The Realm of Last Chances

by Steve Yarbrough

  The first time he spoke to Kristin after she returned his declaration of love with a halfhearted one of her own, she informed him she was worried about her husband’s reaction to the robbery he’d broken up the previous day and that Matt would either have to be patient with her preoccupations or write her off before things went any further. She made those remarks over the phone, having divulged her cell number in exchange for his. Her tone suggested that if he chose the latter course she’d be relieved, if not pleased.

  He felt as if he’d stepped into the realm of last chances, where the ice is thin and apt to break and caution is no currency. “I saw you last night,” he said.

  “Where was this?”

  “I saw you making love. Your shadow, anyway. Those blinds of yours must be thin as paper.”

  “Is that why you wrote to me?”

  “It’s one reason.”

  “If that’s the only reason, why don’t we hang up?”

  “It’s not.”

  “What’s the other reason?”

  “I need you.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “I want you.”

  “That’s better. Because while you might’ve seen what I was doing, you couldn’t see what I was feeling. There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Matt. I’m afraid there’s plenty I don’t know about myself.”

  “When can I start learning?”

  “Maybe we could meet for a drink on Friday.”

  “Why not today?”

  “Like I said, I’m concerned about Cal. His arm’s in bad shape, and his mind’s even worse.”

  Having no choice, he agreed, and the delay left him time to think. Among other things, he thought about routine. For him, it had always resulted in ruin. He’d lulled himself into assuming that because he’d ripped the store off ninety-nine times, he’d sail on into the hundreds. Because Carla hadn’t left him each time he slipped into the bathroom and snorted a line, he thought she’d stay forever. The best thing that could’ve happened to him, he thought now, was if somebody had walked into the bookstore and pointed a gun at him. Maybe, if he’d survived, he would have made more of his life.

  She waited on the platform, intending for him to climb out of his car and come find her. If it cost five dollars and fifty cents to park in the lot across the street, so be it. If the lot was full, he could park illegally and risk a ticket as he had the first time. She wanted to be sought, and for the seeking to be a constant activity, taking place every hour of the day and also the night.

  Each time she thought of him standing on Essex Street in the dark, watching her rocking shadow and wishing he were the one who lay beneath her, her throat constricted and her face flushed. It had occurred this afternoon during a meeting with the academic deans and Joanne Bedard, that tiresome woman droning like a window unit and disgorging one acronym after another—AO, RTP, DPTC—until she noticed the redness spreading over Kristin’s neck and cheeks. “Are you feeling all right?” she asked. “You’re looking a little … overheated. Want me to call one of my assistants to bring you a bottle of water?”

  “No,” Kristin said, “I’ll be fine.”

  Everyone in the room probably assumed she was caught in the throes of menopausal malfunction, but she could care less. Nor did the provost’s smirk trouble her.

  Matt walked around the corner and onto the platform at four thirty. He was wearing a heavy black fleece jacket she’d never seen before, and instead of his usual jeans or khakis, he had on a pair of black sweatpants. She was still dressed for work: tweed skirt with matching jacket, white blouse, brown leather riding boots. Nobody who saw them together this evening would ever forget it. She was about to express her dismay when he threw his arms around her and kissed her on the mouth.

  Seven or eight people were waiting on the platform, and while she didn’t recognize any of them, she couldn’t swear that none of them worked at the university. She placed her palm against his chest in an effort to back him off. “What are you doing?” she whispered. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Absolutely. Haven’t you?”

  “I guess so. But does everyone else need to know it?”

  He let go of her, and she followed him to the car. When she opened the passenger-side door, she saw another sweat suit lying on the backseat, new, along with a jacket just like his and a box with the Nike symbol on it.

  “I bought you size eights,” he said. “I was just guessing.”

  “So our first official date, after we’ve both gone insane, is a trip to the gym?”

  He laughed and told her to get in, so she did. He started the car. “Not the gym,” he said. He gestured over his shoulder. “Back there on the floor there’s a portable cooler with a jug of premixed martinis. We’ll have to drink from plastic cups, though. I have something special in mind.”

  “And it requires me to wear jogging clothes?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “And where am I supposed to change into them?”

  “At a gas station.”

  The one he chose was grungy enough to make her feel like she was back in high school, except she’d never done anything like this then. It was unheated, with a concrete floor and a bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. The toilet bowl abounded in botanical activity, so she lowered the seat cover. She pulled her blouse off and folded it, then laid it on the lid, reminding herself it would need to be washed. Slowly, she removed the rest of her clothes, then took a moment to look at herself in the mirror.

  In her hips and thighs she saw the first hint of heaviness she had long associated with Sarah Connulty. She’d once assumed it came from a preference for sweets, but when she thought back on it she hadn’t really seen Mrs. Connulty eat that many sweets. In pictures around the house of her and her husband when they were younger, she was tall and slim. The weight crept in over time, and the day she died she weighed close to two hundred pounds. Kristin’s mother was the one who found her half buried in the snow at the foot of the back steps. According to the coroner, she’d slipped, and the cause of death was blunt trauma. Why she’d fallen forward, he said, was anybody’s guess. When your feet slid out from under you, you usually landed on your back.

