Crossers (5 page)

To the kitchen, where he warmed two slices of leftover pizza and washed them down with several glasses of wine. To the den, where he tried to read the
Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
but couldn’t get past the first paragraph of any story. He caught
Headline News
on CNN … Much talk about getting UN inspectors back into Iraq … Was there a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 … WMD … A new addition to the lexicon, WMD … At nine-thirty he returned to the bedroom and undressed and went into the bathroom and took an Ambien. He held the bottle for a moment before putting it back in the medicine cabinet and counted the remaining pills. Six. Aware of his state of mind, his doctor allowed him only ten per prescription.

Castle fell onto the unmade bed, hands crossed over his waist. The interregnum of fear that had gripped him on the train had passed; grief, the true monarch of his heart, resumed its oppression. It was a physical sensation, like a weight on his chest, while from within came a sharp, cold prickling, as if he were breathing ground glass. Would it be this bad, he wondered, if she had died in an accidental plane crash? If she’d been murdered by a mugger? One image that kept coming back to him was of Mandy at the moment she knew she was going to die. She would not have been hysterical, she would not have been begging for mercy, she would have been crying quietly, resigned to her fate, for a phlegmatic, even a tragic temperament dwelled beneath her jaunty exterior. The picture knifed Castle right through his marrow, she imprisoned in that hurtling missile among strangers, facing her death without him, while in the cockpit Muhammad Atta, hands on the yoke and throttles, prayers to Allah on his lips, aimed for the north tower with no feeling for the lives he was about to extinguish. Amanda had been the victim of a huge atrocity calculated down to the last small detail, and that stark fact made all the difference in the world.

Samantha stood beside the bed, her long snout resting on the mattress, and whimpered a plea to have her ears tickled or her head rubbed, but he couldn’t move his arms against the weight pressing down on him. Morgan had told him to sell the place and move into a condominium before he drove himself crazy. Sensible advice, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Nor to sell Amanda’s car, still in the garage, or her little sloop, still in the boatyard. He hadn’t got rid of her clothes and shoes and jewelry, her hairbrushes and cosmetics and the hundred and one other things that belonged to her. Everything was as she’d left it, right down to the Tampax in the bathroom closet. Castle wasn’t sure why he clung to her possessions. Ms. Hartley assured him his was a normal reaction to a traumatic loss. To remove her belongings would be to acknowledge that she really was gone, and he wasn’t ready for the acceptance stage. He, or some part of him, was still in the denial stage. Another tidy explanation from the young woman whose job was to cage unruly emotions in airtight categories. Denial. Acceptance. Crap. Let the wild beasts pounce and devour, Castle thought. They will anyway.

Sam’s demands for affection grew more insistent. He managed to reach over and ruffle her floppy ears. Her claws clicking on the hardwood floor, she moved to the other side of the bed. She was seven years old now, and he could not break her of the habit she’d had since she was a pup of going first to his side of the bed for a good-morning and a good-night petting, then to Mandy’s. Nearly every night and every morning she would stand there for a minute or longer, as she was now, and it broke Castle’s heart to see her, waiting and wagging her tail in expectation of the touch that could never come.

He remembered the last time he and Mandy made love on this same bed—the balmy night before he left for Atlanta on business, she for Boston to visit her family before she was to fly on to L.A. She had been a large woman with large, healthy appetites. She liked to eat and pummeled her body with cycling and sit-ups and swimming at the Y to keep her weight under what she called “the George Foreman range.” That strong, ample body, so much life in it. Anthropologists found bones of protohumans who’d walked the earth with mastodons and saber-toothed tigers. How could there be not a fragment left of her?

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present sorrow
. His second marriage, in contrast to the first, had been happy, happier than he thought possible. He supposed that was why his pain could find no relief—he could not forget the joys. The heaviness increased, crushing him into the mattress; it had a color—black, of course—a taste, a metallic taste, it was almost tangible. He began to weep. It had been like this for more than a year; he could see no end to it. Too many reminders, prompts to a memory that needed none: this house no longer theirs but his; the friends no longer theirs but his; the neighbors no longer theirs but his.

