There Must Be Some Mistake (7 page)

MY NIGHTS
in Kemah were spent clicking around on the Internet, finding things that held my interest a few minutes at a time, sometimes longer—sort of like reading the paper was in olden times, except the range was wider and more colorful. I got sidetracked a lot, but I kept clicking most nights, link after link, and smoking the occasional cigarette, a vice I'd cultivated in spite of all good sense. I tried to keep it to a couple cigarettes a day, thinking I'd read somewhere that statistically a few cigarettes a day were the same as no cigarettes a day. The “few” was stretchable. The house at night was cleaner and more pristine than it ever was in the daylight, and since I always had most of the lights off, the place looked great—quiet and refined. It was magnificently straight. The pots and pans were polished, the silverware crisply sorted in its drawer, the curtains clean and flounced, the towels fine enough for hotel duty. Days were dreary, a time to work at something you didn't want to do, a waste, time spent waiting for evening, for darkness, and the window, the bay, the birds, the pretty little boats, the distant weather, watching as the night gathered it all up.

At five
A.M.
one day in April my ex-wife Diane called. She said, “Wallace. I have a problem. I have several problems and I am going to need some help.”

“It's five in the morning,” I said.

It wasn't unusual for her to call, though she usually did it around midnight. We still talked often, holidays, birthdays, other times when one of us felt like talking.

“Just listen,” she said, and she told me a friend named Dan Crosley was killed in a one-car crash on a rainy highway seventy miles from her place in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. She learned this on the telephone when she got a call from the police. Dan was, she said, a publicity guy working freelance for cigarette companies. He ran a short route of outlets, where he managed promotions, delivered posters and punch-out promo boxes, supplied flyouts, and rode herd on the new age cigarettes—Saratoga, Misty, Sweet Dreams, Capri, Bailey Reds, a couple dozen others—in smaller mom-and-pop groceries, gas stations, nightspots all through his territory. In that world he was a powerhouse—a man with more friends than he knew what to do with.

The morning after the crash, after being bumped around most of the night by sheriffs, highway patrol guys, hospital aides who were too sweet or too clipped, Diane got back home in time to catch the video of Dan's car twisted around a little concrete bridge on the local TV morning news. It was a picture more horrible than she had imagined.

“Sounds awful,” I said. “Are you OK now?”

“From that moment I pay attention to tiny things,” she said. “Details and only details, because that's relief. Wallace, I'm older and I'm alone. I have nothing to do. I have plenty of money, but I don't know anyone and I am alone.”

“What happened with Cal?” I said.

“He's around,” she said. “But I don't know about Cal. He's a whisper in the dark, something flying past the window. Dan was another deal entirely. Dan is why you haven't heard so much from me recently.”

“I haven't heard much from you?”

“Oh, stop,” she said. “I need to talk about this. With Dan I was fine. The move, divorce, everything. But now this town up here looks like a foreign country to me. I might as well be in Yugoslavia, which doesn't even exist anymore.”

It hit me at this point that there was risk in continuing this phone conversation and that, if we did continue, the call was going to be long. “Let me get up and get some coffee and call you right back.”

“You're not up?” Diane said. “What time is it? I thought you were up till six.”

“Usually,” I said. “But I fell asleep a bit ago. I'll call you in ten minutes, OK?”

“Thanks,” she said. “Thanks, Wallace.”

We hung up, and I went into the bathroom for a shower. Then I had three pancakes microwaved back to life from a package Jilly had left. It was getting light out, and the world outside my windows looked like a toy world—one of the reasons I liked living there. I called Diane back. “Thank God,” she said. “I was beginning to think you'd ditched me.”

“I was getting set up.”

“I met Dan at the pet store. They say pet stores are great places to meet people if you're a pet person. Anyway, he was this nice guy. He was a couple years younger. Thick necked, bristle haired, quick to smile. He smelled like something in a barbershop bottle. Vitalis—you remember Vitalis?” She didn't wait for me to answer. “We went to a restaurant and talked for a couple hours. His name was Dan Crosley and he was from New Orleans.”

“Let me Google him,” I said, clicking randomly on the keyboard in front of me.

“Stop it,” she said. “We get some odd people up here, you know, tourists and guys passing through, but he was a straight shooter.” Diane didn't pause there, went right on with her story, telling me that she took Dan home and slept with him.

“Thrilled to hear it,” I said.

“I mean, he wasn't Michael-damn-Douglas, but he paid attention. We had dinner at my house and after that we drove through Woonsocket. He showed me some places I'd never seen before, showed me around. He'd been up here since college.”

“How much of this do I really want to know?” I said. “You met your boyfriend in a pet store, went to a bar, took him home and screwed, then took the Woonsocket tour.”

