New Jerusalem News

by John Enright

  Destinationless, Dominick wandered back roads for a while, then found himself headed not south but east, out the cape. It was late when he pulled into the Radisson Hyannis, but it was off-season and there were rooms. He took one with a balcony and smoked a cigar out there before retiring. Hyannis, he decided, had probably been the name of some big man, the chief who had taken a gift to let the white guys stay. Who knew what Massachusetts meant? It sounded descriptive. He wondered if Emma had gotten away.

  Dominick bought a Boston Globe on the way to breakfast. The news was that Commander Em, the homegrown terrorist, had not yet been apprehended. The local judge who had released her from custody was catching a lot of flak. Bay Savers was mentioned, and Atticus. No bombs had been discovered. The FBI let it be known in no uncertain terms that it did not like being threatened. ICE had no comment. Emma was now wanted on charges of terroristic threatening.

  A sidebar article was entitled “Coast Guard Continues Investigation.” The Chris-Craft destroyed in the Old Grofton attack had been identified as one stolen from a marina in East Haven, where, ironically, it had been mothballed after being seized a year previously in a drug raid by ICE agents. Divers were searching for additional wreckage. None of the detonated suspects had yet been identified. Forensics on the recovered body parts was continuing.

  Dominick disliked Hyannis. He headed on to Provincetown, only an hour further out at the end of the Cape, which was deserted and encased in a frozen fog. He found a nice enough inn and decided to stay. He was reading Philbrick’s book on the Mayflower people. What presumptuous bastards they were. He avoided the news and newspapers, but he still checked his e-mail each morning on the inn’s guest computer to see if he had any leads on where to head next. On the third day there was a message from Angelica:

  Once again, dear Dominick, where are you? Mother has escaped. Would you have any idea where she might be? The police checked Mt. Sinai, but she wasn’t there. I have no idea how she could get there anyway. I had to put her in a home here in Boston. She was just impossible to live with, and Dex wouldn’t put up with her. It was supposedly a secure facility, but she managed to get out, after stealing cash from other residents and the office. I’m afraid she’s gone too far this time. If she does contact you, please let me know. By the way, I did not appreciate you sneaking out on me at that witch’s house. Angie.

  That evening he finished Philbrick’s book, and the next morning he headed back down the Cape, out of Pilgrim territory. He stuck to the coast roads to New Jerusalem and caught the late-afternoon ferry back to the island. At Mt. Sinai he parked out front and walked around the house and back through the brown and winter-blasted garden to Lydia’s potting shed studio. He called out, “Lydia, it’s me, Nick. Okay if I come in?”

  There was no answer, so he went on in.

  “Hold it right there, mister, or I will shoot you.” Lydia’s voice came from behind him, from behind the door.

  “Lydia, now you’re supposed to tell me to put my hands up where you can see them.”

  “I know that part. Put your hands up, and they better be empty. Now turn around, slowly.”

  Dominick did as she told him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you. Your daughter e-mailed me that you were missing, so I came to see if I could help you hide.”

  “You came alone?”

  “You know me, Lydia. I’m always alone.”

  “Have you been sleeping with her?”

  “Lydia, what kind of question is that to ask?”

  “An easy one to answer. Yes or no?”

  “But there is honor and privacy involved.”

  “So you did get on her privates. I hope you had a doctor check you out.”

  Dominick laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” She raised the handgun she was holding toward his face.

  “You are, my dear. Look at you.”

  Lydia was dressed in Atticus’s clothes—baggy brown corduroy pants, a plaid woolen shirt, and a bulky green cardigan sweater. She was wearing Atticus’s battered old fisherman’s hat. She looked like a girl dressed up in her daddy’s clothes.

  “No mirrors out here and no laughter either. I don’t like laughter.”

  “Lydia, could you put down the gun or at least point it in some other direction? Those things are made to go off.”

  Lydia looked at the gun in her hand as if wondering what it was doing there. “Oh,” she said. “No funny stuff?”

