When the two o’clock bells chimed, Jack absently reached inside the paper bag and removed one of the sandwiches Sally Richards had made. Pimento-cheese on white bread, crusts removed.
He heard the knock on the door.
“I’m looking for room two-seventeen.”
Jack turned around. “This is two-seventeen.”
“Are you Jack Owens?”
Jack put down the sandwich. “That’s right.”
He wasn’t very old, middle thirties probably, about average height and weight, thinning blond hair, gray suit, no tie, hands tucked into his pockets. He looked like someone who’d been selling insurance most of his life, or he might have been the parent of some student and taken the wrong turn in the hallway and was trying to get his bearings. He said he was Detective Hopewell, asked, “Can I come in?” closed the door behind him and moved slowly into the office, looking around at the bookshelves, the VCR, and monitor.
Jack watched silently, thinking only the worst while at the same time his mind raced desperately for some reasonable explanation for a detective to come to his office in the middle of the day. In the three seconds it took Detective Hopewell to walk inside, Jack decided that his car must have been stolen…or Draper, down the hall, had finally had that heart attack…that someone was playing a practical joke on him…But the look on Hopewell’s face wasn’t the look that went with a sick colleague or a stolen car. The look on his face wasn’t a joke.
The back of Jack’s neck grew cold and damp. He had the dreadful, slippery feeling that happens when the phone rings at three in the morning or when it doesn’t ring by noon or when the bed is still empty at dawn. He had a taste in his mouth that started in his stomach and crawled, dark and acrid, up the back of his throat and lay sour on his tongue, atavistic and terrifying. He felt it before he knew he was feeling it. Before the detective said another word, Jack’s eyes went to the picture on the desk and he breathed, “Danny.”
“Danny Owens, is he your son?” That’s all Hopewell said, as though that was all there was to say.
“Yes. Danny’s my son.” Jack’s mouth had gone dry, his throat was burning.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this.” Hopewell put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. He was pressing down hard, as though Jack might leap up and out of the room. “Your son is dead. He was found by the ruins in Fairmont Park. Around twelve noon. It looks like suicide.”
III
The morgue smelled of death and chemicals and pre-embalmed odors. All of life’s air had been sucked from this place. It stank of necrosis. Jack turned away from the steel slab with the white sheet. He stared at the empty gray wall across the room, at the floor with the black scuff marks. He turned his face to the ceiling, where lights reflected dull and cold, and when he managed to move he found himself standing in the corner shaking his head, crossing his arms around his chest and holding on to himself.
Hopewell pulled the sheet back and Jack saw the body, the blue-faced body, Danny—no, not really Danny. Only what remained of Danny.
Hopewell asked, “Is this your son?”
“Yes,” Jack said, “he’s my son,” and pushed the dark, curly hair away from Danny’s forehead, ran the palm of his hand across Danny’s smooth cheekbones. He traced the contours of Danny’s lips and caressed the strong jaw that covered the vulnerability. That was when he saw the narrow purple welt around Danny’s neck. “What’s this?”
“It’s from the plastic bag.”
Jack held Danny’s face in his hands. “Was there…was there a note?”
“No note,” Hopewell answered. “He might have left one at home. I need you to call me if you find one.” A moment later he said, “I’m sorry.”
But Jack did not hear any sorrow in Hopewell’s voice, only the dispassionate tone, empty of inflection, at odds with the words he said. There wasn’t even the appearance of sorrow, or sympathy, not in the voice, not in Hopewell’s eyes or the expression on his face. But there was something there, not that Jack could identify it, and whatever it was, it was disturbing to see in the face of a man watching you stand over the body of your dead son, disturbing to hear in his voice. Hopewell said, “His bike was next to him.” Jack felt his stomach turn. He wanted to say something. He wanted to ask questions, but he didn’t know what to ask. He didn’t know what to think. He wasn’t taking it in. His head felt as though it had filled with helium and was floating away from his body, like when you have a fever and everything seems to be happening far away and a beat too slowly.
