There is great news to report from Chez Dunnevant on this Saturday morning. Last night I fell asleep at roughly 11:00 and slept without dreams or interruptions all the way through until 6:00. If you are keeping score at home, that comes to seven blissful hours of quality sleep, something that heretofore during this crisis has been nonexistent. This morning, there are birds singing outside, I’m starving, and the New York Times has put out yet another article explaining how much harder it is to quarantine oneself when one is poor...in other words...all is right with the world!!
Now, since it’s Saturday, another chapter of Saving Jack to give you something free to read. This is chapter five in which it starts to become clear that Jack is losing his grip on reality...
5
The first night was rough. Even though the drive had been long and tiring, sleep wouldn’t come. He lay awake, listening to the strong winds battering his windchime. Bobby had warned him about a snowstorm coming through. In all the years they had come here, Jack had never seen a snowfall. He had hoped that the snow would be gone by April. Should have known better. Should have listened to Bobby. Jack closed his eyes and tried to imagine a different life.
The wind was still blowing in the morning when Jack staggered into the kitchen, feeling exhausted. He brewed a pot of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table with its view of Quantabacook’s open waters toward the southern, widest expanse of the lake. Evelyn had loved the house so much because of this very view, as well as the bright sunshine that splashed their dock all day during the summer. But today there would be no sun. Today the clouds were thick and expectant, the air frigid and angry as if they had been sent with purposeful malice toward this Virginian who had come up too soon. The lake was not for outsiders in April. In April, the lake still belonged to Maine, and this storm would seek to drive home the point with vigor. Life was all about knowing your place, knowing when and where you belonged at any given moment. There was a time to be in Virginia and a time to be in Maine. There was a right time to cut your grass and a time to leave it alone, a time to run off half-cocked to the mountains and a time to stay at home, a time to satisfy a craving for beef jerky, and a time to just let it go. These thoughts swirled in Jack’s head as he watched the first delicate flakes fall.
He had not known what to call it, this cold-blooded murder of his wife. Whenever it became necessary to refer to it in conversation, he hesitated awkwardly. But it wasn’t just him. Everyone he knew stumbled over it, especially his children. From either laziness or lack of imagination, it became the agreed-upon pronoun: simple, unadorned. Shorthand for something unspeakable.
After a cup of coffee, he opened his laptop. This device had turned into his primary way of communicating, banging out short spurts of information to Mitchell and everyone else back at the office covering for him since it happened. He knew that at some point he would need to get back to work. A small business, even one as well-run as his, could only carry on so long with half of its institutional memory AWOL. Mitchell had been an irreplaceable friend for most of the past thirty years, but never more so than since Evelyn’s murder. He had been Trooper Sullivan’s last call. He and Tricia had driven to Lynchburg the next morning to be with him, and ever since, they’d done everything in their power to make Jack’s recovery possible. Mitchell had taken all of Jack’s workload without complaint, given him all the time and space he needed. Seven months later, progress was being measured in how many hours Jack managed to show up at the office in a week, not days. Although Tricia had begun showing signs of resenting the imbalance in their business relationship, Mitchell was steadfast, refusing to even mention it to Jack.
Jack understood better than anyone just how much of a strain his prolonged absence was for Mitchell. In a newly discovered, dark corner of his heart, Jack actually found Mitchell’s inconvenience satisfying. Hadn’t he coveted her all these years? If his financial security hadn’t been so entangled with Evelyn’s husband, would he have acted upon his adulterous fantasies?
When these sorts of thoughts began forming in his mind, Jack sensed himself detaching from anything solid in the world. He felt the rising tide of panic. When the panic rose still higher, Evelyn would drift through, calming the storm but pushing him further away from anything real. He possessed neither the discipline nor the energy to resist her appearances. So she would come and he would make no objection, choosing to drift with her further and further away from the moorings of the tangible world.
