Since We Fell

by Dennis Lehane

  Rachel hopped back on IMDb and cross-referenced Robert Hays’s and Vivica A. Fox’s credits for other links or information. She found none. She did further due diligence and checked for the title in the credits of Stephen Dorff, Gary Busey, and the two actors she’d never heard of, Kristy Gale and Brett Alden.

  Messrs. Dorff and Busey didn’t even list the film in their credits.

  Kristy Gale seemed to have had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it career in straight-to-video and had appeared in only one major theatrical release, Scary Movie 3, as “Girl on Unicycle.” Her page hadn’t been updated since 2007, which was also the date of her last credit, something called Lethal Kill. (Was there another kind? Rachel wondered.)

  No page existed for Brett Alden. He must have had his one acrid taste of the off-off-off Hollywood Boulevard life and run back home to Iowa or Wisconsin. Rachel clicked back on the open eBay window and purchased the tape for $4.87 and chose second-day air for delivery.

  She got another cup of coffee and came back to her laptop, still in her pajamas, and looked out at the river. Sometime last night, it had stopped raining. And sometime this morning, the sun—yes, the sun—rose. Everything appeared not just clean but polished, the sky looking like a frozen tidal wave, the trees along the river as sharp as jade. And here she sat indoors, with a hangover that thumped in her head and throbbed in her chest and made every synapse hiccup at least once before it fired. She clicked on her music folder and chose a playlist she’d compiled to chill herself out on days when the nerves were too close to the skin—The National, Lord Huron, Atoms for Peace, My Morning Jacket, and others of that ilk—and started looking into Baker Lake.

  There were three of them—the biggest in Washington State, another in the Canadian Arctic, and a third in Maine. The one in Washington looked touristy, the one in Canada was populated mostly by Inuit, and the one in Maine was wilderness, the nearest town, by the looks of it, forty miles away. As for proximity to a major city, it was actually closer to Quebec City than Bangor.

  “Camping trip?”

  She spun with the chair to face him: Brian, covered in sweat from his run, standing eight feet behind her, drinking from a water bottle.

  “Reading over my shoulder?” She smiled.

  He matched her smile. “Just walked in, happened to see the back of my wife’s head and ‘Baker Lake’ beyond it.”

  She dug her toe into the rug and swiveled the chair again, back and forth this time. “Your friend mentioned it last night.”

  “Which friend?”

  She gave him an arched eyebrow.

  “I had several there last night.”

  “Any others that you bitch-slapped?”

  “Ah.” He took a small step back and another sip of water.

  “Yes. Ah. What was that about?”

  “He got drunk, nearly got us tossed from our favorite bar, and then took a swing at me on the sidewalk.”

  “Yes, but why?”

  “Why?” He peered at her in a way she found vaguely reptilian. “He’s a violent drunk. He always was.”

  “So why did Caleb bring him two drinks at the same time?”

  “Because he’s Caleb. I dunno. Ask him.”

  “It just seems an odd thing to do—give a violent drunk a plethora of liquor as soon as he walks through the door.”

  “Plethora?”

  She nodded. “Plethora.”

  He shrugged. “Again, you’d have to ask Caleb. Maybe next time you guys hang out while I’m away.”

  She mock-pouted, something she knew irritated him to no end. “That threatens you?”

  “Didn’t say it did.” A blithe shrug from his broad shoulders, trying to play it cool while the temperature in the room ticked up five degrees.

  “That you can’t trust your partner?” she said. “Or you can’t trust your wife?”

  “I can trust both of you. I just find it odd that you, virtually a shut-in for the last two years, hopped a cab to Cambridge and stumbled across my business partner.”

  “I didn’t stumble across him. I went to your building.”

  He squatted on the rug and rolled the bottle between his palms. “And why would you do that?”

  “Because I thought you were lying to me.”

  “This again?” His laugh was unpleasant.

  “I guess so.”

  “You understand how nuts you sound?”

  “No. Illuminate it for me.”

