Byron's Lane (21 page)

On the other side of the threshold stood Christina Peterson.

She smiled at first, and then she frowned. Her blond hair was loosely gathered on top of her head, pinned there precariously, looking like it could all easily tumble down with one casual headshake. She wore no make-up; her face was puffy, her eyes red. She was clad in sandals, jeans, and a sweatshirt that advertised a dolphin rescue center in the Florida Keys.

“I saw a car in the driveway. I hoped it was yours. I wanted to see you before you left.”

Christina made no mention of where she had been and why she hadn’t made any effort to contact me since Adams’s death. They were matters instantly unimportant.

After standing too long in the doorway, I reached over the threshold for Christina’s hand and gently pulled her across it. She fell through the doorway and into my arms. We held each other for a long time. Our sobs made our bodies shake. Her neck and her hair were wet with my tears. They were the first I had shed since Maggie’s death.

“Can I help?” she asked. She spoke so softly I wouldn’t have heard her voice if my ears hadn’t been two inches from her mouth. Christina gently pushed back from me and took a tissue from the front pocket of her jeans. She wiped the tears from her face with soft dabs. Then her eyes dropped. They caught a faint red stain that remained embedded in the white grout on the foyer’s gray marble floor. Her chin shook, she shivered, and her lower lip began to quiver. Both of us needed to get away from this place.

“Of course you can help,” I quietly answered. “I’ve got a few more things to collect in the study. You can help me finish my walkthrough. You can help me carry boxes out to the car.” I reached for her chin and gently tipped her head from the floor to focus on my face. She managed a smile and turned to close the door behind her. She put her arm around my waist and maneuvered us around the rose-stained spot on the floor, down the hallway, and into the study.

Legs crossed, we sat on the carpeted floor, at opposite ends of Adams’s office. My thoughts were not about what I was supposed to be doing; they were about how nicely Christina would have fit into Adams’s mercurial life. I wasn’t as sure that a reignited relationship with Lisa Chandler, dropped unexpectedly in his lap in his last moments, would have turned out as well. But it’s likely he would have pursued it, given Christina’s involvement with Richard Hunter.

There was really not much more to do at his house that evening. Nervously rearranging things we had already packed away, Christina broke our silence. “I wish Jonathan and I could have had a talk like you and I had at my party.”

Christina had pulled from a box a framed picture of Adams sitting with Bill Clinton on a sand dune, somewhere on the Outer Banks. Both of them were staring out at the Atlantic Ocean. She carefully examined it, running her fingers around its edges. She looked up at me.

“What makes us fragile and dissatisfied when we have every reason to be confident and content? Why are we so sad and vulnerable in the midst of having so much?” Her words echoed throughout Adams’s disheveled house.

I thought about that glorious night on the dock at Pine Lake. “Too many choices, too few tests and measurements of how we’re doing,” I answered. This was Adams’s opinion, but I had seized it and made it my own. He would have approved.

I put the three boxes of Adams’s photographs in the trunk of my rental car. Christina had written my address on them. We made sure they were taped tight enough to accompany me back to Connecticut on my plane the next evening as baggage. I had asked Christina to label the boxes so she would be inspired to keep my address somewhere. It worked. When I returned to Adams’s office, she was sitting at his desk, writing my address and my telephone number on a piece of stationery she had found in its half-opened top drawer.

While I had been busy in the kitchen labeling boxes that needed to be shipped to Adams’s sister, Christina had found and claimed two items: Adams’s State Capitol building access pass and a small brass pelican paperweight that he often absentmindedly played with during long conversations she’d had with him in his office. She noticed me watching her from the hallway. With tears in her eyes, she held the identification badge out away from her so I could see it. She had put it around her neck as carefully as if it had been a pearl necklace. “It’s the only picture of him that I’ll have, except what’s been printed on campaign brochures or in newspaper articles I’ve saved.”

I quickly replied: “I’ll send you a better picture of him as soon as I’m home. Keep the ring, too. It’s yours. It’s next to the computer.” I had left the ring in a conspicuous place, on the keyboard of his desktop computer, so I wouldn’t forget to take it with me when I left.

