Sandman (3 page)

“Doesn’t look that way,” Jack said. “I still have to meet with Ellen and Rob and go over the details of the case. You might as well sit in.”

Will checked his watch. “Did you call home to let them know we’d be running late?”

“Just before I talked to Ellen.”

“Was my wife there yet?”

“I didn’t ask.”

Will picked up the phone, his meaty finger stabbing out Jack’s home number. Jenny answered on the fourth ring.

“Jen, it’s Will. Is Nina there yet?”

“Just walked in.”

“Put her on, would you?” Behind Will, Dr. Kolb entered the room.

Nina came on the line and said hello.

Will said, “I’ve been trying to reach you since three o’clock.”

“Hi, hon,” Nina said. “I missed you, too.”

“I don’t need that shit, Nina. Not right now. Are you going to answer me?”

Jack got to his feet. “Will, can we put that off for now? Ellen’s here.”

“I’m waiting,” Will said into the phone.

Huffing, Nina said, “I dropped the twins off at Claudia’s. They didn’t want me to go and kicked up a fuss. Then I went to the grocery store to pick up steaks and corn on the cob. The lineups were horrendous. After that I got caught in traffic on the Queensway. There was an accident just before the Bronson exit. When I got through that I drove straight here. That about sums it up.”

“And that took two and a half hours?”

Jack touched Will’s arm. “Will, please.”

Will turned and glared at him and for an instant Jack thought the man was actually going to take a swing at him. At forty-two, Jack stood six-four and held black belts in three martial arts disciplines, but he didn’t take the possibility lightly. Will stood two inches taller than Jack and outweighed him by a hundred pounds.

Jack held his gaze and Will seemed to snap out of it. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and said, “Sure, Jack. Sorry. I’ll just say goodbye.”

While Will signed off, Jack invited Dr. Kolb to sit down. Kolb, a fit, eccentric woman of fifty-three, glanced uncertainly at Will and offered to come back later, but Jack insisted. After Will hung up, the three physicians sat in embarrassed silence.

A few minutes later Rob Hardie entered the room and the grim business of post mortem investigation continued.

* * *

“What’s up with Will?” Jenny said as Nina cradled the receiver.

“Oh, nothing special,” Nina said. “Things are just a bit tense in the Armstrong camp these days.” She smiled gamely, but Jenny wasn’t buying it. “He’s not all that nuts about me starting back to work.”

Jenny understood the syndrome. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m gonna go for it,” Nina said. Her five-year-old boys would be going to school full time in the fall and Nina had an offer to manage a new fitness franchise, something she’d dreamed about doing for a very long time.

“I wish I had your nerve,” Jenny said.

Nina patted the low, firm swelling of Jenny’s belly; at four months along, she was just beginning to show. “Have your papoose,” she said. “Enjoy that. Then, when it feels right, tell Jack you’re going to do something for yourself. Photography, whatever you decide. Believe me, he’ll adapt.”

“You don’t know Jack.”

“Sure I do,” Nina said. She was a tiny woman with a dynamite figure and a wholesome, ready smile. “They’re all the same. Get the right rhythm going on the workbench—” she ground her hips like a pole dancer “—they’re putty in your hands.”

Jenny laughed and gave Nina a poke.

Grinning, Nina scanned the room with her sea-green eyes. “Now,” she said, “where’s that teenager of yours? I want her to show me some moves.”

Kim was where Jenny had left her, staring out at the yard through the solarium windows. Nina crept up behind her and plucked off her headphones, startling her.

“Hey, kid. Who shit in your Corn Flakes?”

“Nina,”
Kim said, instantly brightening. That was one of Nina’s great gifts; her arrival in any room lit it up like a sunburst.

“I heard you can out-jive Jackie Wilson,” Nina said.

“You heard right,” Kim said, playing along.

“Care to prove it?”

Kim stood, her beaming smile like the grille on a ’53 Buick. She pointed at the Wurlitzer. “Choose your weapon, plebe.”

Nina strode over and punched in Bobby Day’s “Rock-in Robin”.

Jenny picked up her cat and leaned in the solarium doorway, a vague unease coloring her contentment. The reason for this contradictory blend of feelings occurred to her as she watched her daughter and her best friend dance.

Her house was only this happy when her husband wasn’t in it.

