Cynthia didn’t know what to say.
“You ever lost everything?” he asked her.
She hesitated. “I know a bit about that.”
He grew curious. “Really? You had a fortune and then it was gone? Big house, fancy car? All that shit?”
“No. It wasn’t a financial loss.” She put the glass to her lips and sipped.
Nathaniel’s eyes softened. “Oh, sorry. Shit. But you don’t mean your husband and your kid. You’ve still got them.”
She moved the wine around her tongue, as if it cost more than seven dollars a bottle, then swallowed it slowly. “It was a long time ago. My family. I lost my family.”
“What do you mean? Like, your parents died?”
Cynthia had neither the energy nor the desire to tell the story. “More or less,” she said. “And my brother, too. I was the only one left. After that, I went to live with my aunt.”
“Jesus,” he said. “What happened?”
She shook her head.
“Sorry, sorry. It’s not even any of my business. God, I’m such an ass. I’m all ‘pity me’ and you’ve been through something probably a thousand times worse.” He grabbed his glass and the bottle and came around the island, parked himself on the stool next to her so their shoulders were just touching. Cynthia felt a kind of charge come off his body. “Really, I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “Don’t feel bad. What happened to you, what happened to me, they’re both life-changing. They’re both traumatic in their own ways.”
“Yeah, but still. Let me top you up there.”
Cynthia had had only half a glass but let him refill it. He’d nearly finished his second glassful and helped himself to more, which emptied the bottle.
“Do you ever think,” he said slowly, “when you’ve been through something really horrendous that . . . I don’t know how to put this. You ever think, I’m sick of playing by the rules? Like, the hell with it. I just don’t give a fuck. Like you want to get even. Not just with some person, but the whole world.”
Cynthia took another sip. “I went through that, when I was in my later teens. You think you’re entitled to do whatever you want because you got the short end of the stick. But I got over it. I didn’t want to be a huge pain in the ass to my aunt. I mean, she was good enough to take me in. If she’d kicked me out, I’d have had no place to go. Just because something shitty happens to you doesn’t mean you get to make life harder for those around you.”
“Well, yeah, sure. Your aunt, she still around?”
Cynthia felt a constriction in her throat, a moistening in her eyes. “No.”
They sat there, shoulders touching, for a while, neither one saying anything.
Cynthia finally said, “Look, I should go.”
“I’ve got another partial bottle in the fridge. Seems stupid not to kill it off.” She felt the pressure from his shoulder grow ever so slightly.
“Nate,” she said.
“I feel like I’ve wasted these last few weeks. Having someone like you across the hall, and now you’re getting ready to leave.”
“Nate.”
“I’m just saying, I like you. You’re nice to talk to. Easy to talk to. Maybe, because of what happened to you, maybe you have more empathy than most people.”
“I don’t know about that.”
He opened his mouth to say something, stopped, tried again. “I think I may have done something I shouldn’t have,” he said.
He shifted on the stool so that he was facing her more directly, his face only inches from hers.
“Nate, it’s okay. Whatever it is, don’t worry.”
“Your husband, he’s lucky you’re coming home. If you were my wife, I’d have never let you go in the first place.”
“I should really—”
“No, I mean it. You’re a very—”
“I’m old enough to be your mother,” Cynthia said.
“Bullshit, unless you got knocked up when you were ten,” he said quietly.
“And you’re wrong—you haven’t done anything you shouldn’t have, and neither have I. We’re just having a drink. And now I’m going home.”
“No, wait—that’s not what I meant,” Nathaniel said. “The reason I asked you over here—I mean, I did ask you over here because I like you, you know? But there was something I wanted to ask you about.”
Hesitantly, she said, “Okay.”
“It’s about your friend.”
“My friend?”
“The one who dropped by here a couple of weeks ago.”
Cynthia recalled the encounter he was talking about. “What about him, Nate?”
“Remember he asked what I did, and I told him. About the dog walking.”
“Yeah.”
“So you must have told him a bit more about me that after, right?”
She tried to recall. “If I did, I didn’t have a lot to say, Nate, honestly.”
“The thing is, he got in touch with me later.”
Cynthia felt a shiver. “Oh.”
“Yeah. He must have Googled me or something because he kind of knew what I’d been through, read up on my financial problems, that what I was doing now was just a bit of a comedown from selling apps and making hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? He even looked into my personal life, knew my wife had left me, found out she was seeing some new guy.”
“Nate, what on earth—?”
“Anyway, he said he could help me out, if I could help him out.”
“Help him out how?”
He hesitated. “I don’t want to get into that part.”
“Well, what did you say?”
“I thought about it, and said sure,” Nathaniel said. “Because he said, and he was really firm about this, that nothing bad would happen. That no one would ever know.”
“Nate, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Tell me, what did you agree to do?”
He put his palm over his mouth, dragged it down over his chin. “I think it’s probably better if I don’t tell you everything.”
