The Accident (32 page)

After introductions, Charlie invited himself to join them for a drink. Three vintage ports, elegant little tulip glasses, a plate of almond cookies, another of meticulously painted chocolates.

The woman was definitely examining Charlie closely, maybe curiously, perhaps suspiciously. It was undeniable that Charlie was charismatic, and always had been. The author felt a pang of jealousy intrude on his underlying anxiety with bouts of occasional horror; it was a messy emotional stew simmering inside him, everything but the kitchen sink.

The three of them had all gone to college in the same town, at roughly the same time; they had a lot of Finger Lakes reminiscing they could do. They all lived in Manhattan and worked in the media, so there was a productive six-degrees-of-separation interrogation. It was one of those not uncommon New York conversations, exclamations of surprise at utterly unsurprising non-coincidences, the intersections of Ivy League classmates and Hamptons neighbors, ex-colleagues and ex-girlfriends.

When the port was gone, even smaller glasses, for grappa.

And when the grappa was gone, a sudden look of recognition crossed the woman’s face, then a dark cloud. “I know!” she exclaimed, leaning away from Charlie, staring at him. “I know who you are.”

T
he author awakens again in the middle of the night, panicked again, grabbing his gun, again. And again he realizes that the problem that woke him—the thing he’s terrified of, tonight—is once again not something that’s solvable with a gun.

He collapses back onto the pillow, in a cold sweat, his mind still
flooded with dream detritus mingling with real memory, a recollection that seems impossibly fresh and incredibly old at the same time. It was just a half-year ago. But a half-year was a lifetime ago.

He remembers walking out of the hospital, a cool crisp day, fallen leaves everywhere, a foreboding chill in the wind.

“Charlie,” he said, after a ten-minute taxi back to the office, a soft rap on his boss’s door. “I’m sick.”

He’d been losing weight all autumn, fifteen pounds. He was pale and gaunt, his suits hanging off him like a kid trying on his father’s clothes in the secrecy of an empty house, the parents at work, four o’clock on a lonely bored weekday afternoon.

“Sorry to hear it, Dave. Take all the time you need.”

“No, Charlie, you don’t understand.” Dave shut the door behind him, the loud din of the big busy office instantly disappearing into a low background hum. “It’s not that I have a cold. Or shingles.”

He’d been anticipating this conversation for a long time, practicing in the mirror, trying to not sound rehearsed, to not look disingenuous. There was a lot at stake, and it wasn’t easy.

“I’m dying, Charlie.”

Charlie raised his eyebrows, a question, but not a lot of emotion. Ever since their conversation about the Finnish debacle, Dave had felt a gulf growing between them, a frostiness. Something not dissimilar to the end of his marriage.

“Stage-four cancer.”

“I’m so sorry, Dave. That’s … terrible.”

Charlie stood up, walked around his desk. He opened his arms, and they shared a brief, awkward embrace.

“How long?”

Dave shrugged. He was prepared to provide a plethora of details, but as it turned it out he didn’t need to. He looked down at his feet, and noticed that his right shoelace was almost entirely untied. But now would’ve been a bad time to fix it.

“I’m so,
so
sorry.”

And then there didn’t seem to be anything left to say.

H
e took a DC taxi to the jam-packed airport, the chaotic throng and din of the busiest travel day of the year, the airplanes and -port packed to bursting capacity, tens of thousands of people moving among one another in oblivious isolation, from check-in to fast-food to restroom to gate, where the guys with gazillions of frequent-flyer miles and two-brass-buttoned blazers swaggered up to the counter to demand upgrades or bulkhead seats or whatever preferential treatment they thought they were entitled to by virtue of being guys who spend a lot of time on airplanes.

Then flying over the gray denuded landscape, the factories along the rivers belching white plumes of noxious gas, the New Jersey Turnpike looking like a modern-day Great Wall, the green-gray marsh of the Meadowlands giving way to the brown-gray buildings of Jersey City and Hoboken and then the vast blue-gray of the Hudson River, skirting over the green-gray Statue of Liberty and flying up the length of the gray-gray island, and he could pinpoint actual buildings where he’d lived, then veering over the East River and looking off to the South Bronx, its slummy blight and the pot-holed truck-laden expressway and the gigantic cubes of warehouses, the bombed-out buildings and vacant lots littered with the torched shells of stolen cars and abandoned vans, dropping precipitously over
All in the Family
–style Queens and then the terrifyingly close serpentine spit of the mouth of the Long Island Sound, screeching onto La Guardia’s tarmac with a brief, alarming bump.

