The Last Place

CHAPTER 8

“You’re going to die, Tess.”

It was Monday and she was back in Dr. Armistead’s office, sulkily pulling on the wing chair’s fringe. It had seemed to her that her Antietam epiphany was just the sort of story one brought to therapy, but Dr. Armistead did not seem impressed or even interested. It was as if she had shown up for a dinner party and the host had frowned at the label on her proffered bottle of wine.

“Well, I don’t know what else to tell you. I thought it was the most interesting moment of my week.”

“Really? What about your encounter with that man in the bar?”

“Troy Plunkett? There was nothing particularly interesting about that. It’s what I do. I talk to people. Sometimes I have to pay them.”

She had told him about her work only to provide some context for her Antietam moment, although she was confused about the crosscurrents of confidentiality here. Was it breaching confidentiality if she spoke of the matter in a setting where all was presumed confidential?

“I think it’s quite interesting. You’ll excuse me for playing armchair psychiatrist”-he smiled at his joke, so she did too, out of politeness- “but I couldn’t help noticing the similarities between that encounter and the one that brought you here.”

“Similarities? I talked to a guy in a bar. He didn’t make a pass at me, and I didn’t attempt to remove his body hair.”

“You went to that bar on a mission, with an agenda you masked to some extent. After all, if you honestly believed this man had killed his girlfriend all those years ago, I suppose you would go to the police and tell them what you discovered, not attempt to interview him on your own.”

“Well, yeah, of course. But that’s not how my job works. I don’t solve cases, not on purpose. I look into things, I make reports. Sometimes I come at it sideways, sometimes I don’t. It’s a judgment call. After all, I was straight up with the landlord, the guy in Sharpsburg.”

“I suppose that’s something we share.”

He had lost her.

“The public misperception of what we do, and the role of the mass media in perpetuating stereotypes.”

“Sure,” Tess said. For one thing, you talk more than I do. But she liked that. She had worried it would be up to her to fill the hour, which was part of the reason she had stored up the Antietam story and told it in such detail. But if it was going to be all back-and-forth like this, more a conversation than an interrogation, she could probably ride out the six months. Tess had been a reporter for a few years, which had taught her how to draw people out. And she had been a woman all her life, so she knew men were always happy to talk about themselves.

“Come to think of it, the mass media has done much worse by my old job.”

“Your old job?”

She kept thinking he was omniscient, that he knew everything about her life to date.

“I was a reporter before I became a licensed investigator, back at the old Star. But when it folded, the Beacon-Light didn’t hire me, and I had to change careers. At the ripe old age of twenty-seven.”

“Did that bother you?”

“Of course it did.” Tess tried to keep her words light, but she was surprised at how much the memory of that rejection still rankled: the token interview with the editor in charge of recruitment, a bulldog-ugly woman who wouldn’t even deign to touch Tess’s résumé. She felt the blood rush to her face, her cheeks burn.

“Why?”

“It was the only job I ever wanted. It took me two years to find a new career for myself, and that was mainly luck. Now I see it was for the best. I’m a much better investigator than I was a reporter. I still go out, ask questions, collect facts. But I’m no longer obligated to cram them into the limited templates of newspaper journalism. I’m much happier now.”

He didn’t speak right away, letting the last sentence sit there, naked and conspicuous, shivering in its exposure.

“That seems a good thing to have learned,” he said at last.

“What?”

“A devastating rejection is often the only path to a better life. Endings can be beginnings.”

“If you don’t figure out that life lesson by the age of thirty-one, you shouldn’t be free to walk the streets without a keeper.”

He seemed mildly offended to have his insight dismissed so cavalierly. But he was a pro, he kept going.

“I’m not so sure. After all, there must be a reason why that Robert Frost poem, ”The Road Not Taken,“ resonates with so many of us. When he stops in the woods on that snowy evening, he’s not a child. He’s a grown man, and it’s not clear if he’s happy with the choice he made, simply that the choice mattered. He takes the less-traveled road. And, according to the poem’s end, it changes his life.”

“But he doesn’t say if it’s for better or worse, just that it made all the difference.”

