Before I Say Good-Bye (7 page)

“Nell, is there anything I can do?”

She was vaguely aware that Mac was talking to her, vaguely aware that it was after midnight. Gert’s birthday dinner had gone ahead as planned, none of them aware of what had happened. Nell had made the lame excuse that Adam couldn’t be there because of an important meeting. She had said it with as much conviction as possible, but the disappointment on Gert’s face and the forced festivity of the evening had built up in her a new head of steam against him.

By the time she arrived home at ten o’clock, she had decided that she would have to work things out with Adam that night, assuming, of course, that he didn’t accept her challenge to not come home. She would reason with him, listen to his objections, see what compromises they could make—but she just could not stand more days of uncertainty and irritation. Being a good politician was all about being able to negotiate and, when necessary, come to a compromise. It struck Nell that maybe the same qualities were necessary in a good wife.

When Nell walked into the lobby of her building, however, she realized that the sense of foreboding that had troubled her all day had reached its culmination. Waiting there for her were Mac’s assistant, Liz Hanley, and NYPD Detective George Brennan. Instantly Nell had known that something was terribly wrong, but they insisted on not talking until they were inside the apartment.

Then, as gently as he could, Detective Brennan told her about the accident, and with an apology said he needed to ask her some questions.

There were witnesses who had seen her husband getting on his boat, he told her, followed by at least three more people. Did she know the names of his companions? he asked.

Too stunned yet for reality to sink in, Nell had told him that she understood it was to be an associates’ meeting, and that Winifred Johnson, Adam’s assistant, was also going to be there. She told him the names of the associates, even offered to look up phone numbers, but the detective demurred. He told her he would take it from there for the night, and that she should go to bed and try to get some sleep. The media blitz would start tomorrow, and she would need all her strength.

“I’ll be back to talk with you in the morning, Mrs. Cauliff. I’m so terribly sorry,” he said, then walked with Liz Hanley to the door.

As the detective left, both Mac and Gert arrived at the apartment, having been called by Liz.

“Nell, go to bed,” Mac said immediately.

Mac’s voice always has had a peculiar ability to sound both brusque and concerned at the same time, Nell thought objectively.

“Mac’s right, Nell. The next few days aren’t going to be easy,” Gertrude MacDermott coaxed, taking a seat on the couch next to Nell.

Nell looked at these two people, the only family she had now. With a slight smile, she remembered how one of her grandfather’s aides had commented once, “How can Cornelius and Gertrude look so much alike, yet be so different?”

It was true. Both of them had a shock of unruly white hair, vivid blue eyes, thin lips and a jutting chin. But the expression in Gert’s eyes was tranquil rather than fierce like Mac’s; her demeanor was as retiring as her brother’s was combative.

“I’ll stay with you tonight,” Gert volunteered. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

Nell shook her head. “Thank you, Aunt Gert. But I need to be alone tonight,” she said.

Liz came back to say good night, and Nell got up and walked her to the door. “Nell, I’m so sorry. When I heard the news on the radio tonight, I came right over. I know you mean more to Mac than anything else in the world, and I know he feels terrible about Adam too, even though he was always a little hard on him. If there is anything I can do . . .”

“I know, Liz. Thanks for coming so quickly. Thanks for taking care of so many things already.”

“Tomorrow we’ll talk about arrangements,” Liz said.

Arrangements? Nell thought with a start. Arrangements. A funeral. “Adam and I never really discussed what he would want if something happened to him,” Nell said. “It was just not something that seemed necessary. But I do remember that one time in Nantucket, when he’d been out fishing, he said that when his time came he’d like to be cremated and have his ashes spread over the ocean.”

She looked at Liz and understood the surge of sympathy in her eyes. Nell shook her head and forced herself to smile. “I guess it looks like he got his wish, doesn’t it?”

“I’ll call you in the morning,” Liz said, taking Nell’s hand and squeezing it gently.

