Light of Day (3 page)

He walked over to the piano. There was the book of sheet music Danny had left out. Jack did not touch it. He started to sit down, stopped, started to walk away and stopped again. He rested his fingers on top of the keys and noticed that his hand was shaking. He leaned against the wall and felt his knees knocking together.

The thing to do now was to keep moving. Turn on the lights. Wash up. Feed Mutt. Pour a drink. Keep moving.

He walked though the foyer turning on lights, the living room, turning on lights. He walked past the wall of photographs. The “Danny wall” they called it. The framed arrangement in polished chrome and lacquer and wood. Round and square frames. Frames bought in roadside junk shops and Manhattan boutiques, and street vendors in Florence: Danny on his first two-wheeler. Danny at the Bronx Zoo. Danny at the beach. Danny and Jack at the ballgame. Danny and Jack at the
Indiana State Fair. Danny's first day at school. Danny at his first piano recital, eyes wide, tie a little crooked, hands folded on his lap. And the recital last March at his high school looking handsome in his blue suit, and confident, his eyes deep in concentration…

Jack hurried down the hall to the kitchen like a man pursued. He was sweating. For all he knew he hadn't stopped sweating since he left the morgue. He turned on the kitchen lights, opened the back door and let Mutt in.

The red light on the answering machine blinked, his message to Danny waiting across the room, like an assassin. Their breakfast dishes, from how many days before, were still in the sink—dried cereal still in the bowl, juice still in the glass. The things Danny had touched and left behind.

Danny killed himself today. He put a plastic bag over his head—Jack broke down. He cried as he walked through the downstairs rooms. He was thinking: Danny is still alive in the house.

Sweating and crying. In his study, turning on lights. The den, turning on lights. The back porch and front, turning on lights. Climbing the stairs, turning on lights. In his bedroom, turning on lights. In the guest room. In Danny's room—he couldn't stay away from Danny's room—where clothes were scattered like refuse. Shirts and underwear and socks, jeans, pants, jackets, shoes and ties piled outside the closet, draped over the desk and computer. Notebooks, textbooks and loose papers strewn across the floor, the wreckage Jack had left behind when he came looking for the suicide note, when he'd found only silence—he didn't remember his search being this violent, he didn't remember making this mess. Now, Mutt lay in the middle of Danny's clothes, whimpering.

Jack sat on the bed and ran his palm across the bedspread. He faced the photographs on the wall. Danny's photographs, Danny's eyes and Danny's legs and Danny's body. Playing ball, riding a boogie board. His face ready to smile, his laugh ready to happen. But what else was in that face? Was there suicide hidden just below the surface, like in those old photographs with the double exposure, the second face looming like ectoplasm in the background? Is it there if you know where to look? Is it
there if you're brave enough to see it? Brave enough to admit putting it there, because Jack was sure his hand was all over Danny's death. That it was the life he had made for Danny, that Danny couldn't live.

Jack pressed his face into the pillow and inhaled the smell of Danny's mornings and nights. He sobbed plaintively, until his throat ached and there was nothing left to sob.

This wasn't supposed to happen.

Mutt pawed at the clothes, as though he were looking for his lost boy. Jack couldn't stand to watch it. He yelled at him to stop, dammit. He yelled a second and third time, but Mutt went on frantically scratching.

“Stop it,” Jack shouted.

He heaved himself off the bed and, sweeping up Mutt in his arms, carried him into the hallway and closed the door behind him. Mutt squirmed free and scratched to get back in. Jack grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and pulled him away. Mutt twisted free again and lay outside Danny's room.

Jack walked downstairs, thinking: Danny killed himself today. He put a plastic—

He saw the silhouette on the other side of the screen door, silent and motionless against the porch light. Jack could only stare, not saying a word—unsure of what he was seeing, what to think. Unsure if he should move or stand still and feeling the urge to scream or cry out and believe in the existence of ghosts. He took a cautious step forward and was about to speak Danny's name when he heard: “Dr. Owens?” Softly, no louder than the evening breeze. “Dr. Owens, is Danny home?”

