by Lynn Kostoff
Ben looked over at Hatch.
“I admit I was mightily pissed when you went at Corrine Tedros unauthorized,” Hatch said. “We were up to our neck in bad tips, and the chief was pushing the drifter angle for the perp, and I didn’t need any more complications.” He paused and rubbed his jawline. “Your instincts about Corrine Tedros were on the money though. I owe you an apology on that one.”
“No,” Ben said. He finished off his beer and signaled for another. “After today, it’s Corrine Tedros we owe the apology to.”
SIXTY-TWO
JACK CARSON LOOKED out the bedroom window. The light was shading to gray. He was late. Normally, he’d be on the job before the sun was up.
His clothes were laid out. He got dressed and walked through the house to the kitchen.
He looked around for his wife, but figured Carol was already in her classroom getting ready for her third-graders.
He ate a bowl of cereal.
He hunted down his work cap.
Carol had left the front door unlocked again.
Jack crossed the landing and walked down the stairs. At the end of the driveway, he paused and looked back at the house.
A girl stood framed in the front living room window. Jack frowned and waved.
She closed the curtains.
Jack looked at the sky and frowned a second time.
Something about the light bothered him.
The wind ran into his face.
Jack started walking to Bob Burnett’s house. Bob lived a couple streets over on Tilton and handled a lot of the roofing jobs for Jack. Jack had loaned Bob his truck to pick up a load of shingles for a renovation that Carson Construction was doing on a rundown beach house for a family from Charlotte.
There were street signs on each corner, and he read their names as he walked past, but after a while, the street names were like the ones at the house when he opened a kitchen cabinet, and there were shelves upon shelves of boxes and bottles, and all those names came rushing down at him at once like a swarm of bees.
The light had shaded to a deeper gray. Jack looked toward what he was sure was east, but the light didn’t quite match the direction.
He walked some more. Then he didn’t.
He remembered his wife was dead. She had died during childbirth.
He tried, but her name would not arrive.
His left knee was stiff.
A horn sounded behind him, and someone said, “Hey, are you all right?”
Jack looked around. He was standing in the middle of the street.
A pickup rolled slowly and stopped next to him. The truck was a bright glossy red and had a long silver antenna sprouting from the hood. A teenage boy in a blue shirt was driving. There were more teenagers in the cab with him and another group riding in the back. There was music playing, and then there wasn’t, and the boy leaned partway out the window.
“Man, those dark clothes, this time of evening, you need to be careful,” the boy said.
Jack looked down at what he was wearing. They were dark, all right, and on top of that, they looked like old man clothes. He couldn’t remember putting any of them on.
He flexed his fingers. He thought he’d been carrying something too.
“Look, you need a lift?” the boy said. “We’re headed for Old Mill Beach.”
“Party Time,” someone said from the back of the truck, and then a girl laughed. Jack liked the sound of the laugh. It was pretty, and it rippled.
“Ok,” he said. He walked over to the tailgate, and the ones in back helped him climb in. He sat down across from a young girl. He could see her nipples pressing against her shirt.
Then the truck was moving, and they had the music playing again, and the teenage boys and girls in back were yelling to each other, and sometimes they yelled things to Jack, but he had a hard time following what they said because the wind ripped their words apart as soon as they said them, and the movement of the truck left him a little dizzy and light-headed, like the way he felt when he hadn’t eaten for a while.
There were two large coolers in the back and a jumble of rolled sleeping bags and next to them, a pile of logs and some bundled kindling.
The girl’s breasts moved under her shirt every time she did.
And then Jack was remembering. No, not quite remembering. Partially developed snapshots. Images that refused to hold long enough to fit in time and become a memory.
Blips on some internal radar screen he couldn’t read anymore.
The truck took a corner fast, and before Jack could get his hand up, his cap was ripped from his head. He watched it sail away and then land in the middle of the road.
His knee was stiff.
After a while, there were tall stands of pine trees lining the side of the road and pieces of the sky missing light.
Jack was hungry. He tried, but couldn’t find the words to explain that.
His hands were resting in his lap. His ring finger and thumb twitched, and then one of the muscles in his neck did too.
He was hungry, and then he wasn’t or didn’t think he was, and he couldn’t find the words to explain that either, and after a while, feeling hungry and not exactly feeling hungry felt like the same thing.
There were more pine trees and some dogs barking far away, and then the truck stopped, and Jack Carson was looking at the ocean.
When the wind gusted, he could taste the waves.
Two cars and three other trucks were parked on the beach, and there were people moving around a bonfire and voices rising and falling and overlapping and music playing.
Jack heard someone yell, “Hey, you forgot to drop off the old guy. He’s still sitting in the back of the truck.”
Jack was looking at the ocean. He could smell it too. Everything else was wind.
When he turned his head, a teenager in a blue shirt squatted next to him. Two others stood by the tailgate. One had black hair, and the other had black hair with its tips streaked blonde.
Jack had no idea who they were or what they wanted with him.
The boy in the blue shirt asked Jack his name and where he was supposed to be. He asked Jack that three times.
Jack set his lips and concentrated, but when he spoke, he heard himself asking about a hat.
