The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

  “I didn’t realize,” said Renee.

  Tentatively Caroline was making her way across the cluttered floor. She removed a pile of books and unopened mail from the couch and sat down. “What happened?” she said. I could tell from her voice that she was crying; we had all been crying so much this past week that it seemed unremarkable. Neither Renee nor I moved to comfort her.

  “I can’t believe he lived this way,” said Renee. “Ever since the Pause I can’t stand mess.”

  Caroline nodded.

  “I loved the Pause,” I said.

  “I hated the Pause,” Renee answered.

  Caroline tilted her head. “Well, there was Nathan.”

  “I wonder if Noni ever thinks about it,” I said.

  “Nope. No way,” answered Renee. “Once it was over for Noni, it was over.” She picked up a beer bottle and began peeling back its label. “Do you remember Dad’s funeral? Remember Joe with the fireplace poker?”

  “Of course I remember,” I said.

  “Me, too,” said Caroline. “And do you remember how we hugged him? We surrounded him. He almost fell over.” She smiled. “Remember that?”

  * * *

  The next day we returned to Joe’s apartment with cleaning supplies and a roll of large black garbage bags. We fanned out, each of us intent on a separate corner. Renee went first to the balcony’s glass doors and pushed them fully open, letting the sea air and the distant thrum of traffic and crashing waves work their way into the apartment. Sixteen stories below, the precarious body of a surfer bobbled atop a gray wave. Renee closed her eyes and counted to ten. Then she started on the pizza boxes.

  Caroline declared that she’d focus on the kitchen. This was the cleanest room in the apartment though also the worst, because on these tiles, this floor, Joe had fallen. Tentatively she entered, expecting a taped silhouette on the floor or a roped-off area like she’d seen on TV. But there was nothing to suggest tragedy. Sunlight streamed through the large windows, bright and insistent, glancing off the black floors and black countertops and silver appliances. It looks like a showroom in here, Caroline thought, not like a kitchen where anyone had ever prepared a meal or worried over bills.

  Her sandals made a soft sucking noise as she moved about the room, wiping, sorting, tossing. The fridge contained one desiccated lime, brown and shrunken, and a large bottle of gin. On the counter lay a tall pile of catalogs. Caroline picked one off the top: Hammacher Schlemmer. A heated massage chair, remote-control attack helicopters, noise-canceling earphones. What would Joe have wanted in here? And what should she buy Nathan for his birthday? Or for Louis—the helicopters? At twelve, was he too old for toys like this?

  Since learning of Joe’s death, Caroline had been able to do this: disappear into pockets of concentration like a gopher dropping down into its comfortable hole. She had coasted through the last few days, distracted from the reality of a Joe-less world with the sudden adrenaline of crisis planning: contacting family, contacting friends, the funeral, the memorial service. Plus the nagging specifics of her regular life: meal preparation and helping the kids with their homework and loading the dishwasher and folding the sheets. Caroline found that she could pretend, in the shadowy corners of her consciousness, that Joe was in a work meeting and could not be disturbed or had embarked on a lengthy, impressive business trip.

  Caroline picked up another catalog, and a photo fell out, an old-fashioned Polaroid of Joe, his arm around a pretty young woman with dark hair pulled back from her face, a mole high on the right side of her cheek. They were sitting at a bar, the glint of bottles to their left flaring white from the camera’s flash. Joe and the woman were smiling, skin a little flushed, eyes bright.

  Oh, Caroline thought. Joe looks happy.

  * * *

  Dragging a black garbage bag, I walked along the shadowy hall toward the bedroom. Inside, Joe had tacked towels over the ceiling light and windows. Sunlight edged in, but the room was dank, murky, as though it existed within an algae-filled pool. There was a king-size bed, unmade, a grayish white duvet swirled up in the middle. The floor was littered with clothes, shoes, socks, a long snaking belt. Inside the closet hung a few dark suits.

  We hadn’t talked about Joe’s clothes. Furniture, all the household effects would be donated, apart from the few specific items that various family members had requested. Joe’s bicycle would go to Nathan. Renee wanted the vintage Casablanca poster she had given him years ago for Christmas. Caroline wanted Joe’s old guitar, for Louis, she had said, who’d been talking about taking it up. Noni wanted Joe’s baseball glove, the first one from Coach Marty.

