Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  Jimmy came out into the parking lot in time to see what she drove, a pearlescent white Infiniti FX45 SUV that was probably almost pink in the right light. She pointed the remote at the door. There was a double click, and she went first to the hatchback and opened it and put the plastic bag there, on the carpet.

  He didn’t know why exactly, but Jimmy tailed her across town to Russian Hill.

  The Infiniti was parked in the stubby driveway of a six-story apartment building, a vintage place, some vintage. It had character. He found a place down in the next block and hiked back up the incline. No wonder San Francisco women had such good-looking legs. He was about to go into the first floor—the door was propped open—when he saw something on the door of the Infiniti, letters impossible to read from any real distance. He came closer. They were silver on white. Dignified. Rich. Muted.

  What they said was:

  GRACEFUL EXITS

  SENIOR MOVING—ESTATE CLOSURE

  In the lobby was an old-fashioned elevator, with a brass arrow to point to the number of the floor. It was pointing at six. The top. As good a bet as any for where the woman had gone. Jimmy pushed the button to bring it down and stepped back. It was slow. It took twenty seconds just to creak down to five.

  He leaned against the opposite wall. He’d been smoking all day, since he’d gotten in the Porsche in the basement garage of the Mark, since he’d dropped the metal door of the glove box, looking for his sunglasses, and had seen the pack of cigarettes he’d bought at the little store back down in Paso Robles.

  Luckies.

  He was snubbing out the cigarette in the sand in the canister ashtray across from the elevator when the Infiniti woman stepped out of a door at the end of the lobby, a door that had been left standing open but that he hadn’t noticed.

  “Hello,” she said. “Again.”

  “Hi.”

  “Do you need a minute?”

  Jimmy took one, to think what to say. He had been intending to work on his opening lines on the ride up in the elevator, have something worked out before he got to the top floor.

  “I know it’s difficult,” the woman said.

  “Unprecedented,” Jimmy said.

  She smiled and nodded. She’d been misting up again, just like she had in the coroner’s office. He could see the teary sparkle in her eye. She turned around and left him there, went back through the door at the end of the lobby, left it open.

  When he looked in, it was a small apartment. The door opened into a four-foot-square foyer and then a twelve-foot living room. It was tiny, but it was a deluxe apartment. The building was on the top of the hill, so even on the first flo or there was a view, a blue and white pane of color, clear and bright, like a stained glass rendering of a slice of the skyline and the Bay beyond. The woman saw him looking out the window and for some reason got a bit flustered, apologetic.

  “I opened the drapes,” she said. “She kept it so dark in here.”

  “It’s all right,” Jimmy said. “It’s a beautiful day.”

  She crossed to him, a card already in her hand. “Someone said you weren’t coming in until this afternoon,” she said. “Patricia Hatch.”

  Jimmy took the card. He convinced himself that he was working, working for some greater good, and just let the lie tell itself.

  “Were you her only child?” she said. “No,” she immediately corrected, “I’m sorry. A neighbor said she had a daughter here in the City who came to see her often. Who had just moved here?”

  Jimmy kept quiet, took in the place. Every inch of wall, every flat surface, was covered with photographs, framed. On the coffee table was an ashtray from The Coconut Grove.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she corrected again. “You would be grandchildren. I forgot how old she—she was ninety.”

  There was picture after picture of a beautiful, sassy girl, maybe twenty-two. In gowns. In a bathing suit, what they used to call a bather.

  “Why were you crying?” Jimmy said, still scanning the pictures. “At the coroner’s. And here, before I came in. I mean, in your business you must see the same thing, over and over. Was something different with her?”

  The woman stepped closer, with a kind of familiarity, the same familiarity she’d been apologizing for ever since he came in.

  “Can I show you my favorite picture?” she said.

  “Please,” Jimmy said.

  “It’s this one.” It was a publicity shot, the young woman as a chorus girl. She handed it to him. “You see, I was a dancer, too,” she said. “A million years ago.”

  “But not seventy,” Jimmy said.

  “No.”

  Jimmy put the picture back on the table.

  “The world has changed so much,” the woman said.

  Jimmy couldn’t argue with her there. “I don’t have a sister,” he said. “You said a woman had been coming by?” He tried to amend his tone, to keep from sounding like he was pushing. “Someone young?”

  “That’s what they said. A new friend. Maybe she’s just someone in the neighborhood,” the other said. “Someone like me. Who cared very much for your grandmother. It was good that she had a friend.”

  She went to her purse and started unpacking. A pad. A gold pen. A phone with a keyboard. A handheld tape recorder. A digital camera. “Timothy from our office will be here in a few minutes. Of course, you can have your own Trusted Witness for the inventory.” He heard her capitalize the T and the W. He thought, That’s what I’d like to be: a Trusted Witness. Angel was a Trusted Witness. Jimmy knew a few others. “Of course, you can take anything today, before the walk-through,” she said.

  “I think I’ll walk around the block,” Jimmy said.

  “Of course.”

