The Music of Chance (2 page)

It all came down to a question of sequence, the order of events.
If it had not taken the lawyer six months to find him, he never would have been on the road the day he met Jack Pozzi, and therefore none of the things that followed from that meeting ever would have happened. Nashe found it unsettling to think of his life in those terms, but the fact was that his father had died a full month before Thérèse walked out on him, and if he had had some inkling of the money he was about to inherit, he probably could have talked her into staying. Even if she hadn’t stayed, there would have been no need to take Juliette out to Minnesota to live with his sister, and that alone would have kept him from doing what he did. But he still had his job with the fire department back then, and how was he supposed to take care of a two-year-old child when his work kept him out of the house at all hours of the day and night? If there had been some money, he would have hired a woman to live with them and look after Juliette, but if there had been any money, they wouldn’t have been renting the bottom half of a dismal two-family house in Somerville, and Thérèse might never have run off in the first place. It wasn’t that his salary was so bad, but his mother’s stroke four years ago had emptied him out, and he was still sending monthly payments down to the rest home in Florida where she had died. Given all that, his sister’s place had seemed like the only solution. At least Juliette would have a chance to live with a real family, to be surrounded by other kids and to breathe some fresh air, and that was a lot better than anything he could offer her himself. Then, out of the blue, the lawyer found him and the money fell into his lap. It was a colossal sum—close to two hundred thousand dollars, an almost unimaginable sum to Nashe—but by then it was already too late. Too many things had been set in motion during the past five months, and not even the money could stop them anymore.

He had not seen his father in over thirty years. The last time had been when he was two, and since then there had been no contact between them—not one letter, not one phone call, nothing.
According to the lawyer who handled the estate, Nashe’s father had spent the last twenty-six years of his life in a small California desert town not far from Palm Springs. He had owned a hardware store, had played the stock market in his spare time, and had never remarried. He had kept his past to himself, the lawyer said, and it was only when Nashe Senior walked into his office one day to make out a will that he ever mentioned having any children. “He was dying of cancer,” the voice on the telephone continued, “and he didn’t know who else to leave his money to. He figured he might as well split it between his two kids—half for you and half for Donna.”

“A peculiar way to make amends,” Nashe said.

“Well, he was a peculiar one, your old man, no question about it. I’ll never forget what he said when I asked him about you and your sister. ‘They probably hate my guts,’ he said, ‘but it’s too late to cry about that now. I only wish I could be around after I croak—just to see the look on their faces when they get the money.’”

“I’m surprised he knew where to find us.”

“He didn’t,” the lawyer said. “And believe me, I’ve had one hell of a time tracking you down. It’s taken me six months.”

“It would have been a lot better for me if you’d made this call on the day of the funeral.”

“Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don’t. Six months ago, I still didn’t know if you were alive or dead.”

It wasn’t possible to feel grief, but Nashe assumed that he would be touched in some other way—by something akin to sadness, perhaps, by a surge of last-minute angers and regrets. The man had been his father, after all, and that alone should have counted for a few somber thoughts about the mysteries of life. But it turned out that Nashe felt little else but joy. The money was so extraordinary to him, so monumental in its consequences, that it overwhelmed all the rest. Without pausing to consider the matter very carefully, he paid off his thirty-two-thousand-dollar debt to the
Pleasant Acres Nursing Home, went out and bought himself a new car (a red two-door Saab 900—the first unused car he had ever owned), and cashed in on the vacation time that he had accumulated over the past four years. The night before he left Boston, he threw a lavish party in his own honor, carried on with his friends until three o’clock in the morning, and then, without bothering to go to bed, climbed into the new car and drove to Minnesota.

