Light of Day

by Jamie M. Saul

  “Someone? One of your friends?” Jack smiled because he knew it wasn’t just one of Danny’s friends.

  “Rachael Tate.”

  “Sure you can.” And a moment later, “It sounds like this might be serious.”

  “We’re just friends.”

  Danny brought Rachael. Irwin got a kick out of it. He said, “You two ain’t about to run off and elope or nothin’?” Which made Rachael blush and Danny give Irwin a punch in the arm.

  Jack liked that Danny brought Rachael along. He watched Danny propped in his seat, his face a soft shadow in the flickering light. Sometimes he looked worried, sometimes confused. But it didn’t matter, as long as he was there…

  When One Plus One ended and only pale white light glowed on the empty screen, while Irwin kept to himself in the projection booth, Jack sat thinking that this was where he belonged. He didn’t understand what that meant, except that he would forever be Danny’s father and Danny would forever have committed suicide and this town, this college, seemed to be the two places where those two facts could best be lived with. He would always be Danny’s father, someone called Dr. Owens, someone called Jack. It was the trapdoor that led, not out, but in, in to his schedule and his office hours and to something that he was incapable at the moment of articulating to himself. Perhaps it had no name, or perhaps he simply didn’t know what to call it, because he could not identify what was happening inside of himself, but he wanted to believe that it was something he was capable of being, who he was now and where he belonged.

  He would have liked to talk this over with Marty, who would look at him, the way he’d been looking at him all summer, nod his head and say, “It sounds like you’re coming to terms with all this.” Or meet Lois at her house and tell her, “It isn’t much, but I think it’s enough.” Lois would consider this for a moment, then tell him, “Sometimes enough is all that you really need.” But when Jack walked back to his office and called Marty, he’d already left. Lois was meeting Tim and two other couples at the country club. She invited Jack to come along, but that was a crowd he was never comfortable with, so he sat at his desk, looking at the photograph of Danny, the face sun-bright and excited, smiling a full vacation smile. Jack wanted to talk to that face. To sit with him one more time, in the morning before the school bus came—“Which is more important, Dad, honesty or loyalty?” To meet him after work and drive out to Mickey’s for steaks and salads, like they used to when he told Danny, “I thought we’d spend spring break in California. We’ll get to see Henry and Suzette. Drive out to the beach.”

  Danny took a sip of his Coke, gave it some thought. “Can I sleep in the tent with Charlie and Oliver?”

  “What kind of vacation would it be otherwise?”

  “Cool.”

  Or tonight, Jack would say, “I think I’ve figured out a way to get through this without you. Do you understand? Is it all right with you?”

  Danny would look at him and smile shyly, making Jack hold him so tight he could feel the beating of his heart.

  Jack thought about the nights when he used to go home and lie on the grass in the backyard and look forward to the next day and the day after that. He would rise up on his elbows and see Danny running with Mutt through the field, the two of them cutting and twisting through the deep green rows, just making it back to the house before Mutt fell panting on the ground and Danny lay in the grass breathing too hard to speak.

  All of that was impossible now, but at least he was able to remember what it felt like, and that was enough to take home with him, enough to bring back to his office in the morning where there was a job to do and idleness was gone; where he could rely on the schedule and the routine to occupy his time for another day, fill the space on the calendar and cross it off.

  There was a sense of revelation to be had from this. He could sit in this room and look at his lecture notes, or the office hours posted on the door, or leave instructions for Robbie and know there was work to be done in the days ahead, time filled. He felt reassured by this, emboldened by it. It was all there in black and white; and he wasn’t in a hurry to leave.

  He called Marty at home, but only the answering machine picked up and he left a perfunctory message. He arranged the memos and papers on his desk, leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. He thought this was who he was now. This was where he belonged.

  The breeze outside smelled of leaves that were getting ready to turn and the summer was losing its grip on the night. Jack walked down the old brick sidewalks, past the boys and girls coming and going outside the dormitories on the old campus, walking in and out of the pale gaslights, slipping into the shadows.

