There are two of them. SACKETT LAWNS & MORE it says on the side of the truck. The one with the red hat gets out of the driver’s seat, bitches about his neck. The other one is quieter. You can tell by the way he closes his door with two hands.
“This is smaller than he said.”
Red Hat’s voice sounds like tobacco. “Cuz he’s a fucking shady prick. Won’t even pay cash. Forces me to go to a convenience store that’s practically all the way in Somerville and pick up the cash in an Amazon freaking drop box. Like I don’t have things of my own to do, like he pays enough to put me in traffic. You believe that shit?”
Blue Hat walks over the crabgrass. “This is way smaller, dude.”
Red Hat finishes off a Bud Light. “Hang on, dude, I’m calling him right now. He said there were keys.” Red Hat groans. Voicemail. “Hey, mista, it’s Dan from Sackett Lawns. Yeah, we’re wondering when you might be coming by to drop off a key to use the facilities, you know, snag a glass of H2O if need be. You can reach me here, guy. Later.”
Blue Hat looks at him. “So,” he says. “When’s he coming?”
Red Hat tosses his phone in the front seat of the truck. “Not soon enough, fucking prick.”
* * *
—
I waited for Roger with Red Hat and Blue Hat all day, but he didn’t show up. A couple of times I would have sworn that he was there. I got that creeping itch I had that day in the woods. I was too young back then, too late, but now when that inkling overtakes me, I brace myself, I whip my head around. But today was like every day. No Magnus in the shadows. Once again, I was just being paranoid.
Now I’m home. I’m not really surprised that I didn’t see him. Your life never happens in one day like that, all the big events at once. I did my job today, but it’s hard to feel good when I still see her on the floor of the bathtub. It’s not like The Dunwich Horror. It isn’t like Incy’s body evaporated. She was a person and there are moments that I can’t live with what I’ve done, what I do, and I close my eyes, I pretend Chloe is here, knowing, It’s okay, Jon. It’s all working out. You’ll see. I promise, you just have to have faith in the big picture. Can you see it? It’s there. I promise.
It’s calming to hear her voice, even if it isn’t real. My mom always said you have to focus on what you do control, which is what her diets were all about. It doesn’t mean she was losing weight, but she was being proactive. I was proactive today. I stopped a monster.
I close my eyes and concentrate on Red Hat and Blue Hat, all of us waiting for Roger Blair. I can hear Red Hat so clearly, Not soon enough, fucking prick. And in my dreams I have a green hat, and the three of us are brothers, digging holes in Roger’s lawn. And we keep bumping into bodies, into Incy, into Kody, into the others. We scoop their bloodless bones out of the ground with our bare hands and we sing along to Journey like there’s nothing weird about it, nothing sad. And then the Bruin comes booming out of the house with a gun. Her baby slides out of her body, onto the driveway, growing even as it rolls toward the bushes, it’s a toddler by the time it reaches the mailbox—just like Wilbur in The Dunwich Horror. The Bruin’s toddler pulls out a newspaper and a bag of heroin. She runs down the street and none of us are fast enough to chase her, not even her mother, who cries so much that I wake up soaked in her tears, my sweat.
EGGS
Lo swears you can’t see my ostomy bag but it doesn’t matter, to a degree. It’s the knowing that it’s there, that everyone on the force is gonna be looking for it when I go back next week. Stacey will run her eyes all over my slacks looking for it.
Lo walks in, clutching her phone. “Wow,” she says. “Guess what?”
I look at her. No guessing. Not now. She nods. She says Marko called, he sold a book. “Can you believe that, Eggie?”
It’s not that I don’t like the kid, it’s that Lo does, that she’s taking this on as one of her achievements. Already, I have to hear about Marko’s forthcoming nuptials to that girl he banged in my house. I have to hear about his paper on Ann Petry and his volunteer work downtown, about his lasagna—still haven’t tasted anything that good since, right?—and now this, a book deal.
“What kind of a book?”
