Ghostheart

by R.J. Ellory

  ‘I know … but I think I’ve come to a point where I’ve had enough.’

  ‘Enough? Enough of what?’

  Annie sighed. ‘Enough of doing the same thing day in, day out Jack. Enough of the store, of the stocks and inventories, of battered paperback books that I’m sure no-one ever reads.’ She looked up at him. ‘You know what I think?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think that they buy books to take home and put in a bookcase so people will think that they’re cultured and academic and well read.’

  ‘That’s a very cynical attitude.’

  ‘I have a right to be cynical tonight … at least allow me that much.’

  ‘So what will you do then? Sell the place? Move?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know … I really don’t know what I’ll do. More than likely piss and moan about it for a few days and then go back to the same old routine.’

  ‘It won’t ever be the same routine Annie. Something like this happens and you always end up seeing things from another point of view. That much difference at least.’

  ‘But not enough,’ she said. ‘Never different enough.’

  ‘Maybe we could move together … a different city, go out to Vegas or something.’

  ‘Sell the store, take all the money and blow it on the blackjack tables. Stay a week in the presidential suite, and then when the money’s all gone we could sleep rough in bus shelters and drink Thunderbird wine out of brown paper bags until we die of liver failure.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  Annie closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

  ‘I’m going home,’ Sullivan said. ‘You get some sleep … we’ll talk in the morning.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  Sullivan eased away from her and got up. He leaned forward and kissed her forehead, touched her face, smiled, and walked towards the door.

  ‘Sleep tight,’ he said.

  ‘Make sure the bugs don’t bite,’ she replied.

  Sullivan left the room and closed the door gently behind him.

  Annie lay for a while on the couch before going through to her bedroom. She couldn’t be bothered with showering or brushing her teeth; she stripped off her clothes, lay down and pulled the covers over herself.

  She lay awake for some time, at one point turning to glance at the clock and then, reaching for it, she turned its face away from her. Time was all she possessed right now, and it was not something she needed to measure.

  There are these moments, she thought, when it all seems so meaningless. Moments when everything you have done, everything you believe you’ve worked towards comes to nothing. How shallow can it all be? How many lives are spent waiting for something to happen, only to end with nothing happening at all? There must be a hundred million people out there feeling what I’m feeling now. Hollow. Inconsequential. And yet all of us felt at some point that there was something out there for us, that one day it would all come right, that there would be a perfect day when everything started to turn around …

  She buried her face in the pillow and closed her eyes. She could feel moisture behind her lids.

  Don’t cry Annie, she thought. Crying serves no purpose. You can just lie here and cry yourself to sleep or you can start to plan how you’re gonna get yourself out of this hole and make something happen for yourself. Two months’ time and you’ll be thirty-one, and there isn’t anyone gonna come along and hold your hand, tell you it’s all gonna be okay and make everything right. That shit doesn’t happen. In Hollywood maybe, but not down here in Morningside Park, Manhattan. This is life. Real life. It has sharp corners and rough edges, and sometimes you collide with them and you break bones and bloody your nose and bruise real easy. And what d’you do then? Well, that depends on who you are. If you’re a victim of circumstance you lie right where you fell, and you just keep on lying there hoping that the noise will stop. If you’re a survivor … well, if you’re a survivor you survive.

  Are you a survivor Annie O’Neill? Are you?

  She hugged the pillow tighter, felt the warmth of her body seeping into the mattress, felt the weight of her thoughts as they tugged her down into sleep.

  Just sleep a while Annie … maybe when you wake up the world will be a different place. Has to be a different place. Can’t take much more of it the way it is. No … can’t take much more the way it is.

  And then she slept, and as she slept the rain started falling, and from the window of her apartment you would have seen a hundred thousand streetlights reflected along wet streets and boulevards and avenues.

  And maybe, somewhere out there, someone was thinking of Annie O’Neill and what tomorrow would bring.

