I could picture it: the moonlight on the ice lighting the scene to a blue dimness. I could envision them, moving toward Tobin, standing there, a wall of disapproval. I could see him deciding to walk away, that he didn’t want an altercation. That he didn’t want to try to explain that he’d had no idea she was a minor, that he was going to do the right thing by the child, do whatever was right for Cadey. I could see him, turning his back on the cold eyes of the men staring at him and walking across the ice, a long last walk by moonlight, the ice crunching beneath his feet.
So he’d gone too far, walked until the ice grew thin, and in the darkness got confused which way was back to shore. Or maybe, just maybe—and this was my worst fear—he had decided to keep walking, decided he was tired of living. Didn’t want to deal with the child, with Cadey, with Jessamyn. Maybe he just gave up on that cold winter day and walked on until he sank beneath the ice.
I picked up my cell phone and called Philippe. He was out, Elise told me, at a play. I called his cell, but it went straight to voice mail. I hung up and cried a while, and then I called Jameson. I couldn’t get any words out at first, just noises.
“English, please,” he said, and I made a sound that was half laugh and half crying. “Are you safe, Troy?” he asked.
I managed to say yes.
“Are you home?”
“No, I’m in my car, in Saranac Lake.”
“You’re not injured.”
“No,” I whispered.
“Can it wait three or so hours?”
“Yes,” I said. He told me he was going to drive down, that this didn’t sound like something I should tell him over the phone, that maybe I needed to talk this out in person. I cried more, and again managed to say yes.
“Are you okay to drive to your house?”
I nodded, and then remembered I needed to speak, and told him yes, I could drive, I was stone-cold sober, and he told me he’d call me when he got close, to go home and get something to eat and drink, and hug my dog and get some rest if I could. I told him I would, and hung up, and wiped the tears from my face and then the thin layer of icy condensation that had formed on the inside of the windshield. And I drove home, slowly, carefully.
Jameson made it in just over three hours. I’d had chamomile tea and crackers and cheese; I’d taken a very hot shower and put on my sweats and curled up in bed with my dog. But I hadn’t slept. After he called that he was close, I went down and waited in the living room until I saw the lights of his car, then opened the door for him. His face was tense, tired, but something in him relaxed when he saw me. He came in and then I was in his arms, holding tight under his open coat, my face against his chest. He held me, tightly, and then pulled back.
“You’re okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “Do you need something to eat, to drink?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Just tell me what you need to tell me, Troy.”
He followed me up to my room, pulling a chair over to sit across from me as I curled up under the covers, and I told him. I told him Tobin hadn’t been a great person, but hadn’t been the awful person I’d thought he was. And I told him everything that had happened, about Cadey and the rest, and about the brothers, following him, watching him start the walk across the lake to his death.
“What do I do?” I asked him. “They didn’t kill him. I don’t think they laid a hand on him. I think they were just there, standing there.”
“But they didn’t go after him.”
“No,” I said.
“They let him walk off, across the ice they must have known would break.”
“Her brother said they never thought he’d keep going, that they thought he would stop and come back when they left. But Tobin had hit his head in the bar, in that scuffle over the pool table. Maybe he passed out. Maybe he stopped and got confused and walked the wrong way. Or maybe … maybe he did it on purpose.”
I cried then, hard and wrenchingly, and he reached out and held my hand as he had in the Burlington hospital last summer, and I clung hard, as I had then. “His family, would it help his family to know, to know that the people in this town may have helped cause his death?” I said, when I could speak, “What good would it do? And the baby, I don’t think he wanted them to know about the baby. And Jessamyn, this would all hurt her so much.”
He didn’t tell me what to do. I didn’t expect him to.
He sat there and let me talk and then moved over and sat on the bed beside me so I could lean up against him. He stayed there until I was nearly asleep, and in the morning I found him on my sofa, his shirt hanging neatly from my desk chair and shoes and belt on the floor, with one of my pillows and a blanket from my closet. I didn’t remember getting the blanket out. Maybe I hadn’t.
