8
“Isn’t it a little warm for a fire?”
“Maybe now . . . but when the sun goes down later, it’s going to get chilly.”
Liz immediately noticed a couple of things. First, he was sober. Second, he had not looked at her, his full attention riveted on the proper placement of wood for maximum heat and flame. Liz jumped to a premature conclusion: this guy was a weirdo, probably former Boy Scout, perhaps gay.
Then he stood up, brushed off his hands, and extended one to her with a smile. “Hello, I’m David Perry.”
Five years later as she watched him sleeping beside her, she could still remember the feeling, the sensation of knowing, the fluttering of her heart, the pop and sizzle of the fire, the smell of burning pine. As corny and sentimental as it always seemed whenever she tried to explain it to her friends, Liz Rigsby knew she was going to marry Fire Man. Sometimes she would lay awake at night and wonder what would have happened had she decided to ditch the party. UVA was a big place and they had no classes together, Liz always shuddered up in the English department and David all the way across campus with the business majors. It was entirely possible, probably a sure thing that they would never have met otherwise. But for reasons that she couldn’t now recall, she had given in to the pleadings of her friends, deciding to tag along, have a drink, chit-chat for a while, then call a cab since her friends would all be wasted by the time she was ready to leave. Suppose she hadn’t ventured back to the kitchen and seen the fire through the window? How immeasurably more difficult would her life now be without this beautiful man?
The vagaries of fate troubled Liz Rigsby. Especially now, when sleep wouldn’t come. She’d had two glasses of wine at dinner, lingered around the table outside on the patio after a lovely dinner that David had made on his ridiculously expensive grill (again with the fire), and then made love to her husband passionately, energetically, collapsing exhausted into his arms. He was asleep in five minutes. She was still awake at 2 in the morning, wrapped up in her thick green robe, staring into her computer screen.
She had cried while reading her father’s email earlier in the day, cried harder the second time, still harder the third, his postscript representing the first time he had shared a single word about that night with his kids. His steadfast silence on the subject had been unrelenting. Kevin was curious but had decided that his father’s refusal to talk about it was his business. Liz had been convinced that his reticence was the very thing preventing him from moving on with his life, and was, in fact, slowly killing him. So to receive these few sentences felt like some sort of dark blessing. Maybe more would come. Maybe this was the beginning of something, she told herself. But then she read back over the words again. What a crushing memory this must have been for him. And there he was, as Kevin had suspected, 700 miles away, alone in Maine . . . remembering.
She sat at her desk in the dark, the oppressive stillness bearing down on her. She began to feel the familiar gnawing pain, the rising bitterness as she typed out the name Robert Deloplane into the search bar. The results were always the same: a link to a story which had appeared in the Richmond Times Dispatch detailing the murder of a local woman at the hands of an Amherst County man. She’d read the story so many times, she had it memorized. She quickly clicked out of it and returned to the results of the search, scrolling down through the various arrests, the assortment of delinquencies which had dominated his short, pathetic life. Then she noticed a new entry. Maybe it wasn’t new; maybe she just had never noticed it. The headline: Deloplane Brothers kicked off basketball team for part in postgame fight. Liz clicked on this article from the Lynchburg News and Advance, dated January of 2009 . . .
A fight which broke out after Wednesday night’s varsity basketball game between Amherst and Heritage has resulted in the suspensions of several players and even a Lancer cheerleader. After a fiercely contested game between the two rivals resulted in a narrow 64-62 victory for the visiting Heritage Pioneers, several Lancer players confronted the victorious Pioneer players as they were waiting to board the team bus. What started the scuffle is unclear, but several eyewitnesses identified Robert and Richard Deloplane, senior Lancer guards, as the aggressors. The fight quickly spread to include over a dozen students from both schools, including Roberta Deloplane—Lancer cheerleader and Robert and Richard’s triplet. Although no one was seriously hurt during the brawl, three Heritage players were taken to the hospital, where they were treated for minor injuries and then released. Amherst High School Principal, Hal Morris, promised swift and sure punishment for the instigators, making good on those threats this morning by suspending all three Deloplanes from participation in any extracurricular activities for the rest of the school year.
How could she have missed this? She was sure it had been here all along in plain view. Why had she just now clicked on it? Triplets? There were three of these bastards?
