by Luanne Rice
Sam
H—
It is evening and I am safely ensconed, if that’s the right term for it, in a Fairtown Motel in downtown Anchorage. I thought about trying to follow your dictum that by discovering new lodgings—B&B’s, rented rooms, the little byways—we discover where we are, but then rejected it in favor of plain old-fashioned American vanilla comfort. See, I am a peasant at heart! Besides, I wanted a big, comfortable bed, a TV with a laser-accurate remote. I tell myself, as I tell you, that it is part of my job to catch up on sports, but mostly I like the abundant light right now, the solid warmth, the sense that I am anonymous. Especially that. I did not want to mosey down to breakfast and chitchat with a retired schoolteacher/innkeeper, who wanted to serve me something-something muffins with homemade something on fancy something china. Forgive me. Going to that kind of place is a delight with you, but for now, just back from Gus’s Laika Star, I want central heat and boring everydayness.
In any case, I have too much to absorb to risk social interaction with anyone. I want to be solitary for a day or two, and eat bowls of spicy chili in a sports bar, and watch the Celtics. Do you see how I depend on you to keep me from turning into a prototypical male?
A couple quick notes while they are fresh in my mind. First, I made a call to the doctor Cindy recommended, and I will have a checkup tomorrow. Our health-care system may be the envy of the world, according to some politicians and talk-show hosts, but those blowhards never had to get an appointment in a strange town, without an insurance history in that office, and with an unspecified complaint. They should be forced to try it and the results should be played at their press conferences. Okay, that’s my only political note.
So, doctor tomorrow.
I also called Kilkenny Charter Company. A young girl answered, maybe early teens from the sound of her voice, and she had atrocious phone manners. It took a few minutes, but I established that, no, her mom wasn’t home, no, her mom might not be back tonight, no, Kilkenny Charter Company no longer existed. How dangerous, I couldn’t help thinking, for a young girl to divulge to a complete stranger that her mother would not be home that night, and so forth. I suspect, though, that her telephone style had been cramped by people dunning them for back payment, because her voice became slightly steadier when she began to understand I wasn’t calling to assert a claim. Although she hadn’t been certain, Gus’s Cindy had suggested that Kilkenny Charter had gone under after Paul’s death. You can imagine the litigation and insurance adjusters descending on them. Long story short, I need to swing by there tomorrow and see what’s what.
Then I dialed you. I called you at home, our home, and my fingers went over the numbers faster than I could have moved them consciously. Muscle memory. I have called you a thousand times from the road, sitting on the edge of motel beds, my eyes probably on a game. This time I heard the phone ring. Our ring. Halfway through the first ring I realized she’s not there and I hung up almost as if I had done something wrong. But then I hit redial, I’m not sure why, and I listened to the phone ring in our old house. Fatigue, probably, but I started to choke up, imagined the sound of the phone passing through the house, touching your studio, the pictures of Paul in his lacrosse uniform, the pictures of your parents’ wedding, the houseplants, the chipped cookie jar. Everything. Then suddenly your voice answered. Of course, it was merely a recording, and I listened to it more carefully than anything I can remember. My girl. My Hadley. As I listened, I had a flushed feeling. I wondered what we are doing, where we are going, why are we so far apart? And now you tell me we are on a docket for a final decree, and that developers have put a bull’s-eye on our orchard. I am concerned, if it comes to it, that you will strap yourself to the bulldozer blade to prevent them from cutting into our land. And I don’t think I am kidding. You know I will stand with you and any decision regarding the house. It’s haunted, I suppose, but only by good days.
After hearing your voice, I came within a whisker of calling your cell, but then I decided no, stay with the plan. Is it a plan? Are you okay that way? I don’t know how else to say it: these letters are the best therapy we’ve ever undergone. I remember that horrible marriage counselor we went to see, Dr. Ames, and she kept secretly checking the time on her wristwatch, and she wore those hideous calfskin boots, and it became clear she knew less about everything in the world than we did. You said on the way out, “We shouldn’t pay for dumb,” and as mixed up as we were right then, I still had to laugh. In any case, I can hear you in these letters. I can see you. The back and forth has slowed us down in important ways. If you’re okay with it, indulge me a little longer.
