Stay Gone Days, page 24
“Because I didn’t want to go there,” she said. She felt a sudden urge, which she knew must be resisted, to drink all the wine in her glass.
“But I wanted to go,” he said. “I wanted to go really badly. And when I found out the bluesman was dead, I thought What the hell.”
He proceeded to tell her how he checked into a motel on Highway 82, then drove over to Loring Academy, parked in the teachers’ lot and walked right in. In the hallway where they displayed photos of all the graduating classes, he found hers. She was standing in the front row, in her cap and gown, looking just as much like Hayley as he expected, though it still gave him a jolt. How he went over to the cemetery and found her father’s grave. How he visited the library where her sister got caught stealing the book. He scrounged through bound copies of the town paper, located the article announcing her win in the state-wide vocal competition. He found the articles, too, about how her father and Grace died in the explosion, how Grady Pace brought a lawsuit against Barkley Petroleum.
Then he strolled over to the courthouse, went through county records and located the address of the house where she’d grown up. “Route 2, Box 79,” he said. “A pickup stood parked in the yard alongside an old car with flat tires. I knocked on the door but nobody answered. Either they weren’t home or they just didn’t feel like being bothered.”
He stayed in town for forty-eight hours. He liked walking the streets where she’d been young, trying to imagine what things looked like back then, trying to imagine her walking those streets herself. He found the former dollar store. It was empty, like so many other buildings on Main Street, quite a few of them boarded up. He walked beside the green bayou and saw what he thought was a nutria.
“I could see how it might once have been a pretty town, though objectively it wasn’t anymore. But to me, it still was. If it weren’t for that town, I wouldn’t have you. Or Hayley. Or Lexa.”
In his love for her, he’d found the will to deceive. There was no distance he might not travel for her, nor was there anything he couldn’t conceal. Her knowledge of his deceit was something new. And with it came a certain thrill.
As if he understood the moment’s import, he picked his glass up and drained it.
“How much of a birth-year D-28 did you just drink?” she asked.
“Oh, probably the peghead and half of the neck and fretboard.”
“Well, here goes the rest of the neck and fretboard,” she said and tossed it back.
It had been a long time since she gave him more than a peck on the cheek, but she planted a serious kiss on him then, followed by another and another, a whole garden of kisses: sunflowers and peonies, tulips and roses. He pulled her close, squeezed her so hard her shoulder bones cracked, then pushed her back onto the couch, her head against the throw pillow as he struggled with his buckle.
•
Later, they poured the remainder of the Chateau Margaux into their glasses and finished it off. He pulled his pants on, then went to the dining room and returned with an ordinary bottle of wine that tasted just as good as the expensive one, and they drank it too, dinner long since forgotten. They talked about some of the trips they’d taken together with the girls, they told funny stories about Tess and money, about Tess and gin, about Liz and married men. They opened a bottle of Champagne Cognac.
Around ten, he disappeared for a few moments, then came back and popped a CD into the stereo. At first, she wasn’t really listening, but then she was. He’d done things like this before, bringing in a new recording by an unknown artist that might or might not ever see the light of day and asking her what she thought. This one was hard-core Americana, plenty of lonesome sounding slide guitar, a touch of dissonance here and there, lots of sevenths, ninths and thirteenths. The third or fourth tune really grabbed her attention: in three-quarter time, it was hauntingly spare, nothing but an acoustic guitar, a Dobro and a bass and the occasional sound of a croaking frog or chirping cricket.
“I like this a lot,” she said. “Who is it? You’re not about to tell me you guys signed Bill Frisell, are you?”
He laughed and shook his head. “Not quite,” he said. “It’s actually a guy nobody’s ever heard of or ever will, just a regular kind of joe, and it’s strictly a homemade recording. He wrote all the tunes and played all the instruments, produced and engineered it himself. I happen to know that this tune we’re listening to was conceived and written in a Quality Inn, in Loring, Mississippi, around one in the morning, in late April of 1999. The title of it’s ‘Waltz for a Girl from Your Town.’”
How could either of them have known that that particular Saturday night, perhaps the finest they’d spent alone together, was as good as things between the two of them would ever get, that they were already on their way down?
THE MUSIC BUSINESS KEPT GETTING worse. That was one thing, and not a small thing, but it didn’t threaten their family’s security. Martin had never closed his accounting firm, had instead long ago turned over the day-to-day operations to a younger CPA with a law degree, and she’d actually expanded, providing tax services to countless individuals and small businesses up and down the North Shore. Financially, Martin and Ella would not suffer.
But personally, Martin was struggling. While Yankee Southern’s backlist remained a root music treasure trove, they released fewer and fewer new titles, and he felt less and less engaged. They lost a few of their longtime artists after their agents had a final falling out with Pete—never with Martin—and it seemed he and Pete had at least one contretemps per week. They’d been disagreeing with each other since playing together in an electric blues band their freshman year at Berklee, and it was nearly always Martin who made the overture that allowed them to patch things up. Now he was starting to think that he was too old to waste his time trying to reason with a wall, no matter how much affection he might still feel for the wall. A couple of times, he developed a violent headache following a dispute. It would have helped if he’d had someone to talk to about it, but he kept the dissatisfaction to himself.
