The time alone. Through all that time standing around the kitchen island, sucking on the shrimps, forking the sausage slices and pushing the corn around the bowl, draining two beers and watching the door to catch the moment when Carrington would come back, Robby longed for the moment when he could be alone with her.
When it arrived he was at a loss for words.
They looked out over the marsh from the deck with the torchlights lit and lining the wooden deck rails. He stood beside her and took in her scent. Jasmine. It wasn’t what she wore way back when, but it was a scent that had drifted by him before and triggered memory. Maybe in an airport or a lounge somewhere. Maybe in a bedroom or bath.
They listened to the dishes clearing, as he polished off the third beer, straight from the bottle now, rounding off the emptiness that was in his gut. She sipped her wine, a large glass that held nearly half a bottle of a deep purple Shiraz. It may have been her second glass, but Robby hadn’t been counting hers. The round of beers had kicked him into a whole n’other gear of tightness.
The sound of the dishes and the thought that Mateen was acting as their private servant was too plain a fact to avoid talking about.
“You got your brother working as your servant?”
Cynthia didn’t smile. Nothing cracked her lips, which were painted a lighter shade now, but still a lighter tone in contrast with her mocha skin. “He’s working himself up to limo driver,” she said with all seeming seriousness. Then she broke. “That’s funny, calling him a servant. No, he’s getting it together after some missteps he took along the way. He’s making a comeback, and I’m helping him.”
“By making him help you?”
“It’s a good trade,” she said. “I help him and he helps me.”
Robby nodded his head. He was already sick of talking about Mateen, when what he really wanted to talk about was closer at hand, but twenty years away.
“Husband disappears for an hour,” he said. “I think he’s leaving you to work on me.”
Cynthia turned to Robby and gave him the look that said she genuinely didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Boss wants you to close the sale.”
She sipped her wine, just practically touching it to her mouth, and her tongue flashed out to touch her upper lip. “There are two things that concern me about that statement. The first is that you consider him to be the boss.”
Robby smiled, his lips prodding his right cheek.
“The second is that you’d think that I care one way or the other whether you stay or not.”
“Oh, you don’t?” Robby said and pulled his head back to give Cynthia a wide view for a fuller examination of the truth.
“It’s up to you,” she said with apparent disdain.
He smiled at the lovely give and take, and he cracked open the fourth Sea Dog from the ice bucket. Robby noted a fine ornamental metal grillwork on the deck and saw the resemblance immediately.
“Was this Pop’s work?” he asked to be sure.
“One of his last pieces,” she said. She said it plainly without hinting it pained her to say it. But Robby knew. He knew he had stepped too sharply, too carelessly, too suddenly into a still-wounded part of her heart.
“I’m sorry, Cyn, I...”
“It was rough,” she said, which stopped him. “It was rough. I didn’t think I’d ever get over it. And I suppose I haven’t. You don’t get over it. But after awhile you don’t remember the acute pain. You adjust to it.”
Why’d he go there? Robby closed his eyes, wishing for a moment he could transport himself back, find the moment again. He was good at doing that. Recovering a lost moment, a mistake with an opponent, an opposing batter he had faced. Return to the moment of the mistake, run through it and visualize doing something different next time. That tact, that tendency, that ability on the mound was often confused in his mind with the thought that he could do it in the actual world. The world outside the ballpark, outside the game. It rarely worked in other places off the mound. In truth it rarely worked on the mound either.
And besides it was bound to come up, wasn’t it? If what he wanted to do, if what he was considering was to happen, he’d have to broach it. It would need to come from him, to surface.
“Mateen though...” Cynthia started and looked back through the screen, the glass door and the sheer white curtains. She brought her voice to a whisper. “He discovered him there, first.”
“They still haven’t found out who did it?”
“Please,” she sneered as if to say, ‘You know better.’ She ran her hand along Pop’s work, work from a blacksmith who had achieved legendary status in the Lowcountry for his historic craftsmanship, but whose life ended violently in his nearby John’s Island workshop, some five years ago. “They gave up trying. She paused for a moment before adding, “They never tried.”
Fact of life here as it is nearly everyplace somebody is missing, somebody not breathing, somebody you suspect. Don’t go looking for the police to bring salvation. Get an investigator. Get a retainer. Get a gun.
Or get over it.
“Recovering was more difficult for Mateen, because he found him there. He might not show it, but he misses Pop. Uncontrollably. I do too.”
“When I heard, I wanted to come, but...” Robby said, but his feeble attempt to bring himself into the story dwindled and faded. He was away. And he wasn’t coming back. He was tied up, out of town. How much sense would it make to come back, after the circumstances of his leaving?