Let me take a break here. I need to eat and I need to rest for a little. I should tell you that I am sitting at the little motel table—the round top they provide for business dopes like me who are supposed to find this all, gee whiz, just great—and I am writing, as you can see, on motel stationery. The stationery is surprisingly rich, again as you can see. I realized, though, that when you turn the TV off in a motel room the decorations become absolutely absurd. It’s as if the TV is the only window in the place, and if you don’t stare at it you are reminded that you are residing in someone’s idea of a neutral, deliberately impersonal adult bedroom. Still, it’s okay for a few nights. And the Celtics are on at ten.
It’s late night and I can’t sleep. The Celtics lost, by the way, and looked feeble doing it. My cough has kicked in again and it feels like a rooted stump in my chest. I hope I don’t sound like a hypochondriac, but I don’t often feel lousy. I wish I could shake this. I’m sorry to bother you with it. I hope to get to the bottom of it tomorrow.
It’s taken me most of the evening to get my mind around Julie’s miscarriage. To know where and how to begin thinking about it. It is a piece of the puzzle that we had been missing, isn’t it? You and Julie both put your fingers on the source of Paul’s reaction, I imagine: he loved too much. It was his one vulnerability, although I’m uncertain you can ever call a loving nature a true vulnerability. But he opened himself, I suspect is what we all mean, and he gave himself to an idea like no one I ever met. I can easily picture him absolutely embracing the child, the potential life, and casting his mind forward to the moment the baby arrived. A child, Hadley. Our grandchild. I would give anything to have met that child. I know you feel the same.
The other part of me, the more worldly and tired part, guards against making things too neat. No question, I’m sure, the miscarriage threw him, but I’m not positive we can draw too many conclusions from it. We both learned long ago that A doesn’t necessarily follow B, and to pretend it does now would be unfair to Paul. He was a complex, incredibly thoughtful young man. I think he loved Julie deeply, and yet, yet…he still went away, didn’t he? He still planned to go north, to leave Amherst, to allow her to slip out of his life. I would never say that to Julie, and I am entirely pleased she has a big, hearty football player from Michigan in her life, but I don’t feel the perspective over this particular hill has given me the view for which I hoped. Why did Paul leave her when she had suffered such a setback? Wouldn’t such an event have brought them closer together instead? I don’t know. I have no clear insight. I just have threads of ideas and possibilities and I am wary of tugging too hard on any individual line of reasoning. (Your unraveling sweater notion, I guess.) I try to imagine that boy on the plane as he left to travel north for a year, and I attempt to climb into his thoughts and I discover I can’t. We are all unknowable, aren’t we?
I feel I don’t know my son right now. The feeling will pass, I’m sure, but that’s how I feel in this lonely motel tonight.
You know, I haven’t mentioned your seeing the northern lights, because it seems so uncanny, and so unlikely, that I wondered if you could have been seeing things. How strange, really, that we would have seen the same event from different sides of the continent. I suppose a physicist or astronomer could explain the phenomenon, but I don’t care to hear it. Call it a sign. Call it a freak chance that both of us could see s
uch a thing so many miles apart. Add to that the fact that I stood watching them a day away from Paul’s crash site, and I hardly know what to make of it.
I am going to try to sleep now. I’m sending you all good thoughts. I will write tomorrow to let you know what Mrs. Kilkenny has to report. Before I forget, I wanted to thank you for the sketches you have included in your letters. I study them, you know. I know the artist pretty well.
Sam
December 19
H—
Lord, do I have a story to tell. Remember when one or the other of us would come home with some juicy insight or dollop of gossip—okay, so we are as venal as the next couple—and we would pour two whiskeys and get near a fire and the deal was the other person could only ask questions about the ongoing story? No interruptions, no everyday jazz about dentists or what we might have for dinner. The story hour. Well, I have center stage right now and you will die to hear this story.
