World Without End (50 page)

Icarus was warned by his father not to fly too close to the sun. The boy didn't heed his father's warning and plummeted into the sea. Enter your mother's life free of judgment. If you can do that, you may finally begin the process of exorcising those demons of doubt and curiosity that torment you deep in the night.

I think of you often.

Steve Conway leaned back in his chair, and in the blood-red early-morning light, met his mother for the first time.

Working with blood in this age of disease called for multiple layers.

One had to be careful.

Raymond Bouchard was disease free. His blood had been tested for all the known lethal viruses Hepatitis and HIV and had come up negative. It was safe to play.

A man in Amon Faust's position couldn't risk even the smallest chance of infection. Before venturing down into the basement, Faust would scrub his hairless skin under the hot water until it turned pink. After air drying, he applied the iso-foam alcohol, and when that had dried, he would apply the first layer: the Tyvek sterile garb. Next came the surgical suit and booties, and the two sets of sterile latex gloves.

The biohazard suit, the final layer, was critical. It allowed Faust to be close to the action when it got messy, as it often did down in the basement. The suit had its own respirator and air-flow supply. As a matter of personal taste, he refused to share the same air with a man like Raymond.

Faust hovered above the same surgical chair in which Major Dixon had been bound. Taking the boy's place was Raymond Bouchard, nude, his pale body sweating and shaking as the painkillers wore off. Raymond had become quite the addict would, in fact, cry for another shot of morphine before another finger was taken. Only three left before moving on to the toes.

Raymond blinked with fear at what fresh new terror awaited him. He opened his dry mouth, his cracked lips quivering as he started in with another request for mercy.

"Please… no more… I can't… please, I'll do whatever you want."

Faust tilted his domed head to the side. Through the shield that covered his eyes, he looked at Major Dixon, who stood next to the same chair in which he had been tortured. The tray of torture instruments lay close to his mutilated hand.

"What shall it be, Major?" Faust asked, his voice amplified by the suit's speaker system.

Major Dixon looked down at the man who had orchestrated all of his pain. He wiggled the remaining fingers on his left hand, thinking.

Under Faust's guidance, the boy had come far in the past few months.

The mental conditioning had helped him erase the memories of what he had endured in the basement; Faust had helped shape the boy's rage, helped him channel it to more satisfying alternatives.

Major Dixon stopped wiggling his fingers.

"Remove his tongue," he said.

"Novocain or not? Your choice, Major."

The boy didn't hesitate.

"Like me, he gets nothing."

Faust turned back to the white-faced Raymond.

"You've been charged with the crime of blasphemy, Raymond. Personally, I think you're getting off lightly. Now be a good boy and hold still.

This won't take but a minute."

Few men have born witness to Faust's strength. With the agility and power of a snapping turtle, Faust pinned Raymond's head against the headrest and held it firmly, his right hand already on the jaw and pushing it open. Raymond's tongue wiggled like an exposed worm searching for a place to crawl away and hide.

Major Dixon fished around for the instrument of choice and settled on a scalpel. He looked up at Faust and smiled. Progress.

Major Dixon held the scalpel above Raymond's wild, terrorized eyes.

Raymond started screaming.

"That's the spirit," Faust said.

"Go ahead and scream, Raymond. Scream as loud as you want."

There's a saying in New England that if you don't like the weather, wait until tomorrow. On Monday, the week of Memorial Day, summer booted spring out of the way and flooded Boston with a heat wave. By Wednesday the heat was gone and spring was back, the air cool and dry, but by Friday morning, the start of the holiday weekend, the heat and humidity was so intense Conway wanted to shut himself inside a meat locker. He leaned back in the driver's seat of Booker's BMW, the windows down, parked across the street from the old two-story white Colonial home that sat directly across from the dormitory building at Framingham State College. He was sweating and miserable, but he wanted to keep watching.

The woman working the garden looked as frail as her tulips. She was dressed in jeans and a plain gray T-shirt spotted with dirt. It was ten o'clock; she had been out here since seven this morning, digging up dirt and planting with a feverish intensity, only pausing long enough to push her glasses back up her nose. Her husband, dressed in chinos and a crisp white shirt, came out every hour or so to give her a fresh glass of water.

Conway's phone rang. The woman looked up from her work and stared in his direction. He picked the phone up from the seat and answered it by the third ring.

"I'm at your place, and you're not answering your door," Booker said.

"Where are you?"

"Out doing errands."

"Why you whispering?"

"I'm trying not to be one of those cellphone assholes who feels the need to broadcast their conversations to the rest of the free world.

What's up?"

"Me and the family are going down to Falmouth this weekend."

Falmouth was part of Cape Cod. Booker's family owned a house near the water. During college summers, Booker would invite Con-way and Riley to this place on weekends, and when Booker was older and more established, he bought the house from his parents and then purchased a boat, a cabin cruiser that slept four comfortably. Sun and water and good food and drinking. Lots of drinking.

"Sounds like a good time," Conway said. The woman had stood up. She was brushing off her jeans with her hands, walking toward him.

"That's what I'm saying. Get back here and pack your bags."

"I'll see you in an hour."

Conway hung up. The woman stood at the car window. She was maybe five-five, razor thin, and had the delicate bones of a bird. Her blond hair was tied behind her head.

"Good morning," she said brightly.

Conway cleared his throat.

"Hello."

"I heard your phone ring and when I looked up, I thought I recognized your face. Were you at the school yesterday?"

"Briefly." He knew she was the director of a nursery school that was half a mile down the road. Yesterday, and the two days before that, he had been parked out in the lot, watching her play with the toddlers at lunch, and at night, around six, the time she left work, he watched her climb into a beat-up red Honda and drive back here to her home. A wedding band and an engagement ring were on her left hand. She was married.

