Since We Fell

by Dennis Lehane

  But, no. No, no, no, that big sister’s voice whispered in her ear. He stayed behind to drink. He stayed behind to collect his thoughts before an hour’s drive. And if that weren’t enough, whatever game he and Brian were playing, they had set it in motion a long time ago.

  She looked at him now. For a full minute.

  “You’re not my fault.” The tears fell and she wiped at them. “But I’ll miss you,” she said and walked out of the apartment.

  28

  PLUNGING

  She gassed up Caleb’s Audi and then got breakfast at the Paramount on Charles Street once it occurred to her that she hadn’t eaten in about twenty-four hours. She didn’t feel hungry, but she ate like it. She drove back over into Copley Square and parked at a meter on Stuart Street and walked the small side street that ran between the Copley Plaza Hotel and the Hancock Tower. She passed the loading dock and the rear door where she’d seen Brian exit in the rain and climb into the black Suburban. She walked around the building, walked along St. James, and at one point she saw a dozen Rachels reflected and re-reflected in the panes. They formed a disjointed ribbon, like a chain of Rachel dolls cut from construction paper. When she rounded the corner, they all took flight. And she never saw them again.

  It was almost nine and the streets were filled with morning commuters. She reached the entrance to the skyscraper and followed the stream heading in through the revolving doors. She found the directory to the right of the security desk. She went through the As and saw no Alden Minerals. Went through the Bs and saw nothing she’d consider germane to her quest. But in the Cs, there it was—Cotter-McCann, the venture capital firm Glen O’Donnell had mentioned. It wasn’t a guarantee, but it was certainly a fair assumption that Brian had come here that day to meet with representatives of Cotter-McCann and sell off a part of his mining interest.

  She exited the building and walked back a block to the central branch of the Boston Public Library. She passed through the McKim building into the Johnson building where the computers were and set to researching Cotter-McCann’s acquisition of an interest in Alden Minerals. There wasn’t anything on it save one tiny item in the business digest section of the Globe, which must have been the source of Glen’s information because it told her nothing new.

  She clicked off and looked up Baker Lake, worked her way to a satellite map, click-click-clicked the zoom icon until she could discern the only abodes in the area, eight roofs in the northeast corner of the lake along the Canadian border, three more she almost missed peeking out a bit to the west of the eight. She printed several images of the region, zooming out a little bit more each time, until she was satisfied she had a reasonable representation of the area. She retrieved the pages from the printer tray, quit all applications, cleared her history, and left the library.

  Just before Haiti, Rachel had done a story for Little Six on the tax breaks the Commonwealth was offering to lure Hollywood film production to Massachusetts. In order to assess the economic effect of the tax breaks on the local economy, she’d interviewed Hollywood studio execs and statehouse reps on Ways and Means as well as local actors, location scouts, and one casting director. Her name was Felicia Ming. She was a jaded gossip, as Rachel recalled. She and Rachel had met for drinks a few times in the months before Rachel left the country for Port-au-Prince. They’d fallen out of touch after that, but Felicia had sent her a few kind e-mails after the meltdown and Rachel still had her contact info in her phone.

  She called her standing outside the library and asked her how she’d track down an actor starring in a local production.

  “Why are you trying to find him?”

  Rachel tried a version not far from the truth. “He got into a drunken tiff with my husband in a bar the other night.”

  “Oh, do tell.”

  “I just feel bad. He got the worst of it, and I want to apologize to the guy.”

  “Was this fight over you, honey?”

  Rachel hoped her instinct was right on this one. “It was, I’m afraid, yeah.”

  “Somebody’s making a comeback,” Felicia Ming said. “You return to this world with us, honey, and you make them crawl to you.”

  Rachel forced a chuckle. “That’s the plan.”

  “What company is he working with right now?” Felicia asked.

  “The Lyric Stage.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Andrew Gattis.”

  “Give me a sec.”

  While Rachel waited, a homeless guy walked by with his dog. Rachel recalled the night Brian forfeited his coat to a needier soul in the park. She gave the dog a pat and the homeless guy ten bucks and Felicia came back on the line.

