Desperate Measures

EPILOGUE

Love is an act of faith, Pittman thought. People get sick and die, or they die in traffic accidents, or they eat food that hasn’t been properly cooked and they get salmonella and they die, or they fall from a ladder and break their necks, or they get tired of you and they don’t want to see you anymore and they don’t answer your phone calls, or they divorce you. There were so many ways to be tortured by love. Indeed, eventually all love, even the truest and most faithful, doomed the lover to agonizing loss-because of death. Love required so much optimism, so much trust in the future. A practical person might say that the possible immediate benefits did not compensate for the ultimate painful result. A cautious person might deny his or her feelings, closet the temptation to love, smother it, and go through life in a safe, emotionless vacuum. But not me, Pittman thought. If love requires faith, I’m a believer.

These thoughts occurred to him as he held Jill’s hand and walked between rows of tombstones toward his beloved son’s grave. It was Thursday again, a week after the events that had taken place at Eustace Gable’s mansion and two weeks after Pittman had tried to save Jonathan Millgate’s life at the Scarsdale estate. Following the arrival of the police and the discovery of the corpses in Gable’s blood-spattered living room, Pittman and Jill had been held in custody. But as Pittman had hoped, the damning conversation that had been broadcast to the police was his salvation. After he and Jill had been questioned at length, after Mrs. Page corroborated those portions of their story about which she had personal experience, after the police in Boston and New York verified other details (with help from the Vermont State Police, who went to Grollier Academy), Pittman and Jill were eventually released.

Now in New York, they stopped before Jeremy’s grave, and the warm sunshine-filled spring afternoon made Pittman’s heart ache worse from love for his absent son. It was terrible that Jeremy would never again see and experience weather so beautiful.

Pittman put his arm around Jill, drawing comfort from her, while he studied the amazingly green grass that covered Jeremy’s grave. As his tear ducts stung his eyes, he was reminded of something that Walt Whitman had written, that grass was the hair of graves. Jeremy’s hair. The only hair he has now. Except that isn’t true, Pittman thought. A hundred years ago maybe, when coffins were made of wood and weren’t surrounded by a concrete sleeve and lid. In the old days, the coffin and the body would decompose, become one with the earth, and generate new life. Now the way bodies are hygienically sealed within the earth, death is truly lifeless, Pittman thought. If his ex-wife had agreed with Pittman’s wishes, their son’s body would have been cremated, his ashes lovingly scattered in a meadow where wildflowers could bloom from him. But Pittman’s ex-wife had insisted so strongly and Pittman had been so emotionally disabled, Jeremy’s body had been disposed of in a traditional manner, and the sterility of it made Pittman want to cry.

The thought of death, which for the past year had preoccupied him, now weighed heavier on his mind. Since his escape from the Scarsdale estate, he had seen his best friend killed, and Father Dandridge, and that didn’t include several men whom he himself had killed, and it certainly didn’t include the slaughter at Gable’s mansion. The more Pittman brooded about it, the more he wondered if the other grand counselors-Anthony Lloyd dead from a stroke, Victor Standish dead from suicide-should also be included. And of course, Jonathan Millgate. I set out to do an obituary on a man who wasn’t dead, Pittman thought. In the process, I inadvertently ended up causing the death of that man and of all his associates.

The grand counselors were evil. Of that, Pittman had no doubt. But they would have died soon anyway, he told himself, and maybe that would have been better than exposing their obscene secret and causing so many other deaths along the way. Would any of this have happened, Pittman wondered, if he hadn’t believed that the public truly had a right to know about the abuses of power? If he’d been less determined, he would never have gone after Jonathan Millgate seven years previously. Burt would never have chosen him to go after Millgate again two weeks ago. Do I bear some responsibility for what happened?

Pittman couldn’t believe that. No, I was right to go after them, he told himself with force. Those bastards did think they were above everyone. They didn’t care who suffered and died as long as their careers prospered. They deserved to be punished-not killed, too easy for them, but exposed, condemned, ridiculed. In the old days, they would have been put in a cage in the town square and people would have spat upon them. And maybe other diplomats would have been discouraged from abusing power.

This “what if” type of thinking, this “if only” second-guessing had been typical of Pittman’s mind-set after Jeremy’s death. He had kept imagining an alternate reality in which if only this or that had happened, everything would have turned out for the best. But the “if only” hadn’t happened. “If only” wasn’t the case. Reality was the case. And reality was painful.

As a consequence, he had not been prepared for the love that he had found in Jill. He held her close to him. He treasured her. Yes, love was doomed to end in pain, he thought, but in the meantime it was an anodyne against other kinds of pain, the tragic imperfections of life. He still could not adjust to the realization of how close he had come to killing himself two weeks earlier. He had been in such black despair because of grief, the pain had been intolerable. Now grief still weighed upon him, unrelieved by the tears that streamed down his cheeks as he blinked through them at Jeremy’s sunbathed grave, but he had been shocked into dealing with the present rather than dwelling on the past, and with Jill beside him to share the weight of his grief, he knew that he could now persist, just as he would gladly share the weight of whatever despair would eventually seize her.

And to be sure, a few good things had happened. The day after the massacre at Gable’s mansion, the newspaper for which Pittman had worked and which had been scheduled to go out of business had found a financial white knight willing to keep it in business. The dying paper had been reborn, and the publicity that Pittman’s story had received had prompted the paper’s new owner to rehire Pittman as a lead reporter-in exchange for an exclusive series about what had happened to him and what he had discovered about the grand counselors, although his prestigious new position didn’t matter to him as much as the chance to continue telling the truth about the abuses of power.

If only Jeremy was alive to cheer me on, Pittman thought.

If only.

But “if only” was to look backward, and at the moment, watching Jeremy’s grave, tightening his arm around Jill, he knew that he had an obligation to himself and Jill to look to the future.

An act of faith, Pittman thought.

He turned to Jill, who wiped his eyes and kissed him.

“I’m sorry you’re hurting,” she told him.

“Hey, I’m alive. You’re here with me.” His voice broke. “Tears don’t always mean a person’s sad.”