Strangled - Brian McGrory [45]
Nothing from the Phantom, either, by the way.
I fired up my laptop and checked my e-mail. Again, nothing from Maggie and nothing from the Phantom. I flicked on the television, but all the March Madness NCAA basketball previews were over for the night. The most interesting thing on the tube was a hotel video of a dealer giving a lesson in baccarat, which I figured after about a minute of watching him would take me roughly six years and a million dollars to learn.
I hit the Off switch on the TV’s remote and turned my attention back to the computer as I bided time waiting for my gold-plated burger. I absently flipped back through my laptop’s remote e-mail account and inexplicably clicked on a note that Maggie had sent me eight months earlier.
In it, she was talking about an award she had just been given as the teacher of the year at her school, and what it meant, and why she believed in her heart that the reason she had just won it was because she was a better teacher and a better, happier person since she met me — that the pain in her life, the loss of a child, the breakup of a marriage, the death of her sister, had lessened since she met me. I read the note a second time, this time with a lump in my throat.
I clicked on another e-mail from her about a month later. This one was a short, chatty, flirty little missive. I was on a work trip to New York, due home that night. She asked me to try to get on an earlier shuttle because she didn’t think she could wait another minute to have sex.
I opened up another that said, simply, “I love you.” I clicked on one that she had sent a few minutes later that said, “I want you.” And a couple of minutes after that, she wrote, “Now.”
I couldn’t help but smile, sitting in a dark hotel room that was illuminated by a low-hanging desk lamp and the bright neon of the strip shining through the picture window. It was a smile, yes, but a rueful one. Not for the first time, I thought how tough it is at the beginning of something good to remember that it’s probably going to end bad, such being one of the overriding lessons of my life.
In those first, heady weeks and months of a relationship, it’s impossible to think that the whole thing will fall apart with a phone call made from the Atlanta airport on what’s supposed to be your wedding day. When you start a new job, it’s impossible to picture the day your company is sold and you’re summoned down to the human resources department and told you’ll be given two months’ severance, but they need all your stuff out of the building by the end of that day. When you watch a new puppy romping around the house, you can’t foresee the day you’re lying with him on the floor of a veterinary office while the doctor sticks a needle in his leg that will forever relieve him of his pain.
But that’s the thing about beginnings — they inevitably, invariably, lead to endings. Jill Dawson and Lauren Hutchens couldn’t foresee their end coming with a ligature around their throats and some freak watching the life vanish from their panic-stricken eyes. That poor widower in the Public Garden, Joshua Carpenter, couldn’t have imagined that his end would come with a bullet to the head while he mourned the loss of his wife, whose ending itself he could never have foreseen. And I never in a million years imagined driving to the hospital with a pregnant wife that morning too many years before and returning home alone that night, completely alone, because Katherine and the daughter I never knew died in childbirth.
I scrolled upward on my computer until I found the name of Elizabeth Riggs, the one I let get away, despite the fact that every sane cell inside of me screamed for me to hold on for the rest of my life. I clicked on the e-mail and it simply said, “The two of you were snoring in stereo.”
That one line just about jumped off my computer screen