The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

by Jonathan Lethem

  Okay, I thought, a serious type. Begging to become his weak point, I searched every inlet and bay of my life for the serious spots. I pulled from my mind every grave section of my memory, things I had discarded, covered up, repressed. I told him of my childhood in Grays Harbor on the Washington coast, my duty-bound, dedicated people. I even wandered outside my safe zone and told him of the coastal storm that killed my father and brother. Yes, I used their tragedy, my tragedy, to impress him. I moved on. Intellectual activity? I told him of my graduate studies in English literature, how I ended my PhD pursuits only after I was fired as university journal editor for writing a scathing deconstruction of E. L. Doctorow’s major work.

  “Why didn’t you stay in that field?”

  “I had this great fear of one day hating it, or my love for it would end.”

  “Won’t that happen with the stock-trading profession?”

  “No. I hate stocks so God can’t take that from me. You see, God is out there lurking about, waiting for my mistakes. The minute I’m happy, he’ll find me, sweep down tragedy, take away my happiness, replace it with panic and depression or something of that sort. My goal in life is to keep God on edge.”

  Joe thoughtfully took another drink. Humor and seriousness, opposite sides of the human psyche, worked best with Joe Donnelly. In a matter of minutes, he presented his gifts to me—the stillness, the smiles, the winks of intelligence, the cosmopolitan atmosphere of his being, the dedication. That morning, full of hope and desire, we lived out those feelings. The passion between us overwhelmed me. We became one person, one whole being meant from inception to eternity to be together. We made love past dawn.

  The Christmas tour was to leave midmorning. I packed slowly, still high from the lovemaking, unsure how to sneak around Bridget, fearful of facing Joe, who had fallen asleep with no promises. Too, I was unsure of where or how to get around, through, and out of Dublin.

  Joe awoke. “No, no, no. You stay put, Colleen. We’ll tour together. I can show you the country.”

  I closed my tapestry suitcase. This was what I wanted, unconditionally, truly, madly. I envisioned what I would tell my friends. The LA envy I would engender. The pictures I would take.

  Bridget burst into the room in what surely was a black mourning dress. “Get on with the tour, girlie. I think we’ve all had enough.”

  Joe jumped out of bed, uninhibited in his nakedness. Bridget gasped and turned her head. “We’re staying here, Bridget. It’s Christmas Day.”

  “I don’t care.” She spoke to the wall. “You two are not staying here. That behavior will not take place in a reputable house. I want this girl out.”

  “Reputable? Here? That’s a fine tune to play.” Joe grabbed his clothes. “I’ll take her into the city. I’m on holiday, anyway.”

  Bridget waved us both off. Her old-fashioned dress swished as she hurried out of the room.

  “Are you packed, Colleen?”

  I pointed to my tapestry suitcase. He dressed and lugged it out the door.

  In Ireland’s northwest coastal region, during the Troubles, there were still sights where only ghosts would walk. Ireland was a lonely island, dark and rainy, with a brooding cloudy atmosphere. I felt I had stepped out of the boundaries of sanity, history, reality. With no native language to describe it or label it, I became one with whatever the earth and wind and water was to its universe. Ireland made no sense to me. But I was with Joe Donnelly, and Joe Donnelly was what I wanted.

  Joe sat still and quiet in an abandoned core of an early-Christian church. We’d spent five days searching ruins, visiting museums, tracking down O’Casey, Joyce, Yeats. We were both exhausted, reserved. The walls of the ancient structure were barely two feet high. Joe sat silently and stared at an altar that no longer was, in one of those manic-depressive undertows that had periodically appeared in the midst of our passionate days in Dublin, Cork, Kildare, Connemara—a time full of sex and drink and James Joyce. There was peace on that coastline. It was still, empty. I teetered on an old stone wall, carefully balancing, challenging myself to keep from falling to my left, which would land me in the ocean several hundred feet below the cliff, or falling to my right, where I would land on soft, wet, chalk-like sand just feet from Joe. But I was confident in my happiness that week, and I knew I could balance and by balancing could enjoy both worlds on each side of me—the vast, rough, raging sea to one side and the quiet stillness of Joe on the other.