“I’ve always assumed it was positive.”

Tess shrugged. She wasn’t so sure. Frost should have written a sequel to clarify. “You’ve conflated two poems, by the way.”

“Excuse me?”

“You said he stopped in the woods on a snowy evening, but that’s the title of another Frost poem. You know, Whose house is this, blah, blah, blah. Frost is a great poet, of course, but he’s a bit Norman Rockwellian, don’t you think? So good for you, so American, so beloved it sticks a bit in the throat, like oatmeal. I prefer Auden or Yeats.”

“Do you have a favorite poem?”

“Yes-but it’s as much of a chestnut as ”The Road Not Taken,“ if I’m going to be truthful.”

“That’s the one rule here,” the doctor said, his manner grave. “You must be truthful. Lying to me is like going to a doctor and telling him the pain in your knee is really in your neck. It won’t help and it could hurt. So what is this… chestnut?”

“ ”To His Coy Mistress.“ ” Dr. Armistead betrayed no recognition. “Andrew Marvell. The one about the guy who is trying to persuade a woman that life is too short for a prolonged courtship and they have to go for it right now.” Which was not exactly how she had worded it in her college term papers, but it was succinct.

“I’m not sure I know it.”

“You must. It’s one of those things they don’t let you get out of school without learning.

“Thus though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run. The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.”

“A morbid image.”

“That line always makes me think about a song we sang as kids. ”Did you ever think when a hearse goes by, that one of these days you’re going to die?“ There’s some line about the worms playing pinochle in your snout. Now there’s an image.”

Dr. Armistead laughed, which pleased her in some way she didn’t fully understand. “I must say you have a broad frame of references. From the Civil War to Andrew Marvell to pinochle-playing worms. But we’re back where we started.”

“Which is?”

“In the grave, which is a fine and private place. Like it or not, Tess, you are going to die. Everyone does.”

“So far. But I hear they’re working on some solutions to that problem over at Johns Hopkins.”

Was it a coincidence that the old nightmare returned that night? Tess thought not. She opened the French doors off her bedroom and crept out onto the deck. In her perpetually-under-renovation bungalow, this deck was one of the few finished spaces. Damn Dr. Armistead and all his talk of death. Damn her, for hanging out in graveyards and battlefields, thinking about death. Jonathan Ross had been buried more than two years ago, and it had been a year since she had this nightmare, the one in which she watched him die again and again.

The April night was cool, and she wore nothing but a thin cotton robe, but it felt good, clearing her head. She leaned on the railing, looked out into the darkness that was Stony Run Park. There was light at the edges of the view-streetlamps from the major streets to the north and the south. But here, with the neighbors’ houses dark, it was inky black and quiet.

Jonathan had not been her boyfriend, not by the time he was killed. They were something much less and something much more. They had been each other’s first post-college relationship, which had allowed them to mistake one another for adults. They became each other’s benchmarks, former lovers who gauged their progress through life by the other’s achievements. Jonathan had been far ahead of her when he died, a rising star at the newspaper. He was killed for a secret he had not yet uncovered, a secret that fell to Tess to divine and keep. Tess, without a newspaper in which to publish her suspicions, had not been important enough to kill.

Or so Luisa O’Neal had told her at the time.

Was Jonathan’s death the catalyst that had changed her life? Tess could never decide. She had been a failure when he died, essentially jobless and loveless. Now she owned her own business and her own house-a house where the world’s best boyfriend was now sleeping. Her adventure with Mickey Pechter had put all those things at risk. She pulled the robe tighter around her shoulders.

“If you could see me now,” she whispered to the night sky. “I’m doing really good.”

Then she thought of her case, how she must report to the board before the end of the week and how little she had to tell them, how far she was from developing any information that would help them lobby for new funds.

“Well, pretty good,” she amended.

Tess could not leave bed for more than five minutes before Crow awoke as well. He said the temperature dropped when she slipped away, but she thought the real story was that the greyhound sneaked into her spot, and Esskay’s horrible fishy breath would rouse the soundest sleeper.

