He had given much more careful consideration to reading material. A brush with what real guns did to real people had cured him of any desire to seek out casual depictions of bogus violence by people who’d no idea what they were talking about—so thrillers were out. Nor did alarmist tracts appeal, about climate change, or the rise of Islamic terrorism; if they were right, catastrophe would ensue of its own accord without his having to read about it. He had never been one for serious novels; he’d never had time. But he was buying time. Consequently, on yesterday’s trip to Manhattan for provisions, he had consulted a bespectacled clerk at a Barnes and Noble who, unlike most of their staff, seemed to have learned how to read. Thus in the corner of the hard-shell Samsonite on the bed upstairs he stacked four fat new paperbacks: Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose brave, self-sacrificing protagonist described on the back had seemed comfortingly kindred. William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, since the grand, rolling sadness of the first few pages he’d read in the aisle now suited his mood. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, a title that seemed to encapsulate all of Jackson Burdina’s long-winded subtitles in just two words. Besides, the young man at B&N had explained that the novel was about goodness, and how goodness just made people hate you; that suited his mood, too. When Shep had mentioned Africa, the shop assistant steered him toward Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast. Given the plot synopsis, inclusion of the Theroux was a fine joke at his own expense. These novels wouldn’t last forever, but thankfully he was a slow reader. Tourists would likely leave spent paperbacks behind, and who knows, maybe for a price Amazon would deliver to Pemba.
Of course, the abortive rehearsal of 2005 had been quiet, furtive, intensely concentrated. Given that the household was now a cross between a hospice and a refugee camp, the repeat performance was eternally interrupted by Heather’s clamoring for a second slice of Entenmann’s crumb cake, or Zach’s sullen complaint that with a little more advance notice he might have ordered Mighty Mordlock and the Sword of Doom in time for UPS to deliver before Thursday. Shep couldn’t help but be distracted by snippets of conversation that he caught while whisking in and out of the bedroom, where Glynis and Carol were huddled in sotto voce consultation on the pillows: what really lay at the bottom of Jackson’s misery, whether he had acted out of sadness or out of spite. Shep was jealous. Jackson was his best friend. If there were answers to those questions he would like to hear them himself. The jealousy thickened when at heated junctures in their conversation the women went silent when he walked in.
After getting off the phone with Rick Mystic last Thursday night, he’d had one hour to prepare for the arrival of Carol and the girls at nine, and that was not a matter of making up beds. He couldn’t invite Carol to stay here and then expect her to say nothing to Glynis about why she was an exile from her own house and why her husband was so conspicuously AWOL. Real hospitality entailed telling Glynis in advance. He liked to think of himself as courageous. But without such a hard deadline, he probably would have put it off.
Shep’s inclinations had been at war. The advice he’d been given that same day was perfectly conflicting. You deal with it by telling her, Carol had abjured. Being sick is not the same thing as being stupid or a small child. Goldman had countered a mere two hours later, I think I’d counsel you to keep my prognosis to yourself … Preserve the quality of the time she has left … Keep her upbeat.
It was a hackneyed formulation, but this was not a time to worry about originality:
“I have some good news and some bad news,” he’d announced soberly in their bedroom after delivering her dinner of canned split-pea soup—all he could rustle up in five minutes. “Which do you want first?”
Blowing to cool a sip, Glynis eyed him over her spoon with gladiatorial wariness. “Since we get so little good news in this household lately, maybe you’d better start with that.”
“Forge Craft wants to settle. They’ve offered us one-point-two million.”
Given that the offer was an accolade for her spectacular performance that morning, he would have expected at least a limp high-five. Yet her reaction was bafflingly mild. “That’s nice,” she said, and took her sip of soup.
“Do you want to accept?”
“I seem to recall there was an issue, with the rent,” she said, dabbing the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “So I suppose so, yes.”
