Blackbird Fly (4 page)

Tristan sulked in the train. Merle forced herself to
look at the scenery and feel joy — or something,
anything
—
whenever she saw a redbud or crabapple in bloom.

Why was she so obsessed with time? Now the future
looked fuzzy, and it scared her. She had no idea what was going to
happen, and felt herself clinging to her old life, unwilling to let
it go even though the reality was that it was gone already. And
shame, that was a big one. Her failure to love her husband hovered
at the edges of everything. She was deficient. That was obvious.
She hadn’t admitted it to her sisters yet but she would. She
couldn’t keep something so big, so emotional, from Annie
especially.

She watched Tristan, his black eye and sad face full
of boredom and pain. She loved her son deeply, but that was
organic, wasn’t it? She reached out for his hand on the train. He
allowed the touch for exactly ten seconds. She didn’t have to
consult her watch.

Don’t think:
of pain or regret, love or hate,
past or future. Just be in the world. She breathed out, slowly.
Relax, this is your life
. Why is that so hard? Her mind
spun, torturing her. The past was a minefield. The future refused
to show itself, as murky as the puddles in the streets.

Hanford Welsh was on the ill-fated seventh floor of
the building, not far from the Stock Exchange. They took the
elevator.

“
Whoa, buddy,” said one of the
traders in the lobby, Mike, or Ike, or Mickey. “I hope the other
guy looks worse.”

Tristan put up his fists. “You want some?! Come on!”
The trader laughed and edged away.

Dragging the boy into Harry’s corner office Merle
shut the door. “This is hard enough without you acting like a
child.” He stalked to the corner windows. Everyone had stared at
him on the train. She could kick that trader except she’d said the
same dumb thing.

Harry’s secretary poked her head in. “Hi, Merle. Do
you need anything?”

Merle tried to smile. People were scared enough
around the Widow. “Thanks, June. A box maybe?”

She returned with two paper boxes with lids. June was
a tiny, young thing, just Harry’s type, with wispy light brown hair
and big gray eyes. “I’m working for Mr. Marshall now. He said to
help you, if you need me.”

“
I want to look at Harry’s computer
files before I leave. I need his password.”

June frowned. “I’ll check.”

Merle looked over Harry’s desk, the death site. There
was no sign of his last breath, of the ambulance workers who pushed
him to the carpet and pounded on his chest, shocked him with
paddles, gave him mouth-to-mouth. Everything was tidy, as if he’d
be back tomorrow. There was his nameplate, which she dropped in the
box. On a spindle a stack of pink “While You Were Out” messages sat
skewered.

“
You want all these pens and stuff?”
Tristan was staring at the open pencil drawer.

“
Why not.” He grabbed two handfuls.
“Do you see any passwords?” The boy pushed the mess of papers
around and said no. “Keep an eye peeled.”

The message slips were old, from people who must have
given up weeks ago. Should she call them? She owed Harry a little
dignity. She dropped them into the box. His gray overcoat still
hung behind the door. She folded it and set it in the second
box.

There was a solid wall of file cabinets across one
wall. Last night when she couldn’t sleep she’d spent a couple hours
poking aimlessly around in Harry’s den. She didn’t have passwords
at home either. What was she looking for? His life, in a thousand
manila folders. It was depressing.

She was fingering files when Steve Hanford burst in
and enveloped her in designer cologne. If there was a fine grooming
class at business school, Harry’s manager had aced it. Steve oozed
success, from his tassled Italian loafers to his dyed brown coif
that swirled elaborately over his forehead.

“
How are you? You look great, Merle.
But you shouldn’t have to do this. I'm so sorry. It can’t be
fun.”

Tristan was making a face behind Steve’s back. Merle
said, “Life goes on.”

“
That’s what they say.” He put an
arm around her shoulders, easing her away from the file cabinets.
“What can we do to make things easier?”

“
There’s a steep learning curve
here. I let Harry do all the financial stuff — ” Steve winced
dramatically. She felt a jolt:
What-what?!
“What — is
it?”