Jack looked closer into the darkness.

“Dr. Owens?”

It was C.J., Carl Ainsley's son.

Jack opened the door and asked him to come inside. But all C.J. did was say, “I can wait out here. I just came over to see Danny.”

“Danny. Danny's—you better come in,” and Jack stepped out of the way.

C.J. was breathing heavily, as though he'd been running. He stared into the room with a morose expression on his face—which was the ex
pression he usually wore. He lowered his eyes, raised them to Jack and lowered them again. “I just came over to see Danny.”

“Come in.”

But C.J. took a step back. “Is something wrong?”

“Come in.” Jack led him into the living room. “Sit down. Please.” C.J. looked thinner than Jack remembered. There were dark rings under his eyes, as though he might have shared Danny's sleepless nights, and his clothes, his T-shirt and jeans, were in need of washing. “Danny wasn't in school today,” he said flatly.

Jack hesitated before he told him, “Danny is dead.” It was the first time that he'd articulated this to anyone. The back of his throat burned and his fingertips were numb. “He killed himself. Out by the ruins.”

C.J. didn't sit so much as drop onto the couch. His body sagged and he started to weep. Jack sat next to him and put an arm around his shoulder. C.J. felt so slight and frail that Jack was careful not to hold him too tightly for fear of crushing him like a piece of brittle glass—Jack might have been holding on to Danny, the fragile part of Danny, which Danny had been so careful not to show.

C.J. cried and trembled and muttered softly to himself, something that sounded like “bad luck” or “fucked up.” And after Jack let go of him, C.J. rocked back and forth, talking under his breath, whispering indiscernible words over and over again like an incantation.

“What is that? What are you saying?” C.J. only rocked and cried, his arms wrapped around himself. “I'm so sorry,” he moaned. “I'm so sorry, Dr. Owens,” and a moment later, “I can't—Danny—I'm so sorry.” He wiped his eyes and nose with the back of his arm. When he said, “I was with him last night,” it sounded like a confession.

“Last night? You
talked
to Danny last night?”

“Kind of.”

“Kind of? Kind of yes? Kind of no? Kind of what?”

All the color left C.J.'s face. “We just hung out for a little while, that's all.”

“And he didn't say anything about—he didn't act like he was depressed or troubled by something?”

C.J. shook his head. “He said he had things he had to do, to get ready for summer, summer vacation, and I went home.”

Jack walked across the room and stared out the window, at the field across the road and the sky, which had grown darker, and a small piece of the moon. He turned to C.J. “Danny must have said
something
.”

“No. I don't know. I don't know why—” C.J. started crying, softly.

“Danny killed himself,” Jack said, with no small amount of disbelief, and C.J. started rocking back and forth again and talking under his breath. It made Jack uncomfortable to watch him. He went back to looking out the window.

A moment later, C.J. asked, “Do Brian and Rick know?”

“I haven't told anyone. I don't want anyone else to know about it. Not yet.”

A moment after that, C.J. said, “I won't tell. I can keep a secret.” It was startling, how sad he sounded when he said this, and regretful. It made Jack take a long look at him.

C.J. must have startled himself, or maybe it was the expression on Jack's face, because he stood up quickly and said, “I better go now.”

But Jack told him to wait. “I don't understand something. Danny committed—committed suicide this morning and all he talked about last night was getting ready for summer?”

“That's all he said, Dr. Owens. I only came over because he wasn't in school today. That's all, Dr. Owens.” C.J. started to cry and rushed out of the house.

 

Jack stood under the shower. He was thinking that he'd have to call his father in the morning. He'd have to arrange Danny's funeral.

