head Cliffs. Every vacation, every long weekend, every space in our lives we scrambled to get here.
“We became engaged and set a date to get married, right after the bar exam the summer I graduated from law school. We bought the house together and started to fix it up. Adam had known the old lady who lived in it widow of a fisherman from an old island family and had promised her he’d never tear it down or modernize it the way so many people have done to the original farmhouses.”
We were walking westward, as sand crabs scurried to get out of our way and birds hovered behind us to see if we had scraps of food to drop for their dinner.
“Most of my family and friends had come up to the island the week before the wedding. There were beach picnics and cocktail parties and Sunfish races and clambakes and I never thought there could be an end to my happiness.
“Adam was the one with the inflexible schedule so he was the only person we were waiting for those last days.
His final shift was over at midnight on Thursday he was working in New York City by then and he got in his car to make the drive up to the ferry so he could be here at daybreak on Friday.“
I was doing fine. I was telling the story so flatly that I knew I could get through it okay there wasn’t enough emotion left in me this week to squeeze out much for these memories, mixed as they were with such swings of joy and agony.
“I never saw Adam again, never heard his gentle voice or felt the warmth of those wonderful hands on my body.
Everyone who loved him as I did stayed on the island for his funeral. There was no wedding, and I never got to be his bride.”
My voice was still strong and I wasn’t even conscious of the tears streaking down my cheeks, till Mike grabbed me by the shoulders.
“C’mon, Alex, sit down for a minute.
I didn’t mean to get into this. Sit down and catch your breath…“
“Whew. I haven’t said it out loud in so long I just can’t be here without thinking of Adam,” I said, crossing my knees to sit in the sand. Mike joined me and watched as I picked up a stick and mindlessly drew a heart and arrow with Adam’s initials in it, as I used to do so many years ago.
He was too polite to ask me what happened and I was too self-absorbed in the story not to go on.
“It was an accident, Mike, a terrible one Someone on the highway sideswiped Adam’s car. They were crossing one of those bridges in Connecticut, the ones that go over the rivers, and Adam’s car crashed through the guardrail and went over the side of the bridge. It was demolished completely crushed by the impact.”
“Did they get the guy who did it?” asked Mike, as only someone in our business would, I think, since it mattered so little to everyone else once Adam was gone.
“No. It was the middle of the night. No one was around to see what happened. The police didn’t find the car till hours later. But you’re like Adam’s mother. She was sure it had been done on purpose, convinced that he had been working on some secret medical research for the government. She couldn’t let go and accept that it was accidental.”
“But you could?”
“The police gave it a hard look it didn’t make sense that anyone needed to kill Adam for anything, for any reason at all. You know me. I just assumed that the gods don’t like to see me too happy. Adam had given me the future he was smart and funny and warm and loving, and the happiest person I ever met. As my mother would say, ”It just wasn’t meant to be.“
“So instead of dancing in a white tent on our hilltop, we all came to this beach Adam’s favorite. His father and sister went out on his sailboat, brought it around from Menemsha to this point, and scattered his ashes where they thought he’d want them to be. And this is where I come to talk to him, Mike, like some madwoman in a bad novel, you’re probably thinking. But I’ll never let go of him. It’s where I always come to find him and love him, and know that he loved me better than anything on earth.
That’s the thing that killed him driving all night to get here to marry me.“
Mike let me sit there alone for five or ten minutes while he walked further down the beach, before returning with an outstretched arm to pull me up from the sand.
“Give me the keys, kid, and let’s get to the plane. It would be my luck to get marooned here overnight at a time when you’re this maudlin, and stuck on another guy.”
We walked back to the car and Mike drove the short distance to the airport, where we turned in the rental car and waited in the terminal for the perky pilot to come back for the six o’clock Cape Air flight to Logan. There was no wind to speak of so even Mike stayed calm on the short hop into Boston.
I was leading him from the exit gate of the commuter plane to the corridor for the connecting shuttle flight, when I heard Mike call out for me to stop. He was standing still, staring at the television screen that was facing out at him from the airport bar, and gesturing excitedly for me to walk back to him.
“Hey, Coop, can you believe it?
“Jeopardy” must be on earlier up here than in New York. C’mon, they’re about to do the Final Jeopardy question.“
I reminded myself of a mother talking to a five-year-old kid as I shook my head in annoyance and called out to him, “No, Mike. Move it let’s not miss the seven o’clock shuttle.”
“Wait a minute. What’s your hurry? There’s another plane in half an hour. The category’s the Oscars. What do you say, blondie? I’ll bet you twenty-five dollars.”
Mike and I were both addicted to “Jeopardy‘ although I rarely got home in time from the office to see the seven o’clock show. There were some subjects I wouldn’t bet him on like the Bible because he beat me every time. And I had a few topics that he wouldn’t touch.
But we usually passed our ten dollars back and forth from week to week, challenging each other on our known weaknesses, when the ante could rise considerably. Mercer Wallace swears the worst time to get killed in Manhattan is between six fifty-five and seven-thirty in the evening.
He has known Chapman to stand in an airless tenement in the middle of July with three bodies strewn around a homicide scene, listening to Alex Trebek recite the answers to the Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy rounds while calling out the questions in response, as the medical examiner silently probes the corpses for clues.
I turned around and reached for my wallet, since we both knew the movies pretty well.
“It’ll cost you fifty if you make me stay.” I could see he wasn’t leaving in the next three minutes, in time to make the flight, so I put my money on the bar and told Chapman to do the same.
He pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, ordered us each a drink, and turned to me with a sheepish grin on his face.
“I’ve only got twenty bucks. I have to pick up my paycheck at the office when we get in. Trust me?”
I nodded as Trebek announced that the Final Jeopardy answer was: the only two actors who have ever won Oscars back-to-back, in consecutive years.
Mike and I both slammed our hands on the edge of the wooden bar counter at the same time, as though pressing the buzzer as the contestants on the program do.
“Tom Hanks and Gary Cooper.”
“Wrong. You better cash your check tonight, Chapman.”
“Whaddaya mean wrong? Who do you say?”
“Tom Hanks and Spencer Tracy. Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, Captains Courageous and Boys Town.”
“What about Gary Cooper? High Noon and Pride of the Yankees?”
“You’re really slipping. Those movies came out about ten years apart. Besides he never got the Oscar for Pride of the Yankees.”
“Are you kidding me? I don’t believe it. He was amazing in that flick. He was incred-‘
”Enjoy your cocktail, Mikey, ’cause you’re buying.“
Alex Trebek gave him the bad news, we finished our drinks, and made it onto the seven-thirty shuttle for the last leg home.
By the time we landed, picked up the car, and drove to my apartment it was after nine o’clock Friday night, and I offered Mike the chance for another fast-food dinner at home. He declined, explaining that he had a date that evening, although I wasn’t able to pry any more details about her out of him.