  “He’s at the Demange. It’s corporate housing in Bay Village.” She gave Rachel the address. “Want to grab a drink soon? Now that you’ve rejoined the living?”

  Rachel actually felt bad about lying. “I’d love to.”

  Twenty minutes later, she stood on a sidewalk in Bay Village and rang his doorbell.

  When his voice came through the intercom it was groggy. “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Gattis, it’s Rachel Delacroix.”

  “Who?”

  “Brian’s wife.” The pause that followed was so lengthy she finally said, “Mr. Gattis, you there?”

  “I’d like you to go away.”

  “I won’t.” The calm force in her voice surprised her. “I’ll wait down here until you have to come out. And if you slip out the back, I’ll come to your performance tonight and cause a scene in the middle of it. So, let’s—”

  The door buzzed and she grabbed the handle and entered the building. It smelled of Lysol and linoleum in the lobby, Indian food as she climbed to the second-floor landing. A woman passed her leading a huffing French bulldog on a leash, the dog reminding Rachel of something you’d get if a pug impregnated a wombat.

  Gattis was waiting in the doorway of 24, his stringy gray hair yellowed by nicotine. He tied it back into a bun as he led her into the apartment. It was a simple layout—kitchen and living room to the right, bedroom and bathroom back to the left. The window at the back of the living room opened onto a fire escape.

  “Coffee?” he said.

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  She took a seat at a small round table by the window and he brought them each a cup of coffee, put a carton of creamer and a bowl of sugar between them. In the morning light, he looked even worse than the drunk she’d met Saturday night. His skin was scaly and pink and blue veins had erupted along the sides of his nose like electric bolts. His eyes swam.

  “I have rehearsal in an hour and I have to shower, so we’re going to have to move this along.”

  She sipped her coffee. “You and Brian were actors together.”

  “Caleb too.” He nodded. “Brian had more raw talent than I’ve ever seen before or since. We all knew he’d be a star as long as he didn’t find a way to fuck it up.”

  “What happened?”

  “Couple things, I guess. He had no patience. And maybe, I dunno, he didn’t respect it because it came so easy to him? Who knows? He was angry, I remember that. Charming and angry. Cut quite the romantic figure in that regard. Chicks were fucking crazy about him. No offense.”

  She shrugged and drank her coffee. Say what you would about Andrew Gattis, he made good coffee. “What was he angry about?”

  “Being poor. Brian had to work. I mean we were dawn to dusk at school. We had acting classes and improvisation classes and improvisational movement classes. We had dance and playwriting and stagecraft and directing classes. Voice class, speech class, and something called Alexander Technique, which taught command of the body so you could use it as an instrument, you know? Morph it to your will. All that work was no joke. You’d get to six o’clock, your eyes would be shutting and your muscles screaming and your head throbbing. You’d go to bed or you’d go to the bar. Not Brian, though. Brian would go to work until two in the morning. And then right back at it at seven. Most of us were in our mid-twenties so,
shit, plenty of energy, but even at that age we wondered how he did it. Then all that work added up to nothing anyway when he got kicked out.”

  “He was kicked out of Trinity?”

