Before I Say Good-Bye (26 page)

sixty-one

A
T WORK ON
W
EDNESDAY AFTERNOON,
Lisa Ryan received a phone call from Kelly’s guidance counselor, Mrs. Evans. “She’s grieving terribly for her father,” Evans said. “She started to cry in class today.”

Instantly heartsick, Lisa said, “But of the three, I thought she was doing the best. At home, she seems to be just fine.”

“I tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t say very much,” Mrs. Evans said. “She is, however, very mature for a ten-year-old. I get the feeling that she’s trying to spare you, Mrs. Ryan.”

It’s not Kelly’s job to spare me, Lisa thought despairingly. It’s
my
job to spare
her.
I’ve been too wrapped up in myself, and I’ve been too worried about that damn money. Well, I’m going to do something about that before another day goes by.

She fished around in her purse, found the number she wanted, and went to the pay phone. Then, while her client looked pointedly at her watch, she hurried into the office and told the manager she had to cancel her last two appointments.

As he voiced his protest, she told him flatly, “I have some business to take care of tonight, and it is absolutely necessary. Before I do it, though, I have to give my kids dinner.”

“Lisa, we gave you a week off to get your affairs settled. Don’t make this a habit.”

She hurried back to her station and smiled apologetically at her client. “I’m so sorry. I had a call from school. One of the kids was upset in class.”

“That’s a shame, but Lisa, can you please finish me up. I’ve got a million things to do myself.”

M
ORGAN
C
URREN
was coming to baby-sit at seven o’clock. At 5:30 Lisa had dinner on the table. She had followed the funeral director’s advice and moved the chairs around. Because there were only four of them now, she had taken the extra leaf out of the center, so the table was again a circle. It had been that way until Charley was out of his high chair. With a pang, she remembered how they had made a big event of moving him to a “big-boy chair.”

With senses newly attuned to the pain her children were experiencing, she saw the troubled expression on Kyle’s face, as well as the deep grief in Kelly’s eyes, and she understood the unnatural silence of little Charley.

“How was school today?” she asked, trying to sound cheerful, not talking to anyone in particular.

“It was okay,” Kyle said stiffly. “You know that overnight trip the guys are going on next weekend?”

Lisa’s heart sank. The trip he was referring to was a father-and-son outing to the Greenwood Lake home of one of Kyle’s friends. “What about it?” she asked.

“I know Bobby’s father is going to call and say he really wants me to be with him and Bobby, but I just don’t want to go. Please, Mom, don’t make me.”

Lisa wanted to cry. Kyle would be the only boy at the outing without a father. “It wouldn’t be much fun for you,” she agreed. “I’ll tell Bobby’s dad that you’d rather skip it this time.”

She remembered another bit of advice from the funeral director: “Give the children something to anticipate,” he had said. Well, thanks to Brenda Curren, she could do that.

“Good news,” she said brightly. “The Currens are renting a bigger house at Breezy Point this year because they want us to stay with them every weekend. And are you ready for the best part? This house is
right on the ocean!”

“Really, Mom! That’s awesome,” Charley said with a big sigh.

Charley the water rat, Lisa thought, rejoicing as she watched an ecstatic smile brighten his face.

“That’s really good, Mom.” Kyle, now visibly relaxed, was obviously pleased.

Lisa looked at Kelly. She seemed indifferent to the good news; it was almost as though she weren’t listening. The plate of pasta before her was barely touched.

It wasn’t the time to press her, though. Lisa knew that. She needed more time to come to terms with the loss. There also wasn’t time to deal with any of this right now, since Lisa knew she had to clear the table, get the homework started and be in Manhattan at 7:30.

“Kyle,” she said, “as soon as we finish dinner, I want you to help me bring up a couple of packages from Daddy’s workroom downstairs. They belong to someone he worked for, and I’m dropping them off with a lady who’s going to figure out to whom they should be returned.”

sixty-two

A
FTER HE LEFT THE HOSPITAL
on Wednesday afternoon, Dan Minor went directly to Cornelius MacDermott’s office. When he had called for an appointment, he learned that Nell already had told her grandfather about him, so his call was expected.

