The Last Tomorrow

THIRTY-EIGHT

1

Carl walks through the hallway. He looks down at his scuffed black shoes as they kick one in front of the other. His feet are beginning to hurt as the drug wears off, but at least he managed to stop the bleeding. He wishes he felt better. The junk doesn’t do for him what it used to do. It used to make him feel blissful nothingness. Now it simply takes away the sickness, and that horrible itch at the back of his brain. That’s something, of course. But he can’t bring back that bliss, that feeling that he’s a silent echo bouncing against the emptiness of the universe, bouncing out further and further into nothing, free of trouble and thought and doubt and worry.

He needs to make Candice understand that he’s not addicted. If he can do that maybe he won’t feel sad anymore.

The trick is to feel nothing. To keep your soul winter-numb.

He pushes his way through a door labeled

HOMICIDE DIVISION

and into the squad room. He starts toward his desk, but only manages three or four steps before he sees Friedman get to his feet and start toward him. He’s about to say good morning, how you doing, but doesn’t get the first word out before Friedman grabs him by the arm and starts pulling on him. He says what are you doing, have you lost your goddamn mind, but Friedman doesn’t answer, only pulls him into the bathroom.

‘Do you think you’re fooling anyone?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘How long have you been using?’

‘What? I don’t-’

‘You think people don’t talk? You want to know what most secrets are? They’re things everybody knows but whispers about in hushed tones. If more than one person has a piece of information, it’s not a secret anymore. How long have you been using?’

Carl says nothing. He stares at his partner and wonders about his future. Will he be suspended? Lose his job? Go to jail? He doesn’t even know if he wants answers to those questions. He supposes he doesn’t. He supposes he’d like to echo against the emptiness and pretend none of this is happening. He doesn’t want answers, but his mind forms the questions anyway.

‘I was hoping you’d pull yourself out of this, but all I can see is you sinking deeper into it. You’re not far from drowning in it.’

‘I’m fine, Zach. It’s fine.’

‘You’re not fine. You’re not even close.’

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Because you’re my friend and I can’t watch you kill yourself when-’ He looks away, blinks several times, looks back. ‘Because you’re my friend.’

‘Fine, then. We’re no longer friends. Go fuck yourself.’

‘Carl.’

‘No, if you’re doing this because I’m your friend, then I won’t be your friend. We’ll be enemies instead. Come on.’

Carl puts his fists up in front of his face, swaying slightly, glaring at Friedman. He wants Friedman to hit him. He doesn’t know why, but he does.

‘Come on.’

‘I’m not gonna fight you.’

‘Then I’ll fight you.’

He throws a punch, fist swinging only through air as Friedman pulls back, and next thing he knows he’s lying on his back looking up at Friedman and past him to the glowing lights in the ceiling. They’re very bright.

Friedman holds a hand out, offering to help him up. Carl slaps it away.

‘Fuck you.’

Friedman nods.

‘Okay. But you need to pull yourself together. I know things have been rough for you since Naomi died, I know you’re having a hard time, and I understand it. I’d fall apart if I lost Deborah. But you’re killing yourself. You’re killing yourself, and I refuse to stand by and watch it happen. Think about that.’

Friedman pushes out of the bathroom, leaving him alone on the cold tile floor.

He doesn’t move for a long time. Then after a while he does. He pushes himself up to a sitting position, finds a packet of cigarettes in his pocket, lights one. He reaches to the counter and pulls himself up.

He pushes out of the bathroom, then out of the building.

He’s going to lose his job anyway, and maybe he should. He doesn’t care one way or the other. Why should he? It’s pointless work. Everybody dies. Take all the murderers off the streets and the very next day someone will die choking on a cold roast-beef sandwich. You can’t arrest a heart attack and you can’t arrest cancer.

You can’t prevent death. You just pretend you can so the living can remain oblivious to it right up until a pain shoots through their left arm or they find the tumor.

The dead, meanwhile, don’t care; it’s a one-way door they’ve gone through.

He walks to his car and gets inside. He starts the engine, puts it into gear.

He doesn’t know where he’s going. Somewhere.

2

Candice parks her car in the driveway and kills the engine. She looks through the water-spotted windshield to the paint-peeling garage door. She feels slightly dazed. She can’t believe her son did what the Sheriff’s Department thinks he did. It’s impossible.

They think he caused an accident by trying to steal a deputy’s service revolver while the man was driving. They think another man tried stop his escape after the accident and Sandy shot him because of it. They think he’s a badly warped record that plays different from the rest of us. Of course he is. He killed his stepfather, so he must also have done what the Sheriff’s Department thinks he did.

But something else must have happened.

She wants to believe something else must have happened.

