Goodnight Blackbird (13 page)

"She's there all the time," Kat said, "but I don't think she saw me as a threat. I'm a stranger. I suspect she becomes very protective of him when she senses that he has strong feelings for someone."

Darren sipped his water.

Jacqueline stared into her mostly uneaten plate of food.

Kat, a forkful of rice half-raised to her lips, looked from Jacqueline to Darren, a flicker of alarm on her face. "Oh," she said.

"I am so so sorry I said that!" Kat exclaimed as Darren drove her back to the house. "I guess I just naturally assumed the two of you were a couple."

"We're just friends."

"I am such an idiot! This is so embarrassing! I mean, I'm supposed to have a knack for picking up emotional impressions, but I go and put my foot in my mouth and screw things up—"

"You didn't screw anything up. It's fine."

"No, it's not. I'm getting the feeling that I really, really messed up. I shifted the ground beneath the two of you."

Darren said nothing.

"You care for her a great deal," Kat said. "Jacqueline."

"I wouldn't go that far. We've only known each other a couple months."

He pulled into the driveway, and before he shut off the motor Kat said, "She's in flux right now. Jacqueline. It's none of my business, I know, but I do get the sense that she doesn't know what she wants or who she really is right now. So if she ever does say to you, 'It's not you, it's me,' know that it isn't just a cliché to let you down easily. It really isn't about you."

"Thanks. What was with the tape player?"

"EVP. Electronic voice phenomena. Spirits are most likely a form of electromagnetic energy, vibrating at a frequency beyond the limits of our perception. But there are many cases where their voices can be picked up on audio recordings. I want you to listen to the tape, but you'll have to really crank the volume. Sometimes their voices are so faint you can barely hear them. But there's also a good chance that we didn't pick up anything. It's worth a try, though. We might pick up something that'll give us more insight into her personality."

They got out of the car, but Kat remained by the passenger door, looking at Darren closely. "I didn't want to bring this up with Jacqueline around. But I'm getting a great deal of ambivalence from you about clearing the house. Am I right?"

Darren looked up at the dark windows, feeling antsy. Was Rachel watching him now?

"I don't know," he said. "Part of me thinks maybe it should be up to her when she leaves. She was forced out of this life. Now I'm about to force her out of her house for good. She's like one of those displaced persons in World War II. No home."

"What good would it do her to stay? Especially since you're selling the house."

"I've been thinking about that a lot lately, too."

"You mean you might not sell it?"

Darren twirled his car keys on one finger, not looking at her.

"You both would be keeping each other from where you're supposed to be, Darren. You really need to think about this."

As they went into the house, Darren said, "I'm sorry about your father."

She squeezed his arm. "You're sweet. He was the reason I got mixed up in this stuff, you know. He was a child psychologist. He knew I had these... quirks. Sometimes when he was having trouble connecting with one of his patients, he would ask me to play with the child for a few minutes. Just be friendly. Then later on he would ask me what I thought was going on with the kid. And I'd tell him. He said I was always on the money. He'd say, 'We ought to go into practice together. Your name will definitely go first on the letterhead. You do more good than I ever could.'"

In the living room, Kat popped out the tape and handed it over to Darren. "I'll contact you in a few days about what I think the next step should be." Then she took another stroll around the house, making the occasional note, running her slender finger across counters and tables.

"She's a good person," Kat murmured as they stood in the spare bedroom again. She was looking out of the window. "Her parents fought, almost constantly. There was a lot of unhappiness here. But a nice man lives here now and she feels safe again." Kat turned and Darren noticed her eyes go wide. She was staring at something behind him. The blood had drained from her face. "Darren, I want you to keep looking at me. Can you do that? I just want you to keep your eyes on mine for a bit."

"What's wrong?"

"Rachel's in the doorway, and she's trying to scare me. She thinks I'm the enemy now, and she's trying to frighten me."

