The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  She decided to ignore them for the moment and instead to dig deep into the dirt for the last of the heirloom potatoes, hoping the season hadn’t been a total loss.

  For a few seconds, she was back on Birch Lane, trying to rescue her mother’s garden. The big stalky weeds sticking up amid those seventies Day-Glo flowers. She saw herself as a skinny hippie girl trying to step gingerly between the flower beds to break the weeds off. Not that Mom let it all go to hell at once. The multiple sclerosis crept up on all of them. That sudden tiredness at the A&P, then the numbness in the limbs and the lopsided staggering in the school parking lot that had all the other moms whispering that they always suspected Liz Stockdale was a bit of a lush. The embarrassment of defending her own mother in the girls’ locker room (She’s not drinking, it’s a disease!) and the shame of resenting all the extra household tasks she had to take on. The folding of laundry, the hand-washing of dishes, going up and down the stairs with dinner on the tea tray, getting her sister ready for school, the clumsy raking of topsoil—all in a vain effort to somehow keep things together until Mom could maybe get back on her feet again. Instead of sinking deeper into her wheelchair by the garden, smoking a Newport, kicking her leg like a Rockette on disability and singing, If they could see me now, that little gang of mine …

  Lynn remembered the crack in her father’s voice as he shouted, One of us has to have a life! from the bedroom a few weeks before he moved out, unable to handle the strain. Well, okay then. At least one of them did end up having a life. One of them did end up having a husband, a career, two kids, and a house on the hill that Mom got to see before she died last year. Was it all absolute perfection? Of course not. But she was here on top of the hill, gathering the potatoes against her T-shirt, looking at her house, thinking about Barry’s lips on the back of her neck, and hearing her mother’s Newport crackle in the wind and her voice saying, Didn’t I tell you, baby?

  But then everything seemed to go quiet around her. A blue jay cut off its morning song midsquall, and a woodchuck scurried past. She listened for Eduardo and the other gardeners mowing the lawn in front, but for some reason the whine of their machines sounded like it was coming from miles away.

  The house was surrounded by an acre of woods on three sides, with the fence marking the boundaries before the slopes. She saw a flicker of movement behind the tree line to her left and realized her wheelbarrow wasn’t where she had left it.

  “Hello,” she called out, dropping her potatoes and picking up a shovel.

  A light breeze made maple leaves shiver like digitized pixels and swayed the clothes she’d put out on the line because the dryer was on the blink. A red-tailed hawk glided silently through the cloudless sky, its wings spread out against the sun.

  “Hello!” She raised her voice, tightening her grip on the shovel and wondering where the gardeners could have gone.

  Just a little bit down the slope to the right, the gate between the backyard and the gravel driveway was slightly ajar, though she distinctly remembered having closed it when she went to get the shovel from the garage. A chill crept up between her shoulder blades as she edged down the incline and saw an unfamiliar car in the driveway.

  “Hey.”

  She whirled around with the shovel raised over her shoulder.

  Mike Fallon put his hands up and laughed.

  “You fucker,” she said.

  “Whoa. I didn’t mean to scare you. I saw your Mexicans working out front, so I figured it was okay if I just came in.”

  He shielded his eyes, checking out her studio just a few yards past the garden.

  “It’s quite a spread you got. Your husband must be doing all right. He say he’s a lawyer?”

  “He provides.” She lowered the shovel without putting it down.

  It always made her uneasy, this suburban ritual of people coming over to your house and estimating the cost of everything. Who did your garden? How much do they charge for that tile? It was like having bitchy commandos descend on you.

  “I see the deer got to your vegetables,” he said, glancing over at the chewed-up carrot tops.

  “Yeah, they’re beautiful, but they’re vermin.”

  “I noticed that’s not much of a fence you got. I bet they jump right over it.”

  “Yeah.” She brooded, thinking of the twelve hundred dollars they’d already spent. “Not as ugly as the stockade we used to have, but it’s not getting the job done.”

