by Joni Rodgers
Shep rocked back a bit in his chair. He couldn’t say “How did you know?” because there was suddenly a lump in his throat, a white hot coal of sadness and guilt that lurked below his Adam’s apple almost all the time these days.
“Backstory is not everything,” he mumbled, carefully collecting the last undamaged rose, trying to keep his face in play as he walked stiffly toward the revolving door, ignoring Claire O’Connell’s voice over his shoulder.
“Hartigate,” she warned. “Sit down, or I will remember that you didn’t.”
Shep didn’t doubt she meant it, and he knew for a fact that Claire O’Connell had a scalpel-sharp memory. He pushed through the door anyway, and Claire barreled onto the sidewalk after him.
“Hartigate!”
“What?” Shep wheeled and gripped her shoulders. “What else do you want from me, Claire?”
She looked up at him and said, “Nothing.”
Beyond a slight, momentary quiver of her chin, the expression on her face was utterly flat and unfathomable. Shep let go of her, and they stood in the halogen-lit drizzle.
“Do they still talk the same shit about me downtown?” he asked.
“Now and then.”
“Don’t stick up for me.”
“Don’t worry.”
He nodded and walked away.
Smartie Breedlove stood at the window and watched him go. As Shep Hartigate disappeared down the teeming street, the desire for a cigarette needled up her spine, along with the need for a drink, the need to know. Curiosity consumed her. She needed to see what Charma saw on the way down: the face of the person who’d pushed her, the rapidly receding stars, the fleeting lights of the city, the moment of truth.
\ ///
2
The half-lit kitchen was fragrant with cinnamon toast and coffee when Shep came in. He crept up the back stairs to the bedroom where Janny was sound asleep, her body curved in a protective fortress between the edge of the bed and the tiny figure in footy pajamas. She stirred only slightly when Shep kissed her lips and laid the filched white rose on the pillow beside her, but the baby puckered into the fiercely hiccuppy beginnings of a squall. Shep took him up, brushing his mouth against his impeccably soft crown.
“Shhhh, Charlie,” he crooned. “Put a cork in it, Tonto.”
Charlie moved his drooly mouth against Shep’s neck, bunching a bit of Shep’s shirt in a fierce little fist.
“We’re okay,” Shep whispered in the baby’s tiny seashell ear. “We can do this.”
Charlie tensed his little Buddha belly, brayed like a mule, and noisily filled his diaper.
“Whoa,” Shep recoiled. “Let’s go see mommy.”
Like Riverdance—feet moving fast while the upper body stays stone frozen—Shep supported Charlie’s hatchling neck as he hurried down the hall.
“Libby?” He rapped softly on the bathroom door. “Candygram.”
There was a slosh of bathwater, creak of the linen closet door, and a moment of whatever Shep didn’t care to imagine his little sister doing before Libby opened the door, piling a towel on top of her head. He proffered her malodorous cub at arm’s length.
“Happy Mother’s Day.”
“Wheesh. Stinky McGee,” Libby puffed a gentle raspberry against Charlie’s tiny palm. “How’s your day, big bro?”
“Long. Strange. How’s Janny?” asked Shep.
“Hypoxic. BP’s very low. She’s been asking for you.”
“Sorry. I had a thing I had to look into.”
“We’re at that place now, Shep.” Libby squeezed his hand with the loving but practiced candor of a registered nurse. “The hospice doc is fairly certain it’ll be tonight.”
“Okay.” He nodded and repeated it woodenly. “Okay.”
“Don’t do the emotional manhole cover, all right? She needs you to be with her. It’s time for you to start your family leave.”
“Tell her I’ll be in after I make the call.”
Libby kissed his cheek and took Charlie to her encampment in the guest room. Despite the lousy timing (or perhaps it was perfect timing because she was still on maternity leave from her job in the ER at St. Luke’s) she’d arrived like a Freon injection precisely at the moment when Shep had begun to feel utterly overwhelmed by Janny’s care.
The vocabulary alone was pulverizing. Cardiomyopathy. Idiopathic hypertrophic subaortic stenosis. Atrial fibrillation. Paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea.
