Teddy dropped the butt of his cigarette to the stone walk and ground it out with his heel.
Dolores, he thought, I’ve got to tell him. I can’t do this alone.
If after all my sins—all my drinking, all the times I left you alone for too long, let you down, broke your heart—if I can ever make up for any of that, this might be the time, the last opportunity I’ll ever have.
I want to do right, honey. I want to atone. You, of all people, would understand that.
“Andrew Laeddis,” he said to Chuck, and the words clogged in his dry throat. He swallowed, got some moisture into his mouth, tried again…
“Andrew Laeddis,” he said, “was the maintenance man in the apartment building where my wife and I lived.”
“Okay.”
“He was also a firebug.”
Chuck took that in, studied Teddy’s face.
“So…”
“Andrew Laeddis,” Teddy said, “lit the match that caused the fire—”
“Holy fuck.”
“—that killed my wife.”
8
TEDDY WALKED OVER to the edge of the breezeway and stuck his head out from under the roof to douse his face and hair. He could see her in the drops. Dissolving on impact.
She hadn’t wanted him to go to work that morning. In that final year of her life, she’d grown inexplicably skittish, prone to insomnia that left her tremor-filled and addled. She’d tickled him after the alarm had gone off, then suggested they close the shutters and block out the day, never leave the bed. When she hugged him, she held on too tightly and for too long, and Teddy could feel the bones in her arms crush into his neck.
As he took his shower, she came to him, but he was too rushed, already late, and as had so often been the case in those days, hungover. His head simultaneously soggy and filled with spikes. Her body like sandpaper when she pressed it against his. The water from the shower as hard as BBs.
“Just stay,” she said. “One day. What difference will one day make?”
He tried to smile as he lifted her gently out of the way and reached for the soap. “Honey, I can’t.”
“Why not?” She ran her hand between his legs. “Here. Give me the soap. I’ll wash it for you.” Her palm sliding under his testicles, her teeth nipping his chest.
He tried not to push her. He gripped her shoulders as gently as he could and lifted her back a step or two. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve really got to go.”
She laughed some more, tried to nuzzle him again, but he could see her eyes growing hard with desperation. To be happy. To not be left alone. To have the old days back—before he worked too much, drank too much, before she woke up one morning and the world seemed too bright, too loud, too cold.
“Okay, okay.” She leaned back so he could see her face as the water bounced off his shoulders and misted her body. “I’ll make a deal with you. Not the whole day, baby. Not the whole day. Just an hour. Just be an hour late.”
“I’m already—”
“One hour,” she said, stroking him again, her hand soapy now. “One hour and then you can go. I want to feel you inside of me.” She raised herself up on her toes to kiss him.
He gave her a quick peck on the lips and said, “Honey, I can’t,” and turned his face to the shower spray.
“Will they call you back up?” she said.
“Huh?”
“To fight.”
“That piss-ant country? Honey, that war will be over before I could lace my boots.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t even know why we’re there. I mean—”
“Because the NKPA doesn’t get weaponry like that from nowhere, honey. They got it from Stalin. We have to prove that we learned from Munich, that we should have stopped Hitler then, so we’ll stop Stalin and Mao. Now. In Korea.”
“You’d go.”
“If they called me up? I’d have to. But they won’t, honey.”
“How do you know?”
He shampooed his hair.
“You ever wonder why they hate us so much? The Communists?” she said. “Why can’t they leave us alone? The world’s going to blow up and I don’t even know why.”
“It’s not going to blow up.”
“It is. You read the papers and—”
“Stop reading the papers, then.”
Teddy rinsed the shampoo from his hair and she pressed her face to his back and her hands snaked around his abdomen. “I remember the first time I saw you at the Grove. In your uniform.”
Teddy hated when she did this. Memory Lane. She couldn’t adapt to the present, to who they were now, warts and all, so she drove winding lanes into the past to warm herself.
“You were so handsome. And Linda Cox said, ’I saw him first.’ But you know what I said?”
“I’m late, honey.”
“Why would I say that? No. I said, ’You might have seen him first, Linda, but I’ll see him last.’ She thought you looked mean up close, but I said, ’Honey, have you looked in his eyes? There’s nothing mean there.’”
Teddy shut off the shower and turned, noticed that his wife had managed to get some of his soap on her. Smudges of lather splattered her flesh.
“You want me to turn it back on?”
She shook her head.
He wrapped a towel around his waist and shaved at the sink, and Dolores leaned against the wall as the soap dried white on her body and watched him.
“Why don’t you dry off?” Teddy said. “Put a robe on?”
“It’s gone now,” she said.
“It’s not gone. Looks like white leeches stuck all over you.”
“Not the soap,” she said.
“What, then?”
“The Cocoanut Grove. Burned to the ground while you were over there.”
“Yeah, honey, I heard that.”
“Over there,” she sang lightly, trying to lighten the mood. “Over there…”
She’d always had the prettiest voice. The night he’d returned from the war, they’d splurged on a room at the Parker House, and after they’d made love, he heard her sing for the first time from the bathroom as he lay in bed—“Buffalo Girls” with the steam creeping out from under the door.
