It feels more like a birthday party and she wonders why more funerals aren't like this, or like this anymore, because they should be. Jackie's there, too, laughing along with everyone else, though because nobody has the heart to make her go to the funeral, or to tell her what the gathering's for, she's never clear on just where Stefan went. Stefan leaves everything he has to her, and it's more than the rest of the family expected.
He must have gone out of his way to save this much,
Henry tells Muriel and Sylvie.
He hasn't taken a dime from this family in years.
Lets them share in the collective guilt that they didn't do as much for their own sister. Stefan's will has instructions to sell everything and then manage the funds to best pay Jackie's way, get her the care and therapies she needs.
Tell your uncle thank you,
Henry says, after he's made the arrangements.
Thank you, Uncle Stefan,
Jackie says.
See you soon!
It's
1995
, and she still doesn't know he's gone for good.

“He couldn't make it today, sweetie,” Muriel says.

“Well, tell him I say hello and miss him.”

“Yes, of course.”

They talk about nothing. They play cards, the same games they played when they were kids. Jackie claps her hands every time she wins. When Muriel has to go, Jackie tells her how good it is to see her, and Muriel realizes that nobody's said that to her in a long time. So she visits again the next month, and the next. When Petey's trial is over, she switches to visiting every two weeks, then every week, on Tuesday in the late afternoon, a pattern that lasts for decades, until one day Muriel can't leave the house anymore. Not long after that, Jackie goes deaf.

But we're still in August
1995
, before Petey's trial starts. Henry wakes up in New York City next to Holly, calls Muriel, now that they're talking again, and finds out that Petey's turned himself in and is coming home. It feels like a sign, but he's not too sure, so he stays a few more days that turn into a few weeks. He's still there when there's another knock on Rufus's gate in Livingstone, Zambia.
I'm coming, I'm coming,
Rufus says, and wheels himself to the door. He knows who it is already. Sylvie doesn't say anything when she sees him. She keeps smiling, because it's so good to be with her brother again, but Rufus can tell she's holding back tears; she knows he hasn't been in a wheelchair long, and the bandages over his left eye are fresh. Rufus pushes himself forward and she bends down and hugs him, hard. He reaches up and hugs her back. They stay like that for a long time, because it's been years, way too many years, and they need to begin something that never ended.

“Is Peter here?” Sylvie says, into Rufus's shoulder.

“Yes. He's still here.”

“Tell me you're going to be okay. Both of you.”