Ghostheart

by R.J. Ellory

  A Kodak moment for the heart.

  She left him sleeping, wanted to leave him sleeping, because she could barely remember the last time she had done that: gone away and come back again to find someone in her bed. The feeling was one of completeness, coupled with anticipation for what this might bring and an urgent need to discover all that could be discovered in a relationship that worked. And beyond and beneath all that, she was aware that loneliness was already something she could barely remember as significant.

  Annie put on a tee-shirt and jeans, slipped out of the apartment and crossed the landing to Sullivan’s. She tapped on the door, waited a handful of seconds, and stepped inside as the door opened.

  ‘Good to see you,’ she told Sullivan, and hugged him.

  He was dressed, had more than likely been up since dawn. He did that sometimes, and then other times she couldn’t rouse him until after lunch. There was something around his eyes, not so much the shadows of insomnia, but more the mental and physical tension he must have been fighting. It was not easy to stop drinking, she knew that much, and Sullivan had a battle on his hands.

  ‘How’re you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘With the drinking, I’m actually doing okay Annie. I figured it would be tougher, kinda cursed myself for making a promise, but I’m actually doing okay. And you?’

  Annie smiled. She knew he was lying for her. She would have said something, but she didn’t know what to say, and in this moment she believed she could not have submerged her sense of well-being beneath anything.

  ‘I’m doing good enough,’ she said. ‘David’s still sleeping … I came over because I wanted to ask if you’d do something for me.’

  Sullivan walked into his front room and sat on the couch. Annie took a seat at the table facing him.

  ‘My father,’ she stated matter-of-factly.

  ‘Your father?’

  She nodded. ‘I wondered if you could do a little investigatory work, find out what you can about him … I figured you might have some contacts in the newspapers or something.’

  ‘And why would I be doing this?’ Sullivan asked. ‘First time in the five years we’ve known each other that you’ve asked me to do something like this.’

  She shook her head. ‘Thought about it many times, but I think the letters from Forrester made me look at it more seriously. I could never get the nerve up, you know what I mean?’

  Sullivan frowned. ‘Because there’s something you think you might not like?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. More because I thought it might make me sad that I never got the chance to know him.’

  ‘I can check it out,’ Sullivan said. ‘Pass me a pen and paper from over there.’ He pointed to a chest of drawers against the wall. ‘Tell me his date of birth, where he lived, anything like that.’

  ‘I think he was born at the end of the ’30s, but I’m not sure. Mainly lived here in New York as far as I know, and Forrester said he was some kind of engineer.’

  ‘Anything more specific than just a kind of engineer?’ Sullivan asked. He took the pen and paper and jotted down what Annie told him.

  Annie shook her head. ‘That’s as good as I’ve got. I know it doesn’t help much but I thought you might be able to find out something.’

  Sullivan shrugged his shoulders. ‘You never know,’ he said. ‘But for this kind of work it’s a hundred an hour plus expenses.’

  Annie smiled. ‘I appreciate it Jack, I really do.’

  She turned suddenly at the sound of someone knocking the door.

  ‘Come!’ Sullivan hollered.

  The door inched cautiously open and David’s head appeared.

  ‘David,’ Annie said, rising from her chair. ‘Come and meet the cat.’

  Sullivan frowned.

  Annie winked at him. ‘A short story,’ she said.

  David walked towards them, held out his hand as he reached Sullivan.

  ‘David Quinn,’ he said.

  ‘Jack Sullivan.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘You want to stay and have some coffee with me?’ Sullivan asked.

  ‘I’d love to,’ David said, ‘but I just got paged. I wondered if I could use the phone, Annie.’

  ‘Use mine,’ Sullivan said.

  David looked awkward for a moment. ‘My pager’s back inside,’ he said. ‘The number’s on it … I might as well call from there.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Annie said. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

  David nodded, smiled. ‘No hurry,’ he said, and turned back towards the door.

  ‘He seems okay,’ Sullivan commented when he was once again alone with Annie.

  ‘Yes,’ Annie replied. ‘He really is okay, Jack.’

  ‘I’m happy for you.’

  She reached out and touched his face. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘So go and be with him, not with the old drunk opposite, eh?’

  ‘Ex-drunk,’ Annie reminded him.

  ‘Drunk, ex-drunk, whatever … go be someone’s girlfriend.’

  Someone’s girlfriend, she thought as she closed Sullivan’s door behind her. Long time since I’ve been someone’s girlfriend.

  Stepping back into her apartment she found David standing there, his expression intent. He held the pager in his hand.

  ‘Something up?’ Annie asked.

  ‘Boston,’ he said. ‘I need to go to Boston for a couple of days.’

  Disappointment was evident in her face before she said a word. ‘Right now?’

  He nodded. ‘Right now.’

  ‘You get that little warning?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes,’ he said, and then – almost as an afterthought –‘but I have an idea.’ His expression suddenly lost its intensity, became animated. He started smiling.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come with me … come up to Boston with me.’

  ‘Go to Boston? What the hell am I going to do in Boston?’

