The plan was for her to pick up Sarah and Nathan at Katydids after her doctor’s appointment and take them to the Aquarium. She was so good with them that it almost made me jealous. About two-thirty in the afternoon, I got a call at work from a lieutenant in the Braintree Police Department saying they had Amanda in custody.
“One of our officers stopped Mrs. Thornhill for driving erratically on Route Three,” the lieutenant said. “She refused to take a breathalyzer, but her eyes are glassy and her speech is slurred.”
“Oh my god. How are the children?”
“They’re fine. One of the female members of our administrative staff is looking after them. We’re hoping you can pick them up soon, or we’ll have to get social services involved.”
“Yes, of course. Thank you. What about my mother?”
“She wasn’t happy when we brought her to the station, but I’d say she was more confused than belligerent. We’ll release her to your custody, but she’ll have to come back to court at a later date.”
“Thank you so much. I’ll take a cab immediately and drive her car home.” He gave me the address.
I wondered how Amanda ended up in Braintree, which was about fifteen miles south of the Aquarium. She must have gotten on the Southeast Expressway and kept going. I sat in the cab with my mind racing, furious at her and even more furious at myself. She was just doing what she had always done. How many times had she driven drunk with my brother Mark and me in the car when we were kids? She seemed to have gotten her drinking under control lately. Still, I should have said something to her about never drinking when she had Sarah and Nathan in the car. What if this had happened a few months ago? I imagined Claxton looking at me with disdain over his rimless glasses: Had you been aware of your mother’s drinking problem, Mrs. Drobyshev? Isn’t it true that she had been hospitalized for alcoholism on numerous occasions? Didn’t Mrs. Thornhill once crash her automobile through the plate glass window of a beauty parlor, causing considerable property damage and injuring a female patron? Yes. Yes. Yes. And you still let her drive your children around?
I could recite my mother’s excuse before hearing it: Amanda saying her sinuses were still blocked, the pressure so bad when she woke up this morning it felt like her teeth were falling out, so the doctor at Mass. Eye and Ear gave her some capsules—a little something to go along with her prescriptions for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and depression. At lunch she’d treated herself to a gin and tonic, just one, which was understandable after everything she’d been through—a mistake in hindsight, of course, but the doctor should have warned her not to drink with those pills or she never would have gotten behind the wheel with the kids in the car and driven on these dreadful highways with rude drivers and signs pointing everywhere except the place you wanted to go.
Or maybe she’d say, I’m sorry, I’m a drunk, what I did was horrible. Time for me to go somewhere and dry out for a while.
Ultimately, what Amanda said to me didn’t matter; the issue was what I would say to Matt when he found out. If he found out. The trick was how to get the kids to keep it a secret. Nathan could easily blurt something out, but he’d follow Sarah’s lead. If she didn’t say anything about the incident, chances are he wouldn’t either. But what if Matt caught me trying to keep it from him? This was a man who never made mistakes or bent the rules. Last week I’d gotten a lecture for letting Sarah sit in the backseat without a seat belt. Maybe the best way to mitigate the damage would be to tell him myself.
I paid the cabbie and went into the police station. Amanda looked so old when the lieutenant brought her out to me. She was meek and downcast, muttering apologies as I gave her a hug. The officer handed me her keys, and I walked her out to the car. By the time I came back out with the children she was curled up in the front seat, asleep, a shiny trail of drool running down her chin. The kids started giggling as they imitated her snores.
Sarah said, “Are they going to make Nanda go back to jail?”
“Oh no, honey. Nanda’s sick. She just took the wrong pills, that’s all. The policemen will understand.” I was almost ready to believe it myself. “But you know what? Nanda’s going to be embarrassed by all this. She’ll be worried people will say she did something really bad.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Maybe we shouldn’t tell anybody.”
“You mean keep it a secret,” Sarah said.
“Yes, kind of. Just keep it to ourselves.” I was trying to split hairs with a preschooler.
“Not even tell Daddy?”
“Not Daddy. Not anybody. That’s what makes it a secret.”
“Okay,” Sarah said.
I could only hope.
***
Matt was planning to take the children to Disney World the second week in June; he said he heard it was a good time to go, just before most schools let out. It was all the kids could talk about. They’d be gone from Friday to Friday, and I was hoping Griffin and I might be able to take a vacation of our own, but he had arranged some meetings in Dallas that couldn’t be changed.
One afternoon I was talking to one of the mothers I had met at Katydids, and we set up a Friday sleepover for her daughter at my house.
It was interesting to watch the girls interact. Naomi wasn’t bossy, but she had a rich imagination and definitely took the lead, which was a surprise to me given Sarah’s personality. I could hear them chattering in Sarah’s room long after I’d turned out the lights. In the morning Griffin played with them on the trampoline. I sat on the back steps smoking a cigarette with Nathan between my knees. Naomi was frustrated that she couldn’t do a flip like Sarah, but she loved doing belly flops and back flops over and over.
The phone rang in the kitchen. Griffin and Sarah were on the trampoline together, Naomi waiting her turn. I put Nathan down at the bottom of the steps and said to Naomi, “Could you watch him a sec while I get the phone?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She was polite to a fault.
