The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  Lynn thought of Barry trying to set up basketball drills with Clay in the driveway this summer, the boy’s halfhearted enthusiasm quickly fading into indifference and a long afternoon in front of the Sega Dreamcast. She pictured Barry going back to shooting baskets by himself, trying not to be disappointed that his son didn’t share his love of the game.

  “And you know he was up for the chief’s job last year, didn’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Oh, yeah. Supposedly, he was the one who really cleaned things up downtown. Remember how sleazy it used to be along the waterfront?”

  “So why didn’t he get the job?”

  “A black kid got shot, and they decided to go with Harold instead.” Jeanine wrinkled her nose, not needing to spell out the implications.

  “That must’ve been quite a blow, with them being such good friends and all.”

  Lynn thought of the way they slid past each other like sandpaper blocks this morning.

  “I think Mike was okay about it,” said Jeanine. “He’s just a real true-blue straight arrow. Did you know he was one of the rescue-and-recovery guys at Ground Zero?”

  “Really?”

  “Just jumped in his car and drove down there because he wanted to do something to help. They showed him on Fox news lifting a girder with a couple of guys.” She leaned across the table, confiding. “I have to tell you, I looked over at Marty in his Jockey shorts with his stomach hanging out and his little bottle of Evian, and I thought, And what are you doing, ya big slug?”

  “I’m glad Michael finally seems to have straightened out,” Lynn said, bending a little red coffee straw around her fingers.

  “Well, you two were always kind of an odd combination.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you were kind of this arty chick, and he was this bottom-dog guy whose dad worked at the prison.”

  Lynn sat back, experiencing the uncomfortable sensation of being in front of the camera for once.

  “Hold on a minute,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s kind of oversimplifying it?”

  “No, why?” Jeanine dabbed at the sides of her mouth. “It’s true. He’s from that shantytown crowd that’s always worked down by the river. And you’re from halfway up the hill, where people can come and go anytime. Your dad was in advertising. It’s just an accident of geography that we all went to the same high school.”

  “But I never looked down on anyone.” Lynn crossed her arms defensively. “I never put anyone down because of where they came from.”

  “You don’t have to. It’s in your pictures.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Well, come on. Look at them.”

  Lynn turned, elbow on the back of her chair. Each of the prints on the wall had been matted and framed. The Michelangelo clouds and the guard tower overlooking the Hudson at dawn; the Great White Commuters with their trench coats and briefcases on the platform; the Town Fathers with their rictus grins and nine irons on the Stone Ridge Country Club golf course; twilight in the windows of the old map factory by the river; the middle-class homes up in the hills with their roofs spreading out like the skirts of girls on summer lawns; the empty cracked swimming pool full of leaves on the grounds of the old Van Der Hayden estate.

  “What’s the matter with them?” She turned back to Jeanine.

  “Nothing. Unless you mind your hometown looking like a cross between a war-torn Bosnia and a Coney Island sideshow.”

  “I thought you liked my work.”

  “I do. It’s very accomplished,” Jeanine said crisply, pushing her plate away. “But it’s like you’re looking at us through a microscope.”

  “That’s not true. I love this town. That’s why I came back.”

  “Oh, yeah, right.” Jeanine smirked. “And you’re really doing a lot for our property values with those kinds of pictures.”

  Lynn looked down at the little round table between them. In the last few seconds, it seemed to have widened into a small icy pond.

  “Well, I think there’s also a lot of affection in these photos,” she said.

  “Sure, like the ones you won that award for. What was it called?”

  “The Thomas Cole Prize.” Lynn lowered her voice. “You say that like it’s something I should be ashamed of.”

  “Well, it got you into Pratt Institute, so I guess they must have done somebody some good.”

  “Are you saying I used him to get ahead?”

  Jeanine raised her eyes to flag down a passing waitress, as if she had no interest in continuing the argument now that she’d gotten her digs in.

