Nantucket Grand

by Steven Axelrod

  I loved it that Lonnie still used the word hinky. “How do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure. The FBI thinks it may have been doctored, but Thayer’s dead and they have bigger fish to fry. They don’t care about Andy’s reputation. But we do. I made a copy. I’m sending it over. Check your e-mail.”

  Lonnie could always surprise me. Sure, he was a smug, careless, marginally competent glory-hound; but he was a decent guy, too—and not a spineless one. It couldn’t have been easy to get that video away from the FBI. They hoard evidence like Billy Delavane’s father hoarded fifty-year-old checkbooks and rusty fishhooks.

  “Thanks, man,” I said. “I’ll take a look at it.”

  But I didn’t get a chance to, not that day. I ushered Alana out and opened up my e-mail. First up—a message from the filmmaker Mark Toland, telling me he was on-island if I wanted to talk about the photographs he sent me, or just pick his brains about the crime scene, and I was about to call him—who better to look at the Andrew Thayer video?—when I got an hysterical call from my ex-wife.

  “Tim has run away!” she moaned.

  “Wait—what? Slow down. What happened?”

  “He’s gone! He took his bike and he’s gone.”

  “So…he’s riding his bike on a summer day unsupervised. You wanted to live in a place where that was okay. I’m not sure what you—”

  “We had a fight. He said he hated me!”

  “He’s twelve, what do you expect?”

  “He wanted to talk about your father—how he died, and my grandparents…and Todd Macy, he’s still upset about that…and the poor kid who fell through the roof last winter, and Oscar Graham and Andy Thayer and Jill Phelan…and I don’t know. He had a dream where all the dead people were hanging around the Boys and Girls Club. He asked if I was dying, like he thought I was sick or something, and he wanted to know about police fatalities as if you were going to be shot on the job, and…and I—it was morbid and creepy and—and sick, Henry! I told him it was sick and he screamed at me and took off, and he could be anywhere right now.”

  “It’s a small island, Miranda.”

  “He could be killed the way he was riding! He wasn’t looking where he was going. He wasn’t even on the bike path!”

  “Now you’re sounding morbid.”

  “We have to find him!”

  “Does he have his phone with him?”

  “You think he’s talking on the phone while he’s riding? Or texting? Oh, my God, I’ve told him a million times—”

  “No, no—but I installed a GPS app so we could find the kids’ phones if they ever lost them. I can use it to find Tim just as easily, if he has the phone with him.”

  “He always has the phone with him. He’s surgically attached to that stupid phone!”

  She was the one who had insisted they have top-of-the-line smartphones. I preferred landlines. But this wasn’t the best moment to bring up that disagreement.

  “I’ll find him,” I said.

  “Good because this is on you.”

  “What?”

  “We came here so we could raise our children away from fear and violence but you carry it with you everywhere you go. It’s like body odor.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Just look at the last few years—Tim’s formative years! You were beaten up by that horrible thug in the sandpit, the one who killed Preston Lomax!”

  “I remember. Ed Delavane is in prison now, Miranda. He’s no threat to anyone.”

  “But he put you in the hospital, Henry! Then the fireworks last year—”

  “I stopped that lunatic from bombing the pops concert!”

  “And he practically killed you in the process! And you dragged Tim into the next fight. Goading him on to fight with that horrible bully. I begged you to stay out of it. But no, you had to prove something to Timmy, you had to prove you were a man! And when the horrible bully’s horrible father attacked you, your own son had to come to the rescue! Your own son! You needed a ten-year-old boy to save you.”

  “He and a few other people.”

  “How do you think that made him feel?”

  “He was proud of himself. He was proud of me. We were proud of each other.”

  “And now he’s brooding about death! No twelve-year-old boy should be brooding about death.”

  “I did.”

  “Great, so it’s in the genes. You’ve got him both ways, nature and nurture. This is so fucked up. He could be dead himself now while we sit around talking about it.”

