Grist Mill Road (16 page)

Perhaps the world is not entirely against him. Or maybe its conspiracy is unraveling at last. He hurries toward the hotel.

*   *   *

TREVINO STRIDES THROUGH THE DIM
lobby in his radiant seersucker, smoothing his silver hair, fussing with the knot of his tie.

Patrick has started to limp. But it doesn't matter about the pain in his leg, he feels nothing but the steel of his resolve. Trevino moves on past the front desk toward the hotel restaurant and Patrick pauses by a sofa, picking up
Cosmopolitan
from a coffee table, leafing through its pages while keeping his eye on Trevino. Trevino is speaking to the restaurant greeter now, the woman laughing as she touches the screen of her terminal and passing Trevino on to a waiter who leads him away.

Patrick thinks about how best it would work. Yes, at some point Trevino will have to use the restroom. Patrick will follow him there. Quiet now, Don.

He looks down at the magazine, 27
SURPRISING WAYS TO TELL IF HE'S MR. RIGHT
, drops it on the table and walks across the lobby. The restaurant greeter's head is down over her screen but she lifts it when Patrick is only a few steps away.

Good afternoon, sir.

He spots him right away, Trevino sitting down at a two-top, another man at the table already.

Good afternoon, says Patrick. I wonder if you have … He feels a stab of pain in his leg … Do you have any tables available this evening for … He reaches down to touch the leg where it hurts and the woman's eyes follow the movement, down to his thigh where he feels the shape of the knife handle.

The woman throws her hands to her cheeks. Oh, sir, your leg! You're … Let me call someone to help you right away.

He feels it before he sees it. Blood. More blood is running down his leg. He looks down and sees that his pants have turned almost black from his thigh to his knee and blood is running into his shoe, darkly staining the sand-colored suede.

No, it's nothing, he says, grabbing the knife handle, pulling.

The woman sees the knife, its blade covered in blood, and screams.

No, he says, attempting to conceal the weapon behind his back.

He has a knife, she shouts.

Panic ripples through the restaurant, heads spinning around, hands grabbing for cell phones. Don Trevino is reaching inside his jacket where he keeps his bifocals. The other man at his table is turning.

And it doesn't make sense to Patrick for as long as a second or two—the other man, hair swept back and faintly receding, dark stubble, green eyes. This isn't where he should be, he left him somewhere else. And yet it is him, undeniably him.

Matthew.

Matthew?

Well, that changes everything, Paddyboy.

 

HANNAH

Recalling that kiss was as far as I got.

Matthew and Christie, their lips pressed together at the top of the school steps, would be the last thing I wrote for several years, because everything in 2008 was about to start speeding up. A Friday afternoon at my desk in The Shack, a phone call from Detective Mike McCluskey—how could I have known that everything would be over before the weekend was out?

Which means that Matthew and Christie's gaudy display now seems immensely trivial to me, insignificant almost compared to everything that took place later on, both in 1982 and 2008.

Although, when it happened that kiss was everything, all four walls of my existence. Christie had displayed impeccably malicious timing, she couldn't have chosen a worse moment at which to smash my glass slipper to pieces. For days, weeks, I felt as if I were still rooted to that spot watching them kiss, the world spinning on without me, a sense of heartbreak giving birth to jealousy, and then jealousy spawning my rage.

I think Christie had fallen for some version of Matthew almost as much as I had fallen for my fantasy version. Why do I think that? Because she left me alone. For as long as they were together, Christie Laing kept her barbs to herself. (Don't worry, she would return to spectacular form not long after I lost my eye.)

And how much did this put me off Matthew? Not one inch. From the black seed of my rage there grew an even deeper sense of yearning for him, the world conspiring to keep us apart until the school year was over. I had turned thirteen years old, I was flowering inside, and if my adolescent desire hadn't built to such a fever pitch by the time summer vacation started, maybe I would have been able to see everything that happened later much more clearly.

*   *   *

I'VE JUST REMEMBERED SOMETHING PATCH
once said to me in the early days when we were dating. He said you could line up a hundred cooks and give them all the same ingredients, that those hundred cooks could prepare each one of those ingredients in the same proportions and by the same method, but not one of the finished meals would taste the same.

I think that's how I feel about this story. How am I supposed to know what made the difference anymore?

