Goodnight Blackbird (25 page)

"I
t's a 14-carat white gold 5/8-carat princess-cut diamond solitaire," the woman behind the counter said. "Definitely one of the more elite pieces we have."

She probably would have said the same thing about a $14.99 cubic zirconium set on a twisted paperclip; she was, after all, a saleswoman. But the price was unquestionably elite, and in the realm of jewelry, price was Darren's lone, clumsy criterion for quality. He slid his Visa card across the counter. While the woman totaled him up, Darren watched the young couple at the other end of the counter. The boy had a lot of acne and the slouch of a kid just barely out of high school. The girl was a brunette who looked all of sixteen. She gushed over the rings spread out before her. This one—no,
this
one. Oh, this is
gorgeous
.

Darren watched the face of the girl. She seemed to bubble up with joy, as if she knew she was smack dab in the middle of the prime of her life, the best time, the golden time against which all other moments of her life would be judged.

Darren stepped out of the store and into a heavy midday fog. The mist blanketed the stores and the winding asphalt ribbon of Route 91. A few moments later the girl and the boy came out. The girl was telling the boy he absolutely had to learn how to dance for the wedding. "It's, like, so important. Everyone's gonna be watching us, and I don't want to see you just shuffling your feet."

"I don't need lessons."

"Yes you do. I'm serious. The day should be perfect. I want a perfect memory of my wedding. That's all our lives are—a string of memories. That's all we have in the end."

The boy's hand crept down over the girl's behind. "Even if the day isn't perfect, you can bet the night will be."

She elbowed him in the ribs and called him a pig. But she was laughing.

The girl and the boy faded into the parking lot mist.

I don't ever have to go there again, Darren thought, mingling with some of his parents' friends, shaking their hands. His parents had invited him and Jacqueline over for dinner—a dinner which turned out to be a small surprise engagement party. Julia was there too. Sam and the kids were not.

He didn't ever have to set foot in 1661 Shadeland again. He could send Khabir over from time to time to pick up clothes or empty the refrigerator, and when it came time to decamp to Portland, he could just pay the movers to pack up whatever wasn't nailed down. There wasn't much furniture.

The downside was that the Steinbachs would be furious and might refuse to take the house off his hands. But then they would be in the moral hot seat. Would they too wash his hands of Rachel and leave her marooned in the house? Probably not. He hoped not. Larry was his best shot to get rid of the place. Only a handful of people had even looked at the house. Miriam said there was just no money out there. The Shipley house, which was two doors down from Darren's place, was still languishing on the market after sixteen months. It even had a new roof and new appliances.

After sixteen months of renting a place in Portland and continuing to pay the note on 1661 Shadeland, Darren would be digging under the couch cushions for grocery money.

But, Christ, the recession was easing. Yesterday the paper said existing home sales were starting to come back from the dead. Even if the Steinbachs were out of the picture Darren was sure he'd still have an offer by spring. Maybe sooner.

He could walk away and never set foot in there again.

"How come I'm always the last to know?" Julia said for the third time. "Mom and Dad call me three days ago and tell me you're engaged. Thanks for keeping me in the loop."

"Spare me the indignation," Darren said. "You and Sam eloped. All we ever got was a phone call the day after the ceremony."

Julia scrutinized Jacqueline's hands as Jacqueline selected some cold cuts from the sideboard. "No ring? Darren, what's wrong with you?"

"Actually, I did the proposing," Jacqueline said. "So I guess technically it's my job to produce a ring. But I think we're at that age when stuff like that really doesn't matter."

Julia gaped at her "The ring always matters."

"It's the world's smallest handcuff," Darren said.

"And you have the world's smallest brain," Julia said, flouncing off.

Jacqueline grinned. "We're like two aliens to her. To the rest of the world, probably."

"She is right, though. About the ring."

"No, she's not. Try this corned beef. I've never much liked corned beef but this is fabulous—"

"Sometimes I've fantasized about the perfect place to pop the question. Maybe a picturesque hill in Tuscany, or in front of the Eiffel Tower. With Annika, I guess I picked a pretty lame spot. We were walking in her favorite park, tromping through the leaves. It was early fall. It was nice. But definitely no Tuscany."

