The Fates Will Find Their Way (15 page)

23

T
rey Stephens had a heart attack and died in prison. It was October, the year we all turned forty-five, and we held a very private ceremony for him at Danny Hatchet’s apartment. We didn’t tell our wives, and out of respect we didn’t invite Paul Epstein. Who knows? Maybe the mere act of getting together in honor of a pedophile is an automatic disrespect towards the family, towards the victim. But Trey, before he did those things to Ginger Epstein, was one of us. We’d grown up with him, down the street from him. Not too long ago, he’d been a friend, and his parting merited our acknowledgment.

It’s unclear how we ended up at Danny’s place. Maybe because he didn’t have a wife to object to the get-together, though it seems more likely that we would have gone to the recently divorced Winston Rutherford’s house. It must have been that before any of us could suggest Winston’s place, Danny offered his and we felt bad about saying no. The day was supposed to be about Trey Stephens, after all. We didn’t have time to worry about things like cramped space and mildewed coffee tables.

In other ways, it made sense. Perhaps more than any of us, Danny had been closest to Trey. The public schooler and the poorest of the private schoolers—destined to be either the most obvious allies or the bitterest enemies. But it was October; we were depressed, feeling older than we’d ever felt, and we went to Danny’s apartment because we could, because we needed to get out of the house, away from our families, away from our wives.

I
t was the first time we can remember actually asking Danny to give us weed. There was fake wood paneling on the walls of his apartment. Someone pointed out there wasn’t a mirror in the bathroom.

“How do you shave?” asked Drew Price.

“Sitting down,” said Danny. Drew could be a total ass when he wanted to and everyone knew it, especially Danny.

“At any rate,” said Chuck Goodhue, “the weed.” He held out his hand towards Danny as if Danny might just reach into his pocket and pull out a joint the way he’d done his whole life. But Danny just shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t have any.”

We didn’t believe him.

Chuck said, “Seriously, quit dicking around. Produce the pot.”

But Danny said, “No, man, for real. I don’t have any.”

“What the fuck,” said Chuck. “Way to come through for the team. Especially today. Today of all days you’re going to hold out. What the fuck.”

We only stayed another half hour after that, drinking beers and watching a basketball game that none of us really cared about. Danny stood by the window, looking up at the parking lot behind his basement apartment. We didn’t talk about Trey. What was there to say? Instead, we thought about our cholesterol, our hearts, our families. We thought about how little had happened in our lives, but how quickly the little that had happened had actually gone by. It was hard not to be angry with our bodies, with our aging. It was hard to believe that we’d actually gotten this far and not figured out a way to stop it, to pause life, to enjoy it. Hadn’t our own fathers been counting on just that—on our ability to outlast what they couldn’t?

We drank our beers and eventually someone—Chuck probably?—gave the cue that it was time to get out of there. Danny looked hurt when we said goodbye in the parking lot. Maybe it felt as final to him as it did to us. We were feeling dramatic that day. Why shouldn’t we?

Jack Boyd said, “Look, you’ve got to understand, Danny, there are children involved. We’ve got to get home.”

“Yeah,” said Danny. “I understand.”

He glanced at Winston Rutherford, like maybe he would stay since there were no children, and since Maggie had just left, but Winston said, without being asked, “I’m meeting some guys from work. They do drinks once a week to get out of the house. Maggie said it would be good for me.”

“Maggie’s gone,” said Chuck.

“Thanks for the reminder.”

“I think Chuck means that maybe you shouldn’t be taking her advice.” Danny kicked at the curb.

“Yeah, maybe.”

We walked to our cars. Chuck slapped Danny on the back. “Sorry I snapped,” he said.

“It happens,” said Danny.

“Shit happens,” said Chuck, getting into his car.

Danny shut the door and gave the window a final knock.

“Shit happens,” Chuck said again from the other side of the glass. There was a shared laugh between the two of them that, from where we were sitting in our own cars, looked sad, forced. The clouds overhead threatened snow. They would threaten snow almost every day that winter, though they would ultimately produce only an inch, just after Christmas. What a disappointment that would be to all of us; no matter how old we got, Christmas was never really Christmas without the snow.

Danny waited outside as we left the parking lot. It was like watching our moms watch us drive away to college for the first time. Something deep down felt like crying.

T
hat night—lying awake, watching our wives’ shoulders rise up, sink down with their easy female breathing—we didn’t think about Trey Stephens as, earlier in the day, we imagined we would upon getting into bed. We didn’t think about the gray cement cell where his heart finally gave out, or about his ashes and how there was no one to claim them and how none of us had volunteered. We didn’t even think about Ginger Epstein, and whether or not her parents had told her or if she already knew because she’d somehow been getting news about Trey on her own. Instead, somewhat surprisingly, we thought about Danny Hatchet.

