Safer (5 page)

Roger Mallory offered a rueful smile and said, “Sara, how are you? Can I do anything?”

“I’m all right, Roger. But thank you. We’re sorry for all the commotion.”

“For Pete’s sake, don’t apologize.” Standing there in his pajamas, Roger Mallory seemed personally wounded that we’d had to move all the way to his little corner of the Midwest just to experience home invasion and attempted rape in the same evening. “I don’t know what to say. This kind of thing doesn’t normally happen around here.”

I wasn’t sure what to say, either. “I guess anything can happen anywhere.”

“I guess that’s the truth.”

On the other side of the common, two men broke away from the same officer I’d seen talking to Mallory a moment ago. They walked toward us, both wearing bright green vests with reflective striping, flashlights and walkie- talkies on their belts. I assumed they were with the police department until they came close enough that I could make out the badge emblems printed
on their vests. Framing the logos, top and bottom, were the words
Ponca Heights
and
Neighborhood Patrol.

As they approached, Roger winked sideways at us and said, “Some program you people are running here.”

“I can’t believe we didn’t see anything,” the shorter of the two answered. “Cripes. We were just coming back up the hill. He must have slipped right—”

An easy pat on the back from Roger seemed to settle him. “I’m busting your chops, Barry. Can’t expect to be everywhere at once.”

“I still can’t believe we didn’t see anything.”

“Paul, Sara, meet Barry Firth.”

“Two houses up,” Barry Firth said, gesturing toward the gabled Colonial with the ivy on the chimney and the big juniper trees in the front yard. He gave us a sheepish look. “Boy. This is embarrassing.”

The taller guy rolled his eyes and stepped forward. He had athletic shoulders and a firm grip and turned out to be Pete Seward, our neighbor next door. “What Deputy Firth here means to say is, are you two okay?”

“We’re fine, we’re fine,” Sara said. Her voice was steady, but as she rubbed my back, I could feel the lingering tremble in her fingers. “Thank you. We’re just sorry we have to meet like this.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Roger said. “We’ll give you folks a proper welcome after you’ve had a chance to catch your breath.” He nodded at Pete and Barry. “For now, you know where we are. Need anything, Sara, Paul, please. Just holler.”

“We will,” I said.

Sara drew in a breath, nodded, and exhaled. She said, “Thank you, guys.”

Roger Mallory touched each of us on a shoulder, then turned and headed across the common to rejoin the officers now rounding the other side. Barry Firth fell in behind. Pete Seward sighed, shook his head for our benefit, and followed along.

As they cut across the common, I saw Pete pull his flashlight from his belt and play the beam along the ground in front of Barry Firth’s feet, as though trying to trip him. I thought I heard Barry Firth tell him to knock it off.

After they’d moved beyond earshot, I said, “Wow. I feel safer already. How about you?”

“Be nice,” Sara said.

But she smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, and it didn’t last long, but it was something.

I pulled her closer; she put her head on my shoulder. I noticed that I’d placed my free hand on her stomach without being aware that I’d done so. She’d covered my hand with hers.

As we stood together, watching the activity around us, listening to the summer cicadas making their strange windup buzz in the trees, I found myself imagining a little Callaway bopping around the playground over there. It seemed funny to think that we’d both considered the playground an eyesore when we’d been here in the spring. Everything seemed to look different to me now.

Most nights, I sleep like a dead man. That night I lay blinking in the dark until long after the police had gone. Sara collapsed into a depleted, motionless pile almost the instant we’d finally turned in. For her sake, I was thankful for that much.

I don’t know what time I finally gave up trying. We hadn’t unpacked any clocks yet.

But there was still a six- pack of Goose Island sitting untouched in the fridge, so I slipped out of bed without waking Sara, opened a beer, and took it with me to the same chair Detective Harmon had occupied earlier.

There I worked on distracting my overcooked brain with a paperback novel someone had left behind in the hotel room where we’d stayed the night before.

The beer helped. The next one kept helping. By the time the first shades of daybreak lightened the curtains, Sara hadn’t yet
stirred, and I was almost finished with the beer and the book both.

