Day for Night

by Frederick Reiken

Genres: Literary Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

"If you look hard enough into the history of anything, you will discover things that seem to be connected but are not." So claims a character in Frederick Reiken's wonderful, surprising novel, which seems, in fact, to be determined to prove just the opposite. How else to explain the threads that link a middle-aged woman on vacation in Florida with a rock and roll singer visiting her comatose brother in Utah, where he's been transported after a motorcycle injury in Israel, where he works with a man whose long-lost mother, in a retirement community in New Jersey, recognizes him in a televised report about an Israeli-Palestinian skirmish? And that's not the half of it.



In Day for Night, critically acclaimed writer Reiken spins an unlikely and yet utterly convincing story about people lost and found. They are all refugees from their own lives or history's cruelties, yet they wind up linked to each other in compelling and unpredictable ways that will keep you guessing until the very end.

Release date: June 1, 2010

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 352

Sample

THEY’RE AROUND HERE,” said our guide, as we slowly motored up the Homosassa River. It was late afternoon, a mildly sunny day in midwinter. My
boyfriend David, his son Jordan, and I wore wetsuits, which we had rented along with snorkeling equipment. We’d been assured
that a group of five overwintering manatees had been grazing all day in the oxbow.


“Look!” Jordan yelled, and pointed. Across the river, a pair of seal-like heads had surfaced.

“Well, thar she blows,” said the guide, and let the motor die. He tossed a small metal anchor into the blue-gray water.

We’d been in Tampa for one of David’s conferences. We had heard about the Homosassa River, an hour’s drive north and one of
just a few places on earth where it was possible to swim with wild manatees. I had mixed feelings about the venture, but we
had Jordan, who was thirteen, with us, and he had been extremely bored and brooding for the three days of the conference.


Since the proximate cause of Jordan’s moodiness was not apparent, I chalked it up to the obvious, larger issue we were facing.
Six months before, David had been diagnosed with leukemia. He had recently gone into remission, but the odds were that the
remission would not last more than a year. Though Jordan had not been briefed yet on the prognosis, his father’s bald head
and skinny frame were enough to suggest that something was vastly different. This three-day trip also marked the first time
either Jordan or I had gone with David to a conference. Perhaps it had not been a waste of money, though Jordan and I had
spent most of the time
playing backgammon in our motel room while David agonized about his presentation.


In our rented car we’d driven up to the town of Homosassa right after David finally gave his talk about the latest trends
in the population dynamics of the long-spined black sea urchin. During the ride I offered David my impressions of the talk
while Jordan tuned us both out with his Sony Walkman. He was thirteen, after all. Somehow he’d managed it. His mother died
when he was six, but he’d come through it more or less okay. I attributed this to David’s good and loving nature, and I reluctantly
gave some credit to the two twentysomething budding marine biologists whose thesis committees David had more than chaired.
That was during the years between his wife Deborah’s death and our first meeting, on the occasion of his bringing Jordan into
my office with tonsillitis. It took three years before we started discussing marriage, but then his diagnosis came, and so
instead we discussed my plans to adopt Jordan, if David died.


I thought about this as Jordan jumped into the river. He liked me now but I wondered if he would still like me as his mother.
I guessed the grad students were more sisterly than maternal, and that maybe this had been a safer enterprise. I also guessed
I wasn’t anything like Deborah. She was a dancer. David once told me she had a habit of getting extremely lost while she was
driving. Sometimes she went to the store for milk and took an hour to get home.


Jordan swam calmly up to the nearest manatee and dove down, as if to take a few bites of whatever species of aquatic grass
was growing on the river bottom. When he resurfaced, the nearby manatee approached and seemed to nuzzle him. Within seconds,
he appeared to have been approved as a new member of the herd.


David followed Jordan in. With the same unlearned skill Jordan had inherited, he too was quickly welcomed by the manatees.
For twenty minutes or so, I watched the two of them swim around with these floating teddy bears, one of whom seemed to
be continually demanding that David tickle him. “Go on,” said our guide, a tall, skinny young man who looked to be in his
early twenties. He had blond hair and a very bad complexion, and I had noticed that he kept glancing at my chest.


I said, “I don’t know that I want to.”