Hopewell asked, “Is there someone—Do you want to call your wife?”
“How did you find him?”
“A woman found him and called us.”
“What woman?”
“Just a woman. Her story holds up, if you’re thinking she had anything—”
“Her name. Who is she?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you.”
“We’re talking about Danny. We’re talking about my—”
“I know. But she has a right to her privacy. That’s our procedure.”
“I have a right to know what sort of person found my son.”
“I’m sorry,” was all Hopewell said.
“I want him out of here.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to wait till after the autopsy.”
“What do you mean autopsy?”
“It’s procedure.”
“He’s dead.”
“We have to follow procedure. I’m sorry, Dr. Owens.”
“When can I have Danny?” Jack wanted to hold his boy and cradle him, feel the weight of Danny’s body. He wanted to drop to the floor and cry. But he wouldn’t cry. Not here.
“It depends on the medical examiner,” Hopewell explained. “We share him with three other towns. It shouldn’t be any later than the day after tomorrow, maybe sooner.”
“I want my son’s clothes.”
“I have to keep them.”
“They’re Danny’s.”
“I need them for forensic evidence. Look, I know this isn’t easy for you, Dr. Owens. I’ll get them back to you just as soon as possible.”
“Don’t wrinkle his jacket.” Jack stroked Danny’s head. “He was very particular about that.”
“Sure. Do you have anyone to drive you home?”
“I want him out of here.”
Late in the afternoon, Jack drove out to the ruins. He’d gone home and picked through all the obvious places, but Danny had left no note, no explanation, and there was nowhere else to go but the ruins, to hold one of Danny’s shirts against his heart, stand on top of the hill where Danny had spent the last minutes of his life and try to sense Danny’s presence and the traces left in the wake of his death.
Jack stared at the cloudless sky above the sycamores that leaned lush and heavy over the riverbank. He thought of Danny sitting here alone, crouched against the wall, hidden by the growth of Queen Anne’s lace, thinking his last thoughts alone. The chill in the air must have made him shiver.
Jack knew the look on Danny’s face—serious and solemn, the way he looked when there was something on his mind that he had to talk about and couldn’t get started. He always got around to it, though—they talked about everything. Well, Jack thought, obviously not. A plastic bag over his head? Not something a fifteen-year-old kid just comes up with in a minute. How long had he been thinking about it? And what the hell was Jack looking at all that time? He thought he could read that face within an inch of its life. So how the hell did he miss the look of suicide?
Jack tried to remember each detail freeze-framed against the past two weeks. Their fifteen minutes at breakfast, the few nights when they ate supper together. What Danny said. How Danny looked.
He looked the way he always looked. He looked like Danny. Or maybe Jack didn’t know what he was seeing.
They’d had dinner together the night before last, but Jack hadn’t seen it. When he reached across the table to push the hair away from Danny’s eyes, Danny didn’t look any di
fferent. He didn’t do anything different. It embarrassed him to have Jack fuss over him, made him feel self-conscious, but Jack knew Danny liked the attention, just like he always did.
When they had breakfast just a few days ago, Danny wasn’t eating, just pushing his cereal around in the bowl. He asked, “Which is more important, Dad, honesty or loyalty?”
What was in Danny’s voice?
What was the expression on Danny’s face?
What had Jack seen? What did he see now?
Danny was sitting at the kitchen table looking into a bowl of soggy cereal on Saturday morning, not speaking. Yawning. Looking tired.
“You wouldn’t be tired from studying too hard?” Jack said to him.
No answer.
“Too tired to talk?”
“I guess.”
“My working late at the office doesn’t give you license to stay up all night.”
“I know when to go to sleep,” Danny said. “I’m fifteen, you know.”
What was in the voice? What did Jack hear?
Danny sounded annoyed but he’d sounded annoyed plenty of other times.