Go to sleep in mourning and wake up in dread of each new day, like a man with terminal cancer. The hell of this cancer was that it wasn’t terminal.

He went downstairs with the movements of someone in a trance, Sam following him. In the den, surrounded by his books, by his prints of leaping trout and flushing grouse, by the trophies attesting to his triumphs in skeet-shooting matches and country-club tennis tournaments, observed from above by the heads of a whitetail buck, a bull elk, and the big glass eye of a mounted tarpon, from below by Samantha, lying on the worn, antique Bukhara, and from his desk by his mother and father, his daughters, and Amanda, with her direct, green-eyed gaze and faint smile, her upper lip thin and straight, the lower lip full, suggesting a tension between the New England rigor and the southern sensuality in her blood—her father’s ancestors were Massachusetts Puritans, her mother’s French Huguenots from Charleston—Castle opened a door behind which stood a tall black safe. He twirled the combination lock, and from the firearms standing upright in felt-lined racks, he selected an old Fox Sterlingworth side-by-side with a double trigger. His favorite shotgun. It had been his father’s. He opened a drawer below the gun racks and took a twelve-gauge shell from out of its box and loaded the right barrel and thumbed the safety off. Turning the photographs facedown, as if to spare everyone the sight, he sat at his desk, placed the gun stock on the floor and, leaning a little forward, put the muzzle in his mouth, his thumb on the front trigger.

There he sat, looking a bit like a Turk smoking a hookah, his face wearing a relaxed, thoughtful expression. He was actually in a semblance of a cheerful mood and restrained his thumb to give himself a moment to savor it. Then his brow creased as a picture of what he would look like afterward flashed in the brain he intended to blow apart. If his daughters were to discover his body, they would be horrified. Could he do that to them?
Yes
. And what of Sam? Who would take care of her? She was more than a pet, she was his hunting buddy, a partner. Could he leave her alone?
Yes
. Yes, if by applying a little more pressure on the trigger, he would hurl himself to Amanda’s side. But he wasn’t convinced that that was where he would go. He envied those who believed in the immortality of the soul, but he considered himself a realist—anyone who managed half a billion in assets had to be or he would soon be out of a job—and Amanda, declared the realist, wasn’t anywhere. Annihilated body
and soul
. She lived on only in his memory, and if he pressed a little harder, he would obliterate all that remained of her. There would be surcease from pain, yes, but nothing more. The end of everything. Eternal darkness. His resolve drained away as another piece of wisdom came to him: his terror of oblivion exceeded his longing for it. He took the gun out of his mouth, unloaded it, and returned it to the safe. He could almost hear the monarch cackling,
You can’t get away from me that easily
.

Climbing the stairs to the bathroom, he gulped three Ambiens, not in expectation that thirty milligrams would be enough to kill him but in the certainty that they would give him an installment of death. The installment lasted nearly fourteen hours, from darkness to noon of the next day. He woke to the sound of Samantha slurping water from the toilet bowl. Dry-mouthed and groggy, his knees rubbery from the aftereffects of the drug, he sat up, cleared his head, and then shuffled downstairs to fill Sam’s water dish and food bowl. In the den the red light on his answering machine was flickering—eight messages. The caller ID informed him that four were from his office, two from Morgan, and two from anonymous callers, probably telemarketers. He would deal with the office later. He played back Morgan’s messages, the first just a call to find out how he was doing, the second a follow-up.
“Dad? Where are you? Are you all right? Please call me.”
A great worrier, Morgan was. A shiver passed through him when he thought of what he would have done to her had last night’s attempt, or rather attempted attempt, succeeded.

He sat for a while, gazing at the tarpon hung above the doorway, the 120-pounder he’d caught years ago in the Florida Keys, and attempted to bend his normally analytical mind to his predicament. He had proven that death, the boundary beyond which all his ills could not pass, was also a boundary he could not cross until his natural time was up. He was condemned to live. But how was he to live with this pain that was like a chronic migraine of the heart? He was going to go mad if he didn’t find some way out. Out. Yes,
out
. Morgan was right. Out of this memory-haunted house, and more—out of the East altogether, far away from all these reminders. It was the only solution he could think of.

