Catherine

by April Lindner

  “Everything,” I said. “Well, not everything.” I struggled for an unembarrassing way to say it. “I know you were together.” Saying the words, I felt a flood of relief. Now he knew I knew, and maybe we could talk for real. “I know she left us to be with you.”

  His eyes narrowed, taking me in more closely, and handed me the postcard. On one side was a glossy picture of some nightclub, with a little Union Jack embossed in the corner. Just as I was turning it over, a band started playing in the next room, the heavy bass and drums thundering through the walls. Hence leaped from his seat.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said over his shoulder. “Don’t go anywhere with that.”

  Glad to be unobserved, I read the postcard.

  Catherine,

  Don’t you think it’s time we stop playing games? Riptide’s success, my farce of a marriage—nothing I’ve done since you left means anything. I wanted to hurt you, but I’m over all that. Come to The Underground. I only bought it so you would have a home to come back to. As soon as I can get out of England, I’ll meet you there. The window’s open.

  All my love, always,

  Hence

  The postmark was blurry, with a date I couldn’t make out. The card had been addressed to our old house in Danvers. So this was the trigger for my mother’s running away from home. I turned it over and over in my hands, hardly knowing how I felt about this new information.

  “Cooper’s got everything under control,” Hence said as he reentered the room. “We have some time.”

  I handed back the postcard. “But how do you have this if you sent it to her? Did you… did the two of you…?” I was trying to ask if he’d come home and found her here after all, if they’d had time together before she disappeared. But what about the alibi that supposedly put him in England at the time of her disappearance? I wanted to ask, but the look on his face—a terrible sadness—made me fall silent.

  “I found it here, up in her bedroom, lying on the rug. She’d left the window open. The downstairs was boarded up; there was no other way in or out. There were no signs of forced entry, or of any kind of a scuffle. She left the way she came—of her own free will.”

  “Why would she leave before you got here?” Could he be lying? Somehow I didn’t think so. “If she left us to be with you, why wouldn’t she wait till you got here?”

  Hence frowned. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be finding out?”

  “Jackie said something about her having business to attend to.”

  “I know that,” Hence snapped.

  His tone of voice set me on edge. But a new thought occurred to me. “Do the police know about that postcard? Do they know my mother was here before she disappeared?”

  “It doesn’t change anything,” Hence said. “It wouldn’t have helped them find her.”

  “You can’t know that for sure,” I said. “You withheld evidence that might have made you look guilty. That’s got to be some kind of crime….” The words popped out of my mouth before I could think about what I was saying. I’d just gotten a tiny bit comfortable with Hence, had decided I could maybe trust him, and he seemed to have decided the same thing about me. But the look that crossed his face now frightened me.

  “It’s nobody’s business,” he said. “Not the police’s. Not even yours.”

  “Then why did you show it to me?”

  I thought my question was innocent enough, but it seemed to enrage him. He jumped to his feet and glowered down at me. For a moment I wondered who would hear me if I screamed. Nobody, not with the racket being made by the band one room over. “So you can go home and tell that egghead father of yours his marriage was a lie. Catherine could never love somebody like him. She spent their whole marriage waiting for a chance to come back to me.”

  This made me so angry I forgot to be scared. I sputtered, unable to speak.

  “She was only trying to hurt me, like I was trying to hurt her. Everything I did—buying the club, marrying my sorry excuse of a… I never loved that bitch, never even liked her. I couldn’t hear her voice without wanting to slap her. Not that I ever hit her, but I was tempted. I came close, more than once. I could have….” He turned and, without warning, smashed his fist through the wall, the plaster crumbling under his hand.

  Maybe I should have jumped to my feet and raced out of the room, but all I could do was stare.

  “And that’s what I’ll do to the skull of the son of a bitch who killed Catherine, when I find out who he is.”

  “She’s alive,” I heard myself say. “Just because she didn’t wait here for you to come back doesn’t mean she’s dead.”

  He spun around and looked at me like he’d forgotten I was in the room. What was I saying? Did I really want to make him angrier than he already was? He took a step toward me, his arm still raised.

  “You’re seriously going to hit a girl?” It was the only thing I could think of to say that might stop him.

  To my surprise, it worked. He laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh, but at least he wasn’t putting his hand through my skull.

  “You do have some of your mother’s courage,” he said grudgingly.

  Coming from him, this was a compliment. For one weird moment, it made me almost happy.

  But then he frowned, and his tone turned poisonous again. “Even so, if there was any justice in this universe, you would never have been born.”

  What was I supposed to say to that?

  “You’d better get out of here. I’ll give you half an hour to pack.” He looked at his watch. “Starting now.” He turned his back to me, so I left the room.

  It’s a good thing Cooper wasn’t in sight; I was way too upset to explain what had happened. I punched the button for the elevator over and over, as if that would get me upstairs faster. There was no way I wanted to spend another minute in the same building with that madman Hence.

  But where would I go? I wasn’t ready to give up my search and crawl home to Massachusetts. I couldn’t face my father, knowing what I knew about his marriage to my mom. I’d have to explain where I’d been and what I’d learned, and how could I do that without breaking his heart?

