by Linda Sands
I looked at my watch, not because I had scheduling conflicts or because I wasn’t sure I wanted to see her. It was a reaction, a reflex, and in the back of my head I was calculating how long it would take me to drive across town.
“I can be at your place in forty minutes,” I said.
“No! It’s just that . . . Mick’s home and I . . . well . . . he doesn’t know I’ve hired you.”
She sighed then, a good old-fashioned exhalation that said it all. I heard her exasperation, her depression, her desire, I heard in that escape of breath an invitation. Maybe I was reading a little too much into a simple sigh, but they weren’t all simple, were they? You didn’t just go around sighing all day like it was a stretch or a blink. You sighed when a task was complete, when a problem was too big, when you were ready to admit something, when you were whooped big time.
Barbara made that kind of sigh. The I-need-you-to-take-over sigh.
So I said, “Come to me,” thinking only a little that it sounded like a song reprise, or a line from a diamond commercial with a couple in silhouette and a spotlight on the glittering necklace the man dangles to his beloved in the gazebo at twilight.
Barbara was still talking, so I zoned in on that, thinking she obviously hadn’t placed much importance on the “come to me” line, that she might not even have heard it.
“Mick says we need to let Chamonix go. Whenever I bring up her murder he thinks it’s just a way to keep the pain fresh. Can you believe he said that? He took all her things away, stripped her room at the house when I was helping out at church last weekend. I can’t even talk to him right now. Where are you?”
I heard the sound of another door opening when she said, “Can I come to you?”
I gave her directions to My Place and went back inside to wait, pausing at the restroom to make sure that my fly was zipped and that I didn’t have anything green in my teeth.
I went back to my booth, saw the beer Francie had left for me on top of a cocktail napkin that said: “If you can read this, you haven’t had enough to drink.”
I sipped the lager, pretended it was something stronger, and thought about Barbara. As much as a part of me wanted it, I couldn’t see a future for us. It would always be: I found out the truth about her daughter’s death and that was how we met—or re-met.
There would always be a dead girl between us, and there’s no happiness in that.
It was like those screwed-up relationships that came out of 9/11, the wives of dead stockbrokers and bankers that were consoled by guilty firemen who couldn’t save the husbands, and later the consoling became a private thing and some of the firemen even left their own families to be with 9/11 widows. As if that was something you wanted to tell your great-grandchildren.
No, that backstory wouldn’t work for me.
Maybe I was being too picky, or maybe I had just been out of the dating game for too long. Granted, I wasn’t a monogamous person, but when I went from wife to mistress and back I never considered it dating, just time spent in bed.
Fifi, my old dancing buddy, was great at dating. He really knew how to woo a woman. Once he planned an elaborate lunch for a girl he liked, Cheryl. He drove to the mall and set up a table in the parking lot with candles, flowers, and real silverware. He buzzed the delivery button at the back door of the bookstore where Cheryl worked and when she unlocked the door he tucked her arm under his and walked her right down the loading dock to her seat. As classical music played he teased her, stripping off his suit jacket, shirt, and tie before settling in beside her to enjoy the steak au poivre he’d cooked himself.
Fifi knew how to get into a girl’s heart before he got into her pants. He understood that all women liked soft music, candlelight, poetry, chocolate, and flowers, even if she was an amateur mud wrestler on her days off.
I could blame my family for my inability to understand women. I won’t, but I could. My father had issues. He was a purebred male chauvinist pig. He even had a tie that loudly proclaimed his tendencies. He’d been a bona fide card-carrying member of Hef’s Bunny Club, married to a stay-at-home mother who’d raised all of his sons. My father taught me that manly men were supposed to be assholes, his point driven home daily by my two jock older brothers.
It’s surprising that I turned out so good with all that crap in my life. Never mind that my mother took my brothers with her when she moved to Canada to study the migratory pattern of the zebra mussel. She wooed those boys with promises of French girls and cheap, potent beer. It took my brothers years to understand Canadian girls are nothing like their French counterparts, and by then it was too late.
