Past Perfect (19 page)

“Did he get better?” I asked.

“A short rally. Katie, all I’m saying is you should think it through.” He went back to squeezing the bridge of his nose. “Is she dying?”

“I think so.”

“I can understand you want to say good-bye, but— ”

“You said you liked the first draft of the final Episode.”

“Dani and Javiero haven’t looked at it yet. They’ll have a lot to say, as you well know.”

“I’ll call. I’ll get their notes. You know I can deal with them.”

“How long do you think you’ll stay?” Forget empathy: even sympathy was not in Oliver’s nature, but he’d worked with actors all his professional life and had mastered eyebrows-drawn-together-in-concern along with tsk-tsking. He was feeling big-time pressure over the deadline for getting the season’s final episode in the can.

“I’ll just be gone for a day. Tops two. And I’ll be just a phone call away and I’ll take my laptop. That way, I can redo whatever needs redoing and e-mail it right back to you. My phone will be on constantly.”

“Most hospitals don’t allow cell phones,” he said sadly.

“She’s at home. There’s nothing more the doctors can do for her.”

Oliver gripped the edge of his desk and half pulled, half pushed up his bulk. “To tell you the truth, this isn’t a great time for you to be away. Is she that bad? I mean, is she going to, you know, go within the next two weeks?”

Was this a veiled threat? I preferred Blustering Oliver to Semi-Polite Oliver, because at least the former was predictable. Most of the time I thought I was indispensable to the show, but in this business, who could be sure? They could hire another writer tomorrow at half my salary. Or less. By midseason, the ratings might be hurtling downhill, but by then it would be too late for me.

I told myself not to think about having to reinvent myself at Total Kitchen, about learning how to amortize baker’s racks or market electric lobster steamers. That, of course, led to a high-def image of my father’s face as he tried to mask his anguish when he realized that when he retired, I would rapidly run his wonderful business into the ground.

I leaned toward Oliver and said, “I’m going. This is something I have to do for my own peace of mind.”

Lying to Oliver was like a day in fields of daisies compared with lying to Adam again. A day trip to Cincinnati was one thing. Schlepping to the middle of nowhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains—which to me was already the middle of nowhere—to see a Defense Intelligence guy named Jacques who made Huff Van Damme nervous was another.

“I’ll go with you,” Adam said. We were walking the dogs in Riverside Park, watching the pink sky turn amethyst as the sun set across the Hudson over New Jersey.

“I’m really only going to be gone for one night. Fly to Asheville, rent a car, and get to wherever this guy lives. Then I have to interview him …” I suddenly realized I couldn’t say I wanted to find out about East Berlin 1989, since Spy Guys was set in the present, “… about spying in Hong Kong.” I chuckled, then added, “That means they’re going to have to get a lot of stock footage of Hong Kong and find a couple of locations or two in Chinatown. Maybe Flushing.”

One of the dogs, the beagle Lucy, stopped to pee beside a maple that looked sickly, probably from having its roots burned by gallons of uric acid every day. I looked up at Adam and realized he knew my lightheartedness was phony. Unless he or she is being willfully ignorant, one spouse can usually sense when the other is lying. I can’t say Adam’s forehead had deep lines of concern, as if he were thinking, She’s going to the Blue Ridge Mountains for a tryst with her lover and that’s why she doesn’t want me to go. It was more a recognition that he knew I was trying to put something over on him and couldn’t figure out what.

“You can go, do your business with this guy,” he said. “Then we’ll spend a couple of days. I used to drive down there from Washington, do some fishing, camping. Before you, I think. We never got down there together, did we?”

“No.”

“So how about it?” He peered at me quizzically, as did Lucy and Flippy. How could you say no to such a good idea? their looks seemed to demand. “We don’t have to camp out,” Adam said. “We could stay at a hotel someplace.”

Say yes, I told myself. Why not? His being along wouldn’t stop me from going to see Jacques Harlow. He could spend the time browsing in stores that sold fishing lures, which was the kind of shopping he liked. Then we could go hiking for a couple of days. But I couldn’t say yes. Here I was, pulling away from him. Was it out of petulance? Adam hadn’t been particularly supportive of any of my recent journeys into the past. He had wanted no part of it.

