The Last Good Night (20 page)

“I'm trying my best,” I said. “They're not making it easy for me.”

He laughed. “Easy? Why the fuck did you think they'd make it easy for you? That's not their job. Get real, Laura. This isn't some goddamned college radio station. Do you want to keep this job?”

“Yes.”

“Then show them.” He paused. “I've got to go. Listen, if you need anything, anything at all, just tell me. Do you need anything?”

“No. Jerry?”

“Yes?”

“I can do this.”

“I know you can.”

I knew, too, that just the fact that I had to reassure him was not a good sign.

 

A
S
I
WALKED
through the newsroom to the studio two hours later to do the evening news, pumping my fists, I repeated that famous mantra from the 1920s: Every day in every way I am getting better and better.

Silly, and yet.

I used to believe in the possibility of improvement, of perfectibility.

Perhaps I still do.

I don't know.

 

M
AYBE
I
SAT
up a little straighter that night.

Maybe I held on to the air, that great imperceptible of the broadcast, a little tighter.

Maybe I took up more of it.

Except for major gaffes, it is all intangibles, really, the shift of ions that makes one work on-air. Or not.

Whatever it was, Quinn held back, shrank into his own space and did not cross over into mine.

We smiled at each other as we said goodnight.

And then, the minute the cameras clicked off, we stopped smiling.

 

B
EFORE
I
LEFT
the studio, I had Carla send the Townsends a bouquet of flowers with a condolence note and I took their number with me.

“Their child just died,” David said as I hung up the living room phone after another fruitless effort as soon as I got home that night. “Don't you think you should wait a day or two?”

“I wish I could wait ten years,” I responded. “I wish I could wait forever.”

“But?”

“Do you think Diane will wait? Do you think Barbara or Dan are going to wait?”

“That doesn't sound like you.”

“I don't know what ‘me' sounds like anymore. But you're right, it was Berkman's line.”

David shook his head. “Oh, I forgot, someone called for you earlier.”

“Who?”

“I don't know. He wouldn't leave his name. Said he was a news source. Here.” He handed me the phone number he had scrawled on the back of a magazine and then he went to shower and change his clothes before dinner.

I glanced down at the writing, chilled.

As soon as David was gone, I went into the den, closed the door and dialed.

“Hello?” Jack answered.

“How did you get my home phone number?” I asked.

“You can learn an awful lot in prison if you put your mind to it,” he said. “That was you who called this afternoon, wasn't it?”

I looked nervously about the empty room. David was in the shower and I could hear him humming beneath the pounding water. He has a good voice, steady and melodic. Lately he had begun to write rhyming songs about mice and marionettes to play on his old guitar for Sophie.

“Yes,” I admitted finally. I knew that I was admitting more than just the phone call, to myself, to Jack, though I wasn't precisely sure what. “It was me. But please. You can't call me here.”

Jack took a deep breath. “Let me ask you something. How much does David know about what happened?”

“Nothing.”

“You never told him?”

“No.”

“Why not? Don't you trust him?”

“It's not a matter of trust.”

“What is it a matter of?”

“Nothing. I don't know.” But I did know, of course I did. David had fallen in love with a different woman entirely from the girl Jack remembered, and more than anything I simply wanted to be that woman. Sometimes I even thought I was.

“What kind of love is that?” Jack asked.

I flinched, suddenly defensive of David, of our marriage. I wanted to say he would love me anyway, he would love me despite anything, despite everything, but how could I be sure? I said nothing.

“What are you going to do?” I asked Jack at last. “Just tell me what you're going to do.”

“About what?”

I heard the shower stop and the sliding glass doors of the stall open. “About us. About me,” I whispered.

“I don't know.” Jack paused. “I guess we're going to have to talk about that, aren't we?”

We both listened to each other's breath over the wires.

“I love you, Marta,” he said.

I hung up as David walked in wrapped in a chocolate brown towel.

“Who was that? The parents of the dead boy?” he asked.

“No. I still haven't been able to get through to them.”

“Why don't you take that as a message from God?”

