The Last Good Day (35 page)

“No,” he said, remaining male and frustratingly obdurate. “I’m sure he was wonderful. But so what? Attila the Hun probably had a nice sister too. Is that supposed to be an excuse?”

No.
He’d missed the signal. There used to be this subfrequency between them, a silent way she could prompt him to ask the right question, but they weren’t hearing each other as well anymore. Too much static on the line. The noise-to-signal ratio was off. Even their sex life was phasing in and out lately. For a while there, they’d been in a real groove, not just having boring Married People Sex, but Rock-’Em Sock-’Em Post-Apocalypse Sex. The last few days, though, they’d been having Refugee Sex, furtive and uncomfortable, as if they were doing it in steerage among hordes of other starving immigrants.

“So did you call the police to report it?” Barry pushed back the covers.

“I spoke to one of the sergeants. Larry Quinn. He said there’s no law against talking to somebody in the aisle of a chain store.”

“Bullshit.” He pushed back, knocking the headboard against the wall. “You’re a material witness against an officer in a disciplinary procedure.”

“They said somebody would have an informal conversation with him about keeping his distance.”

“And that’s supposed to make us feel better?”

They both fell quiet for a few seconds, watching maple-leaf shadows on the ceiling.

“I really don’t want to do this,” she said. “I don’t want to testify against him.”

“Great,” he said. “We keep our mouths shut, and he skates? Is that the idea?”

“Would that really be so terrible?”

“Hell yeah. I just spent the afternoon pulling his old CCRB complaints. The guy’s got a file like the Sunday
Times.
Harassment complaints from at least two other women and four brutality complaints out of the drug sweeps they did down by the waterfront. If we let him off the hook, what’ll we do next time he comes by the house?”

She heard a distant sound in the woods like the tensing of a dock rope. You should tell him. He’ll understand. Unless he doesn’t.

“We could move again,” she said, rubbing her chin against her kneecap. “Our old apartment in Manhattan’s probably renting for a couple of hundred dollars less since the Eleventh.”

“You’re serious?”

“Halfway. What if we just stayed in Paris after Christmas vacation? Remember how we used to talk about moving there?”

“Yeah, before we had kids and high cholesterol.”

She felt around for his hand in the dark. “You really wouldn’t consider moving?”

“Lynn”—he sighed, his knuckles lightly brushing hers—“all our money’s tied up in this house. We can’t just pick up and move tomorrow. We’d lose our shirts if we tried to sell it in this market.”

“I thought you said our company stock was going to come roaring back any minute.”

She felt him go rigid beside her, a center of gravity sinking into the mattress. “It’s late,” he said, starting to roll away. “We should talk about all this tomorrow.”

He was shutting down on her, like the old local television stations used to.
This concludes our broadcast day.

“Did you make sure all the doors were locked before you turned in?” She watched him pull the covers up again, his silhouette curving away from her, becoming an indistinct lump.

“I did.”

“Did you tuck the kids in?”

“Hannah’s seventeen,” he muttered. “If I tried to tuck her in at this point, she’d call child welfare on me.”

“They’re still very young.”

“Lynn”—he reached back, feeling around for her tentatively in the darkness—“everything’s going to be okay. You know that, don’t you?”

“That’s what you keep telling me.” She turned back the quilt and started to slip out of bed. “I’m going to check on them again. I can’t help it.”

Parquet cold against the soles of her feet, she padded out into the hallway, grabbing the blue flannel robe from the closet on the way. The thermostat reported it was 68 degrees in the house, but that seemed unlikely. Even with pajama tops and bottoms on under the robe, the chill went right into her bones.

Call me Cleopatra, Queen of Denial.

She stopped in Clay’s room first and found him curled up under the “Raw is War” quilt, little Stone Cold Steve Austin action figure clutched in his pudgy left hand, like a talisman to ward off evil spirits.

Almost thirteen years old. Should she be worried? Hannah had put most of her dolls away by the time she was ten. Shouldn’t he at least have something more appropriate for his age, like a stroke book hidden under his pillow? She smoothed back his hair and moved on to her daughter’s room.

