Best Intentions

by Joseph T. Klempner

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  Out of concern for the privacy rights of certain individuals, I have taken the liberty of changing names and locations and even modifying some of the less important details of the story that follows.

  But it happened, it really did.

  As the old saying goes, you just can’t make up stuff like this.

  The boxer tapped the bag softly with a left, hard enough to get it moving, before following up with a right, then another left, followed by another right. The idea was to catch the bag with the next punch at the precise moment it swung back through the bottom of its arc and began to rise toward you. If you did it right, you quickly fell into a rhythm, making contact with each punch and producing a pleasing rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat sound that echoed through the gym. It was a lot like jumping rope: It was all in the timing. Someone good at it could do it for minutes at a time, hours at a time, if it weren’t for the fatigue that would eventually set in.

  The boxer working at the speed bag was good, but not that good. Before long, one blow caught the bag just an inch off to the side, sending it slightly to the left, instead of straight back. Somebody really good - a professional, say - might have been able to make the necessary correction. But the boxer was only an amateur, and something of a novice at that, and the correction turned out to be an overcorrection, and before long the pleasing rat-tat-tat had disintegrated into a rat-tat-tat . . . tat . . . tat before ceasing altogether.

  “Okay, Muholland,” the trainer called out. The trainer was a squat fireplug of a man, who couldn’t have been more than five foot three, but who must’ve weighed in at 220, 230 easy. Everyone called him Tony. It was entirely possible that he had no last name. “Okay,” he called out again. “Gimme ten minutes on the heavy bag. And work it!”

  The boxer moved over to the heavy bag, leaning into it with one shoulder before starting to throw short jabs at it. Here it was much harder to develop any kind of a rhythm at all. The heavy bag was simply too heavy: Unlike the speed bag, which would go whichever way you hit it, the heavy bag had a tendency to stay put. But that was okay. Here you weren’t working on timing so much; you were working on strength. And your reward came not from any pleasing rhythm or sound, but from a drenching sweat and a pair of arms that after five minutes felt like they had lead in their veins.

  “C’mon, Red!” yelled Tony. “Hit the sonofabitch, willya?”

  The boxer responded by lashing out harder, tiny droplets of sweat flying with each blow, until the leaded arms simply became too heavy, first dropping down after each punch, then skipping a punch, then finally hanging down lifelessly, as though the gloved hands at the ends of them might have been carrying invisible pails of water.

  “Okay, okay,” said Tony. “Good workout, kid. Go get yourself a shower.”

  But there was no going anywhere, not just yet. It took a full three minutes just to peel the drenched gloves off, another three to unwrap the yards of soggy tape beneath them. Even then, there were fingers that needed to be flexed and rubbed and kneaded, before the circulation gradually returned to them and they were supple enough to work properly once again. Only then did the boxer finally reach up to unsnap the chin strap of the protective leather helmet and, using both hands, lift it off. Then two good sideways shakes of the head, first to the left, then to the right, causing long red hair to spill down onto her narrow shoulders.

  Twenty miles to the east, Stephen Barrow held the inside of his wrist under the spigot to test the temperature of the water, the exact same way they’d showed him how to do it at the hospital, almost seven years ago. “If you use the palm of your hand,” the nurse had told them, “you’re liable to end up scalding baby.” Baby, she’d said, instead of referring to their daughter by her name. “Baby’s skin is much more sensitive than yours, but she has no way of telling you that the water’s too hot or too cold, until it’s too late.” Stephen had listened to every word, memorizing each bit of wisdom as though his daughter’s very life depended upon his ability to do so. He’d even taken notes at times, so struck had he been by the awesome responsibility that fatherhood had suddenly thrust upon him. He’d marveled back then at his wife’s nonchalance, her confidence that everything would be all right, even as he’d secretly wondered if perhaps she loved their new child less than he did. Even then, even in those first terrifying days, he’d wondered.

  Now, more than six years later, bath time was still a special time for father and daughter. Gone was the fear that he’d scald Penny with water that was too hot, or induce instant frostbite with liquid ice. Gone was the need to hold her tiny head above the waterline, or to keep the shampoo from burning her sensitive eyes, the “No Tears” assurance on its label notwithstanding. And though he no longer felt the need to stay in the bathroom for the entire time she was in the tub, he never strayed far, and not a minute went by that he didn’t call out her name to make certain she was still okay.

  “I’m fine, Daddy,” she’d call back. And she always was.

  Bath time was unwinding time. It was that period of transition at the end of the day, that shifting-of-gears process designed to slow Penny down from full speed ahead to something approaching calm, something that would allow her to sit still for a bedtime story, curl up beside one stuffed animal or another, and eventually let go of the day and slip into sleep.

  “Look at me,” he heard her calling to him - or perhaps to no one in particular. “I’m a unicord!”

  He put down whatever he was doing (later he’d be unable to remember just what it had been) and went to her to investigate. It wasn’t every day, after all, that your only child was transformed into a unicord.

