The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  She says, “So my work is less significant for being personal.”

  “It’s unfair, totally. Believe me, your pieces are way more fun.”

  “You did not just say that.”

  “What I mean is that it’s less likely, okay,” Bryan says quickly over the noise of guitar rock, though now with exhaustion, more than a little male impatience, to have to explain something so basic, “it’s less probable to be the kind of stuff that Lian or Remnick, fair or unfair, will be predisposed, you know, to identify as high-end shit.

  “They’ll think you’re a blogger,” he adds.

  “And he’s the ‘writer.’”

  “Exactly.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “He tutored kids with Dave in San Francisco. That’s really good optics right now. I mean, they want the best.”

  “But so,” Leela says, dazed, “‘the best’ could still be me, potentially.”

  “Absolutely. Potentially.” Bryan signals the bartender for the check. He says loudly, “Dude, what do I know? They like go-getters. What if you found a story out there and reported it out? Didn’t you do that piece a year ago that blew up?”

  It was true. She’d even been on CNN.

  “And that was what, three thousand words? Call up some people, knock it out, then stick it in your pocket. What’s the worst that happens? You really want to impress Lian, go find something new. It doesn’t need to run anywhere. Better yet, it doesn’t, then maybe she wants it. Seriously, you’ve got time. I mean, how amazing would that shit be?”

  He smiles generously, signing the bill on the bar. The bar itself is a long, crooked elbow of light, it up-lights everyone, even Bryan, and now she only feels guilty. She wishes she were a better candidate for the job.

  “I mean, imagine you show up at Lian’s door,” he says, “hand over a story during the interview, and you’re like, ‘Hire me and you also get this.’ Suddenly dude bro is dead in the water, right?”

  “Absolutely,” she says. And does actually contemplate the idea.

  “Trust me, the last thing we need is another white boy who loves Gaddis.” He stands, his eyes fall to her hand. “Wait, did you get a drink?”

  “I’m fine,” she says, in fact dying for alcohol. “I’ve got this thing.”

  “Was that my bad?”

  “It’s no problem.”

  “Shit, it was.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “I’m so wiped. They’ve put me on this special issue, I haven’t slept in a week.”

  “Bryan, really, thank you.”

  “Anyway, this place sucked.”

  “It was great.”

  The air outside glows liquidly. There’s no name above the bar, just a hanging sign, a metal weasel looking roughly chewed. Bryan stops on the corner and lights a cigarette. Leela steels herself against desire for nicotine, fixates instead on the twilight street vivacity, the couples, the shop curtains, the facades. There’s an old man in a diner having dinner in the window, alone with his radiant tablet. Normally he would make her sad, but she’s got something new, in the New York night: a sense of hope.

  And in about a minute, after Bryan leaves, she’ll need to find two gallons of bodega coffee to get her back to New Hampshire.

  “You know this is my dream,” she says quietly.

  “I know. You told me.”

  She frowns and laughs. “I didn’t.”

  “At that party. You even had the tote bag. You’re, like, the core fan.”

  He blows a plume of smoke over his shoulder.

  “I need to say something,” he says.

  Oh, shit.

  “About that night.”

  “What night?”

  “The party. What I said.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Please,” she implores, “it’s fine.”

  He shakes his head. “I was wasted. Which is not an excuse. But I want to say I’m sorry. For coming on to you like I did. It wasn’t consensual at all.”

  “Please don’t apologize,” she says sharply.

  He doesn’t hear her. “The other day, I got your note, I was so psyched. I’d been thinking about this moment for a while.”

  A pair of women walk by, walking a dachshund.

  Leela tries desperately to swap souls with the dachshund.

  “Anyway, I’ve got a thing for brown chicks, fine, at least I know my hang-ups. Just, seriously, congratulations. Lian’s going to love you. I’m happy I can be the messenger.”

  “My messenger, yes. Thank you.”

