by Delia Ephron
“Mom, I’m serious, okay? You’re …” His body lolled sideways, and surprisingly, his head ended up in my lap. And then he got comfy, stretching out on the couch.
I smoothed the prickly growth on his bald head. “Have I been scaring you?”
“We should go home, Mom.”
“Home?”
“You know.”
We should go to New York? He should leave Deidre? I was confused. I didn’t doubt his sincerity. At that instant, I knew Sam’s single motive was concern for me and an instinctual grasp of his own needs. But I had this niggling worry. Why would a madly-in-love teenage boy want to leave his girlfriend? I was about to ask this when the telephone rang.
Sam sat up. “It’s probably Deidre.”
I couldn’t tell whether he was pleased or not. I decided to answer. Sam and I should visit Deidre’s anyway. Sam, Deidre, Glenn, and I should have a talk.
I was about to pick up the phone when Sam waved to catch my attention from the couch. “Do you love me, Mom?” he asked.
“More than anything.”
He sighed.
“Hello,” I said into the receiver.
“Lily, it’s Sally.”
“Who?”
“The Police Department dispatch officer. Hold on.” I heard her exchange her official voice for something more chummy. “Get red crepe paper. Timmy loves red. One second, Mom.” She returned to me. “Sergeant McKee requests that you come down to the station. Oh my Lord.”
“Sally?”
No response.
“Sally, are you there?”
“Come down here right now, please,” she ordered. “Sergeant McKee thinks it would be helpful. I’ve got to go.”
“Wait.” Too late—she’d disconnected. I slammed the phone down. “She’s got to go? She’s 911. How can she have to go?”
“What happened, Mom?” Sam had wandered in and was removing an old slice of pizza from his backpack.
“I don’t know, honey, I really don’t know. I have to go down to the police station.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know.”
He gathered his backpack in his arms and started up the stairs. “I’ll be in my room.”
I would like to claim that I inferred nothing from his hasty retreat and that all the way to the station I was as calm as a yogi. In fact, I was wondering whether I should call a lawyer. Mentally, I thumbed through a list of connections—a classmate who had gone into criminal law, a guy I’d dated a few times whose father was a judge. At worst, if Deidre was involved, Sam could be accused of being an accessory, although clearly he was not. He might know something, a little, that’s all.
Even before parking, I could see the department was abuzz: many more cars in the lot, extra vehicles from Suffolk County, mobile units from two local radio stations. I pulled my notepad and pen from my purse. If other press was there, I should act like them. No one would think that my son was a suspect or that I was about to be questioned. There it was, the ultimate foolishness—I still imagined that there could be such a thing as a secret in Sakonnet Bay.
I squeezed my way through many insistent reporters demanding the scoop. At the open door, Sally held them back with outstretched arms. “Chief Blocker will give a press conference in two hours,” she repeated as I ducked under her fence. “Lily Davis is here,” she shouted.
I climbed the stairs past the dispatch office, where three officers were coping with the continuous ringing of telephones. “Did they identify the body?” I inquired, but an officer shooed me into a hushed hallway, where, clustered at the far end, I saw Tom, Chief Blocker, Detective Mooney, and Jane. Why is Jane’s hair pinned up as if she just got out of the shower, I was thinking, when she fainted.
The Sakonnet Times, November 12
* * *
Big City Eyes
BY LILY DAVIS
JANE ATKINS and I met on the day that I decided to move to Sakonnet Bay. She found a house for me and my son, and was with us on the lawn to cheer as the moving van rumbled in six hours late. When the lights blew during a recent nor’easter, I lit candles that she had given me. A transistor radio, her other housewarming gift, kept me sane during bursts of wind and hail. When I wanted to gab, when I wanted to have fun, when I found life to be more than I could handle, I phoned Jane. Of course she could have tea, lunch, dinner, go to the movies. Did I want to trundle off with her to open houses? With Jane, I could talk until the sun set in Sakonnet Bay, get tipsy over margaritas, wipe my tears with tissues from the packet that she kept in her monster of a purse. From the first day, as Jane whirled me from one end of town to the other, I knew I would grow old with her.