  “No funny stuff, cross my heart.”

  Lydia went to put the gun down on the potting shed counter and it went off, sending a slug through a windowpane. “Mercy, that’s loud,” she said, putting her hands to her ears as if the gun might go off again by itself.

  “Is that Atticus’s old gun?” Dominick asked.

  “Yes, the one he took to hiding beneath his pillow. Lot of good it did him.” Lydia wandered off toward the studio end of the shed, leaving the gun where it was. Dominick went over and found the gun’s safety and switched it on before following her.

  “Are your ears still ringing?” Lydia asked. “I can’t hear my crickets anymore.”

  “Lydia, how did you get here?

  “What do you mean, how did I get here? Why, I walked all the way from the ferry dock.”

  “How did you get to the ferry?” The daybed in the studio’s far corner was now piled with pillows, quilt, and a comforter. There were a teakettle and a saucepan on top of the space heater and a large oblong canvas up on her easel. “From Boston, I mean.”

  “Why, the way I always have, the train and a taxi. I know my way home, you know. I’m not totally addled.”

  “You stole money from folks at the nursing home?”

  “They weren’t using it, bunch of zombies. And it wasn’t a nursing home. It was an asylum, a loony bin with bars on the windows.”

  “How did you get out?” Dominick noticed that the canvas was up on the easel backwards, with its frame side out. She had already gessoed it.

  “Kitchen door. They never locked it after taking out the garbage. Was she any good in bed? Angie, I mean.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not really. I’m not sure what that means anymore anyway. You know, people used to sleep around in my day, too. Especially here on the island. Summertime, parties, drinks. A lot of times husbands weren’t around, either still back in the city working or out sailing or fishing. But we didn’t have all these diseases you’ve got now back then.”

  “People look at old folks and can’t imagine them doing it, so they think they never did.”

  “She married a homosexual, you know. They catch even more diseases.”

  “Didn’t they give you pills in there?”

  “I never swallowed them. Held them under my tongue.”

  Dominick looked in the saucepan—the remains of a can of chicken noodle soup. “Have the police been by?”

  “I guess so. Maybe. They never came out here. You’re the first. You are right, you know. It’s hard to imagine George Washington in bed with someone.”

  “What’s the painting going to be?”

  “I am waiting to find out. I’m still trying to find the picture behind the painting, so I thought I would start from the back looking out. But so far all I can see is white, all the colors together, like looking at the sun.”

  “Weren’t we told as kids never to do that?”

  “Who remembers what we were told as kids? Most of it was lies anyway.”

  “And shall I continue in that tradition and lie to your daughter?”

  “Oh, please do. About what?”

  “About your whereabouts—a lie of omission—and not tell her I found you here?”

  Lydia was staring intently at her reversed canvas. She answered almost absentmindedly, “Oh, she really doesn’t care where I am, as long is it’s not around her. That geriatric prison they had me in must have been costing them a small fortune. They’re glad I’m not there. What was it that was suppos
ed to happen to us if we looked at the sun?”

  “I think it was supposed to burn a hole in our retina, a blind spot for life.”

  “That’s right,” Lydia said, still staring at the canvas as her right hand rummaged among brushes in a jar, “a blind spot for life.” When she stepped up to the easel she was holding a rusty Exacto knife and she reached out and with a flip of her wrist opened a teardrop-shaped hole in the canvas. “That’s a start,” she said.

  Lydia stood there, her head bent to one side, silhouetted against the pale canvas. Most of the daylight had left the room. Atticus’s fishing hat now looked jaunty on her. She shifted her weight and the tilt of her head, put down the knife and picked up a brush. “Turn on the lights when you leave, please, Nick. And if you return, bring me some chocolate doughnuts, the kind that never go stale.”

