“How can you not know the characters from Seinfeld?”
“I was a child, and my family wasn’t interested in a show about New Yorkers. I’m still not.”
DeMarco pulled the harness over his shoulder, then slipped his left arm through it so that only the belt held him in place. “What were those big words you threw at him?”
“Pusillanimous means cowardly. Pococurante is an Italian word. To be indifferent.”
“I’ve never loved you more,” DeMarco said.
She grinned. “I wish I could see his face when he looks up the definitions. Why are you wearing your seat belt like that?”
“The shoulder harness gives me a stiff neck.”
“Since when?”
“Since this morning, I guess.”
“Did the thought of coming here this morning make you tense?”
“Nothing makes me tense.” He put a hand on the gearshift, checked his mirrors, started the engine, and flashed her an exaggerated grin. Then pulled away from the curb.
“You mind if we don’t head home just yet?” Jayme asked. “I showed you my childhood playground in Kentucky. So how about you show me Ryan DeMarco’s Youngstown.”
“You’re not going to find butterflies and summersweet here,” he told her. “Unless we hit the MetroParks. I could go for that. Being in the woods makes me horny.”
“Breathing makes you horny,” she said. “Show me where you used to live. Where you and Ben played football and made all the cheerleaders swoon.”
“Nothing’s where it used to be.”
“Just do it,” she said. From the console she took her MP3 player and plugged it into the car’s sound system. “You want to start with Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days’ or Mellencamp’s ‘Small Town’? No, wait—how about ‘I did it my way!’”
“Like that’s on your playlist.”
“‘Memories,’” she sang, “‘from the da da dada da…’”
“I miss Fascetti already.”
Ten
From the justice center, DeMarco drove south, crossed the Mahoning River, merged smoothly with the heavy traffic. Jayme was less interested in looking at the passing buildings than in watching his face and eyes for subtle indications of his emotions. He had grown quiet since leaving the parking lot, and sat hunched slightly forward in his seat. And that exaggerated grin after he said he wasn’t tense—he knew he was lying and so did she.
And now she wondered about the source of that tension. Taking on another case? Being back in his old hometown? He had grown up only forty minutes from his house in Pennsylvania, but she had never thought to ask how frequently he returned to Youngstown. Did he ever visit old haunts, drop in on old friends? If so, he kept those excursions to himself. Her knowledge of his past couldn’t fill a Post-it Note.
“Gibson Park is over that way,” he said without expression, and nodded to his left. “South Side Park is off to your right.”
“That’s where you played as a boy?”
His brow wrinkled. “Played what?”
“Games,” she said. “Tag. Hide-and-seek. Whatever you and your little friends played.”
He shook his head. “No.”
Several minutes and red lights later he pulled to the curb. Off to the left, thirty yards beyond a cyclone fence with a no trespassing sign attached to the gate, was an impressive three-story granite building, its windows boarded shut. “That’s my old high school,” he told her.
“It’s a beautiful building. Can we get out and walk around?”
“You see the sign, right?”
“I just thought that somebody of your standing…former All-Conference football star…”
“All-City,” he said.
“They must have surely put up a statue to you.”
“One in every hallway. Have you seen enough?”
“What’s your hurry? Tell me what it was like back in the olden days.”
He rolled his eyes at the word olden. Then answered flatly. “It was school. Nobody likes school.”
“Lots of people like school. You must have enjoyed something about it.”
He pursed his lips. Thought for a few moments. “Around back there’s an entrance to the park. I used to love running the trails in there. Just running for the fun of it.”
“You want to do it now?” she said. “I’m game.”
“Too hot. Too many bugs.”
So she said nothing for a while. Stole glances at his face as he continued to gaze across the street.
Finally he said, “So that’s the nickel tour.”
“Wow, a penny a minute. I think I overpaid.”
He didn’t even look at her. Smiled a melancholy smile. “As long as we’re in the neighborhood,” he said, “you mind if we visit the dead?”
“Isn’t that what we’ve been doing?”
“I mean the cemetery.”
At first she thought he meant the cemetery where his son was buried, then realized that he was probably referring to his parents’ graves. They, of course, would have been buried in Youngstown. Yet in all the time she had known him, he had never once mentioned their graves. But now he wanted to visit them? To share them with her? She didn’t know whether to be nervous or happy.
She said, “I’m not sure I can stand much more excitement.”
“Let’s find out,” he said.
After five additional minutes of low-speed zigzagging through the neighborhood, DeMarco drove down a short entrance road into a cemetery. Many of the stones nearest the road were lopsided, the faces eroded, engravings indecipherable.
He shut off the engine and removed the keys. “We have to walk from here.”
At the front of the car, she took his hand. “How long since you’ve been here?” she asked.
“It’s been a while.”
His parents had separate gravestones, his father’s a flat, grass-level stone of gray granite, approximately the size of a shoebox, his mother’s four times larger and five years newer, a slant marker with a polished black face. His mother had borrowed the money for her husband’s stone, which listed only his name and the dates of birth and death. DeMarco had purchased his mother’s stone with army pay, and had added the two-line inscription, Devoted Mother, Peace At Last.
