My palms were sweating like that time back in high school when I asked my deepest, sincerest teenage crush to the prom, and she said—well, nevermind what she said. These things aren’t important now, or at least that’s what my psychiatrist would tell me if I could find the courage to enlist one. On the third ring, the most familiar voice in the world said, “Hello, this is Elizabeth.”
I hesitated, though not necessarily on purpose. My voice caught for a small fraction of a fast second, or maybe it was my brain. Either way, I said, “Hello, this is Jack.”
Get it? I was mimicking her. I don’t know if she did. Hell, I don’t know if I did.
Then it was her turn to hesitate, just long enough for me to say, “Flynn. F-L-Y-N-N. We used to live in the same condominium, sleep together every night, and have very good sex, at least by my modest standards.”
She said, surprised but not necessarily amused, “Jack. How—how—are you? Where are you?”
“I’m great, and I’m in your lobby.”
“Jesus, you could track down a black widow in a coal mine.” She said this with a laugh, though I’m not quite sure that, while true, she thought it all that funny.
We had spoken the night before, or, technically, earlier that very day, but it still seemed like forever ago, and if I remember right, she concluded the conversation in a fit of tears saying that she’d speak to me soon. So I guess she was right, even if she didn’t necessarily mean to be.
I said, “I thought I’d just say hi.” I was shuffling my feet on the thick lobby carpet. I could feel my cheeks burn from embarrassment, or nervousness, or some other not-so-random emotion that I wasn’t accustomed to. The words on both sides were delivered like wet noodles, and I instantly regretted walking into this hotel and placing this call.
I added, “So I’ve said it. I’ll leave you alone now. You’re probably on deadline.”
I hesitated, and so did she, until she replied, “No, Jack, why don’t you come up for a moment.”
A moment.
She gave me her room number, and I was off.
Heading upstairs, I recalled the first time that I kissed her. It was in an elevator at a roadside motel in Portland, Maine, both of us covering a terribly depressing story about children burned to death in a day care center fire, and somehow, amid the endless misery of that awful day, finding each other in the hotel bar, and in that find, discovering years of happiness that should have gone on forever. But shouldn’t I have known that they never would?
I knocked on her door just once, softly, and she opened it immediately, expectantly. She was dressed in what she used to call her “uniform,” a pair of perfectly fitting boot-cut jeans, faded, and a tee shirt with her long sleeves pushed up beyond her elbows.
Her hair was slightly messy, no doubt from playing with it as she tends to do on deadline. Her face, especially her eyes, looked tired, and I knew it was because she gets exhausted flying on airplanes, regardless of the time of day. She said, looking me square in the face, “Come in,” and I did. But the most noticeable, most important thing about the entrance was our failure to kiss.
We walked into the room with big, wide windows looking out across the blackness of Boston Harbor. She sat on the bed, me on an upholstered chair with a matching ottoman before it. Her laptop was open on the desk, beside a pot of coffee and a single cup. To break the ice, she said to me, “You beat me to the punch. I was going to call you tomorrow.”
“Well, I saw you on the news, asking a question, and I figured I’d just say hello in case we both got tied up with other things.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“Yeah, so am I.”
If I’d ever been involved in a more tortured, more awkward exchange, then my mind must have blanked it out completely and fortunately. This was like watching a fifty-car interstate highway pileup on a snowy night, only without any of the fascinating gore. We were talking about the fact we were talking, as if we were either eighty years old or had never previously met.
So I said, “I definitely shouldn’t have stopped by, unannounced. I’m just sad about Baker and aggravated over Hilary Kane and generally at wit’s end about life.” I paused and added, “And I miss you.”
She looked down now, as if the rug posed some new and fascinating aesthetic challenges, and replied, “I’m really sad about Baker too. I really am.” When she looked back at me, her eyes were wet.
Note her failure to say the simple, soothing words, “I miss you too.”
