The Realm of Last Chances (31 page)

“It was clear Garza knew who he was. For one thing, there couldn’t be that many six-and-half-foot teenagers walking around Bakersfield at any given time, and anyway Cal had his father’s features. So his girlfriend’s father looked at him for a moment, then called him a motherfucker and told him that if he ever found out he’d so much as gotten near his daughter again, he’d kill him and piss on his corpse.

“Cal said something happened inside him then. He began to think in a completely rational manner about doing irrational things. The first was to take a couple steps toward the other man. It was late afternoon and the sun was behind him, and he wanted Garza to become aware of the shadow he cast on his face. He said that was the strangest thing when he thought back on it—that he was aware he was casting a shadow. He let Garza feel it for a few seconds, then told him that if he ever laid a hand on his daughter again, he would kill him. And just to make the experience a little more humiliating, he said that after killing him he’d call his father and tell him he needed help disposing of his remains, because his dad was great when it came to getting rid of a nuisance.”

Beside her, Dave shifted and took a big swallow of whiskey. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I don’t know if I want to hear the rest of this.”

“You probably don’t. But I’m afraid you have no choice.”

At first, Cal had told her, Garza didn’t react. His face got a little darker, maybe, but he didn’t say anything and didn’t do anything, so Cal thought the encounter was over. He was already starting to despise himself for what he’d said, but at the same time he was sorry that nothing more was going to happen. He’d never had a girlfriend before, and he was really in love with Jacinta, and now here was this guy who’d hit his
wife and broken his daughter’s nose telling him he didn’t have the right to see her. They stood there looking at each other for a moment, and then Cal shrugged and turned to climb away, and that was when Garza made his move.

Cal’s knees buckled, and he pitched onto the creek bank. It was quite a kick, given the man’s size. He rolled over just as his girlfriend’s father brought his arm forward. Garza had found a stone as big as a shot put and intended to crush his skull. He took the blow on his left forearm. Within seconds he’d gotten out from under the other man, turned him onto his back and straddled him.

He hadn’t played sports, wasn’t particularly athletic and had never been in a fight. But it seemed to come naturally. To get started, he slapped Garza a few times. Slapping another man’s face, he’d heard his father say, was worse than hitting him with your fists. Garza cursed him, calling him names in Spanish, some of which Cal knew and others he didn’t. He began to pound away at him then, knocking a few teeth out, breaking his nose, busting his own knuckles. He didn’t know how long the beating lasted, but he kept it up long after Garza had quit cussing. It was only when he saw the pink Pepto-Bismol-like froth coating his lips that he decided it was time to stop.

He lifted his girlfriend’s father to his feet, whirled him around and threw him on the ground. He intended that to be his final statement—to show he could toss him aside like a piece of garbage—but Garza must have landed on a bottle or a jar, because he heard a crunching sound. When he turned him over, there was a gash in his forehead and glass shards embedded near his right eye.

The lesson to be learned from what had happened—as his father told him later on, after Cal declined to ask what it might be—was simple: if you mean to administer a beating, take care when choosing your spot.

He hadn’t taken care because he didn’t plan on beating the
guy up. But he had anyway, and in the aftermath he realized that his position was almost as bad as Garza’s: he couldn’t leave him there. He had to get him away from the creek bed for fear that if his wounds weren’t treated he might die or go blind.

He’d borrowed his mom’s Mercedes, and it was parked at the truck stop. He could think of only one thing to do, so he hoisted the man’s body over his shoulder, Garza groaning once or twice as he stumbled across the parched ground. Fortunately, the Mercedes was in a corner of the lot, where a semi blocked it from view, and he deposited his load into the backseat.

The closest hospital was about four miles away. Originally founded by nuns in the twenties, it had recently moved north and was one of the reasons his father started building in that direction. People want to live close to medical care, he said. What Cal didn’t know was that about two years ago his father had wangled an appointment to the board of trustees. That accrued to Cal’s good fortune on a day when not much else had.