My brothers were close—less than a year apart—and close in our family meant competitive. So when Edgar decided the military was for him, Scott signed up too. The day they left for boot camp, a major storm passed through our town. Though the skies were clear and the woman on the Weather Channel claimed the worst was past, as the bus left New York, the storm resurfaced and grew more fierce, the winds reaching tornado levels and eventually ripping the roof off the bus, sucking out the occupants, and spitting their bones into a basin lake in Virginia.
The military managed to kill my brothers before their first “Booyah!”
Maybe remembering the past wasn’t such a good thing. I might do better concentrating on the present.
Francie smacked me on the head with a bar towel. “Earth to Willy. What is up with you?”
“Ow. Nothing. I was just thinking.”
“Shit. We’re in trouble now,” she said.
Laughter came from the bar area.
I tipped my head in that direction. “Who’s your pal?”
“None of your business.”
“Take your sweet pills today, Francie?”
“Yeah, only mine are stamped: Fuck You.”
That made me laugh. Francie dropped the tough act enough to let one edge of one lip lift. It was as much of a smile as I was going to get, so I took it.
“Good to see you too, hot stuff,” I said. “Can I get another beer? And could you put on some music? I’m expecting a friend and the ambiance . . . Well, it’s a bit lacking.” I glanced in the direction of the crying girl.
Francie leaned in, dropped her voice another notch. “New student. She’s not taking the criticism well. You know how that goes.”
Boy did I. And boy, did I know this was a good time to go mute.
“Hey, Francie,” the guy from the bar called. “Why don’t you sing us a song?” He was doing a total guy-from-the-bar thing, arms outspread, bleary eyes beckoning. It was like he’d stolen his act from a Charles Bukowski story. Suddenly I needed some air.
Francie caught my eye and we shrugged at the same time. I watched Francie sashay her way back to the guy. Just as I started to get up, the door opened. Barbara was standing there looking for me, letting her eyes get used to the dim. I waved and she offered me a smile, the one I could never refuse.
“Hey,” she said as she approached.
We did the friendly hug thing with a bit of cheek press. It was hard to not linger.
“Hey yourself. Have a seat. You look good.”
“I know.” She giggled. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that. Chamonix used to say that to her father all the time. It was her way of assuring us everything was okay, you know? Like she had it all together, like she wasn’t . . .”
I watched as Barbara twirled her wrist, swiping away an air thought or practicing tai chi.
“She wasn’t what?” I pushed.
“I don’t know.” She looked around and I saw the desperation in her eyes as she gazed toward the pretty bottles lined up behind Francie’s bar.
I tapped the table then leaned back, offering my version of nonchalance when really it was killing me that she was still so broken up. I said, “Can I get you something to drink? Francie makes a helluva martini.”
Barbara nodded and I twisted around in my seat and ordered with hand motions that only Francie understood.
Barbara
and I sat for almost an hour, talking and laughing and enjoying the music and the moment for what it was. It was like sneaking off to a matinee on a rainy day when you’re supposed to be serving subpoenas on the South Side or following the guy with the bad back to batting practice. It was a forbidden dalliance that felt good. It made me wish I’d skipped school more often.
I barely registered Tommy’s arrival until he punched my arm. “Why are you being an ass?”
“What?” Forget what I said earlier about liking the kid, or wanting to be friendlier. “What the fuck, Tommy? I’m just sitting here. I didn’t even see you come in.”
“The loons?”
“Yeah. So what?”
“Listen Tedesco, if you want to make fun of me, I can take it. It’s just that when you bring my mother into the picture I don’t think it’s fair. “
“Let me reiterate: What the fuck, Tommy?”
“I should be asking you the same thing. Leaving me that message about loons and the woods. I know you were talking about my mom.”
I started to laugh. “I wasn’t talking about your mother. Shit, I was talking about the sounds on the tape.”
