I.O.U Read online

  I ordered a second beer.

  As I drank that one, I stripped the label off of it, too: My mother was so distraught about having a hysterectomy, that it drove her crazy; my mother, like a lot of women, was a victim of an unnecessary operation, and that drove her crazy; my father drove my mother crazy; the combination of the hysterectomy, the hormonal changes, and the emotional overload of the bankruptcy combined to drive my mother crazy; my mother was crazy to begin with, and I’d never noticed, because in my family, who could tell?

  I laughed, and ordered a third Beck’s.

  I considered pulling out my notebook, but thought, the hell with it. The notebook was stupid, merely a silly way to give me the illusion of accomplishing something. Hah. What was there to write down, anyway —that Pete Falwell had loved my mother in the eighth grade? What if she’d fallen for Pete instead of for my dad, then Pete could have been my father. Now there was a chilling thought. On the other hand, we’d still have a business. And on the other hand, he probably never would have considered allowing a daughter to run it. Pete had always had enough trouble just living with the idea of a woman running the civic foundation. I had always wondered if he had been outvoted when they hired me.

  Not that it mattered now.

  When the beer came, I opened my purse, fumbled around for the bottle of Doc Farrell’s magic vitamins, poured one into my hand without even looking at it, and washed it down with a swallow of beer. With any luck, the B-complex would help to counteract the hangover I was sure to have in the morning. I didn’t drink much anymore; three beers in a row was unusual for me. But the whole day, in fact the whole last several days, had been the most unusual and upsetting of my life, which, considering my life, was saying something. I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t “adjust.” So my mother died. So everybody’s mother dies. So come on, Jenny, get with it; it’s been almost a whole week

  I laughed again.

  “Ready for another beer?”

  I shook my head at the waitress. No, definitely not.

  Checking my watch, I saw that it was nearly six o’clock. I gathered my purse and put out enough money for the drinks and a tip. I stood up and slid into my coat, and then weaved my way between the tables to the pay phones out front.

  “Sam?” I said, when I reached the publisher of The Times. “Listen, I’m sorry, but I got held up, and now I won’t be able to make it tonight. How about tomorrow?”

  “Are you at a bar? It sounds like it.”

  “How about I’ll buy you lunch tomorrow, Sam?”

  “Where are you going now? I want to talk to you.”

  “Now? Home, I guess. Why do you want to talk to me?”

  “I want a statement on why you quit the foundation.”

  Oh, shit. I had forgotten about this part of it. In a city this size, with a foundation this important, it was already news. “Personal reasons.”

  “Come on, Jenny, give me more than that.”

  “Have lunch with me tomorrow, Sam, and maybe I will.”

  I heard him sigh, but he said, “Noon. Meet me here.”

  He hung up before I did. I fished out another quarter, inserted it and dialed Geof’s extension at the police department.

  “Hi,” he said, “how are you?”

  “A little drunk, I think. Geof, I quit my job.”

  “Did you say quit?”

  “That’s what I said. Any chance you can drive me home?”

  “Honey, I can’t right now. Where are you, at The Buoy? I wish I could meet you there, but I’m right in the middle of something. Why don’t you call a cab? I’ll be home as soon as I can. I want to hear all about it.”

  “Okay, love you.”

  “Love you, too,” he said, and hung up.

  I searched my billfold, and then the bottom of my purse, for another quarter, but came up empty-handed. “Oops. Can’t call a cab without any money,” I said. I felt so funny, all of a sudden, so loose-limbed and happy, and I couldn’t imagine why I thought I couldn’t drive home perfectly safely. Why, I was a good driver. I didn’t need any old cab to deliver me, like some old drunk. I’d just drive on home myself, and be there in a jiffy, and crawl right into bed to wait for my husband to celebrate my new freedom. What a lovely, fuzzy feeling I had around the edges of my head and my body. My, how my fingers tingled and my toes, enough to make me giggle a little. Life wasn’t so bad, life was good and rich and full, and I could survive anything, sure I could, sure I would, just watch me…

  Outside, it was cold as midnight. I rolled down all the car windows so the freezing air would keep me awake, but by the time I turned off the two-lane blacktop onto our dark dirt road, I was so drowsy and soft-limbed that I felt as if I could have sleep-driven the car the rest of the way home. Oh, it felt so good to want to sleep so bad. To know that my eyes would seal shut and my brain would shut down the minute my head hit the pillow. Sorry, Geof, we’ll have to wait to celebrate in the morning. I sighed, looking forward to deep and dreamless, drowning sleep.

