The Last Day

by John Ramsey Miller

  Due to the woods, and since the house faced north, there had been no need for curtains to block the sun or to give the McCartys privacy. For the past weeks, though, she'd been considering having blinds installed. She had even gotten an estimate, which had been staggering since the curved thirty- foot- wide wall was comprised of four- by- eight double panes of thick glass.

  Natasha sat down and put her feet up next to the bowl on the coffee table. The bowl held a baseball she'd put in it the night after Ward left for the trade show. She'd been almost asleep when she put her hand under his pillow and was startled to discover the baseball. She brought it out to the den as she paced, holding it like the egg of a strange bird, trying to figure out why Ward had placed it there. It had to have been a message about Barney, but the meaning hadn't been apparent, unless Ward simply wanted her to think about him. When had she not thought about their son? The incident had stunned her and she'd fought the urge to call Ward and yell at him, but she had taken a pill instead and had gone to sleep angry. It seemed cruel, and not like the old Ward she'd fallen in love with—had lived with all these years.

  Natasha reclined on the couch and chased an Ambien with a glass of the chilled wine. She held up her hand and stared at it, daring it to shake.

  THREE

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  The hotel shuttle deposited Ward McCarty at the airport to catch his flight home after three days of overfilled tote bags, crowded sales booths, and insincere smiles. He hated trade shows but had to attend them in order to keep up with new suppliers, new materials, gimmicks, manufacturers, competition.

  After standing in a long line, Ward showed his North Carolina license and ticket to a bored female guard, slipped off his shoes, belt, cell phone, and watch, and put them all in a plastic tray. He took the computer out of the briefcase and placed it, his briefcase, and his carry- on on the conveyor belt, watching them vanish into the X-ray machine. He felt naked in his sock feet and he hated holding his khakis up with one hand so the cuffs didn't drag.

  At the other end of the conveyor belt, a burly guard with a buzz cut opened his briefcase. Ward glanced over to see an elderly woman standing calmly while a guard ran a wand up and down over her stooped body. Satisfied, Ward's guard lifted out a bubble-lined envelope from the briefcase and slipped out a small blue die-cast race car. As he studied the toy, his eyes grew comically larger. He looked at Ward as if asking permission.

  Ward smiled. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “Man.” The guard whistled. “Richard Petty's Road Runner die- cast in near mint. You are one lucky devil. That was a one- year deal, that car.” He looked at the underside. “It's not marked on the bottom.”

  “It's a prototype. It was never produced. One of a kind.”

  “One of a kind?” The guard placed it back into the envelope with care. “What's it worth?”

  “No idea. It's been in my family since before I was born,” Ward said.

  “Have a good day, sir,” the guard told him, as he put the padded envelope into Ward's briefcase beside his computer and closed it.

  Ward reached his assigned concourse through a maze of temporary signs, Sheetrock dust, scaffolding, plastic sheeting, and constructive pandemonium, accented by the shrill buzzing of power drills and electric saws. At Ward's insistence, the travel agent had booked his and his uncle's flights so the two business owners wouldn't be on the same plane. Ward had spent a few hours of his time in Vegas with Mark and his second wife while they were being entertained by manufacturers’ reps, only slightly more pleasant than visiting the dentist.

  At his gate Ward spent the time waiting for his flight staring at an open novel he'd bought before leaving Charlotte, trying to absorb the words and make sense of the plot. When he traveled with paperback novels, he always tore out the chapters as he finished them and threw the pages away, which served to both mark his place and make his load lighter. After he finished the chapter he was working on, he ripped the pages out and put them on the seat beside him, then slowly realized that he had no idea what had happened in the discarded chapter.

  Ward was bothered by the lack of clocks at the gate, which meant that passengers had to have watches or cell phones in order to know how long they had until their planes boarded. Of all of the things Ward didn't like about Las Vegas—and there was nothing he did like—he most disliked the city's denial that time passed there. Sitting in a leather chair with his carry- on bag and briefcase at his feet, he looked out through the windows at the Strip—easy to spot from the monstrous black glass pyramid and the giant sphinx with its lion ass backed right up to it.

