Bloodline (15 page)

I
didn't think Poole was convinced.

During the conversation, he'd remained alert, watching for anything that might help fill in the jigsaw puzzle of Jack McMorrow the drug dealer. Even when outwardly he seemed to relax, there still was this underlying and unstated relationship: He was the cop and I was the suspect. Or at least I could be.

After he left, I made breakfast. Cutting a cinnamon-raisin bagel, I wondered what his conclusion had been. Maybe that I'd seemed like a nice-enough guy, but a big piece of the picture was missing. Here's this guy who was a big-time reporter, for the
New York Times
, mind you. Went to a little paper and found nothing but trouble. Now he's living in a hippie house on a back road in a town where he knows no one, has no family, no woman, no job to speak of, no real connection to anything. He arrives in town and in no time at all he's hanging around with the local outlaws, pissing them—or somebody else—off enough to get a hole blown in the side of his house.

I crammed the bagel in the toaster.

Poole was right. It didn't add up. I could see Poole thinking I had to have a screw loose. A skeleton in the closet, or under the bed. Was
I running from somebody in New York? Had I been dealing drugs down there? Was I a stashed federal witness? Who was this guy?

If Poole could figure that out, he was a better man than I.

I pried the bagel loose from the toaster, spread it with cream cheese, and brought it over to the table. It looked so good I went back and put another one in to toast. Looked for orange juice but there wasn't any, so I had milk instead. I sat down at the table and took a bite, chewing the bagel and mulling the questions that Poole didn't so much ask as imply.

The self-assured, well-adjusted, small-town, fly-fishing son of a bitch.

I sat and ate. Drank my milk. Thought to myself that I really wasn't any different. It was just that I didn't have the
Times
and all of its assumptions to fall back on. When you were there, or anyplace like it, you were part of a bigger picture, a massive machine. You didn't doubt yourself because, after all, you worked for the best newspaper in the world. It was like being onstage in a long-running musical extravaganza. You just sang and danced and got off the stage to make room for the next guy. The play was the thing, as the Bard used to say, and the
Times
was the longest-running show in the world. I left it to go to the weekly, thinking it would be the summer stock of newspapers. A break from the grind. It turned out it was just a different kind of grind. Some nice people, really. A close relationship with a small closed community. Life reduced to this miniature scale that made everything intimate and intense, like a weekend retreat. And in the end, it had gotten so intense that it had blown up. The paper. The people. Roxanne.

Roxanne.

I knew as soon as I thought of her, my mouth full of bagel, that I was going to call her. I would tell myself I wouldn't, I would think of all the reasons I shouldn't. I would try to distract myself with something,
everything else, and then I would get her number from the top drawer of the desk in the living room and call her.

So I went through the motions. I told myself she didn't need me, that it was over, that she'd given me my chance to stay with her and I had turned her down. Flat. And even if I did call her, it shouldn't be in angst-ridden doldrums that would just remind her that I could be a real drag and the underwear models she hung out with now could not. That they were sophisticated world travelers who went skiing with royalty and had documentaries done about their outdoor adventures, while my present associates were people whose adventures were documented in the police blotter of small-town papers, if at all.

Ah, but that was part of my charm,
n'est-ce pas
?

I walked to the desk and rummaged for the piece of paper that had Roxanne's number on it. I found it and remembered it was earlier in Colorado, but on a workday Roxanne should be up, even if she'd been out the night before with Prince Andrew. Assuming she hadn't joined the prince's entourage.

I dialed with a twinge of nervousness, like a junior-high boy calling for his first date. The phone was an old black rotary that torturously prolonged each number. I dialed the last one and waited for the endless clicks and ticks to end. Then the rings began. One, two, three, four—

“Hello,” Roxanne said.

“Hi,” I said. “How was Prince Andrew?”

It was quarter past eight there, and Roxanne said she was getting ready for work.

“I'll let you go,” I said.

“No. I've got time. Just close your eyes because I'm getting dressed.”

“Thank God for portable phones.”

“Makes it a lot easier to get a dress on over your head while you talk,” she said.

“Or to take it off.”

We both paused.

“Jack, I was just thinking about you. Really. I swear we're telepathically connected.”

“Even in our estrangement. Kind of like still getting cable TV after you've stopped paying for it.”

“You were the one who pulled the plug.”

“I know,” I said. “A day that will live in infamy. Has somebody already said that?”

“Yes.”

“Story of my life. My best lines come via reincarnation. So what were you thinking about me?”

“That I'd like to see you.”

“In the next line at the checkout, or up close and personal?”

“I don't know,” Roxanne said. “Maybe in the same line at the checkout.”

“I'd have difficulty counting my items in your immediate proximity.”

“Your items or mine?”

I stopped the patter for a moment and took a long deep breath. I got the feeling she did the same.

“It doesn't take long to go right back to it, does it?” I said.

“No. Not long at all.”

“I wonder what that means?”

“I don't know,” Roxanne said. “That something's still there, maybe.”

“That maybe it never left.”

“I left,” she said.

“Because I wouldn't go with you.”

“Nope. Turned me down flat.”

“Must've been the medication. I wasn't thinking straight.”

“How are you thinking now?”

“I think maybe my head's starting to clear.”

“How would you like a visitor?”

“Don't tell me,” I said. “Your grandmother's signed up for one of those foliage tours.”