We thought about his dark skin and how it had kept him looking young, even as we continued markedly to age. We thought about his body, so lanky in high school, now somehow muscular and substantial. Our own bodies were turning soft, difficult. At some point in the last decade, Danny Hatchet’s face had cleared up. Why hadn’t we noticed that before today? The scars on his forehead had faded. When had that happened? There was whole skin around his cuticles, which were normally blistered with hangnails and infections. Was it possible that Danny Hatchet looked healthy for the first time in his life? Suddenly the image of Danny in our rearview mirrors—pathetic as he might have seemed as we drove away—was the image of a full-fledged man. Danny Hatchet had grown up. When the fuck had that happened? And how?

R
emember that year in middle school when Danny came back after Christmas break and told us about the flea market his mom had given him, and somehow we knew not to make fun of him? And remember how angry we got when Maggie Frasier told him that what he meant to say was
ant farm
, not
flea market
? His face turned so red that we thought he might cry. And, really, for a moment, we thought Winston Rutherford might punch Maggie—his future bride, his future ex-wife—in the face.

Already, that early, even before his mom died, we had learned to feel sorry for Danny. Why was that? Maybe it wasn’t fair. Our sympathy. Our coddling. There is a vanity, after all, in believing you are better than someone else, and wasn’t our fierce protection of Danny just that? Maybe, at the end of the day, we had something to do with his protracted childhood, his inability to move forward, advance in life, marry, have children, form a family. Maybe. Or maybe we were being too hard on ourselves. Impossible to say. But we did, that night, as our wives turned to face us and coax us into sleep, perhaps make mental notes that we should call Danny more often. Invite him for a barbeque. Maybe even Thanksgiving. Yes, we thought, Thanksgiving. Not knowing, of course, that by Thanksgiving, Danny Hatchet would be gone.

Because what we couldn’t know the day of Trey Stephens’ informal memorial, driving away from Danny’s apartment, watching him watch us in our rearview mirrors, feeling so sorry for him, for all of us, really—what we couldn’t know then was that in less than two months from that day, he’d be packed up and moved to Arizona with Sissy Lindell and all three of those strange little girls. If we’d known that, if we’d known what he and Sissy were already plotting—a life together away from us—we might have understood that Danny wasn’t sad about being left alone or left behind. He was sad for us. He was already saying goodbye and we didn’t even know it.

24

T
his is how we thought it would end. We thought it would end with Danny Hatchet and Sissy Lindell alone in that dark little bar on High Street the year we all turned forty-five. Mr. Lindell had been dead for twelve years. Minka Dinnerman had been dead for ten. It was the year Maggie Rutherford drove to Florida with a grief counselor. The year Winston Rutherford told her it was fine if she went, but she couldn’t take the dog. Trey Stephens died in prison that year, and Ginger Epstein turned eighteen and moved in with a forty-year-old two states away. We were embarrassed for the Epsteins, embarrassed for ourselves as men. It seemed like the year for endings, and so maybe that’s why we imagined it would end for them as well—for Sissy and Danny. We were ready for it to be over.

Nora Lindell, even if she’d actually made it past that night in the woods with the man in the Catalina, was probably dead by now too. Nothing had come of the riverbank bones, except to confirm that several dog bones and only one as-yet untraceable human bone had been found. Sissy must never have relinquished the DNA to the police, and Gail Cummings must not have been crafty enough to come up with any on her own.

It seemed we had all finally stopped looking for her, asking about her. It was a sickness, a leftover from a youth too long protracted. Of course we still thought about her. Late at night, lying awake, especially in early autumn, when we could fall asleep for a few weeks with the bedroom windows open, the curtains pulled halfway, a breeze coming in, and the occasional stray dry leaf, we still allowed ourselves the vague and unfair comparisons between what our wives were and what she might have been. At least we were able to acknowledge the futility of the fantasies, even if we still couldn’t control them.

But that’s beside the point now. The point is, how we imagined it ending was with Danny and Sissy sitting side by side at that bar on High Street, facing the mirror behind the liquor bottles. Danny still smoked. Sissy had quit. She was in town because of the continued Gail Cummings debacle. Or maybe something else. The point is, she was in town again, and she’d given Danny a call.

“Some days I almost don’t even think of her,” said Sissy. “Most days I do. You’d think I’d miss my dad or even my mom. But I don’t. I mean, I do, but it’s Nora who’s there, front and center. You know?”

“I know,” Danny said. “I do.”

We imagined it would be sweet for them at the end. They weren’t in love. They’d never even suspected they were. Maybe Danny. Maybe for a minute he held out hope that the feeling was there, in either one of them. But as much of a fuckup as Danny might have been, he wasn’t stupid. None of us was stupid. We were just dreamers. Caught in the dream of the Lindells and what might have been.

“I brought you something.” This we imagined Danny saying towards the end of the night, when he knew the goodbyes were imminent.

“It’s not jewelry, is it?”

He laughed. “No, it’s not jewelry.”

“I can’t smoke pot anymore. My lungs can’t handle it.”

He laughed again. “Good guess, but no.”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. Sandwiched between the billfold was a folded-up piece of paper. He put the wallet back in his pocket and slid the paper across the counter to Sissy.

