“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.