10
DeeRay Deloplane had spent the better part of the last twenty years repairing his life from a series of unforced errors that had almost killed him. Primarily, his rehabilitation had involved putting as much distance between his present and his troublesome past as possible. Since his rebirth had involved abandoning a wife and three kids, some might suggest that his reinvention stood upon a shaky moral foundation, but DeeRay had long ago made peace with his past and had learned to live with very few regrets. He owned a reasonably profitable auto mechanic business that he ran out of a former 7-Eleven store on the outskirts of Worcester, Massachusetts—the furthest his bus fare would take him two decades earlier.
He had fled his wife, Starla, in the dead of night after a particularly ferocious fight that had left each of them exhausted and bleeding profusely. The fight had been about money—most fights with Starla were—primarily the fact that DeeRay wasn’t making enough of it fast enough to please her. With three young mouths to feed and her insistence on being a stay-at-home mom, she often made a fair point during their frequent money fights, especially considering DeeRay’s fondness for beer and vintage Corvettes, neither of which he could afford. It had always been DeeRay’s contention that he and Starla might have been okay if they’d only had one kid. They might have been able to survive with twins, even . . . but triplets had been a bridge too far for two people who were basically kids themselves.
If DeeRay had been a more religious man—or religious at all—maybe he would have shouldered a more respectable level of guilt for abandoning three kids under five years old. But admittedly, he hardly gave them a second thought. Truth be told, they only entered his mind while writing his compulsory support checks to Starla. Just like death and taxes, Starla Deloplane, who had a nose for money like a coon dog for escaped convicts, eventually tracked him down with the help of a relentless Richmond lawyer. After six months of threats and counterthreats, the lawyer extracted a series of monthly checks from DeeRay, written on Deloplane Auto-Repair’s extra-wide, fancy-looking checks in the dainty handwriting of his bookkeeper and wife number two, Priscilla. She never complained about money, since her Daddy had boatloads of it and showered his only daughter with all of her heart’s desires. DeeRay would sometimes stare at his father-in-law across the table during Sunday dinners and ponder that since leaving Virginia, he had become the luckiest man in the world. Unburdened of three unruly children and an argumentative, money-grubbing wife, he had managed to meet and marry a woman who not only woke up horny every morning of her life but also had a filthy-rich old man willing to loan his new son-in-law money to buy an old 7-Eleven and turn it into a garage.
Eventually the monthly support checks ended, and the Deloplanes of Massachusetts were in the money. Starla’s communications with DeeRay had dwindled to the rare phone call to inform him of Robert’s latest run-in with the law. Of the three, Robert was always the one getting in the most serious trouble, and it had been this way since the day all three of them were born. DeeRay’s communications with his kids had dwindled to the even more rare phone call . . . usually every other Christmas and the occasional birthday. The last time he had laid eyes on any of them had been the day of their high school graduation, an event which the triplets were grudgingly allowed to participate in only with assurances from all parties that each Deloplane would complete the summer school classes still required to earn their diplomas.
To assuage the rare rumblings of guilt, DeeRay would occasionally fold fifty-dollar bills into envelopes from the garage and send one to each kid with a perfunctory note:
Don’t spend it all in one place,
Dad Deloplane
But DeeRay Deloplane had always known that eventually he would pay the price for abandoning his children. Although it would have appeared to most observers that he had gotten away with it—his gutless flight from responsibility—every passing year brought with it a strange and disturbing feeling that his comeuppance was closer at hand. Along with this gnawing fear, there was a longing, a haunting thought that his choices had robbed him of something. After the triplets, there would be no more children. For a woman so enamored with sexual intercourse, Priscilla had let it be known early and often that she had no interest in motherhood—which was fine, except when the holidays rolled around, or their birthdays. That’s when the longings would come, heavier each year.