  But she means it, she does. Enough so that when Bryan hugs her with feeling, she can will herself to mirror his emotional state, if only to leave a good impression. It’s something she once read, attributed to Maya Angelou, though maybe it was a greeting card: That people inevitably will forget what you say, what you do, but they’ll always remember how you made them feel.

  “Just think, we might work together again,” he whispers in her ear. “And not for Phish fans.”

  * * *

  Thursday, Martin interviews the Ashburns’ daughter at home. They talk first on the phone, she says she’s happy to meet. Perhaps too happy? An old bell rings in his mind, a piece of advice from his first captain: Beware the agreeable, for they will fuck you over twice.

  The address is in the small town of Leduc, twenty minutes northwest of Claymore. He drives past subdivisions, signs for the shore, into the woods for seven miles and eventually over a bridge laced with green oxidation.

  Downtown Leduc is sad, deadbeat, a tiny mill town with no mill. A tattoo parlor’s front window is papered with skulls and crossbones. The daughter’s condo is two blocks adjacent to the main street, in a pair of squat, yellow, three-story condos that look out of place, with a FOR SALE sign in the yard.

  A dog barks when he knocks. Footsteps. A moment later a woman’s in the doorframe, a Dalmatian between her legs. Moira Ashburn, with a long stare. High cheekbones as a feature of a too-slender frame. Caucasian, brown ponytail, glazed eyes. Corduroy pants, tight tank top. Confidently poised in the doorway, but nervous, the way her eyes don’t stay still.

  “I’m Martin,” he says. “We spoke on the phone.”

  “Come in,” she says tersely, “we’re having juice.”

  She holds an e-cigarette so loosely, it’s as if she’s performing a magic trick. Behind him he hears a sound rising audibly, a whine. He looks up as a drone launches into the sky.

  “Are you selling?” he says, referring to the sign.

  “That’s the neighbors. That’s their drone.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he says, following her back into the house. The dog barks happily. He wonders if the “we” she mentioned meant the dog.

  In the hallway a red mountain bike is perched against a wall, spattered with mud. Through the hall is a kitchen covered in green vegetables. Another woman, maybe five feet tall, washes her hands in the sink. With legs that bulge in cycling shorts, mud on her calves and socks, a long scar on her right leg. Black hair, pixie haircut, fine features. Sports bra in pink fluorescent, no other top.

  “This is Jennifer,” Moira says.

  “I’m the girlfriend,” she says, extending her hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  The daughter sits on the couch. The girlfriend sits at the other end.

  He takes a chair. He asks, “So what do you do, Jennifer?”

  “I’m in retail. In Claymore. At the New Balance store.”

  “Moira, you work in Claymore, is that right?” He looks around the room to ease up on the eye contact. “But live out here.”

  “Is that a question?”

  “How tall are you?” asks the girlfriend.

  He says to the daughter, “It must get aggravating, having to commute all that way.”

  “Otherwise I’d have to live in Claymore.”

  “People do. There must be something nice about it.”

&nbs
p; The girlfriend juts forward at an angle, one hand on the back of the couch, like a painter stretching away from her ladder. “So if you’re a police officer, how come you’re not in uniform?”

  “I used to be,” Martin says. “I retired recently. It’s a long story.”

  Moira Ashburn draws in smoke and stares.

  “So, no longer,” says the girlfriend.

  “No longer.”

  “Now you’re a lawyer or something.”

  She takes Moira’s hand and starts to massage it.

  Moira takes her hand back, tucks it under her leg.

  “I’m a consultant,” he says briskly, to indicate that he’s not really watching, also to show that he’s irritated by the girlfriend’s presence. “A consultant in police matters. Now, Ms. Ashburn—”

  The daughter sneezes, jumps up to blow her nose.

  “Ms. Ashburn, I am sorry to have to do this,” he says, and follows her with his voice. “It’s probably best if we get straight to it, then I won’t take up any more of your time.”

