Nine Lives, page 16
4
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 10:30 A.M.
Jay Coates, the Jay Coates that lived in Los Angeles, California, was preparing for his weekly talk with his mother by doing a couple of tai chi moves while staring out of his apartment window at the smoggy sky.
His phone rang right on cue. 10:30 his time, 12:30 hers.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
“Hi, darling. I haven’t caught you at a bad time, have I?”
“Nope. I was expecting your call.”
“Oh, good. I just finished my lunch.”
“What did you have?” Jay said, and then finished his moves with the phone in his hand as he heard her say something about a tomato salad.
“Are you there, darling? I think you’re breaking up.”
“I’m here.”
“Oh, good. Tell me about you. Did you get that commercial you were going for?”
“They wanted me for it, but I turned it down. I mean, it would have been okay money, but that’s not what I came out here to do, you know?” He went on to tell her about a fantastic play he was going to be in, and when she asked if she could come out and see it, he told her it was only being performed for industry insiders. He wasn’t sure she bought it, but she moved on. It was hard to lie about having acting success, since acting was a public performance. Sometimes he told her that he wrote screenplays as well, and that he’d sold a few, although who knew when they’d go into production. She always wanted to know if he’d written a part for himself, like Matt and Ben did in Good Will Hunting, and he’d told her that he wasn’t that egotistical. His mother had grown up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she acted as though she were somehow related to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, talking about them constantly.
“Did you hear what I just said, Jay?”
“What? Sorry, you dropped out there, for a moment.”
“I have some news about your father.”
She often had news about his father, despite the fact that he’d left her over twenty years ago. “Oh, what’s that?” Jay said.
“You know I don’t follow him on Facebook, but my friend Stella still does, and she told me that he’s trying to sell vitamin supplements or something like that. She said it looked like a total scam, and it made me think he must be desperate for money.”
“He’s a loser, Mom, you know that.”
“As you know I don’t have very warm feelings toward your father, Jay, but I don’t like to hear you say that.”
“Then stop bringing him up.”
“Well, I hear you loud and clear, my dear. I won’t speak another word about it. What movies have you seen lately? I just saw something with Bradley Cooper that was very good.”
Twenty minutes later, after several failed attempts, Jay managed to end the call with his mother. To calm himself down, he decided to go on a run. As he was lacing up his running shoes, his mind went to Jeremy Evans, his best friend from grade school, and the time that Jeremy had gotten a pair of Air Jordans for his twelfth birthday. Jay had been so jealous of the fancy sneakers that he’d broken into Jeremy’s ground-floor bedroom through an open window during church hours, stolen the Air Jordans, and tossed them into a dumpster behind a convenience store. He hadn’t thought about that for years; it was probably the combination of hearing his mother’s voice on the phone, then lacing up his own sneakers that brought it bubbling up. He found himself luxuriating in the memory. Jeremy’s grief at losing those sneakers had been a momentous experience for Jay. He’d done something in secret that made someone else feel bad and made him feel good. It had been a transformative moment.
After cuing up his running mix, he left his condo, thinking he’d do three miles at least.
5
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 8:49 P.M.
Ethan and Caroline still emailed, but they’d spent more time on the phone lately, and they’d even taken up skyping. Ethan sometimes believed skyping was the safest mode of conversation. He assumed that the police or the FBI or some lunatic killer was constantly listening in on any conversation that went between their cell phones. Skype felt private, somehow, even if it wasn’t. It also meant that he could look at Caroline instead of looking only at the words she typed or listening to her voice on the cell. He’d become enamored by her face. His mother used to collect small ceramic animals that were dressed like tiny humans. They had a name, although Ethan couldn’t remember exactly what it was—woodland creatures, or something like that—and whenever she’d gotten a new piece for her collection, she’d stare at all their little faces and say again and again how cute they were.
Caroline’s face reminded Ethan of a woodland creature, not something he’d ever tell her. She had a small mouth and a small nose, but large eyes and a large forehead, made larger by the brown hair that she always pulled back into a loose bun. Her skin was so pale that it almost seemed reflective, as did her pale brown eyes. Ethan thought she alternated between looking like a young girl and looking like an old lady. Again, these were things he hadn’t told her.
But he had told her almost everything else. About how he subsisted on the meager royalties from the one song he’d sold over five years ago, a song that had been retrofitted into a national commercial for jeans. About all his relationships with women, about his fear that he had no talent, that he was wasting his life on the pursuit of an unattainable dream. He told her about his year-long relationship with Phoebe Faunce, another singer-songwriter, and how she’d died from an Oxycontin overdose while he’d slept beside her. And he even told her about what his parents’ friend Bob O’Neal had done to him in the dunes near a Cape Cod rental they had all shared one summer week when Ethan was twelve. In return, Caroline had spoken at length about her family dynamics and the particular insidious cruelty of her own father, and how, when she’d finally confronted her mother about him after he died a few years earlier, her mother had said that she married her father because he’d been cruel, not in spite of it.
