Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (23 page)

But it didn’t work. One kid, who wore an imbecilic winter cap despite the heat, mounted the base of the streetlamp and began to shimmy up with his two hands and feet wrapped around the pole for dear life. His friends called to him, laughing and cheering him on. Arlen walked over to the group and looked up at the kid who was by now halfway up the pole and wheezing.

“Get on down from there,” he said. “You hear me? I said get down.”

The kid slid fireman-style back to the pavement. His two feet landed at the same time, and he sprang up and sauntered toward Arlen. He was about the same size as Arlen, puffed up like a chicken and fuming. His jeans were two sizes too big. Behind the anger and testosterone in the kid’s eyes there was something wickedly, dangerously pleased.

“You don’t tell me what I can and can’t do,” he said.

Arlen laughed. “You ought to thank me. I saved you from having everybody find out that you’re not strong enough to get to the top of that pole.”

The kid tipped his head, his teeth pulled back in a sneer. “I know who you are. You’re that guy who got thrown in jail.”

“You ain’t right in the head.”

“You so totally are!” The kid turned to his friends. They were quiet now, sensing a threat. “This is that guy who just got let out of jail.”

Arlen didn’t say a word, hoping his glare was warning enough. His skin flushed with heat and his armpits itched.

“So—what—now you’re all tough?” the kid said, his arms open wide in an exaggerated shrug. “Ten years of being somebody’s bitch and you think that gives you the right to tell people what to do?”

Arlen threw down the plastic grabber and, in a blink, he had the kid up against a wall. In the back of his mind, Arlen considered that the group might try to come to the kid’s rescue—then Arlen would be outnumbered. But none of them moved.

“Listen to me”—he pulled the kid toward him, then pushed him hard against the wall—“you little piece of shit. I say get down off that pole, you get off it. And I swear to God if you want to know about being somebody’s bitch, I’ll mess you up so bad you’ll have to dig your balls out of your tonsils.”

Arlen’s teeth clenched. He didn’t care that he spit all over the kid’s face. He didn’t care that people were behind him, telling him to stop. The kid was gripping Arlen’s hands, his fingernails digging. His toes bumped Arlen’s knees.

“Let me go, man. Come on. I didn’t mean anything. Let me go.”

Arlen blinked. He saw himself looking down on the scene, saw himself holding the kid by the throat, saw people gathered in a half circle behind them. As fast as the anger came on, it vanished. And when the blood in his eyes cleared and he could look at the kid against the wall, he saw that the boy was sniveling, that he was actually much younger than Arlen had first thought, sixteen or seventeen at the most, and that tears were gathering in his eyes.

Arlen gave him a little shove. “Son of a damn bitch,” he said. He left his grabber and garbage bag on the ground, and he walked away.

Lauren’s heart pumped blood deep within her chest. Her heart was a miner that trudged down into the pits every day, rain or shine. It was the pistons and valves of an engine that operated by magic instead of gasoline. It was the heart that beat when she landed her first pirouette, when she learned to drive a car, when she daydreamed about having a child, when she closed her eyes and slept. And Lauren believed in her heart like she believed in the earth under her feet—a thing taken for granted, a thing that would not change until the end.

But in the night, in the shadows caught between Saturday and Sunday, she woke in the film of a cold sweat, the sheet twisted tight beneath her. Her heart was a berserker, warring wildly against the confines of her chest. She put her hand on her ribs, wondering if this was it—if her heart would give up now. She panicked. She hadn’t really thought her heart was in danger of stopping. Not like this. Not before she . . . before she . . . 

What?

She lay awake in the faint red glow of a decades-old alarm clock, too afraid to reach for her phone. She waited, waited, hardly daring to breathe until her heart’s wrinkled beat went smooth under her fingers and she knew that when the sun rose, she would too. She comforted herself: just a minor aberration. She’d overreacted. She wasn’t going to die. But still, if she was . . . 

She rubbed her eyes to clear her head, decided to get a glass of water from the bathroom in the hall. She splashed her face in the sink. In the mirror, the woman who looked back at her was pale with faint crow’s-feet despite an expensive skin regimen and a dedicated avoidance of the sun. She could see the past week on her skin—the days spent with Will in the hot sunshine. Last night, she’d passed out cold with her laptop open at her side.

She leaned against the sink. The frantic palpitations of her heart stopped as quickly as they came on. It beat normally now, but she minimized her movements. Just in case. All her life she’d handled stress, fatigue, pressure, and tension. She thrived on it. So what was different now?

Sometime over the last few days—when she’d been laughing with Maisie, or perhaps when she’d been digging up old farm equipment with Will, or rinsing the fine film of dust from the folds of her eyelids—a question had gripped her and not let go. There was, quite unexpectedly, the idea that she could be doing something different with her life. If she wanted to. But what? She’d dedicated her entire adult life to one singular and focused outcome: the reward at the end of the travails, her own private promised land. And, since she’d so carefully laid down the tracks that would channel her toward a very specific kind of future, was it even possible to go in another direction now?

