The Judgment

Twenty-one

Now that we were to be married, Jennifer moved in with me and we spent five days alone together, trying not to talk too much about the things we had missed. Middle-aged, all the glam-our gone, we spent the passion we had left and learned the gentler sentiments of love.

Early the next Sunday evening we left the house I would never again live in alone and drove down the long sloping driveway, through the open iron gate to the street below. She could not stop laughing.

“You look just awful!”

“This is how I earn my living,” I said, deadpan. “The law is a noble profession.”

“Try going to court looking like that.”

“I did-once,” I replied.

She nodded. “The time you went to jail. I wasn’t there to see it, but-trust me-you look a lot worse now. You’ll probably get picked up by the police and put in jail again.”

She drove me into town and dropped me off on a dark corner next to a small park, a block away from a mission where the homeless could sometimes get a meal and a bed.

“Are you going to be warm enough?” she asked as I opened the door. “There’s a chill in the air. It’s going to get cold tonight.”

She stared at me with large, melancholy eyes. “Look at you! We haven’t even lived together a week, and you don’t shave, you dress like a bum, and you make up the most outrageous excuse any woman ever heard about why you have to spend the night away from home.”

“You going to be all right?” I asked as I leaned over to kiss her goodbye.

She held me for a long time, laughing quietly about how rough my face felt with its scraggly five-day growth, teasing me that I smelled too good to pass for homeless. When she was certain I did not want to go, she pretended she did not mind and with one last kiss let me leave. With my hands shoved into the pockets of an old, ragged, oversize wool coat, I watched her drive away and then, when she was gone, turned around and walked slowly into the night.

There was at first a feeling of adventure, like someone starting out on a voyage, when danger and hardship still seem like a romance, and hunger and thirst are things you talk about on a full stomach. I was doing this to find out what I could about who had killed Quincy Griswald and then given the murder weapon to someone who would not be able to explain where it had come from. But deep down I also wanted to know what it was like to live like this: homeless and abandoned, surrounded by things you could not have and people who, when they saw you coming, would cross the street to get away.

It was not yet completely dark. A man and a woman coming from the opposite direction saw me and moved as far away on the sidewalk as they could. I went right for them and held out my hand.

“Spare change?” I asked in a harsh, rasping voice. My head rolled to the side and my chin sagged down to my chest. “Haven’t had anything to eat all day,” I said, pleading with my eyes.

He did what I probably would have done. He put his arm around her and tried to shelter her with his shoulder. She was pretty and well dressed, and as they hurried past she looked at me with loathing and disgust.

I had gotten away with it and I felt a thrill of exhilaration.

“All right,” I yelled after them in my normal voice, “if you don’t have any change, how about the keys to the BMW?”

The man shot a glance at me over his shoulder and then quickened his step, afraid I might follow.

I crossed the street to the mission and studied the dead eyes of the men who were sprawled against the front brick wall near the entrance, waiting for it to open, as I walked past them and turned the corner. Cheap hotels with dirty windows and dimly lit bars with shadows sliding slowly across the floor; hookers in short tight dresses and junkies with vapid smug smiles and pockmarked faces; fat men with fat wallets ready to buy a good time, and haggard tired women no one wanted trying to forget they had no one waiting at home: This was the world I now entered instead of my own.

In an alleyway behind an adult bookstore I rummaged through the trash cans and watched the people who came in and out the back entrance, and realized I had become invisible. A girl in a black leather miniskirt led a short, paunchy man out the door, watched with calculating eyes while he counted out the money, tucked it in her bra, and then got down on her knees in front of him and did what she had been paid for. When she finished, she watched him walk nervously down the alley toward the sidewalk, and then turned to me, searching through the garbage less than ten feet away.

“I’ll bet you wish you could have some,” she said with a smirk, and then disappeared inside.

I had just bent down to look inside the next garbage can when, suddenly, I went flying over it, and landed in a heap on the other side, buried under the trash that collapsed on top of me. Twisting around, I pulled my head up, tried to get to my feet, and was shoved back. A hulking wreck of a human being, with stinking breath and a slobbering mouth that looked like it bred corrup-tion, was waving his arm at me and pointing a finger at his chest.

