The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  “Yeah.”

  “Around to the left, the yellow door. He’s leaving tonight.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  “Couldn’t tell you. Ask him yourself.”

  Nick goes around the corner. The sunlight through the trees turns green. His knee hurts from all the walking. At the end of the little row beside the building is a view of the sea. He knocks on the door and it swings in, unlocked.

  “Nick, what a surprise,” the cop says. “Come on in.”

  The old man’s shirt isn’t buttoned. He’s wearing canvas hiking shorts and around his middle what looks like an old-fashioned corset, but made from Velcro. On the bed is an open suitcase.

  “Going somewhere?” Nick says suspiciously, looking around.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  The cop reaches his hand inside the corset to scratch himself, like a woman fixing her bra. Nick doesn’t even know where to start.

  “What is that thing?”

  “A back brace. Take a seat. If you want,” the cop says, awkwardly. As if they hadn’t sat a dozen times facing each other. “I’m glad to see you. I was just thinking to myself, it’s all going to work out for Nick. They’ll drop the charges. You’ll see.”

  The cop buttons up his shirt.

  Nick sits on the end of the bed and says nothing for a moment. He’s all the more uncomfortable for being in that room. “I meant to say thanks,” he says morosely. “For what you did. I mean, what you’ve done.”

  “I should be the one thanking you.”

  “What?”

  The cop sits stiffly next to him. His legs in the shorts look like barkless trees.

  “How’s your mother doing?”

  “Drunk, probably.”

  “I tried to help her. I don’t think she was ready.”

  “Yeah, well, thanks.”

  It is true he likes the cop, or trusts him. The guy never lied to him that he could tell. Suzanne had said as much, vaguely. Brenner said he’d put up the bail money. But why? And what did he want in return?

  “So where are you going?” he asks.

  “California.”

  “No shit.”

  “My daughter lives there. I’m trying to patch up some things.”

  Nick almost asks him how she got there, but it makes no sense.

  “I want to go to California. When this is over.” The rash on his arm burns. Nick scratches it away. “Look,” he says impulsively, “could you give me some advice?”

  “Of course. For what it’s worth.”

  “It’s Emily. She’s doing all this stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  He fills the cop in on what the lawyer said, about the photographs, the interviews. Based on the guy’s face, he wonders if he knows some of it already. How does everybody know everything before him?

  “Let me ask you something, Nick,” Martin says after a second. “What do you want? For yourself?”

  “What does that mean?” he says angrily.

  “I mean for you. For your future.”

  He doesn’t know how to answer. The cop must sense that. He stands up and goes back to packing his clothes.

  “Nick, let me walk you through a scenario,” the cop says quietly, addressing his suitcase. “There’s one or two things that remain unsaid. And I’m worried, if you don’t deal with them, it’s going to be worse in the long run.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That night. There was a phone call. It was the sheriff. He called the doctor while you were there.” Nick starts to protest but the cop holds up a hand. “Don’t worry. This is just a game. I can’t prove a thing. Just hear me out. With the beacon, Emily’s dad tracked you to the doctor’s house. What you don’t know, he’s got leverage with the doctor, he’s got power over him. It doesn’t matter how, just trust me. The point is that if he wanted the doctor to tell him something, the doctor was going to tell him. So here’s what happened, as far as I’ve pieced together. The phone rings. The doctor answers. Probably leaves you in the study to go pick it up in the kitchen. It’s Emily’s dad. He wants to know what you’re doing there. Who knows why, but he’s obsessed, he’s following you. The doctor’s gotta be surprised. And scared. Because how does this guy know? Now what I’m pretty sure happens next is that the doctor says something. About Emily. Something that alerts the sheriff as to what’s going on. Whatever it is, the crucial thing is that it sounds off to you.”

  The cop turns, stares at him. Almost daring him to protest.