For example, should I have noticed what was happening to my husband before that Friday afternoon? Maybe I was suffering from self-hypnosis, just as my mother had somehow hypnotized herself into turning a blind eye to everything concerning my brothers. Or did I think that because we had money, because Patrick didn't absolutely have to find another job, that everything would simply work itself out in the end?

How foolish of me to have seen so clearly, even from a young age, how money had distorted my immediate family, but to have failed to notice it affecting my own life.

Oh, the money—gray gold—yes, I suppose if we're listing all the ingredients, I really should tell you about that.

*   *   *

TOWARD THE END OF 1992,
little more than a year after completing my journalism degree at Northwestern, I was living in New Jersey, working at the
Star-Ledger
in Newark where I wrote
mostly about the least serious of reportable local crimes—domestic burglary, spates of car thefts, minor assaults.

On December 12 that year, my mother, father, and brothers set off together on a family vacation to Clearwater, Florida—even in their thirties Bobby and Pauly were living at home and vacationing with our parents. They had chartered a small aircraft, my mother being not fond of flying commercial, and somewhere off the coast of Delaware they encountered a thunderstorm of such violence that the wings were torn clean off the plane's fuselage, the remaining trunk then dropping from the sky, straight down into the Delaware Bay, leaving no survivors.

I heard the news of the air crash when I was called back to the office urgently from a story, the coach at a local high school having been accused of supplying his students with alcohol, the juiciest story I'd been assigned up to that point.

Until that day, I had always believed my first editor, Max Reagan, to be a man with no discernible heart, very much of the old school, grizzled by years of hard news, and fond of shouting his very public and scathing rebukes. (Among other things, we called him Old Yeller.) Max was the kind of boss who kept Scotch in his bottom drawer, because somewhere in the newsroom there was always a fire in need of extra fuel.

I suppose that before I was nervously ushered into his office, Max's newshound nose had sniffed the story out of the police officers, who had come to find me at work, and he'd offered to be the one to sit me down and tell me of the accident and no survivors, his furious yell replaced that day by an avuncular growl, the police officers looking on and filling in details when asked, strong and official, the room solemnly darkened by their uniforms.

That day the editor of the
Star-Ledger
and I finished a bottle of whiskey in less time than it takes a good journalist to track down the free drinks at a party. Later on he told me that it was the worst news story he'd ever had to break.

So, early in 1993, the sole surviving beneficiary of my parents' will, I sold the stables, the cave, the house, everything. I also sold
Jensen Royal Cement, which turned out to be worth unfathomably more than I could have imagined.

I wanted to use the money well, and for a long time I thought that I did, looking upon my inheritance as nothing more than security, something that could steer my life in the direction I wanted to go. The money allowed me to stay in a poorly paid job that I loved, meaning that I never had to move away from the streets, up to the higher-salaried echelons of editing or management. No, I could remain where I felt safest, felt best, on the beat, surrounded by the police in their uniforms, in their blousy fitting suits, while I told the stories of the victims—the victims who want to be listened to, who want to be heard almost as much as they want justice. That's all I ever wanted to put down on the page, the tales of crimes solved, cases closed, and criminals punished.

Or that's what I thought the money might allow—and I hope there's some degree to which this has been the case—but perhaps another effect of the money was that I became partially blinded to what was happening in the world around me.

Despite 1993's windfall, I remained at the Newark
Star-Ledger
for another three years (Max Reagan becoming something of a father figure to me in that time), and after the funeral I wouldn't return to Roseborn for the next fifteen years.

When Max told me the news of the accident, me sitting in his editor's chair, I can clearly remember my very first thoughts.

No, that can't be true, not my dad. Please not my dad. Please, anyone but my dad
.

Guilt is a terrible thing. I mourned my father first and hardest, I still do, and when I remember my family, I cry for him most of all, seeing his face the clearest when I close my eye. But what am I supposed to do? I can't rewire my thoughts, unthink them or ignore them. And the thoughts refuse to go away, words that whisper themselves to me over and over, feelings of guilt like a bad neighbor I will have to live next to for the rest of my life.

The only thing that dims those thoughts is my work.
Work work work
has become my mantra, the only drug that has any effect.

