The Realm of Last Chances (11 page)

“Sometimes,” she said, pulling a key from her pocket and unlocking the door. He wiped his boots on the mat, laid down the umbrella and followed her inside.

He’d been in the house before but not for more than thirty years. When he was young, he and Frankie had a friend, Kyle, who lived here with his brother, sister and their parents. The father was a cop, in Malden, if memory served, and his wife worked for a government agency in Boston, either the Registry or the MBTA, something to do with transportation. One Saturday night they went to dinner; it was a special occasion, an anniversary, so the kids stayed home alone. His and Frankie’s friend was the oldest, ten or eleven, and Matt remembered Kyle’s mother coming over and telling his mom that she’d instructed the kids to call her if anything went wrong.

This was in winter, snow everywhere, big icicles hanging off the roofs. Though he couldn’t say for sure anymore, it might have been right after the blizzard of ’78. He recalled that just a day or two earlier, he and his parents had been jolted awake in the middle of the night by a popping noise that sounded like a shotgun blast and seemed to have come from the house next
door. While Matt and his mother waited at the top of the stairs, his father grabbed a flashlight and stepped outside. Moments later, he returned grinning. “Remember how mad I got,” he asked, “when Steve Aaron switched to Vermont Mutual? Well, I don’t hold it against him now. The snow just caved in the roof of his Coronet.”

The night Kyle’s parents went out, the first indication they had that anything was wrong came when they heard his sister beating on their front door and screaming. Her little brother had gotten into a closet on the second floor, where their father kept his service weapon, and while playing with it he’d shot Kyle in the chest. Terry Drinnan ran down the street. When he came back, an hour or so later, he had blood all over his clothes. The next morning you could see a trail of it leading from the steps of Kyle’s house across the snowy yard to the street. An ambulance had carried him to the Cedar Park hospital, though he was probably already dead.

The family moved away within six months, and since then the house had been sold three times. Kristin wouldn’t know any of this history, because in Massachusetts, unlike some states, sellers don’t have to inform potential buyers that a violent death has occurred on the property. And Matt wasn’t about to tell her.

He trailed her down the hallway, glancing into the living room where he and Frankie and Kyle used to lie on the floor watching
Sanford and Son
or
Happy Days
. Back then it had a carpet on it, so it was easy to roll around and wrestle if you wanted to, but now the boards were exposed. They looked great, which surprised him, since the previous occupants hadn’t seemed like the kind of people who cared much about appearances. The guy drove a panel truck and sometimes came home with his shirtfront unbuttoned, the woman favored baggy skirts that concealed a lumpy figure, and the kids—four boys—left their stuff all over the yard. Last winter one of their bikes got buried
in the snow, a single handgrip poking out of a drift for three or four weeks.

“Did your husband redo the floors?” he asked as they moved into what used to be the dining room but was now lined with bookcases and CD cabinets.

“Yes, but only on the first floor. He just finished yesterday—and now the house is filling up with water.” She opened the door to the basement. “Watch your head.”

The light was on, but descending the narrow staircase made him nervous. Kyle used to keep a ball python down there in a fifty-five-gallon aquarium, and nobody—not even Frankie, who loved spiders and lizards and all kinds of creepy things—had much interest in going down to see it.

The water was lapping at the bottom step, and a Narragansett can bobbed by. “Is there a sump pump?” he asked.

“I remember Cal saying something about one, but I don’t know where it is. I’ve only been down here two or three times.”

She was somewhere behind him on the stairs. He caught a whiff of fragrance, faint but pleasant. “Can you call him?”

“I tried. His phone went straight to voice mail, and he hasn’t called back. I think maybe the concert already started.”

Having no other choice, he stepped into the flood. Against the far wall stood a long workbench, with all kinds of tools stacked on it: power drills, sanders, circular saws, things he could name but not use. Beyond it was an opening into a second room, where the sound of falling water seemed to be coming from. He waded over and, stooping to keep from cracking his head, got inside and played his flashlight around until he fixed it on one of the side walls. A couple feet above the concrete floor, there was a hole about the size of a silver dollar, and water was spewing through it. “Found your problem,” he called. “One of them, anyway. There’s a small hole in the wall, and my guess is a storm drain’s right on top of it.”