  When he poked his head into the bathroom, there was Penny, her long hair piled on top of her head with the assistance of what must have been half a bottle of shampoo and an equal measure of bubble bath. And, true to her description - give or take a letter - she’d somehow managed to create a spike at the very top of her head that pointed straight up, in absolute defiance of the laws of gravity.

  His reaction was to laugh out loud. His daughter did that to him at least once a day, and often more. Even in the first early weeks of the separation, even during the divorce proceedings and the custody battle that followed, even when there was precious little to feel good about, she’d never lost her ability to make him laugh.

  “I wanna see!” she said now, lifting her arms for him to pluck her up and hold her in front of the mirror.

  “No,” he said, “you stay put. I’ll be right back.” And he’d gone into his bedroom to find a hand mirror, the one he used periodically to check on that tiny bald spot threatening to spread across the top of his head.

  And had the mirror been there on his dresser, where it was supposed to be, that would have been that. He would have picked it up, brought it into the bathroom, handed it to his daughter, and let her see for herself how funny she looked.

  But the mirror wasn’t there, where it was supposed to be. Instead, it was down in the kitchen, where he’d left it the night before, after trimming Penny’s bangs. But there was something else on the dresser that caught his eye: his camera. A 35mm Nikon that had seen better days, but still worked well enough. He picked it up, checked to see if it was loaded, and saw it had seven exposures left on a roll that had once contained twenty-four, or maybe thirty-six; he couldn’t remember.


  Back in the bathroom, he set the camera down so that he could pick Penny up and - being careful not to let her soapy body slip through his hands - held her in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, so that she could see her reflection and share his laughter. Then he set her back in the bathtub. He expected her knees to bend, which would have returned her to the sitting position she’d been in before, but she stiffened them - much the same way a cat will stiffen its legs to avoid being placed in water - and ended up standing.

  “Show me again!” she laughed, but by that time he’d already reached for the camera. With a certain measure of tolerance, she indulged him as he snapped away. He took three shots of her from the shoulders up, paying little attention to her expression, concentrating instead on the absurd hairdo she’d created. It was only when he went to put the camera down on the sink that he became aware of her exaggerated pout.

  “Show me again,” she repeated, this time in mock seriousness.

  And it was a combination of that pout and that seriousness on the one hand, and her vulnerable, skinny nakedness on the other, that struck him so, that filled him with a tenderness he could not have put into words. He picked the camera back up, and, pressing the button that pulled her image away from him in the viewfinder, he clicked away, taking full body shots of her standing in the tub, unicord hairdo, bubble bath and all.

  Her reaction, though not immediate - he managed to get three or four shots first - was to turn away from him. This, too, he saw through the viewfinder. And as he watched the tiny image, she bent over so that her head suddenly appeared upside down between her legs, grabbed the cheeks of her tiny butt with either hand, and made a noise that could best be described as a Bronx cheer by one on a diet of baked beans.

  He snapped the shutter one last time.

  “Daddeeee!” she protested.

  “You’re just lucky,” he told her, “that I was out of film.” They both laughed.

  It took Theresa Mulholland twenty-two minutes to drive from the gym to work. Anyone else, it might have taken half an hour. But Theresa Mulholland had what is commonly referred to as a heavy foot. Beyond that, she knew the back roads of Columbia County as well as anyone. She’d grown up in Chatham, and - except for four years of college spent over in Boston - she had lived her whole life in the area. And as areas went, it was pretty, and she liked it okay. But there tended to be a lot of time left over for getting to know the back roads.

  Work, for Theresa, was at the offices of the Hudson Valley Herald, a regional newspaper that came out twice a week and served New York’s Dutchess and Columbia counties, as well as southern Vermont and the northern Berkshires of Massachusetts, to the east.

  Theresa Mulholland was a reporter.

  And though it was after nine o’clock at night when she arrived at the Herald office, working an occasional evening shift wasn’t all that out of the ordinary. Evening shift, they always called it; call it a night shift and suddenly extra pay would be required, union organizers would be coming over from Pittsfield, there’d be dues and lockouts and strikes, jobs would be lost, God knows what else would happen. So to play it safe, they sent you home around one or two in the morning, before their idea of evening ended, and actual night began. It was a once-a-month thing, maybe, something that only happened when some real news came along just when they were about to put an issue to bed. Real news in the tri-county area being a relative term: some teenage vandalism in Chatham, perhaps, or the sudden cancelation of an auction down in Copake. Today’s event had been the unexpected announcement that the Columbia County Board of Assessors was thinking about reappraising all the homes in Hudson. News like that certainly couldn’t wait till the next issue.

  But for Theresa, it was no big deal. It wasn’t as if she’d made previous plans for the evening. Theresa - or Terry, as most everyone called her, the principal exception being Tony the Trainer, who referred to her as Mulholland, Red, Kid, Hey Youse, Yo, and an assortment of other things - was pretty, and at thirty-one, she was not only unmarried but, as they like to say, uninvolved. Which was, surprisingly or not, a fairly common state of affairs for college-educated young women living in the area. There were lots of young men around, to be sure. But they all seemed to have grown up right there in town after struggling to make it through high school, or not quite. Now they worked at contracting jobs by day, drank beer by night, and saved their deepest commitment for deer hunting and snowmobile maintenance. And though Theresa didn’t like to think of herself as a snob, she nonetheless had her standards. And those standards tended to result in a number of free evenings.