"Darren, if two people truly love each other, even a booth in a Burger King can be the most romantic spot on earth."

"Still, I imagined doing this in a more impressive place than my parents' dining room, but I'm a little short on cash." He deftly slipped the ring onto her finger. "The ring is important."

Jacqueline stared, her mouth full of corned beef.

"Come on. Looks like my dad is opening the champagne."

At the table, his dad's old colleague Steve Wittenberg lamented the fact that his grandson, who worked part-time at a Mr. Hero fast food joint, wanted to take a year off after high school to "find himself."

"At the end of the year he'll find himself between the Romanburger and the cheesesteak," Lou Ciccone said, passing out the champagne flutes.

"'Finding yourself' is usually code for 'I want to sit on my butt and watch TV for a year,'" Darren's mother said. "People never find themselves."

"Sometimes they do," Jacqueline said quietly.

The discussion shifted to Darren's haunted house (this despite the stern look Darren directed at his parents) and then, naturally, to horror movies. His parents' friends, all of them intellectuals who could quote Ibsen in their sleep, were of the opinion that virtually all horror movies were artistic failures because of the cartoon simplicity of the characters—the slutty, arrogant prom queen who gets it in the second reel; the plucky, quiet heroine; the faceless, remorseless axe murderer, a one-man killing machine.

"For once, for
once
," Darren's father said, "I'd like to see Hollywood try to make me care about the monster. Make me see the long string of abuses and bad luck that can take an ordinary little boy and turn him into a homicidal disaster. Make me weep for that boy."

"That's not a horror movie, Dad," Julia said. "That's just life."

I don't have to go back, he thought, but of course he knew he would.

For one thing, the graffiti all over the living room had to be cleaned up in the next couple days. Miriam was planning to have an open house on Sunday.

In the early morning hours of Saturday, Darren got out of bed and hunted around for his tennis shoes. He tried to be quiet, but Jacqueline sat up in bed, her eyes glimmering in the darkness.

"Can't sleep," he said. "I'm gonna go over and take care of that graffiti. I'll be back in a couple hours."

"Are you sure about this?"

He held a shoe in his hand. "Not really, no."

"I had a dream," she said. "You left and never came back."

"I'm coming back."

Jacqueline looked at him. He tied his shoes.

"What are you going to say to her?" Jacqueline asked.

Darren sat on the end of the bed. "Goodbye, I guess. What else can I say?"

In the darkness, her hand found his and their fingers intertwined. They sat like that for a few moments. It was 3:17 a.m.

Twenty minutes later, he was in the basement of 1661 Shadeland, filling a bucket full of hot water and liquid soap.

He flipped on the living room lights, then he got the stepladder out of the garage.

The house was quiet. Darren worked on the walls first. At first the graffiti just smeared alarmingly across the drywall but it came off with a little elbow grease. What had she used? Some grease pencil that had lain forgotten in the back of a drawer? Maybe something from the great OfficeMax in the sky?

On the stepladder, he scrubbed and scrubbed until his arm ached and the sponge was as grey as cigarette ash. The house creaked once, loudly, and Darren froze, his heart doing a passable imitation of a snare drum roll in his chest. But it was only the house settling. The ladder wasn't kicked out from under him; the light fixture didn't come down on his head.

He washed his hands. He put the ladder back in the garage. Then he sat on the couch and looked at his damp, prune-wrinkled fingers, which reminded him of the one summer during his high school years when he worked at a car wash. Four-twenty-five an hour. He wondered what kind of jobs Rachel McAvoy had had in high school. Probably the usual—working retail, waiting tables. As crappy as those jobs were—and Darren had worked his share—he remembered a satisfying feeling of forward progress at the end of a long shift. A few more dollars to sock away for college, for textbooks, for a car. Every dollar a humble down payment on a dream.

What had been Rachel's dream?