“This is yours?” I asked, as I scrambled sideways to get beyond his reach. “Yours?” I asked, nodding. I kept moving, and kept repeating the same question, letting him know that my trespass was entirely inadvertent. “Sorry,” I said when I was far enough away from him to risk struggling to my feet. I backed down the alley, apologizing, and then, when I was safe, turned around and walked away as quickly as I could.

Late that night I made my way to the Morrison Street Bridge.

I dragged a few rotting pieces of cardboard I found under the bushes, and crawled underneath this makeshift blanket. The ground was hard, cold, jagged with rocks, and each time I turned over there were only a few moments of relief before I started to hurt in a new place. I hardly slept at all that night, and never for very long. Though I could not clearly see more than a few of them when I first arrived, I could sense that there were breathing bodies scattered all around. Years had passed, but the memory I had of the nights spent in the county jail was still vivid in my mind. This was not like that. No one cried out; no one moaned or whimpered or cursed; no one made a noise, nothing, except the heavy rolling sound of people who were sleeping in their own beds, the only ones they knew.

I did not think I had slept at all, but when I opened my eyes the sun was out and the traffic on the bridge overhead was deafening. My mouth felt like glue and my teeth hurt. I climbed out from under the cardboard blanket and looked around. Down at the edge of the river, two men stood side by side, urinating. Off to the side, sitting on his haunches, another man soaked his shirt and then wrung it out with his hands. On the shadows next to the concrete pilings, four men were gathered around a small fire, warming their hands while water boiled in a blue aluminum pot.

No one moved aside to let me in, and I stood a few feet away.

The one who had been doing his laundry in the river came back, carrying his shirt in his hand.

“Let him in,” he said as he sat down in the circle. “Come on,”

he insisted when at first I did not move. They made room, and I joined them. No one said anything, and looking at them, dull-eyed and lethargic, I wondered how many knew how.

“It’s the best coffee in town,” the man said, urging me to drink it. My eye darted to the river behind him. He shook his head.

“The water came from a fountain. I fill my canteen.”

I wondered if, with that careless glance, I had given myself away. With a blank look, as if I had no idea why he thought he had to explain something so obvious, I tried to cover my mistake. My eye still on him, I took a drink, and almost gagged on the rancid taste. He watched me for a moment longer, and then, smiling to himself, lowered his gaze.

No one said anything, not to me, not to anyone. They sat in a circle, drinking that awful brew, made, I discovered later, from the used coffee grinds found in the garbage behind one of my favorite restaurants. Then, a few minutes later, as if by some silent signal that passed my notice, they got to their feet and, without a word, drifted off in different directions.

The one who had given me the cup lingered behind. “You coming back tonight?” he asked.

I let him know with a look that it was none of his business what I did. If he thought my belligerence a threat, he did not show it. He reached inside his overcoat pocket and brought out a half-pint bottle of whiskey and offered it to me.

“Suit yourself,” he said when I refused. Removing the cap, he took a short swig and wiped his mouth with the back of his tattered, greasy sleeve. “Helps keep the coffee down,” he explained as he shoved the bottle back in his pocket.

I started to walk away. “You can come with me, if you want,”

he said. I stopped and looked back. He had already turned and was heading along a path that led under the bridge and came up on the other side. I followed behind and when we reached the top, he moved a bush aside and pulled out a rusty shopping cart heaped with black garbage bags stuffed full. Craning his neck, he squinted up at the glaring white sky. His lips pressed tight together, he moved his mouth back and forth while he made up his mind. Opening the bag on top, he dug out an olive green army camouflage jacket. He took off the overcoat, rolled it into a ball, and shoved it as far down in the basket as it would go and then put on the jacket.

We worked our way through town, stopping at every trash basket. A division of labor soon developed between master and ap-prentice: I pushed the cart, and each time we halted, he did a thorough search, deciding what was useless and what had value.

