The Last Good Night (32 page)

“Who?”

“Kyler. I'm new.”

“All right. What do you have for me?”

 

I
HELD
D
OUGHERTY
on the phone as long as possible, purposefully confusing days and dates and shifts. As soon as we hung up, I hurried back down Sixth Avenue to Waverly Place and rounded the corner. The same bum was still sleeping two feet from the phone where I had told David to meet me. I leaned sideways against the brick wall behind the diner and, with my face lowered, I began to wait. I figured it would take him about eight minutes to get here.

The snow thinned and then thickened, the fat white flakes clustering in my eyelashes as I watched people hurry home, groceries in hand, to their warm apartments. Across the street, a couple stood pondering the offerings of an expensive wine store. Beside me lay the deserted subway station, its blackened stairs leading nowhere. My hands were growing numb. Four minutes had gone by since the phone call.

The bum began to stir, his eyes flickering open. He pulled his jacket tighter about his neck and sat up, his glance roaming from my feet to my face.

I tried to ignore him, peering up the dark street. There was no sign of David.

The bum pulled a brown paper bag from his pocket, brought it to his mouth, cursed, and then flung it into the street, where it crashed with a thud.

I shifted my weight anxiously.

A car went by with a loud boom box playing rap.

Around the corner, I could see a line begin to form in front of a movie theater.

A taxi let out an elderly woman in a plaid coat a few doors away.

I pretended not to notice that the bum was still looking intently at me.

Seven minutes had gone by, and still no sight of David.

I stamped my feet to warm my toes.

I could feel the man at my feet, waiting to speak, to acknowledge, to attend to me.

“This is my corner,” he said at last.

I nodded.

“Mine. Go on,” he admonished me. “Go on someplace else.”

“I'm waiting for someone,” I told him in a whisper, fearful of a scene.

“Aren't we all?” He pulled his socks up and continued to stare at me. “You look like someone,” he said.

I turned my face away from him.

Ten minutes.

If David wasn't here in five more minutes, I would leave without him.

“Hey, I'm talking to you. Are you someone?” he demanded.

“No.”

A man with a briefcase hurried by, glancing curiously at us.

“What you looking at?” the bum called after him. “Haven't you ever seen a man talk to a lady before? Jeez.”

I pulled my hat lower.

Thirteen minutes. I wondered if David had changed his mind, or been caught by Dougherty. I bit my lip angrily. He should have been here, should have come.

“You got any money?” the bum asked.

I dug in my pocket to get out the extra change I had brought for the phone.

The man took it, laid the coins out in his soiled palms and then glared back up at me. “Ninety-three cents? You serious, lady? You expect me to believe all you can come up with is ninety-three fucking cents? Haven't you heard of inflation?”

“Sshhh,” I implored him.

“What do you expect me to do with ninety-three fucking cents?” he continued to rant, louder and louder. “That doesn't buy me a paper cup to drink out of. Go back into that big black bag you got and see what you can come up with. Go on.”

“All right, all right. Just keep your voice down. Please.” I'd had enough. Enough waiting. Enough of this. It was time for me to go.

“What's the matter with my voice? You got a problem with it?” “No, it's just that—”

“What?”

“Here.” I reached into my bag for more money, threw a couple of dollars into the man's hand, and began to hurry back to Sixth Avenue.

I would go alone then. I would go to Sophie.

“Hey, lady, come back,” the bum called out. “I thought we were friends.”

I ignored his rising voice and continued, my head down, my feet slipping dangerously on the wet pavement as I walked.

I was almost to the corner when I felt a hand on my left
arm. Startled, I turned around, ready to free myself from the wino.

But it was David, breathless and flushed.

“Wait here.” He darted out into the oncoming traffic on Sixth Avenue to hail a cab while I hid my face.

“La Guardia,” David told the driver as we clambered in.

 

W
E WERE THE
last people to board the plane.