“You haven’t had insomnia for a long, long time,” he said, coming out on the porch. He was bare-chested, nothing but baggy sweats hanging on his long lean frame. She knew that men like Crow often fattened up in middle age, but it was impossible to imagine an extra pound on him. Impossible to imagine him in middle age.

“I had a bad dream.”

“The usual?”

Crow knew all about Jonathan Ross, but he begrudged her no memory, which was more than she could say for herself. For a young man inclined toward monogamy, Crow had been awfully generous with his charms before they hooked up.

Still, she didn’t want to tell him the truth, for fear he would want to talk about it. And talking about it was only going to make the nightmare recur.

“No, no,” she lied. “One of the flailing dreams.”

“Who was the target this time?”

The first lie had seemed acceptable, compounding it with a second did not. So she tried to get back on honest territory by remembering the last flailing dream she had had.

“My parents. Of course. It’s almost always my parents.”

“Never me?”

“Never.”

“Would you tell me if it was?”

“Probably not.”

They laughed, Tess out of relief that she had come full circle, out of a lie and into the full truth. She had never had one of her flailing dreams with Crow. And if she did, she probably wouldn’t tell him. Those dreams were as disturbing, in some ways more disturbing, as the reruns of Jonathan’s death. In them, she windmilled her arms helplessly, crying hysterically, trying to get someone to listen to her. But her blows were puny, weak, ineffectual. And the object of her assault walked away, unimpressed. Clearly, it would make great material for Dr. Armistead. Clearly, she wasn’t going to talk about it with him.

“Hey,” she said, intent on changing the subject. “Did we make love tonight?”

“You can’t remember? Well, there’s a boost for my self-esteem.”

“My head is kind of fuzzed. Too much work, too much analysis.”

“I was at the club late, and you were asleep by the time I got home.”

“Right.” He was responsible for booking the musical acts that played at her father’s bar on Franklintown Road. This did not make their schedules very compatible, but Tess considered this a good thing. They were less likely to take each other for granted. And if they ever did, he had a scar on his abdomen to remind them how foolhardy that could be. She had almost lost him, too. She was a regular black widow, come to think of it.

“So let’s,” she said.

“Okay.” He stood up to go inside.

“No.” She took off her robe and spread it on the deck like a blanket. “Here.”

He looked at once surprised and amused. Crow was usually the one who pushed for innovation, while Tess was inclined toward a series of greatest hits.

“The neighbors might hear us,” he pointed out.

“Only if you do it right.”

He leaves when they start making love. He doesn’t need to see that or even hear it. Which isn’t to say he’s jealous. Quite the opposite. He feels sorry for her, sad that she has settled. Her boyfriend is just that, a boy. He knows, once he claims her, they will enjoy a closeness she has never experienced with anyone. Their lives are already intertwined, even if she doesn’t realize it. And she, better than most, respects destiny. She will welcome him, embrace him, be grateful for him. She understands so much-trajectories, physics, probabilities. What she doesn’t understand, he will teach her. Tides, toxins, the number of places that remain uncharted and unmapped in a world ruled by measurement.

No, he leaves because he has to go to work. Luckily, this job will take him down to Anne Arundel County, and he can go see his mother when he’s done.

The Western Shore was a compromise. She wanted someplace closer to home, which was totally impractical. They kept the house on the island, leaving it vacant, and he set her up here, near the Severn River. She complained about the lack of a view. She said he had promised her a water view, which he never did. She said he had told her she would get free premium cable, and that the stove would be gas, not electric. He doesn’t know where she gets these ideas.

Lately, however, she doesn’t complain at all, and he finds he misses her querulous laments. She is shrinking, becoming fearful and small. She isn’t even fifty-five, but she looks much older than her neighbors here. Then again, they had cushier lives. She hasn’t made friends, which is probably a good thing, but it makes him sad and angry for her. She’s a lovely woman, his mother, but her background makes her shy. She’s probably right to be shy around these snobs. Real rich people-and he knows something about real rich people now, has realized in hindsight how rich Becca’s father was-are much nicer than these folks, who made middle class by the skin of their teeth. Real rich people don’t worry about losing what they have.

