Next Time You See Me (4 page)

“I don’t think I can.”

“We’ll have to deal with the house,” Mac said. “But it can wait a bit.”

“Meantime, what do we do about Danny?” Rosie asked.

“Danny . . .” Mac shook his head.

“Did the lawyer find you before?”

“No.”

“He said Mom and Dad were in the process of changing their will. They were at his office just last week.”

“Changing it how?”

“They were cutting Danny out. They should have done that a long time ago, as far as I’m concerned. But they didn’t get it done in time so now we’re going to have to deal with him when we make decisions about the house and the business.”

Mac took in the news, betraying little reaction. Hugh and Aileen had always been fair with their three children, never showing favoritism or making judgments beyond Hugh’s occasional harsh comments to Danny about his drinking and his lifestyle. Danny had never developed a career and frequently changed jobs, apartments, and girlfriends. He had recently turned forty and I wondered if Hugh had finally lost patience.

“You heard him in there,” Rosie went on, “cursing at that detective?”

“I heard it.”

“You know what I think? I think
he
thinks that Danny—”

“Don’t go there,” Mac said. “He’s our brother.”

“Oh, come on, Mac, don’t tell me it hasn’t crossed your mind. Especially with what we know now about their intentions for their will. And the ring”—her voice rose—“was going to
me
and I was going to pass it on to
one of my girls
. Danny knew that. He’s always been a jealous, good-for-nothing, son-of-a—” She stopped herself as jaws dropped all around her.

Mac stood there staring at his older sister. He was the middle child, the peacemaker, and though I had never known him to disrespect the bottom line of truth, I could see in the way he winced that the possibility of this one was too harsh even for him, despite what his years as a cop had shown him of unimaginable cruelty.

“Rosie,” he said, “Danny didn’t do it.”

“How do you know that?”

He sighed, didn’t answer.

“We
have
to consider it.”

“No we don’t. Not today.”

Chapter 3

A
s soon as my eyes opened I felt that Mac wasn’t there. His side of the bed was rumpled, but barely. I had woken briefly in the middle of the night and heard sounds in the kitchen. My guess was he hadn’t slept at all.

I waited for Ben’s morning cry . . . and waited. Finally I got up and went to his room: His crib was empty. I went to find them, a hook of nervousness catching in my stomach. Something felt off about today, a strange foreboding I couldn’t pinpoint. As I went upstairs to our parlor level my mind dialed through today’s agenda, or what today’s agenda would have been had Mac’s parents not been murdered four days ago and buried just yesterday. Nothing would be the same for a long time; Mac would have to adjust and I would have to figure out how to help him. I had already decided, for starters, that his own behavior toward me when Jackson and Cece were killed would be my guide: vigilant caring and attention but most of all
being there
. He had stuck by me through the thick and thin of my own depression and insanity. I would stick by him.

As soon as I saw Mac and Ben sprawled on the living room floor stacking multicolored blocks and knocking them down (Mac stacking, Ben knocking) in a flood of peachy sunlight, my feeling of apprehension melted away. Through the doorless archway into the kitchen I saw breakfast dishes scattered on the counter and the newspaper open on the table. Mac looked up at me from the floor with weary eyes—but he smiled.

“Morning.”

“Morning.” I crouched down to kiss him.

Ben toppled the latest tower, shouting, “Down!”

“Down!” Mac and I said in chorus to our son.

“Thought I’d let you sleep in,” Mac said.

“Did you sleep at all?”

“Couldn’t.”

“Take a sleeping pill tonight.”

“Maybe.”

“You can’t go on not sleeping.”

“You’re probably right. I will.”

“And you have to stop thinking about Danny.”

Mac sighed and got up. I watched him walk into the kitchen, his robe hanging open over his boxers and T-shirt. While he refilled his coffee, Ben thrust a green block into my hand.

“More!”

I built Ben another tower while he eagerly waited for it to get as high as it could without falling on its own. Every now and then I looked over at Mac, pacing the kitchen, shaking his head. Beyond him, I saw that our late summer garden, which had been neglected all week, was browning from lack of water. The thought of having to care for the garden and the house and the new semester and Ben
and Mac
made me feel suddenly overwhelmed. Mac, who walked our kitchen like a courtroom, considering a maze of possibilities, all of which were awful. Mac, who emanated an energy of desperation I recognized all too well . . . standing on the precipice of a day that appeared mercilessly bottomless. His suffering over his parents’ deaths was bad enough. But adding to it the gathering cloud of suspicions of Danny was unbearable.