And they talked about the list, and the police presence that had become part of their lives, and, once, they had talked late into the night about their own impending deaths, and whether they thought the police would catch whoever had killed Frank Hopkins, Matthew Beaumont, and Arthur Kruse.
“I think they’ll get him or her,” Ethan said. He had propped several pillows under his head, and was lying on his side, looking at Caroline doing the same thing from her house in Michigan.
“Really?”
“I don’t know. He’s stopped now, for a while, anyway.”
“That’s because we’re all being watched,” Caroline said. “But they can’t watch us forever. I think he’s just biding his time.”
“You’re probably right. He killed as many of us as he could kill before the police presence got out of hand, and now he’s just waiting. There’s no real rush, unless they figure out who he is.”
“I hope so,” Caroline said.
“I read somewhere that human beings can’t actually conceive of their own deaths, that if we could we’d all be paralyzed by fear.”
“I study poetry for a living and, trust me, poets must be the exception to that particular rule. Lots of conception of mortality.”
“What about your students?” Ethan said.
Caroline frowned, then laughed. “I think you’re onto something there. My students definitely have no conception they will one day die, which is probably why they seem so unmoved by poetry.”
Ethan didn’t immediately respond; his mind was trying to unearth a thought. These silences—comfortable silences, for the most part—had become part of their routine, especially when they talked on Skype. “They might catch him,” he said, at last. “They clearly have a lead.”
“Oh, we’re back to that. Do you mean our parents are the lead?”
“Uh-huh.”
A few days earlier both Ethan and Caroline had been contacted by different federal agents, and asked questions about their parents. Shortly after that, their parents had been questioned as well. Ethan had talked with his mom immediately after she’d been interviewed, and she told him that they had a long list of names, people they wondered if she knew.
“Caroline Geddes? Jay Coates? Jessica Winslow?” Ethan had asked.
“I don’t think so. The last names sound familiar. They asked me about a Wayne Coates, and I told them I knew a Wayne Chalfant, you remember him, don’t you, that nice retarded man who worked at the grocery store?”
“So you didn’t know any of the actual people they mentioned?”
“No, I didn’t, honey, but maybe I’m getting old and forgetful. I mean, that’s what your father tells me, anyway.”
“I don’t think you’re getting forgetful, Mom,” he lied. “And, really, the agents are just fishing. What about Mary Louise Gauthier? Or Meg Gauthier?”
She had paused, then said, “Yes, I think they did ask me about her. Why? Do you know all these people? I wish you’d tell me more, Ethan, I don’t like what’s happening to my baby boy.”
Gauthier was the maiden name of Caroline’s mother, and Ethan had confirmed that the agents had asked her about his mother as well. This was why it was obvious that there was a lead that the FBI were following. It might be a false lead—probably was a false lead—but they thought they’d found some connection that had to do with the parents of the people on the list.
“Mom,” Ethan had said during his last conversation with his mother. “This is a strange question, but could anyone want to get revenge on you? Did you ever have anything to do with hurting a child maybe? I mean, just accidentally.”
There was the slightest pause, maybe only noticeable to Ethan because he was so familiar with the rhythms of his mom’s speech, but then she said, “Of course not. I would never hurt anyone.”
“No, I know, Mom. But what if it were an accident or something?”
Again, a slight pause, and for a moment he thought she was going to tell him something significant, but, instead, she said, “I don’t know why you’re asking me these questions.”
Caroline was falling asleep—he could tell by the way she had just folded her pillow in half, and let her head fall onto it—and Ethan said, “I’ll let you go. Do you want to skype tomorrow?”
She yawned, but propped herself up on her elbow. “I read a poem the other day and thought of us.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“It’s a recently published Philip Larkin poem called ‘We Met at the End of the Party.’”
“How is it a recently published Philip Larkin poem?”
“Posthumously published, I should’ve said.”
“You want to read it to me?”
“No, not right now. You’re right, I’m tired. It just made me think of us, like we’ve met but maybe it’s too late.”
“That’s grim.”
Caroline smiled. She had a small mouth but a large smile. He could see a sliver of her pink gumline. “It is, I know, but I can’t help how it made me feel. Look it up and read it.”
“Okay, I will.”
After ending the call, Ethan got up to use the bathroom, brushing his teeth and getting a glass of water from the kitchen. As he passed the sliding glass doors that led to the small backyard, he thought he heard something outside. Pulling the curtain aside he saw the feral cat he’d named Townes chowing down on the cat food he’d left out on the brick patio. It was a full moon, and there was a yellow sheen across the scrubby yard with its two lawn chairs, its rusty Weber grill.
Back in bed, he found the Larkin poem online; it had been published in The New Yorker a few years earlier. It was clearly about being old, about meeting someone and falling in love when there’s not much time left, and it bothered him that Caroline had thought of them when she read it. He almost called her back but decided to let her sleep, instead. He’d text her first thing in the morning.
6
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 11:11 P.M.
