The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  “You think she blames us for what happened?” asked Lynn.

  “I don’t know how she could. Most of those balls were in play before we even got here, but …” He hesitated, not quite ready to exonerate himself so easily. “It’s hard to say. Maybe we could’ve done some things differently.”

  She looked out the window, watching a white gull walk along the empty platform, as if wondering where all the commuters had gone. Behind it, the river churned implacably, turning the color of melted green toy soldiers.

  “She said we would be happy here,” said Lynn. “Remember that?”

  “But she didn’t say for how long.”

  “You think that’s what she meant by that other thing?” She adjusted the side mirror.

  “What other thing?”

  “What she said today. That some houses are like states of mind. You’re not supposed to stay in them. They’re just stages you go through.”

  “Hippie bullshit,” he grunted as he tried to pull his seat belt strap over a shoulder joint held together by titanium screws.

  “Works for her.”

  “I guess.”

  He grimaced, trying to find a comfortable position for the full cast on his leg and his cane.

  “So, what’s going to work for us?”

  “Getting on the road.” He adjusted his seat back.

  “You seriously don’t want to go up the hill and take one last look?”

  “I do, but what’s the point? I don’t think the Davises need us poking around anymore.”

  “You think they’ll be happy there?”

  “Why not?” He shrugged.

  She thought of the young couple who’d just signed the contract across the table from them. He, a medical supplies salesman, beginning to bulk up a little from road food. She, a hugely pregnant former kindergarten teacher, ready to nest and have her own garden. Lynn had watched them stand before the oak tree in the backyard, gesturing grandly, outlining plans in the air, murmuring quietly about the baby’s room, the tree fort, rocking chairs, and how things were going to be different once they moved in. And in some melancholy way she’d been touched by them, as if these were the people who’d come along to complete the dream she couldn’t finish for herself.

  “And how about us?” asked Lynn.

  “I think we’re gonna be all right,” said Barry. “I think we’re going to rent for a while in Hawthorne and Hannah’s going to go off to school and Clay’s eventually going to find a group of friends who don’t beat the crap out of him. I think you’re going to do your gallery show in the spring and eventually, if miracles come to pass, we’ll get the money from the insurance company and I might even get another job.”

  “Did you talk to Lisa yesterday?”

  “Yeah, you’re not going to believe it. She wants to apply for a new patent for a drug she’s working on and start another company with me.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It blocks the neurotransmitters that help you store and retrieve memories.”

  “Oh my God. You’re kidding me. You mean it’s the opposite of an Alzheimer’s drug? Why would anybody want that?”

  He shrugged as she started the car. “I don’t know. Seems to me like they got a few million potential customers these days. What’s the point of remembering something if all it does is make you miserable?”

  “Because you need to,” she said. “It’s evolution. What about remembering you got burned the last time you stuck your hand in a fire?”

  “Well, we have pictures to tell us that, don’t we?”

  She stepped on the gas, throwing him back against his seat.

  Because of the holiday week, it wasn’t just day laborers out on the street for once. People stood in clusters outside stores, upholstered in heavy down coats, breathing out little white puffs of condensed air, shaking their heads in wonder and talking about …

  The dead. They were everywhere. You couldn’t get around them. They lowered real estate values. They distracted the kids at school. They discouraged shoppers. They made you lock your doors and check your windows at night. They practically stood on corners and dared you not to look back at them.

  A line of cars was moving slowly ahead of them on River Road. Each had a Christmas tree tied to its roof like a silent movie damsel lashed to the railroad tracks. These were the people who didn’t want to wait around for their trees to be picked up from the end of their driveways. As she drove on, Lynn heard the ferocious grinding of a wood mulcher and saw the cars making a right turn into the Department of Public Works yard just past the train station, where the gates were usually closed to the public.

  Without really thinking, she made the turn and followed them.

  “What are you doing?” said Barry. “We’re supposed to meet the kids at Jeanine’s by four-thirty.”

  She put the car in park behind an idling Navigator and got out with the loaded Canon she had beside her seat. The smell of fresh pine was everywhere. People stood around the mulcher, watching one tree after another get fed in. They entered tip first, smallest branches disappearing, the machine jolting, threatening to choke on the size, and then somehow fitting it all in and spewing out the wood chips. On almost any other day, it would be a picture worth taking, but this time she walked straight past it, starting to see another image take shape.