To the extent that he might have described her as “quietly pleased,” he dreaded moving on to Part II. Although his “good news and bad news” cliché had about it a sense of equivalence, the bad news far outweighed the good. In point of fact, there was only one piece of good news, which was now over, and had fallen disappointingly flat. As for the bad news, the pieces were two. Torn between Carol’s honesty as best policy and the doctor’s let sleeping cancer patients lie, for now he would split the difference.
“The bad news,” he stalled, “is very bad.”
Her eyes charged at him. “Are you sure you want to tell me?”
“Of course I don’t want to. But I have to.”
“You have to.”
“Not telling you doesn’t change anything, doesn’t—make it un-so.”
She put her spoon down slowly. Sliding her hands on either side of the tray, she gripped its sides the way a trucker would steady his steering wheel with his foot on the gas. Were the bed a semi-trailer, she would have run him over.
“Jackson shot himself.”
Apparently what he’d said was so far afield from what she’d expected that she almost didn’t hear him. Her question was insensible. “Is—is he okay?”
Shep gave her a moment to rehear him. “No.”
“Oh.” She dropped her hands. Her face was full of complexity, and it took a tiny instant for deep and genuine sorrow—”Poor Carol!”—to get the better of her guilty relief.
Now six nights on, he wouldn’t go so grotesquely far as to claim that the suicide of one of their oldest and closest friends had cheered his wife up. Nonetheless, Glynis seemed palpably thankful to throw herself into suffering other than her own. Pausing only for embraces, she and Carol had hardly stopped talking since the Burdinas’ arrival. Finally feeling useful if only as a confidante, Glynis seemed to be experiencing a resurgence of physical energy whose timing was fortuitous. He planned to draw on all her strength for a demanding journey beginning tomorrow afternoon that would take more than a full day.
But then, nothing could be harder than the much shorter trip he had taken the Friday morning after Carol and the girls arrived. To be fair, Carol had given him ample opportunity to get out of it—they could buy new clothes, she said, get new prescriptions—but he had promised.
With a detailed list of the Burdinas’ vital possessions and their locations in his hip pocket, Shep had sat in the driver’s seat that morning for a solid twenty minutes without starting the car. He was not by nature a procrastinator. But he did not want to go. For most of that twenty minutes not wanting to go had translated into not being able to go: not going. He could not start the car. True, he had summarily forsaken a sense of duty in all other respects: to his company, his country, and—in bilking a management that, whatever their predecessors may have manufactured thirty years ago, had never themselves done his wife a speck of harm—his very conscience. Yet he could not forsake a sense of duty to his friends. He believed in little now, but he did still believe in that. If he broke down this onerous mission into tiny, achievable units—reverse down the drive, signal right, round the golf course, merge onto 287—it would soon be over, and in this mechanical spirit he turned the key.
At the front door in Windsor Terrace his heart thundered in his eardrums, and a rush of adrenaline made Shep feel light-headed and slightly sick. Despite the mantra of his mental reassurance, his inner organs did not believe that there was nothing to be afraid of. The feeling was quite otherwise: of being trapped in a horror film on the wrong side of the screen. Once he’d let himself into the enclosed front porch, he stood clutching the duffe
l for his plunder and stared ferociously at the floor. Beside his shoe, the aqua linoleum was stained with the slender footprint of a woman’s shoe. The footprint was rust-brown. There was no escaping what had happened here, even by staring at the floor.
He raised his gaze and entered the living room. At the far end of the room, the entrance to the kitchen was feebly barred with yellow police tape. The stairs to the bedrooms and study, where most items on Carol’s list would be found, rose on his left-hand side. So he needn’t enter the kitchen, or even look into it. For a moment he blinked and squinted, so that the kitchen opposite remained a blur. But it was what you didn’t look at that frightened you. He would do this job more competently if he faced the kitchen down. Moreover, loyalty to Jackson demanded that he take on the full splatter of his friend’s unhappiness.