T
he mediation session at the Cuyahoga County courthouse started out fine. Jacqueline and Kevin were polite, the lawyers were informal and friendly, and the court-appointed mediator—a sixtyish woman named Denise Palatka—had the manner of a kindly kindergarten teacher who knew exactly how to soothe everyone's nerves.

When the matter of the house came up, however, the wheels came off the train.

"Since we're all agreed that keeping up with the mortgage and his current apartment expenses is not a sustainable situation," Denise said, flipping through the document before her, "Kevin has decided to put the home up for sale beginning in September. Jacqueline, you may stay in the house until the sale, but starting in September both you and Kevin will begin splitting the monthly mortgage payments in a manner that reflects each of your relative incomes—Kevin will shoulder 65 percent of the payment, Jacqueline 35 percent."

"Fine by us," said Jacqueline's lawyer, George Pulaski.

"Not exactly," Jacqueline said. "I'm more than willing to pay a higher percentage if Kevin will not put the house on the market."

Pulaski rubbed his neck, and Kevin's lawyer, Josh Culberson, looked almost amused. "Jacqueline, with the market the way it is, the house probably won't be sold for a year or more," Culberson said. "You'll have plenty of time to find a new place—"

"That's not the point. I'm not being given an opportunity to keep a house that I am happy with."

"You have been given the opportunity," Kevin said. "The bank wouldn't let you refinance. My name is on the note, unfortunately, so this is my call, not yours."

Jacqueline fished a piece of paper from her notebook of divorce miscellany and pushed it across the table to Denise. "This is a current bank statement. I have close to five grand in savings. I'm making money again."

"You haven't even started your new job yet," Kevin said.

"I'm making money again," Jacqueline repeated, "and this is my proposal: I'll start paying more of the mortgage in exchange for you not putting the place up for sale or letting the bank foreclose. We'll flip the percentages—I'll pay 65 percent, you pay 35 percent."

Kevin looked at the bank statement.
"Two months ago you had less than $800. Where did you get this?"

"Do we have a deal or not, Kevin? Let's do it this way until the end of the year. If I'm not settled in at a decent-paying job by then, we can come back and talk about putting it on the market. Five months—can't you just give me that?"

Pulaski took off his glasses and looked as if he wished he'd gone into corporate law. Kevin got up wearily. "Jacqueline, let's talk outside."

Culberson started to tell him it would be better if they all talked in the same room but Kevin cut him off. "She's still technically my wife. I can have a private conversation with my wife if I want to."

Out in the corridor, Kevin held up the bank statement as if it were a bad report card. Jacqueline nearly laughed. He bitches about the house draining his wallet, so she does something about it, and now he bitches even more.

"Where the hell did you get all this?" he said. "You said you don't even start the new job until the middle of August."

"I borrowed some. I've been doing freelance work. What difference does it make?"

"Freelancing doing what?"

"It's a high-tech job called none of your goddamned business. Five months. Can't you at least give me that?"

"Jacqueline, listen to me. There is no ghost there."

"How would you know, you don't even live there anymore—"

"I lived there for years after she died and I didn't see or hear
anything
," he said, his voice almost becoming a shout. Two men in suits passing by glanced over at them. Kevin lowered his voice. "This is ludicrous. What happens after five months? Do you really think you're gonna get a job that'll pay enough to let you keep the house?"

"Darling, your confidence in me is so touching, it's so moving."

"Be realistic. The bank probably won't let you refinance until you're making at least sixty grand, and the last time I checked you don't have a law degree or an M.B.A. You're just putting off the inevitable."

There was an undercurrent of arrogance in his words that Jacqueline found remarkable. She had never once thought of her husband as pompous, yet here he was, making it clear that they belonged to two different worlds. Kevin was a member of that rarefied class of Those Who Make Money—the lawyers, the investment bankers, the people who hired architects to remodel their kitchens. Then there was Jacqueline's class—those who had their liberal arts B.A.s and shopped at Target and were more or less one paycheck away from bankruptcy.

Jacqueline tried to keep the fury out of her voice. "What I'm asking for is not unreasonable."

