Since We Fell

by Dennis Lehane

  “You’re stating conjecture. In the most threatening manner possible.”

  “It’s not conjecture,” he said, “to notice you’re terrified right now.”

  “I’ve been terrified before.”

  He shook his head slowly, this tough cop looking at this entitled yuppie without a day job. Probably pictured her walk-in closet full of high-end workout clothes, Louboutin heels, silk business suits she wore to restaurants no cop could afford.

  “You think you have but you haven’t. There’s darkness in this world you can’t learn about watching TV and reading books.”

  That night at the camp in Léogâne, the men strode back and forth through the mud and the heat in the light of the trash can fires, serpettes and bottles of cheap liquor in hand. Around two in the morning Widdy said to her, “If I let them have me now, they may only”—she made a circle with one hand and drove the index finger of the other hand in and out of the circle several times—“but if we make them wait, they may grow angry and”—she drew the same finger across her throat.

  Widdy—Widelene Jean-Calixte was her full name—was eleven years old. Rachel had convinced her to stay hidden. But, as Widdy had predicted, all that did was make the men angrier. And a short time after sunup, they had found her. Found them both.

  “I know a little bit about the darkness in this world,” Rachel told Trayvon Kessler.

  “Yeah?” His eyes searched hers.

  “Yeah.”

  “And what have you learned?” he whispered.

  “If you wait for it to find you, you’re already dead.”

  She got out of the car. When she came around to the sidewalk, he’d rolled down his window. “You planning on giving me the slip?”

  She smiled. “Yes.”

  “I’m a cop. Kinda good at keeping people in my sights.”

  “But you’re from Providence. And this is Boston.”

  He acknowledged that with a slight tilt of his head. “Next time you see me, then, Mrs. Delacroix, I’ll have a search warrant in my hand.”

  “Fair enough.” She walked up the sidewalk as he pulled away. She didn’t even pretend to walk into the store, just watched Kessler turn right at the next corner before she crossed Boylston to the cab stand in front of a hotel. She hopped into the back of the first cab and told the driver to head for the marina at Port Norfolk.

  The parking lot at the marina was empty, so she had the driver wait a few minutes to see if anyone had followed her but the entire neighborhood was gone to bed, so quiet you could hear the boats bump against their slips and the old wood buildings creak in the night breeze.

  Back on the boat, she went into the galley, turned on the lights, and pulled the keys out of the drawer where she’d left them when they’d tied the boat off. She untied the ropes next and then motored out into the harbor, running lights on full. Twenty minutes later, she could see Thompson Island appear in the starlight, and a minute after that she reached the minuscule island with the one bent tree. She went back into the galley, and this go-around, with the luxury of time, she found the scuba gear: mask, flippers, oxygen tank. She rummaged around a little more and found another flashlight and a wet suit, woman’s medium, belonging, she presumed, to the late Nicole Alden. She changed into the suit, donned the oxygen tank, flippers, and mask, and returned with the flashlight to the stern. She took her seat on the gunwale and looked up at the sky. The cloud bank from earlier had moved on and the stars arrayed themselves in clusters, as if seeking the protection of the herd, and she felt them not as celestial things, as gods or the servants of gods, but as castoffs, exiles, lost in the vast ink sky. What appeared as clusters down here were, up there, fields a million miles wide. The closest stars were light-years apart, no closer to one another than she was to a tribeswoman of the Saharan steppe in the fifteenth century.

  If we are this alone, she wanted to know, then what is the point?

  And she tipped back and fell through the ocean.

  She turned on her flashlight and soon discerned the one she’d dropped. It winked up at her from the floor of the bay. As she descended, she saw that it had landed in the sand about twenty yards from the boulder where Brian lay. She trained her light on the top of the boulder and moved the shaft down and down some more until she reached the sand.

  There was no body there.

