The Great Forgetting Read online

  He blinked.

  “Good. Jack, I want you to try moving your fingers for me.”

  He pretended to play the piano.

  The woman breathed a sigh of relief. “Good. Now, your toes.”

  He did those, too.

  “Excellent.”

  He heard someone running up the steps and then Jean was at his side. “Is he paralyzed?” she asked.

  “He’ll be fine.”

  Jean buried her face in his shoulder and sobbed.

  “Jack,” the EMT said in a measured tone, “your head is in a brace. I don’t think your neck is broken, but we’re going to keep you secure until we get to the hospital. In a second my partner will be here with the gurney and we’ll take you downstairs.”

  Jack blinked again.

  “I thought he killed you,” Jean said.

  A moment later the gurney arrived. They lifted him onto it, strapped him down, and wheeled him through the house, out the back, and through the open doors of a waiting ambulance. In another minute they were rocketing down SR 14 toward Robinson Memorial Hospital. Somewhere ahead another ambulance carried the Captain, bound for St. Mary’s, an assisted-living home where, Jack suspected, his father would spend his remaining days.

  THREE

  ELEGY

  1 When Jack awoke in the hospital the next morning, there were flowers on the windowsill, daisies from Sam. He watched the TV hanging in the corner for a while and willed himself not to think about why he was there. Halfway through a documentary on Joseph Mengele, Dr. Palmstrum arrived and rolled across the room on a wheeled stool. The man was ancient, with a long, horsey face, white hair pinned back with some gel that smelled like antiseptic. He sucked a Werther’s and regarded his patient.

  “My dad had Alzheimer’s before they called it Alzheimer’s,” said Palmstrum. “I ever tell you that?”

  Jack swallowed and grimaced at the immediate pain. “No,” he whispered.

  “Sometimes he thought he was in a trench in Montfaucon. Nothing you could do to talk him out of it. If you came up behind him when he was like that he would toss you to the ground and smack you around a bit. Gave my mother a black eye. That’s when we put him away. A’course back then it was the mental ward.” He sat on the stool with his arms crossed in his lap. Finally, he said something from a part of Jack’s childhood that he could no longer place. “Where is fancy bred? In the heart or in the head?”

  Jack smiled faintly.

  “We know so very little about the human mind,” said Palmstrum. “Everything we are, wrapped up in three pounds of gray matter between our ears. Storage for the memories we create. Memories make us who we are, and when you take even one away, it it changes us forever.”

  Jack nodded.

  “Give us a look.”

  Jack opened the top of his gown. He’d checked it out in the bathroom mirror already: a necklace of bruises, purply around the edges. Palmstrum touched the back of his neck with fingers of loose, warm skin.

  “You feel that?”

  Jack nodded.

  The doctor kneaded his skin a little, probing the vertebrae.

  “He almost killed you. I guess you don’t need me to tell you that.”

  Jack’s mind would not allow him to think of his father just yet, so he focused on the easy questions. “When…?”

  “You can leave today. No reason to keep you. I’ll write you a script for the pain.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m no headshrinker, Johnny. I never needed one. A nip of the shine always worked for me. But there’s no shame in it. Now’s as good a time as any.”

  He shook his head.

  “All right.” Palmstrum scribbled on a pad of paper. “How’s your sister?”

  Jack gave him the thumbs-up.

  “You win some, you lose some. It’s always a surprise which side of the fence people end up on.” He patted Jack on the head as if he were eternally four. “Take care, young man.”

  2 Jean came by later that afternoon and took him home. She’d gotten rid of the Captain’s hospital bed and the living room felt too big. The bedroom lamp had been replaced. The only reminder of the attack was a black scuff mark on the kitchen tile where the gurney wheel had locked up. Jean had even lit scented candles to rid the house of that sweet molasses smell of the infirm.

  Time ticked on and allowed Jack to begin to forget.

  On Sunday he went with Jean and Paige into Ravenna for groceries. Later that day he taught his platinum-haired niece the basics of chess, showing her the movements of each piece on an empty board until she understood the rules.

