Bloodline (18 page)

I did, and I said so. Joyce Hewett took a drink. It was beginning to show.

“She just looks right through you,” she said, a vague sloppiness creeping into her voice. “She was just different. Sometimes I wonder if they got the babies switched at the hospital with Missy. From a different mold, you know?”

“I noticed.”

“Always like that. Quiet. Off in her room with a book. There could be World War Three going on around here, and there was, most of the time, and that kid would have her nose in some book.”

Her only escape, I thought.

“Talked to her teachers more than her mother. Ever since she was a little thing. Miss So and So says this. Mrs. So and So says that. And then this one at the high school. Janice something or other. I blame
her for a lot of this, that bitch. She planted this idea in the girl's head about giving the baby away. Helped her get into college. Got her thinking she was too good for the rest of us.”

“You and your daughters?”

“We were nothin' to Missy. Just getting in the way of her plans. That's the way she'd put it. ‘But I have plans, Ma. I gotta study. I have plans.' And nothin' was gonna get in the way of her plans. Not me. Not the rest of the family. Not even a baby.”

I looked at her, this paragon of maternal instinct. The lipstick. The black-lined eyes staring through a boozy film, the frosted glass of alcohol. The tight jeans, an awkward and desperate attempt to remain twenty.

“So you didn't approve of the adoption?”

“What would you think?” Joyce Hewett demanded. “Give away your flesh and blood? To some stranger? My God almighty, I still can't believe it. That I'm never gonna see my granddaughter. Not ever. I mean, she's just gone, like she never existed.”

“Where did she go?”

“Nobody knows. Maybe Missy knows, but I'm not sure of that, even. One time she told me, you know, during one of our fights about it, that the baby was safe, that it was in New Jersey or Rhode Island or someplace like that. I don't remember.”

She sipped again. The fog must have been lifting.

“So I said, ‘New Jersey? Oh, yeah. That's real safe for a little kid. Drugs and these gangs and people getting killed all the time,' I said, ‘Don't you watch the news? You call that safe?' She says the baby's new parents teach in a college or something. Like I'm supposed to be impressed. Excuse me for living, but I thought I did pretty well for my girls, all by myself. They had clothes. They had food on the
table. They had a roof over their heads. Sorry if that wasn't good enough. She takes my grandchild and gives her to some college professor someplace. I said, ‘That's my flesh and blood, and you're giving it away like it was a friggin' kitten.' I told her that.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘Drop dead, Ma.' Nice, huh? I'm only her mother.”

With that, Joyce Hewett got up and headed for the freezer. I was beginning to think it was time to leave the two of them alone, but when she slid back onto the couch with her mug, she smiled and started right in.

“Where'd you say you live, Jack?” Joyce Hewett said.

“Right here in town,” I said.

“You got people here?”

“Nope.”

“Kids?”

“Nope.”

“Married?”

“Nope. Just me.”

She looked at me with a new glint in her eye. With one hand she held her mug on her lap. The other hand moved to the buttons on her sweater. She began buttoning and unbuttoning the top button, then left it undone and moved down to the next one.

Oh, no, I thought.

“Must get awful lonely up here all by yourself,” Joyce Hewett said, a new softness in her voice. I pictured her using the same line on some trucker, an eligible bachelor with his house all paid for.

“You get used to it,” I said.

Her cleavage was showing now. Her finger ran up and down it, anything but absently.

“I could make you a fresh drink?” she said.

“No, thanks. I haven't even touched this one.”

“How 'bout a beer? I didn't even ask you if you wanted a beer. That was dumb, huh. I'll bet you drink beer.”

“No, I really have to go. Thanks, though.”

I sat up in the chair. Joyce Hewett looked at me languidly, her finger still running up and down her chest. I found myself thinking her attractive, but fought it off.

“You seem like a nice guy,” she said. “And you're cute.”

“Thanks.”

“If I'd been Missy, I would've been all over you. Older guys treat you right, if you know what I mean.”

I thought I did, but I hoped I didn't.

“I gotta go,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”

I got up. She got up, too. Moved toward me with her mug in her hand, her hips rolling as she walked. She stopped inches in front of me and unbuttoned another button. If I'd dared to look, I would have seen the curve of her breasts.

“Why don't you stay?” Joyce Hewett said. “I like you.”

I could smell the vodka on her breath, see the lines of her lips.

“No, I really have to go. Really.”

“We could have a nice long afternoon. We could talk.”

The word hung in the air. It still was hanging as I tried to ease my way by Joyce Hewett. She moved against me.

“You going back to that empty house?” she breathed. “Don't you know there's nothing worse than being alone?”

I looked at her. Her eyes dull under the makeup. Her lips open. Her breasts half bared to a stranger.

“You're right about that,” I said. “Nothing worse than being alone.”

18

B
ut I felt alone that night, more than usual.

“You got family?”

“Nope.”

“You got kids?”

“Nope.”

“You got a wife?”

“Nope.”

Joyce Hewett had touched a nerve, and it wasn't in my pants. It was in the back of my mind, always. The loneliness, the feeling that I was missing what others took for granted.

Family. Kids. A wife.

I didn't have family. I was an only child of parents who married late and died early. The fact that they loved me completely and wonderfully in between sometimes just made it worse.

My father had worked for New York's Museum of Natural History. A big, gentle man, he'd commuted by train from Long Island to spend his days in rooms full of dead bugs. My mother had stayed home and taken care of me. When they'd gone, a couple of years
apart, I'd been left with a feeling of being marooned. For some reason, it had become my natural state.

