The Last Good Night (22 page)

I called the bus station for the schedule back to Flagerty, writing down the times on the back of a magazine. Upstairs, I hurriedly packed my suitcase, zipped it, and headed for the door. But I turned back, paralyzed by the thought of Flagerty waiting open-armed and curious for me. I sat for hours holding the bus schedule, staring at the numbers until they became a senseless geometry.

The next morning I packed again, turned back again.

In truth, I didn't even have the money for the return ticket.

Slowly, inexorably, the days piled up.

On my fifth day, I was downstairs waiting for the phone when I heard the hotel's only maid quit. I talked the owner into hiring me in exchange for free rent and pocket money, all of it off the books. I started that afternoon. It was something I knew, anyway, and easier than the Breezeway. The rooms were only cleaned once a week each, and the hotel's numerous junkies often didn't even want to be interrupted for that.

I had been in New York nearly a week before I left the hotel for the first time, my eyes squinting into the light, my legs weak and wobbly.

There were days when I went no farther than a block, certain that people were staring at me, pointing to me, purposefully knocking into me. I rushed with my arms tight about my torso back to the room, the blankets, the bus schedule, overwhelmed by a new and encompassing fear of being touched.

It was only after dark that the city streets comforted me with their opaqueness, their lack of curiosity, and I wandered aimlessly for miles filled sometimes with dread, and sometimes with elation.

For there was this, along with the horror at what I had done and the shame and the fear, there was this, too: freedom.

A dreadful guilt-drenched freedom, but freedom nonetheless.

The freedom of being in a place where no one knew me, no one knew anything at all. Freedom from Astrid, Garner, the Breezeway, the rooms and what I had done in them. Freedom from the past. There was suddenly so much air, so much space. I ventured out into it apprehensively at first, tasting it, testing it, then swallowing it whole, greedily, desperately.

There are no excuses.

I believe in right and wrong.

I did not go back. It was wrong. That is what I live with. Every day, every night.

I have looked up the word
guilt
in the dictionary. It is defined as “the state of having done a wrong.”

Not just a single act, but a state of being.

Endless.

Always.

I never told David about the tiny roach-infested room I eventually moved into, or of the Upper East Side restaurant where I worked six shifts a week as I put myself through City College. I used to watch the women who came into the restaurant, rich women, women with elegant wardrobes and handsome men, women with country homes and confident gaits, women I studied as scrupulously as my books, analyzing them, envying them, copying them.

I starved myself until my rounded cheeks grew planes and angles, I cut my hair and bleached all the color out of it with drugstore peroxide before putting in the honey blond the res
taurant women had. I changed the intonations of my voice by listening to myself night after night reading the dictionary into a Woolworth's tape recorder. There were mistakes made along the way, times when my hair turned orange, and when in an attempt to copy the clothes in magazines, I ended up looking cheap or matronly or clumsy. Years later, when I could afford it, I had my nose fixed. Afterwards, I stared into the mirror at my swollen skin, my black eyes, and wondered what I had done. I looked nothing like Astrid, nothing like myself.

I grew into the new contours slowly but completely until my own image in the mirror no longer surprised me but fit so thoroughly with what I had intended that I almost began to forget there had ever been anything else.

By the time I met David I was thirty-four years old. I had accumulated enough other stories to tell him. In fact, I was Laura Barrett. Am Laura Barrett. Why would he question that? Why would anyone?

Only at night the dream still comes to me, as vivid as the first time. The gnats swarming in my nostrils, my mouth, Xavier's arms tightening and tightening about my throat, the brick, the blood, Jack.

There were years when I tried drinking myself into a stupor at night to squelch it, and years when I tried sleeping pills. There were brief attempts at therapy, but I could never bring myself to confess the source of the nightmares, so there could be no help. I tried endless middle-of-the-night letters of apology and confession that I ripped up in the morning, and I tried working until I was so exhausted I could barely speak by the time I got home.

Still, it came to me, comes to me, the arms, the blood, and I wake across the room, breathless and shivering.

Early Sunday morning, I heard David in his study, tapping lightly on his keyboard. He had decided to write a new book and
he spent every free moment there now, rising early, going to bed late. I listened to the steady sound of his fingers and then I knocked softly.