  “I got a little side business, doing fences. Have you thought about solar panels? Give ’em a nasty little two hundred volts next time they try that high jump.”

  “What are you doing here, Mike?”

  She noticed that he was dressed more neatly today, in pressed chinos and an ironed yellow Ralph Lauren shirt with a small red polo player over the left breast.

  He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “I’ve actually got some official business to take care of with you.”

  “Oh?” She rested the shovel against her leg.

  “Have you seen Sandi Lanier lately?”

  She crossed her arms. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Were you supposed to have dinner with her the other night?”

  She felt the tiny dorsal hairs on her neck stiffen slightly. “Who told you that?”

  “She ever show up?”

  “No. Look, what’s this all about?”

  She noticed the Doppler effect of the lawn mower in the front yard, fading and coming in again at the far edge of her hearing.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this.”

  A small black circle throbbed inside her. “No way.”

  “The lady we found by the train station yesterday …”

  “No fucking way.”

  The circle enlarged, and she raised her hands as if she was about to slap him.

  “Jeff came in last night to file a missing person report …”

  The circle became a heavy black ball, expanding, threatening to crush her lungs. She saw a flash of light among the trees, and her knees started to give way.

  “We’re pretty sure it’s her,” he was saying. “She’s got the same scars and the tattoo on her ankle …”

  She wondered if he’d actually just punched her in the stomach or if it only felt that way.

  “This is not happening,” she said.

  The ground seemed to come rushing up and then fall away as if she had been dropped and then jerked back on a bungee cord.

  “Hey, maybe you better sit down.” He touched her arm. “You’re starting to look a little pale.”

  The lawn mower faded back in, as fierce and noisy as an old air force bomber.

  “Oh God …”

  The bottom of her stomach squeezed, and a wave of nausea washed up through her chest.

  “So you’re telling me somebody killed her and threw her in the river like an old tire?” The ground came rushing up again.

  “It appears that way.” She touched his arm to steady herself and noticed how his wrists looked like they had small barbells inside them instead of bones.

  I’m not going to faint. I’m not going to throw up. She willed herself to try to stand straight without his help.

  “And her head was cut off?”

  “We haven’t located the head.”

  She stuck the shovel blade deep into the ground, balancing precariously and inhaling deeply.

  “Who did this to her?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “I can’t believe this.” She felt herself start to wobble again, like a top losing centrifugal force. “She just beat cancer.”

  “I know.”

  She sucked air, trying to fight gravity. “I went with her for her last test in March. She’d just got the all-clear.”

  “These things never make sense.”

  “You know, I never even got to see her new house.” A laugh and a sob tried to fit through her throat, like two fat people trying to get through a narrow doorway. “She
kept putting me off, saying it wasn’t ready yet. She wanted to have this grand unveiling …”

  She remembered all those endless discussions about Thermador versus Miele built-in ovens, the questionable hegemony of Sub-Zero freezers and Viking ranges, and the pros and cons of mid-century furniture.

  Then a light showed down the corridor of years, and she saw the two of them again as giggling gangly teenage girls, heaping bales of spaghetti into boiling water, jumping back from flames shooting up from the backyard grill, trying to make hamburgers for their ungrateful younger siblings in the little GE toaster oven. The two of them just looking at each other when that Eric Clapton riff came around on the radio and that husky voice intoned, Motherless children have a hard time when mother is dead, Lord … , and then Sandi rolling her eyes and saying, Yeah, tell me about it, pal …

  The lawn mower rounded the side of the house, its mindless grind rising in pitch as she tried to wipe her eyes. She saw Mike looking past her, a great blue distance in his sunken eyes, as if he was waiting for her to get through this.

  “Lynn,” he said finally, “it’s very important that we know if Sandi was having a problem with anybody lately.”

  “No. No. She never said anything like that.”

