So there it was.
I was thirty-two years old, I lived alone, I’d never held a relationship together longer than eight months. Gran was my closest friend, and I saw her three times a year if I was lucky. I went to my ten year class reunion in Evanston, and everybody there was in a different life-place than I was. They all had kids and homes and churches.
Me, I had my job. Twelve hour days, five days a week. Saturdays I spent three or four hours at the office catching up. Sundays I watched the talk shows and then it was time to start all over again. That had been my routine for nearly a decade, and in all those years I never bothered to ask myself how I came to be there. It never even struck me as the kind of thing a person ought to ask.
Four years ago, during Burton’s re-election campaign for the Senate, Lewis said a funny thing to me. We’re sitting in a hotel bar, drinking Miller Lite and eating peanuts, when he turns to me and says, “You got anyone, Rob?”
“Got anyone?”
“You know, a girlfriend, a fiancée, somebody you care about.”
Gwen flickered at the edge of my consciousness, but that was all. A flicker, nothing more.
I said, “No.”
“That’s good,” Lewis said.
It was just the kind of thing he always said, sarcastic, a little mean-hearted. Usually I let it pass, but that night I had just enough alcohol zipping through my veins to call him on it.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Lewis turned to look at me.
“I was going to say, you have someone you really care about—somebody you want to spend your life with—you might want to walk away from all this.”
“Why’s that?”
“This job doesn’t leave enough room for relationships.”
He finished his beer and pushed the bottle away, his gaze steady and clear. In the dim light his scars were invisible, and I saw him then as he could have been in a better world. For maybe a moment, Lewis was one step short of handsome.
And then the moment broke.
“Good night,” he said, and turned away.
A few months after that—not long before Burton won his second six-year Senate term—Libby Dixon told me Lewis was getting a divorce. I suppose he must have known the marriage was coming apart around him.
But at the time nothing like that even occurred to me.
After Lewis left, I just sat at the bar running those words over in my mind. This job doesn’t leave enough room for relationships, he had said, and I knew he had intended it as a warning. But what I felt instead was a bottomless sense of relief. I was perfectly content to be alone.
Burton was doing an event in St. Louis when the nursing home called to say that Gran had fallen again. Eighty-one-year-old bones are fragile, and the last time I had been out there—just after the convention—Gran’s case manager had privately informed me that another fall would probably do it.
“Do what?” I had asked.
The case manager looked away. She shuffled papers on her desk while her meaning bore in on me: another fall would kill her.
I suppose I must have known this at some level, but to hear it articulated so baldly shook me. From the time I was four, Gran had been the single stable institution in my life. I had been visiting in Long Beach, half a continent from home, when my family—my parents and sister—died in the car crash. It took the state police back in Pennsylvania nearly a day to track me down. I still remember the moment: Gran’s mask-like expression as she hung up the phone, her hands cold against my face as she knelt before me.
She made no sound as she wept. Tears spilled down her cheeks, leaving muddy tracks in her make-up, but she made no sound at all. “I love you, Robert,” she said. She said, “You must be strong.”
That’s my first true memory.
Of my parents, my sister, I remember nothing at all. I have a snapshot of them at a beach somewhere, maybe six months before I was born: my father lean and smoking, my mother smiling, her abdomen just beginning to swell. In the picture, Alice—she would have been four then—stands just in front of them, a happy blonde child cradling a plastic shovel. When I was a kid I used to stare at that photo, wondering how you can miss people you never even knew. I did though, an almost physical ache way down inside me, the kind of phantom pain amputees must feel.
A ghost of that old pain squeezed my heart as the case manager told me about Gran’s fall. “We got lucky,” she said. “She’s going to be in a wheelchair a month or two, but she’s going to be okay.”
Afterwards, I talked to Gran herself, her voice thin and querulous, addled with pain killers. “Robert,” she said, “I want you to come out here. I want to see you.”
“I want to see you, too,” I said, “but I can’t get away right now. As soon as the election’s over—”
“I’m an old woman,” she told me crossly. “I may not be here after the election.”
I managed a laugh at that, but the laugh sounded hollow even in my own ears. The words had started a grim little movie unreeling in my head—a snippet of Gran’s cold body staggering to its feet, that somehow inhuman tomb light shining out from behind its eyes. I suppose most of us must have imagined something like that during those weeks, but it unnerved me all the same. It reminded me too much of the dreams. It felt like I was there again, gazing out into the faces of the implacable dead, that enormous clock banging out the hours.
“Robert—” Gran was saying, and I could hear the Demerol singing in her voice. “Are you there, Ro—”
And for no reason at all, I said:
“Did my parents have a clock, Gran?”
“A clock?”
“A grandfather clock.”
She was silent so long I thought maybe she had hung up.
“That was your uncle’s clock,” she said finally, her voice thick and distant.
“My uncle?”
“Don,” she said. “On your father’s side.”
“What happened to the clock?”
“Robert, I want you to come out he—”
“What happened to the clock, Gran?”
“Well, how would I know?” she said. “He couldn’t keep it, could he? I suppose he must have sold it.”
“What do you mean?”
But she didn’t answer.
I listened to the swell and fall of Demerol sleep for a moment, and then the voice of the case manager filled my ear. “She’s drifted off. If you want, I can call back later—”
I looked up as a shadow fell across me. Lewis stood in the doorway.
“No, that’s okay. I’ll call her in the morning.”
I hung up the phone and stared over the desk at him. He had a strange expression on his face.
“What?” I said.
“It’s Dana Maguire.”
“What about her?”
“They’ve found her.”
Eight hours later, I touched down at Logan under a cloudy midnight sky. We had hired a private security firm to find her, and one of their agents—an expressionless man with the build of an ex-athlete—met me at the gate.
“You hook up with the ad people all right?” I asked in the car, and from the way he answered, a monosyllabic “Fine,” you could tell what he thought of ad people.
“The crew’s in place?”
“They’re already rigging the lights.”
“How’d you find her?”
He glanced at me, streetlight shadow rippling across his face like water. “Dead people ain’t got much imagination. Soon’s we get the fresh ones in the ground, they’re out there digging.” He laughed humorlessly. “You’d think people’d stop burying ’em.”
“It’s the ritual, I guess.”
“Maybe.” He paused. Then: “Finding her, we put some guys on the cemeteries and kept our eyes open, that’s all.”