“This is all kind of new to me,” Cal replied. “I really haven’t had time to find out what I think.”
Big drops of spittle had formed in both corners of Saucer’s mouth. The first couple of weeks after his release, he’d stayed in Montvale with his brother and his sister-in-law. Then he’d lifted a pair of twenties from her purse, and even though she didn’t see him do it and couldn’t be sure he had, they told him to clear out. Last night, he’d ridden the Orange Line from Oak Grove to Forest Hills and back three times, and when the trains finally quit running he’d shivered for a few hours on a bench near Pleasant Pond. This morning, after his brother and sister-in-law left for work, he’d gone back and forced a window, eaten a sandwich and swiped his brother’s gun. They’d hidden it in a tool chest, but he knew how that asshole’s mind worked.
Cal decided later that if he’d been in Saucer’s position, he would’ve shot the dog first. That would’ve made the most sense for at least two reasons. To begin with, Suzy was raising holy hell, already attracting attention, and because of her size it wasn’t inconceivable that she might jar the door open and lunge into the store. She’d never bitten anybody, but Andrew Saucer didn’t know that. Second, Cal was on the far side of the counter and deli case from Saucer, a good seven or eight feet away. If he was a decent shot, Saucer could have killed the dog and then turned to fire at Cal before he was able to take more than one stride.
But for whatever reason, Saucer, who’d aimed plenty of weapons at people but never shot anybody, made the opposite choice. He stepped back behind the deli case and braced the butt of the pistol on top of it, between two big jars of Lakeside Red Hots.
According to the article in the Globe, the deli case weighed 543 pounds when it was empty, and all the stuff inside and on top of it probably added another 40 or 50 pounds. Yet when Cal lowered his head and threw himself against it, the case moved enough to disrupt Saucer’s aim, so he fired a round into the ceiling before losing his grip on the gun, and the glass in the case shattered, several shards ending up in Cal’s left arm and shoulder.
What occurred next was never clear to Cal. Unlike Andrew Saucer, he’d gone apeshit.
“My neighbor’s on the floor with blood streaming down his arm,” Vico told two of his friends that night, sitting in overstuffed chairs in his “man cave” in the basement. There was yet another wide-screen TV down there, and the Yankees were playing the Rangers in the American League championship series, New York up two games to one, but he didn’t feel like watching, and his friends understood. It was the drunkest he’d been in years, which wasn’t saying much, since normally he never got drunk. The ex-cop from Everett kept drawing him glasses of wine from a big box of Franzia Cabernet that stood on the wet bar. Vico hadn’t drunk such bad wine since college. “I mean, for all I know it’s his jugular.”
“If it’d been his jugular,” the ex-cop said, “he never would’ve made it to his feet. See, body posture’s got a lot to do with how fast you lose blood. If you’re in a prone position, your ticket’s punched. I saw a guy bleed to death like that down in the Dirty E.”
“He didn’t stay down long,” Vico said. “It was like he shot off the floor. He just kind of high-jumps the counter—that’s the only way I can put it. Like he’s doing the fucking Fosbury Flop.”
“He went over backward?” the ex-coach asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Fosbury jumped backward—that’s why they called it the flop.”
“I don’t know if he went over backward, forward, sideways or upside down. That’s what I’m trying to get across. It all happened so fast it’s like one constant blur. He’s over that counter in a flash, so fast the poor Pakistani can’t move aside in time and gets knocked like a bowling pin. And when he throws the first punch at the skid, the bastard just disintegrates. I mean he crumbles before my very eyes.”
“And the whole time this is happening,” the ex-cop said, “you’re doing what?”
At some point during the ordeal he’d wet himself. He was on prostate meds, and most of the time he did well to squeeze out a couple ounces, but he hadn’t needed Flomax today. “What do you mean, what am I doing?” he asked, downing the last of his wine.
The ex-cop got up again to refill his glass, and this time he had to tilt the box. “Like maybe you grabbed the gun?”