  So she’d gotten the boulders mixed up. She turned her beam to the left and saw another boulder about twenty yards away. She swam halfway to it but then grew certain it was the wrong shape and color. She’d left Brian against a tall, conical rock. Just like the one she’d landed near. She swam back, moving her flashlight continually left and then right. Then farther left. Then farther right. No boulders that looked anything like the one where she’d left him. The one in front of which she now floated.

  This was the boulder where she’d left him. She was sure of it. She could tell by the depth of its craters and the conical shape.

  Had he been carried off by the current? Or worse, a shark? She kicked her way over to exactly where she’d last seen him. She checked the sand for signs of indentation, an impression of his legs or buttocks, but it had been worn smooth by the water.

  She caught a glimpse of black that was blacker than the boulder. It was just a flicker of it, like a flaking of skin along the left edge of the rock. She kicked to her left and shone her light around the corner and at first she saw nothing.

  But then she saw everything.

  It was a mouthpiece.

  She swam around to the back of the rock. The mouthpiece was attached to a tube that was attached to an oxygen tank.

  She looked back up through the dark water to the hull of the boat.

  You’re alive.

  She kicked for the surface.

  Until I find you.

  27

  IT

  She motored out to Thompson Island and found the dock within four hundred yards of where Brian had fallen in. There was no boat there, of course. Whatever boat had been there was long gone.

  And he was on it.

  She had to wait a long time for the cab. It was four in the morning and the dispatcher didn’t know where the Point Norfolk Marina was. She heard him tap his computer keyboard for about half a minute before he grumbled, “Twenty minutes,” into the phone and hung up.

  She stood in the dark parking lot and imagined all the things that could be going wrong right now. Trayvon Kessler could have gotten his warrant. (No, Rachel, he’d have to go back to Providence, find a judge, deal with jurisdiction issues. Maybe by sunup, but probably not even then. Breathe. Breathe.)

  Breathe? Brian was alive. Ned had shot Caleb in the face. She could see the older man’s face as he did it, lupine somehow, wholly comfortable with predatory dominance. He’d looked at a fellow human being sitting four feet away from him and killed that human being as easily as a hawk would spear a chipmunk with its talons. There was no pleasure to be had in the killing for Ned but no regret either.

  Brian was out there, eluding her. Alive. (Had she always known somewhere deep in her lizard brain that he’d never died?) But vengeance on Brian was, at this immediate moment as she stood in an empty parking at the witching hour, a luxury.

  Ned and Lars were out there, hunting her.

  Smartphones could be hacked. Turned quite easily into tracking devices and listening devices for hostile parties or government snoops. If Ned or Lars knew how to hack into hers, they’d know where she was.

  Headlights appeared two hundred yards away, at the beginning of the rutted street that led from the edge of Tenean Beach to here. The two lights bounced and canted and glowed brighter as they neared. Could be a cab. Could be Ned. She wrapped her hand around the gun in her bag, the gun her husband had tried to kill her with. Or acted as if he were trying to kill her. She wrapped her finger around the trigger and thumbed off the safety even as it occurred to her that it wouldn’t matter. If the car belonged to Ned and Lars, they could just accelerate at the last possible second and r
un her over. Not a thing she could do about it.

  The headlights swept the parking lot and the car turned in an arc to pull in front of her. It was brown and white and had BOSTON CAB painted on the doors. The driver was a middle-aged white woman with a beige afro. Rachel climbed in, and they pulled out of the marina.

  She had the cab drop her two blocks south of her apartment and walked up through an alley as a false dawn grayed the lower edges of the sky. She crossed Fairfield and walked down the ramp to the garage grate. She entered her code in the keypad to the right of the grate and the grate rose and she entered the garage. She took the elevator to eleven, got out, and walked up the stairs to fifteen. Soon she stood outside her door.

