The Sweetheart Deal (2 page)

Nick and Jeff returned to their chairs.

“I reached Kevin,” Nick or Jeff said. “He's coming with the medical examiner and will drive your car home. I'll give him your keys.”

“Erin and her husband will be waiting at your house for you,” the other one said.

“We'll have someone drive you all home,” said Richard.

My hands were numb, as useful as two dead fish at the ends of my wrists. “He was a firefighter.” I worked to move my lips. “He did what you do. He saved people. He had to do this too.”

Jeff and Nick both nodded. “Yes, ma'am. We know he was.”

Richard sat looking at his hands folded between his knees before he looked at me. “Take as much time as you need. When I hear from the team and you're ready, we can go see him. In the meantime, is there a funeral home I can contact? One less thing for you to handle.”

“I don't know,” I said. I kept kissing the boys. Andrew had wormed his way into my lap and curled up into a ball half his size. “I guess McKays? A lot of the Catholics use McKays, I think.”

“I know Matt well,” said Richard. “I'll call him.”

They were like an envelope around us, Richard, Nick, Jeff, and the other Mount Hood Meadows staff that joined them as we moved from the lodge—
don't fall down, don't fall down
—to the private room in the medical center where they had Leo, to the car that took us home. I don't know if their job was to keep us away from other people—how our news would have ruined their time at the mountain—or to keep other people away from us. I suppose people around us wondered why we moved as a pack—my family surrounded by officials wearing matching jackets—intuiting it surely couldn't be good. I clung to the boys on the ride home, which was no longer the home any of us knew, shushing and comforting with words I mustered without thinking. On a very dark stretch of road on Highway 26, I hoped and waited for an instant head-on fatal collision.
Bury the five of us together
.

When we got to the house, the boys were asleep, and Erin and Mark came out to the car to meet us. Mark half woke the boys and got them all inside. Since we had taken my Subaru wagon to the mountain like we always did, Leo's Land Cruiser—his impenetrable four-door, more than twenty years old—loomed alone in front of the car that had driven us home. Its appearance looked exactly the way it had when we left that morning, suggesting that Leo was home and waiting inside for us, and I fell against Erin, unleashing the agony I'd harnessed for hours for the boys' sake—to not come undone in front of them—in waves of wild sounds I'd never heard before. We stood in the driveway, behind Leo's car, and I leaned on her and wailed until she shepherded me into the house and upstairs. Mark had put the boys in my bed, and they were all asleep again, and Erin helped me change, and tucked me in next to my sons. I lay there whimpering in the dark, with her sitting on the floor next to me, stroking my hair until I fell asleep.

L
eo and I had both grown up in Radnor, Pennsylvania, but we didn't become friends until 1983, when we were fourteen, during our freshman year at the Shipley School. Leo had gone to school there since kindergarten, and my parents, content enough with the public education I'd gotten through eighth grade, had decided Shipley, for countless compelling reasons, was where I would attend high school.

Neither of us was big, but because we were both fast and accurate, we played varsity basketball as sophomores. That first year, when I was new to Shipley, Leo and I found each other through basketball, and because of him, within weeks I had shaken the stink of being the new kid. Once we were friends, it was like we always had been.

Leo, and three of his friends who'd all been at Shipley since kindergarten and who played ball too—though not nearly as well as the two of us—took me in. We made five with Eric McGinnis, Ryan Wheeler, and Keith Donahue. We each had our own quirks, but for the rest of high school we were a unit. Eric refused to ever chip in for gas when Ryan, the first one of us to get his license, starting driving us all around, but as soon as Eric started driving, he started asking for gas money and Ryan shut him down right away, reminding Eric he was a cheap bastard and had been for months. Keith was the one we had to watch out for if we liked a girl. Once he got wind of it, she'd be the one he'd go for, with rare success, but he was on thin ice a lot of the time with us because he couldn't help himself. We put up with him anyway, and never let him forget when he'd gone for someone one of us liked and failed bitterly.

As tight as we were in general, in spite of our squabbles, when Lisa Ponti died right after our junior year ended, it changed us and cemented us together in a way that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Lisa was in our class, one of the four Ponti girls, and was a superb golfer, a prodigy. All her sisters were too, but Lisa was on track for a golf scholarship, colleges and universities already fighting over her, and when she was killed instantly by a drunk driver, coming home from the course the Friday afternoon a week after school let out, in the car her parents had bought her for her birthday in January, her death froze everything in town and cast a pall over what should have been a carefree summer.

Without any discussion, like a flock of birds operating on instinct, the five of us packed sleeping bags, enough clothes, and our suits for the funeral, and lived together at Leo's house for five days, in the McGearys' basement rec room. It was an oppressively hot week, and Leo's mom, Libby, fed us around the clock while we got through the days together. The McGearys had a pool but none of us swam, as hot as it was. Before Lisa's funeral we waited, walked, watched a little TV, and played cards, and again for another two days after she was buried. Then we all went back home again.

