She lowered her eyes, and with a wistful look slowly stirred the cup with a spoon. “He didn’t take me back,” she said as she lifted the cup to her mouth, holding it with both hands. She sipped the coffee and then placed the cup back in the saucer.
“Anyway, I got pregnant and we got married. That’s how it worked in those days, remember?” she asked, a faint, reluctant trace of defiance flashing for just a moment through her eyes.
“Why didn’t you-?”
“Have an abortion? I’d done that once already. I wasn’t going to do it again.” Her eyes flared again, followed closely by a sad, apologetic smile. “It was a long time ago, Joey. We were just kids.”
We left the restaurant and found a bench at the edge of the cliff, next to a wooden staircase that led down to the beach.
Above the low roar of the ocean, we listened to the shouts of the children playing and tried not to think too much about what might have been. After a while we got back in the car and drove along the shore, like two aimless wanderers with no place to call home.
“We lived in Los Angeles, until four years ago, when we got a divorce, and he moved back to Seattle. My son, Andrew, is a producer. Television shows. He’s done very well. I’m a grandmother, for God’s sakes. Twice. A boy and a girl, eight and six.”
It was what every parent wanted to think, that their child had done well. My parents had thought it about me, and I guessed Jennifer’s parents had thought the same thing about her. It was, I imagined, one of those instincts that must come with having a child of your own, the capacity to limit your memory to what was only seen in the best possible light.
“Did you ever see him again?”
Her eyes stayed on the road. “The man at the country club?”
She wrinkled her nose. “The man!” She laughed, struck by how incongruous it all seemed now. “He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six. He was just a boy. And I was only twenty-four, just a girl.” The smile lingered a moment longer, then faded away. “Yes,” she said finally. “I mean, no. I never saw him again. He called me, left me his number. In case I ever changed my mind, he said. I kept it for a while, then I threw it away. If I’d kept it any longer, I would have changed my mind.”
On the way back, we stopped and watched the sun slide down the sky and dissolve into a liquid orange fire that spread out across the horizon as it pulled down the darkness over the edge of the sea. And then we left, the lights of the Porsche slashing the night as we followed the narrow road that cut through the coastal range and took us back to the city.
“Want to have dinner tomorrow night?” I asked, as casually as I could, when she dropped me off at the house.
“Call me tomorrow.” She leaned over and kissed me on the side of my face. I watched her drive away, and thought about all the years I had missed, all the things that might have been.
When I got inside, I picked up the telephone and dialed the number. No one answered but I let it ring anyway. Finally, she picked it up, and I heard her frail voice.
“It’s me, Joseph,” I said brusquely.
“Oh, hello, dear. I was asleep. Is everything all right?”
I had forgotten the three-hour time difference between here and North Carolina where my mother lived with her second husband in a retirement community.
“Do you remember Jennifer Frazier?” I asked. The anger that had been building inside me was suddenly replaced by a feeling of helpless fatigue.
“No,” she said, “I don’t think so. Was she a friend of yours?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said quietly. “I just called to see if you were okay. Sorry I forgot how late it is there.”
My mother had kept Jennifer’s letter and changed two lives forever, and had dismissed it from her mind as a matter of no great consequence. It was probably better that she did not remember. She would still have insisted that she had been right.
Eleven
Iheard it on the radio the next morning on my way to the office. The police had made an arrest in the murder of Judge Calvin Jeffries. According to a police department spokesman, no other details, not even the name of the suspect, would be released until a formal press conference, tentatively scheduled for five o’clock in the afternoon.
The timing was anything but accidental. I had seen it often enough before, the brief preliminary announcement, followed by a day-long wait; the rumors started and then denied in a way that made it seem certain they were true; the frenetic race among reporters to be the first one to get the story right before there was any story to tell; and then, finally, the press conference itself scheduled at the time when the local television news shows would have no choice but to carry it live. The chief of police, the head of the state police, the lead investigator, everyone who had played a prominent part in the search for the killer, would stand in front of the camera, surrounded by every politician who could bluff or cajole his way onto the stage, and explain in muted monotones the highly efficient way in which they had developed and explored thousands of different leads and how all their painstaking patience had finally paid off. It was the law enforcement equivalent of a military parade. Watching it, everyone felt safe, secure, protected by a well-trained and well-equipped force of dedicated men and women. They caught a killer and called it a victory; someone had been murdered and no one even wondered whether that might not have been a defeat.
My investigator, Howard Flynn, was waiting for me when I arrived at the office, hidden behind a section of the newspaper.
“Come in, Howard,” I said without stopping.
Squeezed tight between the arms of a straight-back chair, Flynn shoved himself up and followed behind me. While I settled into the leather chair behind my desk, Flynn, breathing heavily, lowered himself into the blue wingback chair directly in front. He looked like an aging bouncer in one of those bars where the drinks are watered and the customers too drunk to care. Over six feet tall, and well over two hundred thirty pounds, the skin at the back of his short, squat neck lay in taut, thick folds, as if a hangman had decided that a single rope could never hold him.
His face was blotched like a red rash. Reddish brown hair, graying at the sides, swept back from a flat forehead in a series of small, sharp waves. He was wearing what he always wore, a brown plaid sports coat and a solid brown tie. The left collar of his starched white shirt curled up at the tip, and the thread on the top button had begun to unravel. Without a word he pulled out a pack of Camels and lit one up.
“You quit drinking,” I remarked as I glanced through the stack of papers my secretary had left on my desk. “Don’t you think it’s time you quit that, too?”
“And make the same mistake twice?” Flynn asked in a gruff voice. He took a long drag, and then added, as if it was the end of all argument on the subject, “I’m Catholic.”
Each excuse he offered became more bizarre. “What?” I asked, astonished. “What do you mean? The reason you don’t quit is because you’re Catholic?”
He shrugged. “I’m Catholic. That means I believe in the here-after.” He paused as if this was some fine point of theology. “And that means that I’m not some goddamn health nut who doesn’t care about anything except how nice and pink his goddamn lungs are.”
Knitting my brow, I shook my head and studied him through half-closed eyes. “You really should have been a priest. With that kind of logic you might have become a cardinal.”