Since We Fell

by Dennis Lehane

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Bullshit. Bullshit.” She downed half her wine. At this rate, she’d be peeling the foil off a second bottle soon. But she didn’t care, because it felt good to have focus for her rage. It gave her the illusion of power. And at this point she’d take illusions if they beat back the terror.

  “What do you think you know?” he said.

  “Don’t you fucking speak to me in that tone.”

  “What tone?”

  “The condescending one.”

  He held up his hands like a man being robbed at gunpoint.

  She said, “I saw Brian go to Providence. I saw Brian at Alden Minerals. I saw Brian go to a camera store and buy flowers and go to a bank. And I saw Brian and his preg—”

  “What do you mean, he went to the camera store?”

  “He went to a camera store.”

  “The one on Broadway?”

  She didn’t know how she’d managed to strike a nerve, only that she had. Caleb scowled at his reflection in the marble countertop, scowled at his glass before draining it of bourbon.

  “What’s in the camera store?” After a minute of silence, she said, “Caleb—”

  He held up a finger to silence her and called someone on his cell. As he waited, she could hear the rings on the other end. She was still back to the finger he’d raised to silence her, the contempt in it. It reminded her of Dr. Felix Browner; he’d dismissed her in the same way once.

  He pressed “end” on his cell and immediately tried another number. No answer there either. He pressed “end” again and then squeezed the phone so hard she expected it to shatter.

  He said to her, “Tell me some—”

  She turned her back on him. She retrieved the bottle of wine from the counter beside the oven, kept her back to him as she refilled her glass. It was petty of her, but that didn’t make it feel any less sweet. When she turned back to him, the glare on his face vanished a half second after she noted it and he smiled a very Calebesque smile—boyish and sleepy.

  “Tell me some more about what you saw in Providence.”

  “You first.” She placed her wine down on the counter across from him.

  “There’s nothing for me to tell.” He shrugged. “I don’t know anything.”

  She nodded. “Then leave.”

  His sleepy smile turned into a sleepy chuckle. “Why would I do that?”

  “If you don’t know anything, Caleb, then I don’t know anything.”

  “Ah.” He unscrewed the cap on the bourbon and poured himself another two fingers. He put the cap back on, swirled the liquor in his glass. “You’re one hundred percent sure you saw Brian enter the camera store.”

  She nodded.

  “How long was he in there?”

  “Who’s Andrew Gattis?”

  He gave that a touché nod as he took a drink. “He’s an actor.”

  “I know that. Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “He went to Trinity Rep in Providence.”

  “The acting school.”

  Another nod. “It’s where we all met.”

  “So my husband’s an actor.”

  “Pretty much, yeah. So the camera store. How long was he in there?”

  She looked across the counter at him for a bit. “About five minutes, tops.”

  He gnawed the inside of his mouth. “He come back out with anything?”

  “What’s Brian’s real name?” She couldn’t fucking believe the words left her mouth. Who in her life ever expected to ask that about her husband?

  “Alden,” he said.

  “Brett?”

  He shook his head. “Brian. Brett was his stage name. My turn.”

  She shook her head. “No, no, no. You’ve been withholding information from me since we met. I just started tonight. You get one question for every two of mine.”

  “What if that isn’t good enough?”

  She wiggled her fingers at the door behind him. “Then fuck off, my friend.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “I’m buzzed,” she said. “What’s at the offices in Cambridge?”

  “Nothing. It’s never used. A friend owns it. If we need it—like, say, you’re coming over and we have warning—we dress it. Just like a stage.”

  “So who are the interns?”

  “You’ve already had your two questions.”

  But in that moment she saw the answer, as if it had descended from the heavens decked out in neon.

  “They’re actors,” she said.

  “Ding!” Caleb checked an imaginary box in the air before his eyes. “Gold star. Did Brian leave the camera store with anything?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  He checked her eyes. “Did he go to the bank before or after the camera store?”

  “That’s a second question.”

  “Be kind.”

  She laughed so hard she almost threw up. Laughed the way flood victims and earthquake survivors laughed. Laughed not because something was funny but because nothing was.

  “Kind?” she said. “Kind?”

  Caleb made a steeple of his hands and placed his forehead to their point. A supplicant. A martyr waiting to be sculpted. After no sculptor arrived, he raised his head. His face was ash, his eye sockets dark. He was aging as she watched.

  She swirled her wine but didn’t drink it. “How’d he fake the selfie from London?”

  “I did it.” He rotated his glass of bourbon on the countertop a full three-sixty. “He texted me, told me what was up. You were sitting right across from me in Grendel’s. It was all just hitting buttons on a phone, snatching an image here, an image there and running it through a photo program. If you’d looked at it in hi-res on a decent computer screen, it probably wouldn’t have held up, but for a selfie supposedly taken in low light? It was easy.”

  “Caleb,” she said, the wine definitely hitting her now, “what am I part of?”

  “Huh?”

  “I woke up this morning, I was someone’s wife. Now I’m . . . I’m, what, I’m one of his wives? In one of his lives? What am I?”

