The Last Good Day (16 page)

“I’m going to put you in a cage and make you my slave,” he nattered on in his heavy-breathing dragon voice. “
Peek-ahhhhh!
”

She noticed the higher voice edging toward hysteria.

“Dylan, are you okay, honey?”

“Shut up, you stupid bitch.”

She lurched back, as if he’d just turned in on her with dripping yellow fangs.

“What’d you just say?”

He ignored her, off in his own world again. “Charizard, flamethrower! Hyyuhhhh!”

“Dylan, what’d you just say to me?”

A squished moppet face finally turned around with a ring of syrup around the mouth. “Will you play Chinese checkers with me, Lynn?”

“Um, sure. But, Dyl? Who did you hear talk like that?”

She remembered Sandi and Jeff prattling on like old fogies about using bad language in front of the children, even though they both swore like teamsters when the kids weren’t around.

“Inspector Gadget,
goynk, goynk, goynk!
Inspector Gadget,
goynk, goynk
…”

He picked up a dismembered robot leg and waved it in her face, almost as if he was warning her off. A cheapo plastic made-in-Taiwan movie tie-in from a McDonald’s Happy Meal a couple of years ago.

“Dylan, put that down for a second. I’m trying to talk to you …”

“Inspector Gadget …”

“Dylan,
please …
”

She shook her head in frustration, and for a second her eyes lingered on a light brown-red smear near the phone jack on the baseboard.

“Hey, Lynn, thanks for coming.”

She whipped around and saw Jeff in a blue bathrobe, standing in the wide proscenium doorway behind her and looking like he’d been up all night giving blood. His jowls were heavy, and the middle of his face was dull and smeared-looking, as if someone had tried to rub it away. A lock of hair lapped over his brow like an exhausted dog’s tongue.

“Jeff, oh my God …”

She got up to throw her arms around him as he stood there, stiff and wavering, smelling of sweat and Smirnoff.

The truth was, she’d always felt the same way about Jeff as she had about the house: that she’d really wanted to like him. Sandi had always had
such
terrible taste in boys, going all the way back to high school. There’d been Dougie Mason, the back-up quarterback, who always had two or three girls on the side. Then Larry the Mooch, who always made her pay for everything. And worst of all, that dunce Sir Jimbo of Piscataway, that horseback-riding idiot she’d met at the traveling Renaissance fair where she’d worked for six months after she flipped out at Sarah Lawrence. So Lynn had been thrilled back in ’93 when Sandi called her and told her that she’d finally met her Barry, a handsome successful Harvard-educated “Love God” she called him. In fact, Jeff was kind of a stud then. His chin was a little firmer, the union of man and hair a little more certain. But even during the first dinner at Bouley, she’d thought there was something a little young and unformed about him. That he was not quite a full-grown man yet but still a boy collecting baseball cards in his father’s garage.

Now she gave him an extra hug, silently urging him to bear up.

“I came as soon as I heard,” she said, taking his hand and leading him into the hall, wondering if the police had already been here.

“Lynn, I’m such a mess.”

“I know. All the way over here, I was telling myself, ‘This is a dream. You’re going to wake up any minute.’”

And this was only the first day’s sadness. From Mom’s death last year, she knew grief had its own inevitable arc. The shock and numbness, the faltering effort to carry on for everyone else’s sake, and then the way your mind keeps circling back unexpectedly. A Post-it note on a refrigerator or an old phone number scribbled in familiar handwriting on the back of an envelope could plunge you into months of despair. All this and more awaited poor Jeff. At least she’d had a chance to prepare herself in her mother’s last days.

“She was the love of my life,” Jeff said. “What am I going to do without her?”

“You’re going to lean on the rest of us. You’re going to pull your friends around you.”

She squeezed his hand tightly, trying to send a stronger pulse to his heart, and noticed how small and clammy his palm felt, almost like a little girl’s.

“So, what have you told the kids?” She sniffed.