He said, “Why not?”

I didn’t answer. I almost told him that as a young girl I had lived in a small village in eastern Poland, that we didn’t have
any marine mammals, and that I’d once seen a dead man floating facedown in the river Bug. But that would have been melodramatic.
The truth was I was afraid that I would not be made as welcome by these manatees. That they would sense a certain problematic
energy in me—or worse, I would find that I was terrified of them. As rationalization, I was reviewing various environmentalist
arguments against fostering interaction with wild animals. These ranged from ethical problems related to ecotourism to the
dangers these manatees might face thanks to their willingness to tolerate human presence. Of course, it also occurred to me
that they’d been tamed long ago, that their nature was genuinely docile in the first place, and finally, that I had never
seen creatures more beautiful in my life.


So I went in with my rented mask, fins, snorkel, and too-small wetsuit. I swam toward them with far less ease than David or
Jordan, veering away, then toward, then back away, and at last choosing to swim in the general direction of a single manatee
on the periphery. It was the wrong choice, I quickly realized. This manatee was the only member of the group that appeared
to be the least bit skittish. I stopped swimming when it drew back from me. I prepared to face unprecedented manatee rejection,
but thankfully, it did not turn its whiskered snout away. With the most placid, unearthly face, it watched me. Its tiny eyes
looked to me like stars. It let its tail fluke sink until its body was almost vertical. When I looked down I saw that the
tail was horribly disfigured, sliced into several leaflike segments by the blades of an outboard motor.



I knew what to do, somehow. I swam away from the manatee and it followed. I took a few more gentle strokes, let myself glide,
and did not look back. When the creature swam up beside me, I kept going. It stayed with me for a minute or so, once even
nuzzling me, and finally I turned toward it. I saw more scars on its back, including one that was shaped like the letter Z.
It moved up close and pressed the side of its long body against my shoulder. Then it drew back again, submerged, swam under
me, and was gone.


Our guide had told us that if you stay where you are and do not try to follow, the manatee will usually return in a few minutes.
I treaded water until its head popped up near the main group. It stayed away and submerged again when Jordan swam out toward
it. I didn’t see its head resurface, although I waited ten more minutes. Then I swam back to the boat and felt as if my heart
would burst.


I pulled myself up the rope ladder that our guide had hung down the boat’s side.

“That one, she likes you,” he said.

“She swam away from me.”

“She’s just a shy one. See any markings?”

“What kind of markings?”

“Propeller scars,” he said, and glanced down at my chest again. Fixed action pattern, David would say. All part of preprogrammed
neurophysiology. He’d claimed his attraction to the second of the two grad students, a top-heavy girl named Stacy Bennett,
could be blamed on the phenomenon of “supernormal stimuli.” Just like the oversized claw of the fiddler crab or the inflatable
red neck of the magnificent frigatebird. David conveniently ignored the fact that these and other supernormally stimulating
appendages typically cited in college textbooks were, almost exclusively, traits that occurred in males.


“Oh, those markings,” I said. “Yeah, her tail was mangled. She also had a scar shaped like a big Z along her back.”


“That’s what I figured,” he said. “Zelda. She’s a real shy one, like I said.”


“Do you have names for all the manatees?”

He nodded and said, “We get to know them.”

“And this is all you do? Take people out to see manatees?”

“No, ma’am,” he said.

“What else?”

“I work on boats.”

“You’re a mechanic?”

He said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“What’s all this ma’am stuff?” I asked.


“Being polite.”

“Did you grow up around here?”

“Born and raised in Homosassa.” With a twinkly smile he added, “Ma’am.”

“That’s very nice,” I said, and stared at his vaguely Germanic features.

“I also play the guitar,” he said. “We have a band. We’re called Dee Luxe. That’s because Dee, she’s the lead singer and she
started the band with her boyfriend. He plays the drums.”


“Is his name Luxe?” I asked.

He smiled again and said, “It’s Jerry.”

Jordan and David were swimming up. By then they’d been in the water close to an hour.

“Hey, Beverly, did you see us?” Jordan said, as he climbed up the rope ladder.

I said, “Yes. You turned into a manatee.”

