The Darkest Evening of the Year

Page 28

The sound stopped abruptly when the dog turned away from him and went forward into the cargo area.
Brian became aware of the traffic noise in the street rising slowly from the hush into which he had not until now realized that it had fallen.
He closed the tailgate and went around to the front passenger door. Amy had expressed the desire to drive.
In the car, on the open road, they would have privacy. Secrets could more easily be shared.
On the interstate, bound for the storied city, she was silent for a while but then said, “When I was eighteen, I married a man named Michael Cogland. He probably intended to kill me from the day that I accepted his proposal.”
Chapter 54
The previous evening, when he had shot Gunny Schloss, Billy had killed his third person since dawn, having also assisted in two other homicides. When he should have been full of merriment, all the fun had gone out of the day and all the frolic out of him.
As he drove away from the restaurant in Monterey, feeling the dog’s stare on the back of his head even after he turned the corner, he decided the problem might be that he had killed those people solely for business reasons. He hadn’t wasted any of them just for a lark, simply as an expression of his conviction that life was a parade of fools marching to no purpose.
Shumpeter had not been a business associate, but he had not been killed as an act of meaningless violence, either. Billy blew him away for his Cadillac and to use his house as a furnace in which to obliterate multiple life-sentences worth of incriminating evidence.
To his chagrin, Billy realized that he had lost his way. He had gotten so consumed by business that he’d strayed from the philosophy that had given him such a happy and successful life. He had become so serious about the illegal drug dealing, arms dealing, organ dealing, and other enterprises that he had succumbed to the idea that what he did mattered. Other than the fact that everything he did to earn money was illegal, he could not see one lick of difference between himself and Bill Gates: He had committed himself to building something, to a legacy!
He was embarrassed for himself. He had become a counter-culture bourgeois, seduced by the illusion of purpose and accomplishment.
The previous night, driving away from Brian McCarthy’s place after the inexplicable crying jag, he had told himself that the tonic most certain to improve his mood would be the ruthless murder of a total stranger selected on a whim, thus confirming the meaningless and dark-comic nature of life.
He had been correct. Amoment of clear seeing. But he had not yet acted on his own good advice more than half a day later.
With the Learjet, he could leapfrog over McCarthy and Redwing, and be waiting at the interception point long before they arrived. He had time to put his life back on track.
In a Best Buy parking lot, Billy opened the weapons case. He snapped the thirty-three-round magazine into the 9-mm Glock 18 and screwed on the sound suppressor.
Then he cruised.
During the next half hour, he encountered numerous excellent targets. A sweet-looking elderly woman walking a Maltese. A girl in a wheelchair. A beautiful young woman, demurely dressed, getting into a Honda bearing bumper stickers that urged JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS and ABSTINENCE ALWAYS WORKS.
When he failed to work up the energy to pull the trigger on a young mother pushing two infants in a tandem stroller, Billy knew he was having a midlife crisis.
In a Target parking lot, he unscrewed the silencer from the Glock, ejected the extended magazine, and returned everything to the molded-foam niches in the suitcase.
He had never been so scared in his life.
When he completed the current job, he would take off longer than a few days, perhaps a month. He would live the entire time as Tyrone Slothrop, and would reread all the classics that had liberated him in his youth.
The problem might be that the current generation of alienated, bitter, ironic, angry, nihilistic writers with a comic bent were not as talented as the giants who had come before them. If he had been sustaining himself on weak tea, mistaking it for white lightning, he could have unwittingly been starving his mind.
He returned to the airport, where the Lear waited.
At Billy’s request, the steward with the British accent prepared Chivas Regal over cracked ice.
Lunch, served high above the earth, was a chopped salad with breast of capon and quail’s eggs.
Billy sipped Scotch, ate, and brooded. He did not pick up any magazines. He went to the bathroom once, but he didn’t glance at the mirror. He did not worry about the dog getting his scent through the open SUV window. He did not weep. Not a single tear. His malaise was just a bump in the road. Nothing to worry about. A bump. In the road. Hi-ho.
Chapter 55
Driving toward the city where so many people had claimed to have left their hearts, Amy unburdened hers.
In her senior year at Misericordiæ, she won a scholarship from a major university. Because it was partial, she had to support herself.
