All Mortal Flesh (3 page)

“I won’t. I—”

The dispatcher hung up. Meg stared at the phone. Weren’t they supposed to keep her on the line until someone got there? Inside her warming car, she shivered. She wrapped her arms around herself and settled in to wait for someone to deliver her from this nightmare.

There are moments in life that are between: between the blow and the pain, between the phone ringing and the answer, between the misstep and the fall. One that comes to everyone is a moment, or three, or five, between sleeping and waking, when the past has not yet been re-created out of memory and the present has made no impression. It is a moment of great mercy; disorienting, like all brushes with grace, but a gift nonetheless.

Russ Van Alstyne was floating in this moment.

He rolled over and emerged from a dreamless sleep like a diver floating to the surface of the ocean. The room he was in was dark, tiny, not his. He had never made up stories about the cracks in the plaster ceiling, and he had never tried to replace the lopsided overhead glass light. The room was neither dark nor light but thick with shadows, and he lay in the comfortable bed with quilts rucked up beneath his chin and wondered if it was day or night. Was it summer or winter or spring or fall? His hand moved between thick, thousand-wash sheets. Was he alone or was… ?

That thought tumbled him back into his life.

He pressed his face toward the feather pillow, desperately reaching for the last handhold on the vanishing train of sleep, but that car was gone, and he was well and truly awake. In an upstairs bedroom at his mother’s house. He eyed the small windows in the kneehole wall, where gray light leaked in around the brittle green shades. Probably late afternoon. He should call the station and get a status report from Lyle MacAuley. Things had been dead quiet since New Year’s, thank God. The only open case they had was the death of Herb Perkins’s border collie. Somebody had lured the dog out of the barnyard and butchered it. Gruesome but not urgent. Lyle was checking out the extremely long list of people who might have disliked the foul-tempered Perkins enough to give him the Millers Kill equivalent of the horse’s head between the sheets.

He dropped his hand over his eyes. He could identify with the poor dumb dog. Get tempted out of your home by a forbidden treat and next thing you know, your guts are steaming in the snow next to you.

No. He wasn’t going to start feeling sorry for himself again. He had too many things to do. Empty the woodstove ashes and restock the bin. Get a head start on shoveling out the driveway. Offer to help his mom with dinner.

He wondered how he was going to manage any of these when he couldn’t summon the will to get out of bed. He checked his watch, holding his arm out straight and squinting to bring the face into view. It was three o’clock on Monday. And he was still alive. Not doing much, but still here. That was something, wasn’t it?

He heard the stairs creaking, quiet footfalls outside his door. He shut his eyes and let his hand fall relaxed over the quilt, putting off for a little more time the minute he would have to emerge in the land of the living again. The steps retreated downstairs, and he sighed. Christ, here he was, fifty years old and hiding from his mother. Could he possibly be any more pitiful?

With that, he tossed off the covers and swung out of bed. He was completely clothed, except for his socks, and as he pulled them on he tried out his game face. Capable. Stable. A guy who can Deal with Things. He stood and checked himself out in the dresser mirror. Okay. No stains. No bad bed head—although if he didn’t get to the barber soon, he might as well start wearing a ponytail like one of those idiot downstaters in the throes of a midlife crisis.

He did not meet his own eyes.

He opened the door onto an upper landing masquerading as a miniature hallway. In the bedroom opposite, twin beds frothed with pink gingham and lace and heaps of stuffed animals, ready for his nieces to sleep over. He shuffled down the first flight and paused on the turning. He could hear voices from the kitchen. His mom and… he eased down a few more steps… his sister.

“… yet?” Janet was saying.

“No. He got in a little before lunchtime, looking like death warmed over. He went straight to bed. I didn’t ask.”

“What’s going on with Linda?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying not to interfere.”

“Has he talked to a lawyer yet?”

“As near as I can tell, he doesn’t want to consider it.”

“Oh, for chrissakes.”

“Janet…” His mother’s warning tone. God help the child who swore or blasphemed in front of her. Even if that child was a forty-six-year-old mother of three.

“Sorry.” A chair scraped the floor. “But really, Mom. She could be clearing out their accounts while he mopes over here.”

