The Last Good Day (19 page)

“Oh, you still have your striped bass and your white perch, but chances are all we’ll catch are eels,” he said, feeling a slight tug on the line as the current shifted. “You know about eels, don’t you?”

“No.” Kyle leaned against him, still not quite awake.

“Scavengers is what they are. Nighttime scavengers. They live at the bottom of the river, and they don’t care how dirty and dark it gets; they just lie there, waiting in sunken old scows.”

He felt the tension in his rod and started to wind the line in.

“Have you got something?” The boy sat up alertly.

The top of the rod bent as Ray pulled it. “Feels that way.”

“Can I help you?”

“No, stay back.”

The rod bowed and seemed to stretch like taffy in his hands. He felt the strain in his shoulders as he leaned back and tried to reel it in.

“Maybe it’s a swordfish!” Kyle bounced up and down excitedly, rocking the boat.

“Nothing of the kind,” Ray said.

He felt the weight tumble away and then surge back toward him. Too heavy for seaweed, too light to be an anchor. Maybe it was a fish. The truth was, he hadn’t caught anything substantial in years, making it that much more important that he actually haul something in that his grandson could bring home. A memory he could hold on to, spray with polyurethane, and put up on a wall.

He cranked the reel in two more times and felt the weight start to fight him again. His grandson grabbed him around the waist as he braced a foot against the gunwale and pulled with all his might.

“Don’t let go, Grampa.”

He told himself he couldn’t just cut the line and admit defeat. The boy was depending on him. He gritted his teeth and heard a crack in his lower lumbar as the boat drifted and the line went taut. He reeled in some more line, the translucent spool thickening, and twisted himself for leverage.

“Grampa, let me hold the rod.”

“It’s all right.” He pushed the boy’s hand away.

It was a pitched personal battle. The weight thrashed and tried to swim away from him, but he cranked it back, refusing to relinquish control. A tingling sensation began in the middle of his chest.

“Grampa, are you all right?”

“Of course, I’m all right.”

He was aware of the tingling becoming a burning dullness.
Oh my God,
he thought.
I’m about to have a coronary in the middle of the Hudson, stuck with a five-year-old in a rowboat. I’m going to die and take my grandson with me.
All at once, the anger and bitterness that he’d been holding back for years bloomed forth. Damn his worthless son. Damn his own sainted thrifty wife, who never gave him a day’s peace while she drew a breath. Damn the mortgage, the people he worked for at the bank, the fact that he hadn’t made love to a woman in twelve years. And damn this child for needing him so badly.

“Grampa, please, let me help you pull it in.” A little hand reached for the nylon string.

“I said
stay back,
” he snapped. “Are you deaf?”

But just then the line slackened. He turned the reel a few times, making sure the tug wasn’t completely gone. But there was still something on the hook. He cackled and gave the boy a gleeful sideways look, hoping the jagged edge he’d flashed a moment ago had been forgotten.
See what the old man’s getting for you?
The boat rocked on a passing swell as he reeled in faster. Yeah, come on, mama. The river seemed ready to part with this prize. He felt it rise toward him, limp with defeat. He sat back in his seat for the last few victorious turns as regular color returned to his face.

There was a tug of resistance from below, and then he pulled the weight free of the water’s grip and hoisted it high into the air. He only had time to register that it was a torn black plastic contractor’s bag before it came plummeting back at him and landed with a heavy hollow
thonk
in the gritty skim of water at his feet. He heard his grandson scream before he looked down. The bag had spilled its contents on impact. A gallon can of Thompson’s Wood Protector lay on its side, having obviously been used to weight down the bag. And next to it, the severed head of a woman with a long aquiline nose, a blackened tongue, and seaweed tangled in her hair stared up at him from the bottom of the boat.

17

THE CHAIR WAS
what finally unhinged Lynn again the next morning. A straight-backed French Provincial with a maroon cushion. She’d been doing all right until she saw it sitting empty at the emergency meeting that Jeanine had called for their book group. She’d managed to get up clearheaded, shower and dress, make breakfast for Barry and the kids, and then run them to their various destinations before stopping by the house on Love Lane to take Isadora to school for Jeff. She’d even kept up a cheerful front when Izzy started to sing “The Piña Colada Song” from the backseat in her mother’s exaggerated showy vibrato.

