The Last Refuge (9 page)

We moved around her and would have left right then, but she wasn’t quite ready to have us dismissed.

“You’re welcome to visit anytime you’d like. But please check in with us occasionally. My office is just inside the front entrance.”

“Certainly.”

We walked out together, and Miss Filmore escorted us all the way to the front door. She wanted to shake hands again.

“It’s wonderful to have people show some interest in the elderly,” she said by way of seeing us off. “They have so much to offer, but tend to get lost in the shuffle.”

“Yeah, so I’ve noticed.”

Hodges climbed into a rusty Ford Econoline after looking over the Grand Prix. As I drove off, I looked back at the Senior Center and saw Barbara Filmore
still standing at the door, a trained professional, alert to threats and poised to seize opportunity.

Amanda’s car was in my driveway when I got home. I didn’t see it at first because it was raining hard and silver Audis aren’t normally parked in front of my house. She was in the driver’s seat, her head back on the headrest. I thought she might be asleep, but she jumped out of the car when I pulled up and ran behind Eddie and me through the rain and into my kitchen.

The cottage filled up with the smell of wet dog. Amanda’s hair was all flattened out, which made it more obvious that she had a very pretty face. It was still strained, and there were dark semicircles under her eyes. She clutched her windbreaker close to her throat and shivered. I looked up at her from where I was drying off Eddie with an old beach towel.

“Sorry. I’ll turn up the heat.”

“That’s okay.”

Eddie sniffed at her knees and wagged his tail. She rumpled the top of his head.

“My, aren’t you a handsome boy. What’s your name?”

“Eddie Van Halen.”

She kept scratching his face.

“Are you a guitar player?”

“He gave it up. No money in it.”

I switched on the furnace, hoping there was some oil left. I only ran it once in a while to keep it from rusting up, or when I couldn’t keep the house above
freezing with the woodstove in the living room. The radiators clanged into action.

She stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room and watched me bunch up newspapers and toss kindling into the stove. I overstocked it with split red oak and opened up the dampers.

“You want some coffee?”

“You drink a lot of coffee.”

“Yeah, too much. Want some?”

“I drink too much coffee, too. Sure.”

I built a five-cup pot of freshly ground Cinnamon Hazelnut. The rain was trying to beat in the windows, but the house started to feel warm. From the kitchen, I could look through the living room and out to the screened-in porch. Beyond the porch the bay was all in a charcoal gray and white-tipped uproar. The nearest buoy, a green can, was rocking back and forth like a dweeble. The only thing in the room besides the stove was a pull-out couch. I sat on it after Amanda sank down next to the stove and took a sip of her coffee, holding the cup with both hands. Somehow while I was fussing with stoves and coffee she’d managed to brush back her hair and smooth out her face. She wore Reeboks, clean, faded Wranglers and a chambray shirt under her cotton windbreaker. The shirt was opened to just below the top curve of her breasts. Her chest had seen a lot of sun—it was very dark with freckles that were almost black.

“So,” I said, for openers.

“I’m sorry I’m bothering you again.”

“You mostly bother me when you say you’re sorry.”

Self-effacement can be hard work on the receiving end.

“You like your privacy. I’m making you uncomfortable.”

“I’m just not used to other people sitting in my living room.”

“I understand that. I’ve lived alone.”

“Where’s Roy?”

“He had to go to the City.” She looked up as if unsure I believed her. “HQ keeps a pretty tight rein, so he has to go in two or three times a month. I took off early. They’ll cover for me.”

“Does he know you’re here?”

She busied herself petting and cooing at Eddie. He didn’t discourage her.

“Of course not. That bothers you?”

“Not really. I’m just not much for company.”

“I’m sorry. I should go.”

“No, I mean,
I’m
not good company. Me. Obviously. You’re fine.”

“I still should go. You’re probably busy.”

She started to stand up. I waved her back down.

“Nah. Drink your coffee. I got nothing else to do.”

“When we talked about Regina Broadhurst it got me thinking about my mother again. Not that I ever stopped. It’s all I’ve done since she died. They’re all dying. Our parents. Yours, mine.”

“It’s been five years since my mother went. I don’t think about it much.”

Amanda leaned back against the wall and looked at me through frustrated, anxious eyes. Tears rushed up into her voice.

“She was just a sweet, wonderful old woman. She made dolls for charity for Chrissakes.”

The impossible tangle of her emotions created an attraction current that drew her legs back against her chest. She pulled them to her and rested her head on her knees.

“I’m an engineer, not a shrink. But it looks to me like it all happened too quick for you and you got what they call unresolved issues.”

A couple sessions of court-ordered therapy and I’m fucking Sigmund Freud.

“I know. They have grief counselors, but Roy was really unhappy about the idea. Doesn’t approve of it.”

“Can’t say he’s helping out too much here.”

“No, you can’t say that.”

Eddie found people down at his level irresistible. He tried to lick her face, from which she gently demurred. I told him to bug off, so he went out to the screened-in porch, a little put out.

“It’s none of my business, but since you’re here in my living room, I guess I can say you should talk to somebody about this and to hell with Roy. With all due respect.”

“Maybe I can just talk to you.”

“Now I know you need help.”

She smiled at me. “You want me to think you’re just an old burnout.”

It’s amazing how pretty women who like you and wear rough chambray shirts and smell like fresh expectations can say anything they want and get away with it.

“Too burned out to think straight, that’s for sure.”