"I didn't mean to startle you. I'm new to this area," Conway said, not wanting her to think he was stalking her or the kids at the school.

"I'm thinking of having kids. I heard a lot of good things about this neighborhood and about your school, so yesterday, I thought I'd stop there and, you know, check it out on my own."

"Sometimes that's the best way to do it."

"And then this morning, I was driving by here, checking out houses for sale and saw you working " "You stopped and have been sitting here this entire time, wanting to come up and ask me some questions."

"Something like that. I hope I didn't spook you."

"No, of course not. My name is Claire Arlington."

"Stephen," he said, and stuck out his hand. She shook it. It felt like a crackle of electricity hit him. His mouth went dry.

"Why don't you stop by the school Tuesday morning around nine and I'll give you the official tour."

"Sounds good."

"I look forward to seeing you then."

"Yes. Likewise."

"Enjoy your holiday weekend. Try to stay cool."

"Yes. You too. Thank you."

She smiled, accenting the tiny web of lines near the corners of her eyes, turned and walked back toward her home where her husband was standing outside waiting for her with a glass of ice water clutched in his hand.

They decided to do it Saturday morning, early, when the world lay quiet and still. Just before five, Conway and Booker crept away from the sleeping house, went down to the dock and climbed aboard the boat. The sky was a dark blue and the sun was up, peeking over the horizon, its red and gold colors washing over the bellies of the rolling clouds, the air cool and sweet. It would turn colder once they got out in the water. Conway was dressed in jeans and a beat-up gray UNH sweatshirt and wore his dark blue Red Sox baseball cap, a birthday gift from John Riley. Booker drove. Conway sat in the back in a padded white-leather chair, holding the urn tight against his hip.

The ocean makes you reflect on things. What Conway thought about in that peaceful, early-morning stillness was religion. Growing up at St.

Anthony's, Catholicism had been drilled into him hard. He could recite any prayer on command; knew when to sit and kneel and stand; knew when to give thanks. He had performed the rituals with the manufactured, robotic joy of a toy dog programmed to bark and sit.

Conway didn't believe in the great Catholic watchdog God who followed you around twenty-four-seven and marked your activities and transgressions on a clipboard. And he didn't know if he believed in another world that existed beyond this one, some island paradise of blue skies and clouds and the sort of eternal joy that could send you to the kind of great heights of pleasure that only existed in dreams.

What he did believe in was the power of nature. His time spent in Colorado had showed him how the simple act of taking a moment to give yourself to the view of a snowcapped mountain, or to watch a sunset, could bring you a sense of eternal peace that couldn't be found in pills or booze or listening to the worn-out sermon of a white-collared man who didn't know how to stir the joys or settle the fears that moved through your soul. When he looked out at the color of the sky, when he heard the water splashing hard against the boat and smelled the salty air in the cool wind, Conway felt a sense of peace, an acceptance and serenity that couldn't be forged from a store-bought Bible or recycled sermon.

Booker turned the boat around so that it was facing in the direction it had just traveled. They were far away from the bay, out in the water, but not far enough so that Conway couldn't see Booker's home. Booker cut the engine and turned around and leaned back against the wheel, his face hidden by his sunglasses. Conway stood up. His stomach was knotted. He went to hand the urn to Booker.

"No," Book said.

"You need to do it."

John Riley's will asked Booker to spread his ashes across the sea in full view of Booker's home. Conway knew that Booker's change of heart was an invitation for Conway to share a final moment with a close friend, to start the process of grieving and, hopefully, closure.

Conway navigated his way to the bow with the urn tucked under his arm.

The wind had a solid push to it; it swirled around him, whistling past his ears. His feet firmly planted, the bow rocking up and down against the water's current, he looked down at the urn he held in both hands and thought about family. Conway only had two people in his life he could call family. One was behind him, and the other he held in his hands. John Riley, the essence of his short life, all the memories, everything he stood for and loved was now compressed into black ash and resting inside this urn.

Conway placed his hand on the urn's lid. The images he had seen in the video, images that haunted his sleep every night, banged from behind their locked doors. Conway didn't want to remember Riley this way, not here, not now. But the memory was strong, and what Conway saw in his mind was The two of them sitting in an outdoor bar in downtown Vail in the middle of winter after a long morning of skiing. It was early afternoon, and the sky was a bright blue, the sun -warm on their faces, fresh powder everywhere you looked. John Riley had just kicked back in his chair, propped his boots up on the railing and smiled as he watched the good-looking people who lived off of trust funds walk the streets in their top-of-the-line ski wear. A Jimmy Buffet song was being pumped over the outdoor speakers.

"This place is heaven," John Riley said. He turned his baseball cap backward the sure sign that he was shit-faced.

"When we die, you think you and I will go to a place like this?"

"I doubt heaven is a ski lodge with blond chicks with big plastic tits."

"Of course it is. Why do you think I go to church every Sunday?" Riley laughed, drank some of his beer.

"Where do you think we go?"

"Into the ground."

"And?"

"And that's it."

Riley laughed.

"You're one morbid son of a bitch, you know that?"

"What can I tell you, I was raised a Catholic Riley laughed again.

Then his eyes, shining with alcohol, turned serious.

"It's all about choices, Steve."

Riley put on his sunglasses and stared out at the sunshine, at the people parading in front of him, his life limitless, his smile wide and genuine.

Here, alone with the water and sea air and a lifetime away from that memory, Conway made the choice to remember the good times. This is the power we have.

Steve Conway lifted up the lid on the urn. The wind kicked the ashes into the air. They swirled up into his face, into his nose and lungs, and when he looked up, the ashes danced around him and sparkled like diamonds in the sunlight. He closed his eyes and dove deep within himself, to those locked places where we hide and protect what we love and treasure. This is where we remember. This is where we live.