“
Dee Dee was just saying that. She
wanted me to explain everything to her. And it’s taken me years to
get things balanced — Oh, listen to me. Please, go on.”

“
I need to see Harry’s personal
accounts. I have to know everything that went on here with our
money.”

He flinched again and stepped back, hands deep in
fine gabardine. “Of course, Merle. That’s your privilege. Let’s —
can you follow me out here?”

In the hallway he stopped, lowering his voice.
“Merle, did Harry tell you about his trading account? What he
did?”

“
I assume he traded
stocks.”

Steve rubbed his forehead. “Right before — you know —
he ran some options, you know, futures? Trying to predict if prices
of stocks and commodities will go up or down. He was selling short
because he thought prices were going to fall. He would have cashed
them the next day, probably, because prices did go down a little.
But he didn’t, because, well.”
Because he was face down on his
desk
. “Nobody looked at them until the end of the week. By then
it was too late. The options were called.”

Merle felt bile rise in her throat. Called options
meant you had lost your bet. You had gambled and lost. And you had
to pay up.

“
His clients’ money?”

Steve shook his head.

She felt her breath catch. “How much?”

“
He never did anything halfway, you
know that. He loved rolling the dice. ”

“
How much did he lose,
Steve?”

“
Six-hundred.” She squinted at him.
“Thousand. And change.”After a microwaved casserole that night
Merle spread the day’s booty across the kitchen counter to commence
a stare-down. Almost immediately her parents called. They were “in
the neighborhood.” They lived about an hour away and had only
returned from Florida a few days before Harry died.

Although moved by their concern, what she really
needed was some quiet time. After Steve Hanford’s little revelation
that her husband had lost over half a million dollars and she could
be sued for even more lost dollars from his chancy option trading,
she had gone to the bank. When she tried to clean out the joint
account, she found out Harry had taken almost thirty-thousand
dollars out of their checking account the day before he died. While
she was fuming about that she emptied out the contents of his safe
deposit box into a McDonald’s sack still warm with grease from
Tristan’s lunch.

Then, after the bank, back to the lawyers.

“
Anything I can do to help,” the
younger partner boomed. They must love him in court. Troy Lester
was the Brooks Brothers version of Steve Hanford, but bald and
smelling of spearmint chewing gum.

“
At Harry’s office,” she said
slowly, trying to breathe. “He was trading options when he died,
and they were called. He lost whatever he was trading, our money,
and a lot more. I won’t be liable for that, will I?”

“
Normally, no.”

She stared at him, willing him to speak.
“Normally?”

“
The house is safe, since he put the
mortgage insurance in your name. And the French property is too
complicated to touch. That leaves the life insurance policy — ” He
paused, frowning, as if life insurance was nauseating.

“
Do you mean — can they garnish
that?”

“
I think we can avoid that. But
there’s a problem Mr. McGuinness wasn’t aware of.”

The other shoe hovered, preparing to drop. She felt
it deep in her guts, the looseness, the hollow sense of doom.
You thought that was bad, eh? Well, let me tell ya.

She swallowed hard and looked him in the eye. “Tell
me.”

“
Creditors would have to sue the
estate, which if the debts were large enough — and from what you’re
telling me maybe they are — they definitely would. Even I would
sue.”

“
And litigation isn’t your bag. What
are you saying?”

He grimaced. “Lawsuits are potential problems, if
there are creditors. But the immediate problem is that he borrowed
against the life insurance.”

She stared at Troy’s oversized forehead. She had
already decided how much she would set aside from the insurance for
Tristan’s prep school, then college, and the funeral expenses. But
this was what Harry had used to play the options market. This was
how much he cared about the security of his family. Damn him. It
was gone, all of it. Harry had borrowed against it and lost it
all.

She may have swatted Troy Lester with her purse.
Lawyers! Who could trust them?

In the kitchen Merle stared again at the meager list
of sums on her notepad. Her parents would want to help if they
thought she was in trouble. She swept up the checks and statements
into her address book and put them on the shelf over the kitchen
desk. The last thing she wanted was their pity. They had their own
problems, everybody did. One thing she’d learned already since
Harry’s death — there was only so much sympathy in the world, then
people turned back to their own woes. And who could blame them? The
world was a hard, unfair place. She would lie and tell her parents
Harry left them secure and well-off.

