The Last Good Day (58 page)

Muscles seizing, one arm crooked tight around Lynn’s neck, Mike shot back, fire jumping from his hand.

The report echoed down the driveway and faded among the elms and oaks.

Looking strangely befuddled, Harold slowly opened his navy jacket, as if he was checking the designer’s label.

A red dot thickened like a wax seal over his breast pocket and then dripped down the front of his white shirt.

“Oh my God!” Mike shouted. “Where’s your vest? Where’s your fucking vest?”

Harold staggered back against the hood of his car and clapped his hand over the wound, blood pouring out between his fingers.

“Are you insane?” Mike screamed at him. “I told you never to take it off. Didn’t I?
Didn’t I?
”

Mike reeled back, still keeping Lynn in a half nelson, gasping and wheezing, “What’d I do? What’d I do?” under his breath. The other cops scrambled around Harold as he collapsed, trying to bear him up like the fallen king.

“What happened?” Mike dragged Lynn back to the wooded edge of the slope. “What the fuck just happened?”

“Okay. You have to give up now.” She gagged, hearing stirring in the brush behind her. “It’s over …”

“But is he all right? Is Harold going to be all right?”

The shock had loosened his grip on her neck again. She bolted, trying to pull away from him. He lunged after her off-balance, grabbing her by the collar. But then a sudden fierce grunt made them both turn at the same time.

Barry smashed Michael in the side of the head with a fence post.

Michael staggered back with the wood sticking to his temple and blood running down his cheek. Barry yanked it away, and Lynn saw there was a long crooked rusty nail on the end of it.

Michael gave a long primal scream of anguish, as he cupped a hand over the wound. He spun around, and his other hand went up, firing the gun.

Lynn hit the ground, covering her head as the bay window exploded behind her. When she looked up, Barry was hobbling frantically toward her, thinking she’d been shot. She started to wave and tell him she was all right.

But then Mike lurched up right behind him, about to shoot him in the back of the head.

“BARRY LOOK OUT!” She pointed behind him.

He whirled around and hit Mike with the fence post again, flat in the face, right above the eye socket.

Mike fell howling to his knees. The gun in his hand came up again, the hole a blind eye at the end of the barrel. Barry raised the wood above his head and brought it down on top of Mike’s skull, the wood splintering and making a sickening hollow
thock
as Mike fell face forward. Barry brought the post down a second time, and Mike’s whole body shuddered.

“All right, that’s enough.” Lynn started running over.

But Barry was in a tribal frenzy, clubbing him again and again, blood spattering with each blow.

“Stop it!” She grabbed him and pinned his arms to his sides, trying to pull him back to his senses. “It’s done.”

He pushed her aside and brought the wood down one more time across Mike’s back before he tossed it in disgust, finally exhausted and satisfied that the other man wasn’t getting up.

Lynn reached up and took his face in her hands, forcing him to meet her eyes, dimly aware of Paco coming up into the yard and a phone ringing in the house.

Gradually Barry’s breathing slowed, and after a few seconds, a crackling of twigs made both of them turn.

Two gray-brown deer were bedded down at the edge of the property. Realizing they were being looked at, they both stood up at once and stared back at the humans, wondering what these strangers were doing on their trail. Then they turned and leaped away, supple-spined and indifferent, over the part of the fence that was still standing.

63

THE SNOW NEVER
really came this year. Just a light wedge of frost before the holidays, not even enough to merit getting the driveway plowed. It was as if someone knew they already had enough cleaning up on their hands.

All around town, slightly chewed-looking Christmas trees were lying on lawns and sidewalks, waiting to be picked up. The giant wreaths and snowflake decorations were coming down at the mall, and the post-holiday sale signs were going up. There were long lines to see the new movie about wizards and old demons in dark caves. On the radio, Afghan women were going to the hairdresser and painting their nails again, but a tall man had been caught trying to blow up a flight from Paris with explosives in his sneakers. Lynn heard the news and found herself wondering if it was the same flight they would’ve taken if they hadn’t ended up selling their tickets on eBay.

“You got the check?” she asked as they left the closing at the lawyer’s office, across the street from the train station.

“I got the check.” Barry patted the inside pocket under his bad shoulder.