  “I think you heard him. Maybe it’s a warning. Regarding the information you’ve just shared, the sheriff’s crimes. I think you overheard it, or just enough of it. Either way, you’re enraged. Here’s the one adult you thought you could trust, and he just betrayed you. You couldn’t go to the authorities. The ‘authority’ is the guy who attacked his own daughter, the girl you love. Now the guy you turned to appears to be on the other side. So, maybe you confronted him. Maybe you got in a fight. Somehow the doctor hits the back of his head, we know from the autopsy. There’s a contusion, a bruise. From the lab reports they’re actually able to know it took place before the stabbings. Now, it didn’t kill him, I got that confirmed, too. But that’s what I’m getting at. Because once I figured this all out, and I’m not saying I got it even half-right—in fact, I don’t want you to tell me if I’m right or not. But I realized, all this time, basically since the night we met, some part of you may think you were complicit in all of this. Going to the doctor’s house. What you heard. Whatever happened between you and him. Kid, you’ve got enough to shoulder as it is. You didn’t kill them, any of them. If you never listened to me before, then this is the one time. You didn’t do this. He did. You understand?”

  He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t look up from his hands. The night is never far away. The phone rang. The doctor excused himself. So what do you want me to do with him? The total mind-fuck, the wild punch he threw. The cordless phone went clattering. And a second later Emily’s dad was there, in the door, on the floor. Is he dead? He’d felt for a pulse, then pulled out the knife.

  “He said he was going to kill my mom.”

  “I know.”

  He gets up to leave. He doesn’t have to listen to this, on top of everything else. “Don’t you think I thought about turning myself in? He’s a cop. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Nick, I’m sorry. Calm down.”

  His forehead hurts. His knee throbs. “And then I had to—”

  “Nick, I know.”

  He clutches his knee and sits down hard on a bench.

  “It’s eating me up.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  Martin sits down next to him and puts his big arm around him. Nick flinches, he can’t help himself. After a minute the cop gets up and brings him a glass of water.

  “You ask for my advice? Figure out what you want. For you. It’s as simple as that. Just answer that one question.”

  * * *

  Granville Portis is alone and he prefers it this way, for he is in control.

  He refuses to eat, refuses legal counsel, refuses to be visited by medical professionals. He paces and seethes, thinks about everyone against him, about an entire society that never understood him.

  He is visited nightly by his father, his father’s haranguing and sermons.

  He is visited by Marleen, their love affair.

  He holds his pride intact. Still, he’s attacked by stomach cramps, eaten alive from the inside out, shitting and groaning, made to perform scrounging ablutions with toilet paper every hour.

  He does feel occasionally a transporting pleasure, of pure innocence, to remember what had once been. Then he thinks about the wife who became sick, who tricked him, whose blood turned traitor. And then the daughter who turned against him, who dishonored him, who gave up everything they had. Who’d been the one and only one who—

  And the boy in the end to turn her against him finally, a Toussaint!
/>   He hears his father’s I-told-you-so, a haunting from beyond the grave.

  He is the most misunderstood man.

  He wakes up in the middle of the night in sweat-soaked sheets. He knows what he did, he accepts it, because the boy finally caved, to be expected from someone of his background—and yet Granville is still not understood, he is understood less. So he continues to refuse any food or advice from his minders, of whom he knows none, doesn’t remember their names, doesn’t answer their questions. He is glad they’re so angry.

  For he will not give his enemies any satisfaction, and he will be absolved, furthermore will heed no regret and will not waver.

  The solitary man is different from what people think. He is believed to be of no consequence. In fact he is of the greatest consequence. He is like an eternal child, of the most tender sensitivities. And so he must learn to prefer his own company, forever misunderstood, cruelly outcast. But therefore he will never be alone, for he has himself.

  And he understands, better than anyone, the significance and insignificance of his place in the greater order.

  For whom vengeance is there to be claimed.

  He has a plan.