From a cabinet beneath a bookcase, he removed a box containing the condolence letters and sympathy cards he had saved. Among them was a letter from Monica Erskine, his cousin Blaine’s wife.

SAN IGNACIO CATTLE COMPANY
POB 651
Patagonia, Arizona 85624
Tel: 520-394-2118 E-mail:
[email protected]

September 13, 2001

Dear Gil
,

Your sister has called us with the terrible news. I have been sitting here for an hour trying to think of something to say. Everything seems so inadequate. This is an outrage beyond words. Blaine, Aunt Sally, and I cannot imagine what you must be thinking and feeling. Our sympathy (Sympathy? What a pathetic word) gets all mixed up with anger. Rage, really. There is no pit in hell deep enough or fire hot enough for the monsters who did this. We are so, so sorry we never got to meet Amanda
.

We have been thinking if there is anything we can do for you. Sally suggested that you might feel a need at some point to get away for a while. If you do, we have a place for you. It’s the original homestead your great-uncle Jeff built. Maybe you remember it from the last time you were out here. It isn’t much, but we have fixed it up some. When we hire extra hands for branding or gathering, we put them up there. You would be most welcome to it. Just call or write or e-mail, and we’ll have it ready for you
.

I will write you a better letter once my mind has wrapped itself around this awful thing. All I can do for now is express my deepest condolences. Blaine and Sally do, too
.

Sincerely yours
,

Monica

It was a generous offer, considering that he wasn’t close to anyone on his mother’s side of the family. He hadn’t met them until he was in his late thirties and had seen them only three or four times since. So he felt like an intruder when he phoned Monica to ask if the offer still stood. It did, she replied, surprised to hear from him after all this time. Her recently divorced brother had been living in the place, but found it too lonesome and had moved back to Tucson. Castle said his stay might be for longer than a while. Was that all right? He would, of course, pay rent, whatever they thought was fair. Yes, she answered after a few moments’ hesitation. Yes, he was welcome, and forget about rent. When could they expect him? In a few weeks.

C
ASTLE SPENT THOSE WEEKS
methodically cutting ties. At his office he gave notice to Jay Strauss and his partners in the Castle Group, Melissa Josephson and Joyce Redding, that he was taking early retirement. They all three asked him to reconsider, but their entreaties were largely ceremonial; in the past year it had become as obvious to them as it was to Castle himself that he’d been merely going through the motions, a crippled lion who had to rely on his females to do the hunting on the veldts of the capital markets.

He informed his daughters and his younger sister, Anne, that he was leaving for good. All approved except Morgan, who in characteristic fashion argued that he was doing what the terrorists wanted, fleeing, and that it would be much better if he resumed his therapy. He crushed an impulse to tell her that the only thing babbling to the banal Ms. Hartley had accomplished was to bring him to the edge of suicide.

But for several days it looked like Castle wasn’t going anywhere. He’d drawn up a long to-do list and proceeded to do nothing. The closer he came to the date he’d set for his departure, the more he felt the gravity of the familiar pulling at him. It was as though he’d grown so accustomed to his misery that he was reluctant to do anything that might alleviate it. Extraordinary measures were called for.

He purged the house of everything Amanda had owned. Strangling at birth all temptations to linger over some object or picture in bitter reverie, he cleaned out her closets and drawers, emptied her desk, tore the dresses and coats from the mothballed hanger bags in the attic, and ruthlessly added to the pile their wedding album and every photo he could of her or of them together. He stuffed the lot into plastic lawn bags and hauled them to Goodwill. He sold her sloop and her car and wished there were an agency to which he could consign the comical hum Amanda made when she couldn’t or wouldn’t answer some question of his, or the mock pout she put on when she suffered a minor disappointment—all the little tics that he remembered about her.