  An hour or two later, she woke once again. And she cried. And though she cried for David Quinn, or whoever she might have believed was David Quinn, she cried more for herself. She cried for her loneliness, her loss, for many reasons. And she cried for her father. Frank O’Neill. She touched his wristwatch, watched the sweep-hand slowly devour its metronomic seconds, and then she searched out Breathing Space, and with her finger she traced the words he had written inside the cover. Annie, for when the time comes. Dad. 2 June 1979.

  Dad, she thought, and this thought brought more tears, and when her eyes were raw-red she made her way to the bathroom and washed her face.

  She stood there for a while, stood there doing nothing but looking at her reflection in the mirror.

  Perhaps all of them, she thought, Perhaps Tom Parselle and Ben Leonhardt and Richard Lorentzen and Michael Duggan … even David Quinn, and in a curious way Jack Sullivan … perhaps all of them were nothing more than substitutes for him. For Frank. For Daddy.

  Later she cried some more, and then she slept.

  Did not dream.

  Too tired, too hollow, too broken up to dream.

  And when morning came she was still sleeping, and Sullivan – mindful of sleep’s curative nature – left her that way. Seemed the best he could do. At least for now.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Friday the thirteenth was Annie O’Neill’s first thought as she woke.

  Her second was Fuck it.

  The third was neither as portentous nor as angry, it was simply David.

  It seemed as if the atmosphere in the room had pressed down on her during the night and was challenging her to rise from where she lay. She felt bruised – physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually – and even as she tried to move the will to do so was not there. She slumped back onto the mattress and tried to sleep again, tried to force her mind to close down and succumb; but there was traffic beyond the window, the sound of life moving on without her, and it beckoned and teased and cajoled her into unwilling wakefulness.

  Eventually, resisting every inch of the way, she dragged herself to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. She sat there, naked but for her panties, and looked down at her own body – her breasts, her stomach, the tops of her thighs. It seemed only hours ago that she had permitted this man – this David whoever-the-fuck-he-was – to invade every inch of her, inside and out. It seemed like only last night that he had taken everything she possessed and consumed it for his own entertainment, and then he had walked. Just got up and walked with no intention of returning.

  ‘Bastard!’ she said out loud, and then clenching her fist she turned and thumped the pillow repeatedly, and with each impact she hissed ‘Bastard … bastard! … bastard!’

  She leaned forward and buried her face in her hands.

  There were tears, but she would not allow them to come. She would not allow this man to bring her to the edge of grief once more. He didn’t deserve it. She was better than that. Annie O’Neill, bookstore owner, was altogether better than that. At least she had strength of character, some backbone, some honor and integrity and a willingness to speak the truth. David Quinn had possessed none of these things, and what he had possessed had been insufficient even to proffer an explanation, an apology.

  We need to talk.

  It all seems to h
ave happened so fast.

  ‘Asshole,’ she muttered under her breath and stood up.

  From beneath the rushing shower she didn’t hear Sullivan come in. He knocked on the door and Annie jumped, slightly startled, when he hollered ‘Coffee?’ over the sound of the water.

  ‘Please!’ she shouted back, and spent another minute attempting to scrub David Quinn from her body before she came out of the bathroom in her robe. Her wet hair hung in tails around her face.

  ‘I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair,’ Sullivan said as Annie entered the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t try the humor,’ she said. ‘Humor never suited you Jack Sullivan.’

  ‘Coffee,’ he said, handing her a cup. She took it and sat at the kitchen table.

  Sullivan sat facing her. ‘You’re gonna get over this,’ he said.

  ‘That a question or a statement?’ she asked.

  ‘Whichever way you wanna take it,’ Sullivan replied.

  ‘If it’s a question,’ she said, ‘then the answer is yes. If it’s a statement then sympathetic platitudes are the last thing I need.’

  ‘How does it go?’

  ‘What?’ she asked, frowning.

  ‘The emotional rollercoaster.’

