Satisfied there had been no electrical or structural damage, the lieutenant was leaving.
“It’s those goddamn kids. I don’t know what more I can do,” Neil called through the closing door. He locked it. Gordon had been filling a trash bag with the cans and bottles. He and Neil watched the smaller truck pull into the street, where it held back traffic so the hook and ladder could turn out of the lot.
“Neil, it was the old man. Cootie, he’s the one who set the fire. I saw him.”
“You saw him? You saw him set it?”
“Well, no, not setting it. But he was right there. I was trying to get the hose around and I saw him. He was running into the woods.”
“Did you tell them that?”
“No. I thought I should tell you first.”
“Well, that’s good. That’s really fucking good,” Neil said with a deep sigh.
“It’s a mess out there, huh? But it shouldn’t take too long to clean up. I can get started first thing in the morning.”
Neil looked out at the street.
“At least you don’t have to shut down, that’s one good thing,” Gordon continued.
Neil turned, face twisted, his eyes red and wet. “Forget about Cootie. You didn’t see him. He wasn’t there. He had nothing to do with this, all right? You got that straight?”
Gordon nodded.
“You’re not as thick as you want me to think, are you, Gloomis?” That slow smile leaked from Neil’s mouth. “You want something, don’t you. What? What is it? How much?”
“I don’t want anything,” he said, drawing back.
“Then why the fuck didn’t you let it burn?”
He didn’t understand men like his brother and Neil, he thought as he walked home. Didn’t they know how close to the edge they walked? Couldn’t they feel the frenzy, like particles of mad, fatal energy charging the very air they breathed?
The next day, Eddie Chapman was sitting in his truck outside the Market. One of his laborers was with him, a burly young fellow with a thin ponytail halfway down his back.
Probably here to clean the mess out back, Gordon thought as he reached to open the door.
“Hey! Hey, Loomis!” Eddie called, climbing down from the truck. He and the laborer walked toward him.
“How’re you doing, Eddie?” He smiled and held the door open for them.
“Shut the door,” Eddie said.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“You’re through. You’re done. You don’t need to go in there,” Eddie said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re fired, plain and simple.”
“I don’t understand.”
Serena and June watched from their registers, arms folded and tense.
“What’s to understand? You don’t work here anymore.”
“But why? I mean . . . why?”
“Jesus! I gotta spell it out for you? It’s like one thing after another.”
Gordon opened the door, and Eddie’s arm blocked him. “I want to talk to Neil,” he said, pushing past. He hurried to the back of the store, past Leo, who continued splitting chicken breasts with his cleaver. With the men right behind, he knocked on the door and Neil opened it, startled to see him.
“What? What’re you doing here? What do you want?”
“Why are you firing me, Neil? What did I do?”
“People are nervous. They don’t feel safe anymore.” Neil peered around him at his brother-in-law.
“Why? What did I do?”
“Jesus Christ!” Eddie growled. “You almost burned the whole fucking place down.”
“No! It wasn’t me. Neil, you know—”
“All I know is I don’t want any trouble. And you don’t, either, do you, Gloom? Besides, it’s not like I even hired you in the first place. And Eddie, he didn’t know, so, What the hell, I said to myself, we’ll give it a go, see what happens. But after last night, Christ, I mean, this is a whole new ball game. And it’s not just my employees, I got customers to think of here. Public safety, you know? Here. Take it.” He stuffed a wad of bills into Gordon’s hand. “Tide you over, okay?”
Dullness prevailed. His appetite was gone. Even his vision was off. Everything seemed murky, as if he were peering through a soiled curtain. Sunshine swelled in the windows, but the little house stayed cold and gray inside. Where once he had found peace in this stillness, now there was a constant watery rush in the air. The phone rang unanswered. He opened the front door just wide enough to get the mail. The roses were dropping leaves. Mrs. Jukas went back and forth to appointments in a MediVan. Loose papers and fast-food detritus littered both their lawns. Is that all that would be left? Who in the end would care? His sleep was riddled with distorted faces and frantic prison voices. In last night’s dream he sat naked on Mrs. Jukas’s porch, masturbating while women and children ran off screaming. Janine Walters was the only one who stayed. She watched with an indulgent smile, then began to pant with him, moaning as he pushed away from her bed, then looked down at her cold, staring eyes and her open mouth’s blunted scream.
The phone rang, and once again the machine clicked on. “Gordon! If you’re there, will you please pick up?” Delores said, and he cringed. “Please! I’m so worried about you. All right, that’s it. I’m coming—”
He picked up the phone and told her he wasn’t feeling too well, that was all. She wanted to come right over. She’d stop at the deli for some chicken soup. Was there anything else he wanted or needed? She’d be going right by the drugstore. No, no, he tried to explain. It wasn’t that he was sick. He just hadn’t felt like going anywhere. Or seeing anyone.
“Oh. Oh, all right,” she said quickly.