  “I like the horses,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re sneaky. They can come up behind you and snatch you up!”

  On Monday he walked Paige to the bus. It was her last week of school before the summer break. He waved to Mrs. Beahl, the bus driver, one of Virginia’s old canasta partners.

  “Welcome back,” she said.

  He smiled.

  Wednesday night he babysat so Jean could drive in to Kent to catch a screening of Jurassic World with her sponsor, Anna. Jack made bologna boats in the oven, slabs of greasy meat with cheese that rolled into crispy-gooey canoes when baked. Paige ate five. They watched The Hobbit. Paige was fascinated by Rivendell because some of the elves had hair like hers. “Can we go there, please?” she asked. “Can we visit the elves?” She fell asleep leaning against him on the couch.

  He wondered what his kid would have looked like if he’d married Sam.

  He found a biography on Truman in the bookcase behind the couch and spent hours reading, napping when his eyes got tired.

  Mostly he and his sister didn’t talk. They didn’t talk about the Captain. Or Sam. Or Tony’s bones. That unfinished story seemed less important now. Sam, for her part, kept a distance.

  Jack would have been content to drift through the summer this way, appreciating the little things and growing a belly. But then he went to see Paige’s end-of-school play inside John F. Kennedy High School’s cafetorium and, well, his story changed.

  3 “Uzzzzz,” Paige said from the backseat. She was in the bumblebee suit again. She wore antennae made of pipe cleaners atop her white hair. “Hey, Uncle Jack, didja know that it’s impossible for a bee to fly but they do it anyway?”

  “I didn’t know that,” he said softly from the passenger seat.

  “It’s a fact.”

  “You know what she looks like in that costume,” he whispered to Jean.

  “What?”

  “Remember the hybrid human-bug at the end of The Fly? The original with Vincent Price? With all that white hair, she looks just like that thing. Like the fly with the human head that got caught in the spider’s web.”

  “Ew,” said Jean. She looked back at Paige in the rearview mirror. “Jack, that’s creepy.”

  “Help me! Help me!” he cried in falsetto.

  “Stop it.” But she laughed as they turned into the parking lot.

  He was hit with a wave of nostalgia when he stepped inside. It was the smell, that pervasive stink of government-grade floor cleaner and sweat, of books and pencil shavings. It was also the sound, the way every voice echoed off metal lockers and traveled the length of the building.

  The cafetorium was a block of a room with a narrow stage set into one wall, space enough for two hundred foldout chairs and a row of bleachers in the back. The concrete walls were painted maroon and beige, emblazoned with the incongruous symbol of Kennedy pride: a marauding pirate clenching a scabbard in his teeth.

  Paige walked off with a boy stuffed into a costume that was either a small horse or a large pig. Sam was holding seats for them near the front. Jack checked his watch. There were still fifteen minutes before the play and he wasn’t up for idle chatter with his ex-girlfriend, so he took a walk.

  Jack’s senior class picture still hung outside the library next to the awkward photographs of the other members of the National Honor Society. His young face was
pointed, his ears radar dishes stuck to his head. Tony’s picture was up there, too. He was the handsome one.

  “He’s out there, somewhere,” said a familiar voice.

  Jack turned to find Tom Harris, a tall, bespectacled fellow who had once been his history teacher. He’d been a mentor to Tony, his favorite for a time. In his hand was a mug of coffee, some exotic blend he brought from home that smelled of cinnamon and dry leaves.

  “Hi, Mr. Harris,” said Jack.

  “It’s Tom now, John.”

  He smiled.

  “Good lord. What happened to your neck?”

  He had practiced for this. “Went for a swim up in Put-in-Bay,” he said. “My friend has this boat. Jumped off the side but didn’t see the lifesaver hanging there. Got tangled up in the rope. Lucky the guy had a knife to cut me loose.”

  “Looks awful.”

  “Doesn’t hurt.” A lie. He brought the subject back to Tony. “I heard he was acting strange right before it happened.”

