When All Light Fails

by Randall Silvis

  Still, no matter how much DeMarco learned, the mystery would always hold. And now, as he smiled to himself and walked up the sidewalk to his door, each step with its own new chill on the bottom of his feet, he was okay with that. Each life would bring a new discovery, another fold of mystery. That was the way of things, and he was a part of it. And it was all so infinitely and hilariously beautiful. It deserved another fritter.

  Ninety-Eight

  Oh, how sweet the song the canary sings!

  Judge Morrison had been true to his word, which he had never really given to DeMarco except obliquely, by an implication more assumed by DeMarco than suggested by Morrison. Not that it mattered to DeMarco. Just so long as the judge spilled the beans to the feds, which he did, but only after the proffer of immunity from the charge of conspiracy to commit murder. According to the FBI agent who briefed Captain Bowen and DeMarco, Morrison had admitted how he and his college pal Jeff Thompkins, both married at the time, had spent a week in Michigan without their spouses, fishing and drinking and sharing the favors of a young and financially strapped barmaid by the name of Jennifer Barrie. They had then returned home to their wives and public lives without much of a thought. Morrison described the young Barrie as “a free spirit,” and professed no surprise that she had wanted to raise her daughter alone, without the aid of a man more than twice her age.

  “I wouldn’t go as far as to say that she was a man-hater,” Morrison had said, “considering how much she enjoyed sex. But she was adamantly opposed to monogamy and considered it a masculine ploy to harness a woman’s independence. Jeff and I, I am ashamed to admit, were all too eager to encourage her rebellion.”

  “I suppose,” he also said, “that when she instructed the girl to write to us, she felt she had no other choice. I can’t fault her for reaching out. Nor can I fault her for using the girl to entice and, yes, in a sense, to manipulate us. Not that I am attempting to shift the blame to her. I hold myself and Jeff culpable for the decisions we made.”

  At Thompkins’s insistence, they had invented two phantom friends who accompanied them on the fishing trip, one long dead. Morrison claimed a faulty memory when asked about the rationale for such an invention, just as he claimed no knowledge that Thompkins would turn in two fraudulent DNA samples to be tested. The cashier’s check for $20,000, however, had been Morrison’s idea, he claimed. Thompkins was reluctant at first to participate, felt he had no obligation to provide for another man’s child. Felt certain, or at least pretended to be certain, that his and the judge’s “romp” with Jennifer Barrie was only one of many in which she had regularly indulged. Only when pressured by the judge did Thompkins admit that his own secret DNA test had shown Emma Barrie to be his closest genetic match.

  As for how the deputy commissioner came to know Benny Szabo, “Yes,” Morrison admitted, “I did pass his name on to Jeff. But I had no idea—of course I had no idea!—of what Jeff had planned. If, indeed, Szabo was used as you assume. That is yet to be proven.

  “Jeff was in need of an individual,” Morrison claimed, “with the facility to recover a piece of his wife’s jewelry. Stolen, he’d said, during a dinner party at his home. By the wife of a man he did not wish to insult. The woman, he said, was well known for her tendencies. She was widely rumored to be a kleptomaniac.”

  Did Morrison actually believe this story? “I had my doubts,” he said. “To be honest, I didn’t really want to know. Jeff asked for my help and I felt duty bound by our friendship to trust that he would not abuse our friendship. I provided him with Mr. Szabo’s contact information, and that is all I did. I had no idea whatsoever that Szabo would be sent to Michigan.”

  The agent, when he recounted this conversation, had been unable to suppress a chuckle. “It was all bull and we knew it. We’ll see how it plays out after Thompkins gets a good taste of prison life. If Morrison is dirty once, he’s been dirty before, and my money is on Thompkins to start looking for a little revenge down the road. Rich guys doing hard time like to spread the misery around.”

  Ninety-Nine

  When the silence speaks, shut up and listen

  By evening, Morrison’s and Thompkins’s troubles were all yesterday’s news to DeMarco. He would remember Emma forever and would always hold a warm and tender love for her in his heart. As for this picture-perfect gloaming in May, the forsythia in brilliant bloom in his neighbor’s yard, the air clear and warm and fresh with spring, he had other fish to fry. Eight beautiful halibut steaks, to be specific. He seared them in a cast iron skillet atop his barbecue that evening, then served them in the dining room with roasted asparagus and a beurre blanc sauce. Boyd and Flores were there, plus Bowen and his wife. Ben Brinker and Vee drove over from Youngstown.

  It had been Jayme’s idea that they all get together for what she called an Amateur Talent Night, though all present understood that the RV in the backyard would soon take to the highway. Where it might find a permanent parking spot, nobody knew. Dani had written a song on her keyboard for the occasion, called it “Half-Past Midnight on a Monday Afternoon,” and performed it after dinner, all gathered in the living room with coffee and Baileys Irish Cream, with Boyd accompanying on acoustic guitar, a talent DeMarco had hitherto been unaware of. Boyd a guitarist! And a pretty darned good one at that. Who would ever have thought?

