Last Lie (4 page)

4

M
y brief meeting with Mattin Snow during the week before the big housewarming they were planning to show off their new digs--or at least the "before" version of their new digs--proved an inauspicious start between new neighbors.

I think Emily was aware that I shared her sense of impotence about the state of affairs that was developing across the lane. Peter and Adrienne had been almost perfect neighbors. Whoever followed them into that house had a high bar to vault. I was determined to offer Mattin and his wife, Mimi, whom I had not yet met, as much latitude as I could muster while they settled into our remote Spanish Hills neighborhood and assimilated into our odd part-of-Boulder-but-not-part-of-Boulder culture.

I reminded myself that I didn't really know Mattin. But Boulder is, despite its geographical size, a small town. Our good friends Diane and Raoul knew Mimi and Mattin well and considered them friends.

Diane, in fact, was the one who told me who had purchased Adrienne's house. She'd explained that she'd only known Mattin for a few years, but that she'd known Mimi, Mattin's wife, and her ex-husband since Raoul's heady NBI days in the eighties. Diane, who knew more about other people's family histories than the average ancestry website, also informed me that Mimi had a couple of kids who wouldn't be around much--a daughter, currently studying in Prague, who was a cheerleader at the University of Iowa, and a son who was at a boarding school in the mountains perfecting his skiing, or something.

Diane thought we'd all become fine friends. Lauren seemed to agree. It was increasingly clear to me that my wife was a fan of Mattin's work, and perchance even a fan of Mattin himself. Lauren, I knew, had good radar. So, except for the part about maybe being a jerk about Emily running off leash for ten minutes each evening, I was working to keep an open mind about my new neighbor.

EMILY'S LATE ROUNDS the night of the big housewarming began only after she completed a careful reconnaissance of the few vehicles that remained parked across the lane. Her quick appraisal--she's a nimble beast--ended with a head-shake and a loud huff. I could relate. She then dashed through the narrow gap between Peter's old barn and our house in the direction of the distant dark vertical gash in the Front Range that was the entrance to the wonders of Eldorado Canyon. When she reemerged in my sight she was halfway down the hill, hopping at an angle in the Bouvier-as-jackrabbit motion of hers that I have never tired of observing. In seconds she bounded over the nearest miniridge--okay, it was more like a berm--and disappeared from view.

Our other dog was by my side.

When Adrienne died the previous year, she left behind her wish that Lauren and I raise her son, Jonas. Our second dog was her posthumous gift to Jonas. Fiji was a Havanese, a breed I hadn't known existed. It took Jonas a while to settle on a name for the puppy--she'd come to us as Callie, a moniker that he announced wasn't going to last. Befitting her heritage, Jonas had eventually named his new dog after a tropical island. Jonas being Jonas, he'd chosen an island about as far from the puppy's ancestral homeland, Cuba, as was possible.

Fiji had no choice but to stay with me while Emily took off down the hill. Because she hadn't yet proven herself qualified to act as Emily's deputy, Fiji was haltered and leashed. Truth be told, Fiji wasn't even yet Girl Scout material. The Havanese was still a puppy, if not in size--the vet assured us that she was approaching her full weight of a dozen pounds--certainly in temperament.

She was a bit of a nut. Intellectually, we hoped she still had some maturing to do. Though we were no longer holding out hope for a canine Einstein, we were praying for something more cognitively complex than what we'd seen so far. Jonas kept telling us that the dog had hidden smarts. I kept hoping he was right.

For almost a month, Fiji had spent every determined moment of our daily late evening walks sniffing for prairie dogs. After a solitary surprise encounter in the open with one of the critters--the two mammals, Cuban puppy and Great Plains prairie dog, had a precious moment nose-to-nose before the prairie dog went all subterranean on her--Fiji reached a couple of impetuous conclusions about life in the Boulder Valley. She decided that prairie dogs were as ubiquitous as dirt and that they were as dangerous as the devil.

The first conclusion had some truth to it. There were plenty of prairie dog colonies in our neck of the nonwoods of Boulder County. But dangerous? Not so much, at least not to humans. Well over a century of Western history had proven that livestock legs and prairie dog tunnels were most definitely not a match made in heaven. Occasional plague was another small risk from the colonies, sure. But from my perspective of many years in the valley, prairie dogs were more of a nuisance than they were a danger.