I was about to open the back door when I heard Sarah shriek and Griffin shout her name. I turned around to see her arcing high in the air, her arms and legs pinwheeling as if she were trying to fly. She landed in the grass between the trampoline and the swing set and let out a heart-stopping scream.
Griffin leaped down and cradled her in his arms, his face stricken.
Sarah was crying, “My arm, my arm. Ouch, my arm.”
I rushed to them and took Sarah from Griffin and hugged her to my chest. “Oh, honey, you’re okay, you’re okay. Let me see. Show me where it hurts. I’ll kiss it and make it better.”
She was wailing so hard she could barely catch her breath. “I want Daddy,” she said.
Chapter 24
Matt
My job was a godsend. During the dark days of the divorce, it gave me something challenging to focus on and kept me from spending all my time being angry and feeling sorry for myself. I cut back on the number of trips I made but still spent a lot of nights and weekends in the office when I didn’t have the kids. Javi gave me free rein. I was the primary contact with clients, managed the couriers, and coordinated all pickups and deliveries. I did the payroll, taxes, and billing.
“You gotta pace yourself, partner,” Javi said the last time he dropped by the office. “Why don’t you hire a bookkeeper?”
“Nah, I’m okay for now.”
I handed him the latest financials. He gave them a once-over and let out a whistle. “Can’t argue with the results. Lean and mean.”
“Lean maybe, but definitely not mean.” There were days when I felt like a toady dealing with some of our clients.
I had to keep reminding our couriers that we had clients, not customers. Our personnel consisted of four men and a woman who specialized in escorting children. They were all ex-cops Javi and I knew from the force—reliable, trustworthy people who occasionally needed a little polishing. I’d correct one of them and get an eye roll
or a sarcastic salute. Listen, I’d tell them, we’re professionals. That’s why we wear coats and ties and fly first class. You want customers, go deliver pizzas. The parameters of the job were defined by our name—Discreet Courier Service. It was important for the clients to see us as savvy, no-nonsense operatives, but we also had to know when to bow and scrape.
The first time Javi told me about DCS, at lunch at Jake Wirth’s, he mentioned the painting he brought back from Germany that was so beautiful it gave him chills. I didn’t think about it much at the time. I was more interested in the business opportunity. But I soon learned what he meant. My third trip as a courier took me to London, where I picked up a painting by a Dutch artist named Salomon van Ruysdael. It was a river scene—two men in a rowboat with a cloudy sky and tall, overhanging trees. It was a small oil on an oak board only about eighteen by twenty-four inches, but you could get lost in that world. Not all the pieces I transported had the same effect on me. Some antiquities seemed to be valuable only because they were old, and as far I was concerned, most of the abstract paintings were the emperor’s new clothes. But our clients paid huge sums of money for the artwork we transported and I wanted to learn more.
I was never much of a museumgoer. Before this job the only exhibit that ever really knocked my socks off was the treasures of King Tut. Then, as a courier, I started visiting museums in the cities where I traveled. In Frankfurt I came across The Geographer by Johannes Vermeer, a painting of a man standing by a window with a pair of dividers in his hand, that mapmaker’s tool for measuring distances. It was a small canvas about the same size as the van Ruysdael. The light coming through the window looked so real the paint seemed to glow. I stopped in the museum shop to buy a print of it to hang on the wall at home, but the reproductions didn’t come close to capturing the magic of the original. The difference was so startling I went back into the museum and stared at the painting. In the end I bought a postcard of the picture and put it in a drawer in my office. It was the first of many. Reminders of the real artworks I wanted to go back and see again.
We had gotten a call recently to pick up a collection of daguerreotypes in Amsterdam, and I decided to take the trip myself. I had never been to the Netherlands and wanted to see the Vermeers and Rembrandts and go to the Van Gogh museum. I was also curious about the red-light district where the prostitutes displayed themselves in windows, waiting for johns. I couldn’t quite see myself hiring a prostitute, but maybe it was time to start. My sex life had been nonexistent since Lucy and I split. Maybe I could make it a theme trip—fine art and whores.
A week before I left, I went to an opening for several new artists at a gallery on Newbury Street. I didn’t care for that sort of thing, but Billy Tuttle insisted I come and meet a potential client. Billy was a dealmaker in the Boston art world and a good source of business for DCS. The prospect he wanted me to meet was Pamela McDermott, a furniture heiress from North Carolina. She was about fifty, a short, pudgy platinum blond upholstered in a red leather pantsuit. When Billy introduced me, she eyed me up and down like I was a slave on the auction block. We had only exchanged a few words when someone came along and spirited her away.
“So,” Billy said, raising an eyebrow, “what did you think?”
“What? Of Pamela? Billy, you don’t mean…?”
“How much do you want the business, pal?”
“Not that much.”
“Ah, a man with standards.” He said it like it was a four-letter word. “Actually, she can make that sort of thing quite interesting.”
“Billy? I thought you…” Were gay.
He laughed. “Come on, Matt. You know I try to make everyone happy.”
“Yes, you do, Billy,” a woman said behind me. “I couldn’t get this big ox to give me the time of day.”
