by Jonathan Dee
—
His little sister Candace called, and then Gerry called because Candace had called him, and so Karen just wound up inviting them all over for a drink or dinner or whatever—really just to lay eyes on their brother. Candace swung up to Pittsfield to collect their parents, so they were there too. All the Firths except the oldest of the four siblings, Renee, who lived in Colorado Springs—but she called as well, sobbing, and Mark told her the whole story over again while standing on his porch in the twilight, half-drunk, grateful, missing her in a way he usually neglected to do. Before everybody got there he’d asked Karen, a little ashamedly, what she’d been telling people when they asked what he’d been doing in the city in the first place. She said she’d told them he was showing plans to a client. So that was the story he went with.
His mother cried, and though Gerry was the youngest of the four, Mark could already see how he was turning into their dad: the way they held it in, the stoic, hyper-masculine, one-emotion-fits-all look on both their faces. Candace, with her prim adult hairstyle that Mark could never get used to, kept wrapping her arms around him—Candace, whom he could reduce to tears when they were kids just by repeatedly touching her with an index finger. Only six years separated the four of them, and maybe the intensity that had generated was what made their adult selves seem less real to Mark than their childhood ones, when they fronted with each other less adeptly, when everything within them was closer to the surface, like it was tonight. Only Renee had managed to move more than thirty minutes away from the house in which they had all grown up. Their love was more important to him—more unconditional, more reflexive—than he remembered; he regretted not having let himself feel closer to them, safer with them, not being honest about everything that had happened, though now was certainly not the time.
Haley got to stay up late because the family was over, and when inevitably she started to melt down, the others took that as their cue to leave. Mark and Karen put her to bed together and then went downstairs and had another beer in the living room, side by side on the couch, carefully silent, just as on most nights, not talking until they were confident Haley had gone to sleep. He smiled at her, whereupon she put her face on his chest and started to cry. She too, like his siblings and even his parents, seemed to be responding to something new or different about him, something he didn’t get and thus felt slightly guilty about projecting. In Karen’s case maybe it was just the thought of how close she had been brought to the idea, at least, of having to go forward in life without him. But even that didn’t seem to account fully for it. They hadn’t had sex at night for he didn’t know how long—Haley had a stubborn habit of waking up in the small hours and stumbling wordlessly down the hall and into their bed—but somewhere in the middle of this night Karen woke him up and they did everything, in total darkness, in charged silence. At some point she took him by the shoulders and pushed him forcibly down beneath the comforter, leaving her fingers in his hair. When that was done, and he could feel her whole body trembling in his hands, she pulled him back up to her. He felt her tears on his face, but whatever she was thinking, she couldn’t say it.
Monday everybody went back to work. Mark’s knee ached below its surgical scar, but he was still superstitious about taking the last Vicodin; he’d held on to the one pill for a month now, worried that the day he didn’t have it would be the day he’d stumble or fall on the job and the pain would become unbearable. He stopped, as he did whenever feasible, for a coffee and an egg sandwich at Daisy’s, on the county road just inside the Howland line, where he saw another half-dozen people he knew. He accepted their hugs, and the tears of Chase (Daisy’s daughter, middle-aged herself now), who worked behind the counter, and he told his story again—Times Square, the evacuations, the video billboards, the angry, weeping crowds. The repetition made the temptation to embellish very strong, but he resisted it, even when he could see he was disappointing people. Then he drove out to New Marlborough, where he was putting in a bid on the restoration of a Dutch colonial for new owners fanatic about period details, a job that was as much research as it was construction. The owners were currently asking for bids only on the kitchen—they said they didn’t want to start any work that would open up the walls of the house during the winter months—but having met them once, he felt good about the larger prospect, because they were just the kind of city people he did well with, good-looking entitled perfectionists who prided themselves on not appearing demanding or unreasonable even though you could tell they would turn out to be both. He was good at instilling confidence in clients like that, the wives especially.
—
In the end he got the kitchen job, which occupied him and a crew of two until mid-October; but then, the night after the custom-salvaged gamekeeper’s sink went in, the wife called Mark at home to tell him sheepishly that, even though they were thrilled with what he’d done, the rest of the renovation was going to have to be put on hold indefinitely. Her husband was an executive at American Airlines, as bad luck would have it: all the airlines were suffering and this guy was basically waiting for the ax to fall on him and his whole department. This, for Mark, was not good news. Karen suggested they ask for an increase in their credit limit, or else just apply for another card, as they’d done before to help them through lean months; but when Mark tried both those things, he was told that he’d been placed on something called a security freeze. That was a whole day of phone calls right there. The card he’d previously reported lost had been used, they said. He asked where, and they said Russia. Russia? It had occurred to Mark, in trying to recall what he could of those jumpy days and nights in New York, that maybe he hadn’t lost the card at all, maybe that twitchy little co-plaintiff who came up to his hotel room had stolen it. But the Russia business seemed to rule out that suspicion, farfetched as it was in the first place. Probably he had dropped it somewhere and some eagle-eyed criminal, some guy who did this for a living, had scooped it up. Guys like that never took a holiday. Disaster and panic were like good growing weather for them. Anyway, the credit agencies assured him it would all be straightened out, though it might take a while, because the Russia thing was a real red flag.
