Marty might have had a quick smile at the first sight of Jack bunched up like the day’s dirty wash, but he was looking at him slowly now, trying to get a good read, and he didn’t seem at all amused by what he was facing. He pressed his lips tightly together, gave Jack a second looking-over, although he did a good job of making it look like nothing more than a quick glance, grunted “Hmm,” softly and unhappily. “I guess I’m a little surprised to find you sleeping in your car, and especially out here.”
Jack shrugged his shoulders innocently and offered no explanation. The sun was hot and the air warm but he felt cold to the bone.
Marty wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “You’re sure you’re okay?” His voice held that familiar tone of concern; and when Jack didn’t answer, Marty leaned against the car door, looked across the park as though what he wanted from Jack lay among the broken bricks and Queen Anne’s lace, or might be found riding downriver with the fallen branches. “Being here makes you feel close to Danny, doesn’t it?”
Jack answered yes, it made him feel close to Danny, but that was all he said.
Marty waited a moment, then gave Jack another slow look, rested his arms on the car door, thrust his head slightly forward, looked straight into Jack’s eyes, then down at his clothes, and made another pass at the eyes because it must not have been enough of an answer and Marty didn’t seem to know what to do about it. Not that the expression on his face was the expression of someone looking for a lie, or maybe he hadn’t started out looking for it but wound up looking nonetheless, the way you start rummaging through the attic looking for the dusty old year-book with the goofy pictures and puerile sentiment, then you notice the sagging cardboard box and suddenly you’re digging through the baby clothes and the tarnished trophies. Or you’re down in the basement trying to find your old lecture notes. Only you don’t know the dangers of your determination, and you may not be prepared for what’s lying around down there, which is what Jack wanted to tell Marty, his friend from the summer who had no reason to think anything had changed from last week, or yesterday. His friend from the summer, who was working on the old assumptions. Who said what a friend from the summer would say. Expected the answers a friend from the summer would expect. And when there were no answers, or not the kind of answers to satisfy him, Marty couldn’t help but be a little curious.
“I guess with school about to start you’ve been playing a bit of catch-up.”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re—”
“I’m all right. Really. Just a late night.”
Marty kept looking him over but he couldn’t walk away, not without knowing more than he started with. Not without seeing what made the cabinet wobble.
Jack wondered what Marty would think if he told him his cautionary tale about what rummaging through cartons and cabinets gets you; about finding out more than your expectations prepared you for. What would Marty do? Would he call off the search or would he keep looking, thinking there was nothing he didn’t want to know, nothing he wasn’t prepared to find?
“I’m all right.”
“Well, I’ve got to tell you, you look—”
“Just hard work,” Jack said, working a smile.
“Yeah. It’s like that sometimes. But I have to say, seeing you out here like this. You had me worried for a minute.” Marty was still looking.
“You have more important things to worry about, even for a minute.”
I don’t know about that.” Marty said, “I guess I’ve felt protective about you for these past few months, so if I’m overstepping the bounds—if being back at work’s too much too soon for you and you feel like talking about it—”
“It’s nothing. Nothing like that. I was too tired to drive, so I stopped and fell asleep.” That was all the truth he could offer.
“Fair enough.” Marty put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “But we’ve never pulled our punches before so let’s not start now, okay?”
Marty was ready to ride to the rescue. It was only that. He hadn’t been looking for the lie at all. He was only doing what he’d been doing all summer. He was only working on summer assumptions.
Jack wondered if he could tell Marty that Danny had killed that little boy? Could he tell Marty about accidents and expectation? Isn’t that what friends were for? Could he tell him that Danny was driven mad. Tell him, “I need you to help me protect my son.” Would Marty help him protect Danny even in death, especially in death? Would he know a way out of this? Would he help or would he turn cop? Would he do his duty?
Jack had the urge to say, “This is what you’re looking at.” To tell him, “This is what you’re seeing. This is why you found me here this morning.”
