“You’re welcome.” Keys in hand, we leave through the kitchen door to the garage and head to our cars. I can’t breathe in this house, either.
• • •
The guest list is a priority, but when Simone shows me my book—appointments back-to-back, open to close, all on account of rescheduling for that goddamn funeral—it becomes obvious I’ll never get through the invitations today. Or tomorrow. And I promised.
Pressing my luck to the limit, I kick off the workday by saying, “Hey listen, would you mind knocking out these phone calls when you get any free time today? The numbers are right here, you don’t have to look anything up. Just give them the details in that top paragraph: Sunday, six o’clock, address, et cetera. Tell them no flowers, please.” I roll my eyes to remind her of our inside joke that’s not funny. “Oh, one more.” I grab her pen and scribble a name and phone number at the bottom of the page, perhaps the only number I know by heart outside of immediate family and my childhood homes. “Raymond Harrison. He’s my oldest friend. You might have met him at a holiday party one time or another. Big guy? Just—I don’t know. Make sure he knows I want him there.”
Simone stares at the page, then up at me. “Doc?”
“Yeah.”
“We need to talk.”
“I know. How’s tomorrow? This day—” I nod toward the appointment book.
“This can’t wait.”
I check the time. “Can you do it in five minutes so doors open on time?”
“I need a raise,” she says. Well, that’s unexpected. “I’ve been here a long time.” She sounds nervous and rehearsed. “I do my job, and I do it very well, but I also do lots of things that aren’t my job.” She shakes the guest list. “This is personal assistant stuff, Dr. Hart. I should have set better boundaries in the beginning, but this isn’t my responsibility. Neither is shopping for gifts for your wife. Neither is covering your bases.” She pauses, letting this last part settle. In a hard whisper, she says, “I lied to the cops for you. You realize that, right? I’ve practically perjured myself.”
Fire in my veins. “Do you even know what perjure means? What are you suggesting?”
“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m asking for a raise.”
“Or else?”
“Or else I quit, or else—well, what are you suggesting?”
I stiffen. “Are you trying to blackmail me?”
She plays innocent with, “Do you really think that’s the kind of person I am?”
“I don’t know what to think. I’m sorry. This is a very stressful time.”
“Yes. Of course it is.” She stares into space, her head bobbing gently, then she freezes and looks me in the eye. “And you know what? I hadn’t thought of it before, but you bring up a very good point. This has been an exceptionally stressful time. If I were to lose my job or be forced to quit, it might be difficult to keep ignoring the things I ignore as part of my job. Is that what you were suggesting? Because if so, you understood what I was saying even before I did.”
I’ve never done this before. “How much?”
“Forty percent.”
“A forty percent raise? That’s pitiful.” She’s sitting here with my kryptonite in her back pocket, and the best she can ask for is forty percent? If her dreams max out at a forty percent increase in quality of life, she has let me down. Disappointment makes a poor bargaining chip.
She points to Bonnie’s stupid list and says, “Then don’t ask me to do two jobs.” There’s a knock at the main entrance. It should’ve been unlocked by now. The nurses will already be in the staff room—hopefully not eavesdropping on Simone’s negotiations—and I don’t have a minute to think, let alone plan an idiotic party.
“Help me with this,” I beg. “We’ll sit down and talk about the raise in depth later. I value you and want to make it right.” To ingratiate myself completely, I say, “You can add your name to the list. Elizabeth would love to have you.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
I throw my hands in the air. “I’m doing my best. Please meet me halfway.”
“I’m letting in your seven-thirty hypertension. This conversation is on hold, not over.”
“Fine.”
“Also, I said practically perjure. I know what perjury is.”
I clear one landmine just in time to make way for another, because an hour later, Mr. Walsh from the medical examiner’s office calls again. I check my voice mail over lunch, listen to his invitation to swing by the office at my earliest convenience, listen to him say, “We have a few questions concerning the death of Nick Carpenter.”
27.
