Empty ever after

CHAPTER ONE

Some thoughts are traceable, but I don’t know why I was thinking of Israel Roth and that winter’s day in the cemetery. He was long dead now and I was all cried out. I was all cried out for the both of us. In death he was beyond the reach of my love and scorn. Even now, I am amazed at how he feared losing my affection. “You don’t know my sins,” he’d said. Hell, he didn’t know mine. It’s funny how that works. We were men of sins and secrets, Israel Roth and me. We could share love, but not sins. Too bad he died before mine were out in the open, before he could witness the bill come due.

You would think I’d be good at grief by now, having mourned a mother, a father, a marriage, and a miscarriage before him. Miscarriage, what an asinine term. Oh, dear, I seem to have miscarried that baby. How clumsy of me! That child had been a part of Katy and me, not a tray of dirty dishes. As I recall, no one shouted, “Oops!” But experience had taught me that God doesn’t say oops. You have to have faith in God’s big plan, so I’m told, and that misery is all just part of it. For Mr. Roth, misery had been a big part of the big plan. No more misery for him. He had gotten his wish. Kaddish and ashes, ashes and Kaddish. Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may ra-bo, B’ol-mo dee-v’ro… I hadn’t been quite so lucky.

Sure, there was some sense of relief in the secret being out, with Patrick dead and buried and buried again. Just lately, I find relief is overrated and secrets, no matter how potentially corrosive, can often sustain a man much the better than truth. I would know. Patrick’s vanishing act had changed the course of my life. Without his dis-appearance in December ’77, I would never have met his sister, Katy Maloney, my future and now ex-wife. With Katy and me, as with all things, the seeds of destruction were sown at birth. Even if we hadn’t made Sarah, the most glorious child ever, I would not regret my time with Katy. She had taught me love and comfort and how not to be only an observer to my own life. So no matter what Patrick had or had not done, I could never hate him.

The same could not be said of my late father-in-law, Francis Maloney. I knew exactly how I felt about that cruel and callous fuck. My father-in-law chilled the earth when they laid him in it, not the other way around. He too had known the secret of his son’s disappearance, that I had found Patrick all those years ago and let him slip away. For twenty years, neither of us had managed the courage to confess our sin to Katy. We held the secret between us like a jug of acid, both of us scared to let it drop for fear of being maimed by the backsplash. We were right to fear it. For when, in death, Francis let go of the jug, the splash scarred us all.

Foolishly, he had assumed it would burn me worst. But the anticipation of the burn, the years of his taunting about ghosts and payback had hardened me. Secrets do that. If the secret’s big enough, you build a wall around it until there’s only wall and very little left of yourself. And Patrick’s secret was only one of many. As a PI, I had become a collector of secrets, a gatekeeper of orphaned truths. I kept the secrets of the murdered and murderers alike.

Since the divorce, secrets and loss were my only companions. I suppose, then, that it wasn’t such a mystery, my thinking about Israel Roth on a rainy Sunday in July. Katy and I had tried briefly to reconcile, but there are some wounds from which recovery is neither possible nor truly desirable. We had sold the house even before the divorce was finalized. Katy moved back upstate to Janus and I bought a condo in one of the new buildings across from the water in Sheepshead Bay. Sarah stayed in Ann Arbor over the summer instead of coming home to work at one of the stores. The wine business wasn’t for her. Like father like daughter. Christ, I hoped not.

The phone rang and there was someone at the door. Amazing! I had sat alone for hours staring out at the rain making shiny little ripples out of the petroleum film floating atop the bay. Now I was pulled in two directions at once.

“One second!” I shouted at the door.

I picked up the phone, “Hello.”

“Dad!”

“Sarah! What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“At school still. It’s Mom.”

“What’s Mom?”

“Call her.”

“Sarah, what’s going on?”

“Somebody disturbed Uncle Patrick’s grave.”

I would never get used to her calling him Uncle Patrick. It was weird, like me thinking of him as my brother-in-law. As it happened, Patrick had been murdered before Sarah was born. She was now older than he ever was.

“What do you mean, someone disturbed his grave?”

“I don’t know, Dad. Mommy was hysterical crying when she called me. You better call her.”

“Okay, I’ll take care of it.” There was that banging again. “One second!”

“Dad, did you say something?”

“No, kiddo, there’s somebody at the door.”

“So you’ll call Mom?”

“As soon as I get the door, yeah. I promise.”

“Call me later and let me know what’s going on.”

“I will. Thanks for calling me about this.”

“I love you, Dad.”

“You too, kiddo.”

The banging at the door was more insistent, but I wasn’t in the mood for anyone else’s crap. Divorce, no matter how amicable, isn’t easy, and Katy, Sarah, and I were still in the midst of realigning our hearts to deal with the new tilt of our worlds. That’s why Katy had moved back upstate, why Sarah had made work for herself in Michigan, and why I was watching raindrops in Sheepshead Bay. The last thing I wanted was to be dragged back into the thing that had blown us all apart. I must’ve looked pretty fucking fierce to Mrs. Dejesus, the maintenance man’s wife.

“For chrissakes!” She didn’t quite jump back at the sight of me. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Dejesus. I was on the phone with my daughter and…”

“Look!” she said, pointing down at my threshold and along the blue flecked terrazzo floor of the hallway. “Mud everywhere, Mr. Prager, to your door. And this!”

I knelt down to try and compose myself. There, on my welcome mat, was a withered red rose and, beneath it, drawn in the mud, was the Chinese character for eternity.