“Come in.”

I entered and he swiveled partially around. The room is so completely his, with its pristine model of the city on pedestals, its carefully arranged books, its scent of erasers and Elmer's glue and old wood. What David craved, what he hoarded most was time. Time alone in this windowless room where he could sit and brood amid the carefully ordered spaces of the maquettes he created. “Hi.”

“Hi.” He had gotten his hair cut on Saturday afternoon and there was a shorn vulnerability about his ears, his neck. I bent down to kiss the pink uncovered skin below his newly crisp hairline.

He was waiting for me to get to the point of the intrusion, but there was none, not one that I could explain anyway.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

I touched his cheek.

“What is it, Laura?”

I looked away. “I'm sorry.”

“For what?”

“Disturbing you.”

He looked at me curiously.

“I'll leave.”

He bent his head back to his work, nodding. “I just want to get this thought down before I forget it.”

I kissed him one more time and left.

 

A
LL DAY AS
I played with Sophie, I saw David, the new skin, the concentration, the fingers tap tap tapping.

And I saw Jack too, Jack waking in the wintry midafternoon in that crummy hotel room.

I could not see after that, could not see what he did next, felt next.

I only saw him opening his eyes in that empty gray light, and finding himself deserted again.

I
TRIED TO
will myself not to think, to will all the jagged pieces that cut, that mangled, away.

I threw myself into my work.

On Monday morning, I sat at my desk, doodling across the top of a memo from Berkman while I listened to the Townsends' phone ring for the fourth time.

I was just about to give up when a woman answered. “Yes?”

“Hello.” I was so surprised that I had actually gotten through after so many days that I stumbled at first. “Yes. Um. This is Laura Barrett, from…”

“I know where you're from.”

We were both silent for a minute.

“Are you Mrs. Townsend?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I glanced down at the notes I had prepared, as if reading the words would somehow disassociate them from me, making them easier to speak. “I was wondering,” I began, “if you would consider—”

“I think you're doing a fine job,” she interrupted. “'Bout time a woman was up there.”

“Thank you.” I swallowed once. “I'm so sorry about your boy.”

Mrs. Townsend said nothing. I listened to her breath, heavy and labored.

“I have a little girl myself. She's five months old,” I continued.

Still, her breathing, just her breathing. And my own.

“I won't pretend to be able to imagine what you must be going through,” I said, though I could not help but imagine it, adding it to all the other permutations of loss I had imagined since the moment Sophie was born.

“What's her name?”

“Sophie.”

“My boy was Kyle. Kyle Jason Townsend.” She invoked his name softly, as if he was sleeping in the next room and she did not want to wake him. “You should be calling the government, not me,” she added in a far firmer tone. “You call them and ask them what happened. I got me a lawyer now and we're going to make them answer for what happened to Kyle.”

“I will call the government. Mrs. Townsend, I think it would help if you would talk. On television, I mean.”

“Help who?”

“Help make sure this doesn't happen again.”

“My husband thinks you're all a bunch of vultures, circling around here after Kyle died, pretending you care about our little boy.”

“He's right.”

“I'll tell him you said so.”

“But that doesn't mean there might not be some value in you coming forward to talk about your experience. Maybe it will put pressure on the government to improve the standards of safety in their buildings. You know the expression ‘a picture is worth a
thousand words'? Well, I honestly believe your image on television will have more effect than a hundred investigative reports alone.”

“I'll think about it.”

“Fair enough. Why don't I call around and see what I can find out about the building?” I suggested. “In the meantime, will you at least consider doing an interview?”

“All right.”

“Thank you.”

We hung up without saying goodbye.

What would I have done in her position? Bolt the doors, curl up tightly with my mourning and my rage? Probably. But anger, grief are unpredictable. And the seduction of an audience of millions on which to play them out can be powerful, as if the image itself, magnified, refracted, will somehow deflect the pain.

That is the promise, anyway.

 

I
BEGAN PHONING
everyone I knew who might have information, and many I didn't know. I was surprised at how much faster people came to the phone now that I was on a national show, and how obsequious they could be, even when they were lying. I found an engineer who had quit the G.S.A. eight months ago, disgusted with the shoddiness of their work. I discovered an internal review detailing the dangers in a number of federal buildings throughout the country. The more I learned of the government's negligence, the more outraged I became. I do not believe that all death is senseless but I believe that Kyle Townsend's was.

