‘My God.’
Talk on, thought Stromsoe. Tell how Hallie handled that pain. Words, don’t fail me now.
‘She hitchhiked to the nearest house, called a friend to pick her up. Stayed in bed for three days at her Lido apartment, medicated herself with antibiotics, dope, and liquor. She forced herself to make an appearance back home for her parents’ twenty-fifth anniversary, saw my graduation announcement, called my folks, and found out where the party was. By the time the doctors saw her, she was bleeding inside, infected, poisoned by the dope. Three of her ribs were broken and there were internal injuries to her spleen and ovaries. They took one ovary and said she’d probably never conceive. Three years later she had Billy.’
‘What did she tell the cops?’
‘That she picked up the wrong guy one night. They knew she was protecting Mike but they couldn’t crack her. Hallie was tough inside.’
‘Why cover for him?’
‘The beating was five days old, so she knew it would be hard to make a case against four friends with their alibis lined up. And pride too – Hallie thought it was a victory not to go to the law. She also realized he might kill her. The cops busted him from a liquor-store videotape a week after Hallie left the hospital. So, she thought Mike would get at least a partial punishment for what he did to her. Big news, when the Harvard boy was popped for a string of armed robberies in California.’
‘I remember.’
He closed his eyes and could see Hallie as she was in high school, and again as she was on the day they were married, and then as she lay in the maternity ward with tiny William Jaynes Stromsoe in her arms.
But again, as had happened so many times in the last two months, his mind betrayed him with a vision of the nails and his wife and son.
He watched a neighbor’s cat licking its rear foot in a patch of sunlight on the courtyard bricks.
His felt his heart laboring and he admitted to himself that telling this story was far more difficult than he had thought it would be. Where he had hoped to find some moments of fond memory, he found the awful truth instead. The truth he thought would set him free.
Then Stromsoe admitted another truth to himself – he was feeling worse each day, feeling farther from shore. It was like swimming against a tide. Wasn’t he supposed to get closer?
He was astonished again, almost to the point of disbelief, that he would never see Hallie or Billy as they were, only as they had ended.
God put them there for reasons we don’t understand.
‘Maybe we should take a walk on the beach while we talk,’ said Susan.
They came to the ocean at Fifty-second Street and turned south. The sun was caught in the clouds above Catalina Island like an orange suspended in gauze. The stiff breeze dried Stromsoe’s left eyelid and the pins in his legs felt creaky as old door hinges. The skin graft on his left breast tended to tighten in the cool evenings. He pulled up his coat collar and slipped on his sunglasses.
He told Susan about taking Hallie into his little college apartment in Fullerton and getting her off the drugs. And about how he had escorted her into court to testify in Mike’s robbery trial, traded mad dog stares with Tavarez, how Mike’s mother sobbed after the sentencing, and how Mike nodded to them – a courtly, emotionless nod – as he was led back to his cell.
‘Do you mind?’ Susan asked, taking a small digital camera from the pocket of her jacket.
‘Okay.’
She set her notebook in the sand with the pen clipped to the rings, and started snapping pictures. ‘I’d like some candids of you and Hallie and Billy too. From your home.’
‘Okay,’ he said.
Okay, because their story must be told and their pictures must be seen. Okay, because Tavarez can’t take away their stories or their pictures. Or my memories. Ever.
‘I know it hurts,’ said Susan, ‘but face the sun, will you? It lights your face beautifully.’
He faced the sun, his right eye shuddering with the brightness and his left eye registering nothing at all. Susan circled him, clicking away. He turned to face her and he began talking about their wedding and their life while he went through the Sheriff’s Academy, about their attempts to have a child and the doctors and tests and doctors and tests and the sudden presence of another life inside Hallie, detected by a drugstore pregnancy test on what was probably the happiest day of their life together until then.
Billy.
They walked on, then stopped to watch the sun dissolve into an ocean of dark metallic blue. To Stromsoe none of it looked like it used to. He wondered if this would be the last time he’d walk this beach. That would be okay. That’s why he listed the house for sale. The world was large. A new home can be a new life.
‘When Mike ordered the bomb, was it intended for Hallie and Billy, or just you?’
‘Just me.’
‘Why does he hate you so much?’
‘I loved Hallie and spent my life trying to put him in a cage.’
There was Ofelia too, and what happened to her, but that was not something he could tell a reporter.
‘You accomplished both,’ she said. ‘You won.’
Stromsoe said nothing.
They started back across the sand toward the houses. Stromsoe looked at the beachfront windows, copper in the fading light.
‘Thanks for everything,’ she said. ‘For telling me your story. I know it hurt.’
‘It helped too.’
‘If you need a friend, I’ll be it,’ said Susan Doss.
‘Oh?’ He glanced at her and saw that she was looking down. ‘I appreciate that. I really do.’
‘What I mean is, this is me. This is what I look like and this is what I am. And I think you’re wonderful and brave and loyal and I’d be proud to be your friend. Maybe more. I’m sorry to be clumsy and insensitive. I think my moment is right now and if it passes I’ll never see you again.’
He looked at her, not knowing what to say.
‘Plus, I get four weeks’ paid vacation, great medical, and good retirement. I’ve got good teeth, strong legs, and an iron stomach. I’m relatively low maintenance.’
He smiled.
‘And I only look clean-cut.’
‘I can’t.’
They came to the street and headed toward Stromsoe’s house.
‘I talk too much at the wrong time,’ she said. ‘It’s a problem.’
‘Hallie was the same way.’
‘You’re a beautiful man.’