I
They fled. Tom Phillips to Orlando, Brady Johnson to Dallas, Jeff Lombardo to Chicago, Tim Forrester to L.A. David couldn’t think of a single friend from high school who still lived in Detroit, or anywhere near it. David himself had moved to Denver, but now he was back.
It was the very first morning of his return that he noticed the photos, a light-skinned black man and a blond woman, side-by-side in the Free Press, front page and above the fold. Recognition came slowly, then suddenly. He took the paper and sat down to study it. Three nights ago these two had been gunned down in an E-Class Mercedes just north of Greektown, a dozen shots fired at close range. The paper identified the male victim, Dirk Burton, as a retired FBI agent. The woman was Natalie Brooks. The paper speculated on what they were doing in a place and car like that, on whether the killing was racial, which was doubted by a police source, who said violence against interracial couples tended not to happen in black neighborhoods. Perhaps the cops didn’t yet know they were brother and sister.
David dated Natalie in high school, a two-year affair that fell apart when they went to different colleges. Natalie was the serious love of his youth, maybe his life, unforgettable still. Evans was the family name. David recalled when as a teenager he pulled his Chevy into the Evanses’ driveway and parked behind a large black Mercedes with fat wheels and tinted windows. Natalie walked out of the house with a black man, tall and broad-shouldered. He moved with an athlete’s swagger. “This is my brother, Dirk,” Natalie said.
David had known Natalie since she was fourteen, and there had never been mention of a brother, black or otherwise. The Evans sisters were blond; they would have been considered fair in Sweden. In the milky summer light, on the edge of adulthood, David sensed that there was an awful lot going on in the world he had no idea about. He learned that Natalie, her sister, Carolyn, and Dirk shared the same mother, Tina, a German immigrant who’d made her way to Detroit in the fifties. Later, Natalie related the story of Dirk’s birth: rushed to the hospital when her water broke, Tina was wheeled from the white ward to the black when the father showed up. Then, as now, half white was black.
It was the one time David met Dirk. He showed David the Mercedes; they leaned into the car through opposite doors, their heads together in front of the German sound system. The vehicle, seized from a drug dealer and pushed into service for Dirk’s undercover work, was more expensive portable stereo system than automobile. “You can’t believe the shit these dopers spend money on,” Dirk said. Then he turned up the bass till the vibrations made David’s sternum hum.
Dirk looked a little older in the newspaper photo (it had been twenty-five years), his hair now shaved down to stubble. Natalie was still beautiful, blond and angular. It was hard to think of them as dead. Natalie especially. It was as if his youth had died with her.
• • •
SIX WEEKS HAD passed since his father called. “It’s your mother,” the old man said. She was forgetting things; often she became disoriented, so much so that he could no longer let her drive. She was belligerent. She swore often.
“Mom?” David asked.
“A blue streak. You can’t believe the things that come out of her mouth.”
David asked what the doctors thought.
“Dementia. Wonderful, huh? Like I can’t tell that myself. These doctors are no help. There’s no cure, just some precautionary things you can do.”
“Like what?”
“Lock her in the house, so she doesn’t wander outside in her housecoat. Still, she can get out. I’m always on guard.”
“Jeez, Dad.”
“Jesus, hey-ZEUS, Yahveh, Allah. Pick any damn god you want. It won’t help.”
David sighed.
“I need you to come home,” his father said.
“To Detroit?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Okay. I’ll visit.”
“Not just for a visit. I need you to come and stay.”
“Stay?” David asked. Only the demented moved to Detroit; his father had to know this. “Why?”
“Because I don’t know what to do.”
• • •
AT FIRST DAVID resisted the idea. He was sitting in his office, looking out through the haze to the tawny foothills of the Rocky Mountains, when he decided there was nothing important holding him to Denver, or anywhere. He was three years a partner at Cornish and Kohl, a position not nearly as lucrative as he had hoped. He specialized in estate planning and asset protection. “Well,” his father said, “people are always dying, and the asset-protection side of things must mean you’re protecting people from other lawyers.” Solomon Halpert had worked his entire life in manufacturing—for him the only worthy profession, other than perhaps medicine—and this was as close to an endorsement as David was going to get. Despite the subject of David’s work, it never seemed life-or-death; he didn’t see how three months off would leave anyone in the lurch.
