The Distance Between Us

  PRAISE FOR NOAH BLY AND THE THIRD HILL NORTH OF TOWN

  “A brilliant combination of chaos and coincidence. With fresh language and uniquely imperfect characters, Noah Bly weaves a story of a cross-country trek that is both improbable and believable. This fresh, engrossing novel left me convinced of the power of memory, even as it arises from a disturbed mind, and taught me—as Bly promises—the wisdom of faith in the ridiculous.”

  —Anna Jean Mayhew, author of The Dry Grass of August

  “This is an eerie, haunting, beautifully realized novel populated by charming misfits and eccentrics.”

  —Joseph Olshan, author of Cloudland

  “Once The Third Hill North of Town turns over its engine, readers will do well to secure their grip on themselves, their loved ones, and any notions they have about guilt and innocence, truth and trust, convenience and blame. By its end, Bly’s whirlwind challenges much of what we believe without necessarily meaning to, including those comfortable views on the infinite gradations we lump under the banner of mental illness, including racism. A hell of a journey.”

  —Kyle Beachy, author of The Slide

  “What a wild ride this novel is! The Third Hill North of Town grabs hold and doesn’t let go. A story of the tragedy and beauty of coincidence and circumstance, this novel is one that brings the unlikeliest characters together in a way that is somehow both surprising and meaningful.”

  —T. Greenwood, author of Bodies of Water

  “Noah Bly takes readers on an unforgettable ride through America. Well written, page-turning, and hard to put down!” —Jim Kokoris, author of The Pursuit of Other Interests

  “A glorious, madcap American road novel in the picaresque tradition, The Third Hill North of Town explores a dark uncharted territory where vengefulness and desire and coincidence and consequence blow wild through human hearts, tossing people together and tearing them apart. Think On the Road written by Flannery O’Connor. A profound meditation on the sanctity of improvised friendships.”

  —Stephen Lovely, author of Irreplaceable

  Books by Noah Bly

  THE THIRD HILL NORTH OF TOWN

  THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US

  And writing as Bart Yates

  LEAVE MYSELF BEHIND

  THE BROTHERS BISHOP

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  The Distance Between Us

  NOAH BLY

  For my family.

  Acknowledgments

  Deepest thanks, yet again, to Gordon Mennenga, for his ruthless editorial eye, good humor and endless patience. Thanks also to

  Marian Clark for performing honest and gentle triage on

  the second draft.

  For thoughtful feedback and much-needed reassurance on bad days, my thanks to Peder Bartling and Liz Schonhorst.

  For answers to random medical questions, my appreciation to Lucas Readinger, Jim Gibson, Abe Assad, Rob Weingeist, and

  Bill Landis.

  For creating the kind of home that feeds the imagination, my thanks to Jim Bynum and John Moriarty.

  For legal know-how and generosity of spirit, my gratitude to Ed and Lisa Leff and my brother, Jeff Yates.

  For sharing their piano expertise, I am grateful to Peter Cacioppo and Alice Lindsey.

  For far too many things to mention, my thanks to Brad Schonhorst, Andrew Knapp, Michael Becker, Libby and Rob Shannon, Jack Manu, Tonja Robins, Rob Burns, Mick Benner and John Perona. A huge thanks also to Sifu Moy Yat Tung (a.k.a. Dr. Robert Squatrito), and my entire kung fu family.

  Finally, thanks to my editor at Kensington, John Scognamiglio, for his unflagging support and terrific advice.

  “Blessed are those who have no talent!”

  —Emerson

  “If the only prayer you say in your life is thank you, that would suffice.”

  —Meister Eckhart

  Contents

  Praise

  Books by Noah Bly

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  EPILOGUE

  TEASER

  CHAPTER 1

  I spend a great deal of time admiring my hands, but that’s only because they belong to another woman.

  My body turned seventy-one last month and has, of late, begun to bear a disturbing resemblance to an overripe avocado. If you slit me down the middle from my neck to my pelvis and peeled off my bumpy hide, I’m sure you’d find nothing underneath but a gooey, greenish pulp, riddled with black and brown bruises and completely unusable for anything worthwhile—except maybe as the base in a suspicious batch of guacamole.

  But my hands are only forty or so. My fingers are long and thin and supple, my palms are soft and smooth, and when I make a fist, the wrinkles between my knuckles and my wrists vanish, the skin pulled taut by a layer of fine, strong muscles attached firmly to my bones.

  But as I said, then there’s the rest of me.

  You bring the garlic and the lime juice, I’ll provide the tortilla chips.

  No. Not yet.