  “Come here, Colleen, before you fall to your death.”

  Ah, he sounded like a man who would raise children, love a wife, work hard and long, build a home, a future, a life with a good-looking, accomplished, quite intellectual American woman at his side. If not for the pain and horror to come, those words, spoken in a deteriorated church on an empty coastline in a dilapidated country, would be the words that still echo from that short week. I jumped from the stone wall and stood at the entrance of what was left of the church.

  “Colleen, did you ever think about the humiliation that poor bugger felt when you left the night before your wedding?”

  “No, I didn’t. LA people are incapable of feeling humiliation.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “I didn’t trust it would last forever. I told you that.” I sauntered over and sat next to him. “I knew that happiness would end with the vows. God would find me and make me miserable.”

  “Are you capable of love, then?”

  “I don’t know. It depends upon how much happiness is involved. I’d hate to see myself happy then lose it.”

  “Have you ever loved a man?”

  “What odd questions. I don’t really know.”

  “Will you marry me, then?”

  “Marry you?” My heart leapt, my body shook. Such words from the man I dared not dream would spend his life with me.

  “Yes, I want to marry you,” he said. He looked young and innocent at that moment in his black trousers and new sweater, like an earnest schoolboy. “You’d get happiness that could last forever. I’d get, well, I suppose I’d get everything I wanted.”

  While traveling with Joe during the previous five days, I had occasionally found him resigned, perhaps fatalistic. Once, in a small pub near the university in Cork, an old school chum joined us. This happened everywhere we went, an old mate here, a school chum there, a childhood buddy down the row. In Cork, the man plopped down at our table and ordered us three pints. From his rumpled suit, white shirt, and food stains on his tie, I assumed he was university stuff. I kept guessing all the while he talked. A surveyor? An out-of-work grade school teacher? A government worker?

  Oddly, Joe never introduced us. He let the man ramble on about his and Joe’s childhood. Had he seen the new parish priest, Tommy Casey? Their old schoolmate? The one who had a thing for your sister, Bridget? Joe chuckled. The man took the chuckle as encouragement to go on about Bridget. Was she still running the family B&B? Should have kept it as your home, Joe, “’stead of running all over Europe trying to make something of yourself. You can run, but as they say, you cannot hide.”

  He turned to me. “Have you met Bridget?” He wiped foam from his mouth. “Bridget Donnelly is the type of woman who would make a man a wonderful grandmother.” He laughed at his own joke. “A wonderful grandmother, except the explosive parts.” He snorted until droplets came from his nose. “The Donnelly family. What a bunch—”

  I started to ask what he meant when Joe stood, grabbed my hand, and we left. He remained silent the rest of the day. No amount of gentle humor could bring him out of it. I had quite enjoyed his chum. Traditional Irish pub, red-faced, curly-haired drinking mate, dark ales, laughter—quite a picture postcard. I said nothing to Joe. I don’t think I wanted to know. I let Joe brood.

  But in the unexpected proposal of marriage, he’d also sounded depressed. If I had not been so distracted by the idea of it, by his gorgeous being sitting alone in that ruin, by the romance of the brooding Irish, I would have cared enough to question him. But the percep
tions of love levitate a woman. I melted every time I looked at Joe, awake or asleep. As I lay next to him, I dared not think of a life without him. My emotions were so deep, my reactions to his body, his mind, his sexuality so fulfilling. We had been like two beings sailing into oblivion, with no anchor, no stopping point, no handle. So powerful was our lovemaking, I felt like a feather or leaf floating from the heavens, touching earth only when the morning light hit the lace curtains. I felt that if I could take a deep breath, I would swallow the world, as he had swallowed me. For that second, I felt there was a rewarding God, there was a heaven and angels and life ever after. I stopped watching my backside.

  “But,” Joe said, “you have to marry me now.”

  “Now?”

  “Back in Dublin. Tomorrow. I want to get married tomorrow.”

  “Why tomorrow?”