She glanced at the clock. Still the middle of the night. She wanted to call Kevin but knew that she should wait until morning.
***
Angela arrived at Kevin’s within thirty minutes of his text. She had stopped and picked up Chinese takeout from Yen’s on her way over. When she walked in the door, Kevin greeted her with a kiss. It was almost midnight. When he agreed to her requested talk, she had thought it best to strike while the iron was hot, Kevin not being the soul-baring type at any hour. She knew he would be hungry, and it was always easier to talk with someone while eating. As she made her way past him into the kitchen, she stopped to pick up his coat from the sofa, walked back past him with a playful eye roll, and deftly hung it on its hook. Soon, the smell of orange beef and crispy honey shrimp filled the massive room, and both of them discovered that they were hungry.
Kevin always loved watching Angela eat. She loved food, and it showed on her face with every bite. She wasn’t one of these women who were always counting calories, always scolding everybody about fat and cholesterol. Of course, she had the body of a model and the metabolism of a teenager, so she could get away with Chinese takeout at midnight. Still, it was nice watching someone guiltlessly enjoying their food.
“I told my Mom about you,” she began. “There wasn’t much to tell, really. I said that I had met this guy who was really nice, who was something of an entrepreneur, and who treated me very well. A real gentleman, I said. That was about it. Of course she was all excited that I had met someone. And you know how parents are . . . she immediately wanted to know all about your family. What kind of stock you come from, that sort of thing. Well, that’s when I had to start making up stuff . . . not about your family, since I wouldn’t even know where to begin. No, I had to start making up stuff about why you and I have been seeing each other for months and you still haven’t been willing to tell me anything about your family. Oh, except that you have a sister and you grew up in Virginia.”
Kevin had done everything in his power to avoid this conversation. He knew that eventually the subject would be unavoidable, but his strategy of deflection was no longer workable. He had thought that she might tire of him and move on after a few months, so why dredge it all up unnecessarily? Then, when she had shown no signs of tiring, he had tried to convince himself that he would soon tire of her. They were in the process of falling in love with each other, and according to all the movies, honesty was supposedly a good thing.
But as he looked at her sitting at his table, in his house, reaching out to hold his hand, he realized that what he was about to tell her might be a deal-breaker. Angela Wright — age 29, beautiful, talented, successful, possessed of magnificent bearing and a large and pure heart — could have anyone she wanted. Why would she want to hitch her wagon to someone with such a damaged story?
“Okay . . . I figured that this was what you wanted to talk about.”
“I really do, Kevin.”
“Yes, yes, you’re right. The thing is, I suppose I have been waiting for the right moment, and that right moment never comes. But, I guess there’s no better time than after Chinese takeout, right?”
They both moved to the sofa, leaving the table scattered with paper plates and styrofoam cups, Angela fighting the urge to clean it all up, afraid that any interruption would derail the momentum. Finally, Kevin began . . .
“So, yeah . . . I love my family. Like I told you before, I have a kid sister, Liz, who is married to a great guy, David, and they live in Philadelphia. No kids yet, not even a dog, which is weird because we always had dogs when we were growing up . . . Roger was her favorite . . . dog, her favorite dog.”
Kevin now understood clearly why he had put off talking about his family for so long. He felt the muscles in his neck beginning to tighten. His mouth became dry. He felt his hands begin to tremble. What the hell was wrong with him?
“Yeah, so my dad still lives outside of Richmond in the house that Liz and I grew up in. He’s done quite well for himself. He started an insurance brokerage business from scratch years ago when we were kids and built it into a pretty big deal. He’s practically retired now — the business runs itself, really — so he spends a lot of time up at our lakehouse in Maine. We vacationed there my whole life, really, and about ten years ago they bought a place. Quantabacook. That’s the name of the lake. It’s Native American, I think.”
Kevin was desperately trying to calm himself, to subdue the well of emotion rising up in his heart. He wasn’t sure he could speak about his mother to anyone now, especially Angela. It was maddening. He felt his heart racing. He was searching for a way to get ahold of himself.
He rose from the sofa, turned to Angela. “Want a beer? That orange beef always makes me thirsty.”
Angela watched him walk into the kitchen. She had never seen him so ill at ease, his movements so unsure. Whatever was in his past still had power over him. When he slumped back down beside her, Angela leaned forward, placing her hand on his knee and asked, “Tell me about your Mother.”