The den of iniquity. The door gave a long drawn-out groan as she pushed it open, and she found herself cringing, awaiting the contemptuous hiss and the inevitable exasperated question—
What are you doing?
It felt as though it had been weeks since she’d entered this space uninvited. Light from the red gamma-globulin Lava lamp illuminated the Marilyn Manson poster and the faux-Egyptian amulet dangling from a nail above the bed. She felt a pang, remembering the old kindergarten finger paintings and crayon scrawls they used to tape to the apartment walls. Back when she wanted to make pictures like Mommy. She stepped carefully, knowing there were stacks of Anne Rice novels and CDs by the Cure somewhere in the dark. For some reason, the Goth obsession was lasting longer than her other phases. Odors of patchouli and recently extinguished incense lingered vaguely. Hey, what happened to the little bottle of Chanel Number Five she bought for Hannah’s birthday last year at Bloomingdale’s? Her daughter lay face up on her pillow, the full moon melting away her baby fat, a thin black camisole strap slipping off her bare shoulder, as if she was waiting to be ravished.

The time was near for another one of their
talks,
if it hadn’t already come and gone. Seeing that soft white shoulder, she sensed with a reasonable degree of certainty that Hannah had begun having sex with Dennis Paultz, and all she could do about it at this point was make sure her warnings about protection had been heeded and prepare Barry so he wouldn’t need four-point restraints when he found out.

She sat down on the side of the bed, wondering if she’d missed the moment. More and more these days, she was looking around and asking where her children went. The details of their daily lives were no longer second nature to her. There were friends, places, and habits popping up in the middle of conversations that she’d absolutely never heard of before.

She touched the satiny side of Hannah’s face, a privilege she was no longer permitted to enjoy in waking hours.

Are you proud of yourself?
Why didn’t she say something to Barry just now? The shot was right there. The light was perfect. But somehow she missed the chance to frame it and click the shutter. Why couldn’t she just come out with it? Instead, here she was, rambling at midnight, the little disturbances of the house echoing and amplifying the disjunction of her thoughts.

It occurred to her that secrets were like a town sometimes, with their own social hierarchy. The Arrivistes sunning themselves at the top of the hill, having bootstrapped their way up into semirespectability. The Status-Seekers in the middle, trying to stay busy so no one will question them too closely. And at the very bottom, the Unmentionables, the things you tried not to think about, the memories you could barely admit even to yourself. They labored like a mutant workforce under the surface, toiling in the fuming, grinding infrastructure, pushing the millstones, loading up coal carts, digging deeper and deeper into the sediment, and occasionally hitting a vein and sending spumes shooting up into the Overworld.

Realizing she wouldn’t get back to sleep easily, she prowled back out into the hallway. From the master bedroom, Barry was snoring along obliviously like the distant surf.
Everything’s going to be okay,
he’d said. And she’d let that stand.
Are you proud of yourself?

She noticed that the door to the vest-pocket study at the other end of the hall was half-open. A soft beacon glow spilled out. Her heart tripped on the off beat, thinking someone was in there. But when she cautiously pushed the door open, she found the room empty and the desktop computer left on. She went to turn it off and found a gray-blue grinning devil’s head on the Gateway screen, a window in its mouth asking, “Are you sure you wish to be released from the dark realm? Yes / No.” Jesus, another one of Clay’s games about creating your own world and then torturing its inhabitants like a malevolent god. She turned it off, wondering if Barry had pushed him too hard on this Bar Mitzvah business and given the kid an angry Messiah complex. The devil’s head scrolled away, leaving the America Online sign-on greeting in its place. Were they affiliates?

From outside, she heard a tiny
chp-chp
sound, like two wet marbles being tapped together. A woodpecker? A cricket? She’d always had an overstimulated imagination in the late hours, telling her younger sister, Carol, bedtime stories about headless horsemen and dismembered schoolgirls that scared both of them so badly they’d need to sleep in the same bed. She sat down in the chair, regretting they’d never regained that closeness. In becoming an instant grown-up after Mom got sick, Lynn had turned into one of the people that Carol had to get away from. And so she’d gone all the way out to Oregon to join a commune and then marry an architect and start a family of her own, having had more than enough of MS, her bossy older sister, and Riverside in general. Maybe she had the right idea, Lynn thought, making a clean break instead of stumbling back into town like the prodigal daughter.

