A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  She knew that the visit from Laraine had upset him, the message even more. Had started him wondering, worrying. “Then go, babe. Spend some time with your boy.”

  He left soon after that, and for the remainder of the morning she didn’t know what to do with herself. Her brain, instead of resting, went into overdrive, composing one worst-case scenario after another. While she cleaned up the kitchen, then vacuumed the carpets upstairs and down, then reorganized the walk-in closet, her body felt tense and restless. Finally she dumped half a box of Epsom salts into the tub and filled it with hot water, then lay with the water up to her chin, and only then felt her racing heart begin to quiet. Ryan was not the kind of man to let some message from a psychic drive them apart. Yes, he cared about Laraine’s health, but the marriage was over; it could not be revived. There was nothing to be worried about. Everything would be fine. She laid a hand over her navel and told herself to relax. Too much glutamate in the amygdala, that was the culprit here, the only thing wrong. Too much adrenaline and cortisol, the chemistry of fear. She was too sensitive to everything, and that was the estrogen and progesterone’s fault. If she wanted to cry, so what? She was already wet, the water was already salty. What would a little more hurt?

  Forty-Three

  At the cemetery he sat in the car with the doors closed and the front windows down, and for a while he watched an elderly woman some thirty feet away as she filled a plastic milk jug with water from the faucet outside the little equipment shed. He watched her carry it off to her right, leaning from the eight-pound drag on her bony arm, past half a dozen graves until she came to a gravestone with three pots of chrysanthemums beside it. With difficulty she eased herself down on one knee, set the milk jug aside, went down on both knees, and picked up a trowel that she had apparently brought with the mums.

  There had been thunder that morning, but the sky was quiet now. Not even the distant jet could be heard, a half-inch glimmer of chrome, its long vapor trail crisscrossing other trails already diffusing outward. DeMarco watched the jet for half a minute before turning his attention to the woman again. She was taking her time replanting the orange flowers, patting the soil firm and watering the plants and cleaning up the area around the gravestone. He wished he knew if she was mourning a husband or a child, and how long the grief had been with her, and if it was still as sharp and strong as the day it began.

  He held the silver locket with a few strands of his son’s hair in it and hoped the grief would never lose its sting. The grief was their connection now, the grief and love, and he wanted neither to ever ease their grip on him.

  After the old woman finished tending to the grave, she wiped her hands on the grass, then leaned to the side and sat on one hip, right hand flat on the ground beside her hip, other hand to the ground two feet forward, in the same posture as the thin young woman in the painting by Andrew Wyeth, except that instead of gazing at a farmhouse on a distant hill, the old woman gazed at the gravestone only two feet away.

  He had read somewhere that the real woman depicted in the painting was actually in her midfifties and suffered from a rare and incurable disease. But to DeMarco’s mind, that information was incidental and only detracted from the painting. What mattered was the longing insinuated by the woman’s pose. The nameless, wistful, unrelenting ache.

  DeMarco climbed out of his car and closed the door as softly as he could. He didn’t usually talk to his son when he came to the cemetery, but this time he knelt to the side of the stone and put a hand to the corner of it and spoke in a whisper.

  “I wish I could say that I believe it all really happened, my son. That you really came to me in those mountains. That I wasn’t just feverish or dreaming or whatever. I wish I could say that I really did see your face and your smile and that I know what you look like now. I wish with all my heart I could say that.”

  The stone was cold and rough under his hand, the locket warmed in the palm of his other hand. “Either way,” he said, “I want you to know that I have never stopped missing you. That you’re the best part of me and always will be.”

  He sniffed. Looked up toward the woman. She hadn’t turned to look back at him. His voice was not too loud.

  “But if it was really you,” he said, “could you give me another sign?”

  And he sat very still for a while, both hands motionless. Then he closed his eyes and remained unmoving, saw only a lingering image of the gravestone in the dull glow of sunlight coming through his eyelids. Then he looked up and across the field of stones and hoped he would see something significant and startling, but he did not.

  “Okay,” he said after a while, and patted the corner of the gravestone. “I’ll always be your dad, my son. I will always love you with every breath and every beat of my heart. And I hope you will forgive me someday. I hope you can.”

  He had to lean against the gravestone then to push himself to his feet. He slipped his hand into a pocket and let go of the silver heart. Then, just before turning back to the car, he cast a last glance toward the old woman. She had turned at the waist and was looking in his direction, smiling.

  He gave her a nod, a smile of recognition, and continued on his way.

  Forty-Four

  Jayme had a light lunch prepared for them when he returned from the cemetery. He came in through the back door to find her seated at the table with her laptop open. Also on the table was a round platter, covered with plastic wrap, holding raw carrots and celery sticks, Kalamata and green olives, and a bowl of tuna salad.

  She smiled to see him but did not ask how his morning had gone. He was always somber when he returned from the cemetery, and she wanted to respect his need to keep those hours to himself. She said, “Tuna salad okay for lunch?”

  “Excellent,” he said. “I’ll get the bread.”

  “If that’s what you’d like.”