He rented an apartment in the suburb of Birmingham, not far from his parents’ house. His father had been slow to give up on the city proper, even after ’67, but move he did, first to Oak Park (three miles north of 8 Mile Road, the green line with the city proper) and then out to Maple (15 Mile) before David reached high school. David’s room was still intact in that house. His mother had taken down the Led Zeppelin poster, and the one of the Lange Girl (“Soft Inside”), but it was otherwise the same, twin bed and bookshelves with paperback copies of The Hobbit, Paper Lion, and other books of his youth. It was a museum, that room; he couldn’t stay there. Duty was one thing, but he could only go so far. Besides, he suspected his father wanted him close, but not that close.
• • •
“YOUR FATHER THINKS I’ve lost my mind,” his mother told him when he walked in the door. No hello, even. She hugged him, pronounced him too thin, and told him she’d fix him a drink. She was still a trim woman, small, her hair cut short and dyed shoe-polish black.
“Are you?” he asked.
“Am I what?” she said.
“Losing your mind.”
“Not yet.” She looked back at his father. “But he’s pushing me.”
David stuck his hand out, but his father bypassed it and hugged him. The man was a former marine, and not a hugger. “Thank you,” he whispered in David’s ear. His mother, meanwhile, was making drinks at the bar. “She insisted on cooking,” his father whispered.
“So?”
“You’ll see.”
The house had the same framed prints from the Galerie Maeght, the same black upright Steinway, unmoved for three decades. His parents didn’t play but had bought the piano for David, then forced him to take lessons because his mother had read that studying music was good for a student’s math scores. She probably figured that if she didn’t get a scientist she’d get a concert pianist, rather than neither.
She handed him a scotch. As a kid he couldn’t stand the smell; now he drank it only at home, for medicinal purposes.
“So tell me,” she said, “how’s Julie?”
The ex-wife, back in Boston now. He hadn’t talked to her in two and a half years. He was glad to be free of her, and yet it still hurt like hell.
“Good,” he said.
“Tell her I said hello. You should marry that girl, you know.”
He looked at his father, who stared back, then nodded just slightly.
“Mom, I did marry her.”
She studied him. “Oh,” she said at last. She looked away, perhaps remembering, perhaps not, and then retreated to the kitchen.
• • •
LATER, HIS MOTHER went up to get ready for bed. Dinner had been excruciating. She’d made pasta but drained it too soon, so that each bite was a deafening crunch. She hadn’t washed the lettuce; on his first and only bite of salad he found himself chewing dirt. Again, it was terribly loud. His mother asked him ludicrous questions—“How are your grades?”—and, worst of all, she wanted to know about Cory, her one grandson, dead now more than four years.
He was a man divided against himself, burning with undying love for his dead child and at the same time wanting to forget, to put the whole thing out of his mind, to be nothing more than a new person, a man without a past. Tough in your parents’ house.
Cory would have been sixteen this year, but four years ago he’d gone skiing with his friend Jess Barker and Jess’s brother and mother and father. Coming out of the mountains on a snowy night, Jess’s father called from I-70 to say they were in Georgetown, moving now; they’d be there in maybe an hour. But then the traffic stopped and a semi ran into them, killing the Barker family whole and destroying the Halperts just the same.
David calculated that the accident happened maybe twenty minutes after he’d talked to Lance Barker; for almost two hours he was oblivious of the disaster. Then he called and got voicemail. Forty minutes later he saw the accident report on Channel 9. Still, he didn’t make the connection. That came later, when he called the state police, who took his name and number and then sent a trooper to his door. Snow collected on the plastic that covered the trooper’s flat-brimmed hat. The man wore a look so grim that David understood immediately, looking at this stranger, a picture of bad news.
• • •
“YOU SEE WHAT I’m talking about?” His father handed David another Johnnie Walker Black, the smell of home.
David nodded.
“Sometimes I find her sitting on the bed, crying. When I ask what’s wrong, she says she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
David studied his father, who had fought in Korea, then spent three years in Japan before returning to work for Bethlehem Steel. Deep vertical lines divided his cheeks. His eyebrows had grown bushy. Unlike David, he had all of his hair, a lot of it dark for a man of seventy-four.
“I’ve talked to her about it,” he said.
“About the forgetting?” David asked.
“About the home.” His father had put her on the waiting list for a place in Orchard Lake, a fine institution, he said, with locked, coded doors, so she couldn’t wander away.
“Are you sure?” David asked.
“Unless you think you can look after her. And believe me, you have no idea what that entails. Sometimes—” His father stopped talking. He waved his hand, as if to say, Never mind.
“What?”
He shook his head, but spoke anyway.