I kept digging. It is an aspect of reporting that I have always loved, unearthing the pieces, putting them together. It leaves no time, no space for the puzzles of your own.

I did not go to lunch.

I made lists of names, of numbers, of possibilities.

I juggled all the pieces once, and then again.

But it did not work this time.

In between the phone calls and the notes, I felt him, heard him, Jack.

Close your eyes, Marta. Just close your eyes.

I shook my head and returned to the phones, the legal pad.

At three o'clock, I hurried from the studio to the pediatrician's office on Thirty-fourth Street for Sophie's monthly checkup. Dora was already there with Sophie, sitting in the waiting room crowded with push toys, pop-up books that no longer popped, and children in various states of distress. Sophie reached for me as soon as I came near and I took her from Dora's arms. “Thanks,” I said.

Dora, still wearing her long navy down coat, nodded as she reluctantly handed her over. “She's been a good little girlie. She finished all her bottles and she had two bowel movements today. Nice and firm.”

I smiled at Sophie, then turned back to Dora. “You can go if you want. David's meeting me here to take Sophie home.”

Ten minutes later, I took Sophie into the examining room.

She cried as I stripped her and lay her naked on the paper-covered scale, her skin a mottled white beneath the brilliant lights, her veins a delicate blue network. I held her tightly while the doctor looked in her eyes, her ears, pressed her stomach and curled her feet, looking for defects.

“Everything's fine,” Dr. Tetrasoni said at last.

I put Sophie's diaper back on and held her on my lap while she got a shot in her thigh. I watched the sharp tip of the needle press against her plump skin and then break through with a tiny popping sound while Sophie let out a howl of shock.

Dr. Tetrasoni wrote down Sophie's measurements while I finished dressing her. “I don't need to see you for another two months,” she said, as she held the door for us.

I nodded thankfully. I'm always terrified that she will find something wrong with Sophie that will be my fault, and I am always surprised when she lets me leave with her.

David was in the waiting room, sitting beneath a giant blue Crayola crayon stuck to the wall. He kissed us both while I told him Sophie's frighteningly high percentages in height and weight, the superiority of her reflexes. “She has good genes,” he said, smiling.

He paid the receptionist while I slipped Sophie into her one-piece snowsuit and then handed her to him.

We rode down in the crowded elevator together, Sophie's eyes beginning to close as she lay nestled froglike against David's chest.

Out on the street, I kissed her cheek, and then his.

“Our little glue pot,” he said, smiling down at Sophie snug between us.

I watched as he stepped out into the bustle of Thirty-fourth Street to hail a cab. When he got one, he looked back once, smiled and waved as he ducked into a taxi, his large broad hand on Sophie's head to protect it as he maneuvered through the door.

I don't know which is the truer reflection, the person you were born as or the person you will yourself to become.

I only know that this, too, is real.

This child, this man. The woman I am to them, with them.

The life we have constructed.

I waited until they were completely out of sight and then I hailed a cab back to the studio.

 

C
ARLA STOPPED ME
on my way into the office and handed me a stack of phone messages on yellow slips of paper. The top one was from Mrs. Townsend.

And the next was from Jack Pierce.

“He called twice,” Carla said, her eyebrows raised, waiting for an explanation.

“Hold all my calls,” I told her. “I've got to get an answer from the Townsends.”

I closed the door and sat down at my desk.

I smoothed the papers out and stared at Jack's phone number at the Hotel Angelica.

Close your eyes, Marta. Just close your eyes.

I felt him pulling me in, pulling me back, felt the lure.

Like death might be, I thought, when you are very sick and weary to the bone.

Come, come. Just close your eyes and come.

Let go.

It is time now.

This is where you belong.

I did as he said, closed my eyes. I saw the island, just as we had left it, a compression of sand and pines. I saw Jack. Jack young, Jack now.

But I could not see myself there, not any self I recognized.

I could feel Jack waiting for me, waiting for an answer I could not give him, for words I could not say, alone and waiting, waiting once again.

For the debt to be paid.

I folded up the yellow phone slip and put it deep inside my purse.