  Black bags were piled up along the edge of the water, full of mulch to be spread around the trees in Eisenhower Park—just enough to stay under the circumference of the branches at high noon. But today, they didn’t interest her either. She turned left at the great unused salt pyramid with its attendant spreader truck and then walked out onto the gritty beige spit of beach, a few yards beyond the lot.

  “Hey, lady, you’re not supposed to be there,” a garbageman called from behind her.

  But his voice was drowned by the smashing of the tide against the long jagged jetty that stretched out into the river like a beckoning arm. She ignored him and stepped out onto the rocks, trying not to slip on the algae-encrusted surfaces and rags of seaweed caught in the crevasses. Gulls dipped and pivoted in the sky before her. The smell of ground wood gave way to mud and brine. The vicious cold wind ripped at her clothes and her hair. But she kept walking to the end of the rocks, even as Barry hobbled after her on his cane and joined the garbageman on the shore, yelling for her to come back.

  The river swelled and slapped on either side of her, a freezing rain spraying her every few seconds. The wind made ridges on its surface, making it look like a long corrugated gate. Then she turned around and saw it: almost the view Michael had been talking about, but closer. Half her life she’d been here without ever realizing this angle existed: far enough back to frame the town from top to bottom, but near enough to see all its knobby distinct features and patches of greenery. It was like glimpsing her memories carved into the side of a mountain. The rock face rising from the riverbank; the train platform; the prison guard tower; the little winding streets leading up into the hills; the riot of trees; the steeple of Saint Stephen’s; the farmhouses on Grace Hill, where she’d once thought she’d spend her sunset years with Barry; and, of course, the rows of tiny white tombstones in Green Hill Cemetery, where her mother was buried a stone’s throw from Sandi, and Harold rested a couple of football fields away from his old friend Michael.

  The dead—the one neighborhood that would always take you in, no matter what you’d done.

  In the late afternoon, it had a subdued amber shading, as if it were already a fading photograph. If she waited too long, she’d lose the light. A grip on her heart told her to shoot quickly. She took a meter reading, adjusted the lens, raised the Canon, and pressed the little button. The shutter in her head clicked at the same time as the camera’s, closing and then slowly opening up again.

  Water cascaded over the rocks on either side of her. But she held her angle, wiped the drops off the lens with her shirttail, and clicked the shutter two more times. Then she turned and carefully picked her way over the ro
cks back to the shore.

  “You get what you need?” Barry was waiting with his good arm outstretched.

  “Yes,” she said, putting the lens cap back on and nestling against the undamaged part of him. “As a matter of fact, I did.”

  They turned their backs to the boiling river and staggered away together.

  A Biography of Peter Blauner

  Although Peter Blauner (b. 1959) grew up on Manhattan’s East Side and attended the prestigious Collegiate School for Boys, he has always been drawn to the dark side of city life. “Being a kid during the fiscal-crisis seventies, I saw how things could change and you could go from the high to the low very quickly. Which is a very good lesson in humility and an even better one for writing crime fiction.”

  Influenced equally by the films of Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorsese, the burgeoning punk rock scene, and the split-lip school of American pulp fiction, Blauner began writing short stories in high school and while still in college got a summer job assisting legendary newspaper columnist and author Pete Hamill. “He gave me a master class on what it means to be an urban writer. He taught me to always get your notes on paper right away, always ask the hardest question you can think of, and always listen carefully to the last thing somebody says to you.”

  After graduating from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1982, Blauner returned to the city and began working at New York magazine, where he apprenticed with Nicholas Pileggi, author of Wise Guy and screenwriter of the film Goodfellas. Over the next few years, Blauner developed his byline for the magazine, writing about crime, politics, and other forms of antisocial behavior. But, he says, “My real goal was to train myself to become an urban novelist. I wanted to write stories that were suspenseful and compelling, but that also tried to capture what’s funny, surrealistic, and occasionally beautiful about city life.”