Tess, a constant in his life for as long as he could remember, was in a nursing home in Stoughton. The last time he and Ella visited, she didn’t recognize either of them. Another constant, his sister, was now thousands of miles away: when Irma retired from the University of Rhode Island, she and Maeve pooled their resources and moved to Puerto Vallarta. With luck, he might see her every couple of years. The other thing he’d always been able to count on, at least since 1955, when his parents gave him a ukulele for Christmas, was playing music. Even that had fallen into neglect. For most of his life, he’d played for at least an hour or two each day, but recently he sometimes went two or three days in a row without touching an instrument. His playing, he knew, would still have sounded good to all but the most discerning ears, two of which were attached to his own head.
From Ella, for no reason he could assign a name to, he sensed a turning-away. She wasn’t having an affair—about this he felt certain. It wasn’t the kind of thing she would do any more than he would have. There wasn’t that much outward change. At dinner parties, she was still her old charming self. She still liked listening to good music, enjoyed reading good books about composers and performers, was attentive to Lexa her last couple of high school years without seeming to hover. She stayed in touch with Liz, and he’d still sometimes come home to find them sitting on the balcony enjoying a glass of wine, laughing and talking, he supposed, about Liz’s latest flame.
He’d noticed, in the incremental manner in which couples everywhere notice things they would have preferred not to register, that they were going through a good bit more wine and liquor. He drank more than he used to, but his intake had remained steady for many years, so he knew he was not the one depleting their stock. He didn’t think Lexa was doing it either. She drank with her friends just like he had at her age, and there were times when she’d ask him or Ella if she could have a beer or a glass of wine, and they always said yes. So that left only Ella. He never came home and found her drunk or thick-tongued, which was in some ways more disturbing than if he had.
Too much time went by before he began to have further inklings. That he came to them due to technological mishap said more about the state of their marriage than he wished to admit, though admit it he eventually would, if only to himself. One day, after an honest-to-God shouting match with Pete—his partner wanted to sign a singer songwriter whose talents, in Martin’s estimation, were mediocre at best, which led him to suspect Pete either wanted to sleep with her or already had—he left work in the middle of the day, went home and saw that Ella’s car was gone. He made himself a big cup of coffee, then sat down at the desk in his study and turned on his laptop to write Pete an email and tell him just how insufferable he’d become. Evidently, though he was not aware of it, his hand was shaking, and when he grabbed the cup to take another big swig and fortify himself, it slipped from his hand. Twelve ounces of Major Dickason’s cascaded onto his PowerBook.
“Son of a bitch!” he cried. He grabbed the laptop, wiped the keyboard off, then carried it to the kitchen, stood it in a big roasting pan and covered the keyboard in rice. Then he stormed into the nearby alcove where Ella kept her laptop and paid their monthly bills. To his surprise, she’d set a password. He hadn’t set a password on his home computer. Why had she? Later, he would try to analyze his actions, to determine if what he did next was the result of his determination to send his partner an email right then or if it was instead evidence of suspicions that he was not aware he’d entertained. He typed in 1Rockland. That didn’t work. Neither did Ella1958, Hayley1986, Lexa1988 or Martin 1949. Bootsnflannel1983—no dice. He was about to give up when sheer desperation made him try one more time. Two highways intersected in her hometown. So he typed 49Loring82. Blue wallpaper appeared, the toolbar at the bottom.
He opened Safari to go to his webmail. But he couldn’t quite prevent himself from clicking the “History” tab. What he found was that twice in the last week she’d launched searches for “Caroline Cole.” The previous Sunday alone, she’d clicked on eighteen different results. He closed the browser, located her Documents folder, found a file labeled CC and opened it. She’d compiled an extensive list of people with her sister’s name, nearly seven hundred in total, along with information about each. Sometimes the info included birthdates, sometimes addresses and/or phone numbers. Several were marked D. Quite a few were marked CNF. Many more were marked NH, but neither the addresses nor phone numbers indicated they lived in New Hampshire. He finally figured out the abbreviations. D: Deceased. CNF: Could Not Find. NH: Not Her. He was still staring at the screen when he heard a car pull into the driveway.
He clicked “Shut Down,” jumped up and hurried back to the kitchen and was standing there making himself another cup of coffee when she walked in carrying a Stop & Shop sack. “I didn’t expect to find you here so early,” she said. “Everything okay?”
“Sure. More or less.”
She stood the sack on the work island, then pulled off the black leather jacket he’d always loved to see her wear because it seemed to accentuate her blondness. She draped it over the back of a stool, then noticed the roasting pan on the counter near the sink. “Why’s the laptop in it?” she asked, stepping over to take a closer look. “And my God, why’s it full of rice?”
“I accidently spilled coffee all over the keyboard.”
“Accidentally? Well, I wouldn’t have thought you did it on purpose. Do you think you can save it?”
“I hope so.” He waited for her to say he could use hers if he needed to. But she didn’t. What she did instead was glance over her shoulder at the alcove, where he noticed what she could not have failed to notice herself: he’d neglected to reposition her chair, which now stood at an angle a couple of feet from her desk. He thought sure she’d ask if he’d used it, or tried to, but she didn’t.
