The Forgers (12 page)

“What's up?” I asked. “We win the lottery?”

“Here,” she said, and handed me a glass of orange juice.

“Well, did we?” taking a sip.

“You might say we did,” was her response. “Sit. Let's eat.”

Though I was keen to know what was going on, I played along and asked no further questions. We were halfway into our breakfast when Meghan set her fork on her plate and said, without any prefatory comment, “I'm pregnant.”

Beside those words and the look on the face of the woman who uttered them, I had neither heard nor seen anything more moving in my life. Without a sound I got up out of my chair, rounded the breakfast table, and took Meghan into my arms. After all the heartache she had suffered and courage she'd shown, it was as if a sluice gate inside her had opened, allowing a flood of tears to come forth. I kissed her moist eyes, held her close, told her we would do everything in our power to make this the happiest, healthiest, wisest, most coddled baby ever. I couldn't remember being so lighthearted, so rapturous, even during the bygone times when the act of forgery produced similar feelings.

The rest of the day swung back and forth from unfettered giddiness to a more mature conversation about whether we needed to find new lodgings, if we were absolutely certain we wanted to raise our boy or girl in rural Ireland rather than New York, how long Meghan would continue to work at the bookshop, and so forth. Despite our dizzy glee over the prospect of raising a child together and probably not being in the proper state of mind to make rational decisions, most of what we settled on would prove to be the way we later agreed things should go. There was plenty of room in the furnished cottage we'd leased. Besides, we liked it here. The grove of soughing pines that edged the field behind the house, the dancing creek nearby, the house itself with its thatched roof and cozy fireplaces—what child wouldn't want to grow up in such an idyllic environment as this? Manhattan wasn't a place that drew us much at all anymore and, unbeknown to my wife, of course, it wasn't a place I might ever like to set foot in again, if I had my druthers.

“Can I put in a couple of name requests early?” Meghan asked that afternoon as we walked arm in arm after taking a drive over to Bantry Bay to watch the rollers come in and the fishing boats bob like carved and painted corks atop the heavy swells.

“You bet,” I said.

“Well, okay. If it's a girl I want to name her after your mother, Nicole.”

“She'd have been very honored. And if it's a boy?”

“If it's a boy, and you don't have any objections, I'd love to name him Adam.”

I could easily come up with any number of objections to naming our son Adam, not the least of which would be, Why drape the albatross of a murdered man's name over the shoulders of our son? Instead, I simply said, “That sounds fine, great. I thought you were going to say William Butler.”

“Well, it could be Adam William Butler, or William Butler Adam, you know.”

“Fortunately, we have months to settle on names. Right now, I couldn't even tell you my own name. I love you, Meghan.”

“And I love you.”

The rest of August floated by without incident as summer gave way to early fall, and the throngs of tourists—
Americans, Japanese, Germans—passing through on their
way to visiting the Ring of Kerry were now thinning. Then, no warning, it was as if my life simply collapsed in on itself like a sheet of paper wadded into a ball. Walking home after an evening pint in my favorite pub in the village, far up at the top of the street, I could swear I saw Henry Slader looking me right in the eye before ducking around the corner. Rather than reverse course to take an alternate route home, I found myself half-running up the block, pushing my way past other pedestrians, cursing under my breath. Those nights of lying awake, mentally parading through a host of ways my current Eden could witness a second fall had, it seemed, not been altogether a fool's game.

Naturally, ridiculously, when I made it to the corner he was nowhere to be seen. It reminded me of that awful moment in the Armory when I glanced down for a moment and he vanished before I looked back up. Yet he wasn't some ghostly magician or supernatural revenant. Quite the opposite, Slader had proven himself to be very much of this world, a man capable of all manner of very ugly, very human desires and faults. Hadn't he said we were done when I handed over, to the last dollar, the money he demanded and his now-second-rate cache of fake Conan Doyle letters? Didn't the man have anything better to do than harass me, someone who had treated him fairly, honored my end of the bargain?

