The Shadow of Seth Read online

  ChooChoo was busy giving advice to A.J., so I was on my own. I rinsed out my mouth and toweled the sweat off my face. I tried to get my breath back before my break was over.

  When round two started, A.J. went right for my body again. I blocked whatever I could, but enough of his hits still came through that I could barely keep my wind. I was ready to drop.

  I’d never even exchanged words with this guy, but A.J. felt like the whole world to me—a world that was bigger, meaner, and stronger than me. I was lined up for another ass-kicking when what I really wanted was to kick ass.

  Somewhere down deep, I found a crumb of strength and broke away from A.J. I danced across the ring from him, trying to catch my breath. He must have known that I was just one good punch from going down. He came at me swinging. I countered, somehow, with a couple of decent body blows. That was all it took for A.J. to fall into his old, bad habit. Jab, jab, cross. It was like a tic with this guy. I blocked his first combination without much trouble, except he punched so hard it hurt my arm to take the hits.

  The next time he came at me, I ducked under his cross and hit him with a solid uppercut to the chin, then two more quick punches that actually sent him back against the ropes. He shook them off, then came at me again. I did the exact same thing—ducked his punch and threw an uppercut to his chin. With gloves on and with my skinny arms, I wasn’t doing a lot of damage, but I could tell I was pissing A.J. off. He came at me again, swinging wildly, and I hit him twice more. He was windmilling like an overgrown sixth-grader and I was ducking under his punches and countering with quickness and precision. A.J. kept getting angrier and I wasn’t letting up.

  After one of A.J.’s wild swings, I got off a hard three-punch combination that stunned him. We were only sparring, so I should have backed off, but I was raging by now and I just kept hitting until I had him back against the ropes. I hit him until he would have fallen down, but the ropes kept him up and I kept swinging.

  I could hear ChooChoo’s voice one hundred miles away yelling for someone to stop doing something. I could hear another voice, too, but this one was screaming in animal noises and sobs.

  That was me.

  ChooChoo pulled me off A.J. and he fell to the mat. ChooChoo held me by my shoulders as I kept swinging at the air, kept growling and sobbing. Finally, he let me fall to the mat, too.

  I crawled out of the ring and upstairs to my apartment, where I unlaced my gloves with my teeth and sat in the shower until the water ran cold. I turned the TV on to some droning voices, then buried my head in a couch pillow.

  For the next two days, I barely came off that couch. I ate food every now and then, slept off and on and stared right through the TV. I could hear my phone buzzing, letting me know that someone was texting me, but I never checked to see who it was.

  Finally, on the morning of the third day, ChooChoo rolled the stone away from my grave and pulled me to my feet. Azura was standing behind him, with a dry-cleaned suit draped over her arm. ChooChoo left.

  “It’s today,” Azura said, handing me the clothes.

  I showered and shaved. I put on a clean t-shirt and boxer shorts, then climbed into the black pants and white shirt Azura gave me. I had no idea what to do with the tie, so I came out and told Azura so.

  “Come here,” she said. She flipped up the collar of my shirt and wrapped the tie around my neck, with the fat end hanging farther down. She wrapped the fat end once around the skinny end and pulled it over the front of the knot, letting it fall to the back. Then she wrapped it around to the back once more, brought it over the top and somehow slipped it through the knot. She buttoned the top button of my shirt, then pulled the tie up tight.

  “Put the jacket on,” she said. I draped it over my shoulders. She adjusted my shirt cuffs and smoothed down the front of the jacket. “You look better than you have a right to, you jerk. I bet your mom would love to see you dressed up like this.”

  I tried to say thank you, but words weren’t quite yet ready to form in my mouth.

  Azura kissed me on the cheek, more like a mother than a girl. “This day is about your mom. Go do this for her.”

  Sixteen

  The funeral was held graveside at a cemetery in Lakewood, one town south of Tacoma. I parked Mom’s Jeep on a curving cemetery lane and Azura and I walked through the tombstones marking the burial sites of hundreds of other people’s dead parents and children. Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?

  There were about forty people gathered at Mom’s gravesite, which surprised me. What surprised me even more was that I knew nearly all of them. Most of Mom’s customers were there—Pastor Vandegrift and Diana from Trinity Presbyterian Church, Wayne from the driving school, Checker Cab from Shotgun Shack. Stanley Chang—wearing a black suit over a plain, black shirt—and a few other Shotgun Shack regulars stood in a group at the foot end of the casket, comforting each other. I recognized some of Mom’s old customers as well, like Mrs. Tavish, who used to hire Mom to clean her house until Mrs. Tavish was laid off from her office job because she was so old and tired she couldn’t stay awake at work. Mom kept cleaning it for a while for free, until Mrs. Tavish made her stop. Javier Montero, who ran the muffler shop right next to Shotgun Shack, was another former customer. He was there with his wife, who was swathed in black lace from head to waist and blue jeans and sneakers from the waist down. Javier finally stopped using my mom as a cleaning lady when he realized that his customers didn’t care if his shop was clean and he didn’t either. ChooChoo was there, with a small crowd of boxing folks. Manny the trainer; A.J., who stayed away from me; and a handful of other fighters and trainers. Sweet Pea and Nikki came together, even though neither one had ever met my mom. Nikki gave me a hug, and almost smiled at Azura. The rest of the crowd were those vaguely familiar people I knew from the neighborhood—the people whose names Mom always reminded me of, but that I couldn’t remember that day.

