But now she was back. He thought about the way she stared up at him from her husband’s lap tonight. Mike’s a big man in the department… . Mike’s family’s been in this town for generations. Maybe she finally realized what she’d done. He wondered if he could forgive her. One thing was for sure—it was going to take a helluva lot more than a family barbecue to make up for all the damage.
The Nextel cell phone suddenly rang out in his jeans pocket, a tinny minuet that jump-started his heart. He grabbed it quickly and stepped back behind the tree line as bats circled the chimney and crickets made a sound like a thousand tiny watches being wound.
“Yo,” he muttered, knowing it was either his wife or somebody from the station house with info they didn’t want to put out over the radio.
The husband pulled back the curtain upstairs and looked out into the driveway to see what the noise was about. The new trapezoid of light from the window ended less than a yard from Mike’s feet.
“Hey,” said Harold. “What’s your location? I just called the house, and Marie said you weren’t there yet.”
“I’m over on the Post Road.” He lowered his voice, hoping one of the bicycle guys wouldn’t be riding by that location at this very moment to blow him in. “I was just heading back, and I saw a bunch of kids looking in cars at the Pizza Hut parking lot.”
He heard a rustling in the bushes behind him and turned just in time to see an animal go leaping off into the woods. Too big for a raccoon.
“We need you back at the base forthwith,” said Harold. “I think we may have just caught a break.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s going on?”
“A gentleman just came in to give us a missing person report about someone we both know.”
“Who?”
Mike sensed that whatever had jumped off into the bushes was still lingering nearby, watching him.
“Just get your ass back down here,” he heard Harold snap as he covered the mouthpiece. “Things are starting to move.”
He pushed the Off button as the husband opened the bedroom window and stuck his head out.
Mike drew back, hearing an owl screeching in the woods behind him and a bullfrog croaking like an untuned banjo. His heart was beating so hard that it felt as if a second heart on the other side of his chest was answering it. You have really lost it this time. You are going to turn your life into a federal disaster site.
He raised the binoculars for one last look at Lynn tightening her belt and turning off the kitchen light. For a few seconds, the brightness of her robe lingered, gradually darkening and leaving just nine black panes in the window frame. He thought of something he’d read in the paper the other day, about how certain powerful telescopes could see light from stars that died millions of years ago.
But what did it matter when they died as long as you could still see their glow? And how could you be sure they were really dead anyway? Maybe their energy was still pulsing out there somewhere in the great dark void. He lowered the glasses with quiet satisfaction, knowing there were still parts of her that no one else could see. That not even her husband or children would ever know her as long or as well as he had. And nothing could change that because nothing could change the past.
He walked to the end of the driveway and got back in his car. As he turned it around, two deer sauntered out from the bushes, where they’d been watching him the whole time. Taking a leisurely stroll through his high beams, their coats the color of whipped cream and stained wood, their eyes turning android green in the lights. Stupid beasts, he thought, cruising around them. They used to know enough to be afraid of us.
9
AS LYNN PADDED past Clay’s bedroom, she saw a dim light still on and pushed the door open. Her son was kneeling on the window seat, peering out at the driveway from behind his white-on-black World Wrestling Federation “Raw is War” curtains.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing. Aren’t you supposed to be getting ready for bed?”
“I thought I heard something.” His stubby fingers let go of the curtain. “There was a car in our driveway.”
“Probably just somebody who got lost and needed to turn themselves around.”
He got up from the window seat. This room seemed smaller every time she walked in it, as if she was deliberately being crowded out. Clothes on the floor multiplied. The bookshelves groaned with the wrestlers’ biographies—I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed; The Rock Says …; and Mick Foley’s immortal Foley Is Good: And the Real World Is Faker Than Wrestling—sharing space with Jewish Literacy by Joseph Telushkin and the Great Jews in Sports that Barry had given Clay for his twelfth birthday. She used to feel mildly put out that a child of hers didn’t take more interest in the Protestant side of the family, but then his sister started wearing crosses the size of staple guns and Lynn decided to keep her own counsel.
The huge neo-Federalist desk she’d carefully picked out for Clay in Fairfield last year was disappearing in a deluge of half-finished math homework, mammoth American history textbooks that looked as if they’d never been opened, and well-thumbed stacks of Magic cards—the latest of the arcane, vaguely medieval-sounding boy games he was obsessed with. She took some small comfort in the fact that as transplanted city kids, both her children still confined anarchy to their own rooms, instead of suburban-sprawling down the stairs and into the living room.
“I don’t like it here,” he said.
“Since when?” She sat down on his bed and carefully arranged the folds of her bathrobe to cover her bare knees.
“It’s creepy. I hear noises at night.”
“It’s called nature. Some people even love it.”
“I miss the city,” he said.
“You’re kidding me.”
“There’s nothing to do here.” He fiddled with an old gyroscope that he’d had since he was seven. “I never get to see my friends, you can’t walk anywhere, and I always have to wait for a ride.”
She hesitated, not wanting to remind him that he always depended on her for transport when they lived in a city.
“You’re safe here,” she said.