“Maybe I did,” he said, and appeared to be assessing the possibility. He reached behind himself to unzip his wetsuit. I helped
him peel it down off his shoulders and draped a towel around his neck. Jordan was wearing a little necklace he’d won last
summer playing Skee-Ball at an arcade in Cape May, New Jersey. He and Rocky, my younger daughter, had each cashed in their
win tickets
for a pendant of polished light green stone that hung from a thin black cord. They called them “wonder stones,” which, apparently,
was how they had been marketed.


“We saw you swimming,” Jordan said. “With that one manatee who wouldn’t go near me and Dad. It had a messed-up tail, from
all the boats.”


I said, “Our guide said her name’s Zelda. She has a Z-shaped scar across her back.”

“What about that one with three scars on its head? What’s his name?”

“That must be June,” said the guide. “The others were Lana, Kate, and Francie.”

“How do you know?” Jordan asked.

He said, “I came here with another group this morning. They swam right up to the boat, so I got a good look at their scars.”

“Can you tell who they are without the scars?” I asked.

“Not really.”

Jordan said, “Dad,” and looked at David, who had just climbed up the ladder. “We were with Lana, Kate, and Francie.”

“That’s good to know,” David said softly, and pushed his mask up to his forehead. He’d started growing a new mustache, which
made him look like a big, wet seal.


On the ride back, I sat with David, pulling him close with my arm around his shoulder. For the first time in a long while,
he seemed relaxed, even serene. I recognized his mood. He’d been this way after a whale-watching trip we’d taken during the
past fall. For all his scientific deconstruction of wild habitats, for all the academic bureaucracy and political maneuvering
he had weathered, David had somehow preserved his fundamental love of nature. For me it was long gone, beaten out of me in
my twenties, during med school, when I was taught to recognize the many horrors that nature can bestow. This was a problem,
I later realized, and maybe one I’d hoped to remedy by falling in love with David.
But in the three years since we’d met, I hadn’t healed much or gotten any softer. And in the months since David’s diagnosis,
I’d often felt—more than he—that I wanted to give up trying.


— — —

When we got back to the dive shop, our fearless guide gave me a flyer for his gig that night at some local bar. I thanked
him, folded the flyer up, and stuck it in my pocket. I wanted to tell him there were drugs that he could take for his bad
acne, but I didn’t. It didn’t really seem appropriate.


We ate pizza and then returned to our motel room. The plan was to wake at six, drive back to Tampa, and catch a nine-thirty
flight to Newark. I made phone calls—checked with my answering service, called two patients, and then called Jennifer and
Rocky, my two daughters. Rocky was short for Roxanne, a name I’d once been keen on, God knows why. As expected, I got the
answering machine. I left the number of our motel. I said we’d swum today with manatees and were staying in a town called
Homosassa. I said to call if either one of them got home that night before ten o’clock.


As had become our nightly ritual, Jordan and I played backgammon. He rolled doubles on three straight moves and went on to
achieve a gammon. Because David no longer had his presentation to obsess about, he’d been coaching me and suggesting moves,
and after this thorough beating, I let David take my spot.


I went downstairs and found the motel lobby. I bought three root beers from a soda machine. As I walked back up, I encountered
David, who had run down to find me. He said that Rocky was on the telephone, that it was urgent. “Nu?” I said—Yiddish for “So?” or “Well?”—which had become our little joke. My mother said it all the time, and for a year David
had thought she was always asking about my clothes. “So is my house burning down?” I asked, when he didn’t answer. Then he
explained that my older daughter, Jennifer, was about to spend the night in jail.



I assumed that whatever happened had involved alcohol. I was wrong, as it turned out. She’d been arrested with a girlfriend
of hers, Alison Belle, for blowing up a mailbox in East Brunswick. They’d used M-80s, Rocky said, which I inferred was some
kind of explosive. The owner of the exploded mailbox was Mildred Turner, a hated history teacher. Still it seemed strange
to me since Jennifer’s midterm grade in history that trimester had been, as usual, an A.


To make matters more complex, Rocky had Jennifer on hold, calling from the police station, and had called me since, in theory,
Jennifer was only allowed one phone call. I guessed she might have been granted two, but, in truth, I didn’t want to talk
to her.


