M
C felt as tight as a helium bond. She needed exercise, but hated running in the rain, which had been continuous for the whole weekend. She dragged her worn navy and neon green mat onto the living room floor, and sat on it, legs crossed.
Breathe
. She leaned forward and placed her arms, elbow to wrist, flat on the mat in front of her, her butt rising in the air in the process. She rocked back and took a deep breath.
She lay on her back and went through the routine. The straight leg raise. A hamstring stretch. A whole-body stretch. Raise, count, breathe in, breathe out, bend, count, breathe in, breathe out.
When she was finished, she lay on the mat and closed her eyes. No babbling brooks; she was never any good at picturing nature in the abstract, but she’d built a stock of images that helped her relax. The Atlantic rushing toward her at Revere Beach. Lake Tahoe, California, where Aunt G had taken her over Christmas vacation one year. She smiled as she remembered the exhilarating skiing lessons Aunt G treated her to, while Aunt G herself read science books in the lodge.
And all her trips to oil refineries as a professional engineer—San Francisco Bay, the Gulf Coast. Who would have guessed thousands of gallons of crude a day were coming out of such exotic locales? The Caribbean. Hawaii.
Oops
. Hawaii. Relaxation over. That’s where she’d gotten to know Jake Powers. After a few months as casual acquaintances and colleagues around the plant, they’d been sent to Oahu together on
a job. The Hawaiian facility had reported problems with the cracking unit, where the larger molecules were broken down into smaller ones, and Jake was the expert on that part of the process.
“I love making little ones out of big ones,” he’d said, cracking his knuckles for emphasis.
She’d been so taken with him. Short, dark, and fit, like her father, and a smooth dancer. And the way he handled his horses, gently, but you knew who was in charge. One time he’d ridden right up to her after a practice oxer jump—he’d taught her the name of the jump with width as well as height—and he made Spartan Q, his jumper horse, bow to her.
Cool
. Later he told her the horse’s three snorts were really her initials, MCG, which he’d taught Spartan Q.
Very cool
.
Yes, Jake was a real charmer. But a drinker, she eventually admitted. That first night in Oahu, they’d been sipping something pink at a bar, after a twelve-hour shift at the plant, lots of flirting on both sides. Coy glances, fingering each other’s bright fuchsia leis, brushing body parts here and there as they twisted on their stools.
Another night they’d been with about twenty people their own age, many of them native Hawaiian plant workers out for a good time after a hard day’s work. Jake had picked up a plastic bowl of salty snack food. She could see it clearly, feel the excitement.
“Hey, everybody! Want a lesson in how to convert molecules? Let’s pretend these are the heavy hydrocarbons we start out with at the plant.” Jake had swayed and grabbed the counter for balance. Then he smashed the bowl with his fist. Nuts, pretzels, cheese sticks, bits of plastic dish flew everywhere, across the counter, on the floor, on the flowery tee she’d bought in the hotel store. “Now they’re converted,” he’d said, drawing hysterical laughter from the crowd. “We just made gasoline!” Jake loved that he’d made a joke that only the in-crowd at the oil company would get.
How adolescent was she that she’d been impressed by that display? The other guys and girls had encouraged him also, and it ended up with the manager politely asking them all to leave. MC left with Jake. And stayed with him that night.
A few months later, after she’d been the target of his displays more than once, she’d finally called it quits.
Buzzzzzzzz!
The doorbell.
She screwed up her nose. Who could that be? No one just dropped in anymore, and who’s going to climb two flights of stairs inside a mortuary building to take an advertising poll? She was glad Aunt G wasn’t very tall, either; the peephole was in just the right place.
She closed her left eye, the weaker one, and put her right eye to the lens. Her breath caught. She stepped back, nearly tripping over the runner.
Jake.
“Come on, MC, open up. I know you’re in there. I saw you at the window. I haven’t bugged you, like you asked. Just let me in for ten minutes.” Jake’s voice was pleading, almost sweet, and maybe sober. “Okay, nine minutes.” A laugh. The charming side of Jake Powers. She knew if she looked out the peephole again, she’d see a bouquet of flowers in his hand.
MC blinked, turned away, as if her thoughts of him in Hawaii, in Houston, in bed, had caused him to appear on her landing. If she could just stop thinking of him, he would go away. She shut her eyes against the images.