  Detective Carlyle was there. At first, his presence made me mad. But he didn’t try, even for a second, to conduct any business. He wore a suit, but he was still the worst-dressed man at the place.

  Seeing that crowd finally loosened my tongue. “Thank you,” I said to Azura, who was holding on to my arm. The crowd loosened my eyes, too. Tears started rolling down my cheeks, one after another. I let them flow.

  All the mourners looked like they were genuinely sad that my mom had died. Either that, or they were simply considering their own mortality. Funerals have a way of reminding you that your days are numbered.

  The weather held while Pastor Vandegrift gave a short talk. He spoke for a while about there being a time for everything. He reminded everyone that Jesus went to heaven before the rest of us, so he could get the place spiffed up for the arrival of people like my mom. “I go there to prepare a place for you.” That’s what Jesus said, according to Pastor Vandegrift. He kind of made Jesus sound like a cleaning lady.

  The pastor finished strong. At the close of his talk, he said, “Eve and I had one common interest: Poetry. Our tastes were different, perhaps. I was more Carl Sandberg and she was more Khalil Gibran, but still, it seemed appropriate to me that I share a poem today. I’m certain that the one I chose would not have been a favorite of Eve’s. It’s a war poem. It’s about soldiers, not mothers. But I think you’ll get the idea. It’s by Archibald MacLeish and was written at the very outset of World War Two.

  And then he read:

  The young dead soldiers do not speak.

  Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses:

  who has not heard them?

  They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts.

  They say: We were young. We have died. Remember us.

  They say: We have done what we could but until it is finished it is not done.

  They say: We have given our lives but until it is finished no one can know what our lives gave.

 
They say: Our deaths are not ours; they are yours;

  they will mean what you make them.

  They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for

  peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say;

  it is you who must say this.

  They say: We leave you our deaths. Give them their

  meaning.

  We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.

  Azura and I left at the first pitch of earth into the grave. I didn’t want to stick around and figure out how I was supposed to reply to all the sympathy people were waiting to pour out on me.

  It was quiet in the car. I had the radio switched off. Azura’s hand was lightly touching my arm. When I realized it, I covered her hand in mine. We sat like that for fifteen minutes. In my rearview mirror I began to see the other mourners getting in their cars and following each other out of the cemetery. Last to go was Stanley Chang, who climbed into an old, mostly yellow pickup truck, but instead of following the other cars, he turned and drove farther into the cemetery. I watched to see where he went.

  “What are you looking at?” said Azura.

  “Stanley Chang…is going…why is he going in that direction?” I opened the car door and climbed out. “Are you coming?” I said to Azura.

  “I’m coming, Mr. Mood Swing.”

  We began jogging across the cemetery grounds, running from monument to monument, trying to keep out of sight while keeping up with Stanley’s yellow pickup. The truck pulled up in front of a large veterans’ memorial and stopped. Azura and I stopped, too, and crouched behind a tombstone. A figure stepped out from behind the memorial. It was a woman in a long-sleeved black dress with a hem that fell all the way to the ground. She was wearing a wide-brimmed hat with a facial veil so that it was impossible to see any part of her face, hair or skin. Stanley jumped out of his truck and opened the passenger door. The woman stepped inside. Stanley closed the door, got in on his own side, and drove away.

  Azura and I ran back to the Jeep, but by the time we got there, the yellow truck was gone.

  “Who was that lady?”

  “Who do you think?” I said.

  Seventeen

  Azura texted me the next afternoon, asking if I wanted to run an errand with her. She drove over and picked me up in her Lexus at three o’clock. Her iPod was plugged into her car stereo, playing Jack Johnson again. I scrolled through her playlist and switched it to Kid Cudi without asking. She frowned at me, so I switched it back. “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Does it matter, as long as you’re with me?”

  “I guess that depends on where we’re going.” She frowned again, then explained that her dad had asked her to pick up the antique clock from the repair shop. I frowned back at her. She noticed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that Nadel usually asks me to do pickups and deliveries for him. Wonder why he didn’t call me.”

  “Maybe he heard how you pick up more than just clocks. You pick up daughters, too.”

  “I thought you picked me up.”

  “That’s what you want to think. You picked up precisely what you needed.”

  “Does your dad know you’re with me?”

  “No. I lied and said I’d do it by myself.”

  Azura’s answer bugged me. I was the boy she had to lie about.

  In a dirty world, what’s the point of being clean? What was the point? Everyone was dirty in some way. Miss Irene said she was innocent of Mom’s murder, but then she ran from the cops. Checker Cab was still holding down the fort, but he was probably skimming off the till as well. Everybody had an angle. Did Azura have one, too?

  “This guy was one of your mom’s customers?” asked Azura.

  “Nadel? Yeah. One of her oldest. I’ve been hanging out in his shop for pretty much my whole life. He’s a funny old guy, but always been nice to me.”

