His wife had been walking home from the train station late at night, even though it was already cold out, and if she wanted him to come get her—to drive up to Bradbury or down East Border to the station—all she had to do was ask. He didn’t suggest it because from the outset their marriage had been based on the assumption that neither of them would intrude on the other’s privacy. There were boundaries, and they respected them. If she came home late, she came home late. If she wanted to walk, she walked. If he’d changed his last name, well, he’d changed his last name. If he wanted to stay up all night and sleep in a different room, he did. That they retained some rights for themselves didn’t mean they couldn’t trust each other. As the last year had proven, there wasn’t much in the world you could bank on, but he’d always banked on that.
The other night, when he stood in Vico’s kitchen drinking a glass of water and saw her mouthing those unmistakable words, he knew there was something he couldn’t overlook much longer. What he didn’t know, and was scared to imagine, was what he’d do when forced to place a label on it.
• • •
The Cedar Park station had just two sets of tracks, each with a covered platform and three or four benches. There was also a small parking lot that could accommodate forty or fifty vehicles. Most of the spaces were unoccupied when he got there. He took a seat on the southbound side, choosing a bench at the north end of the platform. He could stay out of the light there while keeping an eye on both the platform and the lot.
Around eight thirty it started to rain, and the night felt even colder. A southbound train should be arriving at eight fifty-three; that was the one she usually took, assuming she’d been telling him the truth. He hoped she was on it now. Then he could stop thinking about whatever was wrong until at least this time tomorrow.
The train pulled in, only about two minutes late, rainwater streaming off the cars. As they passed, he watched the windows but didn’t see her. The train was nearly empty anyway. How many people would be riding toward Boston at this time of night? Almost everyone would be going in the opposite direction, heading home after working late in the city.
The conductor stepped down and scanned the platform, his gaze briefly meeting Cal’s. No one else got off. Eventually, he waved toward the front of the train and climbed aboard, and a moment later the undercarriage creaked into motion.
Cal continued to sit there. A northbound train pulled in a few minutes later, and ten or twelve people got off. The ones who didn’t immediately find their cars in the lot opened their umbrellas and slogged away on foot.
About nine fifteen a car turned in, either a Honda or a Toyota. The driver headed for the end of the lot, not far from where Cal was sitting, finally turning into an open space. When he saw the dented rear bumper, Cal recognized the car. He watched as two heads came together in the front seat for a long kiss. And when the passenger door opened, his wife climbed out under her umbrella.
the next morning the rain turned to snow, the flakes big amorphous butterflies that melted the instant they fluttered to earth. After taking a peek out, Matt padded downstairs in his bathrobe and slippers, turned the heat up and put on a pot of coffee. Then he unlocked the front door and stepped onto the porch to pick up the Globe. He thought he’d spend half an hour with the paper, read a couple more chapters of Kristin Lavransdatter, then devote a few minutes to the little exercise he’d begun on Sunday night after Nowicki drove away with the girls. It probably wouldn’t amount to much, but you never knew. Nobody, he’d decided, could deny you the right to hope except yourself.
The paper lay on the top step, rolled up in a yellow plastic bag, and he was just pulling it out when he realized that something in his immediate environment wasn’t quite right. He stood there for a moment trying to figure out what had changed. Then it hit him. The view across his driveway to the next-door neighbor’s house was unobstructed.
He dropped the paper and bounded down the steps, intending to make sure that in his brandy-addled state last night, he hadn’t driven in farther than usual. His haste might have accounted for what happened next: his left foot slid out from under him, and he sprawled onto the walkway, clipping the back of his head on the bottom step.
Stunned, he lay there for a moment before it dawned on him that he had nothing on beneath his bathrobe, so he pulled it closed and struggled upright.
He hobbled across the mushy yard, the slush seeping into his slippers. The driveway, as he’d feared, was empty. Had he left the car unlocked? Maybe so, but nobody ever stole anything on Essex Street. As far as he knew, he was the only thief who’d ever lived here, and he’d committed his crimes elsewhere.
