eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781491810750 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 09/06/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 406 KB |
Read an Excerpt
EXPOSED
A NOVEL
By Sandra Altschuler
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2013 Sandra AltschulerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4918-1074-3
CHAPTER 1
Saturday afternoon demands an autopilot cruise down Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive in lower Manhattan. Doing what? Well, doing what's required. The Volvo's heater warms her toes and fingertips but it doesn't defrost her solid assertion mothers need designer chauffeur's hats after their first child slides out of the birth canal. She has two caps stacked up. Their father doesn't have a single one. He manages to be unavailable for duty with reasonable, logical excuses she can't penetrate. There are times, like now, in window-fogging winter, when life takes on a shape Roisin doesn't intend; a plan superimposed over an original one. The difficulty is she can't recover her primary intention? Where did it go? Unearthing it would mean excavating a buried treasure, hidden from her current life.
Her son's voice interrupts unsettling thoughts.
"You know they gave you the part in the play because nobody else showed up for try-outs," Warren says, reaching to jab his sister in the ribs, smiling at her discomfort, gloating at his poison-pen words landing exactly on the mark.
"They gave it to me because, unlike you, I have talent and I'm willing to share it," Brooke counters, leaning forward to pull her brother's cap off, pretending to throw it out of the now open window.
It's not that Roisin resents picking up her children from Saturday activities, it's just that she hates the corrosive sound of their bickering. They peck at each other like chickens in a pen. Confrontation in general, sits on her lap as precarious as a wiggling toddler. She would rather remain agreeable but her offspring are escalating their combat.
A blast of December frigid air hits Roisin on the back of her neck and she clenches her jaw as her hands tighten on the steering wheel. Is her left eye beginning to twitch? She can feel the rippling sensation across her upper lid. Traffic is moving faster than the low-hanging clouds, devoid of discernable shapes, except for sheep. She won't make it home before the snow, now falling in large, isolated flakes.
Her exit is coming up and she has to switch to the left lane but their conduct—she has to do something about her children's behavior. It is her responsibility to improve it, but how? They take such pride in torturing one another.
"Okay, that's it," she says frowning, looking first at Warren seated next to her, then at Brooke in the rear. For a moment, she forgets about the cars zooming past her in the left lane and the buckling potholes requiring a swerve or relinquishing an axel. This is New York where you drive like your life depends on accuracy. Diplomacy, skillful child management techniques, and tempered judgment vanish. All she wants is for her kids to settle down and be co-operative like their mother.
"Whether you like it or not there's a price for misbehavior," she says.
"We were just kidding around," says Warren.
Roisin glares at her son, raises a palm near the driver's head-rest and demands, "Hand me a dollar each of you. No excuses."
"Watch out, Mom," Warren yells.
The cry comes from a well of little boy terror, not from a teenage son.
"What? Oh God!" The sound of shearing metal comes before the shudder of impact and the crunch of shattered glass. Thrown forward, her forehead bangs against the steering wheel; time stretches into a gelatinous mass. When she rights herself, the Volvo isn't moving, its momentum brought to a jarring halt.
She takes a dazed inventory of her body: limbs still attached, heart beating a wild, primitive beat, eyes blinking. No, she isn't dead. There is a strong smell of something burning, but her car isn't on fire; she double checks. A hissing sound accompanies the smell. For a moment, she can't explain to herself what has happened. Then, with a crushing sense of panic, she thinks about her kids. They are in the car with her, on their way home. What happened to them? She looks over at the passenger seat. "Are you hurt?" she asks Warren. When he doesn't answer, she probes. "Everything okay? Can you talk?" He seems unharmed but her eyes search for injuries. Does he have internal injuries? Touching him would reassure her and she extends her hand but quickly retracts it knowing that at seventeen, he eschews physical contact.
"I'm good, Mom." he says, "What about Brooke?"
Roisin twists her head to inspect her daughter. "Ouch." With movement, her neck strains, a rubber band stretched taut. She places her hand on the tender spot waiting for her daughter's answer.
"Are you—is anything-?" Roisin asks, not wanting to set the stage for Brooke's theatrics.
"I got scared," Brooke says, as tears well up in her large, blue eyes and spill down her cheeks.
Roisin wants to hug her. She presses her hand against the driver's door but it refuses to open. I have to get them out of here. The thought repeats in her head but she can't make it happen. She is trapped.
"You're bleeding, Mom," Warren says, forcing her to release her other hand from the steering wheel to investigate. With her fingers, she wipes the blood seeping from her forehead and stares at it as if it belongs to someone else. She is a whole, in tact, protective mother trying to be in charge. But she senses she's not any of these things at the moment.
"Here's a towel," Warren says, unzipping his sports bag. She watches him sniff the fabric, make a sour face, then hold it out to her.
"Take it," he says, thrusting it toward her.
Roisin takes the offending towel with grace.
"Thank you," she says, suddenly aware of the world outside the car, a world she has to rely on for help.
