The Nominee

Fifteen

SO MAYBE IT BRUSHED up against the pathetic, but as I jumped out of my car in the gravel parking lot at Long Wharf at the end of an extraordinarily long day, I was near frantic to see my dog. Let’s face it. I had no wife. I had none of the children that I was expecting to have by now (see above). As of yesterday, I had no publisher. At times like these, you take whatever you can get, and what I could get was Baker. Truth is, I was legitimately thrilled to see him.

I was also thrilled to get out of the musty clothes that I had worn in the coroner’s archives — clothes so musty that they caused me to be somewhat an outcast in the newsroom all afternoon as I pounded the telephones with mixed success.

But at Long Wharf the first sign of distress came when there was no sign of distress, meaning my man Baker was neither up on the edge of the boat barking as I came across the lot, nor was he running up the docks to greet me as he usually does when he’s been spending the day with Nathan, the old man by the sea who runs the marina.

As I walked down the docks to the boat, the silence was strange and growing stranger with each step. I could hear my own breathing and the creak of the wood beneath me. When I reached the boat, still no Baker. I went downstairs, figuring he might be napping on the bed, but saw nothing. So I walked back down the dock to Nathan’s little wharf-side shack and rapped on his door.

Nathan, by the way, is what we New Englanders might call an old salt, a bearded mariner who takes great pains to talk in a Maine accent so thick that it often renders him incomprehensible, which seems just the way he likes it. He’s the only guy I know who actually says, “Eyup,” which in the Queen’s English means, “Yes.”

He came to the door in a flannel shirt and a pair of filthy khakis, but more important than that, he came to the door alone. My fear turned to panic.

“Nathan, have you seen Baker around? He’s not on the boat.”

He studied me for a second as he thought this over. “Well, yeah, I was just with him an hour ago. Last I saw him, he was sleeping on the dock right next toThe Emancipation.”

“How long ago was that?”

I had heard him say an hour, but wanted him to repeat it, to think about it again to make sure it was right.

He did, and said, “Pretty sure it was an hour, cuz I left him to come inside and watch my National Geographic video here, which is an hour long and is just about ending now.”

“Thanks, I’m sure he’s around,” I said, turning swiftly away and heading back to the boat. I wasn’t so sure.

Images — vivid, awful images — filled my mind, images of poor, trusting Baker being shot or stabbed by the intruder who had tried to kill me in the Florida swamp. Or perhaps he was lured into a car or van and driven away, a hostage in some deadly game, the nature or purpose of which I didn’t yet understand. Maybe it was innocent. Maybe he was sleeping up in the park or had taken himself for a swim. But I knew that wasn’t the case. He never swims without me, and he would never roam away from the boat if he weren’t with someone he knew.

I went back to the boat, looked it up and down, inside and out. On deck, I called his name out loudly, the sound of my voice carrying across the black skin of the harbor before disintegrating into the warm hazy night. I called out again, and again, and again, and again, but nothing.

By now, Nathan was walking down the dock with a pair of industrial flashlights in either hand. “The critter’s never taken off before,” he said as he approached. Then he handed me one of the lights and said, “Here, this’ll help.”

I took the light and trotted off across the docks to the parking lot. Nathan stayed behind shining a beam into the water beneath the dock. Fact is, I felt far more panicked at that moment than I had ever been in that Florida swamp.

Baker was seven years old — well into middle age, by dog standards, though he acted like anything but, aside from the fact he had injured his back hips in an explosion a couple of years before, which I won’t get into now. He ran when he felt like running, walked when he felt like walking, chased squirrels at will, slept often, and he’d look at me like I was an abject idiot if I missed his mealtime by any more than a few minutes.

He was also my very best friend, the only living, breathing creature who had accompanied me through the mourning of my wife, the long, meandering and still ongoing recovery, the joy of meeting Elizabeth, the agony of seeing her go, and always, always, his eyes lit up and his tail wagged at the very sight of me coming through the door. He had one motto in life: Count me in. If I did something, he wanted to do it as well.