They were eating supper at the drive-in on Route 41, Thursday night. Danny inhaled his cheeseburger…They were eating supper at the drive-in four days later, Danny left half his burger on the plate. Jack never monitored Danny’s behavior, he didn’t that night, either. He assumed Danny had eaten late in the day.
A week before that, they were sitting at breakfast, Danny wasn’t yawning. He ate his cereal, not with great enthusiasm, breakfast for him was never an official meal. They were talking about pitching in the sectionals. Danny said he was nervous. Jack told him, “If you aren’t nervous, you aren’t ready.” Danny offered up a smile and ran to catch the school bus.
Jack leaned against the cement pillars. He looked down at the three terraced patios and the old stone steps descending in long leaps toward the road. The ruins had always been a safe place. This was where he’d had the courage to speak to Anne for the first time. Before they lived in the loft on Crosby Street. Before they had Danny. This was the place where he’d brought Danny when the two of them moved to Gilbert after Anne left.
He wasn’t aware of walking, but now Jack was standing at the side of the road atop the river’s muddy bank, where sunlight weaved through the loam and wildflowers, where he and Danny played catch when Danny was five and afraid of the ball. “It won’t hurt you. Don’t be scared.” Or when they sat in the shade of the sycamore trees and the shadows of the grand decaying façade and Jack told Danny stories, when Danny was still young enough to fit on Jack’s lap.
“Old story or new?”
“Old,” Danny said.
“Any requests?”
“Casey.”
“‘Casey at the Bat’?”
Danny nodded his head emphatically.
“But that’s such a sad story. Don’t you remember? Mighty Casey strikes out. There’s no joy in Mudville. You don’t want a disappointing story on such a pretty day.”
“It’s not disappointing if you root for the other team,” Danny answered.
Jack couldn’t hold him tightly enough when he said that, or love him enough. He would laugh a little and feel not only pride and astonishment but wonder.
How did Danny think of that? How did he find the loophole?
This was the place where Jack had held his little boy and watched him sleep. The place where he told him stories and recited doggerel. Where Jack made the plans parents make with the fearless faith of the convert. Plans that stretch across time. This was the place where Danny chose to die.
What had he been showing that Jack hadn’t seen? Jack thought: Why would Danny want to kill himself?
Danny pitched in the high school sectionals just two weeks ago. He stood on the mound, tall and broad-shouldered, staring intently at the catcher the way he’d seen major league pitchers do, looking calm. Jack remembered the ball leaving Danny’s hand and the batter swinging late and weakly, the ground ball finding the hole between shortstop and third, trickling into the outfield. A soft, seeing-eye single scoring the winning run. Danny’s team lost 2–1.
Danny seemed to take the loss in stride. He didn’t cry, not in front of his teammates and not later riding home in the car. “It was my game to win or lose and I put the winning run on base.” He said he was disappointed. He said he’d wanted to take the team all the way. But he’d made his best pitch and the kid put his bat on the ball and it took a bad bounce.
“I’d say it was the best game I ever saw you pitch,” Jack told him. “I’m very proud of you.”
“I wanted to pitch in the finals.”
“There’s always next year,” Jack promised him. “And you’ll be even better and, believe it or not, bigger and stronger. About my height, I bet. And another five pounds heavier, easily, maybe ten.”
“I really wanted to win the championship,” Danny answered.
“Making it to the sectionals isn’t too shabby.” But Jack knew that Danny thought big. He thought he was good enough to take the team all the way.
Danny stared out the car window for a little while before he said, “Wait till next year,” with the same equanimity he’d shown during the game. Not unlike the little boy who’d found the loophole in “Casey at the Bat.”
Jack thought: But maybe there wasn’t a loophole to losing the game, or Danny couldn’t find one. Maybe he never found the loophole when his mother left him. Maybe there was less composure than he let on. Maybe it was all a show because that’s what he thought people expected of him. What he thought Jack expected of him.
Jack wondered: Was there that much pressure on him? Was there that much sorrow inside him?
