Bill Warrington's Last Chance

by James King

  Poor thing.

  Those two words always seemed to come up whenever Aunt Marilyn’s name was mentioned. April hadn’t seen her all that often even though—unlike her other aunt in Chicago—she and Uncle Nick lived fairly close by. About the only times were on holidays, when they’d stop in on their way to one of Marilyn’s relatives, but even on those short visits her aunt was always eager to find out what April was reading, what music she was listening to, and—here Aunt Marilyn would look around her and lean closer, secret-sharing style—did she have a crush on anyone? For her part, April liked her aunt but was always slightly intimidated by her. Aunt Marilyn was so tall, always so nicely dressed, with thick black hair swept up and back into elegant, complicated, fascinating styles. It wasn’t that she was stuck-up or anything—it wasn’t beyond her to get down on the floor with April, even in a nice holiday dress, to sit Indian-style during their “girl talk”—but April was afraid that any move she might make would somehow throw dirt or otherwise do damage to the perfection that was Aunt Marilyn.

  But now that April thought about it, Aunt Marilyn seemed more eager during those visits to spend time with her than she did with her mom and dad. Which reminded April of a time Uncle Nick, who had been in the living room with her parents, came into the den to get Aunt Marilyn, who’d come in to listen to a CD with her. Uncle Nick, usually so serious, smiled at her aunt so broadly that, for a moment, April thought he was drunk. And she thought then—as she did now—that she had never seen her father look at her mother that way.

  Uncle Nick, she thought. Poor thing.

  The noise of the wind whistling through the slightly cracked driver’s-side window was the only sound for miles. Her grandfather got talkative again just as April started watching the road signs for a motel. These stories were familiar to her: Korea, the family vacations, some of the characters he had met during his days in sales. And then, when April found a motel with the “Vacancy” portion of the “No Vacancy” sign lit, her grandfather talked again about how he had remained loyal to Clare (he had stopped calling Clare “your grandmother” somewhere in Illinois) while all his buddies were “sowing their oats.”

  April didn’t want to hear it. There was something about it that bothered her.

  “Am I supposed to admire you for that?” she finally asked.

  Her grandfather stopped. “Admire me for what?”

  “For not screwing other women when you promised Grandma you wouldn’t.”

  Her grandfather glanced over. “You’ve got quite a mouth on you, don’t you?”

  “Well, that’s what we’re talking about, aren’t we?” April didn’t know why she was getting so angry. But she wanted to scream. She came close. “Being unfaithful. Screwing around. Fucking other women. Like my father did?”

  “Enough!” her grandfather shouted. “I don’t like that kind of language,” he said.

  “You use it all the time,” April said.

  “I mean from you,” he said. “You’re too . . . too . . . what word am I looking for?”

  “Young? Well, that’s wrong, Grandpa. I’m not too young. You wouldn’t believe what some of my friends do with their boyfriends. I’m not too young. I just don’t do it yet. But when I meet someone who isn’t a complete moron and loser, I’m gonna find out what all the fuss is about. Believe me!”

  “Good!” her grandfather shouted.

  “You want me to do it? Fine. Believe me, I will.”

  “No. I mean, ‘good’ is the word I was looking for,” her grandfather shouted. Then he quieted. “You’re too good for that,” he said.

  April pulled over, threw the car in park, and hugged the steering wheel, crying.

  “I’m not too good,” she cried. “In fact, I’m not good at all.”

  She could sense her grandfather’s uneasiness in the silence around her, but then he reached over and started to rub her back.

  “Not so, Marcy,” he said. “Not so.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  All sorts of scenarios played themselves out in Marcy’s head.

