I was almost as sissy about merry-go-rounds. I could handle the animals that just went around, but the ones that went up and down were the stuff of nightmares, and no amount of gentle persua-sion could ever get me onto them. An even greater fear was of our cemetery; not of corpses or ghosts or the like, since it was just family history, after all, but of being locked in there after dark. I knew the place closed at five o’clock, that the big iron gates were chained shut then, so I kept an eye on the mausoleum clock when my father pulled the weeds off our ancestors after church. I was certain that without my diligence we’d be trapped in there all night, forced to eat worms and drink rainwater until the caretaker came in the morning.
Our cottage on Sullivan’s Island was a disheveled, gray-shingled thing that tiptoed above the tide on barnacled pilings. I loved it there. I liked to get up early, when the sand was still cool under the house, and crack the crust of it with my toes. Sometimes, all by myself, I’d head down to the place we called the Point, where there were dozens of odd little beach-bound pools, warm as piss and very shallow, where fickle tides were known to dump a treasure trove of flotsam and shells. My cousin Lucy, who was my age and lived two cottages away, would join me there after breakfast, and we would spend the morning digging for coquinas—brightly hued little clams no bigger than a black-eyed pea. In the belief that these poor creatures were lonely for their own kind, we would build them orphanages in the sand, lodging them according to color, as God had surely intended.
But I rarely ventured into the surf. The horror I felt under the dead weight of the waves was something primal and undeniable. My father once tried to break me of this by tempting me with the offshore sandbar. It might be scary near the beach, he said, but if you went out far enough, there was a place where the water was less than a foot deep, where you could stroll along as easy as could be, like Jesus on the Sea of Galilee. And I didn’t even have to be able to swim, since he was tall enough to walk us there, if I would just ride on his shoulders like the tough little roughneck he knew me to be.
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. But the old man promised we’d come back whenever I wanted, so I rode him like a trusted steed into the foam, anxiously awaiting the sandbar. I could see the waves forming in the distance, brittle as broken glass and grimly dark green on their undersides. Most of them petered out after a while, but one, I could tell, was building with evil intention. As I sank closer to water level I yelled at my father to stop, to turn around and go back, or let me down, but he just tightened his grip on my legs and headed toward that emerald menace like a madman.
“Hang on, son,” he bellowed above the roar of the surf. “We’re gonna jump that sorry son-of-a-bitch.” When I screamed again in protest, realizing his betrayal, he told me not to be such a crybaby, not to be such a goddamn girl, and this hellish green wall exploded over us, ripping me from his shoulders and spinning me backward and downward, like a palmetto bug caught in a storm drain. When I washed up in the shallows, coughing and sobbing, my father clapped me manfully on the back. “Goddamn,” he said, “that was a son-of-a-bitch, wasn’t it?” But I knew who the son-of-a-bitch was, and I wouldn’t speak to him until suppertime. The next morning, as Lucy and I were busily segregating coquinas, I told her what I’d learned from this: that when I got old and had kids of my own I would never lie to them, never promise them a sandbar I couldn’t deliver.
When I reached Ashe Findlay, he came on the line like a coroner confirming the death of a loved one: “I assume you’ve heard.”
“Yeah. Last night.”
“Did she call you?”
“No. I called them. I talked to them both.”
“It’s a shame, really. I wish there were another way.”
“Well…there is, I think.”
“It’s a little too late for that, I’m afraid.”
“No. Please. Don’t say that. I can’t do this to him.” A silence, then a sigh. “You’re not the one who’s doing it, Gabriel.”
“But you would never have killed it, if I hadn’t—”
“No. That’s not true at all. I had my own misgivings even before we talked. I told you that. You asked me to leave you out of it and I did. This was strictly our decision. You have no reason to be troubled.”
“I have every reason! This boy matters to me, Ashe! Haven’t I been clear about that? I’m not some big heartless publishing house.
