The Zizzas lived just off Montvale Avenue, about halfway between Main Street and I-93. When Matt parked at the curb and got out, it was raining as hard as it had been all day. A hurricane, supposedly too far out at sea to cause major damage, was lashing the Cape right now with sixty-mile-an-hour winds and torrential rain. Locally, the meteorologists were forecasting evening downpours and flash flooding.
He reached into the backseat and pulled out a sack that contained a bottle of wine, some petunias he’d brought for Andrea and an envelope with Frankie’s birthday gift: two tickets to see the Pats’ home opener against Rex Ryan and the hated New York Jets. He walked across the yard to the door and rang the bell.
Andrea opened it. A tall redhead who’d always worn far too much makeup, she had a hard face with deep worry lines departing from both corners of her mouth and long red fingernails too thick to be real. Matt knew she didn’t like him. He wasn’t crazy about her either, which made it all the more puzzling that suddenly—at the exact moment he heard his ex-wife say, “Frankie, you are absolutely outrageous”—he wished Andrea Zizza would pull him close and kiss him.
He lifted the petunias out of the bag and offered them to her. She didn’t take the bouquet, just stared at it. “Who’s that for?”
“You.”
“Oh. Well, thanks.” She held the flowers at arm’s length, as if she thought they might be poisonous. “I’ll get a vase for these,” she said, then nodded toward the dining room. “All the hoopla’s in there.”
Despite never having been a dog lover, he understood their use as props. Zizza’s mutts, Eddie and Wolf, were smelly, flea-addled creatures who barked too much and stole food, but when he walked into the dining room he dropped to a knee, grabbed Wolf around the neck and whispered, “Hey, boy, how you doing?” The dog’s long pink tongue, smelling suspiciously of mortadella, mopped his chin. He wiped it off, then stood to face the jury.
As odd as it might sound given the town’s size, he’d never seen Carla and Nowicki side by side until now. Yet there they were, at the far end of a table loaded down with cold cuts, salads, chips and dips. Paul had his arm around her shoulder, his fingertips gently massaging her rotator cuff.
As a literary construct, love at first sight had always seemed problematic, the fallback position of bourgeois nineteenth-century writers whose characters were prohibited by social mores from doing anything except sitting in drawing rooms, sneaking peeks and sighing. But Matt had loved Carla since the moment he first saw her in the hallway between classes at Montvale High. She was wearing a pair of Jordache jeans and a Flashdance shirt, and her hair was pinned with banana clips. She came toward him, hugging a copy of a magazine. Wine Spectator, he saw when she got closer.
She was pretty, but so were others. She was smart, but back then she didn’t read anything serious and listened to awful music by people like Teena Marie and Cyndi Lauper. Her standard grade was B minus, and when he finally asked her out he discovered she had no plans to attend college, that she hoped to open a wine-and-cheese shop someday in Arlington or Belmont or some other tony suburb. While none of this made her more interesting to him, that didn’t matter when he was sixteen, just as it wouldn’t matter when he was twenty-six or thirty-six.
Now her eyes—big and round, accentuated with just the right amount of eyeliner—were again meeting his. And when they did, several things happened. Nowicki’s face colored and he removed his hand from her shoulder. Carla’s mouth dropped open, and Dushay’s mother put her hands over her ears and said, “Oh, my!” Dushay lost his grip on the broccoli sprig he was about to scoop up dip with and dropped it in the bowl. One of Frankie’s neighbors whispered, “Jesus H.”
Zizza grabbed a wad of napkins and ran toward Matt, who was puzzled until he felt the liquid trickling out of his nostrils, over his lips and down his chin. He didn’t bother looking at the front of his white polo shirt, because he knew what he’d see there. He’d seen it before. And so had Carla.
• • •
Despite having catered countless parties over the years, the Zizzas didn’t seem to know how to throw one. There was no music, and conversation had started to lag. Everybody was just standing around, Matt holding a Kleenex to his nose now and wearing an aloha shirt that Frankie’d bought last year in Hawaii. It was an awful sight—yellow, with brownish-green palm trees in the foreground and behind them, in silhouette, a bunch of surfers hoisting boards on their shoulders as they trooped toward the ocean. Inside it, he felt like a scarecrow.