You didn’t know you were married—still married, I might add—to a first-rate detective. Here goes.
I have this theory, as you know, that 11 a.m. is the optimal hour for catching someone on the phone or in person. Any earlier and the person is still in breakfast mode. Later, the person is out doing chores or tracking down lunch. Most of the world’s business, I swear, takes place between 11:00 and 11:30. After that it’s a crap shoot.
So at 9 I rented a car, and at 10:50 I was at the former headquarters of Kilkenny Charter Company. Picture a plane hangar, really just an oversized Quonset hut, next to a wide lake. The script of Kilkenny Charter had long since faded away to ghost letters, and on one side of the hangar high school kids had spray-painted the usual teen hieroglyphics. The place appeared deserted. I’ve read enough mystery novels to know how to case a joint, so I sat in my car and drank Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and waited. I didn’t have an appointment, remember, but I had told the girl on the phone the night before that I would swing by and I imagined the message would have been delivered. So I was doing a Sam Spade imitation out in my car, trying to remain inconspicuous as I watched the place.
Eleven, nothing. Eleven twelve, she shows up. She drives an old Chevy pickup, sky blue, and it has plenty of brown patches of rust. She climbs out, slides out, actually, because she is extremely short. She wears a man’s leather bomber jacket, jeans, and a plain black watch cap. She hurries around the side and fishes a key out of her jacket. Door open, door shut. Obviously there is some sort of office around front.
I’m not sure why, but I felt wary of Mrs. Kilkenny. I couldn’t quite figure why she would want to contact me after all this time. Surely anything she had of Paul’s, or any information she had about the accident, had already been wrung out of her by the authorities. I felt a con coming on, and I admit I was almost amused by the possibility. Maybe that’s strange, I don’t know, but there it is.
I waited another five minutes, then went around to the office. You can picture that, too. Disheveled, paper everywhere, schoolteacher metal desks, camel bells that rattle when you push through the door. Parts and odd pieces of aviation equipment around the dooryard, most of it covered with snow now.
Mrs. Kilkenny was on her hands and knees, feeding a small flame in a woodstove as I stuck my head inside. She looked up, said nothing, and went back to feeding the fire. Who knows what she thought, but I admired her sangfroid.
“Mrs. Kilkenny?” I asked.
“Who’s asking?” she said.
(She actually said that, a line straight out of an Ed McBain novel.)
I gave her my name.
“Let me just get this going,” she said. “Cold as the devil.”
She rocked back on her knees. The fire snapped a little. She burned paint sticks. Then she tossed in a few pieces of pine tinder and the fire died for a second, then sprang back. She closed the door of the stove and didn’t move. She listened to the stove and in a few more moments she opened the door and tossed in a fair-sized log. I couldn’t feel any heat from the stove. A picture window looked out on the water.
“I’d offer you coffee,” she said, standing, “but I just arrived myself. Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” I said, raising my Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. “I have mine.”
“So you do,” she said.
We waited for the heat. Or something. She appeared profoundly uncomfortable. She had said nothing about Paul. No customary “Gee, glad to meet you, so sorry about your son.” But then again, I hadn’t said anything about the loss of her husband. So I did. Said I was sorry. Said I had been out to the plane wreck. That’s what I was doing in Alaska. And so forth.
She was a tough little plug, believe me. It became clear as I talked that she was never going to say she was sorry about our son. Do you know that kind of person? She wasn’t going to give an inch, because her entire life rested on the edge of a cliff, every day, and she couldn’t take a deep breath without worrying that the exhalation would blow her to oblivion. And here was this man who caused her pain—that’s how she saw it, believe me—by daring to have a son who happened to be on a plane when her husband crashed it. Who had hired the plane, in fact. I was one more thing the world did to her.
She asked me to sit. I did. The stove started pushing more heat. My mind raced around, trying to figure her angle, but then I decided to watch it like a piece of theater. I knew she had a role to play, and so I contented myself to watch and listen. She didn’t disappoint.
