Sacrifice Read online

  The houses were different colors and had some accessories that spoke of different current owners, like basketball hoops or porch wind chimes. But they were still the same houses. Jeff remembered who had lived where: Mrs. Klein with the six cats, retired Old Joe who was ready to pounce if you followed a stray ball onto his manicured lawn, the Winters sisters, reigning neighborhood stuck-up bitches. He wondered how many ex-husbands they had collected by now.

  Paul’s house was several streets up, but the right turn here would take him to 22 Blackwood Lane. He turned right out of habit, as if he were still going home. He coasted to a stop in front of the old homestead.

  The Cape Cod seemed half-scale compared to his memories. The white with black trim color scheme was now yellow and brown. Gnomes and a yard art flamingo stood watch at the front door. Jeff’s parents would have had a heart attack if that kind of kitsch had been in the yard. Dormers had sprouted from the upstairs bedrooms. The live Christmas tree he’d planted in the side yard in 1976 was gone.

  The house no longer sprouted the old collection of aerials. Not just the TV antenna that cable and satellite had made obsolete, but the ones Jeff had installed. The four-way CB antenna near his old bedroom window and the larger ham radio mast that needed the oil burner’s chimney for support. Those were his conduit to a larger world back then.

  He cruised over to Paul’s. Cars filled the driveway and spilled out into the street. He wedged the Caddy in behind a red BMW. It had a license plate frame that read “Realtors do it at the best addresses.” That could only be Ken’s sense of humor. He got out.

  Paul’s house, unlike his, was unchanged. Jeff remembered a picture they took in front of this house senior year, he and Paul in ragged jeans with Katy and… What was her name? Deirdre. He swore nothing looked different. He wondered if the collection of stolen street signs they had amassed still hung on the wall of the garage. He couldn’t suppress his smile.

  The front door swung open before he could knock. And there was Paul. Grayer and certainly wider, but with the same eyes and that same goofy grin from thirty years ago. He extended a hand and for the first time in his life, Jeff shook Paul’s hand, an act far too adult and conventional in 1980. Paul yanked him closer and slapped him on the back.

  “Welcome home, Sparky,” Paul said.

  Jeff recoiled. No one had called him that in three decades. The nickname had been coined when Jeff had tried to demonstrate an intercom system he’d made for his house. He threw the power switch and speakers in four rooms exploded like sparklers. He hadn’t been too fond of the moniker. He hadn’t expected its resurrection.

  Paul dragged him down the hall, past pictures of Paul in his NYPD uniform and a framed copy of a newspaper with the headline COPS BUST MAJOR HEROIN RING. The final picture on the wall was a candid shot from the ’60s of Paul’s father in his police uniform leaning against a boxy black and white.

  Jeff entered the living room and he was surrounded. Marc Brady, looking quite professorial with a beard. Ken Scott, with red hair that hadn’t dulled a single shade, was still in his shirtsleeves and slacks from work. Both grinned ear to ear. Ken tapped his watch.

  “Ten minutes late,” he said. “Still on California time?”

  “Bite me sideways, douchebag.”

  “So now it’s official,” Marc said. “None of us have matured.”

  Everyone broke into laughter as Hallie entered with four open long necks in her hand. She had on a flattering pair of jeans and a sharp set of heels. Paul headed off Jeff’s quizzical look.

  “My wife, Hallie,” Paul said. He passed Jeff a beer. “Jeff Block, my dear.”

  “The solar panel tycoon,” Hallie said with feigned reverence. “Paul has told me so much about you.”

  “I’m sure none of it’s true,” Jeff said.

  “Not even the facts,” Ken added.

  Hallie returned to the kitchen.

  “I thought you were married to…” Jeff said.

  “It didn’t take,” Paul said. “Hallie and I married after I retired from the force. We call the first round ‘The Practice Marriage.’ You?”

  Jeff raised the bottle like he was giving a toast. “Currently creating my third ex-Mrs. Block, thank you.”

  “Congratulations,” Marc said.

  “I have a gift,” Jeff said. “You two?”

  “Twenty years, one wife,” Marc said.

  “And I’m smarter than the rest of you,” Ken said. “As always. Never encumbered by a wedding band.”