“Sometimes she wets the bed. Or she forgets to get up and go to the bathroom. I have her in diapers now. Your mother. She was something once.”
• • •
IT FELT GOOD to be out of Denver. In coming back to Detroit, it was as if he were skirting his bad times, going back before they happened. David’s apartment sat walking distance from Birmingham’s commercial core; it was a clean, furnished ground-floor one-bedroom rented easily for three months, so happy was the landlord to fill a vacancy. David liked the idea of walking, of not having to get in a car (very un-Detroit) to buy a sandwich. His folks’ house was a mile away, close enough to walk if he wanted.
A few evenings into his return the newspaper with Dirk’s and Natalie’s picture still lay on the kitchen counter. He found an old phone book and located the Evanses’ number. It was too late to call, so he wrote the number out and left it on the Formica countertop.
He wondered what his father would do when his mother went into the home. David resolved to take him on excursions. They could revisit all the old sites—the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, Greektown, the DIA, the Ren Cen, Belle Isle—just as they’d done when David was a boy. He thought of these places, embedded in his memory, and felt he was considering ruins. But no, they had to be there still; it hadn’t been that long. He vowed to see them all; perhaps bearing witness would preserve them.
He decided to take a walk. It was a warm and humid evening. He strolled down Merrill Street, past the Varsity Shop, the one landmark he remembered, where his father used to buy him cleats, baseball gloves, his first cup. The year his Little League team won the championship the team photo went up on the wall, and it stayed there for a year, till it was taken down to make way for newer champions.
He continued on. The shops were all closed for the night, but Birmingham maintained its sheen of prosperity. He felt possessed with an odd feeling of well-being, walking the streets that he’d known as a teenager. He could hear traffic nearby on Woodward. The air had become damp, portending rain; there was a far-off sound of electrical disturbance, the thunder a low rumble, big guns in the distance. He walked on, confident, as if things here might work out right.
II
HER MOTHER SLEPT, sedated, unable to function without a drug of some sort. Last night Carolyn had helped her with the child-resistant top of the prescription bottle, tapped out two yellow pills as instructed, remembering the time long ago when her mother had given her children’s aspirin, little orange tablets, or antibiotics prescribed by her father. Carolyn’s mother believed in pills and their life-changing qualities, even if the change was nothing more than a good night’s sleep.
Natalie was dead. Dirk was dead. The Bureau was evasive, either reluctant to divulge details or not in possession of them. The one thing Carolyn knew was that Dirk had not been lost. He knew the city, the white areas as well as the black, and especially the dangerous parts, the “Klingon air space,” as he called them, where he’d worked undercover (drugs, guns, you name it) for the better part of two decades. “Not that Bloomfield Hills or Grosse Pointe are necessarily easier,” he once told her. “At least for me.” He gave up the undercover work when he turned forty, saying it was a young man’s game, and too dangerous. That was more than ten years ago. The Mercedes he died in was his own; he’d developed a taste for them.
Carolyn was home, but this wasn’t really home. Her mother had sold their house when Carolyn’s father died and moved to this townhome, where she paid a monthly fee and someone else did the maintenance and groundskeeping, chores which had once been the province of Carolyn’s father, Arthur. He was English by birth, trained at Johns Hopkins, an immigrant like her mother, but also different. Perhaps being English made him as forbidden as Dirk’s father. It was hard to think of your mother in rebellion, but she’d left Germany, come to America, married a black man, then an Englishman. Something must have been going on.
• • •
TINA STAGGERED INTO the kitchen a little after ten; she’d gone to bed the night before at nine. Carolyn watched as she heaped two teaspoons of sugar into a demitasse of coffee, then added cream. Real cream. Old World all the way. She waited for her mother to sit, exchanged a couple of pleasantries, and then asked, “Mom, you came all the way from Germany—why did you pick Detroit?”
“Back then,” her mother said, “Detroit was a very prosperous place. One of the most prosperous in the world.”
“Detroit?”
“Sure. Besides, I was nineteen. I had a friend I met in New York, Trudy Schembler, also German. She said there was plenty of money in Detroit. Lots of Germans also. So we came. I didn’t like New York. I came from a small town. New York was . . . pfft. Crazy. Too many people.”
“And you thought Detroit was a small town?” Carolyn asked.
“What did I know?”
Carolyn walked to the counter and poured herself more coffee.
“How old are you now? Forty-seven?” her mother asked.
“Thanks, Mom. Forty-two.”
“You look good. You’ve taken care of yourself. How’s my grandson?”
“Pretty full of himself, actually.”
