by Chris Mooney
Sam didn’t say anything, already knowing of Lou’s comment about Jean Paul not wanting children.
“This guy seems to be constantly on the move,” Mike continued. “He has multiple phone numbers. Nancy finally managed to get him on the phone by pretending to be the vice president of some big-name paper company here in the U.S. You mind if I smoke?”
“Just as long as you share.”
“You smoke?”
“I quit four years ago, but I like to dabble every now and then.”
Mike pulled out his pack, lit hers first and then his.
“So back to Nancy,” he said after a moment. “She didn’t ask him anything about Mary Sullivan. She thought I might want to, you know, talk to Jean Paul directly myself. He speaks very good English.”
They walked past the bronze ducks that Sarah thought came alive at night and stopped at the intersection of Beacon Street and Charles, Sam grabbing his arm as they darted across the street and then releasing it when they reached the sidewalk.
Sam said, “Are you thinking of calling him?”
“Jean Paul?”
Sam nodded.
“I’ve got to do something else first.”
“Jess,” Sam said.
“I thought I could walk away from it.”
“It’s a hard thing to walk away from.” Sam paused, and then said, “When are you going?”
“Tomorrow morning. I called Jess and asked her if she was going to be around.”
“What did she say when you told her you were coming out to New York?”
“I told her I was coming out there for a couple of days with this friend of mine, Bam-Bam, and wanted to get together and talk. We’re meeting for lunch.”
Sam nodded, seemed to be considering a thought.
“You need anything, you call.”
“I will.” Mike saw the sign for Mt. Vernon, turned right and headed up her street. He got about six steps before Sam called for him.
“Where are you going?” She stood at the corner, in the shadows next to the liquor store.
“I thought I was walking you home.”
“Grandpa, it’s nine-thirty. Are you tired—or are you afraid of breaking curfew at the nursing home?”
“They let us stay out till eleven these days. And no, I’m not tired.”
Mike walked up to her, holding her eyes in his own for a moment. Those old feelings he had for her were still there—dented and bruised and maybe a little different from all this time apart, but they were definitely still there. And Sam knew it too. He could tell by the way she stared back at him now.
“Sam said,—You want to go home?”
“Not really. You?”
“Not really.”
“Any ideas? And please, no dancing.”
“I was thinking of cannolis.”
“I haven’t had a good cannoli in a long time.”
“Then you’re in luck. I know this great spot in the North End. You in?”
“I’m in.”
They walked down Charles Street, Sam slipping her arm through his.
CHAPTER 39
New York was Boston on steroids: taller and wider, meaner, ready to devour you if you were careless or clumsy or just plain stupid. Rule number one of city life mandated that you made every effort not to look like a tourist. That meant keeping up with foot traffic and watching where the hell you were going; but this country bumpkin across the street (by the looks of him, probably from some cornfield town in Iowa, a-yuck) was trying to divide his attention between reading the street signs and finding his location on the city map he held spread out in front of his face like a newspaper. A mental patient stood on the corner with a big white sign that read THE TIME FOR REDEMPTION IS NOW,ASSHOLES!
That was the great thing about cities like New York. They were never short of free entertainment.
It was a gorgeous spring day—Tanqueray season, as Bam-Bam liked to say—the afternoon sun warming his face and bringing to mind those weekend afternoons spent on Bam’s boat with a few stiffies, laughing away the day. Mike sat an outdoor table at a restaurant across the street, watching as Mr. Iowa ran headfirst into a Magilla Gorilla clone who dwarfed even Bill, when he caught sight of Jess heading his way. As he watched her approaching, he could see the smile on her face, the kind of automatic, good-natured happiness that came from enjoying the warm air and sunshine—or being a nobody—in a city where people didn’t stop to stare.
“I can’t believe you’re actually here.”
Jess stood next to the table.
He forced a grin. “I’m here,” he said. His tone sounded strong, in control.
Jess slid her sunglasses up across her forehead and parked them on the top of her head.
“Where’s Bam?” she asked.
“Something came up and he couldn’t make it. It’s just you and me.”
No sooner did Jess sit down than the waiter sidled up to the table, eager to please,Mike supposed, or maybe the guy just wanted to get a good, up-front look at Jess, Mike remembering how time had been more of an ally to Jess than an enemy. She ordered a white wine, and after the waiter ran off, she placed her purse on the ground next to her,Mike again trying to place himself back in the time period frozen in the pictures. Back then, Jess had still been fun—although the caution that would later rule his life and Sarah’s had started to seep in when Jess learned she was pregnant for the first time—that caution about to become a permanent resident after the second miscarriage.
“So,” Jess said, smiling as she leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, “what are you and Bam doing for fun tonight?”
Looking at her, he thought back to her “I’ll never lie to you, Michael” and “There will never be any secrets between us, Michael” philosophies of life and marriage. Having an affair went against everything she was—or, at least, everything she had pretended to be during their life together. Cheap words or did Jess practice what she preached? Time to find out.
There was no gentle way of doing it. He slid the envelope across the table, knowing full well he was about to torpedo the good will between them.
