The Last Good Night (23 page)

No one stirred until the fifth knock.

“Yeah?”

“Can I come in?”

“Who is it?”

I didn't want to yell my name out into the hallway. “A friend of your sister's,” I said.

“She ain't here.”

“I know that.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Please. Can I come in and talk to you? It will only take a minute.”

“Shit.” I heard the chain lock being slid from its holder and then two other locks being turned.

An emaciated man stood before me in low-slung blue jeans and a T-shirt. He had a tattoo of an inky blue mermaid across the slim rise of his bicep that seemed to swim when he moved. “You're that lady on TV,” he said.

“Yes. And you're Cort?”

“Right.” He stepped back and let me enter.

There was only one light on, a dim bulb in a pink-frosted goose-neck lamp over a wooden table cluttered with dirty dishes, loose papers, and overflowing ashtrays. The walls were streaked with grease marks.

“Is Shana here?” I asked.

“I already told you that she wasn't.” His eyes, beneath prominent brows, were a clear hazel, without layers, without depth, strangely childlike in his otherwise beaten-up face.

I nodded. “How long has she been gone?”

“What's it to you?”

“We're friends.”

“Yeah, well, we don't exactly give each other our travel itineraries, if you know what I mean.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“You sound like her fucking parole officer.”

“I want to help her.”

“Why?”

“I told you, we're friends.”

“You don't look much like the rest of her friends.”

“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked again.

“I don't know, last week, the week before. If I knew so many people would be interested, I'd have made a note of it in my fucking date book.”

“What about her boyfriend, Jay? Has he been around?”

Cort laughed. “Now why would he be around if she's not? You think he's gonna come 'round here to have tea and crumpets with me?”

“You don't like Jay?”

“I don't got an opinion about him one way or the other.”

“What's his last name?”

“Christ, how should I know?”

We stood in silence for a minute.

“Is Shana in some kind of trouble?” he asked. “I mean, besides the parole shit.”

“I don't know. That's what I'm trying to figure out.”

He sniffed loudly and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“Will you tell her to call me if you hear from her?”

“Sure, whatever.”

I was just about to leave when I had a second thought. “Can I see her room?” I asked.

“Why do you want to see her room?”

“Just curious.”

I followed him down a narrow hallway to a tiny bedroom with a window that looked directly into the window of the next tenement. There was a single bed covered in a shiny lavender spread, white frilly curtains, and one dead cactus plant, its needles dried and brown. On the walls, there were posters of boys in leather and studs I did not recognize.

And next to them there was a vast collage of faces that I did.

They were all mine.

There were the tabloid photos from three years ago when I first came to New York to do the news and a grainy newspaper photo of my last day at the local show. There was an eight-by-ten glossy with my signature in black across the bottom that the studio sent to those who asked for it. There were the pictures of me and Quinn that had run in ads announcing my addition to the
National Evening News,
along with reviews from all the local papers and some out-of-town ones. I stepped closer. There were Xeroxes of ten-year-old photos from Burlington and Pittsburgh, and reviews of the shows there. There was a copy of an interview I had given to a high school newspaper in Maryland thirteen years ago. There was a clip from a neighborhood weekly in Pennsylvania about the very first time I had appeared on-air at twenty-two. There were the tabloid wedding shots of David and me.

I stood stunned by all the disparate images of my own face for a long while before I turned back to Cort, who was standing in the doorway watching me impassively.

“How long have these been here?”

“What do I look like, a fucking interior decorator? How should I know?”

I took a deep breath.

“You done?” he asked. “Not to rush you or anything. But I got, like, things to do. Places to go.”

“I'm done.”

I followed him to the door. “Let me give you my home phone number in case you hear from Shana,” I said, and scribbled it down on a loose sheet of paper I pulled from my purse.

He jammed it into the back pocket of his blue jeans as I turned to leave.

I heard him slide the chain lock into place as I headed down the crooked stairs.

J
ACK LEFT ONE
more message but I did not call him back.

I knew that I had to and I started to, more than once.

Each time, though, I hung up.

I did not know what I could give him.

I did not know what I could ask him to do, or not do. How could I ask anything of him?

I jumped whenever the phone rang, fearful that it might be him.

I listened from the doorway whenever David picked up and spoke.

I looked over my shoulder as I ducked into the studio car each night.

But Jack did not appear.

Did I really think he would just go away?

 

B
ERKMAN DECIDED TO
let me do the interview with the Townsends live on the debut of
In Step
. Olivia Redding would get to do the secretary after all.

Jerry called every day to check on my progress, relieved that I once more had what he called “a fighting spirit.” To say nothing of a good story.

During breaks in the nightly broadcast, Quinn checked on my progress, hopeful that it was good—we both needed
In Step
to be a success—but not too good. I told him just enough to make him curious, and nervous.

I called Mike Compton twice, but there was no word on Shana, and his hurried manner told me that unless I had information to add, not to call again. He was a busy man with other cases, other problems.