  There was music playing through the windows and telephones ringing, voices calling to each other inside the yellow rooms, and laughter. It made Jack think of the barbecue shack where he and Marty went last July, where they played jazz after dark and served illegal liquor; which made him think of the sound that pushes through a roomful of people and over the music, the ambient mixture of smoke and bodies and voices, the rhythm and cadence of song and conversation bearing its own intimacy and secrets.

  Two girls sat under the lights reading tarot cards and looking very serious. Four skateboarders scooted by. Two other girls came hurrying around the corner giggling and chanting: “Laaa…ree…Haas…kel…Laree…Haas…kel…” at a boy who kept walking away from them, shaking his head, hands over his ears. “Laaa…ree…Laaa…ree…Laaa…ree…”

  Jack walked along the old brick sidewalks while the half-moon leaned against the roof of the dormitory, lifted itself gently, followed him to his car and rode above his shoulder as he drove down Third Street, where the ruins were a black silhouette against the trees and stars.

  The half-moon rode with him as he drove through the streets, where the flicker of televisions was visible and children were coming from front lawns and backyards, while he drove past the old houses with the tired roofs and the screens all had holes in them but they kept the windows open all night, anyway. The moon followed him into the neighborhoods of matchbox houses on cookie-cutter lawns with ceramic gnomes and pink flamingos, and the streets with the large Tudor houses set back from the sidewalk and the live oaks that muted the streetlights, where no one seemed to ever raise a voice.

  The half-moon rode with him while he drove through streets where he was a stranger and streets where he could pick out the houses of his friends.

  Through streets that narrowed into circular drives, and streets that opened into boulevards where a man walked his dog, and a little girl tagged behind her parents, and a couple strolled aimlessly around the corner.

  The half-moon rode over Jack’s shoulder, stayed with him, silently, all the way home, leaving him at the front door, where not very long ago he would have heard Danny at the piano, and Jack would have stopped, just as he reached the porch, and sat on the bottom step listening, careful not to interrupt, careful not to intrude, listening to the swell and sweep of the music, the certainty of each note, and now there was only the mail and the newspaper. Where it was the end of his first day back from the summer.

  Mutt barked, ran the length of the porch and into the house while Jack walked to the kitchen, dropped the newspaper and mail on the table, filled the dog dish with food and went out to the backyard. He wanted to sit in the grass, where he used to see Danny running through the field.

  Tiny winged insects were rising around him, buzzing and cricking their awakening. Fireflies flashed and vanished and appeared again. One, then three, then dozens darting and dotting. Jack felt the dark, cool ground against his bare feet. He could hear the stream running fast against the rocks, the frogs and tree toads croaking and clicking, the night birds whistling, the quick scudding sounds brushing the undergrowth—raccoons most likely, or possums—breaking through the silence. He leaned back on his elbows and looked at the stars thickening in the sky. The air held the scent of a fey dampness.

  Jack could not deny his loneliness, but neither could he deny th
e night, which was not, he realized, a time of rest. It was not something dormant, but a rising, a calling to life; not the end of the day but its extension. Not an absence of daylight but the presence of a persistent vitality, offering its own light, its own sounds and fragrances, its own welkin company.

  Overhead was the ghostly surveillance of an owl, the snap of a twig, a hurried rustling of leaves. A minute later the breeze picked up and all the trees bent like supplicants. A minute after that the air was still and quiet. The moon cast a shadow across his garden. The darkness itself contained texture and substance, and the field no longer looked like a piece of solid ground but like liquid, like Homer’s wine-dark sea. Jack imagined a huge ocean liner floating out of the night, materializing out of the soil, not of this world, but an enchantment. Crimson and yellow. Strung with hundreds of golden lights, a ship built by Fellini. Flares erupt from the deck, their meaning unclear: is it a celebration or a signal of distress? A mass of passengers stands at the railing. There are children and nannies. Sailors and stewards. Everyone is cheering. Or they might be crying. Theirs are the voices of both peril and exultation. The ship appears safely anchored yet there is doubt about the travelers’ well-being. But there is no doubt about the magnificence of the vessel. It is a creation sprung from itself and also of the earth. Mythical and literal. Unreal and actual. It appears to grow in size and is a trick of perspective.