When Nell returned to the living room, her grandfather was standing up and Gert was looking for her pocketbook. As Nell walked Mac to the door, he said gruffly, “You’re smart not to have Gert stay. She’d be going on all night in that channel-babble nonsense of hers.” Mac stopped and faced Nell, putting a gentle hand on each of her arms. “I’m more sorry than I can express, Nell. After what happened to your mother and father, you certainly don’t deserve to lose Adam this way.”

I especially don’t deserve to lose him after a quarrel, Nell thought, feeling a surge of resentment rise in her. Mac, you were the root of the problem, she told herself. Your demands on me—they do sometimes get to be too much. Adam was wrong about not wanting me to run for office, but he was right about that.

When she did not answer, after a moment her grandfather turned away from her.

Gert appeared and took both of Nell’s hands. “I know there is little anyone can say at a time like this that will offer any real consolation, but Nell, I want you to remember that you haven’t really lost him. He’s on a different plane now, but he’s still your Adam.”

“Come on, Gert,” Mac said, taking his sister’s arm, “Nell doesn’t need to listen to that kind of talk now. Try to get some sleep, Nell. We’ll talk in the morning.”

They were gone. Nell walked back into the living room, aware that she was half listening for the sound of Adam’s key in the lock. She moved about the apartment as though in a trance, arranging some magazines on a side table, straightening the decorative pillows on the deep, comfortable couch. The room had northern light, and the couch had been reupholstered last year in
a warm red fabric that Adam at first questioned, then approved.

She looked about the room, noting the eclectic combination of furnishings. Both she and Adam had strong likes and dislikes. Some things from her parents’ home—wonderful artifacts from their travels—had been kept in storage for her. Other items she had bought—most of them at hole-in-the-wall antique shops or at obscure auctions found by Aunt Gert. Many things had been purchased only after a period of negotiation. Negotiation and compromise, Nell thought again, another pang of sorrow gripping her. Adam and I would have worked everything out, I just know we would have.

She crossed to a three-legged table that Adam had found one day when she was off at a party fund-raiser, and he had accompanied Gert on one of her foraging expeditions. Adam and Gert had hit it off from the beginning. She will miss him tremendously too, Nell thought sadly. She knew Gert encouraged him to buy the table for her.

Sometimes she worried about Gert, concerned lest someone take advantage of her. She is so trusting, Nell thought, letting all those psychics and channelers influence virtually every decision she makes. Yet when it came to bargaining over things like this sofa, Gert was amazingly sharp. Her own apartment on East Eighty-first Street was a cheerful, somewhat dusty hodgepodge of furniture and artifacts she had either inherited or accumulated over the years, and which now had the pull of sentimental ties and cozy familiarity.

Adam, on his first visit there, had laughingly commented that Gert’s apartment was like her mind: busy,
eclectic and somewhat fey. “No one else would have art deco lacquer cheek by jowl with rococo fantasy,” he said.

Aunt Gert’s furniture! The stuff in this room! What in the name of God was her mind doing, thinking about tables and chairs and carpets at a time like this? When would it finally register, she wondered, when would she finally get it through her head that Adam was dead?

But it
was
difficult, and it would continue to be. It was because she needed him to be alive, needed him to open the door and come in and say, “Nell, let me say it first: I love you and I’m sorry about the blowup.”

The blowup. First they had had an explosive fight, and then Adam’s boat had blown up. Detective Brennan had said it was too soon to know if it was a fuel leak that caused the explosion.

Adam named both his boats after me, Nell thought, but I hardly ever went out on either one with him. I’ve been so afraid of water ever since the time I was caught in that riptide in Hawaii. He begged me to come out on the boat with him. He promised he’d stay near shore.

She had tried to overcome the fear of the ocean, but she never really succeeded. She restricted her swimming now entirely to a pool, and while she could travel on an ocean liner—although, in truth, she was never completely comfortable there—she just could not stand to be on a smaller boat, where the feeling of the undulating water made her relive the certainty that she was going to drown.

But Adam loved boats, loved being on them. In a way, what could have been a problem became a plus for us, Nell thought. So many weekends, when Mac wanted me to go to political affairs with him, or when I
needed to work on my column, Adam would go sailing or fishing.

