Rebecca staggered back as a staff member finally reached them. “Mrs. Hendricks, please—”
* * *
His name was Gordon Hendricks, they found out a half hour later in the manager’s office. He was seventy-four and had worked in the UVA maintenance department for thirty-five years.
“A smoker, two previous heart attacks, a coronary waiting to happen,” the manager told them. The screaming woman was his wife, Delilah, who was suffering from early-onset dementia. “She’s flat-out crazy.”
“I’m so sorry,” Rebecca said. “Is she going to be okay?”
“She should be. I hope you know it wasn’t your fault. They loved you. In fact, if that hadn’t happened we’d probably ask you to come back every month.”
“You still can,” Brian said. “Free up some rooms.”
“We take the death of any resident very seriously,” the manager said.
“Too soon?”
The manager didn’t smile. Rebecca didn’t think what Brian had said was very funny either.
* * *
They walked back through the lobby, empty now, the chairs gone. A guy in a blue uniform mopped the floor where Gordon had collapsed.
Outside the parking lot lights glared down.
“Strumming my pain with his fingers,” Brian murmured. “Singing my life with his words…”
Rebecca knew the lyrics. Everyone did. They’d been inescapable for almost a year. Lauryn Hill and the Fugees, a remake of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” She couldn’t believe he was same man who had gone to the trouble to find her a piano to play. “He just died, Brian. He’s still warm.”
“You want to cry about it? Or laugh.”
“Are those my only choices? Jesus, what’s wrong with you.” She stopped midstride, stared at him.
He nodded, then blinked. The humanity seemed to come back to his eyes. “Sorry.”
She followed him silently to the truck. Inside the cab, he put the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it.
“I am sorry. I mean it.”
“How did you learn how to do that?” She needed to talk about something besides his ghoulishness.
“CPR, you mean? My dad was a medic—”
“Really?”
“Yeah, in the army, served in Vietnam. He taught me the basics when I was like twelve. Practically the only good thing he ever did for me. When I was eighteen I got my EMT training. I was thinking about becoming a paramedic, too.”
The longest speech he’d given her in four dates. Maybe he was trying to forget his ghoulishness too. “What’s the difference?”
“As a tech you can’t do much more than CPR, oxygen mask. Paramedics can intubate, use needles.” He looked over at her, tried a smile. “Not that any of it would have done Gordon much good. He was dead before he hit the floor. I would have needed Jesus training, that’s like eight months plus a saint has to recommend you.”
She laughed a little, the tension easing out of her.
“Before the Internet stuff I worked overnights as a tech. I guess, I don’t want to make an excuse, but see enough ODs, car accidents, your skin gets thick.”
He turned the ignition, and they were quiet as he steered the pickup out of the parking lot.
* * *
“So was this the worst date ever?” he said a few minutes later. “Or the best?”
“I’m trying to figure that out too.” She’d married him and divorced him in barely two hours.
“I have to tell you one thing, though. You are a fantastic piano player.”
A flush reddened her cheeks. “Stop.”
“I’m serious. I mean, I don’t know much about it, but you are great.”
At 601 he signaled to turn left, back toward Charlottesville.
“Other way,” she said. “I want a beer somewhere I’m guaranteed not to see anyone from school.”
He swept the steering wheel right and the pickup rumbled north. She could already feel herself forgiving him, deciding that his fearless reaction when Gordon collapsed and his odd coldness afterward were inseparable.
The Virginia fields were dark, but she saw a big black horse silhouetted against the white light of an open barn door. She thought of the Steinway, how he’d found it and brought her to it.
* * *
They spent that night together, and the next, and the next.
Now they were curled up on her couch, and he was explaining the Internet.
“It’s the future. I’m telling you.”
“How is buying books on your computer changing anyone’s life?”
“Instant communication with anyone, anywhere? That doesn’t sound like a big deal?”
“You mean like a telephone?”
They were sitting on her couch, eating chocolate-chip pancakes and scrambled eggs with cheese. Saturday night. They’d said they were going to a movie. Then they’d started fooling around. Leaving the apartment had seemed like too much trouble. He’d said, Let me cook. Breakfast for dinner. His range was limited, but what he did make was perfect. He baked, too: blueberry muffins, warm and crumbly and tangy. He’d worked as a short-order cook for a few months up in Seattle, he said. Cooks never starve I can walk into a diner anywhere and get hired in ten minutes. Those places always need people.
He was so different from the men she met in school. They thought smart was all that mattered, didn’t care if they couldn’t change their oil. Even the ones who could, who knew how to use their hands—the Virginia bros who spent weekends hunting, the Connecticut boys who built their own bookcases—weren’t actually tough. They were hobbyists.
Not Brian. He was a survivor. He’d paid his bills a half dozen ways, from driving cabs to working as a landscaper—a fancy way to say mowing lawns, he’d said. Now he was a computer programmer who made “Web pages” for the Internet.
“Telephone?” he said now. “Tell me you’re joking. Pretty soon you’ll get music and movies and television this way. Right on your computer.”
“It takes two minutes to see the picture.”
“The connections aren’t fast enough yet. But they will be.”