  The bell on the door dinged when we entered the shop. “Just a minute,” Nadel called from the back.

  The shop was full of clocks, all running simultaneously. Big grandfather clocks with lazy pendulums, small dome clocks with spinning weights under glass, shelves of mantle clocks, walls of wall clocks, a case full of antique wrist and pocket watches. All were running.

  “I wonder what time it is,” I said.

  Azura rolled her eyes, then went back to staring around the room. “It’s like Gepetto’s,” said Azura, “in Pinocchio. It’s only ten minutes until the top of the hour. Will they all start gonging then?”

  “Oh, yeah. Nadel always keeps them all running. He says that’s the only way to display a clock and the only way to make sure it’s still working well. Nadel says that anything mechanical will break down eventually. But that anything broken can be fixed. And believe me, this guy can fix anything.”

  “I want to stay until they all go off,” Azura said.

  “Then we’ll stay. C’mon,” I said. “Let’s go into the workshop. It’s pretty cool back there, too.” I led Azura around the counter and through the workshop door. Nadel was just finishing cleaning the floor—sweeping a neatly mounded pile of dirt into a dustpan. He didn’t notice us.

  The workshop was as clean as I’d ever seen it, with all the drawers and cupboards closed. The Lear clock was hanging on the wall, just as it had been since the first day it arrived. The only other clock in the workshop was a humble little Hermle regulator which had been bouncing around his store forever. The workbench was bare, except for Nadel’s drill press, vice, and other tools. Two books were opened on the workbench as well. Manuals, maybe? I’d never seen books in the shop before, so I had no idea what they might be.

  “Hey, Nadel,” I said. “Hope it’s okay that I let Azura come back here.”

  Nadel froze in mid-sweep. He dropped the broom and spilled the contents of the dustpan, sending sawdust and metal filings across the floor. He stood up. “Seth? What are you doing here?”

  “I’m a friend of Azura’s. She asked me to come along. We’re here for the old clock. For the Lears.”

  “You two know each other?”

  “Yeah, but not for all that long. We actually met when I picked up the clock for you the first time.”

  “Ahh,” he said. “That’s interesting.” He was still wiping his hands with the rag, even though they were free of grease. He kept wiping for about ten seconds, then suddenly stopped. He pushed both of us out into the showroom. “Let’s talk out here where it isn’t so messy.” He closed the door behind him. “Your mother. I’m sorry to hear about that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But the clock isn’t ready. You’ll have to come back later.”

  “That’s weird,” said Azura, “because I believe you called our house to say it was done.”

  “It’s not done. Another time. Another time. Good-bye.”

  He disappeared into the workshop again suddenly.

  “What was that about?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s trying to jack up the price of your repair. Nadel likes his money.”

  “He’s definitely a funny old guy. Can we still stay until the clocks go off?”

  While we waited for the top of the hour, Azura walked around the showroom, looking at all the old clocks. “That one’s a Hayley Perpetual,” I said, when she walked up to a six-foot grandfather clock. “It stays wound for eight days and is amazingly accurate, considering it was built more than one hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “How do you wind it?”

  I kind of loved being an expert in her presence. “You pull these chains down, which makes those weights go up. The weights—and gravity—are what power the pendulum. And the pendulum is what powers the gears. Every swing is one click of a gear. And each gear has a different job—transferring power, regulating power, and redistributing power. Some make the hour hand move, some are there for the moon cyc
le—the part you can see through that little fan-shaped window—and some for the minute hand. They all work together. But when just one tiny part stops working, the whole clock might stop.”

  We moved silently among the showroom, watching as the minute hands ticked toward twelve. With one minute to go, I heard the workshop phone ring. Nadel’s voice said hello, then said, “Why do you keep calling me?” I could only hear his part of the conversation. “He was here… Yes, here in the shop… No, a girl was with him…must be the daughter…yes, what other one would there be? How should I know? I don’t think that’s necessary. Please stop calling me.”

  I couldn’t hear any more after that, because a small mantel clock near me let loose a soft series of gongs as its hammer clanged against a coil of metal inside. The door of a cuckoo clock next to it opened and the tiny wooden bird poked out and began its mating call. The big Hayley Perpetual took up the low part with its deep, majestic gongs. Three clocks around the shop started playing Westminster chimes, all a half second off from each other, as if they hadn’t practiced together before. Before they finished, the whole showroom was gonging, clanging, and chirping. Azura spun around in the middle of it, her arms out, her wide eyes looking from one clock to the next. Then she closed her eyes and listened, her hands turned upward, as if she were standing in the rain trying to catch raindrops. I watched her, thinking how beautiful she was and wondering how Nadel was involved in the death of my mother.

  Eighteen

  We walked out of Nadel’s. Was it possible this old man could be a killer? I didn’t think so. I’d always thought of Nadel as a kind of grandfather to me and father to my mom. Now I was wondering if he was a murderer. I was about to get in Azura’s car when I noticed the tavern across the street. Breakneck Bar and Grill—the same bar that Carlyle ate in. He’d said the bartender across the street from Nadel had seen my mom leave.