  “Are you sure he kept it?” Renee had asked her gently, the day before we left for Miami.

  “He’s got it. I know he does,” Noni replied. Now in grief our mother was sure and stubborn. We no longer worried about a return of the Pause; at least there was that. “If you can’t find the glove, then you’re not looking in the right place.”

  Only I didn’t know what I wanted. I couldn’t remember what Joe had, which of his possessions would mean something to me. I wanted everything of his, and yet I could not bear to take a thing.

  “What are we doing with his clothes?” I yelled over my shoulder, though weakly. Neither of my sisters answered. I pulled at the towel on the window until it came down with a flurry of dust, and raised a hand to my eyes with the sudden influx of light.

  A tall chest of drawers was pushed inside the closet. All those drawers, and I both did and did not want to see what was inside. I had no right to uncover Joe’s secret self, and yet I felt an obligation to protect him from embarrassment; anything bad, anything Joe wouldn’t want Noni to see, porn or drugs, I would take it away and destroy it. Flush it down the toilet, stuff it into my bag, and drop it into the sea. I felt a sudden, urgent nausea to think of what Caroline and Renee would find in my bedroom were I to die unexpectedly, unprepared.

  But I found only boxer shorts and socks, white T-shirts still wrapped in plastic, belts, jeans, shorts—so many shorts, plaid, canvas, and khaki. And then, deep in the last drawer, my hand closed around a small box. I brought it out into the bedroom’s new, tentative light. It was a pale blue, the color of a perfect sky. Across the top, in black letters, were etched the words tiffany & co. The box looked brand-new, the edges sharp, the surface unmarked.

  I sat on Joe’s bed holding the box in my hands. It seemed almost to emit light, to glow deeply, bluely from within. I opened the top. Inside was another box, this one covered in a deep navy velvet. Carefully I lifted the hinged lid, and there, nestled in a crack of velvet, was the most beautiful ring I had ever seen. A diamond, large and round, smaller than Sandrine’s, but somehow more brilliant, positioned on a band set with smaller diamonds. The whole thing took the light from the room and flung it back at me magnified a hundred times, a thousand. The ring seemed on fire, and I threw it down onto the bed.

  * * *

  After a spell I returned to the living room.

  “What were you doing back there?” Renee asked.

  “Cleaning. Joe’s bedroom.” I held the box loosely in my hand and considered for the briefest, rashest moment just tucking it into the pocket of my jeans, taking it home with me to New York. But that, I knew, would be cruel.

  “Look what I found,” I said, and held out the box on an opened palm.

  “Tiffany blue,” Caroline remarked as she walked in from the kitchen. “What’s inside?”

  “A diamond ring. An engagement ring.”

  Renee dropped her half-full garbage bag. “Sandrine’s?”

  “No,” I said. “This one’s brand-new.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Renee.

  “Yes. I’m sure. Sandrine kept hers. Remember? And look at it. Look at the box.” I held it up but did not move toward Renee. She stepped forward and plucked it from my palm. She lifted the lid and whistled.

  The three of us remained still, eyes trained on the ring. All silently asking ourselves the same question. />
  “Is it . . . ?” Caroline breathed. “The woman who was with him?” The detectives had told us about Luna Hernandez, the woman who’d left him alone that last night.

  “The detectives said she hadn’t known Joe for very long, just a few months.” Renee turned toward Caroline. “And he wanted to marry her?”

  “I . . . I don’t know,” said Caroline, and then she held up a hand. “Wait—” She darted out of the room, into the kitchen, and returned with the polaroid. Caroline placed the photo of Joe and Luna on the coffee table, and we crowded around to look. For a moment no one spoke. The muffled clang of the elevator reached us from the distant interior of the building.

  “Look at them,” said Renee. “How old do you think she is?” My sister appeared to vibrate ever so slightly, like a rocket in the seconds before liftoff. “So the woman who leaves him, leaves him to die, he was going to propose to her?” Renee’s hands were shaking. She sat down on the couch. Her garbage bag hit the floor with a splinter of glass. “Does Joe have a will?” Renee said. “We need to get in touch with that lawyer. This is important.” She was looking directly at the ring, as if she were speaking to it and the ring was talking back. “Did this woman know? I mean, did she know how serious Joe was?”