It takes four days and two additional voice mails before I find time to pay Zeb Walsh a visit in a building I’ve driven by a thousand times without ever considering what transpires here. It’s enormous. Modern. Expansive. And single-purposed. The Office of the Medical Examiner. All of this, all for death. Medical examiners, deputy medical examiners, forensic medical investigators, scholars in labs. Toxicology labs, crime scene labs, serology labs. Front desks.
A receptionist takes my name and sends me upstairs to another receptionist, who tells me to have a seat and doesn’t call my name for another seventeen minutes, at which point she leads me to a windowless office crowded with a desk, two chairs, a file cabinet, a tiny couch.
“Mr. Hart.” Walsh rises from his desk to shake my hand. “I was wondering when you’d finally get here. You got my messages?”
“Doctor, actually. And yes, I did. It’s been a busy week. Took off time for the funeral.”
“How was that?”
“Sad.”
“I bet.”
“What can I do for you?”
He sorts through some papers, stores them in a drawer, redirects his attention to a computer monitor, flips to a page in his notebook, then asks, “Remind me, when was the last time you saw Nick alive?”
“Let’s see.” I pause to be certain my story is straight. “I last saw him the Thursday—or was it Friday?—before he died.”
“Mm-hm.” Walsh checks his monitor once again. “You got a traffic citation last weekend.”
“That’s right,” I say. “Speeding. I was speeding.”
“Anyone in the car with you that day?”
“Yes.” I swallow, or try to, anyway—try willing my pharynx to squeeze—but my throat feels paralyzed, or weaponized, as though my own body is choking me into silence.
Walsh is still staring at his monitor, one finger over his mouse, and he looks at me and asks, “Who?”
I smile. At least my facial muscles work. I clear my throat to be sure my vocal cords do, too, and when a sound happens, I say the first thing that comes to mind: “My son, Jonah.”
Walsh looks at his monitor again and begins to type, hitting far more keys than necessary to spell my son’s name. He asks, “Where were you going?”
“We were coming from my office,” I say, and knowing better than to volunteer details, I still add, “He needed to use the printer.”
Walsh leans back and gives me his full attention. “You don’t have a printer at home?”
“We do. Sure. But he needed to print a large document. Book-length. Something to help him cram for an exam. He’s in summer school. The inkjet at the office is better for that sort of thing. We didn’t have much ink at home.” Shutting up is harder than it should be.
Walsh asks, “Why didn’t he drive himself?”
“Hm?”
“Does your son have a car?”
“Oh. Yes, he does.”
“So why did you drive him?”
“To let him in and make sure the system was online.”
“Was anyone else there?”
“No. Just us. The office is always empty on the weekends.” As soon as I say it, I hear in my head the demonic grind of that goddamn Keurig, and Simone saying, Nice to meet you, to Nick.
“Well, that about does it,” Walsh says. He flips his notebook over, obscuring his notes, and stand
s to see me out. At the door, he shakes my hand. “Thanks for coming down.”
“Of course. Anything I can do.”
His grip is too tight when he says, “One more thing,” and he’s still squeezing my hand when he asks, “How’d the exam go?”
“Hm?”
“How did he fare in his exam?”
What else is there to do but play dumb? “Exam?” Play dumb. Play dumb until the end.
“The big exam. Didn’t you say your son was cramming for one? The document?”
“Oh, right.” A smile slips through my cracks, and because I can, this time I tell the truth. “You know something? I have no idea.”
• • •
It’s taken this long for me to revisit the scene of Nick’s death, but now that I’ve lied to the police when I had nothing to hide, my interest is piqued. Once home, I head upstairs to the skinny door between the upstairs bathroom and Jonah’s bedroom, and I slide the key from its hiding place on the trim atop the doorframe, but a key wasn’t necessary. The police must have left it unlocked.