Instead, she walked back over to the work island and began to pull items from her shopping bag. “Since you’re here,” she said, “any chance you could pick Lexa up from school? I would’ve gone straight there, but I bought some Ben and Jerry’s and wanted to get it in the fridge. We’re having a boneless leg of lamb stuffed with spinach and goat cheese, and a little extra prep time would help. I was planning to use that pan, but I think it’ll fit into the smaller one.”
“Sure. No problem. I’m glad we’re having that particular dish. It’s been a while.”
“The lamb looked too good to pass up. So did the Ben and Jerry’s.” She glanced at the wall clock. “You might want to get going. She hates having to wait.”
He never told her what he’d done, and she never asked if he’d done it. But one evening a couple of weeks later, when he came home past midnight after attending a performance by one of their artists at Club Passim, he again switched on her computer and typed in 49Loring82.
She’d changed her password, which meant he couldn’t even turn off the machine without doing a force quit, which of course she would be informed of the next time she turned it on. So he didn’t bother. He quietly pushed the chair back under her desk and went to bed. She never said a word about what had happened, and neither did he. As had become their hardened habit, they kept their concerns to themselves.
LEXA WENT TO COLLEGE ALL the way across the country at UC Santa Cruz. Her grades were good but not stellar, and she probably would have gotten rejected by the same schools where her sister was accepted. That might have accounted for her decision to apply only to large state universities in the western US. She had her choice of several, and they took her to visit three of them on spring break. They started with the University of Washington, but it rained nonstop when they were in Seattle, and she decided against the school before they left town. She liked the University of Oregon and Eugene a good bit better. But when they got to Santa Cruz and she saw Boardwalk Beach and smelled all the pot in the air around campus and downtown, Ella realized the deal was sealed. She wasn’t wild about the idea—actually, she hated it—but she resigned herself to it. It was Lexa’s life. She hoped the decision would be the right one.
In late August they took her to Logan and put her on a plane to San Jose, where they’d arranged to have a limo pick her up. On the drive back, they were again silent just as they’d been after leaving Hayley in Somerville. But otherwise the day bore no resemblance to that earlier one. When they got home, Ella told Martin she was going back to bed and asked him not to wake her—she’d gotten up at three am to make breakfast—but instead of going to their bedroom, she went to one of their two guest rooms, where she’d left a bottle of wine the night before. She removed the cork and poured herself a glass, thinking she’d have just one and then try to sleep. The problem was that she didn’t really feel all that tired. If anything she felt a little bit wired. She’d drunk four cups of black coffee before they left home, whereas she normally had only one or at most two. The first glass of wine didn’t accomplish much of anything except to make her feel worse than she had before she drank it. The second began to anesthetize her a bit, and with the anesthesia came a degree of clarity. Her days, once so full, were going to be long and empty if she didn’t find some way to fill them. No more getting up early to feed the girls, no more driving them to and from school, no more PTA meetings, no more long phone chats with Tess, no more, no more, no more. Something was happening to Martin, too, something that sometimes left him silent and brooding. She didn’t know the source of it. Of course, how could she, since she hadn’t asked? And why didn’t she ask? Lack of interest? Or had something happened to both of them to preclude that kind of interest?
Finding the answers, if they were to be found, seemed to depend on her having another glass of wine and then one more after that, but when the bottle was finally empty, she still had not found the answers. All she’d done was forget the questions.
•
A few days later, on her forty-seventh birthday, Hurricane Katrina roared ashore. When she got downstairs that morning, Martin was already gone. On the counter he’d left her a note, reminding her they had a seven pm reservation in Boston at Un Coq Rouge, so she’d need to be ready to leave no later than six. And by the way, he wrote, your home state’s taking quite a beating and so is New Orleans. You might want to turn on the TV. He’d left coffee for her in the stainless-steel carafe; she poured herself a cup, grabbed a carton of yoghurt and walked into the family room.
Along with the rest of the country and much of the world, she watched as levees and flood walls were breached and water began to inundate New Orleans, sweeping people away in the Lower Ninth Ward, leaving others stranded on rooftops. That afternoon she watched the hurricane blow a hole in the roof of the Super Dome, saw water cascading into the darkened structure, scores of tired, terrified people, nearly all of them black, huddling together, hoping to stay dry, then just hoping not to die. Commentators were comparing Katrina to Hurricane Camille, suggesting it might exceed even the fury of that epic storm.
She was a week shy of her twelfth birthday when Camille smashed into the Mississippi Gulf Coast. A Sunday night in late August. They lived 250 miles from Gulfport, where the storm was predicted to make landfall around midnight. The wind had picked up by the time they ate supper, but their father said he wasn’t concerned, hurricanes never did much damage this far inland, except for one he remembered from when he was a boy. He said, “That sucker chugged on up the Mississippi, and because we were on the dirty side, it leveled a slew of trees, knocked down some power lines, blew off some roofs.” He tossed around a few technical terms—“right front quadrant,” “additive effect,” “atmospheric flow”—but told them not to worry, they’d fare just fine. That kind of thing only happened every hundred years or two.