  “I’ll find him, I told you that.”

  “You better,” she said, and disconnected. She would have preferred to hang up on me, I’m sure, like in the good old days of primitive technology, when you could slam an actual phone down on its cradle for dramatic effect. Miranda had always been fond of dramatic effect.

  But maybe she was right. I tried to shield the kids from the darker aspects of my job but I hadn’t been doing so well lately. It wasn’t a problem for Caroline—she sailed through life’s complications and difficulties like a yacht through kelp. Tim was the swimmer thrashing in the wake behind her, tangled up in the seaweed.

  ***

  The GPS app located Tim at the site of the Thayer cottage arson. He had spent time there with Debbie Gibson before Caroline swept in and appropriated her. Tim was a year younger than the girls. Which had proved socially calamitous during the school year. Girls their age liked older boys. Carrie and Debbie were in high school now, which made the gap even wider. A lot of Tim’s happiest memories had gone up in smoke two weeks ago. No wonder the world seemed unstable to him now.

  I pulled into the dirt driveway. Tim turned around at the engine note of my cruiser, then resumed his study of the ruins. A scorched chimney stood out of the ashes and rubble amid the lingering stink of burned carpet and plastic.

  I walked up and stood beside him. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “You okay? Your mom was worried.”

  “She always worries. She’s a ‘watch out-sayer,’ like Granma says. I bet Granma wasn’t like that.”

  “No, she’d let us do pretty much anything. Climb rocks in Central Park, ride our bikes to school on the city streets…even ride the subway!”

  “Granma’s sick, isn’t she?”

  I tried to catch his eye, but he was looking down studying the incinerated skeleton of a sleeper couch. “Granma has Parkinson’s Disease, but she was diagnosed when she was seventy, so it moves more slowly. She’s got a lot of good years left.”

  “But she could die tomorrow.”

  “We could all die tomorrow.”

  “Like the dinosaurs, when that meteor hit.”

  “Or we could do it to ourselves. We have plenty of bombs.”

  “Plus global warming.”

  “Right. Who needs a stupid meteor?”

  He gave me a quick look and a wan smile; no laugh.

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I don’t want you to die or Mom to die or Carrie, or…anyone. Except maybe Jake Sauter. Just kidding.”

  “Immortality would be weird, though. Think about it. Whole clusters of friends and family would keep dying while you stayed young. You’d start to think of other people the way we think about pets. You know—they’re a tragedy waiting to happen, don’t get too attached. Plus it would be hard remembering everything, once you’d lived for three or four hundred years. I have trouble with what I did on my birthday fifteen years ago. Where was I on June fifth, 1735? Forget about it.”

  He brightened a little. “Like they say on police shows.” He put on a gruff interrogator’s voice—“Where were you on the night of June fifth?”

  I liked his tough-guy-interrogator voice. “I have no alibi for any time during the Austrian Succession.”

&
nbsp; “But what if everybody lived forever?”

  “I don’t know…It would be pretty crowded by now.”

  “Yeah.” He kicked at the ashes. Something that had been the leg of a table crumbled. “Why would someone burn this place down?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It was so nice.”

  “Yeah, I know you guys liked it.”

  “Debbie really liked it a lot.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe people are just bad.”

  “Some of them.”

  “Most of them, I think. Like whoever killed Mr. Macy.”

  “Your grandfather used to say ninety percent of everything is bad. Finding the other ten percent—that’s the secret of life.”

  “I guess.”

  “Look, there’s plenty of good people. It’s just…the bad people make more noise. They get in the newspaper. They burn stuff down. You don’t get in the newspaper for building this cottage, or spending time here and enjoying it. That’s not news. Can you see the headline? LOCAL COTTAGE REMAINS INTACT WHILE CHILDREN INSIDE ENJOY ANOTHER UNEVENTFUL SUMMER AFTERNOON.”

  He laughed. “Details at eleven!”

  “I’m sure everyone would tune in for that one.”