“I don’t want to wait for the weekend to go,” I told him. “It’s not as though I’ll be lolling about down there. Oliver wants me back ASAP.” He picked up his pace, and because his legs were so much longer than mine, I had to racewalk to keep up with him. “Listen, Adam — ”

“I have plenty of time coming. I could take a couple of days midweek.” It was barely a suggestion anymore. It was more like he was already in the middle of an argument, telling me that he’d offered me X and Y and Z and, coldly, unreasonably, I’d said no to all of them.

“It’s not that I don’t want to take advantage of being just the two of us this summer,” I told him. “But I have to go and get back fast, get through the last episode. I think the first draft is pretty clean, so it’s just a question of—”

“What you seem to want this summer is to take advantage of being the one of you, not the two of us.”

“That’s not true!” I scurried up beside him and tried to hold his hand. He didn’t take it. Instead, he presented me with Flippy’s leash, then jogged off with Lucy fast enough that I couldn’t possibly keep up.

ROAD LORE SAYS as long as you’re the driver of a car, not a passenger, you won’t get carsick. Not true. I’d been doing fine: tooling around winding North Carolina mountain roads with forests looming on either side. I’d gotten lost only twice. Ten a.m. and merely queasy from a few hairpin turns. But then I got out of the car. Bad idea.

The beginning of the gravel drive that led up to Jacques Harlow’s house had one of those galvanized-steel mailboxes on a splintery wood post—the silvery ones that look recycled out of milk pails. Suddenly I wanted to heave what had been listed on the coffee shop menu as a “breakfast sandwich.” Sausage, egg, and cheese: what a person from a blue state would order in a red state to display openness to another culture and also a willingness to let bygones (segregation, Bush versus Gore) be bygones. I also figured that a sandwich with sausage had to be better than the other choice: a sandwich with liver mush, egg, and cheese. I hadn’t even been able to bring myself to ask the waitress what liver mush was.

Oh boy, was I sick now! The overgrown grass around the mailbox looked promising for heaving. Despite all the mountain air, I could smell only greasy sausage slices. But I had to try to control myself because just then I saw a Jeep careen down the gravel drive. It pulled up at a ninety-degree angle and blocked any entry. Two people jumped out.

“Hi!” a woman called. Resonant voice, friendly too, except she was carrying a rifle. “You Katherine Scotland?” Close enough. I would have nodded, but part of me was writing a scene in my head in which I smile and say, Yes, I’m Katherine … usually Katie, but, hey, with that rifle you can call me anything you want, and, instead of looking amused, she says coldly, This is a shotgun, then aims and shoots. “I’m Merry Slone,” she said instead. “S-L-O-N-E.” Her copper-streaked hair was pulled back into a ponytail that she wore high on her head, like someone in an old movie where kids jitterbug at sock hops. She laid the weapon in the back of the Jeep—the model without a roof, only a rollbar. “We were out after coyote.” She sounded as though she thought that an excellent pastime. She was wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt decorated with two orange kittens: on it was written PURR-FECT! As another wave of nausea hit, I decided she was between five and ten years younger than I was.

The man, who had been driving, walked down the few feet of gravel from his car. He must have noticed I seemed disturbed because he explained, “Always open season on coyote!” in a voice even more cheerful than hers. I guessed he’d pegged me as a New York liberal coyote lover. He was one of those sun-reddened, tall, skinny guys with an Adam’s apple that popped out almost as far as his turned-up nose. Men like that were usually not menacing, but there was something in the way he held himself that gave me the sense of a Special Forces type who could live in a cave and eat cactus for months at a time. “You are Katherine, right?”

I realized I had not yet said a word. “Sorry, I got a little fluttery in the stomach driving on the roads up here. Just needed a few breaths of fresh air. Yes, I’m Katie Schottland.”

He must have picked up my unspoken Who the hell are you? because he said, “I’m Harv. Harvey Aiges. A-I-G-E-S.” I figured that if they were planning on gunning me down, they wouldn’t have been so precise about their names. Unless they were truly perverse. “We work for Jock Harlow. Help manage the place. Do whatever needs doing. I can call you Katie?” I was pondering the meaning of “do whatever needs doing.” Splitting logs? Torturing trespassers? So I just nodded. Harv looked no more than a couple of years from forty either way.

“You feeling like you got to spew?” Merry asked.