Frankie sent Dushay to pick him up, and on the way to work Matt got a primer on hot-wiring a car. “In some ways it used to be easier,” Dushay said. “In others it was harder. There’s always trade-offs. See, if the car was made before ’86, you could do everything that needed doing through the engine bay. You had a carburetor, one ignition coil, a distributor. Piece of cake, right? Yeah, as long as you knew what you were up to. But what if you didn’t? Where’d you turn for instruction? I mean, you can’t walk into the station and say, ‘Excuse me, Sergeant, I’m an aspiring car thief, and I wondered if you could tell me how the people you’ve apprehended went about their business.’
“But these days, virtually every vehicle uses electronic chips, transponder verification, real sophisticated technology. But the good news—if you’re a car thief, anyways—is you can find fucking training videos online. The shit’s on YouTube. Can you believe that?”
Matt wasn’t in the mood for Dushay’s wit and wisdom. When he’d checked his cell, there was a message from Kristin, left around seven thirty, with train-type noises in the background. “Since your car’s gone,” she said, “I thought you must’ve driven out for breakfast or something.” He heard her take a couple of deep breaths, like she was on the verge of hyperventilating. “Listen, Matt, Cal’s acting strange. He was gone last night when I got home, and when he came back he was soaked to the bone and barely spoke to me. He left again sometime later, and when I got up this morning he was sitting on the couch drinking whiskey from a coffee cup. The place is a mess—paint cans everywhere, some of the furniture in the wrong room. Please call me as soon as you can. It’s probably nothing, he’s always been moody and has trouble sleeping, and he often starts jobs and quits for a while. But I don’t know.… I’m just a little unnerved.” He’d already tried her twice unsuccessfully. The last time he left a message begging her to phone him back soon.
The lunch queue was already forming when they got to Zizza’s, so they both tied their aprons on and went to work. Matt set his cell to vibrate. If he received a call, he was going to pretend it was the cops, step into the back room and take it. The stolen car didn’t worry him nearly as much as the message from Kristin. The automobile was insured. The relationship wasn’t.
She didn’t phone him until close to two that afternoon, and by then he really had gotten a call from the cops telling him the car had been found half submerged in Pleasant Pond. Whoever stole it drove it through the parking lot at Cellucci’s Funeral Home, down the bank and into the water. It had been towed to a salvage yard in Wakefield. His insurance agent warned it might be totaled.
When she called he’d just begun serving a customer, so he motioned for Dushay to help and hurried into the back room. “Hey,” he said.
“Hi, Matt.” She sounded shaky. Not a good sign.
“What’s the matter?”
“Where were you this morning?”
The accusatory note was impossible to miss. To his mind, that was a good sign, proof she’d staked her claim. “I was at home.”
“But your car was gone.”
“It got stolen.”
“You’re joking.”
“I wish. It’s been found, though. Somebody ran it into Pleasant Pond.”
“What time?”
“I don’t know. I was probably asleep.”
“Did the
y catch whoever did it?”
“No, and they’re not going to try. The cop I spoke to said that unless they find a body inside or a good-sized stash, they don’t even bother to check for fingerprints.”
“I wonder if Cal didn’t steal it,” she said.
That was a possibility he hadn’t considered. He figured if her husband ever found out about them, he’d beat him to death and be done with it. Or he’d pack up and disappear. Kristin wouldn’t be the one who left the marriage. That was just a fact, and facts had to be accepted. “I assumed it was just some kids,” he told her.
“Why would a kid steal your car in the middle of the night and drive it into a pond?”
“Why would a fifty-year-old man?”
“Because if you don’t have a car, you and I can’t do what we do. Can we?”
He’d already thought about that. “I’m going to rent one. My boss’ll take me to pick it up as soon as we close.”
“Matt,” she said. Nothing more.