Then he had gotten the call back in September from Starla, informing him that his son had died a murderer. The details horrified DeeRay, and immediately the guilt became unbearable. Priscilla, who possessed all the empathy of a Teamster foreman, scolded her husband for blaming himself and threatened to leave him if he traveled to Virginia for the small funeral service Starla had arranged for her unmourned son at the local Baptist church the family seldom attended. DeeRay made the drive anyway, standing off by himself at the graveside, afraid of how his remaining two children would react upon seeing their father for the first time in seven years. The small crowd paying their respects all looked like thugs to DeeRay with their shaggy hair, tattoos, and ripped jeans—dressed more for fighting than mourning, DeeRay thought. These were the sort of friends a boy without a proper dad falls in with, DeeRay thought. The tears that flowed weren’t for his son; they were an admission of the hash he had made of his life. He was reaping what he had sown, skipping out on his family like a whimpering coward.
Starla had been cold to him when he showed up at the funeral home the previous day. She had recognized him standing beside his Corvette in the parking lot, too afraid to come inside. As she approached him, she noticed that he looked much better than she would have thought after so much time. His hands were rough and red from a mechanic’s abuse, but the rest of him hadn’t aged as much as she had. This was one more reason to resent him.
“I suppose I should thank you for coming,” was all she deemed appropriate to say, though a hundred other biting remarks would have spilled out of her on any other occasion. DeeRay could hardly look at her, his guilt and remorse oozing out of every pore.
Finally he managed, “How are you holding up? You need anything? How are Rich and Bertie dealing with everything?”
“Do I need anything? You mean like money? No, I’m good, DeeRay. I had insurance on him, so we’re all good.” Starla’s eyes filled with tears.
After the last rose was tossed onto the casket, DeeRay’s kids turned to leave the graveside, noticing their father for the first time. To his profound horror, they both ran to him and held him tight, tears flowing, the air filled with cries of Oh, daddy . . . daddy . . . , a greeting that DeeRay knew he didn’t deserve. He wept at the spectacle of such a ghastly reunion—every Deloplane crying and hugging each other as if they’d been separated by the ravages of war or biblical famine or some other cosmic pestilence instead of his own petty selfishness. When Starla joined in on the ill-timed group hug, DeeRay fought a new urge to make a break for the Corvette and leave them all in the lurch a second time.
By the time they all settled in at the house for the covered-dish supper, everyone seemed to have recovered from the awkward graveside outpouring of emotion and transitioned into somber indifference—a much more familiar playing field. Strangers kept interrupting their attempts at conversation, passing along their condolences and confusing DeeRay with Starla’s two more recent husbands—neither of whom, DeeRay noticed, were in attendance. The fact that he was the only former husband of Starla Deloplane to attend her son’s funeral provided DeeRay with the smallest fig leaf of comfort. Truthfully, DeeRay had always been grateful to Starla for running off two other husbands over the years, since it armed him with the reassurance of shared blame.
As he walked to his car to leave, Starla followed him. They both leaned against the Corvette, searching for words that fit the moment. As usual, Starla went first.
“Nice car. You always had a thing for Vettes, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. This one was a mess when I bought it. I spent a year working on it at the shop. I could probably make some money if I sold it, but I don’t want to.”
Uncomfortable silence. A cigarette was lit. More silence.
“I knew he was going to end up killing somebody, DeeRay. It wasn’t just the drugs . . . it was him. He had a dark heart. I used to blame it on you. I thought that if you hadn’t left like you did, maybe he would have turned out different . . . but the truth is, he was just a bad seed.”
“Well, if he was, it was my seed. You can blame me all you want. Actually, it would make me feel better if you did.”
“Why would that make you feel better?”
“Because that’s what I deserve.”
“What’s done is done, DeeRay. We can’t go back and have a do-over.”
Another long silence fell over them as the sun slipped behind the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance.
“You sure you don’t need anything? I’ve got plenty-enough money to help you out with the funeral if you’d like.”
“Relax, DeeRay. I’m not broke anymore either. You know I’ve got the best divorce lawyer in Richmond on my Christmas card list. I’ve taken practically every nickel from the two after you, thanks to him. It’s been kind of like a cottage industry for me.”
They both laughed together at the same time about the same joke for probably the first time in twenty-five years.
“So, you heading back to Massachusetts in the morning?”
