No Time for Goodbye (13 page)

“You stay right here,” I said, and bolted out of her room, went down the steps two at a time, and nearly flew out the front door. I ran down to the end of the drive, looked up the street in the direction I’d seen the man run. A hundred feet ahead, red brake lights on a car parked at the curb came on as someone turned the ignition, moved it from park to drive, and floored it.

I was too far away, and it was too dark out to catch a license plate, or tell what kind of car it was before it turned the corner and rumbled away. From the sound of it, it was an older model, and dark. Blue, brown, gray, it was impossible to tell.

I was tempted to jump in my car, but the keys were in the house, and by the time I had them the man would be to Bridgeport.

When I got back to the front door, Grace was standing there. “I told you to stay in your room,” I said angrily.

“I just wanted to see—”

“Get to bed right now.”

She could tell from my tone that I wasn’t interested in an argument, and she tore up the stairs lickety-split.

My heart was pounding, and I needed a moment for it to settle down before I went upstairs. When I finally did, I found Cynthia, under the covers, fast asleep.

I looked at her and wondered what sorts of conversations she was listening in on or having with the missing or the dead.

Ask them a question for me,
I wanted to say.
Ask them who’s watching our house. Ask them what he wants with us.

18

Cynthia phoned Pam
and arranged to show up for work a bit late the next day. We had a locksmith coming at nine. If we hadn’t already booked one, last night’s incident surely would have tipped me in that direction. If the locksmith ended up taking longer installing deadbolts than expected, Cynthia was covered.

I told her, over breakfast and before Grace came down to go to school, about the man on the sidewalk. I contemplated not doing so, but only briefly. First of all, Grace would in all likelihood bring it up, and second, if there was someone watching the house, whoever he was and for whatever reason, we all needed to be on high alert. For all we knew, this had absolutely nothing to do with Cynthia’s particular situation, but was some sort of neighborhood pervert the entire street needed to be alerted to.

“Did you get a good look at him?” Cynthia asked.

“No. I went to chase him down the street, but he got in a car and drove away.”

“Did you get a look at the car?”

“No.”

“Could it have been a brown car?”

“Cyn, I don’t know. It was dark, the car was dark.”

“So it could have been brown.”

“Yes, it could have been brown. And it could have been dark blue, or black. I don’t know.”

“I’ll bet it was the same person. The one who was driving past me and Grace on the way to school.”

“I’m going to talk to the neighbors,” I said.

I managed to catch the people on both sides as they were leaving for work, asked them if they’d noticed anyone hanging around last night, or any other night for that matter, whether they’d seen anything they’d consider suspicious. No one had seen a thing.

But I put in a call to the police anyway, just in case someone else on the street had reported anything out of the ordinary in the last few days, and they transferred me to someone who kept track of these things, and he said, “Nothing much, although, hang on, there was a report the other day, something quite bizarre, really.”

“What?” I asked. “What was it?”

“Someone called about a strange hat in their house.” The man laughed. “At first, I thought maybe this was a typo, that someone got a
bat
in their house, but nope, it’s ‘hat.’”

“Never mind,” I said.

Before I left for school, Cynthia said, “I’d like to go out and see Tess. I mean, I know we were there last weekend, and we don’t usually see her every week, but considering what she’s been through lately, I was thinking that—”

“Say no more,” I said. “I think that’s a great idea. Why don’t we go over tomorrow night? Maybe take her out for ice cream or something?”

“I’m going to call her,” Cynthia said.

At school, I found Rolly rinsing out a mug in the school staff room so he could pour himself some incredibly horrible coffee. “How’re things?” I asked, coming up behind him.

He jumped. “Jesus,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said. “I work here.” I got myself a mug, filled it, added a few extra sugars to mask the taste.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

Rolly shrugged. He seemed distracted. “Same old. You?”

I let out a sigh. “Someone was standing in the dark staring at our house last night, and when I tried to find out who it was, he ran away.” I took a sip of the coffee I had poured. It tasted bad, but at least it was cold. “Who’s responsible for this? Is the coffee thing contracted out to a sewage disposal company?”

