Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

Jackie was still in the bathroom.

He had a sudden, horrible feeling.

Many times Davis had found his wife passed out in the bathroom – on the toilet, in the tub, under the sink – and had to undress her and put her to bed. He never resented her more than when pulling a nightgown over her limp, sour-smelling body, and he never felt less culpable for her unhappiness.

He walked to the bathroom door and kicked it open, gently, with the toe of his right shoe.

“Jackie?” he called to her, hoping she would answer, hoping she would give him some indication, even a sentient grunt, that she could walk on her own, any gesture at all to demonstrate that she was capable of reclaiming some dignity tonight.

The bathroom was barely lit by thick purple candles that smelled like berries – cherries, it seemed to him, although he guessed it was blueberry or boysenberry the makers intended. The faucet dripped like an abandoned metronome keeping time atop a silent piano. On the tile next to the tub was a mostly full glass of white wine and an empty brown prescription bottle with JACKIE MOORE written at the top of the label and DAVIS MOORE typed at the bottom. The tub was half filled with lukewarm water and displaced almost to the point of overflowing by 115 pounds of naked lifelessness.

For the second time in his life, but not the last, Davis stood over the hollow body of a person he had once loved.

Justin at Nine

Folks had called Sam Coyne many cruel names as a child, but none had stung him more than “mama’s boy.” Perhaps it was the insinuation that he was weak, or maybe he simply didn’t want to be identified so closely with his gregarious and eccentric parents, but all these years later he was still reluctant to ride with his mother to the store when she asked. Running errands with his mom around town, around Northwood, where he grew up, made him self-conscious.

“Heck, Ma,” he said, trying not to whine. “Why don’t you make me a list? I’ll go get it myself. Save you the trip.”

“Jesus, Sam,” she said. “You’re thirty years old. The other boys won’t make fun of you when they see you with your mom.”

“It’s not that,” he muttered. But of course it was, and when he thought about it again, he realized how ridiculous he was being. Maybe it was his thirtieth birthday (for which his buddies from the law firm had surprised him with an expensive hooker at the Drake) or maybe it was just being home for the weekend, but Sam was having a tough time accepting himself as an adult. He looked at people in their early twenties and was convinced they were older than he. He always assumed certain kinds of celebrities – athletes, for instance – were older, and he suffered tiny spasms of panic when he read that this shortstop or that seven-foot center had a birth date ten years later than his.

“Anyone new in your life?” Mrs. Coyne asked from the passenger’s seat as he backed out of the driveway, where, in an earlier family car, Sam had accepted a blow job from a cheerleader named Alex who also had a twin brother named Alex, a fact that Sam couldn’t put out of his mind through the duration of the act.

“No,” Sam said. In truth there were many new anyones – Samantha, Joanne, Tammy, the hooker at the Drake – and he knew them all about equally well. When he called a girl for a date it had more to do with matching her preferences to his mood – this one’s a baseball fan, that one likes to be bent over a leather chair – than it did with any desire to advance a relationship. Unless a woman was especially good at scratching that month’s sexual itch, he usually let pass just enough time between dates so that she and he were starting over each time. It kept complications at bay.

Sal Faludi had been butcher to Northwood for all of Sam’s life and longer. He was in the shop every day, commanding about fifteen employees in a downtown space that over the years had expanded across four storefronts. Rare were the times when you didn’t have to wait your turn at Faludi’s. On summer Saturday mornings like this one, you took a number. Sam’s was seventy-four.

When Sam was in high school, he and the others would sometimes leave campus for lunch and they would usually end up here. When the weather was nice, Sal set up tables made from black steel mesh on the sidewalk, and the kids would each grab a sandwich from the deli and race for one of the al fresco seats.

“Sixty!” Sal called out.

A pretty young woman, about Sam’s age or a little older, pushed open the glass door with her rear end and her shoulders. Sam noticed the appealing shape of her right away, even before she turned around to reveal her white teeth and giant eyes. She had a brown grocery bag in her left arm and was holding the hand of a boy – seven, eight, nine, ten years old, somewhere in there, Sam thought – with her right. The woman smiled curiously at Sam, who was staring, and said hello to Sam’s mother before looking away and taking a number from the big snail-shaped dispenser.

“Oh, good!” Sam’s mother said, pinching his arm. “Sam, look!” She took two long steps and a graceful skip to the woman’s side and she pulled the woman and the boy back in Sam’s direction. “Martha!” Mrs. Coyne said. “This is my son, Sam. The one I’ve been telling you about all these months.”

“You know, I was wondering.” Martha laughed. “I see what you mean. Hello, Sam.” She let go of the boy’s hand long enough to shake Sam’s. The boy looked into each of their faces and sighed politely. This turn of events wouldn’t get him out of the store any sooner.

Sam was gracious and puzzled, quietly assuming his mother was matchmaking again. If that were the case she had done better than usual, except for the presence of a child, which triggered an automatic preemptory challenge for him as far as dating was concerned. This Martha was extremely pretty. She had short, reddish blond hair with fashionable bangs that transcended the common suburban bob. Her lips were full and her neck was long. Her eyes were so large and green they reminded Sam of sexy girls in comic books. She wore a green sleeveless top with narrow openings for her thin and angular gym-toned arms. Under a long abstract leaf-patterned skirt he could make out shapely athletic legs. He liked the way her head tilted when she said hello. The shy but confident way she shook hands. The silent manner in which she respected (and received respect from) her little boy. She must have been young when she had him, he thought.

“Sam, I’ve mentioned Martha to you a hundred times,” his mother said. “We’re always running into each other downtown. Little Justin here looks exactly like you did when you were his age.”

Right, Sam thought. The little boy. The bastard child his father was always kidding him about. Nope, it wasn’t his. Sam couldn’t remember every woman he’d slept with, but he would have remembered Martha. Now imagining her, flesh against flesh, he chuckled and looked at the boy’s face for the first time. Yeah, he supposed he had once looked like that. A little. Not so much that his mother should have been going on and on about it for the last year. But then, one never sees himself, or remembers himself, exactly the way others do. Self-recognition is a sign of intelligence, his freshman psychology professor had claimed. Only advanced mammals are capable of looking in a mirror and acknowledging the image there is their own. But the mirror also distorts. How many times have you heard people say, That’s a terrible picture of me, when the photo, in fact, is quite accurate? We disavow the correct images of ourselves because they don’t match against the idealized snapshots we all carry in our heads.

“Well, I’ll be,” Sam said.