Pressed up against the side of her vehicle is a smoking, dark-green, rusty truck vying for the same space as her blue Volvo. A law of physics, she can't remember, says this isn't possible. Where has that thing come from? Her car is nosed halfway into the left lane, but is cut off by the truck, violated. Before she can grasp the situation, a shouting man springs from the pick-up in the left lane of the highway. He has claimed the space, making it appear like outdoor theatre. He hand-gestures and shoots words at her like bullets. What is he saying? Shards of shattered glass hang from her driver's window and spill onto the floor of the car. She brushes them off her shoulder and listens closer to his words.
"Dios mio," the man wails, holding his hands to his head.
Is he moaning over a worthless truck? Or has he suffered a head injury? She can't decide. Do her children have head injuries?
"This guy must be a lunatic," Warren says. Then he presses his hand over the towel, forcing Roisin to increase pressure on the wound. "We have to stem the flow of blood," he says, as if he has medical training. "It doesn't look too bad, maybe a butterfly clip is all."
I've got to get my kids out of the traffic lanes to somewhere safe. We're downtown. This neighborhood isn't safe and the snow is getting heavier. What kind of mother exposes er kids to dangerous conditions? Action! She has to take action.
"That man might kill us," Brooke squeals, bouncing on her seat.
"Call the police," says Warren.
Of course, the police need to be here. She tries to unscramble their number: 191,119. Her mind, sticky cotton candy, can't pull the numbers apart. Come on, think clearly, she demands of herself.
"Give it to me," Warren says, easing the phone from her hand, his voice sounding oddly like his father's.
"We've had an accident on the FDR at Canal Street," he says. "My mother hit a car." He gives the license number, make, model, and her name. "The other driver is outside raving ... I mean he's yelling. I don't know what he's saying. It's Spanish."
Spanish. Yes. That explains it. But Warren said I hit him. "I've never hit anyone. Once I was rear-ended, nothing like this—I'm always careful," she says, unable to stop talking until she hears the sound of a police siren and sees flashing lights approach. Then, the unmistakable, chilling sound of an ambulance resonates. "Oh God! Is someone in the other car hurt? Or ... she can't say the word ... dead?"
She looks outside her cracked driver's window and this time she sees inside the truck. A woman is weeping as if all were lost, her black hair fanned out covering her face. Roisin's hands begin to shake even though she has clutched them together. Tears spring from her eyes clouding her vision. Someone says, "I'm Officer Bonikowski." He is big, big enough for his dark uniform to occlude her visual field. He is the help she needs.
With her free hand, she wipes her face and looks up at him standing beside her door exhaling puffs of late afternoon, frigid air.
"You kids alright?" he asks, pressing his head closer to the Volvo. "I'm going to help you get out to somewhere safe where you can be examined. Too much traffic here." He pulls on Roisin's door, which yields to him on the third try. When she steps out of the car, glacial wind assails her lungs, making subsequent breathe tentative. Snow clings to her beige, ultra-soft vicuna coat and she turns up the collar covering a lilac, cashmere scarf. Her toes chill inside Jimmy Choo boots and her fingers stiffen inside beige, kid gloves. A hat would have kept her head warm and her highlighted hair dry. But she hasn't planned on being outside. Just do a few errands, pick up her kids and go home—a normal mother's Saturday routine. She has thought of herself as normal and highly competent ... until now. Her legs hold her upright, but she feels unsteady as if they are wooden and need to be screwed on tighter. Suddenly, she becomes aware of cars speeding by, some slowing down as they come closer to her car. She and her family are objects of other drivers' curiosity. They are judging her unfairly. I didn't mean to cause trouble. With this thought, she bites the inside of her cheek.
When she turns her head, it is then she notices a second officer on the scene. He places orange cones around both cars and is re-directing traffic. The first policeman herds her family to a waiting ambulance. She refuses treatment insisting, "I'm okay. Check my kids," she says, pushing them in front of her.
"I'm going to ask you some questions," the original officer says, "and I need to see your ID and insurance information. Tell me your name, address and what happened here." He takes out a pad. She hears herself say, "Roisin Casey, 628 West End Avenue. I was getting into the left lane when ... she stops. "My children weren't getting along in the car and ..." She tries to relay details in order but they are coming out in the wrong sequence. "We were on our way home ... I picked them up and needed to exit here ... I don't know my exact speed." The phrase, I'm a good girl, runs through her mind. She looks around and sees the other officer talking to the Hispanic man.
Brooke exits the ambulance and mirrors the direction of her mother's gaze. She stands beside Roisin and whispers, "Mom, that other officer is cute. He looks like an actor. I'll bet he's brave too." Roisin stares at her daughter unable to fathom how she can think this now under these conditions. Then she remembers; her daughter is thirteen.