“I thought I was supposed to be the superstitious one,” I replied.

“Maybe it's contagious. Like head lice.” He pulled the towel tighter. “Are you ready to eat?”

“In a minute. I just want to go in and check on Sophie.”

I crept into her dark room on tiptoes and stood over her crib, listening to her heavy breath. Sophie sleeping, Sophie peaceful, Sophie safe.

I crossed myself three times before I left her.

W
HERE DOES BETRAYAL
begin? In the heart, in the mind, in the past?

“What are you going to do today?” David asked the following morning as he sat on the edge of the bed tying his sneakers.

Lately, we had been dividing Saturdays in half. David spent the morning with Sophie, taking her to the playground in Washington Square Park, while I went off to do whatever I wanted. In the afternoon, we reversed it. It was the only way either of us had any time to shop or stroll or read, the only way either of us got to be alone.

“I thought I'd go in to work.”

“On the weekend?”

“Yes.” For years before we had Sophie, I'd used the compulsion to work to create a barrier of activity and achievement through which even I could not see in or out. Since her birth, I had shed the habit, resentful of any unnecessary time away from her.

David shrugged and wandered into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee.

I got up, showered, and dressed before Sophie rose. She likes to sleep late, ignoring the light that dances through the lace curtains in her room, often not rising until after nine o'clock.

I hovered in the foyer, making as much noise as possible, trying to wake Sophie without actually going in and shaking her. I hated leaving without seeing her, holding her first. As soon as I heard her first throaty cry, I went to get her. I bent down to kiss her on her damp brow. “Good morning, little pie.”

She made a trilling sound as I picked her up and nuzzled the back of her neck where the dark hairs grow in a tender jagged border. Her breath had the sweet/sour smell of formula and sleep. “Little angel,” I whispered. She took my bottom lip in her fingers and yanked it strenuously.

Twenty minutes later, I left her having a bottle with David in the living room, batting at the paper while he tried to read it.

There was no studio car waiting for me and I walked up Fifth Avenue through the Village and past Fourteenth Street, festooned with racks of clothing leaking from the off-price stores, sweatshirts and wind-up toys in neon colors, perfumes and watches of dubious origin. When I hit Twenty-seventh Street, I turned right.

I pushed open the heavy glass door of the Hotel Angelica and breathed in the odor of dust, musty slipcovers, plastic potted palms. I walked quickly by the reception desk and went to wait for the single rickety elevator.

“Where you going, miss?” the desk clerk called out loudly.

I turned around. His eyes were boring into me.

“Room six fifty-eight,” I muttered.

“Huh?”

“Jack Pierce.”

“He expecting you?”

I nodded.

I waited another minute for the elevator. Every time I glanced up I met the desk clerk's eyes. Finally I ducked into the stairwell
and began to climb. By the time I got to the sixth floor I was out of breath and a thin cold film had formed across my forehead. The light of the hallway made me dizzy as I hurried down it.

I swallowed once and knocked on Jack's door.

Inside, a radio played softly and then stopped.

The door creaked as it opened.

“Marta.” Jack smiled. “Come in.” He was freshly showered and his cheeks, newly shaved, were pale. He had lost the last vestiges of the southern sun someplace in the city.

I entered without saying a word and, weak-kneed, sat down at the small Formica table by the window. For a long while Jack stood over me, watching as I ran my hand through my hair again and again, unable to look at him.

“You have every right to hate me,” I said finally. “What I did was shameful.”

“I wish I did.” He walked to the window, looking out of the smudged pane, his long sloping back to me. He still had the slim tautness of a runner.

“Jack?”

He turned around to face me. “Yes?”

“There's something I've always wondered.” I glanced up at him. “It would make it easier for me if you sat down.”

He remained still another moment and then he settled on the edge of the bed.

I stared at his feet, sockless in scuffed Topsiders. The light shimmered off the sparse dark blond hairs. It took me a long time to speak.

“Why did you do it?” I asked at last.

“Do what?”

“Why did you say it was you who was fighting with Xavier?”

