32
Polar Bear Swim
The weather remained pleasant after Labor Day, but the sky lost its richly saturated blueness due to the changing angle of the sun. They spent September pulling the boats out of the water with a Hostar hydraulic lift. The operator was crane-certified. A three-man crew made four with Ian. Corey was the helper. They brought the boats on land and set them on tripodal jack stands, then took out the docks and stacked the sections. The banks of the river were going to freeze. To winterize a boat they bent a long narrow rib of wood from bow to stern and stretched a skin of plastic over it.
Joan and Corey spoke again that month. He heard something in her voice.
“You’re upset with me. What is it?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m upset about anything.”
“You are. I hear the anger.”
She recalled Corey’s mentioning of an individual from MIT who wore a cup at all times, last year in his kitchen. “So you did know the kid who killed her. And you did tell Leonard about her.”
“I never said I didn’t.”
“I wonder what you said to him. I guess we’ll never know.”
“Joan, what are you saying?”
She said it was a damn shame Tom wasn’t alive. She’d never known his daughter, but Joan was sure she’d been a nice girl who hadn’t wanted to lose her life.
“You weren’t honest with me,” Joan declared.
“Well, I’m being honest now.”
“You didn’t invite me to your mother’s funeral. You should have.”
“It was out of my control.”
“I guess I didn’t know you.”
They finished winterizing the marina in October. Corey told Ian he hoped to see him in the spring. Ian said he was dreading it already.
“Then again, I might not be seeing you. I might be in court.”
The rigger listened, curly head lowered, chin to chest, looking at his belly, iron-claw hands at his sides, as Corey talked:
“They think I killed a girl. She was my friend. I didn’t do it.”
“I don’t know what to think of you.”
“I understand. I hope you don’t regret knowing me.”
“It takes all kinds,” Ian said and went back to work without inviting Corey to help him.
They parted.
Corey got a new job at a business that made kitchen countertops off Commercial Street in Weymouth. The stone came in by flatbed, the slabs leaning together like books on a library shelf separated by wooden spacers. The driver unstrapped it and they picked it up by forklift and drove it into the warehouse. Maneuvering granite was based on tilting, rocking and lifting together. Corey stayed off to the side. The men didn’t know him. They cut marble with a circular saw and used water to wash away the slurry.
In his dreams at night he saw the murder.
Gray days, winter ahead. His depression returned. He turned nineteen. He went to work without enthusiasm. He waited for anything to happen—even to hear from the police.
On November 12, he was summoned to the office of the Suffolk County prosecutor, who was reviewing the Hibbard case because the alleged killer had gone to MIT, which was in his jurisdiction. Corey took the train to Government Center—that open stadium which looks like a massive skate park. There was a courthouse faced in marble with Egyptian friezes, clean, sparkling granite, new, bright, smooth, silent, sealed with green glass, running silent silver elevators. The prosecutor was around the corner in a structure without character, a narrow high-rise that could have been an apartment tower, scaffolding around the entrance.
A woman behind a bulletproof barricade buzzed him in. The prosecutor was a trim, short, white-haired man in his seventies wearing a charcoal suit. He was talking to a police detective in a belted leather jacket when Corey entered. The detective eased to the back of the room and everybody sat. Gold-framed oil paintings of Washington and Lafayette hung on the walls, these tall figures seeming powdered white and spot-lit against their dark backgrounds. Under the feet of Corey’s chair, there was a woven rug adorned with fleur-de-lis.
The prosecutor looked at Corey from across his massive antique desk. “So here you are,” he said. “On paper you don’t look so good.” He glanced at a folder on his desk top. “Vandalism. Harassment. Assault—that was dropped. Theft. Restitution. A restraining order. Did you deal drugs in high school? Never mind. I see you thinking about your answer. And now a suspect in a murder. How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“And you’re a high school dropout. That fits. Any idea what you’ve got planned for the next nineteen years? Want to spend it in MCI?”
“What’s MCI?”
“Massachusetts Correctional Institutions.”
“No, I don’t.”
“If you lie to me, that is exactly where you will go. Have you been advised of your right to counsel? You don’t have to talk to me. You can walk out that door, but if you do, you’re not getting back in. Now I’m going to ask you some questions and, so help me God, you better tell me the truth. Who killed Molly Hibbard?”
“I think Adrian did. He called me and admitted it.”
“You and Adrian were friends.”
“At one time but not when this happened.”
“Did you plan it with him?”