“You’ve still got fast hands.” She slid in on the driver’s side of the Saab in the parking lot and unlocked the passenger’s door for him.

“I can catch two flies at a time. I used to be able to catch three, but the flies found out about me.”

They sat there quietly for a moment, not quite ready to go. The trunk was sagging with things they’d collected in their final walkthrough of the house, before the sale was finalized. They were loaded up with boxes of old linens, stray socks, second-best china, books that had been hiding under the bed for a year, pots that no one wanted at the final tag sale.

“I didn’t see Emmie come in the conference room,” she said. “Did you?”

“No. I just looked up from signing the papers, and there she was. She just materialized on the other side of the table while we were talking about when the oil company made deliveries.”

“She looked good, I thought. Considering.”

“Yeah. Considering.”

This had been the season of funerals without the funeral director.

Jeffrey’s was first. Saul quietly arranged for one of the national chains to spirit the body out of town and perform a service somewhere out near North Babylon on the island. According to Jeanine, no one from Riverside went. Michael’s funeral was a more complicated arrangement. Because he’d been suspended pending dismissal at the time of his death, there was no way to justify a full dress-blue, bagpipes, and war-drums ceremony. Instead there’d been an Irish wake that lasted for a few days, with Michael’s father propping himself up by the casket, warily accepting condolences from various cops, retired C.O.s, and half-forgotten friends who’d long since fled the Hollow. Again, there was no way Lynn would have attended, but Jeanine said that as acting chief, Paco Ortiz arranged for the family to receive three-quarter benefits.

Harold’s was the last of the services. There were too many mourners for the old AME church in the Hollow to accommodate, so instead Saint Stephen’s was filled to the rafters with cops, town trustees, schoolteachers, Chamber of Commerce types, soccer moms, slacker dads, go-for-the-throat Wall Streeters, and, surprisingly, even a few local pot dealers who apparently held no grudge. It took a funeral to show the man knew everybody. Reverend Ezekiel P. Philips thundered from the pulpit about how Harold paid the price for being a pioneer, and sitting near the back, Lynn understood the larger point he was trying to make. But Emmie seemed far closer to the spirit of the man when she got up afterward and talked about Harold sitting in the living room late at night with the children asleep upstairs, paying his bills and watching a big polar bear on the Nature Channel, swimming back and forth across his little pond.

“You think she blames us for what happened?” asked Lynn.

“I don’t know how she could. Most of those balls were in play before we even got here, but …” He hesitated, not quite ready to exonerate himself so easily. “It’s hard to say. Maybe we could’ve done some things differently.”

She looked out the window, watching a white gull walk along the empty platform, as if wondering where all the commuters had gone. Behind it, the river churned implacably, turning the color of melted green toy soldiers.

“She said we would be happy here,” said Lynn. “Remember that?”

“But she didn’t say for how long.”

“You think that’s what she meant by that other thing?” She adjusted the side mirror.

“What other thing?”

“What she said today. That some houses are like states of mind. You’re not supposed to stay in them. They’re just stages you go through.”

“Hippie bullshit,” he grunted as he tried to pull his seat belt strap over a shoulder joint held together by titanium screws.

“Works for her.”

“I guess.”

He grimaced, trying to find a comfortable position for the full cast on his leg and his cane.

“So, what’s going to work for us?”

“Getting on the road.” He adjusted his seat back.

“You seriously don’t want to go up the hill and take one last look?”

“I do, but what’s the point? I don’t think the Davises need us poking around anymore.”

“You think they’ll be happy there?”

“Why not?” He shrugged.

She thought of the young couple who’d just signed the contract across the table from them. He, a medical supplies salesman, beginning to bulk up a little from road food. She, a hugely pregnant former kindergarten teacher, ready to nest and have her own garden. Lynn had watched them stand before the oak tree in the backyard, gesturing grandly, outlining plans in the air, murmuring quietly about the baby’s room, the tree fort, rocking chairs, and how things were going to be different once they moved in. And in some melancholy way she’d been touched by them, as if these were the people who’d come along to complete the dream she couldn’t finish for herself.

“And how about us?” asked Lynn.