“Danny's funeral.” And he thought about Danny all alone tonight in the morgue. Vomit bubbled up in his throat and sprayed the walls around the stall, spilled over his chin and down his legs. It congealed like a fetid pool in a sewer. The water was slow to wash it away.

J
ack was in his office. He didn't hear the door open, but felt it open. He felt it open a moment
before
it opened. Someone was there. It was Danny. Jack could feel his heart inflate as though a puncture had been sealed.

“Danny,” he breathed. “Danny. I thought—”

“I'm here now, Dad.” He was wearing his green shirt and black shorts.

Jack grabbed him and hugged him. “Don't ever do that again.”

“I love you,” Danny told him.

“I love you, too. Promise you'll never go away again.”

“I promise.”

It was a cruel dream, made more cruel by awakening, which Jack resisted, if he'd actually been asleep. He was lying naked on the couch, his head on Danny's pillow. His neck hurt and his eyes were crusty in the corners and felt raw. There was an untouched glass of whiskey on the table behind him. He sat up slowly and looked at the clock. It was four in the morning and he was alone.

He reached for his bathrobe, walked outside and stood on the back porch. He leaned against the railing and stared past the fence, across the expanse of pasture and the fields of soy and alfalfa, at the urban glow on the edge of the horizon. He thought of the semis driving the interstate and how peaceful and private the highway is at four o'clock in the
morning with the darkness riding up front, the headlights leading the way home, to the place
called
home because someone is waiting for you there, someone whose face is so familiar you can't remember what she looks like until just before the moment that she gets to the door and it all comes back, the way her eyes look at you and the shape of her mouth. How her hair is sleep-crushed but so what, just so long as she's there waiting; and there's a kid upstairs in bed fighting like hell to stay awake so he can hear the front door open and the sound of your voice.

Well, Jack didn't have a wife waiting for him and there was no kid sleeping inside, but this was the place he called home. The place he came to ten years ago with a five-year-old son after things went bad with Anne. When he and Danny needed a soft landing.

The trees were silhouettes against the straight line of fence. Beyond them, on the other side of the field, a light went on in an upstairs window in the Richardses' house, and for a moment Jack's feelings of solitude were gone, knowing someone else was awake in these wee small hours. He'd always liked the privacy here, with the pastures and field, but tonight he wished there were people right next door turning in their sleep, switching on lights. He wanted to hear the sound of a curtain rustling in a house across the driveway, the plumbing gurgling.

He pulled his bathrobe tight around his chest and paced the width of the yard, once and then again. He was thinking about his boy and how much he missed him. He was thinking that Danny would never know this new day. He was thinking that Danny had been robbed of his youth, twice in his brief life. Once when his mother had left him, taking with her the childhood illusion that life is sane and painless, and again when he robbed himself of simply growing old. It would never happen. Danny would never grow to be a man. He was frozen in time, a fifteen-year-old boy, forever. After today, people would know him as the boy who killed himself in Fairmont Park. They wouldn't know Danny who pitched high school ball and didn't embarrass himself. Or Danny who played piano Wednesday afternoons at the senior center. Or…

From the field rose the scent of darkness and the musky smell of soil and fertilizer and damp night air; the green smell of young crops and of earth plowed and tilled and planted. It was a country smell, rid
ing the breeze like a child's kite. The sun had yet to appear, but the deep blue rim of dawn was inching toward a morning which, Jack knew, would be like no other morning in his life. And then what? Condolences, of course. Fathers with sons thinking, Better you than me. The pitying expressions on their faces. The patronizing looks of sympathy and commiseration.

He had to talk to someone. It was too early to call Lois. He dreaded calling his father. He started pacing the yard again. The grass was cold against his bare feet. The air was starting to change, the way it does just before sunrise. A train whistle wailed in the distance and sank down the length of silent track. He sat on the porch steps and watched the yellow light in the Richardses' window dissolve like a lozenge in the light of dawn.

 

Mutt was still lying outside Danny's room. He raised his eyes at the sound of Jack's approach and whined listlessly when Jack called to him.