By the time I got to the parking lot, I was in a full sprint, though where I was heading, I didn’t know. Then suddenly I did. I was heading right toward Baker, who was sprinting across the parking lot toward me. When we met, I leaned down and hugged him hard, too happy to be mad. I saw that he kept looking over his shoulder in that urgent way he sometimes does when he wants me to look as well. So I did.

And in the dusk, walking in our direction at a slow pace, was a strikingly familiar figure — long and lean and confident and elegant and so much more. When she got a few feet closer, she said in her characteristically rhythmic voice, “Hello, Jack. I hope you don’t mind.”

I straightened up and looked at her square from several feet away, and said in a tone that emanated from that vast emotional acreage somewhere between friendly and aloof, “Hello, Elizabeth.” Pause. “You scared me to death. I thought my dog was missing.”

“I’m really sorry. The last thing I wanted to do was scare you. When I came down here looking for you, he grabbed his ball and led me toward the park. I just followed. I really am sorry.”

I looked down at Baker looking up at me, and I couldn’t help but laugh softly to myself. In his dog mind, Elizabeth had probably just come home after an unusually long day at work, and everyone was together again, as they should be.

I leaned down and hugged him one more time, perhaps because I just felt the need to hug someone, and no one else in my present company would do. Elizabeth, still standing just far enough away that I couldn’t make out all those features that I knew by heart, said one more time, “Jack, I’m really sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

That was followed by an awkward silence between us. I didn’t know what she wanted; she didn’t know whether I wanted her here. Finally, she said, “He looks terrific.” And then, softly, “And so do you.”

“Thanks.” I was surprised that my voice suddenly felt weak.

I hadn’t seen her since that day I asked her to leave our apartment about nine months ago. We had talked several times by phone after she left, but because we didn’t have a lot of things to split up, our contact was almost nil.

More silence hanging in that chasm between us. Then she said, “And I’m really sorry about Paul. I just can’t believe it.”

I shook my head. She took a step closer, knelt down and scratched the dog’s chest. She stood up and said, “And I’m really sorry about theRecord. That was an incredible story you had today. I can’t even imagine the Cutter-Ellis family not owning it. I don’t want to imagine the family not owning it. I know how close you were to Paul, how you regarded him, and how he regarded you.”

And then, explaining the point of this visit, she added, “I was worried about you, Jack. And yes, despite what you think, I still have a right to worry about you. There’s too much going on here for anyone to handle alone. I just wanted to come by and make sure you were okay, and if you’re not, to see if I could help. We all need somebody sometimes — even you, even when you refuse to admit it.”

Ah, history. It hangs over every thought we think, every word we speak, every action we take. Sometimes, it’s good history, compelling us forward with lessons learned. Other times, history sucks. Put me and Elizabeth into the latter category.

To the uninitiated, her visit, her kind words, seemed born of nothing more than loving concern. Think again. In that one little passage, she got in, let me count, one, no two, no three jabs, oblique as they might be. She always accused me of being too independent, of shutting her out, of trying to live my life with an allegiance to someone who had died nearly four years before, mainly, my wife.

I looked down at Baker, not at her, for reasons I can’t fully explain. I said, “That’s nice of you.”

And that line hung out there in the air between us, tinged with both sincerity and sarcasm. Truth is, I’m not sure which way it was meant.

Regarding Elizabeth, she was, in a word, beautiful, and if you’d like more words, try these: gorgeous, elegant, unfailingly sexy, gravity-defying, and in many ways classic. As I’ve said, she had enormous blue eyes, perfect white teeth, swollen lips, long brown hair that framed a face that could grace the cover of a fashion magazine. She was the type of woman who other women stared at when they passed each other on the street. Men too, most of whom would then shoot me a look of utter, unabashed envy, if not surprise.

Nice perks, all, but no reasons for love. At least that’s what I’m supposed to say. What I had loved about the woman was that all her many physical attributes didn’t seem to matter to her in the least. She would go days without showering. She would roll in the grass and dirt with the dog. She would bunch her perfect hair in a ponytail or beneath an old baseball cap, preside over a wardrobe made up almost entirely of old (tight) jeans and fraying tee shirts, and barely touch her face with makeup.

