The Unfortunates (43 page)
The three remaining stand idle by the door. She can’t read anything from their expressions. They’ve quit squinting into the house. The woman tries the bell again. Iris jumps. 3D barks, deep and sure.
“No!” Iris whispers. “Shhh!”
It’s as if she’s stumbled into a nightmare where everything George makes up comes true. Was he right? Are they here to arrest him? To arrest her? For what? What had George called Bob? A financial criminal? What has she done! 3D barks again.
“Hey, somebody’s home. C’mere, boy!”
“You going to interrogate the dog?” The female officer’s voice. Another laughs. Iris muzzles 3D. He closes his mouth on her palm. The pain isn’t bad, but it startles her and she lets the collar go. He springs forward and takes off, not around the house as she would expect, but back from where they came, down the lawn and into the trees. She can’t think why—is he on the scent of the cop who’s no longer in sight? Could it be Victor? Could it be George? The doorbell rings again. “3D, 3D,” she whispers. She stands. She steps out after him, light and fleet as she can down the hill. The three officers are coming around the house. Where is the fourth? They talk casually among themselves. She ducks down. She whispers, “Come, 3D. Please.” She reaches the edge of the woods and with all thought traded for panic, she breaks into a run. She’s in the trees. Left, no right. She only needs time. To understand what’s happening. To understand what is meant for her. Time to think, time to get the dog. She pleads with her body,
3D, come, come, come
. Farther in, she sees him! Careening up the narrow path to Booth Hill. She chases him to the break in the trees. The ocean fills her vision. What if—if she’s really in trouble—what will happen to her baby? The cops will testify she ran away. That looks bad, doesn’t it? Could they lock her away from her baby? They do, they lock women away from their children. They do it all the time! Her child! But she’s done nothing wrong! She calls to 3D once more, hears nothing. She’ll get him later. She turns from the ocean and hurries back out onto the lawn. She lifts her face to the officers. She greets them with a wave.
The airport! Destiny’s steely armchair. Infinity’s featureless foyer, tedious antechamber—the air as refreshing as thinned glue, the pattern of the long concourse’s carpeting rolling out before him simultaneously dull and frenetic, static and busy as a lost language. Here in the Fortress of Boredom and Becoming, he strides to his gate. Or not quite strides, as he must first wade through security, taking off his shoes and putting them in the gray plastic bin, wondering, briefly, if they can glean anything from the laptop that might be used against him. He finds a seat at Gate 3, but he can’t sit still. He calms his nerves by rushing several times around the departure area. He thinks of his mother, the word she used, how for so long she called JFK by its old name, Idlewild, and he thinks, Ha-ha! She was right, she’s always right, in some intricate, useless way, for this is exactly how he is, idle-wild, and what else can a person be, waiting for takeoff?
Freedom. It’s free to be rash, to speed to the airport with no particular plan, to call one’s treacherous wife with one hand on the wheel. Freedom to tell her he’s no longer a fucking dupe and hang up, though really he hung up because he’d hit congestion on the perilous Van Wyck, stopped short, and was rear-ended with a neck-jolting thunk by a yellow cab. He hadn’t seen the traffic ahead of him, distracted as he was, shouting and also maybe crying. Freedom to simply drive on, even as in his rearview mirror he watched the cabdriver climb out on the litter-strewed shoulder and wave his arms in the direction of George’s Lexus, picking up speed. No, he would not be delayed. He found the hulking ramp to the terminals, chose one at random, parked at a rakish angle in the lot, hurried in to buy a ticket, got lost in the crap-faced and anemic swarm of what was apparently a line, cut the line, was shouted at, was escorted to the proper counter. He was exasperated to discover he couldn’t, at the last minute, book a direct flight to Rome or Paris. The ticket agent explained (and how well George comported himself, how politely he contained his wrath! His upbringing good for something, after all) that he could go to Montreal and then Milan, or Montreal and then Rome, or Logan in Boston and then Paris. A variety of other destinations were available with a first stop in Geneva or Reykjavik. Logan to Paris, he said, because it was the flight leaving soonest, so soon the agent only allowed it because George didn’t have luggage to check. She told him to proceed directly to the gate. Paris! A dignified escape. It’s been many years. Yes, he’ll stay at Le Meurice and go to the opera and, maybe, he’ll bring to them
his
opera. His opera, to which he has in secret been making no small revision! He’ll take a meeting. America’s too stupid, too young, and at the same time too washed-up. He should have seen this all along. Maybe then he’ll take the train south and look around for dear old dad, dead or alive.
