I went back to my desk and flipped through the pages, stopping when I found Wade’s mug shot. It had been taken in 1995, and in it his hair was an oily mess and his face was splotched with whiskers. I tried to imagine that face, clean-shaven and years younger, atop the pitcher’s body.
The cordless phone sat on my desk, and I picked it up and called Sandy’s number at the station.
“What’s up?” he asked
“Who scratched out his face?”
“Whose face?”
“Chesterfield’s on the baseball card: who scratched it out?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We found it under the older one’s mattress. I guess she did it. Looks like he wasn’t in the running for father of the year, not this year anyway.” When he said that I looked at the framed picture of Jessica and me sitting on my desk; I imagined finding that photo with my own face scratched out. Something turned in my chest, and I forced the picture out of my mind. I stood and walked to the reception area and stared out at the cars passing by on Franklin Avenue.
“What was he arrested for?”
“DUI,” Sandy said. “And that wasn’t his first. Hopefully it was his last, especially if he’s got those girls with him.” The phone grew quiet, and I knew Sandy was staring at his desk, trying to think of what to say next since he couldn’t take back what he’d already said. I cleared my throat.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Hey,” he said, “plan on lunch tomorrow so we can talk about all this. I’ll give you a call if I hear anything before then.”
“Sure,” I said. I hung up.
When I turned to walk back to my desk, I saw that a sheet of paper had been left in the fax machine’s tray. It was a copy of Easter’s and Ruby’s school pictures. They’d had them displayed on the dresser in their bedroom back at the home. Unlike most kids, whose parents dressed them up for school photos, Easter and Ruby just had on shorts and T-shirts, and their hair was long and unbrushed. Even though they hardly looked like sisters, there was something in their eyes that told you they’d seen the same things, and I thought about how no one else in this world had a picture of these two little girls displayed in their home, and that the only picture of either of them was on a dresser in a bedroom they’d disappeared from.
There were appointments I needed to make and orders to the manufacturer that needed to be completed, but instead I sat in one of the three chairs in the otherwise empty office’s reception area and watched the sunlight coming through the glass door move across the carpet. Every now and then I’d pick up the faxed pages sitting in the chair to my right and flip through them before sitting them down again, but mostly I just sat there, waiting until it was time to leave. I could’ve gone home already, relied on the answering machine to take any messages that might need taking, but I hated being at my apartment when it was still light out, and I never left the office before dusk, which meant I left pretty late sometimes during the summer. It was the first day of September, and I knew it wouldn’t be dark enough to go home for a while just yet.
There was a television in the back of the office, and I thought about turning on ESPN and trying to catch the pregame news of McGwire against the Marlins. I had $250 on him going homerless tonight, but something told me I’d be wrong.
It had taken a couple of years, but I’d learned that this kind of restlessness couldn’t be helped; the late afternoon still felt like the beginning of the day to me, and habit made me half afraid to go home until full dark, afraid to make something to eat, to sit down and turn on a game for fear that I’d be called away any minute to tramp along railroad tracks on the way to a dead body or to pick shell casings out of a gravel driveway in a dark trailer park. For years I’d laid in bed beside Tina, wide-awake and waiting for the phone to ring. It never rang at my place now, but that didn’t mean I’d stopped listening for it.
I thought about what Sandy had said earlier about Wade Chesterfield not being “father of the year” and his arrests on DUIs, and I wondered if Easter knew about those, wherever she and Ruby were, if she was thinking about those arrests when she’d scratched out his face on that baseball card, if she was thinking about them right now while her dad drove them around God knows where. I wondered if Wade was thinking about them too, if he looked in his rearview mirror at his daughters in the backseat if and when those DUIs popped into his mind, or if he didn’t look because he didn’t want to take his eyes off the road because a split second had already shown him what could happen if you did.
That’s what I’d done: looked at Jessica in the rearview mirror where she sat in the backseat telling me all about the basketball practice I’d just nodded off during instead of watching like the others parents had. We were in the driveway by then, and I’d already found the remote and pushed the button to raise the garage door. I didn’t even know he was standing there until Jessica screamed; by then it was too late.
Tina’s father was in his last days with a failed liver at the hospital in Chapel Hill, and I’d had to take the weekend off and switch to days so I could be there when Jessica got home from school. Before leaving, Tina had taped a note to the refrigerator, reminding me to do two things: take twenty dollars over to Michael, our neighbors’ fifteen-year-old son who cut our grass every Saturday morning, and take Jessica to basketball practice at 7 P.M. on Wednesday night; I’d forgotten about both. Tina had always looked at our marriage as a years-long investigation that she couldn’t quite get to the bottom of. I was either the uncooperative witness who never gave the right answers or the suspect who’d stumbled his way into doing the wrong thing.
On Wednesday evening, after splitting a Domino’s pizza with Jessica, I’d popped two sleeping pills and knocked them back with a beer, hoping for one good, long night of sleep before Tina came home sometime that weekend. It was mid-October and almost dark at 6:30 when Jessica came into the living room in her tennis shoes, shorts, and sweatshirt and reminded me about her basketball practice through my half-closed eyes.
It was pitch black by the time we got home from the Y. I’ve gone over and over this in my mind, and every time that driveway gets darker and my headlights seem dimmer. We never knew if Michael was on his way over or if he’d already discovered that we weren’t home, but, when I pulled in, he’d been there in the middle of the driveway only because I’d forgotten to pay him, forgotten to do both of the two things Tina had asked of me before leaving town to go be with her dad.
The paramedics were there by the time the responding officers arrived; I recognized them both through the window in the kitchen, where I leaned over the sink and splashed cold water on my face. They stood out in the yard, talking to Michael’s parents, two people I’d known well for years, the lights from the ambulance flashing across the four of them. Jessica had stopped crying by then, and she was upstairs in her bedroom, not making a sound, probably wishing Tina was at home as badly as I did.
I knew the officers suspected something when they suggested that I let one of them drive me down to the station for questioning, even though I wasn’t arrested. The other one stayed behind at the house. At the station I explained what happened, or what I thought had happened. Most of the eyes I met were looking down at the carpet. They let me decline a drug test, which seemed like a favor at the time, but it ended up the other way around.