  Ward called his wife on his cell phone to explain the delay, but got their home answering machine. He had spoken to Natasha only once in the past few days, when he'd arrived at the airport for the memorabilia- suppliers’ trade show. Of the six or seven times he'd called since, he'd left short messages. He wasn't alarmed, because Natasha often turned the phones’ ringers off, or ignored them. She carried a cell phone but rarely turned it on unless she needed to answer her emergency beeper.

  Sudden jazzy notes of youthful laughter froze Ward and he turned slowly to see not the young boy he expected to see but a young girl of eight or so playing tag with a smaller child. He exhaled loudly and looked down at his paperback, feeling the sudden tears running down his cheeks. Several times each day for the past year, something brought Barney into his mind, and, with that trigger, a choking gloom descended over him like a wet curtain. It could begin with a familiar odor like iced tea, a flash of a red shirt, a sudden movement in his periphery, a flag snapping in a brisk wind, a child with blond hair, a bicycle lying on a lawn—just about anything at all. Any thought of Barney brought Ward back to the memory of clutching a small, limp body in his arms as hell closed in on him.

  Barney's given name had been Ward McCarty III, but he chose the name Barney himself at the age of five because he so admired that insipid purple dinosaur. At first, Ward and Natasha humored their beautiful boy. Soon, he stopped answering to anything but his newly chosen name.

  Ward often dreamed—some dreams included a cameo by his son, or, if Ward was very lucky, a starring role. Those double- edged dreams were sweet torture, leaving his soul lacerated and leaking some essential nectar. He always woke with an odd feeling of being both full and empty at the same time.

  What consumed a great deal of Ward's waking hours was the thought that every decision a creature made led to a path with unknowable consequences. An animal's choice of an action—or path—might find it a mate, shelter, or food—or the possibility of becoming another animal's dinner. By the same token, some bean counter with a sharp pencil might choose to install a less expensive—not ground- fault-interrupted—electrical outlet near a pool, and then not properly insulate a connection which, if the ground was saturated, could lead to the tragic death of an angelic child. Ward thought about this faceless man in some generic office day after day and saw no relief to being forever haunted by the avalanche that had begun with the simple decision of a budget- conscious drone.

  Sometimes, when Ward McCarty looked at animals, he wondered if they ever dreamed alive their dead the way people did.

  It was cool inside the wide- bodied craft. When Ward arrived at his assigned row, he found the center seat already occupied by a young girl with blond hair accented with bright red and blue streaks. She was plugged into an iPod. He opened the overhead compartment and managed to wedge in his carry- on.

  The girl looked up at him, and when he met her green eyes, she smiled, showing small teeth accented with silver wire braces. Ward pointed to the window seat beyond her, whereupon she unplugged her earphones, got up, and moved into the aisle to let him pass, leaving her cloth tote bag on her seat.

  Ward spent the first two hours alternating between watching the movie on a small screen in the ceiling over the aisle, and, out of the corner of his eye, observing the electronic activities of the girl beside him.

  He figured her age as somewhere between thirteen
and seventeen. Her freckled skin was clear. She wore an ebony pearl stud in her small earlobe. She was five five, and the yellow too-large- by- a-mile sweatshirt had the famous “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign screen- printed on it, which contrasted with her red shorts and blue flip- flops. He couldn't help but notice that each of the nails on her fingers and toes was painted a different color.

  The black tote bag in her lap contained an assortment of electronic devices, and like a child with a short attention span she went from her iPod, to a Game Boy, to plugging a set of airline earphones into the armrest to watch the movie, then back to the iPod. And when he had decided that she was closer to seventeen than thirteen, she took out a DVD player and watched a cartoon clearly geared to very young children. She watched intently, laughing melodiously here and there as the cartoon played.