  This was the step she’d agonized over. If either Ned or Lars had remained behind, she was dead as soon as she entered the apartment. But if—no, when—Trayvon Kessler returned with that warrant and broke down this door, she needed to know what he’d find on the other side. The ride back from the bay to the marina, she’d debated if it was worth the risk and decided that Ned and Lars would assume she’d never return. It made no sense. Then again, she mused as she stood outside the door with the key in her hand, maybe they were counting on her to do the stupid thing. She had no experience dealing with people like them, but they had plenty of experience dealing with rubes like her. On the other side of that door was either death or knowledge. Plus a stash of cash Brian kept in a floor safe. Not much, a couple thousand, but enough to run on if Kessler had already taken the step of shutting down her credit cards. She doubted, on one hand, that he had the power to do so, but then, on the other, what did she know about police procedure when dealing with a murder suspect? And by now that’s what she could be, a murder suspect. By midmorning, she could be a suspect in two murders.

  She looked at the lock. At the key in her hand. She took a breath. Her hand shook when she raised it, so she lowered it again. Took several more breaths.

  Brian was alive. Brian had put her in this situation. Somehow, some way, she was going to find him and make him pay.

  Or she was going to die in the next thirty seconds.

  She inserted the key in the lock. But she didn’t turn it. She imagined a fusillade of bullets punching through the door and into her head, neck, and chest. She closed her eyes and tried to will herself to turn the key, turn the key, but once she did, the only step to take would be forward. Into the apartment. And she wasn’t ready. She wasn’t.

  If they were on the other side and if they were close enough to the door to have heard her insert the key, they could simply shoot her through the door. But just because they hadn’t didn’t mean they weren’t in there. They could be waiting patiently on the other side of the door, exchanging glances, maybe even smirks, screwing their silencers onto their pistols, taking careful aim at the doorway, and waiting for the moment when she opened the door.

  She’d wait them out. If they were in there, they’d heard the key enter the lock. Sooner or later, if she didn’t enter, they’d open the door.

  Then again, Rachel, you dumb fuck, they could be watching you through the spyhole right now. She stepped to the right of the door, pulled the pistol from her bag, thumbed off the safety yet again. Waited.

  She waited five minutes. Felt like fifty. Checked her watch again. Nope. Five.

  In some time continuum, we’re all dead as soon as we’re born. By that logic, she was long dead somewhere, looking back through the portals of time at this very moment and smiling at all the fuss Corporeal Rachel was putting herself through.

  I’m already dead, she assured herself. She turned the key in the lock and threw the door open, the gun pointing straight into the apartment, completely useless if either Lars or Ned was to her right or her left.

  They weren’t. Caleb still sat at the table, his flesh the white of soap, the blood crusted and black in the center of his face. She closed the door behind her and moved to her right, inching down the wall until she reached the open doorway of the half bath. It appeared empty. She looked in the crack between the open door and the jamb and saw that no one was hiding on the other side.

  She moved toward the bedroom. The door was closed. She put her palm on the handle but her flesh was so slick with sweat it slid off. She wiped it on her pants, used her sleeve to wipe the door handle. Grasped it with her left hand, held the gun in her right. Swung the door inward. As she did, she imagined Lars sitting on her bed, waiting for her. A soft pop and she’d be on her back, leaking.

  He wasn’t there. The room appeared empty. But it reinforced what she’d felt entering the apartment—they were better at this than she was. If they were in here with her, she was already dead. She entered the master bathroom and then checked the his and her walk-in closets with a sudden fatalism. She felt closer to death than at any time since Leógâne. She felt it emerge through the floorboards and penetrate her body, conjoin with her blood and pull her back down through the floor into the cellar of the next world.

  That’s what was waiting, what had always been waiting, the next world. Whether it was above or below, white or black, cold or warm, it was not this world with its comforts and distractions and knowable ills. Maybe it was nothing at all. Maybe it was just absence. Absence of self, absence of sense, absence of soul or memory.

  She realized now that in Haiti, even before the camp, as far back as Port-au-Prince and the corpses smoldering in the streets and stacked in the parking lot of the hospital, stacked like old cars in junkyards, beginning to swell and balloon in the heat, as far back as then, the truth of their deaths became the truth of her own: We are not special. We are lit from within by a single candle flame, and when that flame is blown out and all light leaves our eyes, it is the same as if we never existed at all. We don’t own our life, we rent it.