  “Because, Colleen, you have a history of leaving the chap at the altar. The reason is no fookin’ mystery.” He waved me off as though I were a child. At the time, I liked the off-handed way he controlled my questioning, the drawn-out owl-type oooo that turned fuckin’ into fookin’. The style gave him a bit of shabby sexiness. “We’ll marry tomorrow. I have to get back to work on Monday.”

  “To London?”

  “I can clear things up before we go to America. We’ll start a new life in America.”

  A dart hit my inflated ego. Foreign man looking for a lonely American woman, his ticket to the New World. For a nanosecond, questions flew through my head, his background, his life abroad, his Swedish ex-wife, his apartment in Germany, the house in London, the IRA brother in a rebel’s grave. Just as quickly, I dismissed such questions. In the silence of the landscape we returned to his little car, then to Dublin.

  Bridget did not come to our small wedding. Through the whispered arguments in her makeshift lobby, I learned that I wasn’t to get their mother’s wedding ring or their parents’ marriage bed that night, or any of the essentials a family would bestow on a new bride. I didn’t contact what was left of my own family. My mother had a new husband, and she had long ago tired of my antics, my frivolous lifestyle. In truth, I never once thought I was being impulsive. How easily we discard all sense when love is involved. We’re left with decision-making that is limp, unsupportable, without anchors. No wonder such massive, earthquake-size mistakes are made. No wonder people die.

  I relied on Joe to diddle with Catholic rules and regulations and put together a wedding in one afternoon. Both of us were sure of our plan. I felt lightheaded as I vowed to a life with him. He looked smug and sure in his words. As the priest, Tommy Casey, Joe’s old schoolmate, spoke the words, and as I repeated them, Joe put his arm around me and held me tightly. If he hadn’t, I would have fallen.

  The next night, a storm arose on the Irish Sea. We went to the dock to board the ferry for Holyhead, then on to London, only to find that gale warnings were in effect. They canceled the crossing. A small crowd of passengers, Joe included, put up a fight. They argued with the dock man, the ticket man, and finally, the captain. The others chose Joe as spokesman. Eventually he convinced the captain and crew to make the crossing and get us all to England.

  I saw the danger of the rising storm. I was too familiar with the pounding waves, the rain and cold, the growing winds, the shattered, empty boats returning to shore. I felt the fear my brother must have felt that night he drowned in such a storm. I pulled Joe aside and begged him to return to Dublin.

  “You’re a coastal girl, Colleen. This will be nothing.”

  “My father and brother were killed in a storm like this. I don’t want to go.”

  He pushed my hand from his sleeve. “I can’t think about that now. I have to get back.”

  Out on the sea, the waters became even rougher. The passengers retired to the belly of the ferry. I sat with them, my tapestry suitcase at my feet, waiting for Joe, who had not come down with the rest of us.

  The ferry bounced and banged against the raging sea for another hour when I finally left my bench to find him. The black sky met me at the door, that ethereal darkness I so hated. The ratty boat, in a sickly pitch, flew into vertical upheaval, crashed down to the white foam of the beating waves and banged hard against the dark sea. It rose again, rested a second in midair, then plunged hard against the waves. I grabbed the handrails and pulled myself forward. I staggered out the door, stood for a moment while the boat rose to the sky, then crashed down. I took that opportunity to get on deck.

  Joe was under the awning, his back to me, one arm around a pole. He was wearing a slicker, and for a second, I wondered where he had gotten it, but I discarded the question as immediately as it entered my mind. He smoked a cigarette and leaned to and fro with the rhythm of the boat. A man stood next to him, grasping the railing. He, too, swayed. I yelled to Joe, but the crashing and clambering of the raging sea swallowed my words. I shouted again, to curse that dark being that had taken my brother and father, to apologize for the thoughtless way I had used them to get Joe, to beg them to keep this flimsy junk of a ferry in one piece. Joe didn’t hear me. He continued to shake his head and wave his cigarette at the man. They seemed to be arguing. The man finally noticed me. He alerted Joe, who turned, looked surprised, and motioned the man off. The man lurched away into the rain and darkness.

