Pictures of You (36 page)

“Can you follow up on this for me?”

“I suppose I could.” Hank’s cautious tone irritated Charlie. Why couldn’t Hank jump on this, and then Charlie thought, why did he really need Hank to do it at all? He had a name. He could call information and get a phone number. Why couldn’t he do this himself?

“You know what, never mind,” Charlie said.

“Good for you. You’re doing the right thing. Getting on with your life,” Hank said, and as soon as Hank hung up, Charlie reached for the phone and called information, and a minute after he said Bill Thrommer’s name, he had a phone number and an address.

He was afraid this Bill might not talk to him on the phone if he called. Besides, Charlie wanted to see him. He’d ask his parents to come and watch Sam, and then he’d go to Pittsburgh.

C
HARLIE’S PARENTS WERE
thrilled to have Sam to themselves. “It’s just for two days,” Charlie told them. “Just business.” He lied so easily. He said he had to go to a building conference.
He’d call every night and every morning, and he’d be back before anyone knew it. Charlie didn’t even know how long it would take. It could be two minutes, long enough for Bill to slam the door in his face and refuse to come out. Or it could be two days, where Bill might talk and talk and show him a whole life with April that Charlie didn’t know could possibly exist. The horrible thing was that Charlie didn’t know which of the possibilities would make him feel worse.

“Why can’t I go with you?” Sam said.

“You’d be bored silly. All that talk about drywall. And think what fun you’ll have with Grandma and Gramps. All those cookies. Movies.”

Sam’s face lightened. Ever since Charlie had found out about Bill, he had felt this burning in his stomach, as if he had swallowed lighted matches. Where did Bill fit in? Judging from the letter, the relationship was over.

Would it do any good to know?

He couldn’t bear to think of another man spending time with his son, and he couldn’t bring himself to ask Sam if he’d ever met Bill. But did he know him? Did Bill act like a father to him? A friend? Did he bribe him with presents? Tell him knock-knock jokes?

C
HARLIE WAS ON
a plane halfway to Pittsburgh when he began to worry that what had seemed like such a good idea now seemed like a fool’s mission. What did he expect? He didn’t even know if Bill was home. He could be on vacation or out of the country. He could have a family. “What will it take to put it to rest?” Hank Williams had once asked Charlie. Isabelle had asked him the same thing. The truth was, Charlie didn’t know.

By the time he arrived, it was almost lunch time. Charlie rented a car, got some maps, and drove out into a day golden with light. He didn’t know what he had expected, but he had thought the skies might be murky with soot, that the city would be ugly and cramped. Instead, he was surprised at how pretty Pittsburgh was,
how green and hilly. The sky was vast, like a chip of the ocean, and when he reached Oakland, it was lively with people.

There, halfway down a green, leafy street, was Bill’s house, a beautiful little Colonial with blue shutters and a wraparound porch. Tasteful. You could look at this house and just know what it was like inside. Lots of wood floors, he bet. A staircase. An Oriental rug or two. There weren’t any kids’ bikes or toys in the yard.

He heard music. An itchy slide of jazz. A trombone. His father used to tell him, when Charlie said he wasn’t a jazz fan, that the most intelligent people in the world loved jazz, that it took smarts to appreciate it. Charlie parked the car. If a woman answered, a wife or a girlfriend, he’d ask to see Bill alone. He wouldn’t say why he was there until they were out of her range. He didn’t want to hurt anyone.

He rang the bell, and before he could turn and leave, before he could decide this was a mistake, he heard footsteps, and then the door opened and there was a man with a wooden cooking spoon in his hand.

Charlie’s mouth opened. Was this him? This guy didn’t look like someone April would love or even notice if he walked past her on the street. He had a face as ordinary and unhandsome as a baked potato. He was just a guy in a faded black T-shirt and blue jeans and sneakers, with thinning dark hair and a squint. He was older than Charlie by at least ten years. He could have been anybody, but oh God, he wasn’t. And then Bill lifted his other hand to scratch his face and that was when Charlie saw his glinting wedding band, as thin as a wire around his finger. “Bill?” he said, and the man nodded.

“And you are …?” Bill said. The wood spoon was red at the tip. Tomato sauce, Charlie thought. He suddenly noticed the air was spicy with basil.