He was owed another eleven thousand for a job in Lenox he’d completed in August, but past that there was nothing definite on the horizon. And that’s if he could even collect on the eleven grand. It was all over the TV that the economy was hurting, and there was a sense that everyone else’s hardship in the wake of catastrophe was your hardship too, which made it awkward to go after people to settle their debts. Not that Mark had ever excelled at that aspect of the job anyway. Karen had volunteered, a few times, to become a kind of office manager for him, but he didn’t want to set that precedent. He felt like some distinction ought to be preserved there, between business and family, days and nights. Anyway, there were always lean times like this in the life of someone who did what Mark did. It was the nature of the work, not to mention the nature of having only yourself for a boss. You socked some money away for winters like this one was shaping up to be. But thanks to Garrett Spalding, they would enter this winter with their savings gone.
He spent mornings in his office—really just one of the empty bedrooms at home—doing random but still valuable professional research online, mostly just thinking. The day after Halloween Karen asked him to do the school pickup that afternoon, without explaining why; and then when she came home at four thirty, she announced that she had gotten a job.
“At the school,” she said. “It’s kind of informal. Teacher’s aide, some admissions-office help. Eighteen, twenty hours a week. It doesn’t pay, but they will knock fifty percent off you-know-who’s tuition. You hear that, Haley? You’re going to see Mommy at school!”
“Yay!” Haley said.
“You didn’t want to talk this over with me first,” Mark said, resenting her for starting this conversation in front of Haley, which meant he would have to keep his tone light.
“What’s to talk over?” she said br
ightly. “That tuition bill is due at the end of December, in case you forgot. So the alternative is for me to home-school her, and I know you’re not suggesting that.”
The more reasonable alternative was actually the public school in Howland—where Mark’s sister Candace was vice principal—but he knew better than to bring that up.
“Daddy, you can come to school too,” Haley suggested.
“Sure,” Karen said while searching through the fridge, her back to them. “You can restore some of its period details.”
Some of his regular hires—Hartley, his cabinetry guy, and Kurt, who was a master plumber—were already wandering, committing to other jobs with other contractors in the Berkshires and elsewhere, which of course was understandable. They had to work. But it meant that even if he got the opportunity to bid on something now, he might not be telling the truth if he said he could get started right away.
He mowed the grass for what would probably be the last time this year, and he went up on a ladder outside the house to rehang one of the shutters before it got too dark. Karen was picking up Haley from a birthday party. Mark opened a beer and stood with his shoulder against the newel post atop the three back porch steps, and as the sun went down over the ryegrass field, he saw something he had previously seen before only in the summertime—and never so clearly as now, when the trees were beginning to lose their leaves: all the lights blazing in the Hadi house, just on the far edge of his property.
—
The locals spotted Hadi’s wife—at the Price Chopper south of Great Barrington, tipping some teenager in a smock to put what looked like eight or ten grocery bags in the back of her black Mercedes SUV—before they ever saw him. Which was odd only because the wife seemed all but invisible whenever the Hadis were in town for the summer; it was Philip who was the gregarious type, one of those guys who just assumed he fit in everywhere, with anybody. They all had a Phil Hadi story. The wife—they couldn’t even all agree on her name; Karen was pretty sure it was Rachel—would materialize once in a while, at the drugstore or the post office; she was polite, semi-friendly, answered questions, said goodbye. But none of them, not the year-rounders at least, had ever had more than a four-line conversation with her, so none of them was about to approach her now in the Price Chopper parking lot, or in the Rexall the next day, to ask what she and, presumably, her family were doing in Howland on a weekday in November, why they were opening up their summer house again. Planning to stay awhile too, judging by the eight bags of food.
After several days of happily reckless group conjecture, Karen found herself in a debate after morning dropoff as to whether Hadi himself was in town at all. A couple of women were confidently putting forth the idea, based on nothing, that Rachel had left her rich husband and fled to Massachusetts with the kids. Not that anyone had seen the kids either. But it was unthinkable that she’d be up here without them, even though it seemed likely that a woman who led the kind of life she must have led would have full-time live-in childcare to see to the kids’ needs wherever they went. And there was still the initial evidence of all the groceries. She had to be feeding somebody.
