The Year That Follows (13 page)

Higginbotham took a piece, paper and all. So did Sam. “I’ve always liked the taste of chocolate with scotch,” Higginbotham said, while he sniffed the empty flask.

“Not gin?” Sam said.

“God, no, not with chocolate. Besides, I don’t bring gin on board.”

“Why not?”

“First, because I like it too much. And second, I can’t get it cold enough to make a decent martini.”

Sam thought about this, the quest for the right drink, the importance it took on inside the larger mission. Earlier that day they had been chasing a sub, which had likely gotten away. It would come back, or another would. Zeros would appear. It wouldn’t end. Probably not for years. A good drink, though, that was a possibility you could believe in.

As if reading Sam’s mind, Higginbotham spoke. “I think I could do this forever, if it were not for one thing.”

“Do what forever, sir?”

“Stay at sea. At war.”

“And what is the one thing?”

“Women. We go too long without them. Not that there aren’t advantages to that, but it’s not natural.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll see. When the shooting stops, all sorts of other things start to get important. The cut of a suit, who’s going to make what presentation. Money. Christ, always money. Out here, who cares? You have scotch, or chocolate, and you’re a king.”

“Except we have no women, and people are shooting at us,” Sam said.

“They’re
supposed
to shoot at us. It’s why we’re here. Someday you’ll see, this isn’t so bad. Everyone wants to go home, I guarantee you. But they may not like it when they get there. Home is not an easy thing for a man. Especially if you’ve been out here.”

“You prefer the ocean.”

“I even prefer the navy. They’re going to kick me out, but not till this war is over. Right now, they need the bodies.” Sam had heard stories, rumors of some transgression that stymied Higginbotham’s career. It involved a woman. There had to be truth to it. An academy graduate, in the greatest war of all time—he should have been someplace better.

“You think we will win?” Sam asked. A dangerous question, as it implied another outcome was possible, which in turn implied doubt.

“Of course. Always have. Why should this time be any different? Look at the Japs. They’ve started to send their boys on suicide missions. That’s always a sign of the end. They can’t win, so they glorify dying. The outcome is not the question. The question is: what comes after the outcome? That I don’t know. You, though, should stay in the navy.”

“Why me?” Sam asked.

“Because you’ll always have something to do. You may escape boredom. And you’ll go far.”

“And what about women?” Sam asked.

“Find a good one, the right one for you. Not an easy
thing, so you’ll have to spend some time at it. That’s time well spent. Even if you decide she’s the wrong woman, it’s time well spent.”

“Are you married, sir?”

“I was, but that’s a complicated story.” Higginbotham raised his empty flask for a toast—to what he didn’t say.

S
he sits at the gate at LaGuardia, the space confined and gray, almost deserted. Two rows away, in a phalanx of connected chairs, a man is trying to type on a laptop he has balanced on his knees. Three seats down there’s a priest reading a
Daily News
. Otherwise, there don’t seem to be many takers for Detroit, or anywhere else. Even a year after the attacks, people aren’t flying, and the airlines are desperate. She’d gotten a hardship deal on her ticket when she pleaded to an airline manager that she needed to get to New York to make funeral arrangements for her brother. The family, she said, had finally decided that the body would not show up. “He died on September eleventh,” she murmured. That’s all you have to say now, and people show respect.

Her phone comes alight, a
212
number. The cop. Ludvenko. She left him a message to tell him that she’d found Siobhan, and that she needed the sample of her
brother’s DNA that the police department had. He seemed to like her; he always called back.

“I’m sorry,” he says now. “I mean, I’m glad you got answers, that you found her, but I’m sorry she’s deceased.”

Deceased, Cat thinks. Ended.

“Anyway,” Ludvenko says, “There’s a lab near the boy, in White Plains. They can do the DNA test. We don’t do it, not if it’s not really police business. But you give me the go-ahead, I’ll get your brother’s sample up there. They’ll have some paperwork for you.”

“You have my go-ahead,” she says. She writes down the lab’s name, its phone number, another
914
.

“Have you seen the kid?” the cop asks.

“Yes, I have.”

“So, whaddya think? Is it your brother’s?”

