Strangled - Brian McGrory [46]
And then it did, the day she walked down the jetway to board a flight for San Francisco. She told me she loved me, but she knew I couldn’t love her back, not the way she needed me to. And all I could do was stand there like an idiot and mutter good-bye. Very rarely, too rarely, endings come with warnings, but far more often they don’t.
Someone rang the doorbell of the hotel room. I jumped up, startled, then heard a man’s voice call out, “Room service.” When I opened the door, he rolled in a cart and reached into a warmer. For a fleeting moment, I thought he might pull out a gun. Instead, he held out a plate with my hamburger. We exchanged pleasantries, I signed the check, and he left. I took a bite of the burger, which was good, though twenty-seven dollars’ worth of good, I doubted. Of course, at that moment, it could have been the best burger ever and I don’t think I would have tasted a thing. I dropped it back on the plate with a quiet thud and pushed the cart back toward the door.
I looked around the empty hotel room and thought about my empty apartment back home. Had I been the one to die in the Public Garden that day, I wondered how many people would have really, truly cared. Would Maggie have come back for the funeral? Elizabeth? Is that what it would take to be with them again, to finally be at peace in our relationships, for me to be dead?
Wait a minute. This wasn’t me. This wasn’t how I thought. This wasn’t how I looked at life.
I flicked off the desk lamp, leaving the room with just the glare of the red and blue neon outside. And with that, I climbed slowly into bed.
14
The day dawned with a chain saw ripping through the darkness and heading toward my handsome head. I bolted upright to see who or what was attacking me, and for that matter, where I had been taken hostage, when I realized I was in a hotel room, a pretty nice one, actually, and the urgent sound emanated from my cell phone, which was lying on the nightstand. I squinted at the alarm clock’s lighted red numbers and saw it was 3:15 a.m.
“Peter, it’s the middle of the fucking night here,” I said, my voice still thick from a sleep that had barely begun.
In response, I heard no response, just silence. I said, “Hello?”
The caller cleared his throat, hesitated, and asked, “Is Jack Flynn there, please?” It was one of those deep voices that called attention to itself, like Ted Baxter’s on the old Mary Tyler Moore show, but with more of an edge.
I replied, “He is.”
Again, no response, not immediately, anyway. The caller cleared his throat again and said, “May I please speak to him?” He calls me at three-fifteen in the morning and he keeps using the word please, as if he’s being polite.
I said, “You are.”
“Great. Jack, if I may call you Jack, this is Walt Bedrock from the WBZ-TV morning show. Terrific story in today’s Record. Terrific read. We’re interested in getting you on the air so you can tell people about it.”
The name was familiar to me in the way that the names of dozens of lightweight television reporters and anchors are familiar to me, which is to say it was barely familiar at all. Put them all in a room together and you’d discover an immediate cure for even the worst TV addict.
I asked, “Didn’t I already tell people about it — in the Record?”
Again he hesitated. Sometimes you’re on someone’s wavelength, other times you couldn’t possibly be further away. Walt Bedrock and I, it was immediately apparent, were like fire and ice, though it was either too early in the morning or too late at night to tell who was which.