“So,” I said, and shifted on the seat, brought one leg up off the floor, and our knees touched. “You’re saying if I was one of the last guys on the planet…”
She laughed. “You still wouldn’t have a chance with me.”
But she didn’t pull away when she said it. She moved her head in another inch.
I could suddenly feel it in my chest, a cool funnel of air that loosened as it twirled-loosened everything that had been clenched and sore since Angie walked out of my apartment with the last of her suitcases in hand.
The gaiety left her eyes and was replaced by something warmer, but unsettled, still questioning.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“What?”
“About what happened in the woods last year. About that child.”
She held my eyes. “I’m not sure any longer that I was right.”
“Why’s that?”
“Maybe nobody has the right to play God. Look at the Dawes.”
I smiled.
“What’s funny?”
“Just…” I took the fingers of her right hand in mine, and she blinked, but didn’t pull them away. “Just that over the last nine months I’ve been seeing it more your way. Maybe it was a relative situation. Maybe we should have left her there. Five years old, and she was happy.”
She shrugged, squeezed my hand. “We’ll never know, will we?”
“About Amanda McCready?”
“About anything. I think sometimes when we’re old and gray, will we finally be settled about the things we’ve done, all the choices we made, or will we look back and think about all the things we could’ve done?”
I kept my head very still, my eyes on hers, waiting for the searching to settle, for her to see whatever answers she was looking for in my face.
She tilted her head slightly, and her lips parted a tenth of an inch.
And a white post office truck sluiced through the rain on my left, glided in front of us, clicked on its hazards, and double-parked in front of the mailboxes fifty yards ahead.
Angie pulled away and I turned forward in my seat.
A man in a clear, hooded slicker over his blue and white postal uniform jumped from the right side of the truck. He held a white plastic carton in his hands, its contents protected from the rain by a plastic trash bag taped loosely on top. The man came around to the front of the mailboxes, placed the crate by his feet, and used a key to open the green mailbox.
Most of his face was obscured by the rain and the hood, but as he emptied the carton of mail into the box, I could still see his lips-thick and red and cruel.
“It’s him,” I said.
“You’re sure?”
I nodded. “A hundred percent. It’s Wesley.”
“Or the Artist Formerly Known as Wesley, as I like to call him.”
“That’s because you need psychiatric care.”
As we watched him fill the green box, the postman descended the stairs of a brownstone and called out to him. He joined him at the boxes and they chatted, raised their heads to the rain, then down again, laughed about something.
They bullshitted for another minute and then Wesley waved, hopped in the truck and drove off.
I opened my door and left Angie’s sudden, surprised “Hey!” behind as I ran down the sidewalk, my hand raised and yelled, “Wait up! Wait!” as Wesley’s truck reached the green light at Fairfield and kept going, drifting into the far left lane for a turn onto Gloucester.
The postman narrowed his eyes at me as I reached him.
“Trying to catch a bus, buddy?”
I bent over as if out of breath. “No, that truck.”
He held out his hand. “I’ll take it.”
“What?”
“Your letter. You trying to send something, right?”
“Huh? No.” I shook my head, then gestured with it up Beacon as Wesley made the turn onto Gloucester. “I saw you two talking here, and I think that’s my old roommate. Haven’t seen him in ten years.”
“Scott?”
Scott.
“Yeah,” I said. “Scottie Simon!” I clapped my hands as if elated.
The postman shook his head. “Sorry, pal.”
“What?”
“That ain’t your buddy.”
“It was,” I said. “That was Scott Simon, no question. I’d recognize him anywhere.”
The postman snorted. “No offense, mister, but you may want to see an optometrist. That guy’s name is Scott Pearse, and no one’s ever called him Scottie.”
“Damn,” I said, trying to sound deflated as fireworks exploded through my body, electrified it.
Scott Pearse.
Got you, Scott. Goddamn got you.
You wanted to play? Well, hide-and-seek is over. Let the real games begin, motherfucker.
29
I spent the week sitting on Scott Pearse-following him to work every morning, following him home every night. Angie covered his days while I slept, so I’d leave him when he picked up his truck at a garage on A Street, be watching again when he left the General Mail Facility along the Fort Point Channel after his final mail collection of the day. His routine, that week anyway, was maddeningly innocuous.
In the morning, he’d leave A Street, his truck fully loaded with large parcels. These he’d deliver to the green boxes throughout Back Bay, where they’d be picked up by the mail carriers on foot and brought to people’s doorsteps. After a midafternoon lunch, according to Angie, he’d head out again, this time with an empty truck, that he’d gradually fill with the contents of the blue mailboxes. Once that was done, he’d drop the mail at the sorting facility and clock out.
He’d have a single-malt scotch every night with his fellow postmen at the Celtic Arms on Otis Street. He always left after one drink, no matter how many men tried to pull him back down to his seat, always dropped ten bucks on the table to cover the Laphroaig and the tip.
Then he’d walk down Summer Street and follow Atlantic north until he reached Congress, where he’d turn right. Five minutes later, he’d be up in his Sleeper Street loft, and he’d stay there until lights-out at eleven-thirty.
I had to work at it to begin thinking of him as Scott and not Wesley. The name Wesley had fit him-patrician and haughty and cold. Scott seemed too bland and middle class. Wesley was the name of the guy you knew in college who was captain of the golf team and didn’t like blacks at his parties. Scott was the guy who wore tank tops and loud baggy shorts, organized pickup games, and puked in the back of your car.
But after some time spent watching him in which he acted far more like a Scott than a Wesley-watching TV alone, reading in a slim leather recliner under a gooseneck lamp in the center of his loft, pulling Fit-N-Easy meals from his freezer and nuking them in his microwave, eating them at the bar that curled around the edge of his kitchen-I eventually came around to the idea of Scott. Scott the Sinister. Scott the Asshole. Scott the Marked Man.
The first night I followed him, I found a fire escape with roof access behind the building across the street from his. His loft was four stories off the ground and two below my rooftop perch, and Scott Pearse hadn’t bothered with curtains over his floor-to-ceiling dormers except in the bedroom and bathroom. So I had an unobstructed, well-lit view of his spacious living room, kitchen, and dining area, the framed black-and-white photographs that hung from