 

I
CALLED
M
RS.
Townsend and told her that I'd found an engineer from the G.S.A. who was willing to go on the record as a whistle blower.

“What's the G.S.A.?” she asked.

“Government Services Administration.”

“Oh.” She paused, and then she asked, “Your little girl, does she sleep through the night yet?”

“She just started to. The first time it happened, I was so scared something was wrong, I went in and woke her up just to make sure she was okay. I'm still not used to it.”

She sighed. “He was the spelling bee champion in our school district, did you know that? Kyle was. He was going to the citywide meet next month. That boy just loved to spell. He was funny that way. The first thing he ever did with crayons was draw an ‘H.' He was only two. Well, it's an easy letter I guess. I wish I had saved those papers. But I didn't. Save everything,” she told me. “Take it from me. You never know. You just never know.”

“I'm so sorry.”

There was a long silence.

“All right,” she said. “I'll do the interview.”

“Are you sure?”

“I thought you said it would be helpful,” she remarked, suddenly taken aback. “I thought you said my image on television would mean something. Now what are you telling me?”

“Nothing,” I replied hastily. “You're right. That's just what I said. I think you've made the right decision.”

“All right then.”

I thanked her and told her I'd get back in touch with the details.

What I did not tell her is that the image, once sent out, is beyond your control. And, yes, maybe it will serve a purpose. Maybe it will even help free you from your pain.

But maybe, too, it will find a home in other people's hearts, and fester. Once gone, there is nothing you can do about it, nothing you can fucking do about it.

It no longer belongs to you.

As soon as I hung up, Carla knocked and came into my office.

“I know you said no phone calls, Laura, but there's a man on the line, and I can't get rid of him.”

“Who is it?”

“He wouldn't give a name. But I think you'd better take it. He says it's urgent.”

“All right.” I picked up the receiver and waited until Carla left. “Hello?”

“Miss Barrett?”

“Yes?”

“Miss Barrett, you're familiar with a Shana Joseph?”

“Yes,” I answered warily. “Who is this?”

“Mike Compton. I'm her parole officer.” His voice was weary, put-upon.

“I see. How did you get my private number here?”

“Shana gave it to me.”

“How can I help you?”

“When was the last time you saw Shana?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“Did she make any mention to you of leaving town?”

“No. Is she all right?”

“That's what we're trying to ascertain, Miss Barrett.” I could tell by the way he used my name that he despised me. There are some people who automatically hate me because they think that I would never understand what it's like for them, the unfamous, the people who actually work for a living. The flip side of all the unearned adoration we receive is a distorted envy. Neither seems to have much to do with me. “She didn't show up for her meeting on Monday, and she hasn't gone to school,” Compton said.

“Did you call her brother?”

“Her brother says he doesn't know where she is. I don't know if he's lying or he's just too doped up to notice, but he's no help either way.”

“What about Jay?”

“Jay?”

“Her boyfriend.”

“Jay who?”

I thought for a minute. “Actually, I don't know his last name.”

“Oh.” His tone made it clear that he considered this a personal failing of mine. “Anyway, if you hear from her, you'll let us know?”

“Yes.”

Compton gave me his number at the Department of Corrections and got off the phone.

 

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
I left the house early. I took a taxi to the Lower East Side and got off on Stanton Street. I headed south along the block dotted with broken pay phones and overflowing garbage cans, looking for number 104. The metal gates of the shops were just going up for the day and the loud clanging made me jump. I walked past a bodega with three men already drinking beers out front, and a mother helping her little boy pee onto a mound of black plastic garbage bags. Finally, I found “104” spray-painted in dripping white across a red door. It was surrounded by so much graffiti, hearts and lovers' names, indecipherable scrawls and a skull, that I had to look three times to be sure. There was no intercom and I knocked loudly in hopes that someone would hear me. I didn't notice until then that there was a hole where the lock used to be. The door swung open easily.

Inside, the stairwell was dimly lit and smelled of wet newspapers, cat piss, and years of cooking grease. The stairs were worn out and uneven, the railing swayed beneath my hand as I climbed to the third floor.

Televisions were blaring out of many doors, a disharmony of early morning talk shows and cartoons in Spanish, but there was no sound from apartment 3C. I knocked softly, then again.