  She shut her eyes, trying to keep her thoughts in order even as the sound of the lawn mower scrambled them.

  “Well, what’d you guys talk about last time you got together?”

  “I don’t know. It’s hard for me to think straight. I feel like you just dropped a bomb on me. What’d we talk about?” She watched the clothes billowing on the line. “It’d been such a long time. She kept canceling on me because she said she had contractors coming over. That last time was, what? Maybe August, while the kids were in camp. What’d we say? God, I can’t remember. The kids. Our lives. Baby-sitters. Pilates classes. Imus. This new restaurant on the Upper East Side that was thinking of hiring her to do some PR. How we went to these really good liberal arts schools and wound up making Halloween cupcakes at midnight.”

  The clothes sagged, and her jerry-built composure began to fall apart again. Sandi. She had almost gotten it together this time. All her life she’d been off by just a few degrees. Her teeth were always too big, and her hair was always too frizzy. In high school, she was always coming on a little too strong for most boys. They never got to see her loyal soul or her priceless Raquel Welch-as-Latin-spitfire imitation: Wh-hut coood mek a maan do a theeng like dees … Even after she got married and had the kids, she still struggled. Always felt guilty about not seeing the kids when she was working and then guilty about not bringing in any money once she’d quit. And then there’d been that spasm of craziness right after the lumpectomy, when she got the tattoo and the liposuction, as if she was going to start being a teenager again. But the last couple of times, she seemed so much more settled. Bragging about the kids’ soccer, talking about the new house, and saying she was back on speaking terms with her father after years of refusing to have anything to do with him. She’d even given up on the idea of a nose job, saying that she finally understood it was a compliment when people called her “striking.”

  “She ever talk to you about her marriage?” Mike asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” she heard herself muttering like a derelict. “We talked about our husbands all the time.”

  “She say anything about having some trouble?”

  She stopped and tried to get her thoughts aligned again. “I know that she and Jeff have had their problems, but who hasn’t that’s been married this many years?”

  He looked at her a beat too long, clearly reading more into the remark than she’d intended.

  “Don’t you think?” she said, wanting his eyes off her face.

  He rubbed his chin with his knuckles, and she heard Stieglitz barking from behind the screen door, wanting to be let out.

  “Can you think of anybody who would have wanted to hurt her? Any running disputes with neighbors or financial problems?”

  “No. I think Jeff’s business is surviving, and her dad’s loaded. And now that they’re talking again, he can’t stay away from the grandchildren, and she’s going to go on vacation with …”

  Her voice trailed off as she realized she was talking about Sandi in the present tense. The shockwave washed over her again. We haven’t located the head. It was more than she could take in at the moment. The ground yo-yoed once more. She felt herself start to go dim.

  “You’re telling me this is real.” She looked at him.

  “Sure as I’m standing here.” He touched her shoulder lightly.

  Eduardo the gardener came back around the side of the house with his lawn mower and a pair of orange headphones clapped over his ears. The smell of chopped chlorophyll sprayed the air and whirring blades filled her head. Once again, she needed to sit down and secure the essentials. Call Barry. Call school to make sure the kids were okay. E-mail her sister and all her other friends to make sure none of them had mysteriously disappeared.

  “Oh, shit.” She turned back to Mike, as if she’d forgotten about him for a few seconds. “I almost didn’t remember you knew her nearly as long as I did.”

  12

  A RAZOR-THIN lookdown fish slithered by like a strip of living aluminum foil.

  At that moment, Barry stood before the saltwater tank in the waiting room of the Montgomery-Young hedge fund. It was one of those expensive eight-foot-long five-hundred-gallon numbers equipped to perfectly re-create the environment and ecosystems from the bottom of the ocean, complete with orange sun coral, giant carpet anemones, and precured Fiji live rock.

  In the thick tinted glass, he saw the reflection of Mark Young as he came around the reception desk to talk to him.

  “Nice tank,” Barry said, turning to introduce himself.