  She shrugged into the sweat suit, then laid her clothes on the edge of the sink, sat down on the toilet and began to lace up the new Nikes. He rapped at the door. “What’s taking so long?”

  “I’m almost finished. This is crazy, you know? I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

  “Me neither. Are you sure it’s happening?”

  “I guess so. The odor in here’s definitely real.”

  They drove back toward Montvale, the traffic moving slowly as it always does on Friday afternoon in autumn, when people pour out of Boston toward New Hampshire and Vermont. A major jam had formed near the I-95 interchange. While they sat there, she couldn’t stop herself from glancing at the cars on either side, to see if anyone from work was nearby. Cal had reluctantly attended a couple of functions at the school, so at least a few people knew what he looked like.

  Her anxiety didn’t escape Matt. He was feeling plenty of it himself, though his was of a different nature. She’d never done anything like this—he knew that without being told—and he hadn’t either, and it was likely, if not certain, that they’d fuck it up through sheer ineptitude. He began to question his plan, wondering if they shouldn’t turn around and head back to their usual spot. Maybe that was their romance setting, the only place where anything that mattered could happen between them. Maybe two martinis at an environmentally conscious roadhouse was all the future they could hope for.

  “Would you mind telling me where we’re going?”

  “Ever heard of Penny Hill Park?”

  “No.”

  “Technically, it’s part of Montvale, though it’s right at the edge of the Fells Reservation. There’s something there I want you to see.”

  He was trying to sound confident, but his voice faltered, and she knew he was afraid she’d ask him to let her
change back into her work clothes and drive her to the train station so she could walk home. Strangely, she gained courage from his fear. If she chose to, she could seize control of the situation, though for now she would cede it.

  Their destination proved close to Essex Street, no more than four or five blocks from her house. He turned onto a narrow lane that she and Cal had noticed while walking Suzy. The road wound steeply upward for a couple hundred yards. Then they came to a heavy chain with a sign suspended from it banning automobiles beyond that point. Off to the right lay a gravel lot big enough to accommodate three or four cars. A marker said PENNY HILL PARK. DOGS MUST REMAIN ON LEASH. He pulled in and stopped near the lone garbage barrel.

  Darkness was falling, so he reached under the seat and grabbed a large flashlight. “Hop out,” he said. “I’ll snag the cooler.”

  When she got out, she discovered that the temperature had dropped ten or twelve degrees. A plume of smoke escaped her mouth. She’d initially thought the sweats and jacket silly, even childish, but now she realized she would have frozen in her work outfit, and his concern for her comfort was touching. “I don’t know if a cooler’s what’s called for on a night like this,” she said. “Maybe you should’ve brought a thermos.”

  “We don’t have to drink martinis. There’s a bottle of brandy, too, if you’d prefer it.”

  Philip had drunk a lot of brandy during their last couple of years together. By then he’d achieved tenure and was no longer called Phil. He still walked around campus in jeans and a hoodie, but he’d developed a preference for expensive wines and small-batch bourbons, and on their sideboard there was always a decanter of Germain-Robin XO. “What kind of brandy did you get?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He opened the rear door and looked inside, then lifted out the bottle and examined it. “Christian Brothers.”

  “Let’s take that instead.”

  “Want me to bring the cups?”

  “No. If you’ve got germs, you infected me in Andover.”

  They stepped over the chain and walked uphill into the gathering darkness, Matt holding on to her arm. Her natural tendency to resist seemed to have been left in the parking lot. After the first few yards, she leaned in against him.

  “Are you really in love with me?” he asked.

  “I’ve decided,” she said, “to behave as if I am. We’ll see where it takes us.”

  “You realize that’s not the most romantic answer.”

  “I’m not the most romantic person.”

  “Did you used to be?”

  Looking back, it seemed that maybe she had been at certain points in her life. But since being a romantic was a character trait that presumably you couldn’t switch off, she supposed the answer was no and was about to say so when he said, “Forget I asked.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with asking. It’s just that I’m not sure.”

  “You’ve never quite gotten over the end of your first marriage. Isn’t it as simple as that?”

  “Not exactly.” Up ahead on the left she spotted a pitched roof. Through the shadows a mansion emerged, and she recognized the Tudor Revival elements: half-timbers and herringbone brickwork, dormer windows and wall plates. There was a high, patterned chimney on the side nearest the path. “This is what you wanted me to see?”

  “Yes, because it means something special to me.”

  “Another place you came with your ex-wife?”

  “No. It’s one of the few places in Montvale that I didn’t come to with her.”

  The place looked fairly well maintained except for some missing roof tiles, but there were no lights on anywhere, and it seemed deserted. A second-story hallway with a single dormer window connected the main house to a two-car garage, and beneath it was a wrought-iron gate. He pushed it open—“Follow me”—and they stepped through it into a garden. A few pieces of heavy patio furniture stood there—a table, three or four chairs. The lawn and sparse landscaping were surrounded by a brick wall seven or eight feet high.