Now life is a lot more than Jane can handle, with the arrest last Saturday of her husband, Jonathan Atkins, for the alleged murder of a young New York City woman named Tracey Kenniston.
According to police sources, Atkins met the young woman by chance. When one of his Internet stock transactions did not go through, Ms. Kenniston called from the brokerage company to inform him that the computers were down. A phone flirtation ensued, then clandestine dates.
Jane kept a key to each house she brokered. Over the years, she’d accumulated enough to fill two desk drawers. Each key was wrapped in white bond paper and secured with a double-twisted rubber band. On each piece of paper she had printed the address and any necessary instructions. This was how Jonathan Atkins was reportedly able to enter vacant summer mansions, following his wife’s written directions for disarming the security systems. The Nicholas house on Ocean Drive, along with other real estate she sold, was a trysting spot for her husband and his lover. They had planned to run off, but according to Ms. Kenniston’s friends, she changed her mind.
Perhaps the suspect meant only to detain Ms. Kenniston by such crude means, the tranquilizer dart. Perhaps he was trying to deter her from leaving him. He might not have known that ketamine, a drug that can sedate a deer, can kill a woman … especially if it is shot into her … especially if she has already ingested Valium.
Chief Ben Blocker praised the brilliantly intuitive detecting of Sergeant Tom McKee, who picked up Jonathan Atkins on a hunch.
As people have gathered in every conceivable location to hash and rehash WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE CASE, I have been thinking and rethinking gossip. I have come to believe that gossip contains an element of malicious glee, whereas this other activity that bears a strong resemblance to gossip is just people trying to make sense of life. Folks munching on facts as well as doughnuts are trying to understand how this terrible hurt could have come to pass, to deplore it and construct some version of the facts that protects them from believing that such madness could happen to them.
At one time I would have seen these events through the eyes of Tracey Kenniston. I would have tried to figure out what needs this older man satisfied in her. She fell in love, tried to escape from it, and as a result, she is dead at the absurdly young age of twenty-three. At one time, not only would I have sympathized with Tracey, I would have been willing to do what she did: blindly follow her heart. Giddy and extraordinary passion is compelling, and a life lived without that paradise painfully incomplete. It is self-delusion to imagine otherwise. But at my own stage of life and in my own circumstances, I suffer from myopia and see this tragedy only through the eyes of my friend. If the accounts are true, I wonder, how could her husband betray her so brutally? How will she ever survive?
Jane Atkins is a realtor, but her job was simply a concrete, money-earning outlet for her need to mother. She found us homes and made sure our families were safely stowed. Now her own house is coming down around her … except that no one in town will let it.
Each day when I visit, attempting my own hapless version of good cheer, there are at least twenty other Sakonnet Bay residents doing likewise. Meals are cooked, clothes and dishes are washed. Hearts and heads advise and console. Jane bucked us up, and now we are all trying to give something back. Last night even a deer appeared to pay special heed, and passed u
p her leafy hedge for one next door.
CHAPTER 18
JANE AND I were lying side by side on lounge chairs in her backyard, both bundled in wool blankets. The stubby grass had a film of frost and the bare trees provided no shelter. Through the back windows, we could see Coral moving from kitchen to dining room, laying out the never-ending buffet of snacks. Jane’s daughter, Carrie, helping Coral, paused every so often at the window and sent her mother an encouraging smile. She and her brother Simon had come home from college.
In the almost three weeks since Jonathan’s arrest, Jane had dropped pounds. Her full cheeks had hollowed out. With haunted eyes looking larger, taking up a disproportionate amount of her face, she had a romantic look: the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel, wasting away with something tragic like consumption.
“I gave them evidence, you know.”
“What do you mean, Jane?”
“He said he’d never met her, but I was sure he’d taken the key. I told them. They found his fingerprints there.”