“If she does, he’ll have to deal with it. I’m not pushing him into a divorce, and I’m not telling him to go back to his wife. I’m keeping my mouth shut.”

He was about to stomp down the rest of the stairs and announce himself when Janet said, “I can’t believe you! When I was thinking about splitting up with Mike, you were falling all over yourself with advice!”

Russ stopped, one stockinged foot poised over a stair tread. Janet? Almost left her husband? Didn’t anyone tell him
anything
?

“Sweetie, you know I love Mike like he was a son. Any advice I gave you was meant to help the both of you. It’s not the same with Russ and Linda. It’s no secret I never really took to her.”

No shit
, Russ thought.

“If I start bad-mouthing his wife, who is it fixing to get hurt when they get back together?”

“You think they’re going to get back together?”

“I’d like to think…” Her voice trailed off. Even with the last turn of the stairs and the living room between them, Russ could hear his mother sigh. “Your brother is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a real-life Horton the Elephant. He meant what he said and he said what he meant…”

“An elephant’s faithful one hundred percent,” Janet finished the quote.

Great. His entire personality could be summed up by Dr. Seuss.

“So you think this is just the middle-aged crazies?” Janet sounded relieved. “Well, he won’t be the first guy to get the urge to dip his wick into a much younger woman when the clock starts tolling fifty.”

His hand tightened around the banister until his knuckles showed white and his arm shook. To hear all his pain, all his teeth-gritting self-control, all his astonished joy dismissed as a midlife crisis was almost more than he could bear right now. He knew his sister and his mother loved him, but they didn’t know him. Nobody knew him.

Except Clare. Who was lost to him now.

He let his next step come down loudly, then thudded the rest of the way down the stairs. His mom’s tiny living room opened directly onto an even tinier dining room, where the two women were sitting, folding single printed sheets of paper into thirds.

Margy Van Alstyne looked up at him with the face of a worried chipmunk, well-padded cheeks between frown lines above and a little wedge of a chin below. That, combined with her short, beer-keg body, gave her a misleadingly harmless appearance. “Hey, sweetie. We were just talking about you. Did you have a good nap?”

He cleared his throat. He could at least try to sound normal, even if he couldn’t feel that way. “Yeah, I was out like a light. What’s this you two are working on?” He picked up one of the pamphlets. “An antiwar rally? Aw, Mom, not again.” One of his mother’s proudest possessions was a photo from a 1970
Time
magazine showing her in a screaming match with the then-governor of New York at a peace demonstration.

“Just because the corporate war machine doesn’t have you in its clutches this time doesn’t mean I’m not going to shout out against this blood-for-oil idiocy.”

He scowled at his sister. “Are you in this, too?”

Janet, like him, had gotten most of her features from their father, and they shared a rangy build and bright blue eyes. She used to have his almost-but-not-quite-brown hair until a few years ago, when it mysteriously went blond overnight. From fright at turning forty, she claimed. Now she stretched out her long legs beneath the table and cracked her arms over her head. “Don’t look at me. I’m just the hired help.”

“You’d be singing a different song if you had sons instead of daughters,” their mother said.

“I did all the singing I intend to do back when I was a kid,” Janet said. “I’ll help you fold your mailers and I’ll take ’em to the post office and I’ll even drive you to Albany to picket at the statehouse, but I have yet to see that anything an ordinary person does has any effect whatsoever on the powers that be.”

“And this would explain why you drive your old mother batty by refusing to vote?”

O-kay. At least they were off the topic of him and his marriage. Or him and Clare. “I’ll see if there’s anything I can make for dinner,” he said, beating a retreat into the kitchen.

He was head-deep in the pantry, wrestling out a sack of potatoes, when he saw Janet’s jeans in the doorway.

“What are you going to make?” She moved out of the way as he hoisted the twenty-pound bag onto the table.

“Potato soup,” he said. “Mom’s on one of these all-protein, no-carb diets. All she ever has for supper is this freeze-dried wild salmon or turkey sausages.”

“So of course that makes you crave bread and rice and potatoes.”

“What can I say? I guess I’m the type to want what I can’t have.” He tried to smile, but from the look on Janet’s face, he didn’t succeed.

