“Didn’t hear you come to bed last night,” Jill said.
I stumbled into the kitchen around half past nine, weary from a night of bad sleep. My mind had been on fire with questions about Finn Donnelly. Every time I finally started to drift off, some little noise outside would startle me awake. Several times, I wondered if I hadn’t dreamed my entire encounter with Barack Obama.
The lingering scent of tobacco in my hair said otherwise.
Meanwhile, Jill looked beautiful and well-rested as always. She’d been up for who knew how many hours in the sunroom, enjoying her e-reader. She used to read paperbacks, the small kind they sold in grocery stores. Harlequins. A couple of years back, she’d switched to electronic books. Said she liked being able to adjust the size of the type, even though she missed all the shirtless men on the book covers. I could laugh along with this little joke, because I certainly didn’t feel threatened. See, your Uncle Joe had something those men would never have: a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“You fell asleep to the TV,” I reminded her. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
She’d set out coffee and breakfast. The coffee was cold.
“Hmmmm,” she said. She didn’t glance up from her bodice ripper. Jill didn’t know anything about Barack’s visit, as far as I knew. I didn’t plan on telling her that he’d stopped over. It was just better that way.
The morning paper was on the table. The above-the-fold story on the front page of the News Journal was much ado about nothing, as usual. More White House drama. The current administration knew how to do one thing right: If you wanted to push through an unpopular agenda with minimal resistance, distract the bastards. Do something every day to grab the headlines—something big, bold, and preferably stupid—thereby banishing the dull stories about how you were systematically dismantling the country to the back pages with the Hagar comics.
I flipped through the paper, pretending to read the headlines and a paragraph or two of each story.
“Have you thought any more about the CPAP machine?” Jill asked.
“No,” I said, dodging the question for the umpteenth time. My doctor had diagnosed me with mild sleep apnea. It could lead to sleep deprivation, which could explain why I’d been waking up later and later in the mornings. My doc had recommended a complicated gizmo that forced air up my nose while I slept. She showed me one of the devices in her office. It looked and sounded like Darth Vader’s mask.
I returned to the newspaper. There was a small write-up on the train accident on the front page of the Local section, under the byline of the News Journal‘s crime beat reporter:
MAN KILLED IN AMTRAK ACCIDENT
WILMINGTON, DE—A man was struck and killed by an Amtrak passenger train approximately a mile from Wilmington Station around 8:23 a.m. Wednesday morning.
Wilmington police identified the man as Finn Donnelly, 63, of Wilmington, Del. According to Amtrak officials, Donnelly was an Amtrak conductor but was off duty at the time of the incident. No passengers were injured.
All inbound and outbound trains were halted Wednesday morning as local authorities investigated. The National Transportation Safety Board has announced its own investigation into the matter, a routine procedure for all railroad accidents involving loss of life.
No further details were immediately available.
No mention of the map.
And no mention of Delaware’s favorite son, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
I flipped to the obituaries. Finn’s funeral was Friday. Tomorrow. They used to wait a couple of days before dumping you in the ground. These days, it seemed like they wanted to shuffle you off this mortal coil before your body was even cool.
I excused myself from the breakfast table. Champ followed me to my office, where I closed the door halfway—just enough to give me a warning if Jill busted in on me.
The News Journal‘s story hadn’t been updated online. Somehow Barack had managed to keep the lurid details under wraps…for now.
I didn’t expect to hear from him again. We’d had a great run together in office, but Barack had moved on to bigger and better things. He was too big for one country. He was too big for one best friend. He belonged to the world now. I told myself I was happy for him. But if that was really true, why couldn’t I shake the feeling that I’d been dumped the day after graduation?
There was a knock at my office door. Champ’s head perked up. Jill had changed out of her robe and into her black jogging pants and a Race for the Cure tee.
“I’m heading out for a run,” she said.
Champ didn’t move. He was too much like me—a walker at heart. Especially when the weather outside was as nasty as the devil’s armpit.
For a split second, I considered telling my wife about Finn’s accident. I couldn’t remember if she’d ever met him, though, and there was no sense ruining her morning jog with such grim news. It could wait until she got back.
“Break a leg,” I told her.
“You’re always welcome to join me.”
I waved goodbye, and she blew me a kiss.
Jill ran five miles every day, averaging nine and a half minutes a mile. I was more of a fourteen-minute-mile-on-a-treadmill sort of guy. Lately I’d been slowing down my pace. Sometimes I’d quit early because I felt out of breath.
My doc said I was healthier than ninety percent of guys my age. Why didn’t I feel it?
“What do you think, Champ? Should we go downstairs and walk a couple miles?”
He stared blankly at me. Some dogs can run on treadmills, but Champ wasn’t one of them.
I tied on my running shoes. Normally, I’d use my time on the treadmill to think through whatever was troubling me. Getting the legs moving supposedly has a synergistic effect with brain synapses (that’s what Malcolm Gladwell told me once). Today, however, I planned to watch some TV and zone out. I didn’t need to think through my troubles, because I’d already decided on a course of action: I’d tell Jill about the accident, of course, but keep the information about Finn’s map to myself. At least for the time being. It wasn’t like he’d been found with a gun or anything. There was no reason to worry Jill. These past few weeks, she’d been enjoying her newfound ability to go running without a Secret Service escort. I didn’t have a clue where we’d find private security that could keep pace with her.
Besides, Finn was dead. Everybody knows that dead men can’t hurt you.
Only the living can do that.