The Last Good Day (11 page)

He pulled off to the side and got out with the binoculars he used for his occasional on-duty birding expeditions. Shafts of light streamed out of the house, stark white diagonals stabbing through the trees. He raised the binoculars, adjusting the focus knob with his index finger. Lynn blurred and then came into focus. She was downstairs in the kitchen, rubbing lotion on her chin and hands and fixing herself a drink. The usual routine. She’d taken a shower, and her hair was still damp and sleek, as if she’d just emerged from the river. A white terry-cloth bathrobe parted at her collarbone, revealing a fair glistening delta.
This was insane.
He knew he shouldn’t be doing this again, especially not today of all days. But certain women were viruses. You couldn’t get rid of them. They got into your bloodstream and seared your veins.

He turned the knob another three or four degrees until the view was sharp enough to read the label off the Chardonnay bottle and see the little hairs clinging to her temples. When he tried to fine-tune the focus a little more, she turned into a cloud of white cloth and floating dark hair.

He raised the glasses and saw the husband upstairs in the bedroom, taking off his tie and sneaking in a quick furtive phone call. Kiss my ass. He’d never liked these city guys anyway. Always jabbering at you when they came to renew their parking permits for the station, always making speeches at the School Board meetings—
Let me tell you something, I pay taxes here too
—as if they were volunteering at the firehouse every Saturday washing the hook-and-ladder truck. All right, you bought your wife a big house with a swimming pool and a rolling lawn that you pay somebody else to mow once a week.
The skin hadn’t started to separate.
Okay, jerk-off. Let’s trade places. I’ll give you the shield and you give me the big house and the wife and we’ll call it even.

He panned around the grounds with the binoculars, taking in the vinyl-mesh deer fence, the covered pool, the gnome with the basketball, and the small blue ADT security system sign on the window near the door.
Incredible.
A man pays more than a half-million dollars for a house with less than four acres, jacking up the prices on all the working people, and then pays less than two grand to have the property protected? Any moron crackhead burglar knew where to cut the line so he could have the run of the place. A man that careless didn’t deserve what he had.

He took a few more cautious steps up the driveway, raising the glasses to see if he could find the kids’ bedroom windows. There was a dim pale glow from behind one of the curtains. One of the children was still up. The girl was about the same age Lynn was when he’d gone out with her. Was it possible that that much time had passed? He remembered how she used to buck and try to roll him off when he got on top of her, especially when he got a little rough. One time, he found his hands around her neck, squeezing. She said she didn’t like it, but he knew she did. She liked to feel his power over her. The fact that she wasn’t easy to push around only made it better. He hated the ones who just rolled over and played dead.

He lowered the binoculars and turned the focus knob back a few degrees, and there she was again, still gleaming and damp from the shower. He remembered that day they went swimming in the river. The cocky way she hooked her thumbs under the bra straps and gave him that look over her shoulder, daring him to follow. A sense of yearning rose in him like a compass needle finding magnetic north. She always managed to stay a little bit ahead of him, no matter how hard he fought the current. She was absolutely fearless back then. He could still see her pitching her white body against the black tide, riding the swells, always receding, never looking back. That was the thing he should’ve noticed then:
she never looked back.

He fine-tuned the focus again, wondering why any woman with two children had the right to look this way after twenty-five years. It was as if several other ladies had given more than their share of ugliness to make her. His own wife was getting a little thick and knobby these days. Shouldn’t Lynn be marked, wrinkled, or tainted somehow, especially after what she’d done to his family?

But now she was back. He thought about the way she stared up at him from her husband’s lap tonight.
Mike’s a big man in the department… . Mike’s family’s been in this town for generations.
Maybe she finally realized what she’d done. He wondered if he could forgive her. One thing was for sure—it was going to take a helluva lot more than a family barbecue to make up for all the damage.

The Nextel cell phone suddenly rang out in his jeans pocket, a tinny minuet that jump-started his heart. He grabbed it quickly and stepped back behind the tree line as bats circled the chimney and crickets made a sound like a thousand tiny watches being wound.