He always found something, a bottle, a can, something that could be turned into cash. When we reached the park behind the courthouse, I remembered the two men I had seen there late at night, doing what we were doing now, my own life somehow prefigured in that dreamlike apparition from the past.

On the sidewalk outside the courthouse entrance, afraid I might be recognized, I left my newfound friend and partner to rummage through the wire mesh trash baskets alone. I stood off to the side, next to a lamppost at the curb, watching people I knew at least vaguely going in and out the doors. Hunching my shoulders, I pulled the flaps of the cap I was wearing farther down over my ears. I ran my fingers over my beard and felt a little more confident that at least at a distance no one would know it was me.

He finished with the one basket and looked around to see where I was. I was about to catch up with him when someone bumped into me from behind. Instinctively, I turned around, and found myself face-to-face with Cassandra Loescher, the deputy district attorney who was prosecuting the case. She had been talking to someone, not paying attention to where she was going, and when she knocked into me had spilled the paper coffee cup she was carrying in her hand.

“Damn it!” she cried, holding the cup out in front of her. She started to apologize, but as soon as she saw me all she could think about was getting away. I reached out to help, but she dropped the cup on the sidewalk and walked rapidly up the courthouse steps.

Emboldened, I took a position next to the steps, held out my filthy hand, and studied the various ways in which the people I asked for money averted their gaze and tried to avoid making an answer. Two otherwise fair-minded judges treated me with open contempt, one of them complaining loudly to the other that it was bad enough this sort of thing went on in the public park and disgraceful that it was allowed in front of a public building. Defense lawyers sneered and turned away when I asked them if they could help one of the indigent. Harper Bryce, his reporter’s notebook sticking out of his suit coat pocket, ambled past me, on his way to cover yet another trial. He stopped, turned back, reached into his pants pocket, gave me all the change he had, and without once looking at me, disappeared inside. I opened my hand, counted seventy-eight cents, and felt like a wealthy man.

I caught up with my nameless friend and his shopping cart a block away and, while he searched through a basket, stood ready to push when it was time to move on to the next one. All day long we did this, drifting from one street to the next, taking what no one wanted, until the cart groaned under a mountain of debris and I had to lean my shoulder into it to keep it going. I never did know what he did with it. At a corner near the mission, he took over control of the cart, and made me wait while he pushed it down an alleyway. When he came back a few minutes later, he had emptied the cart of everything we had picked up during the day. He took out of his pocket an old coin purse and gave me three one-dollar bills, the wages of a scavenger’s helper. He snapped the purse shut and put it in his pocket, and from the same place pulled out the half-pint bottle. Thrusting it toward me, he held it still until I shook my head and then, with his head thrown back, guzzled a mouthful. He smacked his lips while he screwed the cap on and slipped the flat bottle back into his coat pocket.

We made our way through back streets and alleyways to the bridge, pushing the cart ahead of us, staring into the distance in a dull-witted daze. I had lived homeless only a night and a day and already the edge seemed to be off all existence. My senses were numbed and the only things that had meaning were the simple necessities of survival. Homeless, I was learning, meant more than not having a place of your own: It meant having nothing of your own-no friends, no family, no one you could talk to, no one you could trust. I could go home whenever I wanted, and I could only wonder at how it must feel to know that you could not.

“How long have you been doing this?” I asked when he finished hiding the cart in the bushes on the side of the bridge.

He studied me, suspicion in his eyes. “Long enough.” He turned and walked down the path that led under the bridge, the dull echo of the traffic throbbing overhead.

The pieces of cardboard I had used as a bed and a blanket were still where I had left them, and so strong is the instinct for possession, I felt a sense of relief that no one had taken what I now considered my own. There was no one else around, and after he had gone down to the edge of the river, where he took off his shoes and washed out his socks, he climbed barefoot back to where I was sitting. He lowered himself down beside me, wrapped his arms around his knees, and watched the slow-moving brown water flow past.

“Are you an undercover cop?” he asked in a flat voice that seemed not to care one way or the other.