We went to breakfast at Ho-Jo’s, and it felt good to be with him. Afterward we took Tiger for a walk. I thanked him, and we exchanged one of our overstuffed-sofa parka hugs, and he headed back to Ottawa, and I went upstairs to make some phone calls.
I called Cadey’s brothers. I told Wade who I was, and told him he needed to call the state police and tell them about seeing Tobin on the ice that night. We talked a long time. He told me Cadey and Jimmy were getting married, that they’d stay in the house while they finished high school, and all the brothers would help with the baby. And he told me the name of the fellow Tobin had had the scuffle with in the bar, someone who had been in school with Cadey’s youngest brothers, someone who’d maybe had a crush on her. And somehow it didn’t surprise me to find out it was the young Saranac Lake policeman, the one whose name I’d somehow never gotten, who had come to our house to question Jessamyn the morning after Tobin’s body had been found.
Then I looked up that man’s number, and called him too, and told him politely but definitively that he needed to call the state police, and call them now, and tell them about Tobin falling against the wall in their pool table scuffle that night.
Both he and Wade could tell the police it was Tobin’s memorial service that made them realize they needed to speak up, to clear the air, so his sister and family could have some peace. I didn’t need to come into it. I called George, and told him I would need one more day to finish writing.
For this article I’d done a first-person sidebar about seeing Tobin’s body being taken from the ice, about the rumors that ran through town and the ugliness that had ensued, about getting to know Tobin’s sister and becoming friends with her. The main article covered his life here, and I’d interspersed bits from his friends here, their favorite stories about Tobin.
Now I wrote an ending to the main piece, from the imagined perspective of someone who had been there. I wrote of the shove in the bar that night, the bump on the head, but didn’t name names. I wrote of Tobin walking out on the ice with his head aching, perhaps sinking to his knees and then lying down on the ice to rest and sliding under. I didn’t say that maybe, just maybe, Tobin thought of the night his brother had drowned to save him, to give him a life, and that maybe Tobin had just walked on until the ice cracked under him. Neither did I mention that he had been with a sixteen-year-old girl with an ethereal beauty that had entranced him, that she was most likely carrying a child that was his, who would be brought up bearing another man’s name.
Nothing in the story was a lie, but neither was it the whole truth. These truths didn’t belong to me; they weren’t mine to share. Even if some people suspected that Cadey’s child wasn’t Jimmy’s, even if they put the pieces together, no one would say a word. This town would close ranks. Cadey and Jimmy would be one more set of local teens who married young with a baby on the way.
After I finished the piece and turned it in, I called Win. She came in to meet me, and we had a long talk as we walked around the lake, and I told her about a baby, one being born to a local girl who had briefly loved her brother, a baby that would be born in late spring or early summer. And the two of us agreed not to tell Jessamyn any of this, or anyone else.
It took George a day to review the
story and have lawyers vet it. He ran it with a photo I’d taken of the hole left in the ice after Tobin’s body had been removed. I thought it wonderfully appropriate, and hauntingly beautiful. It made me think of one of the postcards Tobin had sent his sister soon after he’d moved here, a snow-covered Adirondack scene. I think I’m going to like it here, he’d written. It’s a cold and lonely place—but it suits me.
CHAPTER 51
Jessamyn went off to live with her father in Boston. She got a part-time job, because she likes to be earning money, which made Daniel proud. And she got her GED and started community college classes, which also made him proud. Brent sometimes goes down to see her. This is a lot of new for Jessamyn: new father, new home, new boyfriend. I imagine it’s going to take some getting used to. But she seems to be taking to it. It’s the life she was supposed to have, coming later but not too late, and in an odd way brought to her by Tobin, from the article on him that mentioned her name and brought her father to her door. In death, Tobin brought her what she’d perhaps hoped he could give her in life: somewhere she belonged, someone to belong to.
If there’s an afterlife, I imagine Tobin’s smiling at that. He’s also probably smiling at me becoming friends with his sister.
