“There’s something I want to tell you,” she said.
“I hope it’s how madly in love you are with me, and that you’re finally over your PMS, which I thought was surely terminal.”
He was making light of the moment, but she really couldn’t blame him. They were sitting on the balcony of the Blue Heron overlooking Magnolia Harbor. The reflection of the moon made a rippling carpet all the way out to the horizon. Above was a cloudless black velvet vault dappled with stars. They had just eaten a sumptuous meal—Martin, the frutti di mare, and she, the Chilean sea bass—which they washed down with a bottle of Hermitage La Chappelle 1988.
“Martin, I think we should talk.”
“Uh-oh. Is this the big thorn you’ve been sitting on for the last month?”
“It’s a problem I have … we have.”
Martin’s face hardened. “Rachel, if you’re going to tell me that you’ve found somebody else, I’m not sure I can take it.”
“It’s nothing like that.”
“And you’re not sick.”
“No.”
Martin nodded, as if to say that the high horribles had been eliminated. “Okay, hit me.”
“It’s Dylan.”
“What about him?”
“He has brain damage, and it’s because in college I took some dope, something called TNT, which some guy I know made in a chemistry lab. In any case, I read a report saying the stuff damaged female reproductive cells, resulting in chromosomal defects of their children. I had him tested, and the left hemisphere of Dylan’s brain is underdeveloped, and it probably was caused by the TNT.” Rachel was amazed at her glibness. That was totally unexpected.
She couldn’t tell if it was the flickering light from the small glass kerosene lantern that sat between them, but Martin’s face seemed to shift several times as he struggled to process her words.
“You’re telling me that my son has brain damage because you took a lot of bad dope?” His voice was a strange hissy whisper.
“Yes. His IQ is eighty-three, which is the low side of average.” Again, she could not believe the smoothness of her confession—but, of course, she had rehearsed it so many times over the last several days that she had managed to strip the words down to their phonetic bones.
“Eighty-three. EIGHTY-THREE. My son is going to grow up dumb because you took some sex drug?”
“Martin, you’re shouting.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I read about that TNT shit. It was for sex thrills. SEX THRILLS.”
The people at other tables were glaring at them in astonishment.
“You goddamn idiot! You ruined my son. You ruined my only child.”
“Martin, keep your voice down.”
“No, I won’t keep my voice down. That means he’ll be handicapped forever, just because you wanted good orgasms.”
The other diners were now muttering to each other and scowling at Rachel. Suddenly she recognized neighbors, acquaintances, and other members of the Dells. Even the minister from the Hawthorne Unitarian Church and her husband, the choirmaster. “How could you?” someone said. “Shame!” cried another. “Pigs like her shouldn’t be allowed to have children.”
“I didn’t know,” she said to Martin. Then to the others. “Really, I didn’t know. I was young.”
The entire balcony was glowering at her, their large rubbery mouths jabbering condemnations.
“You didn’t know because you’re stupid,” Martin growled. “He was going to grow up to take over the business.” Then he made that bitter mocking face she had come to hate. “Maybe he can head up the cleaning crew. President and CEO of latrines. The world’s leading expert on SageSearch’s urinal camphor. Can plunge a toilet and change the paper lickety-split.” His eyes were huge and red and his teeth flashed as his mouth spit out the venom.
“I’m sorry. I’M SORRY. I’m SORRY …”
“Sorry? SORRY? You bet you’re sorry,” he said and picked up the kerosene lantern with the burning wick and smashed it on her head.
Even before the cutting pain registered, her head was engulfed in flames, burning hair dripping onto her dress and sizzling her eyes.
“SORREEEEEE!”
It was her own scream that woke her, and she bolted upright gasping to catch her breath.
It was Lindsay. Greg could not recollect the details of the dream, but he woke filled with the sense of her.
But as much as he tried, he could not recapture the scenario—just the afterglow of her presence, like the fast-fading image of a TV. He sat at the edge of the bed, wishing he could put the moment on rewind. He had had dreams of her in the past, lots of them—odd, disjointed scraps, floating images—sometimes of her alive and vibrant, sometimes of her on Joe Steiner’s table. Once he had dreamt of her and their son—but not as a baby, but a little boy.
As he sat there thinking about the day, he felt the old sadness spread its way through his soul like root hairs. He knew if he let himself loosen a bit he’d dissolve into deep wracking sobs—the kind that had left him reamed out and barely functional. He had had enough of those and fought back the urge, telling himself that he didn’t want to be one of those widowers who went through the rest of his life embracing his grief like a mistress.
A photo of Lindsay smiled at him from his bureau. It was taken in Jamaica on their honeymoon six years ago. She was dressed in white with a large red hibiscus behind her ear and smiling brightly at the camera in a tangerine setting sun. With her shiny black hair and large brown eyes and honey skin, she looked like a vision in amber. They had been crazy in love.
Greg got up.
It was nearly eleven, and the sun was pouring through the window. Although he had slept for nearly six hours, he felt fatigued. It had been four days since they put him on night shift, and he still could not get used to sleeping in the daytime. Most of the time he felt low and out of focus, as if he were suffering permanent jet lag. But it was worse when he was drinking. He had stopped fifteen months ago. He had been disciplined then, too, because he had showed up late for work and was nearly useless on the job. After a second verbal warning, he quit the booze cold turkey—a victory of which he was proud, telling himself that he had done it for Lindsay. The only strategy that worked. But there were nights when the craving made his body hum.
He pushed himself off the bed and headed into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of orange juice. He put on a pot of coffee, thinking how the caffeine would pick him up, maybe even shock the fur off his brain.
He wasn’t sure how he’d spend the rest of the day. He knew he should check out some leads on the high school break-in, but he had done very little on the Sagamore Boy case over the last week beyond scanning the latest missing-children reports. No leads, as usual. The boy had been missing for over three years, and all that came in were bulletins of recent disappearances. The Dixon case had iced over also. He had nothing but faint hunches and colleagues who thought he was nuts.
The red light on his answering machine flashed.
It was probably Steve Powers calling to see if the kids he interviewed the other night had given him anything on the school break-in. Unfortunately, the security cameras in the damaged area weren’t functioning. All he had was names, some with prior records. He hit the button.
“Detective Zakarian, this is Adrian Budd, radiologist from Essex Medical. I’m not sure if this is significant, but after we talked the other day, it dawned on me why those holes kept bothering me. They just didn’t seem random, nor did they look like all the needle-bore nuclear seedings of tumors I’d seen. Also, the number threw me. So I checked with some neurospecialists here at the center, and they confirmed my suspicions.