So Near

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  About five minutes into McCarthy’s questioning, a side door behind the court reporter opened and Kurt slipped into the room. I noticed him because I happened to be glancing in that direction, but the others had been looking back and forth between McCarthy and myself. I’m not sure if anyone besides me saw Kurt quietly take a seat at the far end of the row of chairs where Eddie was sitting. His sudden appearance must have distracted me, because the next thing I knew, McCarthy was asking:

  “Mr. Horigan? Do you need me to repeat the question?”

  “I guess so.”

  “There was a keg of beer at this game, was there not?”

  “No,” I said. “There was a cooler of beer. Actually, two. Both sides are expected to bring their own. It was a hot day.”

  “Yes, you’ve mentioned that. How many beers did you have?”

  “I don’t remember exactly.”

  “Give me a guess. How many beers do you estimate you consumed across the course of the afternoon?”

  I’d discussed this particular question with both Lester and Janet. We’d circled around the problem several times on different occasions and had settled on “a couple.” Meaning, at most, two. But, like so much else about that day, the beer count remains a gray area for me. And, because I couldn’t be sure, I’ve somehow let myself be persuaded that, yes, I might have had just one or two. It might have been a couple. But the few times I’ve allowed myself to really consider the question on my own, I’ve had to admit that it was more than a couple. More like four or five possibly. One every other inning or so. Definitely one after I hit the homer. Thinking about that particular moment again, I clearly remembered the worn-down playing field. The way the sun burst through a cloud bank. Make it happen, I remember telling myself. Just go ahead and make it happen. And I knew the second my bat connected with the ball that I’d gotten my wish.

  “Mr. Horigan?” McCarthy asked again. “An estimate please.”

  I was taking too long, I realized. And yet, it came to me that this was the central question. No, this was the only question. The turning point for me. How could I have convinced myself I’d made a stand when I took on Gannon? In fact, I’d simply turned my back on the real fight—and had been running from it ever since. Jenny tried to tell me. Again and again. But she never came right out and said it. She refused to blame me. My heart ached just thinking about that. And her.

  “More than a couple . . . ,” I began. Then I said, “I had too many.”

  “Mr. Horigan?” McCarthy asked. “Is that really your—”

  “Hold on a second here,” Lester said, turning to me.

  I saw Eddie start to get up from his chair.

  “I can’t say I was drunk exactly,” I said, sitting back and looking up at the ceiling. The overhead lights glittered above me, and I felt faint. I bowed my head. “But I can tell you for sure that I’d had too much to drink. I should never have gotten behind that wheel.”

  Everyone started talking at once. Lester called for a break. I just sat there looking down at the table. I half heard Lester, Janet, and Eddie conferring behind me, their words overlapping: “clearly not well . . . flu-like symptoms . . . tossed his cookies on the way up here . . . shouldn’t have allowed . . . obviously we’ll postpone . . .”

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. I knew who it was without looking up.

  The double doors closed, and Eddie, Kurt, and I were alone together.

  “Oh, boy, did you fuck up,” Eddie said. “You really fucked up!” He was pacing back and forth. I was still seated, Kurt standing behind me.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Lester thinks we can still pull this out. He’s trying to feed McCarthy the line that you’re sick. Walked in here sick. That he never should have let you—”

  “No, it’s over, Eddie,” I said. “It’s not going to happen.”

  “What?” he turned, staring from me to Kurt. “Because of what this asshole claims? You’re really going to take that to heart? What kind of a pussy—”

  “It’s bullshit. This whole thing is bullshit. I was drinking, and I rolled the Jeep and—”

  “You walked away without a scratch,” Eddie said. “And your daughter was killed. Why? Because the goddamn seat was defective! Isn’t that the whole reason we’re here, Cal?”

  “You tell me, Eddie,” I said. “I don’t give a damn anymore.”

  “Well, you better,” Eddie said. He stopped moving. He stood across the table from Kurt and me, hands on hips. “Or the business is fucked.”