Win ended up buying the cabin, and made plans to return in the summer. And she got a dog, an eight-month-old Australian shepherd mix from the animal shelter in Westport. She took him home with her in her new dog-friendly car, and started a new life, with a rescued dog that adored her and a mother she could see once in a while, at least, and somewhat at peace with what had happened to her two brothers. She was, she said, considering law school, which didn’t surprise me. She would be one heck of a lawyer.
I sold a version of the articles to, of all places, Rolling Stone, for an absurd amount of money. They had no problem with how involved I was with the piece—it was one of the things that sold them on it. That clipping would open an insane number of doors for me professionally. There were a lot of articles I could write involving this region, a lot of stories to tell. I had mixed feelings about it—all this had taken a lot out of me—but Baker told me, emphatically, that this sort of writing was what I was meant to do. And maybe she was right.
Dean pretty much forgave me, although I think my role in revealing what his brother had done still made him uncomfortable. Eddie cashed the check from Win and paid the drug debt, and ended up enlisting in the Army—partly to please his brother; partly, I think, because he knew he wouldn’t change if he stayed here. Every two weeks, Win gets a check for fifty dollars from Eddie. We didn’t know if he would keep it up, and we didn’t discuss it. But it helped Dean to know about it, and Win would never tell him if the checks stopped coming.
I told most of the story to my brother, not all of it, and he told me what he could of the tough case he’d been working on. I heard back from the accountant in Greenwich I’d never interviewed, the childhood friend, who had flown to England after his brother was seriously injured in a small plane crash. I found out through an efficient grapevine—Marilyn, in fact—that it was the fired reporter, the kid Dirk, who’d made the hang-up calls to me. I guessed he was the one who’d let the air out of my tires, or had gotten someone to do it. Now he’d gotten a job in Massachusetts, so I figured that was the end of his vengefulness. I hoped he’d learn to be a better reporter.
The near miss that sent my car into a ditch? Most likely just a careless driver. The Saranac Lake policeman who’d shoved Tobin, the one who’d been captivated by Cadey when he’d been in high school with her brothers, left the force and went to work in his brother-in-law’s plumbing business. Win let the Lake Placid police know she’d found out who had trashed the cabin, the person had made restitution, and she didn’t want to press charges. Case closed.
Paul and Philippe came down for a long weekend—I turned my rooms over to them and stayed in Jessamyn’s old room. I hadn’t rented it out yet. I was doing okay financially, with the sale of the articles, so wasn’t in any hurry. Paul wanted to see the ice palace, so we went over to Saranac Lake, and I stayed on the shore as he and his father walked through it, and then we went to visit Baker and her husband and their three boys.
Philippe took me aside when Paul was playing with Baker’s kids. “I need to talk to you,” he said, his voice odd, and we bundled up and went outside.
This wasn’t good. I knew it wasn’t good. It never is when someone says they need to talk to you. They’re either going to tell you they’re moving away or they have a life-threatening ailment or something else that’s going to shake up your life, and not in a pleasant way. So off we went for a walk, me trying not to show how rattled I was.
To give him credit, he went pretty much straight to the point. “You know I care deeply about you,” he said. “You know you are very important to my and Paul’s life.”
“Yes,” I said, and it seemed that the breath was leaving my body. This was not the sort of preamble that led up to suggesting moving in together, to pulling out a ring, to making a proposal. It was the kind of speech that led up to what he said next.
“We live a long way apart, Troy. I’ve … I need to tell you that I’ve started seeing someone.”
I like to think of myself as the type of person who would be stoic when hearing something like this, all brave and stiff-upper-lip and all, but I couldn’t pull it off. Tears started to fall and then I was sobbing, and he was holding me. My world had just upended, turned inside out, and I had never seen it coming.
“I’m sorry,” I said between sobs. “I’m sorry I was so busy, I’m sorry I didn’t come up more. I’m sorry I wasn’t ready. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“No, no, no,” he said. “It’s all right, it wasn’t that. I didn’t plan it, I didn’t plan on meeting someone, it just happened.”