  I mumbled a song blissfully to myself as the car bounced along the dirt road. “Pack up all my cares and woe, see them go, goo-ood niight, Jen-ny.” And then a chorus of “Lullaby of Birdland,” and “Rockabye Baby”… “Rockabye Jenny in an Accord, when the car stops, you’ll fall on the floord.” I giggled sleepily at my own nonsense. And even that felt good, so good, to be silly for once instead of so damned serious and somber all of the time. I sang as I pressed the button on the garage door opener, and as I waited for the double door to rise.

  Oops, I’d forgotten it didn’t work.

  “Outta batt’ries.”

  The door was already open, just as I’d left it that morning.

  “Come on along and listen to the Lullaby of Jen-ny, the hiphooray and wallaby, the Lullaby of Jen-ny.” Driving into the garage, I miscalculated and banged into the trash cans. “Oops again.” Feeling befuddled but good, so good, I stared at the cans, wondering what in the world I should do now. “Leave’m,” I decided, and then I sang some more. “When a Poor Fred baby says good-night, it’s early in the morning, Fredricans don’t sleep tight, unless it’s liiiight! Goooodniiight, Jennnnny, policeman’s on his waaay…”

  I opened my door, but didn’t move to get out.

  The car was still running as I reached for my purse. Ah, there was the Port Frederick Fisheries annual report under my purse. I picked it up and flipped through it in slow motion. Huh? What was this, under the heading “subsidiary companies”? The amazing, disturbing words doubled and fuzzed and pinwheeled and cartwheeled in front of my eyes. I was suddenly so tired that all I wanted to do was to drape my arms over the top of the steering wheel and rest my cheek on them and go to sleep.

  And so I did.

  I never heard the sound of footsteps on the garage floor.

  I didn’t see the hand that lifted the PFF report as it slid from my lap, or hear my car door close. And I didn’t hear the garage door come down and shut me inside with the car engine still running.

  12

  “JEN? HONEY? JENNY!”

  A face with a halo around it floated in front of me. My, they had handsome angels in heaven. But oh, how I wished it would hold still. It made me so sick and dizzy just to look at it. I closed my eyes again.

  “Jenny!”

  Ohhh. I was going to throw up.

  “Here, honey, here’s the pan, do it here.”

  “Ohhh. Goddd.”

  I remembered a time when I was a teenager and a couple of friends and I had decided it would be a great adventure to cross the United States by Greyhound bus. And of course it was. Except that the bus fumes made me sick. Regularly. There had been one time in particular when we were all three standing outside of the L.A. downtown bus station waiting for one of our relatives to pick us up, and he’d been late and the bus fumes had been as thick as—

  “Oh, God, I feel so incredibly sick.”

  Smog flu, he’d called it.

  “Your system’s full of carbon monoxide, that�
��s why.”

  Is that what I had this time, smog flu?

  One of the voices I’d been hearing in heaven—the deep, worried, gentle one that I took for St. Peter—was, I realized now, my husband’s. He was the one saying honey and Jenny. The other one was unfamiliar to me, a woman’s that was sharp and high-pitched, and when I opened my eyes again I discovered her to be a nurse. A nurse? I was lying in a hospital room? Must be one hell of a case of smog flu. Over a horrible new wave of nausea, I asked her, “Why’ssyt’mfull’oxide?”

  She didn’t respond to my question.

  I heaved into a gold plastic, kidney-shaped pan again, and she helped me to wash off my lips and chin. Only then did I open my eyes once more, focus them on my husband’s face, and try like anything to smile at him, though I pretty much failed to do it. One thing I definitely didn’t want to do was to breathe on him. Love has its limits, and I thought that might breach his. The room, I managed to see, was painted a bilious mauve. Geof was leaning toward me from a chair made of chrome and vinyl that was a sickening brown color. The television set, which stuck out of the wall opposite my feet, was turned on to an afternoon Western adventure. Even with the volume turned low, the sound of every bullet pierced my eyes and made me feel like Wyatt Earp’s last name. The nurse returned from the bathroom where she had taken my gold pan. Give me back my pan! She set it next to me on the bed. I felt so relieved to have it back.

