Linwood Barclay: Never Look Away

He hung up.

I put down my pen, took off my headset, hit the stop button on my digital recorder. I was feeling pretty proud of myself, right up until the end there.

The phone had only been on the receiver for ten seconds when it rang.

I put the headset to my ear without hooking it on. “Standard . Harwood.”

“Hey.” It was Jan.

“Hey,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“Okay.”

“You at work?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” Jan paused. “I was just thinking of that movie. You know the one? With Jack Nicholson?”

“I need more,” I said.

“Where he’s a germaphobe, always takes plastic cutlery to the restaurant?”

“Okay, I know the one,” I said. “You were thinking about that?”

“Remember that scene, where he goes to the shrink’s office? And all those people are sitting there? And he says the line, the one from the title? He says, ‘What if this is as good as it gets?’”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I remember. That’s what you’re thinking about?”

She shifted gears. “So what about you? What’s the scoop, Woodward?”

Maybe there were clues earlier that something was wrong and I’d just been too dumb to notice them. It’s not like I’d be the first journalist who fancied himself a keen observer of current events, but didn’t have a clue when it came to the home front. But still, it seemed as though Jan’s mood had changed almost overnight.

She was tense, short-tempered. Minor irritants that would not have fazed her in the past now were major burdens. One evening, while we were getting ready to make up some lunches for the next day, she burst into tears upon discovering we were out of bread.

“It’s all too much,” she said to me that night. “I feel like I’m at the bottom of this well and I can’t climb out.”

At first, because I’m a man and don’t really know-and don’t really want to know-what the hell’s going on with women in a physiological sense, I thought maybe it was some kind of hormonal thing. But I realized soon enough it was more than that. Jan was, and I realize this is not what you’d call a clinical diagnosis, down in the dumps. Depressed. But depressed did not necessarily mean depression.

“Is it work?” I asked her one night in bed, running my hand on her back. Jan, with one other woman, managed the office for Bertram’s Heating and Cooling. “Has something happened there?” The latest economic slowdown meant fewer people were buying new air conditioners or furnaces, but that actually meant more repair work for Ernie Bertram. And sometimes, she and Leanne Kowalski, that other woman, didn’t always see eye to eye.

“Work’s fine,” she said.

“Have I done something?” I asked. “If I have, tell me.”

“You haven’t done anything,” she said. “It’s just… I don’t know. Sometimes I wish I could make it all go away.”

“Make what all go away?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

A couple of days later, I suggested maybe she should talk to someone. Starting with our family doctor.

“Maybe there’s a prescription or something,” I said.

“I don’t want to take drugs,” Jan said, then quickly added, “I don’t want to be somebody I’m not.”

After work on the day she called me at the paper, Jan and I drove up together to pick up Ethan at his grandparents’ place.

My mother and father, Arlene and Don Harwood, lived in one of the older parts of Promise Falls in a two-story red-brick house that was built in the forties. They didn’t buy until the fall of 1971, when my mother was pregnant with me, and they’d had the place ever since. Mom had made some noises about selling it after Dad retired from the city’s building department four years ago, arguing that they didn’t need all this space, a lawn to cut, a garden to maintain, that they could get along just fine in a condo or an apartment, but Dad wouldn’t have any of it. He’d go mad cooped up in a condo. He had his workshop out back in a separate two-car garage, and spent more time in there than in the house, if you didn’t count sleeping. He was a relentless putterer, always looking for something to fix or tear down and do all over again. A door or cupboard hinge never had a chance to squeak twice. Dad practically carried a can of WD-40 with him at all times. A stuck window, a dripping tap, a running toilet, a jiggly doorknob-none of them stood a chance in our house. Dad always knew exactly what tool he needed, and could have strolled into his garage blindfolded to lay his hands on it.

“He drives me nuts,” Mom would say, “but in forty-two years of marriage I don’t think we’ve had even one mosquito get through a hole in a screen.”

Dad’s problem was that he couldn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t as diligent about their duties as he was with his. He was intolerant of other people’s mistakes. As a city building inspector, he was a major pain in the ass to every Promise Falls contractor and developer. Behind his back they called him Don Hardass. When he got wind of that, he had some business cards made up with his new nickname.

He found it difficult not to share his wisdom about how to make this a more perfect world, in every respect.

“When you leave the spoons to dry like this without turning them over, the water ends up leaving a mark,” he’d say to my mother, holding up one of the offensive items of cutlery.

“Piss off,” Arlene would say, and Don would grumble and go out to the garage.

Their squabbling masked a deep love for each other. Dad never forgot a birthday or anniversary or Valentine’s Day.

Jan and I knew, when we left Ethan with his grandparents, as we did through the week when we both went to work, that he wasn’t going to be exposed to any hazards. No frayed light cords, no poisonous chemicals left where he could get his hands on them, no upturned carpet edges he could run and trip on. And their rates just happened to be more reasonable than any nursery schools in the area.

“Mom called me after you,” I said to Jan, who was driving in her Jetta wagon. It was nearly five-thirty. We’d rendezvoused at our house so we could pick up Ethan in one car, together.

Jan looked over, said nothing, figured I’d continue. “She said Dad’s really done something over the top this time.”

“She say what?”

“No. I guess she wanted to build the suspense. I got hold of Reeves today, asked him about his hotel bill in Florence.”

Jan said, without actually sounding all that interested, “How’s that story coming?”

“Some woman called me anonymously. She had some good stuff. What I need to know now is how many others on the council are taking bribes or gifts or trips or whatever from this private prison corporation so that they’ll give them the nod when the rezoning comes up for a vote.”

And you thought all the fun’d be over when Finley dropped out of politics.” A reference to our former mayor, whose night with a teenage hooker didn’t sit well with his constituents. Maybe, if you were Roman Polanski, you could screw someone a third your age and still win an Oscar, but if you were Randall Finley, it kind of played hell with your bid for Congress.

“Yeah, well, that’s the thing about politics,” I said. “When one dick-head leaves the scene, half a dozen others rush in to fill the vacancy.”

“Even if you get the story,” Jan said, “will they print it?”

I looked out my window. I made a fist and tapped it lightly on my knee. “I don’t know,” I said.

Things had changed at the Standard . It was still owned by the Russell family, and a Russell still sat in the publisher’s chair, and there were various Russells scattered about the newsroom and other departments. But the family’s commitment to keeping it a real newspaper had shifted in the last five years. The overriding concern now, with declining revenues and readership, was survival. The paper had always kept a reporter in Albany to cover state issues, but now relied on wires. The weekly book section had been killed, reduced to a page in the back end of Style. The editorial cartoonist, tremendously gifted at lampooning and harpooning local officials, was given the heave-ho, and now we picked up any number of national, syndicated cartoonists who’d probably never even heard of Promise Falls, let alone visited it, to fill the hole on the editorial page. Oh yeah, the editorials. We used to run two a day, written by staffers. Now, we ran “What Others Think,” a sampling of editorials from across the country. We didn’t think for ourselves more than three or four times a week.