Our little Havanese, bred to protect Cuban chickens from Cuban foxes, begged to differ. That evening's search-and-destroy mission had Fiji checking at the roots of some dry grasses at the base of the accumulated loose dirt that multiple passes by graders and snowplows had left piled on each side of the lane. Since I was significantly more copacetic about burrowing rodents than was the dog--but please don't get me started on wasps and yellow jackets--I was content to meander along the edge of the eastern rim of the dirt and gravel path while catching up on my e-mails.

Fiji's retractable leash dangled from one of my hands. The dog's lead was at maximum extension, stretching across the lane between the amusingly paranoid Havanese and me. My other hand held my cell phone.

I was walking north. An hour or so before, a solid wind had begun blowing out of Wyoming. One of the perks of living in the vicinity of Colorado's Front Range is that compass directions are easy to discern. If the Rocky Mountains are on your left--as a landmark, they are nigh on impossible to miss from a distance of seventy blocks--north is the direction you're walking. Since north is also where Wyoming is, the insistent gusts from the Wind River Range were blowing into my face. I was forcing my chin down near my chest in a futile effort to keep dust from my eyes.

I was already thinking that night's walk with the dogs would be abbreviated. Although the sky was clear above the Rockies, the harsh chill in the wind and the unpleasant tang in my nose--northern gusts carried the unmistakable scent of the big stockyards near Greeley--suggested we might have a dusting of snow by morning.

Because the northern wind was so boisterous, my ears didn't even register the advent of the siren crackle of tires rolling on gravel behind me, from the south. The first thing I heard that announced any impending danger was the scream of a woman's voice: "Eric! Oh my God, there's--Your lights! Lights! Lights!" Then, as the van passed, "Oh my--Did you--"

The driver of the van--Eric, I presumed--didn't flick on the lights until his vehicle was almost fifty yards farther down the road, a fraction of a second after he was into the kind of not-so-subtle bend that drivers typically don't like to be surprised by in the dark on unfamiliar, unlit, unpaved roads in rural neighborhoods on hillsides. The sudden illumination of brake lights, followed by the even more sudden shift of those bright red squares to the right, confirmed what my ears were telling me--the van's rear tires had lost purchase on the first sharp curve that lay dead ahead.

I knew from ample personal experience that there was not much margin for driver error in that particular location. If the back of that big van slid even a few feet off the center line of the narrow lane, the van's right rear tire would cross the laughably small shoulder and then it would immediately succumb to gravity's will.

Gravity's will was, of course, reliably down.
Down
in that location meant an immediate slide of eighteen inches at about forty-five degrees, followed by a quick dozen feet at about thirty degrees. Once the van's tire scooted down the first foot and a half, those next dozen feet were almost guaranteed to follow. The odds of a vehicle with the van's center of gravity staying upright during that kind of sudden detour? Let's just say they were much worse than the odds of Fiji finding her prairie dog. The immutable truth was that if the right rear tire crossed the shoulder and completed the first little slide, the van was going to start to roll. And once it started to roll, it wasn't going to stop for a while.

If the van does go off the lane,
I thought
,
anticipating the aftermath of the almost certain disaster that was coming,
maybe I'll consider going over to help after I corral my dogs.

I had all those thoughts from the sitting position that I'd ended up in as I avoided the fender of the van. As I tried to regain an upright posture, my balance, and my bearings, the wind carried a cocktail of obnoxious fumes to my nose. Three components dominated the aroma: cow shit from Weld County, overheated motor oil, and burning tobacco leaves.

Two conclusions were instantaneous for me. The van needed a ring job, or worse, and someone in the van--Eric or the woman in the passenger seat--needed a nicotine patch. The stockyards? No conclusion was necessary.

The woman hadn't lowered her voice at all. The passenger-side window, open, I assumed, to release the cigarette smoke, permitted me to hear her continuing play-by-play: "The dog! Eric, stop! Stop! Go . . . back. Stop! Eric! Did you even see the little--"

The dog?

From my vantage, it appeared that Eric wasn't stopping. Eric didn't even seem to slow. He had instead decided to chance the application of brute horsepower to try to keep his vehicle on the lane. The van's engine roared and whined as the RPM climbed. The back wheels continued to spin faster and slide sideways in mockery of Eric's strategy.

I suspected that Eric wasn't aware that he had yet another unwelcome surprise just ahead of him. The curve he was currently navigating, not very successfully, was only the first C-bend of an S-curve.

