Now begins the hard time, DeMarco thought. He had washed and dried his dinner plate, washed and dried his hands, and refilled his glass with four more inches of whiskey. He stood by the kitchen sink now and looked out the window at the small back lawn enshrouded in darkness. When he was a younger man, he used to sit on the porch step on summer evenings, a cold beer or glass of iced tea in hand, and talk to Laraine while she worked in the flower beds bordering the porch. She had especially loved daffodils and lilies and gladioli, tall, stately flowers that required a lot of attention. His own preferences ran to mums and marigolds, black-eyed Susans and sunflowers—showy blasts of exuberant color. But even more than those, he had loved watching Laraine’s elegant hands as they worked the topsoil and peat moss and excised weeds. Back then, he had thought her care merely evidence of a meticulous nature and never guessed the fragility of spirit at its foundation.
But that was all a long time ago, and flowers no longer grew around the house.
It was for her that he had started the brick path from the back porch to the small barnlike garage across the alley. For her he had started converting the second floor of the garage. It was going to be her sewing room, exercise room, reading room, whatever she wanted it to be. “You can use it too,” she had told him. “I don’t want you to think of it as just mine.”
But he had. It was all for her. Now the unfinished path. Now the unfinished room.
DeMarco stared into the darkness and wished he had the energy to return to work. He wished he had the stamina to work twenty hours a day, to push himself to an exhaustion that would reward him with four hours of dreamless sleep. Unfortunately, his body tired and his attention always began to wander before he was ready for sleep. If he dragged himself to bed now, he would end up having to silence his thoughts with an all-night radio talk show. His favorite was a program devoted to the supernatural, to considerations of shadow people, spirits and demons, poltergeists and ghosts. Stories of a happy or purposeful afterlife held his attention, kept him listening for shreds of credibility. Other times he dozed off, only to have the demons and poltergeists ride their radio waves into his brain.
He knew he had at least three hours to kill before he could crawl into bed with any realistic expectation of sleep. He could drink himself into a stupor, but he would pay for it all the next day, and right now he wanted to keep his wits about him, wanted to keep the puzzle of Thomas Huston’s life laid out in distinct pieces to be fitted together eventually, not all jumbled together in a sloppy pile blurred by hangover.
He knew how he was going to kill those three hours but was reluctant to admit it to himself. Only once or twice a month would he give in to the impulse to drive to Erie. The activity always stung him with self-loathing for several days afterward, as if he were a boy who had been caught masturbating to pornography. He knew he would do it again tonight but remained standing at the window for another fifteen minutes. Finally he admitted his weakness, as he always did, and told himself, “Just fucking go, why don’t you?”
The drive from his home to the I-79 on-ramp was less than twenty miles, just enough time for him to settle into the whiskey-smoothed rhythm of the road. Headed north on the interstate, he listened to a blues station out of Cleveland and occasionally lifted his glass from the cup holder for another sip. The whiskey was warm on his tongue and throat. It carried the old reconciliation into his core, the old surrender to the way of things, and he paid small attention to the familiar landmarks briefly revealed by his headlights, let the muscles in his shoulders and neck release their angry tension, let his grip on the steering wheel give up its vehemence. Sometimes he felt as if the car were doing the driving, making this decision for him. In the morning he would know better, but for now, he indulged himself in the illusion.
The little Cape Cod was dark except for a soft light in the first-floor eastern window. The stove light, he told himself. It was the only light Laraine left burning when she went out for the evening. It would provide just enough illumination to guide her and a companion to the staircase and upstairs into darkness.