  Thirty minutes out of Charlotte, he dropped his tray, reached into his shirt pocket, and pulled out one of the monogrammed index cards he carried to list things to do. As he lined up his thoughts, Ward began sketching a small familiar face in one corner of the card.

  “Hey,” the girl said suddenly, interrupting his drawing.

  As she stared down at the card on the tray, she pulled her earphones off.

  “Whacha doing?” she asked.

  “Thinking,” he replied.

  “You're a good drawer,” she said. “Could you draw me?”

  Ward studied her round face and reproduced her likeness in less than two minutes, all the while her eyes moved from his face to the drawing and back like someone watching a tennis match. Ward had the ability to sketch what he saw, and faces were what he drew best.

  When he finished the sketch, she smiled. “Cool. Are you a professional artist?”

  He answered, “No. I do some light designing.”

  A confused look briefly took over her features. “Like what kind of lights do you design?”

  “Oh,” he said, smiling. “My company makes and markets NASCAR memorabilia. Cars, hats, T-shirts, mugs, key chains.”

  “No shit?” she said, too loudly. The word earned her a frown from the man beside her. “My mother is a race- car fan.”

  Ward reached down, took out his briefcase, and opened it, taking out the model car to show her.

  “You, what, painted it?” she asked, beaming.

  “My father had it made in Japan. Nowadays they're made mostly in China. See, we take pictures of a real car from several angles and a factory makes the model from the pictures, which they produce, box, and ship to us, and we distribute them from our warehouse. We just change the art on the car depending on whose car it is, since every race team has different sponsors.”

  “This is so fucking cool. Could I get one?”

  “Well, not this one. This one is the first one my father had made,” he explained. “This is the prototype. He didn't have a lot of money and that car only raced one year. As it turned out, he made other models and they did sell and so he ordered more, but this one was handmade. Mostly he used it to show to bankers and investors, who weren't all that impressed. In those days NASCAR was only popular with relatively few people.”

  He started to tell her why he had it with him, but didn't. What he did say was, “I can get you a new one—driver of your choice.”

  “No shit?”

  “Absolutely none.” He took another note card and scribbled his office number on it. “Call and ask for Leslie, and she'll send one to you for your mother. We have thousands of them in our warehouse.”

  She narrowed her eyes, suspiciously. “How much will it cost?”

  “My treat.”

  “No shit? Thanks. That is so sick.”

  “Sick?”

  “Sick as in cool.”

  “Who's your mother's favorite driver?”

  “I dunno. I can find out.” She ran the wheels back and forth on her lap and made a motor noise as she did this. “Is this you on the card?” she asked, pointing at the card he'd given her with her inked likeness. “Ward McCarty That's you?”

  “It is,” he told her.

  “Why were you in Vegas?” she asked. “Gam bling?”

  “No. Work. You?”

  “I fly back and forth a lot,” she said. “My dad lives there and I live with my mother in Charlotte. You married?”

  “Yes.”

  “What's your wife do?”

  “She's a pediatric surgeon,” Ward said.

  “What's that mean?”

  “Pediatric means children,” Ward said.

  “I know that. So she like cuts little kids open?” Her eyes were wide, her mouth a circle.

  “Yes, but I think it's more complicated than making cuts.”

  “Y’all got any kids?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You're like too old?”

  “I expect you're right,” he said, trying to smile. This wasn't true … as far as he knew.

  When she handed the car back, Ward put the padded envelope back in his briefcase, closed it, and placed it under the seat.

  “I need to slip out past you,” he told her.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Visit the little boys’ room.”

  After the man beside the girl unbuckled his seat belt and stood in the aisle, she tucked her feet up in her seat so Ward could get out.

  After he'd finished in the tiny bathroom, Ward left the enclosure and found a man in Bermudas waiting his turn. When Ward returned to his row, the girl, who was back again listening to her iPod, smiled up at him and pulled in her feet to let him get to his seat.