There was silence, then they both spoke at once.
“I just need—”
“That’s okay, I—”
“—to be alone.”
“—understand.”
Jada came twice to his door, but he would not answer it.
“Gordon!” she called this last time. “Hey, Gordon, you in there? It’s me, Jada. I just gotta ask you something, that’s all.”
He heard her breathing against the door. “Jesus . . .” She sighed and then went away.
His sister-in-law called and left a message, inviting him and Delores out to dinner next Friday night. He called back and said he couldn’t on Friday. She was disappointed. It would be their only free weekend for a while. And then Dennis would be away for a week at the International Oral Surgeons’ Symposium.
“In Bermuda.”
“Bermuda?”
“Yes, it’s one of my favorite places,” Lisa said. “But this year it’s going to be seminars all day long, even some at night, Dennis said, so he doesn’t want me to come. He says it’ll just be too frustrating if I’m out on the beach while he’s stuck in a conference room somewhere.”
He hung up feeling even worse. So now Dennis was going on trips with Jilly Cross. He felt guilty in his silence, and weak. He had tried talking to his brother. He couldn’t say any more to Jilly Cross without enraging Dennis further. Life was going terribly wrong, but he didn’t know how to make it right. The grass below his skeletal rose canes was covered with blighted leaves. Of course his father’s roses would die with the son’s touch. There had been no place for him then, and still there was not. Even in Fortley he had never felt this helpless. He only had to get through each day there. The rules had been basic, primitive in some respects. His expectations had been foolish. It was far too complex here. And insidious. Nothing was the way it was supposed to be.
That night he lay in bed, unable to sleep. He reached for the phone and set it on his chest. After a few minutes he lifted the receiver and pushed in the glowing numbers, all but the last one. He hung up. A few minutes later he tried again but still could not push the last button of Delores’s number. In the morning he woke up startled by the phone looming at eye level, rising and falling with each breath.
CHAPTER 17
“Gordon!” Delores
said when he finally opened the door. She had never seen him unshaven. The whiskery stubble made him look old and worn, his eyes faded. “Sorry for all that banging, but I’ve been so worried. I just stopped by the Market. They said you don’t work there anymore.”
He nodded. “Neil fired me. A week and a half ago.” He shrugged, shaking his head as if unable to say more.
“That selfish, no-good bastard,” she blurted over his low voice as he tried to explain how shocked he’d been, too ashamed to tell anyone. Not even his brother. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. As it was, Dennis didn’t want anything to do with him.
Now wait, it wasn’t the disaster he thought it was, she said, then felt like a hypocrite, remembering her own devastation at being fired. But of course Gordon said nothing. People lost jobs for one reason or another all the time, she continued. He’d find another, probably one that paid a whole lot better than the Market had. He was staring at the floor. “Gordon?”
“I’m sorry. I’m not very good at things like this.”
“Things like what?” she asked too quickly, the old dread numbing her heart.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Everything, I guess.”
“What do you mean, everything? Nothing’s everything, Gordon. Nothing is.”
He looked out the side window saying nothing as she drove. Just getting him out of that stale little house had seemed achievement enough, but now, miles from Collerton, her excitement grew. They never went anywhere together. He wouldn’t spend the night at her apartment, so she always went to his house. Though he never said as much, it was obvious she was expected to leave after they had made love. He would turn on all the lights, then slip downstairs to wait while she dressed. Their last time together she had pretended to be asleep. He came back up, gently nudged her awake, and said it was getting late to be driving home alone. Yes, she agreed, it was late, and she was too tired to drive, so she’d leave in the morning. No, that wasn’t a good idea, he said, then just stood there, holding out her clothes. Embarrassed and hurt, she left quickly, only to feel even more castigated when he didn’t call or answer his phone these last ten days. The silent schism had always been Albert’s most effective punishment. And the cruelest. Yell, slam doors, swear, but don’t just walk away. It made her too desperate, too willing to put up with the next disregard, and the next. But that hadn’t been the case at all, she now realized, relief bearing her fears away.
Taking only back roads, she had to keep slowing down. With every turn, she expected him to protest or at least ask where they were going. When she came onto the beach road in Hampton, she rolled down the windows. The tide was low, the warm, boggy marsh smell that filled the car almost obscene with its rich, rank ripeness.
“Isn’t that wonderful?” She took a deep breath, but he didn’t answer. “You’re not mad, are you? I thought you needed a change, that’s all. You know, seeing the same thing all the time, the city streets and all the same people.”
“Oh no, I just can’t believe I forgot this.” He strained to see over the white seawall along the curving shoreline road. “I forgot all about the ocean. I always tried to remember things. Things in rooms, rooms in other people’s houses, their yards even. Kids’ bikes, the way I used to walk to school, where everyone sat in homeroom and all the other classes. And my mother’s clothes. I used to try and remember even what dresses she had and the songs my father used to hum to himself when he was working on something. Like something for my mother, he’d go”—here now, Gordon hummed “Here Comes the Bride” so sweetly that she ached for him—“or if it got really complicated and he was having a hard time, he’d always go”—he hummed a frantic rendition of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.” “It was like an exercise. A discipline. Because remembering was all I had left, and if I forgot, I’d be losing part of . . . I don’t even know what.”