“I’m Charlie Nash,” Charlie said, and the man frowned.

“Excuse me, who?”

“Charlie Nash.” He looked beyond Bill. There was a blue shag
rug in the living room, a clutter of magazines spread across it. “April Nash’s husband.”

Bill’s face changed. “Hold on,” he said, and then he stepped back inside, and for a moment, Charlie thought he was going to shut the door on him and lock it. That he’d refuse to see Charlie or tell him anything. The music stopped. And then Bill was back and the spoon was gone. “Please,” he said. “Come in.”

Bill took him into the kitchen, a bright yellow room with wood floors. “Coffee?” he asked, holding up a pot. Charlie nodded, though he didn’t think he could do more than sip. His appetite had died a long time ago. Plus, he didn’t like how friendly Bill was. He didn’t want to like this man.

Bill glanced at his watch. “I don’t have to be at work until three.” Bill gestured to two seats at the Formica table. Bill’s wedding band glinted in the sun. “Your wife,” Charlie said, taking a seat. “Where is she?”

Charlie put his hands around the cup, warming them. He smelled cinnamon in the coffee, and he thought of April, sifting cinnamon over her morning toast.

“Surgical nurse,” Bill said finally. “McGee Hospital for Women. Met her in an emergency room when I had this kidney infection. Married her a year later.” He took a long, slow sip of coffee. “That was twenty years ago.”

Bill squeezed his eyes shut, so that a fan of wrinkles bloomed in the corners. “Let’s be honest,” he said. “How is April?”

Charlie looked at Bill closely. He saw the tiny scar across Bill’s cheek and wondered if April had kissed it. He saw the way Bill kept tapping one finger on the table, as if he were waiting for something. Charlie had a thousand things he wanted to ask him, how had they met, what had Bill said that made April step out of her life and into his, why had April been drawn to him, and what had even happened? Were they good friends? Were they lovers? April had once told Charlie that she could forgive anything but the one unpardonable sin: infidelity. “You can’t forget that one,” she said.

“April’s dead,” Charlie said.

Bill’s finger stopped tapping.

“She died in a car crash,” Charlie said.

He heard Bill swallow. “When …”

“It’ll be two years September second,” Charlie said.

“What are you saying?” Bill put one hand on his forehead.

“There was a suitcase in the car,” Charlie said, leaning forward. “For the longest time I didn’t know a single fucking thing about you, and now I do and I’m not sure I’m better off for knowing any of it.”

And then, to Charlie’s horror, Bill began to weep.

Charlie didn’t know what to do. Bill didn’t bother sluicing the tears from his eyes. He didn’t cover his face. Instead, he sat crying, a sight so surprising, Charlie averted his eyes. Bill stopped as abruptly as he had begun. He dug out a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. “How?” he asked.

The whole time Charlie was telling him, Bill didn’t move. “She was stopped in the middle of the road, her car turned around. It was a really foggy day and another car was coming. Sam got out of the car last minute, and I think that’s what saved him.”

Bill lay both his hands flat on the table. “Sam?” he said.

The sip of coffee Charlie had taken churned in his stomach. “Sam. My—our son, Sam.”

Bill scraped his chair away from the table and stared at Charlie. “She took Sam?” he said. “He was in the car that day?”

Charlie felt sickened.
That day
. You didn’t say that day unless you knew about what was going on then, unless you were a part of it. “Where were you supposed to meet?” Charlie said thickly.

Bill didn’t speak, but the way he looked down at his shoes made Charlie know what the truth was, and it didn’t matter whether he wanted to hear it or know it, because there it was. And then, Charlie dug out his wallet and took out the plastic binder, and, hands shaking, pulled out a photo. There were the three of them, Charlie, April, and Sam, standing by a big tree in the park, the three
of them laughing. It hurt him to look at it now, and he suddenly didn’t want Bill touching it, so he held the photo up so Bill could see, and when Bill reached for it, Charlie jerked it away.

“I can’t believe she brought Sam,” Bill said.

“You knew my son?”

Bill shook his head. “No. No, I didn’t know him. We never even talked about kids. I don’t have them—I never wanted them. It was never a question with us and that was such a relief not to ever have that conversation, not to even think about it. All the places we went—they weren’t for kids. Casinos. Nightclubs.”