  The Heroic Scenario: April falls in with a bad element; Marcy bravely ignores all threats to her own safety—a gun thrust up against her temple? a heavily tattooed gangbanger?—and leads her daughter home. The Righteous Indignation Scenario: Marcy and April finally come face-to-face, despite April’s every attempt to evade her; Marcy unleashes a torrent of facts—the worry and inconvenience April has caused; the loss of income realized not only by Marcy but by Nick and Mike—and April collapses in a tearful realization of how wrong she’s been and how right her mother is. The Deathbed Scenario: In a variation of the Heroic Scenario, Marcy rescues April from great danger—a pimp? a pusher? a pedophile?—but in the process is mortally injured; April screams out in anguish and remorse when she sees her mother in the hospital bed amidst the tangle of tubes and the steady, ominous beeping of the equipment keeping her, barely, alive.

  These were easier to think about than the one Marcy knew would eventually take place, the one where she’d try to get April to explain what was so horrible about her home, her mother, her life, that needed escaping. What exactly was so awful? What horribly unreasonable demands were put on you? You were expected to be a good person and get good grades. Excuse me for insisting. Pardon me for doing my job as a mother. Do you have any idea what I went through at your age?

  She knew she would lose April’s attention if she started comparing childhoods. She knew that, for April, her past would seem as distant and as irrelevant as her own father’s had been when Marcy was April’s age. But how else to make the point? How else to show that April should be grateful, should show some admiration instead of . . . hate.

  Marcy shivered at the word. Of course it was a word that kids use a lot, especially when venting to a friend over a parent’s latest unreasonable demand. It was a word she herself had used often when she was April’s age: a word directed, more times than not, at her father, when he would suddenly appear before her—full whiskey glass in hand, ice tinkling, eyes watery, breath boozy, posture wobbly—and establish a curfew or demand she get off the phone and get some goddamned homework done. She’d hated him. She knew, just knew, that her mother—who was fast receding into shadowy obscurity—would not have been such a huge pain in the ass. But she also knew, somewhere past the rebellious hormones, that her father was trying. And now that she was older, a mother, she knew exactly how much he’d been dealing with.

  And yet still he tried.

  He tried.

  He really tried.

  So what in the holy hell, as he might say, was he trying now?

  Marcy gritted her teeth. Yes, he had tried, but this game he was playing now was beyond understanding. After everything she had put up with—for years!—he pulls this kind of crap. It was, finally, too much. After she got April home safely, that would be the end of any contact with the old man for good. Let him sit in his chair. Let the newspapers and filth pile up around him. Let the mail go uncollected, the grass go unmowed, the gutters fill with leaves and sticks. Let the paint peel. Let the roof leak. Let the basement flood and the toilets clog and the dirty dishes pile to the ceiling—a tower of maggots and vermin.

  Let him become a newspaper item: Long-Dead Body Discovered by Neighbors.

  Marcy would not care. Once she had April home, she wouldn’t care about anything else.

  “Why is he doing this?” she asked. “Tells us to meet him in the middle of nowhere. Then ditch us.”

  “Who knows?” Nick said.

  Marcy continued as if they had been talking all along and despite the feeling that she should keep her mouth shut. “How can he do this to me? I mean, no offense, but I’m the only one who checked in on him. I’m the only one who called him practically every week. Did anyone else go over there, ever, and clean his house? And don’t feed me that line about wanting to sell it, the way you did during our lovely little lunch together at the diner.”

  There it was: the reason she should have kept quiet
. But Nick didn’t argue. He wasn’t much of an arguer. He pushed the wiper lever to spray fluid on the windshield and clear it of dead bugs.

  “I’m sorry I made that crack about your wanting to sell the house,” he said, quietly. “I was kind of going through a tough time, relationship-wise.”

  “Aren’t we all,” Marcy said. She was quiet for a while. “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we? You’re a nice guy who manages to hook up with, excuse me, a bitch. And I’m a bitch who can’t seem to stay hooked up with a nice guy. What’s wrong with us?”

  Nick shrugged. “We’re Warringtons,” he said.

  Marcy started laughing. She couldn’t stop.

