Next Time You See Me (8 page)

“Nothing in the safe, and I looked really carefully.”

“That’s strange.” I flipped the grilled cheese and replaced the lid on the pan.

“Maybe a friend’s holding it for him?”

“Could be.” I thought of Billy, who lived near enough that it wouldn’t have been an inconvenience getting the gift from him on the day of our anniversary. But why wouldn’t Billy have said something? I knew he would have—he would have, in fact, given me the necklace. He wouldn’t have held that back.

“I’m really sorry about Mac,” Tina said. “I really liked him. I couldn’t stop crying for like two days.”

“I know.”

“Everyone around here is really upset about it. Sigrid hates that this is how she got the job, you know?”

“I do—Mac hated getting the job for the wrong reasons, too. He always believed in Deidre.”

“Yeah, I know, and then how they started dragging
him
into the investigation, like he
and
Deidre would
both
do something like
that
.”

She was referring to the pay-to-play scandal, the accusation that Deidre’s testimony as an expert forensic witness was for sale, that had cost her her job. But I had never before heard anything about Mac also being implicated; if he had been, he had never told me.

“I’m a little confused.”

“Who isn’t?” Her voice fell to a whisper. “I mean, why would they give him her job one day and then say he didn’t deserve it the next day? Personally, it makes me sick. I would look for a new job if I wasn’t about to get married.”

“Mac never mentioned any of this to me.”

“It just started like a couple of days before his parents—” She cut herself off, then shifted directions. “I mean talk about a case of bad timing.”

“What exactly are they saying about Mac?”

“Same stuff they were saying about Deidre, more or less. Hardly anyone around here believes it, though. Mac?
No way
.”

“Where is Deidre working now?”

“I heard she went back to Florida—that’s where she’s from. There are a couple of big security firms down there.”

So she had resuscitated her career closer to home, and in better weather. Not a bad move given what Quest had put her through, according to the stories Mac had been bringing home in the weeks before her ouster.

There was a loud sizzle from the stove and only now did I notice the acrid smell of the sandwich starting to burn.

“Thanks, Tina.”

“Good luck finding the necklace.”

“I’ll have to look harder at home.”

“I guess he was good at hiding stuff.”

“I guess so.”

I hung up and lifted the top off the pan in a blast of smoke. Loosened the sandwich with a spatula and dropped it onto one of the plates I had set out. After it cooled a moment, I scraped off charred bits, cut it in half, and set Ben up at the table in his high chair. I sat with him but couldn’t bring myself to eat my half just yet.

To hear that Mac himself might have been facing similar pressure to what Deidre had suffered in her final weeks at Quest was an upsetting surprise. I could only assume that he hadn’t told me about it so as not to worry me. My semester had been about to start, and we were always busy with Ben. We were
always
overtired. He wouldn’t have wanted to cause me anxiety unless he had to. But to learn that he had seen a dark cloud moving in at work just days before the tempest of his parents’ murder and his brother’s arrest, and knowing now about his history of debilitating depression . . . well, it sent my head spinning. Mac the stoic and Mac the depressive must have coexisted uneasily; it must have taken a lot of energy for him to maintain his balance while juggling mounting anxieties with his sense of himself, and the image he projected of himself, as a man who was supercompetent.

Why hadn’t he told me about his troubles at work?

Opened up to me. Talked to me; told me
everything
.

I could have helped him.

I might have saved him.

Chapter 5

T
he air had lost any warm note of a lingering summer and today had its first real bite. As I walked up West Fifty-eighth Street on my way to the subway at Columbus Circle, I buttoned my sweater all the way up. It was late afternoon and the sun was slanting down, making way for the evenings that seemed to arrive earlier every day.

Summer was gone.

Autumn was here.

Winter would come soon.

The wheel turned, seasons shifted, and still Mac wasn’t home. One by one over the past seven weeks the cases had slapped shut: Pawtusky in Bronxville had his killer locked up, Staples in Brooklyn had found his missing person, and Jones in Stony Creek had her suicide. Turn the page. End the chapter. Close the book. Move on.

But how?

And why did this ending feel so incomplete? Or was that just how it was when someone blew you a see-you-later kiss and evaporated into thin air?

I ducked into a Duane Reade drugstore on the corner of Eighth Avenue to see if they had any Halloween costumes for Ben. This morning my mother had asked me what he was going to be this year and I’d admitted I hadn’t even thought about it. She gave me a look; Halloween was tomorrow. When we had last discussed it, two weeks ago, I had told her that I would take care of his costume. How had the holiday come so fast? Lately it was as if time was melting; it was as if loneliness was engulfing me, drowning me, the more Mac’s absence sank in. It was awful: the coldness of it. The repetition of days, how they became weeks then months and you were still without him. Another thing I recognized in her look was just how badly I was doing. Along with forgetting appointments and wearing clothes too long before putting them in the laundry, I had been unable to concentrate on doing my homework and so, because I was unprepared, I had skipped most of my classes. A minute after my mother’s look, I decided something I had been contemplating for days: I would drop out of school for the time being, get my bearings, and then figure out what to do next. I had just come from the John Jay enrollment office, where I had made it official: I was a thirty-seven-year-old dropout.