“People aren’t going to watch television on their computers, Bri.”
“Why not?” He sounded genuinely surprised.
“They just aren’t. Computers are for work.”
“You’ll see.”
If he’d been one of her classmates, this certainty would have infuriated her. But they weren’t talking about some case they’d both studied. She couldn’t pretend she knew anything about the Internet. He was looking at a future she had never even tried to imagine.
She already felt how well they meshed. Not that they agreed on everything. He didn’t care much about her friends or her family. Then again he wasn’t close to his own parents. When she’d asked about them he mumbled, My mom’s long gone. My dad and I don’t talk much, he’s such an asshole. She’d tried to press him a little, gently. But he shut down.
Yet. During the day, she found herself wishing she could talk to him after every class. They spent most nights together now, though he never pushed her. If she told him she would be studying late and couldn’t see him he never minded. Do your thing, I’ll be here.
And the sex. She wanted to tell her friends, but then again she didn’t want to jinx it. Like if she talked about it too much she risked losing it.
“Bri?” I love you. But she couldn’t say the words, she’d never said them to any guy. “I love you.”
No. Not so soon, out of nowhere. She probably had scrambled eggs between her teeth, it wasn’t like they’d been together for years.
He leaned over, kissed her, open-mouthed, slow and gentle. He tasted of Tabasco sauce. He laced his fingers through her hair.
“Love you too, Becks.”
His blue eyes shimmered and for the first time in her life she found herself thinking, Nothing else, let the world stop, I don’t mind.
“Never said that to anyone before,” he said.
Outside she heard Charlottesville on a Saturday night, boys yelling, girls hooting, glass breaking. I’ll never have to hit another bar. No more dates. I’ve made my choice. It’s all good.
* * *
They didn’t have to discuss anything more.
She didn’t tell her parents, not right away. But Eve, her mother, must have sniffed out what was happening, even from five states away. Two weeks after I love you, she caught Rebecca in her apartment: “I’m in D.C. for a conference this weekend, I’ll come see you. Brunch.”
“That’s crazy, Mom. It’s like three hundred miles.”
“No it isn’t. And we’ve barely spoken this semester. Whenever I call, you don’t answer or you’re busy—”
“Law school, Mom.”
“Big kiss, see you Sunday.”
* * *
She told Brian. “It makes me nervous.”
“Your mom’s coming. So what? You embarrassed about me?” Brian grinned like the idea was impossible. Then his grin winked off. “Wow, you are.”
“I’m not.” She wasn’t, not exactly. But she wasn’t sure what her parents would make of Brian. They were snobby enough to dislike the fact he hadn’t gone to college. Eve was a documentary filmmaker who taught at Boston University and Pete an English professor at Northeastern and a very minor poet—was there any other kind?
They were decent and loving. But they were also pretentious Massachusetts intellectuals, and predictably hypocritical about money. They’d always lived above their salaries and depended on Eve’s father, Jerome, to make up the difference. Jerome had made a couple million bucks in the seventies inventing the first commercially usable insulin pump. Over the years he’d quote-unquote helped Eve and Pete out, first buying a house for them in Cambridge, then paying for college for Rebecca and her sisters.
Rebecca didn’t want to explain any of this to Brian, not yet. Maybe not ever. Discovering that your parents were fallible was one of the most unpleasant parts of growing up. It had been for her, anyway. Maybe Brian had known all along.
But the impulse to keep her parents away ran deeper than that. She didn’t want to let anyone inside the world she and Brian had created. Not even her family. She didn’t want her mom to ask if Brian wanted kids. You need to make sure you two have the same expectations. Someone like him, from a different background, he might not want what you do.
Different background. Ugh.
“I just want to keep you mine for a while.” True, or true enough, anyway.
He wasn’t ready to let her off. “You think I don’t clean up nice. Maybe I better sleep at my place for a few days. Wouldn’t want to scandalize dear old mom.”
His tone bothered her. Cold. So cold, so fast. Like he was arguing over a parking spot with an annoying neighbor. Could he cut her off this easily?
“I promise this stresses me out more than you—” She heard the wheedling in her voice and hated it.
“Fine. But in that case, I’ll meet your mom here. Let’s not pretend I’m not practically living here.”
She laid a hand on his shoulder. Her touch seemed to do the trick. He relaxed, sighed.
“I’m sorry, Becks. People looking down on me, it pisses me off.”
“Eve’s gonna love you. I promise.”
* * *
And she did.
Brian was the best version of himself that Sunday, charming and polite without trying too hard. He and her mother wound up talking about novels that Becks hadn’t read, early twentieth-century fiction, Upton Sinclair and John O’Hara, all the worthy books she’d missed in her headlong pre-law rush. I had a lot of long bus trips, Brian said. He explained the Internet to her mom without being condescending. He listened to the mildly embarrassing stories she told about teenage Rebecca, She almost failed her driving test, not that she couldn’t drive, she was just so stressed about it—
Becks was stressed? No way.
Rebecca could feel Eve settle in as the afternoon passed. “I really have to go,” she said around five.
“Sure you won’t stay for dinner?” Brian asked.
“Bri’s a great cook.”
“He cooks too?”