She couldn’t stay off the subject for very long, and that was part of Jonathan’s curse. His crime possessed her.
“Phone bills, too, with his calls to her. I gave them everything. I won’t talk to him.”
“Of course. Is he going to plead guilty?”
“Simon says he claims he shot her with that blowgun by accident. There are no witnesses.” She barked a brief laugh. “Maybe he’ll get off.”
“Bye Jane, bye Lily.” Coral called from the back door.
“Bye. And thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Jane livened up, summoning years of practice as a happy, outgoing person. “Are you cold?” she asked me. “We can go in.”
“Not unless you want to.”
“No. I like it outside.” She slumped back and pulled the cover up higher, around her chin. We rested awhile, listening to animal sounds, a few hoots and coos that I didn’t recognize.
“I went into the village yesterday. Carrie took me to buy groceries. She thought it might help me to do a chore.”
“Did it?”
“Well, I bumped into my old life.”
I sat up. “It’s inescapable. In this town, I know I’ll turn a corner and there will be what I’m avoiding on the day that I’m missing what I’m avoiding so much that my head hurts, so then what’s going to happen?” I stopped as I realized that I had managed to get Jane’s attention off herself.
“My God, you were involved with someone.”
I took a tissue from the large box I carried around Jane’s house and planted on the ground or floor near wherever she landed. Very handy it was. I blew my nose.
“Did you fall in love?”
I couldn’t see my friend right now through the watery blur, so I just waved my hand—she should forget it.
“If you miss him, Lily, call him.”
He had phoned me. Many times. I had a stack of pink reminder slips at the office, all with the same message. “Tom McKee. Call me at the station.” Peg had probably thought they were related to the Atkins case. Yes, every day after Jonathan’s arrest, I received calls that I hadn’t returned, until my column appeared. The one on Jane. “It’s over. He knows it’s over. He read it in the paper.”
“Huh?”
“I’m joking.”
“Oh.”
We fell silent again, Jane’s mind drifting off, probably to some endless replay of Jonathan’s madness.
From somewhere down the block, a leaf blower roared into action. “I hate that sound. Hate it.”
“You’re leaving,” said Jane.
“I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.”
“Billy McKee hasn’t driven you out, I hope,” she teased.
“Did Coral tell you? She can’t get off him. She assured me that he’s better now, in case I care. He’s joined AA and goes to meetings in Patchogue.”
The clues weren’t all linked to the same person. I’d been right to conclude that, but wrong about which ones did link. Another misguided intuitive leap. The tire tracks weren’t Jonathan’s. They could have been left by Billy, amusing himself on security patrol after knocking back a few.
“Why don’t you come to Manhattan and live with us? You could sell real estate in the city.”
“I could, couldn’t I?” A glimmer of possibility. Jane reached out. Her cold, thin hand tightened on mine. “I’m not going to be all right for a while.”
“No.”
On the way home, I stopped at LePater’s to buy fried chicken for dinner. “Daddy.” I heard a chirpy voice. I was certain it was Alicia’s. I turned and saw a curly-haired tot in a stroller, pointing to a stuffed bunny she had dropped on the floor. Her father was in uniform—the matching green shirt and slacks of a local gas station mechanic. He picked up her toy, and also opened a box of animal crackers for her. Behind them, out the window, a police car passed by. I paid for my chicken and left the store.
I cut down the pedestrian alley, the same one I had limped through after Baby chewed my ankle. I was starving, and as I dug into the takeout container for a drumstick, Tom walked into the alley at the other end.
I bolted back out of the alley, and into traffic, pressing the tub of chicken to my chest while attempting to keep a grip on the cardboard top and drumstick. “Wait up,” I called my alibi to no one, scrambled around cars, and ignored the honking. I hurried down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street and into a cleaner’s where I knew there was a back exit. “Your clothes aren’t ready yet,” the woman told me as I rushed past the conveyor belt of dry cleaning and out the rear. I came to my senses only after several minutes of meandering among garbage cans behind shops.