“I could be safe in the city too. And I wouldn’t be soo bored.”
She smoothed out the bedspread, quietly regretting the little eccentricities he’d been dropping one by one to fit in with the other kids in the suburbs. The bagpipe lessons he’d been taking in the city. The Russian-English dictionary he used to study in bed. The little Crusty Man comic book he’d been drawing and keeping under his mattress, trying to make it good enough to show her someday.
“You don’t remember what it’s like,” he said.
“Believe me. I do.”
She remembered those lonely nights, that desperate yearning for something beyond the end of Birch Lane and her well-worn copy of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. She saw herself again in a darkened bedroom, lighting incense candles and trying to tune in Allison Steele the Night Bird on WNEW FM. Oh, the crackling in the ether. Oh, the solemn tribal flute music and the opening thrum of “Nights in White Satin.” Oh, the Kahlil Gibran poetry and the visions of longhaired sloe-eyed hippie boys in leather vests offering to induct her into the mysteries of foot massage and rolling a joint with one hand. Even the names of the bands seemed to conjure a lurid sensual carnival going on down the river. Tangerine Dream. Tonto’s Expanding Head Band. Renaissance. Caravan. Lothar and the Hand People.
“Then why’d you make us come back here?” Clay asked.
“Because when you get older, you learn to appreciate other things about a place,” she said, sounding a little more pat than she’d meant to.
“Like what?”
She thought of the children near the Trade Center who’d thought the people falling were birds on fire. “Good schools,” she said.
“Ha!”
“Oh, so now you don’t like Green Hill?”
“It’s all about sports,” he said. “And I suck at sports. I
’m too fat.”
“What do you mean, you’re too fat?”
“I mean, look at me! I’m a blimp!” He squeezed a flab roll the size of a Wonder Bread loaf at his waistline. “I’ve been dieting for weeks, and I can’t make this go away. I’m disgusting.”
“You’re not. You’re beautiful to me.”
“I wanna go on Nutri/System, where you just have one milkshake a day,” he said. “I’m ashamed to take my shirt off in front of other guys in the locker room.”
She went over to put a hand on his shoulder, remembering the can of Lysol she’d found under his bed last week. At the time, she’d thought he might be smoking pot, and she gave him a righteous little antidrug lecture. But since then, she’d pulled up all these articles on the Web about boys his age developing anorexia and, in a few extreme cases, bulimia. She wondered if he could be making himself throw up and then using Lysol to get rid of the smell. She’d noticed him skipping dessert and dissecting his food obsessively lately. Trying to cut down on carbs, Mom. She cringed inwardly, thinking about her precious child secretly making himself vomit in the bathroom so he could have washboard abs.
“So, what else is so good about this place?” he asked, sitting down.
A vulnerable nasality told her that he was opening a door a crack. “Well,” she said, “it’s true, there’s not a lot of big buildings or movie theaters you can walk to. But what you do have is a lot of freedom.”
“Yeah. How do you figure that? Freedom to go where?”
“Oh, come on. One of the greatest rivers in the world is just down the hill from us. I used to ride down there on my bike all the time when I was your age so I could hang out along the banks and let my imagination run wild.”
“So what?” His chair squeaked as he turned to face her.
“It was just like this magical place where I could go and make up stories with my friends.” She pushed on, trying to unhook the latch in his mind. “You couldn’t really swim in it before the Clean Water Act because it was so polluted. So we used to just sit on the rocks and talk about all the cool things we could find at the bottom if we ever got scuba gear. Indian arrowheads. War axes. Sunken treasures. I had this friend whose father worked at the prison up the river, and I used to have this whole fantasy of helping these two innocent boys escape. I’d have a rowboat waiting at the shore when they came out of this tunnel they’d dug with spoons. And then they’d shoot at us from the guard tower as we rowed away …”
She could see he was starting to get interested. That little telltale jiggling of his knee reminded her of how he used to squiggle around in bed when she was telling him a particularly exciting good-night story.
“One time,” she said, “my friend’s brother dove into the water looking for a gun.”
“Why?”
“He was a cop and a diver.” She paused, trying to remember exactly how Mike’s older brother, Johnny, told this story. He always managed to wring a loud laugh out of it. But she didn’t have his bravura, his way of tossing a good line up in the air, letting it hang there until everyone was leaning forward, and then banging it home.
“But, you know, the Hudson was like pea soup in those days because of all the sludge they’d dumped in it,” she said. “You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. So he’s swimming around in his wet suit, feeling around at the bottom, and all of a sudden he reaches up and realizes he’s surrounded by steel bars.”
“What happened?”
“He’d swum right into a huge animal cage. Like something you’d keep a lion or a tiger in.”
“Really?” His eyes widened. “And where did the animal go?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the tiger got out. Or maybe it was just an empty cage that fell off the back of a boat. The point is, he swam right into it and couldn’t see enough to find the way out. And his oxygen tank only had about five minutes in it.”