But who plans on something like that? No one. It happens. And it happens because there’s a space for it to happen, an opening, a gap. If I’d been in Ottawa, if I’d been able to make a commitment, take a risk—never mind that we’d agreed that the time wasn’t right, that neither of us was ready—it wouldn’t have happened.
Or maybe it would have. Maybe it would have been far worse. And maybe if Philippe had been perfect for me and I’d been perfect for him, maybe I never would have left, or he would have waited a while longer, waited until the time was right for both of us. Maybe I’d just been a coward, afraid to take a step toward a new life when I should have.
“Of course you’re still welcome to visit,” he said, but then I cried harder, thinking of the house I loved, the meals I’d shared with them, the times I’d driven Paul to school and hung out with Elise, who would now be cooking meals for some other woman. Some other woman would be sitting at the table with Paul, driving him to school, checking his homework. I felt such a sharp pain in my chest it seemed my heart had to have stopped beating, but I could feel it, hear it, a steady, slow lub-dub; it had betrayed me by keeping on beating when it should have stopped, should have frozen in my chest.
I had thought it all would be waiting for me, Philippe and Paul and the house in Ottawa, waiting for me to be ready, but it wasn’t. My retreat, my mecca, my safe haven, gone. The place that had felt like home, gone. The gates clanged shut before I’d known they were even starting to move. Maybe before I’d even realized they’d been open. I thought I had more time. Until Philippe winced, I didn’t know I’d said the words aloud.
“I’ll need to see Paul,” I said thickly. “I can’t lose Paul.”
And now he was crying too. “You’ll never lose Paul,” he said. “He needs you. I’ll bring him down to see you; he can visit on holidays.”
We walked until I could control myself, and we rubbed our faces with snow so they would just look red with cold, and we went back and pretended to be cheerful, and then Philippe and the child I loved beyond reason went off to Canada, and I went home, home to my dog. And laid in my lonely bed and wished hard I hadn’t taken the high road, the sensible path. Wished I had stayed up in Canada
last summer, that I had gone for it, rushed it, risked it. At least I would have had that time and I’d have those memories, and I wouldn’t be wondering What if. But I’d been careful, and I’d been cautious, partly to safeguard Paul, and maybe myself as well, and now the decision had been made for me.
I didn’t tell Baker for a few days. When I did, she said, “Troy, it’s not over until it’s over—he’s just seeing this person, not marrying her.” And I suppose she was right, but it seemed that the tiny window Philippe and I might have had had closed, sometime when we weren’t looking. Maybe it had never really been open and we’d only come together because of Paul; maybe it had slammed shut after the death of Philippe’s wife. Maybe I’d let it slide shut bit by bit while I was busy writing articles that had altered life for other families, brought Jessamyn a father, lost one for Win; estranged Dean and his brother, brought David Zimmer some peace.
I couldn’t judge this at all. All I knew is that I was alone, and it hurt.
Of course, I had to wonder if I’d done the right thing about Tobin, about Cadey, about the baby. I’d exposed one set of family secrets and let a new one remain hidden—that Tobin had apparently left a child, not yet born, one that his parents would never know about. This was a weighty decision, and we’d likely never know if it was the right one.
But I think it was.
Tobin’s baby would grow up here, in the Adirondacks. The child would grow up hiking and fishing, skiing and ice-skating and snowshoeing with uncles and mother and the man he or she would call father. The child wouldn’t know Tobin’s parents, wouldn’t be pressured to go to a prestigious school or take a prestigious job. Win would quietly start a trust fund, moving some of Tobin’s share of her own trust fund into it, one that would help pay for college or first-home-buying or other expenses. The one thing Cadey agreed to accept was a family health plan, covering her and Jimmy and the unborn child and whatever children they might have. So this child would have health care, and some financial help when needed, and would likely never know the family history on the birth father’s side.
A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel Page 26