  She searched the rest of the apartment, but it was clear they weren’t there. Her initial instinct had been right—if they’d been waiting to kill her, they would have done so the moment she came through the door. She returned to the bedroom and packed a backpack with hiking boots, several pairs of warm socks, a heavy wool coat. She took a gym bag with her into the kitchen and added one carving knife, one paring knife, a flashlight and batteries, half a dozen power bars, several bottles of water, and the contents of the fruit bowl on the counter. She left the bag and the backpack by the door and returned to the bedroom. She changed into cargo pants, a thermal long-sleeved T-shirt, a black hoodie. She tied her hair back into a ponytail and covered it with a Newbury Comics ball cap. She opened the floor safe in his closet and removed the cash there and took it and the gun into the bathroom and placed them on the counter and looked in the mirror for a long time, and the woman who stared back at her was exhausted and angry. She was also afraid, but not paralyzed with it. She said to herself, with the compassionate authority of an older sister speaking to a younger, “It is not your fault.”

  What’s “it”?

  It was Widdy and Esther and the ex-nun, Veronique, and all the dead in Port-au-Prince. It was her mother’s toxicity and her father’s absence and Jeremy James’s abandonment. It was Sebastian’s disappointment in just about everything she did. It was the feeling she’d had as long back as she could remember that she was unforgivably inadequate and worth abandoning.

  And the voice in her head was primarily correct—most of it was not her fault.

  Except for Widdy. Widdy was her insurmountable sin. Widdy was four years dead. And Rachel, who’d gotten her killed, was four years older.

  She lifted a picture of her and Brian off the dresser. Their unofficial wedding photo. She looked in his lying eyes and his lying smile and she knew she was just as much a liar as he was. From grade school through high school, college, grad school, and out into the working world, she had assembled herself into a character she played every day for most of her life. Once that character failed to connect with the audience any longer, she disassembled it and assembled a new one. And on and on. Until, after Haiti, after Widdy, she couldn’t reassemble. All that w
as left of her was the nub of her hollow, manufactured self and the whole of her sin.

  We are liars, Brian. We.

  She left the bedroom. In the living room, she realized her laptop wasn’t on the bar where she’d left it. She looked around for a few minutes but surmised pretty quickly that Lars and Ned had taken it with them when they left.

  Fine. She had a smartphone.

  What she didn’t have was a car. Even if Kessler hadn’t frozen her credit cards, she couldn’t rent a car or use Zipcar because then she’d be a cinch to find. She looked around the apartment again, as if it could tell her something, looked everywhere except at the corpse at her dining room table. And then she realized that’s exactly where she should be looking.

  The key fob was in the right front pocket of Caleb’s jeans. She could see the bulge of it when she came around the table to him. She didn’t look at his face. She couldn’t.

  What about Haya? she wondered. What about AB? At the party just four days ago, Caleb had lifted his daughter in front of his face and she’d gripped his upper lip and pulled it toward her like a drawer. He’d let her do it. He’d laughed, even as it was clearly painful, and when Annabelle released his lip, he held her to his chest and pressed his nose to the crown of her head and breathed her in.

  Caleb had been an actor. Just like Brian. Just like her. But the acting was just one aspect of the whole. He wasn’t acting the father. He wasn’t acting his loves. Wasn’t pretending what his dreams and desires and hopes for the future were.

  He had been, she realized, her friend. She’d always thought of him as Brian’s friend, as Brian’s partner because those roles (there was that word again) had been firmly entrenched when he’d entered into his association with her. But time and attrition had created a familiarity and comfort with each other that one could only call friendship.

  She reached into his pocket. The denim was stiff and his body was stiffer. Rigor mortis had set in, and it took her a solid minute to work the key fob up his thigh and out of the pocket. In that time it occurred to her that if they’d never returned here so she could e-mail her book to herself, he might still be alive.