Of course I didn't want to neglect my husband, my wonderful Patch, but when he was in pain, more pain than I could see, the burden was too much for me to share. I had to keep on going, keep on working, my job not so different from Bobby's vodka or Pauly's pot.

Obviously I miss my brothers too. And I wish I'd gotten the chance to know my mother, to properly understand her. Perhaps one day Mom would have gotten to know me as well. It is one thing to miss a father and brothers you loved, and another thing to miss a mother you never quite had.

But in the hierarchy of my guilt, all of this now forms only the midsection of the pyramid. A Friday afternoon at my desk in The Shack, a phone call from Detective Mike McCluskey—it was time to start building that pyramid higher.

 

NEW YORK, 2008

Jen has tried her cell three times already, each call unanswered, Hannah working a police brutality story that is currently blowing up, two female cops, great angle, maced and pistol-whipped a van driver, great story, and now there's a witness, Good Samaritan telling the investigating officers how one of the cops pointed a gun in his face and … Hannah's phone makes a sound—Not now, Jen. But then she looks at the screen, not Jen's number, and she answers.

I'm pretty busy here, McCluskey.

Sure, but look, something has come up. You and I, we need to talk.

We're talking. So talk.

Nah, I have to show you.

I'm trying to get this witness—

Trust me, this is more important, Hannah.

OK. Where are you?

At my desk. But not here.

Coffee and a sugary repast?

Come on, Hannah, it's Friday. Paddy Finn's, thirty minutes.

*   *   *

WHEN SHE GETS THERE MCCLUSKEY
is at the bar looking like a large scoop of vanilla with a cherry on top, acres of white
shirting damp from the single-block trek, his round face reddened by exertion.

Georgie is pouring the drinks today, he greets her like family, McCluskey twisting on his barstool. He closes the copy of the
New York Mail
he's been thumbing through, calls out to her, Hey, Aitch. And then, This one's on me, Georgie, McCluskey's big finger chalking it up in the air.

Ginger ale, Georgie.

Put something Russian in it, Georgie. Twice! And then seeing Hannah's expression, he adds, What? Don't make me drink on my own here, Aitch.

Hannah studies the liquid in McCluskey's glass, which looks suspiciously unlike a beer, and steals a sip, seltzer water. Drink? she says. That's not a drink. What's going on, McCluskey?

Jeesh, OK, Lindy's got me on this diet, he says, no alcohol for six weeks. And she makes me these smoothies for breakfast. This is about the only thing I've drunk for a week that isn't green. Every morning's like St. Paddy's Day for fuckin vegans.

But for some reason I need two shots of vodka? Come on, Mike, you're scaring me.

McCluskey looks up at one of the giant flat-screens decorating the bar, the baseball highlight reel jumping from city to city. You believe this guy? barks McCluskey, spreading his arms up at the TV. This bozo gets paid fifteen mil a year to swing at that junk? The pitcher smacks his fist triumphantly into his glove. Oh and you can talk, shouts McCluskey, you serve up homers like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Behind the bar, Georgie finds a glass to wipe clean.

Sorry, Aitch, says McCluskey, turning back to her. This whole green diet thing is making me angry.

Everything makes you angry, McCluskey.

That's true, says McCluskey, taking a sip from his seltzer on ice, his body bobbing back-and-forth in affirmation. But Lindy says it's to be expected now, he says. She tells me I'm something called
hangry,
which dumbass me had no idea is a combination of hungry and—

I know what it is.

Right. Well, you know what else makes me angry?

The word
hangry
?

Fuckin A, Aitch. McCluskey sighs so heavily his newspaper ripples on the bar.

And then he points to Hannah's drink and she drinks and says to him, Is there a reason we're not getting to the point here, McCluskey?

Yeah, number one, because I haven't eaten anything that doesn't look like Astroturf for a week and, number two, because I don't want to be the one who shows you this. McCluskey slides a piece of paper out from beneath his
Mail
. But before you turn it over, Aitch, remember a month ago? Fatal stabbing in that restaurant on Mott, perp still at large?

Of course. I suggested
RED SAUCE JOINT
for the headline, but apparently that kind of thing's considered insensitive.

Fuckin clowns, Hannah. Anyway, so today, some guy was waving a knife outside the restaurant in the Park Square Hotel. Long story short, it ain't my guy. Today's guy must've been carrying the knife in his pants pocket and somehow managed to stab himself. Staff sees the blood, guy waves the knife around … Anyway, they grabbed some stills from the security cameras and sent them to me, just in case. Finish your drink before you turn it over.