He wanted to tell him because it was Marty, who babysat him through his compulsions. Who said, “Go easy on yourself,” when Jack was beating himself to a pulp. Who sat on the curb with him through the long, hot night. Who sat with him at lunch and cocktails and talked about love and marriage and all the things that can go wrong. Jack wanted to fall back on Marty the way he had all summer. He wanted to tell him all about Danny and C.J. and Rick and Brian. Isn’t that what friends were for? He would say: “Danny and his friends killed Lamar Coggin.” He would say: “This is your chance to save Joseph Rich and stick it to Hopewell at the same time. Only sticking it to Hopewell has nothing to do with it, does it.”
Jack could feel the words and the pulse of energy driving them: “Let me tell you why you found me here…” Maybe that’s what he was going to say, or maybe he only thought it was when he turned toward Marty, who had a look of expectation on his face, as though this were just another morning; an expression Jack had spoken to since the day Marty appeared at the house, an expression he could speak to now, if he looked at nothing else, if he didn’t stop to take the measure of his words. With less effort than it took not to speak, he could swallow hard and say, “The hell with it. Let me tell you why you found me here,” looking only at the expression, listening only to the voice that held that familiar tone of concern—“Can I trust you, Marty? Can I trust you to protect my son?”
But Jack couldn’t get himself to speak. All he could do was stare back in silence and feel sour inside. All he could do was pity Danny, who stood shivering in the night and felt Lamar’s dead chill. All he could do was pity Marty when he leaned against the car, in the neighborly way he’d learned to do as a boy, and gave Jack another looking-over; because this was no way to treat a friend. Or, Jack wondered, was it more than just protecting Danny? Was he also protecting Marty? By his silence, was he protecting Marty from having to make the same choice Danny had to make—the same choice Jack had to make? Was that why he couldn’t say it, because he didn’t want Marty to have to make the choice? Or was it because he didn’t know what Marty would choose and he was not about to put him to the test, even if Marty had passed a summer’s worth of tests already. Or was it because Marty also had a summer’s worth of expectations, expectations of Jack Owens and what Jack Owens expected of Marty Foulk and, doubtless, what Marty Foulk expected of himself?
Or, Jack wondered, was he simply protecting himself?
Marty didn’t say anything. If he was giving Jack time to think things over, then Jack would take it. He raised his eyes to the ragged rows of hemlock and oleander that grew along the edge of the road, the weeds that inhabited the ruins, the trampled grass and wildflowers at the top of the hill where Danny had died.
Marty was getting ready to ride to the rescue but there was nothing left to save. There was hardly enough of Jack to feel the shame of his deception. Hardly enough to be aware of what was missing—Anne had said, “The absence of anything, some element, creates the presence of something else.” Jack wondered what was present in the absence of his shame. “You weren’t being intrusive,” was all he managed to say.
Marty nodded his head. “Listen, I’ve got to get over to the station, but I’ll take a quick shower and buy you breakfast.”
“I’ve really got to get some sl
eep.”
“What the hell was I thinking?” Marty took a few steps back. “I’ll give you a call later. We’ll talk.” And he began running slowly across the sorry grass toward the road.
Jack watched, expecting, at any moment, for the morning light to telescope and slowly fade to black, not like Chaplin’s tramp, more like the samurai, with only his handful of rice and code of honor for company. Or Virgil Tibbs hopping the train out of Sparta, Mississippi, leaving Bill Gillespie sadly behind. Shane riding off into the big sky and into the child’s consciousness.
“Hey,” Jack called out. “Hey. Wait a minute.” He drove up the road and shouted, “I can’t let you leave like that. I’ll drive you back to the station.”
Marty stopped running and waited for him. “I’d like that,” he said, and got in the car.
They crossed the railroad tracks and rode down Third Street. They were silent now, like the day at the chicken shack when they were more strangers than friends. They were silent until they passed the county jail, where a crowd of people, three deep, was picketing, carrying posters and banners and bigger-than-life photos of Lamar Coggin with “He Could Have Been Your Son” printed across his chest in large black letters. And: “He’s Everyone’s Son.” And: “To Die in Vain?”