  He rose up and down on his haunches several times, as if preparing his calves for the blast of a starter’s pistol. “You thought you saw me in Boston when I was actually thirty thousand feet in the air.”

  “Unless”—she crinkled her nose at him—“you weren’t.”

  He batted his eyelashes at her. “Then you put me through a series of hoops to prove I was actually in London. Hoops that I successfully jumped through. But that wasn’t enough. You”—he coughed out a laugh of sudden disbelief—“you walk around for the last week giving me looks like I’m the . . . the leader of a fucking sleeper cell.”

  “Or,” she said, “you could be like that guy who pretended to be a Rockefeller.”

  “I could.” He nodded as if that made absolute sense. Drained his water. “He killed people, didn’t he?”

  She stared back at him. “I believe that he did, yes.”

  “Left the wife alive,” he said.

  “That was sporting of him.” She felt an inexplicable smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth.

  “Stole their kid but left behind the silverware.”

  “Place settings are important.”

  “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “Why are you?”

  “Because this is so ridiculous.”

  “Beyond the pale,” she agreed.

  “So do we keep circling it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He knelt at her feet, took her hands in his, looked in her eyes. “I flew out of Boston last Monday on British Airways.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “The flight was delayed because of weather for seventy-five minutes. I spent the time wandering E Terminal, read an Us Weekly someone left behind at an empty gate. A janitor caught me doing it. You ever gotten a disapproving look from an airport janitor? Shrivels the testes, it does.”

  She grinned and shook her head. “Really, I believe you.”

  “Then I grabbed a cup of Dunkin’s, and by that point we were boarding. I got on, found out the outlet in my seat wasn’t working. Fell asleep for an hour or so. Woke up, read my board meeting materials even though I knew it was pointless, and watched a movie where Denzel refused to take any shit.”

  “That was the name of it?”

  “In several foreign territories, yes.”

  She met his eyes again. There was always something in that act; you either ceded power, took it, or shared it. They came to a mutual decision to share it.

  She put a hand lightly to the side of his head. “I believe you.”

  “You haven’t been acting like it.”

  “And I wish I could tell you why. It’s probably just all this fucking rain.”

  “Rain’s gone.”

  She acknowledged that with a nod. “But, hey, I did a lot these two weeks—the subway, the mall, the cab, I even walked into Copley Square.”

  “I know you did.” The empathy in his face—the love—was so genuine it hurt. “And I couldn’t be prouder.”

  “I know you went to London.”

  “Say it one more time.”

  She kicked his inner thigh softly with her bare foot. “I know you went to London.”

  “Trust is back in the house?”

  “Trust is back in the house.”

  He kissed her forehead. “I’m going to take a shower.” He touched her hips with both hands as he rose from his knees.

  She sat in the chair with her back to her laptop, her back to the river, her back to the perfect day, and she
wondered if they’d been off all week because she’d been off. If Brian was acting weird because she was acting weird.

  As she’d just pointed out to him, in the last fourteen days she’d ridden a subway, entered a mall, walked into Copley Square, and trusted a stranger to drive her—all for the first time in two years. For most, these were tiny accomplishments, but for her they were monumental. But maybe those accomplishments had also scared the shit out of her. Every step she took out of her comfort zone was either one step closer to better mental health or one step closer to another breakdown. But another breakdown now, after so much progress, would feel ten times as debilitating.

  For the last two years, one refrain had raced back and forth through her brain pan—I can’t go back there. I can’t go back there—every fucking minute of every fucking day.

  So it made sense that when she engaged in acts that promised liberation at the same moment they threatened imprisonment she might start to deflect the totality of it by obsessing over something else, something that began with a credible basis—she’d seen an awfully realistic replica of her husband in a place he wasn’t supposed to be—but had clearly evolved past a rational place.