Here it comes, he thought, and the truth announced itself in his knees. Just at that moment Frankie stepped into the back room and whispered, “Cops?”
Matt nodded.
“They catch the thief?”
He shook his head.
Frankie studied him for a moment, as if he were considering saying something else. Finally, he left.
“Yes?” Matt said.
“I think we need to be careful.”
He went over and stood beside the big reach-in freezer that hadn’t worked for twenty years, turning his back to the room so that neither Frankie nor Dushay could see his face if they came in unannounced. “I thought we were being careful.”
“If we were, we never would’ve done what we did.”
At Tufts, he’d taken only one creative writing class, because criticism always seemed to rob him of whatever determination he’d mustered. But he recalled that the novelist who taught the course said tense is much more than a time marker; it’s a metaphysical signpost that tells the reader if he’s in the Land of Is or the Land of Was.
“Are we in the Land of Was?” he asked her now.
“Are we where?”
“Are we in the Land of Was?”
“Oz?” she said.
He saw himself then as he would have looked to anyone who stepped into the room: he’d been sent to stand in the corner, punished for unruly behavior, like a schoolboy who’d gotten caught scrawling on the walls of bathroom stalls or sticking gum on the seat of someone else’s desk. He’d been bad. If this were happening to someone else, he would have found it funny. “Yes,” he said, “Oz.”
“I hope not,” she said.
They agreed to hold off meeting for a couple of days, during which time she’d keep an eye on Cal to see if his behavior changed, though where a change in his behavior might lead went unaddressed. He knew she had plenty on her mind. She was planning to see the provost the following day about those plagiarism charges.
He’d arranged to pick up a rental at the Enterprise office in Reading, but he’d run off this morning without his wallet. So after they cleaned up at the deli, Frankie drove him home to get it. As they pulled out he asked if he had any idea who’d stolen his car.
“I’m sure it was kids,” Matt said. “We used to do shit, remember?”
“I don’t remember us doing any shit like that.”
“Well, we broke into Penny Hill’s and drank beer and smoked weed.”
“We didn’t break in. You had that key.”
“Yeah, but I stole it.”
“That’s right. At one time, you saw no problem with certain types of crime. I forgot.”
If you’d known Frankie as long as Matt had, you could always tell when he adopted the judicial mode, the right side of his mouth curling up in a sneer as it was doing now. “True,” he said. “But that was a while back.”
“What about these days? You got a big problem with theft?”
“I don’t like having my car swiped.”
“What about other forms of larceny?”
The conversation was causing Matt discomfort. Had Dushay ripped off the cash register? And had he, Matt, fallen under suspicion instead? That would make sense, he guessed. Except that it didn’t. “What are you getting at?” he asked.
His old friend shook his head. “MD, MD.”
“Frankie Z, Frankie Z. You’re about to piss me off. If you got something to say, why not say it?”
“All right,” Frankie said, thumping the steering wheel with his finger. “The other day, Andrea goes into the hardware to stock up on ice melt and your ex is all aflutter wanting to know if I’ve said anything about you having a new woman in your life. Says the girls are convinced you’ve got one, which jibes with what she heard from a friend, who told her she’d seen you having drinks with a blonde at that place up in North Reading that used to be Mister Mike’s. And that got me to thinking. I realized you’ve had a bounce in your step lately, MD. A bounce in your step, and a smile on your face, and you get a shitload of text messages and voice mails at work.
“And all of that points in one direction: feminine companionship. So I asked myself what type of female could come into MD’s life that he wouldn’t want to tell his buddy about. Want to know what conclusion I reached?” he asked, turning into Matt’s empty driveway.