  Gattis nodded and took a long chug of coffee. “I look back now and I think he was probably popping a lot of speed or doing blow to keep up his pace. Either way, he was getting edgier and edgier during our second year. We had this one professor, real to-the-manner-born dilettante douchebag named Nigel Rawlins. He was one of those break-you-down-to-build-you-up kind of teachers, but I always suspected he didn’t really know about building anyone back up, he just liked to break them down. He was notorious for getting students to drop out. He built his rep on it. One morning he went after the only student there who was poorer than Brian. This kid had Brian’s bare pockets but not his talent, not a tenth of it. Anyway, Nigel Rawlins, one morning they’re rehearsing a scene set in a men’s room, right? And this kid’s got a monologue about unclogging a toilet—that’s all I remember about it to this day; I think it was a student piece—and the kid, he’s just not selling the scene. He’s fucking gassing it, to be quite honest. Which is setting Nigel off. He tore into that kid for being a shit actor and a shit human being, an embarrassment as a son and a brother, a source of shame to anyone unlucky enough to have him as a friend. He’d been on the kid for months, but that morning he was the fucking Terminator. Kept coming and coming. The kid pleads for him to stop, but Nigel gets stuck in this rage-loop about how the kid is a log of shit covered in hair that’s clogging the drain and it was Nigel’s job to plunge him the fuck out of the class before he dragged everyone else into that clogged toilet with him. So Brian, man—I mean, nobody ever even saw him leave the stage—but when he came back he had an actual plunger in his hand, not the fucking stage prop, and it was dripping with piss. He flipped Nigel on his back and he fitted that plunger over his mouth and nose and he just started . . . plunging. Once Nigel managed to push his head off the floor, grab at Brian’s legs, and Brian punched him so hard in the center of his face, you could hear it in the back row of the theater. And Brian went back to plunging and plunging and fucking plunging Nigel’s face until Nigel passed out.” He sat back and drained his coffee. “They kicked Brian out the next morning. He hung around Providence for a while, delivering pizzas, but I think it grew too embarrassing, ya know, handing over pies and taking sweaty bills from people you used to party with. He lit out one day and I didn’t hear from him again for, I dunno, nine years.”

  She sat with that a bit, wishing she hadn’t heard it because it actually made her like the lying prick again, if only for a moment. “What happened to the other student? The one who was being abused?”

  “You mean Caleb?”

  She chuckled in sadness and surprise and Gattis refilled their coffee cups.

  She said, “When’s the last time you saw Brian before the other night?”

  “Ten years ago, maybe twelve.” He looked out the window for a bit. “Can’t remember exactly.”

  “Any idea where he’d go if he didn’t want to be found?”

  “That cabin he has in Maine.”

  “Baker Lake.”

  He nodded.

  She showed him one of the satellite photos. He looked at it for a bit and took a Sharpie from a cup on the windowsill. He circled the cluster of three rooftops.

  “Those other eight cabins over here? They’re part of a hunting camp. These three, though? Brian owns them. We had a Trinity reunion there around 2005. Not too many showed up but it was fun. Don’t ask me where he got the money for them because I didn’t ask. Brian preferred the middle cabin. It was painted green when I was there, had a red door.”

  “And that was 2005?”

  “Or 2004.” He nodded at the bathroom door. “I got to shower.”

  She returned the satellite photo to her bag and thanked him for his time and the coffee.

  “I don’t know if this is worth anything,” he said as she reached the door, “but he looks at you different than I’ve ever known him to look at anyone.” He shrugged. “Then again, he’s a very good actor.”

  He remained in the bathroom doorway. She held his gaze and saw his eyes change as, she presumed, he watched hers do the same.

  “Wait,” she said slowly.

  Andrew Gattis waited.

  “He paid you to crash our party that night, didn’t he? He staged the whole fight, everything.”

  Andrew Gattis stroked the jamb of his bathroom door, a jamb that looked to have been painted so many times over the decades she bet the door never latched correctly. “And if he did?”

  “Why are you helping him?”

  His shoulders rose and fell in a half shrug. “When we were young, at a crucial time in the development of our selves, Brian and I were great friends. Now he’s where he is and I’m where I am”—he looked around the room, which suddenly appeared grim and insignificant—“and I’m not sure who we are anymore. When you spend so much time in the skins of others that you don’t even recognize the smell of your own anymore, maybe the only allegiance you owe is to the people who remembered you before the makeup and the stagecraft took over.”

  “I don’t follow,” she said.

  He gave that another half shrug. “You remember how I told you that at Trinity we studied every discipline, no matter what our focus—dance, acting, writing, what have you?” He gave her a soft, distant grin. “Well, Brian was a hell of an actor, like I said. But you know what his real passion was?”

  She shook her head.

  “Directing.” He disappeared into the bathroom. He closed the door behind him, and she was mildly surprised to hear it latch.