“It’s all right,” Cynthia smiled, and Robby wondered why. “You’ve had a complicated life,” she added, and then he knew why.
“Yes, I have.”
“You went looking for it.”
“It found me,” he said, but as soon as he said it he recognized it didn’t hold much truth. He left here on his own, and in his mind he was reconciled to that fact for years. He was who he was. He couldn’t be somebody different. He was Robby Bullet Train Cochran with his career stats, his performance in the big games, his wild side, his National League single season saves record, the record that lasted just a couple years before a right-hander broke it anyway. Relievers don’t get a plaque in Cooperstown that often. Only Wilhelm, Fingers and the Eck in the history of the game so far. Unfair as it was. The ball he threw in that All-Star game in ’88 is in a display case, at least it used to be. Maybe they’ve since pulled it out after...
Would they put Boxley’s bat in a case instead?
Perhaps these weren’t the life complications that Cynthia meant?
“Anybody you miss? Around here?” she said, tugging Robby out of his brief reverie. She pivoted to face him. He took a quick glance at her chest to see that her nipples were alert through her push-up bra and low v-neck pink sweater. The pink was the new pale color on her lips after she freshened up before they came out to the deck. Yeah, he noticed those kinds of things. Noticed the hell out of those things.
It was too soon. Too soon to say it, despite her move in his direction.
“I miss my mom. That’s the last time I was here, when she passed,” he said. He wondered if that sounded calculated.
“I came by, you know?” Cynthia murmured softly. “You didn’t see me there, but I came to the cemetery.”
“You were there?” Robby asked. “Where?”
“Out of view. By the trees.”
“I wish I saw you. You should have...”
“I wanted to, but I wasn’t sure.”
Missed sightings. Opportunities lost. She saw him there, but did the reality that he didn’t see her make it real? Did it really happen if he didn’t see it?
“Yup,” Robby said loudly, suddenly, inappropriately perhaps, with a laugh. “One hell of a friend I turned out to be!”
“Same here,” she said, thinking on how they were ghosts in each others lives after being so desperately close so long ago.
More sips from the wine. The last beer dripped from the ice bucket and the top twisted off with his callused fingers and thumb. Like in Koufax’s day, the trainers would place the bucket for his sore elbow and line beer bottles inside. For Sandy, the trainer left three beers. For Robby, the trainer left a six. When five were done, the time was up and he could pull out his numbed extremity from the ice. The sixth beer bottle went with Robby to the showers as the water ran down his inebriated post-game head.
Thinking on the friends he had, the trainer Mike was somebody he could still call. Some of the sycophantic broadcasters, radio guys, would still go out and have a meal. Didn’t matter to them. Robby was still a pariah though to be around for his ex-mates. Who’s still standing?
“You...and Carrington,” Robby said haltingly. “Might be the only ones who don’t hold a grudge over me.” A wholly ridiculous statement on its face, given the deep past, but Robby figured the intervening years had brought peace and prosperity to whitewash any earlier conflicts. “I’ve burned ‘em all. Every relationship. My marriage. My career. My playing pals. My managers. My agents. My neighbors. My friends. Who’s left?”
He wouldn’t look at her directly, in case she faked it. Pouted her lips at his sorry for himself act. Oh hell, he looked up at her anyway. “Coming back like this,” he said. “After all this time makes me think about things I neglected and choices I made. When I had choices, more choices, major life choices about roads to take. The roads narrowed until I was on cruise control. But long ago, I had genuine choices. What would’ve happened? Had I stayed closer here? I wouldn’t be a ball-player, I wouldn’t be famous, or infamous, probably. Had I gone here instead of there.”
Then the image appeared in his eyes. Of a face. Of his girl. Of her mother.
“Savannah.”
Cynthia knew her name, Robby’s wife. This would mark the first time that he said his wife’s name, his soon to be ex-wife, in her presence.
“There are plenty of people with busted up lives. Especially busted up marriages. There’s nothing new about that,” Cynthia said. “You made more out of yours than most. You may not be married all the way, but you have a daughter.”
Robby saw her face. He saw something there in Cynthia’s face that he couldn’t explain. He’d know it later, when it all became clearer. But there was a change then. Something he couldn’t explain.”
“There is a daughter, true,” and the image in Robby’s visage turned back to Rebecca. But the image faded again as Savannah’s arms coiled around Rebecca’s chest and her soccer jersey, holding her at the beginning of the season practice. “My wife has a daughter, and my daughter has a mother,” Robby sighed. “I’m just a pay stub from the state of Connecticut.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Maybe I do,” Robby mumbled, drifting, fading.
