THE NEXT DAY, I had a lawyer’s appointment and couldn’t go on mapping out Chris’s route and tracing it with the red marker.
My mother called at my studio door.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, Mom, I’m fine. You don’t have to ask me if I’m all right every half hour.”
“Well, I put my ear up to the door, and I didn’t even hear you breathing . . . Remember you’ve got an appointment with the insurance lawyer today?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?”
“No, thanks . . .”
“Or Dad? You know they might try and scam you. I don’t trust lawyers.”
I opened the door, wedging my body so that my mother couldn’t peek inside.
“Don’t worry, Mom. It’s nothing . . . I’d rather go by myself. I’ll work it out.”
“OK, fine . . . But seriously, honey, why do you spend so much time shut up in there?”
“This is my painting studio, Mom. I’m a painter. I like to paint. It relaxes me. It makes me forget everything for a while.”
“It doesn’t smell like paint, honey,” she said to me without a trace of hostility. The opposite, in fact: she wanted me to know she was there for me. Suddenly, I realized I had turned my mother into a threat instead of a possible accomplice. I was about to break down and confess everything. Everything.
“I’m drawing, Mom. Pencils don’t have a scent.”
I closed the door. And locked it.
The lawyer looked like he’d come straight out of central casting and was seated in a typical lawyer’s office in a typical law firm.
“Your husband had a life insurance contract that covered accidental death. After looking over the autopsy report, which determined that he wasn’t under the influence of controlled substances or driving recklessly, and since the accident was the result of natural causes, the board has approved payment of the policy in full. Would you like to know how much it is?”
“A million and a half dollars . . .” I said inexpressively. We used to joke a lot about how well a fatal accident would work out.
When the lawyer began to advise me about various investments I could make to derive maximum benefit from the money, I stopped him gently. I didn’t want to speculate with the money. I didn’t want to use it. It was dirty money, and it wasn’t going to bring Chris back. But it might help you find him. It was a fleeting thought that passed rapidly through the corners of my mind, but I caught it and never let it go.
When I returned home, the piano had just arrived. No, I hadn’t forgotten about the gift for my presumptive child prodigy. I’d bought it that same day after returning from the funeral home. I’d shut myself up in the bathroom because I needed to cry alone. Then I opened the browser on my cell phone and typed into the search bar Piano stores buy online. I clicked the first link in the results. The grand pianos looked too ostentatious and pricey for me. A genius can make any piano sound good, I thought. So I bought an upright digital piano, a glossy white Roland (which sounded like a good brand). It cost $1,999 and took me less than four minutes to order.
Now that pretty piano, because it was very pretty, was in the living room against the wall where we had all the family photos.
“What’s that for?” Olivia asked, holding on to her Big Smelly Bear. She hadn’t let it go since I gave it to her.
“What do you mean, what’s it for? It’s a piano, Oli. For playing music.”
“Yeah, but why’s it here?”
“It’s here for you. It’s a present Daddy ordered for you.”
She looked under the lid and lifted the mat that covered the keys.
“Don’t you want to learn to play the piano?”
Olivia looked closer. I turned it on and she touched a key. A few times, but only that one key.
“You can touch more,” I said. “They all sound different.”
I played a complete scale. Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do . . . Olivia watched me with obviously disdainful curiosity.
“This isn’t a gift from Daddy.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, Daddy doesn’t give me presents like this.”
“What do you mean?”
“Daddy gives me better presents. Fun ones. If you had died, Daddy would have given me a pony to make me feel better, not a piano.”
At this point it was clear she wasn’t a genius, but she was certainly clever. She was about to leave the living room when I snatched the stuffed animal from her hands.
“Leave Big Smelly Bear alone! Give him to me! Mom!”
I used a voice at once reedy and garbled, as if I was the Big Smelly Bear.
“Olivia, if you don’t want the piano, I’ll take it. I love pianos.”
“Don’t use that voice. I don’t like it!”
I ignored her.
“And you know why I like pianos? Because then I can fart while I’m playing and nobody will hear it.”
I sat Big Smelly Bear in my lap and banged wildly on the piano’s keys with the animal’s front paws.
“You like it? It’s an original composition. It’s called ‘Poop Melody in Fart Minor.’ Dance for me, Olivia! Dance for me!”
Olivia had stopped trying to force the bear out of my hands and was laughing and dancing and turning around in a circle. Two weeks after Chris’s death, I had finally managed to make Olivia laugh. Not that she hadn’t laughed the entire time, but it had never been laughter I had provoked. Just for that, buying the piano had been worth it. Anyway, I had forty-five days to return it.