  “You were right,” she said, wiping her eyes. “About the house, I mean. Not at first. But the more I started getting into real estate, the more I kept wondering about how long the old man was going to hold on to the place. I don’t want to admit that, even to myself. But it’s true.”

  Nick didn’t laugh, but he was smiling. A sad sort of smile, Marcy thought.

  “If it’ll make you feel any better, I can top that.”

  Nick was quiet for a while before he continued. Marcy got the feeling he was trying to make up his mind about something.

  “After Marilyn died, I took some time off from work. I figured I needed a week or two. My boss was very understanding. Told me to take whatever time I needed. But after a month, she started asking when I’d be back. And then at six weeks—the six-week anniversary, to the day, as it turned out—she fired me. She had to do it. I understood.”

  Nick was quiet as he maneuvered onto a new highway.

  “It turned out she did me a favor. I took the job with this travel magazine, mainly as a way to get out of my funk. Get away from the house, away from everything that reminded me of Marilyn. And it worked. I had to think about catching planes, checking out trains, visiting museums, eating in restaurants, meeting deadlines. Only problem is, when I first started there, they didn’t pay squat. I had the same salary as a kid fresh out of journalism school. It was humiliating.”

  He shrugged again, and Marcy squelched the urge to yell at him to get on with it.

  “I didn’t wish Dad ill. I guess I was just hoping that if he was going to check out within a year or two, that he’d do it sooner than later. I guess I envisioned a secret inheritance or, at the least, a third of whatever we’d be able to get for the house.”

  “Oh, dear,” Marcy said, laughing and crying at the same time again. “It’s all coming out. We are truly evil.”

  She grabbed her pocketbook and retrieved her cell phone. She did it as if something Nick had said had persuaded her on the correctness of the course of action she’d been mulling over. She started dialing.

  “Who are you calling?” Nick asked.

  “Three guesses,” Marcy replied.

  She waited for April’s message, then left her own: “April, I’ve talked to your father about what’s going on. He wants to talk to you. But I won’t give him your cell phone number, and I won’t give you his, until you call me and we talk. You and me. So call me right away.”

  She flipped her phone off, tossed it in her bag, and exhaled loudly. Nick didn’t say anything for a while.

  “You don’t approve,” Marcy said.

  Nick kept his eyes on the road, signaling and moving into the left lane to make room for a car merging in from an entrance ramp. “You do what you have to,” he said.

  A while later, she asked, “Why do you think he’s doing this? What’s the deal with these ridiculous messages where we have to call someone else to figure out what they mean? And why this insistence on all three of us being there when we figure out what he’s talking about?”

  Once again, Nick didn’t say anything.

  “He’s dying, isn’t he?”

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “Well, this is certainly a dramatic way to go about it, but I can’t keep going like this. We have to do something. I can’t go back to Ohio and just sit there, waiting.”

  “I agree. That’s why, in case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t been driving on I-80 for the last hour.”

  “Where the hell are we?”

  “I didn’t think it right that we drive by Chicago without stopping in to see our long-lost brother.”

  “You’re proposing we just show up on his doorstep?”

  “Why not? If we call ahead of time, he’ll just figure out a way not to see us, as always.”

  “I don’t know, he sounds different lately. Something’s up with him.”

  “All the more reason. Maybe we can call Dad when the three of us are together. Ask him what he wants.”

  Her cell phone rang. It felt to Marcy like it was taking forever to dig it out of her bag. As she searched frantically, she reminded herself to stay calm. Remember: You’re the mother. Don’t let her hook you. Pretend she’s a client.

  She found her phone and flipped it open without bothering to check the caller ID. “That was fast,” she said.

  There was pause, and then, “What’s his number?”

  “I’m fine, April. How nice of you to even care about how I’ve been holding up during the unexplained disappearance of my daughter.” Marcy thought she saw Nick grimace. He was right. This was not the way to start this particular conversation. She tried to regroup.

  “You said you’d give me his number if I called you,” April said. “I’m calling you.”