  He decided on an approach of full-immersion research, which he has continued throughout his writing career. In 1988, he took a leave from the magazine and became a volunteer at the New York Department of Probation, so he could write about the criminal culture of the era from the front lines. The result was his debut novel, Slow Motion Riot, which was published in 1991. It went on to win the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first novel and was named one of the “International Books of the Year” in the Times Literary Supplement by Patricia Highsmith, who called it “unforgettable.”

  Soon after, Blauner turned his attention to fiction writing fulltime, and his next novel, Casino Moon, was a kind of update of the classic noir pulp genre, set in the Atlantic City boxing world and published in 1994. After his time in Atlantic City researching Casino Moon, he returned to New York and spent a year working at a homeless shelter to research The Intruder, which was published in 1996 and became a New York Times bestseller. For his next novel, Man of the Hour, published in 1999, he anticipated the reality of 9/11 by writing about misguided notions of heroism and Middle Eastern terrorism in America. Four years later, he shifted gears and wrote The Last Good Day, about a murder in a quiet Hudson River town and the resulting social fissures among the people who live there.

  Blauner’s most recent novel, Slipping Into Darkness (2006), found him back on the city streets creating a modern urban mystery. It tells the story of Julian Vega, a bright young immigrant’s son, locked up in the early eighties for killing a female doctor on New York’s Upper East Side. Twenty years later, Julian is released from prison and another female doctor is killed under strikingly similar circumstances. Only this time, the evidence doesn’t point to Julian at all—it points to the woman he allegedly murdered two decades before. And the detective who arrested him in the first place, Francis X. Loughlin, is left to wrestle with the possibility that he ruined the life of an innocent man. The book earned the strongest reviews of Blauner’s career, with everyone from Stephen King to the New York Times ringing in, and introduced him to a new audience.

  More recently, Blauner has branched out into television work, writing scripts for the Law & Order franchise, and also into short fiction. His short stories have been anthologized in the Best American Mystery collection and on NPR’s Selected Shorts from Symphony Space. He continues to live in Brooklyn with his wife, Peg Tyre, author of the bestselling nonfiction book The Trouble With Boys, and their two sons, Mac and Mose.

  Blauner grew up in the New York City of the 1970s and started writing fiction while a student at the Collegiate School for Boys. “I became a writer right before Mother’s Day when I was fifteen: I saw a little girl at Gimbel’s Department Store trying to pull her dress down, and heard her nanny say, ‘Stop that, you’re as bad as your mother.’”

  For his first novel, Slow Motion Riot, Blauner immersed himself in research, spending six months as a volunteer at the New York Department of Probation.

  For his fourth novel, Man of the Hour, Blauner traveled Jerusalem and the West Bank to get a sense of his characters’ background stories. This photograph was taken by a shepherd at the sheep market outside of Bethlehem.

  Since 1989, Blauner has been married to bestselling author Peg Tyre (The Trouble with Boys, The Good School). They have two sons.

  In recent years, Blauner has been working in television, as a writer and producer for the Law & Order franchise.

  Acknowledgments

  I WOULD LIKE TO give special thanks to Peter Bloom and Michael McElroy for their patience, wit, and good company in helping me research this book.

  I would also like to thank William Kress, Tom Reddy, Randy Jefferson, Lisa Kovitz, David Crowley, Sarah Jane Crowley, Elizabeth Keyishian, Sarah Siegle, Jason Cohen, Milton Hoffman, Michael Cherkasky, Nancy Pine, Ray Stevens, Jeff Parthemore, Arney Rosenblatt, Matthew Nimetz, Joe Reed, Jane Hammerslough, Samuel G. Freedman, Constance Hall, Tim Tully, Donna Dietrich, Lori Grinker, Ellen Binder, Joyce Slevin, Bob Slevin, Julie Betts Testuwide, Lori Andiman, Art Levitt, Gene Heller, Joseph Mitchell, Fred Starler, Jordan Fields, Jimmy Wall, Eva Merk, Jesse James Lewis, Bob Merk, Alexander Morales, Richard Ligi, Stephen Brown, Audrey Winer, Richard Sokolow, Lynn Saville, George Johansen, Shannon Langone, and, of course, Richard Pine.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 2003 by Peter Blauner

  cover design by Karen Horton

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-1519-7

  This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

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    Peter Blauner, The Last Good Day