  He looked up at me, serious again. “You’re going to catch whoever did this. Aren’t you?”

  “It doesn’t bother you that I have to deal with this awful stuff all the time?”

  “I think it’s cool.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  His next question took me by surprise. “Do we go somewhere when we die?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so.”

  “Debbie says we do. She’s Catholic.”

  “She may be right. Most people in the world agree with her.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “We’ll all find out, eventually.”

  “Are you sick too?”

  “No! I just meant—it’s…who else is sick?”

  “Granma Flo and Granny Mary. And Carl at school has MS. And, I don’t know. Lots of people. They were all fine until they got sick and then bang. You could get sick, too.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “You better.”

  I could hear the echo of his mother’s voice in that mock threat. Nature and nurture. I tipped my head and touched two fingers to my forehead. “Okay, boss.”

  Another silence slipped between us: birds, distant cars, wind shuffling the leaves. Finally: “If everyone just dies and there’s no Heaven or anything, what’s the point? Why bother doing anything?”

  I felt like we’d arrived at the heart of the matter. And I felt a quick flush of relief. This had nothing to do with my profession. This was just the basic material of being human. “Well,” I said, “you have to figure that one out for yourself. For me it’s just…I feel like it’s a privilege to be here on this gorgeous planet for a while. Breathe that air. It’s so soft and pure, you can taste the ocean on it. Look around, it’s beautiful out here. You get to enjoy it.”

  “I guess.”

  “Would you skip a ride at Disney World, just because it ended?”

  “No.”

  “So take the ride. It beats standing on the line. It’s like Warren Zevon said—”

  “Who’s Warren Zevon?”

  “Okay, my bad. You need hear some Warren Zevon. He was a singer-songwriter. He died of cancer and instead of getting all these awful treatments and losing his hair and being miserable, he decided to walk away from the doctors and do what he loved doing. In his case that meant…recording an album. So he made one last record, and then he died. It’s a pretty good record, too.”

  “So what did he say?”

  ‘“Enjoy every sandwich.’ That was his deathbed advice. Speaking of which, I’m hungry and Provisions is open. Want to get one of those sandwiches Warren was talking about? We’ll throw the bike in the car.”

  “Okay, but that doesn’t change anything. We’re still going to die and Debbie still dumped me and Mom’s still mad.”

  “And you haven’t even started your summer reading yet! And one of the books is The Pearl. You’re going to have to get through that book, somehow. Assuming you survive to the ninth grade.”

  “You’re supposed to be cheering me up.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I hate everything.”

  “Yeah, it’s a crappy deal. So…I’m having the Sicilian tuna, what about you?”

  “Turkey Terrific. And that iced tea they make with the mint.”

  I ruffled his hair. “Kid, you’re turning into a regular existentialist—Camus style.”

  “Who was that?”

  “A philosopher who thought a lot about this stuff. But he had fun, and he noticed things. He loved life, despite the crappy deal. In his notebooks one day he wrote, hold on let me get this right, because I really love this quote…“In the evening, the gentleness of the world on the bay. There are days when the world lies and days when it tells the truth. It is telling the truth this evening—with what sad and insistent beauty.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “He died in a car crash at age forty-seven. He was just four years older than I am now. The worst part was he was walking to the train station, and he had his ticket in his pocket. Some friends drove by and offered him a lift. Half an hour later they were all dead.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Yeah…and all kinds of mean stupid people live into their nineties, making everyone miserable.”

  “That’s so…not fair.”

  “Yeah.”

  I picked up his bike and we started back to my cruiser, rolling it beside us. When we got to the car, Tim said “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  “You will be. Trust me.”

  “Just be careful driving.”

  “If I speed I’ll write myself a ticket.” He laughed. “What?”

  “Granma always says ‘don’t beat yourself up.’ But if you beat yourself up, it would be police brutality!”

  “I could get in trouble for that.”