"The hell it isn't." Kevin's face was becoming flushed. "Every month that house isn't on the market is yet another month I get financially strangled by it. You think that's fair? You know, I always have the option of just letting the bank take it."

"You're a son of a bitch, you know that? Do you get some sick thrill out of trying to hurt me now?"

"That's rich. Take a look in the mirror sometime, then talk to me about who's hurting who."

"I'm not trying to ruin you. Didn't you hear my proposal? You're actually getting the better part of the deal."

Kevin looked at the ceiling fluorescents, chuckling wearily. He headed back into the conference room.

"Kevin."

"Five months," he said and went back inside.

"Five months isn't a long time," Cassie Christopher said. They were at Nordstrom, shopping for blouses for Cassie.

"It's a stay of execution," Jacqueline said.

Cassie studied her. Then she turned back to the mirror, holding up a cream-colored silk Diane von Furstenberg one-shoulder number that was $178. "You're just putting off the inevitable."

Her voice was soft, almost shy, and tender. It wasn't an affectation for the benefit of her escort service's clients. Even in trig class, amid the screeching monkey-chatter of the other girls, Cassie had been the polite kitten.

"When my mom was dying," Cassie said, "my brother and I tried everything to keep her alive. Even after the cancer got into her brain. She was in a coma for two months at the end. It did her no good. It did us no good."

Jacqueline said nothing.

Cassie gazed at herself in the mirror again, head cocked to the side. "You know, it took years, but finally when I look in the mirror I think: Not bad. Not bad at all." She looked at her friend. "Kevin's right. What happens after five months? And what happens even if you're able to keep the house free and clear? Is this what you want your life to be? You alone in a house with a ghost? It's very sad. And empty."

Jacqueline looked in the mirror. "You're probably not the one to talk to me about emptiness."

"No, probably not." She considered another blouse, a crimson one. "Too much like blood."

The person who was Jacqueline LaPierre began to disintegrate in those last, humid days of July. If you wanted to be technical about it, though, the disintegration most likely didn't begin then but simply reached a critical mass at that time, like a fractured miles-long chunk of the Antarctic coast that has been so riddled with fissures over the decades that it crumbles away into the sea in a matter of minutes. If Jacqueline had to guess, the crumbling in her had begun years earlier. Perhaps the fine little stress fractures had their provenance back when she stood in the immense backyard at Kevin's grandparents' sprawling home in Bentleyville that sunny May afternoon, letting Kevin slip the ring on her finger while mosquitoes flew chaotic sorties around her veiled head. With this ring I thee dread. Because there was a dark little part of her that had felt a pang of dread, that wondered even at that superficially happy moment,
Should I be doing this?
She and Kevin had been dating off and on since her last semester of college, and she liked him well enough, and he was gentlemanly and he listened, and her mother exclaimed he was "excellent husband material," but did all that add up to love? It reminded her of when she was a freshman in college and her parents had bought her a used Chevy Caprice. They talked up the car so much (such low mileage! no rust!) that they pretty much convinced her she should love it, too, but she had never truly felt comfortable in the boxy old thing and was glad when the transmission finally gave out.

Maybe her marriage had injured her somehow and she didn't even know it. Maybe it was like cutting yourself with an exquisitely sharp blade—you don't even realize you've cut yourself until you've just about half-bled to death.

However it began, that late summer it began to end. To invoke another analogy, Jacqueline felt herself go into "safe mode," like a damaged computer trying to operate on only the most essential of programs. She only had time to survive. She felt her mind go blank for long stretches—there was no humor, no wonderment, no clever opinions left in her brain. Eat (very little), sleep, survive. That was her program now. And survival meant making money and keeping the house.

Two months ago you had less than $800. Where did you get this?

What did it matter, really? When she was on Facebook she reconnected with Becky Horowitz, a high school acquaintance who was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy because of medical bills from four years of breast cancer treatments. Becky had to take a second job as a clerk in a store that sold sex toys in order to stave off the creditors.
I'm not proud of it
, she told Jacqueline,
but in a weird way I am. Little by little I'm paying my bills, and the bastards aren't going to win
.