“Fifty-fifty,” I murmured.

“I got ginger ale at the cabin. Ten times better than Coke. That’ll fix you up. Then we’ll take you to Jock.”

“Do you live in the house with Jacques?” I asked. Half a second later I realized they might think I was correcting their pronunciation. Not that they would shoot me for it.

“Oh no,” Harv answered. “We have our own place, really nice, not too far from the house.”

“We’re married,” Merry said as she walked around to the passenger door of my rented car. “I was going to change my name to Aiges, but at the last minute I thought, Gee, both my sisters took their husbands’ names. For my Daddy’s sake someone should carry on the Slone. Harv was okay with it and I think it really meant something to my daddy.” The next thing I knew, she opened the door of my car and got in. “I’ll keep you going in the right direction in case you lose sight of Harv. He drives like he’s doing the Baja 500.”

“How long have you been working here?” I asked as we waited for her husband to get back in the Jeep.

“Few years,” Merry said. I was about to ask another question—where had she and Harv met, what had she done before coming here—but Harv vaulted over the door of the Jeep, put it into gear, and headed up the road with a spray of gravel.

Chez Slone-Aiges looked like a small weekend house you might see on a lake in Connecticut or upstate New York. Except there was no lake, just a little clearing in front of a rocking-chair porch that ran the length of the cabin. The clearing of grass tufts and dark brown dirt was a countrified version of a suburban circular drive, a place for the car to turn around quickly and get back on the road. I was so sick I didn’t want to get out of the car.

I did though and Merry said, “Hey, you look green around the gills!”

The interior of the cabin was so close to adorable it looked ready for its close-up in Elle Decor. “Art of the Artless” or something. The first floor was what I guessed was called a great room, with a couple of red and white quilts on the wall, plain chairs, and a long table that looked as though it had once been part of a barn. Whoever had put it together either had an eye for the beauty of simple things or a sophisticated aesthetic sense and knew from rustic. I would have bet it wasn’t the woman with PURR-FECT! on her T-shirt.

In a kitchen with a wrought-iron pot rack, Merry handed me a can of ginger ale. It helped, but I would have felt better if she hadn’t been standing six inches from me as I drank it. I would also have felt better, once I finally burped—and none too delicately—if she hadn’t announced, “I got a million things to do. You can leave your car here. It’s too complicated for directions. Harv will run you up to the house. One of us will be here all day, so have Jock call when you’re done and we’ll pick you up.” Not that I was really worried, but I tried not to picture Harv and Merry using a backhoe to dig a separate hole for my car after they’d buried my body.

There was some solace in being driven. At first the rutted road seemed constructed like a maze in a puzzle book. On my own, I might have wound up facing wall after wall of trees. After a while we began to ascend one of those mountain roads that induced me to recite the Twenty-third Psalm to myself when I glanced down into the abyss right below the car door. I thought about Adam. He would have been stretching out his neck to admire the view.

What was wrong with me that I hadn’t simply said to him, Okay, come along and while I go to see this North Carolina guy, you can spend that day by yourself? Just knowing Adam was close by, hanging out in Asheville, not scared of being high up in the mountains and looking down, would have braced me. Why, I didn’t know, except being nearer Adam, a man who knew his coyotes, would have made me feel less of an urban weenie who was out of her element in any area with more than three trees. Yet I’d pushed him away, and not subtly either. Adam was angry. Probably confused too. So was I.

I put him out of my mind by tuning in on Harv. He talked all the way without saying anything significant, though by sharing his thoughts about maybe buying Goodyear Wrangler MT/R tires he was baring his soul. I was listening so intently, working on not thinking about Adam, that I didn’t notice we had pulled up to the house until Harv shifted the car into park, or whatever it’s called in standard-shift lingo.

“Knock good and hard,” he told me. “It’s a big house.” Understatement.

Jacques Harlow’s house was huge, a log cathedral with tall, Romanesque windows topped with arches, except they were clear instead of stained glass. I wasn’t sure whether it was the angle of the morning sun or some kind of film over the windows, but I couldn’t see inside.

I marveled at the size of the house. It was what a seven-foot basketball star would design with the thought of having all his teammates over for long weekends. I suppressed a Holy shit! and instead asked, “Does he have a big family?”