Cynthia shook her head and took a longer than usual, for her at least, sip of her wine, leaving but a tiny pool collect as it slid down from the rim. A drip escaped her lips that she casually wiped with a finger from the deck rail. “We need to change the subject cause nobody wants to hear baseball heroes talking this way.”
“No kidding,” he admitted and laughed.
“They are supposed to be all swagger and bluster and confidence and balls,” she said.
“That’s right,” Robby said, feeling fucked up. It was delightful to talk this way. To hear somebody challenge him without really busting his balls. No passive aggressive attitudes, the bullshit he was used to from his wife, his ex-wife, whatever the fuck she was at that moment up the Atlantic Coast.
What was it that made him able to break through the years, the unspoken, unsaid perspective that they shared, Cynthia and he? They could just plain talk without all that subtext. It was all text.
An alligator, the first one he’d seen yet, floated by in the creek water below the deck. Robby wondered if this was the one that chomped the dude’s leg off, the construction worker Rodney Monroe who took a piss.
“You and Carrington,” he started, as he thought on the gator, allowing his words to unconsciously dangle. “You and Carrington...”
“Yes?” Cynthia said, warily.
“I don’t know. You seem to be at each other’s throats.”
“That’s an interesting perception...”
“Forgive me, I never saw you two together before, as a couple, so I don’t know how you’ve ever been before.”
“Yes?” She waited for the shoe to crash, thinking she knew exactly where he was going, but unprepared for where he actually went.
“Why didn’t you want to have children?”
It hit Cynthia hard. She was a talented actress, but she couldn’t act her way out of that one. It came from someplace out of nowhere. The non-sequitar of the decade. But to Robby, from his point of view, it spoke to the whole rationale of why two would become one and get married. For a kid. If you want to bang each other, just bang each other. You want to get married, then have a friggin’ kid. Or vice versa.
She regarded him coldly all the same. “It wasn’t entirely my choice.”
“I’m sorry,” Robby said, reading her right and knowing he went the wrong way on a no way street. “I didn’t mean to pry...”
“Carrington,” Cynthia began, but paused, hesitating for a breath. “He’s a very persuasive individual. He has powerfully influenced my life, and other people’s lives.” It was not an explanation, so much as it was a start. “There’s so much for me to do that...having a child...wasn’t a serious consideration for us.”
She said wasn’t. Robby noticed it. Past tense. Couldn’t she have kids? Did they decide this together? It wasn’t too late, was it? But, hell, Robby had to recover the ground that he lost. He considered how to cover that ground in a big hurry.
“I’ve seen how having children affects people. I’ve seen it personally, how they can affect women.” He let it hang there, the obvious inference of distance he wanted to create, to let Cynthia know he created, with Savannah. “Can I tell you?” he said as he slid closer to her, pivoting his hips toward her, opening up as he placed the beer bottle on the deck rail and balanced it there, knowing he was drunk and conscious of the act of trying not to seem drunk. “I like the way you are,” he said.
He made his move. She wondered privately at what point he could make the move. Had he talked to Carrington about the feelings? Had they ever touched on the awkwardness? They must’ve let it slide. Cynthia’s eyes dipped low, at his chest, then slowly, subtly enough for him, she purposefully glanced upward to his eyes.
“And since your husband hasn’t made himself available tonight,” Robby whispered, “I feel emboldened enough to say...”
“You do, huh?” Cynthia said.
“Yes, emboldened enough to say that you are absolutely more beautiful now than ever. And you were the loveliest woman I’d ever known.”
“Is this what ball-players say when they meet women at the clubs? Is this the same line they use?”
He drew up closer still; she looked behind him, past him, to the glass door and the screen and the sheer white curtains, but only for a second.
“I don’t go to the clubs. And I can’t lie. I wouldn’t think it was possible for somebody to become more beautiful after nearly twenty years in a lifetime.”
“You,” she started to say and she lifted a slender finger to touch his cheek, then ran it down to his chin. “You are going to have to stay now. I can’t let these compliments just walk out the door.”
Robby reached his hand up and touched Cynthia as she reeled her hand back in.
“Ah, but what would the people say?” he asked, with a smile.
“About?”
“About being seen with a killer?”
Carrington brushed through the sheer curtain and he saw them standing so close to touching. His wife and his old best friend. Together again. He took it all in.
“I’ve known killers. You’re not a killer,” she said to Robby. “You’re a victim.”
(Read Chapters Nine and Eleven of the serial Blacksmith's Girl.)