“I don’t know.”

“Aw, c’mon. You don’t know by looking at him?”

“I think he is,” Cat allows.

“We get these stories all the time now. The kids whose fathers died before they were born. Lotta women pregnant on nine-eleven, I guess. My wife, even. I got two little ones now. But I’m still here. If some-thing’d happened to me that day, then, I mean, I can’t imagine.”

T
he priest closes his paper; she turns toward him, drawn by the sound. He catches her eye, offers the paper.

“Sure,” she says. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure,” he says. She envies him. He seems so relaxed, so sure. It must be the faith, knowing, if not the answers, then that you’re close to them. Her mother was Catholic, not that Cat received any religious instruction. Her mother’s funeral was Catholic, organized by her grandparents. She remembers sitting with Kyle and watching it all, the foreignness of it, the service long and boring and somehow wonderful. People had been doing this for almost two thousand years, she thought. Here was a time-tested way to deal with death. If you believed, then maybe it was easier. Like the hijackers. They believed and went willingly to their deaths. Amazing.

She calls Tommy. She decides this is okay: she’s the one with the news. It’s a little after seven-thirty, and she finds him at home. “Big plans tonight?” she asks.

“Yeah, Tuesday’s always a big night for me. You?”

“I’m flying back.”

“That was fast.”

“I found him,” she says. “Kyle’s boy. I found him.”

“Wow. Tell me about it.”

“He’s with the mother’s parents. I asked them to do a DNA test. That’s about the extent of it.”

“Give me the name of the lab.” He tells her to name him as her doctor when she signs the privacy forms. “That way, I can call up there and push them on the results. I mean, my office can. And they can release the results to me. It’ll save you a lot of hassle.”

“Great,” she says, grateful to have help, not to have to do everything for herself.

“You need a ride from the airport?” he asks.

“I got my car there.”

“Connor with his dad tonight?”

“No doubt eating Cheetos for dinner and falling asleep on the couch.”

“Sounds like a good night. Jon’s with his mom.”

“You never talk about her.”

“Well, if you can’t say something nice …”

He was always clever. She remembers this. Clever. Also nice, but not nice. She always felt, as she feels now, a little off balance with him, and she likes the feeling.

“Cat?”

“Yeah?”

“Come to my house tonight.”

S
he wants to, very much. Not that she would have admitted it so blatantly, even to herself, until right now.

“When you were a kid,” she asks, “did your parents take you to church?”

“Oh God,” he says. “Is that a no?”

S
omehow, in the plane, she feels closer to Kyle. His meeting was at the top of the building; he must have fallen out of the sky. Did he know it was the end? What would he have regretted? That he never knew his son? Or perhaps he couldn’t understand that yet. Even when she was pregnant, Cat couldn’t guess at the love she would feel for Connor. Yes, she loved him,
but not like she loved him when he was born and she could hold him in her arms and feel his weight, the heft of him and the responsibility that was now hers. She knew then that her life would never be the same, that she had to protect this child at all costs, from everything and everyone. She felt this even with regard to Michael, and now she wonders about Siobhan. Did she really understand Kyle? Did she worry he wasn’t a good enough man? Or did she just want the little boy all to herself? Perhaps she thought she was the only person who could love Ian enough. Cat had felt that about Connor. She asks herself, Do I really want that responsibility with this little boy? With Ian? Do I really have a choice?

Off the plane, walking down the narrow corridors of Metro, she slows to look at two soldiers. They’re dressed in green camo, M1
6
s strapped over their shoulders and pointed at the ground. M
1
6
s. Wasn’t there enough of that just a little to the east, in Detroit’s inner city? The striking thing here, though, isn’t the uniforms or the guns, but the faces of the soldiers, so young and smooth and pink. My God, she thinks, they’re babies. Fifteen? Sixteen? Connor is halfway to that age. No, these boys must be older. They must be, but they don’t look it.

She comes down the stairs to the cramped baggage area still thinking about the soldiers. She has checked nothing, but this is the only way out. She looks up and there’s Tommy, standing by the baggage carousel,
watching her. She feels maybe he’s been watching for some time.