  ‘You ever been to Boston?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘So there’s always a first time for everything.’

  She frowned slightly. ‘You’re serious aren’t you?’

  David came forward and took her hand. ‘I am, yes. Why the hell not? I’ve got to see a couple of people, check out something, but possibly only for a few hours. We could go out to Nantucket Island … hell, we could even see Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. It’s a good idea Annie, a couple of days out of New York, change of environment, you know?’

  David was enthused, passionate, almost insistent, and there was something about the proposition that seemed both exciting and romantic.

  ‘There are these little hotels overlooking the harbor … you can get up early in the morning and go down to see the boats come in. It’s a beautiful part of the country, it really is.’

  Annie was still undecided. She started to shake her head. ‘I don’t know David, it seems a little premature.’

  ‘Christ Annie, I’m not asking you to marry me … I’m suggesting we go up to Boston for a couple of days and have a break from the city. What the hell is there to lose?’

  What the hell is there to lose? she asked herself. Miss out on a couple of sales at the store? What am I so worried about?

  ‘So?’ David asked, his tone insistent again.

  ‘Fuck it,’ she said. ‘I’ll come.’

  ‘Great! Hell, that’s great!’ He threw his arms around her waist, pulled her close and hugged her. ‘It’ll do us both good.’

  Twenty minutes later he left for his apartment to collect his clothes and other necessaries. Annie stuffed a few things in an overnighter, took her toothbrush and hairdryer from the bathroom, went across the hall to tell Sullivan that she was being uncharacteristically spontaneous and impulsive.

  Sullivan seemed pleased. ‘Send me a postcard,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll send a fish,’ she replied.

  ‘A fish for the apartment cat, eh?’

  She laughed with him, hugged him once more an
d left.

  She felt nervous, like a child standing in line at the ferris wheel, tall enough to take a ride for the very first time. It was all too new, and it seemed to be happening too fast, but there was something about it that seemed to pull her along whether she wished to be pulled or not.

  Standing in the kitchen, pouring half a carton of milk down the sink, she asked herself what she was doing.

  Falling in love? Simply taking a running leap at something in the hope that it will all work out? Trying to live ten years of life in a fortnight to make up for all the time you’ve lost?

  She smiled at her vague reflection in the window, smiled and shook her head and told herself to stop reading significant meanings into everything she did. She was simply going away for a couple of days with David. And who was David? Well, he just happened to be some guy she’d met the best part of two weeks before. And was it all happening a little too fast? Hell, how fast was it supposed to happen? Wasn’t there such a thing as love at first sight? Sure as hell there was. That would be the kind of thing that could be considered too fast, and that certainly hadn’t been the case here. There was nothing complicated in this. This was just how life went sometimes … and judging by the way she felt it seemed that this was more like the way life was supposed to be. Something to look forward to, something to be excited about, something to leave, something to come home to …

  The phone rang.

  Annie snapped to, turned and stared at it as if it were some small and intrusive animal.

  Jesus, she thought. And how long is it since the goddamned phone rang in here?

  She came out of the kitchen, crossed the front room and picked it up.

  ‘Hello?’

  Annie?

  ‘David?’

  Are you nearly ready?

  ‘How did you get my number David?’ she asked.

  Christ Annie, I just used your phone to call Boston. Your number is right there on the phone … now are you ready or what?

  Annie nodded. ‘Yes, I’m ready David … five minutes or so.’

  I’m coming in a taxi … we’ll go out to the airport. Got us a flight that leaves in about fifty minutes, okay?

  ‘Okay,’ she said, a little surprised at her reaction to his calling. This was new, all of it, and she had to get used to the fact that now there was someone else in her life. And did she want that someone? Sure she did, and therefore there was a price to pay. You gave up the loneliness, and in return you lost a little of your privacy. Was that such a bad deal? She figured not.

  See you in five.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘See you in five.’

  She hung up the telephone and hurried the last of her things into the overnighter. She checked the appliances were off, turned down the thermostat, bundled a few items of clothing into the washing basket behind the bathroom door, and left the apartment.

  She checked in on Sullivan on her way, found him on the internet.

  ‘Checking on lists of engineering trade organizations,’ he said. ‘Have a good time … and remember that too much screwing makes you blind.’

  She laughed as she closed the door behind her, and then hurried down the stairs.

  TWENTY-TWO

  There was a moment as they came in to land, a moment when the sea was right beside her, water stretching all the way to the horizon and over the edge into the unknown. It was early evening, and the setting sun caught the sea on fire, and beneath her it seemed like a great roiling ocean of sulphur; and suspended there in mid-air with the sensation of being buffeted by the wind, she tried to recall the last time she had felt as free as this. She could not remember, and in the moment that the aircraft’s wheels touched the runway she gripped David’s hand – not out of fear or tension or anything such as that, but in sheer exhilaration. She looked at him and he smiled.

  ‘Too long in New York,’ he whispered.

  ‘Too long alone David,’ she whispered back.

  He squeezed her hand.