And just like that, Roxanne was back, if not in my bed, then in my head. The truth probably was that she'd never really left—my head, that is—and no amount of Budweiser could evict her. Maybe it was just the situation that had separated us. The small world where we'd lived gave her claustrophobia. She had to break loose. I felt it was my duty to stay.

But now she was coming back. Maybe.

Roxanne said she had a social-worker conference to go to in Boston. Three days of name tags and hospitality suites. She left Colorado the next day. She could tack on a few days' vacation time if that seemed like a good idea.

“Maybe we could have some quiet time together,” Roxanne said. “Without cops all over the place and people shooting each other and all that craziness. I really think that was the problem. No relationship can flourish in the midst of all that.”

“Maybe you're right,” I said.

“You know I still love you.”

“I do now.”

“Do you love me?”

“I haven't strayed far from it.”

“Is that a yes, Jack?”

“I think it might be,” I said.

“Do you remember how easy it was for us? I was thinking that. Things started out so naturally. We just fell—”

“Into bed.”

“Jack. I was going to say into step. But bed, too. Oh, baby, did we ever.”

“We didn't fall. We dove. Or is it dived?”

“Dived, I think,” she said. “And I haven't forgotten. Not at all. You know, maybe we could make it work if everything around us wasn't turned upside down. Maybe if we were where you are now. I don't know. On a quiet back road, with nobody to bother us.”

“Right,” I said. “A quiet back road would be nice.”

Maybe I could find one.

So Roxanne asked how things were going. I said, “Good,” a white lie. Then I told her about the baby story and the mothers old enough to be her little sister. Roxanne said they needed counseling before and after making a decision like that, and why didn't the agency help them with that. I said I didn't know, that I hadn't been able to come up with an agency yet. She said it was standard practice because agencies want successful, smooth adoptions, not birth mothers who drag the adoptive parents into court, or worse than that, haunt them for months, or even years.

“I've got one who seems to be having second thoughts already,” I said.

“After how long?”

“A few months, I think. Less than six.”

“That's typical. Unless they're adequately prepared for the feelings that follow something like that, and even if they are, they go through a tremendous emotional upheaval. There can be overwhelming feelings of guilt and loss and grieving. In the long run, it can be the right decision for everybody involved, but the girl needs a lot of people propping her up.”

“Strange,” I said. “This one doesn't seem to have any.”

“Maybe she hasn't availed herself of it. Sometimes that's a problem. The birth mother tries to pretend none of it ever happened. Leave it all behind. Of course, it all comes crashing down on her later.”

“How do you know so much about this?”

“There's lots of stuff in the literature. There are tons of counselors who specialize in just this sort of postpartum trauma.”

“Maybe we should collaborate on this one,” I said.

“Maybe we should collaborate on a lot of things.”

“Oh, you say that to all the guys.”

“No, Jack,” Roxanne said. “I don't.”

There was more, but probably the conversation could have ended right there. Roxanne talked about how her clients now were mostly well-to-do, even wealthy. In a lot of ways, their kids were more screwed up than the abused kids she'd worked with in the Portland projects. The rich kids were harder to reach, but at the same time didn't have the tough kids' hard outer shell.

And then she talked about her new mountain bike and how I really had to get one, that I'd love it, riding through the woods. I said I wouldn't be able to hear the birds with all that clatter, and she said the good bikes were very quiet.

But the whole time, I wasn't listening to her story or even to her words, but to her voice. I was thinking how nice it was to be talking to her, easily and quietly, how I'd missed these conversations, how there wasn't anyone else I could just mesh with so easily.

And boy, did I want to mesh with her.

Standing there with the phone to my ear, I took a mental cold shower and contemplated an actual one. Into my monastic world, images of Roxanne rushed one after another. Our making love. Roxanne getting undressed. Walking from the shower to the bedroom with a towel around her, complaining that I didn't vacuum and sand stuck to her feet. Roxanne in a dress, crossing her legs on the couch. Kicking off her pumps after getting in from work. Her legs in running shoes and shorts. Her legs wrapped around me. Her eyes looking into mine. Her eyes, mostly worried.

That's the way they'd been most of the time, especially toward the end. Worried that something was going to happen to me—to us. Worried and then angry, when I wouldn't come with her. When I wouldn't walk away from the situation that surrounded us, a situation a lot like the one I was facing now.

Roxanne was still talking.

“So when will I see you?” I said.

“How's Friday sound?”

“Thursday night.”

“I'll be at the Hyatt Regency. In Cambridge. You ought to be able to find that.”

“Like a bear finds honey.”

“Oh, Lord,” Roxanne said. “That place has you talking like Grizzly Adams.”

“Drives you crazy, doesn't it?”

16

R
oxanne had asked how things were. I'd said they were good. Now I had three days to make it come true.

I started out by doing the dishes. Sometimes it was the little touches that made all the difference. Or so I hoped. I wiped the counter and the table and swept the floor, preparing for the pitter-patter of Roxanne's feet. Then I picked up the piles of newspapers—the
Globe
, the
Times
, the
Waterville Sentinel
, the
Waldo County Independent
—and carried them out to the shed. I did the same with the beer cans, filling a grocery sack. Coming back in, I surveyed the room. I made a neat pile of my books, put my binoculars back in their case, then vacuumed the floor in front of the window that had been shot out.

If I was going to be terrorized, I could at least be neat about it.