Run for Your Life Read online

  “Erica, you finally did one useful thing,” he said softly.

  He shook the Treo out of his damp suit coat and blooped it on.

  At the bottom of his mission statement, below “Best wishes,” he typed across the glowing screen: “The Teacher.”

  One last time, he checked the recipient boxes to make sure the address for the New York Times was correct.

  Then he hit Send.

  He tucked the Treo into his pocket and jogged along the elegantly sweeping drive toward the waiting BMW.

  He could hardly believe it. Finally, the deed was done.

  He was the Teacher, the world was his students, and class was about to begin.

  Chapter 5

  THE TEACHER ZIPPED the 720Li into the resident parking section of the Locust Valley, Long Island Rail Road, station, between a Mercedes SL600 convertible and a Range Rover HSE. Even the cars in Locust Valley insisted on expensive neighbors, he thought.

  He cut the engine and checked his suit coat, which he’d spread out on the backseat to dry. With the warm, sunny weather helping, the fine fabric had recovered nicely. No one would notice the slight dampness that remained.

  His good mood had returned. In fact, he was feeling great. Things were going his way again. He was on top of the world. Whistling the first aria from Mozart’s Idomeneo, he lifted the butter-soft Vuitton briefcase off the passenger seat and got out of the car.

  As he approached the platform, he noticed a tall pregnant woman struggling with a baby stroller on the platform steps.

  “Here, let me help you with that,” he said. He gripped the stroller’s front axle with his free hand and helped her boost it the rest of the way up the stairs. It was one of those complicated-looking Bugaboo models—expensive, like everything else around here. Including the mother. She was in her early thirties, a head-turning blonde with a diamond tennis bracelet blazing like an electrical fire around her right wrist. Did she notice that her breasts were practically popping out of her skintight lace cami above her swollen belly? he wondered, and decided, Yes. The package was very tantalizing in a kinky way—a way he liked.

  He smiled as she appreciatively sized up his Givenchy suit, Prada shoes, and tanned, chiseled face. Of course she was impressed. He had looks, the kind of high sheen polish that came only from money, and unerring taste, and balls. The combination wasn’t all that common.

  “Thanks so much,” she said, then rolled her eyes at her sleeping, angelic little boy. “Wouldn’t you know it—we flew back from the Maldives yesterday, I have a lunch date at Jean Georges today that I simply can’t break, and on the flight, our nanny quit. I should have left her there.” She lowered her voice to a teasing, conspiratorial tone. “You wouldn’t want to buy a one-year-old, would you?”

  The Teacher gazed into her eyes for a long, leisurely moment, the kind of look that told her he was everything she imagined, and much, much more besides. Her lips parted a little as she stared back at him, rapt.

  “I’d certainly rent him for an hour or two if the mom came with him,” he said.

  The full-bodied stunner arched herself like a cat, giving him a sly smile of her own.

  “You’re naughty and sexy, aren’t you?” she said. “I go into the city two or three days a week, usually about this time—and I’m usually alone. Maybe we’ll bump into each other again, naughty man.” The bastion of elite modern motherhood winked, then sashayed away on her Chanel peep-toe pumps, giving him a show of her long, firm calves and rolling hips.

  The Teacher stood there, puzzled. Naughty? He’d meant his remark to insult the whore, to shame her by letting her know how much her assault on human dignity disgusted him. Hadn’t his sarcasm been clear? Obviously, it had gone right by her.

  But he’d been plenty clear enough. The problem was that you couldn’t possibly shame someone who had none.

  There had been a time in the not-so-distant past when he would have used his formidable charm to get her “digits,” as they said—a time when he’d have taken her to a hotel and let his sadistic lust, inflamed by her pregnancy, run rampant.

  But that man was someone he had once been and no longer was—someone he’d left behind in the dust as he trod the path that had made him the Teacher.

  Now he could vividly imagine beating her to death with the Bugaboo stroller.

  The roar of the arriving New York City–bound train mounted in the Teacher’s ears, and its weight subtly tilted the concrete platform beneath his feet.

