Chapter 9 - The Anatomy of an Essex County Winter
The trial of The United States v. Julian Vance, et al. did not take place in Newark; it was moved to the federal district court in Foley Square because the defense had argued—successfully, as it turned out—that the local dockworkers' union had poisoned the jury pool from Bayonne to Jersey City.
I went to Manhattan only once.
It was a Tuesday in January. The Hudson River was choked with gray, jagged plates of tidal ice that ground against the concrete piers with a sound like iron filings being stirred in a bucket.
I sat in the witness room on the fourth floor for three hours, wearing the same charcoal suit I had worn on the afternoon the dough was rolled, my briefcase resting flat on the linoleum between my boots.
I didn't have to testify.
At eleven-fifteen, Special Agent Marcus Vance stepped into the small room, his overcoat smelling of cold rain and wet wool, his wire-rimmed glasses beaded with moisture.
"He took the plea," Vance said, sitting down on the vinyl chair opposite mine without taking his coat off.
I didn't look up from the floor. "Which one?"
"All of it," Vance said. "Conspiracy to violate the Arms Export Control Act. Wire fraud. Three counts of obstruction of justice. And second-degree murder under the federal maritime jurisdiction statute."
"How long?"
"Thirty-two years," the agent said. "At the administrative maximum facility in Florence, Colorado. No parole. Under the federal guidelines, he’ll be seventy-three before his name can even be submitted to the clemency clerk."
"And Thorne?"
Agent Vance allowed himself a thin, razor-sharp smile that didn't reach his eyes.
"Thorne’s lawyers tried to argue cognitive impairment due to early-onset vascular dementia," he said. "The judge threw the brief at the defense table. He’s going to Fort Dix for fourteen years. His medical license was revoked by the state board forty minutes ago. They’re stripping his name off the research pavilion at Rutgers this afternoon."
I sat in the quiet room for five minutes, listening to the muffled roar of the delivery trucks climbing the ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge two blocks away.
"The company?" I asked.
"The freight line is clean, Mr. Vance," the agent said, rising to his feet and offering me his hand. "We spent four months inside your servers. Every bill of lading you signed personally was down to the penny. The port authority restored your primary operating lease on Dock 4 yesterday morning. The teamsters voted ninety-eight to two to ratify your new three-year master freight contract."
I took his hand. His grip was dry, firm, the grip of an accountant who had finished an audit and closed the ledger with three red lines beneath the total.
"Go home to your girls, Nathan," Agent Vance said softly. "The snow’s coming in from the west. If you don't cross the Pulaski Skyway by four, you’ll be three hours in the slush."
I drove the Denali south through the iron marshes of the Meadowlands.
The salt trucks were already out on Route 1, their orange flashing lights reflecting off the oily, frozen mud of the drainage canals. The radio was off. The heat was set to seventy-two.
In the back seat, where the three car seats had sat like three small, leather-bound prisons for fourteen months, there were two sleds—flexible flyers with red steel runners and yellow pine slats that I had bought at an old hardware store in Bernardsville on Saturday.
Beside the sleds was a twenty-pound sack of King Arthur flour and an eight-pound crate of Meyer lemons from California.
When I turned onto River Road, the streetlights were just coming on through the white pines. The iron bluffs were covered in four inches of clean, untracked powder that had drifted off the river during the midday squall, smoothing over the ruts where the federal Suburbans had turned their wheels three months ago.
The house was blazing with light.
Not the cold, clinical white of the halogen spots Julian had installed to monitor the perimeter, but the warm, yellow amber of sixty-watt incandescent bulbs in the dining room and the kitchen.
I killed the engine.
Through the tall casement windows, I could see them.
Lucy was standing on her wine crate, her yellow plastic laundry clip replaced by a red velvet bow that Claire’s mother had sent down from Boston for Christmas. She was holding a large wooden spoon, her small face animated, her mouth moving in what looked like an instructional lecture about the structural integrity of pie crust.
Emma was sitting on the floor with her legs crossed, holding a white bowl between her knees, whisking egg whites with a speed that sent little flecks of foam onto her wool socks.
And June.
June was sitting on Mara Bennett’s shoulders, her chin resting on top of the nanny’s dark brown hair, holding an orange in both hands like a liturgical orb, her face split into an enormous, gap-toothed grin as Mara spun three slow circles around the Calacatta island.
I opened the front door.
The hydraulic latch gave its soft, expensive thwump.
The house smelled of woodsmoke from the living room hearth, roasted chicken with thyme, and the sweet, sharp, unmistakable tang of fresh lemon zest hitting hot butter.
The singing started before I could take my boots off.
It wasn't high and thin like the E-flat in October. It was loud, chaotic, full of the joyful, irregular rhythm of three small girls who had discovered that the room was large enough to hold their voices without anything breaking.
“...and the big brown bear had shoes on his feet, he walked through the snow looking for something sweet, not a fish, not a frog, not an apple in the tree, just three yellow pancakes for his afternoon tea...”
Emma looked up from her bowl.
She didn't drop the whisk. She set it carefully across the rim of the yellow ceramic, stood up on her wool-socked feet, and walked across the Tabriz runner toward the entrance hall.
She stopped two feet from my boots.
"Daddy," she said, her voice clear as an icicle dropping from the eaves. "You took too long in New York."
I dropped to my knees on the Tabriz wool. I didn't care about the snow melting off the cuffs of my trousers. I didn't care about the gray slush that was dripping from the bottom of my briefcase onto the floorboards.
May you like
I reached out and pulled her small, warm body against my chest, feeling her little hands find the back of my neck, her breath hot against my collarbone, her heart beating with the steady, unyielding, permanent rhythm of four hundred mornings that were finally, completely ours.
"I know, baby," I whispered into her dark curls, while her sisters came through the archway with their wooden spoons and their yellow lemons, their voices filling every corner of the tall stone house until the silence was just an old room that nobody lived in anymore. "I know. But I'm home now. And the door is locked from the inside."