We both sat in silence looking anywhere but at each other. Then I stared at her face and said, “We fucked things up pretty well, didn’t we?” I paused and added, “I fucked things up pretty well.”
“We did, Jack, you and I. You have issues, and I didn’t deal with them very well. Other women would have, and will.”
My stomach felt at once empty and heavy. My head was starting to hurt. My eyes burned. This was a conversation I didn’t want to have, the last chapter in a book I didn’t want to read.
So rather than continue, I slowly, sadly, nodded my head, my lips pursed and my gaze down. I got up in a labored kind of way. I stepped toward her sitting on the edge of her king-size bed, leaned down, and kissed that same soft cheek that used to be pressed against my head in slumber every single glorious and inglorious night. And then I walked out of the room in silence, not fast, not slow, just forlorn. She did nothing to stop me. Maybe it really was good that I came here, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how or why.
Chapter Thirty-four
T his just wasn’t my day—or maybe my week, or more probably, my month, much as I usually love the autumn, what with the foliage and the crisp air and the constant sense that important things are about to happen. As I turned the key in my apartment door, it pushed open before the lock clicked, meaning 1, I had forgotten to lock the door, which is impossible, because it locks automatically, a fact that used to drive Elizabeth crazy when she took the garbage out and found herself stranded in the hall, or 2, someone was in my apartment, or 3, someone had come and gone.
Two and three could have gone either way in terms of desirability and preference. Would I rather be ransacked or attacked? Or were Toby’s heroes waiting inside to whisk me away to destinations unknown for my face-to-face with their boss? Or had someone dropped off more artwork for me? The way things were going, I could walk in on the Mona Lisa, and wouldn’t that be news to all Vinny’s friends at the Louvre?
Options raced through my mind. Do I walk away and call the police? Probably not, considering that their presence could ruin any chance of meeting Toby Harkins. Do I holler into my own apartment? Didn’t seem right, and the reply could be a simple gunshot, which might not be so simple if it were aimed in the direction of my head. So I pushed the door open and slowly stepped inside the darkened front foyer. A sliver of light hit a nearby wall, meaning a lamp in the living room was illuminated. It’s important to note that I used to leave lights on for Baker. Hell, I’d even leave the stereo playing sometimes, usually with Frank Sinatra or the occasional Ella Fitzgerald. But today, I had fingered the light switch, then walked out filled with sad thoughts.
I crept slowly through the small foyer toward the living room, one tiny baby step at a time. My heart was pounding. My head was spinning from the glimpse of sleep I had the night before.
Step. Wait. Step. Wait. Step. Wait. I was moving my feet along the tile floor, searching the walls for shadows, my ears straining for even the hint of a sound. But I saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing.
I was just inches from the corner that would give way to the living room. If I poked my head around, maybe I’d get shot or maybe I’d be quickly captured or maybe I’d see another priceless masterpiece sitting there on my couch as I did the night before. I seemed to have lost all privacy in this life; my apartment was like a bus depot, the way people were coming and going, and the hallowed ground that used to be my newspaper career was a veritable minefield of danger and mistakes.
So what the hell, I gripped the wall and peered slowly around the corner, my eyes nervously scanning the room. And that’s when I saw it, just as I suspected, another priceless masterpiece sitting right there on the couch. Only this was no Rembrandt or Vermeer, but rather a Kane—Maggie Kane, her short blonde hair tousled and her eyes dipping slowly into a state of shallow sleep.
I was relieved. She was beautiful. It was, all things considered, a nice combination.
I stepped around the corner, cleared my throat, and said, “Please, make yourself comfortable.”
Her eyes fluttered open and when she saw me, realized me, her face broke into a wide, warm smile. “I am,” she said, not getting up, not really moving at all.
I leaned against the doorway looking at her looking at me for a long, quiet moment, giving her a chance to regain her bearings and allowing me to breathe a quiet sigh of relief.
I said, “I’m glad to see you don’t let things like locks and laws get in your way.”