  He paused, midturn.

  “No bread for me,” she told him.

  After another pause he crossed to the cupboard and took out two plates, then two forks from the drawer. Brought them to the table. Set them in place. “Water?” he asked.

  “Perfect,” she said, then closed her laptop and pushed it aside.

  He fetched two bottles of water from the fridge and joined her at the table. As he peeled the plastic wrap off the platter, he asked, “What were you working on?”

  “Just doing some research. How’s your exploding head these days?”

  “Non-explosive.”

  They forked mounds of tuna salad onto their plates, added some raw vegetables. She said, “I considered slicing up the olives and putting them in with the tuna. Do you like it that way?”

  “Either way is good.”

  She watched him scoop up some tuna with a stick of celery. Waited until he had chewed and swallowed. “If you really want to make a sandwich,” she said, then left the sentence unfinished.

  “This is fine. I eat too much bread anyway.”

  She nodded and smiled. Had a few bites. A drink of water. They were being so polite to one another. So very distant and polite. He had spent the morning with his sadness, and she with hers. They needed to come together again.

  She asked, “Are you still having difficulty breathing sometimes?”

  “Not really,” he told her.

  “Sometimes, though?”

  He gave her a smile. “It’s only there when I think about it.”

  She nodded. “As it turns out,” she said, “according to WebMD, it might be because of high blood pressure too. That and the exploding head both.”

  He tried to spear an olive with his fork, but it kept skimming away around the plate. Finally he trapped it against the tuna salad. “I’ll get it checked next time I go past the Rite Aid.”

  “That would be good,” she said.

  They smiled at each other and had a few more bites of lunch. “Know what I think is causing it?” he
asked.

  “What, babe?”

  “Too much bread.”

  She smiled, but it felt false, knew it must look false to him too. There were things that had to be said. But when would there be a right time to say them? The clock was ticking, every tick a little louder, just like the beating of a telltale heart.

  Forty-Five

  Two hours later, DeMarco awoke feeling sluggish and dull, as he always did after an afternoon nap. At such times the word logy would come into his consciousness, a word he had never read anywhere else but in Hemingway’s work, which seemed a shame because it was such a useful and descriptive word: to feel like a long-submerged cedar log half-buried in mud. It would take him a while to rise fully to the surface again.

  Jayme was still asleep, still breathing her soft, whispery breath that sounded like a hushed conversation a few decibels below discernible. Her face was perfectly still and composed, her eyelids pale and perfect, every pale freckle across the bridge of her perfect nose perfect, even the pillow beneath her head perfectly molded to the perfect contours of her perfectly sleeping face.

  He reached for his phone on the night table, checked the time, 3:16 p.m., and laid the phone facedown again. He would have to wake her soon. They needed to be in Erie by five.

  The drive to meet with Laraine’s psychic would take an hour. With luck the appointment would last only a few minutes. Afterward they would grab some dinner, then head southwest for the 7:00 p.m. memorial for Samantha Lewis at the Canfield High School. Then home again to Pennsylvania. A round-trip of two hundred miles in an itinerary shaped like a drunken South Dakota standing on its eastern border.

  DeMarco remembered the shapes of all fifty states. As a schoolboy he had scored high on spatial recognition, low on his ability to follow directions. “I test very high on insubordination,” Philip Marlowe had said in Chandler’s The Big Sleep. The quote had always pleased DeMarco. As did Nabokov’s observation that curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

  As male representatives of the human species, Chandler, from DeMarco’s view, was more worthy of admiration than Nabokov, the latter, according to his critics, self-promoting and priggish, a misogynist and all-around rat bastard, the former a man who always felt like an outsider, and who was, like his father, an alcoholic, and who tended to fall apart when not with the woman he adored. Throughout his life, Chandler remained fully aware of his many flaws, and did his best to be, in the words of his alter ego, “as honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it’s out of style.”

  DeMarco saw himself in much the same light. At the age of fifteen he had first figured out that sometimes you have to do bad to do good. In his early years as a trooper, he had tended to go by the book, mainly out of a sense of insecurity driven by the ambition to prove himself a useful human being. After the accident that took away his son, he needed the rule book to help him maneuver through every hungover day. But now, stone-cold sober and with Jayme at his side, he found himself investigating crimes much as Chandler had written his novels, as one who, in Chandler’s words, “cannot plan anything, but has to make it up as he goes along and then try to make sense out of it.”

  But what do we do when there’s no sense to be made? DeMarco asked himself. And supplied his own answer: You keep plodding along until the sense shows itself.

  So he was both a plodder and a freewheeler. An oxymoron, as detectives tend to be. With the right and left hemispheres of their brains always battling for supremacy, an imp of the perverse whispering in one ear, Saint Teresa admonishing in the other.

  That thought made him smile too. Chandler was also a late bloomer who sabotaged most of his early attempts at success. He didn’t write his first novel until he was fifty-one. But with only a handful of novels, he was able to change how mysteries were written.