You could see how Johnny would get himself jammed up. He was all sinew and nerve. Always looking to dive right in and mix it up. A live round, his father called him. You never know where he’s going to end up. As for Mr. Johnny, he said the only time he ever truly felt free was five fathoms down. But he had a good heart. That was his saving grace. And in the end, probably the thing that killed him.
“So, what’d he do?” Clay’s knee jiggled more frantically.
“I guess he just had to feel his way along, bar by bar, until he found the opening,” she said. “And pray that his air would hold out.”
“And did it?”
She felt a diving bell of sadness descend within her chest. “Well, I guess it did,” she said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be telling you this, would I?”
He exhaled with relief, as if she’d just regaled him with the plot of a great horror movie, and she felt a small sunbeam expand in her chest, a quiet delight in knowing that she could still hold his attention sometimes.
She was beginning to wonder. These days she often found herself skulking after the children like a spurned lover, mooning over happy times they’d had at the sandbox and the dinosaur museum, conveniently forgetting the hours of stupefying tedium watching Barney and the mortifying tantrums in overpriced theme restaurants. She missed being the center of their universe—the Golden Idol on an island where no one could swim. But she tried to tell herself it was a good thing, all this growing independence. Who wanted to be worshiped all the time anyway? Still, a part of her could not quite accept that time was passing, that something forged so deep in the well-spring of her body could just paddle away without a backward glance.
Clay’s brow began to furrow. “Mom?”
“What?”
“Why’re all your stories about people trying to get away?”
The question brought her up short. His voice was finally starting to change, she noticed, dropping into a wobbly alto.
“I hadn’t really thought of that,” she said. “They were just stories I wanted to tell you about the river and the kind of things that used to happen to me …”
“But that’s where they found that lady dead this morning. Are you saying you want me to go down there by myself?”
“Um, not exactly …” The spell was breaking. “I was thinking you could find other places here you could make your own.”
“Yeah, right. As soon as I get my own car. In three years.”
He turned away and glanced toward the door. She wondered if he was going to sneak down the hall to the computer room and start downloading porn off the Internet as soon as she left.
“Well, I guess I better get back to work,” he said. “I still have to work on my history outline.”
“You need any help with it?”
“Mom, come on. When have you ever helped me?”
So this is how it’s going to be, she realized. Bit by bit, the child goes away. The bedtime stories no longer enchant. The cuddles embarrass. The voice changes. The world scratches at the windows. And nothing that a mother says makes any difference.
“’Kay, good night.” She went to kiss him on top of the head, trying not to notice the way he flinched slightly. “Don’t stay up too late.”
10
WITH GRAVEL AND GRIT from Lynn’s driveway still wedged in the soles of his work boots, Mike came crunching back into the police station at twelve-thirty and found Harold Baltimore in a small gray room at the back, watching the interrogation next door through one-way glass.
“How’s the show?” he asked quietly.
“Pull up a chair and see for yourself. The reviews aren’t in yet.”
In the next room, Detective Paco Ortiz was moving around the hunched-over man seated at the black table, his shaved head shining like a honeydew melon under the fluorescent light.
“So when you got home from the airport this evening, your wife wasn’t home and you started to get worried,” said Paco, his blue Riverside P.D. T-shirt snug across his oil-barrel chest and his goatee narrowing like a trowel. “Is that right?”
“At first, I was just a lit
tle concerned that she hadn’t left a note,” said Jeffrey Lanier in a high nasal voice. “But then after the kids got home and I talked to the baby-sitter, I started getting really nervous. She hadn’t heard from Sandi since last night.”
Lanier was a tan youngish-looking man in his early forties with the kind of V-shaped all-American face some women liked, hazel eyes behind Clark Kent glasses, wide thin lips, and a cleft in his chin. From the front, he had an impressive mound of chestnut-brown hair, but when he turned, he revealed a bald patch growing like a spotlight on the back of his head. He was dressed as if he’d just been tossed out of bed, in a maroon Harvard sweatshirt, rumpled khaki shorts, and Teva sandals. So this was what a so-called Internet millionaire looked like these days, Mike thought dourly.
“Is it unusual for your wife to be out for so long without letting you know where she is?” asked Paco, hitching up his gun belt.
“She doesn’t give me a daily schedule. All I know is it’s almost eight o’clock, she hasn’t been home since last night, the kids need dinner, the baby-sitter needs a ride to the train station, and her friend Lynn Schulman is on the answering machine from a restaurant last night saying, ‘Where the hell are you?’ And I hear that, and I start to freak out.”
Mike felt Harold nudge him with his elbow but willed himself not to look over. Life in a small town; eventually everything connects.
“Uh-huh.” Paco sat down on the opposite side of the table and balanced a legal pad on his knees. “So your wife was supposed to be meeting somebody for dinner?”
“Girls’-night-out kind of thing,” said Jeffrey. “You know, everybody’s gotta let off steam once in a while. But then I hear this, and I know that Lynn’s one of her best friends forever and I start to think …”
He sniffed, touched the centerpiece of his glasses, and his nostrils turned red at the rims. This was the type of slightly callow boy-man who’d gotten so used to people cutting him slack that some essential muscle in him had started to atrophy.
The Last Good Day Page 9