“Nothing. I haven’t figured out what to say.” His eyes were burned-out flashbulbs behind his glasses. “I’m still trying to get my mind around what happened. I talked to her Sunday afternoon on the cell phone. I told her I was taking the four-o’clock shuttle from Boston so I could see the kids before they went to sleep Monday night. And then I get home and there’s no sign of her. No message. No nothing. Just your voice on the machine.”

She felt a stirring at the base of her spine and realized she was starting to grow a little impatient with him. Unfair, she knew. The man was still reeling, just like she was. You couldn’t hurry him through this. His wife had been slaughtered. Someone had slashed her throat and shredded her larynx. They’d left her children motherless. The impatience gave way to churning revulsion again.

There were children running around this house with unwashed faces. The baby-sitter clearly wasn’t here yet, so someone had to start thinking about dinner for them.

“Look, you have to tell the kids
something
” she said, realizing that she had to think about dinner for her own brood as well. “Izzy still thinks her mother’s coming home.”

“What am I going to say to them, Lynn? God,
I
can’t even deal with it.”

His voice bounced down the empty hallway, and she looked around, making sure neither of the children was in earshot.

“First of all, you’re going to keep your voice down.” She took a deep breath. “Second of all, you’re going to spare them all the horrible details. Because, frankly, they don’t need to know and they won’t want to know. But don’t lie to them. They’re tougher than you think, and they’ll never believe you again if they see you’ve tried to fool them. Just answer their questions as honestly as you can without frightening them and let them know you’re not going anywhere.”

She remembered hearing a kindly old detective from the 43rd Precinct give a grieving Dominican grandmother the same advice in the Bronx after her daughter had been found raped and stabbed to death on a rooftop, leaving five children for her to raise on her own.
Let them know you’re not going anywhere.
She found herself struggling through the flood tide of grief to get to him and keep him from drowning.

“You do it,” Jeff said suddenly.

“What?”

“You’re stronger than me. They’ve known you all their lives. They trust you. You tell them.”

“Jeff, you are their father. No one else can do this. It has to come from you.”

He sagged against the wall, and his bathrobe fell open slightly, revealing a gut that had added a small front porch since the last time she saw it and a pair of red Jockey-style underwear. She averted her eyes, not quite ready for this much humanity.

“I know. You’re right.” He straightened up, trying to gird himself. “But they’re never going to get over this.
I’m
never going to get over this.”

She felt a shimmer go through her body, her sadness shading inch by inch into anger. She told herself that it was a natural animal response against the viciousness done to her friend, a girl she shared a bed with when she was six and a suede skirt with when she was twenty-four.

“So have the police been here?” she said, trying to maintain her outward calm. “What have they told you?”

“I went in last night to give a missing person report, and then they called me this morning. The chief. I guess he knew Sandi from school or something. He was very … decent about it.”

“Harold’s a good man.” Lynn nodded.

“He asked if they could send somebody by in a few minutes to collect some of her things and dust for fingerprints to make sure it’s her, but he seemed pretty certain.” He shriveled again, like a balloon losing all its air. “God, I can’t believe anybody would do this …”

The brown-red smear on the baseboard appeared in Lynn’s mind again. She wanted to go back and look at it, but she didn’t dare. It couldn’t be what she thought it was, could it? Other people’s memories were triggered by words, hers by pictures. Where had she seen that exact shade before? A mashed-up yam Hannah had flung at the wall of their 10th Street apartment when she was a baby? Something awful in Clay’s underpants? Evidence of forbidden M&M’s before dinner?

“I haven’t even started thinking about how to bury her,” Jeff was saying. “And I think it’s the Jewish tradition that you have to have the funeral right away …”

Another image flared in Lynn’s mind. A tenement hallway. A crime scene photo taken on assignment. Dried blood on white cinder block. The
News
hadn’t used it. No color presses back then.

“So now I’ll have to call her father and stepmother in the city and all the relatives in Florida …”

“You want me to make some of those calls for you?”

“No, you’re right.” He banged the back of his head lightly against the wall, as if reminding himself of what he had to do. “I’ve got to try and get it together here. For the kids. That’s what it’s all about. Right? I’ve got to be strong for the kids.”

