Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

Caleb exited the car fast. He pointed back at her, told Brian his wife was not taking things well. Rachel was happy to note Caleb limped even as he speed-walked to the boat. She, on the other hand, moved slowly, her eyes on Brian. His gaze barely left hers except for the occasional flicks in the direction of Caleb.

If she’d known she’d end up killing him, would she have boarded the boat?

She could turn around and go to the police. My husband is an impostor, she’d say. She imagined some smarmy desk sergeant replying, “Aren’t we all, ma’am?” Yes, she was certain, it was a crime to impersonate someone and a crime to keep two wives, but were those serious crimes? In the end, wouldn’t Brian just take a plea and it would all go away? She’d be left the laughingstock never-was, the failed print reporter who’d become a pill-addicted broadcast reporter who’d become a punch line and then a shut-in and who would keep the local comics stocked with weeks of fresh material once it was discovered that Meltdown Media Chick had married a con man with another wife and another life.

She followed Caleb up the ramp to the boat. He stepped aboard. When she went to do the same, Brian offered his hand. She stared at it until he dropped it. He noticed the gun she carried. “Should I show you mine? So I feel safer?”

“Be my guest.” She stepped aboard. As she did, Brian caught her by the wrist and stripped the gun from her hand in the same motion. He pulled his own gun, a.38 snub-nosed revolver, from under the flaps of his shirt and then laid them both on a table by the stern. “Once we get out into the bay, sweetheart, you let me know if you want to walk five paces and draw. I owe you that.”

“You owe me a lot more than that.”

He nodded. “And I’m going to make good on it.” He unraveled a line from the cleat, and before she’d even realized she could hear the engine, Caleb was under the standing shelter with his hand on the throttle and they were chugging up the Neponset River toward the bay.

Brian sat on the bench on one side of the deck and she sat across from him, the front edge of the table in between them.

“So you own a boat,” she said.

He leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. “Yup.”

Port Charlotte receded behind her. “Am I ever going to get back off it?”

He tilted his head to the side. “Of course. Why wouldn’t you?”

“Because I can expose your double life for starters.”

He sat back, opened his palms to the idea. “And where will that get you?”

“It won’t get me anywhere. Get you in jail.”

He shrugged.

“You don’t think so.”

“Look, if you want, we’ll turn this boat around right now and take you back. And you can drive to the nearest police station and tell them your story. And if they believe you — and let’s face it, Rachel, your credibility is a little shaky in this town — then, sure, they’ll send some detective out tomorrow or the next day or a week from Tuesday, whenever they get around to it. But by that point, I’ll be smoke. They’ll never find me and you’ll never find me.”

The thought of never seeing him again slid through her intestinal tract like a shiv. Losing Brian — knowing he was out in the world somewhere, yet she would never see him again — would be like losing a kidney. It was a certifiably insane reaction, and yet there it was.

“Why aren’t you already gone?”

“I couldn’t synchronize every part of my timetable as fast as I wanted.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“We don’t have much time,” Brian said.

“For what?”

“For anything but trust.”

She stared across the boat at him. “Trust?”

“I’m afraid so.”

There were probably a thousand things she could have said to the galactic absurdity of his asking her to trust him, but all she managed to say was “Who is she?”

She hated the words as they left her mouth. He’d stripped her of every foundation she’d built the last three years of her life on, and she was coming off like the jealous shrew.

“Who?” he said.

“The pregnant wife you keep in Providence.”

Another smile, bordering on a smirk, as his eyes rose to the starless sky. “She’s an associate.”

“At your mineral company?”

“Well, tangentially, yes.”

She could feel them dropping into the rhythm of all their fights — she typically played offense, he played an evasive defense, which usually made her more and more aggressive, like the dog chasing the rabbit that has no meat under its fur. So before it could deteriorate any further, she asked the real question.

“Who are you?”

“I’m your husband.”

“You’re not my—”

“I’m the man who loves you.”

“You lied to me about everything in our lives. That’s not love. That’s—”

“Look in my eyes. Tell me whether you see love there or not.”

She looked. Sardonically at first, but then with growing fascination. It was there, no question.

But was it? He was, after all, an actor.

“ Your version of it,” she said.

“Well, yeah,” he said, “that’s the only version I’d know.”

Caleb cut the engine. They were about two miles out in the bay, the lights of Quincy off to their right, the lights of Boston back and to their left. In front of them, the ink dark was interrupted by the ridges and crags of Thompson Island to their west. Impossible to tell in this dark if it was two hundred yards away or two thousand. There was some kind of youth facility on Thompson, Outward Bound maybe, but whatever the organization, they’d turned in for the night because the island emitted no light whatsoever. Small waves broke softly against the hull. She’d once piloted herself and Sebastian home on a night like this using only their running lights, the two of them chuckling nervously through most of the journey, but Caleb had cut every light but the small bulbs of uplighting on the deck by their feet.

Out there in the impermeable dark on a moonless night, she realized Brian and Caleb could quite easily kill her. In fact, all of this could have been orchestrated to get her to think she was supervising the events that led her to this boat and this bay and this callous dark when in fact it was the other way around.

It suddenly seemed important to ask Brian, “What’s your real name?”

“Alden,” he said to her. “Brian Alden.”

“Are you from a lumber family?”

He shook his head. “Nothing so glamorous.”

“Are you from Canada?”

He shook his head. “I’m from Grafton, Vermont.”

He watched her carefully as he removed a plastic sleeve of peanuts from his pocket, the kind they gave you on planes, and opened it.

“You’re Scott Pfeiffer,” she said.

He nodded.

“But your name isn’t Scott Pfeiffer.”

“No. That’s just the name of some kid I went to high school with, used to make me laugh in Latin class.”

“And your father?”

“Stepfather. Yeah. He was the guy I described. Racist, homophobic, scared the world was run by a large-scale conspiracy to fuck his life up and piss on everything he’d put his faith in. He was also, paradoxically maybe, a nice guy, good neighbor, help you put up a fence or fix a gutter. He keeled over from a heart attack while shoveling a neighbor’s walk. Neighbor’s name was Roy Carrol. Funny thing? Roy was never even nice to him, but my stepfather shoveled his walk because it was the decent thing to do and Roy was too poor to hire anyone to help and he lived on a corner lot. You know what Roy did the day after my father’s funeral?” Brian popped a peanut in his mouth. “Went out and bought himself a three-thousand-dollar snowblower.”