Spiral (2 page)

I sobered up—briefly—for Nancy’s memorial service, arranged by the D.A.’s office. Collectively, we who had known her nearly filled Gate of Heaven church in Southie. There were classmates of hers from New England School of Law and coworkers from the courtroom, even a number of opposing attorneys from Nancy’s trials. I sat in a pew near her landlords, the Lynch family, as good and accurate things were recounted by a priest I’d never met. He then asked if anyone wished to come forward and offer their thoughts as well. Everybody waited for me to go first. When I didn’t, others went up to the altar rail, and then everybody waited for me to go last. When I didn’t do that, either, there was a final, short hymn, and the service was over.

Walking out, I saw people who’d come more for me than because they’d known Nancy well. Robert Murphy, a black lieutenant commanding the Homicide Unit; Mo Katzen, a crotchety reporter for the Boston
Herald
; Elie Honein, a Nautilus club manager; and even Primo Zuppone, a mob enforcer. Each tried to talk with me or get me to agree on a date to talk. I fended off all of them.

I’d gone through all this before, you see. I ”knew” how to grieve. Or at least how I grieved.

Once I’d driven myself home, I went back to hitting the watering holes. On bitterly cold nights, understanding bartenders poured me into cabs if they were concerned their self-absorbed patron might die from exposure.

And, frankly, that’s probably a little bit of what I was doing. Trying to die in a way that wasn’t exactly suicide, because I wasn’t putting a gun to my head or diving off a bridge. But I would have been deliriously happy if something beyond my control had conveniently, mercifully taken me off the board.

For what it’s worth, the capper came exactly eleven days after the crash of Flight #133. I was in a nearly empty bar late on a Sunday night, even more hammered than I’d gotten the previous ten. I remember thinking, I can’t talk to Nancy anymore, because she’s gone. Then, ordering what I was firmly told would be my last round, I had a brainstorm.

I could call her apartment in Southie and get the outgoing tape message.

Hear her voice.

I remember leaving my fresh drink on the bar top and stumbling into most of the few people in the bar as I weaved my way back to the pay phone. I even remember putting in the quarter—Jesus, the feel of it leaving my fingers—and how warm the metal buttons were on the keypad, I guessed because somebody else had just made a call. After punching in Nancy’s home number, I counted the rings—three—before her machine kicked in. And then her cheery but no-nonsense announcement started, and I could feel the dam break behind my eyes. I tried twice to hang up the receiver but couldn’t quite manage it.

I did manage to stagger out of the place and back home to my empty condo.

The next night, from just inside the front door of his three-decker, Drew Lynch said, ”John?”

I watched the young police officer relax his right arm, the revolver in that hand now visible against his sweatpants and hanging down loosely at his thigh. ”Sorry to bother you, Drew, but there’re some things I’d like to get from the third floor.”

”Sure.” He stepped aside to let me come in. ”How’re you doing?”

”Not great, but I’m functioning.”

It was almost twenty-four hours since the dam had broken in that last bar. I’d spent the morning and afternoon working through the accumulated paperwork at my office and drinking lots of water chased by aspirin for the hangover. As Drew stared at me, though, I realized I wasn’t quite functioning on the amenities level.

”How’s your family doing?” I said.

”Okay. Mom’s still taking it pretty hard, and on top of that she’s gotten some kind of flu. Nothing that’ll kill her, but—” You could see Drew wince as his own words struck him. ”Christ, John, I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

”Don’t sweat it. We’re all a little off from this thing.”

”Right.” Then a hesitation before, ‘Yeah.”

He turned, and I followed him up the front stairs.

At the second-floor landing, Drew opened his apartment door. ”And don’t worry about Renfield.”

Jesus. Not only hadn’t I been worrying about Nancy’s cat: I’d completely forgotten the poor little guy existed.

Drew said, ”We’ve been feeding him and doing the litter box. My wife even carries him down to our place sometimes so he has somebody to play with, and Mom cuts up scraps from the table.”

