The Shoal of Time Read online

  We were not best friends by the time I handed her over to her parents because I told her no repeatedly. I was not buying her a beer, she could not kick the seat in front of her because she was upset, her parents were not Nazis (nor did she appreciate the deliberately long-winded history lesson I gave her on who and what the Nazis actually were and the ways in which being confined to her room were truly and meaningfully different from a concentration camp).

  Then it was Saturday afternoon and my flight was not leaving until the next day. I went back to the hotel room and tried to call Cordelia, but her sister answered and said she was asleep. I left the message that she could call later if she felt up to talking.

  Then I was by myself in a small hotel room with the bright winter sunshine beckoning me. I stuffed my cell phone in my pocket, bundled up, and went to explore Boston. I’d only been there a few times. First I played history tourist, checking out the Boston Common and Freedom Trail. I was in it mostly for the walk and to see the sites. I wasn’t up to fighting the hordes of screaming school-age children to go into too many places. When I got cold, I ducked into the markets at Faneuil Hall. A bit touristy, but I was warm, could watch people and pass the time.

  Standing in line for coffee, I chatted with the guys in front of me. We had quickly pegged each other as family in this family—different kind—of place. Once they found I was here on my own, they invited me along on their evening. They loved New Orleans.

  Dinner turned into a piano bar. My plane was early, but not that early, so I had a drink. And then another. One of them was a Scotch fan, so we tried a couple of different varieties. They were both lawyers and insisted on paying the way, recompense for, as they said, “the sins of too many men making more money than too many women.” The drinks were free; I didn’t say no.

  I got back to my hotel room after one in the morning. I could sleep on the plane. I felt guilty at having fun, but the small vacation from worry was welcome. In truth, I’d help no one by staying in my hotel room and glumly watching TV reruns.

  When I took out my phone, I realized that the battery had died. I’d planned to charge it at the airport, but my young runaway needed her phone and therefore the one available public charger, and that was a battle I chose not to fight.

  I plugged it in long enough to see that Cordelia had called. But no message. I’d call her when I got back to New Orleans. It was too late tonight and probably would be too early before I got on the plane.

  That was all I managed. I’d had a fair amount to drink, enough to give me a pleasant buzz and make the hotel bed feel very, very welcome.

  When I woke, I was confused, unsure of where I was. Then panic. I hadn’t set the alarm and was supposed to be on a plane at 7:30 am. The clock beside the bed read 6:57. Damn, I had forgotten to set the alarm on my cell phone. I had gotten distracted with the dead battery and missed calls—and being drunk—and didn’t do it.

  Clearly I would not be on the plane. I gave myself an hour to snooze—and sober up—before calling to change my flight. When I woke again, a little after eight, the light had changed to gray. As I punched in the number of the airline, I looked out the window. Snow was falling. A dusting had already accumulated on the window ledge.

  The airline people very politely told me that I was SOL. A major winter storm was moving in and the area was still recovering from Sandy. Within an hour planes would no longer be able to fly in or out for most of the rest of the day.

  If I’d been on my originally scheduled flight, I would have made it.

  The airline person told me to call back tomorrow, but her glum tone indicated this was a major mess. Already-scheduled passengers had priority. People like me were pond scum who missed perfectly good flights for no good reason.

  I spent the next few hours finding a cheaper hotel; I couldn’t afford what my client could. I tried getting one near the airport, but they were all sold out. The snow was pretty, but not when I was trying to schlep from one hotel to the other. They were ten long blocks away, but traffic was at a standstill and in the end the most efficient way to travel was the oldest way—walking. I left my bag at the new hotel, but they didn’t have a room ready for me, so I found the closest coffee shop and settled in for a long breakfast.

  When it was late enough in Central Time, I called Cordelia. I took the coward’s way out and blamed the blizzard.

  “I thought I’d see you today,” she said, sounding cranky.

  “I’ll get there as soon as I can,” was the only answer I had.

