Stephen Carter - Emperor of Ocean Park

Dana looks at me sharply, mouth wide, having heard something in my tone she does not like. She gives me my hand back. Perhaps she has realized, as I have been thinking ever since we both got shot, that our friendship will never be the same. She points a finger at me. “You don’t think it’s over,” she says, wonder in her tone. “There’s something you’re not telling me, Misha.”

“Let it go, Dana. Please.”

“Is that what you’re going to do? Let it go? Somehow I doubt it.” Standing in the middle of the Original Quad, fists folded on her narrow hips. Her voice softens. “Do you really think the box fooled them, Misha?”

“I hope it did. I hope… I hope they’ll think the Judge was just bluffing.”

“What if there’s some kind of test to show how long the box was in the ground?”

“I’m sure there is, but they can’t possibly know when the Judge buried it. For all they know, he did it the day before he died. You buried it half a year later. Can a test really discriminate within a few months?”

“I hope not.” A weak grin. “Otherwise, we’re in big trouble.”

We both think that one over. This is at our final moment together before Dana decamps for the rest of the summer-maybe with Alison, maybe not-to Cayuga Lake in upstate New York, where, a little north of Ithaca, Dana maintains what she calls her “little writing cottage,” an old and naturally cool stone house on the water. I thought we would be hugging, sentimental. Wrong again.

“If we knew where the papers were,” Dana says thoughtfully, “we might be able to use them to protect ourselves.”

“Except we don’t know where they are.”

Worried, she studies my face. “Do me a favor, won’t you, Misha, darling? When they come for you because the box was empty, and you decide to lie to protect me, please do a better job of lying than you just did.”

“Nobody’s coming for anybody,” I soothe. “We fooled them, Dana.”

But the expression on my best friend’s pale face tells me she is not really sure. To tell the truth, neither am I.

So I keep watching, waiting for them to come, while trying to live my life. Like most professors, I generally use my summers to write. But this year I am spending all the time I can with Bentley. Kimmer does not seem to mind, and, now and then, we do things as a threesome. Sara Jacobstein reminds me that Bentley needs to see his parents treat each other with respect. Morris Young tells me that God requires the same thing. We are not getting back together, my soon-to-be-ex-wife has made that clear, but these occasions-a walk in the park, a trip to a Broadway show-are somehow not too onerous, as though Kimmer and I are both growing up a little, even as we grow apart. Once, feeling particularly gay as we stand in the foyer of the house on Hobby Road after returning from a dinner for three, Kimmer even asks me if I would like to stay the night, and I am giddy until I realize that this is no promise of a resumption of our marriage, but only an impulse born of Lionel’s temporary absence from town. When my polite refusal meets with a shrug, I know I am right.

When I am not with Bentley, I spend a lot of time driving through the countryside in my sturdy Camry, watching my rearview mirror with some care, because I have started to catch a whiff, just the faintest distant breath, of new shadows. Somebody, I am confident, is back there. Maybe Nunzio’s people, maybe Jack Ziegler’s, maybe his partners’. But I have a feeling that the breath on my neck belongs to somebody else; somebody who has not been around for a while. Somebody, however, I knew would return.

I am running out of time, but only I know it.

At the law school one midsummer’s day, Shirley Branch cannot control her ebullience, running up and down the halls like a schoolgirl, embracing everyone she meets. “He’s back!” she cries, literally cries, for she is sobbing through her joy. When it is my turn to be hugged, she all but knocks me over, cane and all, and I barely have time to ask who, exactly, is back before she shouts, “Cinque! He’s back!” She came home from Oldie last night and he was there, sitting on the front step, wagging his tail in delight. I am astonished, and relieved, and more certain than ever of a small theory. The odd thing, Shirley adds, is that he was wearing a brand-new collar, with no name on it. But she is smart enough to have an explanation ready: “He must have lost his tag when he ran away, and somebody found him and didn’t know where he lived and put a new collar on him, and then he missed me and he ran away from them and found his way home!”

A good story, even if it is not a true one. I remember, instead, a certain animal-lover on the Vineyard, who grew up with five dogs and ten cats, who could shoot me in the Burial Ground and call it just a job, but could not bring herself to harm Shirley’s black terrier. I wonder where Maxine obtained the blood that she smeared on the tag when she followed me to Aspen. And why she didn’t drop by to say hello when she slipped into Elm Harbor to deliver Cinque to Shirley’s door.

That night, I telephone Thera to check on Sally’s progress, but I reach her answering machine and she does not return the call. A few days later, Kimmer rings at 2 a.m., weeping and whispering my name for no reason I can discern. I ask her if she wants me to come over, and she hesitates and then says no. When I call to check on her later that day, she apologizes for troubling me and will say no more. Perhaps every disintegrated marriage has such moments.

The following day, the elegant Peter Van Dyke invites me to join him and Tish Kirschbaum for lunch, to talk about the many court cases involving the Boy Scouts; Peter says he cannot think of a better referee. The three of us banter and argue as though I am, almost, a respected member of the faculty again. And perhaps a respected member of the community as well, for my trio of bullet holes has brought me a certain local prominence: a couple of Elm Harbor pastors ask me to speak at their churches, and the Rotary and the local branch of the NAACP both inform me that their members would love to hear what I have to say. Most significant of all, Kwame Kennerly takes me out for coffee, trying to secure my support for his swiftly evolving mayoral campaign. He has traded in his kente hat and navy blazer for a beige vested suit, and he assures me that big changes are on the way in our town.

I tell him I have no interest in politics.

In the middle of the first week of August, my landlord, Lemaster Carlyle, is sworn in as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals. His beaming wife Julia holds the Bible. Half of the law school faculty is crowded into the city’s brand-new federal courthouse, the half that is not on vacation. All the leaders of the local bar are in attendance. Judge Carlyle makes some brief remarks, solemnly promising to do his best to live up to the traditions of the bench-the better traditions, one assumes. He is applauded vigorously, for everybody has decided to love him. More friends thump him on the back than Lemaster probably knew he had. Standing at some distance from the hero of the day, I find myself still irritated that he never told us he was in the running. Despite everything that has occurred, I continue to feel, although I recognize its masochistic character, a degree of loyalty to my wayward wife, whose judicial ambitions Lem managed to trump. I remind myself that Lemaster Carlyle, he of the endless Washington connections, went behind both our backs-successfully, to be sure, but behind our backs nevertheless.

Still, I shake his hand and say the right things. Kimmer, too, attends, and is among the many backslappers. Dahlia Hadley was right, and my wife knows it: there will be other chances for her, if she only continues to work hard and please those she must please. And if she can only settle this unpleasantness with her husband, and act sensible about Lionel. I even catch myself wondering whether a part of her calculation, when she decided to leave, was that her chances for the bench are better without me than with me. But that is an unworthy thought, and, with due credit to the Judge, I push it away. We make small talk, Kimmer and I, which is about all the talk we have left. I decide not to burden my wife with what I have figured out: that because she assumed the task of complaining to the alarm company after the break-in on the Vineyard, she must have learned immediately that the vandals possessed the correct code to turn the alarm on and off again. She never shared this vital clue with me, preserving the secret through the agonizing months of my search, because she did not want to jeopardize her chances at the nomination by supplying the evidence that I was right all along. I look at her tense face and forgive her. As it happens, the ceremony takes place on my forty-second birthday. Kimmer does not mention the coincidence, and I am not about to beg her to remember. So my only celebration is a late-night call from Mariah, who effuses on the subject of Mary, now six months old, but also confides that she plans to head back to Shepard Street soon: there are, after all, papers yet uncatalogued.