  “Renee, do you think . . . she did something?” Caroline asked. She peered first at Renee, then at me with the look of a confused passenger who has just been told she’s boarded the wrong train.

  “The police talked to her. They let her go,” I said. “Don’t even think about that. He fell. He slipped. There was water on the floor, that’s what the police said. It was a horrible, horrible accident.”

  “I don’t know, Fiona,” Caroline whispered.

  I saw Renee’s paranoia taking hold of Caroline, the wheels spinning as they often did, with Renee alerting us of danger. Don’t put plastic in the microwave. Exercise twenty minutes every single day. No trans fat. We should have listened to her about Joe and the drugs, I knew that, but that didn’t mean we had to listen to her now. The idea that Joe had loved Luna made me feel just a tiny bit better, and this seemed reason enough to believe. Here before us was the most magical of fairy tales: a secret ring, an innocent girl, a true love.

  “Renee, you always assume the worst,” I said. “They were in love. She made a mistake, that’s all. She was in shock when they told her—you heard what the police said.”

  “Fiona, did Joe ever tell you he was dating someone?” Renee asked.

  Joe had called me early on Sunday morning, just a week before he died. Somehow he’d found the blog and deduced that I was the Last Romantic. I think I know her pretty well, he’d said. And then, Why, Fiona? Why are you doing this? It cheapens you. This was what seemed the most intolerable: his judgment, his dismissal of the entire project. Find someone you love, he’d said at the end, and his voice was earnest and sincere in a way I hadn’t heard before. Perhaps it was this moment of vulnerability that provoked my anger. Joe had cheated on his fiancée, lied to his sisters, kept secrets from me, from everyone, distanced himself year after year while we were living in the same city, and then just left, left us all behind as though we meant nothing. As though his sisters occupied the same position as his fraternity brothers and work colleagues. Who was Joe to advise me about love? I hadn’t wanted to hear his voice or his judgment, so I hung up on him.

  And that was the last time I spoke to my brother, Joe. The very last.

  “The last time I spoke to Joe—” I began. Maybe he’d intended to tell me about Luna. Find someone to love. But maybe it was something else entirely.

  “What is it, Fiona?” Renee asked. “What did he say? Did he mention Luna?”

  I shook my head. “No, he didn’t mention anyone.” I looked around the room, at the newly open spaces of dusty floor, the taped-up boxes and bulging bags of trash. “But I never asked him. We only talked about me.”

  “Well, I don’t buy it,” Renee said, her voice fierce. Her suspicion filled the room. “There’s something going on here. There’s motive.”

  “Okay, Miss Marple, let me go get my magnifying glass,” I said, and I began to cry.

  “I want to meet her. I want to look her in the eye and ask her why she left him,” said Renee.

  Caroline clapped her hands fast. “Yes, we should look her in the eye. We should give her the ring!” She said the last with the conviction of a missionary. “That’s what we should do. That’s what Joe would have wanted us to do.” She nodded once with finality.

  “I agree with Caroline,” I said, wiping my tears. Of course, fulfill the last wish. Bestow the ring upon its rightful owner. There was a simplicity to it, a clarity of purpose. “Yes, that’s exactly what we should do.”

  For a moment Renee was silent. She recognized that she was losing ground. Her anger, so vivid on her face just moments before, had gone slack.

  “We should not give her the ring,” Renee said.

  “It’s hers,” I replied. “Renee, don’t you see?”

  Caroline nodded emphatically. We sat together in our dead brother’s apartment, and we waited for our big sister to decide.

  “Okay,” Renee said at last. In her hands the diamond ring flared and sparkled in the room’s reflected sunlight. “Give it to her. But I want to be there. I want to see her face.”

  For five more hours, we cleaned Joe’s apartment. Once the windows were washed, the garbage bags deposited in the dumpster, three runs made to the Goodwill, Renee told us that she was going for a drive. “I just need some air,” she said. “I won’t go looking for Luna. Don’t worry.”