“They need you, Jeff.” She reached out and squeezed his elbow harder than she’d meant to. “But don’t forget, the rest of us are here for
you.
Anything you need. Call me anytime. I’ll help with the funeral, and I’ll make travel arrangements for the family. I’m serious. Use me.
Lean on me.
I’ll come and cook for the kids. Or they can come and stay with us. We’ve got plenty of room. Sandi would have done the same for me in a heartbeat.”

She pushed the sepia image of the blood smear out of her mind and tried to think of something she could make and bring over later so the kids wouldn’t starve. Lasagna. Pot roast. Lamb chops. Did these kids eat anything other than chicken fingers and French fries?

“Is there anything you need right away?” she asked, desperate to help, to do anything to alleviate this sense of suffocating helplessness.

“How about a new wife to help me raise Dyl and Izzy?”

Her jaw went slack. “Jeff …”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He put up his hand. “I don’t know what got into me. I’m still in shock.”

“I understand.”

She heard a car pull up outside and grind to a halt. The squeaky cry of a door opening and then a brisk aluminum slam. The stately bell rang once more.

“I think that’s the police,” he said.

“You want me to stick around while they’re here?”

“No, I’ll just put on a video for the kids. It’ll be fine. I rented
Bambi.
”

“Did you?” She looked stricken, remembering what happened to the mother in the movie.

“Oh, shit. You’re right. Bad choice. Maybe I’ll just put on
Yellow Submarine
instead. They always like that.”

14

“SO WHO WAS
the
mujer bonita?
”

Paco sat on the rim of a tub in an upstairs bathroom five minutes later, watching Mike Fallon dust the sink counter for fingerprints.

“Who? The one we just saw on the porch going out?”

Paco wrung his hand as if he’d just touched something hot. “I seen you talking to her before at the train station, right?”

“An old flame of mine.” Mike shrugged, delicately brushing the dark powder across the white surface. “You know how that is.”

“
Ai, pappi!
You put all my old ladies together in a room, they’d form a coalition. Women United Against Paco. They’d form subcommittees to talk about different things I did that pissed them off.”

“Hey, you guys got everything you need in there?” Jeff Lanier called out from the bedroom just outside the door.

Mike’s eyes fell on a red toothbrush, and his stomach dropped, realizing her DNA was in its bristles. He thought of tagging and bagging it, but then Paco would ask how the hell he knew it was hers.
Damage control.
That’s what it was all about today.

“Ah, we’ll just be another couple of minutes, sir,” Paco answered in his hoarse Bronx accent. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

Mike shook his head and mouthed the word
asshole
as he went back to brushing and tapping powder out of his little vial, watching latent patterns beginning to emerge as whorls.

Say something. Don’t say anything.
He’d had a terrible night and a worse morning. For twelve hours, he’d been steadily replaying last night’s conversation with Harold every fifteen minutes, second-guessing himself, seeing the obvious places where he could have given himself a little more breathing room. But, no.
You know everything you need to know.
Why didn’t he just find himself a nice tight iron maiden to climb into?

“See this, man?” Paco leaned over the edge of the tub and touched a little silver nozzle in the side. “They got a Jacuzzi right here in the bathroom. Think they got a sauna too?”

Mike ignored him, patiently sifting grains across the white surface, waiting for more of the dark patterns to appear next to the sink with the shiny brass basin.

He remembered how large the Castlemans’ bathroom used to seem to him, when in truth it was probably half this size. He could still picture the white marble floor, the deep sunken bathtub, the greenish Jean Naté bottle with the black ball on top that looked like the dot over an
i,
the white Lancôme powder puff on the sink counter, the potpourri basket, the individual paper hand towels with flower designs draped elegantly over the brass rack, the little pink and purple seashell soaps, and the space-age toilet so clean and shiny that he felt guilty just squatting on it.

His mother used to clean the place twice a week when she’d come by to help take care of the house and the kids for Mrs. Castleman on High Plains Road. Years later, it would finally dawn on Michael that the occasional seashell nugget and flowered hand towel that he later saw in their bathroom at home were items she’d spirited away from her employer, at a rate of about one every two weeks.