I browsed through the little costumes hanging on rods that protruded from a pegboard under a sign reading
Seasonal
. A Tigger costume looked like it would fit Ben, and I bought it. Back on the street, it was already darker than when I had gone into the store. Forty-five minutes later, when I emerged from the subway onto Smith Street, night had fallen.

The first thing I smelled upon opening my front door was roasting chicken. If I knew my mother, she was also making the diced potatoes, onions, and carrots mélange she liked to cook alongside the chicken. She had made dinner every night since she had moved in with me two weeks ago, and not just to help me care for Ben; she had given up her rental apartment (not too difficult, as she had no lease) so that we could join our financial resources. Now that I was living on disability from my interrupted career with the Maplewood Police and nothing else, I couldn’t afford the duplex on my own.

After Mac had been gone three weeks, and I had mustered enough focus and energy to pay my first round of bills, the reality of his lost income really hit me. After two weeks, his paychecks had stopped. Because the police had deemed his so-called death a suicide, his life insurance policy was considered forfeited. His pension and my disability weren’t enough to cover our mortgage. But because we co-owned our co-op apartment, I couldn’t sell it without either Mac’s signature, a power of attorney, or a death certificate. None of which I had. I soon learned that, without a body, it would take seven years to produce a death certificate, unless you obtained a court order, which I wasn’t prepared to do because I still had trouble believing my husband was really dead. I told everyone I knew that I accepted Mac’s presumed death, and I
tried
to accept it, but maybe it was the cop in me: I needed the body to be sure. More and more, I understood why in some cultures viewing the body at a funeral was so important: It convinced you the person was truly gone, that the remains were just a shell, a leftover. You couldn’t argue with a dead body. And while hope may spring eternal, it never survived a face-to-face encounter with a corpse. I had learned, and was learning, so much more than I’d ever known about how cultural and legal definitions of death were sometimes at odds with each other. And that for people like me—for families left behind when the primary breadwinner vanished—there was a vast gray area that extended from the emotional to the financial. A miasma you fought for a while and then sank into.

“Like it?” I held up the costume.

“Adorable. I gave him his bath early. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Thanks.”

“He seemed tired, and I thought an early night would be good since tomorrow’s a big day.” Mom opened the oven, lifted out the pan of golden chicken and roasted potatoes, and set it on the stove. Steam burst upward and then diminished.

“He won’t really understand trick-or-treating, Mom.”

“No, but he’ll be there, and we’ll take pictures. When he’s older it will mean a lot to him. You’ll see.”

“Where is he?”

“In bed.”

“Oh, I thought—”

“I bathed him
and
fed him. Is that okay?”

“Whatever you do is okay, Mom.”

She stared at me.

“I mean that.” And I did. How could I dispute a bedtime with someone who had altered her life to take care of my child?

“Do you know what time it is?” she asked me.

“Six, six-thirty.”

“It’s
seven
-thirty.”

I looked at the wall clock: It was seven thirty-five.

Mom had already set the table and we sat down to eat. I still hadn’t regained my appetite so ate what I could manage of the delicious dinner, but not much. The chicken and potatoes seemed to naturally lead to the topic of turkey and of course Thanksgiving, which was just around the corner.

“Jon and Andrea have decided to stay in California,” Mom told me, “so it will just be us.”

“That’s fine,” I said, though the thought of Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, without Jon, Andrea, their kids,
or Mac
made me very, very sad.

“We’ll take pictures.”

“Mom, why are you so determined to photograph everything lately? Ben won’t remember any of this.”

“So that he’ll
know
.”

She leaned over her plate and caught my eye when she said that, and I understood. She wanted to document every milestone so that one day Ben would know about his life before his own memory kicked in, since clearly
my
memory of this time was going to be fairly skewed. My mother wanted to make sure that Ben would know that nothing important had been neglected, that
he
had not been neglected, in the wake of Mac’s death.

“Mom, I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“Yes?”

“How can you be so sure?”

She put down her fork and nodded. She knew I meant
sure
about Mac being dead and not just missing. We had discussed it enough times.

“Because it’s easier.”

Of course it was.
Not
being convinced of it was exhausting to sustain, like when you’re dreaming that you’re flying and you stay up by dint of the
belief
that you’re flying, a belief predicated on the power of suspended disbelief that dissipates as soon as you begin to wake up.