  “What business?” Kurt asked.

  “Horigan Lumber and Hardware. I’ve—I made some bad moves in the market. I had to take out some loans to cover for it. And I used the business as collateral. Unless we win this suit, we’re screwed.”

  22

  Cal

  Eddie told us in the parking garage under the Stephens, Stokes office building that he needed to get away for a while. He was thinking of heading north to a hunting cabin he sometimes rented with some of his old college buddies.

  “I have to work out what I’m going to do next,” he said, looking from me to Kurt. “I don’t believe either of you really understands what you just kissed good-bye back there. We’re looking into the eye of a fucking financial hurricane.”

  “No,” Kurt said, “not we. You’re out of Horigan Lumber. You take one step back into those offices, and I’ll personally call Chief Tyler and have you arrested.”

  “You wouldn’t—”

  “Or maybe we should just make the call right now,” I told Kurt. “What’s the point of waiting? This asshole already admitted that he’s been robbing the old man blind.”

  “Hold on, Cal,” Eddie began. “I think that after all I tried to do for you—”

  “Oh, just shut the fuck up,” I said, turning to face him. I’d been too stunned to look him in the eye after the EBT conference. Or during the awful postmortem in Lester’s office when I had to tell the lawyer that I’d been lying—to myself as much as to anybody. But I think Lester must have known what was coming, because he took the news with what seemed to me surprising calm. He wasn’t happy about it, and he told me there were some legal matters we still had to deal with, but it was clear the litigation was a no-go without my support. We hadn’t told him what had happened with Edmund, but Lester made an interesting comment as we were leaving:

  “I should always know something’s wrong when it isn’t the actual plaintiff who makes that first inquiry.”

  I should have known, too, of course. After all the bad blood between Eddie and myself over the years, I should have suspected that whatever my older brother was up to, it would be primarily to his advantage. Edmund’s always been a me-first kind of guy. Why should Betsy’s death have changed him in any real way? After all, it hadn’t changed me—her own father. I went right on taking the easy way out, doing what made me feel better. Just as Eddie probably knew I would. All I’d needed was a little prodding on his part. And I hated myself for that almost as much as I hated him for knowing how easily I could be played.

  “You tried to rob me, too,” I told him. “You saw an opportunity to use the situation—and you went for it. You knew I was vulnerable. Hell, you knew I was a mess. But, then, you were counting on that, weren’t you? You were able to push me in whatever direction you needed. You don’t give a damn that my life’s a total disaster right now. You don’t give a fuck that this whole fiasco has maybe cost me my marriage. But you know what burns me the most? You know what forces me to think that my own flesh and blood is the scum of the earth?”

  He looked at me blandly, though I noticed he’d balled his hands into fists. He was waiting for me to make some kind of a move.

  “You don’t even know, do you?”

  “No, but I’m sure you’re going to enlighten me. You seem to be in a very confessional mood today.”

  I tried to move forward, but Kurt grabbed my arm.

  “Don’t give him the satisfaction,” he said. “If he doesn’t get it, th
ere’s really no hope.”

  Eddie shrugged and took a few steps back before he turned and started toward his car. I was going to leave it at that. Kurt was right—there was no hope. But when Eddie nonchalantly clicked his key fob and the lights flashed on the Beamer, I lost it for some reason.

  “You used Betsy!” I cried, my voice ricocheting off the low cement ceiling of the parking garage. “Betsy, Betsy, Betsy!”

  Kurt and I drove back down to Covington in his car. We didn’t say anything for a while.

  “Jesus,” Kurt muttered once we’d hit the highway, shaking his head.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “It’s just unbelievable.”

  “What the fuck?” he said after another mile or so. “What are we going to do?”

  “I guess it’s up to us to tell the old man,” I said.

  “You think he doesn’t know already?” Kurt asked.

