Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

I stepped around the corner, cleared my throat, and said, “Please, make yourself comfortable.”

Her eyes fluttered open and when she saw me, realized me, her face broke into a wide, warm smile. “I am,” she said, not getting up, not really moving at all.

I leaned against the doorway looking at her looking at me for a long, quiet moment, giving her a chance to regain her bearings and allowing me to breathe a quiet sigh of relief.

I said, “I’m glad to see you don’t let things like locks and laws get in your way.”

She smiled anew and asked, “Are you going to call the cops on me? You left a key right on the ledge over your door, you know.”

I had, actually, or more accurately, it was Elizabeth who used to keep one there for all those aforementioned times when she would lock herself out. I walked slowly into the living room, uncharacteristically conscious of my movements, and sat heavily in the upholstered chair facing Maggie Kane.

She said, laughing now, “Tough day at work, honey?”

“They’re all tough these days,” I replied, straight-faced, not sharing any of the frivolity.

We locked gazes for another long, quiet moment. She finally took a swig from a bottle of water that I assumed she had pulled from my refrigerator. “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

“Where else am I supposed to be?”

Good question, until I really mulled it. When I did, I replied, “With some security guards, at a hotel?”

“Sick of them, sick of the hotel. You guys had me in some dump out at the airport. I was going crazy.”

She shook her head and stared off into space. I walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and realized I was fresh out of Sam Adams, which was just as well, considering my upcoming meeting with Jankle and whoever else. So instead I grabbed a Coke.

Back in the living room, I leaned back in a chair and said, “This hasn’t been a good stretch for either of us, has it?”

She shook her head, looking at me, looking away. She didn’t say anything, and after a moment, she took a long chug of water. It was mostly dark in the room, but for the one low lamp. I said, “And I’m really sorry about it. About all of it.”

Again, she shook her head. She said, still staring off, “What’s the worst loss you’ve ever had?”

Life was all about loss, lately, or even longer than lately — loss of wife, loss of daughter, loss of feelings, loss of control, loss of the confidence to know that when I did my job, I was doing right and I was doing well.

But I didn’t much want to talk about it, not then, not with her. She was coming to grips with her own immense loss, caused by yours truly, and I knew that she’d rather talk than listen. So I said, “That’s a tough question. What about you?”

She looked down at her water and then off again into the dark and finally at me. As we locked gazes, the room suddenly struck me as particularly empty, given the lack of Baker who, if he were around, would no doubt be trying to entertain our female guest in some fashion, maybe with a tennis ball, or perhaps just sitting beside her demanding an ear massage.

She said, “I lost my son,” and then paused. The words, just four of them, spoken plainly and directly, hit me like gunfire, though I should probably be careful about such analogies these days. Or is that a metaphor? Either way, I was somewhere beyond stunned, for a variety of reasons. I had pictured Maggie Kane living the relatively carefree life of an attractive, single, early thirty-something woman. Of course, she’d have the typical neuroses that some such women have, the fears, the hang-ups, all that and maybe more. But I had believed that life had come relatively easy to her, and now this one declarative sentence flung open doors and windows into spaces that I never imagined could possibly exist.

“I made a mistake when I was young that turned out not to be a mistake at all. I got pregnant. I had the baby. He was the most precious thing in my entire life.”

She smiled as she said this, a wan smile, but a smile just the same. She seemed to have climbed into her own familiar world of soothing memories. I stayed quiet, mostly because there was nothing that I could possibly say.

She said, “The father’s name was Brad.” She paused. At this point, I could have told her just how much I hated the name Brad. Not as much as I disdain Eric, but almost. Still, I thought it best to keep quiet.

“He wanted to be involved, even though he wasn’t very mature. I wanted Jay to know his father, so I’d share him as much as I could. Well, one evening, around suppertime, Jay was over at Brad’s apartment. I was supposed to get him back that night. I hadn’t seen him in two days. Brad calls and asks if he can keep him another night.

“I said, ‘No, I miss my boy.’ Brad gets argumentative. He starts in about how he’s going to take me to court about getting better visitation rights, about how if he can’t see his kid more, he’s going to pay less support. All this stuff. I told him, ‘Go ahead. Do it. Just get my kid back here within the hour.’ ”

She paused again to collect her thoughts. She put her hands up to her cheeks and rubbed her own face as she stared off at the carpet with big, blank eyes. Then she looked at me and said in a lower, huskier voice, “An hour passed, and no Brad. He’s not answering his cell phone or his home phone. An hour after that, my doorbell rings and I figure it’s finally him. When I open it up, there’s a policeman there, a state trooper. I don’t know why, but I always remember these incredibly shiny boots. He asks if I’m Maggie Kane. Then he asks if he could come in.

“I’m petrified, trying to keep everything under control. Before I know it, we’re sitting in my living room and he tells me that Brad had a head-on collision with an eighteen-wheeler. Brad had drifted into oncoming traffic. Jay was in a car seat in the back. Both were killed instantly. I lost the most important thing that I’ll ever have in my life.”

She looked away again, her chin pointed up and strong as she gazed toward the blackened expanse beyond the sliding doors. She wasn’t crying, and I kind of knew how she felt. She had already shed all the tears she had over her boy’s death, and there were none left to fall.

I asked, “When was this?” I spoke low and soft, trying to be curious but mostly soothing.

“Five years ago last week.”

I felt a lump in my throat. As she was running for her life, contending with the slaying of her sister, she was also mourning anew during the anniversary of her son’s death.

Before I could say anything else or ask anything more, she said, “Jay wouldn’t have been on the road if I hadn’t been such a bitch to his father. All he wanted to do was keep his own son for another night.”

Her head remained bowed, but still no tears.

“That’s not your fault,” I said, firm and fast. And I believed that. If you followed her logic, then I got my wife pregnant, and she died during childbirth, so I actually killed her. And I didn’t believe that, at least I didn’t used to. These days, who knows.

She nodded, her face still down. “I know,” she replied. “At least in my saner moments, I know. But I don’t know if it makes it any better. It doesn’t make the loss any less immense. It doesn’t make my sadness any less overwhelming.”

After a long moment, she looked back up at me and said, “So that’s my biggest loss.” She gave me a sad, tired smile, then asked, “What’s yours?”

In my mind, I saw a gallery of loss — from Katherine to my unnamed daughter to Baker to my father to my recent girlfriend to Vinny Mongillo. I expected a call at any moment from Peter Martin saying he was taking a job at the goddamned New York Times or The Washington Post.