“Poems,” she says. “And it’s a real feat, Eggie, getting someone to cut a check for poems.”
I do my best. I try to get it up for Marko and his poems. Lo says her kids are gonna be so excited, that this sort of thing is good for all the kids because it makes them remember that good things happen. She’s fired up, happy. I have an ostomy bag and a headache but for the first time since all this happened, this cancer business, my wife is happy. And it stings, her smile, her smile that doesn’t have anything to do with me, she’s already busy with her phone, telling me that Marko wrote to her in the back of his book.
“You know what he calls me, Eggie?”
“No, obviously.”
She ignores my sarcasm or she misses it. Neither possibility is good. “My sweet Lo,” she says, hand to heart. She comes over to me, kneels on the floor the way she did when I first got sick, when the cancer was new and exciting, paid vacation, pre-pills, pre-bag. “Wanna see something funny?”
“Always,” I say, relieved that she’s back. When’s the last time she was this close and not to take my temp?
“He wants me to help him pick out some pictures for his press packet.”
She scrolls through pictures of happy, healthy Marko, sometimes with his hair tucked behind his ears, sometimes serious, once on a sailboat, another time in a garden, sometimes laughing, here he is in black-and-white with the girlfriend—fiancée, Lo says, we have the engagement party coming up—and all the time he’s healthy. Healthier than my boy. Lo gets to the end, the last picture, Marko and the girlfriend. They’re on a bench, waving.
“How come she’s in half the pictures? I thought this was his book.”
“It’s theirs. She wrote all the footnotes.”
“Poems with footnotes.”
She smiles. “Be nice, Eggie. This is my first truly published kid.”
I try. I try to love Marko and his fiancée. Her soft turquoise moccasins that jump out at you, as if the girl wants you to know she’s special, as if shoes are an indication of personality and soul. Lo is quiet, still. Our house is quiet, still. There’s something about this last picture, something vital to it, it’s the opposite of cancer. They both look so goddamn healthy, like nothing in this world could stop them. Lo’s shoulders soften. She says this is her favorite picture. I tell her I know. We are a sad couple and then the screen turns black. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t realize that I can see her there, reflected, all that sadness pent up in her eyes, she wishes they really were her kids and she doesn’t swipe her finger across the screen to bring them back.
“I’m sorry, Lo.”
“I know,” she says. “You don’t have to say it all the time.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shakes it off, she swipes. She goes on Facebook. She leaves me, she goes to her chair. Before cancer, she was a reader, always turning the pages of a book. But then I got sick and forced her into so many waiting rooms. She became someone else, one of those Facebook people, one of those people surfing the Internet instead of exploring the world.
I owe it to her to do better, to fix us. I can’t fix my son. I can’t have Marko’s parents murdered so that we can step in and adopt him. But I have to do something. I have to make it up to her. I need a win. It’s been one loss on top of another and it can’t be that my boy is incurable, it can’t be that the only good thing we have is Marko fucking Kallenberg and his embarrassment of riches, his family coming into town, coming into Lo’s Facebook feed, she’s lifting the iPad, as if I give a fuck—He looks a lot like his mother, don’t you think?—and this will not be my life, my weekend, on the couch again, the dismal fading glory of someone else’s accomplishment—Oh Eggie, they have
a nice picture of him in the Pro Jo online, we have to get a copy.
Pro Jo. Theo Ward. Tenley’s.
That’s it for me. I whistle at her, like I used to do.
She smiles, a real smile, a good start. “What’s that, E?”
“That’s me saying we should get the hell out of here.”
She laughs. “And go where? Bermuda?”
“No,” I say. “I’m not ready for swimming just yet.”
“You’re really serious?”
“I think we deserve a change of scenery.”
“Where would we even go?”
It’s times like this when I’m grateful for my old man, how he taught me to lie to a woman. You look her in the eye and smile and then you look away like you never meant for her to see you smile. I do that and I tell my wife I wanna go to Salem.
“Salem? Eggie, you’re going back to work this week.”