Both graves were surrounded by overgrown grass, dandelions, and slender weeds growing out of the dead, matted leaves. The smaller stone was coated with a thick layer of dust and old grass clippings. When DeMarco sank to his knees to clean up around his mother’s stone, Jayme did so too. In silence they pulled and cropped the grass on all sides. DeMarco finished by using a handful of dead leaves to scour the polished face bright again, then blew bits of leaf out of the engravings, and gave the face a final brush with his hand.
He leaned back and looked at it for a moment, then stood. “I’m ready to go when you are,” he said.
Jayme looked up at him. “We’re not done yet, are we?”
“Looks good to me.”
“But don’t you think—”
He interrupted. “I’ll get the car cooled off,” he told her, and walked away.
Jayme spent the next five minutes clearing the weeds and debris from around his father’s headstone. When finished, she filled her hand with a ball of leaves and grass and scoured the face as best she could. His first name was Francis. Francis Joseph DeMarco. She had never once heard Ryan utter his father’s name, and only a few times refer to him at all.
And now she remembered Ryan’s comments earlier at his old high school, when he had pointed to the woods and said he loved to run the trails just for the fun of it. At the time she had thought, for the joy of being young. But now she amended it to the joy of forgetting.
She leaned forward, close to the gravestone. “Whatever you did to him, Frankie,” she said, “I hope you are appropriately ashamed of yourself.�
�
Then she rose, brushed off her knees, and returned to the car.
Eleven
After leaving the cemetery, Jayme asked to visit the mobile home park where DeMarco had lived with his mother and sometimes-father. “There’s nothing there anymore,” he told her.
“I’d like to see it. How far can it be?”
“It no longer exists.”
“So what’s there now?”
“What does it matter? The same thing that’s all around us. Take your pick.”
“You haven’t been back, have you?” she asked.
He gave her a Can we drop this? look, then turned his eyes to the road again.
She leaned closer, took hold of his arm. “I challenge you to tell me. Exactly what is there now where your trailer used to sit?”
“A car wash,” he said.
“Hogwash. In fact, are you sure they even had trailers back then? Maybe you lived in a log cabin.”
He tried to hold back his smile. “Maybe you’d like to walk to Pennsylvania.”
She squeezed his arm. “Thirty years, Sergeant? And you’ve never once been back?” She could not comprehend such a possibility. If she lived within forty minutes of the place she grew up, she would return every weekend. To be so close yet keep so distant—it could only be a deliberate choice.
“All right,” he said. “I did come back once. It was a couple years after I buried my mother.”
“And?”
“What are you, the Grand Inquisitor?”
“Why did you come back? And what did you see when you came back?” She heard the insistence in her voice, knew what it would do to him, so she kneaded his arm while assuming a comical sinister tone. “Answer fully and completely or I will have you toasted like a marshmallow.”
Again he smiled. She felt some of the tension go out of his arm. “I came back with a belly full of Jack Daniels, a can of gasoline, and a book of matches. Unfortunately, the place had been razed. Nothing but dirty concrete pads. I have no idea what was later built there, if anything.”
She was startled by the image he’d painted, but tried not to show it. “And you’re not the least bit curious to know?”
“Could not care less,” he said.
She continued to hold his arm throughout the rest of the drive, and tried not to think of that angry young man coming upon the empty lot, his moment of revenge stolen. All those memories he had wanted to burn to the ground. And what had she done but to unearth those memories again?
Surely one of these days he would share them with her. She had to be patient, let them come at his own pace. Another good reason to avoid the baby discussion for a while? Or a good reason to speed it up?
Twelve
Their arrival at the barracks thirty minutes later was no less solemn. They spoke briefly with two other troopers, who greeted them like returning heroes, apparently unaware that Jayme and DeMarco had come to finalize their retirement from the state police. Jayme had sent a text to Captain Kyle Bowen, the station commander, alerting him that they would be stopping by, but he must not have shared that information yet with the troopers.
She and DeMarco walked down the short hall to Bowen’s office. His door was halfway open. Jayme peeked inside.
Bowen sat behind his desk, leaning back in his chair, frowning as he met her gaze. He shook his head from side to side. He was younger than both of them, and now looked even more boyish than the last time she had seen him—but currently not a happy boy.
Jayme pushed the door open and led the way inside.
Still no one spoke. They sat side by side in the pair of brown vinyl chairs facing his desk.
Finally DeMarco said, “I take it Sheriff Brinker placed a courtesy call.”
“Courtesy?” Bowen said. “This is anything but a courtesy.”
DeMarco said, “I’ve been doing this long enough. I need a change. I’m sorry.”
“You I can understand,” Bowen told him. “I freaking hate it, but I can understand it. But you,” he said to Jayme. “This is like treason to me. I can’t lose you both.”
“My heart’s just not in it anymore,” she said.