Billy grinned. “Hello, Marcy.” He kissed the police commissioner’s assistant on both cheeks.
She turned to me, a glass of wine in her hand. “Sergeant Drobyshev.”
I bent down and gave her an awkward one-sider. I hadn’t seen her since I left the force a year and a half ago. I’d thought about looking her up from time to time, remembering our flirtation in the bar, but never got around to it.
Billy said, “You two know each other?”
“Vaguely,” Marcy said. She was wearing a tight blue dress. She’d put on a little weight, done something different with her hair.
The three of us made small talk for a few minutes before Billy moved on.
“Surprising to see you here, Matt,” Marcy said. She sipped her wine. “I didn’t know you were an art lover.”
I shrugged. “Trying to drum up business. What about you?”
She said one of the artists was an old friend from her hometown in New Jersey. We walked across the gallery to look at his work. The canvases were mostly cityscapes, very dark. Each painting was divided into five or six distinct parts, but somehow they all fit together.
Marcy said, “What sort of business are you in, Matt?”
I began to tell her and got carried away, talking too fast, trying to impress her. She looked terrific in that blue dress. I paused to take a breath.
“Fascinating,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“No, I mean it. Sounds romantic, flying all over the world.”
“Yeah, it’s neat. I get to meet some interesting people. The ones who live behind the high hedges and gates with security cameras.”
She finished her wine. I asked if she’d like me to get her another.
“Can we make it a real drink?”
“Sure.”
She gave me the claim check for her coat. It was a short black trench coat with wide lapels and a belt she cinched tight around her waist. I imagined her walking across the room, naked beneath the coat. It was a chilly evening with a light rain falling as we walked down to the Ritz. I got Bailey’s on the rocks; she ordered a Dewar’s neat. She told me she’d left the commissioner’s office at the end of last year.
I said, “So where’re you working now?”
“I’m in-house counsel for a high-tech start-up on 128. The salary isn’t much, but they gave me great stock options. Half the time I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, but I’m hoping the company goes public before anyone finds out.”
“Did you get recruited for the job?”
“No, nothing as glamorous as that. Things got complicated in the commissioner’s office and it was time to get out. Now, if you want to know why…” She finished her Dewar’s. “That requires another drink.”
I signaled the waiter.
“Oldest story in the book,” Marcy said. “Married guy, three kids. You see his name in the paper sometimes. We couldn’t go out in public, I couldn’t take him home to meet my parents. I threatened to leave him, he promised to leave his wife. All the while I’m wondering how a smart, reasonably attractive chick like me could be such an idiot. He’s calling me, writing me, feeding me lines they couldn’t get away with in a bad soap opera. Meanwhile, I’m hanging on every word like it’s Shakespeare. Get me drunk enough and I’ll recite some for you.”
“You ended it?”
“Not exactly. His wife got suspicious, so we’re taking a break. If I hold on for the next five or ten years, he might actually leave the bitch. No, that’s unfair. I’ve met her. She seems perfectly lovely. Of course, if he dumps her…” She smiled forlornly. “…he’ll probably start shacking up with some twenty-four-year-old intern.”
“Sorry.”
“Nah, don’t be. I did it all by myself.” She gave me a look that said, But I’m here with you, and ran the tip of her finger around the rim of my glass. “Okay, it’s your turn now.”
Which I took. My story was not a short, self-mocking version like Marcy’s but the whole sordid saga. She was the first person other than Norman Claxton I told about the incident in the bedroom. I went step by step.
Spared no details. It was a purging of the first order—vile, unseemly, humiliating. Another round of drinks came. Marcy slouched in her chair, a look on her face that said it was okay for me to use her like that. Perhaps listening was what she did best.
“She’s a lousy mother,” I said. I had been talking nonstop for at least half an hour. “I was blind to it when we were married. I loved her. We were a family, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt. Now I look at her and realize she doesn’t have a fucking clue. She packs overnight bags for the kids to come to my house, and she’s always forgetting something. Underwear, sweater, extra pair of shoes in case it rains. It isn’t just little things. One day I get a call at the office from the director of the kids’ day-care center. Matt, where’s Lucy? We’re about to close. She hasn’t picked up the kids. Shit! I have to drop everything and go over and get them. What if I had been out of town? What was the director supposed to do? Take them home with her and keep them overnight?”
I finished my drink—my fourth—and kept going. “The woman is a fucking menace. It’s like she doesn’t have a motherly bone in her body. She lets the kids ride in the car without their seat belts. Lets them eat those disgusting sugar-coated cereals with so much food dye the milk turns pink. A month or two ago, I caught Sarah with a candy cigarette holding it just like her mother. Like she can’t wait to have a real one. Maybe she can drop ashes on the furniture like Lucy. Burn the fucking house down. I don’t know what to do, Marcy. The whole thing’s tearing me apart. I’ve tried talking to her. Sometimes she’ll roll her eyes and tell me to chill out, or get pissed off and go into some convoluted explanation of why she’s right. Half the time it’s like she doesn’t even understand what I’m talking about. I might as well be speaking Norwegian. It’s like she’s off on some other planet.”
Lies You Wanted to Hear Page 19