Roisin's attention refocuses on the other driver's car and the shiny, religious medal hanging from the mirror. Raucous Spanish music is playing, punctuated by the woman's sobs. While her face lays buried in her hands, another sound emerges; faint at first, then louder; a familiar sound that shakes Roisin to her core. She moves closer to be certain. A baby shrieks from the rear seat. She hadn't known a baby was in the car. Was the baby hungry or hurt? This is turning into a nightmare. Roisin watches the mother to see what she will do. But the Hispanic man, who spoke in rapid Spanish to the dark-skinned officer, raises a threatening hand to the woman. Then, he shocks Roisin into holding her breath as he bursts into tears. She stares at him feeling frightened. Men don't cry. I've never seen my husband, John, cry, not even at his mother's funeral. I should call John and tell him what happened. The thought passes, just as it came, without her phoning.
Then, her attention shifts and stays riveted on the woman being gently extracted from the truck with the help of the second officer. She watched the woman remove her infant from the car seat and begin to nurse it. The baby's shrieks stop. But the ones in Roisin's head scream louder. My god! I hope the child isn't hurt. It's so fragile, breakable. She feels her heart beat like the hoofs of a racehorse. She tries to slow it down by picturing it back in a stall, standing with a feedbag around its neck.
"Mom," Brooke whines. "We have to go home. I need to call Jason at 6:30 to go over our lines."
Warren rolls his eyes and approaches. "Dad's on the line." Since the accident, Roisin sees herself as inert, unlike the decisive woman who handles family and work crises with ease and competency. Thank heaven Warren thought to call his father. Only seventeen, but he fills in the part of her that seemed to have vanished since the accident.
What am I going to tell John? He won't believe I'm irresponsible. He thinks he knows me after twenty years of marriage. It is hard for her to admit he doesn't, not at all.
CHAPTER 2
Outside, in the punishing cold, Juan cursed under his breath. "Madre de puta." He paced near his shattered car as he shivered inside a grey, hooded sweatshirt repeating, "La bruja ruined my life." With clenched hands, he sent the blonde witch-driver a look containing the venom of a cobra. In his mind, he pictured his hands around her neck, squeezing the gringa until she went slack. Snow pelting his head did nothing to cool his red rage. On the side of the highway, he saw broken timing belts and punctured, discarded tires.
Cars whizzed by. He knew what they were thinking: another taco-maker arrested. His heart pounded against his chest and his breath shortened to staccato bursts. "Stupid woman, why did she hit me?" he yelled in Spanish, kicking pebbles toward her car with the tip of his steel-tipped work boot. He spit on the ground.
They won't renew my license, not with the new law. Why do the police let her drive, not me? Arrest me not her? Questions spun in his head, but when no answer came, he hung his head between his shoulders and braced his knees with his hands. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw an old dog try to cross the highway.
"Calmate," Valdez, the Hispanic policeman advised, touching Juan's shoulder, but Juan could not rise. His fate was sealed.
"I'm sorry, brother," the officer said, "You live in New York City and it's part of the 287g agreement. I have to detain you. You have an expired license. It's the law."
Juan looked into the officer's brown eyes and knew he could like this man if he wasn't la chota, the police.
"They're going to ask you questions at the jail. Por favor answer immigration with truth. Things are worse if you lie to ICE," the officer said. Then, he pulled Juan aside where he wouldn't be heard and whispered, "I don't like this law but I have to enforce it. Entiendes?"
Juan nodded. He understood that now, in the season before Navidad, when people were expecting joy, he could expect sorrow. Without papers Juan knew he didn't exist, wasn't a person. Papers changed who you were, decided if you were good enough to stay in the U.S. He was the same man with or without them, but now, Juan Rosado Hernandez, a piece of garbage, would be thrown away.
None of what the police told him was welcome, none of it reversible. He was caught with his pants down, as the gringos say, revealing the two glaring melons of his buttocks. They couldn't be hidden or their shapes disguised. Exposed, he heard men's ridicule, their laughter, and knew that soon they would extract their pound of flesh. He pounded his knees. They would make his dream of a good life evaporate. He had promised his brother, Manuel, before he died, to make a successful life in the United States. He had kept his promise, until now.
Images of how he and his crew planted flowers, mowed lawns, raked, trimmed bushes and trees had to be erased. The happiness of hard work in a sweat-soaked shirt would be wiped out; enduring a sore back without complaint, forgotten.
He laughed when he thought of yesterday when he had told Lourdes, "Our dream is coming true; the business is growing good." Today it was a corpse, a rotting corpse. He sniffed to hold back tears threatening to break loose. Cerveza. "I need a drink," he said to himself, picturing the liquid slide down his throat. But no amount of it would make him forget.
Instead, he wiped his nose against his sleeve, and quoted "three strikes you're out," a phrase his workers had used." Then, he counted on his fingers. I have no license, no papers, and no future just like the phrase. But I came this close, he said, moving his thumb and index finger together. He drew a big breath in, let it out completely, and removed a cell phone from his pocket. He phoned his brother, Angel.
"Angel, necesita ayudame," he said. The words 'help me' burned his throat like cheap tequila. Asking aid from his younger brother felt wrong, upside down, a man standing on his head. Angel, his physical double: blue-black hair, frijoles negros eyes and compact build—always needed his help, still, now what choice did he have? Angel was the only brother in the States.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from EXPOSED by Sandra Altschuler. Copyright © 2013 Sandra Altschuler. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.