Early on, Janny had mined the experience for material, as she did everything about their life. Using her illness as a storyline in Janny’s World, her syndicated comic strip, was a great opportunity to educate women about heart health. But after a few months, doctors had determined that even if a heart became available, Janny was no longer a viable candidate to receive it. She was removed from the transplant list, and the final months of Janny’s World served as a vehicle for thinly veiled thanks, farewells, and F-yous to a long list of people, including the middle school art teacher who’d dismissed her ambitions and the internist who’d dismissed early signs of the viral infection that eventually pulled the plug on Janny’s heart.
As each breath became a multi-phased project—formation of intention, execution of effort, aftermath of complete exhaustion—Janny worked diligently to finish the final week of Janny’s World to run after her death. Many of her readers had been dedicated to the comic strip through its ten years in syndication, and she felt strongly that they deserved a resolution to the story.
Fans felt like they knew Janny and “Skip,” comic Janny’s galumphing high school boyfriend, who graduated to galumphing college fiancé and eventually became her galumphing traffic cop husband. Over the years, Skip had been portrayed with increasing paunch and decreasing virility. Skip drank. Skip didn’t get comic Janny’s jokes. Skip, in fact, was the joke most of the time, especially on Sundays, when his bulbous nose was scuffed with a rosy glow and his five o’clock shadow was shaded reddish gold.
Back in the day, when Shep was still HPD and Claire O’Connell was his partner, Claire had found the whole Skip thing hilarious. But the teasing turned bitter after he ended up in bed with her, and the affair devolved to a ball-hammering, bullet-sweating powder keg. Claire pointed to Janny’s World as evidence that Shep’s wife didn’t understand him. The opposite was true. Skip was the man Shep couldn’t hide from Janny. The jerk who failed and drank and didn’t appreciate her but always came galumphing home.
Despite the not insubstantial ups and downs of their marriage, he loved her with a depth of feeling that threatened to buckle his knees at times. He had to stop, lean on a wall, teeth clenched against the void that had already begun to settle over him. She hadn’t eaten anything for several days now, and her Living Will precluded the insertion of a feeding tube or ventilation.
Shep felt the quiet house crumbling around him, the bricks and windows and two-by-fours collapsing into each other. The life he and Janny had made together. It was all slipping away now. They’d put all their financial resources into keeping her alive. Without Janny’s income, the house was unsustainable. Without Janny’s heart, Shep saw his own heart similarly foreclosed.
He fished his iPhone from his pocket, and Suri Fitch answered on the second ring, her clipped, birdlike accent equal parts India and Oxford.
“Mr. Hartigate. Where are you? I’m at the hotel to make a statement to the press. I expected you to be here.”
“Sorry. It’s Janny.” Shep cleared his throat. “They’re telling me this is it.”
“Oh, God. Shep, I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?”
“No.” Shep shook his head, half expecting it to rattle like a tackle box. “I hate to bail on you in the middle of this Bovet thing. I’ll upload my notes and photos with the previous surveillance items for Barth and get back on task next week. I might need ten days.”
“Upload the products of surveillance and take your family leave,” said Suri. “There’s nothing else you need to do on the case.”
“Sur
i, there’s a lot of unresolved questions here.”
“It’s as resolved as it needs to be. The coroner’s ruled it a suicide.”
“Already? How is that even possible?”
“Because it’s obvious. Particularly in light of the damaging information you brought us last week.”
“I told you, something is off with that. I’m not buying—”
“Shep.” She stopped him gently but firmly. “It’s not your concern. Mrs. Bovet is dead, which renders the property issues moot. My job now is to protect our client from the media. Your job is to be with your wife. Your contract allows for eight weeks bereavement leave. I don’t expect to see you here one day sooner.”
“If I sit in this house for eight weeks, I’ll be a worse basket case than I am now.”
“Then go somewhere,” Suri said. “Clear your mind. Do what you have to do, then go to India. Take the train from Chennai to Pondicherry. I could arrange for you to stay with friends.”
They both knew it wasn’t something he would do, but there was kindness in the offer and comfort in the tilted melody of her voice.
