Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(76)
Throughout the evening, the baby moved from one lap to another, played alone for a while with his Barnyard See’n Say, and finally fell asleep snuggled against Thomas Jr. A part of Thomas Huston Sr. watched and absorbed every move and word and laugh from his family, felt keenly every moment of their typical Saturday night together because he knew how transitory it was. All too soon, he knew, Thomas Jr. would be spending his Saturday nights elsewhere, first just hanging out with a small group of friends, then with that one special girl. Alyssa would not be far behind. Then there would be just three of them to share a quiet evening, and in the blink of an eye, only two.
In bed that night, just after midnight, with Claire nestled against him with her head on his chest, her hair still damp and scented by a mango-infused shampoo, Thomas spoke of the ache of wistfulness he felt, and she comforted him as she always did. She said, “Things change but we’ll always be a family, baby.” She said, “Someday we’ll have a house full of grandkids.” She said, “Baby, make love to me again. I can never get enough of you.”
Later, he listened to her hair dryer in the bathroom, then she came back to him and quickly fell asleep in his arms. He waited another half hour or so before slipping out of bed. He had some lines he wanted to get down before the night spirited them away, a few words for his protagonist, some lines of description for his Annabel, lines that had appeared out of the ether while watching Claire undress. Plus, he was concerned about the garbage. He had forgotten to check to see if Tommy had carried the garbage outside after dinner as asked. Sometimes the boy got distracted during his chores and left them unfinished, and now Thomas could not rest with wondering if the plastic bag full of chicken bones and skin had been left somewhere between the kitchen and the garbage cans outside the garage. If so, the bag would leak and Thomas would find it in the morning, probably torn open with its contents dragged all over his and his neighbor’s yards.
He slid out of bed and, well aware that his restlessness went deeper than the chicken bones, deep enough to keep him awake awhile longer, deep enough to require a slow walk through the neighborhood, he gathered his clothes off the floor, where he had left them in a pile, then dressed in the hallway, took his shoes out of the downstairs closet, and slipped them on, and quietly made his way into the kitchen. No bag of chicken bones there. The battery-operated clock on the wall, the one Claire had purchased online with Bienvenue au café Huston written in red script across the face, ticked off the seconds. The dishwasher was silent now. Thomas opened the door and laid it open so the dishes would be dry by morning.
Then he crossed to the door that opened into the garage, unlocked it, reached around the jamb, and switched on the garage light. The bag of chicken bones was sitting on the roof of the car. Tommy liked to climb into Claire’s silver Altima and pretend he was driving. He would work a make-believe gearshift through its five gears, braking and downshifting, mashing down the accelerator on straightaways. He had probably completed several laps around Daytona’s brickyard before bringing himself and the car back to the garage. Through it all, four Cornish game hen carcasses had ridden on the roof.
Thomas Huston smiled to himself as he retrieved the plastic bag, opened the side door of the garage, and went out into the darkness. A pair of twenty-gallon plastic garbage containers stood against the garage wall. He opened the nearest one, placed the bag inside, then snapped the lid on tightly, so a marauding raccoon could not pry it off. Then he came back to the front corner of the garage and stood looking at the sky. The night was clear, cool but not cold, still in the high forties though many of the leaves on the four maples in the front yard were already down. He smelled winter coming, and the nameless ache began in him again, that strange longing he often felt when alone, especially at night, that desire for something he could not articulate or identify. Sometimes it came over him so forcefully that he felt like weeping, and occasionally did. Sometimes it helped to walk.
He went out to the sidewalk and turned to the right. He would go only as far as the end of the street, three blocks to the intersection with Redfern, then turn back again. He had left the garage door standing open, the garage light on, and if he stayed away too long, the garage would fill with moths.
He had been thinking about Poe a lot lately. Two years before that, it had been Steinbeck. And before that, Faulkner. A trinity of troubled men. He felt a kinship with all of them, felt he understood their misery. Lately he had been thinking about Poe’s “imp of perversity,” that compulsion toward contrariness that always had Poe shooting off his mouth when he should have bitten his tongue, his inability to keep from criticizing his colleagues. Huston, by comparison, was a master of restraint. His anger simmered well beneath the surface, visible only to himself. He had learned that trick from his father, whom most people had considered the most congenial of men, always smiling, always nodding in agreement. Not until Thomas’s mother and father were gone did it occur to Thomas that there was more to his father than had met the eye.
At the intersection with Redfern, Thomas Huston paused for a while. There was no traffic in the development at that hour. The houses were dark. No dogs barked, no alley cats prowled the shadows. All quiet on the suburban front.
By the time he returned to his garage, he had finished crafting several sentences for the novel. The first two would introduce the scene in which his protagonist first succumbed to his desire. He knew what he had to do. His heart knew what was necessary and right, but he could not make his body move away from her, could not summon the strength to resist what he would have to live with forever and which would give him no peace. The other sentences were about Annabel by way of Claire, about his protagonist’s desire by way of Huston’s own.