“No. Molly was my friend.”
“Did you go with him to see her?”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Why do we have this letter where it says you want to rape somebody to know what it feels like?”
“Those are not my words. Adrian wrote that.”
“Your father is Leonard—how do you say his name?—Agoglia. Security guard at MIT. Gives us the letter. Says he’s worried about you. Wants you to get some help. You were in family court?”
“Yes. He was phone-harassing our house.”
“What’s his role in this?”
“I don’t know. I think he planned it.”
“He says you, you say him.”
“I say him, yes. I don’t know how else Adrian would know Molly existed. I think my father told him to hurt her. I’m convinced of that. I believe that in my heart.”
“So you gave—what do we have here?—pots and pans, knives—to the Quincy police and said they belonged to your father?”
“They did belong to him. That was his bag—I stole it—I admit it—and threw it in the marsh.”
“Did he use these things in a crime?”
“I have no knowledge that he did. I just felt it was possible, based on knowing him. Did the police test them?”
“Test them for what?”
“DNA.”
“I don’t know why they would do that. Your father’s not a suspect in a crime.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“No, I haven’t because I don’t need to.” The prosecutor raised his voice. “If I feel like talking to him, I’ll get around to it. Right now, I’m talking to you. Problem?”
“No problem.”
“Just answer his questions,” the detective said from the back of the room.
“Fella, if you give me a hard time, I’ll chase you out of here so fast your head’ll spin.”
“I understand,” said Corey. “I’m not giving you a hard time.”
“What happened in Cambridge?”
“Are you talking about Molly’s dad?”
“I’m talking about Molly’s dad and Adrian Reinhardt, who wound up dead of a collision. I want to know how that happened.”
“I went over to Molly’s house to see Tom. We got in the truck and started driving. I told him I knew where Adrian lived and we drove there. And Adrian was outside. I said, ‘That’s him.’ Tom told me to get out of his truck and I did. I got back on the train and went home. I heard about it the next day.”
“Did you know Tom was going to run over Mr. Reinhardt?”
“I didn’t know what he was going to do.”
“Did you talk about it?”
“It was in the air.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing was said out loud. But I don’t have a problem with the fact that Adrian got killed.”
“That’s not an intelligent thing to say to a prosecutor.”
“I’m just telling you the truth.”
The prosecutor looked at the detective, who said, “Just stick to what he asks you.”
“You did or didn’t know what Molly’s dad was going to do before he did it?” resumed the prosecutor.
“I didn’t know.”
“Did you have a reason to want to see Mr. Reinhardt killed?”
“Yeah. He killed Molly, didn’t he? Shouldn’t he pay for that?”
“Do you have a problem containing yourself?”
“Sometimes.”
“That’s not a compliment.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What do you think of Mr. Goltz, Detective?”
“I’d like to see him take a polygraph.”
“So would I.”
“I’ll gladly take one,” Corey said.
He took the polygraph on November 22 in an interview room at the Quincy police station.
The day after he took it—Sunday—he woke up early and walked into town as the sun was rising. Everything was silent. The church bells hadn’t rung yet. Orange light was flooding Walter Hannon Parkway.
In the plaza next to Star, he came upon a deep, first-floor warehouse behind a glass storefront. The door was open, but the lights were off; the place was strangely empty. The room was filled with iron barbells.
He moved through the silent field of weights. There was a heavy bag in back. A set of mismatched boxing gloves lay on the floor, one of them pink—a woman’s. He put them on and tapped it with a jab.
After a minute, he began working around the bag—little patty-pat punches, as if he were tapping you on the shoulder, saying, “Hi, remember me?”—until the first light perspiration broke out on his head—then every fourth punch had a crack to it. A minute of this went by, then he pounded the bag five times in a row. The dam broke and he started beating the heavy leather methodically, burying his knuckles in it with every punch he landed, leaving fist holes in the stuffing—sweat from his face wetting his gloves, flying off in spray. He thudded and swatted the bag in violent furious mathematical-sounding bursts, which ended with a shin kick. His shin kicks detonated. The bag jerked and swung. The chains jangled like a tambourine accompaniment to his drum solo.
Drenched in sweat, he went to the parking lot, sat down in the cold sun with the rocky pavement under his haunches and the sun shining through the thin barrier of his eyelids, filling his head with light.