I let Rocky tell me that Jennifer needed a lawyer, that she was going to be transferred to the Middlesex County juvenile detention
center, that she would need to be bailed out in the morning, and that somehow I was supposed to make all of this happen despite
the fact that it was 10:20 p.m. and my plane would not be landing in New Jersey until almost 2:00 p.m. the next day. What
little I knew was this: (1) being two months shy of eighteen, Jennifer was still a minor and would most likely get off easy;
(2) I would have to call Mel Blumenthal, my pediatrics practice partner, and get him to bail her out. I told Rocky to tell
Jennifer these two things and that I’d see her when I got back. I stayed on hold after that for about five minutes, until
Rocky returned and explained that Jennifer was crying.


“What is she crying about?” I asked.

“She keeps on saying it’s a mistake, that she shouldn’t be there.”

“Well, was she present for the explosion of Mrs. Turner’s mailbox?” I asked Rocky.

“Yes, but Alison Belle is evil,” she said, as if this clarified everything.

“What does she want?” I asked, and realized I was shaking.
“She blew up her teacher’s mailbox, and now she’s feeling bad because she happened to get caught.”


“She’s crying,” Rocky said. “She’s all hysterical.”

I took a breath and tried to suppress my anger, not to mention the surge of empathic terror I was feeling for my daughter.

I said, “Okay, Rocky. Listen. This is what I want you to tell Jennifer. Tell her she’s going to be fine and that Mel will
bail her out first thing tomorrow. Tell her I love her, and that you love her, and that one night in a county lockup won’t
kill her. Send her a hug for me and tell her to be brave. Then ask her to take a deep breath and hang up.”


I sat on hold again while Rocky relayed this message. It took another five minutes before Rocky’s voice returned. She said,
“I told her. She won’t hang up.”


Somehow I’d guessed this would be the case.

I said, “Then I will. I’ll call home from the airport in the morning. Tell Jennifer that I said good-bye, okay? I’m hanging
up now. Here I go.”


“Wait,” Rocky said, but I went through with it. She may have tried to call me back, but the line was busy since I immediately
called the East Brunswick Police.


I pleaded with two officers, begged them to let Jennifer out that night on the pretense that she was fragile and might have
a mental breakdown. A Sergeant Jones informed me that the lockup facility would be quite comfortable and that Jennifer and
her friend had both seemed hardy. Furthermore, he said my daughter had committed a very serious and disturbing crime and that
maybe a night in jail would be enough set her fragile soul straight. Barely resisting the urge to respond rudely, I hung up
on him. I quickly got in touch with Mel, who promised he’d be there to bail out Jennifer at 7:00 a.m. sharp. I also called
my lawyer friend, Lynn Burdman, who said she’d come with me to Jennifer’s arraignment Monday morning. David and Jordan sat
there listening to everything. I
hung the phone up after the last of an hour’s worth of calls and said, “Root beer, anyone?”


“Are you okay?” David asked.

I said, “Not really.”

“I’ll have a root beer,” Jordan said, and smiled at me. I smiled back at him—Jordan could elicit this—and tossed him one of
the three cans I had put down on the bed. I agreed to play one more game of backgammon, during which I explained the situation.
He again beat me badly and apologized. I assured him it was okay.


Jordan said, “Why don’t you take the wonder stone tonight?” and lifted the black cord off of his neck.

“Thanks,” I said, and slipped it on over my T-shirt.

We turned off the light so Jordan could get some sleep. It was almost midnight. David and I went outside to take a walk. There
wasn’t much to do but wander around the parking lot. After we’d walked the full perimeter, we got into the rented car. Illogically,
I began kissing him, which lasted twenty seconds or so, at which point I started crying. Then David held me against his chest
and continued telling me how brilliantly I’d handled things. I calmed down after a bit and asked him whether he thought Jennifer
would be okay in jail.


“She should be fine,” David said. “She’s tough, like you.”

I said, “But I’m not fine.”

“I think you’ll be calmer in the morning.”

“Do kids go to jail a lot these days?” I asked. “Is this a normal thing?”

He said, “It’s probably more common than it used to be.”