While David tried to read a magazine, I paid close attention to the stewardess standing in the front giving safety instructions, pointing out the emergency doors, talking about the flotation devices. “If the oxygen masks drop, those traveling with small children should be sure to put their own masks on first before securing their child's,” she said. I reached over and put my hand over David's.

We flew into the starless night.

All through the flight, I kept my face turned away from the other passengers, but I could hear one or two of them whispering, the murmur gaining in momentum. Strangers began to take repeated trips to the bathroom, walking slowly by our seats, staring over, glancing back.

It didn't matter. We were going to get Sophie. I was sure of it. David turned the pages of
Business Week
two at a time.

As we began to descend and the wheels locked into place, I saw the lights of West Palm Beach glittering in the distance, globules of pure white in the black sky. I pressed my hands to the cold glass of the tiny window and prayed.

 

W
E ANGLED OUT
of the airport and drove in our rented car ten miles above the speed limit up Interstate 95. The headlights of
the oncoming cars formed beacons of light, momentarily blinding and then receding. A child's car seat was buckled into the back, its safety belt lying open. I opened my window a crack and breathed in the familiar thick humid night air, an echo of an echo in my lungs.

When we saw the sign for Flagerty, my leg began to rattle up and down, and even when David put his hand on it to still it, more out of annoyance than affection, I could not stop.

We drove past the sporadic cavities of half-empty strip malls, gas stations, and the public tennis courts nestled in the triangular park along the road. The Intracoastal Waterway, as we made our way across the overpass, was green and still. A solitary pelican floated lazily in the dark. Jack had told me that Carol lived on Hibiscus Drive, three blocks south of where the Breezeway Inn used to be, and I directed David to turn right. The palm trees that lined the road cast long graceful shadows, their fronds motionless in the still night.

We saw the house from half a block away, a small pink stucco daub nestled between a Circle K convenience store and a motel with turquoise balconies overhanging the yard. We pulled into the driveway and David cut off the ignition. A light was on behind the sheer gold curtains. “All right. Let's go,” David said. He touched my hand just once and we got out of the car.

We walked up the red stucco steps of the minuscule front porch lined with pots of dead herbs balanced on the ledge and David banged the wrought-iron knocker.

On the third knock, a woman came to the door. She was tall and thin, her blond hair straggly and limp, her pale blue eyes encircled by deep black rings. Everything about her was a little out of focus, her eyes, her clothes, as if she were struggling to keep them from sliding away and not entirely winning the battle.

“Carol?” I asked.

Looking at me, she gasped once and then stared into my face, trancelike, expressionless, mute.

I tried to peer around her into the house. “Can we come in?” I asked carefully.

She didn't move.

“Who is that?” a man called out.

“No one,” she replied and tried to slam the door. David reached over and stopped it with his foot.

“What's going on?” the man asked.

“Nothing,” Carol called back urgently.

“Who's in there?” David demanded.

“No one. A friend.”

We were just about to push our way in when Jack came to the door.

At the sight of us, he stopped short. His face, exhausted, shadowy, and sunken, crumbled even further. “Laura.” I hardly recognized his voice. It was beyond surprise, beyond pain.

“Jack.” I leaned forward, my face inches from his. “Do you have Sophie?”

There was a gulch of silence. For a moment, all four of us were lost in it.

“Yes. She's sleeping inside,” Jack admitted.

I shut my eyes. “Thank God.”

David lunged at Jack. “You fucking bastard.”

“David, stop.” I grabbed his arms and pulled him away. “Not now.”

Jack's eyes were hollow, bleary. “Come in,” he said dully.

He reached around Carol and opened the door.

We entered the house and Jack shut the door behind us. I could feel David, coiled up with fury, beside me, but I did not look at him. The living room had a grease-stained gray carpet and eroded furniture, but it was otherwise neat, barren of the clutter of other people's lives. There was no evidence of a baby.

As soon as we were inside David lurched once more for Jack. “Where is she?”

Jack stepped back, eluding David's grasp. “I'll go get her.”

“No,” Carol protested.

“Carol, it's over,” Jack hissed.

“No,” she cried again.