“He pulls up to the emergency entrance and there’s a wheelchair just sitting by the door, so he runs over, grabs it and rolls it back to the car. Garza’s still lying there, his face and torso covered in blood. Cal pulls him upright and shoves him into the chair. He rolls him inside and leaves him by the admissions window, then turns and starts to leave. ‘Hey,’ he hears someone holler, ‘wait a minute,’ but he’s already out the door. He jumps into his mother’s car, and as he peels away he looks in the rearview mirror and sees an orderly and a security guard run out of the emergency entrance. The orderly’s mouth is moving, and the guard’s writing something on a pad, so he knows they’ve got the number off the license plate.”

She paused. During his days on the force, her husband almost never told her what had happened on his shift unless she asked, and even then she suspected she got an edited version. In thirty-five years he’d been involved in a handful of gun battles, and in one of them an officer was shot, but he didn’t
mention it until after she saw it on WBZ. “The reason I’m telling you all of this,” she said, “is so you won’t be taken by surprise if he tells you himself. The thing is, he considers you his friend. And if ever a man needed friends, this one does.”

Dave sighed and shook his head. “So what happened next?” he asked. “I hope you’re not going to tell me his old man had this Garza bumped off?”

“No, he didn’t have him killed. He bought him.” She explained that because Cal was scared and couldn’t see any way around it, he went home and told his father what he’d done. His dad sat there for a minute, stone-faced, and Cal thought he was going to jump up and hit him or tell him to get out of his house and never come back. But instead he burst out laughing and slapped his knee and, for the first and only time in all their years together, enveloped his son in a bear hug. “ ‘Well, at least I know your mother’s not a whore,’ he said. ‘For eighteen years I’ve wondered if it was really possible you sprang from my loins. Now I’ve got my answer.’ He started making phone calls, and within a few days the whole thing was settled. Garza lost his sight in that eye and had blurred vision in the other for a long time—maybe forever, as far as Cal knows—but his hospital bills were covered, nobody filed a police report, and Jacinta’s family got a new house in a better subdivision.”

“What happened between him and the girl?”

“That was part of the arrangement. He had to promise not to see her again, but she didn’t want anything to do with him anyway. She wrote him a letter telling him she would hate him as long as she lived, that as bad a man as his father might be, he was even worse.”

“He told you all this?” Dave said. “That’s amazing. I knew he was keeping some secrets, but I put him down as the kind of guy who’d take ’em with him to the grave.”

They heard a rumbling noise when the furnace started up,
and through the window they saw lights flash back on in the house across the street.

Gloria was disappointed. She would’ve preferred the night remain dark. “He told me,” she said, “because I asked him what was wrong. Apparently, nobody else ever cared enough to inquire.”

kristin hadn’t left work
until six fifteen, by which time there were just a few flurries. The roads were mostly clear or at least passable, and the bus deposited her in Andover only a few minutes behind schedule. Still, she missed her train and had to sit on the platform and wait for the next one. Around seven thirty, the LED sign informed her that the seven thirty-five would be delayed half an hour. At eight o’clock, it said it would arrive in ten minutes, and at eight ten it said it would arrive at eight thirty-five.

She hadn’t heard from Cal, so who knew what he thought she was up to. Once or twice she started to call and explain, but other, more serious explanations might need to be offered later, and she decided it was best to get through all of that at once and then see what remained of their marriage. To her surprise, she didn’t hear from Matt either. She’d sent him a text around four that afternoon, but he didn’t write back.

Sitting alone on the platform, hugging the down coat to her body, she recalled how her mother looked when she went home for Thanksgiving the year she met Phil. Her mother was often in her bathrobe and, in Kristin’s recollections, even when she was talking on the phone to one friend or another, the hand that wasn’t holding the receiver always seemed to be pulling the robe tightly to her body, as if she were freezing, though the house Kristin grew up in stayed warm no matter how cold it got outside. This was the period when her mother was reaching the decision to let it all go, to forgive both her father for his betrayal and Sarah Connulty for her part in it. In their last years, after Kristin’s father died, the two women once again became inseparable. When her mother called to tell
her she’d found Mrs. Connulty facedown in the snow, Kristin attempted to soothe her by remarking that it was wonderful they’d repaired their friendship. To which her mother replied, “That wasn’t ever really in question.” Only then did Kristin understand that her mother had to forgive her father in order to forgive her friend, for whom she must have felt a deeper, more satisfying love than she ever had for him.