“These belong to you,” Mike said.
Jess tried to read his eyes for some hint of what was going on, and when she failed to find anything, she picked up the envelope and gently shook the pictures onto the table.
The front picture was that of her and her boyfriend or fuck buddy or whatever he meant to her walking hand-in-hand down the front steps of the bed and breakfast. Mike had made sure he put that picture on the top before sealing the envelope shut. Seeing her face would tell him the truth about what had happened.
Jess’s lips parted and the blood drained from her cheeks. She continued to stare at the picture of her former self, trying to prevent what she was seeing from penetrating the shell she had built over the past five years after losing Sarah. Jess swallowed, her eyes narrowing as if saying, I won’t let you break me. It was the same look she had given him the night in the kitchen when he had come home from the Hill dripping wet and told her that Sarah was missing.
But it had broken her, and he knew it when she slowly turned her head away from the picture and to the street, the look of total abandonment on her face reminding him of the high school girl he had fallen in love with standing by her bedroom window, watching as the police car pulled into her driveway and already knowing that the two cops slowly advancing up the front steps were there to tell her why her father, three hours late, hadn’t come home from work.
“How long?” Mike said, and felt something hot and sharp break away inside him and sink. He had mentally prepared himself for this possibility, but having it unfold right in front of your eyes—that was a different thing altogether.
The waiter came over and placed the white wine next to Jess, asked if they were ready to order lunch. Mike shook his head no and the waiter stormed off, miffed at the small tip this bill was going to generate.
“How long?” he said again, Jess flinching from the anger
in his voice.
As much as you want to flip over this table and get into her face—totally justified, I might add—you’ve got a decision to make, and you’ve got to make it right now: Do you want to know what happened, or do you want to punish her? Because you can pick only one. You can’t have it both ways.
Mike started over. “I stumbled on these by accident.”
Jess laughed bitterly. “I doubt that. When it comes to Lou, there are no accidents.”
“You knew he took these pictures?”
She didn’t answer. She kept her attention focused on the street, her eyes bouncing from one object to the next.
Mike said, “You going to talk?”
“What for? I’m sure Lou told you everything already.”
If he said no, he hadn’t spoken to Lou and instead came here to hear it from her instead, would that give her the room she needed to maybe lie and escape? She had no obligation to volunteer the truth, but if she believed Lou had already filled him in …
“Why are you here? To gloat? To have the satisfaction of rubbing my mistake in my face?” Jess met his gaze and Mike saw in her eyes that stony resolve starting to gain footing. She was starting to close up.
“I came here for an explanation,” he said as calmly as he could.
“No, you didn’t. You came here to use me as a whipping post. Well, guess what? That’s not my job anymore.”
“Jess, I—”
“No. I’m not doing this. I made a mistake—a huge mistake—and it has torn me up in ways you’ll never understand. But I’ve forgiven myself. It was a long road, but I’ve forgiven myself, and I’ve moved on. As for that part of my life—” she pointed to the pictures on the table—“that part of my life is over.”
“Don’t I deserve the right to move on?”
She snatched her purse off the ground.
“Just tell me what I did wrong. What made you run to this guy?”
Jess moved her chair back and stood up. Mike stood up too,moved around the table and grabbed her arm.
“I didn’t ask to find this out,” Mike said, “but I did. Now I’ve got all these questions bouncing around in my head. I don’t have any room for them. Not after what happened to Sarah.”
Jess hadn’t moved away, but he could tell she was still contemplating an exit.
“All I’m asking for is an explanation,” Mike said. “I think that’s fair.”
Mike thought her face had softened a little. He was right. She released the grip on her purse and put it back down on the ground. He let go of her arm.
“Thank you,” he said, and they sat back down.
“I want to be clear about this. I’ll talk about it now and that’s it. After I leave, the subject’s closed.”
Don’t worry. After you leave, I have no plans to ever talk to you again.
Jess picked up her glass of wine, settled herself in her chair, and crossed her legs, her face indignant, a woman getting ready to face cross-examination.
“I know this guy?” Mike asked.
“No.”
“What’s his name?”
“I thought Lou told you everything?”
“He didn’t mention a name.”
“Does his name matter?”
“I suppose not.”
Jess drank some of her wine.
“Rodger,” she said. “The summer you and I were engaged, I rented that house in Newport, remember?”
He did. It had been a busy summer for him, the business with Bill going well, starting to pick up. Jess was a special-needs teacher and had her summers off with the exception of the occasional waitress work at The Ground Round in Danvers. A friend from college asked her if she wanted to go in on a house in Newport with four other girls. Jess asked if he had a problem with it and he had said no, said it would be fun to slip down there every other weekend, take a day off and hang out on the beach.
Jess said, “You didn’t come down one weekend and I met Rodger at this party. He was in his late thirties and worked in Boston’s financial district. He was so different from the people you and I grew up with. He was so smart in that … that bookish way I guess you’d call it. Every morning he read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal . My father only read the sports section of the Herald, and my mother, well, you know she could have cared less about what was going on in the world outside of Belham. Rodger was an investor, but he was passionate about art and architecture. He rented a villa in Tuscany one summer. He had all these stories about traveling through Europe. He loved sailing.”