In the bathroom she stared herself down, patting drops of water off her face with a soft towel. And she wondered: If her heart was going to stop tomorrow, and she had to choose how to spend
her last day on earth, would she get back in her Beemer and hightail it to Albany to work on the Dautel case?

She held her own gaze and forced the question: What would she do if she wasn’t locked into the life she’d already made for herself? The voice that answered came from someplace quiet and dangerous:
You could do anything.

The morning dawned muggy and hot, an early thunderstorm having swept through and made the earth steam, and already the bugs were flying frantically around Will’s face as if tossed about in a small hurricane. At his side, Lauren occasionally waved her hands around to fight them off, sending the smell of sunscreen in all directions. Will had told her:
You get used to the gnats
.

They were walking down a long country lane—or, at least, a narrow clearing that had at one point been a lane but which no driver would dare run a car down anymore. The old road was thick with ridges of green-brown mud from ATV wheels. On either side of the lane, Will caught glimpses of promising old treasures in the overgrown woods—bits of rusty things he couldn’t entirely see: an old refrigerator with the door cockeyed, a ladder that hadn’t been climbed in twenty years.

Will stole a glance at Lauren beside him, and for once, he didn’t think she noticed. She seemed distracted. She wore a black baseball cap; her hair was a tuft of ponytail that stuck straight out the back. She wore no makeup, and the sporty white sneakers she’d brought for her trip were now a healthy shade of eggshell. Each day, he found more to admire about her. She was tough in a courtroom and even tougher when she ducked beneath a porch or climbed a questionable ladder into an old loft. Of any partner he’d ever picked with, only she never seemed to complain. Not even when she was acting funny for a reason Will couldn’t begin to guess.

“Why do you keep glancing behind you?” he asked.

She grimaced; apparently, she hadn’t wanted him to notice. “We’re so far back in the woods.”

He laughed. “Right. If there’s not a Starbucks within five miles, we’ve reached the outer limits of civilization.”

She flicked his arm with the backs of her fingers, but she was smiling. “I’ll have you know I don’t drink Starbucks coffee.”

“What do you drink?”

“Starbucks lattes.”

He smiled. The woods were full of sounds, none of them mechanical. The air smelled green and loamy. He never felt safer than when he was walking down an old trail, with nothing but the sky, and the trees, and the occasional animal that lifted its head before running away. But a hint of nervousness shone in Lauren’s eyes.

She glanced behind them again.

“Most of these picks are safe,” he assured her. “We just don’t want to sneak up on anybody.”

“You ever get in any trouble on a pick?”

“Not really,” he said. She glanced at him—the slightest narrowing of her eyes. And he laughed. He forgot he couldn’t lie—or even fudge the truth. He confessed. “Okay, maybe a little trouble.”

“Like what?”

He thought back on his past picks. Once, an octogenarian had run him off his property with a gun full of buckshot. The van still had a hundred little nicks in the paint. Another time, a man had come at him with a broken bottle—but that was before he realized Will had shown up with $1,000 cash, hoping to buy an old motor he’d heard was on the property.

But it wasn’t always the men who were dangerous. Women, too, posed their threats. Some were reluctant to let him poke around on their properties—one had even called the police and then sicced her rottweiler on him. And occasionally he ran into women who
wanted to barter with a commodity far older than the dollar bill. He knew what they wanted: he was a little built—enough to make it worth their while—and he knew they imagined
he
was the one who was dangerous. Only once had he taken anyone up on the offer, years ago, and that had been a mistake that left him hurrying out the back door with his fly down and his shoes in his hands. In some ways, he would have preferred the danger of a shotgun—at least with firearms, he knew where he stood.

Lauren was looking at him with that scrutinizing gaze of hers—he was getting used to it—and he patted her lightly between her shoulder blades. “Don’t worry. It wasn’t real danger. Just enough to keep things interesting.”

“Define
interesting
.”

“Biggest danger on a pick like this is raccoons. Little buggers are nasty.”

She glanced at the woods around them. “So we’re fine now. You know this guy.”

“I know him,” Will said. “Well, I know him some. We’re okay.”

He saw her visibly relax. “Sorry. I guess I’m just paranoid.”

“Any particular reason, apart from the obvious lack of sidewalks and pigeons?”

She fixed her gaze steadily in front of her as they walked, their reflections passing through the clouds that reflected in murky puddles. “Did you give Arlen my note?”

“I did.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing, really. He disappeared for a while. Don’t know where he went. And he hasn’t said a word about it since.”

A muscle in Lauren’s jaw tightened. “I thought he was following me.”

“Really?” A bad feeling settled in Will’s gut. In the treetops, a crow called, hidden by the dripping green leaves. “When? Where?”