He had guessed wrong, but the fact that he had guessed at all told me that I had failed. “No,” I replied.

“When you came here last night, the others wanted to roll you.”

“Roll me?”

“Yeah. Whack you over the head, take whatever you had. I told them they better not, that you might be a cop.”

I looked down at my shoes. A beetle was crawling across the toe and down the other side. The gravel gave way and it tumbled over on its back, legs flailing helplessly in the air. With a flick of my fingernail I flipped it right side up and watched it scramble to safety.

“When you live on the streets you know better than to show up some place for the first time after dark.” He reached in his pocket for the whiskey bottle. “And besides that, you don’t move right: You’re too quick, too nimble. You’re not one of us.” He took a drink and offered it to me.

I took it from him, wiped the opening with the heel of my hand, and put it up to my mouth. It ran down my throat like fire and acid, and for a moment I thought it had burned away my larynx and left me without the power of speech. A second surge scalded my nostrils and flamed out of my ears.

“Thanks,” I said, gritting my teeth as I handed the bottle back to him. “And thanks for last night. But I’m not an undercover cop. Why would a cop come here?” I asked, poking at the dirt.

“You’re not a cop? Why are your clothes so new?”

“Why don’t you mind your own damn business,” I said, pretending to be angry. “You didn’t want to tell me how long you’d lived like this, but I’m supposed to tell you? Who the hell are you, anyway?”

He made no reply. Instead, he passed the bottle back to me. I had no choice, not if I wanted to keep him there, talking. I took another drink, and this time it did not burn quite so much.

“They come once in a while, looking for drugs. They came a week ago, a whole bunch of them, just swooped in on us. We weren’t doing nothing. They took away a guy because he had a knife. They said he killed somebody with it. They’re all nuts.”

He scratched the side of his face and took the bottle out of my hands. There was not much left in it, and he finished that with one last gulp. “Have to get more tonight,” he said matter-of-factly.

A couple of other homeless men appeared at the far side of the bridge and wandered down to the riverbank. “You better not stay here tonight,” he warned me. “Better move on. Find another place.”

“I’ll stay here if I want,” I insisted, tossing a contemptuous look at the pair down at the river. “The guy with the knife didn’t kill anyone?” I asked, trying to sound indifferent.

He tapped the side of his head. “Feebleminded. We looked after him, best we could. It wasn’t even his knife.”

Looking out across the river, I picked up a rock and sent it sailing into the water. I picked up another one. “So whose knife was it?” I asked as I sent it on its way.

There was no answer, and I looked back over my shoulder. He was watching me, a grotesque grin on his face. “You sure you’re not a cop?”

I found another rock. “Go screw yourself,” I grunted as I let it fly. I looked back at him and waited.

“A little guy with crazy eyes. He stayed here a couple of days-

started getting real friendly with the feebleminded kid. We caught him one night. He had the kid’s pants down and he was-you know-trying to do things to him. We sent him on his way.”

“Sent him on his way?”

“Yeah, we threw him in the river,” he explained.

“What happened to him-after you threw him in the river?”

He looked at me and then shrugged. “Don’t know. Didn’t see him get out.”

I fought back the panic that swelled up inside me. Whoever had given Danny the knife had disappeared and was probably dead. We did not even know his name, and the only witness I had that he had ever existed was a homeless drunk who had probably killed him.

“We were pretty tired of that jerk anyway,” I heard him saying. “Always going around mumbling to himself, and then every time he had to take a leak coming up to me to ask if it was all right. I’m telling you: The guy was nuts. He was nuts; the cops are nuts; everybody’s nuts. I gotta go get another bottle,” he said without a pause. He struggled to his feet. “You want to come?”

I walked with him to a liquor store and told him before he went in that I wanted him to get me something, too. I put a few folded-up bills in his hand and said I would wait outside. As I walked away, I wondered what he would end up buying when he discovered that I had given him a couple of twenties instead of a couple of ones.