For two years in high school, she had worked part-time as a waitress. She had liked the job and had earned good tips.
When she went away to university, she landed a job in an upscale steakhouse. There she met Michael Cogland, a regular customer, when he was twenty-six, eight years her senior.
He was charming and intense, but when he asked her out, she did not initially accept the invitation. He proved to be indefatigable.
Amy thought she knew what she wanted: a first-rate education, including a doctorate, a career as a professor, a quiet academic life with many friends, and an opportunity to enrich the lives of students as the sisters of Misericordiæ had enriched hers.
Michael Cogland not only persisted until he swept her out of her waitressing shoes, but he also swept her into a world of wealth that she found irresistibly seductive.
Later she would realize that being abandoned at the age of two with only the clothes she wore, having lost the Harkinsons and the solid middle-class life they would have given her, and having been raised in an orphanage, she had grown up with a thirst for security that had not been quenched by all the love that the sisters had rained on her. She had gotten along for eighteen years without more than a few dollars in her wallet, and she had thought that poverty-and the comfort with which she lived in it-inoculated her against an unhealthy desire for money.
Cogland had recognized her subconscious yearning for security and, with subtlety and cunning, had presented her with a vision of a cozy future that she could not resist.
Because she was a modest Catholic-school girl, he treated her with respect, too, and delayed a physical relationship until they were married. He knew precisely how to play her.
They were engaged two months after they met, and were married in four. She dropped out of university and into a life of leisure.
He wanted a family. Soon she was pregnant. But there would be a nanny, maids.
Only much later did she learn that although Michael was a rich man by most standards, his greatest wealth was held in trust. By the terms of his grandfather’s will, those funds would pass to him only on two conditions: Before his thirtieth birthday, he must marry a girl acceptable to his parents, and he must father a child by her.
Apparently his grandfather, if not also his parents, had seen in him, even when he’d been a boy, a tendency toward bad attitudes and ill-considered actions. As the Coglands had been a scandal-free family of faith, whose wealth had been built with a strong sense of community service, they believed in the power of a good wife and children to settle a man who might otherwise indulge his weaknesses.
Amy gave birth to a daughter when she was nineteen, and for a while all seemed well, a long life of privilege and joy propitiously begun. Michael came into his inheritance-and still she didn’t know that she had been the vehicle by which he obtained it.
Gradually, she began to see in him a different man from the one whom she had thought she married. The better she knew him, the less that his charm seemed genuine, the more it appeared to be a tool for manipulation. His warm manner wore thin, and a colder mind at times revealed itself.
He had a goatish streak, and he jumped the fence to more than a few other women. Twice she found evidence, but in most cases she knew the truth not from facts but from inference. He had a temper, well concealed until the beginning of their third year.
By the time they were married two years, Amy had begun to stay more often and longer in their vacation home, a stunning oceanfront property on which a handsome residence had been expanded from the lightkeeper’s house. The lighthouse itself, while owned by the Coglands, had long been automated; it was serviced once a month by Coast Guard engineers who flew to the site in a helicopter.
Michael was content to remain in the city. He visited as seldom as he could while maintaining the appearance of a marriage, but his desire for her faded so that even during his visits, he often slept in his own room. He seemed to view her with a contempt that she had not earned and could not understand.
She remained married to him solely for the sake of their one child, whom Amy loved desperately and whom she wanted to raise in the stable family environment that characterized the Coglands, generation after generation. In truth, she told herself that she remained for no other reason, but she engaged in self-delusion.
Although she yearned for a genuine husband-wife relationship, and though she suffered loneliness, she liked the lifestyle, liked it perhaps too much: the magisterial aura of old money, the peaceful rhythms of daily life without struggle, the beauty of her property.
Now, years later, having become a far different Amy from that young woman, she braked behind traffic crawling along the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge.
Without glancing at Brian, she said, “He wanted to name our daughter Nicole, and I was pleased with that, it’s a lovely name, but by the time she was three, I called her Nickie.”
Chapter 56
When the dark goes away outside the windows, when Piggy is pretty sure Mother and the man are sleeping, she sleeps, too.
If she sleeps when they don’t sleep, she might wake and see her mother watching. She is scared to have Mother watching her sleep.
Sometimes, she wakes and Mother has fire. A lighter. Her thumb turns the fire on. Then off. Then on. Over and over. Mother watching Piggy sleep and making fire.