Kevin took a long sip from the bottle. “Yeah, so my mom and dad met back in college. Her name is Evelyn. They were married for just over thirty years, my Mom and Dad.” The word were sounding harsh and leaden.
Kevin held tight to his beer, gripping it with both hands. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Angela. But after an uncomfortable silence, and just after Angela placed her hand on his shoulder, he discovered a strange calmness that allowed him to finish . . .
“So, last fall . . . September . . . the 15th of September, in fact, on a Thursday evening, my mother passed away. She was only 58. She was always healthy, really never sick a day in her life. She was beautiful, my mother. Even at 58, she was a knockout. You and her would have gotten along great. I think she would have been crazy about you, actually . . .” Then, silence and the appearance of tears.
Angela edged closer to him, put her arm around him, and whispered, “Oh, Kevin . . . I’m so sorry. What happened? Did she have a heart attack or a stroke or something?”
“No. Like I said, she was the healthiest person I ever knew. Never sick a day in her life. No, she . . .”
Just as suddenly as the tears had arrived, they disappeared. His throat was now clear, his heart beating normally.
“My mother was murdered outside a convenience store near Lynchburg, Virginia by a drug addict while my dad was inside buying beef jerky. They had been on their way to my dad’s partner’s cabin up at Wintergreen, and Dad had decided to stop at a Quik Stop on Highway 29 to get some beef jerky, of all things, when this spaced-out shithead held my mom up and demanded her money, which she gave to him, and then for some reason he decided to shoot her in the face from point-blank range. She died in the parking lot before they could get her to the hospital.”
Once he got started, he found it difficult to stop. For the next hour, he poured out the entire narrative of what had become of the Rigsby family in the wake of such a tragedy: his father’s withdrawal, his sister’s emotional fragility, and his own unwillingness to think, much less talk, about any of it. He finished the story by disclaiming that he would understand totally if she would rather not be drawn into such a dysfunctional drama . . . how he would not hold it against her if she decided to walk away.
Angela had silently wept as Kevin laid it all out for her, and when he suggested that she might want to walk away, she kissed him, told him that she was in love with him. Then they fell asleep in each other’s arms on the sofa.
Angela was roused by the sound of Kevin’s cell phone vibrating on the kitchen counter. She slipped out of his arms and walked lightly across the cold floor to shut it off. There were three missed calls and a text message, all from Liz, who for some reason was desperately trying to reach her brother at 4 o’clock in the morning. She looked back over her shoulder at him on the sofa—spent, exhausted, and dead to the world. He looked like he might sleep for days. She decided that whatever it was would have to wait until morning. He had been through enough for one night. She pulled one of the blankets off his bed and draped it over him where he lay. Then she placed his phone on his nightstand, got under the covers, and fell asleep. Liz would have to wait.
The next morning, David found Liz asleep at her desk, head resting in the crook of her folded arms, the screensaver doing its work. He sighed heavily, jostled the mouse to reveal the story from the Lynchburg News and Advance. His heart sank. My God . . . why can’t she just leave this alone?
9
Jack had persevered through six days of his Maine-in-April decision when finally the weather broke. The clouds were gone, and he could finally venture outside without a heavy coat. With the arrival of more pleasant weather, his spirits began to improve. He decided to pack a lunch and take it to the little state park outside of Camden. There was a picnic table which sat on top of a cliff overlooking Penobscot Bay, framed by towering spruce trees. He and Evelyn had been there many times, and never once had they found anyone using the table—something that had always puzzled them. How could such an idyllic spot go so unnoticed? You could understand the indifference of the locals, there being a thousand equally gorgeous views of this same Bay in town. But what about the tourists? What was their excuse?
He sat in the filtered sunlight, eating his lunch, watching the slow crawl of the three masted schooners leaving from Camden half-filled with tourists. He squinted through the sun to find the lobster trap buoys dotting the blue water, and counted at least a hundred of them. This would have been the perfect opportunity for Evelyn to make an appearance. Since the day he had arrived, she had vanished, the longest stretch since she made her first appearance back on Christmas Eve.