Eat, sleep, survive. Eat, sleep, survive. It was the philosophy of soldiers in the field.

Her mother called her. Jacqueline didn't call her back. Allison called, too—Jacqueline ignored the message, didn't even bother listening to it all the way through before she hit DELETE. Even still, the voices of the persistent, chiding Greek chorus in her life kept seeping through. Allison e-mailed her:

Are we still friends? I can't tell anymore. Why won't you return my calls? I know you're still angry about us ganging up on you but don't you realize it was BECAUSE WE ARE CONCERNED ABOUT YOU!!! I just don't understand you anymore. And what were you doing having lunch with Cassie Christopher of all people up at Legacy Village?!? You DO know what she does for a living, don't you? Does she actually call herself "an escort"? What gets me frustrated is that you sit there all friendly with her but when I stop by the table it's like you're uncomfortable to be around me. Like I'm just dogmeat. So are we even still friends, Jacqueline? I honestly can't tell.

She was even avoiding Darren, canceling dinners left and right, but finally she mustered the courage to pick up the phone one evening when she saw his work number on the phone's caller ID.

"Been a while," he said. "Everything okay?"

"Yeah. I've just been kind of drained lately. Divorce stuff."

"Enough said. I stopped by a couple nights ago and left you the confirmation letter from Michael Percival. It was sent to me. You weren't home so I just left it in the mailbox." He said it casually but Jacqueline sensed the unspoken question:
you weren't home, so where were you?

"I got it. Thank you so much. I've been looking forward to this. More than you realize. I just wish I had the eloquence to properly thank you."

"Are you really all right? Look, this is going to sound awkward, but I was worried that you might have been avoiding me because of what Kat said at lunch that day."

Jacqueline paced the living room with the cordless phone. If the phone had had a cord, it would have been entwined around her finger. Some people were fingernail-biters or foot-tappers, Jacqueline was a phone-cord-twister. "Actually," she said, "I have been thinking about that. Darren, this is a bad time in my life right now."

"I know. The last thing you need is another complication."

"And we really don't know each other that well—"

"I know. Three months is nothing. I have dairy products in the fridge older than that."

"And I just feel sort of numb in a lot of ways. It's like I'm numb to things like romance."

"Say no more."

She heard echoes of Kevin in his voice. Kevin was almost always understanding to a fault. Always eager to see her side of things and offer support, flowers, a nice dinner somewhere, a shoulder to cry on. She felt the sting of tears in her eyes. For a moment the world around her swam and became as fluid and distorted as a Picasso painting. She had wandered out onto the patio and stood before the pool. There was bird crap all over the tile.

"If you were to get involved with me," she said, "it would be a big mistake on your part. You could do much better than me."

"I know. My God, you had not one but two Kenny Loggins CDs in your collection. And don't get me started on your taste in earrings, sister."

"I'm serious. You have so much going for you. You're a catch."

"I write press releases for a living and I'm intermittently impotent. Somehow I don't think I'm in the running for
Esquire
's Man of the Year."

"Put yourself down all you want but compared to me you're a success. I've failed. I have nothing, I've lost my husband and my job, I'm living in a haunted house and I'm going to lose the house soon, and I'm going to lose my daughter once and for all. I've failed, in every way. And it's not going to get any better." Michelle's death had been the worst time of her life, a hellish time that she tried not to think about for very long—it was like staring directly into some blazing, retina-searing sun—but even back then, her naïve mind assumed that life would eventually get better. Kevin's mother loved to repeat that Bible verse,
This too shall pass
, and Jacqueline had bought into it, just as she had bought into so many things. But now she felt another sort of horror, the cold realization that perhaps unhappiness could be a permanent state of affairs.

"Kevin got the best years of my life," Jacqueline said. "Everything now is just the aftermath."