  “Get downstairs,” Joe shouted as he staggered toward me.

  “Who was that?”

  “Nobody. Just a passenger.”

  “But I didn’t see him when we all boarded.”

  “What does it matter?”

  At that moment, it seemed odd to hear him ask such a question in the middle of a deadly storm on the Irish Sea. The question antagonized me.

  “Where did you get the slicker?” I clutched the railing behind me with both hands. Joe removed my hands, turned me around, and steered me down the stairs.

  “Go. Passengers are supposed to be below.”

  “But you’re a passenger.”

  “Colleen, get down there.” At the third step, I lost my footing and caused him to fall. “Shite, Colleen. Don’t bring us both down.” He got up, shook his head, grabbed the hand railing, stepped past me, and found his own way to an empty bench. I struggled, found the railing, and, by small steps and sways, staggered to his side. He scooted over an inch or two as though disgusted by my inability to handle the boat’s pitching and twisting. Unlike the rest of the passengers, either ghostly white or sickly green, moaning and vomiting without embarrassment, Joe sat still, his arms spread across the back of the wooden bench as though he were sitting in a city park.

  “I thought you were born on the American coastline.”

  “It’s been awhile.”

  My upper lip perspired and my mouth felt dry. My attempt at humor, just like my shouting on deck, simply flew through the dank air and found its way out the door and into the storm. Joe stared ahead. I looked in the same direction but only saw a dirty fire hose wound several times on a rusty hook. The sick odor of vomit permeated the stuffy passenger area. I spied the women’s room and stumbled to it. Inside, the toilet water spilled and splattered with every movement of the ferry. I held myself over a sink and vomited.

  “Feel better?” he asked when I returned.

  “No.”

  He looked away.

  After two more hours of beating against the sea, of vomiting and nausea all around me, of silent abuse from Joe, he looked at his watch, stood, and rubbed his face. “Come on. We’re docking in a minute. I’m not feeling so well.”

  “No one feels well, Joe. In hell, no one feels well.”

  “You have no idea of hell.”

  He led me upstairs as the boat limped into dock. Dragging my tapestry suitcase, battering it left and right up the stairs, I stopped at the top to catch my breath. Joe stood impatiently, his leather bag slung over his shoulder. He turned and started down the gangway. The sky was jet-black, the rain fell heavily, and my wool coat smelled like dirty, wet sheep. I used both hands to lug my suitcase down the gangway and ont
o the dock.

  On stable ground, it took me a moment or two to find my equilibrium. I dizzily kept pace with Joe. He had not spoken to me since we docked, and now moved impatiently through the small crowd of dock and ferry workers and the few passengers still walking. I followed him out of the waiting shelter. My hair was dripping wet, and I desperately needed a bathroom. When I said so, Joe stopped, motioned to the ladies’ room, and remained in place.

  Inside, I went to the mirror. “New husband,” I said aloud. What a laugh. Words can be miles from reality, from correct labels and titles. Joe was a stranger to me. His carefree demeanor, his smiles, his joking manner had all disappeared in the black slicker and rough ferry ride. I looked like hell.

  He pounded on the ladies’ room door. “Come on, Colleen. I need to get going.”

  By the time we were in the parking lot, I had enough. “Wait, Joe.”

  He turned.

  “Why are you doing this?” I shouted over the rain and wind. I dropped the suitcase and kicked it toward him, each kick moved it an inch or two across the muddy parking lot. “Why are you being so awful to me?” The words sounded ridiculous, like a pathetic housewife begging for attention or a useless girlfriend who knows the relationship is over—silly, pleading, and naïve.

  Joe picked up my suitcase.

  “I’m not moving until you tell me why you’re doing this!”

  He threw the suitcase to the ground and kicked it several times. “Doing fookin’ what?”

  “This—ignoring me, being rude to me, not talking.” Thin, elementary words that represented nothing of substance or need or importance. “Are you mad you married me? Are you embarrassed for bringing me to London? Embarrassed for me to meet your friends?”

  “I don’t have time for this, Colleen.” He stopped at a small white car and pulled out his keys.