  “Jeanine …”

  “Honey, we don’t need to talk about it anymore. That’s all ancient history.”

  “I know, but what are you saying? You can’t just leave it like that.”

  “I’m just saying that things are more complicated than they look sometimes …”

  “So you think that what happened with Michael and me in the end was only my fault?”

  She saw Jeanine hesitate, as if she were standing at the edge of a cliff. This is the place where a friendship drops off, Lynn realized. This is a place where you stop calling each other and just give each other chilly smiles across the Stew Leonard’s parking lot. This is where you start looking for another doubles partner and rolling your eyes when your husband asks why you guys haven’t seen the Pollacks for a while.

  “Listen, it was a long time ago.” Jeanine gave her a quick reassuring smile, deciding to pull back from the edge. “We’re all different people now. Right?”

  “Riiight,” said Lynn, trying to let the moment go.

  “Seriously, if you told me I was going to spend my evenings making cupcakes and reading The Berenstain Bears over and over when I was on the trading desk at Merrill Lynch, I would’ve had to slit my wrists.”

  “I guess that’s true for me too.” Lynn cleared her throat uncomfortably. “I never counted on carpooling and sewing sequins on little tutus when I was shooting for the News.”

  “And now look at us, a couple of middle-aged broads eating lunch …”

  “Thank God we get to be seventeen and do it all over again,” said Lynn.

  “Oh, yeah, right … hahahhahhaha … ”

  But having gone around this treacherous bend in the conversation, Lynn found herself restless and not quite able to sit still. She kept looking over Jeanine’s shoulder at her old pictures on the walls, finding the light a bit harsh in some, the focus too tight in others. If she were to go back to some of these subjects, she’d want to use softer lighting, more shades, maybe a wider-angle lens.

  “Anyway, let’s talk about something else.” Jeanine reached over to touch her arm. “How are the kids?”

  6

  “COME ON, DANIEL. Move up a little.”

  The kid looked petrified as he hung back in the goalmouth. Not a natural athlete at the best of times, thought Mike, watching the other seven-year-olds hurl themselves around the practice field. A beanpole with a head too big for his body who cowered every time the ball came his way.

  “Come on, Dan the Man, get your head in the game.” Mike clapped his hands, aware of the kid’s mother watching from the sidelines, where she had just given him an earful about how badly this child needed a father figure at the moment. “We’re down a player. We need you on offense.”

  He came over to give the boy a nudge. I don’t have enough to worry about? He pictured the warped blue butterfly on the cold white ankle again. But then Carl Fitzsimmons’s son looked up at him with those crooked Chiclet-size teeth and those old-man eyes. He patted the kid on the shoulder, and Danny started to edge out toward the middle of the field.

  Maybe it was good to get away from the station for a few minutes, clear his head. Sometimes, you could see things more plainly on a field than you could sitting behind a desk. All the little holes in the chaos, all the little patterns and openings in three dimensions that might never occur to you otherwise. She was f
rom around here. Even the New Guy could tell.

  Come on. Get your head in the game. Harold asked him to show up and try to maintain appearances. So here I am. See? Everything’s under control. He looked around, wondering how long it would be until the other moms on the sidelines realized that Carl wasn’t the only one of their friends missing now.

  Meanwhile, Danny Fitzsimmons glanced back at him, making sure he was doing the right thing, and then disappeared into the scrum of boys surrounding the ball.

  “Stay on it, Danny!” he shouted, wondering how the hell he was going to make a graceful exit. “Go for the ball!”

  Once you put a foot in these things with kids who’d lost a parent, you had to chew your own leg off to get out of them. A week after his dad disappeared, Danny got a bloody nose at practice and said he didn’t want to play anymore. So Mike had to start calling the kid’s house every day, telling him that the other guys really needed him. Because what the fuck else were you supposed to do when the roof was falling in? Stand there, waiting to get crushed?