It had been an awkward, prodding dinner with the kids, full of meaningless small talk followed by prolonged silences. He had been ashamed of himself for his inability to rise to the occasion, to rally himself and his family through such a dark passage. He had finally crawled into bed just after midnight when he saw her standing at the window, staring out at the lighted trees on the front lawn. She had not startled him by her presence, dressed in her favorite nightgown, not ten feet from where he lay on his side of the bed. She said nothing. But after several minutes of looking out the window, she had turned her face toward him and smiled. The warmth of her smile summoned Jack’s first tears in months, and then she had vanished. There would be more visitations, complete with long conversations, but nothing for the past five days in Maine.
So here on a picnic bench at one of their favorite places, Jack decided to begin a one-sided discussion with his dead wife, the one who suddenly wouldn’t show herself.
“ . . . So, I suppose you’re done with me now. It’s just as well. It’s about time I righted the ship here and got on with my life. Wish you were here, though. You always loved this spot. It’s beautiful out today.”
Soon he was lost in the conversation, unaware of his surroundings and the woman who stood on the path behind him. She had stopped her walk, cautiously observing the man talking to himself, unsure whether to hurry past him or give in to her curiosity. She decided to take a chance . . .
“Excuse me . . . are you okay?”
The voice. Deeper. Earthier. The sound of pebbles ground into pine straw as he whirled around, expecting Evelyn. The wind changing direction, blowing now from the crest of the hill, sweeping down the path, muffling the sound of the surf on the rocks below. Not Evelyn. Not spirit. Flesh and blood, wearing too heavy a coat for such a mild day . . .
“ . . . Are you okay?” she asked again.
Then, embarrassment at being caught by a stranger talking to himself.
“At first I thought maybe you were talking on your cell phone. Thought maybe you had one of those earbud things, but it looks like maybe not.”
Jack took this to mean that since he had no cell phone, he no longer had the cover of a plausible explanation for sitting at a picnic table talking to himself. Somehow, despite the fact that he would most likely never see this woman again, he felt like he owed her an explanation.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I was just thinking out loud. It happens whenever I come to this place. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Her expression changed from kind curiosity to something a shade darker. “Sure. It’s beautiful.” She loosened the hood of her jacket and slipped it off her head, letting her tangled, blonde hair fall around her face. “. . . But it doesn’t make me talk to myself.”
“Thinking out loud,” Jack explained. “There’s a difference.”
The hair made her appear both younger and older at the same time. Younger because it looked like real blonde hair, not the stuff that comes from a box, but older because it framed her face in a way that suggested she had been around the block, had a rough go of things. Her large eyes warily scoped out her surroundings, searching for avenues of escape. She didn’t have the face of someone who would bother stopping and asking a stranger if he was okay. Adding to his uneasiness, she wasn’t dressed for a walk in the woods in Maine. Her coat was one of those puffy, Michelin Man coats—a glossy, metallic thing that plummeted all the way down to the middle of her calves—a ridiculous look. To make matters worse, she was wearing a thin pair of flats that Evelyn would never have been caught dead wearing in the woods.
She brushed her hair out of her eyes and slid it behind her ears. “What’s the difference?”
“Excuse me?”
“What’s the difference between talking to yourself and thinking out loud?”
She reached inside her huge, silly coat, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it as she sat down on the bench beside him. Jack didn’t know quite what to think of this turn of events; having a conversation with a strange woman dressed like an alien was not in his plans for the day. He had stiffened when she sat down, and she had noticed, attempting a smile in return.
“Well, for one thing,” Jack began, “talking to yourself is usually nonsensical gibberish—the kind of thing that old people in nursing homes do. While thinking out loud is just that—thinking. It’s usually giving voice to some sort of logical thought that’s in your head so you can hear what it sounds like spoken. Sometimes, ideas make total sense in your head, but when you say them out loud, they sound ridiculous.”
Jack figured this was as good a time as any to stop, so he returned to his sandwich. He noticed the smoke from her cigarette drifting out towards the cliffs. The breeze had been in his face all morning. It felt extraordinarily odd to be eating a sandwich next to a stranger at a picnic table in Maine.
She took a long drag on her cigarette, turned to look Jack in the eyes. “You don’t look like the kind of man who would know what old people do in nursing homes.”
“And you don’t look like the kind of woman who goes for walks in the Maine woods very often.”
She put out her cigarette and stood up from the table. “You’re right about that. I’ve only been here a couple of days. I need some better shoes, for one thing.”