* * *

Kim left for Tracy’s house at six-thirty, Jenny watching her through the front window as she trudged down the street, tote bag slung over one round shoulder. Though Tracy wasn’t the kind of kid Jenny would have chosen for Kim to chum around with, she was the only friend Kim had. The two were about as much alike as linen and railway spikes, Kim shy and withdrawn, Tracy bold and provocative. But if Jenny remembered anything from her own early teens it was that friendships defied all attempts at logic. Kids got together for their own arcane reasons, and any efforts on the part of their parents to interfere were met almost uniformly with defiance. Perhaps that was the nub right there, the inevitable pulling away.

Jack and Will arrived at the Fallons’ canal-side home at seven o’clock. Will came inside with Jack, paced around in the front hall for a minute, then went back out to his Suburban. He leaned on the horn twice while Nina gathered her things from her car, then drove off with her in stony silence.

After loading the trunk with supplies, the Fallons followed in Jack’s Mercedes. Jack drove while Jenny reclined in the passenger seat, hands resting over her growing abdomen.

How precious this life is
, she thought as they made their way through downtown traffic.
And how fragile
. In the early years of their marriage she’d been pregnant four times and had lost each of them late in the first trimester. She’d bled heavily each time, on the last occasion requiring a transfusion and earning a strict warning from her obstetrician to practice birth control and adopt. “One more of these could kill you, Jenny.” That had been fourteen years ago, just weeks before she begged Jack to let her adopt the infant girl her obstetrician had found for her, the adorable baby girl she’d christened Kimberly Anne. And now, at thirty-four, she was carrying again. A happy accident. A miracle. But fear was never very far from the surface. She didn’t think she could bear to lose this one, too. All life was a gift, but this one was a special gift. It made her feel whole again, a feeling she’d gotten so far removed from over the years she hadn’t even realized it until the pregnancy test came back positive.

“How’s our little man?” Jack said, resting a hand on top of Jenny’s. They were crossing the bridge into the neighboring province of Quebec, the pungent reek of the E. B. Eddy paper plant eeling in through the air vents.

“Sleeping peacefully,” Jenny said. “Could be a girl, you know.”

Jack smiled, his tan face the color of cherrywood in the glow of the westering sun. “No, honey,” he said, “it’s a boy. I can feel it.”

* * *

Two of their guests were already there, seated in deck chairs by the lake: Paul Daw, a psychiatrist who’d done part of his early training with Jack, and his date, another in a seemingly endless supply of giddy young women. When Jenny caught Paul’s eye she shook her head at him and grinned. Paul just shrugged. Apart from Nina, Paul was the closest friend Jenny had. He was a great listener, a professional listener, and Jenny had spent countless hours with him over the years just talking. It was one of an increasing number of things she couldn’t seem to do comfortably with her husband any more. The girl’s name was Cerise. “French for Cherry,” Paul said as they climbed the hill to the cottage. He’d met her at the University of Ottawa pool, where she worked as a lifeguard and taught grade schoolers to swim.

The guest of honor, Al Sutton, arrived a few minutes later in a rented car. Jenny got the inside poop on him from Jack during the drive up. He was single, thirty-two, and had trained in some of the most prestigious medical centers in America. “A prime catch,” Jack had said. Looking at him now, Jenny was inclined to agree, albeit for different reasons. He had that glow some people had. Like Nina. You took one look at him and you just knew he was somebody special. He had a quick smile, boyish dimples and shining blue eyes. Jenny liked him right away and hoped he would join the department.

Will and Nina, who’d stopped off en route for gas, arrived as the others were climbing the steps to the Fallons’ Pan Abode. Will was still surly, but Nina seemed her usual cheerful self. Jenny introduced Al to the Armstrongs, then helped them unload their gear.

“Okay,” Jack said from the porch. He’d donned a ridiculous looking chef’s hat. “All present and accounted for. Let’s get the barbecue fired up.”

All and sundry agreed.

* * *

After dinner, Jack took Will and Al Sutton out for a power boat tour of the lake. Will had been hitting the beer cooler pretty hard since his arrival, the booze doing wonders for his mood, but he turned sullen again when Jack refused to let him drive the boat. They got back just after dark and joined the others in the cottage, where Paul was playing the piano and leading a hearty sing-along.

