Cal
A
fireman named Darrell let me go up to my apartment to grab a few things. I didn’t notice any actual damage, but an acrid smell overwhelmed the place. The gas had been turned off, so I wouldn’t have been able to cook anything—not that I ever did, anyway—and the power had been turned off to the building as well. I tossed a change of clothes into a small travel bag. From the kitchen, I got a small freezer bag, which I stuffed with my toothbrush and toothpaste and half a dozen other things from the bathroom. I found an extra pair of socks and underwear and tossed it all into a backpack.
Took about three minutes.
Before heading up, I had told the police everything I could about what I’d seen, which was not a lot. I’m usually good with cars, but telling a Ford pickup from a Chevy pickup, from the side, when it’s moving fast, was not among my skills. All I knew with any certainty was that the truck was black and there was some rust around the rear wheel wells. An older model, judging by how loud and rough the engine sounded. The person who threw the Molotov cocktail was male, white, blondish hair, probably early twenties.
And I remembered what he’d said: “Fucking terrorist!”
I felt sick for Naman. The flames had spread from one stack of books to another, and were licking at the ceiling by the time the trucks arrived. But they had water on the fire before it had done any significant structural damage. The place, as bad as it looked, was
not going to fall down. Naman, disbelieving, surveyed his burned and water-damaged stock.
“I’m finished,” he said to me when I reappeared with my stuffed backpack.
“No, you’re not,” I said. “You’ll get this all cleaned up. You’ll be open again in no time.”
“The water seeped through the floor. Hundreds of books in the basement, ruined. I should never have called it Naman’s Books. I should have had a sign that said ‘Used Books,’ that’s all.”
I didn’t know what to say. All I could come up with was “It was a couple of assholes, Naman. The whole town isn’t like that.”
He turned his head slowly to look at me. “Is that what you think? That the man who did this, that he’s an anomaly? That that kind of racism is rare? You have no idea.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not a day goes by that I don’t sense it, that I don’t feel it. Maybe I’ve never been firebombed before, but you think I don’t hear whispers behind my back? You know how long I have lived here, in America? More than forty years. I am an American.” He waved his hand toward the street. “I have taught these people’s children. I have worked with these kids, encouraged them, shaped them, cried with them, helped make them good, decent citizens. I have always paid my taxes. I have sent boxes and boxes of free books to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. And this is my thanks. I am a terrorist. How would you feel about this town if you knew you’d given your whole life to it, and this is how it pays you back?”
He was looking me hard in the eye, and I held his gaze. I said, “You have my cell. If there’s anything you need, call me. Okay?”
Naman said nothing. He turned around, bent over, picked up the now singed and waterlogged copy of
The Blue Hammer
that he’d been reading earlier.
• • •
I decided it made the most sense to stay with my sister, Celeste, at least for tonight. I didn’t know how many days it would be before I’d be able to get back into my apartment, and I might need to rent a motel room. But Celeste had already offered to let me stay with her, even if her husband, Dwayne, was not crazy about the idea. I’d insist she take some money from me. What with the town cutting back on the work it contracted Dwayne’s paving company to do, there wasn’t much money coming in.
I parked out front, grabbed my backpack, and trudged up the two steps to the front door. I was about to knock when I caught sight of Celeste and Dwayne sitting on the couch together. She had her arm around him, and at first I thought they were making out. Kind of sweet, I thought, for a couple married as long as they had been.
Then I realized I was seeing something very different.
Dwayne’s shoulders were hunched over, his head down and propped up on his palms.
The man was crying.
Celeste must have noticed my shadow at the window. She looked my way and caught my eye. She whispered something to her husband, got up, and came to the door. She opened it and slipped outside.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was about to knock and saw—”
“It’s okay,” my sister said. “What’s with the bag?”
“Never mind, don’t worry about it.”
“You want to stay here tonight?”
“There was a fire. At the bookstore. Some yahoos tossed a Molotov cocktail through the window.”
“What?”
I explained the likely motivations of the idiots in the pickup truck.