  It wasn’t until after Renee had left that I wondered about her words. Why reassure us like that? I tried my sister’s phone, but she didn’t answer.

  “Caroline,” I said. “Where’s the ring box?”

  Caroline was eating a piece of pepperoni-and-pineapple pizza; we had ordered from a place one block away. “The usual for Mr. Joe?” the man on the phone had asked. “Yes,” I had answered. “The usual, please.”

  Now Caroline stopped chewing and swallowed. “Let me look.” She began searching around the coffee table, under the couch. “I don’t see it,” she said.

  “Do you think . . . ?” I began.

  “Renee doesn’t like carelessness,” answered Caroline. “Sometimes she forgives people. Other times she doesn’t. It’s hard to know when she will or won’t.”

  Caroline and I looked at each other. “We should go down to that restaurant,” I said.

  Chapter 12

  Renee drove across the causeway from Miami Beach, with its all-week weekend of skin and flash and thumping noise, to downtown Miami, which was slower, more restrained, particularly now, 4:00 p.m. on a Tuesday before the office buildings emptied.

  Inside Revel Bar + Restaurant, the tables were empty. It was possible to see Joe here, Renee thought as she paused just inside the front door. This seemed like Joe’s kind of place. Slick, expensive, but homey, too, comfortable. The bartender was a tall man with hard, pale arms and sharp, straight-edged planes to his face. He looked vaguely dangerous, like a Russian gangster or a struggling actor who auditioned for those kinds of roles.

  Renee strode to the bar and asked brightly, “Hi. I’m here to see Luna, Luna Hernandez?”

  The bartender was drying a glass with a clean white cloth. He continued the motion, but his eyes rose to meet hers. “Luna? She’s not on till later.”

  “Oh. What time?”

  The man stopped polishing and set the glass down somewhere behind the bar. “Are you police?”

  “No. Just a . . . friend.” Renee forced a smile, and with that one small lie her posture caved, her certainty crumbled. She tried to relax her shoulders, to radiate the goodwill that a friend to Luna Hernandez would surely exhibit. She must have some friends, this unknown woman who had left Joe alone; she must even have family. Had they met Joe? Did they know that he had died? A lump rose in Renee’s throat, and she could not swallow, she could not speak, so she looked down, busying
herself with her purse to hide her face from this man.

  “Well,” the bartender said, and he cleared his throat. “Just a moment.” He traveled the length of the bar to check on two men drinking red wine, who shook their heads—No, nothing more, thanks—and then the bartender disappeared.

  * * *

  Dima pushed through the swinging chrome doors into the kitchen, where the pre-dinner service hum was just beginning to sound. A prep cook chopped red peppers in a corner, the dishwasher thrashed through a cycle. Jorge, the sous-chef, was squinting at a packing slip, crates of condiments piled in the narrow space between the walk-in cooler and the service entry.

  “You seen Luna?” Dima asked him.

  “No. Not yet.” Jorge gave him a long look. “Police?”

  All the kitchen staff knew about the detectives who had taken Luna away, though only Rodrigo had been on the floor to see it, Rodrigo whom they all despised because he ran the waitstaff with cruel efficiency, refused to hire more busboys or change the table allotment to a more sensible, fairer arrangement. He watered down the well bottles, dealt small packets of coke from the back men’s room on Saturday nights, never including any of them in the cut. They all wished they’d been there that day to advise Luna. They knew about police, what to refuse, how to behave. I want a lawyer. This they could all say, no matter how poor the English. If it had been any of them—any save Rodrigo—they would have been able to help Luna. Their Luna, beautiful and sad, who stayed after hours to eat a meal, have a drink. They’d seen Luna age from a sixteen-year-old still talking about college to now, twenty-five and the first fine lines blooming at her eyes when she smiled. That awful night Luna had returned from the police station shaking. Jorge gave her a cup of tea and a plate of pasta; Dima covered the whole bar for the hour it took before she was ready to go out there.

  Now Rodrigo came bustling in from the prep area, holding a celery stick in one hand, a clipboard in the other, chewing. “Get out there, Dima,” he said. “What are you doing back here?” A fine sheen of sweat covered Rodrigo’s forehead, and he set down the clipboard to swipe at it with his palm.