“I didn’t have to. When the clerk got to his feet, he darted around the counter and picked it up and ran out the back. Then he called your former colleagues.”
“That still doesn’t tell us what you were doing,” the retired coach said. “And that’s what we’re interested in, my friend, because tonight you’re not yourself. You look like Vico Cignetti, but right now you’re acting like somebody else.”
“I was watching,” Vico said. And then he told them what he couldn’t get out of his head. “He pulls the poor limp fuck off the floor, props him against the wall and hits him so many times, so freakin’ fast, the guy can’t even fall back down. It’s like the force of the blows is what’s holding him up.
“Then my neighbor grabs him with both hands and begins ramming his head into the wall, throwing him into it again and again like he’s on some kind of assembly line, picking up metal parts and jamming them into a punch press. He’s still doing it when the cops pull up.”
“And then what happens?”
This was the part Vico found most troubling. He’d think about it later that night and off and on again for many weeks afterward. It would repeatedly disrupt his sleep, leaving him wondering if he was safer, or more at risk, than he’d been before Cal Stevens and his wife moved in. He’d never even considered safety before. Around here, stealing a hubcap made news, and slashing a tire could land you on the front page of the Montvale Sun. “What happens then is, my neighbor”—he gestured in the direction of the house next door—“my neighbor who damn near just killed a man turns to me and asks if I’m all right. His face is a little red, and he’s got blood all over one arm, and his knuckles are bleeding too, and there’s a gash in his forehead and a Band-Aid dangling down over one eye. But just like that, he’s as placid as if he’s eaten a bottle of Valium. So I nod at him, though I’m anything but all right because I’ve pissed my own pants, and he says, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t make it over to watch the game that night with you and your friends. That was rude of me. Maybe you could ask me again?’ ”
The ex-coach was chewing tobacco. He looked at the ex-cop, then spit a long brown stream into his Styrofoam cup. “Sounds like my kind of guy,” he said. “But he might be more fun to watch boxing with than baseball.”
that night, when she returned from the shower, she found him in their bed. For the last few weeks he’d been sleeping on the third floor, which he explained by saying that he knew she had to rise early and was worried about waking her if he came to bed late. Around two or three, when he climbed the final flight, she always woke anyway and lay there thinking just how easy he was making it for her to disengage. She’d come here hoping that starting over in a new place would bring back whatever it was she’d felt in the crossroads grocery the first time she heard him play. But it was as if he intended to convince her that what she’d felt was nothing at all and that marrying him was simple expediency, like changing a guitar string after you broke one.
He lay on his back in a pair of black jogging shorts, his right knee raised, his left arm bandaged and folded over his chest, his right arm hanging down off the bed so far his fingertips grazed the floor. The only light came from the Himalayan salt lamp she kept on the dresser, and for a moment she thought he was asleep, but as her eyes adjusted she saw that his were wide open and staring at the ceiling. “I almost killed that guy,” he said.
She pulled her bathrobe off, opened the closet door and hung it on the hook. When she received the call from the hospital, she assumed he’d injured himself with a power tool. No one told her until she walked into the emergency room and found him sitting on a gurney that he’d broken up an armed robbery. A
nd it wasn’t until they were riding home in the taxi that she learned someone had tried to shoot him. “Well,” she said, “he almost killed you before that.”
“On the news, they said he’s spent eighteen of the last twenty-one years in prison. He’s fifty-two. Just a couple years older than me. That’d be like me being in jail all but three years since I was twenty-nine.”
He was lying on her side of the bed, or the side she’d come to think of as hers since he began sleeping upstairs. As she walked around the foot of the bed, she noticed what the raised knee was apparently intended to conceal: a huge bulge in his shorts, where she hadn’t seen one in ages.
