Hadley & Grace(20)
Mark rubs the bridge of his nose as Fitz says, “It’s the tapes from last night.” He hesitates, mutters an “uh,” then an “um,” then stops again.
Fitz is a good kid, smart and hardworking, and Mark genuinely likes him. But his dream is to someday be a field agent, and Mark has his doubts. While the kid has a great criminal mind and good instincts, being on the ground means making life-and-death decisions and, more importantly, being able to live with the consequences of those choices after they’re made. There can’t be any second-guessing, and with Fitz, everything the kid says seems to come out a question.
“Fitz?” Mark says, trying to conceal his irritation. A hazy hangover has formed behind the front of his skull, the thrum of his pulse in his brain, and he presses his fingers against it, regretting the beer binge he indulged in last night after the recital.
“Maybe you should take a look for yourself?” Fitz says.
Mark grunts and hangs up, then for a long minute sits where he is, staring at the fan as it pulses back and forth beside the window. Even at seven in the morning, the heat that’s descended on the capital this week is suffocating, and again, he is reminded of how much he misses Boston.
Finally, he pushes from the bed and shuffles to the bathroom, his left shoulder and right knee creaking—the first from his football days, the second from the shrapnel of a grenade that blew up too close to his team’s Humvee during his second tour in Iraq.
As he walks, he turns on every light in the small apartment as well as the television. He pays no attention to what’s on. He does it for the noise so the apartment is not so quiet and so he’ll miss his kids a little less. He scans the empty space as he goes and tells himself, as he has every morning for the past two months, that he needs to get some furniture. Someday, the kids will want to visit, and this is no example of how to live.
As he shaves, he thinks about Shelly and her performance. She was smack in the middle of the front row, her curly blonde hair held up in a large white bow. She got the center stage position, she told him, because she sung with the “most emfusiasm.” And she did. Head held high and shoulders pulled back, she belted out the song with gusto. Yankee Doodle went to town, riding on a pony . . .
He rinses his face and pulls a towel from the box Marcia neatly labeled Bath Stuff in her very precise handwriting.
He stuck a feather in his hat, and called it macaroni . . .
Stan the Insurance Man was there, at the recital. He, Marcia, and Ben, Mark’s nine-year-old, sat two rows in front of Mark. A delightful little family enjoying the show.
Mark had arrived a few minutes late. Probably a good thing. Had he arrived on time, he might have made a scene, told Stan the Insurance Man to go to hell, that he could sit two rows back . . . by himself. That this was his family and that Ben was his son and therefore should be sitting beside him.
But getting out of downtown was a bitch, so Mark showed up late and, broiling mad, took his seat two rows behind them, his eyes shooting daggers at the back of Stan the Insurance Man’s gray-haired, slightly balding head.
He steps into the scalding water.
Yankee Doodle, keep it up, Yankee Doodle dandy . . .
Shelly looked out at the audience, saw Mark, and, for a moment, forgot to sing, her hand waving excitedly. And that’s when he saw it: the gap in her smile where her two front teeth had been.
He slams his fist against the tiles, his shoulder protesting. Damn her.
Damn her. Damn her. Damn her.
Had Marcia called to tell him Shelly had lost her teeth, he would have told her what she needed to do, where the gold dollars, purchased specifically for Tooth Fairy-ing, were kept. He would have told her about the silver Sharpie in his desk and explained that she needed to leave a rhyming note along with the coin, the penmanship curly so it looked like a fairy had written it.
But his ex-wife didn’t call to tell him that their daughter had lost her first tooth. Or her second. It probably didn’t occur to her. Marcia is busy these days, running her business and “raising two kids on her own,” as she likes to say. She has no time to keep her ex-husband informed about small insignificant details like their six-year-old losing her teeth.
He is the Tooth Fairy—also Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Saint Patrick. He should have been there, been a part of it.
After stepping from the shower, he wraps a towel around his waist and returns to the front room. In a single gulp, he finishes the remainder of the stale beer, then, with a heavy sigh, opens his laptop. Fitz has sent four video clips, two from each of the surveillance cameras outside Torelli’s office. He looks at the ones from the entrance camera first, then at those from the back lot; then he looks at them again, this time in sequence.
He calls Fitz. “What the hell?”
“Exactly.”
17
GRACE
Grace is dreaming of food. Bread, mostly, warm from the oven, the crust breaking open in her hands to reveal its soft, steamy insides. Jam and honey and butter waiting to be spread in great slathers across it. Grapes and apples. Blueberry muffins in a basket. A plate of thick waffles beside it. She holds the torn loaf, its heat spreading through her fingers as she reaches for the knife, her mouth watering as her nose fills with its yeasty smell . . .
Her eyes blink open as her mouth continues to water. The ceiling above her is smooth, entirely unlike the popcorn ceiling of her bedroom, and for a precious second, she thinks she is in her old apartment, the one she and Jimmy moved into when they first got married, light flooding in through the window as it always did in the morning. She loved that bedroom and that bed, the way the golden light would stream in each day to wake them. It was such a hopeful way to greet the day.