“Are there more problems?”

Rather than answer, he sloshed across the flooded chamber. He could see a hose like one on a vacuum cleaner coming up from the floor and disappearing through a hatch. That had to be the outflow from the sump pump. In seconds he followed the power cord over to the outlet, where it had gotten dislodged. His boots were made of rubber, so he applied a little pressure to the plug, and the pump kicked on. Immediately he heard water surging through the hose.

“Found your second problem,” he hollered. “Sump pump was unplugged. It’s working now, and it ought to empty this place out over the next few hours. You’ll need to tell your husband about this hole, though.”

“Is there a third problem?”

“I don’t know yet.” He moved toward the water heater carefully, doing his best not to make waves. Fortunately, it stood on a cinder-block platform. The insulation at the bottom of the tank was dry. Stooping, he slipped through a second passageway and saw that the furnace was also on a raised platform, and its bottom was dry, too.

Just ahead, on the stairway, where she’d remained standing, her legs protruded from her skirt. Seeing them like that—pale but shapely and separate from the person they belonged to—sent a shock wave through his groin. For a good while now, his sex life had consisted of several pitiful thrusts into his own hand late at night as he imagined his ex-wife beneath him, all that thick hair spread out on a pillow. While making love, Carla always kept her eyes open to observe the visual effect of her whispered obscenities, words she used nowhere except in bed. Now, he supposed, she was using them on Nowicki.

When he reached the foot of the stairs, Kristin said, “I should thank you.”

He’d gone out in a hurricane and slogged around in a flooded basement where a five-foot-long ball python used to live, and now she was telling him that she
ought
to say thank
you, which indicated that for whatever reason she didn’t plan to? “Yes,” he said, “you really should. That’s exactly what you should do.”

She stood there looking down on him, making no effort to move, leaving him no choice but to remain right where he was, since the stairs were too narrow to climb past her. She’d put her hands together, the left one clutching the right and squeezing it rhythmically. “That book?” she said. “The one you loaned me?”

“Embers?”

“Yes.”

“What about it?”

“I read it.”

“Well, that’s what people usually do with books, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not. They’re much more likely to use them for doorstops. But I didn’t—though I wish I had.”

Not being an aquatic creature, he didn’t intend to remain in the water one second longer and mounted the bottom step. He assumed she’d turn to climb up the stairs and he’d follow, and when they got to the top she’d bring him an old towel so he could dry his boots to keep from trekking water all over her nice floors. Maybe she’d offer him a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, but he’d decline. And then he’d go back home, turn on the TV and see where the eye of the hurricane was. Sooner or later the storm would blow itself out. They all do.

To his surprise, she didn’t move, just continued to stand there, and when the moment grew too long for her, as it had for him, she laid a hand on his shoulder. “Would you hold me?” she said, though there really was no need to ask.

in california
, Cal had kept his distance from the neighbors. He knew the names of only two: Ann and Alex Neal, mortgage bankers in their sixties who lived right next door, on the other side of a redwood fence that he took it upon himself to maintain, replacing rotten boards and bearing all the costs. Because the Neals kept insisting they come over for a drink and get acquainted, Kristin finally prevailed on him to accompany her one Sunday afternoon a year or so after they moved in. The two couples sat together in the living room, which displayed all the worst traits of seventies interior design: green shag carpet, plaid wallpaper, a monstrous chandelier with transparent glass drops.

Alex, it turned out, held strong views about “Mexicans,” a category that for him included everyone whose native language was Spanish, no matter their country of origin. “The ones I hire to do my yard?” he said. “Only the head honcho speaks a word of English, and he can’t understand half of what you tell him. He’ll just stand there shuffling his feet and saying
Sí, sí
. Problem is, he doesn’t see. Last January I dragged my Christmas tree outside, intending to pull it out of the stand. But the phone rang, so I ran in to answer it and got embroiled in a long conversation with a golfing buddy, and in the meantime they showed up and lugged the whole thing off, stand and all. There’s just something missing in the Mexican mind.” By rights, he maintained, they’d rebuild Manzanar, where they’d penned up “the Nips” during World War II, and incarcerate all “the wetbacks” there prior to deportation. Ann reached over, tousled his thick silver hair and urged her new neighbors not to think too badly of him. “He’s been a fine husband and father,”
she said. “He doesn’t have a lot of ideas, but almost every one he
does
have is wrong.”