S,
like in
shithead.
I muttered, "Asshole," as I scrambled toward the other side of the lane on my hands and knees after Fiji.

I had already tugged on the lead. I had tried to call out to the puppy but failed both times to get past the
F
. My vocal cords were coated by dust and smothered by pressure from my suddenly swollen heart. The rest was beyond my capability.

I'd felt dead weight when I yanked on my end of the leash.

Jonas doesn't need this,
is what I was thinking
. Jonas can't take this.

Please. Please. Please.

5

L
auren and I were worried about Jonas's reaction to the sale of what had been his family home.

Weeks before, on the afternoon before the sale of the house became final, I asked Jonas if he would like to spend one last night in the room where he'd slept while growing up.

"Maybe," he said after a moment's contemplation. Way too much trauma and loss had left Jonas a tentative kid.

"Dogs or no dogs?" I asked.

He said, "Didn't have a dog then. So, no dogs. If . . . I decide to do it."

Jonas was growing more cryptic as he aged. I associated his parsimony with his father, Peter. But I was concerned that it might simply be a response to all he'd suffered.

"Not by yourself. I'll be there too, you know," I said. "If you decide to do it." One of my guidelines for myself as a parent was that I always wanted my children to know what options they had and what options they didn't have. My "I'll be there" was my way of making certain that Jonas understood his degrees of freedom in that particular situation. If he chose to spend another night in the house, he would have my company.

Jonas, I thought, was relieved. I assumed he wouldn't want to let me know that he'd feel safer with me close by.

"You can sleep in Ma's room," he said. "If I do it."

Maybe not,
I thought. I didn't believe in ghosts, but if I knew anyone who would be eager to haunt me playfully from the afterlife, it would be Jonas's mom, Adrienne.

"I'll stay out of your way, if that's what you want," I said.

Jonas's aunt and uncle had recently flown out from New York and offered a big assist in helping to sort everything that had been in the house. Some special items had been crated and stored away for Jonas, a few coveted things were distributed to other family members on both sides of Jonas's family, and the rest was tossed or put up for bid at an auction that I didn't attend. What didn't sell went to charity.

Jonas was an eleven-year-old kid. Although he was precocious in some ways, he was immature in others. His sense of value, monetary or sentimental, was undeveloped. He had asked for very little from the house. But he had requested his father's tools. Because the barn that had been Peter's shop and studio had been vacated for the new owners, too, the precious stash of professional woodworking paraphernalia now filled a big rented storage locker down on 55th near Arapahoe.

Jonas had also asked for his mother's music collection, which included a couple of boxes of vintage vinyl that Adrienne had stashed in the cellar--she'd apparently once had a serious disco jones she'd kept completely secret from all of us--and a gazillion CDs. Jonas locked on to what he said was his mom's favorite band, an indie folk group named Girlyman. Their multi-tonal harmonies proved so easy on Lauren's difficult-to-please, MS-irascible ears that we began listening to a lot of Girlyman in our house. Jonas knew all the lyrics and could sing any harmonic line. Gracie started to join him in duets.

During the first weekend after the autumnal equinox, while we were enjoying a Sunday supper of panko-crusted salmon to the sounds of "Tell Me There's a Reason," Grace asked, "What is a girlyman, anyway?"

Lauren and I locked eyes--each of us was begging the other to jump in. Jonas saved us. He said, "My mom was a girlyman." I was shocked by Grace's response: she asked him to pass the creamed corn.

The departed stuff left the big house empty in the way that only well-lived-in houses are ever empty.

Some furniture--almost all of it, save the upholstered pieces, had been handmade by Jonas's father, Peter--had left literal footprints behind. Indentations in the carpet. Scratches on the hardwood. The fingertips of ten thousand hands had darkened the lacquered or polished wood in those places that humans are drawn to touch by instinct or habit. In the master bath upstairs, I spotted a fossilized mosquito frozen in three dimensions, four if you count time, on the vanity mirror. In the scenario in my head, I guessed that it had been squished by Adrienne's hand only hours before she boarded the airplane flight that would take her to Israel and to her death.

I found the empty house eerie yet comforting. I could still feel the human energy in the space that had long been occupied by Peter and Adrienne and Jonas, and a seemingly endless parade of nannies. When I walked the house, I could still hear the echoes of Jonas's laughter ringing through all of his earlier developmental phases.