  Jack imagined himself rising to greet it. Standing in wonder of its brilliance and paradox, of wading out into the water until the waves were chest-high and splashed his lips and nose so he could smell the salt and taste it. He would try to take a closer look, but the great ship would only recede, keeping a constant distance as he approached, and then vanish.

  The vista was once again the field. The night birds and tree toads returned to their song and clatter. The small creatures could be heard scurrying through the undergrowth.

  Jack pulled himself up and walked slowly to the house. He stopped at the top of the porch steps and looked over his shoulder, where only the field remained in darkness. He stood and listened for a moment longer to all the sounds of the night. Then he went inside.

  Jack was making supper for himself when the telephone rang. He’d filled a pot with water, opened a box of pasta, chopped a few overripe tomatoes. He was not unaware that this was the first time since Danny died that he’d thought to cook himself a meal and sit at the table and do more than wait for his food to get cold—after supper, he might pour himself a whiskey, sit in his study and consider the work waiting for him tomorrow and all the small and minor matters that moved him closer to the day when he would stand in front of his class.

  It was Celeste calling, reminding him to bring his lecture notes to school tomorrow. They talked briefly, how was he feeling after his first day back? Did he want to have dinner with Arthur and her tomorrow night? It was only after Jack hung up the phone and cleared the table that he saw the headline in the newspaper about the arrest of Joseph Rich, “Confessed Cyberkiller,” with a picture of a middle-aged balding little man wearing a jacket and tie. And a picture of Hopewell along with the caption: “Local hero promises justice will prevail.” Jack would have to remember to give Marty a call tonight.

  There would come a time when he would look back on that moment, when he hung up the phone, read the headline in the paper, waited for the pasta to cook, and remember it as his final minutes with what he’d been able to salvage of the world he once inhabited with Danny. Like an archaeologist contemplating the piece of broken pottery, the slab of tablet, and trying to reconstruct the lost world from whence it came—the way he might have deconstructed a film, or watched Anne—Jack would turn that moment inside out if only to recover the way the light looked on the kitchen wall, or the aroma coming from the cutting board; if only to recover the sensations of being inside his house after watching the night come to life, of feeling attached to the college and his friends, of feeling the sorrow and loneliness of this exact minute, the sensations of this other-time where he once lived with and then without his son.

  He placed his knife and fork on the table, the table where he’d sat with Danny at suppertime and weekend lunches, where they ate their last breakfast together—“Which is more important, Dad, honesty or loyalty?”—and hung up the phone. He thought he’d wait until after he’d eaten to look for the notes, and then thought, What the hell, get it over with now.

  He walked down to the basement. It was cool and damp and had a spare-parts look, castoffs of family life. Old clothes and shoulder pads, Rollerblades and skateboards. Baseball bats, caps and pieces of uniforms. Unsteady pillars of books, boxes of Christmas decorations, boxes from the loft on Crosby Street that he had never bothered to unpack. The old stereo and the large speakers. Stacks of record albums. This was the one place he had not straightened out during his summer obsession, the place Marty’s phone call had kept him from. Perhaps on some cold winter’s day when the snow was high and the roads iced over, he’d come down here and put things in order.

  He walked over to the filing cabinet in the corner, where Danny used to read on rainy days, where Jack now stored his folders and his disks, where everything was arranged neatly by subject.

  The cabinet wobbled unsteadily. Jack gave it a quick push, the way he might have flicked a speck of lint off a sweater, not enough to interrupt himself, an absent careless push, while he riffled the folders.