  “No way. I just can’t see him letting Eddie get away with it. Dad wouldn’t put up with that kind of crap for a minute.”

  “Unless he’d just turned a blind eye for so long he had no other choice. But no, I can’t really see that happening. You’ve got to be right. He doesn’t know.”

  But as we drove on in silence, I started to rethink my first reaction. And I began to piece together a scenario that would have Jay Horigan caught right in the middle of his oldest son’s schemes and lies.

  During the thirty or so years my father had built up Horigan Lumber and Hardware from the single-floor storefront his father had left him to the biggest hardware supplier in the tricounty region, the financial end of the business had been handled by Alan Sheer, a reliable, reserved, old-fashioned accountant. By the time he retired and my father offered the position to Eddie, a newly minted MBA, Jay Horigan had lost all interest in that side of the business, if he’d ever really had any. In my dad’s mind, the success of Horigan Lumber was due to salesmanship, goodwill, and personal relationships built over the course of a lifetime.

  “A loyal customer,” he was fond of saying, “is money in the bank.” As far as he was concerned, only Jay Horigan knew how to keep a customer truly loyal—while almost anybody could handle the money. So he hadn’t noticed when Eddie began his double-dealing. He barely glanced at the spreadsheets his oldest son insisted on printing out for him every week. Even if he did sense something was a little off, he couldn’t begin to guess where to look for it. He’d never even learned how to turn on a computer.

  Who knows how bad things already were when my father went in for his bypass surgery that summer? But the timing couldn’t have been worse: the markets in free fall and Eddie suddenly in charge of making all the business decisions. That’s probably when it began to really roll downhill—picking up steam as the construction industry tanked and lending dried up.

  Suddenly, I flashed on the lunch Eddie, my dad, and that banker were having at Deer Creek Bistro the day Betsy died. How, afterward, Eddie had driven out to the ball game to assure Kurt and me that “he didn’t want us to worry”—the meeting had been the banker’s idea. It was the conversation that led to my fight with Eddie—and all the terrible things that followed.

  “Actually, I’m pretty sure he does know,” I told Kurt.

  “You think?” Kurt asked, looking over at me, but his expression told me that he wasn’t far from drawing the same conclusion.

  “Yeah, he knows,” I said again, “and it’s probably been breaking his heart.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Step in,” I said without even thinking about it. “Take over. Meet with the creditors. Cut some deal with the bank. Sit down with the big clients. Make it clear we can be trusted.”

  “Yeah,” Kurt said, his tone doubtful. “But you know how these things work. Word spreads so fast. People will be talking about this before we even wake up tomorrow morning. The nasty gossip alone could sink us.”

  “Okay, so we get out in front of it,” I told him, trying to think the thing through. “We do what we can to spin the story. We could even try to finesse Eddie’s role—I don’t know, make it seem like Dad gave Eddie the money to invest or something. And everyone’s been taking a beating in the market, right? Maybe we could find some smart PR guy to help us out there. Then we hire a real pro to clean up the accounting systems. Do whatever needs to be done. But I’m telling you right now, I’m not letting this ship go down.”

  I tried to get through to Jude—the only person to have Jenny’s number—on my cell on the drive back down, but, as usual, the reception was shitty.

  “Listen, let me deal with Dad,” Kurt said as I slapped the phone against my thigh in frustration. “I’m going to drop you at the Honeggers’ on my way. That’s more important.”

  “Yeah, that’d be great,” I said. “I really need to reach her. Oh man, I hope it’s not too late.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine,” Kurt told me.

  “Thanks,” I said as we pulled up in front of the old white gingerbread colonial. “I’ll find you after I talk to Jenny. Tell the old man not to worry. Tell him we’ve got his back.”

  I rang the doorbell, but nobody came. I banged on the front door, but still no answer. I walked around the house to peer in the window of the reverend’s study, but no one was there. I tried Jude’s cell again, and this time the call went through. When she answered, I told her where I was.

