I saw a tear fall from her left eye to her cheekbone, then begin the long descent toward her neck. My reflexes wanted me to reach out for her. My brain kept everything still and in its proper place. Brains can be stupid sometimes, especially mine.
She added, “The thing with you, Jack, the thing with you, is that the dead people in your life keep on dying.”
She paused after this declaration, causing me to replay it in my mind. The dead people keep on dying. She always did have a pretty amazing way with words, as well as piercing insight. The problem now, though, was that even people who had never been in my life kept on dying.
“It’s completely understandable,” she added, “but the fact that it’s understandable doesn’t make it any easier on the living people in your life.”
I said, “You’re over us?” I don’t know where I got the guts to ask that question, but I did.
She replied, “Some days, yes. Other days, not really. You?”
I bit my lip and replied, “That about sums it up here as well.”
“I miss you,” she said.
“I miss you, too.”
A woman’s voice over the PA system announced a preboarding for the flight to Boston, which brought me back to that awful day at Logan Airport when she first left for her new life in San Francisco. I should have stopped her. I could have stopped her. And I didn’t.
She flashed me an odd look, the two of us sitting there amid the soft commotion of passengers all around us rising to their feet and grabbing their purses and computer cases and carry-ons. She said, “I had planned to tell you this if you ever got around to calling me to let me know you were getting married —”
“I didn’t get married,” I said, cutting her off.
She smiled wanly and continued, “But I might as well tell you here.” She paused and gave me a long, familiar look of mild trepidation mixed with excitement, and then said, “I’m pregnant.”
Did someone just set a bomb off? What was that intense white flash? Was I asleep? Would I at some point awake? Any reason I should be this inwardly distraught over a two-word sentence uttered by a woman I hadn’t been involved with in the biblical sense in at least a year?
I said, slowly, calmly, forcing a smile, “I thought you had a glow to you.” I don’t know if she did or didn’t, but it was a pretty good line for its magnanimity and the fact it bought me a little bit of much-needed recovery time.
She smiled in return and said, “I’m not really showing yet, not unless, well, not unless you look really hard. I’ve been a little bit sick, but not too bad. I’m pretty nervous. And I’m really goddamned excited.”
She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling and smiled more broadly — unrestrained happiness all over her face.
I squeezed her hand and said, “I’m really thrilled for you.” Was I? I didn’t know.
Passengers were filing past us, lining up for the boarding call, riffling through their coats for tickets and IDs, completely unaware of the minidrama unfolding in their midst. Or at least I think they were unaware.
I flashed to a scene a few years before, a summer’s evening at a traveling carnival in a small town in Maine. Her hair was wavy from the sun and her tan skin untouched by makeup. She had just nervously told me she thought she was pregnant, and I scooped her up in my arms and paraded her around the grass parking lot, thinking we were going to be parents together, that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together, that I was going to have what was taken away from me before, or at least some sort of approximation of it.
Instead, the tests came back negative, the relationship eventually soured, and, well, here we were. Imagine if I could have looked into the future that night in Maine, and this scene at the San Francisco Airport is what I saw?
Of course, I hid all these feelings and recollections, or at least I hid them as best as I could. I said, “I’m really thrilled for you. And in all seriousness, you look spectacular.”
She beamed.
Left unasked, unanswered, and entirely unstated was the issue of paternity, which, for every logical and illogical reason, I was dying to know, though damned if I was going to bring it up. I did a double-check on her left ring finger and saw nothing but skin. I pictured a tall guy, dark hair, probably an investment banker, maybe a venture capitalist, every bit as thrilled as I was that night in Maine when we had that false alarm. That expanse I was suddenly feeling in my chest was what’s known as emptiness.
She said, “It’s all pretty overwhelming, you know?”
Well, yeah, I did know until I didn’t, which happened in a hospital when Katherine and our daughter died during childbirth. I guess this is exactly what Elizabeth means when she says the dead keep on dying in my life.
The line all around us had receded to a few stragglers, and the hum of activity had lessened to a vague sense of quiet. The gate agent announced over the PA system, “Final call for Flight 423 to Boston. This will be the final boarding call. All ticketed and confirmed passengers, please get on board now.”
A deadline, so I asked, “Are you planning a wedding at the same time?”
Tactful, even if it wasn’t.
Without missing a beat, she replied, “That’s what’s so overwhelming about it. I’m doing it on my own. I’m using a friend’s sperm. He signed away all rights; I freed him of all obligations.”
It’s always something with this woman, always another surprise around every terrific curve. My mood lightened, though I tried to hide it. I asked, “Why?”
The gate agent approached us and asked, “Are you guys on this flight?” You guys — everyone assuming we were a couple. I looked around the waiting lounge and saw only one man in the distance reading a newspaper.
I said, “I am. Do I have ten seconds?”
“How about five.”
Elizabeth said, “Because I was writing about other people’s lives and not living my own. Because time was passing me by. Because it’s something I’ve always wanted, and I don’t have the luxury anymore to sit back and wait.”
I looked at her and she looked at me and the gate agent looked at both of us.
“Congratulations,” I said. “I’m really thrilled for you, and don’t take this the wrong way, but proud of you as well, even if I no longer have the right.”
I kissed her on the cheek, turned around, and walked toward the jetway.
Me and Elizabeth Riggs — we were always parting ways.
20
There was very little rhyme and virtually no reason to the killings to which Albert DeSalvo confessed some forty years before. The victims were all women, they were all single, and they were all strangled. The similarities stopped there.
Sometimes the killer strangled two women in a single week. Other times, he went a month or more without killing anyone. Usually he killed within the borders of Boston, but he also traveled as far as Lowell and Lawrence to commit murder.
His first half-dozen women were into their middle or later years, some of them pretty divorcées, others spinsters. Later, his victims grew younger in age. One black woman was killed, though it was never clear whether she was part of the spree.
Sometimes the killer left big looping bows around their necks, usually tied from the victim’s own hosiery. Other times he didn’t. Occasionally he left them in ghoulish positions — sitting in a chair facing the door, for example, or propped up in bed just so, once in a bathtub. Other times they were left haphazardly where they died.
He left semen on various victims’ crotches, mouths, and chests. Some were vaginally raped, others not. One woman seemed to have been the subject of the killer’s necrophilic fantasies. Other women showed no sign of sexual assault.