  29

  ENOUGH

  I-95 took her through Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and what she would have previously described as deep into Maine, up all the way to Waterville. But from there, she had to leave the interstate and hop onto Route 201, after which everything grew first rural, then desolate, then slightly ethereal, the air and sky turning the cast of newspaper, the land eventually disappearing in thickets of trees as tall as skyscrapers. Soon the sky was gone, and all she knew of the world was the brown trunks and the dark treetops and the ashen road feeding into the space between her thrumming wheels. It felt as if she moved under heavy cloud cover; soon that gave way to the sensation of driving at night, even though it was three in the afternoon in late May.

  She reached a clearing between two forests. Miles of green. Farmland, she presumed, though she couldn’t see any houses or silos, just swaths of well-tended fields, spotted with cows and sheep and the occasional horse. Her phone was propped in the cup holder and she looked down at it long enough to confirm it no longer received service out here. When she looked up again, the sheep—or goat, she’d never be sure which—stood six feet from her bumper. She spun the wheel and swerved off the road, bounced into a small ditch hard enough to bang the top of her head off the roof and the bottom of her chin off the steering wheel. All four wheels detached from the earth. She shot back out of the ditch like something strapped to a booster rocket and hit the road on the front quarter of her left bumper. The air bag punched her in the face as it deployed, and she could taste blood after she bit her tongue. The back of the vehicle rose and the front lifted off the pavement again. It flipped twice to the soundtrack of breaking glass, grinding metal, and her screams.

  It came to a stop.

  She was upright. She shook her head several times and small chunks of glass, dozens of them by the sound of it, flew out. She sat where she was a while longer, chin resting on the air bag like it was a pillow, until she ascertained that she wasn’t in any pain, nothing felt broken, she didn’t seem to be bleeding anywhere but her tongue. The back of her head throbbed and her neck felt stiff and the muscles closest to her spine had turned to rock, but otherwise it seemed possible she was all in one piece. The console compartment and glove compartment had divested themselves of their contents and they were strewn across the dashboard and passenger seat an
d foot wells—maps, insurance cards, registration, packets of handkerchiefs, loose change, pens, a key.

  She unlocked her seat belt.

  She bent over the passenger seat. She pushed aside a pair of cracked sunglasses and lifted the key off the mat. It was small and thin and silver. Not a house key, not a car key. A locker key, or padlock key, or safe deposit box key.

  Was this the key? Which would mean Caleb had had it, not Brian. Which would mean he’d died rather than give it up.

  Or it was just a key.

  She pocketed it and got out of the SUV. It sat dead center in the middle of the road. The sheep or goat was long gone. The black crescents of her skid marks snaked from the center of the road, off the edge, and vanished where she’d left the road. A shower of glass—some clear, some red—marked her return and littered the road along with pieces of chrome, hard black plastic, and a detached door handle.

  She got back in and tried starting the SUV. The engine turned over followed by a repetitive ding-ding-ding to remind her to fasten her seat belt. She used the paring knife she’d packed to cut away the air bag. She popped the hood. She checked under there and couldn’t find any obvious danger. Checked the tires and they looked fine. She turned on the lights—that’d be a problem. The right headlight was shattered. The left was cracked but functional. In the rear, it was the reverse—where the driver’s-side brake light had been, only a metal cavity remained. The passenger’s-side brake light, on the other hand, looked fit for a brochure photo.

  She considered the endless stretches of farmland, the forest behind her and the one ahead. It could be hours before any help arrived. Or it could be minutes. No way to tell.

  The last time she’d looked at the trip meter she’d been seventy miles away from Baker Lake. And that had been ten minutes before the accident. So sixty-five then. Brian had paid Andrew Gattis to show up that night at their party and leave her a series of clues. He’d wanted her to know about Baker Lake. It’s possible his motive had been to draw her up here and kill her. She’d mulled that over a lot. But if he wanted to kill her, he could have done it on the boat. Instead he’d faked his own death at her hand. Every time she’d looked at Baker Lake on the maps, it felt like a door. If you crossed the lake, you reached another country. Was Brian leading her to the door?