  That thought brought back to DeMarco a conversation he had shared with Thomas Huston, the first and so far only person to suggest to him that investigating a crime was a lot like writing a novel. Huston had explained that Chandler chose not to write typical mysteries, those in which the only thing that matters is the resolution, the solution to the mystery, but instead to write mysteries in which every scene matters, because every scene adds another layer to the main character.

  A four-hundred-page novel, Huston told him, cannot justify its existence solely on the final few pages, but on page after page of individual scenes that deepen the reader’s understanding of and empathy for the characters. The best stories, Huston had explained, aren’t about what happens to the world as the plot unfolds, but what happens inside the character and the reader. Chandler’s goal, said Huston, was “to exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it.”

  Just like solving some crimes, DeMarco told himself. Before you can get to the resolution, you have to peel away layer after layer of character, because sometimes the motivation is buried deep. The smart criminals know how to hide it. Fortunately, most criminals aren’t smart. This one, however…

  DeMarco looked at the afternoon sunlight soaking through the curtains like golden blood. God, how he missed Tom Huston. Their every conversation had made DeMarco feel that he was learning something new. More than once Huston had teased that he was going to turn DeMarco into a fictional character. To which DeMarco always said something like, “I could stand to be a little more interesting.”

  In truth, he would not have minded being a Thomas Huston character. Or a Raymond Chandler character. But both authors were dead now, so the chances for DeMarco’s transformation were remote.

  Or were they? What if he really was nothing more than another Huston character? The thought made him smile. And brought to the surface another conversation he and Tom had had, a discussion on the nature of reality. DeMarco had always been what Tom called a materialist, believing that the observable physical world was, if not the all and the everything, at least the most significant part of reality. The rest, if it mattered at all, was too ephemeral to be fully grasped. But Tom disagreed with that paradigm. He had argued something like this:

  “If it is true, as more and more theoretical scientists concur, that mind creates matter, thought creates reality, and that this reality is neither more nor less than the dream or conceit of a higher mind, then why is it not also true that the characters and worlds I create in my novels are as real as I am, though in a slightly lower or perhaps just different dimension than the one I inhabit? That would make me a kind of demented god, wouldn’t it? One who burdens his creations with every pain and tragedy and calamity conceivable! All for personal satisfaction and, with luck, financial gain! Is the true reality nothing more than a hall of mirrors in the labyrinth of a single mind, each of us a story within a story within a story ad infinitum?”

  DeMarco had laughed at the look on Huston’s face, a wide-eyed expression of mock horror. But now he wondered if there might be something to that theory. A hall of mirrors, each reflecting the thoughts portrayed on the previous mirror…

  “Ad infinitum,” he whispered to the light-soaked curtains.

  “Excuse me?” Jayme said.

  He rolled his head in her direction, saw her watching him, smiling.

  She asked, “What did you say, babe?”

  “Just thinking out loud.”

  “About what?”

  “About how long to let my Sleeping Beauty sleep.”

  “I guess you can stop thinking,” she said.

  He moved closer; kissed the tip of her nose. Felt his body press against her. “You smell the way the Moonlight Sonata sounds on a rainy night. What’s that fragrance?”

  “Soap. With aloe and cocoa butter.”

  “Every woman should wear it. Every man too. I’m going to start wearing it so that I can have you on my skin.”

  “Or you could just carry a bar of soap around with you wherever you go.”

  “But then I’d have a big lump in my pocket.”<
br />
  “Not as big as the one you have in your boxers.”

  “I would love to pursue that line of discussion,” he told her, “did we not have a couple of obligations to fulfill. You ready to log some miles?”

  “Depends. Are we getting paid by the mile?”

  “No such luck.”

  “Then screw this job. I’m going back to sleep.” She closed her eyes and made snoring sounds.

  “You know how my father would wake me up sometimes?” he asked.

  She snored louder.

  “By dripping a cup of cold water on my face.”

  She opened her eyes. “So cruel!”

  He leaned closer and kissed her mouth, a long and tender kiss. When he pulled away, she said, “That was a sweet kiss. What was it for? Because I said your father was cruel?”

  He shook his head. “Because a kiss never tasted is a kiss forever and ever wasted.”

  She slipped her arms around his waist. “Did you just now make that up?”

  “Billie Holiday sang it, Sam Lewis wrote it. In the song ‘For All We Know.’”

  “You know what I know?” she asked, and pulled him closer.

  “The same thing I know,” he said, and wished he could remain in that position forever, always breathing her in, their world in quiet suspension, everybody loved, everybody safe, the perfect end for a novel. But if he were a Huston character, if this were a Huston story, such an end would not be possible. Thomas Huston did not write that kind of story. He knew too much of the world beyond the curtains.

  DeMarco, with a smile, leaned away from her. He reached into his boxers, rearranged his erection. “I’ll make us some coffee,” he said.

  Forty-Six

  The address Laraine had sent by text led DeMarco along a twisty narrow dirt lane to a small cottage on a windblown bluff overlooking Lake Erie. He parked behind a yellow Volkswagen and a pale blue Subaru wagon, shut off the engine and looked at the clock. 4:58.