 

I
MET WITH
Stacy Boyle, the field producer for the Townsend piece, for the first time. At thirty, she'd already won an Emmy for a story on a hospital in St. Louis that had used eyedrops that caused the blindness of fifteen babies at birth. She sat down in my office with a purposeful slouch, balancing a notebook across her legs and looking up at me with a skeptical expression. We had five days to pull the piece together.

It was only when I began to tell her all the people I'd already contacted and the information I had gathered that the look gradually wore off, replaced by one of concentration.

As she wrote down the last name and number, she said, “You've done a lot of legwork. It will make my life easier. Thanks.”

“I assumed it was my job,” I replied.

For the first time, she relaxed. I would not be just another diva then, reading the words and taking the credit for the hard work she had done.

Nevertheless, we both knew that she would be the one putting in the long hours in New Orleans, gathering the information and the initial film footage for the background introduction.

“I've talked to Berkman,” Stacy said as she rose to leave, “and he agrees that you will only have to miss two nights' broadcasts of the evening news. I can send the footage back every night and we can do a lot of the work over the phone. It's just a two-hour flight, so I can go back and forth as much as I need to.”

“Great.”

She smiled. “Why give Quinn the extra leg room, right?”

It was not Quinn I was thinking of. I had never spent a night away from Sophie before and the separation already cleaved through my ribs. “Right,” I said.

 

T
HE DAY
I was to fly to New Orleans, I did not go into the studio. I wasn't going to do the news that night anyway, and for once I did not care about appearing to be the most hardworking person in the office.

I left Dora sitting in the living room, drinking coffee with four sugars and watching Regis and Kathie Lee, and I took Sophie to the park alone.

The dried leaves crunched beneath the wheels of the stroller as I maneuvered it into the playground and closed the gate behind us. It was still early, and the air was chilled enough to keep the other children away. Sophie squealed with delight as I squeezed her puffy snow-suited legs into one of the black plastic bucket swings and began pushing her, singing a song that I had heard another mother sing, “Up, up, up in the air, baby goes up, up in the air.”

I wonder where they learn these things, the mothers. Are they remnants of their own childhoods, does everyone but me come armed with heirlooms of charming ditties? All I can do is spy on them, listen and imitate, a maternal impostor. Sophie pumped her arms and legs, reaching for me each time she swung in my direction, her eyes and nose crinkling with expectation.
This is what happiness looks like, I thought, as I sang the song once more.

I had just given the soles of her feet a playful tap when a shadow passed slowly over us.

I swiveled around and saw someone just outside the playground dip behind a barren tree.

But as I continued to watch, I saw no further movement.

The swing slowed down and Sophie banged her fist impatiently.

I started again, “Up, up, up in the air,” while I kept an eye on the playground gate.

A few minutes later, when Sophie's nose had turned red and runny and my own fingers were numb, I lifted her out of the swing and we began walking home.

We had just gotten to the great arch at the entrance to the park when I heard footsteps behind us.

I turned around quickly, but I could not make out who it was among the people hurrying away from us.

I ran the rest of the way home, pushing the stroller in front of me.

 

S
IX HOURS LATER,
I glanced out of the smudged airplane window and saw Lake Pontchartrain, black as an oil slick in the approaching dusk, as we began to make our descent. I gripped the armrest, digging my nails into the itchy tweed covering as I listened to every whir and sputter of the engine.

I have always been a nervous flyer, but it got worse two years ago when David and I were flying back from a weekend in Chicago where he had gone to give a lecture. The takeoff went smoothly, but within twenty minutes we realized something was wrong. We heard the clanking of the wheels as they attempted to
withdraw into the belly of the plane again and again. No one ever came to offer us coffee or a cocktail—not a good sign. We were clearly flying in circles.

I looked over at David, but he would not look me in the eyes, would not hold my hand. “I just want you to know that if anything happens, I love you,” I said.

“Oh, please.” He rolled his eyes.

Finally, the captain came on the loudspeaker. “We seem to be having some trouble with our hydraulic system,” he announced. “We will have to make an emergency landing in Cleveland.”

David continued reading his
Newsweek
magazine. “It's survivable,” he said, as he stonily turned another page. “It may be rocky, but it's survivable.”

Which, of course, it was.

It's become a joke between us, “it's survivable,” repeated on bad days, rocky or blue days.

There is something that I was too embarrassed to tell David then. For years, every time I flew I said a prayer before takeoff and landing. Just let me live and I will have a baby.

I finally told him of it last night as I packed for New Orleans.

“Did you really think having a baby would appease an angry God?” David asked.

“Maybe,” I replied. “But the point is, I haven't flown since we had Sophie.”

“So? Now He can kill you because you've fulfilled your part of the bargain?”

I didn't answer.

“Well, you'll just have to come up with a new prayer,” he said.

“I don't even care about me anymore,” I said as I put another pair of pantyhose in my suitcase. “But I can't stand the thought of Sophie growing up motherless. Promise me if anything happens you'll make sure she knows how much I loved her.”

David groaned. “Nothing's going to happen. Laura, you have premonitions every time you fly. You have premonitions when you go to the bathroom, for God's sake.”

And I had to admit that he was right. Still. “Promise me,” I insisted.

“I promise.”