  The bedtime story Penny had picked out was the Maurice Sendak classic Where the Wild Things Are. With its elaborate illustrations of fanciful monsters, it had long been one of her favorites. Early on, even before she herself had begun to read, Penny had committed many of the passages to memory. Stephen had paused each time he’d come to the end of a sentence, pointing at some item in one of the drawings to cue Penny, who dutifully supplied the missing word. So thoroughly had she memorized the story that when Stephen would slip in a wrong word here or an extra phrase there, she’d instantly correct him. And now that she could actually read many of the words herself, Stephen would require her to do so, even if it meant covering up the illustration that would otherwise provide her a clue.

  They read for twenty minutes like that, Penny propped up against her pillow, a stuffed animal flanking her on either side, while Stephen sat on the edge of her bed, his back wedged against the headboard. If the position caused him physical discomfort (and it did, owing in no small part to a motorcycle accident dating back to earlier, more reckless years), it was a small price to pay. This quiet time - this period at the end of the day when Penny, at last weaned by the day’s frantic adventures and soothed by her bath - brought inexplicable joy to Stephen Barrow. It wasn’t a matter of having the rest of the evening to himself to get back to his writing, or open a book, or even catch part of a ball game on the TV. Working out of his own home gave him plenty of free time during the day, when his daughter was off at school. No, it was more than that. It was a special time because it was quiet, unhurried, safe.

  When his marriage to Ada had come apart, Stephen had fought hard for custody of his only child, hard but fair. He’d had his lawyer stress his parenting skills, his obvious closeness with Penny (who was only four when the battle came to a head), and the fact that his writing gave him the advantage of being home full-time to care for her. At the same time, over his lawyer’s considerable protests, he’d forbidden any mention to be made of Ada’s own shortcomings, including her sometimes erratic behavior and her affinity for the three-martini nightcap. But in the end, the judge - herself a mother - had pretty much figured things out on her own.

  In the two years since, father and daughter had forged a relationship that eventually astounded even Stephen. At the age of six, Penny was more than his daughter; she was his friend, his companion, his approving audience, his sometimes critic, his doting parent. She provided him with nonstop conversation, much of it surprisingly intelligent. She helped him with chores, reminded him of things he might otherwise have forgotten (like her gymnastics lessons or soccer practice), shared cooking responsibilities (she was a leading authority on the grilled cheese sandwich), mastered electronic devices that were total mysteries to him (had it not been for Penny, their VCR would still be nothing but a clock, perpetually flashing 12:12), and kept her own room, well, reasonably neat. Her occasional outbursts and rarer tantrums he viewed as the stuff of a normal six-year-old. Never did he cease to marvel at her overall resiliency, her amazing adjustment to life without a mother.

  For even as the two of them grew closer, Ada receded into the distance. In the months following the judge’s decision, she’d done her share of co-parenting, taking Penny one night a week and every other weekend. But as time went by, her work increasingly got in the way, or her image of herself as a mother who didn’t have custody of her own child became too difficult for her t
o bear; or perhaps it was a combination of those things and more. At first, her last-minute cancelations totally unhinged Penny and infuriated Stephen. But in time, they came to expect and accept them, and finally to count on them. There was never a formal end to Ada’s participation in the raising of her daughter; it just seemed to gradually dwindle to a point where it simply no longer existed. Now there was a man in her life, a live-in boyfriend Stephen had met once or twice. He seemed a decent enough guy who made her happy, which was nice for Ada, and nicer still for Stephen and Penny.

  “One more story,” Penny begged.

  “Not for me,” Stephen said, straightening his back with difficulty. “I’m all storied out. But you can read to yourself, if you like.”

  “Thanks, Stephen.”

  She had this habit of calling him by his first name. Not always - only when she wanted to seem like an adult. It had totally unsettled him at first. After all, how were you supposed to maintain parental authority over a person who addressed you as Stephen? He briefly considered discouraging the practice, or even outright forbidding it. But he didn’t, and he got over it soon enough, coming to realize that if he was to earn his daughter’s respect, he was going to have to do so on grounds more significant than the mere accident of being her biological father.

  He bent down to kiss her. “Goodnight, kiddo,” he said. “I love you.”

  “Goodnight, Daddy. I love you, too.”

  “Hey, Terry, thanks for coming in.”

  The voice belonged to Neil Witt, the managing editor and Theresa’s boss.

  “No problem.”

  “Hope you didn’t have plans.”

  “Luckily,” said Theresa, “I have no life.”

  “Listen,” Witt said. “Grady’s out again.”

  Tom Grady had been a reporter for the Herald for thirteen years - a record, so far as anyone could figure out. He’d been in the business for fifty. You found that out anew each time he confided in you, “I began as a copy boy for the Daily Mirror,” and launched into his life story. Sober, Grady was a good reporter - a capable investigator and a decent writer. But his periods of sobriety were decidedly finite, and Neil Witt’s announcement suggested that the latest such period had come to an end.