Even though I couldn’t stop thinking about Regina floating in that bathtub. She had wicked bad arthritis. Could hardly bend down. She had an old tin-lined shower stall off the kitchen that she could just walk into. My old man used the tub in that bathroom to clean fish. In return he’d leave her a few in the freezer. When I went through the house I saw a bathrobe hanging in the broom closet, which was right near the shower stall, along with a bunch of beach towels. I realized, standing there looking down at Amanda, that Regina never sat on the beach. And never had any guests. Those were her bath towels. Thirty-year-old beach towels she was too cheap to replace.

“What are you saying?”

“I don’t know, Amanda. Old habits die hard. I spent most of my life solving engineering problems, which are like big, complicated puzzles. You have to noodle ’em out. Only here I can’t say there’s anything to noodle. I must be growing an imagination in my old age.”

“You’re not that old.”

Amanda smoothed the legs of her jeans down toward her ankles, pushing out the wrinkles and reinforcing the crease up her shins and over her knees. I thought of my daughter’s cat.

“I wish you could have met my mother. She was very strict, but she had a sense of humor.”

“I probably would’ve been a bit young for her.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

I felt bad when I saw the tears pooling up in her eyes. I find it hard to talk about death without being sarcastic. Grieving relatives usually don’t find it too funny. I went into the bathroom next to the kitchen
and got a box of Kleenex. I was able to keep my mouth shut long enough for her to blow her nose and mop up her tears.

“I think I would have liked her, too,” I said.

“How come?” she said, with a sniff.

“I can tell. Probably loaded with charm. A lot of it rubbed off on you.”

“Does that mean you like me, too?”

“Yes. It does.”

“That’s so amazing.”

“Why?”

“Because I feel so unlikable.”

For a brief moment, her history poured in from some other dimension, flowed around the living room, then drained away through cracks in the floor and special portals in the wall. It caused a lapse.

“So what made you come back to Southampton?”

She looked at me as if concentrating on my face. Evaluating. She scrunched up her mouth and looked away.

“Something bad,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“What about you?”

“Same here. More or less.”

“I thought so,” she said. “Want to know?”

“Nah. Enough of that stuff, okay?”

“Okay. If you want.”

The gray-black rain clouds outside made it even darker in the knotty pine room. I opened the woodstove and threw in a few more logs. We were washed by fire light and smoky dry heat. She took off her windbreaker and pulled up her sleeves. She hadn’t
moved out of the way when I was stoking the stove. Her presence was beginning to unbalance the stolid resignation that decorated the inside of my cottage. I looked down at her and caught a glimpse of a tanned breast held softly in a low-cut flowered bra. I went back to the kitchen to exchange my coffee for something stronger. Something with little blocks of ice in it.

The phone rang. It was Sullivan.

“They gave me a note from a guy named Jimmy Maddox. That’s her nephew?”

“Yeah. He’s letting me handle the funeral and settle the estate. First I want that cause of death.”

“When you get hold of a bone you sure do gnaw on it.”

“A lot of time has gone by. I’m not an expert on morbidity, but it’s got to affect an accurate read. Make sure it’s the full deal. Blood analysis, tissue trauma, stuff under fingernails.”

“That’s not an autopsy. That’s forensics.”

Amanda was standing there watching me. Holding the phone to my ear with my left shoulder, I held up the gin bottle and pointed to the tonic. She nodded. I poured and continued to talk to Sullivan.

“Okay. Do whatever.”

While I talked I watched Amanda busy herself around the kitchen. When she refilled the ice trays she leaned into the sink, bearing her weight on her right leg with her left tucked behind like a dancer.

“I’ll take care of it,” said Sullivan. “You just worry about gettin’ her in the ground. Call me with the name of the funeral home and we’ll send her over there when we’re done.”

“Okay, chief. By the way, who cleaned up her house?”

“I don’t know. Not us. Unless it was the paramedics.”

“Is that usually what they do?”

“No, that’s the family’s business.”

Amanda leaned into me when she reached across the kitchen table for the tonic. She poured for both of us and handed me the drink. She mouthed the word lime and I jerked my head toward the refrigerator.

“So you didn’t turn off the power.”

“I don’t think so. I’ll call the County Health people. The power’s out?”

“I just turned it back on.”

“Don’t forget to pay LIPA. You got the authority.”

“The cop,” I told Amanda when I hung up.

“The cop?”

“Joe Sullivan. Not really the meatball I thought he was.”

“He’s doing what you want?”

“I got Jimmy Maddox, Regina’s nephew, to sign an autopsy request. Sullivan’s going to get the county coroner to do it for me, which probably took a little pull on his part.”

“That poor woman has to be buried.”

“She doesn’t care,” I started going down one road, then quickly switched to another. “I’m just curious. Got a little itch to scratch. Can’t hurt anything at this point.”

Amanda smiled instead of apologizing, which was a step in the right direction.

“I’m sure. Cheers.”

She took a healthy pull on the gin and tonic. We looked around the inside of my barren little house for a while without saying anything.

“I’d better go,” she said, finally.

“Probably should.”

“I feel better.”

“It’s the proximity of the Little Peconic. Has that effect.”

“Couldn’t be the company.”

Eddie and I watched her get back in the windbreaker. He got a pat on the head before she left. I got a complicated little smile.

The rain grew louder and insinuated itself back into the mood of the room. I put on a sweatshirt and went back out to the screened-in porch so I could sit quietly with Eddie, drink my drink and watch the lousy weather do its best to upset the resolute tranquility of the Little Peconic Bay. After a time the world collapsed into a space defined solely by what I could see through the screens, and for the next few hours a tired, threadbare kind of peace took the place of the flat black anguish somebody had bolted down over my heart.