  As I stuffed clothes and my mother’s journal into my backpack, I tried to think who in all of New York City would be willing to give me a bed for the night. That’s how I wound up on Jackie Gray’s front stoop.

  Catherine

  A thousand strangers lined up for Dad’s wake, waiting for more than an hour to see that waxy-looking, made-up body I could barely believe had ever been him. I knew I should be grateful for how beloved Dad was, for how many people knew him and how important some of those people were. Sal Battaglia, Dad’s best friend, stepped in to handle the arrangements, organizing the wake and booking the space for the memorial service. TV crews came, and the room filled up.

  “Standing room only,” Sal whispered in my ear during the service. “Jim always did like a full house.”

  I tried to smile, but all I wanted was to be left alone so I could have a nervous breakdown in peace.

  On my other side, Q looked grim and pale in one of the Italian suits Dad liked to buy for himself but never seemed to wear. That whole afternoon, he didn’t so much as speak a word. It was nothing like when Mom died and the two of us held on to each other and cried. Sitting beside this silent version of Q in his oversize Armani suit was almost worse than being next to a stranger.

  So many of Dad’s friends and business contacts wanted to speak at the funeral that it seemed endless. Guy Snarker—Dad’s least favorite of all the acts he broke—showed up in leather pants and gave a long talk about how Jim Eversole was a visionary, and a rebel against conformity, a John the Baptist who cleared the way in the wilderness of commercial radio for prophets to come. It wasn’t lost on anyone that Guy Snarker was Jesus Christ in that scenario.

  Guy’s speech was the first of many. I’d known Dad was important in the music world, but I hadn’t realized how important. I should have been proud of all the photographers
and news networks straining to get footage, and impressed by the people who’d never even met Dad who showed up wearing black and sobbing audibly. But the man they all were talking about sounded like some distant celebrity—not the generous, spontaneous, funny, loving father I had known. It was hard not to feel that Q and I had wandered into some ghoulish three-ring media circus. I kept wishing we’d told Sal to make the funeral private so I wouldn’t have to keep endlessly shaking hands and comforting acquaintances who struggled to come up with the right words.

  Hence came to the service. He sat near the back, with Jackie and her mother. He should have been beside me, but we’d fallen into the habit of secrecy for Dad’s sake, and, now that he was gone, we hadn’t yet worked through how important it was to maintain the secret. All through the funeral, I had to fight the urge to run to the back of the church, to grab Hence by the hand and drag him up to the front of the room with me, where he belonged. I was really, truly sorry I’d never told Dad about me and Hence. As he died, did he worry that he was leaving me alone in the world?

  Of course, as far as Dad knew, Q and I were as close as we’d ever been. He wouldn’t have wanted to know otherwise. Dad had been an only child and thought his life would have been so much better if only he’d had a brother or sister.

  As we rode in the back of Sal’s car to the funeral home, I put my head on Q’s shoulder and he didn’t pull away, even when my tears spilled down Dad’s charcoal-gray jacket. For a moment it felt the way it used to between us. We’d both lost Dad, but at least we still had each other. But when we got home, Quentin ran straight upstairs, locked himself in his room, and stayed there all night, leaving me to wander through an apartment that felt too large and full of echoes, too emptied of my father’s booming laugh.

  A few days after the funeral, Q and I went uptown to Dad’s lawyer’s office, Harmon, Federman and Gluck, for the reading of his will, one more official sign that our lives had changed forever. I didn’t want to go, but I had no choice. I needed to find out what would happen next, to us and to the club. I only wished Hence could have come along to hold my hand in the fancy waiting room, a warm and steady friend to keep me from falling apart.

  Q’s presence was the opposite of calming; he paced, jingling keys in the pocket of the pin-striped trousers he had taken from Dad’s closet as if he was now the man in the family and had to dress the part. He seemed more anxious than sad, and I couldn’t help feeling he was worried about what Dad had left him. But maybe the truth wasn’t that ugly; maybe he was concerned with how he would look after me from then on. As for me, I didn’t care what stuff Dad had left us. I didn’t want his money or his property—I only wanted what I couldn’t have: him.

  Danny Gluck had been Dad’s roommate in college. The two of them used to play together in that band Dad always talked about, and when he walked into the room, he clasped first Quentin’s hand, then mine, moisture in his hooded blue eyes. “Your father was a good man,” he said. “The best of the best.”

  Tears sprang to my eyes in response. After that, it was hard to sit up straight in his gold-and-blue-striped office chairs and listen, but I caught the most important parts. Q would be getting the club itself. And Dad left me money—enough to put me through any college I got into. But college felt a million years away. I could barely imagine how we would get through the next few minutes, hours, days.

  For most of the taxi ride home, Q didn’t say a word. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, trying to get a sense of how he felt about the will. It wasn’t a huge surprise that Dad had left him the club; Dad had always said that someday Q would take over the family business. But Q had never been interested in running The Underground. Instead of studying business, the way Dad wanted him to, he was majoring in criminal justice at CUNY, and before Dad died Q had been talking about transferring to some school in Miami where he could windsurf and jet-ski year-round.