“Someone was watching your house?” Rolly said. “What do you think he was doing there?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, but they’re putting deadbolts on the doors this morning and just in time, it seems.”

“That’s pretty creepy,” Rolly said. “Maybe some guy, he’s trolling your street, looking for people who’ve left their garage doors open or something. Just wants to steal some stuff.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Either way, new locks aren’t a bad idea.”

“True,” Rolly said, nodded. He paused, then said, “I’m thinking of taking early retirement.”

So we were done talking about me. “I thought you had to stay at least until the end of the school year.”

“Yeah, well, what if I dropped dead? They’d have to find someone fast then, wouldn’t they? It only means a few bucks less per month on my pension. I’m ready to move on, Terry. Running a school, working in a school, it’s not like it used to be, you know? I mean, you always had tough kids, but it’s worse now. They’re armed. Their parents don’t give a shit. I gave the system forty years and now I want out. Millicent and I, we sell the house, sock some money into the bank, head to Bradenton, maybe my blood pressure will start to go down a little bit.”

“You do look a bit tense today. Maybe you should go home.”

“I’m all right.” He paused. Rolly didn’t smoke, but he looked like a smoker who desperately needed to light up. “Millicent’s already retired. There’s nothing to stop me. None of us are getting any younger, right? You never know how much longer you’ve got. You’re here one minute, gone the next.”

“Oh,” I said. “That reminds me.”

“What?”

“About Tess.”

Rolly blinked. “What about Tess?”

“It turns out, she’s going to be okay.”

“What?”

“They did another test, turns out the initial diagnosis was wrong. She’s not dying. She’s going to be okay.”

Rolly looked stupefied. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m telling you she’s going to be okay.”

“But,” he said slowly, as if unable to take it all in, “those doctors, they told her she was dying. And now, what, they say they were wrong?”

“You know,” I said, “this is not what I’d call
bad
news.”

Rolly blinked. “No, of course not. It’s wonderful news. Better than getting good news and then getting bad, I suppose.”

“True.”

Rolly glanced at his watch. “Listen, I’ve got to go.”

So did I. My creative writing class started in one minute. The last assignment I’d given them was to write a letter to someone they didn’t know, and to tell this person—real or imaginary—something they didn’t feel they could tell anyone else. “Sometimes,” I said, “it’s easier to tell a stranger something very personal. It’s like there’s less risk, opening yourself up to someone who doesn’t know you.”

When I asked for a volunteer to kick things off, to my amazement, Bruno, the class wiseass, put up his hand.

“Bruno?”

“Yes, sir, I’m ready.”

It was unlike Bruno to volunteer, or have completed an assignment. I was wary but at the same time intrigued. “Okay, Bruno, let’s have it.”

He opened his notebook and began, “Dear Penthouse.”

“Hold it,” I said. The class was already laughing. “This is supposed to be a letter to someone you don’t know.”

“I don’t know no one at
Penthouse
,” Bruno said. “And I did just like you said. I wrote them about something I wouldn’t tell nobody else. Well, not my mama, anyhow.”

“Your mama’s the one got a staple through her belly,” someone quipped.

“You wish your mama looked like that,” Bruno said, “’stead of like somebody’s photocopied butt.”

“Anyone else?” I asked.

“No, wait,” Bruno said. “Dear Penthouse: I’d like to tell you about an experience involving a very close personal friend of mine, whom I shall henceforth call Mr. Johnson.”

A kid named Ryan nearly fell off his chair from laughing.

As usual, Jane Scavullo sat at the back of the room, gazing at the window, bored, acting as though everything that was happening in this class was beneath her. Today, perhaps she was right. She looked as though she’d rather be anyplace but here, and if I could have looked in a mirror right then, I might have found myself wearing the same expression.

A girl who sat ahead of her, Valerie Swindon, a pleaser if there ever was one, had her hand up.