“Come on, Mutt. Give it a rest.” Jack snapped his fingers and whistled. “Give it a
rest
.” Mutt turned his back. Jack walked downstairs, switching off lights, pulling up shades. He went to the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee.

When he brought a cup with him to his bedroom, Mutt followed and lay down on the bed. Jack reached for the phone.

“Hello, Grace—”

“Jackie. What a surprise.”

There was more than surprise in his stepmother's voice. There was the shot of fear, the spasm of apprehension that catches in the throat like a seed. The phone rings at six in the morning and it's her husband's son, she had to know the news was not good. Her eyes were probably doing that nervous little dance they do, looking everywhere but where they really wanted to look: at the old man with the trembly hands—who was more chemistry than biology these days, half the organs in his body dependent on the right dosage at the right time to keep them pumping and ingesting and churning—sitting up in bed, or on the living room couch, in the apartment in Manhattan, where the sunlight refracted through the large windows, sparkling on the furniture and art. Where
there wasn't a suggestion of the clutter of old age, only the clean and crisp smells of comfort and care, which the pleasant young Irishwoman was paid quite well to maintain five days a week.

“I hope I didn't wake you,” Jack answered.

“
Wake
us. We've been up for
hours
.” When there was nothing more forthcoming, she said, “I'll put Mike on.”

Those chemicals better be doing their job, Jack prayed, or his father wouldn't survive the call.

“What happened?” was the first thing his father said. His voice could still come on strong.

“It's bad.” And Jack let his father absorb that much.

“How bad?”

Jack told him how bad. He told him what had happened and how, where it happened and when. He told him slowly. He told him all the details, not too graphically but he didn't leave anything out. That was how his father would have done it. It was how Jack had learned to do it: he said what had to be said. He answered all the questions.

“Christ almighty, Jackie.” The voice seemed to fade before the last word was said. There was a deep gasp and then, “Danny? Dead?” coming sadly, weakly, as though the news alone had sapped what remained of his energy. Jack could hear Grace's “Oh my God” as the old man asked, “How can he be dead?” the voice cracking now. “I can't comprehend it. Christ almighty.”

There was more than disbelief in the voice, more than sadness, more than grief, although that was all there, but it was something else that started deep inside his throat, a mournful, guttural sound, that came with the exhalation of his breath. It was the sound of an old man feeling the death of his only grandson. “My God, Jackie, suicide…My God…” sounding pained and full of sorrow. “Maybe it was an accident.”

“The detective doesn't think so.” Jack held on to the phone and said nothing else. He listened to his father sobbing and gasping and sobbing again, and Grace crying and saying muffled, inaudible things. Then the old voice said, “Danny was a very complex kid. Complex and complicated for his age, hell, from the day he was born. Even before Anne
walked out.” He paused to clear his throat. “She made a mess of his life, leaving him the way she did.”

It startled Jack to hear Anne's name. They never talked about her, at least not when they talked about Danny.

His father said, “I don't know—who knows
what
was going on inside of him. Who can say after this, but a little boy doesn't get over being abandoned like that. Your mother always said Anne damaged him irrevocably.” When he breathed in it sounded like dry leaves scattering in the wind. “Danny had a tough time. Tougher than we realized.” He struggled with another breath. “Oh God, Jackie, I love that boy so much.” Jack cried with him.

They cried for Danny, who had found living unbearable, and they cried for each other as well: the father who had outlived his son, the grandfather who had outlived his grandson. This wasn't a conversation they ever anticipated having. It was Danny who one day would have had to be told his grandfather died, not this, which is what the old man was saying while he cried and lost his breath and started to cough and wheeze and make hacking sounds from deep inside his chest, until there was no sound at all.

“Dad?” Jack shouted into the phone.

His father didn't answer.

“Dad?”

