The Blue Zone. Andrew Gross

This is our life, Kate …”

      “And it doesn’t erase it, Em.… I know. It just …”

      Em sat up and stared at her. “It just what, Kate?”

      “You’re right.” Kate squeezed her hand. “It doesn’t make it okay.”

      Justin was at his desk at the computer, leaning back with his feet up, like someone in a trance, playing a video game. Kate asked how he was doing. He just looked blankly at her and muttered back, in his usual way, “I’m okay.”

      She went down to her old room at the far end of the hallway.

      They pretty much kept it just as it had been when she lived there. Sometimes she still slept over on weekends or holidays. Kate stared up at the red bookshelves which still had a lot of her old textbooks and folders. The walls were plastered with her old posters. Bono of U-2. Brandi Chastain—the famous soccer shot of her on her knees when the U.S. team won the Olympic gold. Kate was always into Brandi more than Mia Hamm. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jeremy Bloom, the mogul snowboarder. It always felt warm coming back here.

      But not tonight. Em was right. It didn’t make it okay.

      Kate rolled onto her bed and took out her cell. She hit the speed dial and checked the time. She needed someone now. Thank God, he picked up.

      “Greg?”

      They had met at Beth Shalom, her family’s Sephardic temple in the city. He just walked right up to her, at the kiddush after Rosh Hashanah services. She’d noticed him across the sanctuary.

      Greg was great. He was a sort of Wandering Jew himself, from Mexico City. He didn’t have family here. He’d been in his last year of medical school at Columbia when they met. Now he was a second-year resident in children’s orthopedics. He was tall, thin, lanky, and he reminded her a bit of Ashton Kutcher with his mop of thick, brown hair. They’d basically been living together for the past year in her Lower East Side apartment. Now that they were getting serious, the big question was where he would end up in practice. What would happen to them if he had to leave New York?

      “Kate! God, I’ve been really worried. You’ve been leaving these cryptic messages. Is everything all right up there?”

      “No,” Kate said. She held back the tears. “Everything’s not all right, Greg.”

      “Is it Ben? Tell me what’s happened? Is he okay? Is there anything I can do?”

      “No, it’s not medical, Greg. I can’t go into it. I’ll tell you soon, I promise. There’s just something I need to know.”

      “What, pooch?” That was what he called her. His pet. He seemed very worried about her. She could hear it in his voice.

      Kate sniffed back the tears and asked, “Do you love me, Greg?”

      There was a pause. She knew she’d surprised him. Like some stupid kid. “I know we say it all the time. But now it’s important to me. I just need to hear it, Greg.…”

      “Of course I love you, Kate. You know that.”

      “I know,” Kate said. “I don’t mean just that way.… What I mean is, I can trust you, Greg, can’t I? I mean, with everything? With me …?”

      “Kate, are you all right?”

      “Yeah, I’m all right. I just need to hear you say it, Greg. I know it sounds weird.”

      This time he didn’t hesitate. “You can trust me, Kate. I promise you, you can. Just tell me what the hell’s going on up there. Let me come up. Maybe I can help.”

      “Thanks, but you can’t. I just needed to hear that, Greg. Everything’s okay now.”

      She had made up her mind.

      “I love you, too.”

       CHAPTER SIXTEEN

      Kate found him on the back porch, sitting in an Adirondack chair in the chilly late-September air, overlooking the Sound.

      She already felt that something was different about him. His fingers were locked in front of his face, and he was staring out onto the water, a glass of bourbon on the chair arm beside him.

      He didn’t even turn.

      Kate sat on the swinging bench across from him. Finally he looked at her, a brooding darkness in his eyes.

      “Who are you, Daddy?”

      “Kate …” He turned and reached for her hand.

      “No, I need to hear it from you, Daddy. Because all of a sudden, I don’t know. All of a sudden, I’m trying to figure out which part of you—which part of all this—isn’t some kind of crazy lie. All that preaching about what made us strong, our family … How could you, Dad?”

      “I’m your father, Kate,” he said, hunching deeper in the chair. “That’s not a lie.”

      “No.” She shook her head. “My father was this honest, stand-up man. He taught us how to be strong and make a difference. He didn’t look in my eye and tell me to trust him one day and then the next say that everything about his life is a lie. You knew, Daddy. You knew what you were doing all along. You knew every goddamn day you came home to us. Every day of our lives …”

      He nodded. “What isn’t a lie is that I love you, pumpkin.”

      “Don’t call me that!” Kate said. “You don’t get to call me that ever again. That’s gone. That’s the price you pay for this. Look around you, Dad—look at the hurt you’ve caused.”

      Her father flinched. He suddenly looked small to Kate, weakened.

      “You can’t just build this wall down the center of your life and say, ‘On this side I’m a good person—a good father—but on the other side I’m a liar and a thief.’ I know you’re sorry, Dad. I’m sure this hurts. I wish I could stand behind you, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at you quite the same way.”

      “I’m afraid you’re going to have to, Kate. We’re all going to need one another more than ever now, to get through this.”

      “Well, that’s the thing.” Kate shook her head. “I won’t be going with you, Daddy. I’m staying here.”

      He turned—his pupils fixed and widening. Alarmed. “You have to, Kate. You could be in danger. I know how angry you are. But if I testify, anyone who might possibly lead back to me—”

      “No,” she stopped him, “I don’t. I don’t have to, Daddy. I’m over twenty-one. I have my life here. My work. Greg. Maybe Em and Justin, you can drag them along, and somehow I hope to God you can repair the hurt you’ve caused. But I won’t be going. Don’t you see, you’ve ruined lives, Daddy. And not just your own. People you love. You’ve robbed them of someone they loved and looked up to. I’m sorry, Dad, I won’t let you ruin mine, too.”

      He stared at her, stunned at what he was hearing. Then he looked down. “If you don’t,” he said, “you know it might be a very long time before you can see any of us again.”

      “I know,” Kate said. “And it’s breaking my heart, Daddy. About as much as it’s breaking my heart to look at you now.”

      He sucked in a breath and reached out a hand toward her, as if looking for some kind of forgiveness.

      “All I did was buy the gold,” he said. “I’ve never even seen a bag of cocaine.”

      “No, you don’t get to think that, Dad,” Kate said angrily. She took his hand, but his fingers had changed from the ones that she felt yesterday—now foreign and unfamiliar and cold.

      “Look