Though it called itself a city, Portland, or at least that part of it that had stayed on the same side of the river, was no larger than a New York neighborhood. You could walk from one end of it to the other in less than twenty minutes. I was at Howard Flynn’s place in less than ten.

The curtains were open, but it was dark inside. Flynn lived alone and never went out, except to an AA meeting or when one of his friends called for help. I climbed the steep stairs to the unlighted front door and for the first time all day suddenly felt tired. I leaned my forehead against the heavy wooden front door and pressed the bell. I let go, waited, and when I heard no sound inside, punched it again. There was still no response. With one last short burst on the bell, I pushed myself away from the door and sank down on the top step, heavy with fatigue.

At first I thought it was the passing headlights of a car, and shut my eyes to avoid the glare. Then I heard the dead bolt turn, and reaching for the railing above me I struggled to my feet.

Standing in the doorway, thick, hairy legs protruding below a threadbare flannel robe tied together with a cotton belt that did not match, Howard Flynn blinked into the harsh overhead light.

He took one look at me and shook his head.

“How did you know it was me?” I asked as he shut the door behind us.

He turned on the light in the small entryway and looked at me from head to toe. “Why?” he asked with a shrug. “Because you’re not wearing a tie?”

“What took you so long to answer the door?” I asked irritably as I followed him into the kitchen.

“I kept hoping whoever it was would go away.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Actually, I was watching television and I didn’t hear it at first,” he confessed.

“How could you not hear that goddamn thing? It makes as much noise as an electrocution, for Christ sake,” I grumbled.

“For a homeless guy, you’re pretty damn pushy, aren’t you? Sit down,” he ordered. “I’ll make you some coffee. You look like you could use it.”

While Flynn carefully measured three level teaspoons of ground coffee into a paper filter, I waited at a small Formica table that looked onto a square atrium. A glass bowl of artificial fruit-yellow wax bananas, and red wax apples, and green and purple glass grapes-was right in the center where it always was. A bite mark on the side of the apple, left by the teeth of a disappointed child of a long forgotten friend, made all of it seem more real. Flynn poured water in the top of the coffeemaker and turned it on.

“That friend of mine-the psychologist-saw Danny.” He stared into the glass pot, watching as first one drop, then another slowly formed and then fell, coating the glass bottom with a dark turgid liquid. “Turns out he isn’t retarded after all-not in the usual sense, anyway. Fox thinks he’s about twenty-three or -four. Can’t be sure, exactly. Danny doesn’t know. He lived somewhere-out in the country, near a river. Fox thinks it might have been somewhere down around Roseburg or Grants Pass.”

The coffee kept dripping down, gradually increasing speed until it turned into a fine-flowing stream.

“His mother might have been retarded. She wasn’t married-

he didn’t have a father that he knew-but there were always men around. He was abused, probably starting when he was just an infant: sexual things, physical things, mean, perverted, awful things. Fox thinks the burn marks weren’t the half of it.”

Turning around, Flynn put his hands on the counter behind him, looked at me, a grim expression on his face, and then stared down at the floor. “He never went to school; he never went anywhere. When he wasn’t locked in a room he was chained like a dog in the backyard.”

Flynn raised his eyes. “You can’t really blame the mother. You ever know a girl like that when you were a kid, a girl who was a little slow, a little backward: a girl guys knew how to take advantage of? That’s probably what you had here: A girl, young and retarded, who didn’t have any parents of her own, finds herself pregnant, has the kid at home, lives from hand to mouth, becomes the punchboard for every lowlife in the county, and then one of these creeps starts getting his kicks with the kid.”

Suddenly, from out of nowhere, an orange cat with a torn ear and a thick stump where its tail had once been bounded onto my lap and then onto the table. Like a boxer throwing a jab, Flynn flicked out his hand, grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck, and sent it flying out of the room.

“Nomo isn’t supposed to get on the table,” he explained as he poured the coffee.

It was hard to know whether to be more astonished at how much speed Flynn still had in his hands or at the distance the cat had sailed before it landed, without so much as a whimper, somewhere down the hall.

“Nomo?” I asked.

