Tom Lake(93)

“Don’t tell us that,” Emily says.

I wonder if there’s a puppy in the freezer somewhere.

Maisie keeps going. “I was just rubbing puppies, trying to get them stimulated to nurse, trying to get them to latch on. By the time Ramona was finished and I’d wiped the mess out of the bathtub and put the dirty towels in the laundry it was really late. Lauren left out extra towels and I made a new bed in the tub and brought Ramona some food and water. It must have been two o’clock before I got out of there. I drove home with the windows down because I was covered in puppy stink. I came up over the hill in the pitch--black dark and saw Duchess in my headlights, standing in the middle of the road. I swear to god, if I’d turned my head for a second I would have killed her.”

Emily turns around. “What?”

“Duchess was in the middle of the road.”

“You didn’t tell me any of this,” I say to her.

“I didn’t even think about it then but what are the chances?”

“If you were leaving the Minties’ then she was a long way from home,” Emily says.

“Right? And if she’s just standing in the road in the dark, somebody was going to hit her. So I pulled over and got her in the car and she was practically in my lap, licking my sweatshirt, going out of her mind over the puppy slime. That’s not a small dog. I drove her back to the Whitings’ and put her in the yard. I was all keyed up. By the time I took a shower and looked at my phone it was three o’clock. That’s when I saw the news about Duke.” Maisie looks at me. “I don’t know why I woke you up. You’d been working all day. I should have let you sleep.”

“Of course you woke me up.”

She shakes her head. “He was still going to be dead in the morning.”

That night when I opened my eyes, Maisie was sitting on my side of the bed in the dark, scrolling on her phone. It was the light of the phone that woke me up.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

She ran her hand over my leg, over the summer quilt that covered my leg, and I knew it was bad. Joe was asleep beside me. I asked her where the girls were.

She shook her head. “Everyone’s fine.” Then she told me Duke was dead, and I thought for a second she was talking about a dog because Maisie was always going out in the middle of the night for one animal or another. And then I understood.

“How?” I whispered.

“He drowned. He was on a boat in Capri and he drowned.”

She meant both the famous actor and a young man I’d known a hundred years ago, the one who hadn’t crossed my mind in such long time. The two of them died together. I remembered how he would shake me gently awake at four in the morning, his hand running up my arm in the tangle of our sheets. Wake up, wake up, he’d say. It’s time to smoke.

“Mom and I went down to the kitchen and looked at our phones. There wasn’t any update in the news but the internet was flooded with pictures of him. There must have been a thousand pictures, and I said, one of these days, you’re going to have to tell us what happened.”

“I was worried about you finding out,” I say to Emily. “We talked about going over to the little house but we didn’t want to wake you.”

“We decided to go over there first thing in the morning but by then you’d already looked at your phone.” Maisie is apologetic. This has been weighing on her.

“You were worried about me?” Emily asks. “I met the man for what, twenty minutes when I was four years old, and I somehow managed to make the entire story into something that happened to me.” Emily lifts the bucket of cherries from her neck and upends it into the empty lug on the grass. After all these years of begging her to put him down, I can hardly believe the time has come. Emily knows everything now, and she is done.



And I am done, except for this: I saw Duke one other time, and of that time I will say nothing to my girls. His brief reappearance came in the period after my grandmother died but before Joe returned. It was years and years before that day in Michigan when he showed up on our porch. This was when I was living alone in New York and sewing for a costumer. He called me at seven in the morning. Not a Duke hour.

“Cricket,” he said. “It’s your past.”

This was in the Rampart days and Duke was already famous. Not the kind of famous he’d become, but anyone who saw him kept their eyes on the screen. I didn’t have a television, but a sports bar on my block had twenty of them and the bartender was not averse to letting me watch the small one he kept next to the ice machine. I’d show up on Thursday nights a little before nine o’clock even as I promised myself I wouldn’t. Not that it mattered. The bar was full of people who promised themselves they weren’t coming again.

“That guy,” the bartender would say, shaking his head. “Somebody explain it to me.” But I didn’t have to explain anything because half the time he was leaning over my beer, watching.

Duke told me he was in a hospital outside of Boston.

Had he said he was at a diner down the street and could I meet him for breakfast, I might have hung up the phone. But say the word hospital and everything changes. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“What happened,” he began, and then was quiet. “That’s a long one. That’s maybe a whole lifetime.”