The instruction seems odd, but she drinks anyway, the alcohol doing its job, her thoughts softening at the edges, McCluskey has turned up something juicy perhaps, someone famous, but then why the preparatory drink? And she turns the piece of paper over, an image time-stamped in the corner, colors faded, a man holding a magazine but not reading … McCluskey towels his face with his hand, she can hear the sound his fingers make scraping the bristles on his neck … And she sees the man in the image, not just some guy, but then unsees him, no, ridiculous.

I'm sorry, Aitch, says McCluskey.

No, she says, it can't be.

McCluskey swallows, waits.

Why the hell are you showing me this, Mike?

Aitch, look, I'm trying to help.

There must be an explanation. Patch wouldn't do anything like this.

You sure, Aitch? The guy's still out of work, right? You said he was having a hard time. He ever wave a knife in your direction? So help me, Hannah, he ever so much as touches you,
I swear to God
 …

No, Mike, come on. I told you, he's not like this, this isn't … And she's about to say
this isn't him,
but she looks down again at the piece of paper, tilting her head, trying to see it another way as Georgie pushes another drink across the bar, and she reaches down and touches him in the image, Patch, so small and all alone. Whatever could make him do a thing like this?

And then everything starts to blur, McCluskey clambering off his barstool and clamping his arms around her so that Hannah can conceal her tears between them, crying into his shoulder not just for what Patch might have done, or what he might have been going to do, but for everything, the last nine months, the sick feeling that although she still loves him, something has faded, that when she should be strong, she is elsewhere, that when she should be there, she is here, or on the streets that she thrills to, in the job that she needs and she loves, wrapped up in the lights and the tape and the badges, in the place where things are resolved, not always, but bad people are caught and punished and everything has a strange sort of order, a logic, the crimes always the same, the hunt always the same, and the resolution happens or doesn't happen. But is always the same.

She pushes McCluskey away, patting him gratefully, smearing her eyes dry. What will you do? she says.

You and me are the only two people who know who this is, Aitch.

Do you have to arrest him?

That was something I wanted your opinion on. But if you say he's kept his hands off you …

I swear it, McCluskey. He gets sad sometimes. He doesn't do angry.

Right, the kind that bottles it up and then
boom
. McCluskey slaps his big hands down on the bar, Hannah flinching, looking at the printout of her husband again. Sorry, Aitch, says McCluskey. Hey, do me a favor will you? Look over this list. McCluskey pulls a second piece of paper from beneath the
Mail
. These are all the people who made reservations at the restaurant that lunchtime, he says.

Alvarez, Bachman, Denby
 
… Kim, McManus, Nathan
 
…
Samson, Suarez, Villanova
 
…

No, nothing, she says.

McCluskey rubs at his thin white covering of hair. Aitch, I gotta let you make the call, he says. You want me to talk to him? Let me talk to him. I don't have to bring him in.

I'll talk to him, Mike.

Yeah, I was worried you'd say that. But I gotta get involved at some point, unless you can swear to me nothing else will ever happen.

She looks down at her husband again, as if this time it might not be him. Right, she says, distractedly, thinking about whether this might somehow be her fault.

Goddam, this makes me nervous as hell, says McCluskey, his leg jiggling against the bar. Aitch, you're the person I'm most worried about right now, he says. If you talk to him, you gotta be careful how you put the questions.

I know how to talk to people, Mike. I know how to talk to my husband.

Yeah, but you have to make him think like talking's his idea, like he wants to open up to you.

Mike, I know how to do this.

Right, right. But whatever you do, you don't wanna corner the guy, Aitch.

I do this for a living too, Mike.

I know, I know. But handling a witness is a whole different ball game from handling a suspect.

He's not a suspect, McCluskey, he's my husband.

Not a suspect? Dammit, Aitch, I never won any gold stars for sensitivity, but there were other images I could've shown you.

Mike, you know I appreciate this, right?

Sure, this whole thing makes me nervous, says McCluskey, rubbing the back of his neck. You know, if I could just have one … Georgie, you got any of that green Guinness left over from last Paddy's Day?