I tug a chain hanging just inside the musty spiral staircase leading up, but the lightbulb is dead, so I climb the stairs and nearly head-butt the trapdoor, which lifts with ease, and I step up into the cupola, an antique bubble, taking note of the cloudy window panes and overgrowth obscuring an otherwise splendid panorama of my property, neighborhood, town.
So this is where Nick stood before he threw himself to his death. Did he take in the view, too? Did he even appreciate it?
On weathered benches framing the interior of this room, varnish peels in shiny strips. I could have painted it white, fixed the wiring, added pillows, a coffee table, stacks of magazines. That sort of thing might work for people who live in the past, but not for me. Frank McAlister has me all wrong. I’m no champion of bygone days. Overhead hangs the sole decoration: dulled prisms on a dated chandelier that can’t catch light.
I wiggle the loose knob on a swollen, splintered door opening to the roof walk. Until a couple of weeks ago, this place hardly ever crossed my mind. Twice a year, tops: first freeze, first thaw. I clean up leaves and check for leaks and contemplate tearing the whole thing down. Then I lock the door again and forget this place exists.
From a distance, our sculpted banisters suggest the Italian belvederes after which they were modeled, but up here, the effect is more Dr. Zhivago’s winter palace crusted with seagull feces instead of icicles, salt crystals instead of frost. There’s no warmth here. No reason to hang out, except to dive off.
A widow’s walk: even the name portends doom. Some dumb romantic probably made it up, swooning at the thought of sailors’ wives standing on platforms like these, waiting for long-lost mariner husbands, dead husbands. I suppose “chimney cleaner’s walk” didn’t summon the same architectural esteem (or need for prickly building codes). So maybe the romantic wasn’t dumb, after all. Maybe he was a marketing genius.
I appraise the deck, built so far to the northeast corner of our house that most of my property isn’t even visible from here. One can see the sky, the skyline, almost the sea, part of the swimming pool, all of the guesthouse. From below, looking up from the pool or guesthouse—or in a photograph, like those featured in our local paper last year: neighbors celebrating neighbors in photo essays validating our property values—we sell a strong illusion. People complimented those pictures of our home. They still do. But the elm is overgrown, and the linden is getting out of hand, too, so there’s not even much of a view anymore.
I move toward the broken beams where Nick stood at the steepest angle of our roof. A thirty-foot drop to the ground after that. Centering my hips in the gap Nick’s body made, I dare myself to look down the path worn by one-hundred-seventy pounds of young man on his way to his end.
“Dad?”
I spin around to see a figure blurred by the dirty windows between us. Jonah is standing square in the middle of the crow’s nest, facing me. “Hey,” I say, moving toward him. “What are you doing up here?”
“Door was cracked,” he says, still motionless behind the glass.
“Let’s go down. You don’t need to see this.”
“It’s okay,” Jonah says, but he doesn’t move.
I pass through the doorway, stopping below the busted chandelier. The perfect thing to say escapes me, so I put my hands in my pockets and wait.
“What are you doing up here?” he asks.
“I went down to the medical examiner’s office today. They’re still working on that official report. Got me thinking about this place.”
“What are they working on? It’s so stupid. There’s no mystery here.”
“They’re just doing their job.”
“Waste of our taxes.”
Of our taxes? The prospect of Jonah earning enough income to pay that guy’s salary is hilarious, but I’m not in a laughing mood. “Total waste. Hey, listen, I need you to do something.”
“What?”
“If anyone from the police or coroner’s office calls you—anyone who wants to ask about Nick, anyone at all—don’t answer. Let it to go to voice mail, then tell me right away and we’ll go from there.”
“Why?”
Why? Because if they know I lied about the kid in my passenger seat, I’m toast. “I have a hunch they might try to blame us, since it happened at our house.”
“For real?”
“Maybe. Premises liability for an unsafe structure. I’m not sure, but I don’t want to take any risks, especially with a wrongful death charge at stake.”
“Jesus, Dad. She wouldn’t do that.”
“Who?”
“Nick’s aunt. Naomi. She’s not going to sue you.”