“Hey,” she said.
“Yeah?” He caught the reflection of the left side of her body in the mirror. Most of the soap had dried on her skin and something about it annoyed him. It suggested violation in a way he couldn’t put his finger on.
“Do you have somebody else?”
“What?”
“Do you?”
“The fuck are you talking about? I work, Dolores.”
“I’m touching your dick in the—”
“Don’t say that word. Jesus Christ.”
“—shower and you don’t even get hard?”
“Dolores.” He turned from the mirror. “You were talking about bombs. The end of the world.”
She shrugged, as if that had no relevance to this current conversation. She propped her foot back against the wall and used a finger to wipe the water off her inner thigh. “You don’t fuck me anymore.”
“Dolores, I’m serious—you don’t talk like that in this house.”
“So I’ve gotta assume you’re fucking her.”
“I’m not fucking anyone, and could you stop saying that word?”
“Which word?” She placed a hand over her dark public hair. “Fucking?”
“Yes.” He raised one hand. He went back to shaving with the other.
“So that’s a bad word?”
“You know it is.” He pulled the razor up his throat, heard the scratch of hairs through the foam.
“So what’s a good word?”
“Huh?” He dipped the razor, shook it.
“What word about my body won’t cause you to make a fist?”
“I didn’t make a fist.”
“You did.”
He finished his throat, wiped the razor on a facecloth. He laid the flat of it below his left sidebur
n. “No, honey. I didn’t.” He caught her left eye in the mirror.
“What should I say?” She ran one hand through her upper hair and one through her lower. “I mean, you can lick it and you can kiss it and you can fuck it. You can watch a baby come out of it. But you can’t say it?”
“Dolores.”
“Cunt,” she said.
The razor slid so far through Teddy’s skin he suspected it hit jaw bone. It widened his eyes and lit up the entire left side of his face, and then some shaving cream dripped into the wound and eels exploded through his head and the blood poured into the white clouds and water in the sink.
She came to him with a towel, but he pushed her away and sucked air through his teeth and felt the pain burrowing into his eyes, scorching his brain, and he bled into the sink and he felt like crying. Not from the pain. Not from the hangover. But because he didn’t know what was happening to his wife, to the girl he’d first danced with at the Cocoanut Grove. He didn’t know what she was becoming or what the world was becoming with its lesions of tiny, dirty wars and furious hatreds and spies in Washington, in Hollywood, gas masks in schoolhouses, cement bomb shelters in basements. And it was, somehow, all connected—his wife, this world, his drinking, the war he’d fought because he honestly believed it would end all this…
He bled into the sink and Dolores said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and he took the towel the second time she offered it but couldn’t touch her, couldn’t look at her. He could hear the tears in her voice and he knew there were tears in her eyes and on her face, and he hated how fucked up and obscene the world and everything in it had become.
IN THE PAPER, he’d been quoted as saying the last thing he told his wife was that he loved her.
A lie.
The last thing he really said?
Reaching for the doorknob, a third towel pressed to his jaw, her eyes searching his face:
“Jesus, Dolores, you’ve got to get yourself together. You’ve got responsibilities. Think about those sometimes—okay?—and get your fucking head right.”
Those were the last words his wife heard from him. He’d closed the door and walked down the stairs, paused on the last step. He thought of going back. He thought of going back up the stairs and into the apartment and somehow making it right. Or, if not right, at least softer.
Softer. That would have been nice.
THE WOMAN WITH the licorice scar across her throat came waddling down the breezeway toward them, her ankles and wrists enchained, an orderly on each elbow. She looked happy and made duck sounds and tried to flap her elbows.
“What did she do?” Chuck said.
“This one?” the orderly said. “This here Old Maggie. Maggie Moonpie, we call her. She just going to Hydro. Can’t take no chances with her, though.”
Maggie stopped in front of them, and the orderlies made a halfhearted attempt to keep her moving, but she shoved back with her elbows and dug her heels against the stone, and one of the orderlies rolled his eyes and sighed.
“She gone proselytize now, hear?”
Maggie stared up into their faces, her head cocked to the right and moving like a turtle sniffing its way out of its shell.
“I am the way,” she said. “I am the light. And I will not bake your fucking pies. I will not. Do you understand?”
“Sure,” Chuck said.
“You bet,” Teddy said. “No pies.”
“You’ve been here. You’ll stay here.” Maggie sniffed the air. “It’s your future and your past and it cycles like the moon cycles around the earth.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She leaned in close and sniffed them. First Teddy, then Chuck.
“They keep secrets. That’s what feeds this hell.”
“Well, that and pies,” Chuck said.
She smiled at him, and for a moment it seemed as if someone lucid entered her body and passed behind her pupils.
“Laugh,” she said to Chuck. “It’s good for the soul. Laugh.”
“Okay,” Chuck said. “I will, ma’am.”
She touched his nose with a hooked finger. “I want to remember you that way—laughing.”