The phone rang, startling all of us.

Mac walked to the counter and looked at caller ID. “Rosie.”

“Don’t answer it.”

He picked up. “It isn’t even seven o’clock yet” was his hello. Her greeting must have been similarly blunt because he dove right into listening. When his eyes locked on mine, I knew something had happened. “I’m calling Pawtusky and telling him he’s making a mistake.” He hung up.

“Danny?” I asked.

“He has an alibi for Monday—he was with some woman at the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin in Manhattan, holed up in her boat—but Rosie said Pawtusky’s not buying it.”

“I didn’t know Danny had a new girlfriend.”

“He can’t remember her name, just that her boat was called
Party On
.”

We shared a look of disbelief about something that was all too believable, when it came to Danny.

“This has to be stopped before it starts.” Mac carried the phone through the living room and into the front hall, where I heard him rifling through something—yesterday’s suit jacket—looking for Detective Pawtusky’s business card.

“Don’t call Pawtusky,” I said. “Let him do his job.”

“Danny might be an asshole but he didn’t kill our parents.”

I couldn’t tell if it was Mac’s harsh tone or his actual words that got Ben’s attention, but his face screwed up and I hugged him to circumvent tears. From the front hall I heard eleven dialing bleeps and the tense beginning of what turned out to be a short conversation, ending with Mac’s declaration, “It isn’t right!”

He stood in the doorway between the front hall and living room with an expression of helplessness that made him look like he was on his way down a slippery slope with no chance of a foothold. I had never seen him this way before—desolate. Not even when we were hunting JPP. Or when he thought I might try to take my own life again. Or when his own life had hung, literally, in the balance. Val’s words of yesterday rang through me:
Did the dark side grab him yet?
If she asked me that now, a mere fourteen hours later, I would have answered unequivocally yes, without even knowing what that meant.

“The
Party On
set sail Tuesday evening,” Mac said, “without Danny. The boat hasn’t been back since and they can’t find any witnesses seeing him at the boat basin.”

“What was her name?”

“The woman?”

I nodded.

“Connie, I think.”

“Is it her boat?”

“Does it matter?” Mac’s face tightened with derision. “Pawtusky said they found Danny’s DNA all over our parents’ house. Well, what did they expect? He grew up in that house. Visited all the time.”

“DNA from?” I asked, knowing as well as Mac did that the source mattered.

“Hair, skin. Not blood.”

“They won’t be able to prove anything without something more concrete—a good witness, a weapon, your mother’s ring. Someone else’s DNA.”

“They didn’t find anyone else’s, that’s the problem. And that fingerprint doesn’t amount to anything if they can’t identify it. They’ve got nothing, so what do they do? They get a warrant on Danny’s apartment.”

It didn’t look good for Danny. But Mac was my husband and I decided, then and there, that I would support him by sharing his opinion about his brother’s inherent guiltlessness. I knew that in time Mac would be able to separate emotion from logic; but for now, he was too blinded by grief to see anything clearly. I set Ben down in front of the blocks, got up, went over to Mac, and put my arms around him.

“Danny didn’t do it,” I whispered. “They’ll find that out.”

When he reciprocated my embrace, I knew my agreement had done its job, at least for the moment.

“Mom’s coming over at eight-thirty to take Ben to the park. She doesn’t have to be at work until one o’clock. We’ll have the whole morning alone together.” I kissed his neck, behind his ear, the side of his face. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

A
s soon as I had installed Ben in his stroller and Mom had pushed him down the block, Mac and I headed to our bedroom. It was both exciting and frightening the way we couldn’t wait to get each other naked: the way he yanked off my nightgown, the way I pulled off his robe. You could feel that it was going to be a humid day, and a sheen of perspiration coated us before our skin even touched. He felt sticky and tasted salty; and the way he kissed me—it was as if he couldn’t drink in enough of me. We lowered ourselves onto the bed and made love with an intensity we hadn’t experienced for a long time, since the beginning. I wrapped him in my arms and legs, turned him over and slowed him down, my fingers splayed across his collarbones. He gripped my forearms, closed his eyes, lifted his chin. I watched his eyeballs move like metronomes beneath his lids, as if he couldn’t stop thinking. Leaning down, I touched his dahlia tattoo with the tip of my tongue . . . and all at once his eyes stopped moving, his head skewed back, and my body joined his completely.

After, I lay on top of him for a long time. He held me loosely with one arm and the other hand gently stroked my back. I listened as our breathing came into sync, and would have sworn he was asleep until he sighed and said, “Well . . .”

