And now I've come home, and I'm in my office, and I'm planning my next move. Only two resumes to go. What an astonishment. What a relief.
Three weeks ago, I wasn't even sure I could do it. I was afraid I wasn't up to it. Three weeks ago. It feels like a thousand years.
I study them, my two remaining resumes, trying to decide which to go after first, which to go after second. I'll start on it tomorrow, drive to that resume's address, check it out, see how it's going to go.
One of the remaining resumes is here in Connecticut, the other over in New York State. And of course Upton "Ralph" Fallon is in New York State, too.
The easiest ones have been in Connecticut. It was in Massachusetts that Mrs. Ricks complicated the situation and made it all so much worse, and it was in New York that I'd had to hit that poor man with the car.
Maybe it's just superstition, but I think the way for me to go is to finish Connecticut first. Do that next, then the last two are both in New York. And then it's over.
22
The phone rarely rings when we're asleep, maybe once or twice a year, and that's usually some drunk with a wrong number. But there's been a change in us, in Marjorie and me and our relationship to the late-night telephone call, and I never realized it before.
I come slowly awake, in the dark middle of the night, very beclouded by sleep. I can hear Marjorie murmuring into the telephone, and then she turns the light on, and I squint, not wanting to be awake, and the clock says 1:46. (We deliberately got a bedroom alarm-clock-radio without illuminated clock numbers, because we like to sleep in darkness. I'm always aware of those floating numbers at the level of my sleeping head whenever I spend a night in a motel.)
Slowly I focus on Marjorie and her conversation, and it's something troubling to her that's keeping her responses very down and quiet. "Yes, I understand," she says, and "We'll get there as soon as we can," and, "I appreciate that, thank you."
Sometime in through there, during the course of the conversation, failing to understand who she can possibly be talking to or what possible subject it could be about, I suddenly have my realization about us and late-night phone calls, and it is this: I didn't hear the phone ring.
We have phones on both sides of the bed, but it's only the phone on my side that rings, quietly. It used to be, whenever the phone rang at night, I would immediately wake up and deal with it — the drunk, the wrong number — and Marjorie would sleep right through the whole thing. I think in every marriage, that's one of the unconscious items that's worked out early on, who will wake up when the phone rings. In our marriage, it was always me, and now it isn't me any more.
Since I lost my job, Marjorie is the one who wakes up when the phone rings. She can't count on me any more; she has to be alert for herself.
I sit there, while Marjorie continues to talk into the phone and listen to the phone, and I turn this new understanding over and over in my head, to study it. I don't know if it makes me mostly angry or mostly sad or mostly ashamed. All three, I guess.
Marjorie hangs up, and looks at me. She's very solemn. "It's Billy," she says.
I think, an accident! At the same instant, I think, but he's in bed in this house, in his room, asleep. Stupid, still clearing cobwebs, I say, "Billy?"
"He was arrested," she says, astoundingly. "He and another boy."
"Arrested? Arrested?" I sit up, almost falling over. I'm the one who's supposed to be arrested! "Why would he—? Why would they—? For God's sake, what for?"
"They broke into a store," she says. "The police found them, and they tried to run away. They're at the state police barracks in Raskill."
I'm already struggling out from under the covers. The sheet and blanket cling to my legs, not wanting to release me into this terrible unknown. "Poor Billy," I say. A store? What store? "It's all my fault," I say, and go into the bathroom to brush my teeth.
The CID detective at the state police barracks, a sympathetic soft-voiced man in a rumpled brown suit, talks to us first, in a small square office painted pale yellow. Three walls are smooth shiny plastic, the fourth, an exterior wall, is bare rough concrete block. The floor is a different kind of smooth shiny plastic, black, and the ceiling is plastic soundproofing panels, off-white. Since the canary yellow paint on the concrete block was certainly put there as a very good sealer, it occurs to me that, if anything really horrible were to happen in this room, they could hose it clean in two or three minutes. From my position, in this green plastic chair facing the gray metal desk, I can't see a drain in the floor, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is one.
Did the architect plan the room this way? Do architects think in such terms, when they design police stations? Does it bother them? Or are they pleased at their professional skill?
Am I pleased, at my professional skill? My new skill, I mean. I've never thought about that before, and I don't want to think about it now.
It's very hard for me to concentrate on the detective, here in this deniable room. I can't even retain his name. I want to see Billy, that's all I know.
Marjorie is much better at dealing with this than I am. She asks questions. She takes notes. She's as quiet and calm and sympathetic as the detective himself. And, through their conversation, that I tune into and tune out of, over and over, I finally understand what happened.
It took place in the same mall where Marjorie works for Dr. Carney. There's a small computer store there, that sells business software and computer games and things like that. Apparently, Billy and this friend of his from school went there this afternoon — yesterday afternoon, I guess, by now — and found a moment to sneak unobserved into the back and rig the back door, the door that opens to the wide alley in back and that's used for deliveries and trash removal. They rigged that door so it would seem locked but wasn't. Then, tonight, long after we thought Billy was asleep in his bed, he snuck out of the house, was picked up by his friend — the friend has a car — and they drove to the mall, and slipped into the store from the back.
What they didn't know was, the store had already been robbed in exactly the same way three times before, and as a result they'd added a new burglar alarm, a silent alarm that alerted the state police barracks here, so that when Billy and his friend went in, the state police knew it at once, and four police cars converged on the place, two each from the state trooper barracks and the local town police.
The boys were leaving, with canvas tote bags full of software, when the police arrived. They abandoned the bags and ran, and were immediately, as the detective kept saying, apprehended.
The police have everything, or almost everything. They have an admission from the friend. They have absolute proof the robbery was planned and the door rigged, so they can demonstrate it was a planned crime and not a spur of the moment thing. They have police eyewitnesses who saw the boys carrying the stolen goods. They have the attempted flight.
What they don't have yet, and what they want, is proof that these two boys committed the three previous burglaries.
I hear the detective, and I hear how sympathetic he sounds, and I hear him say they're just trying to wrap this all up, get all this paperwork out of their hair, get it all behind them, and I can see Marjorie nodding and being sympathetic in return, ready to help this honest unassuming civil servant, and finally I rouse myself to speak, and I say, "This is the first time."