Now and Then

45.

Ilay on my bed in the Holiday Inn and talked with Susan on the phone.

“Hawk on the job?” I said.

“If he stayed any closer we’d be having sex,” Susan said.

“Yikes,” I said.

“Sort of a metaphor,” Susan said. “He’s very conscientious.”

“Vinnie and Chollo?”

“Right behind Hawk,” Susan said. “In truth they’re driving me crazy.”

“Good,” I said.

“I know. I’m very safe.”

We were quiet. It didn’t feel like quiet. It felt like we were saying things to each other.

After a moment, Susan said, “Progress today?”

“Yeah, some,” I said. “I found someone who knew Alderson. He was associated with a college out here. I’m going there tomorrow.”

“What college?”

“Coyle State,” I said.

“Nope,” Susan said. “Never heard of it.”

“Now you have,” I said. “You can always learn things talk ing to me.”

“Yes,” Susan said. “It’s one of the reasons I do it.”

I looked up at the ceiling. It was a standard sprayed-on ceiling. The room was generic hotel chain, generic furniture, generic rug. Nice view of the lake if I stood up. I’d been in a lot of rooms like this, mostly minus the view. They worked fi ne. They housed you, kept you warm, let you bathe and sleep and eat. They didn’t do much for the soul, but their mission had nothing to do with the soul.

“Any other reasons?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Do you know when you’re coming home?”

“No. It’ll depend a little on what I find out at the college tomorrow.”

“Have you been thinking about us?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Have you been thinking about marriage?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“We are the kind of people who marry,” I said.

“Yes.”

“On the other hand there’s nothing broken.”

“So why fi x it?” Susan said.

“Maybe,” I said.

Again the interactive quiet stretching nearly seven hundred miles across the dark fields of the republic. The fi elds were now probably darker and fewer than the ones Fitzgerald imagined, but I liked the phrase.

“And have you been thinking about why you’re so committed to this case?” Susan said.

“Most of the drive out here,” I said. “When I wasn’t thinking about marriage.”

“Any conclusions?”

“More a bunch of images,” I said. “Doherty talking about his wife. The look on his face when he listened to the tape. The way his wife seemed to feel he didn’t matter.”

“And are there any images of us that pop up?”

“We were separated,” I said. “I had to kill some people in a way I don’t feel so good about.”

“And if I hadn’t done what I did, you wouldn’t have had to kill the people you killed.”

“True.”

“Isn’t that a little hard to forgive?” Susan said.

“I’ve never thought so,” I said.

“Until this case?” Susan said.

“Doherty has to matter to someone,” I said.

“He matters to Epstein,” Susan said.

I didn’t say anything.

“I did a number of things that caused us both a lot of pain.”

“It did,” I said. “But we got past that.”

“I have never liked talking about it,” Susan said. “But I did what I had to do at the time.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Would it help if we talked about it now?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Again the rich silence across the phone connection.

“I love you,” she said. “You know that. I have always loved you. Even when I couldn’t stand to be with you, and was with someone else, I loved you.”

“It didn’t always feel quite that way,” I said.

“No, I’m sure it didn’t,” she said. “But it was true. You have to know it was true. That it is true.”

“I know,” I said.

“Don’t forget it,” she said.

After we hung up I stood in the window and looked at the dark lake stretching north to the horizon and beyond it to Canada. There was a moon, and I could see some sort of isolated bell buoy marking something a half mile from shore.

“I won’t forget it,” I said.