The lights of the runway rose before me. As the front wheels hit the ground and we began taxiing, the overhead luggage rack rattled with a speed that felt uncontrollable, unstoppable. My foot jammed into the floor, as if to hit the brake, until at last we came to a complete stop.

When I stepped out of the airport, the air was thick and humid, like Florida air but without the bleaching clarity. Nevertheless, I recognized its presence. In the North, you can almost forget about air.

I found the car the network had ordered for me, and as I rode to my hotel in the business district of New Orleans, I thanked God.

I'm not one of those people who just prays for safety and salvation in especially worrisome moments.

I thank God every single day for what I have.

But of course that, too, is part of the bargain, part of the plea.

 

S
TACY WAS WAITING
for me in the lobby, sprawled out in a floral wing chair beneath a crystal chandelier with her notes, newspapers, and a cellular phone arrayed across her lap. We had spoken four or five times a day for the last week, and when we greeted each other now we were both genuinely pleased. “How was your flight?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“You sound surprised.”

“Let's just say I still think flying defies logic. How's it going?”

“Good. I've checked you in. Come on, I'll take you to your room and then we can talk about dinner.”

“All right. But how about if I show you the tape of the intro I wrote first?”

She laughed. “You're worse than me.”

Upstairs in my suite, I threw the video into the VCR and we watched the three-and-a-half-minute tape. All week, Stacy had been sending back shots of the federal building, the courthouse, and exteriors of the Townsend house. I'd spent hours helping to edit them and crafting the words to fit the images.

“Still no comment from the government?” she asked.

“No. It looks like we'll have to go with your footage of them shutting the doors on the camera. Then I'll read their official statement.”

“With suitable irony in your voice, I presume?”

I smiled. “With the utmost objectivity.”

“Good. We can finish editing at the local studio tomorrow. Are you ready for some Cajun food? I can fill you in on the Townsends while we walk.”

“Great.” Though I had spoken with Mrs. Townsend by phone a number of times, I had little sense of them as people and I was anxious for any insight Stacy could give me that would help with the interview.

We left the hotel and headed for Canal Street, lined with gaudy souvenir shops and liquor stores, glitzy hotels and men hustling chess for money. Crossing it, we entered the French Quarter. I followed Stacy along the cobblestone streets crowded with tourists pointing to the low pastel candy-colored houses, the ornate balustrades with plants dripping down like useless wigs. Everywhere there were seven-foot-high shutters painted bright blue or green or pink, once meant to protect against the southern sun, now locked against intruders.

“So tell me about the Townsends,” I said as we skirted Jack
son Square, crammed with clowns and mimes, jugglers and high-hatted horsemen offering buggy rides along the Mississippi.

“Well, you know she's a nurse's aide at the local hospital,” Stacy said. “She's been on leave since the accident.”

“What's she like?”

“Weepy. But hard as nails. She's definitely the tough one in the family. I don't think he's crazy about the lawsuit. Or about going on television, for that matter.”

“What else?”

“She's fat and she collects dolls.”

“Dolls?”

“You'll see.”

“What about him?”

“He's more of a cipher. Getting him to talk will be a piece of work. But that's why they pay you the big bucks.” She smiled. “Look, I need to stop and get some aspirin and then I'll take you to the restaurant. It's only this sawdust-on-the-floor kind of dive, but the food is great. Is that okay?”

“That's fine. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, it's just all those hours staring at the monitor this afternoon.”

We found a tiny grocery store on Royal Street and I waited outside, burying my head in a magazine guide to the city I had taken from my hotel room. The putrid stench of shellfish remains from a nearby restaurant's garbage filled the air and every time I looked up I saw people holding their noses as they jumped over the plastic bags, laughing as their drinks sloshed in their paper cups and their cameras swung about their chests.

From half a block away, I saw a solitary man headed directly toward me. I turned a page, pretending to be absorbed. There are tricks to avoid recognition—sitting with your back to a restaurant, never making eye contact. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. The man was wearing a purple mask with
feathers that covered his entire face despite the fact that Mardi Gras was months away. He careened right to me as if I was a magnet. My hands trembled as I clutched the magazine.

He stopped when he was within four inches of my face. I could smell the whiskey on his breath as he leaned into me.

“I read a magazine once,” he said. “It didn't help me.” He came even closer, and one of the long dyed feathers tickled my forehead. “Don't you know you're going to die anyway?”

Suddenly, he broke into a maniacal laugh and wheeled around, rocketing back down the street.

I was shaking when Stacy came back out a minute later.

“Got it,” she said, smiling. She looked at me. “Are you okay?”

“Fine. Let's go.” I began walking quickly, my head down, my eyes lowered.

I should have laughed, I should have shrugged it off, turned it into an anecdote.

But I no longer knew what was harmless and what was not.

I no longer knew how to divulge anything at all.

All through dinner at the Acme Bar and Grill, I tried to keep up my part of the conversation as we drank Dixie beer and waded through baskets of crawfish, snapping their heads off and sucking out the juice, but it was a struggle, and in the end, Stacy was obviously disappointed.

“I guess you would have liked something fancier,” she said.