Yourself, she thought as his voice trailed off. She pulled into the public parking lot in Rye. The tide was out a great distance, exposing large rocks she didn’t remember seeing before. She and Albert used to walk on the beach at night when they first started dating. Did he take Katie here? she wondered in a flare of jealousy. But what did it matter? She had never been happier than now, at this very moment. Gordon was the dearest, most honorable man she had ever known. And there was no more beautiful place than this, this beach at dusk. Bands of pink and lavender glowed with the horizon across the wet sand. Behind them, the rose-colored sunset streaked the sky with fiery light. Straggles of people walked and jogged along the beach. Two boys took turns throwing a tennis ball that a bearish black dog chased, crashing time after time into the surf, then galloped back, wet fur flapping. A small yellow plane was flying up the coast. It dipped over the low waves then lifted suddenly, skimming the treetops on Straw’s Point before it disappeared.
“I forgot about those, too.” Gordon pointed out to the Isles of Shoals, where the first darkness loomed behind the distant islands.
She suggested they get out and walk, and he surprised her by saying yes. She left her shoes in the car, but he kept his on. They were halfway down the beach when the first rim of moonrise appeared over the water. Astonished, Gordon stopped. “Look at that! I never saw that before,” he said. All along the way, others paused to watch the bloodred ascent until it was finally full in the pale night sky. They began walking again. She tripped a little and caught his arm. Apologizing, she pulled back. “That’s okay,” he said quietly.
“I thought I was going to fall.”
“Better hold on, then.” He lifted his elbow. “There’s a lot of holes.”
“Kids dig them,” she said, easing her hand into the crook of his arm.
He must have been eleven or twelve the last time he saw the ocean, he said. He used to love coming to the beach with his parents. His father’s back, that must have been why they stopped. Seeing how stiffly Gordon was walking, she realized he was trying to keep sand from getting in his shoes. “Here.” She plucked an egg-shaped white stone from the wet sand and gave it to him.
“What’s this?” He seemed genuinely puzzled.
“Just a rock.”
“Am I supposed to do something with it?”
“Feel it. See how smooth it is?” He looked at it a moment, agreed it was smooth, then gave it back. As they walked, he kept slapping his hands together to get the sticky sand off. Silly that that should annoy her so, but it did. She reminded herself how artificial his existence had been. Now he was wiping his hands up and down the sides of his pants.
When they reached the long, high wall of riprap, he came to a sudden stop. “I’ve got sand in my shoes,” he said almost accusingly.
“Take them off, then. You’ll feel beachier. See!” She gave a quick little jig in the sand.
“I can’t,” he said with a stricken look.
“Sure you can. Go sit over on one of the rocks there.”
“No, I never go barefoot. I have to have something on my feet. I need to.” He began trudging back, his gait even stiffer.
“You didn’t wear shoes on the beach when you were a kid, did you?” she called, laughing as she tried to keep up, then regretted it when he didn’t answer.
In the car he apologized and tried to explain that in prison being barefoot or in any way half-dressed left a man too vulnerable. To make him feel better, she was telling him how painful an experience the beach had been for her as an overweight teenager in a bathing suit. The senior-class picnic had been the worst, an absolute agony, walking around all day wrapped up in the biggest beach towel she’d been able to find. “I spent more time shopping for that beach towel than I did the bathing suit,” she called over the wheel. “Then all of a sudden I hear, ‘It’s Delores the horse!’ and Bucky Dean runs by and yanks off my towel and I stood there feeling so exposed and just wanting to die.” Funny how those things don’t matter anymore, she said. Nothing did, not even his silence, she thought, in such a high state of anticipation that the thirty-five miles back flew by.
She tiptoed up and saw the light under the bathroom door. He was still in there. Passing his bedroom, she thought of taking off her clothes and slipping into his bed but then knew what a mistake that would be. Sometimes her slightest advance could repel him. It had been the same with Albert, except that his prudery had been a vital part of the relationship, his moral moat against their adultery. As long as she was the one always breaching the barriers, he could be the vanquished, helplessly errant husband. Gordon’s reserve was innate, but also self-protective. Maybe all men were like that. Or maybe there was something in her that made them so defensive.
The doorbell was ringing. Opening the door, Delores was shocked by Jada’s appearance. Her hollow face was a rash of zits. She looked skinnier, her arms and legs all bone. “Hi!” Jada said, but the old breeziness was forced and weary. Delores asked if she was sick. Jada said she had been, some kind of flu or something, but she was better now. Delores said she looked as if she’d lost a lot of weight. Jada said she’d been too sick to eat very much.
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