“Yeah, and I wouldn’t be going back without you. And you love Salem.”
“I don’t even know if they have a hospital there that our insurance would cover.”
I cut her off. “Lo, I’m better, okay? I’m stronger. And when I get back on the job, I’ll be moving around.”
“Which is why you should rest.”
“Or maybe it’s why I should get off my ass and have kind of a trial run, you know, stroll around, test the water.”
It worked. Within a few seconds she’s on the iPad, finding us a deal on a hotel, thinking about a course she could teach next semester, how long it’s been since she was in Salem, how long it’s been since she read The Crucible.
“Are you sure you’re up for a drive? Because you can change your mind, if this was like last week when you thought you wanted to go to the movies…”
“No, Lo, I’m sure. I’m ready.”
Her smile is the real kind and it’s on. We’re going to Salem to see all the witchy things she loves so much. But what this trip is really all about, I’m going to Lynn, which is only two towns over. I’m gonna find him, Theo Ward, gonna catch him, get him squared away, cuffed, as sure a thing as the book deal for Marko’s fucking poems.
* * *
—
Lo-out-of-town is always different from Lo-at-home. I think that’s a new lipstick she’s wearing. Almost purple. She took a century getting spiffed up, she’s wearing a bra that’s new, I saw the tags in the trash can, extra lift. She has new moccasins she picked up in a boutique by all the witchy tourist traps. Brown moccasins with little beads, she asked the girl, Do you have these in turquoise? Broke my heart, the idea of her trying to make us into Marko and that girl. Here I sit across from my beautiful wife, hopped up on The Crucible and the sea, all the things we saw today, on her third glass of wine. And still all I can think is Lynn Lynn City of Sin I gotta find out how the Beard got in.
The plan was simple: come here for steaks and wine, make sure Lo gets nice and lit, get her into bed and then I’m on my own.
But she likes it here. She wanted appetizers, clams casino like in Empire Falls. She says she’s gonna want dessert, she’s inspired, she might even write again. “These waitresses,” she says. “Aren’t they something? Can’t you picture them born as waitresses, with the trays and all?”
I do my part, nodding along.
“You know,” she says. “Since I’m gonna put The Crucible on my syllabus next semester, I think, why not just go for it? I’m gonna see about taking my kids on a field trip here.”
I chew on my fat. It stings. My kids. “I thought that was just for little kids.”
She shrugs.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that, Lo.”
“Do what?”
Don’t tango with your drunk wife, Eggie. Let her be. I break. “You know, I wish you wouldn’t make everything about Marko.”
“Who said anything about Marko?” she scoffs. “He’s graduating. He won’t be on a field trip.”
“I mean your kids.”
“What about my kids?”
“Well they’re busy, Lo, college kids, and they won’t wanna go on a field trip, they got things to do.”
She picks up her wine. “Well,” she says. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t know shit about my kids.”
Instead of fighting, we both get silent. The eye of the storm kind of silent. We’re those old people you see in a movie about young people worrying about becoming old people, sitting in a restaurant, nothing to say to each other, nothing to stop them from walking out except the expenses, the check.
And then she drinks too fast. And then she reaches for my hand. “Eggie,” she says. “Eggie, shoot I think I’m gonna vomit.”
* * *
—
Back in our room, she’s the sick one now. I drove us here, I got us in, I pulled her hair back. It’s me now, standing over her, rubbing her shoulders, her back, offering ice. She is the sick one and I am the caring one and periodically she squeezes my hand. It turns out we needed this.
She puts on an old nightie and gets into the bed with her new witch book and I pretend to be sleepy. We don’t talk about our stupid fight. We could be okay. I’m lucky she forgives me, the shit I pull, not seeing my son, biting her head off about her students. But I can’t sleep. She’s snoring now and I’m looking at that door, thinking about the Beard, less than fifteen miles away.