Flynn handed me a mug of coffee and sat down on the other chair. “Yeah. Stands for Nomellini. You remember Leo Nomellini-played for the San Francisco 49ers back in the fifties? Leo

‘The Lion’ Nomellini?”

I did not remember, if I had ever known, but I was not surprised Flynn had.

“You named the cat after Leo Nomellini because he looks like a lion?”

Flynn rolled his eyes. “I named him after Nomellini because he’s big and stupid.”

It was the lawyer in me: Every answer was the invitation to a question. “How do you know Nomellini was big and stupid?”

“He was a defensive tackle,” he explained patiently. “By definition he was big and stupid.”

“Weren’t you a defensive tackle?”

Flynn nodded. “Which means I know what I’m talking about,”

he said as he got to his feet.

I followed him down a short, narrow hallway to the smaller of the two bedrooms, the room which as long as I had known him had served as both a study and a guest room. A desk, a chair, a television set, and a beige sofa that made into a bed were the only furnishings. Turning off the television, Flynn sat down at the desk and thumbed through a stack of manila folders.

Flynn had loosened the cotton belt that held his robe together.

Sitting on the wooden chair behind the desk that was really nothing more than a plain wooden door resting on cement blocks, the tattered ends of the robe lay in a heap on the rose-colored carpet. He was wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of blue and white striped boxer shorts underneath. The folds of skin around his eyes were thick and puffy, the way they are on the face of a fighter years after he has left the ring. His mouth moved silently as he read the names of the files through which he searched.

“I just had it here,” he mumbled to himself. “Here it is,” he said, as he pulled out a thin report, the pages of which were fastened together with a blue plastic paper clip, and handed it to me. “A lot of it is guesswork, but I don’t think it’s too far from right. The kid never went to school, never had a friend, never had anyone to talk to. He’s not retarded, not in the clinical sense.

There’s nothing wrong with his mind. He’s socially retarded; he’s what you would expect to get if you locked a baby in a room and didn’t let him out except to be mistreated for the first fourteen or fifteen years of his life. Except for one thing,” Flynn said, shaking his head with a kind of wonder. “There’s nothing vicious about him. He’s an innocent. He’s like a dog people keep kicking and he still comes back, hoping that maybe this time someone will treat him with a little kindness,” he said, using the same analogy I had used when I tried to explain to Jennifer what the boy was like.

Flynn took a deep breath and, wearily, let it out. At the sound of it, I felt again my own fatigue. Sinking against the corner of the sofa, I let my feet slide out across the carpet until I caught sight of my own filthy, mud-encrusted shoes. “Sorry,” I began to apologize as I sat up.

Lost in thought, Flynn did not hear me. My eye moved behind him to a photograph barely visible on the shelf behind his chair. Like the bowl of artificial fruit in the kitchen, the tarnished silver frame was always in the same spot.

“How old would he be now?” I asked in a voice that was more like a whisper.

He did not turn around, and I wondered if he ever looked at it anymore: that picture of the bright-eyed little boy held in the powerful arms of his young father.

A clumsy smile came and went and came again. “Twenty-nine last month. Hard to believe, isn’t it: where all the time has gone?”

His eyes looked past me into the distance. Then he got to his feet, tied the belt around his waist, and opened the closet door.

“I’ve got some clothes you can wear. Why don’t you take a shower, get cleaned up, and I’ll drive you home. You don’t want to show up looking like that,” he said with a gentle laugh.

Halfway up the drive the porch light came on and Jennifer, wearing a knee-length cotton nightgown, dashed out and began to wave. The headlights swept past her as Flynn pulled up in front. Darting barefoot down the darkened steps, she threw herself into my arms as I got out of the car.

“I didn’t think you’d be home for days.” Standing on her tiptoes, her arms around my neck, she ran her hand over the side of my face. “You shaved.”

“Say hello to Howard Flynn,” I said, as I opened the back door of the car.

Her arms behind her back, Jennifer looked across the passenger seat. “Hello, Howard Flynn. Thank you for bringing my derelict home.”