With the assistance of Karl, the banker with a heart and stains on his tie, I managed to figure out that Chris crossed the Wareham River on US 6. I traced his path until I made it to a minigolf course on Cranberry Highway called Sand & Surf, where I saw there was a security camera. A security camera on a minigolf course? The place was completely empty.
The manager, Charlie—I read it on his nametag—was walking indolently over the worn-out Astroturf surrounding the holes, a putter resting on his shoulder like a rifle. He had a shaved head with a scar down the center, ending right between his eyebrows.
The story of my brother lost to drugs moved him so deeply it made him cry, without tears, because according to him, when they opened up his head, in addition to losing 11 percent of his brain matter, his tear ducts dried up. He had to use drops throughout the day to keep his eyes from drying up. It turned out he’d split his head open when he was coked out of his gourd on a trip to Miami with a friend he met who was a gun nut like himself. “Nothing weird, no gay stuff, get it?” he added. He got the idea to do some balconing, which he explained to me, without my asking, was when you jumped from the balcony of your hotel into the pool. Clearly, he didn’t make it. Charlie had always wanted to be a marine, but they turned him down because he had a slight limp.
Afterward he applied for practically every branch of the US armed forces, then the state and county police, forest rangers, highway patrol . . . Zilch. So he’d ended up there, with a putter his lone weapon to fend off the local drunks and pranksters. They installed the security camera, he explained to me, when one father accused another of kicking the wooden beam at the boundary of the hole to make his son’s ball go in so that he would win the championship. In the subsequent fight, the accused father wound up stabbing the other man in the stomach with the flag marking the hole.
Charlie not only offered to give me the footage I needed, but also wanted to join me in my investigation. If I was going to delve into the underworld, I’d need protection, someone to cover my back, and he wasn’t afraid to take a bullet in the chest for me and “the little creature I was carrying inside me.”
I gently declined his offer and left with the recordings safely in my possession.
Not all the characters who helped me trace out what I silently referred to as “the route of the red marker” toward Chris’s point of departure or destination were so peculiar. Several refused to collaborate and didn’t feel moved in the least by my story or my personal circumstances. Others even threatened to turn me in for trying to bribe them. Some only had the security cameras for show and others erased footage daily. Occasionally, I was forced to make decisions blindly, assuming I was following Chris’s route, only to discover he hadn’t passed through there, and I’d retrace my footsteps and try another one. But luckily for me—or unfortunately—we lived in a society that was obsessed with defending its territory.
Eventually, I found that Chris had crossed Buzzards Bay, passing by the Bay Motor Inn—information courtesy of the manager, Hugo—until he reached a huge traffic circle close to Bourne Bridge, where a number of main roads meet. There was a gun shop there with an on-site shooting range.
It turned out that the owner of the place, a coarse-looking woman of about fifty, had all of her security footage from more than five years back. Her father, the former owner, was in a nursing home with senile dementia. She went to visit him every Monday morning—the only day the range closed—and took him the tapes for the week, because they were the only thing he liked to watch, the only thing that roused him from his slow and agonizing decline.
“So, tell me, Angela,” she eventually said, “how many pistols are you willing to buy to get me to give you what you want?”
Chris had taken the exit onto US 28 East and crossed Bourne Bridge, one of only two bridges leading onto or off of Cape Cod. Cape Cod? Chris didn’t like the cape one bit. At least, that’s what he said. I had spent a few summer vacations with my parents in Chatham when I was a little girl and then a teenager, and had lovely memories of it, but I’d never gone back since, in part because of Chris, because places with too many crowds made him nervous, especially during vacation season. He’d say, You go on vacation to feel calm, not stressed out all day sitting in traffic or going nuts trying to find a parking place I can’t take the idea of everyone going to the same place like sheep, as if there weren’t other magnificent places, calmer and cheaper, all up and down the East Coast. I vaguely remembered that on one of his business trips, at least two years ago, he had been in a country club in some part of Cape Cod. But the deal hadn’t panned out, as I could corroborate when I looked through all his contracts without finding any pertaining to the cape.
Could he have been lying to me? I suddenly asked myself if the motivation for that visceral rejection of Cape Cod might have been to keep me away from there, from whatever it was he was hiding. No, it couldn’t be. Chris couldn’t stand crowds. He didn’t like big cities. And besides, a place you can only get to by bridge makes me claustrophobic, he had said to me once. Yet there he was now, on my computer screen, turning onto the exit leading directly onto Cape Cod.