  We flattened the backseats, jammed the bike inside and drove to town. By the time we got to Provisions, Tim had gotten his appetite back.

  We took our sandwiches out onto the wharf—the ice cream shop had wooden benches set up on a deck overlooking the harbor. I could sense Tim’s mood darkening again. Had I said something wrong? It was impossible to know. Maybe it had nothing to do with me. There were no rules for parenting, despite the noise of competing experts, who all disagreed with each other anyway.

  Our pediatrician had just shrugged. “Make it up as you go along,” he said. “That’s what everyone else does.”

  ***

  I dropped Tim back at Miranda’s and drove out toward ’Sconset. I felt inept and trapped and frustrated. The feeling had been growing since Dave Carmichael’s first phone call, and my knee-jerk refusal of the job at the AG’s office. It was impossible, I understood that—Miranda would never had let me move the kids to Boston, and I wasn’t walking out on them.

  That was my dad’s move—ditching his family on Christmas Eve, leaving nothing behind but a present for my mother picked out by his new girlfriend.

  There’s a photograph of the two of us on one of his movie locations. They were shooting in Brooklyn and I’d been let out of school for the day to watch. I was my son’s age in that picture. Dad was the age I am now. I’m looking up at him adoringly; he’s smiling down on me. He was the King of Hollywood then—one of the kings, anyway, at the pinnacle of his success. I remember the story in Time magazine about the making of that film, and the pull quote from him about the unknown Italian bombshell who played the female lead: “She’s a star because I say she’s a star.”

  That’s where he was at that moment in his life. Where was I, now? Struggling to make ends me
et, giving up on them ever overlapping even for a moment, running the cop shop in what Franny and my brother derided as a tiny backwater, my writing reduced to a hobby, living in an apartment so small I didn’t even have separate bedrooms for the kids.

  But my son had a father. That’s what I told myself: not a super-star who blew into his life the way Elton John arrived in Las Vegas for lavish two week engagements, but a real father. My daughter was going to be one of the only women I’d ever met who didn’t have some kind of screwed up relationship with her father—at least that was my goal, and I was working on it every day. I was proud of it. Those kids needed me. And I needed them.

  I read a fashionable essay on fatherhood when Miranda was pregnant with Caroline. The man described a day at the playground with his wife and daughter. The little girl fell off the jungle-jim and ran past him screaming “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” He might as well have been a fireplug. It broke his heart. I knew even then, before my daughter was born, when she was just a blur on the ultrasound screen that I never wanted that to happen to me.

  But here was the alternative: an endless set of self-extinguishing sacrifices for the sake of my children, the two of them presiding over the center of my life while my own ambitions and desires and needs were exiled to the outskirts, junked and forgotten. I could follow my ambitions and wreck their lives or stay put and wreck my own. There was no way out, no ingenious escape plan.

  This was the trick where Houdini drowns.

  Sacrifice is supposed to be noble. You’re supposed to feel good about it, pure and strong and righteous. I felt bad and puny and resentful.

  I shook my head hard, as if there was water in my ears. Something bad in there, a tinnitus of unseemly self-pity. Poor me—healthy white American male living on the richest island in the richest country in the world. Snap out of it!

  I still had a job to do, an important one with actual rules and metrics and I was good at it, and I’d proved that fact over and over again.

  Settle for that, pal, it’s pretty good.

  I turned the cruiser around and headed back to the station. Mark Toland was waiting for me.

  ***

  Barnaby Toll had set him up in front of a video monitor and he was watching the blackmail footage when I arrived. Toland hit pause and stood to shake my hand. He was six-foot-two, exactly my height, but he had the lean, loose-jointed look of a long-distance runner. His clothes hung off him in a casual spill—UCLA tee-shirt under what looked like a thousand dollars’ worth of gray Italian silk suit jacket, designer jeans, and black leather dress loafers with no socks. The tan and the pair of sunglasses stuck into the crew neck of his tee-shirt completed the GQ photo layout image of a young movie director.