Reaching inside, I gathered up the thick bundle of clothing I had worn during my brief sojourn as one of the homeless. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Flynn’s face color slightly as he became formal and awkward, trying to be polite.

Dragging the bundle behind me, my arm around her waist, we walked up the steps to the porch and watched the lights of the car recede into the distance as Flynn drove down the drive and out the gate. Inside, Jennifer took the bundle from my hand, dropped it to the floor, and kissed me on the mouth. I gathered her up in my arms and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. She slid under the sheets and started teasing me about my borrowed oversize clothes, and then, after I had taken them off, she turned off the lamp.

We made love with a new intensity, and when it was over, and we lay together in the moonlight that splashed through the bedroom window, she put her hand in mine and touched my soul.

“The only thing I want is to live with you and to die with you, live together, die together, just us, the way we said it would be.

Remember?”

I remembered when we first said it, and I said it again, the same words, the same promises, but it was not the same. We had lived separate lives, and we knew that what we had promised before-that we could never survive apart-had been, not a lie, but something that had not been true. In the innocence of our youth we had believed love and death the only real alternatives, and had come to learn that life was neither so simple nor so kind.

Curling her arm around my neck, she held me as tight as she could. “Just love me, love me forever… please.”

I put my arm around her and spread my fingers on the small of her back, and tried to relieve the tension that was running rigid through her. Her hard, sobbing breath began to slow down, and after a while I could barely feel her heart beating against me; and then, a little later, her hand let go of my neck and her arm slid down onto my shoulder. For a long time I watched her sleep, wondering about the way the most important things seem to come about by chance, and whether chance might be nothing more than a word we hide behind when we don’t want to believe that everything has been decided by fate.

The next morning I found Jennifer dancing around the kitchen, humming to herself as she put dishes away with one hand and rinsed off a pot with the other. Both hands moving at once, she kissed me lightly on the cheek and ordered me to sit down at the table. I squinted at her through eyes still filled with sleep, staggered to the coffeemaker, and poured myself a cup. She watched with amused indulgence as I dragged myself over to the table and collapsed into a chair. Jennifer slid into the chair opposite, and with a pensive expression drank coffee from her cup.

“Tell me about Howard Flynn,” she said presently.

“Flynn? He’s a private investigator. A long time ago he was a lawyer,” I said, my gaze drifting across the kitchen to the windows that let in the yellow morning light.

“You told me once that he was disbarred because he came to court drunk and said some things he shouldn’t have.”

My eyes came back to her. She never seemed to forget anything, no matter what it was and no matter how long ago it might have been said.

“What happened to him?” she asked.

My gaze went back to the window, and I shook my head. “It’s a terrible story,” I said, reluctant to say more.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“It isn’t that,” I said, as I began to stir the cup with a spoon.

“It really is a terrible story, the kind that doesn’t have an end.”

“Does any story have an end?” Her voice was like a long slow breath that made you want to stay right where you were, listening to her talk. “Our story didn’t.”

I thought about what she said. “No,” I remarked presently, “our story didn’t end-it got better-but what happened to Flynn…

“Howard Flynn was a great athlete, one of the best high school football players anyone had ever seen. He was six foot three, two hundred sixty-five pounds, with a thick neck and a head like a barrel keg, and quick as a cat. Every college wanted him; everyone told him he’d be an all-American. He was, too, third-string all-American his sophomore year. But Flynn didn’t play football because he loved it; he played it because he was good at it and because it paid his way through college. If he had come from a wealthy family, I don’t think he would have played at all. Flynn wanted to be a lawyer-from the time he was a kid, that’s what he wanted to do.

“He studied all the time, and almost never went out. Howard was a one-man wrecking crew on a football field, but around other people he was quiet, shy, always a gentleman. I don’t know, but I’d be surprised if he’d ever had a date in high school. But now he was an all-American, and girls who would not have looked at him twice wanted to be with someone famous. There was one in particular: tiny, not more than five foot two, with flashing black eyes and a cute little smile. Her name was Yvonne Montero and they started going out. Everyone liked Flynn, and everyone thought it was great that he finally had a girl. It didn’t matter that she had made it with half the guys in school. Flynn didn’t know anything about that, and besides, they were just going out.