  “All aboard!” the conductor called from the ringing doors.

  Next stop, the Teacher thought, as he joined the other passengers stepping onto the train: Revelation.

  Chapter 6

  ABOUT AN HOUR LATER, the Teacher stepped onto the 34th Street subway platform for the 2 and 3 trains. It was eight thirty-five a.m., the height of rush hour, and the strip of cement was jam-packed with all stripes of humanity from one grimy end to the other.

  He walked to the platform edge’s warning line, near the southern end of the downtown side. On his right was a homeless man who smelled like an open sewer, and on his left, a young female strap hanger, talking loudly on her cell phone.

  The Teacher tried to ignore them both. He had tremendously important things to think about. But while he succeeded with the homeless man, it was impossible to shut out the brazen young hussy who was punishing everyone within earshot with the details of her boring, pointless life.

  He watched her out of his peripheral vision. She was eighteen or nineteen, tall and thin, and, like her squawking voice, her appearance was all about calling attention to herself—dark tan set off by hair bleached an unnatural white, oversized shades, and a pink cutoff designer hoodie that revealed a diamond belly stud in front and one of those oh-so-original, above-the-butt, slut tattoos in the back.

  Forced to hear her rant about her purebred dachshund’s hernia operation through mouthfuls of her onion bagel, he actually found himself leaning more and more toward the reeking Dumpster diver.

  The dime-sized lights of an approaching train appeared in the distance of the far tunnel. The Teacher relaxed—relief from this petty torment was on its way.

  But the human Bratz doll stepped closer to the platform’s edge, brushing past him as she moved. A blob of cream cheese fell from her breakfast and plopped onto the toe cap of his Prada shoe.

  He stared in disbelief, first at his six-hundred-dollar footwear, then at her, as he waited for an apology. But so entrenched was she in the profane hollowness she called her life that she either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care that she had offended a fellow human being.

  He felt a sudden lightness in his belly—a hatred and contempt that went far beyond mere anger.

  But just as swiftly, it turned to pity. People like her were the very ones that he had come to educate.

  Do it now! It’s the perfect opportunity. Start the mission! came a barrage of voices in his head.

  But the Plan, he protested. Don’t I have to stick to the Plan?

  Can’t you take a fucking bonus when you see one, you anal prick? Improvise, overcome, remember? Now!

  The Teacher closed his eyes, as a purpose that he could describe only as holy descended upon him.

  Very well, he thought. So be it.

  The girl weighed barely a hundred pounds. It took him only a slight hip-check to send her over the edge of the platform.

  Too shocked even to scream, she clawed at empty air as she plunged the four feet onto the tracks and landed spread-eagled on her tattooed ass. With beautiful symmetry, her cell phone landed at the exact same instant and clattered along the rails toward the oncoming train.

  Yes! the Teacher thought. It was a sign—a perfect beginning!

  Now she was screaming. Her mouth was open wide enough to stuff in a tennis ball. For once in her life, instead of drivel, something genuine and human was coming out of it. Congratulations, he thought. I didn’t think you had it in you.

  But it wouldn’t do to let his amusement show. “Oh, my God! She jumped!” he called out.

  She was trying to drag herself off the track with her hands, as if her legs wouldn’t move. Maybe her spine had been injured in the fall. He could just hear her words before they were drowned out by the roar of the approaching train: “Help me! Somebody, please, God?—”

  Too bad you lost your cell phone, you could call for help on that! he felt like yelling at her. He knew he should leave, but her pitiful crawling and the freaked-out crowd were too delicious a sight.

  Then out of nowhere, a neatly dressed, middle-aged Hispanic man shoved people aside and leaped down onto the tracks. He scooped up the girl in a fireman’s carry, as naturally as if he’d been doing it all his life.

  Which meant he just might be a cop.

  At the same instant, someone in the crowd yelled, “She not jump—he push! Him, in suit!”

  The Teacher’s head jerked toward the voice. A gnarled, stooped old woman wearing a babushka was pointing at him.

