Ether

Chapter One: Rain on Tuesday

The contract on Leo Mirski's screen concerned the shipment of industrial valves from Gdańsk to Rotterdam, and it was, line by line, the dullest thing he had read all week. He liked that about it. He liked the way Polish commercial law folded neatly into English if you were patient, the way each clause locked into the next like a hinge.

Rain scraped the window of the second-floor apartment on Thirty-Seventh Avenue. Below, a bus knelt at the curb with a sigh of air brakes. Leo's left ear registered all of it; his right ear, the one that had been closest to the blast in the Panjshir four years and seven months ago, gave him a thinner, muffled version of the same world, like a second recording made from farther away. He had stopped noticing except when he was tired.

He typed: *Buyer shall bear the risk of loss upon delivery to the carrier.*

His phone lit up on the desk. Unknown number, 718 area code. He almost let it ring out. Later he would think about that a great deal — the two seconds in which his whole life balanced on whether he could be bothered.

"Mirski."

"Mr. Mirski, this is Detective Frank Peluso, NYPD, out of the four-seven in the Bronx." A voice like a man talking around a sandwich. "Do you have a brother named Peter Mirski?"

Leo set down his coffee. Some cold and practical part of him, the part the Army had installed and never removed, began taking notes.

"I do. Peter. He lives in Virginia."

"Sir, is there somebody there with you?"

"Just tell me."

A pause with weather in it. "We found a man in a parked rental car on Bergen Court, off Zerega. Deceased. The ID in his wallet says Peter Mirski, DOB April eleventh. I'm sorry to be doing this on the phone."

The rain kept on. Leo watched a drop cross the glass diagonally, against all logic, pushed by the wind.

"How," he said.

"There's a needle in the car. There's a needle in his arm, sir. ME's going to run tox, but the scene reads as an overdose. Heroin, most likely. Nothing to suggest anyone else was involved."

"No."

"I know it's—"

"No, I mean you have the wrong man. Peter doesn't drink more than a beer at Thanksgiving. He reads the ingredients on cereal boxes. He once mailed back a bottle of supplements because the label listed a filler he didn't recognize. Detective, my brother is a biochemist. He knows more about what molecules do to people than anybody you've ever met, and he is the most careful human being alive."

"I hear you." Peluso didn't sound unkind. That was the terrible part. He sounded like a man who had heard it eleven hundred times. "Would you be able to come in tomorrow? There's paperwork, and there's the identification. We can do it from a photograph if that's easier."

Leo found he had stood up without deciding to. "I'll come tonight."

"Tonight the ME's office is closed to families. Tomorrow, ten o'clock. Ask for me at the desk." A shuffle of paper. "Mr. Mirski, is there anybody who should be with you?"

"There's somebody," Leo said, and hung up, and stood in the middle of his own front room like a man in a stranger's house.

He called Sophie. She was on shift, which meant nine chances in ten she wouldn't answer, but she answered on the second ring in the way she always did, breathless, with the ER behind her like surf.

"Hey. I've got about forty seconds."

"Peter's dead."

The surf went on and Sophie Chesham went silent inside it. Then, in the flat clear voice she used when a gurney came through the doors, "Where are you?"

"Home."

"Stay there. I'll get someone to cover me. Leo — stay there."

"I'm not going anywhere."

But he was. He was already going, in his head, out to a dead-end street in the Bronx he had never seen, standing at the window of a rented car with rain on it.

She came at half past eleven still in her scrubs with her coat unbuttoned, hair pulled back, the smell of hospital soap on her hands. She didn't say she was sorry. She put her arms around him and held on, hard, the way you brace a thing that might fall, and Leo stood with his face in her shoulder and did not cry, and hated himself a little for that.

"Talk," she said, eventually. They sat on the floor with their backs against the couch because the couch felt too formal.

"They say heroin."

"Peter?"

"Peter."

Sophie was quiet. She had met Peter four times: two Thanksgivings, one weekend in D.C., one long Sunday when Peter came up on the train and the three of them walked Astoria Park in the wind and Peter had talked about a bird he'd seen. She'd liked him. She had once said he was the only man she'd ever met who apologized to waiters for existing.

"I've seen a lot of overdoses," she said carefully. "I've seen a judge. I've seen a woman who taught Sunday school. I've seen a nurse."

"You've never seen Peter."

"No. I haven't." She took his hand and laced her fingers through his. "So what do you want to do?"

"Tomorrow I go to the precinct and I look at a photograph and I say yes, that's him." His voice held level the way a wire holds a weight. "Then I go to Virginia and I clear out his apartment, because there's nobody else. Then I find out what happened."

"Leo."

"I know what you're going to say."

"You don't, actually." She turned his hand over and pressed her thumb into the middle of his palm, a small habit of hers that had always undone him. "I was going to say: don't do the thing where you go inside yourself and lock the door. That's what I was going to say."

He looked at her. Thirty-four, tired, mascara gone at the corners, the most fundamentally *present* person he had ever known. Six weeks ago she had shown him a listing for a two-bedroom in Bayville, sixty feet from her parents' driveway, and he had made a joke about lawns and watched her face close like a shop at the end of the day.

"I'll try," he said.

"That's not a yes."

"It's what I've got."

She slept beside him that night without undressing, one hand fisted in the back of his shirt. He lay awake and listened to the rain with his good ear and did arithmetic on the only two facts he had. A man who read labels. A needle in a rented car on a dead-end street four hundred miles from his own bed.

Nothing about it added up, and Leo Mirski had spent seven years of his life being paid to notice exactly that.