“Of course you can stay here,” she said.
“No, I don’t think so. Looks like you’re dealing with something.”
She moved me toward the far end of the porch, away from the door. “He’s falling apart.”
“I figured.”
“I mean, I’m worried, too, you know. About how much longer we’re going to be able to pay the bills. But we’ll manage somehow, right? Maybe it’s just as well we never had kids. Think how much worse this would be if we had mouths to feed. But it’s just us—we’ll get through. But no matter how much I tell Dwayne that, he’s just not hearing me. The stress of it’s killing him. It goes right to the heart of who he is, being able to look after me. Hey, I can get more hours if I have to, but it’s been wearing him down for a long time.”
“I have money,” I said.
She put a hand on my arm. “Cal.”
“No, really. I have some. Enough to get you through a couple of weeks, anyway.”
She went up on her tiptoes and kissed my cheek. “You’re a good brother. You really are.”
“If there’s anything I can—”
The front door opened. Dwayne said, “What’s going on here?”
“Cal just dropped by.”
Dwayne looked at the backpack I’d left on the porch. “What the hell is this? You’re bunking in with us?”
“No,” I said. He’d wiped his eyes, but I could see where tears had been running down his cheeks.
“I don’t have enough problems? I gotta take people in?”
“Dwayne, Jesus,” Celeste said. “It’s okay.”
“You know, Cal,” Dwayne said, “you had some awful shit happen to you. I get that. Your wife and your kid, what happened to them, that’s a tough break. But we got problems, too, you know? You can’t be coming around here all the time bringing us down.”
“Shut your mouth,” Celeste said. “God, just stop it.”
“It’s okay,” I said. I walked toward the door, grabbed my bag, and went back down the walk to my car.
“Good plan,” Dwayne said. “Good plan.”
• • •
I remembered there was a motel on the road to Albany, but when I got there, I found the place all boarded up. “OUT OF BIZNESS” had been spray-painted across the plywood sheets that had been nailed over the windows.
So then I tried the Walcott, parked under the front apron, and went inside. To my surprise, the place was fully booked. Normally, they’d have had more rooms, but one wing was undergoing renovations.
“Rented my last place to some guy who lost all his credit cards,” said the guy at the front desk. “But he had a good roll of cash.”
Well, shit.
I supposed I could drive closer to Albany. But I’d be spending the better part of an hour on the road before I had a chance to start looking for anything.
I had a thought.
I called Lucy Brighton’s cell phone. She picked up before the second ring.
“Yes?”
“Got a favor to ask. There was a fire and—”
“What?”
I explained. She said, “Can you give me half an hour? To get the guest room ready?”
“Sure,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”
I was going to hit a diner. A couple of crackers and cheese earlier had not quite done the trick.
• • •
Lucy had been watching for me, and opened the door before I reached it. I thought she might be in pajamas or a nightgown, but she was dressed, and in something a little nicer than what I’d seen her in earlier in the evening. A black, low-cut top that showed a hint of cleavage and a pair of tight jeans.
“This is really kind of you,” I said. “Sorry to have kept you from going to bed.”
She had questions, and I told her more about what had happened. She offered to make some coffee, but I told her no. It had been a long day.
“I’ve got you all set up in the spare room,” Lucy said, her voice just above a whisper. Crystal, I figured, had gone to bed some time ago.
“She left me a surprise in my car,” I told Lucy.
“What are you talking about?”
“Her graphic novel. She left it for me to read. I haven’t gotten to it yet, but I will.”
“That little scamp.” Lucy almost looked as though she might cry. “Do you know how rare it is that she’d do something like that?”
I didn’t.
“Crystal likes you. She senses that you’re a good man. That’s why she wants to share her artwork with you. She isolates herself so much, but every once in a while, she reaches out. That’s what she’s doing with you.”
We went upstairs, where she showed me my bedroom. The top of the dresser was stacked three deep in white cardboard business boxes full of files. There were more on the floor, but Lucy had created a path around the bed so I wouldn’t stumble if and when I got up in the middle of the night to hit the bathroom down the hall.