“Pay attention,” she said. “I'm getting to it. So he showed me his place. This gorgeous little cottage nestled back in the woods.”

“Whoops,” I said. “Getting scary.”

“Not at all. It was lovely. We stayed there awhile, a few days, and I was, like, perfectly content. I was happy for the first time in a long while. It was, like, out of my hands. Do you get that, Wallace? I can't really tell you how relieved I was. I was hanging with Dan, and I started seeing the future. I mean, how the future could be. I was on cloud nine. It was sort of like the old days,” she said. “You and me in the old days.”

I remembered that, those days, that feeling, that comfort, the sense of everything in its place, the rightness of it all, when the winter is loved and the summer is all the sun there is. When you want that specific moment, that time, that place, that situation, forever. You can't force it or wish it, and praying doesn't help. You wait, you keep going, you hope maybe it'll come around again. That flawless equilibrium.

“I get that,” I said. “That way of things.”

“I was comfortable for the first time since the divorce,” she said. “I had something that worked for me, that made everything balance. And it was strange but amazing and satisfying—I mean, I figured I was in for the duration, know what I'm saying? Dan was going to be it for me. I was one hundred percent with the program. Do you know that feeling, Wallace? Do you remember it? Everything slipping into place?”

“I do,” I said.

“And then bam! He's gone. The whole thing's gone. Like that. Snapped away.” She paused for a minute, as if that was the end of what she had to tell me, that was the reason for the five o'clock call. “I did all the stuff after that. Talked to the people, arranged stuff. Dan didn't have anybody else, so I took care of it. I was kind of in shock. I walked through it.”

“I am sorry,” I said. “Really.”

“I know you are,” she said. “But now I really miss him. I miss everything about him.”

I could hear her voice break on the phone, like I'd heard it break scores of times before in calls since the divorce. It didn't always happen, but I'd heard it often enough. It made me feel dreadful, like I'd destroyed her life, and nothing could be done. I hated hearing it but couldn't bear to say anything.

“See, I had this whole new world, I was finally home again in that tiny cottage with a man who needed me. It was us, day after day, fooling around more than seemed healthy. He was striking in that dark way. He was a little bit sullen, theatrically, as if life had disappointed him. We were like children together.”

I raised some eyebrows she couldn't see, and said, “I got nothing. I'm on empty here.”

“I know that, Wallace,” she said. “Of course I know that. But this is what's happening with me, and that's why I'm reassessing everything, feeling everything again—a richness that I have not felt in a while, and I wanted to tell you. The world is fresh again, it's all bits and pieces of a thing I had forgotten, that had all but disappeared, something I rediscovered. And I thought you would want to know about it, I thought it was something you should know. This thing is possible, this new thing—”

I made some guttural noise and held on to the phone there at my desk, stayed silent and heard Diane crying, and after a while, after a few minutes, I heard her place the receiver softly back in its cradle.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD
settled down some. The police were always around, and so it seemed things were safer than ever. People figured the cops would leave, so that's what they were worried about. Parker kept sending e-mails to the residents “updating” us on the developments, of which there were none, apparently. Chantal had recovered completely from her “incident,” and we were all “sorry” to learn of the departure of Forest Ng's family following on his “tragic” accident. The rest of the Ngs, it turned out, were going back to Florida and California, whence they had come, and their home had been purchased by the Changs, a local family who already owned one house in Forgetful Bay and needed another, apparently for their relatives who were about to join the family business, a po'boy sandwich shop they ran in town. A new location was to be opened, staffed by this new wing of the family.

Morgan came to visit, and I reported the whole of the conversation with Diane, the life and death of true love, which I did not report in a skeptical light, rather the contrary. Morgan scolded me anyway for making light of her stepmother's love affair. “It's easy for you,” she said. “Not so easy for women at her age.”

“I'm not making light,” I said. “And it's not easy for me, either. What are you talking about?”

“Jilly,” she said.

I handed her the box of pretzels we were both eating out of. “That's something else. It's not like I'm making a move on her,” I said. “You guys, for heaven's sake.”

“A move?”

“You know what I mean,” I said. “Gimme one.” I pushed a broken half pretzel back at her and waited for her to fish a full-grown pretzel from the box. “Besides, Jilly's been there one way or another for years.”

Morgan leaned into me, close, playfully getting up in my face. “Yeah, and what is the deal with you two, anyway?”

“You don't know? You're around, like, all the time when she's here, you see everything, and you have to ask? For years now, since the divorce, maybe before the divorce, you've watched us, and you never once asked.”

“I know,” Morgan said. “Aren't I strange?”

“You are a strange daughter,” I said.