By the time the train finally pulled in, it was eight forty-three. Nobody else was waiting. The other would-be passengers, a woman in her early thirties and an ill-shaven guy wearing a Bruins cap, had already given up. She called somebody to come get her, and he finally walked off into the night.

On the short ride to Cedar Park, she worried about making it up the hill into Montvale. Articles in both local papers had questioned whether enough money had been allocated for snow removal, pointing out that the
Farmers’ Almanac
was predicting an especially tough winter. And according to the
Globe
, the
Almanac
almost never got it wrong. She hoped she, too, wouldn’t end up half buried in white powder.

When the train reached her stop, the parking lot was almost empty, and the few cars that remained were scarcely identifiable. They looked like giant snowdrifts. Over in the corner nearest the street, one vehicle waited with its lights on, smoke billowing from its exhaust pipe. It had backed into the spot, so she couldn’t tell what make or model it was but hoped that perhaps Matt was waiting for her in his rental, despite her request that he steer clear of her for at least a few days. Then she wouldn’t have to walk home. And maybe, if only for a moment, they could embrace. She’d gotten scared after her meeting with Joanne Bedard and Norm Vance. By refusing to talk to Dilson-Alvarez, she’d been negligent, letting feelings and personalities influence her decision. In her job that was the cardinal sin. And if it made her feel more fully human, it also left her wondering if she hadn’t just handed the provost
a blank pink slip on which she could write the name Kristin Stevens.

As she neared the street and saw the familiar circle and arrow on the grille of the car belching smoke, she realized it was her own Volvo. Cal opened the door and climbed out. He was wearing a heavy flannel shirt, one with lots of padding sewn into the lining. Above his forehead, as though purposely aligned with his nose, was a ridiculous-looking streak of cream-colored paint. She didn’t know it yet, but he’d spent the better part of the day painting the living room and priming the walls in the dining room and den. By the weekend the house would look like new. It would no longer seem like a set of walls they’d tried to fit themselves into because they had nowhere else to go.

“Hi,” he said in the same bashful tone she’d first heard at the crossroads grocery, “could I interest you in a lift?”

There in the parking lot at the Cedar Park station, on a night when an early season storm dumped between eighteen and twenty-eight inches of heavy, wet snow over New England, at the beginning of a long hard winter that would throw every municipality in eastern Massachusetts even further into the red, her affair with Matt Drinnan came to an end. It would be a couple days before she knew it, and a couple more before she said it, and on a Saturday night in February, when Cal and Dave went to Framingham for an annual bluegrass festival honoring some long-dead friend of Dave’s, she and Matt would meet for dinner, and afterward he’d suggest they visit Penny Hill Park one last time. Saying no would almost kill her. She knew that when she returned home and went into the bathroom to wash off her makeup, she’d see the face of a woman for whom life held no more surprises.

“A lift,” she told her husband in front of the idling Volvo, “is exactly what I could use.” He’d driven a car into a pond for her. If need be, he’d drive one off a cliff.

on the final day of exams,
after most students had already left for the break, Donna stepped into Kristin’s office and placed a Christmas tin on her desk. “It’s just some homemade fudge,” she said. “But I think it’s pretty good. Charlie says so, anyway.”

“Thank you. I should’ve brought you something, but I forgot. You’ll have to forgive me.”

Rather than leave, her assistant asked, “Mind if I sit down?”

She did mind, but she said of course not and gestured at a chair. Donna knew she had a meeting with the provost in half an hour, and she also knew Kristin was concerned. The university’s general counsel would be there; the presence of a lawyer meant someone was in trouble, and Kristin couldn’t rule out the possibility that in this case it might be her. For the first time since becoming an administrator, she’d behaved unprofessionally. She should have interviewed Dilson-Alvarez. He was a liar, certainly, but deserved the chance to lie to her.