“I’m sorry about this,” she said, indicating the boxes. “This room almost never gets used, so it becomes a kind of dumping ground.” We were standing close together by the foot of the bed, where there was barely enough room for two people to get by.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“The bathroom’s right there, but it’s the only one up here, so if it’s occupied, you can use the little one, the powder room, on the first floor, and there’s another bathroom in the basement, but the one up here is the only one with a shower. God, I’m rambling.”
“This is all good,” I said, setting my bag on top of the double bed. “I appreciate it.”
“That’s a small bag. If you’ve forgotten anything, you can probably find what you need in the bathroom. Every time we go to the dentist, they give us new toothbrushes and I must have a dozen of them that have never been opened. So if you need—”
“I’m good,” I said.
“But I don’t have shaving cream. I mean, I’ve got ladies’ shaving cream, you know, and it’s probably the same stuff—it just comes in a pink can.”
I turned to face her and put my hands on her shoulders. “It’s okay.”
Her lips were twitching. “I know, to many people, he wasn’t a good man, my father,” Lucy said. “But I loved him.”
I waited.
“I did. He was my father. I know there was a kind of . . . hollowness about him. I believe he loved me, and I believe he loved Crystal. At least, as much as he was able to. He could certainly pretend to love. Does that make sense?”
“I think so.”
She took two steps toward the door, closed it. “I don’t want to wake her up.”
“Sure,” I said.
“But he taught me well, you know. From the time I was a little girl, he taught me to stand up for myself. I’m a survivor. I’m a single mother. When my marriage wasn’t working out, I could have tried to stick it out, but I thought, I can’t live like this. Not even for
Crystal’s sake. Because what would that teach her? That you stay in an unhappy situation, that you surrender your life that way?”
“Your father seemed to be someone who went after what he wanted.”
“You mean that room?”
“I guess I mean that he didn’t let the conventions the rest of us tend to live by keep him from living the life he wanted. I’m not judging. I’m just saying, that’s what I see.”
Lucy thought about that. “I wondered sometimes if he was a borderline psychopath, but not in a malicious kind of way. I read somewhere that many successful CEOs are psychopaths. They don’t let the feelings of others get in their way because they’re not even aware of them, but they’re good at acting like they are. Sort of like politicians.”
Lightly, Lucy rested the tips of her fingers on my chest.
“You feel things,” Lucy said. “I can tell.”
I hadn’t slept with a woman since Donna and I made love the night before she died.
Three years.
“Lucy, I—”
“Don’t say anything. Just hold me.”
I did. She trembled slightly, as though my fingers were made of ice.
She turned her mouth up toward me, but she would have had to stand on her tiptoes to put her lips on mine, and even then, she might not have reached, so the ball, as they say, was in my court.
I knew what I wanted to do, and felt guilty about it. A little afraid, too.
The last two decades I’d slept with only one woman, never straying, even when opportunities had presented themselves. Over that kind of time, Donna and I had come to know each other’s needs and rhythms. Things were unspoken. I guess you could say we knew the routine, but that was not to suggest that it
was
routine. It had been good for almost all that time, except the last
couple of months, when we’d grown distant in our grief over Scott. If we could have seen the future—
No, I couldn’t go over all that again.
I feared intimacy with someone whose needs and rhythms I did not know. Who didn’t know mine.
Maybe I had to live up to the words I’d spoken to Celeste. I had to move forward.
“I see it in your eyes,” Lucy said. “What you feel. So much pain.”
I put my mouth on hers and closed the gap between us. Pulled her into me so hard, it was like I was trying to bring her through the other side of me. I eased off, thinking I might hurt her.
How fast did one move in such matters? Did we do this for a while, then move on to something else? Or would one of us break it off, say this was a big mistake, that we were caught up in the moment, that we were both, in our own ways, dealing with loss, and that this was not the way to handle it? And then Lucy would slip quietly out of the room and close the door and that would be the end of that?
Lucy started undoing my belt.