“I don’t buy it,” Martin says. He adjusts his position, but his back hurts no matter which way he sits.
“Understand me, Mr. Krug.” The lawyer purses his lips, as if prevented from smiling by his own good sense. “She doesn’t want to see you. That’s a fact.”
* * *
Middle of the night, almost three o’clock, madness hits her like a collapsing wall and Emily gets out of bed and goes into the closet to find the old shoe box, but the box is gone. She flinches. She digs, like a dog in a hole. She should have kept it safe, she should have put it somewhere for an emergency. She’s furious with herself.
But after only a minute it’s found again, fallen behind a jacket, and inside is the old baggie, two caps. She swallows both and opens the window to the dry night air.
The mushrooms envelop her in five minutes.
And in the darkest dark she sees but doesn’t touch the old feelings, while the cracked chime of the living room clock rings three.
* * *
In the early Saturday dark, a bad dream wrenches Martin awake. He had been seduced by the woman from the car accident, except it was Lillian’s face again, mapped to the dead woman’s skull, missing lip included.
The clock reads four. In less than twenty-four hours the department will throw him a retirement party. Going by previous nights out, everyone will get drunk, sing his praises, wake up the next morning, and hop in a radio car and resume routine. Everyone except him.
He showers and shaves. The chin is deeply notched, tricky to get right. He hears himself breathing more loudly than normal. He goes to the kitchen. In the blue glow of the oven clock, the Urge appears. The Urge, the Thirst, Seductress of a Thousand Faces. He realizes he hasn’t been to a meeting in two days. He eats half a tube of cookie dough with fork and knife.
And for some reason the first name that comes to mind, if he were to call someone up to chat, a name that floats up out of the ether in his brain, is Walter Dennis. A man he hardly knows.
They’d met at a dinner, a banquet in Atlantic City, about a month earlier. A glass-walled ballroom filled with police, politicians, the hired hands who bind them. He hadn’t planned to attend. He’d been on his way home from his Tuesday meeting. The speaker had focused on step four: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. The speech was mind-numbingly dull. But it had made him consider that being around people, the physical act of it, to put himself out there, talk to people in a social setting—which was a lot harder than in a police setting, and not at all his preferred method of existing in the world, especially without the help of a double scotch—was something he’d really only learned how to do in his sobriety.
So maybe it was something he should practice.
So he went to the event.
The room had been full of small talk, a thousand gold balloons. By the time he found his seat, he’d already decided that to spend time around strangers was actually a pretty stupid idea, and what he really needed was his bed, some ice cream, the new Doris Goodwin. The dinner was sushi rolls slathered with mayonnaise. Ten minutes in, he was about to get his car, the guy next to him nudged his elbow. “What’s the matter, you don’t like food poisoning?”
Walter Dennis, Bergen County prosecutor. Maybe a couple years older than him. Buzzed gray hair, silver mustache. Nice blue suit, gray tie with a pattern of tiny flowers. In the front of the room, a short guy started to make a noisy speech, a rap he’d written for the occasion, and Walter suggested they grab a drink at the bar. He said fine, but he didn’t drink. The guy winked. “I kind of figured that out.”
They both ordered herbal tea. Learned they were in the program, in suits of similar cuts. They traded war stories, crazy cases. Twenty minutes in, no time had passed. He remembered that he smiled uncomfortably. What was happening? He hadn’t made a new friend in at least a decade. Then again he hadn’t needed to, he’d had two great friends, his racquetball partners. In the last year, both were gone. Jonah, his first sponsor. Chris, his cardiologist. Somehow he told Walter all about it. How Jonah had gotten him sober with his sarcasm, his street smarts. He’d worked for the Federal Highway Administration and hated ninety-nine percent of the world. And Chris had put a stent in his chest. Quiet guy, do-gooder, who took other people’s pains to heart, literally. Why had he decided to tell all of this to a stranger? But it felt good, to describe his friends. Both cut down by cancer in the spring. He wore the same suit to both funerals, he didn’t realize it until later.