The Zizzas, the Nowickis and Mrs. Dushay had gone into the kitchen, where they stood looking out at the backyard. The wind had picked up and was whipping the trees, the windows of the old Victorian coming alive with sighs and groans. The rain was falling hard now, blown across the yard in silver waves.
“I know two different guys,” Matt heard Dushay tell another guest, “that got personally killed by Whitey Bulger.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. And I’m even related to one of them. He was just my uncle by marriage. But still.”
Carla emerged from the kitchen and walked over to the end of the table, where Matt was using his left hand to spoon potato salad onto a small plate. He didn’t want to risk taking the Kleenex away from his nose; he thought he’d finished bleeding, but you never could tell.
“How have you been?” she asked. She pulled the spoon from his hand, stuck it into the potato salad, lifted out a big clump and deposited it on his plate. “Want any more?”
“This isn’t what you think,” he told her.
“What’s not?”
“The nosebleed. God knows how that happened. I’m clean, Carla.”
“I know you are.”
He didn’t see how she could, since she’d barely been close enough to even wave at him for at least a couple of years, and he said so.
She pursed her lips like she always did when someone said something stupid. He’d always called it making a duck face, or just making a duck. “You’ve never understood what it means to really know somebody,” she said.
It occurred to him that this might well be true and could account for his failure to get very far with his writing. How could you write about people if you didn’t know them? But what he said was, “I’d like to think I know you.”
“I know you would.” She glanced at the kitchen, then reached up and, as if it were something precious and fragile, took the Kleenex from his hand. She looked at the three or four gobs of blood on it for a moment, then stuck the tissue in her breast pocket and fastened the button.
The critical point at which he would turn from a solid to a permeable substance seemed at hand. He was losing viscosity. Everybody’s body betrays them in the end, and his had gotten the jump on him tonight. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m horribly sorry about what happened to us. What I did to us.”
“I know you are,” she said. “But you’re not dead yet, Matt. You know what I mean? There’s still this thing ahead of you called life.” She picked his plate up and handed it to him. How many times had she done that before? He used to go a day or two without eating anything at all while she tried her best to force-feed him. And what dishes he’d passed up then: braised rabbit cacciatore, potato gnocchi with chanterelles and pancetta, veal piccata, braciole.
Loss was a sickening sensation. And no matter what he gorged on nowadays, he’d never make it go away. That might be the one important thing that he knew and she didn’t.
He set the plate back down just as Andrea came out of the kitchen carrying a chocolate layer cake with flaming candles forming the numbers 4 and 1. “Okay,” she announced. “Time to sing. Gather around.”
So everybody assembled around the table and sang “Happy Birthday,” and the most surprising thing about it was Dushay’s beautiful tenor voice, which soared operatically above their grating chorus. He sang with his head held high, arms at his sides, as if he were onstage someplace like Jordan Hall and perfectly at peace in such surroundings.
When t
hey finished, Frankie closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked straight at Matt, and in that instant his old friend knew what he’d wished for, that massed hopes were headed toward him, whooshing out over the cake and mixing with a few flecks of spit to extinguish the candles while everyone cheered.
During the opening of gifts, as Frankie feigned outrage at Dushay for giving him a ridiculous male thong with the Pats’ logo on the crotch, Matt slipped away. Broken branches littered the Zizzas’ yard, now more of a marsh, the water two or three inches deep in many places. He picked a path through the downpour to his car. Soggy leaves covered the windshield, so he had to stand there getting drenched while he cleared it.
A light pole, snapped in half, was down in the middle of Montvale Avenue, a team of guys from NSTAR hovering around it, shouting instructions at one another. He backed up, wheeled into a side street and wove up the hill to Main, dodging a couple of trash cans rolling across the pavement. The center of town was dark, but when he turned onto East Border Road, he again saw lights.
