The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  Almost four years earlier, when Leela graduated from Rutgers, her father had offered to find her a job. At the time, he’d been the manager of human resources at Tanuja Fabrics. It was a textiles importer in Dorchester, a grimy corner of Boston that he commuted to from New Hampshire. The boss needed a personal assistant. Naturally she turned him down, mostly because it was her father who did the offering, but also because it wasn’t writing or editing. Also: Boston.

  At the time she’d had a clear-cut, detailed vision of what her life would become. It did not incorporate being shackled to an eighty-year-old industrialist.

  But now Leela’s back in New Hampshire, unemployed. Awake in gloomy wistfulness, in a friend’s parents’ empty house, mummified in a sleeping bag on floorboards that feel to her spine like railroad ties. No matter that every piece of clothing she owns is piled underneath her, her funeral pyre of cotton blends. And she probably would give her aching back for that assistant job.

  So would her poor father, most likely. Around the time that she landed her first internship in New York, the boss died. A year later, his greedy children had dismantled the firm, sold the parts. Her father had been out of work ever since, and spent his days in coffee shops, reading history books to keep busy when he wasn’t sending out résumés.

  Just recently, her parents had put her childhood home up for sale. They didn’t even tell her about it. On Friday morning—before she’d even reached the office, before she had an inkling that she was about to lose her job—Sandra, her best friend from Claymore, had texted to say that she’d seen a post online from Leela’s mom, announcing the house was for sale, and was it true? She’d called her parents as she stood on the sidewalk, and had maybe demanded information a little too entitled-ly? In any case, yes, Leela, they planned to sell the house. In fact, while they were sharing, they’d also lost quite a bit of their retirement to market swings and some not-so-great stock picks. In addition, they would move soon into a rental condo in Leduc, the impoverished little New Hampshire village next door to Claymore, Leela’s hometown, that was only slightly less impoverished. And no, they didn’t know what would happen next.

  “Please don’t ask us anything more about it,” her mother had said snippily.

  “But I barely asked you about it.”

  “Leela, why don’t you talk to me anymore on chat?” her father asked from the other handset.

  “You know exactly what I mean,” her mother said. “We don’t have the patience today that’s required, please try to understand.”

  But how did they not have more savings? What would happen next? Why were flaming meteors raining down on all their lives?

  Every time she thinks about them, it makes her newly sad. A worse daughter than before. Her career as a journalist, though it had begun to approach the on-ramp of being a verifiable thing, had not enabled her to give them any money. In fact, she was broke, in debt. Her little brother was no help. Satnam had dropped out of college and now worked in a ski-rental shop and shared a house in Oregon with seven friends, and they lived pluralistically, they loved noncompetitively, they snowboarded when powder fell. The last time they spoke, he’d called because his new life plan was to make marijuana-laced energy bars—“no one’s cornered that shit yet on a high-end level”—and he wanted to know if she had any friends who were investors. As usual, she’d lasted maybe a minute into one of her brother’s speeches—“Leela, imagine: hike, eat, high; hike, eat, high”—before she felt hounded by a shame that Satnam never seemed interested in feeling for himself.

  But then she lost her job. And spent Friday lunch at the coffee shop, just like her dad. Somehow, once the messages were sent, she had managed to find enough pride to not freak out and shoot up the place, instead to close her laptop and get some more coffee. Because in the case of Leela Mann, pride is her greatest talent. How she can use it to light almost any unfairness more pleasantly: by associating its positive characteristics with her own positive characteristics. The trick’s not to adjust your personality, but the situation. After all, she lived in New York, and to be planless in New York, to be without a safety net, was actually both a plan and a net, and an age-old practice of up-and-comers. Look around! A big room full of attractive people, some with European accents, all doing their striving best on laptops, so busy, so stressed, and yet all of them surely would be successful one day by force of will, and therefore Leela was not without hope.

  Then it was her turn to order. She smiled at the cashier, resisted annoyance when asked to spell out her name. Really, she didn’t have a right to feel so bad. When many people in the world were actually miserable. And all she had to do was find a job in America. Admittedly, in a tough economy. And pay her bills, extensive, and the money that she owed on rent, which was due. And maybe someday she’d achieve some mental rest, love, happiness, peace, though probably she’d need to go someplace else for all that to happen. Who lived in New York anymore, besides finance types? French people? Maybe she could find a job in Austin, like Sandra, or Nashville. Someplace kids her age still could afford to have fun.

  * * *

  The previous winter, early in her existence as an aspiring creative artist, on a gray, drizzly afternoon in the elite shopping mall that was Greenwich Village—long before she’d learned to scrimp, to live for a week off a pot of black beans; before she became obliged to feel singled out and ashamed anytime she saw an ad on the subway for debt relief—she fell in love with a leather jacket.

  It had never happened so fast before, falling in love. With a jacket festooned with little patches and hand-razored abrasions. The kind of jacket that Solange would buy for a friend on a whim. Seriously, the jacket was amazing, and why shouldn’t she have something nice, just once?