That was where the roof started to cave in on him. In spite of all the celebrating and reminiscing that went on during those days, Nashe gradually understood that the situation was beyond repair. He had been away from Juliette for too long, and now that he had come back for her, it was as if she had forgotten who he was. He had thought the telephone calls would be enough, that talking to her twice a week would somehow keep him alive for her. But what do two-year-olds know about long-distance conversations? For six months, he had been nothing but a voice to her, a vaporous collection of sounds, and little by little he had turned himself into a ghost. Even after he had been in the house for two or three days, Juliette remained shy and tentative with him, shrinking back from his attempts to hold her as though she no longer fully believed in his existence. She had become a part of her new family, and he was little more than an intruder, an alien being who had dropped down from another planet. He cursed himself for having left her there, for having arranged things so well. Juliette was now the adored little princess of the household. There were three older cousins for her to play with, there was the Labrador retriever, there was the cat, there was the swing in the backyard, there was everything she could possibly want. It galled him to think that he had been usurped by his brother-in-law, and as the days wore on he had to struggle not to show his resentment. An ex–football player turned high school coach and math teacher, Ray Schweikert had always struck Nashe as something of a knucklehead, but there was
no question that the guy had a way with kids. He was Mr. Good, the big-hearted American dad, and with Donna there to hold things together, the family was as solid as a rock. Nashe had some money now, but how had anything really changed? He tried to imagine how Juliette’s life could be improved by going back to Boston with him, but he could not muster a single argument in his own defense. He wanted to be selfish, to stand on his rights, but his nerve kept failing him, and at last he gave in to the obvious truth. To wrench Juliette away from all this would do her more harm than good.

When he told Donna what he was thinking, she tried to talk him out of it, using many of the same arguments she had thrown at him twelve years before when he told her he was planning to quit college: Don’t be rash, give it a little more time, don’t burn your bridges behind you. She was wearing that worried big-sister look he had seen on her all through his childhood, and even now, three or four lifetimes later, he knew that she was the one person in the world he could trust. They wound up talking late into the night, sitting in the kitchen long after Ray and the kids had gone to bed, but for all of Donna’s passion and good sense, it turned out just as it had twelve years before: Nashe wore her down until she started to cry, and then he got his way.

His one concession to her was that he would set up a trust fund for Juliette. Donna sensed that he was about to do something crazy (she told him as much that night), and before he ran through the entire inheritance, she wanted him to set aside a part of it, to put it in a place where it couldn’t be touched. The following morning, Nashe spent two hours with the manager of the Northfield Bank and made the necessary arrangements. He hung around for the rest of that day and part of the next, and then he packed his bags and loaded up the trunk of his car. It was a hot afternoon in late July, and the whole family came out onto the front lawn to see him off. One after the other, he hugged and kissed the children, and
when Juliette’s turn came at the end, he hid his eyes from her by picking her up and crushing his face into her neck. Be a good girl, he said. Don’t forget that Daddy loves you.

He had told them he was planning to go back to Massachusetts, but as it happened, he soon found himself traveling in the opposite direction. That was because he missed the ramp to the freeway—a common enough mistake—but instead of driving the extra twenty miles that would have put him back on course, he impulsively went up the next ramp, knowing full well that he had just committed himself to the wrong road. It was a sudden, unpremeditated decision, but in the brief time that elapsed between the two ramps, Nashe understood that there was no difference, that both ramps were finally the same. He had said Boston, but that was only because he had to tell them something, and Boston was the first word that entered his head. For the fact was that no one was expecting to see him there for another two weeks, and with so much time at his disposal, why bother to go back? It was a dizzying prospect—to imagine all that freedom, to understand how little it mattered what choice he made. He could go anywhere he wanted, he could do anything he felt like doing, and not a single person in the world would care. As long as he did not turn back, he could just as well have been invisible.