  * * *

  First there’s a song. It echoes in the barn like it’s being played by a dozen fiddlers, but there’s only one musician, a man onstage in a blue wool vest, with a caller to his left holding a microphone, a woman who tells the roomful of dancers what to do next. There’s simply no escaping the call once you’re in its grip. And even the most closed hearts open to contra’s song, which happens once a month in Rinehart, twenty minutes north of Claymore, free to all, with do-si-do in the residual warmth of a summer day.

  The dance takes place in an old barn. The room has that bland, updated rustic look, like an advertisement for Green Mountain Coffee. Other nights, the hall is available for rent, an immaculate piece of restored Yankee architecture that’s useful for weddings and business seminars, with a stainless steel industrial kitchen, but also plank walls held together not by nails but wooden pegs, the way things once were built.

  And on fourth Fridays, if nothing else is happening, the contra dance is happening.

  Couples arrive in pairs or fours. Women with young families smile at one another and mouth things behind their husbands’ backs. The single men, with long hair and Hawaiian shirts, hurry to find friends inside, find older women who remember them from previous dances and take pity. Some of the women arrive in drop-crotch pants. Some of the men wear Vibrams. Some people are so nervous they make fake phone calls to give themselves something to do.

  There are plenty of teenagers, surprisingly, but that’s because the county offers free pizza as a way to suck kids into something wholesome. Once the adults are finished, a DJ takes over, and until midnight he or she will play pop and rap and EDM. But the only way the kids are allowed in later is if they’re there on the spot at six to get a ticket.

  At dusk, the air is still hot. Mosquitoes circulate. Boys cling to the rails and measure up the girls, under the bored glances of mother types who know exactly what they’re thinking. Other boys stick to the paved lot, the handicapped ramps where skateboarding is tolerated. And if occasionally one of them scores a case of beer, they vanish into the crabapple trees. The girls also huddle, but their groupings are more ordered, by proximity to the best views of the action inside, Zetas near the front, other cliques toward the cars.

  And inside the barn, beneath limp cords of lights, the adults dance like busy brooms, in formal rotations that look practically Victorian.

  Emily watches from the wall. Meg is buzzed before the dance even starts, her braids shine like gold. She has no problem asking guys if they want to dance. Several of whom look like they’ve seen her dance before. Emily’s almost too tired to watch. Her feet hurt, her lungs hurt. She’d been looked at and questioned all day. The sky was darkly blue when Meg drove them away from their last appointment. She fell asleep. Fifteen minutes later, Meg had another big idea and nudged her awake.

  “You need to treat yourself right,” Meg said. “Now that you’re rich.”

  They’d parked outside a JCPenney, in the old River Run mall. The lights were so bright, it could have been a baseball stadium. No one was around. Bats swung through the air. Meg pushed her through the big doors. She’d never shopped there before, never shopped before, period, not like this, where almost anything could be hers. Fifteen minutes later she’d picked out a dress, $249. She found it on one of the mannequins. It looked straight out of a magazine, a tiered dress with a round neck and darted bust. The construction looked so complicated, she just wanted to turn it inside out and see how it was made.

  “Just once, for me, please?” Meg trailed her to the dressing room. “And please do not wear your jeans underneath.”

  The dress was off-white, slightly structured with a yielding feel, with a lace inset at the bodice and waistline. Meg didn’t even have to ask: Emily wore it out of the store. The skirt lent a shape that felt connected to a dream, a different person. She caught sight of herself in a mirror, she almost didn’t recognize herself. It filled her with a pleasure she’d never felt before.

  The barn was their final appointment of the day. Walking in with Meg, her anxiety was almost numbing, then it disappeared. People didn’t notice her, or didn’t recognize her. Maybe it’s the dress. Half an hour into arriving, she feels changed, enveloped in a warm feeling—a different sensation from the day so far. She hadn’t minded the photographers, but the reporters made her uncomfortable. Less their questions than how they seemed: dishonest, mercenary. They gave off a weird lack of self-interest, as if their jobs were below them, as if they were the ones who deserved sympathy. Sweating in a motel room, unbuttoning wrinkled sleeves. “How about we talk about your childhood?”