One of the boys standing by the tailgate said, “He’s drunk, man. He’s probably one of those homeless guys. Hell, let him hang here. He’s too old and blasted to bother anybody.”
The boy in the blue shirt shrugged and said, “I guess,” and then he helped Jack climb out of the back of the truck.
The boy with the black hair put a can of beer in Jack’s hand. “It’ll help keep the buzz going, Dad,” he said. “Just hang loose now.”
The three boys walked back to join the others.
The damp sand around the bonfire steamed. Jack heard gulls crying. His knee was stiff.
He started walking. He had the sense he was supposed to be somewhere. He stayed close to the waterline where the sand was hard-packed.
The sea looked like a crumpled sheet of aluminum foil that someone had tried to smooth out.
He walked through clusters of dead jellyfish. Their skin was clouded as if they’d been given a coat of shellac.
After a while, the water changed and now rushed around his shoes, and Jack was finding it hard to keep his balance, so he moved higher up the beach.
The sand was white there and loose.
Things got slower.
The water made the same sound coming in as it did going out.
Jack stopped a minute to rest.
The sky was cloudless, and the light was leaving it.
He looked back up the beach and saw a fire that seemed to float in the air just above the crest of the waves coming into shore.
He walked some more, and then he was sitting down.
The sound of the waves was mixed with the sound of the wind.
In his right hand was a beer can. Jack wondered where it had come from. He set it in the sand nex
t to him.
The fire floating in the air was orange and yellow and seemed very far away.
His pants were wet to his knees.
He told himself he needed to get up.
He listened to the seagulls crying.
The sea was the same color as the sky.
The waves knocked the beer can over.
Up the beach, a small part of the air was on fire.
Everything was quiet, except for the sound the waves made, and one set of waves sounded the same as the next set, and after a while, Jack wasn’t hearing the waves anymore, the sound dropping away and disappearing into the movement of the waves themselves so that it wasn’t necessary to listen to them at all, any more than it was necessary for Jack, or anyone else, he thought, to listen to his own heart beating. The sound was the same as its movement.
Jack’s pants were wet to the crotch, and he smelled salt.
Everything was very quiet.
Down the beach, a piece of the sky burned.
In front of him was the sea, which was now the same color as the sky, and the sky was the same size as the immense quiet that the movement of the waves left behind, and in that quiet Jack found himself remembering something, not a sliver of memory this time or a snapshot, but a memory that arose before him intact, and Jack’s face was wet because he was remembering, and the memory was right there with him, as if it had been waiting here all along for him, and Jack stepped into the memory as one would the sea, and he could feel the pull of both, and then he was sitting on the beach and in the middle of his seventh grade classroom, third seat from the front, Paul Greene on his left, Donny Kennedy on his right, with the month of April pressing against the classroom windows and his notebook open and Mrs. Allen at the board diagramming sentences, Mrs. Allen the new teacher at the school, young and impossibly pretty with shiny brown hair that moved each time she did and dark brown eyes and a flashbulb smile, and Jack sat in the middle row in a body that was outrunning both him and the confines of the desk, and he listened to the nic, nic, nic of the chalk on the blackboard and watched Mrs. Allen’s dress ride and tighten on the lines of her body as she wrote, and in that moment April forever bloomed in his bones, Mrs. Allen in a bright yellow sundress writing out a sentence and then taking it apart and showing how each part fit, and Jack sensing the power behind that too, of being able to take everything that churned inside him and find the words for it and then to take those words and build a sentence that was true and sturdy as anything in the world, a beauty in that too that seemed as real and desirable as Mrs. Allen herself, subjects and verbs and breasts and hips, all outlined and hidden by the fit of a yellow dress, and only one thing separating them, that would forever separate everything, the gap that Jack sensed even then as he sat at his desk, all hormones and nerve endings and yearnings, the gap that time itself left between everything, the gap between the sight of the curve of a breast beneath a yellow dress from the touch of that breast, the gap between what you felt and the words you used to try and build sentences that fit what you were feeling, time forever separating a boy sitting in a classroom from an impossibly beautiful young woman standing in April light, time forever separating the boy from the man he’d grow up to be, time forever separating an old man from the sentences and everything else he’d built in his life, and as Jack Carson watched Mrs. Allen write on the blackboard, he watched the line where the sea and sky disappeared into each other, and his clothes were heavy and wet, and his face was wet too, because he sensed they were leaving him, all the words he’d ever known and used, all of them leaving and taking the world and him with them, as if they were all being systematically erased from an immense blackboard that was the same color as the sea and the same size as the sky, Jack watching all the words leave until only a handful remained, and he looked out at the sea and the sky which had disappeared into each other like the sound of the waves had disappeared into the movement of the waves, and in the immense quiet, he heard himself speak three words—Oh My God—in a voice that, as it broke, could just as easily have belonged to a young boy or an old man, just as, in that moment, Jack Carson could not be sure if the Oh My God arose from awe or horror at what lay before him, and he chased those three words until they broke against the sound of the waves and disappeared into the rising wind.