I rolled off him. “Let yourself sleep.”

“Can’t. It’s like jet lag: better to wait until tonight.”

“Why? Honestly—you’re exhausted.”

“I have to get into the office.”

“
No
.”

He looked at me, half smiled. “You think I’m fragile.”

“It’s been a hellish week for you. You can take off another day.”

“One more day won’t make any difference.” He sat up.

“Let’s go out for coffee and then maybe we can see an early movie—”

“I’m going to work.” He got out of bed and headed into the bathroom.

I lay there, frustrated, thinking. It didn’t seem as if my wisdom was going to prevail. Finally I followed him into the bathroom and said loudly, above the rush of his shower, “What about our anniversary dinner tonight? I think it would be good for you.” I didn’t expect a yes, but thought it was worth a try: anything to help him feel even an iota removed from the horrific events of Monday. His answer was slow in coming, which told me he hadn’t completely ruled it out.

“Maybe . . . I don’t know.”

“Think about it?”

“I will.”

I got into the shower with him and soaped the damaged skin of his back, the constellation of hard whitish scars reminding me that deep down Mac was as tough as they came. It would just be a matter of time before he steadied himself. I felt his muscles relax under my hands and turned the washing into a massage, kneading deep under his shoulder blades with my thumbs, pressing upward along the tight muscles of his neck, raking my fingertips up and over his scalp. He sighed, turned around, kissed me in the streaming water, and whispered, “I have to go.”

He left me alone in the shower. By the time I finished and was all dried off, he was dressed for work. I threw on shorts and a T-shirt and followed him upstairs to the front door.

“Call me when you get there.” I kissed him.

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t apologize for anything. None of this is your fault.”

“I’m burdening you with my crappy mood.”

“Oh,
please
. I think I owe you big-time in that department.” What I’d put him through a few years ago when I was more or less in his position could have filled a book.

“You owe me nothing.” He leaned forward and tenderly kissed me again. “I promise, next time you see me I’ll be—”

I stopped his guilty apologies with a third kiss. “Go. And let me know about dinner. I’ll leave the reservation in place until the last minute, but whatever you want to do is fine with me.”

Standing on our front stoop, I watched him walk up our leafy block toward Smith Street and the subway. He moved slowly, as if he was in no rush to leave despite his urgency to get to work today. A wave of love for him came over me. I couldn’t take my eyes off him until he was at the end of the block.

And then, just as I was turning to go back inside, he pivoted, looked for me, and threw me a kiss. I pretended to catch it and affix it to my heart.

J
ust before one o’clock I rendezvoused with my mother at BookCourt, the bookstore on Court Street where she worked part-time as an inventory manager, and took Ben off her hands. I had hoped to get him home for lunch and a nap in his crib—and to use the time to get some homework done—but he had fallen asleep in his stroller.

“I tuckered him out.” Mom smiled; she didn’t have to tell me how much she loved spending time with her grandson, particularly since her other two grandchildren had moved three thousand miles away. “He
loves
the swings at the playground.”

“You’re telling me. I pushed him for at least an hour the other day.”

“Do you still need me tonight? How is Mac?”

“Not good. I don’t think he’ll be up for going out.”

“I’m flexible.” She glanced at her watch. “Just let me know.”

I watched through the plate-glass window full of books as she entered her workplace, greeting the young woman behind the counter and a man, the owner, who smiled and said something as she passed him on her way to the office in back.

Since Ben was already asleep and it was a lovely summer day, I decided to run errands. After an hour the stroller handles were festooned with plastic bags. I was tired, and stopped in at One Girl Cookies for an iced espresso to go. Waiting my turn, I saw a strikingly decorated cake—turquoise frosting encircled with bright yellow starbursts—and when I reached the counter asked if it was too late to order one for tomorrow.

“Not at all,” the girl said, and passed me a book of choices.

I ordered a pumpkin cake with cream cheese frosting and requested red decorations: two linked hearts, for our two years of marriage, and the succinct but fitting platitude
Happy Anniversary
.

I pretty much figured Mac would cancel our dinner reservation tonight but refused to let his sorrow deny him any celebration at all. I truly felt that remembering an event that was happy might remind him that
all
was not lost. Tomorrow, Saturday—which was the date of our actual anniversary, anyway, and not just the day we were able to get a reservation at a popular restaurant—I would order our favorite sushi (I was not much of a cook) and we could celebrate quietly. On my way home, I picked up a bottle of champagne, already comfortable with the assumed change of plans.