H
alloween was weird and fun and depressing and exciting. Tigger sat strapped in his stroller holding a round plastic pumpkin with a light-up face, while I pushed him and Mom walked beside us with her little digital camera. We had deliberately come out in daylight so as to ease Ben into this peculiar holiday that gained intensity as darkness fell; but even now, at four o’clock in the afternoon, costumed children, teenagers, and even adults were everywhere and merriment was high. There were witches and goblins and ghosts and skeletons and princesses and storybook characters and ghoulish creatures with fake blood hard-dried down green-glowing faces. Every now and then someone would lean over from a stoop and drop a candy into Ben’s bucket. He would glance over, baffled. He wasn’t officially trick-or-treating but he was fully equipped, as my mother believed it was important that he was seen to be holding a candy bucket
in the pictures
.

We turned onto Court Street, where many of the local merchants stood outside their shops handing out candy. When we came to the bookstore, Mom stopped.

“Let’s go in. I want you to meet Jasmine.”

“The new girl you told me about?”

“I think she’s working this afternoon.”

We went inside. Jasmine was not only working but she was fully costumed for the occasion, and she was not a girl. She was a woman of thirty or so, a slight and very pretty Hispanic woman dressed up as Peter Pan. She danced over to us when she saw my mother.

“Pam, Pamela, Paminsky!”

“Not everyone can wear green tights like that,” Mom told her.

“Not bad, huh?” Jasmine raised her arms and turned so we could view her from varying angles. “At first I was going to be a Lost Boy, but nobody would’ve recognized me. My husband’s the lost boy, anyway, if you want to split hairs.” She rolled her dark brown eyes. “
Ex
-husband, I mean.”

“Hi.” I extended a hand, which she shook with surprising force. “I’m Pam’s daughter, Karin.”

“I figured.”

“It’s slow in the store,” my mother noted.

“Yeah. He’s putting me on candy duty.”

She detoured to the front counter where she picked up a large bowl of assorted candy, and we followed her outside. Walking straight to the middle of the sidewalk, she wasted not a moment actively soliciting takers.

“Who wants candy? Trick or treat! Candy right here! Happy Halloween!”

“Wow,” I whispered to Mom.

“She’s fun, isn’t she?”

I nodded, though I wasn’t sure if Jasmine was fun or borderline.

“Trick or treat!” A boy in a Batman costume raised a plastic bag with two hands.

“What do you want, a trick or a treat?”

The boy contemplated the unexpected question, and answered, “Treat?”

Jasmine dropped in two candies and the boy walked away.

“Tell Robin we got candy!” she shouted after him.

He glanced back, nodded, and picked up his pace until he rejoined his group.

“Cute,” she said. “But I’m glad I never had kids, considering.”

“How long have you been divorced?” I asked her.

“Separated three months ago, divorce is in the works.”

“So it’s still fresh.” She was so cheerful, I was sure she had left him; but she swiftly corrected my assumption.

“You bet it’s fresh—bastard left me for another woman. You there! Angel kid—candy! Get over here and bring your friends!” After the throng of kids moved along, she said, “That’s why I moved down here, to start over.”

“Sometimes I wonder if my husband left me for another woman,” I ventured.

She looked at me, speechless. Obviously Mom had filled her in about Mac’s suicide. I didn’t know what had inspired me to say that to someone I had just met—a desire to voice it, maybe, as I’d ruminated so hard and long over all the reasons Mac might have had to take his life or possibly just flee. I quickly changed the subject.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

But before she could answer, a teenager wearing a head-to-toe Darth Vader outfit passed too close and Ben burst into tears.

“Nice to meet you,” I told Jasmine.

“You too.”

I could hear her summoning another group of children as Mom and I walked away, pushing the stroller.

“I invited her to Thanksgiving,” Mom said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“When? I didn’t hear you.”

“I asked her earlier today. She said yes.”

I looked at her and shook my head. A stranger at our family’s holiday meal? The prospect of it was painful.

“She’s all alone here, she doesn’t know anyone, and honestly, Karin, I thought we could use a little levity.”

“Okay,” I said, because maybe Mom was right, and what did it matter, anyway? I could almost hear her sigh as we turned the corner onto our street, which was quieter than the main drag, and thus a big relief. “I guess she’ll be in all the pictures, so it’ll look like we had a party.” And someday Ben would glance back in time and feel convinced that his mother and grandmother had managed well in a crisis and never let him down.

B
y the time Thanksgiving rolled around, Jasmine Alvarez was no longer a stranger. I had run into her at the bookstore one day when I was dropping Ben off with Mom—she was about to finish up and planned to take him to the park—and Jasmine was just leaving her shift. It was the first time I’d seen her without her Peter Pan makeup; now, instead of green from head to toe, she was dressed in tight jeans, cowboy boots, a close-fitting red shirt, and dangling feather earrings. She threw on a leather jacket, slung her oversized purse over her shoulder, and we walked out the front door together into the chilly November afternoon.