  People on the platform had dropped to the floor, reaching down to the hero and the girl. The train’s horn blared and the sparking brakes shrieked as it tried to make the impossible stop in time. It wasn’t more than twenty feet away when the helping hands from the crowd hauled the pair back to the safety of the platform.

  “You! You push her!” the old lady cried, still pointing at the Teacher. You’ve got to be kidding, the Teacher thought, furious. Not only did the White Knight appear out of nowhere and save her, but some old bag lady had seen him. His fingers itched to grab her and throw her under the still-moving train.

  But with the danger past, other heads were turning toward him. He put on his best charming smile and tapped his temple with his forefinger.

  “She’s crazy,” he said, edging backward. “W
acko.” Instead of boarding the subway car, he turned and walked away casually. People still watched him, but no one was going to challenge a man who looked like him, on the word of a woman who looked like her.

  But when he got to the stairs, he went up them fast and kept a watch for pursuers, just to be sure. Unbelievable, he thought, shaking his head. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned New York apathy? What a pain in my ass!

  Still, there was always something to be learned from experiments. He knew now never to veer from the Plan, no matter how tempting.

  He blinked as he stepped out into the different world aboveground. The light-and-shadow-striped gully of Seventh Avenue was crammed with people—thousands, tens of thousands of them.

  Good morning, class, he said silently, as he pointed himself toward the geyser of lights in Times Square.

  Chapter 7

  GETTING MY KIDS CLEANED UP, hydrated, medicated, and back into their beds took me over an hour. I wasn’t able to tuck myself in until after four a.m. Outside my bedroom window, the sky was actually beginning to lighten above the East Side.

  Hadn’t pulling an all-nighter once been fun? was my last thought before I fell unconscious.

  It seemed like just a finger snap later when my eyes shot open again. The sonata of coughing, sneezing, and wailing that had awakened me continued at full pitch through my open bedroom door. Who needed an alarm clock?

  Being a single parent was tough in a lot of ways, but as I lay there staring up at the ceiling, I decided on the absolute worst one: there was nobody beside me to nudge with an elbow and to mumble, “Your turn.”

  Somehow I managed to get to my feet. Two more of the kids were down: Jane and Fiona in the bathroom, taking turns at the Bennett vomitorium. A dizzy, pleasant fantasy suddenly occurred to me—maybe I was just having a nightmare.

  But it lasted only a couple of nanoseconds before I heard my six-year-old, Trent, moan from his bedroom. Then he uttered a chilling premonition, another thing that fell into the worst-possible category for parents.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” his little voice quavered.

  My bathrobe wafted out behind me like Batman’s cape as I hightailed it to the kitchen. I ripped the garbage bag out of the pail, sprinted back to Trent’s room with the empty barrel—and threw open his door just in time to watch him lose it from the top bunk.

  Trent’s guess had been right, and then some. I stood there helplessly, wondering which was worse. That the thick rope of his projectile vomit had demolished his pajamas, his sheets, and the carpet. Or that I’d been forced to witness another scene straight out of The Exorcist.

  I gingerly picked him up under his arms and lifted him out of bed, shaking the excess vomit off him into the mess on the floor. Then I carried him, crying, toward my shower. At that point, I was seriously considering taking up crying myself. It wouldn’t help, but if I wailed along with everybody else, maybe at least I wouldn’t feel so alone.

  For the next half hour, while dispensing children’s Tylenol, ginger ale, and puke buckets, I wondered what the procedure was for getting a national disaster declared. I knew it usually applied to geographical areas, but my family’s population was almost up there with Rhode Island’s.

  I’d been checking on our baby, Chrissy, every few minutes. She was still giving off more heat than the radiator. That was good, wasn’t it? The body was fighting the virus or something? Or was it the other way around—the higher the fever got, the more you had to worry?

  Where was Maeve, to tell me in her sweet but no-nonsense way exactly how much of an idiot I was?

  Chrissy’s hacking, crushed-glass cough sounded as loud as thunder to my ears, but when she tried to talk, her voice was just a weak whisper.

  “I want my mommy,” she cried.

  So do I, honey, I thought, as I did the only thing I could think of, cradle her in my arms. I want your mommy, too.

