World Gone By: A Novel (8 page)

“Not our shared values.”

“Not our shared professions.”

“Well, shit.” He chuckled and shook his head. “Why are we even together?”

“I know!” She threw a pillow at him and knocked over a lamp. “Joseph Coughlin, we are
fucked
.” She finished buttoning her blouse. “You’re paying for that lamp, by the way.”

They found her skirt and his trousers and worked their way into their shoes, exchanging idiotic grins and slightly embarrassed, slightly lustful glances. They never risked lingering in the parking lot, so their last kiss always took place at the door. This kiss was almost as hungry as the first one they’d exchanged this morning, and when they broke it, she kept her eyes closed and her hand on the doorjamb.

She opened her eyes and looked at the bed, the old chair that sat by the old radio, the white curtains, the porcelain washbasin, the overturned lamp.

“I love this room.”

“I love it too,” he said.

“This is probably the happiest—no, actually, it
is
the happiest—I’ve ever been.” She took his hand and kissed his palm. She ran it along her jaw and the side of her neck. She let go of it and went back to looking at the room. “But don’t think that when the day
comes that Daddy says ‘Sugarplum, it’s time for you to take over and carry the Sloane name into the next age, breed yourself some chillun to take over after you’ve gone,’ that I won’t do exactly what’s expected of me.” She looked up at him with eyes so blue they could cut bronze. “Because, son, I assure you I will.”

SHE LEFT THE ROOM FIRST. Joe gave her a ten-minute head start. He sat by the window and listened to the news reports on the radio. The dock outside the window creaked from nothing at all, just a slight breeze perhaps and age. The wood had been violated beyond fairness by termites and water and the incessant rot-march of humidity. The next strong wind would cripple it, the next tropical storm would wipe it from memory.

A boy stood at the end of it.

A second or two ago, the dock had been empty. Until it wasn’t.

The
boy. The same one he’d seen running along the tree line at the party back in December. Somehow, Joe had always known he’d make another appearance.

He had his back to Joe. He was hatless. The cowlick Joe had noticed previously was tamped in place, though a small nub of it peeked up like an arched knuckle. His hair was so blond it was almost white.

Joe raised the window and said, “Hey.”

A warm and lazy breeze rippled the water but not the boy’s hair.

“Hey,” Joe said again, a little louder.

No reaction from the boy.

Joe lowered his head and stared at the cracks in the windowsill for a count of five. When he looked back up, the boy stood in the same spot, his face in the process of turning away from Joe. As Joe had guessed the first time he’d seen him, what little he glimpsed of
the boy’s profile was indistinct, as if the features were still forming.

Joe left the room and came around the corner of the building to the dock. The boy was no longer there. The sagging dock creaked some more. Joe imagined it being swept away in churning waters. Someone would put up a new one. Or not.

Men had built this dock. They’d driven in the posts, they’d measured and cut, they’d drilled and hammered. When they were finished, they were the first to ever set foot on it. They’d felt pride. Maybe not a lot, but certainly some. They’d set out to build something and they’d built it. It existed because they had. By now, they’d probably passed on. The dock would follow. Someday, they’d bulldoze this motel. Time is rented, Joe thought, never owned.

Across from the dock, about forty yards away, was a spit of sand and a few trees, the kind of baby key that was usually submerged in all but low tide. The boy stood there. The boy and his blond hair and indistinct features, facing Joe, staring at him with closed eyes.

Until the tall reeds and the thin trees inhaled him.

As if there weren’t enough on my plate, Joe thought, now I’ve got a ghost.

PLANS FOR DEPARTURE to Raiford hit an immediate snag when Joe returned home from the Sundowner to discover Tomas had the chicken pox. Miss Narcisa had ordered the boy upstairs and was walking around the house with a wet facecloth tied by kitchen twine over her nose and mouth. Miss Narcisa informed Joe that she had not contracted the virus as a child and was not going to catch it now, as an adult.

“No,” she said, one hand shooting up into the air, the other throwing items into the canvas bag she carried everywhere. “No, no, no.”

“Of course not,” Joe said, hoping secretly that she already had it, a reflexive response to anyone who’d treat his son like a pariah.
And I hope it scabs up.

When she told him she’d cooked three days’ worth of meals and left them in the icebox, pressed four of his suits, and cleaned
the house, though, he did remind himself how handy she was to have around.

At the door, trying to keep the desperation from his voice, he said, “So when will we see you?”

She looked back at him, her flat face as flat as a pan. “When he is no longer sick.”

Joe, who’d had the chicken pox as a boy, went up to Tomas’s room and sat with him. “I knew you looked under the weather yesterday.”

Tomas turned a page of Dumas’s
Twenty Years After.
“How bad do I look?”

“You’d have to put the book down, buddy.”

Tomas lowered the book and looked at his father with a face that appeared to have been ravaged by bees and then left under a strong sun.

“You look great,” Joe said. “Barely noticeable.”

Tomas raised the book in front of his face. “Ha-ha.”

“Okay, you look awful.”

He lowered the book and cocked an eyebrow at his father.