Thump. Thump. Buzzzzzzzz!
“What’s going on here?” Her brother Robert’s voice, from the other side of the door. He must have a Sunday client downstairs.
MC breathed deeply. She heard Jake’s voice.
“Hi, I’m Jake Powers, a friend of MC’s. I … uh … I guess she can’t hear the buzzer.” Robert, at five eight or nine, was the tallest in the family, and the most muscular. MC figured Jake, nearly jockey-size, heard the slightly intimidating tone in her brother’s voice. “Maybe I should come back later.”
MC went back to the door, and opened it. She saw the two men, one carrying flowers for her, the other ready to protect her. Robert was in a suit and tie, indicating he’d just come from claiming a
client. Robert’s thick neck strained against his dark blue shirt. It would not be out of the question to mistake him for a professional bodyguard. Jake, on the other hand, was dressed as if he’d just come down from the back of a horse.
Jake glanced over at her, tucked the flowers at his waist, and bowed slightly. His most charming posture, that always won her heart. She could let him in just for minute, she thought.
“It’s okay, Robert,” MC said. She made very brief introductions, her eyes turned away from Robert. “Come on in, Jake.”
“I’ll be downstairs,” Robert said, knocking his knuckles together.
“I have the number,” MC said.
M
att came through the door, generating a smile for my benefit. The attempt made his face look contorted. I buried my head in his shoulder, not wanting him to see my own unhappy expression.
“Hi, honey,” he said. I looked up in time to see his tipping an imaginary hat. Our little domestic joke.
I’d gotten home before Matt and put on a pot of coffee, for something to do. I’d looked around the house at what seemed important only a few days ago. A bag of Christmas wrapping paper and tags waiting in the corner, a tattered kitchen curtain that needed to be replaced, a pile of newspapers ready for recycling, a to-do list, a to-call list. Call Daniel Endicott at Revere High for the lecture schedule; call cousin Mary Ann in Worcester for a holiday date. None of it was real.
“Tell me,” I said, still in his arms.
“My cancer is a five,” he said.
This is no time to be funny
, I thought, but I smiled anyway. Matt often teased me about my need for quantizing everything. Give me a number from one to ten, I’d ask him, if I wanted to know his reaction to a concert, or a book, or even a tie I’d bought him.
We walked to the couch, still holding on to each other. “No, really, they give these things a number. It’s called grading the cancer.”
“A grade? They give cancers a grade?”
“Yeah, they call it the Gleason system. You know, like Jackie?”
Matt tried a
va-va-voom
, so comical I had to laugh, as much as I wanted to cry.
I let Matt explain. “It goes from one to five, based on how much the arrangement of cells in the cancerous tissue looks like normal tissue. I’m only repeating what they told me, not that I understand it completely. But one is good, five is not.”
I gasped, held my breath. “Five is the worst?”
“No, no. Sorry. I’m a three in one area, and a two in another, so they add them and get a five, which is my total Gleason score. But the five in the total is not bad; it’s average.” He paused, resting his fingers from the demonstration, and put on another smile. “I thought you’d like all this math, Gloria.”
Not in this context
. I moved my lips into a weak smile. My hands had become like ice and I pulled them into the sleeves of my turtleneck, a poor imitation of waif-ness.
He held up his hand, wiggled his fingers. “Five for a total is sort of intermediate. I’m your average guy, as we always knew.”
I loved him for sparing me his own anguish. I took a deep breath, calmed myself. It was his cancer, after all, and I should be at least as composed as he was.
“So, what’s next?” I asked, with a forced calmness. This was a problem, and we would solve it together, as we had so many others.
“Well, it’s a Stage-Two; then there’s another designation with Ts and letters.” Matt pulled a pile of literature out of his briefcase. “I have to digest this information on treatments and come to a decision.” He held the leaflets and notebook pages out halfway between us. “A project for us.”
I took them from his hands. We sat on the couch for a few more minutes, moved to the bedroom, and did not let go of each other for a long time.
Rose had been on my mind. Playing amateur psychologist, I’d decided that she was repressing feelings of anxiety about MC, whose student had been murdered, and not long after MC herself
had felt threatened by a prowler. But I had a hard time concentrating on anything other than Matt’s Gleason score, and in the end she called me first, early Monday morning.
As soon as I heard her voice, I thought of MC and a date I hadn’t kept. I’d forgotten completely that I’d made a date to be at her apartment at six the night before.
