He walked in to find Carol in her saucepan-cluttered kitchen, trying to make estofado. She was a hopeless cook, which was one of the reasons why Frank didn’t visit very often. The last time he had come round to dinner she had cooked chicken breasts in chili cream and he had spent the next day crouched on the toilet with his teeth chattering, praying for death. How Smitty and the kids had survived for so long he couldn’t imagine.
‘You look like shit,’ Carol told him, slicing up green and red capsicums. She was a big woman, three years older than him, with the same brown eyes, but a very much rounder face, and a pudgier nose, and wild brown curls that looked as if she chopped them into shape herself.
‘I think this has finished us off,’ he said. ‘Margot and me. I think it’s kaput sville.’
‘Hey – you’re still in shock, both of you.’
‘All of us.’
‘All of you?’
‘Me and Margot and Danny, too. We held a séance today. You’ve heard of this British guy, Nevile Strange, the psychic detective? The one who’s been helping out with the investigation into these bombings?’
‘You held a séance? For Christ’s sake, Frank. I didn’t think you believed in any of that crap.’
‘I don’t. I didn’t. Not until today. I saw Danny, sis. I actually saw him, and I heard his voice, too.’
Smitty came into the kitchen. He was about two inches shorter than Carol, with thinning blond hair that stuck vertically up in the air, bright blue eyes and a permanently surprised face. He was wearing a T-shirt that read PROFANITY IS THE LAST RESORT OF THE INARTICULATE. He hijacked a slice of red pepper from the chopping board and crunched it between his highly irregular teeth.
‘Did I hear séance?’
Frank said, ‘That’s right. I met this guy Nevile Strange when he was looking around The Cedars. He said he could get in touch with people who had passed over, so I asked him if we could talk to Danny. I guess I wanted to hear Danny forgive me. Well, that isn’t strictly true. I wanted Margot to hear Danny forgive me’
‘What’s to forgive?’ Smitty protested. ‘A bomb went off, for chrissakes. Besides, these séances, what a phony!’
‘I don’t think this one was phony.’
‘Oh yeah? My old lady went to a séance after my old man kicked the bucket. This medium told her that my old man was waiting for her in heaven so that they could dance the night away just like they always did. Total baloney, of course, because my old man lost both his feet at Inch’on. Stupid palooka stood too close to a tank.’
Carol flapped her hand at Smitty in irritable dismissal. ‘You really saw Danny?’ she asked Frank.
‘Standing in the back yard. As clear as I can see you now. We all saw him.’
‘You’re serious?’ asked Smitty, crunching another slice of pepper.
‘He said it was all my fault that he was dead and that he wanted to see me in hell.’
Smitty emphatically shook his head. ‘Nah, you don’t want to take any notice of that. You didn’t see nothing. That was a . . . what . . . an optical delusion. That’s what these mediums do. They delude you. Optically. And financially. You didn’t pay this guy, did you?’
They sat in the swing in the back yard in the last warm light of the day, drinking beer and eating pretzels. Carol’s three boys were rolling around on the crabgrass, playing space ninjas.
Carol said, ‘You won’t lose Margot, believe me. But she’s always been kind of private, hasn’t she? She needs some time to work things out inside of her head.’
‘I guess you’re right. But I feel like something’s gone out of our marriage. Something we can never get back.’
‘That’s life, Frank. We’re always losing things we can never get back.’
He looked at Carol and he knew what she was saying. When she was nineteen she had married her high-school sweetheart, Nick Vereno, and she had been so happy that she had blossomed like her family had never seen her before. For seven months, she had almost looked pretty. But then Nick didn’t come home one night, and a week later he told her he had met somebody else. A twenty-eight-year-old exotic dancer with surgically enhanced breasts and a two-year-old kid in tow. Carol’s happiness had been switched off like the lights in an empty house, when you leave it for the very last time.
Smitty swigged Coors and said, ‘You know what you ought to do, Frank? You ought to insist that this Strange guy does it again. Just to prove that what you saw was genuine. I’ll bet you a lobster dinner that he can’t.’
‘Talking of dinner,’ said Frank, ‘can I smell something burning?’
‘God damn it,’ said Carol. ‘I forgot you’re supposed to keep on adding stock.’
She hurried inside. Smitty, unperturbed, carried on swinging on the swing and drinking his beer. ‘Maybe you and Margot could use a break,’ he suggested.
‘A break?’
‘Well, if your relationship had been in really good shape, it seems to me that she wouldn’t have blamed you for what happened to Danny. Maybe you both need to step back and take a look at what’s wrong. There’s marriage, you know, and then there’s something else. Carol was married to Nick and I know that she still carries this eternal flame for him because he was handsome and charming and everything she thought she ever wanted. But what we have together, Carol and me, is such a closeness that you can’t say where one of us ends and the other begins.’
He finished his can and crumpled it up, and tossed it into the trashcan. ‘No disrespect to Margot, but she’s always been kind of serious, you know, whereas you’re always the guy who can’t keep a straight face for more than five minutes.’ He sniffed. ‘Take my advice, Frank. Don’t force it. Give yourself some space. She’s trying to glue herself back together again and you should do the same, with whatever adhesive you can lay your hands on.’
Frank and Smitty drank so many cans of Coors between them that Frank spent the night on the couch. At two thirty-three A.M. one of the family’s golden retrievers came up to him and licked his face, and he woke up shouting ‘eeaurrghh!’ in disgust. The dog wagged his tail and kept running to the door and back again to tell him that he wanted to go for a walk.
He shuffled to the kitchen door and let the dog out into the yard. The moon was so bright that it could have been daylight. He stood there and thought about all the words of advice that had been given to him since Danny died. It was almost as if everybody else in the world had been discussing what he should do next, behind his back. The old man with the long-billed baseball cap; Nevile Strange; Lieutenant Chessman, and Smitty.
Give yourself some space. Cross the road and never come back.
Carol came up behind him and linked arms with him. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
The next morning, after a breakfast of charred bacon and fried eggs with broken yolks, he kissed Carol and shook hands with Smitty and gave five dollars to each of the boys and then he drove home. Margot’s Jeep was already parked in the driveway. He let himself into the house and found Margot standing in the middle of the living room with her arms folded, like a schoolteacher impatiently waiting for an explanation.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Do I look OK?’
He tried to focus on her through his hangover. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said slowly. ‘You tell me.’