The Last Day

FOUR

While standing on the curb, waiting for the shut-tle, Ward spotted his young seatmate climbing into a dark green Porsche Cabriolet. The driver, a woman with blond hair and pale skin, wore a flowery scarf and dark glasses that obscured her features. Perhaps the woman was the girl's mother, the NASCAR fan.

Six minutes later he climbed down from the bus, walked to his car, and frowned at the thin film of red dust coating the original black paint. Leaving the car in the open sunlight wouldn't do anything to prolong the paint's life. The vehicle, a pristine 1994 BMW 740i, had been his father's only admission to the world that he was a man of above- average means. Ward climbed in and started the engine. Aiming the heavy sedan toward the exit he pressed on the accelerator and felt the powerful V-8 respond.

Ward turned on the radio, which was always set to NPR. He didn't listen to music much when he was driving. He had never felt the need for a soundtrack in his life. Natasha had joked on more than one occasion that her husband danced to the melodious voices of liberal commentators.

Although it should have been just the opposite, Ward's heart seemed to grow heavier as he drove north on I-85. After leaving the Interstate at the Concord Mills exit, Ward drove past the racetrack, up Highway 29, and entered Concord on Cabarrus Avenue, using the new roundabout. He drove out Highway 73 and turned left at the Exxon onto Gold Hill Road. Two miles later he slowed for a doe and her two spotted fawns, which ran across the road near a farm owned by the grandson of a mill owner whose last name was synonymous with bath towels.

Turning onto the asphalt driveway a mile farther down the road, Ward drove through the woods, past the front door, and on around to the side of the house, where he used his remote to open the center garage door. He parked beside Natasha's Lexus, the hood cool to his touch. His other car, a dark blue Toyota Highlander, was parked in the third bay. He rarely drove the Toyota, preferring his father's old BMW

Ward paused in the kitchen where the answering machine blinked a red 4. Natasha hadn't bothered to listen to his short dispatches from the red- hot West. Ward held his finger over the button and hesitated before he finally hit delete.

A stack of unopened mail on the counter lay beside a bottle opener with one cork still impaled on its screw and another nearby. It was Natasha who'd said you never leave a cork impaled on the screw. He hadn't asked what law of winery that violated. Strains of canned laughter drifted into the kitchen from the den. Since the wall of windows overlooking the woods behind the house was dark and there was no moonlight, the television screen was the sole illumination.

Natasha, wearing a light robe over her nightgown, lay sleeping on the sleek sectional sofa. An empty bottle of wine stood on the coffee table, and a blister pack of Ambien rested nearby. Ward frowned to see that of the original eight tablets, only two remained.

He frowned at the empty wineglass standing on the stone floor beside the couch. She appeared pale, but at least her chest was rising and falling. Ward stared down at her delicate features, washed by the uncertain light of the screen. One of his fears was that he would arrive home and find her dead.

Life was fragile.

Death happened just like that.

This he knew far too well.

Natasha was even more beautiful than she'd been the day he met her in Seattle a dozen years earlier. She had been a surgical resident attending a party given by a college friend of his- an artist whose paintings depicted a perfect, though surreal, rural world. There had been an immediate and mutual attraction, and they'd been married three months later in her parents’ living room. Hastily arranged, the service was attended only by her three brothers, her best friend, their parents, and his uncle, Mark Wilson. Gene Duncan, his best friend, who'd been in law school at the time, had flown out from Duke to be his best man.

Natasha Crossingham had just entered her last year of residency at a children's hospital, and Ward had remained in Seattle until she'd completed her term and, as soon as a group of pedi-atric surgeons at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte made her a partnership offer, they'd moved back to North Carolina. Ward had gone to work for his father's company, Raceway Graphics Incorporated, just in time to find out that his father had lung cancer, which despite the best available medical treatment took his life less than two years later. Ward had taken over as the company's president; he'd worked there during the summers for most of his life and he knew the business and the majority of their clients.

Natasha was in her eighth month of pregnancy when the McCartys moved into the newly completed house and within a month their son, Ward Crossingham McCarty was born and their lives had settled into a sort of perpetual perfection that had lasted right up to the afternoon of the electrocution.