  “Fine.”

  “Where were you on the night your parents were killed?”

  “Hanging out. Watching TV.” She sits down again. “I was probably stoned.”

  “Ms. Ashburn, can you—”

  “It’s Moira,” she says flatly.

  He notices she’s got a slight spasm in her leg. The girlfriend picks up on something, jumps into the gulf: “Let’s start over.” She takes her girlfriend’s hand again, no resistance. “We were watching TV. Both of us. You can check the Netflix queue. We went to bed after, that’s it.” She pauses. “We heard your client confessed.”

  “Do you guys know him? Seen him around?”

  “Who?” says Moira.

  “Nick Toussaint Jr.”

  “Why would I know him?”

  “I don’t know. Small town.”

  “You’re asking if I’m friends with the kid who killed my parents?”

  “I’m asking—”

  “She just said,” Moira says, “he confessed.”

  He holds back. He can tell she feels trapped. After a moment he says softly, “There are different types of confessions.”

  The girlfriend laughs. “Now you sound like a lawyer.”

  “Ms. Ashburn, do you or do you not know Mr. Toussaint in any way?”

  “Jesus. No.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry.” He takes a deep breath deliberately. “I understand this is a difficult time. I’ve been through it before. Not from your perspective. But I’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve lost family. I am truly sorry for your loss. And I will be out of your hair as soon as possible, but the more you tell me, the better it is for everyone. Including you.”

  She sneers. “If you say so.”

  “All I want to do today,” he continues wearily, “is review what you told the police. People you met, things people said. For example, what you were doing that day, can you remind me?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember.”

  Jennifer coughs. She fixes the waistband of her shorts and taps her fingers on the edge of the couch. Something in her face changes. Not quite a correction in atmosphere, but almost.

  She says, “Moira had a certification exam.”

  “You don’t have to tell him that.”

  “We were here, at the house, like she said,” the girlfriend continues. “Moira did well on her test. We were celebrating.”

  “You don’t have to tell him that!”

  “Ms. Ashburn,” he says, “you’re currently employed as a vet tech?”

  “You obviously know that.”

  “Ms. Ashburn.”

  “It’s Moira.”

  “She’s getting her real estate license,” Jennifer says calmly. “That’s what the exam was about. She’s looking to change jobs.”

  “There’s no money in medicine, that’s what my dad always said.”

  Then the daughter stiffens unconsciously, stares out the window again, releases a soft cry. It catches them all by surprise.

  “Your parents,” Martin says, “seemed to have been doing well financially.”

  “They inherited,” Jennifer explains. “Both of them.”

  “Which suggests that Moira now stands to inherit, is that correct?”

  Both women stare at him. A dumb move. He tries to recover. “How close were you to your parents?” But he screwed up, and the daughter knows it. She stands up and goes into the tiny kitchen, trailing vapor. She begins to put away dishes.

  Jennifer says quietly, beneath the noise, “Is our relationship a problem for you?”

  “Was it a problem for the Ashburns?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “I don’t see what your relationship has to do with any of this.”

  “That wasn’t the question.”

  “No,” he says grimly, “it’s not a problem.”

  She smiles, adds quietly, “Then, yeah, it was a problem for them.”

  “How much of a problem?”

  The daughter shouts from the kitchen, “Not enough to fucking kill them.” She slaps a plate into the dish drainer and hurries down the hall. The dog runs at her heels. The air trembles.

  For a moment, he has no idea what to say next. There’s always a point when an interview starts to drift away, crumble at the edges into the sea. The girlfriend gets up. Her cycling shoes make loud clicking sounds on the floor. The room gets smaller the more she moves. She turns and comes back, stands in front of him, uncertain, as if weighing some type of decision in her mind.

  He notices the scar again on her leg.

  “That scar looks bad,” he says.

  “You should see the other guy.”

  “You’re protective of her.”

  “I love her. I love her a lot.”