MacDermott greeted him cordially. “You and Nell are both Georgetown graduates, I hear.”

“Yes, although I was ahead of her by some six or seven years.”

“How do you like living in New York?”

“Both my grandmothers were born here, and my mother was raised in Manhattan and lived here until she was about twelve. Then they moved to the D.C.
area. I’ve always felt that genetically I had one foot here and the other in Washington.”

“So do I,” MacDermott agreed. “I was born in this house, and in those days, this wasn’t a fancy neighborhood. In fact, the joke was that you could get a buzz just from smelling the fumes coming out of Jacob Rupert’s brewery.”

Dan smiled. “Cheaper than buying a six-pack.”

“But in the end not quite as satisfying.”

As they chatted, Cornelius MacDermott realized that he very much liked Dr. Dan Minor. Fortunately, he’s no chip off the old block, he thought. Over the years, he had met Dan’s father at various affairs in Washington and had found him to be pretentious and boring. Dan was obviously made from fairly sturdy stuff. Another guy would have written off a mother who deserted him, especially one who was known to be a homeless drunk. This son, though, wanted to find her, and to help her. My kind of guy, MacDermott thought.

“I’ll see if I can’t get some of these bureaucrats off their duffs and have them put on a real search for Quinny, as you call her,” he said. “You say the last time she was seen was in the squats south of Tompkins Square, back in September, about nine months ago?”

“Yes, although her friends there thought she might have gone out of town,” Dan explained. “From the little bit I’ve been able to glean, when she was last seen she was in one of her terribly depressed moods, and whenever that happened, she didn’t want to be with people. Apparently she would just find her own space and crawl into it.”

With every word he spoke, Dan felt with a growing certainty that his mother was no longer alive. “If she’s
alive, I want to take care of her, but I know she may well be dead,” he told Cornelius. “If she is, and if she’s buried in potter’s field, I want to find her and bring her to the family grave in Maryland. Either way, it would give great peace to my grandparents to know that she isn’t still wandering the streets, sick and maybe delusional.” He paused. “And it also would give me great peace,” he admitted.

“Got any pictures of her?” Cornelius asked.

Dan opened his wallet and took out the picture he always carried. He handed it to Nell’s grandfather.

As Cornelius McDermott studied the picture, he felt a lump forming in his throat. The look of love captured there between the pretty young woman and the young boy in her arms seemed to leap from the well-worn black-and-white photo. Both of them were windblown, their faces pressed together, and his small arms were wrapped tightly around her neck.

“I also have a picture of her taken from the documentary film on the homeless that aired on PBS seven years ago. I had it aged digitally on the computer, and then the technician adjusted it to conform to the description her friend gave of her appearance last summer.”

MacDermott knew that Dan’s mother would be about sixty years old. In this picture, the gaunt woman with shoulder-length gray hair looked eighty. “We’ll get some duplicates and put posters around town,” he promised. “And I’ll get some of those guys with nothing better to do to go through the files to see if any unidentified woman buried in potter’s field since September matches this description.”

Dan stood. “I should go. I’ve taken enough of your time, Congressman. I’m very grateful to you.”

MacDermott waved him to a seat. “My friends call me Mac. Look, it’s 5:30, which means the cocktail flag is up. What’s your choice?”

Liz Hanley walked into the office unannounced as the two men were companionably sipping very dry martinis. It was clear to both of them that she was upset.

“I stopped home after I left Bonnie Wilson’s apartment,” she said quietly. “I was pretty shaken.”

MacDermott jumped up. “What happened to you, Liz? You’re so pale!”

Dan was already on his feet. “I’m a doctor . . .” he began.

Liz shook her head and sank into a chair. “I’ll be fine. Mac, pour me a glass of wine. That’ll help. It’s just . . . Mac, you know I went there pretty much as a skeptic, but I have to tell you that she has changed my mind. Bonnie Wilson is on the level. I am convinced that she is a genuine psychic—which means that if she warned Nell about Peter Lang, then she’s got to be taken seriously.”

sixty-three

A
FTER
G
ERT LEFT THE APARTMENT,
Nell had gone back to her desk and reread the column she had drafted earlier for the Friday edition of the
Journal,
a piece about the long and frenzied campaigns that increasingly characterize presidential elections in the United States.

