Closing Costs Read online

  “Pass out. The kids these days call it ‘passing out.’ ” She wiggled her fingers in the air on either side of the imaginary words and smiled. The darkness had blown itself away. He didn’t know how, but it had.

  Nelle turned and squeezed him hard. “Welcome home.”

  “Welcome home, my love.”

  She straightened up and looked him in the face. “Well, what are you waiting for? Go unload the car! Hop to!”

  He made a little hop and a skip and headed for the front door.

  11

  ONE DAY AFTER CLOSING

  Their hips and backs ached in concert with their heads as Evan’s cell phone alarm went off. He’d set it for earlier than usual so they could get back to Cambridge in time to meet the movers and let them into the apartment. As planned, they’d drunk two bottles of wine with dinner, which meant a light hangover for the both of them. Worse, though, was the effect of sleeping on the floor of their new house. While they’d brought their sleeping bags to zipper together, the blow-up mats to put underneath them were packed with the rest of their camping gear, and the hardwood floors were aptly named. They got up slowly, aching, staggered out to their car, and drove back to Cambridge.

  At what they now referred to as “the old place”—even though they’d only spent a single night away—they found the next door neighbor had parked on the street in front of their apartment, despite the signs reserving the space in front of their building for the moving van. Evan didn’t bother going to the door to ask him to move his car. The asshole never answered when anyone rang the bell, and his wife pretended to be deaf when anyone wanted her to act like a member of the community. Evan dialed the police parking enforcement number he had saved in his phone to get them to come tow the guy’s shitbox. As many times as Evan had called to have that car towed from in front of his driveway, he was on a first name basis with half of the Cambridge traffic cops. He wouldn’t miss the neighbor mowing his lawn at a quarter to five in the morning or leaving his old toilet in the back yard for months after he had it replaced inside, but he would miss watching him come barreling out of his house, violin case in hand, late for rehearsal at the orchestra, only to stand on the front walk bewildered by the disappearance of his car.

  * * *

  A-1 Towing was pulling away just as the Intelligent Labor van showed up. A trio of skinny guys in black Misfits and Crass tour shirts, pegged jeans, and Chuck Taylors piled out of the cab of the moving truck. Looking at them, Nelle questioned the decision to hire the crew based on the appeal of their company logo and a couple of good online reviews, but after Evan showed the crew boss around, pointing out the section of the shared basement that needed loading as well as how they’d labeled the boxes so the guys would know which room to put them in on the other end, the boss nodded at the other movers, who immediately went to work.

  Evan and Nelle watched one, who’d been leaning against the van complaining of having a hangover, lift a bookshelf twice his size onto his back without help and trot out of the apartment like it was weightless. It had taken both Evan and Nelle to get that thing up into the apartment when it was still in pieces in the box, but the weight of it didn’t seem to slow this guy’s step even a little bit. Nelle rubbed her head and felt a tinge of shame at how her own hangover depleted her. She had a few years on the movers, but not that many. She also suspected that when these guys tied one on, they went harder than a single bottle of wine apiece.

  She grabbed the Bluetooth speaker off the windowsill in the kitchen and moved it into the rapidly emptying living room. She selected “Cramp Stomp” from Big Beat from Badsville on her phone and pushed PLAY. One of the movers looked at her and nodded approvingly. Inspired by the Cramps, Nekromantix, and HorrorPops, they finished loading the truck before lunch.

  Crammed together in the cab to set off for Ripton, the crew boss said, “We’re going to stop to eat. Be there around two, if that works.” Nelle handed him a fifty-dollar bill and told them lunch was on her. The guy took it without argument, smiled and thanked her, and stuffed the bill in his shirt pocket. After they pulled away, she regretted not giving them more. Fifty dollars for four men seemed like too little. Evan said he doubted they were headed to an expensive gastropub, adding if they worked only half as hard unloading the truck as they had loading it, he still planned on tipping them well enough to ensure a week of hangovers.