That suited her fine. Cynthia wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“But what I was wondering was, since he’s a friend of yours, I wonder if you could talk to him. The thing is, I want to end our arrangement. I want to break things off. I’m even willing to give back every dime he’s paid me so far. Well, most of it anyway. I spent some of it. But he doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d be inclined to let someone out of a business arrangement, even though we don’t exactly have what you’d call a signed contract.”
“You want me to talk to him?” Cynthia said.
Nate nodded. “Yeah, I’d really appreciate it. I mean, Vince is your friend, right? He said he’d known you from way back, all the way to high school, that you’d kept in touch.”
TWENTY
TERRY
IT had been six months since I’d last seen Jane Scavullo.
I was in Whole Foods getting a small container of egg salad, English muffins, and some fresh pasta—enough to set me back twenty bucks—when I noticed her going through the checkout ahead of me.
I debated whether to get her attention. This was a different girl from the one I’d taught seven years earlier, when she was seventeen and a student in my creative writing class. The one who got suspended for fights with other girls, who’d rather spend her days smoking in the girls’ restroom than show up for class, who had a perpetual chip on her shoulder, who didn’t take shit from anybody, but also didn’t seem to give much of a shit about anything, either.
And she could write.
Whenever I had a stack of assignments from that class to mark, I’d always save her submission for last, assuming that she’d actually handed one in on this occasion. I still remembered this part from one of them:
“. . . you’re a kid, and you think things are pretty fucking OK, and then one day this guy who’s supposed to be your dad says so long, have a nice life. And you think, what the fuck is this? So years later, your
mom ends up living with another guy, and he seems OK, but you think, when’s it coming? That’s what life is. Life is always asking yourself, when’s it coming? Because if it hasn’t come for a long, long time, then you know you’re fucking due.”
She wrote that assignment after her mother had moved in with a man named Vince Fleming, an individual who was, as they say, known to police, and not just here in Milford. I spent one long, harrowing night in his company seven years ago, the night he played a role in helping us find out what happened to Cynthia’s family.
He nearly died in the process.
But Vince’s good deeds that night didn’t make him a citizen in good standing.
He as much as admitted, that night, that he was responsible for one murder when he was a young man, and I suspected there were more. He made me uneasy, but he never struck me as a psychopath. Whatever acts of violence he committed were, in his world, just part of doing business. But as I’d reminded myself at the time, just because a scorpion doesn’t sting you out of spite doesn’t make it a good idea to hang out with a scorpion.
One thing he’d made clear to me in the short time we spent together: even though Jane Scavullo was not his daughter, she meant a great deal to him and he wanted the best for her. When Vince was in his early twenties, he’d become a father. A young woman he’d gotten pregnant had a baby girl, but it wasn’t long before mother and daughter were killed in a tragic accident.
I think Vince often saw, in Jane, the girl his own daughter might have grown up to be.
Seven years back, he made me promise to do what I could to help her. Although I transferred out of Old Fairfield High School for a few years before returning, I continued to encourage Jane with her writing. But it wasn’t as simple as that. It wasn’t enough to tell her she was good at stringing words together. I had to persuade her that hers was a life worth writing about. That you didn’t have to be some big-name, lame-brained celebrity to be interesting. That there was value in, and lessons to be learned from, the lives of each and every one of us. That her experience, as much as she tried to diminish it, was worthy of examination.
“What do you care?” Jane asked me, more than once.
“If I tell you I’m doing it because I care about you, you’ll think I’m full of it,” I told her. “You won’t believe me. So I’ll give you a more selfish reason. I’m doing it for myself. If I can get you to give more of a rat’s ass about your future, I’ll feel better about who I am and what I’ve accomplished as a teacher.”
“So it’s a huge ego thing,” she said.
“Yeah. It’s all about me. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with you.”
Jane remained stone-faced. “So if I just pretend to give a shit, you get to be all Mr. Holland’s Opus.”
I smiled. “Yeah. Just fake it. Don’t do well because in your heart you want to be better. Do it to see if you can pull one over on us.”
“Okay,” Jane said. “I’m like your Eliza Do-nothing.”
“That’s a good one,” I said.
“You think I don’t read. I know shit.”
“See? You’re getting into the spirit of this already.”
Other teachers at the school who I kept in touch with reported that Jane Scavullo was starting to make an effort. Not exactly Yale material yet, but she might actually get out of the building with a diploma.
“That act is going very well,” I told her.
“I’m going for an Oscar,” she said.
By the time she was in her last year, she’d stopped skipping so many classes. She completed assignments. Her grades improved.
“I don’t think you’re acting anymore,” I told her one day. “I promise not to tell anyone, but I think you’re starting to give a damn.”
“I’m not doing it for you,” she said.
“You’re doing it for yourself,” I said.
“God, you think you’re so smart, but you’re really not, you know,” she said. “I’m doing it for him.”
For Vince.
I should have figured that out much earlier. She was trying to make things up to him by making something of herself. What I was slow to realize was that Jane was carrying around a lot of guilt where Vince was concerned. It had been Jane who’d persuaded Vince to help me that night when he nearly died.