  Dominick checked himself back into Charlie and Brenda’s that night, his old room with the clean sheets. The next day he brought Lydia her chocolate-covered doughnuts, along with candy bars, cheese and French bread, canned peaches and cider, a rotisseried chicken and a bottle of Chardonnay. He only stayed a few minutes. She was busy with her painting on the back of the canvas, which had grown more holes, blocks of bright colors, and stippled outlines of trees. She called him Lord Witherspoon. He told her to make a list of whatever she might need from the village. At the library he checked his e-mail but did not respond to Angelica.

  It was officially spring now, and the forsythia bushes and maple trees were showing buds, but otherwise the world was monotone drab and dreary. A high point in Dominick’s day was stopping by Mt. Sinai to look in on Lydia. She had begun drinking prodigious amounts of cocoa, and he would have a cup with her and chat. One day she would be fine and the next disconnected. One day she called him Atticus the whole time he was there. She finished the canvas she had started and nailed it to a tree in the garden where she could see it from her studio window. “It needs to be weathered now,” she told him. “It’s just a baby.”

  She had started a new work that was actually several—three smaller canvases, all different sizes and shapes and pastel shades. She was doing them simultaneously, “treating them equally,” as she put it, torturing them. The canvases were backward again, built up with layers of paint and glued-on fabric, then stabbed with pieces of broken glass, pierced with wires, and spattered with blood. At first Dominick thought it was just red paint, but as it dried it darkened like blood, and he asked.

  “It doesn’t take much,” Lydia said, holding up a bandaged hand. “It was an accident, but then they each deserved their due, and I got to like the effect.” She was flicking drops of black paint from a brush among the blood spatters. She called them her seascapes, and as they grew they did take on an abstract sense of rolling waves, stormy skies, and rugged coastline.

  It was on the fourth or fifth day of this routine that Dominick got an e-mail message at the library from Rob and Laurie in Key Largo. Rob and Laurie were part of Dominick’s old cycle of hosts that he had contacted. It had been several years since he last stayed with them. They were one of those couples who had had so much money for so long that they were bored with it all, and houseguests constituted a form of distraction. It was a come-on-down. They were going for a Caribbean sail and he was welcome along. This was his ticket out. It was a four-day drive south on the interstate, but with a known destination he could zone out and do it. He e-mailed them back that he was on his way. It felt good to be back in play. Perhaps his old life was not over yet.

  Dominick packed his car one more time and put Charlie and Brenda’s place back to rights again. He took pleasure in totally covering his tracks, in erasing all evidence of his stay. As he went one last time through the house, he carried a dishcloth and wiped all the surfaces he might have touched as if removing even fingerprints. He remembered to turn the thermostat down to where Charlie had set it.

  In the village he picked up one last load of groceries for Lydia. After this she would be on her own. Whatever happened next would happen. He had no solution. She was wily enough that she would not starve, and now that spring was here she would not absentmindedly freeze to death. Maybe she would go feral like his coyote. Maybe her favorite daughter Desiré would arrive from London and rescue her. Surely, Angelica had put out the word that their mother had gone AWOL. He stopped at the liquor store to buy another bottle of wine, then changed his mind and bought a bottle of Dom Perignon instead. They would properly toast their fare-thee-well.

  Encased in a leaden light, the village seemed deserted, as if the winter had taken a mortal toll. The shops were empty. The clerks were pale zombies. No one spoke. It was a silent, somber, historical diorama of a New England village. Dominick felt invisible, the quick among the unseeing dead. He thought that if he walked out of the store without paying, no one would notice or care to stop him. Even the bay was lifeless and empty, a flat and hammered sheet of pewter blending seamlessly into a horizonless fog that hid distant New Jerusalem. It was as if all this was already part of the past, a halftone memory on a just-turned album page.