“Yo,” he muttered, knowing it was either his wife or somebody from the station house with info they didn’t want to put out over the radio.

The husband pulled back the curtain upstairs and looked out into the driveway to see what the noise was about. The new trapezoid of light from the window ended less than a yard from Mike’s feet.

“Hey,” said Harold. “What’s your location? I just called the house, and Marie said you weren’t there yet.”

“I’m over on the Post Road.” He lowered his voice, hoping one of the bicycle guys wouldn’t be riding by that location at this very moment to blow him in. “I was just heading back, and I saw a bunch of kids looking in cars at the Pizza Hut parking lot.”

He heard a rustling in the bushes behind him and turned just in time to see an animal go leaping off into the woods. Too big for a raccoon.

“We need you back at the base forthwith,” said Harold. “I think we may have just caught a break.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s going on?”

“A gentleman just came in to give us a missing person report about someone we both know.”

“Who?”

Mike sensed that whatever had jumped off into the bushes was still lingering nearby, watching him.

“Just get your ass back down here,” he heard Harold snap as he covered the mouthpiece. “Things are starting to move.”

He pushed the Off button as the husband opened the bedroom window and stuck his head out.

Mike drew back, hearing an owl screeching in the woods behind him and a bullfrog croaking like an untuned banjo. His heart was beating so hard that it felt as if a second heart on the other side of his chest was answering it.
You have really lost it this time.
You are going to turn your life into a federal disaster site.

He raised the binoculars for one last look at Lynn tightening her belt and turning off the kitchen light. For a few seconds, the brightness of her robe lingered, gradually darkening and leaving just nine black panes in the window frame. He thought of something he’d read in the paper the other day, about how certain powerful telescopes could see light from stars that died millions of years ago.

But what did it matter when they died as long as you could still see their glow? And how could you be sure they were really dead anyway? Maybe their energy was still pulsing out there somewhere in the great dark void. He lowered the glasses with quiet satisfaction, knowing there were still parts of her that no one else could see. That not even her husband or children would ever know her as long or as well as he had. And nothing could change that because nothing could change the past.

He walked to the end of the driveway and got back in his car. As he turned it around, two deer sauntered out from the bushes, where they’d been watching him the whole time. Taking a leisurely stroll through his high beams, their coats the color of whipped cream and stained wood, their eyes turning android green in the lights. Stupid beasts, he thought, cruising around them. They used to know enough to be afraid of us.

9

AS LYNN PADDED
past Clay’s bedroom, she saw a dim light still on and pushed the door open. Her son was kneeling on the window seat, peering out at the driveway from behind his white-on-black World Wrestling Federation “Raw is War” curtains.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing. Aren’t you supposed to be getting ready for bed?”

“I thought I heard something.” His stubby fingers let go of the curtain. “There was a car in our driveway.”

“Probably just somebody who got lost and needed to turn themselves around.”

He got up from the window seat. This room seemed smaller every time she walked in it, as if she was deliberately being crowded out. Clothes on the floor multiplied. The bookshelves groaned with the wrestlers’ biographies—
I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed
;
The Rock Says …
; and Mick Foley’s immortal
Foley Is Good: And the Real World Is Faker Than Wrestling
—sharing space with
Jewish Literacy
by Joseph Telushkin and the
Great Jews in Sports
that Barry had given Clay for his twelfth birthday. She used to feel mildly put out that a child of hers didn’t take more interest in the Protestant side of the family, but then his sister started wearing crosses the size of staple guns and Lynn decided to keep her own counsel.

The huge neo-Federalist desk she’d carefully picked out for Clay in Fairfield last year was disappearing in a deluge of half-finished math homework, mammoth American history textbooks that looked as if they’d never been opened, and well-thumbed stacks of
Magic
cards—the latest of the arcane, vaguely medieval-sounding boy games he was obsessed with. She took some small comfort in the fact that as transplanted city kids, both her children still confined anarchy to their own rooms, instead of suburban-sprawling down the stairs and into the living room.