Like a puppet on a string, I marched along the sidewalk that paralleled the main road, moving quickly in the direction I thought I had seen him headed. After a minute of frenzied searching, I stopped to catch my wheezing breath—it seemed I had developed a mild case of asthma since moving to this rainy clime. As I stood there, homeward-bound cars coasting along the roadway and some of the same people I had jostled past now overtaking me, I began seriously to doubt myself. If it had in fact been Slader, he wouldn't have bothered to run away from me, would he? What would be the purpose of such evasion at this point in our, granted, bizarre and unsavory acquaintance? An uneasy sense of calm came over me as I reasoned with myself, breath slowing, that there are more doppelgängers running around out there than any of us dare imagine. This was not my Henry Slader, not here in faraway County Kerry, in a little village tucked away down near the bottom of the isle of Eire. It was, instead, pure paranoia.

Determined not to let this hallucination overcome the calm my life had settled into, I returned to the cozy comfort of the pub, called Meghan at work, and asked her if she'd like to come along and join me for some mutton stew, maybe a bit of trad music. Just because we were married and pregnant didn't mean we couldn't have some good distracting fun. My nerves needed another pint or two, although of course I didn't dare tell her why. She was delighted at the idea, and once the bookstore closed—it stayed open an hour later than the stationery shop—she came straight over and we had a fine night of it. Despite the age-old “Guinness is good for you” myth that suggested even pregnant women in need of health-giving iron benefited from drinking stout, Meghan refrained. But her high spirits belied her sobriety. She laughed and clapped and sang along with some of the songs she knew. Myself, I deliberately pushed my preposterous Slader lookalike out of mind and listened to the singers play guitar and tin whistle, fiddle and bodhrán for a couple of hours. For all the glow I got on, I reminded myself I was an expectant father now. The kind of man I would want raising my child was not one who would glance at faces around the room with a bugbear foreboding. Rather, it would be my job to explain away hobgoblins, gremlins, ogres, and all the other assorted harmless monsters that hide under beds—not to be living in fear of them myself. If my years as a forger were truly behind me, as now they had to be since I was no longer an adult child who felt it was all right to do whatever I pleased and damn all, I knew I must change. Change now, change categorically, change for good.

Our bill settled, we left the pub to find a misty, starless night outside that was not at all cold. The colorful lights of other pubs up and down the main block were reflected in pools of rainwater on the narrow street.

“Shall we walk home?” she asked.

“And leave the car where it's parked?”

“Sure, why not? It'll be safe, no problem. I locked it.”

“Well, walking's what I originally intended.”

“So you said. No reason not to follow through. We can leave a little early and walk back in the morn.”

The house was not quite two kilometers from the center of Kenmare village and our stroll home was quiet, with Meghan humming one of the songs we had heard. My Slader sighting aside, calmed by the pub fare and tired from the walk, I slept like the dead that night and woke up predawn next morning full of vigor. We had already chosen the bedroom adjacent to ours as the nursery and were repainting it a cheery yellow—no pink or blue for us, as we decided we didn't want to know the baby's gender until it was born. Seeing I had an extra hour on my hands, I rolled out a second coat of acrylic on one of the walls by a window that overlooked a spacious span of mowed field behind the cottage. As the sun rose, the grass that extended to the curtain of mature slouch-boughed pines at the end of our yard changed from dark forest green to the bright emerald unique to this landscape—the very shade of emerald green used by William Morris and other Victorians in their wallpapers, which was mixed with arsenic and produced lethal fumes. Death by William Morris wallpaper, who would have thought it possible? Oh, the trivia a good forger must know, I thought, as the dew winked and twinkled in the lawn, making it look as if diamonds had been scattered there by some beneficent creature of the night.

As I painted, I glanced now and then out the window, imagining how many mornings our boy or girl would view this same sylvan scape with wonder—that is, once he or she was tall enough to peer on tiptoes past the sill. It reminded me of my own childhood weekend home in upstate New York, where my parents retreated with almost fanatical regularity from Friday nights through Sunday evenings, to escape the city and, as my father put it, “recharge the batteries.” Didn't matter what case he was involved with or whether he had to make business calls and prepare rebuttals or cross-examinations, pore over testimony, whatever his practice demanded. He always did it in an office attached to our restored farmhouse in the Hudson Valley. So it was that I as a youth had a view out my window that wasn't altogether unlike this one. Grass and more grass, a valance of flowers in summer, and at the periphery a tall partition of trees beyond which lay a forest.