His father coughed a few times and cleared his throat. He said, “You shouldn't be alone now, Jackie. I want you to get on a plane and fly out here. You'll stay with us. We'll take care of each other.”

“I've got to stay here.” Jack wiped his eyes, adjusted the pillow behind his head while Mutt nuzzled the crook of his arm.

His father said, “This is no time to be by yourself, Jackie. We belong together.”

“I can't.”

“Of course you can.”

“I've got to stay here.”

“We have to go through this together. You'll be bouncing off the walls alone in the house.”

“I'd be bouncing off the walls in New York, too. I can't leave.”

“Get on a plane—”

“Listen to me—”

“Listen to
me
. You'll rattle around, chewing yourself up until you're raw and out of your mind. I want you here with me. You won't have to do a thing. My travel agent will book the flight.” He may not have been in the strongest voice today, but the old man could still fight, and there was no placating him; there was no patronizing. But it was also this: his father needed his son.

But Jack insisted, “I can't.”

“Don't be like that, Jackie.”

“I can't come to New York. Not until I get Danny out of the morgue.”

“I'm an idiot,” the old man answered. “Of course. Then I'll come out there.”

“I need you in New York. I need you to make the arrangements for Danny's—Danny's funeral.”

There was silence for a moment at the other end. Then, “I'll call Harry Weber. He took care of your mother's funeral. He'll take care of everything.”

Jack rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. “Yes, Harry's fine.”

After Jack hung up, he lay on the bed with Mutt leaning against his arm. He didn't close his eyes, he didn't try to go to sleep. He simply lay there looking at the whiteness of the ceiling. A minute passed. He called Lois and told her.

“Christ, Jack,” she said softly. “I'm coming over.”

Then there was only the silence. Jack thought, So this is what it feels like without Danny, while he lay there doing nothing; and a moment later he thought he'd better walk down the hall and see if Danny was getting ready for school, and he sat up quickly, his body alert, ready to move, all reflexes, like the frog in the biology experiment that's nothing but nervous system. In that same moment, on that same reflex, he dropped back and lay very still.

He thought: So this is what it feels like without Danny. He thought: He's still alive in this house.

 

Jack arranged a few rolls on a plate for when Lois came over, a platter with butter and cheese, and put it on the table with the pitcher of cream and the sugar bowl. He brewed a fresh pot of coffee. He still couldn't bring himself to wash Danny's breakfast dishes, but he rinsed his own coffee cup and put it on the drainboard.

Outside the kitchen window sunlight was breaking through the branches of the trees. Birds were making their racket deep in the field and out by the stream. The morning paper hit the front door.

It's tomorrow, Jack thought, and found the prospect terrifying. He picked up the phone and called his father again.

“I don't know why I'm calling,” he said when the old man came to the phone.

“You don't have to know.”

“I just want to hear you at the other end.”

“You don't have to explain.”

Jack picked at the dried cereal in Danny's bowl.

His father said, “I've been thinking about him. Something he and I talked about when you were here last Christmas.” He took another hard breath and coughed again. “He asked me something that I thought was really extraordinary. He seemed to be trying to understand, understand life, if I had to describe it. I don't mean he was trying to make sense of it, but—wait a second, I have to—wait.” When he came back: “Danny was trying to
understand it
. He asked about Anne and about you, just general things. And he asked me where I thought
ideas
came from.”

“What?”

“If I thought they came from inside of us or outside. Did I believe in God and did He put ideas into people's heads to get them to do things and behave the way they did.” His father stopped to catch his breath. “He asked me where my ideas came for my inventions. From inside myself or outside, or did they come from God and how could we ever know the difference. And did Anne get ideas for her paintings from inside or outside of herself. Did she get the idea to leave from—”

Jack took the phone away from his ear, stared down the hallway at the photographs on the “Danny wall,” then he brought the phone to his mouth. “Danny told his friend that he had to get ready for summer va
cation, then he killed himself the next morning. Where did he get
that
idea?”