SIXTY-THREE
A CUP OF COFFEE, MAYBE.
Nothing more complicated than that.
Anne Carson’s car was in the drive. Ben parked behind it and sat for a moment behind the wheel before getting out. Anne hadn’t returned any of his calls, and Ben had quit leaving messages after the shooting at Sonny Gramm’s.
A cup of coffee, maybe. See where things went from there.
He climbed the stairs to the landing. Paige Carson answered his knock. She stepped back from the screen door and crossed her arms. In jeans, new athletic shoes, and a white T-shirt, she resembled at first glance a miniature version of Anne.
Except for the eyes. Paige had the eyes of an accountant.
Or a cop, Ben thought.
“I want to talk to your mom,” he said, tilting his head to look past her.
“You smell like beer,” Paige said.
“Your mom.”
“She’s not in.”
“Come on, Paige. Her car’s here.”
“Ok, then,” she said and unlocked the screen door. Ben followed her inside.
Paige opened the living room curtains and went back to the kitchen table and the textbook and laptop opened on it.
Ben started down the hallway. Anne’s bedroom door was open. The bed was unmade, and draped over its lower end was a bright summery dress. Jack’s door was locked from the outside. Ben returned to the kitchen.
“Where’s Mrs. Wood?” he asked.
“She had to leave early today,” Paige said without looking up. She exited the computer and closed its lid. “I told Mother I’d watch Grandfather. He’s already had his medication.”
Ben glanced around the kitchen and frowned slightly. Something felt different. “Why’s he in bed so early?”
“He’s not doing well,” Paige said. “The doctors keep telling Mother it’s time to put him in long-term care. He needs supervision. Grandfather’s become even more unpredictable in his moods lately, and he’s still finding ways to get out of the house.”
“What’s your mom going to do?”
“She can’t make up her mind,” Paige said. “Mother knows what she needs to do, but she’s weak.”
“Aren’t you being a little hard on her?”
“No,” Paige said. “I’m not.”
Ben suddenly recognized what was different. The kitchen had lost its customary clutter. The countertops had been cleared. All the dishes put away. The linoleum floor had been waxed and polished. The curtains over the sink freshly ironed. The wall hangings taken down except for a calendar and a new clock with a loud steady tick. There was also a new microwave on a new stand in the corner next to the refrigerator. Everything around him was organized and in place. He missed the everyday sprawl and clutter he’d been accustomed to seeing.
Ben stood across the table from Paige. She unwrapped a stick of gum and folded it between her teeth. He noticed she’d had her ears pierced. Embedded in each lobe was a dark garnet the size of a teardrop.
“We saw you on the news,” Paige said. “Did you really shoot Mrs. Tedros?”
Ben nodded.
“Mother cried,” Paige said.
There was a new coffeemaker on the counter near the sink.
“Where’s your mom now?” Ben said.
“You asked that like a policeman,” Paige said.
Ben sighed and rubbed his forehead. “You’ve never liked me much, have you, Paige?”
She shook her head no. Paige picked up a ballpoint pen and began tapping it on the textbook’s cover. “You’re not right for her.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He rested both hands on the back of the chair in front of him. “I like your mother.”
> “I’m not talking about how you feel,” Paige said. “I have to watch out for my mother. I mean, I love her, but she’s too emotional, and it clouds her judgment sometimes.”
“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” Ben said, dropping his hands. “You’re twelve years old, for Christ’s sake.”
Paige watched him from the chair. “She can do better than you. Anyone can see that. It doesn’t matter how old they are.” She dropped the pen and added something Ben didn’t catch.
“I said none of that matters anyway,” Paige said. She looked straight at Ben. “She’s happy now. Why can’t you leave us alone?”
Next to the textbook was a new hand-sized graphing calculator. A tiny red dot blinked below its screen.
Paige followed his line of sight and picked up the calculator. “I’m doing math three grades above my age level. I went to the guidance counselor’s office and took some tests.”
“Mr. Deane,” Ben said.
Paige smiled.
“Let me guess,” Ben said. “All the behavioral problems you were having at school …”
I’m doing much better now,” Paige said. “The conferences with Mr. Deane were very helpful. That’s the kind of man Mr. Deane is. He’s helpful and understanding.” She paused. “Charming too. Everybody thinks so.”
“Your mother,” Ben said and looked around the kitchen again.
Paige reached over and cleared the face of the calculator.
Ben rubbed his forehead. “The microwave and all the other new things around here. Mr. Deane too?”
“No,” Paige said. “Mother bought it with the money she got from Mrs. Tedros.”
Ben frowned and pulled out the chair and sat down across from Paige. “What exactly are you talking about?”
Paige pursed her lips and sat up straighter. “She came to the house once. They didn’t know I was in the kitchen. Before she left, Mrs. Tedros gave Mother some money in a brown envelope. Mother was crying, but she took it.”
Ben sat back in the chair. He looked over Paige’s head at the new wall clock.
“What was the money for?” he said finally.
“Something about Grandfather and the tape recorder,” Paige said. “Are you satisfied now? I only told you because Mrs. Tedros is dead, and you can’t prove Mother took anything from her.”