  “We like it.” Mark Young offered a quick tepid handshake.

  He was a tapered blade of a man in a gabardine suit with sharp lapels and a narrow waist that seemed to suggest he was too busy eviscerating struggling companies to be bothered by trivialities like eating.

  “So is that a black-tip reef shark?” Barry turned back as a sleek Cadillac of a fish glided by with silver sides and dead eyes.

  “Certainly is.” Mark came to stand beside him. “Nasty-looking fucker, isn’t he?”

  “He has a kind of sullen charm.”

  “Have you heard this expression, Jumping the shark?” Mark grinned, a deep U shape in his long taut face.

  “Might’ve come up at some point, but I can’t remember where.”

  “It actually comes from television.” Mark Young wiped a light smudge off the glass. “Did you ever watch the show Happy Days?”

  “With the Fonz and all that?” Barry shrugged. “I tuned out after The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.”

  “Well, it was a pretty good show for a few years, and then they had this episode where the Fonz goes waterskiing in his black leather jacket and tries to jump over a shark. After that it was never the same. They lost all credibility. So now whenever we talk about a company that’s going down the tubes, we say it’s jumped the shark.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “And we think you guys jumped the shark a long time ago.”

  Barry didn’t answer immediately. Instead he stooped a little, with his hands on his knees in order to study a sluggish mottled blue-gray fish dwelling near the bottom.

  “You know, I used to work in a corporate office that had a tank just like this in the conference room,” he said. “It had a lot of these same fish too. Your unicorn tangs, your clown fish, your lion-fish and moray eels, your bird wrasses and chocolate chip stars and all that. It must be the same aquarium that services all of them.”

  “I don’t know that much about it.” Mark Young looked at the Patek Philippe on his wrist. “Somebody else handles the maintenance.”

  “I’ve always been interested in this one.” Barry tapped the glass in front of the somnolent blue-gray fish, which lay there munching gravel with a mouth like Edward G.
Robinson’s. “It’s a diamond goby. He’s a bottom-feeder. See what he does? He just takes mouthfuls of gravel or whatever else falls his way, sucks all the bacteria off it, and then squirts it out of his gill pouches. You know why? Because he’s too much of a pussy to go and hunt for himself.”

  “So, what can I do for you?” said Mark, straightening a brash purple tie with small gold links on it.

  “Well, I figured since I seemed to be having trouble getting through to you with my phone calls and e-mails the last day or so, I might as well just take a stroll on up here.”

  He stood up, shoulders back, emphasizing the six inches he had over the short seller.

  “I hear you’ve been giving us hell on the Internet and CNBC.”

  “No more than you deserve.” Mark bounced lightly on the balls of his feet, clearly not intimidated. “You guys way overstated your potential for growth. Twenty-seven million in your second year of operations? I don’t know what drugs you’re on, but they’re stronger than whatever you’re making.”

  “We missed some of our numbers, there’s no question about that …”

  “You did a helluva lot more than that. You went from fifty-one to sixteen in less than twelve months.”

  “It’s been a volatile market.” Barry shrugged. “Everybody knows that. But things were starting to pick up this quarter until you shit-bombed us.”

  “Excuse me,” Mark cut him off, raising his voice slightly. “If you’re a public company, it’s all about debate and disclosures. You guys didn’t get the overseas contracts you promised your investors. You’ve been hiding recurring expenses as capital spending. And worst of all, your drugs don’t deliver. You’ve been stuck in Phase Two trials for Chronex since March.”

  “That’s because we felt we needed to broaden the study group,” said Barry.

  He was aware of the receptionists watching them, two brightly attired dissatisfied middle-aged white women muttering into headsets before a late-period de Kooning abstract. The audience. He realized they’d seen Mark do this act before.

  “Look,” he said, “you’re certainly entitled to your opinions. What you’re not entitled to do is spread false rumors and allegations to drive our price down.”