“No,” Joe said, “you really do.”

Tomas grimaced. “These are times I miss not having a mother.”

Joe came out of his chair and hopped on the bed and lay beside his son. “Oh, sweetie, does it hurt? Can I get you some warm milk?”

Tomas slapped at his father, and Joe tickled him hard enough that he dropped the book to the floor. Joe came off the bed to pick it up. He went to hand it to his son, found Tomas giving him a strange, hesitant look.

“What?” Joe said, a smile finding his face.

“Could you read it to me?”

“What?”

“Like you used to all the time. Remember?”

Joe remembered. The Grimm brothers, Aesop, the Greek and Roman myths, Verne, Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, and, of course, Dumas. He looked down at his son and smoothed the cowlick rising from the back of the boy’s head.

“Sure.”

He kicked off his shoes, climbed on the bed, and opened the book.

After Tomas fell asleep, Joe sat in the office he kept in the back of the house on the first floor. It was at night, alone, when he most thought about what the yokel from Raiford had told him in his office on Friday. He knew it was ridiculous—
no one
would be stupid enough to try to kill him—and yet he pulled the drapes over the French doors, though the thickness of the glass and the height of the wall out back made it unlikely, if not impossible, that anyone could see him from the street.

But if, say, someone had scaled the wall with a rifle, they could easily make out the shape of his head through the glass.

“Christ,” he said as he poured himself a scotch from the decanter, “stop it.” He caught his reflection in the bar mirror as he corked the decanter. “Okay? Just stop.”

He told himself to reopen the drapes, but he didn’t.

Instead, he sat at his desk, with the plan of doing nothing more than reliving his last encounter with Vanessa, when his phone rang.

“Fuck.” His feet came off the desk and he lifted the receiver. “Hello.”

“It’s me.”

Dion.

“Hey, you. How’s things?”

“Pretty fucking bad at the moment, Joseph.”

“Do explain, Dionysius.”

“Ah ha.” Dion chuckled. “You would prefer I call you ‘Joe.’”

“Always, good sir. Always.” Joe put his feet back on the desk. He and Dion had been friends since they were thirteen. They’d each saved the other’s life more than once. They could read each other’s moods and minds better than most married couples. Joe knew that Dion was turning out to be a middling boss at best—the best soldiers often did, and Dion had been an exceptional soldier. He knew that Dion’s fits of rage, always fearsome, had only worsened with age and that most men with any wits were terrified of him. He also knew—though few others did—that Dion’s taste for the cocaine they brought in from Bolivia once a month seemed to contribute to his mood swings and his violence. He knew all these things about his friend, and yet Dion was, in fact, his friend. His oldest friend. The only man who’d known him before the fine suits and the four-dollar haircuts and the refined taste in food and liquor. Dion had known him when he was someone’s son, someone’s little brother, when he was callow and impulsive and unformed. And he’d known Dion when he was much jollier, much fatter, so much more playful. He missed that Dion, but he trusted he was still in there somewhere.

“You heard about the thing happened in Brown Town?” Dion asked.

“Yup.”

“Your thoughts?”

“Freddy DiGiacomo’s a fucking knucklehead.”

“Anything you might want to tell me that I don’t already know?”

“Montooth has been a great earner for us for fourteen years. Since the day you and I got here, D.”

“That is a fact.”

“In a sane world, we’d apologize for bothering him. And for our penance, we’d hit Freddy over the fucking head with a rock and throw him in the bay.”

“Sure,” Dion said, “in a sane world. But two of ours are dead. That has to be addressed. We’ll have a sit-down tomorrow.”

“What time?”

“Let’s say four.”

Joe did the math on what kind of time it would take to get to Raiford and back. “Any way you could push it to five?”

“Don’t see why not.”

“Then I’ll be there.”

“Good enough.” Dion inhaled on one of his ever-present cigars. “How’s my pal?”

“He’s got chicken pox.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. And Narcisa won’t watch him until he’s over it.”

“Who works for who over there?”

“Best governess I ever had.”

“She must be, she makes her own hours.”

“What about you?”

Dion yawned. “Same muck and shit as every other day.”

“Aww. Is the crown too heavy?”

“It was too heavy for you.”

“Nah. Charlie pushed me out because I wasn’t a wop.”

“That’s how you remember it.”

“How it was.”

“Hmm. I recall someone whining about how they just couldn’t take it anymore, all the blood, all the responsibility. Wah wah wah.”

Joe chuckled. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

When he hung up, he thought of parting the drapes. Most nights, he opened the French doors to breathe in the mint and bougainvillea, look out at the wading pool, the dark gardens, the stucco wall covered in ivy and Spanish moss.

If someone were perched on that wall with a rifle, though . . .

What would they see? He’d left the lights off behind him. He could take a peek out there at least.

He turned his chair and slipped a finger between the drapes. He looked out through the slit at the stucco wall the color of a new penny and the one orange tree he could see.

The boy stood in front of the tree, wearing a white sailor suit with matching bloomer pants. He cocked his head, as if he hadn’t expected to see Joe, and then he skipped away. Didn’t walk. Skipped.