“Hi,” said a woman. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Me? I guess it is.”
Becky Ray, stylist at Deborah’s Hair and Nails, was locking the shop. She held the key gingerly between thumb and forefinger. After dropping it into her quilted tote, she blew on her nails.
She walked directly toward me. Her lips tightened prunishly as she drew close.
“Deer only know flight,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing.” I stepped aside, realizing I was blocking the way to her car.
“Did you change your hair?” she asked.
“No. It’s just windblown.”
“It looks good.”
“Really?” I took a bite of my drumstick.
I waited until she drove off, then ambled by a circuitous route to where I was parked—all the way down Barton so I could enter the lot at the far end. The cautious stroll gave me time to assess my panic. Running away wasn’t a sign of weak character, I decided, when the only other choice was giving in.
CHAPTER 19
IN THE half-hour since the moving van left, Sam and Deidre formed a mournful tableau, clinging together, lovers in sacrificial heroism just before the Titanic sank. Every so often Deidre wearily raised her head to gaze with red-rimmed eyes at Sam, recharging them both to hug ever more desperately.
As soon as Sam had suggested that we return to Manhattan, and vented his fears about having such a crazy mom, he’d reversed himself. He didn’t want to leave, he moaned, this was the first place he’d ever been happy, we’d just arrived. A total flipflop—mercifully normal range. When he wasn’t complaining, he forgot to be miserable (also NR). There were small but telling indicators. While I read at night, he sometimes came into my room, collapsed on my bed, and kept me company. He laughed more often, and when he did, he sounded happy. His bedroom door was occasionally left open, and the giant-killer thump of his tread moving about the house was definitely lighter.
Yes, someone actually was fine—how amazing that it was my son. Because I was going back to the city, as far as I could ensure it, another woman’s children would be fine as well.
I left Sam and Deidre on the doorstep and took one last wander through the empty house, trailed by Bernadette reading aloud from her latest piece of reportage.
I hadn’t had the stomach to cov
er the Atkins case as a dispassionate observer, and Rob, the logical second, had been away on the weekend when Jonathan was arrested. With coaching from Art and me, Bernadette had dived in. She researched diligently and wrote with a driven intensity. She sat inches from the computer keyboard, her eyes boring into the screen. She disdained the more efficient route to finding synonyms—the thesaurus built into her word-processing program—and preferred instead to involve us all in her drama. “What’s another word for ‘fast’?” she cried, snapping upright. “Swift,” she proudly answered her own question. “‘The case came to a swift conclusion.’”
Sam had celebrated Thanksgiving with his father. I had spent mine with Jane, as I had every other spare moment.
Jane’s real estate office kindly arranged for us to break the lease on our house with only the security deposit forfeited. After considerable begging on my part, our New York City tenant agreed to relocate. “It’s your office, not your home,” I nagged him. For three weeks after Thanksgiving, I wrapped up our Sakonnet life, quit the paper, hired movers, packed our worldly goods.
I had arranged with Deidre’s parents for Sam to return to Sakonnet Bay after the Christmas holidays. He would finish the last few weeks of the semester with them, ordered to share a room with one of Deidre’s younger brothers, sleeping on an upper bunk. Deidre, who was rarely allowed out on school nights, had a remarkably high grade-point average. As I had suspected, it was not possible to have a low IQ and master the entire Klingon vocabulary. Sam’s grades were improving. He would flourish in the Halls’ stricter family life. And then, because Deidre’s parents were so fond of my nutty son, they would be happy to have him visit on weekends during the spring term. Deidre would visit us.
“‘Having struck a bargain with the Suffolk County district attorney, Jonathan Atkins pleaded guilty to second-degree murder,’” Bernadette continued to read her article as I noticed, in the living room, a plaster crack making a crooked path across the wall. The ceilings were low, the windows looked puny. Dust particles swirled in the mellow afternoon sunlight.