“Why don’t you bring him to visit me?”
“Mom, why don’t you come to us? I have a job. Marty has a job. Kevin’s in school. We’re three and you’re—” She stopped herself. Oh, God, she thought. She hadn’t seen Dirk and Natalie in over a year, and now she would never see them. She looked at her mother, who was carefully sipping her coffee, her blond hair (dyed now) helter-skelter on her head. You’re alone, Carolyn thought, but she didn’t say it, and that was okay, because her mother was always happy with a little silence. She thought of Kevin and the impossibility of losing him, the horror of losing a child; her mother had lost two and there were simply no words for that. Silence would have to do.
• • •
THE FUNERAL HAD taken place two days before, Catholic per her mother’s wishes. When Carolyn tried to count the times she’d been to church, other than for weddings and funerals, she couldn’t get to five. At the cemetery the bodies were buried next to each other, beside Arthur. Their mother’s plot was there, too. Very German, Carolyn thought, to have a plan like that right to the end.
The funeral took place on a warm day, the leaves on the beech and several oaks full and fluttering. Carolyn stood by her mother. It seemed that almost half the crowd was dark-suited men, FBI agents, more men than she would have guessed her brother knew, though she didn’t know Dirk that well; they didn’t have the same father and had never even lived in the same house, didn’t come from the same neighborhood, had only this odd connection of German blood. She reached over and touched her mother’s arm.
At the end of the service she and her mother threw dirt on the graves. Carolyn felt the finality of it then. The priest held her as she sobbed. It had always been up to her to be the stoic one, the responsible one, though what she’d done was to run as far away from her family as she could get. Now Dirk and Natalie were dead. It felt as if she’d had some hand in it, as if by her absence she had allowed it to happen.
• • •
SHE WAITED TILL almost eleven, then called Marty on his cell, knowing he’d be driving Kevin to camp. It was only eight there, probably cooler than a summer day in Michigan, though it would stay that same lovely temperature for months. It never really got cold. If there was anything she missed about Detroit it was the fall, the special smell the air got as the leaves came alight, then fell. “Football weather,” it was called, a phrase that had no meaning in southern California.
“Hey,” Marty said. “How’s it going?”
“Great,” she said. Marty and Kevin had flown back home for work and camp the day after the funeral. Carolyn planned to stay on—“Ten days or so,” she told Marty—to see her mother through.
“It couldn’t even be good,” Marty said. He’d warned her she wouldn’t make the week and a half, but then again, he’d never much liked her mother, a sentiment that was returned. “He lacks a deep soul,” her mother had warned her before the marriage, but Carolyn had ignored this, as she did all her mother’s warnings.
She asked to talk to Kevin.
“Hey, Mom,” the boy said. She was reminded of the Bluetooth, that the boy could hear everything.
“How’s camp?”
“Fine.”
“Doing anything special?” She waited for the reply, but the call had been dropped. This was how it was in the cell age; so many conversations ended without a goodbye.
• • •
BACK IN THE kitchen, her mother was still sitting at the table in her bathrobe, making no attempt to get up or even read the paper. Carolyn asked her if she wanted to go for a drive.
“No, but you go. I’ll be fine.”
“It would do you good to get out,” Carolyn said.
“I don’t think so.”
Carolyn considered whether to counter this challenge and decided against it. She could pretend her mother was always right until she went home to California.
The day was bleached white, a high, bright cloud layer seeming to make everything fuzzy. The rental car was a Mazda—unfathomable in the old days, a rental agency in Detroit renting a Japanese model—and she drove it down Telegraph. Her knowledge of the area had faded; she’d left at eighteen for good. She decided to go to Hancock Street to see the place where her brother and sister died. She thought she might be able to move on better if she could see the spot. She hadn’t seen Natalie in almost two years, not since she and Marty had bought Natalie a plane ticket to L.A. On that trip they’d promised to stay in better touch, but it hadn’t happened. Carolyn should have made more effort, and now she wouldn’t get the chance.
She crossed Maple, past the old Machus Red Fox, a different restaurant now but still the same building, a kind of memorial to Jimmy Hoffa. His disappearance was part of her history, another big milestone along the route of Detroit’s demise. Close to 12 Mile she exited Telegraph to the right—the car dealers were still here, though now you could buy a Nissan or Toyota, Saab or Volvo, and no one would shout at you or take a sledgehammer to the vehicle while you waited at a red light—and then followed the entrance ramp, first right and then left as the road curved south and east into the city. She felt conscious of her breathing, deep and a little rapid, as she was driving seventy-two in the right-hand lane, past the retaining walls, shredded tires, and trash, a splintered crib, on the shoulder. The seat beside her held a copy of the police report and a MapQuest printout. She flicked down the automatic door locks and drove on.