  He started to trot toward the scrum with the whistle in his mouth, ready to break things up before the tears began. All right, you’re stuck for the moment—play the part until the ball goes out of bounds. Keep up the game face. Act like everything’s perfectly normal. But then he saw a skinny white leg kick out stiffly and the ball squirt out of the jam. Javier, the little ringer from Ecuador, tripped and fell going after it, and then all of a sudden Danny was breaking from the pack, running past him, chasing it toward the goal at the other end of the field. The kid ran like a crippled sandpiper, matchstick legs staggering and arms flapping uselessly at his sides, but he was getting there. He hesitated for just a second, still not sure if he should really cut loose, and then reared back and kicked the ball with the side of his foot. It hit a rock, bounced, and then rolled into the far corner of the net.

  “Yeah, baby. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  And hearing a grown man’s voice celebrating his little victory, Danny threw his arms up, let out a war whoop, and came flying over to give his coach a hug.

  The odd thing was, up until two weeks ago, Barry had hardly noticed the other people on the train ride home. Usually he was so deep into reading or looking out the window that everything else just seemed like background noise. But tonight the Metro-North car seemed emptier than usual. He realized that most times he caught the 8:07, the same guy would be sitting across the aisle. Always wearing the same kind of navy Men’s Wearhouse suit, white shirt, and red tie. Always breathing hard and sweating like a horse when he first got on, as if he’d been running for the train. It usually wasn’t until they were well out of the groaning bowels of Grand Central and clearing the clotheslines of Harlem that he’d seem to relax a little. And then he’d slump against the window, an automaton turned off, oblivious to the expanding glory of the Hudson, the blue bridge at Spuyten Duyvil, the little sailboats rocking gently on the current. Once or twice, Barry had found himself imagining the guy’s life. Probably just another poor shlub trying to hold on to a cubicle at Citicorp and a saltbox in Hawthorne, working the phones all day and then being too tense and tired to deal with the wife and kids when he got home. He remembered smugly thinking that he’d never allow himself to live like that again, always running late for the train. But something about seeing that body this morning had made him just a little more attentive to his daily routines. It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen the guy since the Eleventh. And as the train rolled by the old Jack Frost sugar refinery in Yonkers, he saw the sun melt into a red puddle on the river and turned to the Times “Portraits in Grief” section to see if he recognized any of the pictures.

  “Sandi, this is the third message I’ve left.” Lynn sat in the Saab, making a call while she waited for Barry’s train. “I just want to say it really sucks that you stood me up like that last night. Friends don’t treat each other that way.”

  She saw a line of cars slowing down before they left the lot and a big man with a clipboard and a flashlight leaning in to talk to each driver. Something about the way the brake lights glowed in the gathering dusk sharpened the sense she’d had all day that a connection in the town’s underlying mechanisms was not functioning properly.

  “Look, just call me and let me know everything’s all right,” she said. “You’re so fucking irresponsible sometimes it drives me nuts. Call me, you old whore. I miss you.”

  A fine haze was coming off the river as the 8:07 pulled into the station with a gust of relief. Doors popped open, and commuters stumbled out onto the stark fluorescent-lit platform like big-headed aliens disgorged from a flying saucer in a Spielberg movie.

  Mike stood by the parking lot exit with his clipboard and flashlight, watching the elongated silhouettes descend the stairs, remembering how he used to love to come to this station as a kid for its hypnotic rhythms, the tide of commuters coming and going, the unholy racket of the old diesel engines pulling in. The hours he wasted on the bedroom floor with cruddy old toy trains he’d inherited from his brother, Johnny. There was a shiny Tonka model he wanted his mother to get him from Angelo’s Candy Store and Deli around the corner. A midnight-blue die-cast model of an Old 58 Union Pacific steam engine. It killed him not to have it. Every day he’d beg for it, his need churning like wheels in his head. But she squeezed every nickel so tight she made Jefferson look like a forceps baby. And so one day he just took it. Put it right in his pocket when no one was looking, where it became another part of the secret world he always kept hidden from her.

