A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (33 page)

I called Cadey’s brothers. I told Wade who I was, and told him he needed to call the state police and tell them about seeing Tobin on the ice that night. We talked a long time. He told me Cadey and Jimmy were getting married, that they’d stay in the house while they finished high school, and all the brothers would help with the baby. And he told me the name of the fellow Tobin had had the scuffle with in the bar, someone who had been in school
with Cadey’s youngest brothers, someone who’d maybe had a crush on her. And somehow it didn’t surprise me to find out it was the young Saranac Lake policeman, the one whose name I’d somehow never gotten, who had come to our house to question Jessamyn the morning after Tobin’s body had been found.

Then I looked up that man’s number, and called him too, and told him politely but definitively that he needed to call the state police, and call them now, and tell them about Tobin falling against the wall in their pool table scuffle that night.

Both he and Wade could tell the police it was Tobin’s memorial service that made them realize they needed to speak up, to clear the air, so his sister and family could have some peace. I didn’t need to come into it. I called George, and told him I would need one more day to finish writing.

For this article I’d done a first-person sidebar about seeing Tobin’s body being taken from the ice, about the rumors that ran through town and the ugliness that had ensued, about getting to know Tobin’s sister and becoming friends with her. The main article covered his life here, and I’d interspersed bits from his friends here, their favorite stories about Tobin.

Now I wrote an ending to the main piece, from the imagined perspective of someone who had been there. I wrote of the shove in the bar that night, the bump on the head, but didn’t name names. I wrote of Tobin walking out on the ice with his head aching, perhaps sinking to his knees and then lying down on the ice to rest and sliding under. I didn’t say that maybe, just maybe, Tobin thought of the night his brother had drowned to save him, to give him a life, and that maybe Tobin had just walked on until the ice cracked under him. Neither did I mention that he had been with a sixteen-year-old girl with an ethereal beauty that had entranced him, that she was most likely carrying a child that was his, who would be brought up bearing another man’s name.

Nothing in the story was a lie, but neither was it the whole
truth. These truths didn’t belong to me; they weren’t mine to share. Even if some people suspected that Cadey’s child wasn’t Jimmy’s, even if they put the pieces together, no one would say a word. This town would close ranks. Cadey and Jimmy would be one more set of local teens who married young with a baby on the way.

After I finished the piece and turned it in, I called Win. She came in to meet me, and we had a long talk as we walked around the lake, and I told her about a baby, one being born to a local girl who had briefly loved her brother, a baby that would be born in late spring or early summer. And the two of us agreed not to tell Jessamyn any of this, or anyone else.

It took George a day to review the story and have lawyers vet it. He ran it with a photo I’d taken of the hole left in the ice after Tobin’s body had been removed. I thought it wonderfully appropriate, and hauntingly beautiful. It made me think of one of the postcards Tobin had sent his sister soon after he’d moved here, a snow-covered Adirondack scene.
I think I’m going to like it here
, he’d written.
It’s a cold and lonely place—but it suits me
.

Jessamyn went off to live with her father in Boston. She got a part-time job, because she likes to be earning money, which made Daniel proud. And she got her GED and started community college classes, which also made him proud. Brent sometimes goes down to see her. This is a lot of new for Jessamyn: new father, new home, new boyfriend. I imagine it’s going to take some getting used to. But she seems to be taking to it. It’s the life she was supposed to have, coming later but not too late, and in an odd way brought to her by Tobin, from the article on him that mentioned her name and brought her father to her door. In death, Tobin brought her what she’d perhaps hoped he could give her in life: somewhere she belonged, someone to belong to.

If there’s an afterlife, I imagine Tobin’s smiling at that. He’s also probably smiling at me becoming friends with his sister.

Win ended up buying the cabin, and made plans to return in the summer. And she got a dog, an eight-month-old Australian shepherd mix from the animal shelter in Westport. She took him home with her in her new dog-friendly car, and started a new life, with a rescued dog that adored her and a mother she could see once in a while, at least, and somewhat at peace with what
had happened to her two brothers. She was, she said, considering law school, which didn’t surprise me. She would be one heck of a lawyer.