The Grand Central Parkway was choked with the glowing embers of bumper-to-bumper taillights streaming in both directions, commuters and reverse-commuters and the kids coming home from college with backpacks filled with dirty laundry, the business-attired with overnight bags calling to say I’ll be home in twenty, the low gloaming gray and
ominous layers of clouds forming color-neutral folds like a soft-focus black-and-white photograph of an unkempt bed, a light rain falling and the wipers set to the second slowest speed, squeaking, and the directional sounding
click-click, click-click
, the wipers sounding
whish-squeak, whisk-squeak
, these November noises and November shades and textures and layers of grayness, the landscape exuding cold and damp that chilled his spine.

And then stop-and-go through north Queens and the brownstony parts of Brooklyn—Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights and Prospect Heights—then deep into the thick meat of the large dense borough—as a standalone city Brooklyn would be the fourth largest in America—to the tree-lined street and the sprawling Victorian filled with people who were usually protected from one another by distance and busy-ness, by technology and excuses, all now stripped away to reveal the strains and feuds and simmering resentments, brought to the surface by chores left untended and dishes unwashed and leaves unraked and shoes unwiped and ringing phones unanswered, by poor behavior at the festively decorated table, by late arrivals and unintended slights and overt insults, by seething sotto voce and withering contempt and searing stares and sarcastic solicitousness, everything laid bare in the weak oblique light of Thanksgiving, every year, as ritual, until everyone finally pulls themselves off the sofas and out of the armchairs, away from the televisions and tannic red wine and mismatched mugs of mulled cider, when they exchange kisses and hugs and open the front door and walk gingerly down the possibly icy stairs, and then in the privacy of their nuclear unit they turn to each other and recap yet another in the seemingly endless series of final Thursdays in November.

But this one, suddenly, was his last.

CHAPTER 41

H
ayden started reading on the helicopter from New Jersey to Westhampton. Then he read in another overly large SUV, on the long tedious drive from the airfield out to the beach community. He was still reading when the car pulled to a halt within sight and smell and sound of the ocean, a hundred yards on. And now he sits in the backseat, racing through pages, before coming to a breathless stop.

He climbs out of the truck, and walks down to the beach, and stares out at the sea. Fuck. This book would be an unmitigated disaster, the end of him.

He returns to the truck, but doesn’t climb in. “Tyler,” he says through the window, “you wait here.” He checks his sidearm, and tucks it into his waistband. “Colby, you and me, let’s scout the perimeter.” He fits the earpiece into his ear, with the microphone dangling at his throat.

Hayden surveys the semi-dark country lane. The blacktop is rough, gravelly, sandy, its shoulder falling away gently into wild scrub on one side, while the other’s border is cleanly demarcated with landscaping, with shrubs and small trees, with lawn and flowerbeds, with cultivation, civilization. The two men walk on the tamed side, where the vegetation offers more cover.

There are a couple of streetlamps down here near the beach, bathing
the tiny parking lot in yellowish light, discouraging backseat sex, underage drinking, brazen pot-smoking, the other petty misdemeanors of summertime indiscretions. A sandy lane marked
PRIVATE ROAD
, parallel to the shoreline, provides access to the driveways of a handful of beachfront houses in a jumble of styles. There’s a massive shingled thing that looks newly built, and a modest white cottage with overgrown gardens, and a Victorian with dark clapboard and porches and a widow’s walk, and a stark contemporary structure, glass and concrete and steel, right angles and cantilevered planes. This is the only house with lights on.

Hayden and Colby look incongruous here on the beach, wearing long pants and shoes. But it’s dark, and no one can see. Hopefully.

They approach the big modernist box from the sand. The ground floor is half-lit, as is one room on the second floor, casting discrete envelopes of light out to the grounds, ten yards of illumination in a few vectors. A wood-plank path cuts through the low dunes to a gate, which Colby opens, and scampers around the western side of the house to a wide lawn in total darkness. Hayden goes around to the east, ducking between a couple of shrubs near the property line, a long arbor of pines. Good cover.