No one thought it was serious, but of course it was serious. For the first and only time in his life, Howard was in love-the way I was in love with you.

“They got married the day after he graduated, and she probably started fooling around the day after that.” I caught myself getting angry and took a deep breath. “To be fair, she worked while he went through law school. Three years later, he passed the bar and got a good job with a pretty good firm. A few months later, she had their baby, a boy, Howard Flynn, Jr. That was the hap-piest day of Howard Flynn’s life-maybe the last really happy day he ever had-the day he first saw his son.”

Locking my fingers together on top of my head, I stared out the window, rocking back and forth on the chair.

“What happened?” Jennifer asked, breaking my reverie.

“One day, about two years later, while Flynn was in court arguing a case, his wife was home in bed with another man, someone she had been sleeping with for more than a year. The boy, Howard’s son, was asleep in his own room. He woke up and wandered into the living room, looking for his mother. The sliding glass door to the backyard had been left open. She was in the bedroom, making love, when it happened. She never heard her son fall into the pool, never heard him cry for help, never heard anything except the sounds she was making while she cheated on her husband.

“The boy drowned, and Howard died that day as well. He blamed himself. Odd, isn’t it, that after what his wife had been doing, Howard would think it was his fault? He thought he should have known that it was too good to last. His wife was having sex with another man in their bed; their son drowns because of it; and Howard thinks that he should have known what she was going to do, and that he could have saved his only child if he had!”

“What about the mother, Howard’s wife? Didn’t she blame herself?”

“I don’t think she was capable of blaming herself. She moved out right away. The last time Flynn saw her was at the funeral.

Howard had made all the arrangements himself. He did everything himself. For a while-a few months-he kept to his old routine. He went to work every day and he did his job; he kept his grief to himself. Then something happened, some kind of delayed reaction, I guess. He started to drink and he didn’t stop.

And then Jeffries started in on him, ridiculing him, humiliating him in open court. Finally, he just said the hell with it and told Jeffries exactly what he thought. He did it drunk, but I think he would have done it sober, there was so much rage and hurt bottled up inside him. It wasn’t a question whether he was going to explode, but when, and Jeffries was so incredibly easy to hate.”

Jennifer pulled her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around them. “Is that why he has such strong feelings about this Danny? Because of what happened to his own boy?”

I did not understand at first, but then, searching her eyes, I began to grasp her meaning. “I hadn’t thought of it,” I admitted,

“but I suppose you must be right. I’m sure he still blames himself; maybe he thinks he can make up for it a little if he can help someone else.”

Turned down at the corners, her wide mouth looked like the smile of a brokenhearted child. “Maybe, in a strange way, he thinks this boy is his son. You told me he’s a three-year-old in a grown-up’s body. He’s what Howard’s son would be if he hadn’t drowned, if he had just disappeared, and then, after all these years, been discovered.” She looked at me through half-closed eyes. “We do that, don’t we: imagine that someone we haven’t seen in a long time hasn’t really changed, not deep down inside, no matter how much older we both are?”

I wondered if she was talking about us, and as I watched a bittersweet expression form on her gentle face I felt a knot in my stomach, afraid I had done something to disappoint her, afraid that I had changed more than she had thought. Her gaze grew more distant and she pulled her knees tighter under her chin.

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

At first I did not think she had heard me, but then, a moment later, like someone clearing away the cobwebs, she batted her lashes twice and sat up. With a cheerful look in her eyes, she came around the table and sat in my lap, her arms wrapped around my neck. “I love you Joseph Antonelli, and I’ll marry you whenever you want. Tomorrow, if you like.”

She let go of my neck, and for a long time, the bare presence of a smile flickering across her fragile, vulnerable mouth, looked at me like someone peering at their own half-forgotten reflection. Without a word, without a sound, she gently rose and, taking me in her soft, naked hand, led me back upstairs.