I sold a version of the articles to, of all places,
Rolling Stone
, for an absurd amount of money. They had no problem with how involved I was with the piece—it was one of the things that sold them on it. That clipping would open an insane number of doors for me professionally. There were a lot of articles I could write involving this region, a lot of stories to tell. I had mixed feelings about it—all this had taken a lot out of me—but Baker told me, emphatically, that this sort of writing was what I was meant to do. And maybe she was right.

Dean pretty much forgave me, although I think my role in revealing what his brother had done still made him uncomfortable. Eddie cashed the check from Win and paid the drug debt, and ended up enlisting in the Army—partly to please his brother; partly, I think, because he knew he wouldn’t change if he stayed here. Every two weeks, Win gets a check for fifty dollars from Eddie. We didn’t know if he would keep it up, and we didn’t discuss it. But it helped Dean to know about it, and Win would never tell him if the checks stopped coming.

I told most of the story to my brother, not all of it, and he told me what he could of the tough case he’d been working on. I heard back from the accountant in Greenwich I’d never interviewed, the childhood friend, who had flown to England after his brother was seriously injured in a small plane crash. I found out through an efficient grapevine—Marilyn, in fact—that it was the fired reporter, the kid Dirk, who’d made the hang-up calls to me. I guessed he was the one who’d let the air out of my tires, or had gotten someone to do it. Now he’d gotten a job in Massachusetts, so I figured that was the end of his vengefulness. I hoped he’d learn to be a better reporter.

The near miss that sent my car into a ditch? Most likely just a careless driver. The Saranac Lake policeman who’d shoved Tobin, the one who’d been captivated by Cadey when he’d been in high
school with her brothers, left the force and went to work in his brother-in-law’s plumbing business. Win let the Lake Placid police know she’d found out who had trashed the cabin, the person had made restitution, and she didn’t want to press charges. Case closed.

Paul and Philippe came down for a long weekend—I turned my rooms over to them and stayed in Jessamyn’s old room. I hadn’t rented it out yet. I was doing okay financially, with the sale of the articles, so wasn’t in any hurry. Paul wanted to see the ice palace, so we went over to Saranac Lake, and I stayed on the shore as he and his father walked through it, and then we went to visit Baker and her husband and their three boys.

Philippe took me aside when Paul was playing with Baker’s kids. “I need to talk to you,” he said, his voice odd, and we bundled up and went outside.

This wasn’t good. I knew it wasn’t good. It never is when someone says they need to talk to you. They’re either going to tell you they’re moving away or they have a life-threatening ailment or something else that’s going to shake up your life, and not in a pleasant way. So off we went for a walk, me trying not to show how rattled I was.

To give him credit, he went pretty much straight to the point. “You know I care deeply about you,” he said. “You know you are very important to my and Paul’s life.”

“Yes,” I said, and it seemed that the breath was leaving my body. This was not the sort of preamble that led up to suggesting moving in together, to pulling out a ring, to making a proposal. It was the kind of speech that led up to what he said next.

“We live a long way apart, Troy. I’ve … I need to tell you that I’ve started seeing someone.”

I like to think of myself as the type of person who would be stoic when hearing something like this, all brave and stiff-upper-lip and all, but I couldn’t pull it off. Tears started to fall and then I was sobbing, and he was holding me. My world had just upended, turned inside out, and I had never seen it coming.

“I’m sorry,” I said between sobs. “I’m sorry I was so busy, I’m
sorry I didn’t come up more. I’m sorry I wasn’t ready. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“No, no, no,” he said. “It’s all right, it wasn’t that. I didn’t plan it, I didn’t plan on meeting someone, it just happened.”

But who plans on something like that? No one. It happens. And it happens because there’s a space for it to happen, an opening, a gap. If I’d been in Ottawa, if I’d been able to make a commitment, take a risk—never mind that we’d agreed that the time wasn’t right, that neither of us was ready—it wouldn’t have happened.

Or maybe it would have. Maybe it would have been far worse. And maybe if Philippe had been perfect for me and I’d been perfect for him, maybe I never would have left, or he would have waited a while longer, waited until the time was right for both of us. Maybe I’d just been a coward, afraid to take a step toward a new life when I should have.

