Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

“It wasn’t my ankle, it was my shin. And that was a lot worse than the one today. I had to walk two miles on it.”

“Well, it was huge.”

They talked about his sister’s family in Milwaukee until they’d exhausted the topic, and both he and his parents – Mom and Dad on separate cordless extensions – sat quietly with the headsets at their ears. It wasn’t uncomfortable silence – each party knew the call hadn’t yet reached maturity – but no one said a word for almost half a minute as they waited for the conversation to start itself again.

“Sam, there’s a little boy here in Northwood who looks exactly like you,” Mrs. Coyne said finally.

“Really?” Sam was paging through The New York Times Magazine with the phone wedged between his shoulder and head. There was an article on a jazz guitarist he liked and he didn’t feel like waiting for his parents to hang up before he started reading it.

“Yeah, it’s really something,” his father said. “Are you sure you didn’t get any of those girls pregnant in high school?”

Between another father and son, the remark would have been laughed away as familiar joshing. Between Sam and his father there was subtext.

The period of Sam’s worst battles with his father ran roughly the same duration as World War II: from September of his thirteenth year until the August after his graduation from Northwood East. Sam drank a lot of beer and smoked a lot of pot on weekends. He brought girls to the house, girls he knew his mother and father wouldn’t like, and when he slept with one of them he did nothing to conceal the fact from his parents. Freethinkers, Mr. and Mrs. Coyne didn’t mind the sex so much – not after he turned seventeen, anyway – but they were appalled by his lack of discretion. Smart girls, dumb girls, skinny girls, fat girls, rich girls, poor girls: teenaged Sam screwed in the same bored fashion that he flipped channels on the television, with each program being no more or less interesting than the next.

His promiscuity had much to do with the deep supply of willing partners, of course. Sam attributed this to a story that circulated the school concerning his private girth. As it spread, the tale had become exaggerated, of course, but not by much. By the time Sam reached his junior year, he found there was always a curious girl willing to bring him home or follow him home or go for a drive or take in an unpopular movie from the back row. It wasn’t always intercourse – some only wanted a preview – but the attention was all the same to him, frankly.

“So, who is he?” Sam asked.

“The boy? Oh, we don’t know his name,” Mrs. Coyne said. “Dad saw him at the fruit store, and then pointed him out at the butcher.”

“It was uncanny, really. We came home and pulled out the old photo albums. You could be twins – if you were still in second grade,” Mr. Coyne said.

“Did you see the mother?”

“About your age. A few years older maybe. Pretty. Thin,” his mom said.

“You remembering something, son? Did you ever have a rubber go on ‘spring break’?”

“James.” Mrs. Coyne’s frown translated into a sour murmur over the phone.

“There’s nothing to remember, Dad,” Sam said.

“Are you sure? Are you sure you didn’t slip one past that chubby field- hockey goalie? What was her name? Rebecca?”

“He’s kidding, dear.”

“Yeah, Mom. Anyway, that’s funny. This kid. He looked just like me, huh?”

“They say everyone has a twin,” Mrs. Coyne said. “Yours just showed up twenty years late.”

“Weird.”

“So how’s work?”

“Busy.”

“Any good cases?” his father asked. “Have you taken any dirty drug money this week?”

This joke, on the other hand, was not as caustic as it sounded. James Coyne was proud of his son’s work as an attorney, and he boasted to his friends about Sam’s big-moneyed clients. Mr. Coyne often used the phrase “dirty drug money” as an ironic and not-too-subtle reference to his own activist college days. He wasn’t ashamed of them, exactly. He wasn’t embarrassed about his objection to the war, or the editorial pipe bombs he tossed on the back pages of campus newspapers in the direction of the White House. In middle age, however, he had become a pious capitalist, starting his own business, building it large enough and quickly enough to sell it by the time he was fifty, and in retirement he considered the demonstrations of his early adulthood as another stage of growing up. He saw his son’s teenage promiscuity the same way in retrospect, but he couldn’t resist the sharp needling over it, then or now.

Regardless, Sam was happy to talk about something other than his tiny, chocolate-smudged look-alike. He was certain he didn’t have a son wandering around Northwood, but he did have secrets, and this conversation had his parents poking around in the dirt under which they were buried.

That night, however, after he’d hung up the phone, the name of Anna Kat Moore haunted him for only a minute or two. He exorcised it from his mind with a cold shiver, played for an hour on the computer – a new multiplayer game called Shadow World that one of his clients insisted would be the next big thing (the client was so sure, in fact, he’d bought five thousand shares of stock in the company that created it) – then fell asleep watching a basketball game from the West Coast.

Lying in Ricky Weiss’s bed, an arm under Ricky Weiss’s sleeping wife, Big Rob didn’t struggle too much with whether or not it had been ethical. He wondered if it had been ironic – that this began with an investigation of an alleged cheating husband, and ended with him between a married woman’s sheets – but then decided he was confusing “irony” with another word, one that wouldn’t come to him just now. It didn’t matter what you called it. It was what it was: inevitable. Hell, that wasn’t the right word, either.

It made him ill to be in such an intimate array with a woman he now knew to be complicit in Philly’s death. Complicit? Was that right? Did he even know what really happened to Phil Canella? The drink and the dark and the postejaculatory haze dulled his ability to sum up.

The girls had consumed three rounds of juice and alcohol in various combinations before the six of them moved to a just-liberated and more comfortable round table. Big Rob delivered the promised charm in the form of compliments and jokes and reciprocal laughter. He told adventure stories from years back starring his formerly svelte self on high school lacrosse fields and in the navy and on the police force.

Late in the night, Big Rob was telling how he’d almost invested in the stock of some biotech company – human cloning, gene treatment for cancer, that sort of thing. He spent his money on a boat instead, and all of his friends got rich. “And I don’t even have the boat anymore,” Big Rob said to hearty, high-pitched laughter.

“Ricky and I are gonna be rich,” Peg blurted out, bringing a cranberry-colored drink to her lips almost as if she hoped the glass would act as a muzzle to keep her from blabbing.

“Tell us,” the blonde one named Linda said, demonstrating her faithfulness by a lack of skepticism.

“I can’t tell you all the details,” Peg giggled. “It’s a secret.” She made a not-so-discreet nod toward Big Rob, but when her eyes caught his, they stuck there, and she parted her thin lips in a way that Big Rob found incidentally sexy.

“I’m just passing through town,” he said. “Your secrets can stay here, as far as I’m concerned. What happens in Brixton, stays in Brixton, if you know what I mean.” He winked at no one in particular.

Peg brought them all together in a woozy huddle around the table. “Ricky and I have the goods on this rich doctor from Chicago. And when the time is right, he and me are gonna cash in.” She burped. “That’s all I’m saying.”