“Just this and that, not like I know what I’m doing.”
“Come on, Rebecca, walk me to my car.”
* * *
Rebecca came back to the apartment expecting to find Brian excited. Instead he sat on the couch, staring morosely at the television. She knelt in front of him, rested her hands on his legs. His eyes were flat, exhausted.
“What’s wrong, babe?”
He ignored her.
“Brian. What is it?” Her confusion was real. “She loved you, Bri, you know she did. You know what she said? He’s a keeper.” She had actually said, He’s a keeper, don’t blow it. Thanks, Mom.
He didn’t speak.
“Come on, Bri?”
“I wish I had a family like yours.”
* * *
He went to a knee as they were picnicking in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her surprise was genuine. They’d been together just five months. Her surprise and her pleasure. Yes, she said, yes yes yes. The day was perfect, a bright blue May afternoon, finals just over. On Monday she’d start her internship with Poynter Stone, a corporate law firm based in Philly. She was near the top of her class. She could have wound up at a high-end New York firm. But Poynter suited her because of its criminal defense practice. Even before she started law school she’d seen the degree as a means to an end.
By the end of her sophomore year at Wesleyan, she’d grown sick of the intellectual pretension around her. Worst of all was the way the kids talked about cops. Criminals with badges. Her uncle Ned, her dad’s brother, was a Boston police sergeant. He wouldn’t even take a free cup of coffee.
She decided to do something about it. At Thanksgiving break junior year, she told Ned she wanted to join the Boston police.
“Wesleyan to the BPD?” Ned was fleshy and strong, shaped like a keg, with oven-mitt hands. He looked her up and down, appraising her. “You’re serious, huh? Let’s go to Drakes.”
He seemed grim, but the invitation thrilled her. She’d heard him talk about Drakes. Cop bar at the edge of Roxbury, where he worked. District B-2, worst neighborhood in Boston.
He wound through the city’s streets like he was on autopilot. She tried to talk, but he turned up the radio. Late November in Massachusetts meant loooong nights. Only 7 p.m., but the sun seemed to have been gone forever. A freezing rain coated the windows.
He parked outside a two-story concrete building with a single reinforced window. No sign.
Inside, a dingy room reeking of smoke. Two jukeboxes, neither plugged in. A television playing Wheel of Fortune. Everyone in the place looked like Ned; they all had the same bulk in their shoulders and arms.
“New girlfriend, Neddie?” the bartender asked. “Little old for ya.”
“My niece.”
“Niece, sure, right.”
“Nah, true.”
Ned’s accent was thicker here than at her house.
“Rebecca goes to Wesleyan. She wants to be a cop.”
“Yeah?” one guy said to her. He was kinda cute, black hair, thirty or so. “Joking, yeah?”
“No.”
“Fucking idiot.”
“Thinks she’s gonna toss her college degree,” Ned said. “So she can do some good. I thought we should enlighten her about the realities of law enforcement in underserved communities.”
He brought her to a booth. For a solid hour cops came over to tell her horror stories. Getting domestic violence calls from cockroach-infested apartments until the calls turned into murders. Fourteen-year-old girls pimped by their boyfriends, sold to a dozen guys a night. Fifteen-year-old boys shooting each other in the head for the chance to sell a couple hundred dollars of crack. Menageries straight from hell, dead cats and half-starved pit bulls. On and on, each tale worse than the next. I
n the early nineties, Boston had plenty of senseless violence to go ’round.
Even worse than the stories was the way the cops told them, flat and affectless, but with a hint of showmanship. Like they were numb to the horror, yet almost proud of it.
Rebecca barely spoke. She sipped her beer until it was flat and warm. Finally, even Ned seemed to have had enough. He waved them off, went to the bar, came back with two big shots. He lifted his glass.
“To Boston’s finest.”
The whiskey burned her throat. He didn’t even blink.
“Half the guys in here are alcoholics. Maybe two-thirds.”
“You’re not.”
“You’d be surprised how much I drink. Don’t be a cop, Rebecca.”
“I get it.”
“Thought I might have to do this to my boys”—Ned had three sons—“but they just want to go to business school. Marry blondes, live in Cohasset, play golf. God bless ’em.” He grabbed her hand. “Not that I think you can’t do it. I mean, the street, it helps if you can ring somebody’s bell, but the girls find ways around that.”
“The girls. The female cops, you mean?”
He nodded. “It’s everything else. All those cop shows get it wrong. We don’t solve anything. We’re san workers. Clean up after people who are too stupid, too bored, too mean, to do anything but hurt other people. And the bureaucracy, the crap lieutenants who decide they don’t like you and find a hundred different ways to mess up your life—”
“It can’t be that bad. You do it.”
“I don’t have a choice, Rebecca, I didn’t go to Wesleyan. And guess what? The guys in here? They’re the good ones. Not the ones too scared to be out there, or the freaks who’ve gone all the way over and get off on it. They’re drinking because they still care.”
He went back to the bar, left her alone. Occasionally the black-haired cop looked over his shoulder and smirked. Ned came back with four more shots, little ones, the liquor inside yellow and dangerous looking.
The Power Couple Page 8