  At the time she was still employed, still had only a three-figure balance on the MasterCard. But she didn’t know a future yet where she woke each day with a mind full of jungle sounds. Instead, this iteration of Leela could stand before a luxury-goods store and invest in a piece of fashion’s distressed shoulders way too much meaning associated with her future, so that it became not only clothing but a container, storage for anything desirable that other people possessed, that she was forced by a lack of rich-person good fortune to go without.

  Two hours later, she’d ridden the subway home with a hardcover book in front of her face. The A.P.C. bag, tucked between her legs, was concealed inside a larger bag she’d deliberately obtained from Duane Reade to conceal her guilt. And Long Island City in the rain was even grimmer than usual, crustily more familiar, more depressing than even Dorchester. She jogged home from the subway, past her car, her mother’s old wagon, a salted-out Subaru that still smelled of her mother’s perfume—her self-sacrificing mother who’d probably never bought herself anything nice in her whole life. She hated herself. Eight hundred eighty-nine dollars. Plus tax. Could it be considered an investment? It was ludicrous. Someone should shoot her in the face.

  But after a week, she still couldn’t bring herself to return it, either. Lying there like a puppy in the rain.

  It would be several more years, a decade plus, before Leela would have the mental remove to put such mixed-up feelings into a proper sequence of words, but what she felt in that moment was that to return the jacket would be the equivalent of giving up on her dreams.

  Nearly every day since, she’d worn the jacket as penance. But it still took her time to learn her lesson. It sent her through a gateway, down a tapered path that lasted about eight months when it became acceptable in her life to put other things on the credit card and not think about them too hard. Meals out. A snowflake tattoo. A destination wedding for a girl she’d barely known in school.

  Of course, she’d made money at the time and expected to make more, but that logic was more heady than sound, and she’d accepted it to her present regret and flaming guilt. Four figures of white-hot guilt on top of her student loans.

  On the day that Randall informed her that she was laid off from the Voice, events spun out
of control rapidly. In Starbucks, after thirty minutes, there wasn’t a reply to her note. Then Sandra popped up to chat, and Leela nearly burned her fingertips typing, she told her things she’d told no one yet—that she was in debt, she could barely pay her rent, she couldn’t ask her parents for anything more. She was doomed. Sandra consoled her. She suggested, offhand, if it really came to all that, couldn’t she always move back to New Hampshire? Leela sighed a death rattle, but Sandra typed blithely, about how her parents had bought a house recently in Madbury, not far from where they grew up in Claymore, to rent out to college students, and it would be empty for the summer, so maybe Leela could live there for a bit, if all else failed? While she got back on her feet? But of course it would never come to that. But she could put the idea in her back pocket? It was just shelter, rent-free. If only to stave off feelings of imminent disaster? And so on.

  That evening, eleven o’clock, her roommates in Queens staged an intervention—for their own good. She’d felt obliged to tell them she lost her job, and people proffered hugs, even beers from their name-tagged shelves, but then Carlo, head of household, gathered everyone in the kitchen, under the strings of peppers they’d dried together, where he pronounced the news firmly: she would go. Carlo pointed out that she still owed them the previous month’s rent—because there’d been an unanticipated need for car maintenance, on a vehicle that multiple roommates had enjoyed, she could’ve mentioned—and she’d soon owe them the current rent, and he wouldn’t be budged. The point was, she’d pay what she owed, then she would leave.

  The looks around the room, from kids with whom she’d watched the entire West Wing, made pizzas from scratch, and discussed dreams, pretty much said the same thing.

  By the next afternoon, she was gone.

  To Madbury, only half an hour from where she was born, where she’d squat in an old friend’s family’s unfurnished cabin, rent-free. It was beyond humiliating. Had “live free or die” ever been so literal? The morning she left New York it was fittingly muggy. She’d wrestled her futon into an open dumpster. The rest of her possessions fit in her car. Her life in a car! It was spine-tingling, sickeningly, to feel so reduced. But why not take a couple months up north to rethink her plans? When summer weather in New York was so awful anyway? She still had her 917 prefix. Between her security deposit and her prepaid last month, her roommates were covered. Plus she had severance due from the Voice that would cover her expenses for two months, if she could live off beef jerky. And she’d pick up a waitressing job. She didn’t have to tell her parents she was back in New Hampshire. In fact, it was probably more responsible not to trouble them. So what if she told no one she’d left New York? She was “summering” in New England. Who’d miss her for a couple months, anyway? People would just think she was busy.

  And possibly Sandra was a little freaked out when she called to take her up on her offer—but of course her offer still stood. And she loved Sandra. What a great friend. Life was good.

  But it’s really not, not in Madbury, when she wakes up in the empty living room, in the empty house. Birds squeal outside. She urgently checks her email from the darkness of her sleeping bag: no new messages. She turns on her side and stares at the wall. And if she could see through it, the twenty or so miles from that room to Claymore, she’d see kids she grew up with, old haunts where they hung out, everything she once thought she’d left behind for good.