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” Jeff said. “Speaking of missing, where’s…”

  The doorbell rang. Paul pulled it open, and Dave Langdon stood in the doorway in an acid-washed denim shirt with his hair down around his shoulders. He wore a pair of round, rimless glasses that screamed of John Lennon.

  “Dave!” cried the room in unison.

  “Doesn’t this house have any screens?’ Dave said. “Look what flew in.”

  The room erupted in laughter. Dave swung in though the door, his cane taking the weight off his crippled right leg. The laughter died.

  Dave’s injury forced back the memories, the senior year memories that Jeff had avoided as he prepared for Bob’s reunion. But there was no avoiding it now. Dave’s damaged leg was a souvenir of that horrible night, of those disastrous decisions. The thump of his cane on the floor sounded like thunder in the silence.

  “So how do I get one of those?” Dave said, pointing at Marc’s beer.

  Marc recovered. “Well, harvest some hops and some barley…”

  Dave laughed and the tension broke.

  “I’ll speed that process up a bit,” Paul said and went to the kitchen.

  And the story swapping began. Only Jeff had never attended college. Only Paul still lived on the Island. Only Ken had never been married. No one had children.

  “Wait a minute,” Dave asked. “Where’s the mastermind of this anyway? Where’s Bob?”

  Paul had a very uncomfortable look on his face. “He’s not going to make it. Bob passed away on Wednesday.”

  It felt like the air was sucked out of the room. Marc slumped down on the couch. Jeff stared down at his beer.

  “Bob didn’t tell you all,” Paul continued, “but he had lung cancer. By the time he dragged himself to a doctor, it had metastasized, hit his lymph nodes and brain. He wanted to get everyone back together before it was too late, but we didn’t make it.”

  “Why didn’t he call and tell us earlier?’ Ken said.

  “How could you not know?” Jeff accused Paul. “You live ten miles apart.”

  “Ten miles and thirty years,” Paul said.

  “But he was our friend…” Marc said, his voice rising in anger.

  “Is our friend,” Dave corrected. He put his hand on Marc’s shoulder. “There’s no need to lash out. We are all guilty of falling out of touch. Paul, when’s the funeral?”

  “Tomorrow at St. Andrew’s.” The old Anglican church was just off the green in the old village. “Believe it or not, he was an altar boy there during elementary school.”

  Ken had to laugh. “An altar boy? I don’t think I ever heard the guy speak a G-rated sentence.”

  “You didn’t know him back then,” Jeff said. “He was different before he spent those months with his stepfather.

  “Bob’s birth father took off after Bob was born. The two sisters were teens, and he couldn’t handle the whole baby event again. In sixth grade, Bob’s mother remarried. Bob was thrilled. All he did was brag about his new father. A month into the school year, they moved to Babylon with Bob’s stepfather. In March, Bob was back. I don’t know why. He never talked about it. But he was different. We were only, what, ten years old? But he was dark. Distant. His mother went downhill from there as well.”

  “We were just kids,” Marc said. “And not real others-centered, but she seemed to have issues.”

  “I see this thing over and over at work,” Dave said. “A kid without a father, a mother without a
husband. She finds the one she thinks is right and goes all in. Maybe she doesn’t look at the guy as close as she should have, maybe she does and ignores what she sees. It all goes to hell fast when she’s with him full time. I’d guess he was horribly abusive. Probably not sexually, at least not to Bob. But it had to be pretty bad for them to run out after less than a year.”

  “I don’t remember much about Bob’s mother, come to think of it,” Marc said.

  “We never hung out at Bob’s,” Jeff said. “We’d dick around in the garage while Bob worked on the Duster or one of our cars, but we rarely went inside.”

  “Bob’s defense mechanism,” Dave said. “His mother had problems he was ashamed for us to see. In retrospect I’m thinking she was bipolar, with the second failed marriage being her breaking point.”

  “Jesus,” Ken said. “How could I miss all that? There’s crap you just don’t pay attention to when you’re a kid.”