I still felt negligent, guilty of raising a precocious and pretty girl who blew up mailboxes. And Jennifer was the honor student,
whereas Rocky was dyslexic and God only knew what I might get with Jordan.


We went inside and got in bed. Jordan was snoring away, and although David rubbed my back under the covers for a few minutes,
he soon nodded off as well. I counted sheep and other things I never
do. I tried filling my body, part by part, with a gold mist, but this old remedy also didn’t work. So I got up, slipped on
my jeans, walked outside, and leaned over the second-story rail. The bending caused me to feel the piece of paper in my back
pocket. I pulled it out. Dee Luxe at the Blue Ox. 10 p.m. One free drink with $5 admission. The address was on a main road,
the name of which I recognized. I went inside and found the car keys. I flipped the light on and quickly scribbled a note
for David, although I guessed that I would be back in an hour.


— — —

The Blue Ox was as grungy as I’d expected it to be. A sedimentary layer of beer coated the floor and the ventilation system
seemed not to be working. Two steps inside and a cloud of cigarette smoke and body odor enveloped me, though the place wasn’t
really all that crowded.


The stage was near the entrance, and I immediately saw our young manatee guide. He was wearing ripped jeans and a white button-down,
sweating profusely, his electric guitar dangling above his thighs. I found the bar, ordered my free beer, and then sat down
in the small section of the Blue Ox that had tables. From where I sat, I couldn’t see the stage well. The sound system was
terrible, but the music I found tolerable. Mr. Manatee Guide knew how to play guitar, and the lead singer, Dee, clearly had
charisma. She was a hefty and sexy girl whose crass expression and haughty presence contrasted nicely with the soft, sweet
quality of her voice. She had once been in a church choir, I suspected. Now she was doing the angry and rebellious thing,
wearing sheer tights, platform sandals, and hot pink miniskirt. She strutted around the stage while Mr. Manatee Guide stepped
up to play a fast, bluesy, and altogether skillful lead. When he’d stepped back, Dee shouted, “Tim the Slim-Jim Birdsey on
guitar!”


Tim Birdsey. His name seemed to fit him perfectly. They played one more song and thanked the twenty people or so who
were standing around in front of them. They put their instruments down and turned the amps off, and it was clear that they
were finished for the night.


I was about to leave when a young pixie-haired waitress came to my table, placed a Bud Light down in front of me, and said,
“Timmy asked me to bring this.” I thanked her and looked toward Tim, who had been breaking down the stage setup with the other
members of Dee Luxe. A waitress brought all of the band members tequila shots and they downed the shots in unison. Tim had
a lime wedge in his mouth when he caught me looking. He pulled it out and called, “Hey, I’m glad you made it. I’ll be done
here in a minute.” I was relieved to feel myself detaching from the night’s debacle regarding Jennifer, but I still wondered
why I’d wait for a redneck boy who’d spent the afternoon staring at my chest.


“So how’d we sound?” were his first words when he joined me at the table. He had a beer in his hand and had just put on a
Miami Dolphins cap.


I told him, “Pretty good, though maybe not quite ready for the big time.”

“We’ll get there,” he said, and then laughed amiably. He seemed different, much more confident and grounded.

He said, “The funny thing is, I thought you’d come tonight.”

“Are you a psychic?”

He said, “I just had a strong feeling.”

“I had some trouble falling asleep.”

He asked, “Did you and your husband fight?”

“No,” I said, and didn’t bother telling him David was not my husband.

He said, “My mother used to stay up the whole night after she fought with my crazy daddy. He always threatened to smash her
skull in with a shovel while she was sleeping.”


Thankfully, the waitress appeared just then. She had another shot of tequila on her tray.


Tim said, “You want one?”


I said, “No.”

He took the shot glass in his hand and this time drank it without the salt or lime.

“It’s a tradition,” he said. “After we play. But two’s my limit. Dee and Jerry can both drink me under the table.”

“Dee has a nice voice,” I said.

“I know. We could make it big because of her. So why aren’t you sleeping? Are you one of those insomniacs?”

I said, “My daughter got arrested.”

He seemed unsure of whether or not to believe me.