The house was humid and miserable—his mother had never installed central air, and he couldn’t afford to either—so he left the front door open while he went upstairs and pulled off his wet clothes, tossing Frankie’s awful shirt into the washer. He climbed into the tub, lifted the diverter, then grabbed his pliers and twisted the exposed stem to turn on the hot water. While showering, he kept thinking of that instant when Carla put the bloodstained Kleenex in her pocket. Turning his back to the spray, he pressed his face to the wall, nearly overcome by an urge to pound his forehead to pulp on the tile.
When the water grew lukewarm, he turned off both faucets, stepped out and toweled dry. He had no idea how to spend the rest of the evening. He hadn’t finished the last two books he’d started reading, and he’d forgotten to put any movies in the Netflix queue. The most exciting possibility was probably the Weather Channel.
He put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and went back downstairs. He was in the kitchen, rummaging through the refrigerator for a beer, when someone rapped hard at the front door. The rain was still pounding down, and the only person he knew who might be nuts enough to go out in it was Frankie. He hoped to God his friend hadn’t come to fetch him. After a while it became annoying, not to mention humiliating, for someone else to remain so focused on your well-being when you had done your best to destroy it.
Through the screen door, he saw his neighbor Kristin. Her soaked hair fell over her eyes, and her mascara had started to run, leaving squiggly lines on both cheeks. The wind had worked over her umbrella pretty good, inverting it and breaking a couple spokes.
“Hey,” he said and unlatched the door. “Come in. Everything okay?”
“Not exactly.”
She told him she’d gotten home late. They’d had meetings all day, and then her bus flooded out, and after that, on the Haverhill Line, a fallen tree blocked the tracks. “To make matters worse,” she said, “my husband’s down in Providence tonight. He went to hear the Tony Rice Unit.”
“Who?”
“They play bluegrass,” she said, waving off further questions. “So I got home, and when I walked into the kitchen I heard running water. I checked the half bath, but it wasn’t there. So I went upstairs and looked around and everything seemed fine. I couldn’t even hear the sound anymore. And so then I—”
To save her the trouble, he said, “It’s your basement.”
“It’s filling up. There must be half a foot in there already. I don’t know where it’s coming from—I didn’t want to wade down into it—but it sounds like there’s a broken pipe.”
“I doubt that.” He opened the door to the hallway closet, though he hated for her to see inside it. Whatever he lacked a hanger for, he’d thrown on the floor. He had to paw through a pile of coats and rain gear to find his winter boots.
As he took a seat on the bottom stair and began tugging them on, she examined the hallway. “That’s a nice antique,” she said, gesturing at the grandfather clock that stood at the far end, near the kitchen door. “Where did you get it?”
He was lacing one of the boots. “Belonged to my folks,” he said. “It’s been there as long as I remember.”
“So your parents lived here?”
“Yeah. This is the house I grew up in.”
“And you moved back after …”
“That’s right—I moved back after. You ready?”
She nodded, so he grabbed a big umbrella and a flashlight, and they went outside. Crossing the street, he held the umbrella over their heads at an angle to prevent the wind from destroying it.
“You never think about hurricanes hitting Massachusetts,” she said.
“If you live here, you do. One of them flattened a good bit of the North Shore back in 1938. Tore the roof off my mother’s house.”
“That house back there?”
“No. It’s over on Pond Street. My uncle lives in it now.”
While they walked, she held his right elbow. He noticed she wasn’t wearing boots, just a pair of black leather pumps. If she intended to stay here, she’d need some new clothes. He bet she didn’t even own a good coat. In California, she probably never needed one.
When they got to her driveway, he remarked that her husband’s paint job looked great: the exterior of the house was now ocher, with gleaming white trim. He’d noticed him up there on the scaffold, working all day long for nearly a week. In late afternoon he always pulled his shirt off, and he didn’t look nearly as gaunt then. He packed some serious muscle. “Must be nice,” Matt observed, “being married to a guy who knows how to do stuff like that.”
“Sometimes,” she said, pulling a key from her pocket and unlocking the door. He wiped his boots on the mat, laid down the umbrella and followed her inside.