“Yeah. I need to be getting back. Priscilla swore she would leave me if I came down here, so I better get that patched up.”
Starla put her arms around her first husband, hugging him tenderly for a long moment, saying nothing. Then she murmured, “Thank you for coming, DeeRay . . . I mean it.”
After he got in the car, he rolled the window down, searching for something more to say. Starla, who could never let silence hang too long, began talking to no one in particular.
“ . . . The thing is, even though I knew Robert would end up killing someone, I always imagined it would be one of his drug buddies, or one of his dealers. Why couldn’t it have been one of them? Why did he have to kill that Rigsby woman? I mean, of all the people in the world, why did it have to be such a fine and beautiful woman like her? You know, I’ve read up on her and her family. They were from Richmond. She had a couple of grown kids and a rich, successful husband who owns a big business somewhere. They were driving an Escalade. I saw a picture of her on the Internet. Such a lovely woman. The funny thing is, DeeRay . . . my son ended up killing exactly the kind of woman I always wanted to be.”
“It’s a terrible thing, Starla . . . but like a great woman I knew once said, ‘What’s done is done. There’s nothing you can do to fix it.’”
“I suppose so.”
Starla watched him back out of the driveway, then followed his taillights until they disappeared.
11
Jack sat on the deck and watched the sun set, still delightfully warm in his thin jacket even after the sun slipped behind the birch trees across the lake. A steak simmered on the grill over a low flame, the aroma settling his nerves. The woman in the ugly coat was swimming around inside his head, teasing his memory. He’d experienced an odd flicker of recognition earlier at the park and again as he waved to her from the library window, but he couldn’t quite place her. Maybe he had never met her before. But she seemed to recognize him, too—he remembered the way she wouldn’t avert her eyes,and that weird moment at the end with the cigarette. It had occupied his thoughts all afternoon and now into the evening as he cut into his steak.
After dinner, he cleaned up the dishes and settled onto the sofa to read a book he’d picked up in town. Reading a good book, or even a bad one, had always been a mental health exercise for Jack Rigsby. A book was a place you could go to forget about life for a while—an alternate universe to inhabit, less daunting than your own. But tonight it wasn’t working. Stephen King had reliably diverted him in the past, but not tonight. He closed the book and tossed it onto the coffee table alongside the picture album Evelyn had put together of old photographs of the kids. Thirty years’ worth of Maine vacations. Jack hesitated. Maybe tonight wasn’t the best time for a trip down memory lane . . . but who the hell was he kidding? Memory lane was his only real home now. He opened the heavy album and carefully turned the ponderous, plastic-coated pages.
Here was a shot of Evelyn eating a lobster roll; there was a picture of young Jack in a Boston Red Sox hat, fishing off the dock. Then he turned the page and spotted a picture from that horrible year when it rained every day. Kevin was a toddler and Liz just a newborn, yet Evelyn had insisted on making the drive up anyway. A terrible week. A terrible year. Business had been slow. Life at home with a three-year-old and a colicky infant had not been a bed of roses. Truth was, Jack hadn’t been as supportive as he should have. It was the low point of their marriage, a year of selfishness and arguments.
Jack shut the album and placed it back on the coffee table. He should never have picked it up. How quickly the mind can fog over with regret. What powerful storms can be sent raging across the universe by a mere photograph . . .
He had fought so hard to banish the night from his memory, willing himself to forget . . . and that had mostly worked. Years would go by without it once entering his mind or casting a shadow across his heart. But eventually some random image would leap off a page or jump from a television screen, resurrecting every detail of September 15, 1990, and sending him spiraling into despair. What was it about this confounding month?
* * *
Mitchell loved sales meetings. He always looked forward to escaping everything for a few days and the opportunity it offered to relax. Jack hated being away, hated meetings, didn’t know how to relax. This meeting took place at an old resort called The Hedges—one of those places well past its heyday and eager to offer a relative bargain to companies hosting sales meetings. It was in the mountains, only three hours from Richmond, so at least they hadn’t needed to fly anywhere.