  Ben and Vee Brinker sang a medley of songs made famous by Peaches and Herb, including “Reunited,” “Love Is Strange,” and “Shake Your Groove Thing.” Jayme and DeMarco, both of whom claimed to be “artistically challenged,” planned to read excerpts from Thomas Huston’s forthcoming collection of reflections. DeMarco went first. “It’s a little poem called ‘Si la jeunesse savait!’” he announced as he stood in front of his chair.

  “See June what?” Ben Brinker asked.

  “It’s French,” DeMarco told him. “It means ‘If youth knew.’”

  “Knew what?” Brinker asked, teasing now.

  “Shut up and listen, Ben,” DeMarco said, already blushing a little. He did not like being the center of attention in a situation like this, but he had spent a couple of hours going through the advance copy of Huston’s work and was determined to pay homage to his friend. There was so much good stuff in Huston’s book; DeMarco wished he could read it all aloud, but he had settled finally on a single poem that, to his mind, captured what he loved about his friend, his insatiable curiosity, his pain, his all-embracing love. He hoped it came through in his reading, and, judging by the silence and attention paid to his brief performance, it did.

  If youth knew, I would not

  have broken your heart.

  I would have said I love you,

  I do, but we are young,

  so young, let us not cling

  with desperation to only one.

  Let us enfold the world

  inside our love, let us ride

  that fever into a deeper understanding

  of what love is and means.

  If youth knew, I would have paused

  for a while and asked my parents

  how did you meet? What were you

  like as a child? Are you happy now?

  And what has life been that you

  never expected it to be? What

  can I learn from you? Tell me

  everything you know as true!

  If youth knew, I would not have doubted

  God. I would not have asked

  how could you make us this way,

  so frail, so flawed, so weak?

  If youth knew, I would have said Aha!

  I see! How intricate and complex

  and beautiful it is! Oh thank you

  for this chance, this pain, this fear, the love,

  the rare transports of joy.

  Oh thank you for this me!

  He sat down awkwardly as his guests applauded, grinning at his own unease but pleased that
he had made it through the poem without butchering it too badly. “Looks like you can still carry the ball without fumbling, 27,” Brinker said.

  “Twenty-seven?” Flores asked. “What does that mean?”

  “That was his jersey’s number back in high school. All-City fullback.”

  “Really?” Flores said. “Geez. The things we don’t know.”

  “Oh, I could tell you some stories,” Brinker said.

  “No you can’t,” DeMarco told him, and put his hand on Jayme’s arm. “Your turn, beauty. We saved the best for last.”

  As far as DeMarco knew, she too was about to read a Huston poem. But she surprised him and everyone else there. “This is a poem Ryan wrote for me,” she announced.

  “Uh-oh,” Brinker said in a stage whisper. “This should be good.”

  “Shut up and listen, Ben,” she responded. And then she read the poem that had come to DeMarco in the field of corn stubble only a month earlier, when he had felt the need to focus not on anger but on happiness. “It’s called ‘I Like,’” she said.

  “Wow, great title,” Brinker said. “How long did it take you to come up with that one?”

  “Ben, darling,” his wife Vee told him, and squeezed his knee, “shut up and listen.”

  Jayme read the poem then, and as she read it DeMarco held his head low, his body bent forward so that he could scratch Hero’s ears and hide the blush burning in his cheeks.

  When she finished, and while the applause continued, she crossed to DeMarco and pulled his head to her stomach. “Encore!” Brinker called out, and then Boyd and Flores joined him. “Encore! Encore!”

  “How about this for an encore?” Jayme asked, and threw everyone into a startled silence, DeMarco included. “Ryan and I are nine weeks pregnant!”

  He rose to embrace her, surrounded then by cheers and congratulations, his friends’ embraces, his and Jayme’s and Vee Brinker’s tears, a furry tail whipping back and forth, a few happy barks, a cold nose squeezing between his legs.

  Later in the evening, saying goodbye to Ben and Vee at the door, Jayme and DeMarco were again congratulated on their happy news. “I’m going to be needing some advice along the way,” Jayme told them. “You guys will help me out, right?”

  Vee said, “Oh, there’s really nothing to it, sweetie. You just have to love your child with all of your heart.”

  Ben nodded in agreement. “There are some nuances involved. Some tweaks to your behavior you might have to make. Especially yours, 27,” he said with a teasing nudge.

  “Roger that,” DeMarco said.

  “Vee’s right, though. It’s a pretty simple formula once you get the hang of it. Just love them for who they are. Don’t make their lives all about you; make your life all about them.”

  “That we can do,” Jayme said, and took DeMarco’s arm. “Can’t we, baby?”

  “That we can do,” he promised.

  One Hundred

  E pluribus yum-yum

  They made a different kind of love that night, slow and gentle and thoughtful, as if each was discovering the other’s body for the first time and wanted to memorize and preserve every turn of it against any kind of loss, against age and illness and disease and forgetfulness and death, so that it would last and live forever exactly as it was that night. And afterward neither spoke for a long time but remained keenly awake, continuing the slow strokes and light touches of their gratitude even after Hero, ever watchful during their lovemaking, fell asleep, his breath filled with the tiniest of whimpers.