Barbara was listening now. “What tape?”
“The one he found at Smith’s place,” Tommy said before he saw my eyes go wide and my finger come up to my throat, slashing and slashing, a motion I turned into spastic scratching when Barbara looked back at me.
She said, “Bill . . ?”
I had nowhere to hide. I looked at Tommy. “We haven’t had a chance to talk about the tape yet.”
“I see.” Tommy pushed his way into the booth beside Barbara, nudging her with his slender hip.
I could see what Barbara must have been like with her daughter. If I squinted, I might have mistaken Tommy as Chamonix, a little girl snuggled in next to her mom, telling secrets, whispering things that would be forgotten during the next argument, asking for things she’d never get and later realize she never needed.
My first wife used to talk about how she felt when her kid died. It was a tragedy—a misdiagnosed illness followed by a long-lasting coma. Hardly the same as a gunshot to the chest in an Irish bar. Hell, I know everyone’s pain is different. But I could see the same disappointment in Barbara and knew she’d react to another young girl like my ex had when a happy, live, eight-year-old blonde would ride her bike past us on the sidewalk, or a sad, lost kid would call out, “Mom?” in the grocery store. You never stopped being a mother, I figured. Maybe that explained old ladies with lap dogs in cashmere sweaters.
I raised my hand and flapped my fingers at Francie again, ordering a round for the table, glad for the reprieve. I wasn’t eager to spit out way too few facts while relying on way too much instinct, and I didn’t have the damnedest idea how I was going to sell Barbara and Tommy on the importance of a road trip to New Hampshire.
Chapter 32
KARA ANGELINA DI SARRANNO SMITH
Making her way across New Hampshire toward the White Mountains, Angel Smith amused herself by performing a running monologue in the rearview mirror. Hopped up on NoDoz and energy drinks, she played the narrator in her life’s story.
“Sweet Kara Angelina Di Sarranno, born the bastard child of immigrants. No, that’s not right.” She tried again. “It was a Cinderella story.” Angel laughed, chugged the rest of her GoGo Juice, crushed the can, and tossed it in the backseat of the BMW.
“Let’s get to the good stuff. Jumping right ahead to Angel’s sexually active years, we meet a variety of boys who will ultimately disappoint poor Angel and make her wonder about her own mother—someone she never knew. Her father, always too busy for his little girl, takes the three-monkey approach: See no evil. Hear no evil. Fling handfuls of shit when something bad comes near. Yes, Angel loves her daddy.
“Maybe that was why she left all those boys behind in college and dated the professors instead.”
Angel reached across the car and popped open the glove box. She pawed through gas receipts, gum wrappers, and broken sunglasses until her hand closed on a crumpled package of Kools. She slammed the glove box closed and drove with her knees as she extracted the two remaining cigarettes, one broken in half. “Thank you, Jesus, and your mama too.”
The first drag of the first cigarette she’d smoked in over a year took her right back to the night she’d met him. Not Jimbo. The one that came before. The only other man she’d loved. The one she’d always regret letting slip through the cracks. Doctor Peter Hazard.
She’d been on vacation with two studious college pals, two girls who thought vacations were guided bus tours, museum visits, and boring literary events. Didn’t they know if you really wanted to soak up local flavor when you traveled it was necessary to spend time in bars?
Angel had pretended to be asleep when they tiptoed out of the hotel room for the day’s tour. She went for a run, then had a swim and a soak in the hot tub. By the time she left the pool she had a list of the best bars in the area, compliments of the cute towel boy. Scribbled on the back of list was his phone number, with a winkey face.
She took a taxi to the first bar on the list, invoking her Vacation Rule Number Three: It was always five o’clock somewhere.
“How you doing?” The bartender said, drying his hands on a towel hanging from his belt.
Angel smiled. “I’m fine. And from the looks of it, I’m in the right place.”
He grinned. “Wait till you get to know me. You might change your mind.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, sugar. I was talking about your beer selection.” She nodded toward the wall of Belgian beer taps. “I’ll take a Verboden Vrucht.”