Georgie leans on the bar in front of them. It's just food coloring, Mikey, I can knock some up for you, he says, whipping the bar with his towel as he makes to move.

Nah, says McCluskey, ignore me, I'm like that Greek guy tied to a mast.

Odysseus, says Hannah.

Right, I'm like Odysseus, Georgie, no matter how much I ask you for a real drink, you gotta ignore me, OK? I made a promise to Lindy. Here's to promises, he says, raising his glass, and then, after swallowing a sip of seltzer, McCluskey makes a face like a kid after cough syrup. Jesus, Aitch, he says, you know the only thing in the world worse than fizzy water is green smoothies. You know why? Every time I get handed one I can't help thinking of that joke—What's green and goes round at a hundred miles an hour?

Go on then, McCluskey, if you have to.

Kermit in a blender. I'm tellin you, Aitch, frog pur
é
e would taste a thousand times better.

Georgie taps the bar. That reminds me of one—what's green and smells of pork?

Hey, Georgie, not now, says McCluskey, his voice turning sharp. Can't you see we're trying to have a serious conversation? He raises his hands in confused disbelief as Georgie skulks away, and then McCluskey turns back to Hannah. Look, Aitch, he says, Patrick's head's gotta be going in ten different directions at once right now. Let's just let him calm down, you go home when you normally go home. McCluskey takes Hannah's hand and stares hard at her. Aitch, you call me and tell me when you're getting there, right? I'll be in the lobby and you lock yourself in the
goddam bathroom and call me if he even breathes at you funny, you hear?

She squeezes his hand. I love you, Mike.

Terrific. And you know what I love? says McCluskey. Three words,
retirement full pension,
he says, using a hand to block out the words in the air. Because if anyone finds out I knew who this was and kept quiet … So you gotta promise me, Hannah, this is the right way to play this.

On my soul, says Hannah, pulling her hand away, placing it over her chest.

McCluskey gives her a dubious look before dropping some notes on the bar. Hey, Georgie, he says, sorry about cutting you off like that, apparently I'm
hangry
.

No problem, big fella, says Georgie.

Come on, Aitch, says McCluskey. I'll hail you a cab.

As they climb from their barstools, Hannah puts her hand to her mouth and stage-whispers it over the bar. Kermit's finger, she says, Georgie seeing her off with a wink.

*   *   *

SHE WISHES THE CAB COULD
drive around forever, Hannah like a child in the backseat being soothed by the motion, nodding off perhaps, the way she always did when returning home from family trips and vacations as a young girl, and if she could only fall asleep today might she wake up to discover that none of this was real? The taxi lurches urgently downtown, the concrete city speeding by, not unlike her thoughts, nothing settling in one place, nothing that can quite be grasped or held on to, her husband brandishing a knife, the evidence clear, but also making no sense at all. And she wishes they could just keep driving round and round in circles, and when she has looped past the same thought a fifth or seventh or thirteenth time, maybe she could pluck it from the crowded sidewalk, maybe she could hear its words clearly,
this is what it means, Hannah, and this is what you have to do
. And then they hit a red light, the taxicab coming to a halt alongside Union Square, and if they pulled forward just an
other few feet she would be able to see the exact spot where they first kissed, five years ago, she and Patch, and before their lips touched she already knew he was the one, the one she felt safest with, the one who would give purpose and direction to her future, and what does all of this mean right now? That she was wrong?

Moving again, Broadway, movie theater, bookstore, McCluskey, Patch, The Shack, but how can she think of work at a time like this? And soon, back at her desk, all she can concentrate on is the waiting, pretending to work until the moment when she will go home, Hannah carrying something too huge in her chest, who, what, when, where, she has all these pieces, her husband, a knife, this lunchtime, a hotel, which means there is only one more thing she needs for the story, and she can hear herself asking it over and over.

Why?

*   *   *

SITTING ON A PADDED BENCH
with his newspaper, McCluskey nods at her from behind its pages as Hannah crosses the lobby, steps into the elevator, and then, too distracted to find keys in her bag, rings the doorbell when she reaches their apartment.

When Patch opens the door, she pauses, as if waiting to be invited in, her husband giving her a look as if she is the one behaving oddly, the sadness that recently has been worrying away at his eyes still there, but nothing more she can detect, nothing new, he kisses her cheek.