WHEN JOHN CAME back, it didn’t catch me by surprise. I had it down on the calendar, April 14. I was expecting it.
I had done my homework. I had cameras or snitches in the office, bedroom, kitchen and main room at the inn. Also, during various expeditions, taking advantage of Karen’s absence—and when I say absence, I mean just that she was three sheets to the wind, barely conscious—I had tried the Master Key in every imaginable lock without any result. I had found photos of John in his student days and when he was a football player, as well as during his time as an assistant coach. Chris wasn’t in any of them. I had also found photos of John, Mark and Keith on a boat, fishing and posing with a smile along with a bluefin tuna that was six feet long and over four hundred pounds, which did nothing but make me yearn to be on Mark’s boat. Shadows, all shadows.
John was quiet those first few days back, serious, out of sorts. Karen barely talked to him. It was clear this was an important exercise in containment and moderation. She told me that it was hard for John to reconnect with the world after being shut up in a submarine for four months. He needed time. Time he spent exclusively on getting Rick ready for sailing season—to the boy’s misfortune. He took him out of school early, with the blessing of the principal, who was a close friend. He didn’t want anything to compromise his selection of colleges and his ultimate objective: the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.
In any case, there wasn’t a single mention, gesture or action that could tie him to Chris. Maybe I had placed too many expectations on John? What did I hope would happen when he returned? Once more, I had the feeling that I had been deceiving myself, grasping with all my might onto his tangential connection to Chris. To his return. To keep the speeding train of my investigation from running off the rails, I supposed. To know that there would be at least one stop along the way. John’s return. That was my handbrake. Now I had the feeling that I had just blown through that station. And now what? Where did I go? How much fuel did I still have in the steam engine of my obsession?
“How long have we known each other?”
“A little more than seven months, I think.”
“I’d say fifteen days. Since we met each other here one day and switched the coffee to wine.”
“Yeah, that’s true . . .” It was a fact that our complicity had grown exponentially in that café, which was almost always empty except for us.
“So I guess enough time hasn’t passed . . .”
“For what?”
“To tell you I had an affair a few years ago.”
I tried to keep my face and body from reacting to the wave of nervousness I felt on hearing those words. Affair. A few years ago. Chris?
“Affair? Did I say affair? How awful,” she rebuked herself. “Like I was Nicholas Sparks. Which I would have liked, to be honest . . . I was hooking up with another guy for almost three years . . . And you know how Mark found out?” I shook my head. “Reading my last novel.”
“But the novel doesn’t say anything about infidelity.”
“That’s exactly it: I tried so hard to keep from writing about it that finally it became too obvious. And to top it off, the novel ended up being an insubstantial piece of shit,” she said, not hiding her anger. “Lots of times I ask myself to what extent I provoke the things that happen to me to have material for my novels . . . I think I’m afraid of easy cohabitation. The anesthesia of the middle class. It’s fine to write about it but not to fall into it.”
“Then I don’t know if this is the best place to look for stories.”
“This is the perfect place to look for stories. The more calm there is on the surface, the more lava there is underground about to erupt. What a shitty metaphor. Don’t ever let me write that in a novel. Though now that I think of it, I believe I already did . . .” She was beating herself up the way I did. That made me feel more normal. “Anyway, watch out.”
“What do you mean?”
“All I see and hear might end up in one of my novels.”
The DNA test results arrived by courier.
Ruby and Olivia II
Probability of relation: 0.00001%
I’m glad, really glad. But it doesn’t end here, Summer Monfilletto. By hook or by crook, I’m finding out who Olivia II’s father is.
Why this sudden commitment, if it didn’t have anything to do with Chris anymore? Because I was curious. No, it was much more than that. I had a need to know.