“What are you doing here?” she asks. “I told you I had my car.”

“I didn’t want you to drive alone.”

“Afraid I might change my mind?”

“It never occurred to me,” he says, smiling.

He is alive to her, taller than she remembers, bigger, with the bulk men get that, lucky for them, makes them attractive, more real and substantial. He’s wearing a plain black T-shirt; the hair on his arms, she notices, is darker than it once was, and there’s more of it. He takes her bag, wheels it himself, opens the door for her—this terminal is so old and run down that the doors aren’t even automatic—and follows her to her car. She’s left it in the expensive short-term lot for the first time in her life.

The air is warm and humid, a comfort, the air of home.

“You want me to drive?” he asks.

“Where’s your car?”

“I took a cab here, so I could ride with you.”

He pays for parking, drives them out to
94
, where once a plane went down, and then up the Southfield Expressway. “You going to talk to me?” he asks.

She tells him about the trip, the stop at the
Times
and the drive out to Yorktown, about the Boyles and little Ian in his playpen. And at the same time she’s thinking what it will be like to undress Tommy Swenson, to put
her body against his. Will the years melt away? The truth is her memory of sex with him, the physical part of it, is not nearly as strong as what she remembers emotionally, the intensity of what she felt for him, which she thought then was love. She thinks it now, too. Then she loved the idea of herself as a woman, which was exciting and real, devoid, she thought, of artifice. Alone with Tommy she felt free to be herself, which was the same as being free; she felt it partly because she trusted him and partly because she didn’t know yet not to be trustful.

She glances at him, and wants it all back. She’s excited for the physical nature of what’s to come, and curious, too. Her whole life she’s only slept with one man at a time, and she’s never doubled back. Don’t make too much of it, she tells herself. Just let it happen and see where you end up.

L
arge trees line Pilgrim Street and have grown together over the expanse of the road, a long canopy of foliage. Even at night she can see they’re magnificent trees. She asks what they are. “Elms,” he says. “Aren’t elms diseased?” “Not on this street.”

He pulls her Ford in behind his Cadillac, the backside of the sedan wide and substantial, with two chrome exhaust pipes. “Driving American?” she says.

“Started that right after the divorce. Besides, all doctors seem to drive Beemers now, or Lexuses. You see, that car makes me a rebel. Pathetic, right?”

“Hardly.”

“And it’s a nod to my hometown. I hate what’s happened to Detroit. The name Detroit once meant something good and powerful. That car’s my way of putting my finger in the dyke. I don’t care if it’s hopeless.”

He leads her to the side door. She can see nothing, is aware only of the one breath he takes that is deeper than the rest. This reminds her of sneaking around when they were kids. Her stomach is turning over, excited, and then she hears the lock turn. She grabs his arm.

“What?” he asks.

She kisses him. Knowing that there will be more than kissing, it is like a first kiss, new and tempestuous. “Take me to bed,” she tells him. “Right away.”

He guides her through the dark house by pulling on her hand till she is in a large, shadowy bedroom with a king-size sleigh bed onto which she finds herself quickly thrown, reminded of his size and strength, which always surprised her but which she liked, which she likes now as he falls atop her, kissing her, rubbing his hand over her body, then unbuttoning her blouse. He can’t do this fast enough for her, and so she helps him, first with the buttons and then out of his clothes, a well of desire coming up in her that she forgot she even had. Later, lying with her head against his damp chest, she feels almost embarrassed by this, by her desire, her neediness. She has learned to do things—expects to do things—for herself. And now there’s this man, both old and new.

“You’re gonna sigh like that, the least you could do is tell me why. Talk to me,” he says.

“You’re always saying that.”

“You’re never talking. What are you thinking?”

“That was …” She searches for the adjective. “Lovely.”

“Lovely? That was
great,”
he says. “I’m hoping to try it again, very soon.”

“You’re ambitious.”

“Always have been.”

“I remember,” she says.

“But tempered now, as I’m older.”

We’re both older, she thinks, both tempered. When was the last time she lay in his arms?
1976
. Twenty-six years. They couldn’t possibly be the same people they were in ’
76
, and yet she still feels the attraction. There seems no way around it.