  “You’re you,” he said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You’re you,” he said. “You’re unaltered. Pure. You haven’t changed. Your husband’s not who you thought he was. Yes. But that doesn’t change who you are.” He reached across the counter and took her fingers in his hands. “You’re you.”

  She pulled her fingers free of his. He left his hands on the counter. She looked at her own hands, at the two rings there—a round solitaire diamond engagement ring sitting atop a platinum wedding band with five more round diamonds. She once took them to be cleaned at a jeweler’s on Water Street (one, she now realized, Brian had recommended), and the old man who owned the place whistled at them.

  “A man who would give you such precious stones,” the old man said, adjusting his glass. “Whoo. He must love you very much.”

  Her hands began to shake as she looked at them, at the flesh, at the jewels, and wondered if anything, anything in her life, was real. These last three years had been first a crawl and then a climb toward sanity, toward reclamation of her life and her self, a series of baby steps taken in a tsunami of doubt and terror. A blind woman walking down a series of corridors in an unfamiliar building she could not remember entering.

  And who had arrived to guide her? Who had taken her hand and whispered, “Trust me, trust me,” until she finally did? Who had walked her toward the sun?

  Brian.

  Brian had believed in her long after anyone else had gone home. Brian had pulled her out of the hopeless dark.

  “All of it was a lie?” She was surprised to hear the words leave her mouth and surprised to see the tears fall on the marble countertop and on her hands and on her rings. They rolled down the sides of her nose and off her cheekbones and into the corners of her mouth; they burned a bit.

  She moved to get a Kleenex, but Caleb took her hands again.

&
nbsp; “It’s okay,” he said. “Let it out.”

  She wanted to tell him it wasn’t okay, any of it, and would he please let go of her hands?

  She pulled her hands out of his. “Leave.”

  “What?”

  “Just go. I want to be alone.”

  “You can’t be alone.”

  “No, I’ll be fine.”

  “No,” he said, “you know too much.”

  “I . . . ?” She couldn’t repeat the rest of his threat. It was a threat, wasn’t it?

  “He won’t like it if I leave you alone.”

  Now she repeated it. “Because I know too much.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  She’d left the gun in the chair over by the picture window.

  “Brian and I have been at this for a very long time,” he said. “There’s a lot of money at stake.”

  “How much?”

  “A lot.”

  “And you think I might tell someone?”

  He smiled and drank some bourbon. “I don’t think you necessarily will, but I think you could.”

  “Uh-huh.” She carried her wineglass with her to the window, but Caleb came right along with her. They stood by the chair and looked out at the lights of Cambridge, and if Caleb looked down, he’d see the gun. “Is that why you married a woman who didn’t speak the language?”

  He said nothing and she tried not to look down at the chair.

  “Who doesn’t know anyone in this country?”

  He looked out at the night, but moved his hip slightly closer to the chair and kept his eyes on her reflection in the window.

  “Is that why Brian married a shut-in?”

  Eventually, Caleb said, “This could be so good for everyone.” He met her eyes in the dark glass. “So don’t make it bad.”

  “Are you threatening me?” she said softly.

  “I think it’s you who’s been doing the threatening tonight, kid.” And he looked at her the way the rapist, Teacher Paul, had in Haiti.

  Or at least that’s how it felt in the moment.

  “Do you know where Brian is?” she asked.

  “I know where he might be.”

  “Can you take me to him?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because he owes me an explanation.”

  “Or?”

  “Or what?”

  “That’s what I’m asking. Are you giving us an ‘or else’?”

  “Caleb,” she said, and hated how desperate she sounded, “take me to Brian.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Brian has something I need. Something my family needs. I don’t like that he has that and hasn’t told me.”

  She felt herself trying to swim up through the wine again. “Brian has something you . . . ? The camera store?”

  Caleb nodded. “The camera store.”

  “What—?”

  “He has something I need. And you’re something he needs.” He turned to face her, the chair between them. “So I’m not going to take you to him just yet.”

  She reached down, grabbed the pistol, thumbed off the safety, and pointed at the center of his chest.

  “Yes,” she said, “you are.”

  22

  THE SNOWBLOWER

  Driving them south in his silver Audi, Caleb said, “You can put the gun away.”

  “No,” she said, “I like having it.”

  She didn’t. She didn’t like having it at all. It sat in her hand like dead vermin that might spring back to life. Its power to stop a life with the flexing of a finger was suddenly one of the ugliest concepts she’d ever considered. And she’d pointed it at a friend. Was, even now, pointing it generally at him.

  “Could you put the safety on?”

  “That would add an extra step in case I have to pull the trigger.”

  “But you’re not going to pull the trigger. It’s me. And you’re you. Do you get how ridiculous this is?”

  “I do,” she said. “It’s ridiculous for sure.”

  “So now that we’ve agreed you’re not going to shoot me—”

  “We haven’t agreed on that.”

  “But I’m driving,” he pointed out, his tone falling somewhere between helpful and condescending. “So you’re going to shoot me and—what?—sit in the passenger seat as the car goes flying across the expressway?”

