Sleepless Nights (13 page)

I watched her in the side mirror as we pulled out of the driveway, competently hitching Samuel over her shoulder, her hand carefully guarding his still-shaky neck, then settled back against the seat with a sigh. Jeanie was right. I needed to switch off my mommy radar—my madar, as I called it to myself—for a few hours.

Our journey to Kenton Tyler’s office took us several miles along thickly wooded roads. Clapboard houses flashed past, some old but many new, set on manicured green lots with purplish shrubs lined beneath the windows. Enormous cars sat hot and shining in the sunshine. Children thumped basketballs against asphalt, dogs panted in the cool on the edge of their yards, where clipped grass gave way to thicketed wetlands veined with brooks. Every few miles
we glimpsed small lakes glinting through the trees. Dilapidated farm stands offered tomatoes and cucumbers for sale, and bunches of flowers, wilting gently in the damp, warm morning heat.

“There’s a good French restaurant a few miles away,” Tom told me, turning left at a small triangle of yellowing grass. “At least, I drove past it last week, and it looked okay. Everyone around here raves about it.”

A sign outside a gas station announced that we were entering Cheasford, a small town sprawling around a simple old white church and a thriving general store. Half a mile on, we passed the large wooden general store in the center of town, turned right, then pulled into a small apron-shaped strip with a pizza joint, a brake specialist, and a dry-cleaners fronting the parking lot. In the distance, just visible through the large back windows of the restaurant, was the ocean.

In the corner of the strip stood a squat, square, three-floor building with a small weather-beaten sign outside the door and a thin row of hot-pink impatiens peering uncomfortably through a heavy carpet of red cedar mulch. The first floor, we learned from the sign, were the offices of Luna Lilly, Reiki Specialist. Julie’s Hair Emporium occupied the second (a thick draft of hairspray and singed hair wafted down from her windows as Tom opened the car door). The third floor housed the law offices of Kenton Tyler and Associates, LLC.

“This is it, then,” said Tom bracingly.

The building’s painted aluminum door was white and peeling, with a large clear glass panel in the center. Inside we could see a small, square, anonymous blue hallway, adorned with anonymous plastic flowers in an anonymous glass vase. On the right side of the hallway was another door, on the left a flight of stairs.

There didn’t seem to be a buzzer, so Tom knocked. Nothing happened. He knocked again.

The door on the right slowly opened. A face appeared, followed
by the body of a short but lugubrious-looking woman in her fifties with suspiciously blond hair restrained by a velvet Alice-band. She observed us for a second or two, then opened the front door. “May I help you?” she asked in honeyed tones, blinking in the daylight. A heady scent of sandalwood swirled around her loose purple cotton robes and silver-fringed shawl.

“Thanks; we’re here to see Kenton, the lawyer on the top floor,” Tom explained. “May we come in?”

The woman rolled her eyes. “I s’pose I’ll have to let you, because he never opens the door. The stupid old FART,” she yelled suddenly. “Thinks I’m his fucking SLAVE, the crazy drunk BASTARD.” Luna Lilly jerked her head in the direction of the upper floors. “He can HEAR ME, I know he’s fucking LISTENING TO THIS, pretends he doesn’t hear the door, the lazy ASSHOLE!” She was now standing at the bottom of the staircase, holding onto the banister and craning her head up the stairs. “You hear me, I KNOW you do!” she yelled furiously, shaking her fist, “and you might as well know this, you old fucker, don’t come running to me with a bottle of Kahlúa the next time your ex-wife calls, I’m not doing it again, you bastard, last night was the last time, y’understand? You hear me up there? NEVER AGAIN!”

She turned round, fixed us with a disapproving gaze, then disappeared in a swoosh of purple print and heavy perfume. Somewhere above us, we heard the click of a door opening.
“Is she gone?”
a low voice called.

Tom gave me the kind of look a man gives the woman he’s sent, purely by accident, to the guillotine. “Umm—”

“Mr. Tyler, is that you? We’re friends of Paul’s,” I called, setting off up the stairs. “We’re here to talk to you about your practice—ah! Hello.” I shook hands with a short man with impish blue eyes and a long white ponytail, who was hiding, quite unashamedly, behind the third-floor door.