“Shep, I had a word with the partners about your wife’s expenses. They’ve agreed to cover a hundred thousand, which I’ve had deposited to you through payroll. I persuaded the insurance company to relent and cover the rest, so you’ll be reimbursed for the hundred grand you already kicked in. Consider the matter resolved.”
“I don’t know what to say.” Shep found it a bit easier to breathe with that particular cinderblock lifted from the back of his neck. “I can’t tell you how grateful we are. I know you went outside the box for this, for the specialists, getting Janny moved up on the transplant list.”
“I only wish it could have made a difference. God, Shep, I’m so bloody sorry.”
“Thank you, Suri. During this whole process, you’ve been a Hoss.”
“Pardon?”
“A good friend. But a badass when needed.”
“Well. In that spirit, I forbid you to show your face in this office for eight weeks.”
Suri clicked off without saying goodbye, which is what Suri did when she deemed a conversation over. Shep folded the phone back into his pocket, went up to the bedroom and lay down next to Janny.
“Hey, beautiful.”
“Hey,” she smiled. “Hand me the notebook. I thought of a few more items.”
“Janny. Enough,” said Shep, but she shot him a look, and he took up the blue spiral notebook in which she’d been recording basic instructions and reminders. Household, financial and personal issues were separated by tabs.
“Motorcycle helmet,” she said with some difficulty. “Promise to keep wearing the helmet.”
“I promise,” he said, though they both knew he wouldn’t.
“Don’t revert to beer and Tex Mex like you do when I’m out of town. And don’t look at porn, Shep. It’s so unseemly.”
“Damn straight,” said Shep, pulling her into the crook of his arm. “It’s the pirate’s life for me now. One big pay-per-view, leave-the-seat-up stag party, fueled by beer and Tex Mex.”
“Shep?” Janny wove her fingers through his hair and turned his face toward hers. “Is there anything you need to tell me before I go?”
Shep swallowed, his heart hammering hard. Salvation was at hand; he could see it in her face. This was his opportunity to tell the truth. Janny would forgive him, and the lies that weighed him down would evaporate off his back.
“You need to know… Janny… I have always loved you. Even during the bad times. I’ve never loved anyone but you.”
It was too late to even wonder if it was too late. Shep knew he’d be left with a rotting hole in his soul, but he wasn’t about to unburden himself at her expense.
Janny smiled and with substantial effort took in her last insubstantial sip of air.
\ ///
3
Shep had secretly hoped there would be a moment of redemption for old Skip somewhere in that last installment of Janny’s World, but it didn’t happen. In the final Sunday strip, colorized comic Janny is on her deathbed with Skip holding her hand.
“I’ll see you in my dreams,” says Skip, and over the next few panels, comic Janny tells a little Zen parable, illustrated with meticulous skill by real life Janny, whose graceful prowess with pen and ink was never adequately showcased in the comic format.
“There was a monk who meditated for many years,” says cartoon Janny. “One day, he finally experienced a wonderful vision of the Buddha. He ran to his master and said, ‘It was everything I imagined it would be.’ And the master said, ‘If you see the Buddha again, kill him.’”
“I don’t get it,” says clueless Skip.
“The Buddha he saw was not the real Buddha,” comic Janny explains. “It was merely a manifestation of the monk’s longing, a projection of what he wanted Buddha to be.”
“So?”
“When you see me in your dreams,” says Janny, “if you truly love me, kill me.”
Her editor balked. Thought it was a downer. Tried to get her to end with something about angels and Heaven and harps and such, but Janny was adamant about her final word, and she knew her audience. People loved it. Posted it all over the Internet.
A year later on the anniversary of her death, which neatly coincided with the release of Janny’s World: A Ten Year Retrospective of America’s Gal Next Door, papers ran it again, and again, people Facebooked the hell out of it, exactly as anticipated by Janny and her agent.
Studying the hardcover coffee table book on the bar at the Bonham Hotel, Shep wasn’t sure how he felt about Skip’s latest incarnation. Rather than parse it or argue with himself, he was doing his best to blunt it with a few boilermakers. His objective was to get drunk, get a cab, and be unconscious within five minutes of stumbling up the front porch steps.