  “You know we could spend my money and you could be here more.”

  “We need your money for medical bills. It can’t cover everything.”

  “It could cover a week or two. You should take the time off and stay here.”

  I didn’t answer quickly enough. I really didn’t know what to answer. Some of it was money. But I was scared to give up my life, as exhausting as it was, my work was in my control and it was part of who I was.

  “Never mind. There’s nothing for you to do here. It’s not a good time.”

  “No, it’s not that…it’s…we need the money and…”

  “And you’re not stuck here with a dying woman.”

  “You’re not dying,” I protested too loudly. Several patrons in the coffee shop glanced my way. “And I want to be with you. I’m just trying to find a workable balance.”

  “Let me know when you find a balance that works for you. I’m tired, I need to go.”

  “I’ll call later. We can talk more.”

  “Yeah, later.” She hung up.

  I stared at my phone as if I could find an answer there. She was upset. I knew her well enough to know “I’m tired, I don’t want to talk,” was often her way of saying, “I’m totally pissed at you, but I want to calm down first.” She’d been saying it more and more often.

  Maybe she was right. Maybe I should take a week or two and stay in Houston. But I don’t have a regular job where I can take two weeks’ vacation. I’m a small business, the sole owner and, save for occasional jobbers, the only employee. If someone wanted to hire me to find a missing person, they weren’t going to wait two weeks until I came back, they’d find someone else. And the next time they needed someone they’d call that person, not me.

  Two weeks of not being available would be doable, if it didn’t affect the weeks after that.

  What’s more important—your business or Cordelia? The answer to that was easy. Making that answer work, not so easy. I vowed when I got back to New Orleans I’d call in every favor anyone might suspect they owed me. I’d call Chanse and Scotty, every PI I had worked with in the past. And hope they wouldn’t take advantage of the situation and steal my regular clients. I could do a lot from my cell phone and a laptop. I’d just have to get the beat-up old laptop in working condition so I could cart it around with me—another task to somehow find time for.

  Maybe I’d try a week, see how it worked and what I’d need to adjust to stay longer.

  I had thought that her sister—Linda, she does have a name, although I prefer Evil Stepsister—would have the decency to refrain from trying to break us up, but now I suspected she was getting in her little digs. “If she really loved you, she’d find a way to be here. I did, after all.” “Wonder what she’s doing all the time she’s back there without you.” Or maybe Cordelia wanted me there and not Linda, was tired of depending on the sister who was more family than friend.

  Or maybe it was what had happened last summer. She got involved in a case and had to do something she swore she’d never do—fire a gun. She killed a man. His death shook her and although she claimed she’d do it again, I don’t know if she ever really forgave me. She’d never get into those kinds of situations if she’s been with a nice safe social worker or medievalist, like her sister wanted.

  For the next few days my calls were either unanswered or the sister told me that Cordelia was in treatment or tired or asleep.

  I was out in the cold both literally and figuratively.<
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  I checked out of the hotel—even cheap places cost money—and camped out at the airport, hoping that I’d be more likely to get on a plane if they had to stare at my unwashed face instead of a disembodied voice on the phone. I spent the night there, but the next day—four days later than I’d planned, I got lucky—they could fly me to Dallas, if I was willing to go via Denver. It wasn’t Houston, but once I landed, I could rent a car and drive there in a few hours.

  Four hours to Denver, a three-hour layover, three hours back to Dallas, and the final flight delayed by forty-five minutes waiting for their crew got me in at around ten p.m. that evening.

  I called again when I landed. No answer.

  I drove for about an hour but was nodding off. I’d have to stop for the night anyway, otherwise I’d get there at around three or four a.m. I pulled up at the next cheap (but decent) hotel.

  She’ll have to talk to me if I’m standing in front of her, I told myself as I checked in. All I wanted was to be home in my own bed—with Cordelia healthy and there with me. The night in the airport hadn’t been restful, nor had the nights in strange hotel beds. Instead I was at another nameless hotel, driving a clunky rental car through the middle of nowhere Texas.