Jack wondered: Was it enough to make him want to kill himself? Danny had stopped sleeping and lost his appetite—because he lost the ballgame? It wasn’t that important to him.
Jack sat in his car, rested his chin on the steering wheel and watched the blue shadows drop and lengthen along the ruins and across the mottled ground. He began to cry. He shut his eyes and raised his head. The tears ran hot against his face and his neck and made him tremble. He wanted to kick Danny’s ass for killing himself. He wanted to reverse time, like rewinding a tape, and step back into the past and pull Danny back from the dead. He wanted to push past whatever secret silence had lived inside Danny, feeding on him. Push past his own failures as a father and make everything all right; to go back and see beyond Danny’s talk, beyond Danny’s silence.
Last Monday, they were in the kitchen. Danny hadn’t said much. He nudged his toast and eggs out of the way. It was the third morning in a row that he had pushed his breakfast aside. Jack said something about it.
Danny said, “I’m eating, I’m eating.” He rubbed his eyes. His face was pale, it always was when he didn’t get enough sleep.
Mutt started barking. The school bus driver honked his horn. Jack said, “Stick around, I’ll drive you to school.”
“Can’t, Dad.” Danny grabbed his books and bolted. Jack was a little surprised, a little hurt that Danny didn’t want to spend another half hour with him. But, as Danny pointed out only a few days before, he was “fifteen, you know.”
“Too old to be seen with me?” Jack called after him.
Danny didn’t answer.
Jack worked late Monday night and overslept Tuesday morning. He didn’t see Danny—they didn’t have supper together, either.
The following night, they shared a pizza in town. It was a rush job on Jack’s part, he had two days to finish grading final projects. Afterward, he drove Danny home and went back to his office. They didn’t talk much in the restaurant, and neither of them ate much. Jack had the feeling Danny was bothered by something. He’d even asked him. Danny just shook his head.
“It seems there’s something—”
“Nothing’s bothering me. Okay?”
“If there’s—”
“You worry too much.”
It was dark when he walked up the front s
teps to his house and stood on the porch. The reflection of the half-moon floated in the empty windows. Mutt was barking in the backyard, but Jack didn’t move. He didn’t walk around back and he didn’t go inside, not yet. He wasn’t ready for the night without Danny. He could only stand outside for another minute waiting for he-did-not-know-what to happen, before he pushed the front door open with his fingertips, gently, the way you touch a fresh bruise.
He walked over to the piano. There was the book of sheet music Danny had left out. Jack did not touch it. He started to sit down, stopped, started to walk away and stopped again. He rested his fingers on top of the keys and noticed that his hand was shaking. He leaned against the wall and felt his knees knocking together.
The thing to do now was to keep moving. Turn on the lights. Wash up. Feed Mutt. Pour a drink. Keep moving.
He walked though the foyer turning on lights, the living room, turning on lights. He walked past the wall of photographs. The “Danny wall” they called it. The framed arrangement in polished chrome and lacquer and wood. Round and square frames. Frames bought in roadside junk shops and Manhattan boutiques, and street vendors in Florence: Danny on his first two-wheeler. Danny at the Bronx Zoo. Danny at the beach. Danny and Jack at the ballgame. Danny and Jack at the Indiana State Fair. Danny’s first day at school. Danny at his first piano recital, eyes wide, tie a little crooked, hands folded on his lap. And the recital last March at his high school looking handsome in his blue suit, and confident, his eyes deep in concentration…
Jack hurried down the hall to the kitchen like a man pursued. He was sweating. For all he knew he hadn’t stopped sweating since he left the morgue. He turned on the kitchen lights, opened the back door and let Mutt in.
The red light on the answering machine blinked, his message to Danny waiting across the room, like an assassin. Their breakfast dishes, from how many days before, were still in the sink—dried cereal still in the bowl, juice still in the glass. The things Danny had touched and left behind.
Light of Day Page 2