Earlier in the evening, he’d entertained a fleeting hope of getting laid, but not many likely candidates passed through the Bonham Hotel bar on a Monday night. He’d stooped so low as to confide in the shapely barmaid, “My wife died a year ago today,” thinking she might be stricken with a moment of judgment-impairing tenderness.
She walked over and played a little glissando with her purple acrylic nails on his empty glass. “How ya doin’, handsome?”
Shep sat up straight and tried to smile, searching himself for the horndog instincts that ruled him in his youth. The Shep of yore would have had her in the supply closet by now, but even as that idea crossed his mind, he felt dishonorable, disloyal. Unseemly. Particularly if she was doing it out of pity.
“I’ll have another round,” he said wretchedly.
The barmaid leaned in and whispered, “Strawberry blonde at seven o’clock. Corner booth. Drinking gimlets. Specified ‘gin, Rose’s lime juice and nothing else.’”
“Is that significant?” asked Shep.
“She said it was from a book. Google it and act like you knew.”
“Thanks.”
Shep sighed and thumbed up Google on his iPhone. The only thing sadder than a pity lay was a pity go-lay-someone-else, but he figured he could do worse than the diminutive subject in the corner booth. He’d seen her from the corner of his eye when she walked in wearing skinny jeans and stiletto boots she was not quite too old for. She’d been sitting there tapping at a MacBook Air for an hour or so now. Periodically, Shep had felt her attention on the back of his gray suit coat. Now he shifted on his barstool to position her at the edge of his peripheral vision and found her watching him without pretense.
In the watery light of the MacBook, her eyes were bright and bad girly. The neon glow in the window behind her made a chaotic halo of her corkscrew hair. It took him a moment to click to it. Clara Bow mouth. Little sugar vertebrae.
“Smartie Breedlove,” Shep said, and she smiled.
“Hello, Mr. Hartigate. Care to join me?”
“Sure.”
He collected his book and gray suit coat and made his way across the room, feeling a surge of
guarded optimism as he folded his tall, stocky form into the booth.
“Good evening, sir.” The barmaid arrived and ceremoniously positioned a cocktail napkin in front of him. “What’ll it be?”
“Gimlet,” said Shep, adding, “A real gimlet. Half gin, half Rose’s lime juice and nothing else.”
Smartie reacted with a slight tick of her left eyebrow.
The mook lumbered over to my table and popped out a Raymond Chandler ort like a hastily memorized Bible passage. Jesus wept.
“So…” Shep searched for an onramp. “How have you been?”
“Fine as a flea wing. How ’bout you?”
“Giving it my all.”
“Well, you’re lookin’ good. That’s something.”
“You’re looking well yourself,” said Shep. Feeling rusty but encouraged, he nudged her steely heel with the side of his weathered loafer and added, “Nice boots.”
“They’re Italian,” I said. “Like Mussolini, but not as tenderhearted.”
“Maybe you should get off your feet, Smack.”
“Still writing books?” said Shep.
“Yup,” she said. “Still chasing scalawags?”
“Yup.”
On the table next to her MacBook Air lay a leather folio embossed with a familiar Edwardian lettered logo. Salinger, Pringle, Fitch & Edloe: Attorneys-at-Law. Smartie had made no attempt to hide it, so Shep didn’t bother pretending he didn’t notice.
“What’s your interest in my employer?” he asked.
“I’m thinking of getting a divorce.”
“Oh.” Shep withdrew his foot. “You’re married?”
“Not exactly. Vaguely.”
“Vaguely married? How does that work?”
“Oh, you know,” she sighed. “Yeats. Peyote. Vegas. Long story.”
“It always is.”
“It was eight years ago. Charma and I both settled down after that.” Smartie sipped her gimlet. “I guess you heard what happened with the so-called investigation.”
“Only that they ruled it a suicide,” said Shep. “And that the old man died a few months later.”
“Yes. Astonishingly, things worked out beautifully for your incredibly wealthy client who benefited from having them both dead. Who’da thunk?”