“Shut up,” Jack told her.

She watched, glazed, as he began to walk slowly, carefully from the room.

“Let me come.” I began to follow him.

“No,” he answered firmly. “Wait here. I'll be right back.”

He disappeared down the hallway.

David took my hand and we listened to Jack's footsteps as the headlights of the cars driving up to the Circle K flashed against the walls. Carol fell back against a desk on the far wall, her back to us, her fingers nervously playing with a drawer.

“I'm going to kill him,” David muttered. “What kind of man does something like this?”

I hardly heard.

Sophie was here.

Sleeping just a few feet away.

Here.

Jack would come out with her.

Give her to us.

We would have her, hold her, once again.

David's hand pulsed in mine.

In a minute, Jack returned with Sophie over his shoulder. She was rubbing her still drowsy eyes with her fleshy boneless fists, her inky hair standing up on end, revealing the rolls in the back of her neck.

“Sophie.” I took a step closer and a thin skein of drool snaked down her chin as she smiled, I'm sure she smiled. “Sophie.”

I reached for her warm sleepy marshmallow body.

“Thank God,” David whispered, as he too reached for her.

My hands were inches from her body, my eyes locked on hers, only on hers.

I was so close that I could smell her sleep-scent.

“No!” Carol hissed as she slammed the drawer one final time and swiveled around to us.

I turned, startled, my arms hovering in midair.

Carol had a .38 handgun pointed at my chest. “Get away from her.”

“Oh God,” I cried as I took one last step to Sophie, my hands outstretched, open. My fingertips grazed her terry cloth pajamas.

“Move back,” Carol warned. She aimed the gun directly at Sophie's face. “Now.”

I froze.

“Do it.”

I shuddered and stepped back, away from Sophie, her warmth, her scent receding. “Please don't hurt her,” I pleaded.

Carol glared at me, the gun wavering slightly in her hands.

I turned desperately to Jack. “How could you do this?”

His eyes were grievous, pained. He parted his lips to speak but nothing came out.

“He can't help you this time.” Carol took a step closer, the gun steady now, unmoving. “I was the one who took your baby, not him.”

I looked at her, stunned. “You?”

“I followed Jack to New York,” she said, staring defiantly at me. “He followed you and I followed him. I guess that's the way it's always been. Funny, isn't it?” Her bleached eyebrows raised. “You're not laughing.” She waited, then finally continued. “That morning when he called to tell me he wasn't going to meet me, I went to his house. I told the landlord Jack had asked me to pick something up for him and he let me in. When I saw that magazine picture of you that he had colored in next to the old photograph, I knew exactly where he had gone.”

“But Dora said it was a man.”

“She made a mistake. It was easy, really. Jack and I still had the same credit cards so I was able to find out what hotel he was
staying at, and he led me right to you. After that, all I had to do was figure out your baby-sitter's schedule. Do you realize she takes the baby to the park at almost precisely the same time every day? Ten-fifteen. I even talked to her there a few times and admired what a pretty little girl she was taking care of.” She was proud now, shameless, as if she had to prove to us, to Jack, that she was not a fool after all. “No one was looking for a woman, so it was easy to ditch the car and get on a plane. When the police came the next morning, all I had to do was keep the baby in the back. They never even looked.”

Jack took a step in Carol's direction while Sophie burbled her protest.

I stared at her soft red mouth, her moist dark eyelashes, so close.

“Carol, this has gone far enough. Now give me the gun,” he said.

Carol looked at him icily, and waved him away. “Step back. I mean it.”

No one made a sound, no one made a move. Sophie's eyes were on the light gleaming off the gun, entranced as if it was a toy. The curls on the side of her head were damp. I wanted only to smooth them, to dry them.

“He saved that picture of you at the Breezeway all these years,” Carol continued. “And the postcard I drew the coffin on. He thought I didn't know about the box where he kept all his pieces of you, but I did. I never said anything. I thought I could wait it out. I actually thought he would change.” Her breath caught in her mouth. The gun shook dangerously.