Piggy dreams of Bear. He has a sock puppet on each hand. The sock puppets are so funny, like they were when Bear wasn’t dead.
Then Mother is in the dream. She touches fire to the sock puppets. Bear’s hands are all fire.
In the dream, Piggy says No, no, this isn’t how, not fire, it was a knife.
Now Bear’s hair is all fire. He tells Piggy Run. Run. Run, Piggy, run! Bear’s mouth spits fire, his eyes melting.
Piggy sits up in bed. Throws off covers. Gets out of bed. She stands hugging herself, shaking.
She feels so alone. She’s afraid. She’s afraid alone is forever, all the days there are ever going to be, and then that many more.
She hurries to the big chair, lifts off the cushion. Cushion has a cover. Cover has a zipper.
With the Forever Shiny Thing in her hand, Piggy does the Worst Thing She Can Do.
It is really a good thing. It makes her feel not so alone. Makes her remember Bear not all fire, no knife in him, just Bear smiling.
Bear calls it the Worst Thing She Can Do because Mother will get the Big Uglies, maybe bigger than big, if she catches Piggy doing it.
When the Worst Thing She Can Do is done, the Forever Shiny Thing put away, Piggy washes, dresses. She is Ready for Anything.
Bear says when you have HOPE, you are Ready for Anything.
She eats broken cookies from yesterday. She saves food when she can. Food won’t always come when you want it.
She thinks what Bear said in her dream. Run, Piggy, run!
He means not just in her dream but now. Bear is warning her.
She remembers what she read in Mother’s eyes last night, Mother with the like-Bear knife, her eyes so ugly.
Run, Piggy, run!
If Piggy looks at the bottoms of her feet, she will see what you get when you try to run. That was long ago. But the marks are there, you can see them.
What you get when you try to run is hurt, you get hurt. You hear a click, then you hurt.
Mother’s thumb turns fire on. Then off. Then on. If you try to run.
Piggy sits at her desk and takes a box out of a drawer.
In the box are pictures. Lots and lots. They are all the same but different.
She has been cutting them from magazines a long time, not for all the days there are ever going to be and then that many more, but a long time.
She will paste them together in a way that makes her feel good. She has saved them and saved them from so many magazines. Now she has enough. She is ready to start.
The pictures make her smile. They are so nice. Lots and lots. Standing and sitting. Running and jumping. Dogs. All dogs.
Chapter 57
An infinite army all in white marshaled in the west and rolled eastward on silent caissons, seizing the great bridge without shout or shot.
Golden Gate was the name not of the bridge but of the throat of the bay, and the bridge was orange.
The stiffening trusses, the girders, the suspender cables, the main cables, and the towers began to disappear into the fog.
As Amy drove north toward Marin County, there were moments when she could see nothing of the surrounding structure except vertical cables, so it seemed that the bridge was suspended from nothing more than clouds and that it conveyed travelers from the white void of the life they had lived to the white mystery beyond death.
“In those days,” Amy said, speaking of her years of marriage to Michael Cogland, “although I had been raised to believe, I wasn’t able yet to see. Life was vivid and strange and at times tumultuous, but in the rush of days, I was oblivious of patterns. A wonderful dog named Nickie had come to me when I was a girl…and now into my life had come this girl whose nickname became Nickie, and I thought it amusing and sweet, but nothing more.”
As her husband grew more remote and as Amy became increasingly estranged from him, Michael began to travel more frequently and to remain away for longer periods, sometimes in Europe or Asia, or South America, supposedly on business, but perhaps in the company of other women.
Her daughter, Nicole, her second Nickie, at five years of age, had recently begun having bad dreams. They were all the same. In sleep, she found herself wandering in a snowy night, lost in dark woods, alone and afraid.
The woods were those behind their house, thickets of various evergreens, where the great beam of the lighthouse did not sweep.
Amy suspected that Nickie’s dreams were a consequence of having been all but abandoned by her father, who had at first charmed her and won her heart as he had charmed and won her mother.
One night, in her pajamas and sitting on the edge of the bed, Nickie had asked for slippers.
Mommy, last night I was barefoot in the dream. I have to wear slippers to bed so I won’t be walking barefoot through the woods in my dream.