But the sight of that empty chair in the semicircle of friends who’d gathered that morning did her in. It made her grief as real and solid as an iceberg sitting right in front of her, daring her to get around it. She’d photographed dozens of crime scenes, but this was death outside the frame. Death was here in the living room. Death said,
Take a look.
Death said,
How do you like working with me?
Death said,
That’s another one I got.
Death said,
You get a good eyeful, lady?

“Sandi always used to say, ‘I don’t care that much about dying,’” Lynn heard herself begin. “‘Just give me sixteen years to make it to the kids’ college graduations. After that, you can take me away in a pine box for all I care.’ She just wanted to hang on longer than her mother did.”

The other four women in the room turned to her, ignoring the crackers and cheese that had been set out. Jeanine looking both coiffed and glazed, as if she’d managed to put herself together perfectly and then lit up an enormous spliff as soon as the kids were packed off to school. Molly Pratt, with her Dorothy Hamill wedge cut and her copy of
The Corrections
on her lap, as if they were actually going to discuss a novel today. Dianne de Groot, wearing a striped crew-neck shirt and pigtails just like her eight-year-old daughter. And Anne Schaffer, grimacing and groaning quietly, her broken leg still encased in plaster up to the hip, with huge Frankenstein bolts sticking out from the ankle.

“She was a nut, but we loved her,” Jeanine commiserated.

“Remember Dylan’s fourth birthday with the knights in armor and the jousting in the backyard?” Dianne de Groot’s face lit up.

“Didn’t you think that was a little over the top?” said Molly, who wrote a magazine advice column for single moms, wrinkling her nose. “It must have cost them five grand. How were the rest of us supposed to keep up with that for our kids’ birthdays?”

“Oh, I thought it was wonderful,” Lynn said, barely resisting the urge to raise her hand. “I totally got it. It’s like that when you lose your mom and you’re young. You feel like you have to make it up to your own kids by getting everything absolutely right and perfect. She had a lot of life in her, didn’t she?”

“That she did,” Anne Schaffer grumbled, washing down three Advil with her Bloody Mary. “Among a lot of other things.”

There was tension in the air this morning, with everyone vacillating between the urge to get fucked-up and the need to be hyper-vigilant and totally in control. For Lynn, it was enough just to be around other women at the moment. The silence of the house, which she’d yearned for all of last year when contractors were tormenting her and the school meetings seemed endless, was suddenly oppressive and ominous. She’d needed to surround herself with friends, not just to soften the blow but to dilute its impact. To hear other voices in the wreckage, telling her she wasn’t alone.

“Everything she did was ten times bigger than life,” Jeanine rasped into a glass of white wine. “Remember when she hired the hot air balloon to publicize that new restaurant on the West Side, and it almost got stuck between the Twin Towers?”

“Or when she broke up with that schmuck Scott Lewin and played ‘I Will Survive’ over and over into his answering machine so he couldn’t get any messages from his new girlfriend.” Lynn smiled wanly, the gloom lifting momentarily.

“And what about the wedding at the Waldorf with five hundred guests and Lester Lanin’s Orchestra and the shoes for the bridesmaids all dyed matching robin’s-egg blue?” Jeanine dangled her wrist as if her hand was dripping with diamonds.

“It figures she wouldn’t just die like a normal person, in an old-age home,” said Anne Schaffer, wincing as she used both hands to move her leg in its massive cast.

“What do you mean by that?” Lynn drew back in her chair.

“Anne’s just saying that Sandi always took things to an extreme.” Jeanine jumped in like a UN interpreter. “Right?”

“Exactly.” Anne nodded.

Something about the dry click in her voice made Lynn sit up straight again. The other women in this circle had known Sandi for as long as twenty-five years and as briefly as eighteen months, but now it occurred to Lynn that perhaps they’d all looked on Sandi with a slightly more jaundiced eye than she had.