  “I’m in the basement,” she said. “What are you doing here? I read in the paper that you and Gannon were having a big meeting today. Whoa—wait—did they settle?”

  “I’ve been trying to call you. I need Jenny’s number.”

  “I can’t—No, hold on. I’ll be right up. Come around back to the kitchen.”

  I could tell that she knew something was wrong as soon as she opened the door.

  “What? You lost? So what’s going on?”

  “I need to talk to my wife,” I told her, leaving the door half-open behind me. Jude’s flip, flirty attitude has always irritated me.

  “I’m sorry, but she told me I could only give out the number if there was some kind of emergency.”

  “It’s an emergency, Jude. Okay? I need to talk to her—so please let’s stop playing around here. I’m really not in the mood.”

  “And I’m not in the mood to be talked to like I’m a three-year-old. I promised Jenny that I wouldn’t give out the number unless—”

  “It’s a fucking emergency!” I said, slamming the kitchen door shut behind me. “And I’m not going to let you try to get in between the two of us again. I want that number, and I want it now.”

  Her eyes widened, then filled with tears.

  “I’m sorry. I never meant for that to happen. I was going through a really bad time then and—” But she saw my expression and swallowed hard. She pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her jeans and scrolled through the listings. She wrote a number with a 212 area code down for me and handed it over.

  “Just please tell her you forced me to give it to you, okay? Against my will. I’m not responsible for what happens.”

  “Fine,” I said. I was so used to Jude’s histrionics I didn’t think twice about her ominous tone. I turned to the door.

  “And, just for your information,” she said to my back, “I tried to be your champion. You can hardly blame me for coming between the two of you this time.”

  I didn’t want my damn cell phone dying on me in the middle of the most important conversation of my life. I decided I’d make the call on the landline at my folks’ place, which was just a couple of blocks away from the Honeggers’. I’d been using Jenny’s car while she was away, but Eddie had driven me up to Albany that morning, so I had to cover the distance on foot. I jogged through town, the streetlights outside the Public Market and Covington Wine and Liquor starting to sputter on as the afternoon faded. Kurt was right: no matter what we did, this sleepy town would be buzzing with news of our misfortune by morning.

  Kurt’s Subaru was parked in my parents’ driveway. My mother and
Kurt were sitting together at the kitchen table.

  “Oh, honey!” my mom said when I walked in. She stood up and hugged me. “Kurt’s told us. I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it.”

  “I’m really sorry, Mom,” I said, looking across the table at Kurt. “How’s he taking it?”

  “Hard,” Kurt said. “Though I think we were right about—what we said. Anyway, he told us he felt tired—and went downstairs a few minutes ago.”

  My hands were itching to grab a phone, but I asked my mother:

  “Should I go down and talk to him, do you think?”

  “No, let him be for now. I thought he looked exhausted.”

  “I’m going to call Jenny, okay? Can I use the phone in the front hall?”

  “Of course. Tell her it’s time to come home.”

  “I will,” I said, wishing to hell it could be that simple.

  The old black dial-up phone my parents have had for as long as I can remember sat on a mahogany side table at the foot of the stairs. I pulled the chain on the lamp beside it so that I could read the number Jude had jotted down. My fingers shook a little as I dialed—each rotation seeming to take forever. I breathed in deeply when the phone began to ring at the other end, rehearsing the first thing I would say to her: I’m sorry, Jenny. I’ve never been more sorry in my life . . .

  The phone rang four times before a message machine kicked in:

  “Hello, you’ve reached Daniel Brandt. I can’t take your call right now, but please leave . . .”

  I dropped the receiver back into the cradle. I just stood there, staring stupidly at the thing. The familiar voice kept repeating in my ear: Hello, you’ve reached Daniel Brandt. My mind was trying to make sense of what I’d heard, but my body already understood. I slumped into a chair next to the table. Hello, you’ve reached Daniel Brandt.