He looked away. “I don't know. It all happened so fast. It seemed the right thing to do at the time.”

“But you could have told them later. You could have told them at the trial.”

He shrugged. “I didn't, that's all.”

“Why?” I pressed.

“Because I loved you,” he said simply. “I thought that mattered. I thought that was the
only
thing that mattered. Anyway,” he added, “I'd already told the police that Xavier slipped accidentally and hit his head while we were fighting and they believed it. I was stupid enough to think that they'd just let me go. Forensics even backed me up. At least, they couldn't prove that wasn't what happened. The police were curious about you, of course, but they had no choice but to take me at my word. Everyone thought they'd just drop it, even my lawyers. Unfortunately, the D.A. decided to prosecute anyway. Do you think they would have believed me if I suddenly changed my story then?” He leaned forward. “Every day I sat in that courtroom I thought you'd walk in. Every time the door swung open, I turned, certain it was going to be you.”

I stared down at the soiled carpet.

“I still see Xavier's eyes,” I said after a long silence. “I still see them, Jack, every goddamned night. The way they were open and white and staring up at me.”

“Why did you run?” he asked. “That's what I've never understood. It was clearly a case of self-defense. I saw the two of you struggling. I could have testified to that.”

“I don't know. I panicked. Like you said, it all happened so fast. I was just so scared.” I pressed my nails into the palms of my hands, harder and harder. “Not just about Xavier. Well yes, of course about Xavier. I mean, Christ.” I released my fist, looked away. “But there were other things, too.”

“What other things?”

“Nothing. Never mind.” I bit my lip. “Jack, I know you might not believe this, but I never thought you'd go to jail. When I called Astrid, she said…”

“You called Astrid?”

“Yes. I used to call to check on what was happening to you.”

“She told me she never heard from you again,” Jack said, bewildered.

“That's not true. I called her right away and she told me there weren't going to be any charges pressed. And then, when that changed, she told me she was certain you were going to get off.”

“She was your mother. She loved you. Didn't you realize she was just trying to protect you?”

“Jack, I got the Palm Beach papers and they said so, too. They said your parents had hired the most expensive lawyer in the state. It was clearly unintentional, you had no record, your family was well known in the community. No one thought you'd go to jail. I know that's no excuse, but Astrid told me you asked her to tell me to stay away. For both our sakes.”

“And you believed her?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“How convenient for you,” he said. “But I never told her that.”

We were both quiet for a long while.

“Well, my lawyers did believe I'd get a suspended sentence at most, probation, community service, whatever,” Jack admitted. “But it didn't turn out that way. Maybe the jury wanted to make an example of me. The golden boy everything was handed to. I don't know. Astrid did a very good job of covering for you. She said she'd seen me struggling with Xavier. There was some problem with your disappearance, but they still had an eyewitness and a confession. That's more than enough truth for most juries.”

“What about the old lady, Mrs. Patrick?”

“Seventy-three years old and nearsighted as a bat? She didn't stand a chance. I don't think the judge agreed with the jury's decision, but there was nothing he could do. At least he had discretionary sentencing, so he let me off relatively easy. Ten months and five years' probation.”

I rested my head in my hands and took a few shallow breaths. I felt his body near mine, coiled, waiting.

“I'm sorry,” I said at last. “I'm so sorry for everything. I just could never find the way back.”

“It's not that hard, really,” he replied. “You just get on Interstate Ninety-five and keep going south until you hit Flagerty.”

I flinched. “Yes.”

He said nothing.

My fingers were knotted in my hair. “If you could do it over again, that night, I mean, would you? Would you do the same thing?”

“I don't know.” His mouth curled down at the corners. I tried to remember if it always did or if this was new. “What about you? If you could do it over again, would you run?”

“I've asked myself that a million times and I'd like to believe I'd stay. I've been running ever since, I've never really stopped.”

“You want me to feel sorry for you?”

“No.”

He cocked his head. “You want me to forgive you? You want me to tell you it's okay what happened to me while you got what you always wanted, you got out?”

I knew when he said it that it was what I wanted, what I had wanted ever since, though I had no right to it.