  She smiled. ‘Grief, hopelessness, futility, and then maybe contempt and bitterness. After that you feel angry, hateful, destructive, and after that I s’pose you go kind of numb, and then you find yourself again and you’re okay.’

  ‘And where would you be today?’ Sullivan asked.

  ‘Contempt and bitterness,’ she said.

  ‘So I’ve got the really fun things to look forward to?’

  ‘You have,’ Annie said, and drank her coffee.

  ‘I think maybe I’ll go stay with my sister for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘You haven’t got a sister,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll buy one.’

  ‘Smartmouth,’ she said.

  ‘Sassy, beautiful, independent, stubborn, hard-headed bitch,’ Sullivan replied.

  ‘Thank you,’ Annie said. ‘You can go home now.’

  Sullivan smiled. ‘Can I say he wasn’t worth it, that you were too good for him?’

  ‘You can,’ she said. ‘But it will mean absolutely nothing seeing as how you didn’t even know him.’

  ‘But I met him once, and there was something weak about his eyes … you can always tell what someone’s like by looking at their eyes.’

  ‘You can, can you?’

  ‘Sure you can,’ Sullivan said.

  ‘Let me see,’ Annie said, leaning forward and gazing at Sullivan’s face. ‘I see a washed-out ex-alcoholic, a lush by anyone’s standards, a man who could no more find gainful employment than he could find a girlfriend.’

  Sullivan raised his eyebrows. ‘Getting personal now, are we?’

  ‘You started it,’ she said.

  ‘Okay, truce,’ Sullivan replied. ‘We start again. You’re gonna be okay, right?’

  She nodded. ‘I’m gonna be okay.’

  ‘So what do we do today? We gonna try and find this guy?’

  Annie shook her head. ‘Even if I could be bothered I wouldn’t know where to start. What I plan to do is nothing, not today, not the whole weekend, and then after I see Forrester on Monday I’m going to take a holiday.’

  ‘A holiday?’

  ‘Sure, a holiday.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘God knows,’ she said. ‘Maybe go up to Niagara Falls or someplace … you wanna come?’

  Sullivan nodded thoughtfully. ‘Sure I’ll come. Never been to Niagara Falls.’

  ‘Then apparently you have never lived.’

  Sullivan smiled, drank his coffee, thought briefly about asking Annie O’Neill to marry him and then decided against it. Timing wasn’t right. Timing would have sucked.

  Later, as if an afterthought, Annie asked Sullivan what he felt she should do.

  ‘Let it go,’ he said.

  Annie didn’t reply. She seemed pensive, withdrawn.

  ‘You know the old thing about if you love someone the real test is to let them go and see if they come back?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well here … well it doesn’t exactly apply here, but the point I’m making is that if this guy really had a thing for you he wouldn’t have done what he did. He would have come forward with some kind of explanation, right?’

  ‘I s’pose so, yes.’

  ‘There’s no s’pose about it. The truth of the matter is that the world is jammed solid from end to end with people who don’t have a clue what they want, and even when it’s staring them right in the face they still can’t decide.’ Sullivan smiled. ‘You have to let him go, or he’ll haunt you.’

  Annie frowned. ‘Haunt me? What d’you mean?’

  ‘He’ll be there, always there at the back of your mind, and you’ll more than likely find yourself in some situation in the not-too-distant future where there’s an opportunity … you know, an opportunity to meet someone else, to start all over, but because this guy is there in your mind you won’t let yourself. It may be tough to let go, but if you do you also open yourself up to seeing what’s there in front of you when it comes.’

  ‘You’d have made someone a good husband Jack,’ Annie said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Apart from the conceit,’ Annie added.

  Sullivan nodded. ‘I used to figure I was conceited until I actually realized I was perfect.’

  Annie was quiet for a time, and then she said, ‘So you reckon the only way out of this is to let it go, to forget all about it?’