The guy on the bar stool beside her spun around. “Excellent choice.” His eyes slid over her. “I would say you are definitely in the right place.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Peter.”
It may have been the Verboden Vrucht, but Angel fell head over heels for Peter, didn’t even care that he was married. She loved the way he said her name with his British accent, the way he had pulled her aside to kiss her in the hallway between the men’s room and the emergency exit. There was something so honest in his confusion about their mutual attraction—him insisting they must have met somewhere before, known each other in another life. Angel drank it all in hook, line, and sinker. They kissed and danced and she tried to not feel the chill of the wide gold band on his ring finger as he ran his hand up her leg.
She tried to leave him that night and forget him, but he kept coming back—every time she turned on the TV and saw a medical drama, every time a man passed wearing his same cologne, every time she reached down and caressed her calf, running her fingers in slow circles and whispering in her best British accent, “You are fucking amazing.”
She got his calls—and returned none of them at first. She played back his voice on her message machine and tried to discern whether he was sad, drunk, or desperate. She made a pact with herself that if he mentioned divorce, she’d talk to him again, she’d even entertain the idea of seeing him, because what if this was the guy? What if he was who she’d been looking for all along, even when she didn’t know that she was looking?
Angel was no stranger to love. Her forays into it began with the little boy in the second grade who’d played Spock to her Uhura. Love was a challenge and she was a worthy competitor. With the married British doctor from Vacationland, it was no different. She wrote sexy poems and sent videos of herself dancing. He loved it and asked for more. He complained about the stress of his job, how his wife and friends were taking advantage of his kindness and his wealth. She sent him songs to listen to while running, a book of positive affirmations. He sent her goodnight wishes every night and told her every morning that she was beautiful, that he loved her. Angel believed him, and the game played on. They were seven states and two time zones apart but she didn’t care. If he was the one, it would all work out.
As the months wore on and the messages changed from “you’re great” to “you’re too far away and I can’t do this” back
to “I have never felt this way before and it scares me, that’s why I was such a jerk,” to “I can’t leave my wife, I need to end this” and then, weeks later, drunken midnight phone calls pleading for forgiveness, calls that were denied in the light of day.
Angel began to think she wasn’t broken enough for him. She would never be a medical mystery he could solve. She began to see that she was just another conquest in a string of somebodies for the good doctor. She might be nobody after all.
She confided in her friends, the ones she thought wouldn’t judge her when the “but he’s married” part came out. She talked to guy friends who probably wanted to fuck her, because they all said the guy was a loser, advised her to dump him and move on. She was apparently “too good for him.”
Angel had known from the beginning that it would be a whirlwind, a maelstrom. But she loved the way it woke her up, how even the bad feelings—the anger and the angst—turned on a passionate switch inside her.
She found his hospital on the Internet and searched for staff photographs, for any news clips in his city that featured emergency room situations. She stared at the backs of scrub-clad men, believing she knew which cap covered his thick brown hair, which accident victim was even now being soothed by his soft voice, his brown eyes boring into theirs.
Angel hated how her days had become soap operas. She saw an image of herself standing stoic and backlit, perfectly coiffed, waiting for an e-mail to be returned, a phone to ring, a text to chime and then appear. She ate too little, ran too far, and began hearing pieces of love songs that she had never heard before as if they were written for her, as if the doctor was sending his love in a random radio song.
She began to despise the man who had wrecked her stable heart. She hated how she felt weak and manipulated. She imagined driving to his house and confronting his wife, or better yet, meeting and befriending her, getting invited to their house for dinner. But she thought that might have already been done in some psycho movie. So instead, she sent him a message telling him to fuck off, go away, and never think about her again. She deleted his number and his messages and all the e-mails they had ever exchanged. She threw away the shirt she’d been wearing when they met. She changed her favorite satellite radio station setting to “Hard Rock” instead of “In the Mood.”