She smiled anew and asked, “Are you going to call the cops on me? You left a key right on the ledge over your door, you know.”
I had, actually, or more accurately, it was Elizabeth who used to keep one there for all those aforementioned times when she would lock herself out. I walked slowly into the living room, uncharacteristically conscious of my movements, and sat heavily in the upholstered chair facing Maggie Kane.
She said, laughing now, “Tough day at work, honey?”
“They’re all tough these days,” I replied, straight-faced, not sharing any of the frivolity.
We locked gazes for another long, quiet moment. She finally took a swig from a bottle of water that I assumed she had pulled from my refrigerator. “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.
“Where else am I supposed to be?”
Good question, until I really mulled it. When I did, I replied, “With some security guards, at a hotel?”
“Sick of them, sick of the hotel. You guys had me in some dump out at the airport. I was going crazy.”
She shook her head and stared off into space. I walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and realized I was fresh out of Sam Adams, which was just as well, considering my upcoming meeting with Jankle and whoever else. So instead I grabbed a Coke.
Back in the living room, I leaned back in a chair and said, “This hasn’t been a good stretch for either of us, has it?”
She shook her head, looking at me, looking away. She didn’t say anything, and after a moment, she took a long chug of water. It was mostly dark in the room, but for the one low lamp. I said, “And I’m really sorry about it. About all of it.”
Again, she shook her head. She said, still staring off, “What’s the worst loss you’ve ever had?”
Life was all about loss, lately, or even longer than lately—loss of wife, loss of daughter, loss of feelings, loss of control, loss of the confidence to know that when I did my job, I was doing right and I was doing well.
But I didn’t much want to talk about it, not then, not with her. She was coming to grips with her own immense loss, caused by yours truly, and I knew that she’d rather talk than listen. So I said, “That’s a tough question. What about you?”
She looked down at her water and then off again into the dark and finally at me. As we locked gazes, the room suddenly struck me as particularly empty, given the lack of Baker who, if he were around, would no doubt be trying to entertain our female guest in some fashion, maybe with a tennis ball, or perhaps just sitting beside her demanding an ear massage.
She said, “I lost my son,” and then paused. The words, just four of them, spoken plainly and directly, hit me like gunfire, though I should probably be careful about such analogies these days. Or is that a metaphor? Either way, I was somewhere beyond stunned, for a variety of reasons. I had pictured Maggie Kane living the relatively carefree life of an attractive, single, early thirty-something woman. Of course, she’d have the typical neuroses that some such women have, the fears, the hang-ups, all that and maybe more. But I had believed that life had come relatively easy to her, and now this one declarative sentence flung open doors and windows into spaces that I never imagined could possibly exist.
“I made a mistake when I was young that turned out not to be a mistake at all. I got pregnant. I had the baby. He was the most precious thing in my entire life.”
She smiled as she said this, a wan smile, but a smile just the same. She seemed to have climbed into her own familiar world of soothing memories. I stayed quiet, mostly because there was nothing that I could possibly say.
She said, “The father’s name was Brad.” She paused. At this point, I could have told her just how much I hated the name Brad. Not as much as I disdain Eric, but almost. Still, I thought it best to keep quiet.
“He wanted to be involved, even though he wasn’t very mature. I wanted Jay to know his father, so I’d share him as much as I could. Well, one evening, around suppertime, Jay was over at Brad’s apartment. I was supposed to get him back that night. I hadn’t seen him in two days. Brad calls and asks if he can keep him another night.
“I said, ‘No, I miss my boy.’ Brad gets argumentative. He starts in about how he’s going to take me to court about getting better visitation rights, about how if he can’t see his kid more, he’s going to pay less support. All this stuff. I told him, ‘Go ahead. Do it. Just get my kid back here within the hour.’ ”
She paused again to collect her thoughts. She put her hands up to her cheeks and rubbed her own face as she stared off at the carpet with big, blank eyes. Then she looked at me and said in a lower, huskier voice, “An hour passed, and no Brad. He’s not answering his cell phone or his home phone. An hour after that, my doorbell rings and I figure it’s finally him. When I open it up, there’s a policeman there, a state trooper. I don’t know why, but I always remember these incredibly shiny boots. He asks if I’m Maggie Kane. Then he asks if he could come in.