As the plane hauls into the sky, he thinks about what Walter might say to him. He thinks of Iris’s beautiful face, her hand on the back of his neck. Iris! Oh, Iris, we might have sat side by side in the cooling hours of a peaceful summer, so many years from now. I would have taken your hand as we watched our children, doing whatever it is we’d helped them discover they liked to do. We’d hold so many stories between us by then, belonging to us alone. I waited for you there in the dream of our becoming. You saw me waiting and you changed your mind.
Well, fuck her. Fuck them all, he decides. He orders a tomato juice and watches the daylight bounce against the dingy curve of the overheads in the shape and pattern of the windows. He’ll become someone new. Make a new life. A better life. But then, something dark without words, some light without sound, some heartbreak, tells him he won’t. Tells him this is not the trading of one chance for another but the loss of all chance, and beneath him he sees the outlines of other lives he might have had, the shadow of a different wife who never betrayed him, stretching out languid against the clouds, the sweet ghosts of the children he’ll never have. The shadow of himself, taller than he is. The rest of the flight he spends with his head in his hands, trying to convince himself it can’t yet all be over.
As they taxi in at Logan, he turns on his phone. The twelve calls are from Iris, from his mother, from the lawyer, from several numbers he doesn’t recognize. He puts the phone to his ear to listen.
“Sir, not yet, sir,” the passing flight attendant says. “The rules apply to everyone.”
She’s right, he decides. Not yet. He doesn’t want to hear a word from them. He turns off his phone. They hold the plane at the gate long enough the air grows hot and stale and the passengers begin to grumble.
A steward from another section approaches his seat. “Mr. Somner? We need you for reticketing. There’s a ticket issue. If you would follow me.”
“Me?” He looks around the cabin.
“With Preferred Circle, advanced deplaning—”
“Okay, okay.” Sweat blooms along his collar, for the eyes of all the passengers are on him, and why has no one else been told to get up? He disembarks. At the end of the breezeway he sees three officers, not quite idle. A German shepherd, wearing a kind of security overcoat, stands leashed at attention. Again he hears his name. He is told to step to the side please, Mr. Somner. Mr. Somner, right over here.
“Esme,” CeCe calls from the sunroom into the kitchen. “Could you please hold lunch? I think I’ll lie down. Then we’ll visit George. We’ll need sweaters, do you think?” 3D lifts his head and emits a whistling sigh. There’s the stack of books and the newspaper, her chair turned to face the ocean. The sun is in the russet coat of the dog. She reaches down and strokes the top of his head. He is always by her side. “Don’t fuss, Dog.” She only calls him Dog. “I’ll be back. Why don’t you go investigate what’s left of the flower beds? Maybe Yasser has brought you a treat.”
Almost a year ago and out of the blue, the sheriff delivered 3D to her house. He’d been found by a family near Poughkeepsie, some sixty miles northwest, but brought to the pound when one of the children proved allergic. Animal Control scanned him for the address chip. It seemed he’d followed some mysterious course—the smell of an animal, the sound of a car. As it happened, a neighbor had that same day lost his dog, a jittery, drip-eyed Maltese who was later found near Booth Hill. Maybe the Maltese had set 3D going. But why he kept on, they’d never know. His first week back, Dog remained by the kitchen door at Booth Hill, by the kitchen door or the kitchen window or the front door, but always leaning in the direction of Somner’s Rest, forlorn. He whimpered for Iris and wouldn’t eat the food Esme put in his bowl. To coax him, CeCe fed him bacon from her hands. When they took him for walks, CeCe watched from the veranda. Two months back, Dog still couldn’t be let off the leash. Quick as he was free, he’d race into the woods, down the path, and circle the locked and darkened house, crying for all pity.