  Chapter 8

  “DADDY?”

  The speaker was my five-year-old, Shawna, watching me from the kitchen doorway. She’d been following me around all morning, a faithful lieutenant delivering frontline dispatches to a doomed general. “Daddy, we’re out of orange juice.” “Daddy, Eddie doesn’t like peanut butter.”

  I raised my hand in a wait gesture as I squinted at the microscopic Sanskrit on a bottle of children’s cough syrup. Which patient was this for? I tried to remember. Ah, yes, Chrissy. One teaspoon for somebody two to five years and under forty-seven pounds, I managed to decipher. I didn’t have any clear idea of how much she weighed, but she was four and normal size, so I decided to go with it.

  “Daddy?” Shawna inquired again, as the microwave timer behind me started beeping like a nuclear reactor approaching meltdown. Between tending to the sick kids and getting the well ones ready for school, our household had now apparently entered DEFCON 3.

  “Yes, baby?” I yelled above the din, now looking around for the medicine bottle’s plastic measuring cup, which had gone AWOL.

  “Eddie’s wearing two different-colored socks,” she said solemnly.

  I almost dropped the cough syrup and collapsed in laughter. But she looked so concerned that I managed to keep a straight face.

  “What two colors?” I said.

  “Black and blue.”

  Finally, a no-brainer. “That’s okay,” I said. “Cool, in fact. He’s a trendsetter.”

  I gave up on trying to find the measuring cup—it could be anywhere on the planet by now—and started looking for an alternative. My roving gaze landed on my oldest son, Brian, eating Cap’n Crunch at the kitchen table just three feet away.

  “Hey!” he said as I snatched his spoon out of his hand.

  “All’s fair in love and especially war,” I said, drying the spoon off on my bathrobe.

  “War? Jeez, Dad, I’m just trying to eat breakfast.”

  “Slurping works pretty good with cereal,” I said. “Try it.”

  I was tilting out the dose of cough syrup when I noticed that a pregnant silence had taken over the kitchen.

  -Uh-oh.

  “Well, good morning, Mike,” Mary Catherine said behind me. “What do you think you’re doing with that spoon?”

  I tried giving her my warmest smile while I groped for an answer.

  “-Uhh—a teaspoon’s a teaspoon, right?” I said.

  “Not with medicine, it’s not.” Mary Catherine set a shopping bag on the counter and took out a fresh new package of Vicks children’s cough syrup. “This is what civilized humans use,” she said, producing the bottle’s plastic measuring cup and holding it up.

  “Daddy?” It was Shawna again.

  “Yes, Shawna?” I said, for the thousandth time that morning.

  “You’re totally busted!” She ran away down the hall, giggling.

  Busted or not, I didn’t think I’d ever been so glad to see anybody in my life as I was to see Mary Catherine just then.

  “You take over the brain work,” I said, and picked up a vomit pail. “I’ll go back to swamping.”

  “Right,” she said, pouring the dose of cough syrup carefully into the cup. Then, impishly, she offered it to me. “Care for a shot of this to brace you up?”

  “You bet. Neat, with a beer back.”

  “Sorry, too early for beer. But I’ll make some coffee.”

  “You’re a miracle, Mary,” I said.

  As I squeezed past her in the tight kitchen aisle, it suddenly struck me that she was a very warm and lovely miracle. Maybe she read my mind, because I thought I saw her start to blush before she turned hastily away.

  She’d brought a bunch of other supplies, too, including a packet of Flents ear-loop surgical masks. We armored ourselves with them and spent the rest of the hour treating the sick. And by we, I really mean her. While I stayed on relatively undemanding bucket-emptying and sheet-changing patrol, she took care of dispensing medicine and getting the survivors ready for school.

  Within twenty minutes, the moans of the dying had stopped, and the living were in the front hall, lined up, scrubbed, combed, and even wearing correct socks. My private Florence Nightingale had done the impossible. The insanity was almost under control.

  Almost. On the way out the door, Brian, my oldest boy, suddenly bent double, clutching his belly.