  But somebody had to run the club, and I wasn’t old enough. It would have been scarily easy to imagine Q unloading the club and taking off for parts unknown, but Dad’s will stipulated that Quentin couldn’t sell the building until I graduated college, so I would have a place to live if I needed it. When Danny Gluck had read that part, I’d dared a quick look over at Q. He had looked pained. Now, in the cab, he still looked like he had a massive headache.

  “Are you okay?”

  No answer.

  “What happens next, Q?”

  Still no answer.

  I stared out the window, at the first snow of the season falling to the earth in soft, fluffy flakes. The festive snowfall and the Christmas lights in all the store windows felt ludicrous. It should have been pouring icy rain on the streets of Manhattan.

  The wheels in my head kept spinning. Dad’s will made Quentin my legal guardian until I turned eighteen, in nine months. And of course Q was Hence’s boss now, too. How much would it matter to Q that Dad had cared for Hence and wanted to look out for him?

  “What about The Underground?” I asked Q, even though I barely dared hope for an answer.

  The question shook him out of his silence. “What about it?”

  “When are you going to open it back up?” What I really wanted to ask—but didn’t dare—was if he was going to reopen the club.

  His answer wasn’t exactly reassuring. “Hell if I know.”

  “But what about the shows Dad scheduled?”

  “I’ll cancel them.”

  “All of them?” Q knew perfectly well that Dad booked shows a year in advance.

  But Q had fallen back into silence, his jaw muscles visibly flexing, and I couldn’t bring myself to say what I was thinking: Q had to reopen the club. It would break Dad’s heart if The Underground died along with him. I had to believe Dad’s soul was somewhere, watching over us. Heaven, maybe, or some version of it where they had loud music, Harleys, and Jack Daniel’s.

  When the cab pulled up to The Underground, I got out, but Q didn’t move. “Take me to Sutton Place,” I heard him tell the driver, and I realized that he was planning to disappear wherever it was he went for another night.

  “When will you be home?”

  Q shrugged. “Don’t worry about me.” If he was the least bit worried about me—about whether I was feeling lonely or depressed or scared—he certainly didn’t let it show. The cab pulled away while I was still on the sidewalk.

  Inside the club, Hence was leaning against the stage, waiting. When he saw that I was alone, he ran to throw his arms around me, and I buried my head in his chest and sobbed; though I’d known him for just four months, he’d become the only real family I had left.

  Hence didn’t ask about what happened at the lawyer’s office, and I didn’t tell him my worst fear—that The Underground would go out of business and Q would kick him out on the street. I couldn’t think how to begin saying the words. Together, in silence, we rode the elevator up to my bedroom, where he held me—nothing more—as the snow thickened and erased the streets around us.

  Catherine

  Everything in my life felt heavy that winter. It was all I could do to put on clean clothes and drag myself to school in the mornings, much less do my homework—all the term papers and pop quizzes so meaningless to me now. It was good I’d sent my college applications in early; I would never have been able to make myself do them that long, dreadful December. College—the future I had been so worried over—now seemed a million years away, with each of the days in between long and empty.

  As soon as I started functioning like my normal self, when I managed to think about something besides Dad, some random object would remind me of him—his lucky shoes where he’d left them in the parlor, or his winter coat in the hall closet—and I would fall back into grief, as though a trapdoor had opened under my feet. Once in a while, when I was off somewhere with Hence, shopping for groceries or walking aimlessly around the neighborhood, I would forget to think of Dad. Then I would remember and guilt would slap me across the face.

  Christmas was the wors
t. Quentin had said he’d be around for the holiday, but when I woke up that morning, he was gone to who knows where, the way he was most of the time. Hence and I spent the day alone together, eating mu shu pork and watching old movies on TV. Neither of us felt like exchanging presents.

  On those rare occasions when he was actually home, Q would spend hours locked in his room, refusing to come out for meals, sometimes not even answering when I knocked on the door. When I would come home from school and find his parka in the hall closet and the door to his bedroom shut and locked, it felt worse to have Q there than it did to have him away.

  One day I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. Instead of knocking, I banged on the door for about five minutes straight, until he opened it and stared at me like I was a lamp that had come to life and started speaking.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Everything.” I sighed, not knowing how to begin answering that question. I started over. “I’m making grilled cheese and cream of tomato soup. Do you want some?”

  “What?” It was like we spoke two different languages.

  “You know. Dinner. Food on a plate? That you sit down and eat?”

  And he looked blankly at me, shook his head, and shut the door without so much as a thank-you. I thought about banging again, demanding that he talk to me, but I was scared I’d find the Q I used to know had been completely replaced by the expressionless, almost wordless guy I’d just seen in the doorway. Even Bad Quentin, with his temper tantrums and steely eyes, would be better than this new, scary, silent Quentin.

  Less than an hour after that non-conversation, he emerged from his room, grabbed his parka, and hurried out of the apartment without even saying good-bye, locking his bedroom door behind him. I pressed my forehead to the window to watch him disappear down the street and around a corner.