  He picked out the floppy disk from a small box at the front of the drawer, all the while the cabinet rocked back and forth under the pressure from his hand. He gave it another push, harder this time, and another push. He looked through the folders for the hard copy and started peeling back more folders, pulling out additional handwritten notes. The filing cabinet tipped forward and back, like the restaurant table that seesaws gracelessly under your elbow, just annoying enough not to be ignored. He pressed his shoulder against the side, where the metal was soft and pliant. He reached for another folder and gave the cabinet a shove, pushed his hip against it, and when that did no good, aware now that something was stuck back there, pushed it one more time, without much success, and started to walk away, then turned back because he knew, the way he knew why Hopewell had come to his office that morning in May, the way he knew that night in Tuscany before Anne said, “Nothing’s changed.” He knew the way he used to know, used to sense, Danny’s absence in the house, and Danny’s presence before Danny ever made a sound. He knew that this was an anomaly. The face of the stranger in the family portrait. The odd shoe in the bottom of the closet. He knew because he was Danny’s father and he was supposed to know.

  Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe all it really amounted to was this: he had been trying to set things right all these years, was so accustomed to doing it, that this was just one more thing out of kilter, one more thing that needed straightening out; the confluence of coincidence and compulsion—if he had thought about it as it happened.

  He put his weight against the side of the cabinet and pushed, trying to steady it. So little thought went into it. He simply put the folders and disk on the floor and gave the cabinet a solid shove. It was bottom-heavy, like deadweight and he couldn’t move it, couldn’t quite squeeze his hand around it. He dropped to his knees, leaned and pushed, and gradually edged the bottom away from the wall.

  The back of his shirt was damp, he was dripping sweat and breathing deeply. He stopped to wipe his face and catch his breath. The telephone rang upstairs. Jack just let it ring while he reached behind the cabinet, stretched his arm—the way he would have rescued Danny’s sneaker from the bottom of a pond, sleeves rolled up, feeling around the mud and weeds, extending his fingers—and when he came up short, leveraged himself against the wall and pushed, reaching, until his fingertips touched the soft piece of leather: an old slipper…Stretching a little further: an abandoned boot…Extending his arm until he could tap his fingers against, what? A stuffed toy that was lodged back there and which he had to have because it was Danny’s? That he had to
hold because Danny had held it? Had to touch because Danny had touched it?

  How oddly time seemed to be moving. Truncated, contracted, like an accordion squeezed closed, each moment pressed against the next, each event toppling to its consequence as Jack wrapped his fingers around the smooth leather, sliding it along the wall and toward him. He could feel the padded fingers. He lifted it away from the cabinet. He could feel the waffled webbing, the laces and strap. He brought it forward. The heel was soft, like a pillow.

  Closer now. He removed it, gently, slowly, unsheathing it like a dagger, easily, from a scabbard.

  A baseball glove. A baseball glove with a tennis ball in the pocket and a pair of cheap hip-hop sunglasses. It seemed absurd, like finding an alarm clock in a tree. Jack was tempted to toss it over his shoulder into the stack of junk and bury it there, or add it to the clothes and toys for charity, and never look at it again. But he couldn’t do that, because he knew what belonged in the basement and what didn’t. He couldn’t throw it away because he knew it hadn’t been tossed back there by accident while Danny and his friends were playing; Mutt hadn’t dragged it in. He couldn’t throw it away, not without looking. Only he didn’t look.

  First, he had to hold the glasses and roll them around in his hand. He bounced the ball a couple of times and then a few more times. Then he ran his fingers across the torn brown leather, tugged on the laces, punched the pocket, which is what you do with a baseball glove. The laces were nearly shredded, the webbing loose. It was an old glove, something picked up in a thrift shop or handed down from an older brother. Jack turned it over, tested the wrist strap and pulled it loose. That’s when he looked.

  A name had been written on the underside of the wristband and crossed out. A new name was written beneath it. In a child’s hand, in blue ink that had not had time to smudge. The name was Lamar Coggin.

  Part Three