“…wake up? Maybe the dose was wrong. Maybe the drug wore off. I don’t know. I woke up in the coffin, started pounding, figured that was it. Then you showed up.”
He looked at her the way people look at someone who has saved their life. No speech. No drama. Just a long, steady look. Marina never told him her whole story, and he never asked, but pieces of it surfaced in small things, in habits, in the way she moved.
She sliced bread thin, the way people do when they’ve had to make every loaf last. She slept lightly, woke at the smallest sound, and never turned her back to the door. She drank tea without sugar even when there was sugar in the house.
Gregory asked her to buy what he needed and gave her money from the watch she’d pawned for $500. The watch was a Swiss Breguet. The appraiser, an older Armenian man in a basement shop on Church Street, turned it over, studied it through a loupe, whistled, and said, “This is worth ten grand easy, but I’m not paying that.”
“What will you pay?” Marina asked. “Five hundred. Take it or leave it.” With that $500 Marina bought medicine: metformin, enalapril, aspirin, food, candles because the house had no electricity, diapers for Annie, and a can of baby formula.
Gregory counted every dollar, not because he was cheap, but because he understood the money would run out and he couldn’t risk showing his face. His cards were probably frozen, his accounts likely transferred, and Adam had his phone. “I need a lawyer,” Gregory said on the fifth day. “But not just any lawyer. Someone Adam doesn’t know.”
“Lawyers cost money.” “I have money. Just not here. I need to get to it, and that takes time.”
Marina nodded. She was used to impossible problems. In prison, impossible things came up every day, and every day somebody found a way through.
She started making trips into town, leaving Annie with Gregory. He was awkward with the baby, but careful: warming bottles, changing diapers, rocking her to sleep. Marina took the commuter train, then a bus, and looked for a lawyer.
She found one on the third day, not in a polished office but in a storefront by a strip mall with a sign that read “Legal Services, Consultations, Documents.” The lawyer was a woman in her fifties, Linda Parker, wearing thick-framed glasses, with a mug of cold coffee and stacks of paperwork around her. “I need help,” Marina said, “not for me. For someone who is officially dead.”