  The door bell rang, and a pimply faced delivery boy handed Paul two pizzas. He’d ordered them earlier assuming everyone would be hungry. Now they sat untouched. Another round of beers bit the dust as the remaining Half Dozen reminisced about the one who was gone. By midnight the emotional stress of the evening had taken its toll, and the reunion broke up. The visitors headed for the Village Green Inn to take the rooms Bob had reserved for them. The rooms they would awaken in on the day of his funeral. Dave was the last to leave.

  “You were still on the force on 9-11, weren’t you?”

  “Just blocks away from Ground Zero.”

  “Glad you made it okay.”

  “Not as glad as I am,” Paul said. He paused. “How bad is your leg?”

  “Better than an amputation,” Dave said. “Not as good as an Olympic sprinter.”

  Paul frowned and Dave punched him in the shoulder.

  “Seriously,” Dave said. “It’s not bad. It doesn’t like the cold much. It will be my excuse to move to Florida. Remember how the doctor said I’d never walk? So much for six years of med school.”

  “I thought by now,” Paul said, “maybe it would have…”

  “Nah, this will be as good as it gets.”

  “I’m sorry,” Paul said. “Looking back, I shouldn’t have…” He couldn’t look Dave in the eye.

  “Hey, man,” Dave said. “No regrets. You did what you had to do that night. We all did. Small sacrifice considering the results.”

  “But you had a future planned,” Paul said. “Forest ranger school and smoke jumping to put out wildfires. None of that happened.”

  “And instead of saving trees,” Dave said, “I save kids. I have no problem with where my life went. In fact, I should thank you.”

  Paul nodded in understanding. “You’re a good man, Dave.”

  Dave turned for the front door. “Go get some sleep. We’ve got a friend to bury tomorrow.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  At some point on the way to the Village Green Inn, Ken got lost.

  The inn was just a few miles away, over roads Ken had driven thousands of times. This historic section of town was virtually unchanged since the old days. Yet as the trees whizzed by, Ken had no idea where he was.

  Worse, he had no idea where he was going. Or where he had been. The future and the recent past had gone wildly out of focus. His heart started to hammer and panic set in. Where the hell was he? What time was it? What day was it? He pulled over to the side of the road.

  He had to get help. He was lost and alone. Was this place even safe? He’d call the police. They would tell him where he was. He searched his pockets for his phone. He snapped on the interior light and saw the message written on the pad of his steering wheel in white ink:

  YOU HAVE THE BOOK IN YOUR POCKET.

  He pulled a small notebook from his pants pocket. It was one of those rectangular ones with the spiral binding at the top. On the outside was the word MEMORY.

  Yes, this was familiar. He thumbed through pages of handwritten notes until he got to the last page. At the top were today’s date and the time of 12:21 a.m. Underneath it said:

  YOU ARE DRIVING FROM PAUL HAMPTON’S HOUSE TO THE VILLAGE GREEN INN WHERE YOU HAVE A ROOM RESERVED.

  BOB’S FUNERAL IS TOMMORROW.

  YOU WERE ONCE MARRIED TO PAMELA ANDERSON.

  Two truths and a lie, Ken thought. The memory book is always two truths and a lie. Gotta keep a sense of humor about this crap. Throughout each day, he would jot down a note about what was going on in the memory book. In the event he was disoriented, he could flip open the book and basically re-read the last chapter of his life. This was the third book he’d been through since his diagnosis months ago. But he’d burned through the last book in a week.

  Even with the memory prod, Ken could not lock in where he was. Where was the Village Green Inn? The evening was so fuzzy. Instead he reached back farther. Summer of 1975. He and Paul were near the Village Green Inn—behind it actually—down by the harbor. They’d ridden their bikes there from Paul’s house. He could remember that, clear as day, clearer than he had in a while.

  The morning rain had passed, and the sun set the damp roads steaming. They left Paul’s house and Paul almost got hit by a moving van. Empire Movers. 615-555-6607 was the phone number on the side of the truck. (Where did that little detail come from?) They turned down Sagebrook Road, single file, Paul riding first. Something had bloomed and the air had a sweet tinge to it.

  In his mind, he retraced the route down Sagebrook Road. He could feel every pump of his bicycle pedals. He remembered passing certain houses and side streets. Then his memory caught up with the present, to the very spot where his BMW idled. He sighed in relief. He tossed the car into gear and pulled back onto the road. He followed his memory’s mental preview, past signs and homes remembered from the perspective of a bicycle seat.