Years later, I remembered few of the details, only the walks and card games and the waiting. There had been so much time to fill, I didn't know how we had passed it with so little to occupy us. Shock had its place, doing its unseen work to make surviving possible when death could come and pluck any one of us bright young things out of our shining life. We had all liked Lisa, a lot, but not like a girlfriend. She was pretty and smart and cool—besides being the golf phenomenon—and any one of us trying to date her would have tainted our friendship, which none of us wanted. Even Donahue knew it, and wasn't a dog for a change.

After high school, Leo and I drifted away from the other three, although our parents kept us updated. Last I knew, Eric had been living in Europe for years, and Keith had moved to Chicago and been divorced twice. Ryan still lived outside Philadelphia with his wife and four kids.

My family always spent every summer at our house in Surf City on Long Beach Island, and starting that summer after our junior year, through college, Leo came with us. His parents had a house in the Poconos, where he'd learned to ski as a little kid and where I learned as a teenager, after I started going there with his family. The summer between sophomore and junior years, my dad got me a job with Costello, a construction company, light stuff at first, and Leo and I both worked there the next summer, starting weeks after Lisa died. During the day we learned everything from framing to finishing these crazy geometric houses right on the beach that people dripping money could afford for us to build. On our breaks, we'd run and jump in the ocean to cool off, and got in this flirty back-and-forth thing all summer with a few of the badge checkers who always gave us shit because we were on the beach swimming without a badge—
Not really,
we'd say
, we're working, same as you
—before we'd run back and change into dry clothes and return to the hot, sweaty work. On our days off, we went to the beach wearing our badges and showed them off to the checkers who'd harassed us.

One of them, Amy, on the days she didn't work would walk the beach looking for sea glass, wearing her Walkman, and we'd flag her over and she'd sit with us, and sometimes we'd all swim before she resumed her walk. We'd always beg her to stay longer, playing desperate for her company. “You'll see me soon enough,” she'd joke. “I'm going to nail you guys if it's the last thing I do this summer.” That reduced us to raunchy laughter. She knew what she'd said, she was in on her own joke, but nothing ever happened with either of us and Amy. She was like Lisa, cool like that. Instead, we met other girls on the beach, and at night we went to where they were babysitting and hung out, or met up with them somewhere on the island—miniature golf or the arcade or the ice cream or pizza places—and drank and smoked and sometimes made out. A couple of times more than one girl seemed like she could be a summer girlfriend, but neither Leo nor I wanted that kind of ball and chain. It was summer and the island was full of so many girls, there was no way that was going to happen.

That first summer he spent with us, Leo had bought a unicycle and taught himself to ride it, so if we didn't borrow my mom's car, he'd cycle and I'd skateboard on our rounds. No helmets in those days. One night we went to Twenty-Third and the Boulevard, where a girl I liked from the beach was babysitting. While we were there, Leo rode his unicycle down the brick front steps of the house. I never forgot the place, which years later became a law office. Leo's stunt was impressive, no question, but as soon as he did it, that girl stopped knowing I was alive. Without me saying anything, Leo knew it too, and that was the last time we ever spent any time with her.

After Lisa died, we never drank and drove on the nights we borrowed my mom's station wagon and went to The Ketch, a bar in Beach Haven where there was always action. One night, when Leo was driving, I threw up all over the passenger door of the car. The next morning he pretended to be all wrecked and hungover, and, on his own, he finished the half-assed cleanup job we'd started the previous night, before he'd pushed and hauled me to bed. He told my mom I was still in bed because I was fuming and wanted to kill him.

After college graduation, I went to Europe for a year with a fraternity brother, Curtis, which was easy to do back then. He and I traveled together, until I took up with a girl named Katya for a few sweet months, before I left her for another girl named Estelle and a time that was far less sweet. Leo had gone back to working for Costello full-time, and lived in a cheap apartment over a pizza parlor in Ship Bottom.

That fall he met Audrey in Wilton, Connecticut, at the September wedding of Charlotte, Audrey's best friend from high school, and George, a college pal of Leo's. Charlotte and George had met in Scotland, at St. Andrews, during their junior year abroad. Audrey was a year older than Leo and she had a fat job in Portland at an ad agency. They danced together, to the exclusion of all the other guests, and stayed up for hours talking after the reception ended. After he got home, Leo found a note in his pocket that Audrey had put there:
If you have good long distance, you should call me
.

So he called her. And he went to Portland a month later and drove up to Wilton to see her at Christmas, and flew to Portland again in February, and in March he left the East Coast for good and moved in with her. Leo was a hoarder with his money—he always had been—and so he had a cushion until he found a job.

We'd talked on the phone twice while I was abroad, and when he told me he was living in Portland, I gave him shit for following a woman.