  He was a good man. The best she’d ever known. Didn’t make him the best in the world, just the best for her. With the exception of The Sighting, as she’d come to think of it, he’d never given her reason not to trust him. When she was unreasonable, he was understanding. When she was frightened, he soothed. Irrational, he could translate. Frantic, he was patient. And when it had been time for her to venture back into the world, he recognized it, and he led her there. Held her hand, told her she was safe. He was there. They could stay or they could go, he had her back.

  And this man, she thought as she swiveled back to the window and caught her own ghostly reflection hovering over the river and the green banks beyond, is the man you’ve chosen to mistrust?

  When he came out of the shower, she was waiting on the bathroom counter, her pajamas pooled on the floor. He grew hard in the time it took to reach her. There was some awkwardness after he entered her—the countertop was narrow, the condensation was thick, her flesh squeaked against the mirror behind her, he slipped out twice—but she knew from the look in his eyes, a kind of shocked wonder, that he loved her like no one ever had. It seemed to do battle within him sometimes, this love, which made its reappearances so exhilarating.

  We won, she thought. We won again.

  She banged her hip on the faucet one time too many and suggested they move to the floor. They finished on top of her pooled pajamas, with her heels digging into the hollows behind his knees—a ridiculous sight, she imagined, to God, if He was looking, to their dead, if their dead could see through time, through galaxies—but she didn’t care. She loved him.

  The next morning, he left for work while she was still sleeping. When she went into their walk-in closet to pick out her outfit for the day, his suitcase was open on the wooden rack he otherwise kept folded and stowed beside his shoes. He was mostly packed, one empty square of the suitcase awaiting his shaving kit. A garment bag hung from a hook nearby, three suits inside.

  The next trip was tomorrow. And it was one of the big ones he took every six weeks or so. This time it was to Moscow, he’d told her, as well as Kraków and Prague. She lifted a few of his shirts, noticed he’d packed only one sweater and one coat, the thin raincoat he’d worn on his last trip. Seemed light for Eastern Europe in May. Wouldn’t the average temperature there be in the high forties or low fifties?

  She checked it on her phone.

  Actually, temperatures in all three cities were expected to be mostly in the high sixties.

  She went back to their bedroom and flopped on the bed and asked herself what the fuck was wrong with her. He’d passed every test she’d put before him. All yesterday, after they’d made love, he’d been attentive and funny and a joy to be around. A dream husband.

  And she rewarded that by checking the weather report to see if he’d packed appropriately for the places he was claiming to go to.

  Claiming. There it was again. Jesus. Maybe she needed to double up on sessions with Jane for a while, get this paranoia under control. Maybe she just needed to do something with her time besides lying around imagining ways in which her marriage could be a sham. She needed to get back to writing the book. She needed to sit in the chair and not get up until she fixed whatever was causing her blockage in the Jacmel sections.

  She got off the bed and took the laundry basket into the alcove where they’d stacked a washer and dryer. She went through his pants because he always left coins in his pockets and retrieved a total of seventy-seven cents and a couple of balled-up ATM receipts. She checked the receipts—of course she did—and found two cash withdrawals for Brian’s standard “fast cash” amount of $200, a week apart. She tossed the receipts into the small wicker trash basket and added the change to the cracked coffee cup she kept up on a shelf for just that purpose.

  She went through her own pockets, found nothing in any of them until she came across the receipt she’d stolen from his raincoat over a week ago. Well, stolen was a harsh word. Appropriated. That seemed better. She sat on the floor with her back to the washer and smoothed it against her knee and wondered yet again why it bothered her. It was just a receipt from a shop in London where he’d purchased a pack of gum, a Daily Sun, and a bottle of Orangina at 11:12 A.M. on 05/09/14 for a grand total of 5.47 pounds sterling. The address of the shop was 17 Monmouth Street, which put it just down the street from the Covent Garden Hotel.

  Here she went again. It was just a receipt. She tossed it in the trash basket. She added detergent to the washer and turned it on. She walked out of the alcove.