Walter laughed to cut the silence. “See, I prefer squash. Over racquetball.”
“Squash is too aggressive,” Martin said.
“And that’s why I love it.”
There were murmurs of a new speaker, the grand finale.
“I lost somebody,” Walter said confidentially. “Two years ago last week. My partner, Mark.”
“Oh you mean,” Martin said, because he’d thought of work, the guy you rode around with in a car, “he was your husband.”
“That was a little late for us.”
“I’m sorry for your loss. How did he die?”
“Also cancer. Lung cancer. Never smoked. I got him for twenty-one years.”
“What was his name?”
“Mark. Mark Calmes. Best last name a man could get. He was the sweetest guy. First time we met, he was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.”
His friend Chris also had been gay, but rarely partnered, perpetually single, he complained about his loneliness.
“Martin, it’s okay to mourn your friends.”
“I know,” he’d said, and grinned tightly, ready to break it off, then felt his tongue go cold. A number of things rushed up his throat. Now he was going to cry? Walter rubbed his shoulder. He got himself under control. Walter said, “Tell me some more about them.”
Two minutes later, the applause inside in the other room had built to a crescendo. Walter clenched his arm. “That’s my cue.” Martin watched him walk away, hand-clasp his way to the podium. The speech was sincere, self-deprecating, people were laughing, Martin was laughing.
In his wife’s kitchen of Italian affectation, against the quiet creak of an empty house, he makes a pot of coffee in the dark and remembers that Walter Dennis’s business card is in his wallet. And out of thin air he thinks about the kid in New Hampshire, Nick Toussaint. A boy he can’t believe is guilty. Who any day now would be arraigned. The defense would start its own investigation. Maybe Walter Dennis had some advice he could pass along, the star attorney.
* * *
Nick scrapes his fingernails against a concrete patch. He grinds his knuckles where the overhead lights create octagonal shapes on the ground. The night’s orange, his life’s finished, his body cramps with knowledge and fear.
Emily is all he thinks about. She must know by now what happened. She must despise him, she’ll never talk to him again.
A year and a half earlier, they met by accident. His plan that night had been to get drunk with Typically, his best friend. They’d been friends since the sixth grade. His full name was Jacob Guthrie Beliveau-Boggs, but only his girlfriend still called him Jacob. By eleventh grade, he’d referred to himself in the third person too many times while drunk, when so many sentences would start, “Typically Jacob doesn’t vomit,” or, “Typically Jacob doesn’t break into cars.”
After high school, they drank even more. Nick wasn’t always up for all the alcohol, and was scared to do coke, but he liked the fact that someone had an even darker temperament than him. Typically worked as a line cook at the Angry Goat, a bar-grill in Claymore. The night Nick met Emily, he’d gone over to the Goat after work. The bartenders all knew him, served him. The guy on duty had said the kitchen was slammed, two separate birthday parties; Typically wouldn’t be done for at least an hour. Nick ordered a beer and said he’d wait.
Twenty minutes later, a girl appeared, asked for a pair of Long Island Iced Teas. She didn’t wait to get ID’d, she slid a license across the bar. From where Nick sat it w
as obviously a fake. Was she even eighteen? Who orders Long Island Iced Teas except high school chicks? She was interesting to look at, though. Black hair with dyed white streaks. A great body, a nine for Claymore. The face probably knocked her down to a six, it was so long, and with a red-purple birthmark along the jaw. Big nose, too. Then again, he wasn’t more than a six himself, given his height and the limp.
“Who’s drinking the second one?” the bartender said, flipped back the ID.
“They’re for me,” the girl said, flirting. “Want me to prove it?”
The bartender laughed. Nick laughed. They watched her slink back to a booth. A girl probably used to turning defense into offense.
But then before he turned away, her exact opposite stepped out of the booth. She wore a wrinkled blue dress that stopped at the knee, with jeans underneath. Tallish. Long brown hair parted in the center, hippie-style. Broad shoulders, small eyes, a face that was strong-boned. Pretty cute, overall, in a crunchy kind of way. She crossed the dining room, she smiled at something, caught herself in a moment of self-consciousness and tried to hide it. Then she saw Nick and smiled again. He smiled back. She held eye contact. He broke away. She turned the corner toward the restrooms, she still had a smile on her face.