I cleared my throat. ”He likes that.”

‘Yeah.” Drew hesitated again. ‘You, uh, need any help up there?”

”I don’t think so, but thanks.”

As Drew closed his door, I climbed to the third floor. At the landing, I could hear scratching sounds coming from the other side of Nancy’s door.

Renfield.

I turned the knob and pushed slowly. As soon as the door was ajar, a gray tiger head was forcing the issue, scuttling out crablike on rear legs that had some kind of congenital defect requiring them to be literally, clinically broken and reset by the vet. Because Nancy had been flying— God, it hit me hard enough, I nearly went down.

I closed my eyes, steadying myself. When I opened them again, I could see Renfield, now trundling toward his food dish in the corner of the kitchen. He sat back on his haunches and looked up at me, meowing once.

After Renfield’s operation, I’d had to pick him up from the animal hospital because Nancy was... away. Given what he’d been through—including having his hindquarters shaved down to the skin for the surgery—the cat had kind of imprinted on me as a substitute parent. At least, that’s how the vet explained it. When I was around Renfield, he paid unusual attention to me, including licking my hand and always trying to crawl into my lap by rearing up awkwardly and pawing my pant leg with his clawless front feet.

Right now, though, he just cried again.

I walked over to the food bowl. Full of the dry cereal stuff as well as some fresh-looking canned glop.

As soon as I was near him, I noticed Renfield stopped crying and began chowing down. When I turned and started to walk away, he cried a third time. Turning back around, I saw the cat was staring at me.

I turned for good this time and went past Nancy’s bedroom to the living room in the front of the third floor. It was exactly as we’d left it twelve days before. From behind me, I heard a rhythmic, bonking sound.

The noise Renfield’s rear knees made against the hardwood floor, his legs churning like the linkage on a locomotive’s wheels.

As soon as he crossed the threshold into the living room, Renfield stopped before looking up and crying some more.

I went over to him and bent down. He started licking my hand, his tongue like sandpaper. Then an almost fierce purring began.

”Renfield, I’m so sorry.”

I walked carefully past him as he tried to move between my shoes.

In Nancy’s bedroom, I opened her closet door to get the one suit I left there. That scent of her rocketed my memory back to the departure lounge for Flight #133.

I grabbed the hanger holding my suit and closed the door, trying not to inhale.

Renfield, now at the bedroom sill, cried again.

I kept only a few other things at Nancy’s place. Two shirts, three pairs of underwear, five (for some reason) socks, all in ”my” drawer of her dresser. And a dopp kit on top of her bathroom’s toilet tank.

Renfield was at the bathroom threshold now, crying some more.

I stepped over him and toward the kitchen. Above the sink, Nancy had thumbtacked a photo she’d gotten some obliging tourist to take of us when we were at the beach together the prior summer. Judith Harker was the name, from somewhere in Arizona, I knew, because I had to give her my business card so she could mail the print to us. In the shot, Nancy and I were on a blanket, sitting with our knees up and touching each other, my right arm around her shoulders, Nancy’s left hand resting on my left wrist over my left knee. I-wore a yearbook smile, Nancy the same but with her eyes crossed, mugging for the camera.

I tried to remember another photo of just us, together. I couldn’t.

Almost two years, and only the one shot.

Setting down the clothes and toilet kit on Nancy’s kitchen table, I very carefully pried the thumbtack out of the photo and the wall as Renfield began crying again behind me.

The cemetery is on a harbor hillside only a few blocks from the Lynches’ three-decker. There’s a gate that’s kept open, even at night, so folks can visit when they get off work. I walked down the macadam path to her row, stopping at the gravestone with
Elizabeth
mary devlin cuddy
carved into the marble.

John, what’s the matter?

She could always tell. Always.

John?

”It’s Nancy, Beth.”

Trouble between you?

I shook my head before lifting it away from her and toward the inky blackness of the water—Jesus, the ocean water—at the foot of the—

Oh, John. No...no
...