The main character in the novel was a guy who drifted from town to town fixing people’s problems. It was a hell of a story, and I couldn’t stop turning the pages. In the course of the final chapters, the hero had killed four men, rescued the child, made powerful love to the widowed housewife, and hitched a ride out of town at dawn. At no point in the story had he been stomped in the face by a house burglar.

I don’t remember closing my eyes, or finally falling asleep, but I remember dreaming that I was a guy who drifted from town to town selling used golf clubs from the trunk of his car.

Times were tough. Folks were mistrustful of strangers. It seemed like anything could happen anywhere, and with all the trouble in the world, it was hard for an honest fellow to make a go of it the old- fashioned way. There just wasn’t much security in golf clubs anymore.

THE NEXT DAY, Saturday, the Ponca Heights Neighborhood Association called an emergency meeting to discuss the break- in at 34 Sycamore Court. Sara and I learned of the meeting, and of the Ponca Heights Neighborhood Association, when Roger Mallory, the president, dropped by to invite us.

“Figured it might be time to circle the wagons,” he said. He told us that word of our trouble had gotten around twice by now, and people liked to worry. “Hell, you haven’t even unpacked yet, I wouldn’t expect you to come, but I wanted to make sure you knew you were welcome. Sara, how are you feeling?”

“I’m fine, Roger. Come in.”

“You two look like you’re up to your necks,” he said, “and I’ve got a few more calls to make anyway. But if you ask me next time, I promise I’ll accept. How’s that eye there, Paul?”

I said, “You mean it’s noticeable?”

“Not if you’re a prizefighter.”

“I guess not if you’re a very good one.”

Roger chuckled at that, clapping me on the shoulder in a way that seemed almost proud. It was a disproportionately chummy gesture, having known each other then for all of ten minutes combined, and I felt silly that it boosted my ego. From the start it was hard to dislike Roger Mallory.

“I think we should go,” Sara said after he’d left.

I assumed she was kidding, but she wasn’t. I made some joke about bringing a covered dish, knowing as I did it that I was making the wrong play.

“Yes, funnyman. I get it.” She bent at the knees, picked up the box, and headed toward the hall closet. “You don’t want to go.”

“Not really, no,” I told her. “I’m surprised you do. Let me carry that.”

“It’s about us.” Sara transferred our old towels to their new shelf and handed me the empty box over her shoulder. “The least we could do is show up.”

“How can it be about us? We just got here.” I broke the box down flat and added it to the nearest stack. “Nobody knows us yet.”

“If only we could find some kind of an opportunity to introduce ourselves to people.”

This general line of discussion led to more needless sarcasm on my part, followed by a period of stiff silence. It wasn’t the first of the afternoon. I’d been in poor form since lunch, and I knew it, but knowing it didn’t seem to help.

Before anybody gets married, my father used to say, they should paint a room together. Forty years as a service technician for Honeywell had made him a man of diagnostics and sensible gauges, and in his view, the simplest home improvement project teaches most normal people their snapping point. I once repeated this idea to my friend Charlie Bernard, who advised me that academics, who are not normal people, should never marry each other, period.
The overeducated believe themselves to be intellectually superior to childish arguments,
Charlie said. This leaves fewer opportunities to indulge common insecurities and elementary pettiness, which in the long term promotes acrimony, bitter contempt, and avoidable bloodshed.

Even at the time, I’d pointed out that Charlie Bernard’s longest marriage on record—to Sara—had lasted only ten months. I pointed out that he’d been the one who had set the two of us up with each other in the first place.

The bottom line:

Sara and I aren’t rookies. We’re not amateurs. We were looking at our thirties when we met, and we’d both been married before. We can argue like five- year- olds. We know how to paint a room together.

There are times when the trick isn’t knowing how to paint a room, or how to have a good mean fight. Sometimes the trick is in having enough faith to leave each other the hell alone for a minute, and that’s what I was making a piss- poor job out of doing that Saturday.

I wanted Sara to slow down for five minutes. I wanted her to take it easy. We’d had a hell of a thing happen, and I wanted to talk about it.

She needed to be busy. She wasn’t ready to talk yet. It was exactly that simple.

Leave it to the guy with the PhD and the hangover to make it complicated.