One of the saddest things that could happen to you, it had always seemed to him, was being questioned about something good in your life when you knew, or at least suspected, it was already over. When he was still at the bookstore, he’d made the mistake of telling a few writers that he was working on a novel himself, so the next time they came to do a reading and he took them out to dinner, the kindest among them made a point of asking how his own work was coming. He’d lied to Richard Russo, Andre Dubus III, Tom Perrotta—he couldn’t even recall how many others. He pretended the manuscript kept growing and growing, that he had a big unwieldy mess on his hands. They must have known he wasn’t telling the truth, and when they heard he’d been robbing the store they probably weren’t that surprised. “Okay,” he said. “Go ahead and tell me what conclusion you reached.”
Frankie put the car in park and cut the engine. “I didn’t reach one.”
“Sure you did.”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t reach one when I heard about the bookstore business, either. You want to know why?”
As if on cue, Cal Stevens appeared in the sideview mirror. The dog was plodding along with him. He stopped and stared at the car, and his eyes had that hollowed-out look. Matt waited to see if he would drop the leash and make a move. If he did, Matt decided, he wouldn’t resist. Whatever was going to happen could happen. He just hoped Frankie would have the good sense to stay out of it, to run around the corner of the house, whip out his cell and call the cops.
That, of course, was the exact opposite of what would have occurred if Cal had stepped over to the car, jerked open the passenger-side door and begun pummeling Matt. Frankie would’ve come to his aid, high blood pressure and all, and then he would’ve been beaten to a pulp as well. But Cal didn’t advance on the car, just turned his gaze back to the sidewalk ahead, and he and the dog walked on.
Frankie hadn’t even noticed his presence. “I didn’t reach any conclusion,” he said, “because I don’t believe anything I hear about you till you’re the one I hear it from. There’s a word for somebody who takes that kind of position. You know what it is?”
Before they went inside, Matt would sit there in the car and spill the whole story, knowing that who, what, when and where could only go so far. It wouldn’t explain how he’d felt when he first held her on her basement stairs, when he saw the slump in her shoulders on the platform in Andover, when she stood in the garden outside Penny Hill’s house that cold October night and wrapped herself in her own embrace. Who, what, when and where couldn’t help but sound sordid. But that wouldn’t matter, either to him or to Frankie.
“The word for somebody who takes that kind of position,”
Frankie said, “is ‘friend.’ It’s a word everybody knows. But not everybody knows what it means.”
While Matt went upstairs to get his wallet, Frankie took a leak in the downstairs bathroom. He hadn’t been inside the house for a good while, but at one time he’d known it as well as his own, having spent many nights in Matt’s bedroom, the two of them haggling over baseball cards or playing video games. Every now and then Matt would get going on something he’d just read, trying to interest Frankie, but that was a nonstarter. He couldn’t even get him hooked on a sports book like Late Innings.
It wasn’t that Frankie couldn’t read, as some of his teachers thought. It was just simply that he didn’t want to. There were stories in people’s backyards and bedrooms, in alleys and under bridges, in ball parks and coliseums, in the brush-and-broom shop at Walpole, on the loading dock at Boston Sand and Gravel, even in the lunch queue at Zizza’s Deli. He’d rather live his own story or help others live theirs than waste time reading one.
Day-to-day living didn’t excite Matt enough, though, and never had. He’d let his nose ruin his own life, and now it looked like his prick would ruin somebody else’s. Sometimes it was hard to keep loving him. But for Frankie, quitting would have been even harder.
He flushed the toilet, washed his hands, then stepped out of the bathroom. Matt hadn’t come down yet, and Frankie could hear him upstairs talking to somebody. “MD,” he hollered, “you on the phone with your married girlfriend?”
“Shut up! I’m speaking to somebody at the salvage yard.”
“No prob. Just checking.”
While he waited, he wandered into the little room off the hallway where Matt’s mother used to read and listen to awful music—Beethoven, Mozart, shit like that—and write reports for the Montvale Sun detailing the activities of her women’s club. The desk she’d used was still there, and it had Matt’s laptop on it along with a printer and a small stack of pages lying next to the Dell. Idly, he glanced at the one on top.
The Realm of Last Chances Page 22