Jack, optimistic that this awkward encounter seemed to be drawing to a close, offered, “You here visiting family or just touring the coast?”
“Actually, I’m here because I’ve heard a lot of people say that Maine is a great place to come to forget about shit. So far, I haven’t forgotten anything, but it sure is a pretty place. What about you?”
Jack thought for a minute about telling her that Maine, in fact, was a horrible place to come to forget about anything. It was much better at reminding you about shit than making you forget about shit . . . but to speed things along, he settled on, “I’m from away . . . but I have a cabin on a lake close to here. Come up every year to relax.”
“Where’s ‘away’?”
“Virginia.”
She reached in her coat, pulled out another cigarette, lit it, and handed it to Jack. “Virginia is a nice place to be from.”
Then she smiled, pulled her hood back onto her head, and walked back down the path the way she had come, leaving Jack holding a cigarette, a fresh breeze in his face.
** *
Kevin woke up to the sound of clattering plates and the smell of bacon. He didn’t remember having any bacon in the fridge. Then he saw Angela at the stove, smiling at him.
“How do you live like this . . . in a house with no bacon?”
She had walked three blocks to the Aldi and bought enough bacon to feed fifty people. And now he sat across from her, enjoying a real breakfast for the first time in months.
“Kevin Rigsby,” she explained, “if you think that story about your family was enough to get rid of me, you were mistaken.”
His cell phone began vibrating . . . Liz. “It’s my sister again. I suppose I should take this.”
He slid the phone into the middle of the table between them, put the call on speaker phone, and reached across to hold Angela’s hand as Liz answered.
“Hey, Sis.”
“Whatcha doin’?”
“Talkin’ to you.”
“Well, I’ve been trying to reach you all night!”
“Most people sleep at 2 in the morning, Sis.”
“I know . . . I’m sorry, it’s just that I discovered something last night, and I just had to tell you about it.
She began with the article in the Lynchburg paper, and she demanded to know why nobody ever told them that their mother’s murderer was a triplet. The further she went with the narrative, the more frantic her tone became. Kevin never stopped looking at Angela.
Finally, he interrupted. “ . . . Liz, I’ve got a girlfriend.”
A merciful silence grew in awkward intensity until she responded, “Wait . . . you have a girlfriend? Since when?”
“For a few months now.”
“What?? Why didn’t you tell me about her before now? Kevin! This is wonderful news. Who is she? What’s she like? I need details, bud!!”
It was the reaction of the sister he once had, years ago, before jobs and husbands and a murdered mother. Here was his old friend—his annoying but adorable kid sister. Here was the girl he wanted Angela to know—not the pained, hysterical one who had been blabbering on and on about triplets and police conspiracies.
Angela lifted an eyebrow, just as anxious to hear the details.
“Well, her name is Angela Wright. The rest of it you can probably just Google . . . ”
“Shut up, idiot!!”
“We met at a bar, so nothing noteworthy about that. She’s really smart, has a good job, makes plenty of money so she doesn’t need any of mine.” Angela gave him the universal sign of disapproval with both hands.
“What kind of job is it? What does she do?”
“I’m not totally sure, but I think she’s one of those really high-class call girls.” Angela threw her napkin at him as her mouth dropped open in mock horror. He found himself laughing for the first time he could remember in months.
“You are a worthless degenerate!” Liz was laughing, too, this turn in the conversation possessing miraculous curative powers.
Kevin then cleared his throat and once again found Angela’s eyes. “Actually, Sis, . . . she’s beautiful in ways that I can’t even describe. When I’m with her, I feel, first of all . . . lucky, but the big thing I feel is that I’m going to be alright. For the first time since it happened, I feel like it’s okay for me to enjoy my life again, like happiness is again a possibility for me.”
“Does she know about everything?”
“We’ve had a conversation . . . and she didn’t bail, so . . . ”
“Kevin, I am so happy for you . . .”
“Thanks. But listen, about this stuff with the Deloplanes . . . I think we both need to let this go. I mean, what difference does it really make that the shithead was a triplet? At some point, we all have to leave it be . . . Dad, me, and you. Especially you, Liz.
Another long silence.