  When the plane landed ten minutes later and parked at the terminal, the girl grabbed up her bag of toys and was off the plane before Ward got his carry- on and filed out.

  He thought about what the girl had said about him being too old to have children, and realized it wasn't true. He and Natasha hadn't talked about having another child since Barney's accident, and the thought comforted him. For the first time in a very long time, Ward McCarty felt a degree of optimism about the future.

  FOUR

  While standing on the curb, waiting for the shut-tle, Ward spotted his young seatmate climbing into a dark green Porsche Cabriolet. The driver, a woman with blond hair and pale skin, wore a flowery scarf and dark glasses that obscured her features. Perhaps the woman was the girl's mother, the NASCAR fan.

  Six minutes later he climbed down from the bus, walked to his car, and frowned at the thin film of red dust coating the original black paint. Leaving the car in the open sunlight wouldn't do anything to prolong the paint's life. The vehicle, a pristine 1994 BMW 740i, had been his father's only admission to the world that he was a man of above- average means. Ward climbed in and started the engine. Aiming the heavy sedan toward the exit he pressed on the accelerator and felt the powerful V-8 respond.

  Ward turned on the radio, which was always set to NPR. He didn't listen to music much when he was driving. He had never felt the need for a soundtrack in his life. Natasha had joked on more than one occasion that her husband danced to the melodious voices of liberal commentators.

  Although it should have been just the opposite, Ward's heart seemed to grow heavier as he drove north on I-85. After leaving the Interstate at the Concord Mills exit, Ward drove past the racetrack, up Highway 29, and entered Concord on Cabarrus Avenue, using the new roundabout. He drove out Highway 73 and turned left at the Exxon onto Gold Hill Road. Two miles later he slowed for a doe and her two spotted fawns, which ran across the road near a farm owned by the grandson of a mill owner whose last name was synonymous with bath towels.

  Turning onto the asphalt driveway a mile farther down the road, Ward drove through the woods, past the front door, and on around to the side of the house, where he used his remote to open the center garage door. He parked beside Natasha's Lexus, the hood cool to his touch. His other car, a dark blue Toyota Highlander, was parked in the third bay. He rarely drove the Toyota, preferring his father's old BMW

  Ward paused in the kitchen where the answering machin
e blinked a red 4. Natasha hadn't bothered to listen to his short dispatches from the red- hot West. Ward held his finger over the button and hesitated before he finally hit delete.

  A stack of unopened mail on the counter lay beside a bottle opener with one cork still impaled on its screw and another nearby. It was Natasha who'd said you never leave a cork impaled on the screw. He hadn't asked what law of winery that violated. Strains of canned laughter drifted into the kitchen from the den. Since the wall of windows overlooking the woods behind the house was dark and there was no moonlight, the television screen was the sole illumination.

  Natasha, wearing a light robe over her nightgown, lay sleeping on the sleek sectional sofa. An empty bottle of wine stood on the coffee table, and a blister pack of Ambien rested nearby. Ward frowned to see that of the original eight tablets, only two remained.

  He frowned at the empty wineglass standing on the stone floor beside the couch. She appeared pale, but at least her chest was rising and falling. Ward stared down at her delicate features, washed by the uncertain light of the screen. One of his fears was that he would arrive home and find her dead.

  Life was fragile.

  Death happened just like that.

  This he knew far too well.

  Natasha was even more beautiful than she'd been the day he met her in Seattle a dozen years earlier. She had been a surgical resident attending a party given by a college friend of his— an artist whose paintings depicted a perfect, though surreal, rural world. There had been an immediate and mutual attraction, and they'd been married three months later in her parents’ living room. Hastily arranged, the service was attended only by her three brothers, her best friend, their parents, and his uncle, Mark Wilson. Gene Duncan, his best friend, who'd been in law school at the time, had flown out from Duke to be his best man.