  Harris looked grave. Jack sensed some internal debate. “There’s something I probably should have told the police,” said Harris finally.

  “About Tony?”

  He nodded. “A week before it happened he came to visit me. I could tell something was bothering him. He’d lost a lot of weight. And he was edgy. He came into my classroom and we talked for a bit after school.”

  “About what?”

  “About disappearing. And how to do it. I thought it was all hypothetical, of course. Tony said he had a patient who wanted to disappear, start a new life somewhere. He was trying to convince this person that it couldn’t be done. That it was too hard to just walk away and not have the police find you. He knew I was a current-events nut, that I read five papers a day. He asked me if I’d heard of a story about someone trying to do such a thing in the last decade. I told him that I knew of two.

  “The first was a prosecutor from Cleveland who disappeared under strange circumstances in western P.A. He parked his car near a bridge. When they found his laptop and hard drive in the river, they figured he’d committed suicide. But then people started seeing him in Texas. The second was a former policeman who wanted to leave his family and live in a cabin in the West Virginian hills. He faked his death to escape his wife and the taxman.”

  “How’d the cop do it?”

  “Drove out to Edgewater Park and put his shoes, wallet, and clothes on the shore. It looked like he’d walked into the lake and drowned. But then three years later he fell off a ladder while cleaning his cabin’s gutters and ended up in the hospital. Some doctor figured it all out.”

  Jack felt his blood cool, icy shards running through his heart. “Why didn’t you tell Sam?”

  Harris looked back to the picture of Tony hanging on the wall. “All I can think is that he had a hell of a reason to leave. Without knowing what that reason is, maybe I’m putting his life in danger by telling anyone. Maybe it has something to do with Haven, where he worked. Back in the day, couple of those Youngstown Mafia guys got pinched for laundering money through nursing homes. You just don’t know.”

  Jack chewed on this as he returned to the cafetorium. There was only one way to know for sure. By the time Paige came dancing out from the wings, her stinger swinging behind her, he’d made up his mind. Sam needed resolution. So did he. It was time to see how Tony’s story played out.

  4 Jack pulled into Georgio’s a little after ten o’clock that night. A swath of garish yellow light fell upon the gravel lot through a screen door. Gypsy moths danced about like fairies at a feast. The peppery aroma of fried chicken delighted the night. Inside, Nils was closing out a register. He looked up at Jack as he entered. The door crashed loudly behind him.

  “How you holding up?” asked Nils.

  “You mean since my father tried to kill me?”

  “Franklin Mills is a small town, Jack.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Nils looked at his neck. Jack let him. “You want to take some time with the thing we talked about? Probably not a good idea to stir up more trouble, huh?”

  “Fuck that,” said Jack. “If we can find Tony’s body, I can get back to Lakewood with a clear conscience. That’s all I want. When I get back to the city I’m going to stock the fridge with Dortmunder and spend the rest of the summer drunk.”

  “Fuckin’ A.”

  “Yeah, fuckin’ A.”

  “So when do you want me to get the Link-Belt out to the lake?”

  “I guess all I need to do is find this scuba guy from Kent State and then get the okay from the property owner…”

  Nils was shaking his head. “Got it all handled,” he said. “I called the scuba guy. My old man had his number. He’s asking four hundred dollars. It’s a deal. I think he just wants to see the bottom for himself. The property is owned by Glenn Riggenbaugher, the minister from First Church? He bought it at auction. Had plans to turn it into a retreat or some shit, but then he got the diabetus. Anyway, he lives in Florida now. I found him, too. He’d very much like for Tony to have a proper burial.”

  “Nils, that’s perfect. Why did you do all that?”

  The Viking shrugged. “Scouts’ motto, right? Be prepared.”

  “All right, then. When can we do this?”

  “How’s ’bout Sunday, day after tomorrow?”

  “Sunday it is,” said Jack. “Sunday we see if Tony really is at the bottom of Claytor Lake.”