I haven’t got ice water in my veins. If there’s even the slightest chance that Pete is what he says he is…” I suddenly heard myself and stopped, realizing I was about to damage my case beyond repair.
“Look,” I said in a more reasonable tone, “I’ve got an idea…a good one, I think…and I’d like to run it by you.”
“I’m afraid we’re beyond that.”
“Would you just listen to it, goddammit!”
“All right.”
“I’m sorry, Ashe. I don’t mean to be difficult, but…I’m just so worried that…”
“That’s okay. Go ahead.”
“Well…what if I were the one to interview Pete?” The editor’s silence was so dramatic that I knew I had a chance.
If you sell this very carefully, I told myself, you might still be Pete’s hero. Just hang on, son. We’re gonna jump that sorry son-of-a-bitch.
“I want to do a special edition of my show,” I said. “With Pete and me just talking and…you know, having fun together. He could read from his book, and I could explain how he used to listen to me in the hospital. It would be great stuff, and wonderful publicity for his book. He’s comfortable with me, and we wouldn’t even have to get into the gory details. We could talk about the writing process and that sort of thing. And that would sort of make me his sponsor.
You know, help legitimize him.”
“You would do that?” he said.
“In a heartbeat.”
“But you seemed so certain that—”
“Look, I know how I sounded before, but…I’ve had a lot on my mind lately, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’m past that now. I believe in this child. I’ve never believed in anything so much.”
“Yeah, but will Donna go for it?”
“Why not? She’s heartsick about this, Ashe. And it’s not that threatening. It’s just another phone call, really, when you get right down to it.”
Another long silence, but this one was imposing, a huge green wall curling above me. “A phone call?”
“Sure. It’s radio, remember.”
“You mean you wouldn’t go out to Wisconsin?”
“Well, no. The idea was not to be invasive, and this seems like the perfect way to do that.”
Another sigh. “That rather misses the point, doesn’t it?”
“Well, I don’t see why it wouldn’t accomplish…”
“It was proof we needed, Gabriel. Not an interview. That can’t have been lost on you.”
“Look…If I’m willing to make him part of my show…to go out on a limb like that and virtually endorse him…doesn’t that take some of the ethical burden off Argus?”
“Would that it could, my friend.”
This reply, with its archaic wording and unctuous delivery, was so typically Findlay it infuriated me. I realized he wasn’t listening at all. He was merely biding his time until the whole nasty business was behind him.
“This is not right,” I told him. “You can’t grant this boy a voice, then just take it away from him.”
“I’m afraid we can, Gabriel. And must. There are too many questions still unanswered. I’m not willing to risk my reputation and the reputation of this house on a sentimental whim. There are too many risks, frankly. Too many people who know about this thing.” By which he means me, I thought. For Findlay had been perfectly willing to publish Pete’s book when he had only his own doubts to contend with. It was my doubts that had queered the deal. Without me around he might have lied or pleaded ignorance if Pete’s book—or Pete himself—had proven a hoax. Two people in the know constituted a conspirac
y, and that made the whole thing too dangerous. And Findlay knew that I knew this.
“You know,” I said quietly. “I wouldn’t say anything if it turned out that…Pete wasn’t what we thought.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that…you could count on me in that regard. I would never point a finger at anyone. I’d have nothing to gain by—”
“Please, Gabriel. Don’t dishonor us both.”
“I’m just saying—”
“I know what you’re saying, and I know why you’re saying it. I like him, too, and I’m sure I’ll miss him terribly. And Donna as well.
Especially Donna. She despises me now, but I know what a special person she is. I’m just as heartsick as anyone, Gabriel. Make no mistake about that.”
Sensing finality, I scrambled for an alternate plan. “Well, then…
okay…what if I talked to Donna again? Really laid it on the line with her. Maybe she would let me come visit if I told her—”
“Didn’t she refuse you just last week?”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“And I’ve already laid it on the line with her, Gabriel. It didn’t do a bit of good.”