He walked to the tape. Sunlight poured derisively through the windows, ensuring he would miss nothing: a peculiar litter of spatulas, serving spoons, and metal skewers all over the Forbo marmoleum that Shep had helped Jackson to install ten years ago. A cabinet drawer as well on the floor; a second drawer gaping open. A steel and heavy Sabatier cleaver on the breakfast table, both discolored with the same reddish brown of the footprint—as if left to rust, and despite his slapdash side Jackson Burdina had always been respectful of tools. A thick wooden cutting board customarily positioned on the counter by the fridge, but moved to the table, and soaked in the same sullen hue. There was something that Carol hadn’t told him.
Otherwise, it was what he had tried to prepare himself for, although some things were not subject to preparation, and having been braced was no help. When affixing the squares with Forbo glue, he could never have known that Jackson’s choice of a parquet alternating “Lapis Lazuli” and “Blue Mood” would provide such stunning contrast for the heavily tracked splashes and coagulated puddles. Nor could Carol have anticipated when she sewed the cream curtains patterned with pale cornflowers that they would double as canvases for the Rorschach of her husband’s despair. For it was everywhere—as if a boiling pot of marinara had been left to spit and bubble over on the stove. Surly pools of slurry had thickened under the table, from which one hardened drizzle snaked to that impossible-to-clean flooring beneath the fridge. The splay was dull and darkened; a brighter, more glistening vista would have greeted Carol on her return home. She had literally tackled Flicka in the doorway, she said, and dragged her daughter to the porch, but not in time.
It was a pilgrimage. There was nothing to learn here besides that what had happened had happened, but this was information that Shep had needed to absorb.
He took the duffel upstairs to load it with school books and clothes. He rifled the filing cabinet in Carol’s study, locating the wills and insurance policies she had asked him to find; with an instinct that would impress him in retrospect, he also snagged a pocket file that she had not requested: the family’s passports. He picked a few choice selections from Flicka’s cell phone collection that she hadn’t requested, either. All the while he felt stalked, eyed by a presence behind his back, and he jumped when a hanger clattered from a rail, or the transformer on Carol’s computer cord smacked to the floorboards. At last at the front door again, he turned the key to lock not burglars out but something in. The sharp white February air was cleansing, and he took in thirsty lungfuls like gulps of water.
As a salutary gesture, Shep spurned the toll-free Brooklyn Bridge and took the less congested Battery Tunnel. Four bucks on E-ZPass, but after this next errand he could afford the toll. Trolling Lower Manhattan inevitably recalled Jackson, and his rant about the area’s wholesale confiscation of parking spaces by their overlords. In tribute, he pulled into an “Authorized Vehicles Only” space to invite a ticket. He could afford that, too.
In Rick Mystic’s office on Exchange Place, he signed the nondisclosure agreement. Incredibly, Mystic promised that he could indeed get Forge Craft to cut the check by Monday. These people were in such a hurry that they could as well have been eavesdropping on yesterday’s shattering appointment with Philip Goldman. Meantime, even twenty-four hours of keeping “one more” secret from Glynis had been intolerable. Her prognosis sat undissolved in his gut like a kidney stone.
The notion had first entered his head during the phone call with Mystic the night before, when the lawyer delivered the settlement offer: his nest egg for The Afterlife, miraculously restored. With every sluggish homeward mile in horrific Friday traffic, idle whimsy had crystallized to solid game plan.
The scene he walked in on with the duffel slung over his shoulder made him sorry that Carol’s family didn’t have the privacy to lick its wounds—or open them—out of another family’s earshot. Still, it would have been unnatural to have made a U-turn in the foyer when it was his house.
Flicka had long been impatient with her mother, intolerant of that smothering concern for her welfare, but ever since they’d got here the girl had been outright cold. Save for the odd logistical request, she hadn’t been speaking to her mother at all, which, considering what she said when she did speak, may have made Carol lucky.
“All he wanted was a little admiration,” Flicka was delivering in a hot nasal snarl. She was bunched in the corner of the living room sofa, while Carol was sitting stiffly in the farthest chair. “He went to all that trouble to learn stuff, and think about stuff, and not just be some lame-ass handyman. He told you he hated that word, too, and you still said it all the time: handyman, handyman, handyman!”