“What’s all that?”
“They’re going to make sure Rich’s public burning comes off without a hitch,” Marty said, unhappily.
Jack stepped on the gas and quickly put the crowd behind them. “Does he have any chance?”
“If he gets a good enough lawyer, stranger things have happened. My guess is he doesn’t.”
“He can always appeal, can’t he? I mean, if they find him guilty.”
Marty glanced over at him but said nothing.
When Jack stopped in front of the police station, Marty slid out of the seat, said, “Thanks for the lift,” headed inside, stopped and said, “How about if I sneak out later and take you up on that movie?”
“Fair enough.” And Jack drove away.
XXVI
The morning paper was on the front porch. There were three messages on the answering machine. Mutt wanted to go out.
The world continued heaving and pitching through its daily rounds, delivering the news, leaving phone messages, standing at the back door barking. Jack could watch only as a stranger, like the survivor of a car wreck who walks away unscratched, stunned yet alert, oblivious yet focused. Except Jack had no focus, he was alert to nothing.
He opened the back door but did not stop to wait for Mutt to plunge through the verdant soil and hop the fence. He couldn’t look at the field where Danny had made his decision to die.
He didn’t play the messages. He had spent his summer afraid of what the answering machine might bode, fearing What next? Now he was not capable of fear. There was no next. There was nothing in the future to be afraid of. And there was nothing in the past to look back on, not without following it to this day. He was the man from the past whose past had forsaken him and whose future held no consequence. It was the morning after and all that remained was what remained to be done, methodically, with the attention to detail that Dr. Owens was known for. Pack just enough clothes for one suitcase. Leave room in the car for photographs from the Danny wall. Select a dozen books…
He went up to his bedroom to get the box with Anne’s orange button and carried it with him while he performed these last rites. The call to the phone company to cancel service, the utilities to turn off the lights and shut off the gas—stopping to watch the sunlight bend on the yellow windowsills in the kitchen. The final walk-through, past the furniture, the piano, the art, the scattering of his life, which did not flash across his mind the way it does for a drowning man.
He was thinking that this was not the way he imagined he’d leave his house. It wasn’t supposed to happen until Danny was a young man, out of college, living somewhere else—Jack had always imagined Danny would move back east, to New York, back to where he was born. Danny would have a girlfriend, someone not from around here, someone he’d meet after college, with no ties to Gilbert or Indiana. She would be smart and sweet in a way that was never pretentious. She wouldn’t try to impress Jack with how much she loved Danny, although she would love him very much—he’d see it in the way she kept herself out of Danny’s good-bye to his father and his good-bye to the home where he had lived and which had kept him safe. Danny wouldn’t be ashamed to give Jack a hug and Jack would kiss him. Then they would no longer live here together, and it would be so damn bittersweet that Jack would cry, not in front of Danny, but later, when he was alone, and again when he sold the house and moved out. Jack had always thought he’d go west. On the map the land looks endless. It makes you think you can’t go wrong with so much of America to choose from. Or maybe he thought he’d go west because he had no history there, no past. Or maybe because it’s that place in your mind you call “Away.”
But Jack wasn’t crying now. He simply kept to his work, the final task. He retrieved Lamar Coggin’s baseball glove from the basement.
He thought about Danny trying to decide, “Which is more important, Dad, honesty or loyalty?”
And where did he learn that? “From you,” Jack said softly.
After he packed the car, got Mutt settled down—just as he had done countless times when he and Danny were leaving for vacation—Jack dropped the baseball glove on the front seat and held onto the wooden box, like a traveling companion, like a child. He sat still for a minute longer, looking at the house, the graceful wraparound porch, the swing sitting motionless. The house where Anne did not want to live and where he’d taken Danny to try to undo the damage done to him.
Jack listened while the wind rushed softly through the trees and the birds sang. He could not imagine never again hearing these birds singing outside these windows.