  But I’d screwed up, both in being drunk and missing the plane, but also in trying to hold too tightly to my life when Cordelia needed me to let go and be with her. I’d been blind to it, thought the material things—her sister there to fetch her water, take her back and forth—was enough. I hadn’t made it a priority in my life to be there for more than a few days at a time.

  I didn’t sleep very well at the nameless hotel, a place to stare at the ceiling and listen to the whoosh of trucks on the nearby interstate. I fell asleep sometime after midnight and woke up before six. I was on the road just as dawn was a gray glimmer in the sky.

  I called again when I stopped for gas. Again no answer. I wondered if the Evil Stepsister had hijacked Cordelia’s cell phone.

  By nine I was at the hospital. Today was a chemo day, so she should be there.

  I knew something was wrong when the nurse looked at me and said, “What are you doing here?”

  I managed to stammer out that I’d been stuck in a blizzard, had only been able to leave a few messages.

  No, she wasn’t dead. She was gone. Transferred to someplace around New York, to follow the doctor who had been treating her. It was also closer to her sister. They had left four days ago, flying out in the husband’s company jet.

  I was in a daze as I went to the airport, returning the rental car, getting a flight to New Orleans. Nothing felt real. I was so tired, had gone so many miles; somehow this still felt like it was all a bad dream, one I’d wake from.

  But when I opened the door to my house, I knew it wasn’t a dream and I’d never wake from it. They’d come by here, taken all of Cordelia’s stuff. There were blank spaces on the walls where pictures used to hang. The cats were gone, taken with a brief note in strange handwriting saying she needed them with her right now.

  “Do I get them back if you die?” I’d screamed at the empty house.

  I tore through all the rooms, but the emptiness was the same.

  Finally, exhausted, I headed to the kitchen to the liquor cabinet.

  It was empty. She had cleared it out as if knowing once I realized what had happened, I’d take a drink. That was the match to the gasoline of my anger. Walking into our house and tearing herself out of it with no warning was a gut punch I’d never expected. Following it with this petty attempt at control was intolerable.

  Like the local gas station around the corner didn’t sell booze.

  I threw my suitcase across the living room and stormed out.

  By the time I got back from the grocery store and unloaded, there would have been a lot less alcohol in the house if she’d just left what was there.

  “Guess you don’t know me very well, do you?” I muttered as I put away the bottles.

  All but one, a Scotch bottle that I kept with me for most of the night. It the morning it was sitting on my bedside stand with only half of the bottle left. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

  The next thing I really remember is vomiting my guts out and not knowing if it was day or night. Once I’d thrown up everything I possibly could, I drank a little water and went back to bed. When I woke up, I stumbled to the kitchen and made coffee and toast. After that settled my stomach, I dared take aspirin.

  When I finally looked up the date, I found I had lost two days.

  After I’d been sober for a few hours, it occurred to me that it was probably the Evil Stepsister who’d thrown away the liquor. It was the kind of petty controlling thing she’d do. The note about the cats was probably her handwriting. Or whomever she hired to pack up Cordelia’s life and take it from here.

  I tried calling again, but my calls went to voice mail. After a week, the number was disconnected. Even after that, for three days I kept calling that number, as if in a nightmare and every sunrise held the promise I’d wake from it.

  Finally, staring at the bright sun and hearing the mechanical voice tell me this number would never be in service, the creeping numbness of reality oozed into my bones. She had cut me out of her life with more decision and precision than the invading cancer. Her only mercy was a brief note telling me the cats were all right. Gone from my life, but safe with her—wherever that was.

  The worst blows are the ones you never see coming. I wasn’t prepared for this. She was ill, maybe dying. She needed me. She did need me, but she didn’t need the half-assed compromise I’d come up with, me exhausted from travel, there for a few days and then gone. Only a visitor in her life. She needed a partner; I had stopped being one.