What the hell?
For what felt like half an hour he played a game on his phone, wondering where the girl had gone. Then suddenly both girls exited. When did she come back from the bathroom? He hurried after them. The night was prickly cold. Wood smoke, dried leaves, a recent rain. The girl with the skunk hair checked her phone by the bumper of a beat-up Toyota 4Runner. The streetlights made the white streaks in her hair shine blue.
The girl who’d smiled at him was in shotgun.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Who are you?” said the skunk.
“Nick.”
“What’s your last name?”
“Toussaint.”
“You just walk up to girls in a parking lot, Nick Toussaint?”
“Are you guys doing something?”
“Do you have a limp?”
He glanced at the other girl.
She saw him. She smiled again!
The skunk said, “Hey, you have any beer? We were thinking about going up to Whitehall.”
“Sure.” He made himself look at her and not the other one. He couldn’t look at the other one or else he’d smile like an idiot. “What do you want?”
“Whatever works.”
Weekend nights, it was Claymore tradition that Whitehall quarry would be mobbed, at least in the summer. Swimming, drinking, getting high. But this was mid-October. Snow was coming. Thirty minutes later, he parked at the trailhead. The mountain air was silent, which meant the quarry was dead. Nick trudged the half mile up the trail. Fitful darkness, a half-moon’s light. The cold imposed a sense of … fear? Something was off, but he couldn’t place it. Were the chicks pranking him? How old were they anyway? Something had to be wrong. Why had that one girl smiled at him? When he got to the opening, he saw the girls on the Penthouse, the highest outcropping, a granite ledge. He headed up. Twenty feet below, the water was black and flat like a trampoline. He prayed they wouldn’t want to swim. His left leg was thatched with scars, he hated to wear shorts. But some girls were like that, they tested you.
“Beer guy.”
“It’s Nick.”
“Nick Toussaint, hurry up.”
When he reached them, he was out of breath. He laughed uneasily. The girls had an air of belonging there.
“You guys want a fire?” he asked.
“I’ll do it,” the smiling girl said. Then she was gone before he could protest. Had she smiled again? It seemed important to know, but it was too dark. He pressed his left hand hard on the back of his neck. Totally confused. Totally out of his comfort zone.
The skunk asked for a beer. He opened three of them off his teeth. Typically had taught him how. The skunk was unimpressed.
In the moonlight her face looked like an upside-down egg.
“So what’s up with your leg?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Liar.”
They clinked bottles. He felt at ease around her—probably because of the birthmark. Normally he didn’t like to tell the story, but what else did he have? A minute later, he was still in the beginning when the other girl returned with kindling, she scampered down the rocks.
“Here, let me,” he said, starting to get up.
“It’s fine,” she said, and crouched by the fire pit. She looked up at him. “I want to listen.”
So, three years earlier, he was sixteen. Late January. They’d gotten two feet of snow in two days. Very early morning, Saturday, ice-cold, his dad woke him up at seven in the morning with his bullshit reveille—Drop your cock and grab your socks—and told him to warm up the truck and load the sled. They were going out to collect a debt near Manock Lake, from some guy who lived in a bunkhouse. His dad drove, sipped schnapps from a bottle he kept in the glove compartment. Nick guessed he hadn’t slept, had stayed up drinking again. Thirty minutes later, they were on the snowmobile together. They flew up a trail with woods on either side, side-by-side doubling, churning forward like two guys on the prow of a fast ship.
On a flat straightaway, his dad had passed him the bottle. Nick looked back, stared down the disappearing trail, the clouds of snow. He lifted the bottle to his lips.
A second later they’d launched into the air. A tree had fallen across the trail at a corner. His dad must not have seen it, or reacted too late.
“Holy crap,” the skunk said.