The sight caused her to pause, and her reaction didn’t go unnoticed. “We don’t have to make anything of it,” he said, “if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t know if I do or not,” she said. “I mean, it’s the juxtaposition I find troubling. You go out and almost get killed and then proceed to beat somebody senseless, and then you get an erection for the first time in …” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Ten months,” he said helpfully. “If you could call what I got that night an erection. I’m not sure it qualified.”
She wasn’t sure it did either, but agreeing would have been unkind. She went around to the other side of the bed and sat down with her back to him. The clock was over there on the bedside table, and she set the alarm. She had a meeting at eight thirty the next morning with the chair of the history department on a matter he’d termed extremely urgent, and what she really wanted more than anything was to go to sleep.
Sleep wasn’t the only thing she wanted, though, or the only thing she needed, a truth she found disquieting. She sat there for a moment longer, her bare feet on the cold floor. Then she pulled her nightgown up over her thighs, raised her arms and lifted it off.
“I probably better stay on my back,” he said. “My left arm and hand aren’t too useful right now.”
“That’s all right. You’re not going to chord me.”
When she turned toward him, he said, “Jesus. I forgot how beautiful you are. I feel like I did when I saw you the first time.”
“You’ve seen me every day for fifteen years.”
“Some days I see better than others.”
“Almost dying’s sharpened your vision?”
“I imagine that’s what it does to most folks.” He raised his head long enough to stare down the length of his torso. “Kristin,” he said, “I’m scared I’ll lose it.”
“Well, we can’t let that happen, can we?” She reached under his waistband. “You’re fine.” She knelt and pulled his shorts down over his legs and feet and dropped them off the side of the bed. Then she straddled him.
It hurt when he went inside her, and also that he failed to acknowledge her discomfort, pushing hard rather than allowing her a moment to recover. She bit her lip and closed her eyes, but it only got worse. When she opened them again and looked down at him, she saw that his jaw was clenched, that he was hurting too, though where his pain came from she couldn’t imagine.
His hand closed on her left breast, kneading, squeezing. She leaned over him, flattening her palms against the mattress, struggling to find her own rhythm. No one was in control. They were equally helpless, two lost bodies.
From his vantage point all Matt could see was her shadow, but that was more than enough. She bent forward, then seconds later rocked backward. He stood beneath the maple at the corner for another moment, then turned up the collar of his windbreaker and walked down the hill into Cedar Park.
He’d waited at the station in Andover for close to an hour. Waiting was all he could do, because he had no way of reaching her. When he’d suggested they swap cell numbers, she said it was a bad idea, and her home phone was unlisted. His wasn’t, but when he got back she hadn’t left him a message. Just to hear a voice, he turned on the TV and, while eating leftovers, saw the report about the attempted robbery. They said her husband was treated for minor injuries and released.
He sat on a bench next to Pleasant Pond, where he’d learned to ice-skate. He couldn’t have been more than three or four when his mother brought him here to teach him. He’d wanted to zip across the glistening surface like the bigger kids, because it looked like so much fun. But when the day finally arrived he woke up crying, claiming he had a sore throat, that it was too cold out and his ear hurt. She paid his protests no mind, just bundled him up, took him by the hand and led him firmly down the street. While he sat on this same bench, she squatted before him and strapped on his skates, then sat down beside him and strapped hers on too. After that she again clasped his hand, and together they stepped onto the ice.
“When you start skating,” she told him as he clung to her, “don’t look at your feet. Hold your arms out straight, like you’re about to lay them on the dining room table. If you feel a fall coming on, bend over and grab your knees. That will lower your center of gravity. And most importantly? If you do go down, get right back up.” She towed him around in front of herself and gave him a gentle shove.
though no one ever came right out and said it, Kristin gradually understood that Sarah Connulty’s religion was of another order than that practiced by her parents and Mr. Connulty and Patty and everyone else she knew growing up. The only prayers Kristin heard at home were the perfunctory graces her father used to say over dinner at Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. Eventually, by the time she entered high school, he’d even quit saying those, and neither she nor her mother ever missed them. The Connultys themselves never prayed over their meals, so it was a while before Kristin noticed that once she sat down to eat Mrs. Connulty would quickly shut her eyes, her lips moving wordlessly.