  He crested a hill and there was the village green. The inn stood at the far end. Spotlights lit the Victorian façade, and he praised God that it hadn’t changed in thirty years. He pulled into a parking space and shut off the car.

  No one knew about his illness yet. He’d worked hard to cover himself, kept doing research and avoiding any personal closings. But it couldn’t last forever. He couldn’t keep enough notebooks. When that happened, he was screwed. Contrary to conventional wisdom, you did need a brain to be a Realtor.

  The irony was too much. His gift of total recall was on the way to being totally recalled. Sometimes he wondered if people were born with a full tank of memory, and using his at twice normal strength had depleted his allotment early.

  He pulled out his Memory Book and a pen. On a fresh page he wrote the date and 1:10 a.m. Then he wrote:

  YOU ARE STAYING AT THE VILLAGE GREEN INN IN SAGEBROOK.

  YOUR FRIENDS FROM HIGH SCHOOL ARE IN OTHER ROOMS HERE.

  IN 1986 YOU CLIMBED MOUNT EVEREST NAKED.

  “Gotta have a sense of humor,” he said to himself.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  False dawn lit the horizon the next morning. A runabout putted past the Sagebrook harbor dock on the way to catch flounder in the Sound. A few terns rose into the air with raucous squawks. The earthy smell of the salt marsh filled the air. Jeff sat on the edge of the dock. The soles of his shoes skimmed the water.

  Three hours of sleep had apparently been plenty. Jeff had been awake since four thirty a.m. The dining room didn’t open until eight, so he had walked the village shops in the dark and been disappointed. All the buildings were the same with no additions and no new color schemes. But the tenants were different. The butcher, the bakery and the barber his mother used to drag him to were all gone. Instead there was Express, The Gap, The Limited. The village shops were just a shopping mall with all exterior doors. The homes along the west side of the green now housed lawyers, doctors and accountants. The villagers had abandoned their mom-and-pop shops and their small town principles and succumbed to the power of Walmart. But as Jeff sat on the edge of the dock and looked out across the water, he didn’t have to take in all
that change. This view was the one he remembered.

  Footsteps echoes on the dock behind him. Ken stopped and leaned against one of the pilings.

  “You see that Arnie’s Deli back there turned into a candle shop?” Ken said.

  “The village traded the best ham sandwiches in the world for scented wax,” Jeff said. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “No way. Kept thinking about Bob.”

  “We’re too young for death by cancer,” Jeff said. “We’re not even fifty.”

  “Yeah, can you believe a disease that wouldn’t respect our youthful vigor?” Ken said. He slumped down against the piling. Jeff swung around to face him.

  “Why are we here?” Jeff asked. “I mean, why did Bob reserve rooms at the Inn? There are other hotels nearby, closer to his house.”

  “Irony?” Ken offered. “I admit it’s tough to give Bob credit for that kind of depth, no disrespect to the dead. But this was where it all began, and all ended. You, me and the Woodsman right there on the green.” He paused. “Christ, I haven’t said that name out loud in three decades.”

  “But do you think about him?” Jeff asked.

  “How can you not?” Ken said.

  “Did you notice one thing we all have in common?” Jeff said.

  Ken smiled. “Hell, yeah. No kids.”

  “Consciously or subconsciously, none of us wanted to take the risk.”

  “Because even after all we did, none of us trust that the Woodsman’s gone.”

  “Horror Movie Rule Number One,” Jeff said. “’It’s never dead.’”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  About an hour later, Dave went for a walk. Given the condition of his leg, a daily constitutional had dropped from his schedule thirty years ago. But this morning he felt like he had to gut it out. His leg felt pretty good and he only had to rest lightly on his cane. While he was still alone, he had some places he needed to see, some memories to confront.

  After shattering his leg in 1980, he spent weeks in the hospital listening to dismal doctors’ prognoses. He’d always thank his parents for adamantly refusing the recommendations to amputate. He returned home little better than bedridden. But he had finished enough physical therapy by summer’s end to start the fall semester at the University of Massachusetts.