I assisted Jane with her college applications, wrote letters on her behalf. Her teachers were right: she wasn’t Yale material. But she was accepted at the University of Bridgeport, where she took advertising. “It’s perfect for me,” she said. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to make people believe shit that isn’t true.” Advertising allowed her to apply her gift with words and her powers of persuasion.
She e-mailed me once in a while, mostly during her first year. I wondered whether I’d rate an invitation to her graduation, but was quietly relieved when I didn’t. There was a good chance she might not have bothered attending anyway. Jane didn’t put a high value on ceremony. But if she did go, and if I’d attended, there would have been a good chance I’d have run into Vince, and that wasn’t something I’d have wanted.
For a long time, I felt my neck where Vince was concerned.
Cynthia and I visited him twice when he was recovering in Milford Hospital from his gunshot wound. Our times with him weren’t long enough to really qualify as visits. He wasn’t particularly happy to see us.
“Fucking stupidest thing I ever did was get mixed up with you two,” he said the first time we walked into his hospital room.
It was hard to argue. It was Cynthia who’d insisted we go back a second time to see how he was doing.
“His disposition may have improved if he’s feeling better,” she said. “We owe him a lot.”
So we tried.
Looking at Cynthia, Vince said this: “If I could find myself a fucking time machine, I’d get in it, set the dial back to 1983, and instead of going out that night with you, I’d have looked for—shit—the ugliest girl in Milford. I’d have even gone out with a fag and done whatever the hell he wanted to do if it meant I’d never have gotten dragged into your mess and ended up here getting shot in the fucking gut all these years later. So you can keep your get-well cards and your fucking flowers and get the fuck out of here.”
We opted against a third visit, and hadn’t seen him since.
I didn’t tell Jane about the encounter, but kept my promise to Vince to help her out.
“What’s going on between you two?” she asked me once. “I asked him if you guys talk and he just grumbles.”
“We’ve kind of gone our separate ways,” I said.
“You think you’re too good for him, don’t you?” Jane said. “He’s the guy from the wrong side of the tracks. You don’t want to be seen with him.”
That touched a nerve.
Even if Vince had been willing to associate with me, wanted to meet for a beer now and then, I’d probably have resisted, but not because I’d have thought I was too good for him. Vince was not the kind of person I had the nerve to pal around with. He was a tough guy, and so were the people he hung out with. Vince made a living breaking all the rules.
I was a high school teacher who paid his parking tickets.
Vince killed people.
I really couldn’t see the two of us as pals.
So when I saw Jane at Whole Foods, I was ambivalent. It would have been nice to see her, to catch up. But the conversation would inevitably turn to Vince, and I didn’t want to talk about him.
I was getting into my car when a voice behind me said, “You spotted me but didn’t say anything. I know it.”
I turned around, saw her standing there in front of me, brown recyclable bag in her hand.
“Don’t try to deny it,” Jane said.
“I won’t,” I said. “You look good.”
She did, too. No ripped jeans, no nose stud, no streaks of pink in her hair. She looked . . . polished. Tailored clothes, smart jacket, nails polished, hair shorter than I remembered it, nicely trimmed.
> “You kinda look like shit,” she said, and then smiled. “Sorry. I guess that’s the old me talking. Let me try again. How are you?”
“I’m okay,” I said. I guessed there was a heaviness in my voice that she’d picked up on. Things at home were sapping my strength.
“I didn’t mean to get all first-degree on you there. If you didn’t want to talk to me, that’s cool.”
I smiled. “I’m sorry. I did see you. But you looked like you were in a hurry and I didn’t want to slow you down. How are you?”
“I’m good. You know, okay. Just heading back to work.”
“Which is where?”
“After I finished school, I got a job with Anders and Phelps.” She waited a half second to see whether I recognized the name. When she saw that I did not, she said, “They’re a small advertising firm here in Milford. It’s not like we’ve got the Coke account or anything. It’s just local stuff, but it’s fun. I’m putting together a radio spot for a furnace repair guy.”
“That’s fantastic,” I said, and meant it.
She shrugged. “It’s not exactly Mad Men, but you gotta start someplace. So, when I said you looked like shit, I didn’t mean that, but you look kinda, you know, tired.”
“Some,” I said. “But hey, who doesn’t have something going on at one time or another, right? This is just one of those times.”
“God, after all that shit that went down, what, six years ago?”
“Seven.”
“Everything wasn’t okay after that?”
“We’re doing our best.”
“How’s your kid? Grace? How old’s she now?”
“Fourteen. Although it feels more like nineteen.”
“Hell on skates?”
“She has her moments.” I hesitated. “How’s Vince?”
Another shrug. “Okay, I guess. He and my mom made it legal five years ago, got married.”
“Great.”
She shook her head. “Yeah, but then, a month ago, she died. Breast cancer.”
My face fell. “I’m so sorry.”
She shook her head. “Hey, like you said, who doesn’t have something going on at some time, right? So I was officially a stepdaughter until four weeks ago, and then maybe not.” A pause, during which she appeared to be composing herself. “I moved out a while ago anyway.”
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