  He made another scan of the room. There weren’t any pictures anywhere of anyone who looked like a son or a daughter or a grandson or a granddaughter. Or a man friend. Or even the “new friend” she’d made. No friends, neighbors. Nobody. But don’t you get used to being alone, being lonely, in ninety years? Don’t you get used to outliving everyone, even get used to outliving yourself, at least what you used to be? Your perk? Your spark? The tone of young skin? The beauty, the sex that drew people to you? If she had been sixty, it would have made sense. Or seventy.

  At least now he knew how she got her leg up and over the rail on the bridge. She had been a dancer.

  “I wonder why I thought I should do this today,” Jimmy looked at Patricia Hatch and said.

  “Everyone is different,” she said.

  And he made his exit, graceful or otherwise.

  The world wasn’t neat. The world didn’t make sense, at least not moment by moment. Nobody knew that like Jimmy knew it, but still, he tried to neaten it up where he could, even if only in his own head. He made lists. He checked things off.

  So, after Russian Hill, he looked into the other two suicides off the Golden Gate, the latest ones.

  The German woman apparently was traveling alone, had checked in, alone, to a fairly expensive room at a blue-and-white nautical-themed hotel down on Fisherman’s Wharf, a new hotel in an old, old brick building, a former cannery. You could look out every window and see the Buena Vista bar and the cable car turnaround and the water beyond. It didn’t look like the kind of place a last-stage depressive would pick for herself. She’d been there three days, had made the rounds of all the sights, had asked the concierge for maps and restaurant picks. She was signed up for a wine country bus tour tomorrow, prepaid. (A pair of tickets. Why?) From here, it was on to L.A. for the woman. Alone.

  Jimmy talked to a half-dozen guests and hotel staff. It didn’t make sense to anybody, but everybody admitted they didn’t know much about her, about how she was spending her days and nights. The concierge seemed particularly to feel the loss. The woman was German. Europeans understand that you tip the help at the end of your stay.

  So that was two out of the three.

  What about Mr. Wrong Side?

  He had AIDS. That was the first thing Jimmy
learned about him: he was dying of AIDS. It was right there in the paper, a sidebar bylined by Duncan Groner, who apparently owned the suicide beat. Jimmy had stopped for an Irish coffee at a place in North Beach. By night North Beach would be packed with tourists and locals, one of the neighborhoods that satisfied both of them, with good-as-Rome Italian restaurants and bars and hipster bookstores and strip joints. It was three in the afternoon, and the coffee and Irish whisky was good. Up and down in the same cup.

  The young man was living in a hospice. Too weak to move out of his bed, they had thought. So he’d had some help. Jimmy didn’t really want to follow up on it. He had the address for the hospice. It wasn’t far away, four or five streets over. He didn’t want to follow it up because the answer to the question of why the young man was dead was too clear. In spite of what he told himself all the time, he didn’t like simple, obvious answers. A young man killed himself because he was dying in a slow, bad way. Jimmy wanted it to be something else. He wanted a little mystery. Not a lot, a small mystery, easily blown out, like a candle, by a professional with a modicum of sense, even if he was from out of town and wrapped in the cloak of his own mysteries, dragging around his own chains.

  Then again, there was that detail . . .

  The man dying of AIDS had to have had some help.

  And something else . . .

  Most of the day, Red Boots and another had been tailing Jimmy, neither one of them looking all that happy to be up in daylight.

  ELEVEN

  He stayed away for as long as he could, which turned out to be a day and a half. It was five thirty. Mary waited behind the wheel of her husband’s black BMW X-5, in front of a dance studio on a side street in San Raphael. The light was what they call in the movie world the Golden Hour. Everything looked good at five thirty. She wasn’t on the phone. Maybe she was listening to the radio. She had the window down. Jimmy was across the street, in the Porsche. He hadn’t been this close to her before. Her hair was a little darker, at least in this light, than it had been back then when it was so blond it was almost white, when sometimes it looked like there were lights inside it, or at least electricity. He remembered the first time he saw her in daylight, walking toward him, away from the director’s house up in the canyon, early enough in the morning that no one else was awake.

  She put her head back against the headrest. She had one knee up against the door of the car, sitting like a man. She seemed happy, glad to be exactly where she was.

  There was a reason Jimmy didn’t like the simple, obvious answers. They hurt more.

  She just doesn’t love you.

  You’ll never see him again.

  There is no God.

  Everyone’s afraid at the end.

  The past is passed.

  She is happily married now and has a little boy and never thinks of you and is out of your reach forever . . .

  She’s alive; you’re dead.

  Suddenly there were little dancers everywhere. The doors must have opened somewhere, sending them out to their parents and nannies.

  But they weren’t dancers. Mary was parked directly in front of a dance academy, but it was next door to a martial arts dojo, blocked by her car. Another kind of dance. The boys and girls, six and seven and eight and nine, spilled out in their gis, still all jacked up from the class, half of them kicking the air as they crab-walked across the asphalt, white belts or no belts, calling out things to each other, a happy little assault force.

  The boy who was Mary’s boy was one of the last to leave. He came out and stood in the angled sunlight just outside the glass door. The dojo had been a retail store of some kind in its previous life. The instructor came out behind the boy, a serious hand resting on his low shoulder. He was a black man with a Navy SEAL’s body. Whatever he was saying to the boy, the boy kept nodding. By this age, living where he lived, living like he lived, the kid probably had five coaches in his life. He knew the coach drill.