She took the Lodge too far, then, realizing it, exited by the river, turning on a street called Randolph, then Gratiot. Soon she was skirting around the new Ford Field and Comerica Park (no more Tiger Stadium in Detroit). She headed back west to Woodward, then Hancock, the street on the report. Not much beauty here, but nothing sinister, just old and empty buildings under the drab sky, a sheet of newspaper cartwheeling down the street, crabgrass growing out of the sidewalks, not a person on them, an empty city street on a completely normal day.
She approached Cass and the parking lot near the murder spot. Police lights flashed red and blue behind her. She eased the car to the right with two hands on the wheel, ten o’clock and two o’clock, just as she’d been taught as a teenager. The cruiser pulled in behind her.
The cop and his partner sat in their car a long time; she waited, wondering what she’d done wrong. She hadn’t been speeding; she was sure of that. She had her license, assumed the registration and proof of insurance were in the glovebox. A second police car pulled up. The first policeman got out, walked to her window, and asked for her license, registration, and proof of insurance.
He studied the California license for a long time.
“What are you doing here?” he asked finally. He was a large, middle-aged man with a bit of a paunch, evident as he stood at her window. His skin was the deep, rich color of stained maple.
“I’m trying to get to the corner of Hancock and Cass,” she said.
The cop looked to his left. Her destination was less than half a block away. “Why?”
“My brother and sister died there,” she said.
“You’re saying that the FBI agent, Burton, was your brother?”
“Same mother,” she explained. It always needed expla-
nation.
He waved the other cop car away, then handed her back her license and the other paperwork, which the rental car company had packed up in a plastic zip-lock baggie.
“Drive up to Cass,” he told her. “Turn right, put your car in the lot. We’ll stay with you. I don’t want you out here alone.”
The cop’s partner was another black man, older, his hair mixed with gray, frosty curls. She liked these men immediately. They meant to protect her.
“It’s the middle of the day,” she said.
“You got the art museum just a couple blocks north, Wayne State’s nearby, but you shouldn’t come down here alone. Not a woman, especially not a blond woman.”
“You’re asking for trouble,” the older cop said. “Even if it ain’t bad trouble.”
Soon she was standing with the two men at the corner.
“How did this happen?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t park here at night,” the older cop said. “No way.”
“He was waiting for someone,” said the other.
“And vice versa, it looks like.”
A thought came to her. “Why did you pull me over?” she asked.
“You looked lost.”
“What’s that mean?”
“A white woman in a rental car driving slow around here? That’s lost.”
“Maybe looking for the art museum,” said the older cop.
A moment passed, as if to accentuate the basic insincerity of what they were saying.
“You thought I was here to score,” Carolyn said. “You racial-profiled me.”
“Whoa, ma’am,” said the younger cop. “None a that. You looked lost. We were just trying to help.” He paused. “Protect and serve. That’s what this is all about, ma’am.”
“Would you have stopped a black woman here?”
“A black woman would have been speeding,” he said.
III
THE FREE PRESS divulged that the victims were brother and sister, and for a couple days the story moved the mayor’s troubles below the fold. David paced back and forth in front of his kitchen counter, looking at the phone number. He wanted to have an idea what to say; he was bad at speaking on the fly. There was a reason he hadn’t tried to be a litigator. He considered himself especially bad on the phone and often practiced how he thought the conversation might go. Mrs. Evans, this is David Halpert calling. I read about Dirk and Natalie in the papers. I am so sorry. It’s horrible.
He felt an obligation to make the call, but he dreaded it. It was the sorrow. He’d had enough with sorrow. He could let his life become an exercise in it—his son, his marriage, his mother, eventually his father, his city—or he could make it otherwise. Cory was dead four years now. Simply to choose to live differently made as much sense as anything.
He picked up the phone and dialed the Evanses, seven digits. He got an error message. The phone company wanted him to use the new area code.
A woman answered.
“Is this Mrs. Evans?”
“Put me on your do-not-call list,” she said.
“Mrs. Evans, it’s David Halpert calling.”
A pause. “David? Natalie’s friend?”
“Yes. I happen to be in town and, well, I’ve seen the papers and so I’m calling to say I’m very, very sorry. I don’t—”
“Thank you, David,” she said, saving him. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine.”