“Jake Powers, MC’s ex-boyfriend, stopped by her apartment last night, Gloria,” Rose told me. Apparently, MC hadn’t missed me, I thought. “We wouldn’t even have known, except Robert was working late with Mr. Baroni, and he saw someone go upstairs. The guy was banging on her door, making a scene in the hallway. MC let him go in, but Robert waited around until he left, about two hours later.”
I pictured Robert, slightly taller than his father, and well-built. “It’s good that Robert was there,” I said, trying to maintain a neutral tone.
“I’m worried about her, Gloria. I hope she doesn’t take that guy back; I think he wasn’t nice to her in Texas.” Rose’s voice cracked as she told me, and, strangely, I was glad. Psych 101 again—better that she’s acknowledging her concern.
I thought I’d set a good example, and bare my own soul. “I feel so guilty and selfish, Rose. I meant to call you to talk about MC, and instead this … situation with Matt has consumed me.” I knew that Matt and Frank had talked the evening before, and that Rose would understand what the “situation” was.
“Well, I feel selfish, too, and useless. What you and Matt must be going through!”
So we had a deal, born of decades of friendship, that we would allow each other our momentary self-centeredness. Nothing a shared cannoli wouldn’t fix, I decided, and offered to take a box over to Prospect Avenue.
“Just come,” she said. “The cannoli are already here. That’s why I called.”
It felt like old times, except for the layer of worry that seemed
always present since I’d heard Matt’s test results. I tucked him in for one of his naps, no longer rare since his illness, and headed over to Rose’s.
We sat on Rose’s porch, squinting at the first bit of sunlight in several days. Rose’s collection of glass vases caught the light and I traced the rays with an invisible protractor. Reflection, refraction, diffraction, diffusion—the beauty of geometric optics.
Rose always broke into a stream of stories when she was overwrought, and having her daughter under any kind of stress qualified for that condition. I let her tell me incidents I’d heard dozens of times, many of them from the early days of the Galigani business, when the whole family lived in the mortuary building. Their residence took up the top floor and the one below, which now housed offices for Rose and her assistant, Martha. Frank’s idea was to introduce all the children to the trade, but Rose set limits. She’d never let them see anyone they had known while the client was “being prepared” in the basement, as she called it.
“One time MC sneaked down to the prep room,” Rose said, “because she’d heard that her girlfriend Joanie Della Russo’s grandmother was a client. She was about five at the time.” At the last telling, MC had been closer to seven, but I didn’t correct her. “Frank was weighing something, uh, messy, for some reason, when he saw MC out of the corner of his eye. So he swooped down on MC and put her in the pan of the other scale. She laughed and laughed, swinging in that scale. Can you imagine? Any other kid would have been scared to death, but not MC.”
Rose recited this anecdote with more pride than usual.
“MC will be fine, Rose. She’ll find an interesting job, settle down. She’s very strong, and she’ll get through all this.” I felt I was simply articulating the point of Rose’s story.
Rose nodded. “Even when we moved here she’d still go to the mortuary after school sometimes and beg her father to show her ‘something smelly,’ she’d say.” Rose glanced around at the objects of art on her porch, and I wondered what she saw, if not ray optics.
Colors, and shapes, I thought. Memories, too, probably. “John—our top-notch journalist—was never, never interested in what went on down there, but I was amazed when MC didn’t follow Frank and Robert into the business.”
“Well, she just chose a different smelly profession,” I said.
“And maybe journalism has its own smells,” she said, with her delightful laugh.
MC stopped by before I left Rose’s. I had a couple of minutes with her while Rose prepared a new pot of coffee.
“I’m so sorry I forgot about our date last night. Matt came home with his test results, and—”
MC shook her head. “Not to worry, Aunt G, I know you have a lot on your mind. I really hope Matt will be fine, and I bet he will be.” She lowered her eyes. “And anyway, I had some company. I’m sure my mother told you.”
I nodded. I paused for a moment, then decided I had to ask. “MC, did you tell Jake he could stop in Revere to visit you?”
“He was on his way back from the New Hampshire Equestrian Expo, and he stopped by, that’s all,” she told me, a hint of defensiveness in her voice.