And then he would come home, and I would come home, and we’d be together. Compromises and accommodations, she thought again. We would have worked it out.

Nell turned off the living room lights and went into the bedroom. I wish I could feel something, she thought. I wish I could cry or grieve. Instead, I feel like all I can do is wait.

But wait for what? Wait for whom?

She undressed, taking care to hang up the green silk Escada pants suit she had been wearing. It was new. When it was delivered, Adam had opened the box, taken it out of the tissue and examined it carefully. “That’s gotta be great on you, Nell,” he had said.

She had worn it tonight because in her heart she’d been hoping that he would feel as rotten about the quarrel as she did and would join them, even if only in time for dessert. She had visualized him coming in just as they brought over the spun-sugar confection topped by a candle that was a birthday tradition at the Four Seasons.

But, of course, Adam didn’t come. I’d like to think he was planning to join us, Nell thought as she took a cotton nightgown from the drawer. Automatically, she washed her face and brushed her teeth. The image she saw in the bathroom mirror was that of a stranger, a pale woman with wide, blank eyes and dark chestnut hair that framed her face in damp ringlets.

Was it too warm in here? she wondered, noticing the perspiration on her forehead. If so, then why did she feel so cold? She got into bed.

Last night she hadn’t expected Adam to come home from Philadelphia, and when she heard his key, she hadn’t even acknowledged his presence. I was so reluctant to get into a discussion about running for Mac’s old seat that I pretended I wasn’t awake, Nell thought, angry with herself again.

Then, after he fell asleep, he had thrown his arm over her and had murmured her name. Now she said his aloud: “Adam. Adam. I love you. Please come back!”

She waited. The faint hum of the air conditioner and the wail of a police siren were the only sounds she could make out.

Then in the distance she heard the screeching cry of an ambulance.

There must have been police boats and ambulances at the marina, she reasoned. They had looked for survivors, although Detective Brennan had reluctantly explained that it would have been more than a miracle if there were any. “It’s like most plane crashes,” he had explained. “A plane usually disintegrates on the way down. We know there’s no hope for anyone to live through such an occurrence, but we have to give it a shot.”

Tomorrow, or at least in the next few days, they should be able to piece together the exact reason the boat exploded. “It was a new boat,” Brennan had said. “They’ll look for a mechanical problem, a fuel leak, something like that.”

“Adam, I’m sorry.” Again Nell spoke quietly into the darkened room. “Please, somehow let me know that you can hear me. Mom and Daddy said good-bye to me. So did Grammy.”

It had been one of her earliest memories. She’d been only four when her grandmother died. Her mother and father had been teaching at a seminar in Oxford, and she with her au pair had been staying in Mac’s house. Her grandmother was in the hospital. During the night, Nell had awakened and smelled her grandmother’s favorite scent, Arpège. She wore it just about all the time.

I remember it so well, Nell thought. I was very sleepy, but I remember thinking how glad I was that Grammy was home and that she was all better.

The next morning Nell had rushed down to the dining room. “Where’s Grammy? Is she up yet?”

Her grandfather was sitting at the table; Gert was with him. “Grammy is in heaven,” he had said. “She went there last night.”

When I told him that she had come into my room last night, he thought I’d been dreaming, Nell remembered. Gert believed me, though. She understood that Grammy had come to say good-bye. And then later, so did Mom and Dad.

Adam, please come to me. Let me sense your presence. Please give me the chance to tell you how sorry I am before I say good-bye to you.

For the rest of the night, Nell waited, lying awake, staring into the darkness. As dawn broke, she was at last able to weep—for Adam, for all the years they would not spend together, for Winifred and Adam’s associates, Sam and Peter, who had been on the boat with him.

And she was able to weep for herself, because once again she had to become used to living without someone she loved.

thirteen

S
AFELY ENSCONCED
in the backseat of the limousine, Peter Lang reflected on the collision that had taken place earlier between his car and the trailer truck. He had been on his way into Manhattan for a meeting with Adam Cauliff, cruising along on the Long Island Expressway, just about to enter the Midtown Tunnel, when
bang!
Collision!