  The barn fills with adults, over a hundred. Lights dim. Alex arrives from the apartment. At that moment Meg twirls a little old man in logging boots.

  “What is my sister doing?”

  The music changes. Meg shoos the man away. “That was Howie,” she says, “and we were dancing.” The music starts up again, the adults start to move in fours. Women in skirts with scalloped trimmings, boots with tassels, little heeled sandals. Someone nearby drops a glass and there’s a crash. Emily’s heart skips a beat. By the far wall, she spots Jessie Baker, her freshman-year torturer, pointing at her, talking out of the side of her mouth to her friends, who turn and look.

  “Emily, what are you wearing?” Alex asks her loudly, above the music.

  “What?”

  “That dress. It’s amazing.”

  Meg shouts, “Emily, let’s get a move on, you’re keeping this guy waiting.”

  She’d almost forgotten: her final assignment. Along the side, ten feet down the wall, a man from a magazine stands under a wooden beam, with a pair of cameras slung over his shoulder.

  “You’re supposed to dance,” Meg says. “With a man. Preferably an older man, god knows why, until he gets the shot. Then we get the hell out of here.”

  The photographer nods at her. She’s seriously tired. People dance faster, their gazes turn toward her, placing her face.

  “I don’t want to,” she says in a quiet voice.

  “It’s good money.”

  “I don’t care.”

  She looks around for Nick. She’d texted him, he said he’d come.

  “Really good money,” Meg says. “Think of all the dresses you can buy.”

  “What is this for, anyway?” Alex asks. “Ho-Down Monthly?”

  “In Touch,” Meg says. “Or Us Weekly. He says he’ll pay up front, he can sell the photos later. Who cares? Emily, he only needs you dancing for one song.”

  “It’s my decision,” she announces firmly, but the music lifts in volume and no one hears her. There are more musicians now, a woman cradling an acoustic guitar, a boy plucking at a mandolin. The dancers twirl in synchronized patterns, everyone sweating, moving in tight circles, switching partners while matching hands.
/>
  “Tell you what,” Meg shouts, “I’ll grab Howie.”

  Half a minute later, Emily is led onto the floor by a sinewy old man with scratchy hands. They’re surrounded by moving couples. It all seems so ridiculous. Even her legs are sweating, it’s so hot. Why can’t someone turn on a fan? The old man says he’ll show her what to do, then he turns her like she’s a doll, deeper into the crowd, and at the same time his eyes droop, out of bashfulness or embarrassment or politeness, she isn’t sure, but she appreciates it and decides to make an effort. She tries to mimic everyone else. She fights back the bad feelings rising in her throat. But her feet are dead and graceless. Heat radiates off her chest. The dress is confining. A big fat man spins around next to her and bangs into her shoulder.

  The little old man scurries her deeper into the masses. But she refuses his eyes when they lift, refuses any eyes watching. Her blood’s hot. Her vision’s blotchy. Even the walls are perspiring.

  She doesn’t acknowledge the photographer, though she sees the outline of his shoes, hears his cameras clacking while the old man pulls her in, puts his little rubber lips against her ear and asks her name. She says nothing. The satisfaction is not to answer. But her satisfaction feels eyes raking up and down her back. Who does she think she is? Hasn’t she done enough? The caller onstage directs something new and Howie tries to hand her off to another man, and her satisfaction refuses, clutches the old man’s hands, and makes him stop so that the two of them stand in place.

  Suddenly everything is awkward. People try to dance around them, bump into them. The lights burn. Her sweat drips. The music races. She lets go of Howie’s hands and runs away, slips through lines, ducks under arms. She can’t breathe. Finally she reaches the edge, heads back toward Meg and Alex, while kids from school watch her, with faces like mirrors, throwing everything back, her panic, her present, her past. Emily! someone yells, then someone else says it even louder, in the same tone, Emily! Like the whole room is echoing, shrieking hysterically, Emily!

  A hand grabs her shoulder.