“For vandalism,” I said. “Back in New Jersey, where I live. She and her friend blew up their history teacher’s mailbox. You
ever do that? Blow up a mailbox?”


After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Sure, once or twice. Though it was more fun to just drive around and knock them down
with baseball bats. Mailbox polo is what that’s called. You sort of hang out of the passenger-side window…”


“I get it,” I said, and forced myself not to imagine the other crimes Jennifer may or may not have committed.

“That’s a nice necklace,” Tim said.

I was still wearing the wonder stone.

“Is it jade or something? Malachite?”

“No,” I said, surprised by Tim the Slim-Jim Birdsey’s knowledge of semiprecious stones.

“Tourmaline?”

“It’s a wonder stone.”

“A wonder stone?”

I said, “Yes. I have to go.”

“But what’s a wonder stone?” Tim asked.

I took the stone between my fingers and held it toward him.

“I have no idea,” I said.

Tim said, “Actually, it looks more like aventurine.”


I asked him how he knew so much about green stones.


He said, “My pop was a big rock hound. Guess I became one too. And you know, Dee, she knows things about gemstones, like that
jade is good for calming the nerves and ridding yourself of negativity. She has a necklace with jade and rose quartz. Rose
quartz is good for creativity. She keeps a bunch of stones in our practice room. Aventurine is one of them. She said it helps
the imagination. Maybe that’s why whoever gave it to you said it’s a wonder stone.”


“It’s my son’s,” I said. “He won it at an arcade in New Jersey.”

“Well, it looks pretty.”

I said, “Thank you.”

“Your name is Beverly, right?” he said.

I said it was.

“That’s a nice name,” he said. “I knew a Beverly Dupont back in high school. In ninth grade we were partners in biology lab.
We once dissected a fetal pig. She didn’t look anything like you, though. The funny thing is I feel like I just know you. Maybe we’ve met somewhere, a past life or whatever. Dee’s always talking about past lives. Says she was once the servant
of a wizard somewhere in England. You seem familiar is what I’m saying. I bet that maybe you’re like me in certain ways.”


“I bet that maybe you’re drunk,” I said.

He shook his head and said, “Trust me, you would know if I was drunk.”

“How would I know?”

He said, “I’d probably be telling you all about my crazy family.”

I said, “Okay then, Mr. Psychic. Why don’t you tell me all the ways that I’m like you?”

“Well, off of the top of my head, I’d say you think too much,” he said. “That’s not so bad, really. It just gets tiring. I’d
also say that way down deep inside, you’re sad. Did both your parents die when you were really young or something?”



“No,” I said, although my father was believed to have been murdered in World War II. But this was after my mother and I escaped
from eastern Europe, and all we’d ever heard were stories. All we could ever truly know was that we had never seen him again.


“Well, both my grandfather and father blew their brains out,” he said. “My grandfather did it seven years before I was born.
I never knew him. My dad did it when I was sixteen. Right in our yard. I think it’s why I became the way I am.”


“Which is what way?” I asked, not unaware that he was telling me all about his crazy family.

He said, “Oh, lots of ways. But worried is the word I always come to. I’m sort of worried all the time, though I doubt anyone who knows me would even think it. I
worry about my grandma and my mother, who I barely ever see, and about Dee because we slept together a few times, more like
a few dozen times actually, maybe like five dozen, and even though we told Jerry, I still feel guilty because I’m pretty sure
I’ll sleep with her again. I worry about other people and right now I’m even worrying about you because your husband, he looks
like he’s pretty sick. But like I said, I doubt I even look like I’m worried about anything. Maybe it’s wary, more than worried.
Maybe that’s it. I’m always wary. Maybe wary is what you look like when you’re secretly always worried. Does this make any sense at all?”


I said, “A little,” though I think I was being charitable.

“I want to take you somewhere,” he said.

I said, “I’m sorry. It’s getting late.”

“It won’t take long.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

He said, “It also might help you sleep.”

I concentrated on his face and I sensed earnestness. Strangely enough, his intent seemed pure.

“I’ll tell you what,” Tim said. “You can just follow me in your
car. When we get to what I have to show you, you can just leave if you don’t want to get out.”


“How far is it?”

“Five minutes up the river.”

It was one-thirty, poss