John Connolly - The Lovers

“I heard you were working here,” he said.

“Took you awhile to drop by.”

“This isn’t a social call.”

“I guessed that. I don’t think sociability is in your makeup.”

He looked away, shaking his head slightly, a reasonable man faced with an unreasonable one.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, gesturing with disdain at the bar, the clientele, maybe even the world itself.

“Making a living. You and your buddies dug up my chosen career path. I picked another temporarily.”

“‘Temporarily’? You think so? I hear your lawyer is making a lot of calls on your behalf. Good luck to her. Better rack up the tips. She doesn’t work cheap.”

“Well, here’s your chance to contribute to the cause. You want a refill on that, or should I just leave you to fill it yourself with piss and vinegar?”

Hansen leaned forward. His eyes, I now saw, were slightly glazed. Either he’d had more than I thought, or he just couldn’t hold his booze.

“This is a cop place. Don’t you have any dignity? You let good police see you like this, working behind a bar. What are you trying to do, rub it in their faces?”

It was a question that I’d asked myself. Even Dave had said, when he offered me the job, that he would understand if I didn’t want to take it because of the cops who drank there. I told him I didn’t much care what anyone thought, but maybe Hansen was hitting closer to the mark than I wanted to give him credit for. There was an element of cussedness about my decision to work at the Bear. I wasn’t going to slink away after what had happened. True, some of the cops who came to the bar seemed embarrassed at first by my presence there, and a couple were openly contemptuous of me, but they were guys who’d never much cared for me anyway. Most of the rest were just fine, and some had let me know how sorry they were for what had been done. It didn’t matter much either way. I was content to let things rest, for now. It gave me time to do what I wanted to do.

“You know, Detective, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that you had a hard-on for me. Maybe I could introduce you to some people? Might help relieve some of that tension. Or you could take out an ad in the Phoenix . Lot of guys out there aching for a man with a uniform in his closet.”

Hansen expelled a single humorless laugh, like a poison dart being blown from a pipe.

“You’d better hold on to that dry wit,” he said. “A man who goes home smelling of stale beer to an empty house needs something to laugh about.”

“It’s not empty,” I said. “I have a dog.”

I picked up his glass. I figured he was drinking Andrew’s Brown, so I poured him a refill and placed it before him.

“On the house,” I said. “We like to keep good customers happy.”

“You drink it,” he replied. “We’re done here.”

He took his wallet from his pocket and put down a twenty.

“Keep the change. Won’t buy you much, but it’ll buy you even less in New York. You want to tell me what you were doing down there?”

He had taken me by surprise, but I shouldn’t have been shocked. I’d been stopped five times by state troopers on the highway in recent months. It was someone’s way of letting me know that I hadn’t been forgotten. Now a cop at the Portland Jetport had probably recognized me when I was either traveling to, or from, New York, and had made a call. I’d need to be more careful in the future.

“I was visiting friends.”

“That’s good. A man needs friends. But I find that you’re working a case, and I’ll break you.”

He turned away, said his good-byes to his buddies, and left the bar. Gary sidled over to me as the door closed behind Hansen.

“Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine.” I handed him the twenty. “I think he was one of yours.”

Gary looked at the untouched beer.

“He didn’t finish his beer.”

“He didn’t come here to drink.”

“Then why did he come here?”

It was a good question.

“For the company, I guess.”

I TOOK W ALTER, MYLabrador retriever, for a walk when I eventually got home shortly after eleven. The novelty of snow had eventually worn off for him, as it did for most creatures, man or beast, who spent longer than a week in Maine in winter, so that now he contented himself with a few desultory sniffs before doing what he had to do and indicating his preference for returning to his warm basket by turning around and heading straight back to the house. He had matured a lot in the last year. Perhaps it was because the house was quieter than it was before, and he had accommodated himself somewhat to the fact that Rachel and Sam were no longer part of its, and his, routines. I liked having him in the house, for a whole lot of reasons: security, company, and maybe because he was a link to the family life that was no longer mine. Two families lost now: Rachel and Sam to Vermont, and Susan and Jennifer to a man who had torn them apart, and who had died in turn by my hand. But I also felt guilty about the amount of time I was leaving Walter alone, or with my neighbors, the Johnsons. They were happy to look after him when I wasn’t around, but Bob wasn’t so good on his feet anymore, and it was asking a lot of him to exercise a frisky dog regularly.

I locked the doors, patted Walter a final time, then went to bed and tried to sleep, but when it came it brought with it strange dreams, dreams of Susan and Jennifer so vivid that I woke in the darkness, convinced that I had heard someone speak. It had been many months since I had dreamed of them in such a way.

What do I call them? Even now, after all these years, how do I say it? My murdered wife? My late daughter? They died, but I held something of them inside me for too long, and that in turn manifested itself as phantasms, echoes of the next life in this one, and I could not bring myse hooing it?lf to call these remnants by the names of those whom I had loved. We haunt ourselves, I sometimes think; or, rather, we choose to be haunted. If there is a hole in our lives, then something will fill it. We invite it inside, and it accepts willingly.

But I had made my peace with them, I thought. Susan, my wife. Jennifer, my daughter. Beloved of me, and I, beloved of them.

Susan once said to me that, if anything happened to Jennifer, if she were to die before her time, before her mother, then I should not tell Susan what had occurred. I should not try to explain to her that her child was gone. I must not do that to her. If Jennifer were to die, I was to kill Susan. There should be no words, no warning. She should not have time to look at me and understand why. I was to take her life, for she did not believe that she could live with the loss of her child. It would be too much to bear, and she would not be able to withstand such pain. It would not kill her, not at first, but it would draw the life from her just the same, and all that would be left would be a hollow shell, a woman resonant with grief.

And she would hate me. She would hate me for putting her through such sorrow, for not loving her enough to spare her. I would be a coward in her eyes.

“Promise me,” she said as I held her in my arms. “Promise me that you won’t let that happen. I don’t ever want to hear those words. I don’t want to have to hurt that much. I couldn’t bear it. Do you hear me? This isn’t a joke, a ‘what-if.’ I want you to promise me. Promise me that I will never have to endure that pain.”

And I promised. I knew that I could not have done what she asked, and perhaps she knew that too, but I made the promise just the same. That is what we do for the ones we love: we lie to protect them. Not all truths are welcome.