The Ascent(7)

After a time, I rolled out onto the balcony with the Macallan. It was good scotch; I approved of the cozy chateau emblem on the label. I sat and drank, watching the sodium lights twinkling farther down the stretch of beach toward downtown. Directly over the water, which was now a vast blanket of darkness, stood the Bay Bridge, bejeweled with the countless headlights of automobiles.

I’d lied to Marta earlier when I said I thought she’d thrown all those letters away. I knew very well she’d tucked them inside that shoe box under my bed. I’d gone through them a number of times since, though not with any sense of remorse or regret at having missed the opportunities. In fact, I felt very little emotion when I looked at them, except maybe for a sense of anchoring, of stabilizing, the way a ship gets tied to the docks when it growls into port.

They were letters requesting my services as an artist and a sculptor. Usually they came from multinational conglomerates and faceless corporations throughout the country’s major metropolises, requesting some titanium twist of modern art for their marbled courtyards. Or some board member I’d never heard of from a company of equalanonymity would pen a letter, explaining he’d read such and such an article and would love to have me chisel the bust of their CEO in granite, something they could prop on a pedestal in their lobby.

Over the past few years, these requests dwindled dramatically but not to the point of extinction. The latest—the one Marta had read this afternoon on the balcony—was from a textile company in Manhattan. The company’s vice president was infatuated with the number three, the letter explained, and it was this man’s desire to hire Timothy Overleigh to design a wrought-iron numeral to be displayed in his office. His reasons for choosing me were appropriately threefold: the magazine on whose cover I’d once been pictured was called Three Tiers; I was once named the third best sculptor in young America by the Washington Post; and lastly because of the sum of the letters in the abbreviated form of my first name.

I finished off the last of the Macallan and was feeling pretty good. When I squinted, the lights along the shore blurred and spread out in a greasy smear. The chill from the strong breeze caused my injured leg to ache. I turned the chair around and, thumping over the rubber doorjamb, rolled back into the apartment.

Hannah stood across the room, mostly hidden in the dark.

My breath caught in my throat. I felt the empty liquor bottle slide from my hand and strike the floor with a hollow thud. Suddenly I forgot all about the pain in my left leg. Unable to move, I sat frozen in the wheelchair, staring across the room, trying to dissect the shadows to better view my wife.

“Hannah.” It came out in a breathy whisper, the sound of it—the foolishness of it—forcing rational thought to override my panic. She wasn’t there, of course. She was dead. Hannah was dead. She was—

I watched her move along the far wall, an indescribable shifting of depth, until she reached the section spotlighted by the moonlight coming in through the balcony doors. I anticipated her coming into relief the moment she crossed that panel of bluish light … but shenever did. She vanished before she reached it, dispersing into granules of dust in the darkness.

“Jesus,” I uttered, my voice choked and nervous. I forced a laugh; it came out as a bark.

I decided to get the hell out of the apartment for the night. My eyes locked on the pair of crutches leaning in one corner of the room. It was not difficult to maneuver on the crutches, although they certainly provided less comfort than the chair, and I quickly rolled over to them and dragged myself out of the wheelchair while leaning against the television for support. I winced as I carelessly banged my left leg against the credenza, a million fireworks exploding before my eyes, then took a number of slow, deep breaths as I situated the crutches into the sockets of my armpits. Upright, I balanced precipitously for a moment before lunging toward the front door.

My apartment was in walking distance of downtown but not crutching distance, so I had the building’s doorman wrangle me a cab. It was a feat getting into the cab’s backseat, even with the assistance of the doorman and the cabdriver—both of whom spoke little English and looked as though they may have hailed from the same South American country—but I was soon shuttled off and deposited at the city dock.

It was a beautiful night, and the streets were alive. I could faintly hear live music issuing from a number of the closest taverns and beyond that the distant growl of boat engines. The bars along Main Street would be packed at this hour, and I was not in the mood to have my leg bumped by drunks in Navy whites, so I hobbled down an alleyway to seek out a more reclusive haunt hidden from summer tourists.

The Filibuster was as reclusive as one could hope for. A narrow, redbrick front fitted with iron sconces, boasting none of the typical Annapolis fanfare in its windows—goggle-eyed ceramic crabs or miniature rowing oars crossing each other to form an X—the Filibuster was easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it. Brom Holsworth, aretired Department of Justice prosecutor, owned the place ever since I could remember. Inside, it was musty and dark, the walls adorned with yellowing photographs of disgraced Washington politicians, many of whom Brom helped to disgrace.

Tonight, as expected, the bar was only mildly populated. I nearly collapsed on the closest barstool and, leaning my crutches against the wall, let out a hefty sigh.

The bartender was a nice enough kid named Ricky Carrolton. His face seemed to light up when he saw me. “Been gone so long, I was beginning to think you jumped off the Bay Bridge.”