  Annie closed her eyes as the runway rushed beneath them, and when the aircraft taxied to a halt, as people gathered their bags and made their way off the plane, she realized that she had somehow managed to extricate herself almost completely from life. These people, the people she’d flown with, were the same as those who came to browse in The Reader’s Rest. Six degrees of separation and all that.

  David hurried them across the airport concourse and out into the wind and rain of this Boston evening. He hailed a cab, gave the driver the name of a hotel, and as they pulled away Annie looked back towards the airport. Bright lights, a hundred thousand different people criss-crossing their way through the lives of a hundred thousand more, and all of them weaving back and forth, intermingling, associating, living their lives the only way they knew how: ahead of, behind and beside one another. This was people – good, bad, indifferent, inconspicuous, extravagant, idiosyncratic, profound, stupid and beautiful. All of them together, and Annie O’Neill saw how she had lived on the edges of life, and only now was discovering that the only way to survive was to turn and reach outwards once more.

  ‘How’re ya doing?’ David asked as the road unfolded before them.

  ‘I’m good David … how are you?’

  David put his left arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. He took her hand with his right and squeezed it reassuringly. He didn’t say a word. Didn’t need to say a word.

  They drove for little more than ten minutes, and when they pulled up ahead of a small hotel on the outskirts of Boston, when David came around the back of the cab and opened the door for her, as he paid the driver and carried her bag inside, Annie following, feeling something new with each step she took, she realized it was enough to feel in those moments. That was the only way she could later describe it: it was enough to feel.

  The booking was in the name of Mr and Mrs Quinn.

  ‘Nothing prophetic,’ he whispered to her as he signed the register.

  ‘Cash, check or credit card?’ the receptionist asked him.

  ‘We’ll be paying cash,’ David told her.

  ‘And you’re staying just the one night?’

  David nodded.

  ‘If you could make a deposit of seventy-five dollars,’ the receptionist told him, ‘and then settle the remainder when you leave?’

  David paid the money, took their bags. Annie took the key and they were shown up a curved stairwell and along a wide corridor to a room on the right-hand side.

  The room was homely, warm – almost too warm; Annie took off her coat and sweater, stood there surveying the bed, the chairs on either side, the table upon which sat a small colonialstyle lamp, the wide bay window beyond which was nothing but deep blue peppered with streetlights and the passage of cars on the freeway in the distance. David was in the bathroom, unpacking his toiletries, and when he appeared in the doorway he looked at her askance.

  ‘You look like you’ve never been in a hotel before,’ he said.

  ‘Many years ago,’ she said. ‘My mom took me away for a long weekend when I was thirteen.’

  ‘That was the last time?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Hell Annie, you really should get out more.’

  ‘I am … I have done,’ she said, and then she held out her hand and David walked towards her.

  ‘Hungry?’ he asked.

  ‘Famished.’

  ‘They have a good restaurant here,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve been here before?’

  ‘A couple of times … one of our offices is here in Boston. That’s where I have to go tomorrow.’

  ‘So let’s go eat,’ she said.

  There was fresh crab and lobster, shrimp and oysters; David ordered Surf ‘N’ Turf for them both, a bottle of red wine, fresh-baked bran muffins and salad. Annie ate more than she believed humanly possible, and when the meal was finished they sat for a while with their coffee, David smoking, talking about a job he once undertook out near Nantucket.

  By the time they left the restauran
t it was gone ten. Annie was tired, dragged herself along the corridor, and once inside their room she collapsed on the bed fully clothed.

  David ran a bath, called her once he was in it, and together they lay in the deep water, talking a little of things inconsequential, aware of each other, believing perhaps that there was no other place in the world that they would rather be. When they had bathed, she stood naked in the bathroom while he dried her, and then he lifted her and carried her to the bed where he lay beside her for a while before folding himself against her and kissing her neck.

  Their lovemaking was languorous and slow, wordless and without sound. Annie felt whatever tension may have existed within her bones, her muscles, her nerves, slip away, dissolving like ink in water until it vanished. And then she lay beside him as he slept, and she unraveled her mind and drifted effortlessly into sleep.

  She could hear the sound of the rain, the passage of cars on the freeway, and the sound of David’s breathing matching her own.

  The ghosts have gone, she thought. At last – perhaps forever – the ghosts have gone.

  Wednesday morning broke through the windows in bright, cool sunshine. The room was bathed in a lustrous clean warmth that seemed so different from New York.

  At breakfast, an hour or so before David was due to leave for his meetings, she mentioned that she had spoken to Sullivan the day before.

  ‘He’ll have a look for me, you know?’ she said. It was a nonchalant comment, off-hand in a way.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ David replied, and for a moment the intensity of expression came back.

  ‘What?’ she asked, concern suddenly rippling across the tranquility of their breakfast. It had been good – fresh coffee, warm rolls and butter, scrambled eggs, and little porcelain pots of homemade English marmalade.

  He shook his head. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Don’t say nothing when there’s evidently something.’

  David looked at her with a flash of defensiveness, perhaps even defiance.