He drove along Main Street where the sulfur and sunlight turned the air sepia, like an old daguerreotype photograph or a silent movie, and the rose tint and warm brown hues looked so comfortable you wanted to crawl in, pull them over your head and hide; where the old-timers hobbled, wrinkled and weathered like old leather. Jack drove toward the river, past the ruins and across the nameless bridge, and headed west away from Gilbert, away from his home.
Tonight, in some motel off the road, he would lie on a strange bed with an unfamiliar pillow and the unfamiliar motel smell in his nose, the impersonal smell of impermanence. He would call his father and tell him he’d quit his job. He would lie about the reasons. He would lie because there was no truth anymore. Jack would not call Lois and he would not call Stan. He would not call Marty, who of all people would understand why he couldn’t make the call. They would have to draw their own conclusions, it no longer mattered.
Robbie would wait in the office, dutifully, until he was told that Dr. Owens was not coming back.
Dr. Owens was leaving no doubt of his abandonment and his failure. His final act was to kill Dr. Owens, homicide and suicide. Kill the mythology of Dr. Owens, who was not golden, and who did not have the touch, who could not make things right, and could not undo the damage. Kill the mythology of Anne Charon, his mythology of Anne Charon, who was the creation of his hubris and desires, after all.
But he would not harm the mythology of Danny Owens, who played the piano and pitched his team to the semifinals and…And who would always be “the boy who killed himself out by the ruins. Nobody knows why.”
But Jack knew why, and the three boys knew, while their parents were spared. While Joseph Rich was put on trial for his life.
They were sitting in the loft on Crosby Street. Outside it was cold and the early October dark was settling in. The streetlights were glowing the urban yellow that streetlights glow in New York. Anne was lying with her head on Jack’s chest. She had that arousing musky scent, paint and turpentine, perspiration and perfume.
She said, “I went to the doctor today.”
“And?”
“He says that if we’re going to end the pregnan
cy, we should do it within the next two weeks.” She turned her head and looked into Jack’s eyes. “It isn’t like we won’t still be us? If we keep it?”
“Just more of us.” Jack combed his fingers through Anne’s hair.
“That’s what I’ve been thinking. The baby would be us, and not some stranger. Our baby.” She touched his hand with the tips of her fingers. “And we can raise it our way. We don’t have to leave the city if we don’t want, or even this loft. Things are going well enough for us now, don’t you think? With the gallery and your work? I want to keep it, Jack. At least, I’m pretty sure I do.” She sounded neither excited nor afraid.
“I’m pretty sure, too,” he said. “I think deep down I’ve always wanted to. I just had to be sure we both wanted the same thing.”
“I know.” She nuzzled her face in his neck. “Oh, Jack, the way we love each other and get on so well, it won’t be a problem.” She lifted her face and kissed him. “If there are any two people who can make this work, it’s us. Don’t you think?”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been fortunate to know many special people who all had a direct, or indirect, influence on the writing of this book. My first thanks goes to my brother Lawrence A. Saul, a sweet and wise man. And my love and admiration to Joy Harris, a great friend and a great agent.
Sheron J. Daily has been both friend and lifetime teacher. Marcia and William Braman have given me their subtle, gracious support. Rose Tardiff taught me what it is to love a child. My thanks to Melissa Tardiff, who shared her experience, and her daughter, with me. Louisa Ermelino, fellow writer, has been a strong shoulder to lean on. The talented Robert Sabbag never stinted on encouragement. Thanks to Paul White, who makes it easy to be his friend, always. I owe much to Jane B. Supino, whose insights are treasures. Sherill Tippins was a great resource. I am grateful to Nancy Yost, who was there at the beginning. Holly Braman and Mary Braman have always offered their good cheer and patience. Thanks to Jacqueline Mandia and the Little Red School House. And thanks to Michael Morrison, a gentleman and true aristocrat of publishing.
Light of Day Page 34