After a time, he went into Star and bought steak and charcoal and went back home and grilled it in the yard, the smoke billowing up in his face, his eyes on the flames, watching their little story unfold, the rich charcoal smell of the steak, the liveliness of this chemical process, the hot steak in his fingers and teeth—sucking up the blood-coal-juice-oil-salt, standing there in his winter coat as the grill died, the bone in his hand, black on his fingers, the sun in the sky, the slow fullness as the meat broke down in his stomach’s hydrochloric acid and filtered fats and acids out into his bloodstream, his satisfied settled state.
And now to drink some water, something sweet, some soda.
He wondered what the prosecutor would decide and if he would end up going to prison.
He had always thought he was going to get back in the cage. A Brazilian jiujitsu school called Trifecta Martial Arts had opened above the Family Dollar. There was a basement boxing gym across the street, below an African hair-braiding stylist. He’d always figured he’d get back to training, eventually get back to Bestway and impress his old coach with a better, stronger version of himself.
But now, as he thought about Molly, he felt he had to do something bigger—something of which prizefighting was merely a subcomponent: warfare at its highest level—expeditionary, total, encompassing the realms of sea, air, land—even space—something so great it could kill him, forcing him to overcome with finality the inner weakness and self-regard that had allowed him to fail everyone around him—a path to honor, invincibility, pride and moral purity—where his father had indulged in scandal, obscenity and dysfunction.
The weeks passed—he went on cutting stone in Weymouth—then, a few days before Christmas when it was gray after a snow, he found his way to a back alley on an asphalt cliff above Star Market, above a loading dock protected by a rusted iron railing, where there was a single-story building like a postal substation with a poster on the door of young people in uniform gazing up at jets wreathed in the Stars and Stripes. He went inside and down a hallway, passing a roomful of men in faded camouflage fatigues and tan jump boots, all burned red, a shock of color in the barren whiteness of the office, evidently here from somewhere hot—Marines—and at the end of the corridor found the Navy.
The Navy recruiter was a hulk of a man with bulging biceps and full sleeve tattoos hunched over a laptop, hunting and pecking the keys. His room looked like a telemarketing operation—folding chairs and tables, landline telephones, pencil stubs, scraps of paper littering a desk.
Corey told him he intended to be a Navy SEAL.
The man looked up. “That’s extremely hard. No one can guarantee you that.”
He gave him a pencil stub and some pieces of scrap paper and had Corey take a timed, multiple-choice test to determine his mental and moral fitness for the Navy.
Corey went into his mother’s bedroom on Christmas morning, took her reading glasses off the nightstand and looked through them. They made the venetian blinds sharply precise. He set them on the bedspread. He began going through the room, taking each thing of hers and putting it with the glasses—silver jewelry, elephant ornaments, woven purse, driver’s license with the sad picture of her face—taken after she had been diagnosed. Discovering her phallic glass pipe, he hastened to throw it out. He kept cancelled credit cards, South Asian ornaments, clothbound notebooks she had used for shopping and to-do lists, written in what had used to be a beautiful hand.
He hadn’t realized how beautiful her handwriting had been. A note said: “Application, three references, timing belt, inspection sticker, greens, onions, butter, poem.” On the overleaf, she had drawn an abstract design of a flower and the words “I Can See It.”
He found several messages she’d written expressing her hopes for him and bemoaning her struggle with herself—willing herself to struggle past her tendency to self-defeat. Then he found a letter she’d written after getting diagnosed. Like the others, it was addressed to no one. He didn’t finish it. He folded it shut. Her writings got shakier over time. The entries grew shorter and shorter.
Most of what she’d done was beginnings without endings.
But he kept finding more beginnings. She’d written him a partial letter. The handwriting changed halfway and he realized she’d dictated it to Joan. It dated from his trouble with the law: “My dear son…I’ve got my eye on you…” it finished. He read it carefully. She’d wanted him to not throw his life away. He put the letter in his room.
He took her mandala down and folded it.
The next day, Sunday, he went into her closet and took out her clothes, aware of their weight, smell, variety. The things at the back of the closet were different from the things at the front. She had more clothes than he’d ever seen her wear. In the middle of the day, he drove to Goodwill and gave them her clothes and drove away before they could open the bags in front of him.
The house seemed somehow messier when he got back. Everywhere he looked were medical documents, the endless forms and flyers, doctors’ bills, laboratory invoices, insurance company mailers, notices from the state for disability, credit card statements, tax bills, ALS: What It’s All About. He tore it all up—it made a sea of paper in the center of the floor—and stuffed it by the armload in the garbage.