“I can’t tell if this is creepy or not,” he said. He was looking at the mirror, not at Sissy. He was looking at himself, looking at what he’d become, what age had turned him into. When he spoke again, he spoke as much to his reflection as to Sissy. “I feel like maybe that’s been the problem most of my life. Like I’m always doing things that might be creepy or might not be creepy, but I never mean them to be. You know?”

Sissy wasn’t looking at Danny. She wasn’t even looking at the mirror. She was looking down at the bar, at the piece of paper Danny had passed her.

“I took it from the telephone pole outside our house,” he said. “I thought we could be friends back then. You and me. I thought maybe we’d have something to talk about.”

We imagined little tears forming at the edges of Sissy’s eyes. We imagined Danny wanting to touch her, wanting so badly to reach out and touch just the top of her hand or maybe even the small of her back, but he didn’t.

“This picture makes her look like she’s thirty years old,” said Sissy. “She looks older than I did at thirty and she’s only sixteen.” She slid the missing sign towards Danny. “See? Look.”

And they both looked down, genuinely trying to see the thirty-year-old in the sixteen-year-old’s face, trying to see the future, to see what might have been.

“Are you okay?” asked Danny.

“What do you mean? Am I sad? Yes. But will I wake up tomorrow? Yes.”

“That’s not what I mean.” He nodded in the direction of her chest. She turned towards the mirror behind the liquor bottles. Her hand was on her sweater, clutching—the place where her heart must be.

“I’m fine,” she said at last. “My heart hurts.” She shrugged and moved her hand away. Danny said nothing. “My girls trick-or-treat on Halloween. Is that stupid? Is that normal? I don’t know. Should it be a day of reverence?” Again, Danny said nothing. “Listen,” said Sissy. “Is there anything else you want to ask me? About anything? I don’t mind. About the girls maybe?”

“Everyone thinks she’s my daughter,” Danny said at last. “You know that, right? The littlest one.”

“What do you think?”

“I think I’m not father material,” he said. “I know that. That’s one thing I know for sure.”

“Do you want to ask me?”

“No,” he said. “I really don’t. Not unless you think I should.”

She was quiet for a bit.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think you need to ask me.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

They finished their drinks and Sissy asked the bartender for the check. Danny put his hand out to take it. “Please, Sissy,” he said. “At least let me take care of this.”

He looked down at the bar like he was embarrassed or like he might cry, or both.

Sissy, always somehow so young, so demure, so well-put-together, slid off her bar stool, kissed Danny’s cheek, and said, “Anything you want.” Then she walked out of the bar and out of his life forever.

Except.

Except that’s not what happened. That’s only what we wanted to happen. Why did we want it to end that way? Simple: because it’s all that we could imagine.

I
n the end, there was no sad farewell, no protracted crying spell at the bar on High Street. There was nothing maudlin or tragic between them, no final few words about Nora and what might have been. Instead, there was Sissy—Sissy in real life—driving up to the back of Danny Hatchet’s apartment in a new luxury SUV, packing up the last of his belongings just a few days after Halloween.

Chuck Goodhue’s daughters saw the whole thing. They were walking home from school, slinging their book bags, occasionally trying to catch a stray leaf, when they saw the redhead get out of the car and walk down the stairs to Danny Hatchet’s basement apartment.

They waited, not because they’re nosey, but because there was nothing better to do. Maybe they thought they would see a fight, a scene, something ugly or maybe just something to gossip about. Who knows? But what they saw was Sissy coming back up the steps only a few seconds later, carrying a box, laughing, turning around to look at Danny, also coming up the steps, only he was carrying three boxes and his face was obscured, but Chuck Goodhue’s girls say they were mostly just struck by Sissy’s laughter, her mouth open wide, laughing like it was the best feeling on earth, laughing like there was nothing else to do but that.

Of course, at first, we didn’t want to believe the Goodhue girls—they’re not bad kids or anything, and they don’t have a reputation as liars—but because it didn’t fit with what we thought we knew about Sissy or about Danny. I mean, Danny was one of us. Born and raised. We saw him almost every day of our lives. It’s one thing that we mistook Sissy’s intentions, her aspirations, her dreams in life—Sissy’s been a mystery since she left for boarding school. But Danny. We were unprepared for the discovery that Danny had been plotting a whole life separate from ours.

We called our mothers. We started to tell them what the Goodhue girls claimed to have seen, but they already knew. Paul’s mom, Mrs. Epstein, had witnessed the whole thing as well, from the beauty parlor next to the apartment building.

“What a lovely lady,” Mrs. Epstein had told our mothers, referring to Sissy Lindell. “Such a fine-looking woman, and she keeps her car very clean.”

“Can you imagine?” we asked our mothers. “Danny Hatchet and Sissy Lindell? Can you even imagine it?”

“No,” they said in a huff, a sudden change in their tone. “But it’s really none of our business, is it?”