“I’m petrified, trying to keep everything under control. Before I know it, we’re sitting in my living room and he tells me that Brad had a head-on collision with an eighteen-wheeler. Brad had drifted into oncoming traffic. Jay was in a car seat in the back. Both were killed instantly. I lost the most important thing that I’ll ever have in my life.”
She looked away again, her chin pointed up and strong as she gazed toward the blackened expanse beyond the sliding doors. She wasn’t crying, and I kind of knew how she felt. She had already shed all the tears she had over her boy’s death, and there were none left to fall.
I asked, “When was this?” I spoke low and soft, trying to be curious but mostly soothing.
“Five years ago last week.”
I felt a lump in my throat. As she was running for her life, contending with the slaying of her sister, she was also mourning anew during the anniversary of her son’s death.
Before I could say anything else or ask anything more, she said, “Jay wouldn’t have been on the road if I hadn’t been such a bitch to his father. All he wanted to do was keep his own son for another night.”
Her head remained bowed, but still no tears.
“That’s not your fault,” I said, firm and fast. And I believed that. If you followed her logic, then I got my wife pregnant, and she died during childbirth, so I actually killed her. And I didn’t believe that, at least I didn’t used to. These days, who knows.
She nodded, her face still down. “I know,” she replied. “At least in my saner moments, I know. But I don’t know if it makes it any better. It doesn’t make the loss any less immense. It doesn’t make my sadness any less overwhelming.”
After a long moment, she looked back up at me and said, “So that’s my biggest loss.” She gave me a sad, tired smile, then asked, “What’s yours?”
In my mind, I saw a gallery of loss—from Katherine to my unnamed daughter to Baker to my father to my recent girlfriend to Vinny Mongillo. I expected a call at any moment from Peter Martin saying he was taking a job at the goddamned Ne
w York Times or The Washington Post.
I listened for a moment to the stern September breeze slapping at the balcony door and an antique mantel clock ticking toward my meeting with Jankle and the general din of a restless silence. Then I said, “My wife died during childbirth.” And I proceeded to tell her the whole story, about the pains during the delivery, about the frantic command to leave the room, the look on Katherine’s face, the frightening hour in the waiting room, the doctor summoning me into a conference room, pulling the sheet from my wife’s face and kissing her damp, cool forehead good-bye.
And then I told her how it had all affected me, and as I was telling her, I seemed to be telling myself. I couldn’t have a normal relationship. I couldn’t commit myself for reasons that I couldn’t quite understand, even to someone who I knew I had once loved. That said, I told her about my recent visit with Elizabeth, about the general angst of it all, about my fears that this many years later, I should be moving on, and wasn’t.
As I talked, Maggie had her feet on my couch, her knees tucked under her chin, her arms wrapped around her shins. When I was done, she unfolded herself and stood up and walked over to where I was leaning forward in my chair. And she kissed me, on the forehead, her hand on my temple. I felt moisture from her eyes as she allowed her face to linger against mine. She was crying, or maybe weeping, not over her loss, but over mine.
She stepped back and looked at me and said, “I had no idea.”
I said, staring back into her eyes, “I had no idea about yours.”
She walked back to the couch and reached into her leather bag groping around for God only knew what. She pulled out a cell phone, held it in front of her and said, “It’s everywhere, the loss is. This is Hilary’s phone. I found it this morning and the very sight of it almost sent me over the edge.”
My eyes immediately flashed from sad to shocked. It’s as if I heard drums sounding in the room, saw rockets blaze by. The air even seemed to change temperature.
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