“You remember when they put his picture in the paper? We didn’t even know what he looked like until we saw it in the Times Dispatch.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“When I saw that face, I remember wanting so badly to confront him, to stand across from him and tell him what a piece of shit he is for killing our mother. Then I dreamed of what it would be like to slap him across the face, to kick him and rip his eyes out. I wanted him to know what it feels like to be shown no mercy. I’m not proud of myself for thinking such a thing, but it’s how I felt, how I still feel half the time. And then I find out that he has a twin brother who looks just like him?”
“But then what would you do? Suppose you could have confronted him? Suppose you had been allowed to rip his eyes out and show him no mercy? What then? What would you do the next day? Mom would still be dead, Liz. Nothing is going to bring her back.”
* * *
Jack drove his truck into town and parked in front of the library, which commanded the highest ground in Camden both physically and metaphorically. After his encounter with the strange woman, he needed to clear his head. He found a book and sat beneath the arched window that overlooked the town and its harbor. He had hoped that an hour or so of this would help set the world back on its tenuous axis, but instead, it only gave his discontent a better view.
It was at times like these that Jack Rigsby understood he had lost more than a wife back in September—he had lost all of his established assumptions. Prior to Evelyn’s murder, he had believed that life was endowed with a certain order—a tendency toward advancement—and that although bad things did happen in the world, the overarching momentum of civilization was toward progress. Who would prefer to live at any time but the present? Who would want to live in a world where dysentery was the number-one cause of death—a dismal reality merely a hundred years ago? Who would prefer to live at a time when the brightest medical minds attached leeches to their suffering patients? No, Jack Rigsby was a modern man and proud of it, grateful to live in such a progressive world, where scientific advancement had turned dysentery into an annoyance treatable with a $3 bottle of Pepto-Bismol. Jack much preferred central air, his cell phone, the Internet, and the V-8 engine of his truck to the 18th century alternatives, and he was highly suspicious of anyone who confessed nostalgia for anything less.
Then, a drug addict shot his wife in the face.
Since that horrendous, pivotal moment, Jack had become convinced that the primary tilt of human history was toward cruelty. Before September he had been insulated from it, unaware of the barbaric capabilities of the human race. His life had been a series of triumphs, with only a handful of setbacks sprinkled in for flavor. He had married a beautiful woman, built a business from the ground up, brought two smart children into the world. Every challenge that life had thrown at him, he had met head-on and overcome with a combination of guile and grit, and he saw no reason why anyone else couldn’t do the same. If there were failures in the world, they could likely be attributed to insufficient reservoirs of cunning and determination. But when one of those failures slunk out of the woods and killed his wife, all bets were off. Now, everywhere Jack Rigsby looked, he saw human cruelty on display. In the mornings with his coffee, he gravitated toward the Drudge Report, where an unending accounting of cruelty was on display. There were babies thrown into dumpsters, wheelchair-bound old women raped, elderly men sucker-punched by gangs of teenagers, along with men and women in his own profession stealing the life savings of retirees to fund their third vacation home in the Caymans. It now occurred to Jack that these stories weren’t new to his 21st century life, just new to him. His old life didn’t allow him the chance to observe such cruelty. Now, he couldn’t escape it.
He glanced up from his newspaper and watched the schooners sailing back into the harbor at high tide. He watched the tourists milling around the dock, eating their ice cream cones and lobster rolls. On another day it might have been Evelyn and him down there. She loved both, especially the ice cream. But today it was just random tourists enjoying a rare balmy day in April.
Then he saw her, walking down the sidewalk in her shiny silver coat, heading for the dock. She found an empty bench right in front of the harbor master’s shack and lit a cigarette. It was a long way from the arched window of the library to the harbor master’s shack, but the view was unobstructed, and Jack’s eyesight was still good enough to recognize her and that coat. She had managed to both rattle and intrigue him during their earlier encounter, and now here she was again, for the second time, rattling and intriguing. Who the hell was she? There was something in her manner—the odd way she carried herself—that was troubling. Now he watched her stand and walk over to the rail of the dock, drop her cigarette to the ground, and grind it under her foot. She loosened the hood of her coat once more, freeing her wild head of blonde hair. She then turned toward the library and seemed to gaze up the long hill directly to the spot where Jack sat at the base of the great arched window. She waved her hand casually back and forth like Miss America.
Jack slowly lifted his hand and waved back.