When Ward sat down on the edge of the couch, Natasha opened her eyes slowly and looked dreamily up at him. As the real world came to her, she pulled the robe around to cover herself as she would if he were someone there to wash the windows.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“ Eight- fifteen,” he told her.

“When did you get in?”

“Just now,” he said. “Oh, an hour ago.”

Frowning, she said, “I should go to bed. I have rounds at six A.M. Have you eaten?”

“Not hungry,” he said.

“There's leftover lasagna in the fridge,” she said, sitting up. “I thought you were supposed to be back this morning.”

“My original flight was canceled. I took a later flight,” he told her, his heart sinking. “I left a message on the machine.”

“Did you?” she slurred, exhausted. “I didn't check the machine. Sorry. I had a long day at the hospital. Emergency appendectomy last night and I couldn't sleep. I came in from morning rounds and…”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” he said. Ward couldn't mask his disappointment that his calls home had been totally unimportant to the woman he loved more than anybody on earth. He wished he could say that to her, but for some reason the words were stacked away in some mental cubicle he couldn't locate. She had not said “I love you” since Barney's death, and it was possible she no longer did. Perhaps that love was forever gone-a victim of their grief. Perhaps Barney had been such an integral part of their passion for each other that, now that he was gone, there was nothing at all to bind the doctor to the toymaker.

“I put fresh sheets on your bed yesterday,” she told him.

“Thank you,” he said, feeling as though someone had turned a rheostat that had increased the gravity in the room. My bed.

“If it's all right with you, I'm going to order curtains for this room this week.” Natasha stood and looked out the windows into the dark. “I know it's weird, but I feel like I'd like to close them at night.”

“Whatever you want,” Ward said. Although he hated the idea of curtains covering the windows, if she wanted them, what the hell.

She yawned and stretched. “I'll see you in the morning.”

Ward sat back on the couch and watched as Natasha picked up the blister pack containing the sleeping pills and the wine bottle, then bent to retrieve the glass from the floor.

“I'll get that. Leave the bottle, too,” he told her.

“You sure?”

He nodded and watched as his beautiful wife set down the bottle and, moving in a more or less straight line, floated toward the hallway before vanishing into the darkness.

Like a lone egg in a nest, one of Barney's baseballs sat in the ceramic bowl on the coffee table. He picked it up and turned it in his hand, imagining him and Barney playing pitch with it in the backyard on a spring afternoon. He supposed Natasha had been holding it to better remember Barney He put it back and looked down, spotting, between the sofa's cushions, a flash of white. He came up holding an envelope addressed to Natasha at her office. The return address belonged to the head of pediatric surgery at the Seattle children's hospital where she had done her residency. He lifted the flap, took out the letter, and read an offer to join her surgery professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Dr. Taylor Patten, who practiced at Seattle Children's Medical Center, wanted her as a partner in his practice. Ward's face grew hot as he sucked in a long breath and contemplated the letter's significance.

Ward had once wondered if the association between his wife and her mentor had been more than the usual student/teacher relationship, because of their familiarity when they were around each other. The idea now revolted and alarmed him. He'd never asked her about their relationship, just as she'd never asked him about his previous girlfriends. What he wondered as he read the letter was whether she had written her mentor first, or if he had sought her out. And his heart pounded because it reinforced his belief that, aside from Natasha's patients, there was nothing of substance holding her in North Carolina. It didn't make him feel any better to discover that the letter was dated two years earlier, because that meant she had kept it. Why had she? She had been born in Seattle, grew up and had friends and family there. She had never mentioned wanting to return, but in keeping the letter she must have been thinking that she might pursue the offer. She must have been thinking of getting out.

Ward folded the letter, replaced it in the envelope, and put it back where Natasha had left it.

Crossing to the wet bar, Ward opened the liquor cabinet and selected a bottle of Laphroaig. He poured three inches of the golden liquid into a crystal glass, clouding it with a little water from a plastic bottle, and, picking up the remote, sat down, put his stocking feet on the coffee table, and started surfing TV channels as his mind grew dull from the pleasant effects of the Scotch.