held up her hand. “I know where you’re headed. I’ve talked to Social Services. And I’ve checked out nursing homes. I can’t afford to put him in a good one.” She paused and looked away. “And I’m not sure I would even if I could. My daughter and I are all he has left.”
She turned and took her father by his arm, and he got unsteadily to his feet.
She nodded and smiled at Ben, and once again, he was struck by her eyes, how pretty they were, and he wondered too as she led her father away, how long it had been since they’d seen a full night’s sleep.
It was a familiar question. One that he’d asked himself on more than a few occasions.
EIGHT
OFF SHIFT AND LEAKING insomnia like a slow wound, Ben Decovic prowled his apartment at the White Palms.
It was 3:07 AM.
He’d tried reading. Television. The radio. The internet.
Nothing sufficed.
Three AM set its own terms.
The Poes , that’s what he’d come to call these interludes. It felt like Edgar Allen himself was calling the shots. Time slipped from its mooring, and neither late night or early morning fit the clock. For Ben Decovic, three AM was a nameless zone overcrowded with interlocking regrets and a bottomless yearning, all fueled by a waking nightmare logic.
Three AM was a place where you lost and found yourself whether you wanted to or not.
He checked the underside of his left wrist, counting the inked hash-marks.
He was still within limits.
He prowled his apartment.
He eventually started thinking about his wife’s kisses.
The Math: he’d been married for a third of his life.
Ben told himself he had passed beyond the standard-issue responses to her death. He’s had his ticket punched by grief. What he was left with was something more nebulous and frightening.
All the old certainties had evaporated.
He’d been a natural, a virtual artist of the eye, when it came to reading a crime scene or homicide, but all that changed after Diane’s death.
He eventually resigned from the Homicide Division of the Ryeland, Ohio Police Department, jettisoning a promising fast-track rise through the ranks and moving South to Magnolia Beach in what he told himself was a clean break.
But nothing was clean, and everything broken, at three AM.
For example, the names.
Nicholas. Meredith. Emily. Laura. Andrew.
Then a few moments later, the others eventually crowding in.
Karl Metz. Suzanne Raschella. George Gearhart. Thomas Linneti. Diane Decovic.
What was there and not.
He was left finally with the memory of his wife’s kisses.
The way her hair curtained when she inclined her head, the taste of lipstick, the soft press of flesh upon flesh, the warmth of her breath disappearing into his, fifteen years of kisses, Ben replaying them in his head, closing his eyes and trying to hold on to something as fundamental and deep as marrow.
Without those kisses and the weight of their memory, he was left in a perpetual three AM freefall through crime-scene images of his wife bleeding out late one afternoon in the parking lot of Central Dry Cleaners in Ryland, Ohio and a hit parade of postmortem shots of the subsequent autopsy.
NINE
THE VERBS WERE THE FIRST TO GO.
Jack Carson had always been a man of few words. Like many men of his generation who’d been taught to speak through action, he also had a deeply-embedded respect for language, for the power of words and what they could do. His silence was simply a way of acknowledging that power. He’d learned early on to choose his words carefully.
Like many men of his time, Jack Carson also married a woman whom he came to believe could speak for the both of them, a woman with music in her voice, who could read his silences and flesh out what he was feeling or thinking whenever they were together.
He still had every love letter she wrote him.
There were days when he heard a voice he didn’t entirely recognize recite passages from those letters verbatim, and he would then belatedly come to realize that it was