“You don’t have to tell me where your heart is. I know where your heart is. But do you understand what you’re doing here? Do you understand what you’re throwing away?”
“If it’s any consolation,” DeMarco said, “I’ve told her the same thing. She’s obstinate.”
Bowen laid his head forward, placed both hands over his face. When he lowered his hands, dragging them down over his chin and neck, he then spoke directly to Jayme. “He’s old,” he told her. “He’s cranky and mean and emotionally constipated. He’s probably even impotent. Does he have you drugged or something?”
Jayme smiled with tears in her eyes. “We love you too,” she told him.
DeMarco stood, leaned forward, and put out his hand. Bowen stood, took DeMarco’s hand in his. “Tell you what,” DeMarco said. “How about if she calls in a domestic disturbance every week or so? You and the boys can come over and rough me up a little bit.”
“That would almost be worth it,” Bowen said.
Thirteen
After a tedious hour with Human Resources, and another twenty awkward minutes working their way toward the front entrance while one trooper after another wished them well, DeMarco and Jayme walked toward his car in the parking lot. “How are you feeling?” he asked. He had never before noticed the soft crunch of the gravel chips beneath his feet.
“A little strange,” Jayme said.
“You can always go back, you know.”
“I know. How are you doing?”
They reached the car, and stood side by side by the passenger door. He said, “I just now realized that nobody will ever call me Sergeant again.”
“I will.”
“I can’t tell if what I’m feeling is emptiness, or freedom.”
“It’s probably both,” she told him. “We’ve given up one of the ways we’ve defined ourselves.”
He placed a hand between her shoulders, leaned forward to open her door. “So you’re saying I no longer have a definition.”
She slid past him to sit down. Looked up at him and smiled. “Your definition was blurry to begin with. Whoever drew you didn’t color inside the lines.”
* * *
Before returning them to his house, DeMarco swung by the post office to pick up his recent mail. Among the accumulation of junk mail was a cardboard box big enough to hold five reams of printer paper. It was wrapped in brown paper and sealed shut with several yards of clear shipping tape, with a return address he recognized.
He placed the box and the bundle of mail in the back seat, then climbed in behind the wheel. “What’s in the box?” Jayme asked.
“No idea. It’s from Tom’s mother-in-law. Rosemary O’Patchen.”
“Another Rosemary,” Jayme said.
He looked in his side mirror, then the rearview mirror, then pulled away from the curb. “Excuse me?”
“Rosemary Toomey. The librarian? Da Vinci Cave Irregulars?”
“Sorry,” he said, “my mind was elsewhere. But yes, another Rosemary.”
“And what has Rosemary O’Patchen sent you? Copies of Tom’s books?”
“Maybe,” DeMarco said. But it hadn’t felt like books. Felt heavier. Denser. More portentous than books.
He pushed the feeling aside. Drove home. Parked in front of his garage, across the dirt alley from his backyard, where a day earlier they had parked the RV beside Jayme’s silver Nissan, which was now blanketed with weeks of gray dust, windblown grass clippings, and hardened bird droppings.
Before climbing out, Jayme told him, “I’m going to run home and pick up a few things. And get my own mail. I’ll help you carry in those files first.”
“No, you won’t,” he said. He took
the keys from the ignition and held them out to her. But she didn’t reach for them.
“I’ll take my car,” she said. “Run it through the car wash while I’m at it.”
“See you in a bit.”
She returned some ninety minutes later, arms loaded with clothes on plastic hangers, to find him sitting on the living room sofa. The contents of Rosemary’s cardboard box, a dozen cheap composition books and stacks of loose paper, were spread over his coffee table. The look on his face struck her as somewhere between annoyance and panic.
“What’s all this?” she asked.
“Tom’s papers.”
“Okay.” She laid her clothes across his La-Z-Boy. “And why are they here?”
“Apparently Tom’s audience is clamoring for more. According to his publisher. So Rosemary wants me to sift through all this and…put together a book.”
She lowered herself beside him. Leaned forward to survey the papers. The cover of each composition book was inked with a range of dates, month/day/year–month/day/year, the pages filled with Tom’s handwriting. The loose papers appeared to be printouts of emails, advice to students and strangers, ideas for stories, screenplays, novels, essays, short poems, reflections on random subjects…
“Nothing personal,” Jayme said, still thumbing through the pages, “but she knows you’re not an editor, right?”
He lifted up a notebook, slid from beneath it a single sheet of cream-colored stationery, Rosemary’s letter, and handed it to Jayme. She read quickly, scanning the lines:
the big brother he’d always wanted…would want you to do it…wouldn’t trust anyone but you…the man who held him in your arms when he died.
“Oy,” she said.
“Double oy.”
“On the other hand…all she’s asking is that you,” and she looked at the letter again, and read, “‘choose the pieces that show who Tom truly was.’”
“I knew him for less than half a year.”
“She just wants you to winnow it down, that’s all. Then it will go to the editor.”
“I have no idea how to do that. I’ve never even been to college.”
A Long Way Down Page 6