“So you’re saying, what, you were attracted to him because he was rich?”
She shot him a look. “I’m not that shallow and you know it.”
Mike held up his hands and said, “So what was it then?”
“Rodger was … he was just so well put together. I didn’t know anything about investing, and the farthest I had ever traveled was to Rhode Island. But he was interested in me and I was attracted to that. Into discovering why he could like me, I suppose. I didn’t understand why. And I didn’t plan on falling in love with him.”
He heard the word love, and flinched as it twisted its way through his gut.
I thought you didn’t care? a voice asked.
Jess saw the reaction on his face. “It was a very confusing time in my life,” she said by way of apology. “Rodger knew about you. He knew I loved you. I didn’t hide anything from him. He knew I was afraid of losing you. Of losing what we had.”
Mike dug a fingernail into the callous on his palm, aware of the heat climbing into the back of his neck, starting to spread across his face.
“That summer you spent at Hampton Beach, you told me you met someone. Cindy or someone,” Jess said. “I remember you told me you thought you loved her.”
“You and I weren’t engaged at the time.”
“At that time in my life, I believed that your heart was only built to love one person. And I thought that person was you. I chose you because I thought that was where I belonged, but Jesus, Michael, we were so young when we were married. We were practically kids. We didn’t know what we were doing.”
“So why’d you decide to break it off with Rodger and settle for me?”
“I didn’t settle.”
“Then what would you call it?”
Jess propped an elbow on the armrest, rubbed her forehead as if trying to massage back a migraine. As he waited for her to speak, he took in several deep breaths, praying that he could stifle his growing urge to rip into her. He wasn’t sure where that need came from, exactly—Jess describing an event that happened, what, close to twenty years ago?
“September came around and it was time to go back to work,” Jess said. “I had convinced myself that someone like Rodger couldn’t be interested in me in any serious way, so I told myself it was a mistake and broke it off.”
“Only he didn’t want to break it off.”
Jess stared at him the way you did when you bumped into people you once knew and no longer cared to see.
“He kept coming around,” Mike said. “So when did you decide to start screwing him full-time again?”
“There’s no need to be crude.”
“Well what would you call it?” He had come here and had validated what he thought was true. Fuck being nice now.
“I call it a mistake. A big mistake,” Jess said. “I tried being friends with him—just friends—but we were attracted to each other and—What I did was wrong. You and I were going to get married, and it should never have escalated the way it did. But it did, and I knew I had to put an end to it. No matter what Lou told you about that night, I was in the process of breaking up with Rodger.”
“What night?”
“The night I saw Lou at the restaurant.” Jess searched Mike’s eyes. “He didn’t tell you?”
“I only had a few minutes with him. He didn’t get into too many specifics.”
“I met Rodger for dinner at a restaurant in Charlestown. I told him that it was o
ver, that I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I went to the ladies’ room, and there was Lou standing in the hallway with this big smile on his face. He escorted me over to a table in the back, started in on how nice it was to see me, how good I looked, and then he drops the pictures on the table, just like you did.”
Jess took a sip of her wine. “He told me to break it off with Rodger, which I was going to do anyway. He said if he saw me with Rodger again, he’d show you the pictures. Then your father told me that I should, you know, be the person to make peace between you and him. I said I’d try, and your father stressed how it would be in my best interest to make sure it worked out.”
Mike tried to remember back to that time but couldn’t ever recall Jess talking about Lou in any positive way.
“Every day when you came home I worried that Lou had said something to you,” Jess said. “And then your father got mixed up in that business with the armored-car heists, and when I heard he left for Florida, I felt I could breathe again.”
“How lucky for you.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t look at me like that. You have no right to sit there and judge me.”
“You’ll have to excuse me if I’m having a hard time swallowing your load of shit about how you felt confused and weren’t in touch with your feelings.”
The skin on Jess’s face stretched tight, that stony resolve fighting to stay front and center. “You’ve got a lot of goddamn nerve after what happened to Sarah.”
“That hasn’t got anything—”
“You were the one who let her go up that hill by herself, remember? But did I ever turn around and say that what happened was your fault? Did I?”
Mike’s eyes slid off hers. The women from the other table were stealing glances this way.
“You’re goddamn right I didn’t,” Jess said. Tears spilled down her cheeks, but her voice remained clear and strong. “I wanted to. I blamed you for what happened and I hated you for it and you’ll never know how many times I wanted to scream it at you. But I never did, Michael. I never did because I knew how those words would cut you to the bone. Accidents happen, and what happened to me was an accident. When I found out that I was pregnant, as much as it killed me, I had to do it. It was wrong and immoral and I knew that I was committing murder but I had to do it. I couldn’t bring this other man’s baby into our marriage. It was wrong, but I did it. I did it because I wanted to stay with you. Because I loved you.”