“Fuck yeah, I followed her,” Leo said. “Before another man can. I'm not going to let it be anyone else but me.”

The next summer, after I'd returned from Europe and was at my parents', he called me.
Welcome home, let's go out tonight,
he said.
I want you to meet Audrey
. They had flown east to visit both sets of parents when he knew I'd be back. I hadn't seen him in a year. When I got to the pub that was our old haunt, they were playing darts. After I hugged Leo, the way he introduced me to Audrey—with the combined giddiness of a boy and the confidence of a man—told me he was going to marry her.

She hugged me like it was a reunion instead of an introduction, and kissed me on the cheek. “Leo,” she said, “get Garrett a drink, and we're going to sit while you play. Come on.” She linked her arm through mine and pulled me over to a booth, herding me onto the bench before sliding in across from me. She had moved, and moved me so quickly, since I'd walked in, it wasn't until I was sitting that I had the chance to really look at her. She put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands. She wore a red sundress, and a broad spill of freckles flecked her chest and trailed down under the neckline. She was blond, which I didn't expect, because Leo had always gone for dark-haired women. I'd pictured her a brunette before that night, and in seconds I'd had to adjust my expectations to the woman in front of me.

Leo brought us our drinks, and they shared a look before he left us alone. “Come on,” she said. She drank from her beer and laid her palms flat on the table. There was nothing coy about her curiosity. I could tell that she had been waiting for this. “Tell me everything. So I can fill in the blanks.”

We talked while some other guys joined Leo at the dartboard, and for every detail, large or small, that I shared, she had at least one question. Even then, I'd always thought I was good with women, charming, cagey if I wanted to be, and was naturally, not withholding exactly, but careful about what I'd share in conversation. Though it was far from uncomfortable, by the time we were finished talking and joined Leo to play darts and then pool, I felt like a criminal suspect who'd been grilled, then released. From that night on, it was as though I'd known her as long as I'd known Leo. When they got married in Wilton the next summer, I was the best man.

After their wedding, I didn't see them for six years, but we called and wrote—that's how you kept up a friendship back then—until the rare visit we could coordinate, living as far from each other as we did. I went back to school for one graduate degree, then taught high school, then got a second graduate degree, became a college adjunct, then went back for my PhD. I didn't stick with most things for very long, and made the switch easily to something new when I was tired of what I was doing, but I did like being in school, on both sides of the desk.

I still had that fucking piece of paper he made me sign all those years ago. Leo had dated it
December 31, 1999/January 1, 2000,
and mailed it to me a few weeks after my trip. He had enclosed it in a thank-you card—as our mothers had taught us to send for far lesser things, or at least tangible things we could unwrap and hold, a gift or a check.
So you'll have it if you need it,
he'd written in the card. I wondered if Audrey knew. Sobriety was evident in his straight, clean handwriting, so for reasons I couldn't understand, he was serious. I wasn't a worrier by nature, but for the next several months, I was anxious and afraid that he was going to die, like he eerily knew something was coming that no one else knew about, the way you heard people say they did. Maybe it was the millennium that had done it—both before and after, until people settled down—it had made the world skittish. After enough time passed waiting for the tragic news about Leo that didn't come, I stopped worrying. Except during our time that New Year's Eve, and Leo's card, we never mentioned it again. Even the “second husband” banter between the three of us, fueled by Leo and fed, tongue in cheek, by Audrey, had run its course and died a natural death.

But I had saved the paper anyway, not like the years of tax returns I was paranoid to part with, but as an unlikely souvenir, like the photograph that's a bad picture of everyone in it but the only tangible proof of the good time had by all when it was taken. I had the note in a manila folder in a hanging file in my desk, in with cards and letters from both Audrey and Leo. A joke that had become something much graver, although it was far from a binding document of any kind.

I couldn't wrap my head around it. That Leo was dead. I thought I should have known, that I should have felt something happen the moment he died, but maybe Audrey had. Of course, if there had been any kind of an alert, she should have been the one to get it. And not being a believer, or with murky beliefs at best, maybe I wasn't a fertile recipient primed for the goodbye one soul says to another.

When we'd lost my mother to pancreatic cancer three years earlier, we were all there at the house in Radnor, sitting vigil while she was dying. Sometimes we were together, but mostly we took shifts. My father, my sister, Kate, and me. We had been ready for days because of what the hospice people said, the signs they recognized. I loved those people, doing the hardest work I could imagine with their unwavering and infinite kindness and compassion.

When my mother finally did die, on a Tuesday, all three of us were there holding her hands. Her death was peaceful and dignified, like her, and afterward we stayed with her, adjusting to those first minutes of her being gone. When we finally left the room and my mother's body alone, I called the funeral home. They were expecting our call. After I hung up the phone, I saw something happen to Kate, who was sitting in a dining room chair.