Of course she would have gone to college—she was too bright not to. A state school, probably. The McAvoys weren't rich. But maybe Rachel would have been able to wrangle a scholarship to somewhere prestigious. Darren was sure she had loved her parents, but a little breathing room between her and their imploding marriage would have been very much in order. For some reason Darren pictured her walking across the sun-splashed quad of Brown, one of those heavy Norton anthologies under her arm. She would have been an English major, and he was reasonably certain her name would come up with some frequency in the faculty lounge after class.

My love for you is fierce...

You have to see what one of my students is writing,
he imagined one of her professors telling a fellow teacher in the hall one afternoon.
Christ, she's halfway to a Guggenheim already.

Well, not so fast. Maybe no Guggenheim, maybe no book deal at twenty-one. Darren imagined her working jobs similar to his—tech writing, corporate communications—while penning short stories and poems in her spare time. After a couple years she would start to place a few of these in literary journals—the ones that pay in copies. He imagined her dancing around her apartment with her first acceptance letter in her hand, feeling that incomparable joy and sense of validation.
I'm on my way, I'm on my way
.

He pictured her on the phone, calling her boyfriend to come over and celebrate. Darren felt a dark pang of jealousy with the appearance of this theoretical boyfriend, but of course there would be one. Rachel had been a shy girl but also a pretty one. There would be a few guys who'd come up to her after class or after work to make small talk. She would keep the jocks and the frat boys at arm's length, but Darren had no trouble imagining her falling for some nerdy-cute guy who quoted Woody Allen movies and maybe had literary aspirations himself.

(The boy would be funny and self-deprecating. He would be head over heels in love with her long before she even knew he existed. They would be friends for years before things got serious. For some reason Darren imagined their first kiss happening on the first snow of the year. The occasion would inspire them both to write poems about it, but neither would show the other these poems—both would be disappointed at how inadequate their words had been at capturing the fragile heart of the moment.)

Rachel and Boyfriend would toast the publication of her poem or short story with grocery store wine, and the boyfriend would buy fifty copies of the magazine for her. He would have the page with her byline framed as a Christmas present. That wouldn't be her only present from him, though. Darren imagined them back in her crummy little studio apartment late Christmas night, watching the twinkling lights on their tiny too-cute-for-words Charlie Brown tree. Rachel is drowsing on the couch in her pajamas, a mug of eggnog on the coffee table in front of her. The Boyfriend, who maybe has had a drop too much to drink, is shirtless and has made a laurel out of the bows from the unwrapped gifts and is now wearing said laurel like some Greek statue—an image that will undoubtedly show up in the e-mail inboxes of all their mutual friends and relatives in the coming days.
I forgot this other little thing
, he says, nonchalantly handing her the sloppily wrapped little box.

What is it?
she asks, yawning.
Not another one of those kitschy ornaments with the dancing reindeer. My mom has sent me, like, six of them.

No,
he says,
not another one.

The ring will be simple but beautiful. It will have cost the boy three months' pay. But the look on Rachel's face will have been worth it.

Oh my God
, she will repeat.
Oh my God. Do you mean—is this really—
The precocious wordsmith will now be reduced to sentence fragments.

I want you to be my wife
. The Boyfriend gets down on bended knee.
What do you say?

She weeps and hugs him, babbling.

Is that a yes?
he asks.

Yes!

She will want to stay clutching him all night, hugging him as if he is the last floating spar in a dark ocean, the only thing keeping her from drowning. But he will grasp her right hand in his left and haul her to her feet. He will place his right hand firmly on her side.

Come on,
he says.
You took all those ballroom dancing classes. Show me how we're gonna cut a rug at the reception. I need all the practice I can get.

Rachel laughs, with tears in her eyes, and she thinks,
Tonight my life begins
, and she leads as they circle the tiny living room through drifts of torn wrapping paper. Suddenly her crummy day job and cramped apartment don't seem so oppressive anymore. Suddenly it feels as if she could be a noblewoman dancing on the marble floor of a European palace on some festival night.