They stood under her father’s big golf umbrella then
shook themselves in the front hall. Her mother was still an elegant
woman, not as straight and tall as she used to be but always finely
coiffed, her gray hair pinned up in a twist. Tonight she wore a
simple black dress and pearls. They were at the age when funerals
were unfortunately common. Maybe they’d come from one. Merle
glanced down at her sweatpants and Harry’s old Penn t-shirt. Making
an effort was, well, such an effort.

“
Someone here?” her father said,
fixing his blue eyes on her as if she was hiding a boyfriend
upstairs. Jack Bennett never lost that protective feeling toward
his five daughters. He looked tired though, the bags under his eyes
tinged with blue. He was dressed in a dark suit from his attorney
days, a blue shirt with no tie. He missed the law, he told her at
Christmas, missed the action, hated being old and put out to
pasture. She would tell him about old McGuinness the Turd one day,
whose retirement plan was to keel over at the water
fountain.

“
Tristan’s home. He was having
trouble studying. Maybe he went back too soon.”

Bernie — her mother Bernadette — insisted on going
upstairs, exclaiming over his black eye, and swearing to keep it
secret from Grandpa Jack. She loved having secrets with her
grandchildren and could be trusted for six or seven minutes. In the
hallway outside Tristan’s room, she took Merle’s hand.

“
Everything is all right then,” she
said in her firm schoolmarm tone. “You’re strong and young. It
seems hard now but you’ll be all right, both of you. Tristan’s had
some trouble but he should go back next week. ”

“
He’s supposed to see a
counselor.”

“
Oh, rubbish. I knew a thousand boys
like Tristan.” Bernie taught junior high school algebra for
twenty-five years but always sent the bad boys home to their
parents. “Good boys who are picked on by bullies. It’s been going
on for centuries. You just have to put on a face and go
back.”

Bernie’s advice for most everything was to ‘put on a
face.’ If they didn’t think you cared they couldn’t hurt you, and
the piddling little concern, whatever it was, went away. It worked
wonders in the courtroom and the schoolroom. But in your family it
let you hurt in silence and fester in privacy. Merle was an
excellent pupil; she’d been putting on a face to Harry — and maybe
to herself — for years.

“
And what about you?” her mother
said. “You’re thinner, not that it doesn’t look good on you. But
you have dark circles under your eyes like when you were in law
school.”

“
Sleeping's not so good.”

“
Do you have pills? Dr. Farouk gives
everyone pills.”

They left a half hour later, after two cups of milky
coffee and a full rundown on their Florida neighbors who had cooked
a giant octopus on a charcoal grill and made such a stink they got
cited for a public nuisance. Her parents came from the
pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps era, when everything bad could
be pushed down and hidden, when to get by you pretended you didn’t
care. You carried on, until carrying on — and not caring — became
your life, robotic shell of existence that it was.

Merle poured herself a large glass of red wine and
set Dr. Farouk’s pills next it, spreading out the financials again.
They meant well, her parents. They tried to distract her with
coffee and octopus. She’d just have to figure out how to help
herself. Maybe that actually was the old bootstrap approach. Maybe
it would work if she applied herself. On a new sheet of paper she
made lists: Connecticut. France. IRA statement, bank statement,
Legal Aid salary. Potential lawsuits. Lists would keep her sane.
Well, as sane as she ever was.

She drank wine, poured more. The financials didn’t
change. They didn’t grow zeros. The lists grew longer but not in
the plus column. There was no money for college. No money for prep
school. Her salary would barely pay the utilities and train fares.
Property taxes were out of the question. The sleeping pills stared
at her until she dumped them in the toilet. The swirling black
capsules stayed in her mind as she poured more wine.
Don’t need
no stinkin’ pills.
She felt stronger then, like she might find
an answer to the rest of her life, somewhere, somehow.