  Evan and Nelle walked back inside the old place looking for anything that had accidentally been left behind. Anything that could say they had once been there. Nelle looked out the dining room window at the brick wall of the gas station next door. She grinned at the thought they’d somehow spent the last ten years with this scene outside and never thought it was anything but the view they had. Evan sidled up behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist, and kissed her neck. “You going to miss it?” he asked.

  This was their apartment. Each room contained the memories of a decade together. This was where they’d made love for the first time back when it was just her apartment. It was where they’d discussed their future together—getting married, starting a family—where he’d held her while she cried and spotted after the miscarriage. The apartment was where he’d worked a telecommute job he hated so she could finish mortuary school. Once she got the job at the Tremblay Funeral Home, they’d decided there, over takeout, he should quit and work for himself. All the good and bad times in their lives together had happened in this city on this street in this apartment. It was the end of an era of their lives. Now they were off to a fresh start far from Mass Ave traffic, blocked driveways, and blasted drunk college students being sick on their front steps at two in the morning.

  “Not even a little bit,” she lied.

  12

  “But, he’s dead.”

  The words sounded thin coming out of Sharon, a breath dispersing in an airless room. They passed without resonance, failing to elicit even an acknowledgment from the man across from her. She couldn’t give him what he wanted. It was all gone, seized with warrants and subpoenas. She thought of her husband’s things, laptop computers and external hard drives, micro flash memory chips and whatever else, all taped up in plastic bags and labeled with stickers that read EXHIBIT 1, EXHIBIT 2, EXHIBIT 3 and on and on, stored away in a municipal vault no one could get to. She had no illusions that the police would return a single item. It would all eventually be destroyed, if it hadn’t been already. She didn’t know how to get this through to the man sitting in her living room.

  He considered her with a kind of detachment she associated with someone observing a thing, not a person. His gaze made her shiver, and she had no one to help her fend him off. Her husband was dead and buried in Ridgelawn Cemetery. Her understanding of his crimes was a patchwork of suspicions based on what the police and prosecutors claimed. And, yes, things she’d observed, but placed in that part of her consciousness that nurtured doubt. The part that believed her husband wasn’t a bad man; he’d never hurt anyone. The specifics of what he’d done were detailed on a sealed grand jury indictment she never got to see, though it was still ruining her life.

  Her husband’s alleged indiscretions had cost her and her son everything. Losing his income was one thing; she worked, and the house was paid for—he’d insisted it be recorded in her name alone, as if he knew it needed to be sealed off from him—but the stories in the papers and on television had stripped any kind of life from them. Colleagues avoided her; the partners moved her into administrative work, isolating her from interactions with clients. Everyone she knew socially, friend and acquaintance alike, had cut her off. They stopped calling, dropping by. “Innocent until proven guilty” was a legal standard, something for the courts to determine. But friends and co-workers were free to make their own judgments and impose sentences of isolation and exclusion as they saw fit. She’d defended Bryant at first, but his guilt had been established on the radio during the drive to work, on the way home again, and on the nightly news. Everyone she knew assumed her complicity, if not
collaboration, even though she’d neither been arrested nor charged. Defending her husband had only made it worse. What was left was a network of men she didn’t want as friends, but had to utilize when things needed fixing that Bryant wasn’t around to handle. Her relationships with her neighbors bottomed out when one of those men registered her address as a place of employment because the handyman job he was doing on her front steps was going to last a few weeks. The police had come around with flyers and knocked on doors to notify all the neighbors that a Level 3 sex offender was working for her. That was the end of even a sympathetic glance or wave as she drove by. None of them would acknowledge her, let alone engage her in a conversation. Bryant had left and taken everything in the entire world but her son, this house, and his own reputation, which hung over it all like a pall, interring her alive inside.

  And now she had this stern-faced man in a black suit, black shirt, and black tie sitting in her living room demanding her husband’s secrets. As if she knew them. As if she knew her husband at all.