  It’s the worst.

  Except she does have a shard of hope. One glistening shard.

  Leela ducks back inside her sleeping bag and dares to dream.

  CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE

  The hallway door opens with its sucking noise, and Nick’s blood runs cold. It’s been almost a week since the crash. They’ve hauled him back to New Hampshire, Claymore, the county detention center, a locked floor above the courthouse on the old town square. He’s got a steel toilet, a blue plastic mattress, a tiny dresser with a single drawer. Not even a Bible. And all night long, his blood beats in his ears. He walks in circles, no matter how tired he is. The truth is he’s afraid to go to sleep. His brain is full of memories, images, poison gas, the kind that spoils every new thought.

  Nobody else is in custody. He’s got the floor all to himself. The only other person around is a guard who sits in a room, plays on his phone, some kid his age he should probably know from school.

  The sheriff enters the corridor softly despite his boots. He peels an orange. He wears his large hat indoors.

  “Mr. Toussaint.”

  “What do you want?”

  The sheriff doesn’t answer.

  “Leave me alone.”

  He stands and moves to the corner.

  “Is this being recorded? I can see the cameras.”

  The sheriff chews on a piece of fruit.

  “I swear,” Nick says, “if you go anywhere near her.”

  “You don’t have to yell,” the sheriff says. “I turned off the cameras.”

  * * *

  After the encounter at the tavern, Emily rushed over to the courthouse, prepared to run up and bang on the doors and demand to see Nick, but somehow Father came down the stairs at the moment she parked, closed distance quickly before she could get around him, and said forcefully that, first of all, Emily would not visit the boy, and under no circumstances would she attempt to see him or contact him in any manner. Two, no more piano lessons with the kid’s mom. Three, she would cease, going forward, all recent disobedient behavior, and further would quit helling around behind his back. And would rejoin the cross-country team. And would know, no matter what, from that point on, her father planned to watch her every minute, every second.

  She’d been mute in response, a hunk of stone.

  “He’s a murderer,” Father said. “You can read it. I’ve got it right here.”

  At home afterward, she locks herself in the downstairs bathroom. She remembers Nick beside her in bed the previous week. She rinses her face and dries it on the shower curtain. For dinner, she warms a frozen casserole and puts a basket of rolls on the dining table, next to the dish of ranch dressing that Father likes. She won’t eat herself, she stopped eating in front of him more than two years ago. Like any other night, she asks at the beginning of the meal to be excused.

  Father refuses, though he doesn’t say anything. While he eats, he reads aloud from a catalog that came in the mail. Once he’s done, he fixes a glass of syrup milk.

  Emily stands abruptly and shoves in her chair.

  “What happens to Nick?”

  She feels sick.

  “Sit down. Don’t be dramatic.”

  “He didn’t do it. It’s my fault.”

  “Emily.”

  “He didn’t do anything.”

  “What did I just say?” he says softly.

  “I love him,” she shouts. The strands in Father’s neck bulge. He doesn’t look her in the eye. She stands and waits for something to happen, hopes for time to run past them, but it barely passes at all and she feels primal, she can’t be stopped, she’s on the verge of doing something awful.

  Father says even more quietly, “Emily, sit.”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you have some dessert?” He picks up his glass and goes on in a drowsy tone, as if he hasn’t explained it a hundred times before. “It’s like a milk shake, but without the ice cream. Just real maple syrup mixed with a little milk. It’s what my father used to drink after dinner. It’s really delicious.”

  She runs from the room.

  * * *

  On Martin Krug’s last day as a police officer, a lawyer shows up. They sit in his office. The guy launches into a speech, a five-minute motorcade of thoughtfulness. “So it’s not a demand,” the lawyer says, with a slightly repulsive humility, “it’s a good suggestion,” “a path for best outcomes,” something “for uncharted ground.” “Like a bridge,” the man adds while he stares at his phone and taps out a message. “If that makes sense.”

  The room’s hot. The ceili
ng fan makes it hotter. Martin would have continued to say nothing but the idiot seems unstoppable, all his reckless metaphors.

  And he’s about to interrupt when his computer dings: a reminder to send his daughter her monthly check.

  The lawyer’s voice intrudes, says that Martin should think of this moment as free therapy, “or more like a business relationship if that’s easier. Some husbands find that easier.”

  “My wife wants a divorce,” he pronounces.

  “I didn’t say that. You did not hear me say that.”

  “Please give me some credit.”

  The words come out weightless, no impact. The lawyer goes back to chattering, to lull his guard. Martin knows the type. Dislikes the type. And yet he senses, underneath all of the bullshit, who he is in this conversation. The cuckold. The pitiful one.

  “I want to see her,” Martin says.

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Of course it is.”

  The lawyer coughs. “Chief.”

  “I want to see my wife.”

  The lawyer sits upright and puts away his phone. “From this moment forward, everything goes through me. At her request. Lillian needs some space. She asks you to honor that need.”