Her next—and, if all went according to plan, her final—column would be both a farewell and an
announcement of her intention to view the campaign frenzy firsthand by becoming a candidate for her grandfather’s former congressional seat.

I made the decision two weeks ago, Nell thought as she edited the work she had done earlier, but only now does it seem as though all the confusion and doubt and self-questioning are over. Inspired by Mac, she always had known that public office was something she wanted to pursue, but for so long she had harbored many fears and misgivings.

Had all the negativity come from Adam? she wondered. As she sat in her study, she thought back to many discussions they had had about her possibly running for office. I just don’t understand what changed him, she thought. When we were first married three years ago, he was gung-ho for me to take over Mac’s seat, but then he not only cooled to the idea, he became downright hostile. Why the radical turnaround?

It was a gnawing question that she acknowledged had begun to take on added significance since his death. Was there something going on in Adam’s life that made him nervous about our having to face public scrutiny? She got up from her desk and began to walk restlessly around the apartment, pausing at the bookshelves that flanked the fireplace in the living room. Adam had a habit of pulling out a book he hadn’t read, glancing through it briefly, then putting it back willy-nilly in the shelves. Her eyes and hands moving in synch, Nell rearranged the shelves so that the books she especially enjoyed again and again were all once more within easy reach of her comfortable club chair.

I was sitting in this chair, reading a novel, when he phoned me that first time, she recalled. I’d gotten a little
depressed after not hearing from him. We had met at a cocktail party and been attracted to each other. We had dinner, and he said he would call. But then, two weeks later, I was still waiting. I was disappointed.

I remember I’d just come back from Sue Leone’s wedding in Georgetown. Most of the others in our crowd were married and swapping baby pictures. I was very ready to meet someone. Gert and I even joked about it. She said that I had developed an acute nesting instinct.

Gert warned me not to wait too long.
“I
did,” she said. “And I look back and think of a couple of the men I could have married, and I wonder what in the name of God I thought I was waiting for.”

And then Adam phoned. It was about ten o’clock at night. He said his out-of-town business had taken him longer than he expected. He had missed me, he said, but he hadn’t been able to call because he had left my number in his apartment in New York.

I was so ready to fall in love, and Adam was so appealing. I was working for Mac; Adam was starting on his first job in New York, with a small architectural firm. There was so much ahead. Life for us was just beginning. It was a whirlwind courtship, she remembered. We were married three months later, in a quiet wedding, with only my family in attendance. It didn’t matter, though, Nell thought. I never wanted a big splash anyhow.

As she sat now, in her favorite chair, she thought back to that heady, special time. It had all happened so fast, but it had been exciting. What had attracted her so totally to Adam? Nell wondered, as she reminisced, sadly thinking of the man she had loved and then lost
so abruptly. I know what it was, she thought: he was so absolutely charming. He made me feel special.

And of course there was more, Nell told herself, so say it straight. Adam was in some ways the antithesis of Mac. I know how Mac feels about me, she thought, but he would choke on the word “love.” I was hungry for someone to tell me instantly, passionately that I was loved.

But in other ways, Adam and Mac were very similar, and I liked that too. He didn’t so much have the take-no-prisoners mentality that Mac had, but he had the same moral stamina. Adam, like Mac, was very independent, having worked his way through college and graduate school.

“My mother wanted to pay my way, but I wouldn’t have it,” Adam had said. “I told her that
she
was the one who taught me to neither a borrower nor a lender be. And it took.”

I admired that, Nell thought. I believed that Adam, like Mac, would give you the shirt off his back, while at the same time harboring a horror of borrowing money himself. “Make do, or do without, Nell.” That was the lesson Mac preached to me.

All that changed later, though. Adam had no trouble asking me to invade my trust fund to lend him more than a million dollars, Nell thought. What happened to his staunch stand against borrowing? she wondered. But of course she hadn’t questioned him at the time.