Before he knew he was doing it, Joe threw back the drapes and stared out at his still and empty yard.

In the next instant, he pictured a bullet leaving a rifle and pushed his chair back, let the drapes fall over the doors.

He wheeled the chair away from the window and stopped where two of his bookcases met in a V. As he sat there, the boy walked past his office door and headed for the stairs.

The chair spun when Joe left it. He reached the hall and climbed the empty stairs. He checked in on Tomas and found him sleeping. He looked under his bed. Took a look in his closet. Once more, down on his knees, to look under the bed. Nothing.

He moved through the other bedrooms. A vein pulsed under his jaw. The flesh nearest to his spine felt as if ants were crawling under it, and the air in the house was so cold he could feel it in his teeth.

He searched the entire house. When he was done, he entered his bedroom, where he expected to find the boy, but the room was empty.

Joe sat awake well into the night. When the boy had passed by his office door, his features had been more distinct than on previous encounters. This allowed Joe to confirm a clear family resemblance. He had the long Coughlin jaw and small ears. If, in that moment,
he’d turned and looked directly at him, Joe wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d done so with the face of his father.

But why would his father take the form of a child? Even when his father had been a child, Joe doubted he’d ever seemed childlike.

Joe had never encountered a ghost. Hadn’t much expected to, either. After Graciela died, he’d expected—even prayed—that she’d return to him in some form. But most nights she’d even refused to find his dreams. When he did dream of her, the dreams were invariably banal. Most took place on the boat they’d taken from Havana the day she died. Tomas had just turned a rambunctious two. Joe had spent the trip chasing him all over the boat because Graciela had been seasick. She’d vomited once. The rest of the trip, she took shallow breaths and kept a damp towel pressed to her forehead. As the nubs of the Tampa skyline crept above the border where swollen sky met the Florida Straits, Joe brought Graciela another damp towel, but she waved him off. “I changed my mind. Two is enough.”

In the dreams, the other damp towels were usually strewn all over the deck, hanging from the rails, strung from the flagpoles. Damp towels and dry ones, white ones and red, some as small as pocket squares, some as large as mattresses.

In reality, to the best of Joe’s recollection, he hadn’t seen another towel, just the one on her forehead.

Within the hour, Graciela would lie bleeding to death on the pier, her killer crushed under the wheels of a coal truck. Joe couldn’t even recall how long he’d remained on his knees by her. Tomas squirmed, and at times, squealed in his arms, and the light took flight from his wife’s eyes. He watched her cross whatever transom led to whatever world or void lay beyond this one. In the final thirty seconds of her life, her eyelids fluttered nine times. And then never again.

He was still on his knees when the police arrived. Still there when the ambulance driver placed a stethoscope to his wife’s chest
and then looked over at the lead detective and shook his head. By the time the coroner arrived, Joe stood a few feet from her corpse and those of Seppe Carbone and Enrico Pozzetta, answering the questions of Detective Poston and his partner.

When it came time to remove her body, the coroner, a disheveled young man with pale, yellowish skin and lank dark hair, approached Joe.

“I’m Dr. Jefferts,” he said softly. “I’d like to transport your wife, Mr. Coughlin, but I’m concerned it could be difficult for your son to see that.”

Tomas had wrapped himself around Joe’s leg and remained there throughout the detectives’ questions.

Joe looked at the young man and his wrinkled suit. His shirt and tie were spotted with flecks of dried soup, and Joe thought at first that it was unprofessional for such a messy man to be placed in charge of his wife’s autopsy. But another look in the man’s eyes, at the compassion that lived there for a small boy he’d never met and that boy’s grieving father, and Joe nodded his thanks.

Joe detached his son from his leg and lifted him to his chest, held him there. Tomas propped his chin on Joe’s shoulder. He still hadn’t wept. He’d simply repeated the word
Mama
, in a kind of breathless mantra. He’d fall silent for a while, and then it would start again. “Ma-ma, Ma-ma, Ma-ma . . .”

Dr. Jefferts said, “We’ll treat her with respect, Mr. Coughlin. You have my word.”

Joe shook his hand, not trusting himself to speak, and then carried his son off the pier.

And now, seven years removed from that shittiest of shitty days, he rarely dreamed of her at all.

The last time had been four or five months ago. In that dream, instead of bringing her a wet towel, he had brought her a grapefruit.
She looked up at him from her deck chair, her face too thin, almost skeletal, and said the same thing. “I changed my mind. Two is enough.”

He’d looked around her chair and the deck and couldn’t see any grapefruit. “But you don’t even have one.”

She gave him a look of confusion so total it bordered on contempt. “Some things you shouldn’t joke about.”

And the blood bloomed on her dress and her eyelids fluttered and then stopped.

After that dream, Joe had taken a glass of scotch out onto the gallery and smoked half a pack of cigarettes.

Tonight he found the scotch and the cigarettes, but he stayed inside and didn’t smoke as much. He fell asleep sitting up, waiting for the boy.