  I poured alcohol into my wounds until I was finally brave enough—or numb enough—to call our friends. I left messages; I didn’t really want to talk, I just wanted to know.

  “If she dies, let me know. If she lives, let me know as well. Oh, and if the cats are okay,” was the same message I left for them all.

  I dragged myself through the days, working the cases I’d agreed to. They were the respite of things I could control, work I knew how to do, small successes of locating a person, finding the information, a reflection that I was still here. Surviving. I threw myself into work, volunteering for gritty surveillance hours that I normally would have avoided. Three hours here, an overnight there, slowly the days strung together.

  Information I wanted and didn’t need filtered back. She had moved to the New York City area near where the Evil Stepsister lived, following her doctor there. Finally her treatments seemed to be working, and she was getting better. One of the nurses caring for her had donated bone marrow, a nurse who had also moved from Houston to Boston; I didn’t recognize the name, trolling in memory through the women in white who hovered around her. No face stood out, I could recall no extra kindnesses that portended what came. Maybe they were discreet; maybe they were only friends until after she cut it off with me. Maybe I was too blind, too immersed in my own sorrow to see.

  The two of them moved in together after Cordelia left her sister’s. Alex had tried to be kind: “I think they’re just friends. It’s expensive up there.”

  “Two lesbians. The cats will be okay,” was my answer.

  I started avoiding my circle of friends after that. I didn’t want to know anything else. They knew I had failed, that I hadn’t been strong enough or wise enough or caring enough to get us through this together, and I couldn’t bear the reflection in their eyes.

  Instead I stared at department store dummies, nothing except paint in their eyes. It was the holiday season; I took on security jobs for several stores in the area, desperate to fill every hour with mundane routines to drag the days by.

  I lied to Torbin and said I was going to New York to spend time with my mother and lied to her to say I was staying here and would be seeing friends.

  She had needed me; I hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen it. Thought I could balance things�
�no, called it balancing when what I was really doing was hedging my bets—if she died, I wanted a life to go back to. It was my safety net, and I wasn’t willing to give it up for her. The trips back and forth were a show of caring, theater to prove I was willing to make sacrifices, hoping to fool everyone, including myself, that I wasn’t giving up anything truly vital.

  Scotch and self-pity made me think that was too harsh an assessment. Maybe I was trying to find a path that worked for us both and got lost along the way. Or maybe if I’d been a nurse, earning a living while caring for her, instead of a PI who lived in a different city and had to give up my job to be with her we could have held together. I wasn’t and we didn’t. Maybe there was no way for me to have succeeded; maybe every path led to this same failure—I couldn’t give her what she needed, and in the end she moved on to somewhere and someone else.

  The days had passed and I was now here. I had to put my life back together. I just didn’t know how.

  I glanced at my watch. The evening was too young to sit here staring at walls that only reflected my haunted memories.

  I grabbed my jacket and headed out the door. The streets—and bars—of the French Quarter were enticingly close.

  Chapter Nine

  I wandered around, a nod to doing the right thing, taking a stroll down Royal and browsing store windows of antiques I could never afford. I went all the way to Canal Street, then back along Chartres, pausing in Jackson Square to listen to a lone trombone player. I tossed a five into his hat and moved on as a noisy group of tourists ambled up and he started playing the kind of songs they expected to hear. I was way over my limit for listening politely to “When the Saints Go Marching In” if the Saints weren’t playing.

  I had told myself I wouldn’t end up here, this time would be different. But I was tired, didn’t want to go home, and the bar stool called my name. I found myself ordering decent, but not top-shelf Scotch. I choose different bars, all in the gay section of the Quarter, often called the Fruit Loop because there were gay bars on every corner. I didn’t want to be hit on, at least not by straight men. Being in my forties helps in the daylight, but in dim bars and after enough alcohol, some men think any woman is fair game. This was a safe space, mostly gay men, a few straight women, even fewer lesbians and, most importantly, good bartenders.