  “That’s what air bags are for.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “If you try to take the gun from me,” she said, “the only choice I’ll have is to, you know, shoot you.”

  He jerked the wheel and the car lurched into the next lane. He smiled at her. “Well, that felt unpleasant.”

  She could feel the power dynamic shifting and she knew from the housing projects and the ride-alongs and the long nights in Haiti that when power shifted it stayed shifted unless you grabbed it back immediately.

  His eyes were on the road when she flicked the safety on. It didn’t make a sound. She shifted in her seat, leaned forward slightly, and slammed the butt of the pistol down on his kneecap. The car lurched and swerved again. A horn blared.

  Caleb hissed. “Holy fuck. What is wrong with you? That fucking—”

  She did it again, exactly the same spot.

  He jerked the car back out of a third swerve. “Enough!”

  They’d be lucky if another car on the freeway wasn’t calling 911 right now to report a drunk driver, giving the operator Caleb’s license plate number.

  She flicked the safety off again.

  “Enough,” he repeated. Riding his vocal cords along with the anger and attempt at authority was a clear timbre of anxiety. He had no idea what she was going to do next, but he was definitely afraid of the possibilities.

  So now the power had shifted back.

  He exited the freeway in Dorchester, in the southern tip of Neponset. He headed north on Gallivan Boulevard, stayed right at the rotary, and at first she thought they were crossing the bridge to Quincy, but instead he headed for the on-ramp back onto the expressway. At the last moment, he turned right, and drove down a street badly in need of repaving. They bounced along until he turned right and took them into a blocks-long stretch of bent, weather-lashed houses and Quonset-shaped warehouses and dry dockyards filled with boats that ran to the smaller side. At the end of the street, they found the Port Charlotte Marina, something Sebastian had pointed out to her a few times on their sails through Massachusetts Bay their first few summers together. Sebastian, showing her how to steer and navigate at night by the lights in the sky. Sebastian, out on the water with the wind in his Nordic hair, the only time she’d ever known him to be happy.

  A restaurant and yacht club sat just past a near-deserted parking lot, both buildings looking freshly painted and hopeful for a marina in which there were no yachts. The biggest boat moored at the dock looked to be a forty-footer. Most of the others looked to be lobster boats, aged and constructed of wood. A few of the newer ones were fiberglass. The nicest of those was about thirty-five feet long, the hull painted blue, the wheelhouse painted white, the deck a honey teak. She paid attention to it because her husband stood on it, bathed in their headlights.

  Caleb exited the car fast. He pointed back at her, told Brian his wife was not taking things well. Rachel was happy to note Caleb limped even as he speed-walked to the boat. She, on the other hand, moved slowly, her eyes on Brian. His gaze barely left hers except for the occasional flicks in the direction of Caleb.

  If she’d known she’d end up killing him, would she have boarded the boat?

  She could turn around and go to the police. My husband is an impostor, she’d say. She imagined some smarmy desk sergeant replying, “Aren’t we all, ma’am?” Yes, she was certain, it was a crime to impersonate someone and a crime to keep two wives, but were those serious crimes? In the end, wouldn’t Brian just take a plea and it would all go away? She’d be left the laughingstock never-was, the failed pr
int reporter who’d become a pill-addicted broadcast reporter who’d become a punch line and then a shut-in and who would keep the local comics stocked with weeks of fresh material once it was discovered that Meltdown Media Chick had married a con man with another wife and another life.

  She followed Caleb up the ramp to the boat. He stepped aboard. When she went to do the same, Brian offered his hand. She stared at it until he dropped it. He noticed the gun she carried. “Should I show you mine? So I feel safer?”

  “Be my guest.” She stepped aboard. As she did, Brian caught her by the wrist and stripped the gun from her hand in the same motion. He pulled his own gun, a .38 snub-nosed revolver, from under the flaps of his shirt and then laid them both on a table by the stern. “Once we get out into the bay, sweetheart, you let me know if you want to walk five paces and draw. I owe you that.”

  “You owe me a lot more than that.”

  He nodded. “And I’m going to make good on it.” He unraveled a line from the cleat, and before she’d even realized she could hear the engine, Caleb was under the standing shelter with his hand on the throttle and they were chugging up the Neponset River toward the bay.

  Brian sat on the bench on one side of the deck and she sat across from him, the front edge of the table in between them.

  “So you own a boat,” she said.

  He leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. “Yup.”

  Port Charlotte receded behind her. “Am I ever going to get back off it?”

  He tilted his head to the side. “Of course. Why wouldn’t you?”

  “Because I can expose your double life for starters.”

  He sat back, opened his palms to the idea. “And where will that get you?”

  “It won’t get me anywhere. Get you in jail.”

  He shrugged.

  “You don’t think so.”

  “Look, if you want, we’ll turn this boat around right now and take you back. And you can drive to the nearest police station and tell them your story. And if they believe you—and let’s face it, Rachel, your credibility is a little shaky in this town—then, sure, they’ll send some detective out tomorrow or the next day or a week from Tuesday, whenever they get around to it. But by that point, I’ll be smoke. They’ll never find me and you’ll never find me.”