“But if she knew it would save Pete’s book…”
“Nothing will save it. That’s what I’m telling you. I’ve already met with the publisher. We’ve had a long, agonizing talk, and…we’ve come to the end. You’ve done your best, Gabriel. We both have.”
“No, Ashe. You have not done your best. You’ve just taken the coward’s way out. And now you’ve got the nerve to try and make it acceptable. So don’t include me in this, please. You’ve deserted this child in the most heartless way, and I plan to say so. To the world, if necessary.” A long pause. “I’m sure you’ll do what you have to do.” I slammed down the phone.
I didn’t tell anyone anything for hours. I hated the thought of setting this calamity in stone, of making my fuckup official. Again and again, I retraced my steps, looking for the place where I’d taken the wrong turn. And for a while I even shifted the blame to Donna. She had been much too stubborn, I told myself, when even the smallest amount of compromise would have allowed Pete his self-expression as well as his privacy. Then I remembered that Donna knew Pete better than anyone, what his limits were and what it would take to unleash his demons. Who was I to judge that? And what did I really know about the nature of Pete’s abuse? Hadn’t Findlay suggested darkly that there were aspects of it too ghastly to include in the book?
Then I began to ponder the editor’s odd remark about Donna: how “special” she was to him and how much he would miss her.
He had sounded almost like a spurned lover, as if Donna might have offered more than marital advice when they met for that lunch in New York. Had their last heated exchange on the phone been complicated by something else? Had Findlay been denying his doubts because of feelings for Donna? And, if so, had he and I been seduced by two sides of the same person?
I wanted to kick this around with Jess, but we had left so much unresolved after our fight. And I was afraid he’d tell me to stop obsessing and get a life—something I knew in my heart I was no longer able to do.
Anna arrived late that afternoon to find me on the sofa in a pathetic state. She set down her briefcase as soon as she saw me.
“What happened?”
I outlined the catastrophe as succinctly as I could. It sounded even worse when reduced to its essence.
“Well,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not like you didn’t try.”
“Right.”
“Have you talked to him since it happened?”
“Once. But I told him I would try to fix things.” I could see Pete lying there as I spoke, probably in his oxygen tent, gasping for breath as he waited for me to come through.
“Are you gonna talk to him again?”
“Well…yeah. But I can’t handle it right now.” Anna’s dark, intel-ligent eyes were fixed on me so intently that her question seemed more than idle curiosity. “Why do you ask?” She sat down on the edge of the couch next to my feet. “I hope you don’t mind but…I talked to Edgar about this.”
I drew a blank.
“My brother?”
“Oh, yeah. Your twin.”
She nodded. “He works as an intern out at Skywalker Ranch. Sort of a glorified flunky.”
“Cool job, though.” I could picture a male version of Anna bustling through that fantasy factory in the Marin hills, a blueprint for the new Star Wars prequel tucked under his arm. Doing some quick arithmetic, I realized that those twins had barely been born when the first Star Wars was filmed. I would have killed for such a glamorous job at Edgar’s age.
“One of Lucas’s producers eats at my mom’s restaurant, so Edgar made a pitch to him one day. Anyway…I told Edgar about this kid of yours and his mom and all, and he said there’s a real simple way to figure out if they’re the same person.” I groaned and pulled a sofa pillow over my face.
“Shouldn’t have blabbed, huh?” Anna said.
“No, not that. I’m just burned out. And disgusted with myself. I don’t wanna creep around anymore, Anna. It makes me feel too guilty. I would never have raised the issue in the first place if I’d known that Findlay was such a worm. In fact, I’d be blasting him in public right now, if I had any way in the world to—” I cut myself off.
“To what?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“To prove that the kid exists, right? At least to yourself. To prove that he and his mom are two separate people. That’s all you need, right?”
I nodded glumly.
“Well, there’s a simple way to do that. You just get a voiceprint made. You know, those things the cops use.”
“I know what they are, but…”
“Well, they’re just as good as fingerprints, Edgar says. Even if somebody’s trying to disguise his voice. Or hers.”