He’d been in the house before but not for more than thirty years. When he was young, he and Frankie had a friend, Kyle, who lived here with his brother, sister and their parents. The father was a cop, in Malden, if memory served, and his wife worked for a government agency in Boston, either the Registry or the MBTA, something to do with transportation. One Saturday night they went to dinner; it was a special occasion, an anniversary, so the kids stayed home alone. His and Frankie’s friend was the oldest, ten or eleven, and Matt remembered Kyle’s mother coming over and telling his mom that she’d instructed the kids to call her if anything went wrong.
This was in winter, snow everywhere, big icicles hanging off the roofs. Though he couldn’t say for sure anymore, it might have been right after the blizzard of ’78. He recalled that just a day or two earlier, he and his parents had been jolted awake in the middle of the night by a popping noise that sounded like a shotgun blast and seemed to have come from the house next door. While Matt and his mother waited at the top of the stairs, his father grabbed a flashlight and stepped outside. Moments later, he returned grinning. “Remember how mad I got,” he asked, “when Steve Aaron switched to Vermont Mutual? Well, I don’t hold it against him now. The snow just caved in the roof of his Coronet.”
The night Kyle’s parents went out, the first indication they had that anything was wrong came when they heard his sister beating on their front door and screaming. Her little brother had gotten into a closet on the second floor, where their father kept his service weapon, and while playing with it he’d shot Kyle in the chest. Terry Drinnan ran down the street. When he came back, an hour or so later, he had blood all over his clothes. The next morning you could see a trail of it leading from the steps of Kyle’s house across the snowy yard to the street. An ambulance had carried him to the Cedar Park hospital, though he was probably already dead.
The family moved away within six months, and since then the house had been sold three times. Kristin wouldn’t know any of this history, because in Massachusetts, unlike some states, sellers don’t have to inform potential buyers that a violent death has occurred on the property. And Matt wasn’t about to tell her.
He trailed her down the hallway,
glancing into the living room where he and Frankie and Kyle used to lie on the floor watching Sanford and Son or Happy Days. Back then it had a carpet on it, so it was easy to roll around and wrestle if you wanted to, but now the boards were exposed. They looked great, which surprised him, since the previous occupants hadn’t seemed like the kind of people who cared much about appearances. The guy drove a panel truck and sometimes came home with his shirtfront unbuttoned, the woman favored baggy skirts that concealed a lumpy figure, and the kids—four boys—left their stuff all over the yard. Last winter one of their bikes got buried in the snow, a single handgrip poking out of a drift for three or four weeks.
“Did your husband redo the floors?” he asked as they moved into what used to be the dining room but was now lined with bookcases and CD cabinets.
“Yes, but only on the first floor. He just finished yesterday—and now the house is filling up with water.” She opened the door to the basement. “Watch your head.”
The light was on, but descending the narrow staircase made him nervous. Kyle used to keep a ball python down there in a fifty-five-gallon aquarium, and nobody—not even Frankie, who loved spiders and lizards and all kinds of creepy things—had much interest in going down to see it.
The water was lapping at the bottom step, and a Narragansett can bobbed by. “Is there a sump pump?” he asked.
“I remember Cal saying something about one, but I don’t know where it is. I’ve only been down here two or three times.”
She was somewhere behind him on the stairs. He caught a whiff of fragrance, faint but pleasant. “Can you call him?”
“I tried. His phone went straight to voice mail, and he hasn’t called back. I think maybe the concert already started.”
Having no other choice, he stepped into the flood. Against the far wall stood a long workbench, with all kinds of tools stacked on it: power drills, sanders, circular saws, things he could name but not use. Beyond it was an opening into a second room, where the sound of falling water seemed to be coming from. He waded over and, stooping to keep from cracking his head, got inside and played his flashlight around until he fixed it on one of the side walls. A couple feet above the concrete floor, there was a hole about the size of a silver dollar, and water was spewing through it. “Found your problem,” he called. “One of them, anyway. There’s a small hole in the wall, and my guess is a storm drain’s right on top of it.”
The Realm of Last Chances Page 8