  The teacher dismissed the little warrior with a gentle hand on the back of his head. The black man’s palms were so white they almost flashed in the bright, angled light. The boy ran the rest of the way to the SUV, opened the back door, and climbed up and in, buckling himself in and pulling the door closed. The front passenger-side window came down. The sensei leaned in with some words for the mom.

  She is a mother, here, in this life. A wife, a mother.

  There’s your answer, simple as that. No mystery.

  It made Jimmy’s chest ache.

  He followed them halfway home, halfway back to the hump of Tiburon, but he kept going straight when Mary turned left into the parking lot of a market. He’d had enough obvious.

  He looked up in the rearview mirror. Had he caught her looking over at the departing Porsche? Following it with her eyes? Maybe he’d been tailgating or maybe she thought he had. He was wearing the blocky Ray-Ban Wayfarers from the glove compartment. That’s what he had always worn then. Then. Maybe she’d seen him in her rearview mirror.

  Maybe she . . .

  No, it was something simpler than that. It had to be.

  He watched the day die in a place that was almost painfully beautiful, Mount Tam, Tamalpais, one of the world’s most scenic overlooks. At least if you loved California, if it spoke to you, the general drama of the coastline, the specific drama of San Francisco. The knob of the mountain was bare but for grass and outcroppings of smooth rock, hundreds of feet above the water, right at the Gate. The bridge was to the right. Though the sky was still full of light, the cars’ headlights were all on, on the bridge, three lanes north and three lanes south, as if the curbs were channeling opposing flows of bright lava. Or surging white blood cells.

  Two ways to go, he thought.

  Southbound. He should be southbound. He should get the hell out of there. He turned and looked at the Porsche. With the riotous colors in the sky melting on the classic curves of the fenders, it looked like a model sitting there. The whole picture, and him in it, looked managed, staged, touched up. A pensive, handsome young man and his automobile, the symbol of his success. He should finish this cigarette and grind it dead on the ground and get behind the wood-rimmed wheel and turn the key and see the white light leap into the corners of the gauges, see the red-edged needle jump to three-quarters—plenty of gas to get well on down the road—turn the key further, hear the engine go, see the tach leap with the first punch of the gas. Hear and see everything that said Go! Everything that said leave the land of the dead before they all started coming to life.

  Go.

  He let the Lucky Strike burn all the way down, pinching it like a jay, staring at the car sitting there. He thought about the day he bought it. The car. He thought about who was with him. He thought about the ninety-year-old lady. He thought about the German tourist, about the wine-country wine she didn’t drink that day. He thought about the young man dying of AIDS, until he died stepping off the wrong side of the Golden Gate. Everything he thought was complicated. None of it was self-evident. The voice in his head—the voice of himself, Jimmy Miles—was a dozen voices. He was like Machine Shop. But with Shop, at least what was in his head was a debate. With Jimmy, it was ten points of view. Twenty. It was like being in a bus station at midnight listening to crazy people, all of whom think they know you. It was like being in a room with every version of yourself you’ve ever been, hearing every lying man and boy you’ve ever been turning on you.

  Maybe that was the gathering he’d dreamed of that morning.

  Two ways to go.

  He came down off the mountain and went north. To Tiburon.

  A few minutes before seven, the babysitter drove up to the big Craftsman house in a yellow Volkswagen convertible. She looked college age. She parked on a curve just below the house. She got out, locked the car, started toward the gate in the hedge, then remembered something and went back to the bug. A book. In case her boyfriend wasn’t home when she called. Mary’s husband answered the door, stood there in the frame. White shirt, dark pants, tie aro
und his neck waiting to be tied. He was a good-looking man. Jimmy still didn’t know what his name was. He hadn’t seen him again since the first time out in the park until now. He had a glass of red wine in his hand. Even from across the street, Jimmy could guess the lines in the joke he made with the young girl about it.

  Mary was upstairs in the boy’s room. Jimmy didn’t know his name yet, either. She was getting him into PJs. Or trying to. He was jumping on the bed, taking advantage of the special circumstances, a weeknight left with a sitter. She caught him in midair on one jump and hugged him with such devotion it might have scared him a little. There must have been a voice they both heard from downstairs, mother and son, because they suddenly looked at each other and made the same funny face and turned for the door. A second later, the light went out.

  There were two ways off the tip of Tiburon, two ends of the same road, but one way was more direct than the other. Jimmy couldn’t keep himself from making assumptions about Mary’s husband, filling the blanks. He didn’t seem like the take-the-long-way kind of guy.

  Jimmy guessed right; here came the X-5. Somebody had gotten it washed since the late afternoon. With the dark trees of Tiburon behind it on the dark street with its tasteful lighting, it was all black on black, glistening. Everything today looked like an upscale car ad.

  Jimmy waited, let them get a ways up the road. He was parked in the lot of a closed gas station. The lights were out except for three moons of backlit white plastic, the signs over the pumps on the three bays.