And she would, but for this. She’s been worried about her son since last year when she saw what he did to that bird. It was a small bird, a sparrow maybe. It flew into one of the windows, but didn’t die. She heard it hit the glass and walked over to see what had happened. Sandy was hunched over it in the dirt, poking it with a stick, watching it twitch and writhe and flap its broken wing in its attempt to escape. He poked at it and refused to let it get away. His eyes were distant. There was a small smile on his lips. She didn’t say anything. She told herself he was a boy being a boy, a boy discovering what death was. But it bothered her.

Now that her husband is dead it bothers her more.

But she doesn’t want to believe her beautiful boy is a monster. She knows he killed his stepfather, that’s indisputable, but that doesn’t make him a monster. It doesn’t make him anything but a boy who reached his limit.

She should have seen it. She did see it.

But she’s seen too that there’s sweetness in him. Can monsters have sweetness in them as well as evil? Can they wrap their arms around their mothers’ necks and say I love you for no reason at all? Can they make their mothers breakfast in bed simply because they want to be nice?

She doesn’t know.

Whatever happened out on that country road, two men are dead and her son’s gone missing.

She steps from her car, walks to her front door, and pushes her way into the living room. It feels dark and lonesome. She wishes she could talk to Carl. He understands the overwhelming sense of loss you sometimes feel when you walk into an empty room. She wants to call him and talk to him, but she won’t do that, she refuses to do that, refuses to be mistress to a man married to his addiction. She’s done it before and won’t do it again.

She walks to her new couch and sits down. She stares at the wall and wishes she could go out and look for Sandy, but she’d have no idea where to begin. He could be anywhere — anywhere but here. He’s not in the kitchen where he took his first steps, or in the bedroom where he spent so many hours sprawled across his bed reading comic books, or at the dining table where he sometimes did math homework, or out back where he often played alone.

Maybe he’ll come back to her.

If he did, would she turn him over to the police? Knowing what he is, would she do that? She doesn’t think she would; she doesn’t think she could.

Someone knocks on the front door.

Her first thought, of course, is that it’s Sandy. She hopes it is. She hopes it isn’t.

She gets to her feet.

3

Carl stands waiting at the door. He watched her walk inside, so he knows she’s on the other side of it. She was gone when he first arrived, but turned her car into the driveway only four cigarettes later.

She pulls open the door with a somehow hopeful expression on her face — her eyes wide and expectant, her mouth on the verge of a smile. He removes the fedora from his head and says her name. The hope drops from her face.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Hoping to talk to you a minute.’

‘I meant what I said. We’re done.’

‘I can stop.’

‘Then stop.’

‘You don’t understand. I just need to-’

‘I can’t deal with this right now. I can’t deal with you.’

‘But if you just let me-’

‘My son is gone and I don’t know where he is. I’m scared and I’m alone and I can’t deal with your bullshit right now.’

‘Your son is gone? What happened?’

She looks at him for a long time, seems as though she may soften, then shakes her head.

‘No.’

She closes the door in his face.

4

Candice watches through the peephole as Carl turns and walks away, head hanging down, shoulders slumped. He drags his feet. Then he’s gone, and she’s glad that he is. She can’t deal with her own troubles and his as well. She simply can’t.

But as well as being glad she’s sorry.

5

Carl sits behind the wheel of his car, which is parked across the street from his house. He has the window rolled down and a breeze blows against his face. Since he began using he has experienced fewer and fewer moments during which he feels neither wasted nor sick, but he’s experiencing one of those moments now. He feels almost like the man he was before Naomi died. It makes him feel strong. It makes him feel he doesn’t need the junk. He should stop taking it. Friedman was right. Candice was right. He should stop taking it, and he can. He knows he can.

He should also tell his wife goodbye. If he told his wife goodbye his continuing to live without her wouldn’t feel like a betrayal. He should tell her I loved you more than I ever loved anything or anyone and I don’t know how to live without you in my life, and I’m afraid of sitting at our dinner table and looking across it to an empty chair, but you’re gone and I have to say goodbye. I have to say goodbye because even though I’m afraid of facing my life without you I’m more afraid that you will haunt me forever. So let me go, let me go, let me go.

He pushes out of the car and walks across the street and stands on the sidewalk in front of his house and looks at it. His haunted house. The most terrible thing about it is that the ghost within it is kind.

Don’t soothe me while I say goodbye. It only makes it harder. Don’t tell me it’s okay when it isn’t okay and can’t be.

He walks up the path to the front door, his front door, over whose threshold he carried Naomi on the day they moved in. They’d been married two years already, but this was their first home, their only home. Before they bought it they lived in a furnished apartment on De Longpre. He looks at the brass handle. He looks at the keyhole. They had no furniture their first two days, so they made love on the floor and slept in sleeping bags. Then Sears amp; Roebuck delivered their furniture, and they slept together in bed, the same bed which even now sits inside holding Naomi’s scent within its fabric.

He closes his eyes.

Go in and tell her goodbye. It’s what you have to do, so do it.

I will. Right now. I’m going to reach forward right now and unlock the door, then I’ll push into the living room and-

He turns away from the door and walks back to his car.