She was also one of the smartest, most confident human beings I’d ever met, a straight-ahead writer who could report the living hell out of the news while getting an endless kick out of telling people something they didn’t already know, which she did a lot, because people — men and women — liked to tell her things they didn’t tell anyone else. She could have easily made a fortune on television, she was that poised, but she recognized the vacuous simplicity of broadcast news and preferred the world of the written word.

That’s the good news. On the flip side, she was prone to distended periods of near-maddening aloofness when you — rather, I — couldn’t penetrate her exterior with a jackhammer and a team of burly construction workers. Her moods were like the New England weather: if you didn’t like it, just wait a minute. And the changes usually came without warning. In some perverse way, it almost added to her allure; there were enough obsequious sycophants out there, male and female, to people an entire life, especially when you’ve made a national name for yourself by once taking on the president of the United States. She cut a decidedly different figure.

Still, I had learned over the years that aloofness was often about selfishness, and she could be selfish in a world-class kind of way, so I had to ask myself, was she here tonight to selfishly fill some personal void? Or was she genuinely worried about me? More to the point, given her ruthless pursuit of news, was she here to bleed me on Paul’s death? Could she be trying to find out what I knew for the benefit of her paper?

That led to another question: Was I happy to see her? Regardless of her motivation, she probably wondered that as much as I did. Actually, the emotions were crashing over me like, well, swamp water. I was physically exhausted from my broken date with death, mentally ravaged by all that was taking place in my life, and here was my ex-girlfriend, walking in from the gloom to check on my emotional sturdiness. I needed someone to tell me what I was supposed to think. So I asked.

“What am I supposed to think?”

She didn’t hesitate. She never does. Too confident. “Don’t over-think it like you always do, Jack. Just know that someone cares enough about you that she wants to make sure you’re not about to lose your mind in all this.”

I averted my glance again from her stunning face and stared at my dog, whose face was also stunning but in a different, furrier, more canine kind of way. He kept looking from one of us to the other.

“Look,” I said. “I’m exhausted. Somebody tried to shoot me and then drown me about thirty-six hours ago. Tomorrow, I’m going to deliver a eulogy at Paul’s funeral. Oh, and this morning, I found myself standing in the middle of your bedroom. So if you’ll excuse us, Baker and I will be heading down to the boat to bed.”

Let me add here that I wasn’t thinking through what I wanted to do, where I wanted this session to go. In fact, my mouth was operating without the typical, often necessary input from my muddled brain. But I did have a vague understanding that by telling her I was in her bedroom that day, when I walked away, I knew I wouldn’t be leaving her.

She knew that too. She knows me as well as I know myself. Which is why, as I trudged across the lot toward the docks with an indecisive Baker in hesitant tow, I heard her footsteps fall in behind me. Then I heard her voice ask, “You were in my bedroom?” It wasn’t accusatory. It wasn’t even incredulous. It was more, almost, amused.

I kept walking; she kept following. Baker now liked this drill.

“I’m looking for a condo. I need to give up the ship, so to speak, next week. The one you’re renting is for sale. My realtor took me in there before I realized you were the tenant.” Pause, then, “Nice place.”

“I don’t really like the furniture.” Light now, airy, joking. Familiar.

“And you’re almost out of toothpaste,” I said. Favor returned.

I continued walking toward the boat. She called out, “Do you have any beer?”

“I do,” I replied, still without turning around. There’s my mouth getting ahead of my mind again.

We both traversed the docks and boarded the boat and Nathan popped up from the other direction and I said, “Nathan, Elizabeth; Elizabeth, Nathan. She thought it would be a good idea to walk the dog without letting anyone know.”

“Ah, the ex,” he said, shaking her hand. This was getting entirely too bizarre, so I went beneath and pulled out two bottles of Sam Adams Boston Lager. When I came back up and handed her one, Nathan bade us farewell, winked at me on his way out, and left.

We sat across from each other on two teak chairs on the forty-foot boat. She said, crossing her arms close to her body, “Do you have a sweater? It’s getting cold out here.”