“And your parents?”
“My dad is good. My mom, she’s having some medical issues.”
“You give them my best.”
“I will,” he said.
“Would you like to speak to Carolyn?” she asked.
“Why, yes, sure,” he said, for no other reason than he didn’t want to say no to Mrs. Evans, nor did he want to talk to her any longer. Carolyn? He’d last seen her when she was sixteen. What would he say to her?
“David?”
“Hi, Carolyn.”
“Do you actually live here?”
They spent several minutes catching up. She lived in Los Angeles with her husband and son.
“I think I’d heard you were in Arizona, right?”
“Denver. But I’m staying a few months, to help my dad with my mom. She’s losing it. Some kind of dementia.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I’m sorry about Natalie. And Dirk. God, I don’t know what to say.”
“You’ve said it,” she answered. A long, uncomfortable silence followed before Carolyn spoke again. “My sister still talked about you every once in a while.”
“I’m surprised to hear that,” he said.
“Well, you shouldn’t be. I don’t think she ever got over the lack of that goodbye.”
“I don’t know that I did, either,” he said. Natalie’s parents had taken her off to school early. Natalie had called, but David didn’t get the message, so that when he showed up to say goodbye, only Carolyn was left at the house. It was eerie talking to her now; she sounded uncannily like her older sister. They both had a way of swallowing the last word of a sentence, a habit that, intentional or not, meant that you had to listen carefully to the very end.
“Are you free some night to get out for a drink?” he asked. “I know I could use a change of scenery.”
They agreed on the time—nine o’clock the next night—but not the place, as neither of them knew the area well enough to suggest one. David promised to scout out Birmingham, then call her back with a suitable location.
• • •
THE NEXT DAY he sat in the passenger seat, his father driving thirty-five down Woodward. David wanted to say something, but his father was keeping the car in the lane and everyone else was passing them easily enough.
“I want you to call my lawyer,” his father said.
“Steve Bergen? Why?”
“His son, Peter. He’s about your age, I’d guess.”
“What’s it about?” David asked.
“A job,” Sol said.
“You’re going back to work?”
“No, they need someone like you.”
“You know, Dad, I’m already a partner in a law firm. I mean, I appreciate the suggestion, but . . .” Just like the old man, he thought, always nudging, a true marine, never happy just to hold the ground he had.
“But what?”
“Move back to Detroit? For good? What about my job? My life in Denver?”
“You should move back.”
“Why would anyone move here?”
“It’s your home, for one thing. Your family is here.”
“You and Mom.”
“What,” his father said, “we don’t count? And the other thing, just as important? You need to get out of Denver.”
David sat in silence. Every once in a while his father said something that made sense, like a savant who could cut through to the simple truth: he needed to leave Denver. Till now he hadn’t thought of Detroit.
• • •
THAT NIGHT DAVID waited for Carolyn at the bar. The bartender, young, hair spiked, came over with a What’ll-it-be look. Here David was, forty-five, and he still hadn’t settled on a usual drink. He ordered a gin and tonic, the first thing that came into his mind.
He had chosen this bar by walking the streets of Birmingham. His mistake was not to look for a TV. This bar didn’t have one, and so now he was sitting alone, with nothing to do and nowhere to look except at the mirror behind the infantry lines of liquor bottles.
His mother, he’d learned that afternoon, had moved up to first on the waiting list at the nursing home. His father had entrusted him (enlisted him, really) to take her out there next week, to show her around. It was hard to know how she’d take this. He expected the worst, but so far she seemed resigned to the idea, or perhaps unable to comprehend it.
“Another?” asked the bartender.
“Sure,” David replied, trying to approximate a drinker. He had a brief memory of Cory, a waking nightmare that flared up now and again. He shook his head to rid himself of the feeling; it always took some kind of physical effort.
He turned to survey the bar, expecting to find Carolyn, now fifteen minutes late. Natalie was always punctual, but he’d known her when she was young and perhaps didn’t know better. And then Carolyn surprised him.
“Haven’t been here in years,” she said as she slid onto the stool next to him.
“Carolyn.” He wouldn’t have recognized her. She was still blond, but her hair was shorter and she’d filled out into a woman, more attractive than the spindly teenager she’d been. She wore designer jeans and a white blouse. After an awkward pause, they accomplished a lopsided hug, both of them teetering on the edge of their bar stools.
“Getcha something?” the bartender asked. “He’s two up on you.”
She studied David’s gin and tonic. “Bushmills, straight up,” she said.