  They were no longer young and felt no need to speak of love as the young often do, as if they had happened upon a shiny coin from some foreign land, had found it in the grass and now felt compelled to turn it over and over in their hands, handing it back and forth, wondering aloud about its value, who might have dropped it there, what they could buy with it, where they could sell it. No, they were not young and had no need for such dissection. All they wanted was to hold that coin, to share its warmth and shine, not to worry it with unnecessary movement and analysis that could only tarnish and decrease its value.

  DeMarco was the first to speak, his voice low and soft, his mouth against her hair as she lay there looking up at the ceiling. “What are you thinking about, angel?”

  She rolled her head to meet his gaze. “Just dreaming, I guess.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to do that with your eyes closed?”

  She smiled but offered no response.

  “What are you dreaming about?” he asked.

  “Trying to come up with some other kind of work we could get into.”

  So, she had been fretting after all and not simply basking in the afterglow of their lovemaking. “We’re okay for a while,” he told her. “We have your pension and mine, plus my savings and the money I’ll get from the house at closing.”

  “I’m not talking about the money necessarily, even though as parents we do have to think about that.”

  “What then?”

  “We’ve had a lot of misery the past couple of years.”

  “Yes we have,” he said. “Are you sorry you hooked up with me?”

  “Never,” she said. “I’m just wondering what it might be like if we had another profession. Something less dangerous, to begin with. But also something that, you know, brings happiness, not misery.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “That’s just it. I can’t think of any. None we’re qualified for anyway.”

  “You could teach,” he told her. “Tom loved teaching. Teaching and writing brought him a lot of joy, I think.”

  “But writing got him killed,” she said. “His entire family.”

  He was forced to concede the truth of that. If Tom hadn’t been researching another novel, hadn’t crossed paths with Bonnie and Inman… “Children’s books,” he said. “You could do that, I bet.”

  She smiled at the possibility, but remained quiet a while longer. Then said, “There’s a theory, you know, that our thoughts create parallel worlds. Which would mean that every time your friend wrote a new novel, he created a world in which all of those characters existed and lived those lives, and had no idea that they were somebody else’s thought projections.”

  “I hear what you’re saying. Tom didn’t write humor or light romance.” His novels had been dark, filled with deeply troubled people struggling with the consequences of their actions. Would he have written those books if he’d believed that his characters actually suffered through the tragedies he fabricated?

  “If you could do anything you wanted for a living,” she asked, “what would you do?”

  He didn’t have to think long about that one. “I would make music. I can’t imagine a happier profession than that. I would write it and play it, like Van Morrison, for example.”

  “Didn’t you tell me once that he’s kind of nasty toward others?”

  “That’s his rep, anyway. Thanks for shattering my illusion. What would you do?”

  “Something with children. I wish I had some talents to share with them. Writing, painting, dancing—I would love to be that kind of teacher for little children.”

  “You will be,” he told her. “For one, at least.”

  She smiled. “Wouldn’t it be nice if parenting were a paid profession?”

  “It should be. Should require an advanced degree. That’s one degree that might actually do the world a lot of good.”

  She nodded. “We should write a book and create a world where that is the reality. Where every child is cherished and showered with love.”

  “I like that world.”

  “We can make one for ourselves.”

  “I’m all in,” he said.

  Again they were silent for a while. Then she told him, “Wasn’t it wonderful to hear everybody laughing tonight? And I loved how your face lit up when I told you
my secret. You didn’t mind that I hit you with it in front of everybody, did you?”

  “Only for a second. Then I was happy you did.”

  “I’m going to be so very careful this time. I want you to be too. Promise me you will.”

  “I promise.”

  “You have a family now. And we all need you very, very much.”

  “And I need all of you,” he said. “You most of all.” His fingertips glided from her wrist to elbow crease and back to the wrist with the slowness of a recurring sigh.

  “I’ve also been thinking about Emma,” she told him. “Poor sweet darling innocent Emma. I fell so deeply in love with her that day we took them to breakfast. You did too, I know. I could see it when you looked at her.”

  He nodded. “She touched my soul.”

  “I’ve been lying here wondering about all of them. Emma and our little girl and your baby boy. I wish I could just gather them up in my arms and hold them close to me forever.”

  He kissed her hair and wrapped his fingers around her forearm, could feel the pulse of her blood with his thumb pressed into the crease of her elbow, the fragility of flesh, the tenuous complexity and miracle of the body.

  “I can’t decide whether I believe it all or not,” she told him. “I really want to, though. Don’t you?”

  “Believe what, baby?”

  “About Dani seeing Emma just before Szabo was killed. About Emma causing it. I want to believe it happened that way, I really do.”

  “Then believe it,” he told her.

  When she nodded, her hair brushed across his face and made him smile. Her breath was sibilant in the stillness. He could feel the beat and warmth and depth of her heart through his thumb. Felt her longing and her love.