It was Rachel herself who broke the ice. A friend of Karen’s named Sue Scoville was in Grindhouse, getting a coffee for herself and smoothies for her two sons, one of whom had wet-combed hair and a red face and smelled like chlorine and had clearly just gotten out of a swimming pool. Sue felt a tap on her shoulder and turned around to see Rachel, unaccompanied, behind her in line; barely audibly, Rachel asked where the boy had been swimming—her own son, she said, loved to swim—and from there Sue coaxed it all out of her. The whole Hadi family, Philip too, was now living in Howland indefinitely. Philip, Rachel said matter-of-factly, had friends in very high places, both in government and in private-sector companies with strong ties to national defense; and the inside word suggested strongly that another terrorist attack on New York City was not just possible but imminent. There had been that anthrax business but Rachel said no, that wasn’t it, what her husband had been warned about was something much bigger. What struck Sue was that there was no shrugging or eye-rolling on Rachel Hadi’s part at all, none of the hedging two wives in conversation would normally exhibit when describing the impulses or confident opinions of their husbands. She wasn’t happy about it but she clearly believed that her husband was a very well-informed man. And maybe he was. Who knew how these echelons worked.
Anyway, the Hadi family, for safety reasons, was now living here. The only point of contention seemed to be how long they planned to wait before returning home to Manhattan; Rachel’s face, Sue said, clouded a bit at that question. “When it’s safe,” Rachel answered finally, and then Sue was at the front of the line paying for her sons’ smoothies and Rachel withdrew from the store with a quick, borderline rude goodbye, as if concerned that she had said too much.
A few months earlier, there might have been some skepticism in town about the pretensions to secret knowledge of rich summer people from New York, but now no source of dire information seemed safe to dismiss. Rachel’s own paranoia might have been strengthened if she knew the speed at which people in and around Howland shared with each other the details of their every encounter with her. Not just the bit about the terrorist attack: it got around quickly that she’d asked Sue Scoville about nearby indoor swimming pools, and that she’d asked the pool director at Simon’s Rock about good local schools, and that she’d asked the nervous admissions director at Mullins Day School—who was now Karen Firth’s boss—if she knew any good local contractors.
—
Mark had a rudimentary web page for his business—strictly informational, not much different than a Yellow Pages ad—and of course he was listed in the Howland phone book as well. But when he stopped in at Daisy’s one morning for an egg sandwich and a coffee—mostly just to get out of the house; he had no job site to go to afterwards—Chase mentioned to him as she was handing him his change, “That New York fella was in here looking for you earlier. Asking for you.”
“Asking for me?” Mark said. Earlier? It was ten minutes to eight.
“That rich fella,” Chase said, with lips maybe slightly more pressed together than usual, and turned to walk the three steps to the counter to take the next order. Daisy’s staff in the early morning was just Chase and the cook, Horace, who was only ever visible through the thin slot where hot plates and foil-wrapped takeout orders emerged, and with whom the settled rumor was that Chase was sleeping. The fact that you never saw him gave him a troll-like aura that made the rumor, if you knew Chase at all, somehow more plausible.
Next morning Mark got to Daisy’s at six forty-five, and there in the little triangular lot, between the dumpster and the fuel tank (Daisy’s sat at a three-way intersection, with nothing but fields surrounding, so every part of its little operation was just as visible as every other part), was some kind of black SUV that looked like it might have been part of a presidential motorcade, conspicuous amidst the other salt-stained, rust-nibbled vehicles in the lot, Mark’s truck among them. He parked a respectful distance away, mostly because the SUV’s heavily tinted windows made him unsure whether Hadi, or someone else, might still be in there.
But he was inside, sitting alone at one of the two-tops, facing the door. Mark had seen him once or twice before, in the summers in town, but even if that weren’t the case he would have recognized him right away—partly because he knew by name every other red-eyed working man in Daisy’s at that hour, and partly because Hadi was wearing a new-looking gray sleeveless Patagonia fleece over what appeared to be a white oxford shirt. Also, he did not look the least bit tired. An untouched cup of black coffee sat next to him like a prop or camouflage, like the fleece.
“Mark Firth?” Hadi said. “I mean of course it’s you, I just watched you get out of a truck with your name on it. Very simple that way! Maybe everybody should do it. Have a seat. I’m Phil.”
Right away Mark felt a sort of natural ceding of control, one that went beyond the canny
deference you’d normally show a prospective client, if that’s what this meeting was even about. It was more like the respect you’d show an older man, which Hadi was, though not by much—surely he was no older than forty. His hair was thinning. He was not loud but he had a certain preemptive command.
“I heard a remarkable story about you,” Hadi said. “You were actually in New York on 9/11?”
Mark nodded. “Same as you were, I imagine,” he said. “It was nothing, really. I was never in any danger.”
“Yes, you were,” Hadi said. “We were all in danger. But I lived there—what brought you there?”
Mark’s instinct, oddly, was that this question was a trap or a setup, that Hadi already knew the truth about why he’d been in New York, for no other reason than that guys like Hadi made it their business to know everything, and had the means to do so. But that was insane. “I was showing some plans,” Mark said, “to a client who’s thinking about building up here.”
“Of course you were.” Hadi finally went for his coffee, then seemed miffed to discover it was cold. “So, I know you’re a contractor, and I know your work is well thought of. Which is why I was hoping to catch you here. Do you have a few minutes?”