“You went to casinos?” Charlie asked flatly.

“There were never any kids around. And if there were, she never even looked at them.”

“Did you leave when you saw Sam in the car? Is that what happened? Did that make you fucking change your mind? That she brought Sam with her?”

“Charlie, you don’t understand. I didn’t see Sam—”

“I bet you don’t think you do, but you fucking owe me.” Charlie felt his voice rising. “She was
married
to me. She had a
son
. We were a
family
. Or didn’t that mean anything to you?”

Bill took a long swig of coffee. “I told you, we never talked about Sam.”

“What did you talk about, then? Quantum physics? Literature? Did you talk about her husband? Did you talk about me?” Charlie pushed his coffee out of the way so fiercely, some of it sloshed onto the table. He leaned toward Bill. “So you tell me. You tell me everything. How you fucked up my life. How you fucked up hers. How there’s a ten-year-old boy who misses his mom because of goddamned you. Because I really want to know. I came all the way out here and now you fucking tell me what you know.”

Bill spread one hand across his face. When he removed it, he looked like a different person to Charlie, like a person to whom something terrible had happened.

“It was an accident,” Bill said.

B
ILL DIDN’T KNOW
how his life took a turn. He was on business on Boylston Street in Boston, paging his wife Ellen at the hospital because he missed her. “I’m kind of busy right now,” she said, her voice offhanded. She didn’t say she’d call him back or that she missed him, too. When he hung up, something was buzzing in his head.

He passed an art gallery. It was bright and inviting, and splashed full of sunlight. The paintings were big and colorful, but that wasn’t what stopped him. He looked up and there was this woman like an apparition, floating by him in a long filmy dress, looking at the paintings. Suddenly he began to want things he hadn’t wanted in a very long time.

He went inside and it smelled like cinnamon and honey and vanilla. He saw the woman more clearly and she was even more beautiful. Then she looked up at him, like an invitation, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to go up to her. “Great paintings, aren’t they?” he said. “Should we buy everything up?”

She laughed. He had a wedding band, but she did, too. My wife doesn’t understand me, he thought, and then he laughed at himself, at the cliché.

“April,” she said.

“Bill.”

They walked around the small gallery. He stopped in front of a painting that was all skyscrapers tangled together, almost as if they were holding hands. He thrust his hands in his pockets. “I like this,” he said.

“Me, too.” She kept her eyes on the painting.

She told him that she lived on the Cape, that she’d come to Boston just to have a day to herself, popping on a train because it was faster than driving.

“Isn’t that kind of crazy?” he said, “Coming all this way just for a day?” and she gave him this sad, broken little half smile, and that was when he began to fall in love. “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?” he said quietly.

“You have no idea how much it helps just that you asked,” she said. “But I just want to feel good today. I don’t want to think about anything else but that.” She looked outside. “Want to walk with me?”

They walked outside, stopping to look at the windows of the shops. It was growing cooler, darker, and they both had to be going. She thrust out her hand for him to shake and he felt the heat rise up from her skin. “It was nice to meet you, Bill,” she said, and that sad little smile was gone. Her voice had music in it. “You made my day,” she said.

“Maybe we’ll meet again,” he said. “April.”

When he came home, everything seemed different. He felt unmoored. He wandered into a Thrift-T-Mart for Lifesavers, and when the girl rang him up—bored, with scraggly dishwater hair—he looked past her at the sky. “Boy, doesn’t a day like today make you wish you were on the Cape?” he blurted, and she yawned. “The Cape’s for tourists,” she said. “Jamaica, mon. That’s where I want to be.”

He walked past a man on a bench reading a book about modern art. “I come here the third Wednesday of every month,” April had said. The man noticed his stare and looked up. “You an art lover?” he said.

“A friend of mine is,” Bill said, and he thrilled at the word,
friend
, because it was and wasn’t the truth. “She goes to this one art gallery in Boston every month.”

“Lucky her,” the man said, and returned to his book.

He felt discombobulated. He went in to work and told his boss how well the Boston trip had gone. “I think it’s smart to have me there,” he said.

“I’m glad you’re taking the reins,” his boss said. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

At dinner, Ellen talked about vacation. She wanted to go to Paris or London.