As he waited for his painfully slow Internet connection, he glanced up at the snow, coming down harder now, the flakes bigger and wetter. For a second he thought about Evelyn in their early days together, the fun they would have whenever it snowed. Then he glimpsed her on the deck, bundled up in her old sky-blue down jacket with the ugly red bomber hat she used to wear when they were newlyweds. She turned toward him slowly, her face perfectly pink . . . then a smile, then the throwing of a snowball . . . and then she vanished.
The empty email draft split the center of his screen, his fingers poised above the keyboard. Hesitation. Fear. Anger. Then, the slamming down of the screen, and a second cup of coffee.
Later, he would send the kids an email letting them both know where he was. They would be worrying by now, especially Liz. He would try to explain himself. He would assure them that he was fine, there was nothing to worry about. It was a lie, and they wouldn’t believe any of it, but it had to be done. It would take him half the morning. He would read each attempt, and none of them sounded right. They sounded either too optimistic or too pathetic, too breezily nonchalant or ridiculously abrupt and stoic. No matter how many times he thought he’d stumbled upon a decent effort, he would read it and realize that it just didn’t sound like something he would write. It didn’t sound like him, sounded more like a perfect stranger, someone he didn’t know.
Finally, just before noon, he had a winner:
Hey guys,
Just a note to let you both know that your dad is up at Loon Magic for a week or so. I’ve never been here this early, and I’ve been missing your mother a bit more than normal lately, so here I am. It’s actually snowing while I’m writing this. So weird to watch snow coming down on Quantabacook. Ha!
I’ve been getting better over the past few weeks. I’ve been going into the office more, which makes Mitchell happy. I know how much you worry about me, but I am getting better. I already feel better just being here in this place, your mother’s happy place. Remember how she used to call this lake her happy place?
We haven’t talked about it, but I assume that you both will be coming up in July, like always. She would want us to be here together this year, like every year. Especially this year, I think.
So, if it ever stops snowing, I might do some fishing. The ice is gone now. Bobby said I just missed it, actually. Might drive into Camden for some dinner if the roads aren’t bad.
Much Love,
Dad
He read it over several times until he felt comfortable enough not to hit delete. It was a good-enough effort and would pass as a reasonable facsimile of the man he used to be. He got up from the kitchen table, walked over to the sliding glass doors that led out onto the deck, and watched the snow. No trace of Evelyn—just swirling, fat flakes splatting against the deck, melting on contact, the surface too warm. It was April. The snow was late, just as Jack was early. Nothing knew its place anymore.
Abruptly, the snow stopped. The clouds started to thin. The sky began to brighten. Jack saw the Escalade, the driver-side door swinging open, and then himself getting out, a broad smile on his face. He saw his mouth move but heard no sound. He saw himself walking into the Quik Stop with that old energetic gait—a manner of walking abandoned in that parking lot, lost forever.
As the first beams of sunlight broke through the rapidly thinning clouds, Jack remembered.
He raced over to the kitchen table, pulled the email up, and added a postscript . . .
I just this very minute remembered something from that night. I’ve been wracking my brain, not because it’s vital information but just because I wanted to remember, needed to remember. Anyway, you guys remember how none of us could ever win an argument with her? Remember how she was always right about so many things? Remember how frustrated we’d all get when she ended up being right all the time? Suddenly, I remember your mother’s last words to me . . . “Who says there’s going to be a next kiss?”
Right . . . to the very end.
It was the most honest thing he’d ever written, and before he even took the time to think it over, he pressed send.
The sudden memory with its clarity and detail had surprised Jack. It was as if she was right there—three feet from him, teasing him, warning him not to get too cocky. It was the very last glimpse he’d ever have of her face, gleaming and beautiful, before it was blown apart by a handgun. Several weeks after the murder, Jack had met with the detective assigned to the case, a meeting which Liz and Kevin both adamantly opposed. What is to be gained by meeting with the detective, they had asked . . . an excellent question for which Jack had no coherent answer . . . except that he’d prepared a lockbox in his head to store all the horror, and he couldn’t close it until he knew everything.