With occasional exceptions, I'd been alone most of my adult life. Women came but eventually went. They never stayed long enough to bring kids into the situation. There was never any big fight; they usually said they just felt more for me than I felt for them. And they were usually right. So I'd be left to stand in the doorway while they packed their bags, plucked their makeup from the bathroom shelves. Sometimes I'd even called them a cab.

Nobody ever said I wasn't a nice guy.

But nice guys don't just finish last. They finish alone. And seeing Joyce Hewett as she reached out to me, to anyone, made it hard to keep saying that alone was what I wanted to be.

So I went home a little somber. I made notes of my conversation with Missy's mom, omitting the part where she unbuttoned her sweater. I felt for her, although as a mother, she may have been a good barfly. But losing a grandchild to a stranger? Perhaps never to be seen again? It didn't seem right, and I made a note to talk to somebody about the process. Did she have any rights? How did the whole thing work? Maybe I could talk to somebody at probate court, or at an agency. I wondered if they'd tell me what seemed to be increasingly apparent in this case: that adoption may have been the best move, but nobody said it was easy or natural, or that it didn't give a great, wrenching yank to everyone concerned. Missy, her mother, the father, and the baby. Curious.

As I sat at the dining-room table, I found myself staring out the window. I thought of Missy and her mother, and the fact that we had more in common than they would have thought. We were alone and were trying, with varying degrees of success, to convince ourselves we liked it that way. That night, I wasn't very convincing.

I thought of Roxanne and wished she were within arm's reach. We wouldn't have to talk or make love. We could just be in the same house and, instead of the shadow that had moved into the house with me, I'd have a companion. I'd hear her clatter the pans in the kitchen. Hear the toilet flush. Wake up in the night and listen to the reassuring rhythm of her breathing, in and out, like waves breaking on a shore and running back out to sea.

That night, I woke often. I heard a bat flutter in the dark above my head before he, or she, slipped out a crack into the night. I listened to the hum of the refrigerator, separating it into two or three distinct sounds. I heard the house creak, a phenomenon I would never understand. I heard a screech owl, recognizable because it didn't hoot as much as whinny. And then I heard the distant roar of a car or truck, which became louder and more familiar as it came closer. It was practically out front before I realized what and whose it was.

A truck. Kenny's.

As I rolled out of bed, I heard a shout. I got to the bottom of the loft stairs and heard the muffled crunch of glass breaking and a loud metallic bang. My truck. There was a whoop as I got to the back door. I slid the bolt back, yanked the door open, and heard the truck rev and tires spinning on the gravel road. Barefoot, in my shorts, I ran out into the yard in time to see the dark shape of a pickup disappearing up the road with its lights off. The brake lights flashed red once and then the truck was out of sight, its motor roaring in the distance.

I stood for a moment and waited as the sound of the truck receded. It was dark, with no stars showing, and cold. My feet were wet from the dew on the grass, and as I padded over toward the truck, I stepped on a stone or something hard and sharp and flinched. More gingerly, I walked to the rear of the truck and saw that the back window
of the cab was buckled and splintered. In the bed of the truck, below the window, was a rock the size of a baseball. I stood and stared.

“These boys,” I said aloud, “should find something better to do.”

In my underwear, I tiptoed back inside and called the cops.

It was a couple minutes after three by the clock on the shelf in the kitchen. I dialed the sheriff's department number and a woman answered in that nasal tone you hear in people who answer phones for a living. To her credit, she sounded wide awake.

I told her my name and where I lived. I said somebody had just thrown a boulder through the back window of my truck. She asked if I'd been operating the vehicle at the time. I said no, I'd been in bed. She asked if the perpetrators were still there. I said I didn't think so. She said the nearest patrol unit was tied up on a domestic complaint in China, a half-hour away. I said there was no real rush; the damage was done. She said to call if they came back and she would either dispatch a sheriff's department unit or contact a state police unit in the area. I told her that was fine, but asked that she let Poole know about what had happened, because he was already involved in the situation.

“Officer Poole doesn't come on duty for another four hours,” the dispatcher said.

“I'll be here,” I said.

Picking pebbles out of my feet.

That's what I was doing when there was a knock on the door, not two minutes later. I got up from the dining-room table and walked toward the door, slowly.

There was another knock. I stopped.

“Hey, Bones,” a voice said. “It's me and all your friends.”

It was Clair, and he grinned when I opened the door. Hanging by his right side was a shotgun, with the muzzle pointed down.

“Bird season?” I said.

“Beginning to think it's open season on you,” he said.

Clair followed me in and closed the door. He was wearing dark green pants, a dark red plaid jacket, and a black baseball hat that said
REMINGTON
on the front.

“Aren't you supposed to be wearing hunter orange?” I said.

“So call a game warden.”

“Probably get here faster than the cops. I called the sheriff's department and the nearest guy was in New Brunswick doing marriage counseling. They said to call back if somebody was chopping through the front door with an ax.”

“You could always write a letter,” Clair said.

He stood by the kitchen counter, the shotgun slung easily in the crook of his arm.

“Three-thirteen in the morning,” I said. “Is that beer or coffee?”

“Right in the middle. Got any tea?”

“Coming right up. One crumpet or two?”

“None for me. I'm watching my figure.”

“So what's this?” I said, nodding toward the shotgun. “The NRA twenty-minute workout?”

“After a week, I tote a shotgun and a rifle,” Clair said. “The way things are going around here, that wouldn't be a bad idea.”