“Maybe so. But it would just humiliate him further. There’s no way you could keep it secret. It would be all over the place in no time.”
“Why? I don’t get it.”
“Anna, look. Whenever the cops get involved…”
“You don’t need cops. That’s what I’m saying! Edgar could have it done out at Skywalker! They’ve got the best sound equipment around. And nobody would have to know.” I sat up on one elbow. “I thought you said he was a flunky.”
“Well, yeah, but…he knows this girl who’s a sound person.” She widened her eyes in a meaningful way.
“A girlfriend, huh?”
“Probably. Who knows? He’s such a private little squirt.” I smiled at her. “I thought twins were supposed to share everything.”
“That’s a big misconception. It’s not that way with us at all.”
“Really?”
“When somebody knows you really well, you just have to hide things even more.”
Had I been doing that with Jess? I wondered. Had he been doing that with me?
“Let’s go check your machine,” said Anna, already assuming I’d approved her voiceprint scheme. “I bet there’s something on there we could use. You never erase your messages.” She headed for the stairs, then stopped abruptly, beckoning me like a siren. “C’mon.”
“Look, Anna. This is not really…”
“C’mon. It’ll be fun.”
I followed her up to the office, where, as predicted, there were no less than seventeen messages stored in the machine. “This is so cool,” said Anna, rubbing her hands together. “I feel like Inspector Tennison. Where should I look?”
“I don’t know if they’re even on there,” I said. “I’ve mostly been calling them lately.”
“So I’ll start at the beginning, okay?”
“Fine. Whatever.”
She skipped past three messages—one from my agent in New York, one from Jess, one from a nearby Thai restaurant confirming my order—before arriving at Pete’s distinctively chirpy voice. I had picked up the phone immediately, so all you could hear was a s
assy fragment: “Hey, Dicksmoker, I was wondering if you were…” Anna turned and frowned at me. “That’s it?” I nodded. “Piece o’ cake, huh? All we have to do is get his mother to say ‘dicksmoker.’” Anna frowned, still poking the forward button. “It doesn’t have to be the exact same word.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“That’s what Edgar said.”
“There’s nothing else on there,” I told her, indicating the machine.
“At least not from her. I know she hasn’t called in the last ten days.”
“But you said you talked to her.”
“Yeah. But I called her.”
“Okay, then…call her now and tape your conversation.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“For starters I don’t have a tape recorder.”
“You can do it off the machine, dummy. The tape recorder’s built right in.”
For someone in radio, I’m unusually technophobic, but I had never been more so than at that moment. As soon as I located its record button, that machine became something lethal to me, a nuclear device that would detonate with the slightest mishandling. “I still can’t do it,” I told Anna. “Not now. It would feel too weird and cold-blooded.”
“Why?”
“They’re waiting for an answer about Pete’s book. They’re expecting me to fix things.”
“So? It doesn’t matter what you talk about.”
“It does to me, Anna. I can’t break their heart and record it.”
“Their heart?”
“His heart. Her heart. Whoever’s.”
My bookkeeper gave me a long, soulful look. “You need help,” she said sweetly.
Later, when Anna was gone, I took Hugo on his walk. It was already dark. I would have to call Henzke Street as soon as I got home; I knew I’d never sleep knowing that Pete might still be awake, still expecting that sandbar. But I mustn’t get tense about the call, or let myself feel guilty in the least. It was Ashe Findlay, after all, who had rejected Pete, and the greater part of the damage had already been done. My sad little report would just be a postscript at worst, an unpleasant aftertaste.
But I would try to make it easier for him. I’d be funny and warm and sympathetic and pissed off as hell at those bastards in New York. I’d tell him that having a book published was not really that big a deal, not the transcendent chest-thumping thrill it’s often cracked up to be. The real reward, I’d say, sounding as if I meant it, was in the writing itself, in the truthful setting down of things.
The Night Listener Page 17