Just a nod this time.

She paused. Then,
How?

I told her. At first, in short, choppy phrases that an English teacher probably wouldn’t count as sentences. Once the words started coming, though, I began to get more detailed, even glib.

Beth waited me out before saying,
This is the first time you’ve talked it through, right?

”Right.”

Do you feel any... better?

I took a deep breath. ”No more than I did after losing you.”

Another pause.
John, I think you have to accept that Nancy’s death is going to be different for you.

”Different.”

Though I hadn’t said it as a question, Beth answered me anyway.
You
knew for a long time that I was sick, that I was going to-

”Goddamnit, Beth, it’s just not fair!”

The thought jumped out before I was conscious I’d spoken it aloud.

A third pause.
If you’re waiting for life to be fair, John, I think you’re in for a very long siege.

I looked down toward the water again, then immediately back at her stone. ”It’s not just that Nancy was taken so young, or so... abruptly. It’s that because they didn’t find her body, she doesn’t have even a grave.”

And you don’t have any special place for visiting her.

Beth was right. ”Nowhere she wasn’t...”

Alive?

I tried to take a deep breath again. Couldn’t.

John?

”You’re right. I don’t have Nancy anymore, and I don’t have a place I can be with her that doesn’t remind me of...” I shook my head.

This may not help, but there’s a reason why you weren’t on that plane.

”Sure there is. I didn’t check my messages in time to—”

Not
what I mean, John. There’s some reason why you were spared.

I thought back to one of the first visits I’d made to the graveyard after Beth had died. ‘You know that.”

I do.

”Mind letting me in on it?”

A short pause this time that passed for a small smile.
If only I could.

Suddenly, I started to feel the cold. ”Do me a favor?”

What?

”Keep an eye out for Nancy. I think you’d like her.”

I was back in the condo—finally opening almost two weeks of home mail—when the phone rang. I thought about letting the tape machine handle it, then realized nobody had called me, morning or afternoon, at the office. Odd for a Monday.

”John Cuddy.”

”Buenos noches desde Florida,
John.”

”Justo?”

”The one and the same.”

Justo Vega was a friend from my military police days in Saigon. He’d been practicing law in Miami most of the time since, helping me some months before with a case down in the Florida Keys that had blown sky—

”John?”

”Sorry, Justo. Something wrong with the Keys thing?”

”No. No, unfortunately I disturb you on a holiday for another matter.”

”Holiday?”

A hesitation on the other end of the line. ”The third Monday in January. Martin Luther King.”

No wonder there’d been no calls at the office. ”Sorry—” I decided I had to stop saying that. ”I’ve been kind of stuck on another matter.”

A longer hesitation. ”John, there is also something else, no?”

When you soldier with someone during bad times, there’s a certain connection that’s beyond even good friendship. ”Yes, but I’ve gotten a little tired of talking about it”

”Of course.” The longest hesitation yet. ”I am not sure I should be burdening you with what I will say now. Yet, if you were calling me, I would want to know of it because of an old debt we both share.”

”Being?”

”The Skipper, John.”

Shit. Back in Vietnam, ”the Skipper” was the nickname the lieutenants like Justo and me used affectionately for Colonel Nicolas Helides, our commanding officer. Though we were Army, not Navy, we called him that because his real love outside the military was sailing. Helides graduated West Point while most of us came from ROTC programs, but the man treated us all as sons. And in a bar one night when he wasn’t around—the Skipper drank alcohol but never cursed and didn’t suffer gladly those who did—six or seven of us took one of those expletive-laden, drunks-in-arms oaths to watch out for him like we would our own fathers. In the end, of course, Helides was the one who watched out for us, especially during the all-night horrors of the Tet Offensive, keeping us together—and almost sane—as we lost whole squads of our troopers behind barricades of Jeeps, the MPs standing their ground against Viet Cong armed with AK-47s when all we had were the .45 calibre Colts drawn from our hoi— ”John, you are still there?”