  The man’s brow furrowed and then eased back to indifference. “There is a saying where I’m from. Tol’ko samyy nizkiy vor kradyot y svoih. The lowest thief steals from his own village. Alive or dead, he stole from us, and we want back what he took.”

  “I can’t give you what I don’t have.”

  Her visitor shrugged. “Your husband was smart enough to know I would be coming eventually. He knew I would visit this house, where his wife and his son live, and he knew what it would mean for them if I didn’t get what I wanted.”

  Sharon straightened up as best she could under the emotional strain. She said, “I can’t give you anything. Do you think I’d still be living here if I had anything to show for what you say he did?” She gestured around her meager living room, letting her hand pause before the crack running up the wall beside the fireplace.

  He considered her for an uncomfortably long time before letting out a breath and getting up from the chair he’d pulled over to the coffee table opposite her. He smoothed the front of his trousers and buttoned his suit jacket the way she’d seen so many lawyers in the firm do, as though they’d gotten everything they wanted, the deposition was over, and it was time to go. “I had hoped we would’ve had a more productive conversation,” he said. The man turned and walked to the front door. He opened the door, and all the air in Sharon’s body rushed out of her at once, leaving her breathless and desperate. She was unable to move. This was drowning on dry land.

  The man waiting outside was half a head taller than his companion. He seemed more weathered, as though the time he’d spent standing in the sun in situations like this, waiting to be invited in, had leathered his skin. The first man could’ve easily passed for one of the attorneys at the firm, with his well-coiffed hair and manicure, if it weren’t for the tattoos on his hands. But this one, despite his expensive suit, didn’t look like anything but a killer. The similar tattoos on his hands and neck, along with the gun that appeared in his hand as he stepped into her house, dispelled any notion that these men would leave her alive.

  Her thoughts turned to her son, still at school, but for how much longer? The bus would drop him off somewhere around four o’clock, and though she usually met him at the stop, when she didn’t today, he’d find his way right home anyway. He was good like that. And then what would he discover when he arrived?

  “No,” she eked out, wanting to bargain, though unable to find the words. “Please, no!”

  “If it makes any difference,” the first man said. “I believe you. Stas, on the other hand, will take convincing. He is . . . uh, how you say, a skeptic.”

  The man closed the door.

  13

  The movers emptied the truck in half the time it had taken them to fill it. Evan tipped the guys, and they left with smiles on their faces. He watched them drive off, glad to see the boss was a pro who left intact the trees along the driveway with their spreading branches. If he could drive that thing through the narrow side streets of Cambridge and Somerville, he could take it anywhere. Evan turned away and stared at their new house. Their home.

  From the outside, it didn’t look like much. They’d seen so many places with outward promise that turned out to be “fixer-uppers,” or even full-on dumps on the inside. At first blush, this house was a bland, light yellow, slightly updated, two-story Colonial with nothing to distinguish it from any other place, apart from the shed built off to the side in the front yard, instead of out back. Though it was odd, the look somehow worked. It had a kind of prosaic New England charm. But the façade was truly just a mask; inside it was something extraordinary masquerading as average. And they could always have the siding replaced. They could do anything they wanted—it was theirs, and they had the money. More of it, in fact, than they could spend in a lifetime.

  Now they were moving into their dream home. A place with an open floor plan where they were always in sight of each other unless one of them sought privacy in the expansive bedroom upstairs or the lavender-painted front room. (They even thought about breaking through to create a cutout wall to open up into that space too, but were still undecided since a nice breakfast ledge in the kitchen also meant even less wall space for art.) Evan’s office was no longer also the dining room slash library slash workout room slash whatever-else-it-needed-to-be. Not to mention the reduction in noise. No longer neighboring a gas station, only the low drone of distant traffic and, more presently, the rustle of the light breeze in the trees penetrated his office. A crow cawed, and then the whole place was quiet.

