Howard Shrier: Boston Cream

A dishonourable grave. That was about all I’d been able to do for David Fine. Took me all of five days on the job.

When I got back to the hotel, Jenn was still asleep. Ryan was on the other bed, watching TV with the sound off: a local news report that showed firefighters battling to contain the inferno in Wellington Hill. There’d be no word yet about any victims inside, of course. It would be hours before it would be safe enough for anyone to get into the crumbling structure.

He went down to the desk to book another room for himself. I laid my tired body down and wondered how well Ed and Sandy Lerner would hold up under police questioning. They were bound to get a visit, once the Boston cops linked the Coopers’ island residence back to them. He had been an actor once; he’d need every last bit of that skill to stay out of the spotlight. His daughter would simply follow his lead, I guessed, as was her custom. I had no doubt Chuck Stayner could lie his way through a police interview; it would be a simple matter of slipping on his professional mask.

I channel surfed awhile to help me relax, maybe drift off, settling on an outdoor network showing men in hip waders fishing a deep, rushing river treed on both sides, a blue sky behind it, just a few white clouds in friendly shapes. Jenn woke up and asked me to lie beside her and hold her and maybe find some godawful movie or reality show. We rested against each other on the one clean bed and searched the channels until we found a sixties flick that combined surfing, singing and a monster from the Bad Prop Lagoon. We laughed at every dumb scene and song. It was only during the commercials that Jenn would start to weep.

The temperature in Toronto has been above freezing the last ten days. Green shoots of crocuses are poking through the dark fragrant mud in the flower beds around my building. A lone whippoorwill has been perched on the telephone wires across the street, singing its plaintive notes. The Blue Jays open at home next Monday.

Jenn is still away.

I got a postcard the other day from Cuba, where she and Sierra have been holed up. It showed a huge marlin breaking free of the surface of the ocean, blue black against a clear sky. “This will be me again,” she wrote on the back.

I don’t know when she’s coming back to work. Or even back home. We haven’t talked about it at all. I imagine the reality of what happened to her while she was at Halladay’s is still sinking in. I suggested she get counselling but she said, “I used to work on a rape crisis line, remember? I know exactly what they’d say.”

She hasn’t told me yet whether she is pregnant. She did go for a full exam before she left for Cuba but she didn’t offer the results and I didn’t ask. There are other risks, of course: that her rapist might have infected her with HIV or something else. She doesn’t even know if it was only one man. Those results will take longer to know.

It’s still sinking in for me too. Ugly dreams raid my sleep, including one where a man in a surgical mask starts to cut away my face with a scalpel. Waves of depression roar up on me without warning. It’s not the same depression I experienced after the concussion. It’s something else entirely.

On the plus side, my brother the lawyer, my colossus who doth bestride me, has been helping me stay out of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, despite the fervent efforts on the part of authorities to have me deposed there regarding the deaths of Sean Daggett and numerous others found inside Halladay’s and painstakingly identified. And the deaths of David Fine and Carol-Ann. And the disappearance and presumed death of Harinder Patel of Somerville.

“Do not set foot in that city,” Daniel said. “I don’t care if they ask you to throw out the first pitch at Fenway. Don’t even go to Buffalo. The minute you cross the border, you’re theirs.”

Instead, he has been drafting an affidavit that provides my version of said events. It is sadly lacking in details but so far says nothing that is out-and-out perjury. If my brother is going to get all the respect and adulation he commands from our one and only parent, he might as well fucking earn it. And if he can come up with a document that keeps the Commonwealth off my back, he will have done so, in spades.

As I lie in bed at night, trying to fall asleep, I think about Lesley McConnell and I wonder if she has had her transplant yet. I wonder how Frank is handling the death of his kid brother. I think of Rabbi Ed and the misguided mission he set for himself, for his ego, and the tragedy it led to. I think of Ron and Sheila Fine, of course, wishing so badly I could have done better by them, that I could have come home triumphantly, David in tow, the threat to his life erased and his future as bright and shining as the city of Boston once was. All I got for them was a $250,000 endowment of a scholarship in David’s name, courtesy of Dr. E. Charles Stayner, to be given annually to the most deserving transplant fellow. I think of Shana and regret the stone wall that got thrown up between us. She was a lovely young woman, just the kind I think I could fall in love with, given half a chance. Instead, she’s another in a long line that got hurt by getting close to me.

I am not a violent man. I keep telling myself that. I think of myself as a good man at heart, who keeps getting caught up in deeds committed by men who really are violent. So call it justice. It’s how I think of it broadly. Why then can’t it roll off me the way it does Ryan? Why do I feel the cold crushing weight of every corpse? Until last June, my cases at Beacon Security had never involved more than a fist here, an elbow there. Since then, my three forays into the United States have been storms of violence.

So I tell myself, if it only happens when I go to the States, where the stakes seem higher and guns abound, then there’s a simple solution. Turn down any work that would take me there. Recommend someone local instead. Accept any referral fees, which is what I should have done when Ron Fine called. Stay in Canada, where cases rarely degenerate into the same kind of carnage. Hide my passport and keep my peace-loving self at home. Because that is what non-violent men do.