She dropped her voice, in deference to their mother’s presence in the next room. “How are you doing? Really?”

“Really?” He stared at the potato sack. He was numb, that’s how he was. Cauterized. He knew that soon he’d smell the stench of burned flesh and all those nerves that had been seared in half would come screaming to life and he would be in a world of pain. He knew that if he took his concentration for one moment off the here and now and started thinking about the future, he would probably pull on his boots, leave his mother’s house, and jump off the conveniently located bridge—just a two-minute stroll from her front door—into the rocky, ice-rimmed waters of the upper Hudson River.

“I’m okay, I guess,” he said. “Considering.”

Janet looked at him skeptically. “O-kay. And how’s Linda?”

He felt his lips draw tight together. “Busy. She’s redoing all the drapes and stuff she originally did for the Algonquin Waters Spa and Resort.” Pretentious name. Although, having met the owner, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the place had been called the Peasants Stay Out Hotel.

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

“What’s with you and Mom?”
Time to change the subject, little sister
. “You two don’t usually wrangle over her causes.”

She pulled a face that said,
I know what you’re doing, but I’ll play along anyway
. “That’s because she’s been sticking to the save-the-earth stuff since… well, since the last Gulf War.” She dug several potatoes out of the bag and dropped them into the sink.

“Stop the development, stop the war—what’s the difference?” He stooped to retrieve the colander from one of the lower cabinets.

“Easy for you to say. You were in Vietnam.”

He snorted a laugh.

“You know what I mean. You weren’t the only freshman in Millers Kill High whose mother was arrested for throwing cow’s blood on the Armory.” She opened a drawer and got the peeler out. “I went to all those sit-ins and lie-ins and marches with her, and it didn’t mean squat.”

“C’mon. You know Nixon was quaking in his boots at the thought of Mom.”

Now Janet was the one who snorted. Russ turned on the tap and unhooked the wooden cutting board from beside the kitchen window. As his sister rinsed the potatoes and began her rapid-fire peeling, he threw open the freezer door. “Mom! You got any salt pork?”

Her voice floated over the sound of running water. “That stuff will clog your arteries, sweetie. Never touch it.”

“How about some real bacon, then?” He withdrew a package of 100% Lean Turkey De-Lite Bacon and waved it in Janet’s direction. “Look at this crap,” he said.

“Nope. What you see is what we’ve got.”

He swung the freezer door shut. “I’m going to the market. I can’t make potato soup without pig fat.” He stepped into his boots, waiting on the soaking board next to the back door. “Try not to tear each other’s hair out while I’m gone.”

Janet smiled at him. “Watch yourself, smart-ass. Mom believes she can fix anything if she just tries hard enough. If you don’t sort things out, and fast, she’ll make you her next cause.”

Russ was clearing off his windshield and headlights when his cell phone, plugged into a wall socket in the kitchen, began ringing. He was carefully pulling out of the drive when it let off a series of sharp beeps, indicating he had a message. And he was well down Old Route 100, absorbed in his wipers beating away the fast-falling snow, when his mother got up from the dining room table to answer her own phone, ringing off the hook in the living room.

Later—much later—Officer Mark Durkee would wonder what might have happened if he hadn’t gotten the phone call. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion. He often popped in a video and turned off the phone about an hour before Rachel got home from her shift as a surgical nurse at the Washington County Hospital. Maddy, their five-year-old, was like a crack addict getting a pipeload when it came to her Disney Princess tapes. She wouldn’t budge until her mother arrived, and by then he’d be an hour into his evening nap, soaking up enough sleep to make it through another eight-hour overnight in his squad car.

Or he might have been stretched out in the crawl space beneath their kitchen, stuffing yet more insulation in an attempt to protect the pipes from freezing up yet again this winter. There were always, always leaks and blown fuses and foundation cracks to be repaired in the old house. Mark had probably spent more than the place was worth on making it as solid and square and tight as it could be, but he had seen how the chief had transformed his old farmhouse. Twice a year, they were all invited over, for the Christmas party and the summer barbecue, and damned if every time the chief hadn’t done something to make his house sweeter. He was Mark’s inspiration.