“Grief makes people do crazy things. All I’m saying is if anyone reaches out to you about it, we need to handle communication as a family. This affects all of us.”
“Fine,” he mumbles.
“This is serious, Jonah.”
“I said fine. Do you think I want to talk to them? I never want to talk about it again.”
At least we have this in common. I eyeball the stairs Jonah is blocking, and as though guessing the password to a kids’ game, I say, “I know. I’m so sorry, Son.”
He nods and grants passage, leading us back down the spiral staircase. I close the trapdoor behind me without looking back. The place held no power for so long. Now it hovers over us. Its dome compresses our space, invades our days and nights, hosts bad choices decaying above us while we sleep. I suppose now I’m going to have to renovate or destroy. I lock the door, slip the key into my pocket, and slap my son on the back as we part ways.
28.
Sunday morning, a good nine hours before the party, and Elizabeth is stressing about clutter and supplies. She’s dusting neglected corners of our house—gaps in bookshelves, backs of speakers—and pitching old candles burned down to the quick, replacing them with new ones, lighting wicks.
Jonah has risen to meet her frenzy. At ten in the morning, he laces his shoes and recites, “Fancy paper plates, fancy paper napkins, vegetable platter—what else?”
Elizabeth points to a list Scotch-taped to the door. “Get some cash from your father.”
“You two are missing the point,” I tell them. “This is supposed to relieve our stress. This is something people want to do for us. Besides, they won’t be here until six. Relax.”
Elizabeth shakes her head, but Jonah says, “Do you know how many times Bonnie McAlister has called this week? She’s basically stalking Elizabeth with all these great ideas about catering and charity. It hasn’t been relaxing, and we need toilet paper.”
Elizabeth says, “For God’s sake, Robert, that ladder is still out there.” She points to the side yard, where I left the ladder at the police officers’ request, and then I’d forgotten, and now it’s probably killing the grass.
I say, “I’ll put it away.”
“You will,” Elizabeth says. She tells Jonah to hurry back so he can clean the pool. He doesn’t ar
gue or give attitude. Their disdain for this party—a nice gesture they refuse to see clearly—has brought them together in some sort of trauma bond.
Frank and Bonnie arrive exactly half an hour early, bearing a platter of bruschetta and a bottle of cabernet. Jonah’s still in the shower. The pool hasn’t been cleaned.
“Bonnie.” Elizabeth takes the tray. “Frank. You really didn’t have to do this.”
“Not another word,” Bonnie says, as though Elizabeth had just thanked her. “We came early to help. Now what can we do?”
The rest of our guests trickle in around six, six fifteen, six thirty, and suddenly the house is full. There aren’t so many people—maybe thirty, maybe more—but the activity is such a contrast to our lives of late that it feels amplified, magnified. Simone doesn’t show, but Ray and Emily do. They bring Bianca, who has changed far too much since the last time I saw her.
“Leon couldn’t make it,” Ray tells me. “Band practice.”
“Good for him,” I say. We make small talk and I take drink orders, but when I leave, Ray follows me to the bar. He tells me he was glad to be invited, and how he hopes we can talk, and I look around the room and say, “Oh, shit. Hold that thought. I need to grab something. Be right back.” I hurry off, pretending to launch an urgent search for olives, but Ray isn’t dumb. He must know this isn’t the time or place. I wait until he’s locked into a focused conversation with Bonnie’s pastor before I slip back into the mix, joining a conversation already in progress.
Lamont Carver is saying, “Only at open-casket funerals.”
His wife, Kelly, says, “I did when I was ten. My grandmother died at home, and I’ll never forget my mother forcing me to go into her room to pay my respects. Oh, but there you are, Bobby. My God. To see a body like that? My heart just aches for you all.”
I repeat my standard reply: “I’m just glad no one else had to witness it.”
People agree. My son, who has been hovering throughout, adds, “Some silver lining.”
Man of the Year Page 21