“I think we’re gonna be all right,” said Barry. “I think we’re going to rent for a while in Hawthorne and Hannah’s going to go off to school and Clay’s eventually going to find a group of friends who don’t beat the crap out of him. I think you’re going to do your gallery show in the spring and eventually, if miracles come to pass, we’ll get the money from the insurance company and I might even get another job.”

“Did you talk to Lisa yesterday?”

“Yeah, you’re not going to believe it. She wants to apply for a new patent for a drug she’s working on and start another company with me.”

“What does it do?”

“It blocks the neurotransmitters that help you store and retrieve memories.”

“Oh my God. You’re kidding me. You mean it’s the opposite of an Alzheimer’s drug? Why would anybody want that?”

He shrugged as she started the car. “I don’t know. Seems to me like they got a few million potential customers these days. What’s the point of remembering something if all it does is make you miserable?”

“Because you need to,” she said. “It’s evolution. What about remembering you got burned the last time you stuck your hand in a fire?”

“Well, we have pictures to tell us that, don’t we?”

She stepped on the gas, throwing him back against his seat.

Because of the holiday week, it wasn’t just day laborers out on the street for once. People stood in clusters outside stores, upholstered in heavy down coats, breathing out little white puffs of condensed air, shaking their heads in wonder and talking about …

The dead.
They were everywhere. You couldn’t get around them. They lowered real estate values. They distracted the kids at school. They discouraged shoppers. They made you lock your doors and check your windows at night. They practically stood on corners and dared you not to look back at them.

A line of cars was moving slowly ahead of them on River Road. Each had a Christmas tree tied to its roof like a silent movie damsel lashed to the railroad tracks. These were the people who didn’t want to wait around for their trees to be picked up from the end of their driveways. As she drove on, Lynn heard the ferocious grinding of a wood mulcher and saw the cars making a right turn into the Department of Public Works yard just past the train station, where the gates were usually closed to the public.

Without really thinking, she made the turn and followed them.

“What are you doing?” said Barry. “We’re supposed to meet the kids at Jeanine’s by four-thirty.”

She put the car in park behind an idling Navigator and got out with the loaded Canon she had beside her seat. The smell of fresh pine was everywhere. People stood around the mulcher, watching one tree after another get fed in. They entered tip first, smallest branches disappearing, the machine jolting, threatening to choke on the size, and then somehow fitting it all in and spewing out the wood chips. On almost any other day, it would be a picture worth taking, but this time she walked straight past it, starting to see another image take shape.

Black bags were piled up along the edge of the water, full of mulch to be spread around the trees in Eisenhower Park—just enough to stay under the circumference of the branches at high noon. But today, they didn’t interest her either. She turned left at the great unused salt pyramid with its attendant spreader truck and then walked out onto the gritty beige spit of beach, a few yards beyond the lot.

“Hey, lady, you’re not supposed to be there,” a garbageman called from behind her.

But his voice was drowned by the smashing of the tide against the long jagged jetty that stretched out into the river like a beckoning arm. She ignored him and stepped out onto the rocks, trying not to slip on the algae-encrusted surfaces and rags of seaweed caught in the crevasses. Gulls dipped and pivoted in the sky before her. The smell of ground wood gave way to mud and brine. The vicious cold wind ripped at her clothes and her hair. But she kept walking to the end of the rocks, even as Barry hobbled after her on his cane and joined the garbageman on the shore, yelling for her to come back.

The river swelled and slapped on either side of her, a freezing rain spraying her every few seconds. The wind made ridges on its surface, making it look like a long corrugated gate. Then she turned around and saw it: almost the view Michael had been talking about, but closer. Half her life she’d been here without ever realizing this angle existed: far enough back to frame the town from top to bottom, but near enough to see all its knobby distinct features and patches of greenery. It was like glimpsing her memories carved into the side of a mountain. The rock face rising from the riverbank; the train platform; the prison guard tower; the little winding streets leading up into the hills; the riot of trees; the steeple of Saint Stephen’s; the farmhouses on Grace Hill, where she’d once thought she’d spend her sunset years with Barry; and, of course, the rows of tiny white tombstones in Green Hill Cemetery, where her mother was buried a stone’s throw from Sandi, and Harold rested a couple of football fields away from his old friend Michael.