“That’s horrible,” the other girl said, looked at him across the fire she’d built.
“Yeah, it was bad,” he said, encouraged to play it up a little. Not that the story needed it. “I woke up twenty minutes later. It smelled like gas. My whole body was numb. I was trapped, I was pinned under the sled. Honestly I don’t remember much, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. I kept passing out.”
His dad ran a mile through the woods to find help. The pain came and went like fire, like he was under a sheet of flame. He passed in and out of consciousness. They said later his dad returned in the truck of the man they’d gone to see. They pulled the sled off him with a winch, hurried him to the emergency room. In the end, he lost two toes. Left knee shattered, eleven pieces, a transverse fracture of the left tibia, plus a displaced transverse fracture of the left fibula. Basically the snowmobile had pulverized his leg. Multiple second-degree burns on both legs. All things said and done, there would be several operations, full immobilization for three months, near-full immobilization for six months, and four months partial after that.
“You didn’t go back to school?”
“I had a tutor. I got my GED.”
“Can I see your toes?” the skunk said.
“What about your dad?” said the other.
“Haven’t seen him,” he answered, surprised to be asked. Then again most people would be too polite to ask, right? What did that say about her? “Not since the hospital. He basically walked out on me and my mom.”
“I’m Alex,” said the skunk a moment later. “This is Emily.”
A phone beeped. The skunk walked off into the dark. The fire crackled.
“I hate my dad, too,” Emily said.
He was about to say he didn’t hate his dad, but of course he did. “Why?”
She looked him in the eyes, unblinking.
“Can I hold your hand?” she said.
He almost laughed, but she was serious. She sat next to him and they held hands. The fire popped. The sky filled with clouds. The evening ended quickly after that, something to do with the phone call and a chance of rain. They all walked down the trail. He tried to keep the conversation going, he talked about a movie he’d seen on TV. Had the girl slowed down to compensate for his leg? He didn’t want her pity. The last two minutes, they didn’t talk at all.
The hippie girl, Emily, got in the truck. The skunk told h
im to drive home safe.
“Sure,” said Nick. He felt both sick and happy, completely confused. “You guys, too.” Shouldn’t he ask to see them again? He didn’t even know the Emily girl’s last name. She stared out the windshield, she didn’t notice him. It was like she’d forgotten about him entirely.
At home he’d sat in the driveway for twenty minutes. A rainstorm pounded the windshield. He turned on the radio. A lot of nights he did that, if only to avoid his mother. But this was different, on account of the girl. Who’d managed to write him off within fifteen minutes.
What had he done wrong? Something stupid, no doubt.
That night, by the time Nick fell asleep in his bed, the only thing he’d identified that he felt sure about, aside from his own idiocy, was a feeling in his gut that he needed to see the girl again as soon as possible.
A feeling that’s a thousand times stronger now that he’s in jail.
* * *
Suzanne Toussaint is long-bodied and thin-skinned and always cold. She takes on the temperature of her surroundings like a lizard. Saturday morning, six o’clock, she wakes up and drinks a shot of vodka, her father’s shot. He always kept a little glass on the nightstand in case he couldn’t sleep, a trick he learned from W. H. Auden, he said. He used to quote Auden at parties, he’d quote him when he tucked her in at night. Saying alas to less and less. There’s even still a ring in the varnish.
Suzanne Toussaint is nearly fifty and feels seventy. She has a business she resents—and a case of hypochondria caused by the internet—and a certain amount of physical beauty that men used to find arresting, which seems to have vanished—and a longstanding thing for Lou Reed—and a house she inherited from her parents that is, by this point, three times liened against at the bank—and a surname that once meant something in Claymore, was public property in a way, but not anymore.
At all times she has a sense of all the lives she hasn’t lived, all her screw-ups and mistakes, an awareness she resuscitates when it’s dormant with self-absorption, and the overidentification with doomed heroines in shows on HBO.
She has a king-sized mattress that she once shared with a husband who looks more and more, in the rearview mirror, like a long-term houseguest.
The Last Kid Left Page 4