“Hey—good to meet you, come on in,” he said, grinning, pushing
a strand of long white hair behind his ear. “Sorry about that” (with a nod down the stairs), “we have a sort of—er—love/hate relationship, we’re in the hate phase today, it’ll pass, but I sort of keep out of her way until it does.” He beckoned us into a small square office thick with stale cigarette smoke. We could virtually see the nicotine curling and expanding, yellowly, in the dark, dusty air.

Tom retched. Kenton peered round me to look. “You all right, young fella?” he asked concernedly; Tom waved his hand vaguely. We stumbled into the middle of the room like children in a fairy tale, our eyes slowly getting accustomed to the gloom.

The office was lined with about fifteen tottering bookcases from which law books and trial transcripts spilled. Toward the window, on the right side of the room, stood a heavy, overcrowded desk, behind which Kent was now sitting; in the middle of the room stood two red, threadbare velour armchairs. Through a door in the middle of the opposite wall we could see a brown metal desk, an orange-cushioned metal office chair, and an old computer; this, presumably, was the secretary’s office, although there was no secretary anywhere to be seen. A clock ticked loudly by the window. It was twenty minutes slow.

“Sit down, sit down,” Kenton said, cheerily, waving at the red chairs. Both were covered in books, ashtrays, yellowing newspapers, and—most extraordinary of all—socks. We stared speechlessly at what looked like a month’s collection of them, dirty and unmatched, spilling over the arms of the chairs and onto the floor, falling out of every crevice like so many maggots.

Tom seemed to have lost all power of speech. I swept the socks casually off the chair onto the floor, lowered myself down, and looked expectantly at Kenton.

Comfortably ensconced behind his heavy wooden desk, he was nodding and smiling approvingly at me. Tom subsided into the second armchair.

Kenton picked up a smooshed pack of Marlboros from the table, slid out a cigarette, and lit it with a flamboyant
swish
of a match. “Now then, you two,” he said, after a long drag (and a pause for a luxurious exhale), “I’m meeting you because young Paul suggested I should. I wouldn’t normally waste my time on a couple city lawyers, frankly. Still. Why don’t you start by going through your experience?”

It suddenly struck me, from the attentive look in his eyes, that this was a job interview.

Tom was staring at Kenton with the fascinated look of one confronting a lunatic. I knew what he was thinking. Kenton interviewing
us?
Kenton investigating
our
credentials? Shouldn’t he be down on his knees, thanking us for considering taking on this nowheres-ville practice of his? Us—us! With our degrees from Oxford and Harvard, our years of London and New York City experience…

“It’s a pretty challenging job, this one, make no mistake,” Kenton was saying judiciously, leaning back in his chair with his fingertips lightly together, cigarette stuck to his lower lip. There was suddenly an enormous snapping sound and the chair pitched backward, smacking his head into the windowsill behind the desk. We caught a glimpse of a pair of bony ankles above yellow checked socks as the seat flew into the air. Moments later, Kenton’s face reappeared as, with a practiced tug on the underside of his desk, he righted himself. “Must get that fixed,” he explained coolly, clicking the seat back into place. Cigarette still glued miraculously to his lip, he tucked a few loose strands of hair back behind his ears with yellowed fingers. “It may look easy to you, but there are challenges a country lawyer faces that’d make you city types blench. Frankly, I’m not sure you’d be up to it,” he went on severely. “Do you have your résumés with you?”

Tom made an odd gurgling sound.

“Well, no, we don’t,” I explained sweetly. “Truthfully,” I went on, “we’re not sure if this is a life for us or not. We don’t feel ready to
apply for your—ah—very interesting position just yet. Perhaps you could describe an average day here at the practice first?”

Kenton nodded. “Makes a lot of sense, a lot of sense,” he said judiciously. “Well” (locking his hands behind his head), “we get some pretty tricky divorce cases, and there’re probate problems to be worked through, figuring out how to divide up money between taxes and all the members of a family; some you know about some you don’t—heh heh…” He took another long drag on his cigarette.

Tom and I exchanged glances. The odd messy divorce and a trip to probate court once in a while…it sounded like a lifetime of soul-crunching boredom or an easy way to earn a buck, you could take your pick which way to look at it.

Kenton’s face, I suddenly realized, had developed an unexpectedly knowing leer. “Think it sounds pretty easy, don’t you?” he said, leaning forward, toward us,
“I
know what you’re thinking, you two! And there’s something in it, I suppose; you won’t be dealing with multimillion-dollar mergers up here, it’s true. But you need something else to practice in these parts, something I don’t think—I could be wrong—you two actually have.”