“She's old enough to be my mother.”

“If she had you at thirteen, maybe.”

“Happens,” Morgan said.

“Are you taking me out to dinner or somewhere?” I said. “To the store? You want to go to the store? I have to go to Best Buy and get a new iPhone case.” This was a little bit of a sore point with Morgan, since I already had two dozen iPhone cases.

“Great,” she said. “You've spent more on cases than the phone.”

“Free country,” I said. “It's my fortune and I'll et cetera.”

“Quit that,” she said.

“What?”

“Never mind. Let's go.” She shouldered her purse, which was gigantic, and headed for the door. “We'll get dinner. I'll let you buy me some new running shoes.”

So we went out. It was near sundown, and the wind was up, cool. I watched her go down the stairs in front of me and thought how lovely she was, how graceful. Seeing her made me happy.

At dinner we talked about her classes, about Diane's troubles, my meds, the TV shows we were watching, the crap on the news—all the usual, all worn out, of course, but we could eat and nod at each other about these subjects.

She asked, as she often did, about my father, who had practiced architecture in Houston for years. Morgan had not known him when he was alive but knew him through things I'd kept—renderings, models, drawing equipment, articles in
Texas Architect
and other magazines. So she started toying with architecture early, way before she was old enough to think about what she wanted to do as an adult. She liked playing with the tools of the trade, the drawing tools, and as a kid she would go into my office and make drawings using his old equipment. I showed her how to use a T square and triangle, how to use French curves, the different kinds of pencils for different kinds of drawings. I taught her to print like an architect, those precise, boxy letters, striking and evocative, which she still used all these years later, for everything from checks to grocery lists. I had learned lettering from my father, but mine had long since gone to seed. I envied her hand. I was proud and envious in equal measures. I suppose that's common with fathers and daughters.

“There haven't been any more rude events out here?” she asked.

“Not that I've heard of,” I said. “Chantal is the strangest. The dancing woman was a Parker misadventure. No one ever said anything else about it, but the whispers are that he and the wife are duking it out these days.”

“Where did the security people take that woman?”

“Nobody knows. He knows, of course. They work for him, so sweeping her away is an indication of something.”

“So what about Chantal?”

“I like her. She's nice, funny. Easy to be with. I never got the whole story about the break-in and all. I'm guessing it was a one-nighter gone wrong, but she's not talking.”

“Bad romance,” Morgan said.

“If I were a betting man,” I said.

We were eating at a gas-station-turned-Mexican-restaurant. The conversion was well done. All those big windows in the interior, the wall opened up into the two automobile bays, those, too, having new all-glass overhead doors that could be opened up onto a patio. The food was nicely grimy, too, which was a break from the usual franchise stuff. This was Tex-Mex, but made by a hearty crew not afraid to push the envelope greasewise, even though they went easy on the name—it was called Old Mexico, which I remembered was a restaurant in Houston when I was growing up.

“I love this place,” Morgan said. “They ought to call it Pulque Mi Dedo.”

“What's that mean?” I said.

“Look it up,” she said, and went on eating. “The thing with Chantal could be scary. I mean, even if it was a lover it's not a good thing in the neighborhood. Mr. What's'isname wouldn't approve.”

“Mr. Green Jeans? Mr. Who?”

“I forget his name. Lovely day in the neighborhood,” she said.

“Rogers,” I said. “And it's a beautiful day.”

“That's a mistake. Anyway, you ought to ask around, you know? Interview the folks? Give you something new to do. You can be like a PI, like Mangum.”

“Magnum, I think,” I said.

“What I meant,” Morgan said, waving a heavily laden tortilla chip at me. “You could do that, yes? Wheedle around and get the lowdown?”

“You figure that's a good use of my time, do you?”

“Well, it's something. You could do worse. I'm not criticizing—”

“Of course not.”

“Jilly could be your sidekick. Something you guys could do together while you're not doing other things that you aren't doing anyway.”

“Are you staying at the house tonight, or are you returning to your high-class university?”

“I'm with you for the duration,” she said. “I need to stop at Target on the way home, though, pick up a few necessities.”

“Maybe I can find a bumper case there,” I said. “I'm thinking of changing the color of my phone from black to white with this .4-millimeter 9H bulletproof-glass screen protector I found, but I need a case that wraps a little over the front edge so that the edge of the glass isn't exposed.”

“You are a sick lizard,” she said. “Why not buy a white phone?”

“Well, what color is yours? Maybe we could swap. I can't tell what color yours is in that monster case you use, what's that called?”

“OtterBox,” she said. “Defender.”

“Can't even tell what color your phone is in that full enclosure.”

“White,” she said. “It's pearly white.”

“Fancy that,” I said.