He got his wrench and attacked the wheelchair, took apart the leg rests, broke it down and took it to the car. He unwired the Boss license plate and kept it. The oxygen and suction machines went next. He drove to a medical supply in Randolph with the trunk tied down with clothesline and unloaded everything on the sidewalk.
At home again, he vacuumed. Night was falling. He ate chicken fingers, drank a Mountain Dew and turned the lights on.
He was up all night again. Her books and papers, writings about art, society and the self, he preserved. Over and over, he found writings in which she reflected honestly on who she was, grappling with herself, exhorting herself to fight on and do something she could be proud of before it was too late. It had been the theme of her life for decades, long before she had gotten sick.
He saw The Flower Ornament Scripture in her milk crate. He hadn’t opened it in years. He turned the pages—sutra after sutra—Sanskrit on the left, English on the right—Chief in Goodness, Purifying Practice, Super-knowledge, Ascent to Suyama Paradise, Eulogies, Awakening by Light.
On her laptop, he found an abortive essay she had been working on the winter leading up to her diagnosis: run-on word-jammed pages fragmented into stop-and-start ideas, author’s notes: “Need to study French painters!” “Go back to the Greeks!” The last line was “I’ve gotten some bad news. Can I use this?” He went back to the beginning and read it. It didn’t sound like her. It was by turns highly technical—bristling with dates and specialized knowledge about Mycenaean friezes—nudes came flowingly to life in 480 B.C.—and polemical, strident, funny, interrupted by comic interludes and aggressive flights of fancy. It was disorganized too, a wild rough draft with long riffs on small points she built into bigger and bigger mountains—a Nietzschean expansion. There were passages that had come out ringingly well. Most of it was finding her way—and then she’d found it: flares of fire. Bigger, smarter, meaner, surer—more daring—than the mother he’d ever known in person. The start of a new person, but an unfinished one.
He preserved her writings in a waterproof plastic tub marked “The Real Gloria.”
In the new year, he moved out of his mother’s house to a room in town, a few blocks from Molly’s bars. Parking was free. There was an outside staircase to his floor. Women lived on the second floor, men on the third. The rooming house was the size of a barn. He kept the old hatchback downstairs in the snow. Two guys lived on his floor, a landscaper who was always working and a pot smoker who never worked, who woke up in the afternoon and played guitar all night. They shared the kitchen and bath. Corey had brought nothing with him but his sleeping bag and his boots, a few books, a towel laid out to dry on the radiator with a toothbrush and a bar of soap. Everything else was in a storage unit behind a Master lock at Quincy Adams.
In the winter mornings, he left the house before dawn when it was all guys in pickups on the roads, listening to sports radio, windows up, heaters on, eating sandwiches at stoplights, waiting for diesel trucks to roll through. In Weymouth, a giant man named Bench, the boss’s right-hand man, was always there before him—in mackinaw and rubber boots, picking his way around the stone in the half dark. The daily delivery came in and they cut stone all day, filling the drain with milky slurry, or went out on installations.
In the evenings after work, Corey went to Northeast Health and Fitness and trained according to the guidelines from the Naval Special Warfare website.
One night, instead of going to the gym, he ran from the city center all the way down to his mother’s house, hopped the seawall and ran along the ocean.
Soon, he was going over the seawall, regularly, in construction boots, running in water, getting wet on purpose, doing calisthenics in the sand. The SEALs had a deck they called The Grinder; he had a grinder of his own—a spot where he did sit-ups on asphalt deliberately to lacerate his back. He sprinted, picked up lightning-scorched logs, so heavy his skeleton’s integrity was in peril. Worried about tearing apart his shoulder, he cast the timber off and it thudded to the ground. It would have crushed his foot if he hadn’t pulled his leg away. One night, wearing a sack of wet sand on his back, he toiled down the beach, running on his hands like a bear.
He was pushing against an internal limit, the selfish pain-fear boundary in his head, trying to move it. It was the heaviest log to move. Every day he pushed against it, and every night someone came along when he was sleeping and moved it back. His goal was to move it all the way to the horizon.
On the fifth of February, he drove alone to Wollaston beach and parked. On the ocean horizon, the clouds formed a stack of horizontal lines. The stratospheric winds were curling the top row of clouds, blowing them apart and driving them across the sky like suds in a pan. He was shivering in his clothes. He stripped, ran out and threw himself in the heart-stopping water.