A curtain flutters upstairs, and Hayden can see that it’s a woman. But it’s not the woman they’re looking for; a brunette, not a blonde. They are, unsurprisingly, at the wrong house.

He leans on a branch, fragrant and sappy, weighing the viability of his other hunch, and how he should investigate it.

But then he hears a car engine on the street, and he hears Tyler say “Fuck” loudly in Hayden’s earpiece. “Local police arriving.”

Hayden’s heart sinks. “You hear that, Colby?”

“Unh.”

“What?”

“I’ve got”—he can hear heavy breathing—“no cover here. Running.”

Hayden can see the cruiser’s lights aimed down the private lane.

“Move the vehicle one street to the east, at the beach,” Hayden orders into his microphone. “We’ll meet there. Go!
Now!
”

“Police!” the shout comes from around the side of the house. “Freeze!”

“Oh fuck,” Hayden hears Colby exclaim. “Recommend action?”

“Run.” Hayden is moving through the yard of the neighboring house, the big Victorian. “Do not allow yourself to be apprehended.” He runs across another planked path. “I repeat, do not—”

That’s when Hayden hears the first shot.

C
olby’s earpiece will be the first clue. Then the fact that the man isn’t carrying any identification, or a mobile phone, or a wallet, this will all be highly suspicious. But still, these are only small-town police. What will they think?

“The next road is a half-mile,” Tyler says into Hayden’s ear, electronically. “Can you make it?”

Hayden stops running, takes a seat in the sand against a dune, removes his shoes. “I’m going to need to ditch the earpiece and mike.”

“Why?”

“Because if the police stop me I have to look like someone like me would look, out for a walk on the beach.” The possible conversation quickly unspools itself in Hayden’s imagination. “Listen,” he continues, “I need to be someone’s guest. Find me a name, and an address.”

“Okay.”

Hayden slips off his socks, tucks them into his shoes. He rolls his pants up at the cuff, nearly to the knee. He can hear Tyler’s keyboard clicking.

“Jon Sanderson. On Bluff Road.”

“That’s walking distance?”

“You’ve come about three-quarters of a mile.”

“Got it. Now I’m going silent. If you don’t see me in twenty minutes, abandon the truck, and abort.”

Hayden tugs the incriminating plastic out of his ear, the wire out of
his shirt, and buries the thousands of dollars’ worth of tech in the sand. He heads down to the water, the Atlantic lapping and foaming, his shoes dangling in his hand. Just another guy taking a solo nighttime walk, sulking about something or other. He slows his pace, feels the hard cool sand under the soles of his feet. He hasn’t been on a wide sandy beach in years. Decades, maybe.

Christ, what is he doing with his life? Isn’t
this
what he should be doing?

He could retire somewhere near a beach, and go for long lonely walks at night. Get himself a big stupid Labrador, make it fetch sticks out of the surf. Buy a new set of golf clubs—his old woods are made of actual wood—and play every day that ends in
y
, as his grandfather used to say. Hayden had once been a six-handicap; maybe he could again find some satisfaction in swatting a small ball around a big park. Other people seem to.

And maybe he could find himself a more permanent, more satisfying female companion, one who’s not married to someone else. As entertaining as it’s been, Hayden has now had more than a few lifetimes’ worth of other men’s wives; as with pocket squares and his career, another short-term temporary choice that turned out to be long-term. Married women tend to be easy, and grateful, and enthusiastic; they also have short shelf lives.

Anke’s expiration date is nearing, may be past. He met her a year ago, when she took the adjoining plot of land—a meter wide, fifty meters long—at the communal garden he’d joined years ago out in suburban Wessling, a half-hour on the S-Bahn from his apartment. At first he’d been motivated by the idea of growing his own produce; he was carrying an extra ten kilos, and thought that eating his own green beans and such would help take off the weight. It did.

And then Anke showed up, trying to tackle impossible delicacies like tomatoes and strawberries instead of the hard-to-kill crops—potatoes, cabbages, carrots, cauliflower—in which Hayden and other
practical-minded Northern European farmers specialized. They went out for a drink around the corner from his flat. Anke had two, then invited herself up; she’s not shy.