  She came back. She pulled the receipt out of the trash and looked at it again. It was the date that bothered her. 05/09/14. May 9, 2014. Which, yes, was the date Brian was in London. Month, day, year. But in Britain, they didn’t record their dates that way. Instead of month, day, year, they would write day, month, year. If this receipt were truly from a shop in London, it wouldn’t read 05/09/14. It would read 09/05/14.

  She put it in the pocket of her pajama pants and made it to the bathroom before she threw up.

  She survived dinner with him, though she barely spoke. When he asked if anything was wrong, she said her allergies were acting up and the manuscript was turning into far more work than she’d anticipated. When he pressed, she said, “I’m just tired. Can we leave it there?”

  He nodded, a resigned and deflated look on his face, a martyr forced to bear the hostile caprices of an unreasonable wife.

  She slept in the same bed as him. She hadn’t believed she’d be able to fall asleep, and for the first hour or so she just lay there, one side of her face pressed to the pillow, and watched him sleep.

  Who are you? she wanted to ask. She wanted to straddle him and pound his chest and scream it.

  What have you done to me?

  What did I do to myself when I committed to you? When I locked myself to you?

  Where do your lies lead?

  If you’re a fraud, what does that make my life?

  Somehow she fell asleep, a restless sleep, and woke the next morning with a startled “Oh” escaping her lips.

  While he took his shower, she went into the living room and looked out the window at the small red Ford Focus she’d rented yesterday from the Zipcar lot around the corner. Even from this height, she could make out the orange parking ticket a meter maid had slipped under the right windshield wiper. She’d expected that; she’d parked in a resident-only parking zone yesterday because it was the only way she could place the car where she needed it to be today—with a view of their garage exit.

  She dressed in workout clothes and a hoodie. When the shower shut off, she knocked softly on the bathroom door.

  “Yeah?”

  She opened the door, leaned into the frame. He had a towel around his waist and his neck and jaw were covered in shaving gel. He’d been about to cover his
cheeks but now he looked at her, a small swirl of purple gel in his right palm.

  “I’m gonna go work out.”

  “Now?”

  She nodded. “That instructor I like? On Tuesdays she’s only there at this time.”

  “Okay.” He crossed to her. “See you in a week.”

  “Fly safe.”

  They stood there, faces a few inches apart, his eyes searching hers, her eyes not moving at all.

  “Bye.”

  “Love you,” he said.

  “Bye,” she said again and closed the door behind her.

  19

  ALDEN MINERALS LTD.

  Yesterday, when she’d driven the Zipcar from the lot around the corner to the parking spot by their building, she’d covered a distance of two blocks, and even that had been a little nerve-racking. Now, as she watched Brian pull out of the garage and drive up the ramp to street level, all the oxygen in her body pushed into her heart. Brian turned onto Commonwealth and immediately got into the left lane. She pulled out with a jerk. A cab hurtled up on her left. A horn blared. The cab veered around her, the driver throwing his hand in the air at this idiot who couldn’t balance driving and paying attention at the same time.

  She sat, half in the parking spot, half in the lane, and heat flushed through her head and throat.

  Quit.

  The next time he goes on a trip, try it again.

  But she knew if she listened to that voice she’d never do it at all. She’d spend the next year (or years) indoors, in fear, in mistrust and resentment until those very things became a balm, an ironic salve, the worry stone she caressed until that caress replaced every caress she’d ever give or receive again. And the worst of it was that by that point, she’d have convinced herself it was more than enough.

  She pulled out onto Commonwealth and could hear her own breathing, never a good sign. If she didn’t get it back in tempo, she’d hyperventilate, maybe black out and crash, as Brian had once predicted. She exhaled slowly through pursed lips. Brian took a left on Exeter. She dropped in behind the cab that had almost hit her as it made the same turn. She exhaled again, just as slowly, and her breathing resumed a manageable rhythm. Her heart, on the other hand, continued to scamper like a penned animal watching the farmer approach with an ax. She gripped the steering wheel like an old lady or a driving instructor, her neck tight, palms wet, shoulder blades scrunched.