And then she turned away and started walking. The orderlies fell into step and they walked down the breezeway and through a side door into the hospital.
Chuck said, “Fun girl.”
“Kind you’d bring home to Mom.”
“And then she’d kill Mom and bury her in an out-house, but still…” Chuck lit a cigarette. “Laeddis.”
“Killed my wife.”
“You said that. How?”
“He was a firebug.”
“Said that too.”
“He was also the maintenance man in our building. Got in a fight with the owner. The owner fired him. At the time, all we knew was that the fire was arson. Someone had set it. Laeddis was on a list of suspects, but it took them a while to find him, and once they did, he’d shored up an alibi. Hell, I wasn’t even sure it was him.”
“What changed your mind?”
“A year ago, I open the paper and there he is. Burned down a schoolhouse where he’d been working. Same story—they fired him and he came back, lit it in the basement, primed the boiler so it would explode. Exact same M.O. Identical. No kids in the schoolhouse, but the principal was there, working late. She died. Laeddis went to trial, claimed he heard voices, what have you, and they committed him to Shattuck. Something happened there—I don’t know what—but he was transferred here six months ago.”
“But no one’s seen him.”
“No one in Ward A or B.”
“Which suggests he’s in C.”
“Yup.”
“Or dead.”
“Possibly. One more reason to find the cemetery.”
“Let’s say he isn’t dead, though.”
“Okay…”
“If you find him, Teddy, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t bullshit me, boss.”
A pair of nurses came toward them, heels clicking, bodies pressed close to the wall to avoid the rain.
“You guys are wet,” one of them said.
“All wet?” Chuck said, and the one closest to the wall, a tiny girl with short black hair, laughed.
Once they’d passed, the black-haired nurse looked back over her shoulder at them. “You marshals always so flirty?”
“Depends,” Chuck said.
“On?”
“Quality of personnel.”
That stopped both of them for a moment, and then they got it, and the black-haired nurse buried her face in the other one’s shoulder, and they burst out laughing and walked to the hospital door.
Christ, how Teddy envied Chuck. His ability to believe in the words he spoke. In silly flirtations. In his easy-GI’s penchant for quick, meaningless wordplay. But most of all for the weightlessness of his charm.
Charm had never come easily to Teddy. After the war, it had come harder still. After Dolores, not at all.
Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.
“You know,” he said to Chuck, “the last morning I was with my wife, she spoke about the Cocoanut Grove fire.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s where we met. The Grove. She had this rich roommate and I was let in because they gave a serviceman’s discount. It was just before I shipped out. Danced with her all night. Even the foxtrot.”
Chuck craned his neck out from the wall, looked into Teddy’s face. “You doing the foxtrot? I’m trying to picture it, but…”
“Hey, boss,” Teddy said, “if you’d seen my wife that night? You would have hopped around the floor like a bunny if she asked.”
“So you met her at the Cocoanut Grove.”
Teddy nodded. “And then it burned down while I was in—Italy? Yeah, I was in Italy then—and she found that fact, I dunno, meaningful, I guess. She was terrified of fire.”
&nbs
p; “But she died in a fire,” Chuck said softly.
“Beats all, don’t it?” Teddy bit back against an image of her from that last morning, lifting her leg against the bathroom wall, naked, her body splattered with dead white foam.
“Teddy?”
Teddy looked at him.
Chuck spread his hands. “I’ll back you on this. No matter what. You want to find Laeddis and kill him? That’s jake with me.”
“Jake.” Teddy smiled. “I haven’t heard that since—”
“But, boss? I need to know what to expect. I’m serious. We got to get our shit straight or we’ll end up in some new Kefauver Hearing or something. Everyone’s looking these days, you know? Looking in at all of us. Watching. World gets smaller every minute.” Chuck pushed back at the stand of bushy hair over his forehead. “I think you know about this place. I think you know shit you haven’t told me. I think you came here to do damage.”
Teddy fluttered a hand over his heart.
“I’m serious, boss.”
Teddy said, “We’re wet.”
“So?”
“My point. Care if we get wetter?”
THEY LEFT THROUGH the gate and walked the shore. The rain blanketed everything. Waves the size of houses hit the rocks. They flared high and then shattered to make way for new ones.
“I don’t want to kill him,” Teddy shouted over the roar.
“No?”
“No.”
“Not sure I believe you.”
Teddy shrugged.
“It was my wife?” Chuck said. “I’d kill him twice.”
“I’m tired of killing,” Teddy said. “In the war? I lost track. How’s that possible, Chuck? But I did.”
“Still. Your wife, Teddy.”
They found an outcropping of sharp, black stones that rose off the beach toward the trees, and they climbed inland.
“Look,” Teddy said once they’d reached a small plateau and a circle of high trees that blocked some of the rain, “I still put the job first. We find what happened to Rachel Solando. And if I meet up with Laeddis while I’m doing it? Great. I’ll tell him I know he killed my wife. I’ll tell him I’ll be waiting on the mainland when he gets released. I’ll tell him free air isn’t something he breathes as long as I’m alive.”