“Dear President Lincoln: I think you were one of the greatest presidents because you fought to free slaves and make everyone equal.”

It went on from there. Kids yawned, rolled their eyes, and I thought it was a terrible state of affairs when you couldn’t be earnest about Abraham Lincoln without seeming like a dweeb. But even as she read her letter, I found my mind wandering to the Bob Newhart routine, the phone conversation between the savvy Madison Avenue type and the president, how he tells Abe maybe he should unwind, take in a play.

I asked a couple of other kids to share, and then tried Jane.

“I’ll pass,” she said.

At the end of class, on her way out, she dropped a sheet of paper on my desk. It read:

“Dear Anyone: This is a letter from one anyone to another anyone, no names required, because nobody really knows anybody anyway. Names don’t make a hell of a lot of difference. The world is made up entirely of strangers. Millions and millions of them. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else. Sometimes we think we know other people, especially those we supposedly are close to, but if we really knew them, why are we so often surprised by the shit they do? Like, parents are always surprised by what their kids will do. They raise them from the time they are babies, spend each and every day with them, think they’re these goddamn fucking angels, and then one day the cops come to the door and say hey, guess what, parents? Your kid just bashed some other kid’s head in with a baseball bat. Or you’re the kid, and you think things are pretty fucking okay, and then one day this guy who’s supposed to be your dad says so long, have a nice life. And you think, what the fuck is this? So years later, your mom ends up living with another guy, and he seems okay, but you think, when’s it coming? That’s what life is. Life is always asking yourself, when’s it coming? Because if it hasn’t come for a long, long time, you know you’re fucking due. All the best, Anyone.”

I read it a couple of times, and then at the top, with my red pen, I printed an “A.”

I wanted to drop by Pamela’s at lunch again to see Cynthia, and as I was walking to my car in the staff parking lot, Lauren Wells was pulling into the empty spot next to mine, steering with one hand, a cell phone pressed up against her head with the other.

I had managed not to run into her the last couple of days, and didn’t want to talk to her now, but she was powering her window down and raising her chin at me while she kept talking on the cell, signaling me to hold on. She stopped the car, said, “Hang on a sec” into the phone, then turned to me.

“Hey,” she said. “I haven’t seen you since you went back to see Paula. Are you going to be on the show again?”

“No,” I said.

Her face flashed disappointment. “That’s too bad,” she said. “It might have helped, right? Did Paula say no?”

“Nothing like that,” I said.

“Listen,” Lauren said, “can you do me a favor? Just for a second? Can you say hi to my friend?”

“What?”

She held up the cell. “Her name’s Rachel. Just say hi to her. Say, ‘Hi, Rachel.’ She’ll die when I tell her you’re the one whose wife was on that show.”

I opened the door to my car and before I got in said, “Get a life, Lauren.”

She stared at me openmouthed, then shouted, loud enough for me to hear through the glass, “You think you’re hot shit but you’re not!”

When I got to Pamela’s, Cynthia was not there.

“She called in, said the locksmith was coming,” Pamela said. I glanced at my watch. It was nearly one. I figured that if the locksmith showed up on time, he’d have been gone by ten, eleven at the latest.

I reached into my pocket for my cell, but Pam offered me the phone on the counter.

“Hi, Pam,” Cynthia said when she answered. Caller ID. “I’m so sorry. I’m on my way.”

“It’s me,” I said.

“Oh!”

“I dropped by, figured you’d be here.”

“The guy was late, left only a little while ago. I was just heading over.”

Pam said to me, “Tell her not to worry, it’s quiet. Take the day.”

“You hear that?” I said.

“Yeah. Maybe it’s just as well. I can’t keep my mind on anything. Mr. Abagnall phoned. He wants to see us. He’s coming by at four-thirty. Can you be home by then?”

“Of course. What did he say? Has he found out anything?”

Pamela’s eyebrows went up.

“He wouldn’t say. He said he’d discuss everything with us when he gets here.”