There’s that thing with women and men’s clothes. So I went back down and retrieved my favorite cotton pullover, navy blue and ribbed. As she put it on, I took a long pull on my beer. I’d be lying if I said she didn’t look good in my clothes, and she probably still had half my wardrobe to prove it.

I’d also be lying if I didn’t say that I had thought about this moment, this face-to-face encounter, every day for the past few months, hashing and rehashing all the things I wanted her to hear, from my profound disappointment to my so many nights of lonely, relentless hurt to my eventual realization that I just hadn’t been ready back then for something as serious as what we had, and that my mind just shut down, maybe defensively, maybe offensively, but I just stopped functioning as part of what we once were.

Instead, I said, “A long day,” took another swig of beer, and stared straight up at the star-studded sky. This reticence, this silence, is what it meant to be a man, or at least what it meant to be Jack Flynn. Still, the air felt warmer with her in my presence, like she was some sort of blanket protecting me from the increasingly cold world.

“What do you mean you were shot at?” She sounded concerned.

I told her.

Always the reporter, “What were you doing down in Florida? Don’t you have enough going on up here?”

I shook my head. “Long story. Boring story. And a fruitless story.” I lied. I think. I hope.

“You called the police, right?” She knows me that well. When I stared out at the black harbor in silence, she looked at me with alarm and said, “C’mon, Jack, someone tried to kill you. Tell me you called the police.”

I explained to her that if I took the time to report the incident to the Florida Police, I would have been stuck down in Florida while I had too much work to do back in Boston. It wasn’t a viable option at the time.

“So have you reported it to anyone up here.”

Yet again, my mouth got away from me. “Well, the guy running the case up here is Travers, and I have no particular desire to go to him with any of my problems and no particular sense that he has the ability to solve them.”

That line, and that line of thought, deflated any resuming familiarity between us. She became quiet, looking down at her beer, thinking God knows what. I was thinking of Travers and her, which was like being hit in the face with a cold cloth — wrapped around a brick.

I looked at her carefully and she returned the gaze. Travers. Fucking Travers.

Nothing means forever anymore. Never doesn’t mean never.

She was here, but she wasn’t mine. She was sitting inches from me, this woman whose body and mind I knew better than any other, but I couldn’t have her, mostly because I wouldn’t allow myself to have her for reasons that were too complex to fully grasp in my current state. This only fueled my latent anger.

She said to me, obviously trying to change the subject, “You saw the gossip item about Robert this morning, I assume.”

“A cheap shot,” I quickly replied.

She asked, “You sure?”

I was surprised by the question. She used to agree with me that Fitzgerald was the victim of jealousy. Before I could answer, she said, “I’m the one who researched that story. I was trying to do a follow-up with their real names. Jack, I don’t think those people exist.”

By now, my skull was pounding, as if somebody — maybe that guy in the Florida swamp — was taking the business end of a crowbar and gradually whacking it against the back of my brain. Images of Travers kept flashing in my mind.

“So you fed that item to the gossip column?”

“It’s legit.”

I shook my head and laughed a shallow, humorless laugh. My mind was now ahead of my mouth, and I said with great certainty and unmistakable finality, “Thanks for stopping by. Time for you to go.”

She’s a beauty, this woman, as ambitious as she is gorgeous, which made me wonder anew what the hell was she doing here?

I got up. She did, too. She pursed her lips, and her features seemed to sag as she massaged my face with her eyes. She stared at me for a long moment, silently, such that I could see the little black etchings beneath her stunning eyes, and then she knelt down and gave Baker a big kiss on the bridge of his nose. I seem to remember this happening before.

“Good luck, Jack,” she said, straightening up. As she stepped onto the dock and walked away, my eyes were riveted on her. Her walk was my walk. Her face was my face. Her thoughts were my thoughts. There was a time not so long ago when I didn’t know where I ended and where she began — which was the way I always thought it would be.

I watched her until she was engulfed by darkness, until the emptiness of this vast space was overwhelming. And then I thought of Katherine, and wondered not for the first time what she would think of Elizabeth. She’d like her, I thought. She’d like her a lot.

And then I realized that she had left with my favorite sweater. It occurred to me that I’d more than likely have the chance to get it back.