  He watched the commuters getting into their shiny Outlanders, Caravans, Escapes, Expeditions, Land Cruisers, Sequoias, and Tahoes. Rich people’s toys. Two by two, headlights came alive in different sectors and gradually formed a line moving toward him, their beams piercing the dark and revealing little misty swarms of circling gnats.

  “Excuse me, sir?” He stopped a fiftyish guy in a white ’99 Lexus and came around to the driver’s window. “We’re doing a routine canvass because of the incident at the train station this morning.”

  “Oh, look, I really need to get home.”

  The guy’s breath smelled like Cutty Sark, and his eyes were light-bulbs with the filaments burned out. What the hell’s he doing getting behind the wheel of a fifty-thousand-dollar car stewed to the gills? On almost any other night, Mike would’ve pulled him out and made him walk a straight line.

  “We’re just trying to see if anybody might have any relevant information about how this body turned up here …”

  “No, no, and no … I took the later train.”

  “How about last night? Were you at the station?”

  “No, I drove yesterday. Can I go now?”

  A lone Volvo horn beeped behind him, remote and cautious. “Thanks for your help, sir.”

  “Yeah, you too, buddy.”

  Four more cars passed with nothing to say. No one saw anything. No one knows anything. City people. He remembered the way his father would shake his head and hiss through his teeth when they cut him off at the River Road intersection in their snazzy European gas-guzzlers. Middle-aged men with cue-ball scalps and long sideburns. Mike looked at his watch, seeing he’d been at this for almost two hours. His calves ached, and his knees were still killing him from soccer practice. More than two weeks since his last real full day off. He noticed that his lungs were still bothering him, and again he wondered about the toxins he’d breathed in at Ground Zero.

  Some things kill you quickly, and some kill you so slowly that you hardly know you’re sick.

  A polished black Saab with a light scuff on the hood pulled up, and Mike pointed the flashlight beam at the driver’s eyes, taking some satisfaction in the dazzled grimace.

  “Yo, roll your window down.” He spooled a finger in midair.

  The driver looked like a wiseass, with beady eyes and a slightly crooked nose. Banker or a lawyer, Mike guessed. The profile of a pretty wife was half-shadowed in the passenger seat.

  “Excuse me, sir,
we’re following up on the incident at the train station this morning …”

  “Hey, Fallon …” The lady in the passenger seat leaned across her husband’s legs.

  It took him a split second to bring Lynn Stockdale’s face into focus.

  “Hey, you,” he said. “Twice in one day. We’ve gotta stop meeting like this.”

  The husband half-closed one eye as he glanced over suspiciously.

  “So why’d you tell me you had a drowner before?” she asked.

  “We were going on what we had at that point.”

  Mike took her gaze and held it for as long as he could, remembering just what it was like to stare at that Union Pacific engine.

  “Can’t have all the soccer moms making another run on the Prozac without a good reason.” He gave her a small wink.

  “She didn’t look like any drowner to me,” mumbled the husband.

  Mike slowly turned his glare on him, making it clear that nothing this man could say would ever impress him.

  “Michael, this is my husband, Barry Schulman.” Lynn tugged lightly on the driver’s tie.

  “Detective Lieutenant Michael Fallon, Barry. Glad to finally meet you.”

  He waited until the husband turned and mouthed, “Finally?” to Lynn before he reached through the window and gave him the old inmate’s Iron Man handshake, crushing the joints and giving the hand a slight turn to the left and a pull forward. His father used to tell him that if you could get a man a little off-balance, you could probably get him to do anything else you wanted. But instead, Schulman gripped him back hard and kept his wrist rock-steady.

  “Hey, easy there, partner.” Mike took his hand back. “These is delicate instruments.”

  “You got a pretty good grip there yourself.”

  “So, Barry”—Mike stretched his fingers—“you look like you might be part of the commuter class. You see anything this morning?”