Jack had barely settled into his room when Mitchell called, asking him to meet everyone in the resort bar, The Cavern, for drinks. The welcome reception was being held there, and Mitchell wanted to get an early start.
Jack stood at the entrance and surveyed the scene before him. The dark-paneled wood made the place seem smaller than it was. There were probably fifty men gathered in small, conspiratorial packs of three or four. Jack spotted Mitchell right away, holding forth on some topic to the delight of the familiar faces gathered around. Jack knew them all, had known them ever since he began in the insurance business. They were all good guys, fun to be around . . . but pretty much all full of shit. That was fine. We’re all full of shit, Jack thought as he made his way through the crowd.
Mitchell, as usual, had at least an hour’s headstart on him and was freshly inebriated. Alcohol always turned him into an even funnier version of himself—the quintessential happy drunk.
“Gentlemen, may I present Mr. Jack Rigsby!” Mitchell announced to the entire bar. “My partner, my friend, and first-class buzz kill! Where’s our waitress? Get this man a drink before he finds a deck of cards and starts playing solitaire.”
Jack smiled and acknowledged his friends with his trademark low enthusiasm, then noticed the waitress at his arm.
“What can I get you, Love?”
Her blonde hair was cut short, feathered back from her eyes. She wore a waitress uniform—brown and yellow, the resort’s hideous signature colors—but she wore it well. The tight blouse revealed a slender neck and the kind of cleavage men couldn’t help noticing. Her face was pleasant yet plain, but when she smiled it transformed into something mysterious—full of danger, Jack remembered thinking.
“How about a beer? Whatever you have on draft is fine.”
Jack smiled, more enthusiastically than he had thought appropriate for some reason. She smiled back and melted into the crowd.
It was a long night, that first night at The Hedges. Over a hundred insurance brokers had descended on the place like a plague of locusts. After the reception, dinner was served in the big hall, the decimal level rising throughout the night. By the time dessert was served, Mitchell was thoroughly drunk and verging on annoying. Jack had decided at some point during the night to stop drinking, having been overcome by a simmering anger at nothing in particular. He had left Evelyn that morning after an argument that had been building for days and had spilled forth just minutes before he walked out the door. A long couple months with a whining toddler and crying infant had morphed them into nothing more than aggrieved roommates. Resentments had festered, and the occasion of Jack’s business trip brought all of it suddenly, loudly to the surface. Evelyn had lashed out at him, accusing him of shirking his duties as a father, of being emotionally unavailable and adrift. Jack had lashed back with accusations of his own, pointing out the frequency of her short-tempered outbursts and her own unavailability, sexually and otherwise. He’d slammed the door on his way out. Jack had started to call and attempt an apology several times after arriving at the hotel, but each time he had resisted, discovering in himself a surprising stubbornness. Now it was nearly midnight and too late to call. She has the number, he thought. Let her call.
After listening to one too many of Mitchell’s slurred jokes, Jack had gone for a walk. It was warm outside, and a storm was approaching from the western mountains. Heat lightning streaked across the sky, and soon the wind freshened. The front of the old resort featured a grand covered porch, filled with rocking chairs and wicker sofas. A series of ceiling fans, all connected to the same belt, turned overhead. The porch spread out in both directions from the main entrance where the bell captain’s station stood, twenty feet wide and at least a hundred feet long from end to end. There was an entrance to The Cavern at the south end of the porch, but even that section was quiet on this night.
Jack watched a woman come out of the bar, light a cigarette, then sit in one of the rocking chairs. As he got closer, he recognized the waitress from earlier in the evening. Her purse rested on her lap as she leaned her head back against the rocker. She was probably done with her shift and headed home.
“You mind if I bum a cigarette?” Jack heard himself ask.
Jack pondered this moment many times over the years. He didn’t smoke. Well, he only occasionally smoked: usually cigars and usually after a few drinks. What had possessed him to approach this girl, who couldn’t have been a day over twenty-one, to ask for a cigarette? Like so many other momentous events in his life, great calamity had followed the smallest of decisions.
“I recognize you from earlier,” she said as she lit his cigarette. “You were the cute, quiet one who didn’t care what kind of beer I brought him as long as it was on draft.”