  Evan had started to walk up the front steps when a loud car engine starting up halted his step. He turned with interest to see what kind of whip was making such a roar. Their old street in Cambridge was a neighborhood of college students and older homeowners who all owned sensible cars, performance luxury rides like an Audi or a BMW, or junkers that could get dinged up in urban driving. People in that part of the city didn’t often buy trucks or muscle cars. Here, though, there seemed to be a lot of teenage boys with big giant trucks that had big giant American flags waving in the wind on tall poles in the back, and as many throaty muscle cars driven by white-haired guys who looked too old to still be having midlife crises. While not Boston or Cambridge, Ripton was still in Massachusetts, though a different one than they were used to.

  A blood-red Dodge Challenger pulled away from the shoulder and took off, kicking up a small cloud of dirt and grit. Evan wondered what the driver had been doing there. On that side of their driveway, there wasn’t a neighbor for maybe a mile or more. Just thick trees and conservation land. Evan walked to the end of his driveway and looked up the street for the car, but it had already disappeared around the next bend. Whatever the guy had been up to, he was long gone now.

  Evan checked the mailbox. Inside were a couple of coupon flyers and an oversized postcard ad for a local dentist. They were addressed to CURRENT RESIDENT. That was them now. Soon they’d start getting their own mail, addressed by name and everything. Probably tomorrow, he figured. Then they could go update their driver’s licenses, reregister to vote, and do anything else that required proof of residence. But there was no rush.

  He thought again about the car that peeled out. It hadn’t been idling; he’d heard the engine start. It must have been there for a while because he hadn’t heard it pull up. He’d have noticed the growl on a beast like that. He shrugged and told himself to stop being paranoid. He’d only taken note of it because it was a Challenger SRT Demon. If it had been a Prius or a hybrid RAV4 like their own cars, he might not have even looked back at the sound of the engine turning over. Not that he was into modern muscle cars; he wanted a classic two-lane blacktop hotrod—a ’41 Ford Club Coupe or a ’32 Deuce—something that’d go with their rockabilly style better than a fucking crossover SUV. He wanted to go to the Grand National Roadster Show or the Hootenanny with Nelle next to him, leaning against the fender of something almost as beautiful as her. But that muscle car. What had it been doing there?

&
nbsp; Stop. There’d been a moving truck in the driveway. People got curious about new neighbors. It was a thing that happened and didn’t have any other sinister connotation. He rolled up the junk mail in his hand, intending to drop it in the recycling bin, and walked back up the driveway toward the house.

  14

  THREE WEEKS AFTER CLOSING

  The driver behind her laid on the horn as Nelle slowed to make the sharp turn into her driveway. Despite turning on her blinker long before approaching it, the guy still had to stomp on his brakes and swerve to avoid rear-ending her. After the day she’d had, the sounds of screeching tires and a horn set her heart racing. It was long past time for a drink. Fortunately, as she angled the car around in front of the garage, she saw lights on in the dining room.

  It had only been a couple of weeks, but there wasn’t a thing about her commute that was going well. In terms of time, it hadn’t increased by much—only about ten or twenty minutes, depending on traffic—but the difference between driving and riding the subway was significant. Instead of staring at a book and unwinding from the day lost in another world, she stared through the windshield at brake lights and only got to read political bumper stickers. NPR wasn’t doing it for her either. She resolved to try audiobooks and see if that helped.

  She hadn’t quit her job or found a new one closer to Ripton yet. She’d worked hard to learn how to do what she did, so it seemed like a waste not to keep at it for a little while longer; plus, she really liked her boss. She wasn’t sure what she’d do if she stayed home all day, anyway. I’ll read and snack too much and forget to work out. That’s what I’ll do. Saying it in her head, it didn’t actually sound that bad. Gaining a few pounds wouldn’t be the end of the world. It’d likely suit Evan just fine if she got a little more hourglassy.