Squinting under the hot light, we walked to my car. A piece of paper flapped underneath the windshield wiper. An advertisement for a new dry cleaner. I pocketed the flyer. Jeffrey and Nolan got in. Evan went to his rental car. He’d follow us home.
I started the engine and drove. Nolan sat beside me; on his lap was the tape container that on Monday I would put into my safety-deposit box.
We were silent the whole way, each of us thinking about the cars we’d sell this week, the credit cards we’d max out, the various means by which we would raise, before Friday, the few hundred thousand dollars that we were short. We looked out our windows as if we were lifelong prisoners who’d sprung free to find that the outside was only a larger version of the inside.
We played golf.
First, though, we ate most of the food in my refrigerator. Then we changed into shorts and collared shirts, loaded our clubs into my car, and headed out to the course. Should it ever come to our needing an alibi, at least some people would have seen us out there playing. And while the timing wasn’t exactly right—Marie was free by then, obviously—we hoped that our golfing might imply innocence. Would kidnappers hit the links so soon after committing their crime?
But also, we didn’t know what else to do with ourselves.
The drive out to the Kittatinny Mountains took us into the less populated part of New Jersey. The peaceful part. There, the afternoon air felt soft and summery, and the sun cast sharp shadows as we bounced our carts along the narrow fairways, contemplating our next shot. The course was as advertised—completely secluded, with beautiful sloping fairways and speedy greens. We spent the next four hours discussing club selection, the prior hole, the next hole. I shared a cart with Jeffrey, and when the girl came around on her beverage cart, we bought sodas and hot dogs.
I wasn’t too surprised that Evan decided to join us. He might have despised us now, but we had been friends for thirteen years—a long time—and I supposed he preferred his last image of us to be on the golf course, where we were at our least complicated, our most innocent.
Jeffrey sipped his soda and said it tasted better than the sodas in California.
“I think the carbonation’s different,” he speculated.
Evan asked, “Are we playing ‘winter rules’?” when his ball got stuck in a fairway’s soggy spot.
I was struck by how easy it was for us to play this game together, to act as if nothing were any different from the last time we were all together.
Only Nolan was quiet. Contemplative. I wasn’t sure how he’d play at all with his injury, but he did, for a while. Rather than ride in Evan’s cart, he preferred to walk the fairways alone. After the ninth hole he bought a soda and sat by himself on a bench, away from us. Somehow I knew it wasn’t his ear that made him stop. I imagined he must be thinking about his return to Missouri in the morning, to whatever was left of his campaign.
He walked the second nine holes with us, hitting only the occasional shot, sometimes just looking out into the woods. For the rest of us, though, it could’ve been any Sunday of golf.
My short game was off, but my drives were better than usual.
When Evan sank a twenty-foot putt, he couldn’t stop his mouth from curling into a smile.
A passing shower dropped warm, light rain on us for ten minutes and then stopped.
A beaver scrambled across the fairway. Later on, two deer stood and looked at us before loping off into the woods.
And while we were standing at the tee box on the eighteenth hole, the afternoon winds having picked up a little, we saw not one but three eagles overhead, riding the currents of spring air. We stopped what we were doing to watch them climb and dip and climb again, until finally they flew over the mountain ridge and were out of sight.
After putting the last hole, we all shook hands and said, “Good round.”
Back at the cart return, the kid wiping down our clubs with a towel smiled and asked, “Did you gentlemen have fun today?”
24
Evan left my house at six thirty with Jeffrey in the rental car. He would drop Jeffrey at Newark Airport and return the car there, then take a cab back to Manhattan. Nolan’s flight wasn’t until noon the next day, so I suggested he spend the night at the house. He’d said very little since we left the studio hours earlier. I didn’t know if he’d want to stay over, and I wasn’t sure I wanted him to. But Cynthia wasn’t due back until midmorning tomorrow, and the thought of spending the night in the house alone with my thoughts seemed almost unbearable.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll stay.”
The afternoon breeze had stilled, and it was becoming a pleasant evening. Nolan decided to go for a run while I showered. “I can’t remember the last time I skipped two days,” he said.
“What about your head?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It’ll be a good test. See if it stays attached.”