His mother doesn’t have to worry about money, at least. He has made sure of that. But she worries anyway. She, who was so brave and calm, is anxious about everything.

She is sleeping when he lets himself into the house and enters her bedroom. Her hair is thinner but still brown. Does that mean his own hair will never turn white? He smooths it back from her forehead, says her name. Ma. Ma. Wake up, Ma. Ma. Ma.

She wakes with panicky eyes. “Who-what?”

“It’s me, Ma.”

“Oh.” She squints at him, as if to make sure. “What time is it?”

“Not quite seven. I had a job down this way.”

“Did it pay well?”

“They always do.”

“Don’t be afraid to ask for more.”

“I’m not.”

“I mean, just because you’re in business for yourself, doesn’t mean you don’t feel inflation too. And with gas going sky-high-”

“I do better than most, Ma. You don’t have to worry.”

“I saw something on the news last night.”

He sighs, knowing it could be something on the news last night, or a week ago, or a month ago. It’s possible it was never on the news at all.

“They found bones, in this forest. And they could tell who it was. A woman went out to buy milk on New Year’s Eve ten years ago and never came home. And all they had was bones, but they know she was shot and dumped there. Because there’s a nick, see, on one of the bones. It’s amazing, the things they can do.”

“Yes,” he says, wanting to be agreeable.

“No secret ever stays kept. Everything comes up. Nothing stays buried or lost, the way you might think.”

“Some things do.”

“But even in your work, you’ve said, sometimes-”

“Sometimes. But that’s usually someone else’s fault. Not mine. Other folks get greedy, or careless. They think they don’t need me, they try to do it themselves, they don’t take precautions, they don’t realize when a place is tapped out. Those are the ones who get caught, Ma.”

Her brows knit. She struggles to a sitting position. She won’t travel much farther today. From sitting here to sitting in her little living room. She is willing her body into atrophy. What does it matter if the stove is gas or electric? She lives off prepared food and microwaved dinners. Horrible things, microwaves. He’d never choose to live with one.

He admires his mother in a way that her doctors can’t, or won’t. Animals know when death is coming for them. Why shouldn’t his mother? But he can never decide if this new fear is for the past, and what lies there, or for the lack of a future. Does she look forward to death because she thinks it will put an end to these fears? She was so strong when he needed her, so capable. He owes her everything. That’s what the doctor could never understand. She’s a good person, sweet and kind. She gave him life twice. How boring it was, how banal, to be quizzed about her. She was not the problem. She was the solution.

He fixes her breakfast, cereal made hot with boiling water, a sliced banana on top. She has all her teeth but she prefers soft, mushy food. When will he have to feed her a spoonful at a time? Five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty? And then what happens? How can he spare her the final indignities of life? He makes her a cup of Sanka. Hideous stuff. He wonders if she’s ever read the label. Then he gives her some Hydrox cookies, which she will dip into the Sanka until they too are soft.

Her doctors have told her to watch her fat intake. She has a fierce sweet tooth, and if she can’t bake five-layer cakes anymore, she wants to have her Hydrox. Hydrox, not Oreos, never Oreos. And Hydrox are getting hard to find. He has to go on the Internet, buy them from some Texas company that tracks down disappearing foodstuffs. He rather likes the woman he deals with, so peppy and full of enthusiasm for her job. There are so many needs to be filled in this world, so many people, like her and him, filling them. The Endangered Snack Act, he thinks, that’s what the country really needs. Something to protect Hydrox and Hostess Snowballs and Charleston Chews.

She holds the cookie down in the Sanka, dunking it until it almost falls apart, then pops it in her mouth. He turns on the television, the program with the silly morning men, the ones who make people sing “Manic Monday” at the start of every week. A small trail of brown saliva dribbles from the corner of her mouth, and he dabs it for her. More and more, she has trouble swallowing, although the doctors say there’s no reason she should. She has perpetual heartburn.

“Everything comes up,” she says absently, her eyes on the screen. He’s not sure if she’s talking about her food or the past. “Everything comes up.”

“I know, Ma. I know.”