The Goldfinch

“Do they open up everything in the airport?” I asked, in a timid voice—and then asked again, because nobody seemed to hear me. I was sitting in the front seat in order to ensure Dad and Xandra’s romantic privacy.

“Oh, sure,” said the cab driver. He was a beefy, big-shouldered Soviet: coarse features, sweaty red-apple cheeks, like a weightlifter gone to fat. “And if they don’t open, they x-ray.”

“Even if I check it?”

“Oh, yes,” he said reassuringly. “They are wiping for explosives, everything. Very safe.”

“But—” I tried to think of some way to formulate what I needed to ask, without betraying myself, and couldn’t.

“Not to worry,” said the driver. “Lots of police at airport. And three-four days ago? Roadblocks.”

“Well, all I can say is, I can’t fucking wait to get out of here,” Xandra said in her husky voice. For a perplexed moment, I thought she was talking to me, but when I looked back, she was turned toward my father.

My dad put his hand on her knee and said something too low for me to hear. He was wearing his tinted glasses, leaning with his head lolled back on the rear seat, and there was something loose and young-sounding in the flatness of his voice, the secret something that passed between them as he squeezed Xandra’s knee. I turned away from them and looked out at the no-man’s-land rushing past: long low buildings, bodegas and body shops, car lots simmering in the morning heat.

“See, I don’t mind sevens in the flight number,” Xandra was saying quietly. “It’s eights freak me out.”

“Yeah, but eight’s a lucky number in China. Take a look at the international board when we get to McCarran. All the incoming flights from Beijing? Eight eight eight.”

“You and your Wisdom of the Chinese.”

“Number pattern. It’s all energy. Meeting of heaven and earth.”

“ ‘Heaven and earth.’ You make it sound like magic.”

“It is.”

“Oh yeah?”

They were whispering. In the rear view mirror, their faces were goofy, and too close together; when I realized they were about to kiss (something that still shocked me, no matter how often I saw them do it), I turned to stare straight ahead. It occurred to me that if I didn’t already know how my mother had died, no power on earth could have convinced me they hadn’t murdered her.

iv.

WHILE WE WERE WAITING to get our boarding passes I was stiff with fear, fully expecting Security to open my suitcase and discover the painting right then, in the check-in line. But the grumpy woman with the shag haircut whose face I still remember (I’d been praying we wouldn’t have to go to her when it was our turn) hoisted my suitcase on the belt with hardly a glance.

As I watched it wobble away, towards perso

Backpacks, briefcases, shopping bags and strollers, heads bobbing down the terminal as far as I could see. Shuffling through the security line, I heard a shout—of my name, as I thought. I froze.

“Come on, come on,” said my dad, hopping behind me on one foot, trying to get his loafer off, elbowing me in the back, “don’t just stand there, you’re holding up the whole damn line—”

Going through the metal detector, I kept my eyes on the carpet—rigid with fear, expecting any moment a hand to fall on my shoulder. Babies cried. Old people puttered by in motorized carts. What would they do to me? Could I make them understand it wasn’t quite how it looked? I imagined some cinder-block room like in the movies, slammed doors, angry cops in shirtsleeves, forget about it, you’re not going anywhere, kid.

Once out of security, in the echoing corridor, I heard distinct, purposeful steps following close behind me. Again I stopped.

“Don’t tell me,” said my dad—turning back with an exasperated roll of his eyes. “You left something.”

“No,” I said, looking around. “I—” There was no one behind me. Passengers coursed around me on every side.

“Jeez, he’s white as a fucking sheet,” said Xandra. To my father, she said: “Is he all right?”

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” said my father as he started down the corridor again. “Once he’s on the plane. It’s been a tough week for everybody.”

“Hell, if I was him, I’d be freaked about getting on a plane too,” said Xandra bluntly. “After what he’s been through.”

My father—tugging his rolling carry-on behind him, a bag my mother had bought him for his birthday several years before—stopped again.

“Poor kid,” he said—surprising me by his look of sympathy. “You’re not scared, are you?”

“No,” I said, far too fast. The last thing I wanted to do was attract anybody’s attention or look like I was even one quarter as wigged-out as I was.

He knit his brows at me, then turned away. “Xandra?” he said to her, lifting his chin. “Why don’t you give him one of those, you know.”

“Got it,” said Xandra smartly, stopping to fish in her purse, producing two large white bullet-shaped pills. One she dropped in my father’s outstretched palm, and the other she gave to me.

“Thanks,” said my dad, slipping it into the pocket of his jacket. “Let’s go get something to wash these down with, shall we? Put that away,” he said to me as I held the pill up between thumb and forefinger to marvel at how big it was.

“He doesn’t need a whole,” Xandra said, grasping my dad’s arm as she leaned sideways to adjust the strap of her platform sandal.

“Right,” said my dad. He took the pill from me, snapped it expertly in half, and dropped the other half in the pocket of his sports coat as they strolled ahead of me, tugging their luggage behind them.

v.

THE PILL WASN’T STRONG enough to knock me out, but it kept me high and happy and somersaulting in and out of air-conditioned dreams. Passengers whispered in the seats around me as a disembodied air hostess a

I fell back into my body with a jolt as the plane hit the runway and bounced, screaming to a stop.

“And… welcome to Lost Wages, Nevada,” the pilot was saying over the intercom. “Our local time in Sin City is 11:47 a.m.”

Half-blind in the glare, plate glass and reflecting surfaces, I trailed after Dad and Xandra through the terminal, stu

It took a long time for my second bag to come off the carousel. Chewing my fingernails, I stared fixedly at a billboard of a gri