I knew what computer expos and scientific-equipment expos were like, but I had a hard time imagining an expo or a demo about horses. Were they on display in booths? Did the booths have giveaways like the pens and periodic-table coasters given out at science expos? I must have given a visible sign of confusion, because MC went on to clarify.
“They have seminars on all kinds of topics, like rider conditioning, breeding, different styles of saddles, equine medicines, that kind of thing. Jake’s a specialist in composting and manure management techniques. His chemistry comes in handy for his hobby that way.”
I didn’t think I wanted to know more details, and besides, MC had not answered my question. “I’m asking if you agreed to a visit.”
MC looked sheepish. “Well, I thought I’d told him no.”
I guessed MC had said something like “I’d rather you wouldn’t,” which Jake would take as eighty percent no, twenty percent yes; well worth a shot.
I knew how that worked.
My fiancé, Al Gravese, had never physically battered me, but he’d pressed his will on me in such a way that I did what he wanted—even when I thought I’d insisted otherwise.
“Wanna go play cards with Mike and Angie tonight?” he’d ask, in his peculiar uneducated accent, phoning me in the middle of the day.
“I’d rather go to the movies,” I’d answer.
“Angie likes you a lot.”
“I don’t like poker. I don’t know how to play well. I might go to a movie with Gracie instead.”
Might
. There was that eighty-twenty.
“You don’t want to go to a movie with that s
tunata
. I’ll pick you up at six o’clock. You’ll have a good time.”
Having had the same kind of subtly coercive relationship with my mother, who told me what my favorite color was, I’d been ripe for the picking by Al Gravese. I shook away the memory.
“MC, it’s none of my business,” I said. “But—”
“You’re right, Aunt G. It isn’t.” MC stood and walked away.
I thought I heard a weak, “I’m sorry.”
I was distraught over the first tension, ever, between MC and me. I was convinced her mood had to do with more than a drop-in from her ex-boyfriend. Nina Martin’s murder, for one thing. Two murders, really, if you counted that of the hit man. And too many Texans making life miserable for MC.
I had to go to work.
Back at my computer, with Matt at the office—for a couple of hours only, he promised—I started to tabulate the information I had, but the table quickly degenerated into just a string of events. Wayne Gallen shows up; Nina Martin shows up, dead; Rusty Forman shows up, dead; Jake Powers shows up. Wayne is now missing.
Was that reason enough to blame Wayne for Nina’s murder? Was he connected to Rusty Forman?
The string method got me nowhere. I opened a computer drawing program and doodled with a new pattern. A star, with MC at the center, and spokes for Wayne, Nina, Rusty, Jake. All Houstonites, I noted, if that was a word. The design looked western, like something out of a Lone Star State Chamber of Commerce brochure.
Were all these Texans in Revere specifically to see MC? It seemed to have started with Wayne, who said he’d come to warn MC of a threat from Alex Simpson, the buckyball researcher. Jake appeared to be seeking only MC’s affection, but I didn’t believe in pure motives.
I added a spoke with a question mark, to indicate the possible
AS and the bad guys
who were after MC, the ones who allegedly sped off when Wayne showed up. As far as I knew, Alex Simpson had never been seen in Revere, but I left his initials on the chart anyway.
Nina had a Galigani business card in her pocket but had made no attempt to contact MC.
Murdered before contacting?
I wrote. I still hadn’t heard what leads the list of telephone numbers in Nina’s pocket had brought. I made a note to check on it with Matt. It was tough doing police work when you weren’t a cop. If I were a cop in Houston, for example, I could knock on Alex Simpson’s door and ask him to explain every email he wrote this year. If I had any authority at all, I could phone the local FDA office and get an interview with whoever Nina’s contact was. I could open her office files and find out who hired her in the first place.
I knew the real cops probably considered the cases closed, but not me. Nina Martin enrolled in MC’s class for a reason, and that reason could be connected to her murder. In my mind, therefore, MC was still vulnerable.
The days were getting shorter, and even at four in the afternoon, the light was fading. I switched on a new halogen floor lamp, one of
the few items I’d purchased for the Fernwood Avenue home. I’d fixed up one of the extra bedrooms with my computer desk and file cabinets, not bothering to change the bold paisley area rug that hid most of the hardwood floor. I thought how we buy things with the idea that we’ll live long enough to use them, that they will “die,” or wear out, before we do. We don’t plan on our lives being interrupted by disasters. Or by a Stage-II cancer.