“You went to high school with him, didn’t you?” she asked.
Stromsoe had kept his relationship to Mike Tavarez a private thing, but not a secret.
“He played clarinet in my marching band.”
“He and your wife were an item back then.”
“That came a little later.”
“Will you talk to me about it? All of it?”
She gave him a business card and asked him for his home and cell numbers. He gave her his home but not his cell.
“I can’t pay you for the interview,” she said. “But I’d appreciate it if you don’t talk to other media. You’ll have offers from TV — real dollars.”
“I turned them down.”
She smiled. “I’ll call you this afternoon, after you’ve had time to settle in and get some rest. You’re going to need rest, Matt.”
“Give me a few days.”
“Absolutely.”
3
It took Stromsoe a full month to find the strength to talk to the reporter. At first he couldn’t say anything to anybody, could hardly order a combo at the drive-through window.
Two weeks after coming home he had scattered the ashes of his wife and son at sea, as Hallie had requested in a living will. The Neptune Society ship was filled with friends and family, and dipped and rolled noticeably in the big swells off of Newport while the minister spoke. Several people became sick. It was the worst two hours of Stromsoe’s life.
He continued to drink on top of the Vicodin, a little more each night. He thought about the big sleep, saw some advantages to it. He thought about a lot of things he’d never thought about before.
Among them was the idea that the only way to save his sanity was to tell the story of his wife and son, staying his execution like Scheherazade.
“We got to be friends our freshman year,” he said to Susan.
They faced each other at a picnic table in the small courtyard of his Newport Beach home. Susan’s tape recorder sat between them, next to a cobalt-blue vase filled with cut wildflowers. She also had a pen and notebook.
Across the courtyard from where he now sat, Stromsoe’s garage was still under reconstruction. His parents had begun the project weeks ago as a way of doing something optimistic but there had been some trouble with the original contractor. Around the partially rebuilt garage, trampled yellow crime scene tape had been replaced by very similar construction site tape. The muffled blasts of a nail gun popped intermittently in the cool afternoon.
The bomb had taken out one wall of the garage, blown a big hole in the roof, and shredded the bodies of two cars with thousands of tacks. What it had done to Hallie and Billy was unimaginable, but sometimes, against his will, Stromsoe did imagine it. Billy was eight. Stromsoe hadn’t gone into the garage since that day. He was afraid he’d find something.
Stromsoe inwardly shivered at the sound of the nails going into the drywall. None of the reconstruction men had ever spoken to him or looked him directly in the eye. They were all Mexican, and familiar with the presence of the dead.
Use your words, he thought: tell the story and save your self.
“The marching band wasn’t a very hip thing back then,” he said. “It was us and them. But I liked us and them. That made it easy for me to become a cop. Anyway, the band members made friends pretty easy. One night some of the football players bombed our practice with rocks. We were under the lights, marching and playing, and these goofballs stood off behind the chain-link fence in the dark and let the rocks fly. A dumb thing to do. We didn’t know what was going on at first — just a bunch of yelling and screaming about what fags we were. But then Kristy Waters sat down on the grass and covered her face and the blood was coming out from between her fingers. Kristy was first flute, a real sweetie, her dad ran a tire shop on First. I jumped the fence and caught up with a couple of those guys. I messed them up fairly well. I wasn’t the type to get angry but I got very angry then. It seemed wrong that they’d thrown a rock into Kristy’s face because she played the flute in the marching band. Three of my musicians stuck with me — he was one of them.”
“Mike Tavarez?”
Stromsoe nodded and touched the vase. He looked at his four-fingered hand then slid it casually beneath the bench.
“Yes. It surprised me because he was small and quiet. But he fought like a demon. It said something about him. Anyway, he was a good musician and nice kid, a real wiseass when you got to know him. So we became friends. That seems like a hundred years ago, you know? Part of another world, or someone else’s past.”
“I can only imagine what you’re going through, Matt.”
Stromsoe met her gaze and looked away. She had arrived today with the wildflowers in the vase, and a bag of fancy cheeses, salami, and crackers from an overpriced market nearby.
For relief he looked at his house. It was an older home on the Newport peninsula, on Fifty-second Street, two blocks in from the ocean. It was white. There was a fence around it and you could hear the waves. It was a nice little place, yet in the month that Stromsoe had been home from the hospital, he had come to hate it because it seemed complicit in what had happened.
But he loved it too — it had been their often-happy home — and the power of the two emotions made him feel paralyzed.
He thought about selling the place, fully furnished and as is, and moving away. He thought of selling the place but renting storage space for Hallie’s and Billy’s things, so he could visit them when he wanted to. He thought of just staying here and living in it as it was. He thought of burning it down and never coming back, and of burning it down with himself in it. The idea of never seeing his son’s stuffed bears again broke his heart a little more, and the idea of seeing them every day broke it again in a different place.
He took off his sunglasses and noted again the odd sensation of breeze cooling his good eye while his prosthetic eye felt nothing at all.
“How long did your friendship with Mike last?” asked Susan.
“Four years. It was a good friendship. We disagreed about a lot of things and argued about everything. But always the big stuff — does God care or does God laugh at us? Is there heaven and hell, do we determine our lives or is there a divine or a satanic plan?”
“I had a friend like that too,” said Susan. “Funny how we talk about those things when we’re young, then stop talking about them when we get older.”
Stromsoe thought back to the endless games of eight ball on the slouching table in Mike’s garage. The talk, the competition. Two boys looking for a way to face the world.
“We both went nuts for Hallie Jaynes when she transferred in but we were good friends by then. We figured she was out of our reach. That was our sophomore year. She was pretty and smart. Stayed above things, had an edge. Unafraid. Unfazable. Always said what she thought — called Mike and me the marching gland. Sarcastic twinkle in her eyes. Nice face, curly blond hair, pretty legs. Our senior year, I finally got her to go steady. I knew her heart wasn’t in it, but I was flattered that she’d do it for me. We didn’t want to leave Mike out, so the three of us did a lot of things together. The summer after we graduated, Hallie took up with him.”
Sometimes, as he remembered something good about his wife, terrible visions rushed in and destroyed his pleasant memories. How could he keep Hallie in his heart with these hideous pictures attached?
He cleared his throat and focused his attention on a hummingbird.