The Goldfinch

“Look, tell her to come over if she wants—tell her what’s happened. It’s going to completely suck if you have to leave right now.”

Xandra had grown sufficiently distracted with guests and grief that Boris was able to go upstairs to make the call in her bedroom—a room usually kept locked, that Boris and I never saw. In about ten minutes he came skimming rapidly down the steps.

“Kotku said to stay,” he said, ducking in to sit beside me. “She told me to say she’s sorry.”

“Wow,” I said, coming close to tears, scrubbing my hand over my face so he wouldn’t see how startled and touched I was.

“Well, I mean, she knows how it is. Her dad died too.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes, a few years ago. In a motor accident, as well. They weren’t that close—”

“Who died?” said Janet, swaying over us, a frizzy, silk-bloused presence redolent of weed and beauty products. “Somebody else died?”

“No,” I said curtly. I didn’t like Janet—she was the ditz who’d volunteered to take care of Popper and then left him locked up alone with his food dispenser.

“Not you, him,” she said, stepping backwards and focusing her foggy attention on Boris. “Somebody died? That you were close to?”

“Several people, yeah.”

She blinked. “Where are you from?”

“Why?”

“Your voice is so fu

Boris hooted. “Transylvania?” he said, showing her his fangs. “Do you want me to bite you?”

“Oh, fu

Xandra, it seemed, had taken a pill. (“Maybe more than one,” said Boris, in my ear.) She appeared on the verge of passing out. Boris—it was shitty of me, but I just wasn’t willing to do it—took her cigarette away from her and stubbed it out, then helped Courtney get her up the stairs and into her room, where she lay face down on the bedspread with the door open.

I stood in the doorway while Boris and Courtney got her shoes off—interested to see, for once, the room that she and my dad always kept locked up. Dirty cups and ashtrays, stacks of Glamour magazine, puffy green bedspread, laptop I never got to use, exercise bike—who knew they had an exercise bike in there?

Xandra’s shoes were off but they’d decided to leave her dressed. “Do you want me to spend the night?” Courtney was asking Boris in a low voice.

Boris, shamelessly, stretched and yawned. His shirt was riding up and his jeans hung so low you could see he wasn’t wearing any underwear. “Nice of you,” he said. “But she is out cold, I think.”

“I don’t mind.” Maybe I was high—I was high—but she was leaning so close to him it looked like she was trying to make out with him or something, which was hilarious.

I must have made some sort of semi-choking or laughter-like noise—since Courtney turned just in time to see my comical gesture to Boris, a thumb jerked at the door—get her out of here!

“Are you okay?” she said coldly, eyeing me up and down. Boris was laughing too but he’d straightened up by the time she turned back to him, his expression all soulful and concerned, which only made me laugh harder.

xix.

XANDRA WAS OUT COLD by the time they all left—asleep so deeply that Boris got a pocket mirror from her purse (which we had rifled, for pills and cash) and held it under her nose to see if she was breathing. There was two hundred and twenty-nine dollars in her wallet, which I didn’t feel all that bad about taking since she still had her credit cards and an uncashed check for two thousand and twenty-five.

“I knew Xandra wasn’t her real name,” I said, tossing him her driver’s license: orange-tinged face, different fluffed-up hair, name Sandra Jaye Terrell, no restrictions. “Wonder what these keys go to?”

Boris—like an old-fashioned movie doctor, fingers on her pulse, sitting by her on the side of the bed—held the mirror up to the light. “Da, da,” he muttered, then something else I didn’t understand.

“Eh?”

“She’s out.” With one finger, he prodded her shoulder, and then leaned over and peered into the nightstand drawer where I was rapidly sorting through a bewilderment of junk: change, chips, lip gloss, coasters, false eyelashes, nail polish remover, tattered paperbacks (Your Erroneous Zones), perfume samples, old cassette tapes, ten years’ expired insurance cards, and a bunch of giveaway matchbooks from a Reno legal office that said REPRESENTING DWI AND ALL DRUG OFFENSES.

“Hey, let me have those,” said Boris, reaching over and pocketing a strip of condoms. “What’s this?” He picked up something that at first glance looked like a Coke can—but, when he shook it, it rattled. He put his ear to it. “Ha!” he said, tossing it to me.

“Good job.” I screwed off the top—it was obviously fake—and dumped the contents out on the top of the nightstand.

“Wow,” I said, after a few moments. Clearly this was where Xandra kept her tip money—partly cash, partly chips. There was a lot of other stuff, too—so much I had a hard time taking it all in—but my eyes had gone straight to the diamond-and-emerald earrings that my mother had found missing, right before my father took off.

“Wow,” I said again, picking one of them up between thumb and forefinger. My mother had worn these earrings for almost every cocktail party or dress-up occasion—the blue-green transparency of the stones, their wicked three a.m. gleam, were as much a part of her as the color of her eyes or the spicy dark smell of her hair.

Boris was cackling. Amidst the cash he’d immediately spotted, and snatched up, a film canister, which he opened with trembling hands. He dipped the end of his little finger in, tasted it. “Bingo,” he said, ru

I held out the earrings to him on my open hands. “Yah, nice,” he said, hardly looking at them. He was tapping out a pile of powder on the nightstand. “You’ll get a couple of thousand dollars for those.”

“These were my mother’s.” My dad had sold most of her jewelry back in New York, including her wedding ring. But now—I saw—Xandra had skimmed some of it for herself, and it made me weirdly sad to see what she’d chosen—not the pearls or the ruby brooch, but inexpensive things from my mother’s teenage days, including her junior-high charm bracelet, ajingle with horseshoes and ballet slippers and four leaf clovers.

Boris straightened up, pinched his nostrils, handed me the rolled-up bill. “You want some?”

“No.”

“Come on. It’ll make you feel better.”

“No, thanks.”

“There must be four or five eight balls here. Maybe more! We can keep one and sell the others.”

“You did that stuff before?” I said doubtfully, eyeing Xandra’s prone body. Even though she was clearly down for the count, I didn’t like having these conversations over her back.

“Yah. Kotku likes it. Expensive, though.” He seemed to blank out for a minute, then blinked his eyes rapidly. “Wow. Come on,” he said, laughing. “Here. Don’t know what you’re missing.”

“I’m too fucked-up as it is,” I said, shuffling through the money.

“Yah, but this will sober you up.”

“Boris, I can’t goof around,” I said, pocketing the earrings and the charm bracelet. “If we’re going, we need to leave now. Before people start showing up.”

“What people?” said Boris skeptically, ru

“Believe me, it happens fast. Child services coming in, and like that.” I’d counted the cash—thirteen hundred and twenty-one dollars, plus change; there was much more in chips, close to five thousand dollars’ worth, but might as well leave her those. “Half for you and half for me,” I said, as I began to count the cash into two even piles. “There’s enough here for two tickets. Probably we’re too late to catch the last flight but we should go ahead and take a car to the airport.”