“Honey, I’m glad you’re proud of your father, and you should be,” Carol said with rigid self-control. “But if I sometimes called him a ‘handyman,’ that’s only because there isn’t any other word, and that’s what he was. Which is nothing to be ashamed of.”
“You never paid any attention to him! He’d start talking and you just turned off. Think he didn’t notice? You listen more carefully to the radio! And I mean like, the ads!”
“Your father sometimes used talking as a substitute for saying something. I guarantee you that when he spoke to me about anything important, I did listen. Very carefully.”
“You mean important to you, not to him. And nothing that was important to him was important to you! No wonder Daddy killed himself! Every day, you made him feel useless, and boring, and stupid!”
Carol bowed her head soundlessly, until tears ran off her chin and spattered her hands—the kind of slow, insistent leak that any handyman would recognize as difficult to stanch.
“Sweetie,” she said at last, looking back up at Flicka. “You’re not the only one who’s lost your daddy. You’re not the only one who feels bad. You might have a genetic disease. But that doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want—when it doesn’t help anyone or change anything and it’s terribly hurtful. I’m sorry you have FD. But you still have to be kind.”
It was the stern parenting of which, out of fear of the emergency room, Flicka had been too long deprived. Dovetailing the silence of her mother’s weeping, Flicka began to sob, but without the tears. When emotionally demonstrative, her eyes didn’t cry; they got infected.
“It’s not your fault, it’s mine,” the girl got out between shudders. “I was the one kept saying sticking around wasn’t worth the bother. I was the one kept saying that being here isn’t so great. I think I talked him into it. I think he got the idea from me.”
Carol crossed to the sofa and took Flicka in her arms. “Shush, now. It’s an idea we all get from time to time. You didn’t invent it. But I’ll tell you this much: I think one of the biggest reasons he left us? He was afraid that something would happen to you, and he couldn’t bear it, sweetheart. He couldn’t bear the idea of this world without you. He loved you so much, honey, more than you may ever know now, and it wasn’t very brave of him, or even very nice. But whenever people do something out of love, then you have to be extra forgiving. Because I think he couldn’t face your getting worse, or something worse than getting worse. I think he wanted to go first.”
The following Saturday mo
rning, Shep threw some blankets in his backseat. Entrusting Glynis to Carol’s care, he headed for Berlin. He worried that he’d encounter resistance. He wasn’t accustomed to telling his father what to do, and the elderly were famously averse to change. Driving north, Shep had to remind himself that a nursing home was not, technically, a penitentiary. Surely springing your own father from its clutches wasn’t actually against the law. But it was surely in violation of some institutional rule or other to simply scoop up one of their charges absent a stack of paperwork. That said, to whatever degree he was breaking the rules he was beginning to enjoy it.
At reception, he informed the nurse that he was taking his father on “an excursion.” She frowned. “He’s pretty weak. And it’s nasty out there. Looks like snow.”
“Don’t worry,” said Shep. “Where I’m taking my dad it’s very, very warm.”
The painfully diminished patriarch was dozing. Shep consoled himself that at least a man that thin was easy to carry. He whispered in his father’s ear, “Hey Dad, wake up.”
Once the old man’s eyes opened they widened further, and he wrapped his arms around his son with the same surprising strength with which Glynis had thrust him away three days before. “Shepherd!” he croaked. “I was afraid I’d never see you again!”
Shep gently pulled from his father’s clasp. “Shh. Now, listen. We’re going to have to play it cool. As far as the staff is concerned, I’m just taking you for a spin, right? But I want you to think about anything here that you have to have with you. Because you’re about to be kidnapped.”
“You mean—we’re not coming back?”
“No. Can you live with that?”
“Live with that?” Gabe hugged him again. “Oh, son. Maybe there is a God!”
Quietly packing up a few clothes and sweeping up the bottles of tablets from the bureau, Shep mumbled that they were driving back to Elmsford “first.”
So Much for That Page 45
