Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

Rachel said, “Sounds like an amazing guy.”

Maddy pursed her lips and reared back, as if she’d seen a cockroach climb out of her pasta bowl. “He wasn’t an amazing guy . He was an asshole a lot of days. I couldn’t live with him in the end. But he was a great bartender and a lot of people were better off for knowing him.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”

“But you did.”

“I’m sorry.”

Maddy pushed a breath through her lips that managed to be both derisive and melancholy at the same time. “The only people who ask questions like ‘Did he want to be something besides a bartender?’ are people who can become whatever they want. The rest of us are just Americans.”

The rest of us are just Americans .

Rachel recognized the grubby self-aggrandizement of the line as well as the faux modesty. She could already hear herself quoting it at cocktail parties, could hear too the laughs it would garner. But even as she heard the laughs, they shamed her. She was guilty, after all, of success, a success that stemmed from birthright and privilege. She took hope for granted, saw opportunity as her due, and had never really had to worry about vanishing into a sea of unseen faces and unseen voices.

But that was the country her father had inhabited. The country of the unseen and the unheard. And, upon their deaths, the unremembered.

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” she said to Maddy.

Maddy waved it off with a freshly lit cigarette. “Honey, your shit don’t mean shit to me.” She gave Rachel’s knee a friendly squeeze. “If Lee was your flesh and blood, then good. I hope it brings you peace. Woulda been nice for you, I guess, if you’d known him.” She tapped the ash of her cigarette. “But we don’t get what we want, just what we can handle.”

She visited his grave. It was marked by a common granite headstone, black sprinkled with specks of white. She’d seen the same granite in the kitchen countertops of at least two colleagues. They’d used a lot less granite on Lee Grayson, though. It was a small stone, no more than a foot and a half tall and twenty inches wide. Maddy had told her Lee had purchased it on layaway around the time his own folks passed away, paid it off about three years before he died.

There had to be more to it. There had to be.

But if there was, she couldn’t find it.

She’d cobbled together the thumbnail of a biography from what Milo had said about him, what Maddy had said about him, and stray bits both had recalled others had said about him.

Leeland David Grayson had been born and raised in Elkton, Maryland. He’d passed through a kindergarten, a grade school, and a high school. He’d worked for a paving company, a trucking company, a shoe store, and as a driver for a florist before finding work at Milo’s in East Baltimore. He’d spread his seed at least once (or so it seemed), married, divorced, remarried, and divorced again. Owned a house that he’d lost in Divorce #1. Rented a smaller place from then on. Over the course of his life, he’d owned nine cars, three motorcycles, and one dog. Died in the same town where he was born. Fifty-four years on this earth and, to the best of anyone’s recollection, he’d expected little of others and gave about the same in return. Wasn’t an angry man, though most got the sense it would be foolish to push him. Wasn’t a happy man, though he liked a good joke when he heard it.

Someday all who had reason to remember him would pass from the earth. Judging by what Rachel had seen of the ways people looked after their health in Lee’s circle of friends and acquaintances, that someday would come sooner rather than later. Then the only person who would know his name would be whoever mowed the grass near his headstone.

He didn’t live his life, her mother would have said, it lived him.

And in that moment, Rachel realized why her mother had probably never told Lee about her or her about Lee. Elizabeth had seen how his life would play out. She had known his wants were small, his imagination limited, his ambitions nebulous. Elizabeth Childs, who’d grown up in a small town and chosen to live in a small town, had despised small-town thinking.

Her mother had never told Rachel who her father was because to admit she’d given her body to him in the first place would have been to admit that some part of her had never wanted to escape where she’d come from.

So instead, Rachel thought, you robbed us of each other.

Rachel sat at his grave for the better part of an hour. She waited to hear his voice in the wind or the trees.

And it came, it actually came. But it wasn’t pretty.

You want someone to tell you why.

Yes.

Why there’s pain and loss. Why earthquakes and hunger.

But mostly:

Why no one gives a shit about you, Rachel.

“Stop,” she was pretty sure she said aloud.

You know what the answer is?

“Just stop.”

Because.

“Because what?” she said to the quiet of the cemetery.

Because nothing. Just because.

She lowered her head and didn’t weep. Didn’t make a sound. But for a very long time, she couldn’t stop shaking.

You’ve come a long way to get this answer.

And here it is. At long last. Right in front of your face.

She raised her head. Opened her eyes. Stared at it. A foot and a half tall, twenty inches wide.

It’s granite and dirt.

And there’s no more to it.

She didn’t leave the cemetery until the sun fell halfway down its black trees. It was close to four in the afternoon. She’d arrived at ten in the morning.

She never heard his voice again. Not once.

On the train back north, she looked out the window, but it was night and all she could see of the cities and towns was the blur of lights and the dark in between.

Most of the time, she couldn’t see anything at all out there. Just her own reflection. Just Rachel. Still alone.

Still on the wrong side of the mirror.

Rachel and Brian Delacroix crossed paths again six months after their last e-mail contact, in the spring, at a bar in the South End.

He ended up there because it was a few blocks from his apartment and that night, the first of the year to hint of summer, the streets smelled damp and hopeful. She went to the bar because she’d gotten divorced that afternoon and needed to feel brave. She worried her fear of people was metastasizing and she wanted to get on top of it, to prove to herself she was in command of her own neuroses. It was May, and she’d barely left the house since early winter.

She’d go out for groceries but only when the supermarket was at its emptiest. Seven o’clock on a Tuesday morning was ideal, the pallets of shrink-wrapped stock still waiting in the middle of the aisles, the dairy guys talking smack to the deli guys, the cashiers putting their purses away and yawning into cardboard cups of Dunkin’s, bitching about the commute, the weather, their impossible kids, their impossible husbands.

When she needed her hair cut, she always scheduled the last appointment of the day. Same for the rare manicure or pedicure. Most other wants could be satisfied online. Soon, what started as a choice — staying out of the public eye to avoid scrutiny or its bedfellow, judgment — grew into a habit that bordered on addiction. Before Sebastian officially left her, he’d been sleeping in the guest room for months; prior to that, he’d slept on his boat in the South River, a tidal flat that emptied into Massachusetts Bay. It was fitting — Sebastian had probably never loved her, probably never loved any human being, but, man, he loved that boat. Once he was gone, though, her primary motivation for leaving the house — to escape him and all his toxic disregard — was neutralized.