She hadn’t noticed the ring until I called attention to it. She picked it up and examined it for just enough time to express her admiration. She placed it back on the desk. She looked up at me, puzzled. How could I ever think she’d accept something so special and personal; something that either belonged to or was intended for someone else? What authority did I have to give it away?

I told her how the ring had come to the place where I had found it. I told her how Adams scoured the old bazaar in Amman searching for a setting to match the stone he’d found. I told her how much he looked forward to giving it to her when he returned from Iraq. I explained that I intended to give the ring to her if I ever saw her again. It was hers.

Christina pushed her chair back from the desk. Shaking her head, she leaned slightly forward and put her head in her hands. Strands of her hair fell down to her shoulders. She stared at the ring through cloudy, tear-filled eyes. She was afraid to touch it.

I doubted if it would ever find a permanent place on any of her fingers. What I had told her about the green amber ring made it too special to wear in a casual way. The ring’s beauty would cause people who noticed her wearing it to ask where she got it. Its story was too personal to share. But in my presence she took it and put the ring on the third finger of her left hand. She looked up at me and managed a smile through a few sobs and a thick curtain of tears.

“I’m happy you have the ring. Jonathan would be ecstatic.”

We both looked at each other for a long time, silent.

“There’s one more item of business I have to take care of. Are there some envelopes in the top right-hand drawer?” I asked her. “Would you pass them to me?”

She opened the drawer. It was empty except for three oversized tan-colored envelopes. She lifted them from the drawer and pushed it shut. She was about to hand them to me when she suddenly pulled them back, having noticed the names written boldly on two of them in black felt pen:
Christina Peterson
,
Tom Walker
.

She stared at the envelopes. Then, hands trembling, she gave me mine and the third one, marked
Kurdistan
.

She placed hers reverently on top of the desk. I opened the Kurdistan envelope first. It contained a cashier’s check for two hundred and forty thousand dollars with instructions to deliver the money to the families of his murdered Iraqi staff. On a separate folded sheet tucked inside the envelope were their addresses. I showed the contents of the envelope to Christina and told her their story. I folded the envelope in half and placed it on my lap.

I turned the envelope with my name on it over in my hands, like a child does a birthday present, trying to guess what might be inside.

“Can we open them together? Here and now?” Christina asked.

“It’s the only way I’d want to do it,” I said. I marveled at the possibility that somehow, some way, Adams was directing the scene in which we were acting.

“You open yours first,” she insisted in a choked voice, handing me a letter opener she’d taken from a desktop coffee cup. The sound of the letter opener sawing through the large sealed envelope echoed through the room.

Three things were inside my package. They fell into my open, waiting hand and overflowed onto my lap: a tattered black-and-white glossy picture of our Martin’s Amoco Oil Dodgers baseball team, labeled “Maplewood Little League, 1960 Champions”; an opened FedEx envelope that contained a certificate for four hundred shares of Cleveland Indians stock and a stock transfer form with my name on it, signed by Adams and Gabe Chance, dated the day after I left Minneapolis for California; and an eleven-by-sixteen black-and-white photograph of El Capitan in Yosemite Park, carefully wrapped in white tissue paper, signed in the lower right-hand corner in white ink by Ansel Adams.

Smiling through tears, I handed the letter opener back to Christina. She carefully cut the top edge of her envelope and pulled from it something written in blue ink, in Adams’s best handwriting, on a piece of letter-sized expensive linen writing paper. She read it silently. Tears tumbled down her cheeks. Her hands were shaking as she tried to pass the paper to me. Her dazzling green amber ring sparkled as it caught beams of light coming from the desk lamp.

It was Cummings’s poem, “somewhere i have never travelled.” I looked at it. I smiled. I handed it back to her. She carefully put the poem back in the envelope.

I pulled myself up from the floor and took Christina’s hand to urge her up from the chair—the same way I had rescued her at her party.

“I know where Adams hides his thirty-year-old Scotch. I’ll fetch the bottle and two glasses while you get one of his jackets from the hallway closet and turn off the lights behind us. We’ll sit out on the deck and talk about Jonathan and the gifts he gave us.”

It was half past ten o’clock—a crisp, moonless late-autumn evening. The sky was clear and cloudless. I had never seen so many stars. It was so dark we could hardly see each other’s faces, even though we were sitting just an arm’s length apart.

The End