Three-Day Town

Chapter


29


From the high tower of the Singer or the Metropolitan Building the eye travels around the ring and sees waterways, landways, bridgeways, railways, radiating and crossing, leading outward and onward.



—The New New York, 1909



We spent the evening tidying up the apartment, emptying the refrigerator of everything that wouldn’t make a picnic lunch on the train, and packing our suitcases.

While I was busy elsewhere in the apartment, Dwight used a wood cleaner on that bloodstain so that it really wasn’t very noticeable. Nevertheless, I wrote a note to Jordy Lacour to explain that the police had his missing gold-and-enamel pillboxes and to tell him why there was an overly clean spot on the floor near his French doors. We left him a bottle of good brandy as a thank-you for the use of his apartment.

I emailed the kids a group letter to ask if the culprit might be the freshman girl Jess had dismissed out of hand. Something in the picture’s background had already made them start to wonder if it had been taken in a stall in one of the girls’ restrooms. They had been ready to accuse Mark McLamb’s girlfriend of helping Mark and Jamie Benton embarrass Lee, but thought the girl with the lower locker was much more likely since Lee hadn’t even bothered to learn her name after bumping into her every day since school began back in September.

Cal had sounded ecstatic when we called to say we were coming back early. “Bandit’s wagging his tail like crazy,” he told us. “He’s really, really glad.” He paused, then said, “We’re not gonna have to stay at Grandma’s so you can finish your honeymoon, are we?”

“Absolutely not,” I told him. “We’ve been missing you and Bandit way too much for that.”


Next morning, as our southbound train broke free of the dark tunnel under the Hudson River and out into the first real sunlight we’d seen since leaving home, Dwight and I looked back across the snowy New Jersey landscape for a final view of Manhattan. We even caught a brief glimpse of the Statue of Liberty before Dwight settled into his seat with a contented sigh.

We both agreed that it would be good to get home.

“Yesterday?” he said. “When you told Lieutenant Harald that we’d be back? You said ‘with our son.’ ”

“Did I?”

“Is that how you feel about Cal?”

Confused and unsure what he wanted my answer to be, I said, “I know that he’ll never stop remembering that Jonna was his mother, but yeah, after a year, I sometimes forget he’s not really my son, too.”

“He should have been yours.” Dwight drew me closer so that my head was tucked under his chin. “Whatever I’d felt for Jonna was gone long before Cal was born. I should have waited.”

“No,” I said. “If you’d waited, Cal wouldn’t be here.”

“Still…”

I reached up to touch his face and put my fingers across his lips to stop him. “Still, nothing.”

He kissed my fingers and tightened his arm around me as the train lurched toward Newark. “All the same,” he said, “I never told you this, but after the first few months, whenever Jonna and I made love, I used to pretend she was you. I knew it wasn’t fair to her, but I couldn’t help myself. It was you I made love to the night Cal was conceived.”

I was flooded with such emotion that I couldn’t speak.

He tilted my chin up so that he could look into my eyes, and just before we kissed, he said, “So in some psychic way, he really is your son.”

My son?

Yes.





My thanks to those inveterate New Yorkers, Vicky Bijur and Susan Richman, for allowing me to take aspects of their Manhattan apartments and shape them to the needs of this book.