Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [86]
As he packed the van, she asked if he’d show her where he grew up, where he went to school, where he took his trumpet lessons.
“Sure, sweetheart,” he said, wishing she hadn’t.
Six hours later, crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge, he could feel the red brick closing around him, the dry dust of the bocce courts at St. Leo’s scratch-scratching his shoes, and he heard the murky water slapping Pier 5 at 4 a.m. as the Domino Sugars sign flickered across the harbor: a fourteen-year-old boy with his horn, Little Italy over his shoulder, and his father telling him there was nowhere to go, that he would never change.
Cars were backed up at the tunnel mouth.
Tess swung her bare feet in rhythm as she hummed and sketched, and he remembered her mother would do the same as she read a script, straddling the arm of their red love seat, iced tea on the table, a mint leaf.
He didn’t know if Tess thought her mother the ice-eyed murderer on TV’s Spencer: For Hire or the playful strawberry blonde in the photo he placed in a floral frame in her bedroom.
The photo was taken in Harvard Square the day he quit Berklee to follow her down. He wasn’t ready to play the New York clubs, and he’d already been shunned by Julliard, but she wanted Broadway and there was nothing he could do.
And then came the news, and Margaret Mary turned to fury, a relentless blame spout. Seven months later, only five pounds, six ounces, but otherwise fine. She insisted on Therese Ann, bitterly and without explanation. He shrugged, thinking Tess. Short for tesoro, his treasure.
Her figure returned in less than a year, and Margaret Mary bolted west. Her two-word exit line: “Keep her.”
He got the furniture too. Needing sanctuary, he loaded the van and went back to Boston, buoyed by his love for little Tess but certain one day she would leave too. A promise: For as long as he had her, they’d be together and he’d give her something they could always share. He couldn’t chance it’d only be music—Margaret Mary hated jazz, snickering at his tears when Miles played “Summer Nights”—so he brought his esor to Fenway Park. Baseball, and fathers and daughters, sprinkled throughout the stadium. Tess holding his hand, little steps, mustard on her dimpled chin.
At the end of each summer, they traveled south: Yankee Stadium, Shea, Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, and now they were going to see the Orioles at Memorial Stadium, Cal Ripken Jr. on his toes where Mark Belanger once roamed. Tess liked the O’s logo, the blackbird with the orange beak, the sly grin.
By the time they finished the new ballpark at Camden Yards, it’d be too late. She’d be a teenager, gone.
On went the dome light so Tess could keep sketching. He was going to mention he’d never been in the tunnel before, since it was built after he fled. But knowing Tess, she’d ask why he left and he couldn’t lie to her.
They beat the Brewers, but it’d started to rain in the fifth and the sparse crowd filed out early. He saw Tess yawn, and she was drawing in her diary, no longer keeping score. When Ripken popped to third to end the seventh, they packed up to go. A cold August night now, Tess in his denim jacket, O’s cap on the back of her head, her auburn ponytail draped over the black plastic band. Smiling, but she was dragging.
By the time he warmed up the van and headed south on Ellerslie, she was asleep, stretched across the seats, hands folded under the side of her head.
Mind wandering, listening to Chuck Thompson call the ninth, he missed Lombard, and then he was lost on the way back to a Holiday Inn standing less than two miles from his childhood home. A detour sign pulled him into the construction site for a ballpark where the B& train yard once stood: orange cones and wooden horses pressing him toward the long, narrow warehouse looking ghostly, hovering above a hole in the ground where the freight shed had been. Eutaw Street blocked off like they were going to make it disappear,