  “How long have you known each other?”

  “Almost a year.”

  “How close would you say they were as a family?”

  She laughs darkly. “Yeah, not close.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re family. Don’t you have a family?”

  “This is my job,” he says. He stands. “Like it or not, my job is to ask a bunch of stupid questions and see what my stupid brain comes up with. The thing we do know, that kid in there is innocent. Somebody else is walking around free.”

  “Well, that’s not my job,” Jennifer says. “My job is to take care of my girlfriend.”

  She moves to fold laundry from a pile. He wonders where to go next, if he screwed this one up. Something’s off. The girlfriend’s waiting. What is it? For the other shoe to fall? There’s a nervousness in the air. Something’s wrong, and he missed it, he’s missing it. He’s been played in some way.

  “I’ll see myself out,” he says.

  “They were assholes, you know that,” the girlfriend says when Martin walks out through the front door.

  A little brown-haired girl in the yard stares up at the sky, with a remote control in her hands.

  “Her dad especially,” Jennifer continues. “Complete asshole. They wanted a princess, you know what I mean? A country-club queen. She should’ve turned out just like all the other rich kids, but instead they got a really wonderful, special daughter. But they didn’t see that for shit. They didn’t see her.”

  He listens partially. Wondering at the same time: What if the girlfriend had something to do with it? If she’s this worked up? Maybe the girlfriend’s got the profile for something like that?

  She doesn’t notice his absent-mindedness. “All her life they had two reactions. They were uninterested, didn’t pay attention, or they judged her and put her down. Total assholes.”

  “They don’t sound nice.”

  “I don’t know anything about your client,” she says. “But Moira’s been through some shit. Now she’s going through even more.”

  “When was the last time she spoke to her parents?”

  “I told you, they didn’t speak,” the girlfrien
d says conclusively, spelling it out. Inviting him to leave with her permission. “I mean, maybe they talked at Christmas.”

  He says, unconsciously, “But they only lived down the road.”

  There’s a scuffle in the street, a crash. The drone is in two pieces. The little girl stares at her toy, then turns around and stomps angrily back inside.

  He thinks: she didn’t even make a sound.

  The girlfriend moves in closer. The top of her head barely reaches his nose.

  She says quietly, “Moira had nothing to do with it.”

  * * *

  By the time he met Emily, Nick had been off girls for a while. They were too much of a hassle. First of all, chicks loved all that online stuff, texting, messaging every second, but it went without saying, it was so stupid. Like all other fakery, social media, religion, reality TV. Anything that involved people crapping from their mouths just to rationalize their bullshit behavior. As if confessing and telling the truth were the same thing.

  Admittedly, during his convalescence, in the rented hospital bed, he’d spent a lot of time online with the curtains closed. Jerked off about six thousand times. Occasionally he begged chicks for sympathy nudes. He’d tried to think about anything except the accident, which meant a lot of time mainlining the web. But school came through the computer, too: he was tutored online one-on-one so he could get his GED. And he did well, actually, if only to please Suzanne, allow him to get back to his self-prescribed cure of vape pen and Call of Duty. Which Suzanne didn’t approve of, but she also filled ashtrays in every room. He just needed her credit card for level upgrades.

  Months later, once he was on crutches—standing was excruciating—he wanted out as fast as possible, even away from the screen. To do something with his days. Dr. Ashburn wanted him to apply to college, but Nick knew Suzanne didn’t have that kind of cash, not after his medical bills. What was college but more bullshit?

  When the last cast was finally off, Suzanne came through in a different way: she got him the job at Tyree’s. Turned out she and Tyree’s little brother had dated in high school, back in the day, so Nick got paid pretty decently to patch flats and do oil changes. He wasn’t even acting a part, he enjoyed the job. He liked making money even more. Tyree sent him on a Honda course, gave him a pay bump. Like he said, cars weren’t going anywhere, they definitely weren’t getting any better.