When the two families gathered, there was always a pre-dinner drink, and a couple bottles of wine would be consumed during the meal. Afterward, the adults decamped to the living room, where they had yet another drink—brandy or cognac—and while Mrs. Connulty always joined in these activities, she never appeared to do more than wet her lips. When the girls cleared the table, an inch or two of wine usually remained in her glass.
If Kristin’s mother noticed these tendencies, she never remarked on them. Her father made at least one reference, asking his wife, after the two of them went to New York to see Jesus Christ Superstar, if they’d run up much of a bar bill at their Midtown hotel and if Mrs. Connulty agreed with those born-again Christians who considered the Broadway musical blasphemous. Her mother ignored the first question but responded sharply to the second: “If she did, do you think she would’ve gone to see it?”
“Maybe she didn’t know what she was letting herself in for.”
“She was the one who suggested it. Did you forget?”
“I guess I did.” He was dressing up as Santa for the school Christmas party when this conversation took place. Their bedroom door was ajar, and as Kristin walked past she could see him pulling on his red velour pants. His beard and stocking cap lay on the bedside table.
“Yes, I guess you did,” her mother replied. “For someone who teaches literature, you’re far too quick to stereotype.”
That response pleased Kristin. She felt oddly protective of Mrs. Connulty. The source of this impulse was hard to identify, but it had at least something to do with the fact that Patty’s mother differed from the other women in the town in a number of respects and that she never could’ve concealed these differences, no matter how she tried. And try to conceal them she did.
One February morning when Kristin was in junior high, she woke up with an earache. Her mother insisted on taking her temperature and discovered it was already 101. She offered to stay home with her, but Kristin assured her she’d be fine until the school day ended. They made a doctor’s appointment for four fifteen. She went back to sleep but woke up again around eleven with her face on fire and her ear feeling as if someone had stuck a power drill into the canal and was doing his best to drill right into her brain.
When she got out of bed, she felt dizzy and had to
steady herself against the bedpost. As soon as the world quit spinning, she looked out the window and saw that Mrs. Connulty’s car was in the driveway. She stepped into her shoes and wrapped herself in her warm bathrobe, then went downstairs and outside. Later, she wondered why she didn’t just pick the phone up and call her.
She knocked on the door, but nothing happened. People didn’t lock their houses when they were home during the day, and some probably didn’t even lock them at night, so she opened the door and stepped inside. “Mrs. Connulty?” she called.
Sarah would claim afterward that she hadn’t heard her, but she said this with no small amount of embarrassment, her face the color of an August sunset as she stuck a thermometer into Kristin’s mouth. She hadn’t heard anything because she herself had been speaking so earnestly.
The voice came from the pantry, where Kristin had first tasted those homemade wafers. Initially she assumed Mrs. Connulty must be in there talking on the phone, which hung on the wall near the electric range but had an extra-long cord. When she entered the kitchen, however, the receiver was in its cradle. If she hadn’t been in so much pain, she probably would have turned around and gone home to call her mom, but she needed to be comforted and knew that Sarah Connulty wouldn’t disappoint her.
When she parted the curtain, she saw her friend’s mother on her knees, her back to the entrance and her forehead resting on her hands, which were squeezed together atop a twenty-five-pound sack of Martha White flour. “Please, Jesus, please,” she was saying in that thick mountain accent, “don’t let folks find out I’m such a awful fraud. Help me keep it hid. Forgive me, Jesus, please, my God in heaven.”
She didn’t say what she needed to be forgiven for, presumably because God and Jesus already knew. Kristin let the curtain fall and turned to run from the house, but then stumbled into the electric range, at which time Sarah realized she had uninvited company and called for her to stop.
The Realm of Last Chances Page 13