  ‘Not forget, no,’ he replied. ‘Don’t ever forget. It’s a life experience kind of thing. It’s what life is for. The only things that ever really come back to hurt you are the things you never really faced, and the things you forgot about. What I mean is that you imagine it’s like an article of clothing that’s too small for you, but there’s something sentimental about it so you don’t throw it out. You fold it up neat, you stow it in the bottom of your dresser, and every once in a while you remind yourself that it’s there. It’s something you once possessed, and at one time it was perhaps the thing that made you feel best, the thing you felt you looked good in, but that was then, and this is now, and now you have something else that works for you.’

  ‘Homespun philosophy,’ Annie said.

  ‘Homespun it may be, but there’s a thread of truth in what I say. You don’t spend your life looking over your shoulder at what might have been, what could have been … you spend your life looking at what you have right now and how you can make it better for tomorrow.’

  ‘Or you go the Prozac and vodka route,’ Annie said drily.

  ‘Or the Prozac and vodka,’ Sullivan said.

  ‘So today, now, I forget the asshole of the century.’

  He nodded. ‘Good enough.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  Sullivan smiled. ‘I take you to the Italian restaurant on 112th, we eat crab and avocado antipasta, we gorge ourselves sick on fusilli and mortadella and Montepulciano, and then we get a cab home and laugh about how stupid everyone else is but us.’

  ‘Deal,’ Annie said. ‘You’re paying.’

  He put on a shocked expression. ‘Me? Pay? An old lush incapable of finding gainful employment?’

  ‘You pay or I stay home and sulk about how life is a bitch and how everyone has it in for me.’

  Sullivan shrugged. ‘So I pay … get your coat.’

  They walked. It was no more than a couple of blocks, and there on West 112th between Amsterdam and Broadway, was the little trattoria with its subdued lighting, bursting at the seams with Genovese dialects and atmosphere. They took a table near the window, and through the clouded glass Annie watched people walk by in the street. People alone, people in twos and threes, all of them heading someplace with something in mind. She and Sullivan ate, they talked little, and after Annie’s third or fourth glass of wine the world appeared to have mellowed a little. The sharp edge
s were smoother, the rough edges had been sanded down by some unseen and benevolent hand, and as she sat moving a small tiramisu creation around the edges of her plate she felt that perhaps she would recover. There really was no other way. What else could she do – give up?

  She looked up at Sullivan.

  He smiled. ‘It comes, and then it goes,’ he said quietly.

  She nodded, set down her spoon and closed her eyes for a moment.

  ‘What you doing?’ Sullivan asked. ‘You forget grace or what?’

  She laughed. ‘I was just thinking –’

  ‘’Bout what?’

  ‘About another birthday in two months’ time.’

  ‘What is this? You soliciting for birthday presents already?’

  ‘Sure I am,’ she said. ‘You can get me a car.’

  ‘This is New York, you don’t do cars, you do taxicabs and subways.’

  ‘So buy me a subway, what’s your problem?’

  They smiled at one another, and things felt okay. Somehow, some way, they felt okay. And then a thought came. Out of left field, out of nowhere. Wish it was my father here with me. He would know what to say, would know what to do. He would be the sort of man who could make a call and find someone, and drive me there, and stand beside me while I said what I wanted to say, and protect me if things got ugly, and tell me I was right … tell me I was right and the rest of the world was so fucking wrong …

  She turned to the window as a movement caught the corner of her eye.

  David Quinn looked back at her through the glass.

  The sound that escaped her lips was a scream, a sudden inhalation, a gasp of surprise, all these things together. She felt she would choke.

  She tried to stand up, but somehow the tops of her legs caught the edge of the table and, before Sullivan had a chance to react, the bottle of wine had toppled over and the red Montepulciano was flooding the table, filling the spaces between their plates.

  Annie didn’t stop, didn’t hesitate, and coming out from the table her chair fell backwards, collided with someone who was seated behind her. He started to rise also, and confusion spread like a small whirlwind through the half-dozen or so tables near the window.