For Lynn, there’d never been as much critical distance. Sandi was her bud. Her running partner. They were the Gang of Two. To everyone else, maybe they’d always been a little suspect because they didn’t belong to any particular group. They didn’t belong to any of the local country clubs like Anne; they weren’t on the PTA like Dianne or the School Board like Molly; they weren’t active in the local churches or synagogues; they didn’t work with the Historical Society or the library; they weren’t among the strollerati or the hard-core tennis ladies like Jeanine. They were just Lynn and Sandi doing their business and not really worrying about what anyone else thought.

Lynn looked at the vacant chair again and remembered how Sandi had defended her last year after she’d recommended
White Teeth
to the group and everyone else complained,
I can’t identify with these people!
She’d never forget the way Sandi stuck her tongue out as she told Jeanine,
Stretch a little, honey; you won’t snap.

Lately though, Lynn realized, Sandi had withdrawn a bit from their little club, presumably to work on her house.

“I’m not getting what you mean,” she said, turning to Jeanine. “She took things to an extreme? What things?”

“You didn’t know?” Jeanine raised her eyebrows high.

“Didn’t know
what?
”

There was a pregnant pause, a marshaling of forces, a restless anticipation like the beginning of a horse race.

“What are you saying? She was having an affair?” Lynn felt her blood pressure drop.

The four other women started speaking at once like people running for the train.

“Listen,
listen,
she was very cagey, even with me.” Jeanine waved her hands, quieting down. “You know, Jeff and her had been having problems for a long time.”

“But I thought they were past that.” Dianne de Groot frowned.

“Oooooh, nooo …”Jeanine lifted her glass of Chardonnay. “His business is in a lot of trouble. He’s been depressed for months.”

“Had you been over to the new house?” Molly Pratt said in a hushed appalled voice, touching Lynn’s knee.

“Yesterday was the first time I’d been inside.” Lynn’s shoulders drooped. “She kept telling me it wasn’t ready yet. I thought there was supposed to be some big grand opening this fall so she could show it off.”

“Oh, yeah, right.” Anne Schaffer snorted.

“It’s a mess, isn’t it?” Jeanine rolled her eyes. “They almost couldn’t finish one of the upstairs bathrooms because they couldn’t afford to pay the contractor …”

“But how could I not know any of this?” Lynn looked back at the empty dining room chair, as if expecting an explanation. “She’s been one of my best friends since we were six. She stayed with my family for a month after her mother died.”

“Well, that’s probably the reason why.” Jeanine started to cut into the Brie wheel on the coffee table. “Shame. Embarrassment. She didn’t want to look bad in front of you anymore. No one likes to be the poor little waif. And she thought you’d scored so big marrying Barry that she didn’t want you to think she was falling behind.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” Lynn protested. “Like
I
would’ve cared.”

“She was very competitive with you,” Jeanine said, fastidiously spreading Brie on to a thin table water cracker. “That’s what
you
never got about her.”

“Absolutely.” Anne Schaffer nodded.

“What’re you talking about?” Lynn looked around, bewildered. She felt like she’d flipped over a rock in her garden and discovered a council of wriggling worms.

“She talked about you all the time,” Molly said crisply, loading a cracker of her own. “She was always measuring herself against you.”

Lynn held on to the sides of her chair as if someone had tried to tip her over. Could this be true? Her grief doubled back on itself. Not only had she just lost her best friend, she was being told that she’d never really known her. This felt like betrayal. No, like a conspiracy.
No,
it was just a terrible misunderstanding. They had it all wrong. Hot tears surged into the corners of her eyes again, and she had trouble catching her breath. The black circle was back from yesterday, throbbing and pushing back against her insides.

“Wow,” she said, trying to shrink the circle down again. “And in the middle of this, you’re telling me she started having an affair?”

“Hey, listen, people look for solace in different ways.” Jeanine shrugged and wiped her mouth with a cocktail napkin. “You were known to smoke a doobie or two after your mom got sick. Marty hits the scotch every night after he gets home from the magazine because he’s worried about layoffs. You know, Sandi was always kind of insecure about her big nose and the size of her ass.”

“A man comes along and gives you a little positive attention after your husband’s been going around feeling all sorry for himself, you tend to perk up.” Anne Schaffer gave a weary knowing sigh.