David looked at his drink in a new, feminine light. Still, he didn’t like whiskey enough. Perhaps vodka. Or just red wine. Red wine was acceptable.
He noticed her hands on the bar, the same long fingers he remembered Natalie having, except Carolyn wore a wedding ring, the yellow diamond almost bursting from the band.
“You’re married,” he said.
“Aren’t you?”
“I was once. Not now.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be,” he told her. “I’m beginning to see the advantage of being single.”
“Which is?”
“Only one person to make happy.”
Her drink arrived and she raised it for a toast. Their glasses clinked. “So, how’s it going?” she asked.
“With what?”
“Keeping that one person happy.”
Well enough, he allowed, and then changed the subject. He was pretty sure women liked him because he listened. It came to him naturally, and he’d honed it from years of estate planning, when he would sit and listen to people say what they wanted till they got tired of listening to themselves lie. Then he’d draw up a plan that pleased the person paying the bill.
Her husband was a lawyer, intellectual property. Carolyn herself worked in advertising. At home they had daily help, a woman from El Salvador. Carolyn’s son went to private school. These were the details from L.A. “You can play tennis outside in January,” she said.
“Do you?”
“I did, once.”
“Tell me about your son,” he said.
He studied her while she talked, the angular face, the golden hair, the perfect white line of her teeth. He felt something. He didn’t want to, but he did. The implications of this were so uniformly unsettling that he ordered another drink, this time a glass of cabernet, which seemed manly enough, despite its French name.
Carolyn said, “It’s a little weird, being here with you.”
“How so?”
“ ’Cause I think I had a crush on you when I was . . . well, a little girl. I was jealous of my sister because she had you.”
“I’m flattered,” he said.
“It was about Natalie. I was always jealous of her. She was older, more beautiful. But it wasn’t a bad jealousy. I looked up to her.”
“She wasn’t more beautiful.”
She looked down. “You’re sweet,” she said. He thought perhaps that she blushed. Her modesty touched him. Maybe her beauty was something her husband no longer commented on. It was possible, he knew, to disappear in a marriage.
“You must miss Natalie,” he said.
She nodded, and looked down. “Terribly,” she said. “There was so much—” She stopped talking.
“What?”
“So much left for us to do,” she said. “And Dirk, too. Really, I barely knew him.”
“Didn’t he ever live with you?”
Dirk, she said, had lived with his father. This was agreed upon by his parents, the obvious choice to them when they split up, because Dirk was black. Dirk’s father, though, was indifferent at best, and Dirk was really raised by his father’s oldest friend, adopted every way but legally. The FBI was Dirk’s idea. “He wanted to set the world right, get everyone in line,” said Carolyn. “That’s what Natalie always said.”
“What were Natalie and Dirk doing the night they were killed?”
“No one knows. They spent a lot of time together after her marriage ended. Dirk’s daughter was out of college. Shelly, his wife, likes her space. Nat and Dirk kept each other company. My mother liked it that they had a friendship. She felt things with her family were finally coming together. Except I wasn’t there.”
David nodded. He felt a longing, a terrible ache for his son, so he smiled.
“Do you have kids?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “But I can imagine.”
IV
CAROLYN LIKED HIM, had always liked him. She’d realized this as a girl and saw it again now: there was no artifice with David Halpert, no tics or anger or phobias or recklessness hidden in some shadow of his personality. Not that he didn’t have some of these things, but the lights were on. Also, he was not a bad-looking guy. He was losing his hair and he’d put on some weight since high school—who hadn’t?—but he still could look at her directly and get her attention. A man who could look you in the eye was not to be taken lightly.
She remembered her sister’s devotion to David. Carolyn wanted to feel so strongly about a man that nothing else mattered, but it hadn’t gone that way. Marty had come along at the right time. In the end, she’d pursued him and he’d surrendered. She saw in him a steady man, a good provider, someone who didn’t mind being left alone. A man, in short, not unlike her father. She felt secure with Marty. She never really had to worry about anything.
She asked why David had become a lawyer.
“Lack of imagination,” he said.
“What else would you have been?”
“I’m still trying to figure it out.”
He didn’t elaborate, and soon she found herself talking about her mother. The subject was too depressing, so she excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, where she could check her face. David stood when she got up from the table, as her father would have; as Marty once did, but no longer.
• • •
DAVID STOOD AGAIN when she returned to the table.
“Tell me what went wrong with your marriage. And then what went right.”
“Well, we fell in love. It wasn’t all bad, at the beginning. Then we fell out of love. What about you? Why did you get married?”