Jonathan’s house in Bermuda was not what she had expected. Alison had imagined a swank newly built mansion in a gated community, but she’d been brought to a ramshackle nineteenth-century colonial on a narrow twisty street in St. George’s. There was an overgrown garden, and the rooms were filled with musty furniture and threadbare oriental rugs. Alison loved it there. Every morning she would ride a scooter down to Tobacco Bay and swim until she was exhausted, then bake herself in the sun. In the afternoons she’d retreat to the coolness of the house with its high-ceilinged rooms. There was wireless, of course, but except for that, there was nothing modern in the house at all. The kitchen was probably the most recently updated room, and that might have happened sometime in the 1950s.
Being with Jonathan all day was not what she had expected either. He spent a lot of time in his office on his laptop, or taking phone calls in the garden, but he’d take a walk with her every evening around six when the day had cooled. They’d circle a quiet park that smelled of flowers, her arm linked through his. Since his wife’s departure something had changed in him; he was colder, quieter, but prone to asking sudden strange questions. Did Alison think anyone in the world was truly happy? Did she believe in an interventionist God? It was possible that this was Jonathan’s true personality, and she’d just never seen it emerge during their weekly get-togethers. He’d even stopped wanting to have sex with her, although he seemed happy to have her with him in the king-size four-poster bed. He’d fall asleep with a hand on her thigh and a paperback novel perched on his chest. Some nights he’d have bad dreams that would cause him to say indecipherable words. Once, when he moaned, she woke him up, and he looked at her like he had no idea who she was.
The house had belonged to his parents, and he’d been coming there since he was a young boy. There were framed family photographs hung along the upstairs hall, and there were oil paintings in the large sitting room, one of his parents, and one each of Jonathan and his sister, when they were both little kids, probably eight and ten. She asked him about his family, and he wouldn’t say much, just that they were all gone now, and he should probably sell the house sooner rather than later. A local woman came every other afternoon to clean, and Jonathan always made it a point to chat with her; they’d known each other for fifty years, he said, longer than he’d known anybody. She did very little cleaning, just some dusting and vacuuming, so Alison had begun several house projects on her own, mostly working her way through closets and storage spaces, looking for silver to polish, or new artwork to display. One day she found a set of etched cocktail glasses from the 1960s, cleaned them up and served rum swizzles to Jonathan for cocktail hour. But her best find had been an old Instamatic Kodak camera, probably also from the 1960s, plus a whole box of film. She started taking photographs of the house, and of the village, not knowing whether the film was still good. After she’d finished a roll, she’d brought it to a small processing shop in Hamilton and had it developed. The pictures were beautiful, she thought. And now she was working her way through the rest of the rolls, feeling as though the old camera, maybe in combination with the old house, and this new part of the world, had reignited her passion for photography.
They’d been there a week and a half when Jonathan told her he needed to go on a business trip to the West Coast. Before he’d even finished the words a feeling of dread descended on her. She didn’t want to go back to New York. She didn’t want to leave this house. He must have seen it on her face because he quickly said, “Stay here if you want. I’ll only be gone a week or so and then I’ll come back here to be with you.”
She’d been relieved, but the day he’d left to go to the airport there’d been driving rain all afternoon, and the cold, creeping sensation that something was wrong in her life had returned to her. It wasn’t quite a premonition, but she felt a negative energy in her bones. Lying that night in the enormous bed and staring at the network of cracks along the yellowed ceiling, she tried to quell the feeling by picturing herself swimming in the warm Atlantic Ocean, but the image of Tobacco Bay kept turning into something else. Cold, gray water, pocked with steady rain. A slack tide. Wheeling gulls. Dark, seaweed-fringed rocks.
She got out of bed, and wandered the top floor of the house, eventually slipping underneath the slightly musty-smelling sheets of a single bed in a corner bedroom. The wallpaper was patterned with small blue flowers.
7
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14, 12:02 P.M.
It was fully autumn now, Caroline’s favorite season, and the drive from her cottage to her mother’s house on the other side of Ann Arbor was so peaceful she was tempted to skip lunch with her mom and just keep driving.
She was listening to a Lucinda Williams album recommended by Ethan, and the majority of the trees were at peak color, oranges and yellows and reds. The sky was a cold blue, and steady wind was whipping dead leaves through the air. She felt as though she could have stayed in this particular moment forever, but her mother was waiting for her, and a police officer was watching her every move. She parked behind her mother’s Taurus and walked across the leaf-strewn lawn to the open door of the ranch her mother had bought two years earlier in order to be closer to her daughter.
Lunch was an elaborate chicken casserole and a spinach salad with nuts and pomegranate seeds. This was a sign that her mother was feeling well. When she was depressed, bluesy was her word for it, one of the first things she stopped doing was cooking nice meals.
They ate in the dining room, Meg’s elderly labradoodle sleeping underneath the table.
“I’ve met someone,” Caroline said, surprising herself.
“Oh,” Meg said, her eyes lighting up. “Who is it?”
“I should back up. I have met someone nice, but I haven’t actually met him yet, not face-to-face. We talk on the phone. He’s a singer-songwriter in Texas.”
“Interesting. How did you meet him in the first place?”