This visual memory was as strong as any from my past and prompted the question, What kind of father was I going to be? My own dad, looking back, wasn't unassailable, but he presented a model to aspire to, perhaps one that was both too good to be true and thus undesirable because unattainable. Who knows. But as for me? I had much to hide and knew I would always be looking out at the forest edge with different eyes than I did in my youth. I who had never been afraid of what might lurk in the dark woods now couldn't feel quite so self-assured as before, would have to consider the slim but real possibility the forest was looking back at me, framed here in the window.

Dying is, once again, a dangerous business, but so is living. In fatherhood I would have to find a new fearlessness and at the same time be protective of my too-vulnerable family. I realized in that moment how much easier it had been to avoid, erase, ignore such thoughts before Meghan discovered she was pregnant. Now this exile of sorts was no longer a perfect displacement from life and lives past. I would just have to deal with it, and the best way, it seemed as I rolled some fresh paint along the dado, was to embrace anew the fact—and it was a fact, damned if it wasn't—that I was a free man with not a single consequential finger pointed in my direction.

Meghan had entered the room silent as fog. “You plan on going to work today, Picasso?”

“Oh man, you startled me,” I rasped, wheeling around.

“I'm sorry, didn't mean to,” said Meghan, a bit startled herself. “We've got to get going soon though, since we have to walk, remember?”

It was true, I had utterly forgotten we left the car in town. Hurriedly cleaning things up, I changed into my casual work clothes, and we set off.

“That was kind of strange,” she said, after we turned out of the drive and headed down the dirt lane toward the paved road that led to the village. “I never saw you lock the door before.”

“I hadn't even realized I did.”

“You all right, Will?”

The answer was clearly no, but I assured her, “Fine, I'm fine,” startled at hearing my name, a name I never much liked. Usually endearments—none of which need be listed here, as we are all guilty of the same maudlin sobriquets—dislodged my given name from our conversation, which was fine by me. Shadow men never like being called by name, I guess one could say, although now that I was out of the shadows, why shouldn't I shout my name from mountaintops? Habit, caution, self-disgust? I was definitely off this morning and didn't like it. “It's just that I was thinking how isolated the house is. Hope the little one won't be scared of the dark.”

Meghan gave a relieved laugh and told me I was getting way ahead of myself. “Besides,” she said, taking my hand as we strolled along beside the hedgerow, “it's good to be scared of the dark sometimes.”

I
N LOCKING DOORS
—of cottages, cars, any other thing with a key and bolt—we reveal what we treasure. What we desire to protect from others, be they prying or covetous. I thought about Meghan's offhand yet inarguable comment the rest of that morning. What I most needed to protect had no fail-safe lock or key. Nor was it something I treasured. Rather, I wondered, was it an act that had by now become so unreal to me as not to exist? Fortunately business was brisk at work, and anxieties about our cottage or car—the latter was unmolested, of course—dispersed as the day wore on.

As it turned out, to my joyful chagrin, Henry Slader was also so unreal as not to exist. At least, not in Kenmare. I spotted the bastard again during my lunch hour, this time as he climbed out of a parked car, helped an elderly woman from the passenger side, and escorted her into a pharmacy. The resemblance was uncanny, and as I followed him inside I recognized a familiar stature, even a familiar face, but when I heard him speak in a distinctly Irish brogue, relief came over me the likes of which no drug on any shelf at any dosage in the place could possibly have afforded me. I was never more delighted to feel like a perfect imbecile.

That said, I did stop by the hardware store after work to make an enquiry about who in Kenmare might be hired to install security lights at the cottage. Assuming Meghan would agree with my idea, I decided to propose to our landlord that we would let him approve the lighting design and that, in turn, we would pay for everything, including whatever increase there might be in the utility bill. Yes, I realized one of the many reasons we settled in pretty Kenmare was that crime was so low. This was, as far as we could tell, misdemeanor country at worst. Petty theft or, say, the occasional reveler who'd overindulged and maybe broken a window or a nose in schnockered exuberance because his favorite hurling team had won their match, his favorite footballer had scored the winning goal. Still, I knew myself well enough to know my concerns about security at the cottage had taken root, foolish or otherwise, and rather than let them fester it was better to take action. What was more, it occurred to me that when I explained to Mr. Sullivan, whose family had owned the house for generations, that we had lost Meghan's brother to a violent crime in the hours between midnight and predawn, he would be understanding in the extreme. Indeed, how could he not agree? It would constitute a free improvement to his property.