When the singing tapered off, Jenny talked Paul into playing a few of his original ballads. Afterward, she told Al Sutton about the collection of CDs Paul had recorded over the years. “He’s really an incredible musician,” she said. “I keep telling him he should try for a recording contract, but he can’t be bothered. He gives the discs out as Christmas gifts.”

Later, Jack summoned the whole crew outside to a crackling lakeside fire, a deck chair waiting for each of them. Jack sat next to Jenny, Al beside Nina, leaving Will to squeeze in next to Paul and his date.

Al turned out to be the life of the party. The man was a born storyteller and as he spoke Jenny imagined simpler times, friends gathered round cook fires to feast on the hunters’ spoils and enjoy yarns spun by animated imps like Al. At the moment he was sharing a wicked little anecdote about his days in the ER of a busy Detroit trauma center, something about a pick-up artist and his final conquest, a fellating disco queen with epilepsy.

“What our boy didn’t realize,” Al was saying, playing mostly to Paul’s date, “was that whenever this gal got excited, she pitched a fit. An exceedingly violent fit. Anyway, he got her out to this drive-in movie and coaxed her head down into his lap, and everything was going along famously until she got overheated and started to convulse. Now, as I’m sure you’re all aware, when you see someone having a seizure, you stick something between their teeth so they don’t ‘swallow their tongue’. In this case, our boy had already obliged.”

Cerise said, “You’re joking.”

Al showed his dimples. “Not a word of a lie. I was sitting in the ER doing charts when these two hobbled in. His disco pants were soaked with blood and her face looked like she’d gone the distance with Mike Tyson. Apparently, when he couldn’t get her off him, the guy punched her until she was unconscious.”

“Oh, my,” Jenny said, “were you able to...fix him up?”

“Let me put it this way, Jen. She didn’t swallow her tongue.”

Everyone laughed. Everyone but Will.

“God, Al,” Nina said, touching his arm. “You’re wasting your time in medicine. You should be on the stand-up circuit.”

“ Not me,” Al said. “My twin brother, he’s the comedian.”

“You’re a twin?” Nina said.

“Identical. Looking, anyway. My brother’s a lunatic.”

Nina said, “That’s so amazing.
I’ve
got identical twins, Jeffrey and Gerry. They’re five.”

Al said, “Oh, lord,” and spent the next half hour regaling Nina with tales of his exploits growing up as a twin.

Things began to wind down after that. Paul went up with the women. After finishing his beer Al went up too, leaving Jack and Will to put out the fire.

“Not feeling well?” Jack said.

Will was glaring into the fire, crunching a beer can in one massive fist. “Fuck, no,” he said without looking up. “I’m peachy.”

“Just asking,” Jack said. He nudged a branch into the coal bed with the toe of his shoe, then said, “I wonder how Rob’s making out.”

“Must be tough,” Will said, warming a little. “Could’ve happened to any one of us. That’s the bitch about this job, ain’t it, Jack?” Jack agreed that it was. “You think his ass is in a sling over this?”

“Rob did everything by the book. No one can fault him on that.”

But Will had checked out again.

“Okay,” Jack said, standing, “I’m heading up. Coming?”

“Gonna finish my beer,” Will said. “He patted the cooler by his feet. “Maybe slay a few more.”

“Suit yourself. Just kick that fire out before you come up, okay big guy?”

“You got it, Jack. Sweet dreams.”

When Jack was out of sight Will drained his beer, tossed the empty into the lake and tabbed a fresh one.

* * *

Cerise turned her back to him in the dark, the bed squeaking under her weight. Paul could hear her sobbing into her pillow.

“It’s not you,” he told her, thinking how clichéd that sounded but unable to come up with anything better. He felt he should touch her, try to comfort her somehow. He was so clumsy at this. “It’s me,” he said. “This isn’t the first time this has happened.”

She turned to face him, her warm hand, wet with tears, touching his shoulder. Paul shuddered a little.

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“It’s...not that kind of problem,” Paul said, surprised when she said, “Oh.” He hadn’t thought she’d understand.

She said, “So why do you bother? Trying, I mean.”

“It’s complicated.”

“All right. Do you want me to sleep someplace else?”

“No. I’m okay with it if you are.”

She turned away from him again. “I’m going to sleep then. I’m drunk.”

“Goodnight,” Paul said. There was no response.

In minutes she was snoring softly and Paul closed his eyes, thinking of Jack across the bonfire, the orange firelight making his eyes gleam.