Jonas's bedroom had been in the middle of the eastern side of the second floor, down the hall from the master. I suspected--if he chose to spend an additional night in his room--he would sleep in his bedroom's peculiar loft.

The loft. Peter created the nook as a gift for his infant son. He called the private space "the knothole." Adrienne had always called the quirky space "the cubby."

Peter's creation was maybe six feet long, four feet deep, and four feet high. The recess started a good five and a half feet off the floor of the back wall of Jonas's bedroom. A low rail extended across the front opening. It was not there to keep Jonas from tumbling out. Peter, a master rock climber, had always presumed that any kid who carried his genes would be able to intuitively sense gravity's inclinations and would be able to tumble short distances with the agility of a cat, if necessary.

The rail was there to assuage Adrienne's tendency to fret.

And then to kvetch. Adrienne had never been one to suffer her nervousness in silence. When Adrienne fretted, she then kvetched. Sunrise/sunset. Inhale/exhale.

Everyone who loved her knew the best cure, perhaps the only cure, was prevention. Fret prophylaxis equaled kvetch abeyance. Peter knew it better than anyone. And that is why a low rail extended across the opening of the knothole.

The base of the odd nook was lined with a thick slab of corduroy-covered foam. The walls and ceiling were an intricate chevron pattern concocted of zebrawood veneer. The lines--the natural grain of the fabulous wood and the father-made lines of the angled chevrons--went every which way.

The little space was a marvel. On one end of the knothole Peter had recessed shelving and drawers for Jonas's books and his little-boy treasures. The nook had two built-in reading lights, dual outlets for future electronic desires--Peter was a visionary--and a disappearing curtain system that could, at Jonas's whim, transform the space from his private retreat into his public stage.

What the knothole didn't have was any visible means of entry. Peter, who overlooked nothing when he designed and built furniture, had intentionally omitted a ladder, or steps, or handholds, or ledges, or any other way for a small child to enter the high sanctuary of the knothole.

I had always thought that Peter had omitted an entrance because he wanted to be his son's personal elevator. The space was constructed high enough off the floor that Adrienne--she had an excess of many things, but height and upper body strength were not among them--wouldn't be able to lift her growing child, or herself, up into the space. Peter knew all that. By building the knothole so high off the floor, Peter had ensured that it would forever be a special father/son place. That was my theory.

It would turn out that I was wrong about that. If I had been at all prescient about the damn housewarming and what was to follow, it would have been a good place to begin keeping a list.

Of the things I was wrong about.

"TURN YOUR BACK, ALAN," JONAS SAID.

We had carried sleeping bags over to spend the night.

I did what he asked. After I rotated, I found myself looking out his bedroom door, through the open door of the room across the hall, out the far window, and across the lane. I was seeing the shingled roof of the modest house that had originally been constructed as a domicile for the caretaker for the big ranch house. I'd bought that caretaker's shack from the woman who had owned the ranch before Adrienne and Peter.

The now-renovated shack was Jonas's new home, the house that, since his mother's death, he shared with Lauren and me and his sister, Grace.

Behind my turned back, I heard the squeak of a hinge. Once, then again. The brief, hushed hum of a motor. A few seconds passed. I heard the hum of the motor one more time. Then a click, and another.

"Okay," Jonas said.

I turned around. Jonas was in the knothole.

Had he jumped up? I didn't think he could do it without making some kind of racket as he jumped up and scrambled in. I wondered, of course, about the squeaks and the motor. I assumed the squeaky hinge was on the door to the closet that shared a wall with the knothole. The motor? No idea.

"I heard a motor," I said.

He shrugged.

"Can I look?" I asked, nodding at the closet.

"You can try," he said. It was a bit of a dare.

I opened the closet. Heard the telltale squeak from the hinge on the door. The tight space was wainscoted with rough cedar planks, cut and installed on a bias. I tried to spot something that would indicate the entrance to a passageway that might lead from the closet to the knothole.

Nothing was apparent.

Jonas seemed pleased at my failure. "Closets should have closets," he said.

"Closets should have closets?" I said back.

"That's what Ma said Dad always said."

Your mom lied a lot,
is what I was thinking. "Does this closet have a closet?"

"Closets . . . should have closets, Alan." He smiled.

Jonas called me "Alan." Every once in a while he called Lauren "Mom." He'd always called Adrienne "Ma." Peter was "Dad."

After he'd shown off his cubby, Jonas told me he didn't want to spend the night after all.