“I can't do that,” he said.

“I know.”

He took a deep breath and exhaled. “We each made our decisions,” he said. “It's who we are, our decisions. It's all we have.”

“Is it who you still are?” I asked.

“I don't know.”

“Jack, I know it probably means nothing, but it was never you I was running from. It wasn't even jail. Not really. It was myself.”

He came and kneeled before me. His hands were on my
knees, their heat spreading up my thighs. His face was close, his breath brushing against me. “You want me to tell you why I did it?” he asked softly. “You want me to tell you why I never said a word to anyone? You want me to tell you why I'm here? It's because the only thing I've ever known with any certainty in my entire life is that you and I belong together. Everything else is just clutter.”

Tears had begun to trickle down my cheeks and I wiped them with the back of my hand.

He moved closer and kissed my collarbone, his lips lingering on my neck. “Marta,” he whispered, his mouth all over me. “The only time I was ever truly happy was with you. Tell me that isn't true for you, too.”

I pushed him away, trying to resist. “No.”

But he held on, wiping the tears that were still falling, licking them from my face as he pulled me onto the bed. “Don't you remember what it was like for us?” he asked. “Don't you remember?”

I heard my own breath catching in my lungs.

I wanted to say, No, I don't remember, I wanted to tell him to leave me alone, Please just leave me alone, I wanted to make him stop. But I didn't. Fear knotted through my chest, my brain, fear of turning away from him once again, fear of his proximity and his anger, fear of his knowledge and his reprisal.

He pulled me to him and his mouth found mine, his lips soft, open. Perhaps if I gave in just this once, it would sate him.

Our tongues met and gradually the fear began to meld with curiosity and the outlines of desire, as much for the past as for the man, for pieces of my lost self I had left behind. He cried out when he entered me, digging his nails into my skin, as if trying to pull me closer and closer in until that was all there was, all there could be. He sank his teeth into my shoulder, trying to fill himself with me, buried his nose in my hair inhaling and inhaling and inhaling. I felt his hands clutching my upper arms, squeezing
so hard it was as if he wanted to absorb my very flesh into his, a desire beyond time, beyond bruise.

 

A
FTERWARDS, WE LAY
naked and entangled beneath the thin hotel blanket.

He ran his fingers up and down my forearm.

“What was it like?” I asked.

“What was what like?”

“Prison.”

Jack was staring up at an amoeba-shaped water spot on the ceiling. “Ten months is a lot longer than it sounds,” he said, “but in a way, it was far easier than what came after. At least there was no illusion of freedom there. Hell, I was the only guilty man in the whole place.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone else was so busy protesting their innocence. I was the only one protesting my guilt. Funny, don't you think?”

I didn't laugh. I knew then that something had died in him there, something had been left behind, maimed.

“You just do it, that's all,” Jack said. “You do the time, you do the fucking prison walk. I had a lot of time to think.”

“About what?”

“You.”

“What happened after you got out?”

“Like I said, I got five years' probation. I couldn't leave Flagerty, I couldn't even spit without the cops knowing about it. It was much, much worse than prison. So many open doors and I couldn't walk through a single one of them. I couldn't go looking for you. I couldn't go anyplace at all.” He shifted his legs beneath the sheets. “All those months in jail I used to fantasize about running again. I craved that sensation of movement so much I used to dream about it. But you know what? I tried it
once when I got out and for the first time it didn't bring me any sense of freedom. I realized there was no place I could go. I was trapped. I never ran again.” He glanced over at me. “You want to know what I did the day I got out?”

“What?”

“I went to Astrid to find out if she knew where you were.”

“She didn't. I never told her. I used to call her every few weeks for news of you, but after you got out I stopped calling except once a year at Christmas. That's how I found out Garner died twelve years ago. And then I called one year and some strange woman answered. She told me she had bought the motel five months before. She told me Astrid had died. All of a sudden, I began to miss her so much. It took me a long time to realize she did the best she could.” I looked back to Jack. “You were telling me about what happened after you got out.”