To withstand the ordeal, Cal had three or four drinks. When they got back home, he poured himself another. Kristin watched him from the sofa, sipping wine while he strode around the living room with his free hand slashing air. “I’ll never set foot in their house again,” he seethed, “so don’t you try to make me. Who in his right mind would choose to waste the better part of an afternoon with assholes like that? There are better ways to kill time. You could listen to the Grateful Dead. You could oil the door hinges or take a fucking nap.”

As far as Kristin knew, he never spoke to Alex again, though she sometimes saw him talking to Ann near the mailbox. But when their neighbor was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and drugged senseless, Cal went to the hospice in Sacramento every day for a week to sit at his bedside. Ann told Kristin she walked in one time and found him holding her husband’s hand.

Now, here he was on the far side of the continent and once again thinking of fences. He’d spent the last few minutes hoisting sacks of sand, gravel and cement onto his shoulder and carrying them from the truck to the yard, where he propped them against a stack of rails and posts, and he had his garden hose hooked up and had grabbed the posthole digger when the guy who lived next door stuck his head over the rickety, knee-high fence that would soon be replaced. “Hey,” he said, “looks like you’re getting ready to build something.”

Cal sighed. Later, thinking back on it, he guessed maybe he rolled his eyes. He’d been dreading the day when this guy would try to engage him. He was probably about sixty-five, maybe a little older, a short, tanned man who wore glasses and had a carefully trimmed mustache. He drove a small white BMW SUV that looked like it had become what it was against its better judgment, but he rarely left home. His house had
plenty of windows and, since he never closed the shutters, Cal couldn’t help but notice that there were enormous flat-screen TVs in at least three rooms. Sometimes all of them would be going simultaneously—the Red Sox on one, the Patriots on another, Sean Hannity on the third. He kept the volume so loud that you could often even hear them over the noise made by his window units, which still droned day and night, though it wasn’t hot anymore.

“Yeah,” Cal said, “I’m getting ready to fence off the rest of our yard. We’ve got a dog who’s tired of being cooped up inside.”

The neighbor stuck his hand out. “Vincenzo,” he said. “But my friends, which I hope you’re gonna join the ranks of, call me Vico.”

Cal laid down the posthole digger, walked over to the fence and shook his hand. Up close like that, he could see something white protruding from the man’s ear. At first he thought it was cotton, then realized it was a hearing aid. “My name’s Cal,” he said loudly.

“Cal. That’s perfect. I noticed you came here from California.”

“Yeah, we did. But Cal’s not for California. It’s short for Calvin.”

“Like the guy that started the Methodist Church?”

“I believe that was someone named Wesley.”

“I’m Catholic. What do I know?” Vico spread his arms wide, palms out, as if to acknowledge his ignorance. “You like football?”

“Not really.”

“Baseball?”

“Not especially.”

“Food and wine?”

He could see where this was going. “Yeah. If they’re good.”

“Well, over at my house, if I do say so, they will be. I’ve been
divorced for thirty years and cooked for myself every single day. I probably would’ve made a better wife than husband, except I’m one hundred percent heterosexual. Or I was, anyhow, back when I had the necessary tools.” He pointed at the BMW in the driveway. “In there, I’ve got two cases of Barbera. Among some, it’s got a bad name. But I buy good stuff. There’s this little group of guys that get together every week or two, usually at my place, to watch a game and eat and drink. They’re coming tomorrow evening. Sox versus Yankees. I’ll make a big pot of pasta. We’d love to have you join us. We could use some new blood. Any day now, one of us could bite the dust. It happens.”

Cal tried to think of a good excuse but couldn’t come up with one. “Well,” he said, “the truth is, I’m not real sociable.”