“I don’t like it here,” he said.

“Since when?” She sat down on his bed and carefully arranged the folds of her bathrobe to cover her bare knees.

“It’s creepy. I hear noises at night.”

“It’s called
nature.
Some people even love it.”

“I miss the city,” he said.

“You’re kidding me.”

“There’s nothing to do here.” He fiddled with an old gyroscope that he’d had since he was seven. “I never get to see my friends, you can’t walk anywhere, and I always have to wait for a ride.”

She hesitated, not wanting to remind him that he always depended on her for transport when they lived in a city.

“You’re safe here,” she said.

“I could be safe in the city too. And I wouldn’t be
soo
bored.”

She smoothed out the bedspread, quietly regretting the little eccentricities he’d been dropping one by one to fit in with the other kids in the suburbs. The bagpipe lessons he’d been taking in the city. The Russian-English dictionary he used to study in bed. The little Crusty Man comic book he’d been drawing and keeping under his mattress, trying to make it good enough to show her someday.

“You don’t remember what it’s like,” he said.

“Believe me. I do.”

She remembered those lonely nights, that desperate yearning for something beyond the end of Birch Lane and her well-worn copy of
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
She saw herself again in a darkened bedroom, lighting incense candles and trying to tune in Allison Steele the Night Bird on WNEW FM. Oh, the crackling in the ether. Oh, the solemn tribal flute music and the opening thrum of “Nights in White Satin.” Oh, the Kahlil Gibran poetry and the visions of longhaired sloe-eyed hippie boys in leather vests offering to induct her into the mysteries of foot massage and rolling a joint with one hand. Even the names of the bands seemed to conjure a lurid sensual carnival going on down the river.
Tangerine Dream. Tonto’s Expanding Head Band. Renaissance. Caravan. Lothar and the Hand People.

“Then why’d you make us come back here?” Clay asked.

“Because when you get older, you learn to appreciate other things about a place,” she said, sounding a little more pat than she’d meant to.

“Like what?”

She thought of the children near the Trade Center who’d thought the people falling were birds on fire. “Good schools,” she said.

“Ha!”

“Oh, so now you don’t like Green Hill?”

“It’s all about sports,” he said. “And I suck at sports. I’m too fat.”

“What do you mean, you’re too fat?”

“I mean, look at me! I’m a blimp!” He squeezed a flab roll the size of a Wonder Bread loaf at his waistline. “I’ve been dieting for weeks, and I can’t make this go away. I’m
disgusting.
”

“You’re not. You’re beautiful to me.”

“I wanna go on Nutri/System, where you just have one milkshake a day,” he said. “I’m ashamed to take my shirt off in front of other guys in the locker room.”

She went over to put a hand on his shoulder, remembering the can of Lysol she’d found under his bed last week. At the time, she’d thought he might be smoking pot, and she gave him a righteous little antidrug lecture. But since then, she’d pulled up all these articles on the Web about boys his age developing anorexia and, in a few extreme cases, bulimia. She wondered if he could be making himself throw up and then using Lysol to get rid of the smell. She’d noticed him skipping dessert and dissecting his food obsessively lately.
Trying to cut down on carbs, Mom.
She cringed inwardly, thinking about her precious child secretly making himself vomit in the bathroom so he could have washboard abs.

“So, what else is so good about this place?” he asked, sitting down.

A vulnerable nasality told her that he was opening a door a crack. “Well,” she said, “it’s true, there’s not a lot of big buildings or movie theaters you can walk to. But what you do have is a lot of freedom.”

“Yeah. How do you figure that? Freedom to go where?”

“Oh, come on. One of the greatest rivers in the world is just down the hill from us. I used to ride down there on my bike all the time when I was your age so I could hang out along the banks and let my imagination run wild.”

“So what?” His chair squeaked as he turned to face her.