  “I wish I were dead.”

  Geof nodded sympathetically.

  But the nurse retorted, senselessly, it seemed to me, “No, you don’t. You’re a very lucky girl to be alive at all. I don’t want to hear any of that silly talk. We’ve worked too hard on you to put up with that kind of ingratitude now!” She patted my hip (even that light touch on a far extremity made my gorge rise, and I closed my eyes on the misery), and then I heard her leave the room.

  I squinted at Geof.

  “I wish I were dead.”

  “I’ll bet.” He reached a hand toward me.

  “Don’t touch me, or I’ll throw up.”

  Quickly, he withdrew his hand.

  “What happened to me?”

  “Do you remember anything?”

  “Stop that.” I tried to laugh, but that also made my gorge rise. “Will you stop being a cop? I remember driving into the garage—oh, listen, I’m sorry, but I smashed the trash cans—and I think I remember being in the garage, and that’s it. What happened?”

  “Do you remember what else you did yesterday?”

  Yesterday, I thought. Thank God. I’d lost only a day, maybe even less than twenty-four hours. Not days, weeks, or even years. Like my mother. “I had a beer at The Buoy.” I paused a long time between sentences, forcing myself to think back, and trying to breathe past the sickness in my sore throat. Why was my throat so sore? “Maybe more than one. That was just before I went home. Oh, do I have to do this? I’m so dizzy and sick. I met with Pete Falwell before that. I think I quit my job.” I glanced at him to see if he looked surprised. He didn’t, so I gathered that he already knew. “I went to Boston to talk to a man named Cecil Greenstreet. He was a vice president at Cain Clams right before it folded. What else? There’s something. Oh, I can’t think—”

  “What, Jenny? What are you remembering?”

  I started to raise my right hand to rub my forehead, only to discover I was attached to an IV. I put my arm back down on the bed and tried to focus on the wispy thought that had floated in behind my eyes and then out again. “Something… I don’t know, it hurts to think. Please tell me what happened to me.”

  “You passed out,” Geof lied, trying to spare me for a while.

  I believed it, as far as it went, because I knew all too well that I had been abusing my poor body—not feeding it well, not resting it properly. No wonder it had collapsed on me. Served me right.

  Then a smidgen of logic sneaked past the nausea.

  “But why do I have this terrible headache, and why am I so sick to my stomach?”

  “Gas fumes.”

  Oh, I hadn’t turned off the ignition before I passed out. But wait. Another snippet of logic was trying to creep in, trying to make some point about how there was something wrong with that explanation…

  “Go back to sleep,” Geof said, softly.

  That sounded like a fine idea.

  “Who’s been here?” I mumbled, as I closed my eyes. “Besides you?”

  “Your father. He kept going to the window and remarking on what a beautiful view of the harbor you have. Randy came with him. She kept trying to soothe your fevered brow with little pats and kisses—”

  I grimaced, and pulled the gold pan closer.

  “—which I knew you’d hate, so I made them leave. Your trustees sent flowers, and Faye and Marvin did, too.” (Marvin Lastelic was our part-time accountant at the foundation.) “You’ve got a separate bunch of flowers from Miss Lucille Grant, apart from the ones the trustees sent, and a big bunch from Francie and Duke Daniel, with a card saying they love you.” He paused, to let me register that fact.

  “That’s nice,” I managed.

  “Marsha Sandy has been by several times, but I’ve kept everybody else out. So mostly, it’s just been me.”

  “My sister?”

  He didn’t answer, and I was drifting away again.

  “You’re going to be fine, Jenny.”

  Away, away, drifting away.

  “I’ll tell you about it later, Jenny.”

  “Much…” I murmured, “…later.”

