Two Time

SEVEN

EDDIE WAS SO GLAD to get outside he circled the house at a full run, then drank a little water and did it again. I opted for a gin and tonic, which I brought out to the weatherbeaten Adirondacks, which I’d pulled out from under the maples and set up just a few feet from the breakwater. When Eddied had his fill of tearing around, he lay down in front of me with his tongue hanging out of the corner of his mouth. I looked in his eyes for signs of reproach, but only saw the resident look of gleeful anticipation.

I’d pulled a stack of mail out of the mailbox when I got there. Tucked between an electric bill from LIPA and a slippery, full-color promotional flyer from a home center store up island was a photograph from my daughter of a dentist in the 1920s straddling a patient and extracting a tooth with a pair of pliers. She was a graphic artist, with full access to every conceivable image to capture and reformulate into a postcard. This was the communication channel we’d settled on. I didn’t have a computer, so her preferred approach, email, was out of the question. I also hated talking on the phone, especially with her. Way too many pregnant pauses that formed after some offhand comment of mine, without the benefit of visual contact to clue me in on whatever offense I’d just committed. Years ago, at the advice of one of Abby’s friends, I tried to restrict myself to simple declarative sentences and one-or two-word questions whenever I had to speak to my daughter on the phone. With little success. I had a gift for provocation, especially with people I didn’t want to provoke. Somehow, though, brevity became the stylistic conceit of our correspondence, best expressed within the two-by-two hole of the standard postcard:

Hot water’s out, sup’s pissed. Boss a dick, hours late. Mom freaked, calls too much. City, zing. Tom, yum.

—Allison

They should study the genetic composition of provocation. I could supply the data.

I dug a chewed-up pencil out of my back pocket and found a field of white paper on the back of another utility bill.

Peconic calm, surly sky. Cash is cool, hammers fly. Back’s healed, ear, huh? Status quo, oh, no. Eddie misses you. You can tell by the way he drools on your pillow.

—the Dad

I had a backlog of these epistolary haikus scattered around the cottage written on whatever paper was handy. If I didn’t hear from her for a while I’d transfer one to a postcard and send it off. Past experience taught me to mete them out discretely. It took over four years to get to this stage, and I was grateful, but careful.

I wondered how I’d explain to her what I was actually up to besides swinging a hammer. I wondered if I could explain it to myself. Maybe if I sat there and drank for a while I’d be able to get in touch with my feelings. Clarify my priorities. Figure out just what the hell I was doing.

“What the hell am I doing?” I asked Eddie.

Part of me knew Hodges was right. I had a heretofore repressed impulse to stick my nose into this thing. Especially now that the official investigation had crapped out. At least, that’s what it looked like. Hard to tell these days if they were actually stymied or had it all solved, but for some reason had to keep quiet. Not enough evidence, political pressure, interdepartmental turf wars, all the stuff that would piss me off so much I’d probably pop a cranial artery. Which was reason enough to stay the hell out of it.

“Rule one. Don’t go looking for trouble,” I said to Eddie.

On the other hand, somebody tried to kill Jackie and me, albeit indirectly. Along with a bunch of innocent people. To say nothing of Jonathan Eldridge, who may or may not have been innocent, but probably didn’t deserve to be blown to smithereens.

The ugly blind brutality of a car bomb is impossible to appreciate until you’re up close to one of them. I hadn’t been able to sleep through the night for two months after it happened. And I still woke up a lot, freaked at little night sounds. It made me feel helpless and foolish. Powerless. And furious.

A big tern glided gracefully down to perch on the edge of the breakwater. Eddie looked at it like, man, you gotta be kidding me. He gave the bird a second to settle in before launching an attack across the lawn. The tern took flight with as much dignity as haste would allow.

I watched Eddie cut across the bay frontage, then make an unexpected right turn to leap over the rosebush and picket-fence border between my property and the house next door. It was a gray and white bungalow that shared the tip of Oak Point with me. An old lady named Regina Broadhurst used to live there. It had been empty since she died the year before, so it gave me a jolt to see a gray Audi A4 parked in the driveway. Or maybe the jolt was because I knew who owned the Audi.

So did Eddie, which is why he was there barking at the side door. It was opened by a woman in a white silk dressing gown and bare feet. She had long, thick auburn hair that matched the dark reddish brown of her complexion. When she bent down to pet Eddie’s head her gown opened up, revealing enough breast to identify a tan line, even from a few hundred feet. She scratched his ears, then tossed him a treat of some kind. He caught it, did a quick spin, then ran back over to me. The woman followed him with her eyes until she saw me sitting in the Adirondack. Then she backed slowly into the house and shut the door.

Eddie ran up to me with a Big Dog biscuit in his mouth, his favorite. He dropped down in front of me to eat, showing off the prize. As he crunched away I had a chance to get in touch with feelings of another sort.

“Goddammit,” I said, in the direction of Reginas house.