“Greer. Oh God.”
“You say something?”
“No, nothing.”
The driver looked at me in the mirror and shook his head. My carry-on bag was next to me on the seat in the dark. I reached into it and felt around for the sketchbook and a pencil. Flipping the cover over, I put the pencil to the paper and began to draw. Except for the streetlights and the occasional car headlights flicking over us, it was utterly dark in the back of the taxi. But I drew and drew, never looking down, only feeling the pencil scratching across paper, doing whatever my hand felt like doing. I drew until we arrived at the airport, where I left the book and pencil on the seat and got out to catch a plane home.
There was a film on the flight. The stewardess gave me a set of earphones but I left them in my lap. It was better to watch without any sound, making up dialogue in my head, guessing the plot as it skittered silently along. Anything to fill my mind.
A very beautiful blond woman has the world in her hip pocket, money, power, a handsome boyfriend who seems to love her as much as the rest of the world does. But she grows tired of it all. One day she meets an enormously fat man who works as a cashier at a supermarket. They talk, she laughs, they talk some more. The next shot is of her waiting for him out in the parking lot after work. He comes out of the store and sees her there, a blond Venus leaning on her red sports car, obviously waiting for him. Cut to his face. His eyes roll up in his head and he faints.
As the film got worse, I became more and more involved. I put on the earphones and turned them way up. The couple must fight the whole world to prove their love is real. Every cliché you could think of was in the film. Her rich parents are outraged, her once nifty boyfriend turns out to be a cad who does whatever he can to break the lovebirds up. They almost part, but true love wins out.
Probably one of the sillier films I’d seen in my life, but I laughed at the lame jokes, sat forward on my seat when things looked bad for them. At the end, when they are off in an idyllic Vermont town running a general store together, I began to cry. There was no stopping it. A middle-aged woman on the other side of the aisle watched me suspiciously. What did she see? A man with a swollen, bruised face crying like a child. At that moment I would have given anything to see that movie again, but the screen went blank, then black. Unconsciously I reached into my bag for the sketchbook, but remembered I’d left it in the taxi. I looked at the staring woman but she had gone back to her magazine. There was nothing left to do but close my eyes and think about my dead boy.
I got the car from the parking lot and drove toward town. I’d been gone a little over twenty-four hours, but the only thing left in the world that was the same for me was this road with the orange lights above and the familiar billboards for airlines, hotels, weekend package trips to Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe. When I passed the gas station where the cashier looked at you through binoculars, I thought of stopping and asking him through all his thick protective glass: Remember me? Forget how I look now; I was the one who offered you a twenty last night and made no trouble. Last night when things were only full of dangerous possibilities. Not like now with my purple split face and dead future.
I passed the hamburger stand where the murderous gang had stood, but it was empty and only full of lonesome yellow light. A few more rights, lefts, two red traffic lights, another right turn, and I was on our street. Welcome home, Daddy. Lincoln rode his bicycle down this street. We had walked the dog together here. “Lincoln, there are some packages on the lawn. Would you give me a hand bringing them in?”
Lily’s car was nowhere to be seen, but Mary Poe’s black Jeep was parked in our driveway. I pulled up to the curb and turned the motor off.
“I’ll count to fifty and go in. Just give me to fifty and I’ll go.”
The lights were on in the living room and, far away as it was, I tried to see through the window if there was anyone in there besides Mary. No movement, no forms going back and forth. I was counting to fifty in my head as I watched. At fifty I would go. Nothing moved.
Something tapped loudly on my window. I jumped. My mind screamed it’s Lincoln, Lincoln’s back. He’s here, he’s dead but he’s here…
The face at the window was a woman with tan skin and dark hair. Thirty-five or so, she was pretty but there were a great many lines on her face that showed both her age and her experience. I was so spooked by her tapping that I didn’t understand when she gestured with a finger for me to roll down the window. I shook my head. She was close enough so that when she spoke I heard through the glass: “Could you put your window down? Please, only a minute.”
I rolled it down halfway. Calming down, I realized I knew her face from somewhere. Was she a neighbor? What was she doing out here at this time of night?
“Thank you. Do you know who I am? Do you recognize me?”
“No.”
“I’m Little White, Mr. Fischer. Lincoln’s friend, Little White.”
When I saw her the night before, Little White was sixteen years old with a head of spiky white hair and a face so clown-white/deathly pale you’d have thought she wore special makeup. This woman was close to my age, had short dark hair and… freckles. Yet the longer I looked, the more that familiar young face came to the surface through this one. The eyes, mouth… they were the same. I had seen her so often in the months she’d hung around with Lincoln.
“Can we talk a minute?” She waited. I didn’t move. “How about Anwen Meier, Mr. Fischer? How about Lincoln shooting at you on the road?”
I looked again at the house and got out. We stood no more than three feet apart. She was wearing a dark chic dress, a gold bracelet, high heels. I remembered what she had been wearing yesterday: dirty jeans, a T-shirt saying “Nine Inch Nails,” combat boots. Now this thirty-something woman, elegant and attractive, her perfume drifting over subtle and flowery, was saying they were one and the same.
“You’re not really surprised, are you?” The voice. Yes, it was the girl’s voice too, only slightly deeper.
“No.”
“I knew you wouldn’t be. Lincoln told me what he did to you in New Jersey. He told me why too.”
I said nothing.
“I saw him today. Before he did that.” She pointed at our house. “He told me he was going to do it, but I couldn’t stop him. He called from the plane and asked me to pick him up. Told me to come alone and not tell Elvis. He got very upset and begged me to be there when he landed. That wasn’t like him: Lincoln never asked for anything, so I said sure, okay, I’ll come.
“I can’t tell you how bad he looked when I saw him. In the car at first he didn’t say anything, just kept clicking his lighter open and closed till it got on my nerves. I asked him what the hell was going on and he told me. About you and your wife and how she kidnapped him. And about how you told him he was an angel.
“After he was finished telling me his whole story, he asked if I believed him. Know what I said? I’ll believe it if you prove it. That’s the only way you can ever really know, right? He said, ‘Okay, pull over and I’ll prove it.’ I didn’t know what to expect, but I pulled into Loehmann’s parking lot and turned off the car.
“He started telling me things about myself no one in the entire world could have known. Things I’d even forgotten, they were so deeply buried.
“I was still shaking from it when he said, ‘That’s now, that’s who you are today. Now I’m going to show you your immediate future.’ When it was over and he brought me back, I had no doubt in the world that that was what the next few years of my life were going to be.
“And you know what? They were total shit. First, thanks to Elvis, there were bad drugs which landed me in the hospital twice for long stays. Then a withdrawal clinic. I got out and, to spite my parents, married a painter who decided beating me up was more fun than painting. Worse, he wouldn’t let go or give me a divorce until my parents bought him off. And even after that he made trouble for me, the psycho.