  “And I want to know where you are, right now. Your uncle Mike flew to Iowa for nothing, apparently, and your Uncle Nick and I have driven all the way from Ohio. You weren’t where you said you’d be. Enough, April. Enough is enough.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” April said. “I never said I’d be anywhere. Give me Daddy’s number, like you promised.”

  “I didn’t promise you a damn thing, young lady.”

  Nick made a motion with his hand: Calm down.

  Marcy couldn’t. “I want you to tell me where you are and to stay there until Uncle Nick and I come and get you. You have no idea how much trouble and inconvenience—”

  “So you’re not going to give me Daddy’s number.”

  “Listen to me, April. I’m not finished.”

  “You don’t have Daddy’s number.”

  “Forget about your father for a second, April, and listen—”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Marcy concentrated. There was one of those hooks. She would ignore it.

  “Tell me where you are.”

  “You lied about Uncle Mike flying to Iowa. I know that because I talked to him.”

  “April? I want to know, right now—”

  “And you’re lying about Dad. I know that because you’re a liar.”

  “—exactly where you are.”

  “I’m hanging up.”

  “I want you to give your grandfather a message,” Marcy said quickly. “This might be of interest to you, too.”

  April didn’t say anything. There was some static, a rustling sound, but the connection hadn’t been broken.

  “Tell him that if he doesn’t contact us and tell us where you are and let us come and get you, I’m calling the cops. Enough is enough. He’ll spend the rest of his life in jail. Tell him that, April. Tell him he’ll spend what little time he has on earth in a jail cell. He’s going to die a lonely old man, disgraced and humiliated. No one, certainly not me, will ever visit him or see him again. Tell him that, April. You got that?”

  There was a pause. And then her father’s voice said, “Got it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Mike bolted upright. He thought it was noise from the television that woke him, but when he opened his eyes—lids heavy and scratchy—he saw that the set was off. He closed his eyes, thankful he didn’t have to move. His head was pounding, his mouth dry, but things would only get worse if he got up for a glass of water. He needed to stay where he was, to remain perfectly still. Time was the answer.

  He must have
been dreaming. Or maybe, he thought, it was that jerking reaction to the falling sensation you sometimes have when you’re just about to fall asleep. Colleen knew the name for it. She’d told him a million times. Hypnotic . . . no, hypnologic . . . no, hypnic jerk. There was a longer name for it. Scientific. He could never remember.

  Other things, he remembered very well. He’d been spending a lot of time in that chair remembering things. He’d not been making progress with his plans for getting back together with Colleen, for being with his kids. Would Colleen relent? The answer required another drink. What did Clare think of her father now? Would she be at all interested in hearing his side of the story—and exactly what would that side of the story be? It was somehow easier to imagine explaining it to Ty, who was conveniently at that age of hormonal insomnia. He was probably as obsessed with girls as Mike had been at his age—so eager to get laid that he’d understand his father’s . . . indiscretion, he’d call it. Or would Ty understand, after all? He was a bit of a mama’s boy. He might not empathize with an indiscretion that had hurt his mother. But Mike would be ready. You think that now, he’d say. But when you get older, when you get to be my age, if you ever find yourself in a situation remotely close to mine, you’ll understand. In the meantime, don’t be too quick to judge.

  Exactly what Colleen had said to Mike that first night they were together.

  “Unless there’s something you haven’t told me, you don’t know for sure what your father was doing,” Colleen had said all those years ago, lying in Mike’s arms, stroking his chest. “Maybe he accidentally counted out too many pills and was just putting the extra ones back.”

  Mike shook his head. “I saw it in his eyes,” he said. “His Claus von Bülow eyes. He might have changed his mind that night. But I knew that, eventually, he did it. I even confronted him about it once. Couple of weeks after my mom died.”

  “What did he say?” Colleen asked.

  “Not a word.”

  “So you still don’t know for sure.”