She and Esme discussed it, and Pat, on the phone, agreed. CeCe would keep him until they heard from Iris. They couldn’t understand why she didn’t call them back, if only to arrange for the dog—the year before, when 3D hadn’t turned up after a day, a week, six weeks, Iris told CeCe she couldn’t bear to continue looking. She went ahead with her plan to move back to the college town in upstate New York where she’d been living when she met George. She filed for divorce the day she left. She asked for no settlement and did not contest their prenuptial agreement, which left her almost as before the marriage. George granted the divorce quickly, remotely, and without trouble. She promised to be in touch when she was settled, but as the months wore on, CeCe came to think of her and the dog’s vanishing as one, as if they had disappeared into the trees together, like something out of a book. CeCe understood. Iris needed a break. But she didn’t understand about 3D.
After the sheriff drove away, CeCe suggested they crate the dog and send him to Iris’s forwarding address. “No,” Esme said. It was a PO box. “Dog misses her, but what happens with maybe no one to collect him on the other side?” Hard to believe Iris didn’t want him, but so was everything else that had happened. They’d contemplated the dog, drinking water with loud and sloppy gusto from his bowl. CeCe said, “We’ll hire someone to find her if we must. For now, let the poor girl be. If she wants us, she knows where we are.”
“I liked her,” Esme said. “But I don’t think she’s coming back.”
“I liked her too. Do you hear?” CeCe said, to the red backs of 3D’s ears. “Make the best of it, Dog. She’s not coming. We’ll do for you as we can.”
He couldn’t have understood. But he looked at her over his shoulder and lowered his head to the floor and seemed to accept his new situation.
George’s lawyers argued for bail, citing his clean record and the Somners’ prominence in the community. But a defendant apprehended trying to make a connecting flight off U.S. soil was, as the judge put it, not a good beginning, and the request was denied. George awaited his trial, for manslaughter, three months in jail. While the prosecution gathered its case, George’s lawyers organized their defense, principally that Victor’s death, by epidural hematoma due to blunt impact to the head, could not definitively be linked to George’s blow. On the advice of counsel, George agreed to a bench trial at Stamford Superior Court, his appearance in the tabloid news too recent and negative to risk a jury.
Still, the lawyers said he had a good chance. CeCe was hopeful. Each day, she watched her son’s quivering back as he sat beside his lawyers, facing the judge. She listened to the lawyers argue that a definitive timeline could not be established. Victor might have arrived at George’s door already injured, with blood already leaking into his brain. The defense noted that Victor had a felony record of driving under the influence, and individuals with a history of alcohol abuse are potentially at higher risk for hematoma formation. The prosecution countered with testimony from the hospital; Victor, a few hours from death, in what the expert witness called a
lucid interval
, was able to describe his encounter with George. The prosecution followed this with footage retrieved from the security camera George had installed above the front door. It was in George’s favor that, watching the footage, the judge could see the punch was not impressive. George was exonerated of prosecutable intent to kill. Less helpful to the defense was that George’s attack appeared unprovoked, and despite the lack of audio, it was obvious he’d taunted Victor as he lay on the ground. The case proved simple and took less than a week at trial. CeCe looked to the courtroom’s high, narrow window as the judge read the sentence. Fifteen months.
She did not exactly think it was wrong. When she saw in the paper a photographer had caught her in the quick moment the umbrella was pulled away from her face, as they lifted her into the car, her eyes wide, she felt no stake in the world’s opinion and was not ashamed. Since then, no matter her failing health, she’s gone to visit George every day the prison has allowed, with Esme and the strongest of her three nurses, an able, burly giant, graceful as a dancer, good at swooping her through the narrowest of doorways, up and down stairs.
Toward the end of his term, George told CeCe why he’d gone to the airport. He’d thought he was being charged with insider trading. For nothing—the SEC’s investigation discovered Bob’s gift to Iris was one of the altogether-legal transactions he’d made. “I am always afraid,” George said, as they sat in the corner of the visiting room that was wide enough for her chair, “of my own mind. I was so certain.”
Another visit, CeCe brought the envelope that had arrived at Booth Hill without a return address. Two photos, one of the baby in the delivery room, in Iris’s arms. Iris, looking down at the baby through a thick pair of glasses CeCe had never seen. The second, taken from above, of the baby sleeping in a bassinet, with no glimpse of the room or anything beyond. After looking at the photos a long time, George said he did not want to keep them.