  5 By the time Jack, Jean, and Paige walked the path to Claytor Lake at 8:00 a.m. Sunday morning, there were already twenty people milling about the shoreline. Jack recognized Gail and Ted Moore, neighbors from four doors down. They had brought lawn chairs and a cooler full of sandwiches and Cheerwine. Hank Aemmer, the mailman, skimmed rocks beside the tilting lifeguard stand. Shelly, the bartender from the Driftwood, pointed out places she used to sunbathe to her war vet boyfriend. Some cars were parked along the shoulder of Porter Road, the potholed street that ran behind the lake.

  “Is this morbid?” Jean whispered.

  Jack shook his head. “It would be if they hadn’t all known Tony.”

  Sam was not there. She was hiding in Nostalgia, avoiding the scene for as long as her resolve held.

  The crane arrived at 8:30, rumbling like low thunder. The Link-Belt Speeder appeared around the bend of Porter Road where the access drive to Claytor Lake was located, and the crowd let out a whoop and a round of applause. It was a clinkety-clanking behemoth of a crane painted McIntosh red, a metal snout jutting from the front. Nils’s father, a red-haired stringbean of a fellow, waved to Jack as he maneuvered the machine to a part of the shore that had eroded to clay. Nils followed in his pick-’em-up truck, its bed full of tackle.

  By nine o’clock the crowd had grown to forty-seven souls and the beach looked much as it had during long-ago summers, full of middle-class God-fearing folk lazing on blankets, watching the lake. Mr. Harris arrived with two thermoses full of his imported coffee, which he poured into Styrofoam cups and placed on a card table for everyone.

  A short while later a station wagon pulled in and parked near the crane. It was the Kent State professor, a man named Dr. Bednarik, who taught sociology. Jack walked over and put an envelope of cash in the man’s hands.

  “How deep is it, really?” the professor asked.

  “Nobody remembers. Maybe as much as a hundred and fifty feet to the bottom.”

  The professor smiled. “I can do about two hundred without trouble. Don’t look so worried.”

  “Is this safe?”

  Dr. Bednarik heaved the tank over his shoulders and laughed. “Probably not,” he said. “But it’s a lot of fun.”

  Five minutes later the professor waded into the water.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” said Jean. “All this suspense. I’m going to take Paige home.” She took her daughter’s hand and pulled her away.

  “Is Uncle Tony in the lake?” the girl asked.

  “Maybe, sweetie.”

  “But I want to watc
h.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Sorry, hon.”

  The professor’s head slipped under the water.

  6 Sam arrived at a quarter to ten. “Anything?” she asked. Her eyes were puffy, her hair pulled back in a short ponytail.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “One of the detectives is here,” she said. “The guy with the crew cut.”

  Jack found him in the crowd, a wide man in uniform. He stared back, lips like a hyphen painted on his face. “Maybe I should have told him what we were doing.”

  “Why? They haven’t done shit for three years.”

  The crowd murmured. Mr. Harris was pointing at the lake. Dr. Bednarik had surfaced and was swimming over. There was something in his left hand, a piece of metal that reflected the sunlight. When he was close enough to rest an elbow on the ledge of the quarry, he waved Jack over. Sam followed.

  “Who’s this?” asked the professor.

  “Tony’s wife.”

  He looked at her with a sincere sadness.

  “I found your husband,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He held the object out to her. She bent down to take it from him.

  It was a silver watch with a large analog portal. The hands were frozen at 10:03. She flipped it over. On the back was Tony Sanders.

  “I had it engraved when he got into med school,” she said.

  “It was still on his wrist,” said Bednarik.

  “Thank you.” She touched Jack’s arm. “I’m going home,” she said. “Thank you, Jack. For doing this. Thanks.” She walked quickly down the access road. The crowd watched her go. Then Gail and Ted Moore started packing up their snacks.

  The professor sighed. “So shines a good deed in a weary world,” he mumbled.

  “Can we bring him up?” asked Jack.

  “Well,” Bednarik began, “the body is caught on the open window of an old Renault, but I think I can get it unsnagged. If I can pull the net around the remains, I think it’ll come up in one piece.”