He drove to Lynchburg by himself to meet with Detective Dan Powell, who treated Jack with the utmost care and understanding. He counseled against looking at photographs from the crime scene, especially those of his murdered wife, but Jack insisted and did so without emotion. When Detective Powell broached the subject of Robert Deloplane, his voice changed. Gone were the calm, solicitous tones, replaced by something from a lower register, filled with thinly disguised contempt . . .
“Here’s the firearm he used,” the detective said as he took the Smith and Wesson 38-caliber revolver out of a plastic evidence bag and laid it on the table in front of Jack. “Of course, it was stolen. Every nickel the son of a bitch had went to buy drugs, so . . .”
Jack looked at the gun before him with a mixture of anger and fascination. Jack wasn’t a gun guy, didn’t own one, hadn’t held one in his hands since he was a teenager shooting squirrels in the woods behind his house with a 22 rifle. He felt overcome with an urge to pick it up and hold it in his hands, to feel its weight and touch its shiny cylinder, but Detective Powell quickly picked it up with his gloved hand and placed it safely back into the plastic bag.
Jack had been too overcome with grief in the time immediately after Evelyn’s murder to concern himself with the details of her dead killer. He knew his name, that he was a career criminal and drug addict, and that the police killed him the same night he killed Evelyn. But here in a sterile office with metal furniture, sitting across from a talkative officer of the law, he received an education. At this meeting, Jack learned that Robert Deloplane was one of three Deloplanes who entered the world on June 16, 1991. He was a triplet with a brother and a sister: Richard and Roberta, born to DeeRay and Starla Deloplane, DeeRay abandoning them soon after for their ill-equipped mother to raise and nurture alone. Somehow, Starla managed to meet and marry two more men through the years, both of whom followed DeeRay’s example and abandoned her to her unruly brood of triplets. Detective Powell considered it a miracle that it took this long for a Deloplane kid to end up murdering someone.
Liz and Kevin had been right. Nothing good could possibly have come from such a meeting. Jack knew it the minute he got back in his car to drive back to Richmond. Why had he needed to know all the details? Why couldn’t he have left “well enough” alone? Ever since his hour and a half with Detective Dan Powell, Jack determined to cast every thought of the Deloplanes of Amherst County from his mind by seeking refuge in the familiar . . . only to discover that nothing felt familiar any longer. The cliches from friends about safety residing in the familiar felt vacuous, platitudes only comprehensible to men with living, breathing wives. Nothing felt safe, and increasingly, nothing was known. Everyone had warned him against withdrawing from his routine, slipping away from his established life. What nobody seemed to understand was that his established life was unrecognizable. The reason he hadn’t poured himself back into his work was because his work reminded him of what his life used to be. His first day back at the office had launched him into a week of fresh despair. His office was the office he had built when Evelyn was alive, more specifically because she was alive. The photographs that lined his credenza were from another world. He simply couldn’t bear it. So, he had made up an acceptable excuse for his absences, hoping that with time he could ease back into something that resembled a routine.
He was told to take comfort in the friends and associations which had taken a lifetime to build. He was assured that his faith and church would be great comforts. They hadn’t been. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. His friends were supportive, his church caring and solicitous. But the harder they all tried, the more estranged Jack felt. With Evelyn dead, everything felt withered and old.
He was counseled to draw near to his kids. They would need each other now more than ever. He knew in his heart that this was unequivocally true. He made every effort to remain available to them, to hold them close. It was his responsibility as a father to do so. But his efforts had been halfhearted. They felt obligatory and drenched in duty. It was this failure, this betraying withdrawal that hurt him the most. His visits with them felt forced, leaving him embarrassed by his inability to feel anyone’s pain but his own. Thus, each passing month found him further withdrawn, further isolated, and now alone in Maine watching the reluctant sun trying to break through a lonely haze.
No comments:
Post a Comment