  When Dominick drove up to Mt. Sinai there was a black SUV with federal plates parked in the driveway out front. With its tinted windows up he couldn’t tell if there was anyone inside. He drove on by. The next house down the road, the Benson place, was winter-empty and shuttered. He pulled in there. You couldn’t see one house from the other, but Dominick knew there was a path through the brush that connected their backyards. He would just walk over and see if Lydia needed a way to escape, although the feds would not be looking for her. They had more important tasks than tracking down rest-home escapees. He carried over her bags of groceries and the bottle of champagne. Why let uninvited visitors interfere with their goodbyes?

  When he got to her studio Lydia was not there. He put down the groceries and considered the possibilities. Most likely she was out in the garden spying on whomever was spying on the house. He went back outside to look for her. He didn’t want to go up to the house if the feds were there, but he could scout around and see what Lydia was up to. Maybe she didn’t know that the feds were parked out front and was just out starting her spring gardening chores.

  The sound of the gunshot came from inside the house—flat, loud, declarative, final. Dominick froze. There was no mistaking it. Half a minute later there was another identical shot. He waited for a third shot, for a scream, for any other noise. There was none. He was halfway to the house, behind an arbor that partially hid him. He stayed there, frozen from flight like some garden statue, and listened. Off in the distance a crow cawed, then closer to hand some other birds chirped and tried a song, trying to make it sound like just a normal early spring day. After a minute or two he began to feel silly, just standing there. He peeked out and looked around. Nothing was moving. There were no crouching agents with guns leveled in two-handed grips like on TV, no sound of footsteps or of doors opening and closing.

  Slowly, hesitantly, he walked up the path toward the kitchen door. He couldn’t recall if the porch steps creaked or not. They didn’t. He looked in the door window. Nothing strange, nothing moving. He opened the door and went in as silently as he could manage. The line of pegs along the hall, now empty of coats. In front of him the wall where Lydia had nailed the toast, the nail holes still showing. There was the smell of gunpowder or cordite or whatever it was called in the chill air of the house.

  Lydia was seated at the kitchen table, her back to him. She was still wearing Atticus’s plaid shirt and cardigan, but she had lost his fisherman’s hat. Her gray hair was loose and long over her shoulders. On the table beside her was Atticus’s revolver. “That you, Nick?” she said.

  “That’s me.” Dominick came up beside her at the table.

  “Well, we settled that score,” she said.

  “Um, what score is that, Lydia?”

  Lydia gestured with her head toward the closed door to the front hall. “Meriwether,” she said. “The one who killed Atticus.”

  Dominick carefully
slipped the revolver away from Lydia down to the other end of the table. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Never been better.”

  Dominick opened the hall door. There, halfway to the front door in a pool of blood on the hall carpet was the twisted short body of Agent K. The back of his head was missing and fluid still seeped out of a hole in the front of his shirt. His right hand was on his gun in its holster. He had managed to unsnap the clasp. Now all Dominick could smell was Agent K, a most unpleasant smell. He returned to the kitchen, shutting the door behind him.

  “Was he alone?” Dominick asked.

  “Yes, just him.”

  “That’s strange. I didn’t think they let them out alone.”

  “He said he was just here to put locks on the house. He said I would have to leave. Nick, would you fix me some tea?”

  “Lydia, you shot him twice.”

  “He wouldn’t stop moving.” She played with the bandage on her hand. “None of those Meriwethers were ever any good except for Bobbie.”

  “No tea, not right now. What are you going to do?”

  “I had no idea there would be so much blood. That carpet is ruined.”

  “You can always claim you thought he was a burglar.”

  “No, I thought this all out a long time ago, when Atticus was still alive and I realized I was going to be one of those crazy old ladies who lived forever and would be just a burden. I’d commit a felony—I always wanted to—and they would put me away for life. For free. I wouldn’t be a burden to anyone. The state would take care of me, three squares and a cot, and I wouldn’t notice because I’d be gaga. I thought it might be like a convent, just me and the other ladies, only more interesting because they wouldn’t be nuns.”

  “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about, Lydia. Prison’s not like that. You can take my word for it. And the idea of you in a convent is laughable. They won’t let you do your artwork in there. No gardening.”