“What would you think,” she asked, “if I had some information that put things in a whole different light?”
“Information about what?”
She inclined her head. She was reluctant to say anything specific.
“About the crash?” I asked.
She nodded again.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.
“If I told you that things might not be as they appear, what would you say to that?”
“You’re going to have to give me more to go on,” I said.
The stove by this time had started to warm the place. She pushed back in her desk chair. I suspected she didn’t want to meet my eyes when she said the next thing.
“What if I told you your son wasn’t on the plane that day?”
I expected a million things, but never that. Choose your cliché: you could have knocked me over with a feather, or whatever it is people say when they get a shock. I stared at her. I drank some coffee. Not for a second did I think it could possibly be true, but this woman had more nerve than I had estimated. I gave her a careful nod.
“Say again?” I said, which is an old expression my grandmother used to employ when she didn’t understand something. She came from Tennessee. I hadn’t used that expression in years.
“What if your son hadn’t been on that plane?” she said. “Would that be a thing worth knowing?”
“Who was it then?”
“A boy about your son’s age. But not your son.”
“This sounds a little desperate on your part, you know.”
“They do an autopsy?”
“No,” I said. “No point to it.”
“That’s right,” she said. “It was my husband, all right. But your son wasn’t with him.”
Her plan folded out easily from that point. I admit I was fascinated. You may feel a little furious reading this, sweetheart, but you shouldn’t. Think of a pale spider on a pine hedge, spinning for flies or insects. That’s all she was. She had hatched this plan in a feeble attempt to extort us. If I paid her ten thousand dollars, she would tell me where he went. If not, this conversation never happened and I could believe anything I liked. She didn’t really give a damn, she said. She was selling the business and heading down to Idaho, and her husband had died, true enough, and he hadn’t been such great shakes to begin with. She could use the money, she didn’t deny that, but our son, she said, had gone into hiding. Some men do, she said. Some women, too. They decide they don’t like the way their lives have gone, and things feel so piled up that they figure it’s easier to burn it down a
nd rebuild than try to remodel.
You have to hand it to her, honey. As deplorable as her tactics were, for the smallest instant she had me going. What if Paul had decided at the last minute to do something different? What if he had run off somewhere, establishing himself in a new life? I knew it was absurd, but I also know the human heart does crazy things at times.
Good sense—reality—reasserted itself. I told her I appreciated her offer, but if Paul still walked the earth no power in the world could keep us all apart. She smiled and said you never know. I told her you do know. I told her I know. I told her my wife knows. Then I left her.
Driving back to the motel, I felt I had been locked in a room with a small, feral animal. I don’t mean that to be overly cruel. But her humanity had slipped away by circumstances, and what remained was simply appetite and worry. She reminded me of a pound dog, the type that no one will adopt, the type that walks back and forth in its enclosure and is the source of its own misery—though the world has done horrible things to it—but it cannot still itself long enough to accept kindness. Neither did any conscience remain. Our son’s death, the rent, repair bills for the planes—they no longer differentiated themselves in her mind.
Okay, last subject. No worries, really, but the doctor didn’t like the sound of my chest. He suspects pneumonia. Knows it is. I confess he’s probably right and it is almost a relief to give in to it. He said I will feel better soon if he gets the right medicine pumping through me. I haven’t stopped coughing in a while, and it will be a mercy to draw a decent breath.
I am thinking of you. Our last business is finished on Paul’s behalf. Now we have to trust in time.
Sam
December 22
Sam,
I am on my way to you. Made arrangements for Turner and Rosie to look after Cat, left the island at first light—didn’t even wait for the Laura B, but got Turner to take me to Port Clyde in his lobster boat. He arranged for me to catch a ride to Portland with Jim Nealy from the co-op, and I was able to get a flight to New York. I’m on the plane now, and hoping to connect with an Alaska Air flight to Anchorage this afternoon.