  He placed the brandy on the table, pulled a chair out and told her to make herself at home.

  “We’re going to play house,” she said, “but we can’t get inside?”

  “We could if we ever wanted to.”

  “How? By breaking a window?”

  “No. By unlocking the back door. I’ve got a key. I’ve had it for almost twenty years.”

  He screwed the cap off the bottle and handed it to her. She took a swig that burned her throat, making her cough. She wiped her mouth and handed the brandy back. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “About twenty years ago, somebody gave you a key to this place? Or was that the first thing you ever stole?”

  He took a swallow from the bottle and set it on the table. He told her he’d found the black cast-iron key while going through the file cabinet at his father’s office after he died. It was in a folder labeled PENNY HILL HOUSE. “The woman who used to live here was named Penelope Hill,” he said. “She died back in 1983. I was thirteen, and I still remember her funeral. I think it was the first time I cried over somebody’s death.”

  His father had carried the insurance on the house, Matt said, and he’d come over here with him once when he was ten or eleven years old, on a day when his mother was down on the Cape visiting an old college friend. He and his father and Mrs. Hill sat in the library, and while the two adults drank something that might have been brandy or whiskey but was definitely brown and contained alcohol, he had a glass of milk and ate a few cookies and then perused the books, many of which were big leather-bound editions of classics. She had all of Dickens up there, as well as Thackeray and Hardy and de Maupassant and Chekhov.

  He’d noticed her downtown a few times before. She was a striking woman, tall with frizzy hair that he suspected had once either been red or blond but had long since turned gray. He didn’t know precisely how old she was that afternoon, but if he’d had to guess he might have said fifty. As it turned out, she was in her midsixties, though he wouldn’t learn that until she died, and he saw what was engraved on her headstone. That was also when he learned her husband had been a lot older, and that he’d been dead for close to thirty years by then.

  “His family owned one of the shoe factories. Both Montvale and Cedar Park used to be mill towns. By the time I was a kid, the mills had either been razed or, in a few cases, converted. That long building near the train station that now has all those luxury condos? They used to make rubber boots there. Anyhow, shoes are where her husband’s money had come from. And then when the mills shut down, he sold the land to developers.”

  At some point during that first visit, Penelope Hill noticed how interested he was in her books. Not that there weren’t plenty at his own house; both of his parents read, his mother more than his father. But Mrs. Hill’s books had a heft and elegance the ones at home lacked. She asked if he’d like to borrow some of them, and his father said that wouldn’t be necessary, but she waved the objection aside, and he left with A Christmas Carol and one or two others.

  His father never mentioned her to him again, but Matt said he took to dropping by her place every few weeks. She gave him milk and cookies and let him leave with as many books as he could tote in his backpack, and he always returned them in perfect condition. Somehow, he understood that the books she loaned him should never be shown to anyone.

  “She drank a lot during the day,” he said. “I think probably she was an alcoholic, though I didn’t know it at the time. She always had a glass in her hand, and it was always something brown, with no ice. She didn’t talk to me much. I didn’t think she knew how to talk to a child because she’d never had one of her own.

  “She got scared a lot at night. If you start asking people my age or older what they recall about Penny Hill, that’s all most of them can tell you. About once a week, for God knows how many years, she’d call the Montvale Police Department at two or three in the morning, claiming she heard somebody in the woods outside and they were trying to break in
. She was always horribly apologetic with the dispatcher, and when the cops showed up and assured her the property was empty, she invited them inside and offered them a drink.

  “When she died, she left her house and the surrounding land to the city of Montvale and even bequeathed some money for upkeep. She wanted it turned into a conservation center. There used to be bird feeders all over the place, and the grounds were lush for a while, but the endowment couldn’t keep pace with inflation and now the city’s letting it go. There’s a guy who mows the yard and picks up the litter, and I guess somebody must do some basic maintenance from time to time. Otherwise it just sits here. Most people don’t even know it exists.”

  It was dark now. Through the mostly bare tree limbs, she saw a plane beginning its descent into Logan. A few seconds later, they heard the sound of the engines. When that died away, the evening again became still. You couldn’t even hear traffic on 93, though the freeway couldn’t possibly be more than a mile away. “Why’s it so quiet?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It just always has been. There’re a lot of trees and bushes in the Fells. I guess they soak the sound up.”

  He passed her the brandy, and she took another swallow. “What did you think when you found the key in your father’s desk?”

  “Well, I didn’t know what to make of it,” he said, “so for a while I chose not to think anything. Then one night when I’d been to Montvale to visit my mom, I drove over to the place we just parked and walked up here. The key didn’t work in the front door, so I walked around back, figuring surely the city’d changed the locks when they assumed title. But when I stuck it in the lock on the back door, it fit. Next thing I knew, I was inside.”