He drove for seven straight hours, paused momentarily to fill up the tank with gas, and then continued for another six hours until exhaustion finally got the better of him. He was in north-central Wyoming by then, and dawn was just beginning to lift over the horizon. He checked into a motel, slept solidly for eight or nine hours, and then walked over to the diner next door and put away a meal of steak and eggs from the twenty-four-hour breakfast menu. By late afternoon, he was back in the car, and once again he drove clear through the night, not stopping until he had gone halfway through New Mexico. After that second night, Nashe realized that he was no longer in control of himself, that he had
fallen into the grip of some baffling, overpowering force. He was like a crazed animal, careening blindly from one nowhere to the next, but no matter how many resolutions he made to stop, he could not bring himself to do it. Every morning he would go to sleep telling himself that he had had enough, that there would be no more of it, and every afternoon he would wake up with the same desire, the same irresistible urge to crawl back into the car. He wanted that solitude again, that nightlong rush through the emptiness, that rumbling of the road along his skin. He kept it up for the whole two weeks, and each day he pushed himself a little farther, each day he tried to go a little longer than the day before. He covered the entire western part of the country, zigzagging back and forth from Oregon to Texas, charging down the enormous, vacant highways that cut through Arizona, Montana, and Utah, but it wasn’t as though he looked at anything or cared where he was, and except for the odd sentence that he was compelled to speak when buying gas or ordering food, he did not utter a single word. When Nashe finally returned to Boston, he told himself that he was on the verge of a mental breakdown, but that was only because he couldn’t think of anything else to account for what he had done. As he eventually discovered, the truth was far less dramatic. He was simply ashamed of himself for having enjoyed it so much.

Nashe assumed that it would stop there, that he had managed to work out the odd little bug that had been caught in his system, and now he would slip back into his old life. At first, everything seemed to go well. On the day of his return, they teased him at the fire house for not showing up with a tan (“What did you do, Nashe, spend your vacation in a cave?”), and by midmorning he was laughing at the usual wisecracks and dirty jokes. There was a big fire in Roxbury that night, and when the alarm came for a couple of backup engines, Nashe even went so far as to tell someone that he was glad to be home, that he had missed being away from all the action. But those feelings did not continue, and by the end
of the week he found that he was growing restless, that he could not close his eyes at night without remembering the car. On his day off, he drove up to Maine and back, but that only seemed to make it worse, for it left him unsatisfied, itching for more time behind the wheel. He struggled to settle down again, but his mind kept wandering back to the road, to the exhilaration he had felt for those two weeks, and little by little he began to give himself up for lost. It wasn’t that he wanted to quit his job, but with no more time coming to him, what else was he supposed to do? Nashe had been with the fire department for seven years, and it struck him as perverse that he should even consider such a possibility—to throw it away on the strength of an impulse, because of some nameless agitation. It was the only job that had ever meant anything to him, and he had always felt lucky to have stumbled into it. After quitting college, he had knocked around at a number of things for the next few years—bookstore salesman, furniture mover, bartender, taxi driver—and he had only taken the fire exam on a whim, because someone he had met in his cab one night was about to do it and he talked Nashe into giving it a try. That man was turned down, but Nashe wound up receiving the highest grade given that year, and all of a sudden he was being offered a job that he had last thought about when he was four years old. Donna laughed when he called and told her the news, but he went ahead and took the training anyway. There was no question that it was a curious choice, but the work absorbed him and continued to make him happy, and he had never second-guessed himself for sticking with it. Just a few months earlier, it would have been impossible for him to imagine leaving the department, but that was before his life had turned into a soap opera, before the earth had opened around him and swallowed him up. Maybe it was time for a change. He still had over sixty thousand dollars in the bank, and maybe he should use it to get out while he still could.

He told the captain that he was moving to Minnesota. It seemed
like a plausible story, and Nashe did his best to make it sound convincing, going on at some length about how he had received an offer to go into business with one of his brother-in-law’s friends (a partnership in a hardware store, of all things) and why he thought it would be a decent environment for his daughter to grow up in. The captain fell for it, but that did not prevent him from calling Nashe an asshole. “It’s that bimbo wife of yours,” he said. “Ever since she moved her pussy out of town, your brain’s been fucked up, Nashe. There’s nothing more pathetic than that. To see a good man go under because of pussy problems. Get a grip on yourself, fella. Forget those dimwit plans and do your job.”