He had felt flattered that she remembered him. They sat quietly for a while, watching the sky pulsate with electricity. Jack glanced at her and noticed that her eyes were closed and she was smiling.
When he finished his cigarette, he asked, “What’s your name?”
Her eyes opened dreamily, and she turned her face toward him. “Whatever you want it to be.”
Hours later, he lay beside her in his bed, exhausted and numb at what had just happened. Jack had never thought himself capable of infidelity. He was in love with his wife, devoted beyond reason to her happiness, and yet, here he was in the embrace of a complete stranger—a stranger who, naked, didn’t look a day over eighteen. He should have felt shame and revulsion at such a personal failing, but all he felt was a mixture of exhilaration and exhaustion—the very definition of a guilty pleasure, he thought. She hadn’t seemed interested at all in his name or who he was or where he came from. For her, this seemed like an escape from something. But what had it been for Jack? What had Evelyn ever done to deserve this?
After their third time, the sky began to lighten. She freshened herself up, got dressed, and was preparing to slip quietly out of the room when she noticed that Jack was awake. She smiled at him, walked over to the edge of the bed, and gave him a long look. Then she reached into her purse, pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and placed it in his mouth. Have a nice life, love.
The next two days were a blur. The guilt and remorse Jack had expected to feel arrived with a vengeance. He looked for her each night in The Cavern but never saw her again. It was just as well, since he had no idea what he would have said to her anyway. It was just one night of betrayal in a lifetime of devotion. He was going to have to pull himself together. He was going home to Evelyn soon and didn’t want to wear his sin tattooed across his forehead when he walked in the door. Jack had always thought that if he ever committed infidelity, his overwhelming grief and sorrow would compel him to confess everything to Evelyn. He hadn’t thought himself capable of keeping this sort of secret . . . he hadn’t thought himself capable of screwing a 21-year-old waitress either. But the hardest-hitting realization was this: Jack Rigsby had turned out to be a terrible judge of his own character.
On the long drive home, Jack made a decision. He would do whatever it took to put the incident behind him, including burying it. He would guard this secret with his life, ensuring that Evelyn never learned the truth. Furthermore, Jack Rigsby would never again sleep with another woman. He determined to spend the rest of his life atoning for his moral failure, making it up to Evelyn. She would never know the source of his new, deeper devotion. She would just rest in his love for her. By the time he walked through the door and greeted her with a kiss, he was completely committed to his plan, all in on becoming a new and better man.
Twenty-six Septembers later, Evelyn had died convinced of her husband’s faithfulness, thankful to have married the most wonderful man in the world, and Jack had never given another woman a second of his time. He considered his handling of the matter one of his finest accomplishments. He had isolated the worst night of his life, stuck a dagger in it, quarantined it within that king-sized bed at The Hedges, and ensured that nobody’s life went up in flames due to one lapse in judgement . . . one regrettable moment of weakness.
But now, as Jack watched the moonlight dancing on the surface of the lake, he wondered if it was possible to truly escape the past. Even though he had managed to hide it from Evelyn and the kids, was it really a secret if even now, a quarter of a century later, his vivid recollections still pulsated with life? Had he really erased that night if it still commanded a corner of his memory? No—he had guarded his secret, but he hadn’t killed it.
Jack’s cell phone vibrated loudly on the kitchen table, startling him loose from the grip of dark thoughts. He walked across the room to pick it up, grateful for a distraction. It was Liz.
“Hello, Lizzy girl.”
“Hello, Daddy! You’re never going to guess where I am.”
“Where?”
“I just landed at the Portland airport, I’ve picked up my rental, and now I’m headed to the lake! I’ll be there in an hour.”
His daughter’s voice was an electric charge jolting his brain. As he searched for the right words, scrambled for the appropriate response to Liz’s announcement, the identity of the woman in the ugly coat revealed itself to him in a bright flash. She had no name, still, after twenty-six years. She had agreed to be anyone he wished her to be, and he’d preferred anonymity. But now she had found him. By chance or by design . . . she had found him.
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