“I thought Marty would make a good husband, and it seemed like the right time.”
“I see,” he said.
She had in effect told him that she wasn’t in love with her husband, and he had understood immediately.
“I was young,” she said.
“Then there’s the boy. That makes it complicated, right? No kids and you’re like me, you both walk away and it’s no harm, no foul.”
“I’m sure,” she said, meaning the opposite.
He shrugged. “Well, you should be happy.”
“How can you say that? You don’t know me.”
“It’s just how I want to think of you,” he said.
It was like therapy, talking to David; actually, he was better than her therapist in Beverly Hills. David was a much quicker study, and refreshingly direct. There was a sadness to him, but he didn’t try to hide it—or couldn’t—and that made him that much more attractive. She could think of a dozen women back in L.A. who would crawl over each other to have dinner with this man.
“So tell me, David,” she said, “why isn’t there a woman in your life?”
“How do you know there’s not?”
“I don’t think there is.”
“You’re right,” he admitted.
• • •
HE POURED WINE into a tumbler. They were in his living room, walls the color of pudding, an Ansel Adams photo (nice enough, but out of place), carpet the color of dirt, a greenish couch she was sitting on. Before she got married, if a man had brought her to a dump like this she wouldn’t have considered him a serious contender. Tonight they’d gone to a liquor store for wine, then walked back here like a couple of teenagers. She realized that once she stopped asking him questions he became talkative, funny. She was conscious of what she was doing, that she was a married woman in the apartment of an unmarried man, the ex-boyfriend of her dead sister.
“Here’s to you,” he said. He clinked his glass to hers. “I must tell you, I think I’m drunk. I don’t drink often, but . . .”
“And yet you keep drinking,” she said. She was feeling a bit tipsy herself.
She had cheated on Marty twice before; she had considered doing it far more than that. Offers were surprisingly abundant. Just last week she had gone to lunch with the guy from her firm who was to head up the marketing campaign for a new movie. They’d been seated about five seconds when he looked at her ring and said, “So, are you happily married?”
She was appalled by his rudeness, by his lack of respect for her as a professional, and most of all by the world and its excessive store of desperation.
She wasn’t feeling any of that now. She just wanted to be reckless.
“Set down your glass,” she said. He did as he was told. She moved to him and kissed him. He was surprised at first, but he quickly adjusted. It was thrilling, almost like being young again. She hadn’t felt anything like it in years.
V
DAVID PACED IN his kitchen, wanting to call Carolyn. In the last six days they’d had dinner three times. She wouldn’t sleep with him. He’d asked—it seemed almost insulting not to—but only once, at the second dinner. She was married, after all. The last time he called she told him not to call again, but he had a hard time believing her. Yes, she was married, but she was available. He could feel it. He decided to call anyway. Maybe she would pick up. In fact, she did.
“Come over,” he said.
She hung up without a word. Half an hour later, she surprised him at his door. He greeted her, but she entered without speaking, set her purse on the dining table, threw her coat over a chair, slipped out of her shoes. She walked to the bedroom. David gave himself a moment to watch the elaborate design on the back pockets of her jeans swing back and forth.
He took a deep breath, conscious of it, and then walked into the bedroom. He found her studying the bed, arms crossed, head bowed, a picture of agony.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Then don’t.”
“But I want to.”
“Then do.”
• • •
LATER, HE HELD her in his arms, drifting in and out of sleep.
“What are we doing?” she said.
It was a good question. It was new and exciting. He liked her, and he liked himself when he was with her. He hadn’t thought about it beyond that. He stayed quiet till she gave him a nudge, a pointy elbow to his ribcage.
“I just like you,” he said.
“That’s your answer?”
“I don’t have an answer. What do you think we’re doing?”
“I’m a sucker for attention,” she said.
He was hoping for higher standards, but he’d take it.
“And you were Natalie’s boyfriend,” she said. “I always wanted what she had, and suddenly I have it.”
“It isn’t personal, you’re saying.”
“It’s very personal. But I’m married. I have a child. I have to go back home.”
“I’m thinking of moving back here,” he said. The words were out, and he found that they were settling well. The idea of a move, of change, lifted his mood. He was ready to start something new.
“Moving back?”
“It’s home, where I’m from. It seems like a silly, hopeless thing to do, so maybe it will work for me.”
“It’s like moving back to Hiroshima,” she said.
“People live there now, I’m pretty sure.” In the darkness he thought he saw her smile, or grimace. It didn’t matter which. He had made a decision.