Tom was alert now, sitting upright. I knew what he was thinking, of course. Half of him was frankly disbelieving. The other half was thinking: A hoop I’m being told I cannot jump through! I
must
prove I can jump through that hoop…

“What’s that, Mr. Tyler?” he asked. “What’s that?”

Kenton stuck his cigarette in his mouth and took a long drag. “D’you know, young man, I don’t know if I feel like telling you,” he said slowly; and then, his face splitting into a grin that would not have shamed a Cheshire cat, “in fact, I’ve thought about it, and I’m sure I don’t!”

22

Jeanie

I
’m going to hitch down to Heathrow,” Dave informed me seriously, “to minimize my carbon footprint. Ranger’s idea. And then I’ll hitch up to Connecticut from New York.”

“Dave, I don’t think you can hitch in America,” I said faintly. “Everyone’ll think you’re a psychotic killer. You’ll probably get
arrested.”

“Then I’ll try to persuade the policeman to give me a lift the rest of the way,” he returned cheerfully, and I gulped a bit, because I couldn’t imagine any of the heavyset men with guns and crew-cut hair I’d seen around Connecticut consenting to chauffeur a loony Englishman.

“Dave, honestly, I think you’re more likely to get chucked in jail,” I explained nervously. “And when you come into the country, for goodness sake, please don’t wear your
FUCK AUTHORITY
T-shirt, I just don’t think it’s a good idea, they have all these cameras in the immigration area…”

“Oh, Jeanie, don’t be such an old woman,” he said impatiently. “I think they have something called freedom of speech over there, right? Honestly, love,” he went on, “don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. I’m really looking forward to it, they give you free drinks on the plane, right? And you can show me around the area. I’ve never been to America before, never been out of Europe. Only time I ever
travel is when England is playing away! Ha! Perhaps we can do some trips—if it’s all right with you, of course. And if we can lever ourselves out of bed, which I’m not at all sure about. God, Jeanie, every time I think about…”

“I have things to do, Dave, I’m about to start volunteering at a geriatric home,” I cut in, feeling suddenly rather uptight. “I can’t just—I mean, of course I’ll show you around, but I do have to help Q. Remember I have responsibilities here.”

“I know, I know. And I can help as well,” he said earnestly. “I like kids. Funny little scraps. But I really want to enjoy this holiday, Jeanie. I’ve spent the last three days dealing with my mum, y’know, full-time. Poor old sod, she’s been very demanding. Yelling the place down, most days. Dad needed a break, so I’ve been doing it all on my own—apart from Ellen, of course. Thank Christ for her. If she wasn’t there to help I don’t know what I’d have done—”

“Really,” I answered, not rising to the bait.

“Yup. She’s such a helpful lass, so—so warm an’ understanding.”

“Really,” I repeated. I could hear Dave’s irritation grow.

“Mmm. She’s been a rock for our family, and she’s a pleasant sight at the lunch table n’all. ‘A good-looking, strapping sort of girl,’ as Dad puts it.”

“Well, isn’t that nice. You can
all
ogle her over the meatloaf.”

“Is there something wrong?” Dave exploded at last.

“Of course not,” I said, feeling tetchy.

“I mean, are you getting your period or something? Because you’re being really difficult at the moment.”

“What, because I refuse to ask you what color Ellen’s stockings are this week?”

“No, because—because—I don’t know why, but you just
are.”

By the time we put the phone down on each other ten minutes later, we were thoroughly out of sorts; we barely said good-bye, just sort of harrumphed at each other. It’d been a little while since I saw Dave, and surely it wasn’t surprising we weren’t rubbing along as
well as we normally did. There’d been so much going on in my life in Connecticut. It’s going to take us a while to get back into the swing of things when he arrives, I thought to myself. You have to expect a difficult transition.

In spite of that, I was really looking forward to seeing him. He’d promised to stop off at Una’s and pick up my favorite red dress, for a start.

23

Q

T
he young woman was short but lean, her pale yellow hair tucked untidily behind her ears. She was dressed in faded jeans and a baggy pink-stripe T-shirt that bore the signs of many meals’ cooking. On her feet were a pair of scuffed flip-flops; a pair of large gold hoops dangled from her ears. A scar like a sideways T ran across her nose from one cheek to the other. The nails on her left hand, I noticed, were bitten down to the quick.