* * *
—
The next morning we check out and we’re still okay. We drive to Dunkin’ Donuts and we’re giddy like kids, kids who can’t stop talking, voices overlapping. She can’t remember the last time she had a hangover and she wants glazed crullers and strawberry milk and we’re sitting in the car, happy.
Let it go, Eggie. You got your wife back.
But I can’t let it go. I want more than my marriage. I want to find the Beard. I want to be right. She gets out, goes in for another doughnut, comes back with a jelly doughnut, tears it in half.
“You want the AC on?”
When she turns to me, that’s it. “Lo, eleven people died in Lynn, eleven kids, all of ’em under thirty. Heart attacks. Drug dealers.”
She wipes the jelly off her fingers. “Uh-huh.”
On I go, every little bit, like she says to her kids write down to the bone. I tell her about my files, about how I didn’t stop. I get deeper, I get to the day at Tenley’s, the day I thought I had the Beard, the day I didn’t go to my physical because I was at the Lovecraft show.
“Conference,” she says, a murmur, telling me nothing about where she is, if she hates me, if it’s over. She is a good listener, best listener I ever knew, it’s why she’s the world’s greatest teacher.
She is still holding her half of the doughnut. She looks at me, I can’t read her, her eyes level me, know me, hold me. “We can go to Lynn,” she concedes, death in her voice, none of that love from a few minutes ago. “But then we’re going home. After this, we’re going home.”
I know what home is. Home is Chuckie. “You’re the best,” I say and I lay a kiss on her, a kiss like the one Marko laid on his fiancée, a real kiss.
* * *
—
In Lynn, she can’t hold back from admitting what this is. This is fun. I’m driving now and she’s on the iPad, scouring the map of all the death scenes. One of the punks dropped dead by Durkee-Mower, the Marshmallow Fluff factory. She gets a kick out of this, calling it something out of a Tom Robbins book. I can never keep track of them, all her authors, and I search every street corner for the Beard. She insists on seeing that fluff factory in person so we go there. We park. She loves it here, tells me it’s like Upton Sinclair had a baby with Willy Wonka.
Back on the road, we look for him. While I drive, Lo does the talking, telling me about Lynn, about how once upon a time they called it the City of Firsts, because so many things started here. “But the whole plan backf
ired.” Her voice softens. “It turned out that a lot of things didn’t start here and then what did start, most of it floundered.” She points at the sunless postcard horizon. “That’s King Beach,” she says. She holds my hand. “You know what it is about this place? That it could all be so beautiful. It’s so close.”
We go by the school where one of the dealers dropped dead. There’s nobody around, it’s the weekend, and this feels more and more like a fool’s errand. What did I expect? The Beard to be standing around on street corners waiting to get pinned?
Lo wants to go on the swings. She can’t stop thinking about all these young dead kids, how you look at their mug shots and read about them and it turns out they’re just kids, just trying to feed their kids, how they’d sell Omaha Steaks if they could, but what can they sell? Drugs. She says it makes sense when you think about it, that these kids are all dropping dead of broken hearts. Literally. What she means: there is no Beard. She digs her moccasins into the dirt beneath her swing. “Eggie,” she says. “It’s late.”
I remind her that young people stopped dying in Providence and I remind her that the deaths at home were random—an Ivy League Olympian, a harmless lost kid, a junkie—but the deaths in Lynn feel deliberate. Like he’s taking out drug dealers, like he used Providence as some kind of practice ground for his future slayings.
“But Eggie they’re heart attacks.”
“Or maybe whatever he does, he just makes it look like a heart attack. Maybe…maybe there’s another way.”
She is an imaginative woman. She says Marko has a long form poem about an evil fairy and she says I might be right. “But sometimes that has to be enough, Eggie.”
I look at her moccasins, those stupid fucking moccasins. She says we tried. “We came here and we had a nice time, a great time, and you’ll be happy to be back at work. I promise, Eggie, it’s getting better. We’ve got Marko’s engagement party where there’s an open bar.” She laughs. “Maybe I’ll get wasted again!”
Providence Page 22