We resolved the matter of the emergency meeting of the Ponca Heights Neighborhood Association by not discussing it again for the rest of the day. When the time came, Sara still wanted to go, and so she went. I still didn’t, so I stayed home. I felt like a jerk but I stayed home anyway, indignant over being made to feel like a jerk.

In my defense, I didn’t miss anything that I wouldn’t see later on the ten o’clock news.

MR. CALLAWAY?

“Yes?”

“Maya Lamb,” said the young woman at the door. “Do you have a few minutes?”

It was just past eight o’clock, daylight still holding, the shadows of the trees growing longer on the ground. The young woman stood on our front stoop in a sharp beige suit, a collared blouse laid open at the neck. She had dark pretty eyes, a megawatt smile, and held a microphone at her side like a billy club.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Maya Lamb, Channel Five Clark Falls. Sorry to barge in—Sara told me I could find you at home.”

“Sara told you that?”

“Is this a bad time?”

I finally looked past the edge of the door and saw the guy in faded blue jeans and a Channel Five T-shirt standing at the bottom of the steps. He had a massive television camera perched on his shoulder, a Channel Five ball cap turned backward on his head. For now he held the camera’s bazooka lens at a downward tilt toward the sidewalk. When our eyes met, he lifted his goateed chin and said, “Hey.”

“Hi,” I said. Back to you, Maya Lamb. “When did you talk to Sara?”

“We just came from the meeting over at the school.”

“The meeting?”

“The neighborhood watch meeting, yes. We’re running a piece.”

“A piece about what?”

“About your break- in.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’d love to get a comment,” she said. “Do you have a few minutes?”

“I don’t think so.” I had any number of minutes, but none I felt like sharing. I was sweaty and tired. Cranky. By then I’d gotten over my earlier frustration with the Associate Dean, and for the past hour I’d been feeling like a grade- A chump. Wishing I’d done a better job of being supportive, wishing I’d done a better job of just about everything that day. Wishing I hadn’t drunk all my beer the night before. I’d been on my way out to restock when Maya Lamb rang the doorbell. “Actually, I was just leaving.”

“We’ll be quick, I promise.”

“I said I don’t think so. Sorry.”

She dialed down the telecast smile. “I know. Last thing you need, right? I wouldn’t want to talk to me either.” She glanced over her shoulder at the camera guy, then leaned in closer and lowered her voice, as if we were conspirators. “Look, I won’t bullshit you. I’ve got an inside tip that there’s a network job opening up in Chicago. I’m trying to get a decent clip file together. Know where I’m supposed to be right now?”

“Miss Lamb—”

“Covering the garden show at the Kiwanis Center.”

“I don’t know how I can make this any—”

“A home invasion in Roger Mallory’s neighborhood is a great angle, that shiner of yours is going to read great on camera, and if I don’t get this cut to tape inside the hour my news director is going to flame- broil my ass. Five minutes? Help me out?”

“Go away, Miss Lamb.”

Her face fell, but I was unsympathetic. What made a home invasion in Roger Mallory’s neighborhood a great angle? At that point, I didn’t care enough to ask. She’d said that Sara had sent her here, and I doubted that very much.

Maya Lamb stood there a moment, as though considering an alternate approach. Finally she sighed and nodded. “Of course. I’m sorry to disturb you.”

“No harm done. Good night.”

“I mean, some guy breaks into your house with a knife your first night—”

“Sorry?”

“I’m just saying, I understand. Your first night in a new town, and some guy—”

I stopped her there. “Nobody had a knife. That’s not what happened.”

“It’s not?”

“No. Who told you that?”

“I thought … Wait a minute. You’re saying he didn’t have a knife?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

At first I couldn’t tell which disappointed her more: the fact that I didn’t want to be interviewed, or the possibility that her story didn’t have a knife- wielding maniac in it after all. Somehow, over the course of the next minute or so, I found myself explaining the circumstances in spite of myself.

I barely noticed Maya Lamb’s subtle gesture to the cameraman, the subtle rise of the microphone in her hand. I was
headlong into setting the record straight on the knife rumor once and for all when I became aware that both the microphone and the camera were now pointed directly at me.