“Of course you’re still welcome to visit,” he said, but then I cried harder, thinking of the house I loved, the meals I’d shared with them, the times I’d driven Paul to school and hung out with Elise, who would now be cooking meals for some other woman. Some other woman would be sitting at the table with Paul, driving him to school, checking his homework. I felt such a sharp pain in my chest it seemed my heart had to have stopped beating, but I could feel it, hear it, a steady, slow
lub-dub
; it had betrayed me by keeping on beating when it should have stopped, should have frozen in my chest.

I had thought it all would be waiting for me, Philippe and Paul and the house in Ottawa, waiting for me to be ready, but it wasn’t. My retreat, my mecca, my safe haven, gone. The place that had felt like home, gone. The gates clanged shut before I’d known they were even starting to move. Maybe before I’d even realized they’d been open.
I thought I had more time
. Until Philippe winced, I didn’t know I’d said the words aloud.

“I’ll need to see Paul,” I said thickly. “I can’t lose Paul.”

And now he was crying too. “You’ll never lose Paul,” he said. “He needs you. I’ll bring him down to see you; he can visit on holidays.”

We walked until I could control myself, and we rubbed our faces with snow so they would just look red with cold, and we went back and pretended to be cheerful, and then Philippe and the child I loved beyond reason went off to Canada, and I went home, home to my dog. And laid in my lonely bed and wished hard I hadn’t taken the high road, the sensible path. Wished I had stayed up in Canada last summer, that I had gone for it, rushed it, risked it. At least I would have had that time and I’d have those memories, and I wouldn’t be wondering
What if
. But I’d been careful, and I’d been cautious, partly to safeguard Paul, and maybe myself as well, and now the decision had been made for me.

I didn’t tell Baker for a few days. When I did, she said, “Troy, it’s not over until it’s over—he’s just seeing this person, not marrying her.” And I suppose she was right, but it seemed that the tiny window Philippe and I might have had had closed, sometime when we weren’t looking. Maybe it had never really been open and we’d only come together because of Paul; maybe it had slammed shut after the death of Philippe’s wife. Maybe I’d let it slide shut bit by bit while I was busy writing articles that had altered life for other families, brought Jessamyn a father, lost one for Win; estranged Dean and his brother, brought David Zimmer some peace.

I couldn’t judge this at all. All I knew is that I was alone, and it hurt.

Of course, I had to wonder if I’d done the right thing about Tobin, about Cadey, about the baby. I’d exposed one set of family secrets and let a new one remain hidden—that Tobin had apparently left a child, not yet born, one that his parents would never know about. This was a weighty decision, and we’d likely never know if it was the right one.

But I think it was.

Tobin’s baby would grow up here, in the Adirondacks. The
child would grow up hiking and fishing, skiing and ice-skating and snowshoeing with uncles and mother and the man he or she would call father. The child wouldn’t know Tobin’s parents, wouldn’t be pressured to go to a prestigious school or take a prestigious job. Win would quietly start a trust fund, moving some of Tobin’s share of her own trust fund into it, one that would help pay for college or first-home-buying or other expenses. The one thing Cadey agreed to accept was a family health plan, covering her and Jimmy and the unborn child and whatever children they might have. So this child would have health care, and some financial help when needed, and would likely never know the family history on the birth father’s side.

And no one would ask for a DNA test to show who was or wasn’t the father. It was better no one knew for sure, and the fact that Tobin had wanted to provide for Cadey’s child was enough for Win. And with Jimmy’s name on the birth certificate and without a DNA test, presumably Tobin’s parents would never get wind of a small child growing up in the Adirondacks their son may have fathered.

I don’t think Tobin killed himself. I think his death was an accident, a confluence of events, the day his luck ran out. Maybe in a way he’d welcomed it. Maybe when he’d slipped under the ice he hadn’t fought the water, hadn’t struggled to keep the lake from claiming him. Maybe he was tired and until that moment when the ice cracked hadn’t known just how tired—tired of carrying the weight of his brother’s death and his father’s perfidy and his own transgressions and a thousand other things. We’d never know. Everyone could envision whatever version they could live with.