  And it was much, much later when I willingly opened my eyes to admit the world again. Until then, I kept them closed every chance I got, not wanting to talk to anybody, not wanting to encourage anybody to talk to me. If I talked, I threw up. If I listened, I threw up. Silence was as precious as oxygen to me. Still, I heard things. Frightening things. Even though the swish of a nurse’s slacks made my brain feel as if the frontal lobes were rubbing together, even though the mere pop of a plastic cap being pulled off a fresh syringe caused little bubbles of pain to burst in my neck, and so I tried to block it all out with sleep, sleep, sleep—still, I heard things that made me feel even sicker, but now with fear. I was like a drunk waking up with the world’s worst hangover and beginning to get a terrible, nauseating, humiliating glimmer—from little things she overheard people say—of exactly what she had done with the lampshade the night before. More than ever, I began to wish that somebody would just shoot me and put me out of this misery.

  That evening, the night after it happened, I was able to sit up in bed and let Geof tell me the story of what happened to me. Even before he began to talk, I was filled with such dread that I was already on the verge of tears, and trying to hide it from him.

  Was he going to confirm my worst fears?

  Please God, no.

  “I got home that night,” he said, as I endeavored to look him in the eye, and to sit calmly with my hands in my lap. The two of us were alone in the hospital room, with the door closed. “The garage door was down. The house was dark. To make a long story short, I found you unconscious and pulled you out of there and called the dispatcher for help.”

  I closed my eyes, feeling tears starting behind the lids.

  “Jenny? Do you remember anything now?”

  The horrible truth was, I didn’t. For all I knew, I had tried—even if unconsciously—to kill myself. That’s what I was so afraid of. On the face of it, it seemed entirely too possible. At my mother’s funeral, hadn’t I morbidly fantasized about my own death, and about the “rest and comfort” of being cradled by a being of light and love? If that wasn’t a death wish, I didn’t know what was. And the day before, after seeing Pete Falwell, hadn’t I felt run-down, stressed-out, and screwed-over? Manic one minute, despairing the next, I sounded like a perfect candidate for suicide. How selfish, how humiliating. I couldn’t open my eyes. I was too frightened and ashamed to look my husband in the face. I felt the tears rolling down my cheeks, faster and harder, and I brought my hands u
p to hide them.

  “Jenny?” Suddenly Geof was holding me and I was trying to burrow my head into his chest, so he couldn’t see me. “Honey, I’m sorry, I guess it’s too soon to talk about—”

  “Just like my mother—”

  “What, Jenny?”

  “I flipped out, didn’t I?”

  “What?”

  “Just like my poor crazy mother and my nutty father. Like mother, like father, like daughter. I’m sorry, Geof, I’m so—”

  “Stop it.”

  But that only made me cry harder. Geof literally shook me, and said, “Jenny, stop it! It isn’t true. Don’t you know yourself better than that?” He laughed a little. “If you think you tried to kill yourself, you’re wrong.”

  I looked up at him, finally, hardly daring to hope.

  “Prove it,” I whispered.

  “All right,” he said. “Listen to me! The official finding is going to be that it was an accident, that you fell asleep at the wheel after you put the garage door down and before you turned off the ignition.”

  I felt a lifting of hope. Could that have happened?

  “But think, Jenny, what’s the problem with that theory?”

  I didn’t want to think of a problem with it. I liked it. I wanted to keep it. Shit. The dread crept back into my stomach again. “My opener doesn’t work,” I mumbled. “Dead batteries.”

  “Yes, it has dead batteries that I promised to replace for you two weeks ago. So it wouldn’t have mattered if you had sat on the goddamned button, it couldn’t have closed the garage door.”

  “Do the cops—the other cops—know this, Geof?”

  “They know the batteries were missing from the garage door opener when they found it.” A wry, weary tone entered his voice. “They know I claim to have taken them out two weeks ago when you discovered the opener was dead. They also know that I could have removed the batteries last night, to protect you. You see, attempted suicide is unlawful, but it’s not a prosecutable offense in Massachusetts. If you tried to kill yourself, you couldn’t go to jail, but you could lose your insurance over it, and you’d certainly suffer a loss of reputation. So the department thinks it’s doing me a favor by calling it an accident.”