Lynn looked at the clock in the corner of the screen and saw it was almost one o’clock, but still a few minutes before ten in Portland. Her nephews would be asleep, and Carol would almost certainly be dog-tired, but she needed to touch base with somebody. A kind of desperate loneliness had come over her, a yearning for connection without consequence.

The chair’s struts gave a little cry as she tucked a cold foot under her butt. Her fingers danced across the keys, entering her name and her secret password,
Weegee,
as the computer made that odd flickering sound like a fuse burning up, a reminder that they needed to get a DSL line one of these days. She hit the sign-on button and waited for the connection, the whine and squeal of electrodes shooting through miles of fiber-optic cable and branching out like vines across the country, searching for something or someone to latch on to. And just before that bright impersonal male voice announced, “Welcome!” she’d heard a light drizzle like someone pissing against the side of the house.

She froze for a moment, trying to find a benign explanation. An animal. Deer and raccoon go to the bathroom too. Why shouldn’t they do it right outside? Maybe she should’ve gone back for that bag of coyote urine this afternoon, to keep them away.

“You’ve got mail!” announced the voice on the computer, like the world’s most ambitious flight attendant.

She clicked on the yellow envelope and saw she had three messages from François at the gallery, probably wanting to talk about their lunch on Thursday and the most recent set of prints she’d sent him for the spring show. The immigrant laborer series from in front of Starbucks. She knew he was going to hate them.
Too drab,
he’d say.
Too gritty. Isn’t this sort of 1930s social realism old hat? Where’s the cutting edge? Where’s the beauty for beauty’s sake?
She had half a mind to beg François to postpone the show for a month. How could she think about work at this point anyway? It would be like trying to take a picture in the middle of a dust storm.

She clicked to open the first e-mail, and just as she started to read the words
Union Square Cafe, twelve-thirtyish?
a fierce rustling began outside. A thin gust blew into the room. Hugging herself for warmth, she got up to close the window, the floorboards giving a mournful sigh, as if there were a song trapped beneath them.

Wind slapped hard at the glass. She saw the ceaseless tumbling of treetops in the moonlight. A chill crept over her. The
chp-chp
was coming from right under the window. She shut it quickly and backed away. Easy there. Mike wouldn’t just show up at your house in the middle of the night. Would he?

The lunch proposal was where she’d left it on the screen, dutifully awaiting her answer. No, Mike wouldn’t dare. Larry Quinn said someone would talk to him. But there was still an undeniable presence in the vicinity. She’d felt it strongly right by the window, a stillness in the air, a coppery taste in her mouth that reminded her of this afternoon.

Enough. She was scaring herself. She hit the reply button and typed, “see ya then,” back to François, with what she hoped sounded like plucky confidence, and started to turn the computer off. But just before she clicked on the X in the upper right-hand corner, the screen winked. A slightly cheesy-sounding wind-chime sound issued from the speakers, and a small white space appeared in the left corner, signaling an Instant Message.

Stark black words filled in the top line.

I KNOW WHAT YOUR DOING

Her heart jammed. How would anyone even know she was up at this hour? Could he see her?

She started to rise from her chair. Then a second line appeared.

WATCH YOURSELF.

The whole room pulsated in time with her breathing.

In a panic, she blanked out the screen before fully registering the name of the sender. She couldn’t allow this to go any further. The threat was already stamped and burning in her head. She slowly backed away and knocked over her chair, as if a hand was about to reach out of the screen. “
Good-bye!
” said the ambitious flight attendant. She turned and ran, her bare feet thumping hard on the landing, sounding hollow spots below the boards. The master bedroom door was still half-open, and she dove in beside Barry, seeking refuge against his frame. Shivering in the dark, she realized that in her rush to get rid of the message she hadn’t considered how to track it back to its source.