  I need another drink first. And if you know what’s good for you, you better have one, too.

  I open my door and the young man who’s come to see about the attic apartment is standing on the porch, shivering. He’s tall and thin, and he’s not wearing a hat or gloves, and all he’s got for a coat is a thick blue flannel shirt, three sizes too big for him.

  I frown up at him. “It’s ten degrees out there, you idiot. Don’t you know how to dress in the winter?”

  He looks taken aback. “Mrs. Donovan?”

  I wince. “Just Hester, please. Are you Alex?”

  He nods. “Sorry I’m late. I got lost.” His hair is red and curly and wild, spilling over his ears and forehead and down the back of his neck. His chin and cheeks are unevenly dotted with red stubble.

  “You need a haircut and a shave,” I tell him. “You remind me of an Irish setter I owned as a child. His name was Fergus, and he was run over by a logging truck.”

  He blinks but doesn’t say anything. At least he’s not a chatterbox.

  I wave him in. “Well, don’t just stand there. Come in. And take your shoes off before you make a mess.”

  He kicks the snow from his soles and steps past me, then bends over to untie his sneakers as I shut the door behind him. He’s not wearing socks.

  “The stupid streets don’t make sense around here,” he mutters at the floor. “There are no signs on the corners or anything. What’s up with that?”

  I point at his bare feet when he straightens. “Aren’t you freezing?”

  He shrugs. “Not really. I like the cold.” His wire-frame glasses have fogged over and he takes them off and wipes them on his shirttail. He squints down at me for a second—his eyes are pale blue—then replaces the glasses on his nose and looks over my shoulder at the fireplace in the living room. He grins. “Sweet. That’s an awesome fire.” He sniffs. “It even smells great.”

  “Yes, it does, doesn’t it?” I glance at the flames. The fire is so hot it’s mostly blue. “I think the wood is a mix of cedar and pi
ne, but there may be a bit of oak as well.” I look back at him. “I’m burning my husband’s favorite coffee table this afternoon. I believe it was an antique. He swears somebody famous built it, but I can’t remember who. Paul Revere, maybe. Or Oprah Winfrey. I always get those two confused, don’t you?”

  He stares at me.

  I retrieve the glass of red wine I set down on the steps a minute ago when I answered the door. “Yes, I know, I probably shouldn’t have destroyed it, but I really couldn’t be bothered to go out to the woodpile in this cold.” I chew on my lip. “Then again, I had to venture out to the carriage house to get the sledgehammer anyway, and I made quite a shambles of the study afterward. What on earth was I thinking? Arthur will be furious with me.”

  He smiles a little, as if he thinks I’m joking. Poor boy.

  I take a sip of wine and study him. He has freckles on his nose, and a small mole on his left temple. I point at the open bottle by my chair in the living room. “Would you care for a glass of merlot? It’s not very good, but it helps take the chill off.”

  He shakes his head. “No thanks. I’m fine.”

  “Have it your way.” I turn around and head for the east staircase. “The apartment is upstairs.”

  The steps creak under our feet as he follows me. He’s silent for a few seconds, but he clears his throat when we get to the first landing.

  “Wow. This place is huge.” He runs a hand over the mahogany banister and peeks in the doorway of the master bedroom. The late afternoon sun is streaming through the round stained-glass windows on the south wall and lighting the floor and bedspread with patches of red and yellow.

  “Wow,” he says again. “It’s like a church or something in here. The ceilings are so high.”

  I step beside him and stare in at my room. I don’t get much company these days, and I forget how this house appears to strangers.

  Bolton, Illinois, is a river town, and though it’s now known chiefly as the home of The Carson Conservatory of Music (and, to a lesser degree, Carson’s academic sister school, Pritchard University), its original claim to fame was as an industrial port on the Mississippi. In the early 1900s there were dozens of textile mills in Bolton, owned by a few decadently wealthy families who built houses like this one—mansions, really—to live in when they weren’t flitting about Europe or picking caviar from their teeth in stuffy salons up and down the East Coast. Then along came the Depression, and most of them were forced to sell their properties for a fraction of what they were worth and move back to New England and New York to lick their wounds—or commit suicide, in a surprising number of cases. Tycoons are apparently quite fragile.

  Be that as it may, my husband Arthur’s father (who taught philosophy at Pritchard) convinced Pritchard’s board to purchase several of the homes as an institutional investment, and he also somehow finagled them into lending him enough money to buy this house—the best of the lot—for himself and his wife.

  Knowing Arthur’s father as I did, I’m sure it was a shady deal, but I’d be lying if I said I’m not grateful. Our home—my home, I mean—is a three-story, elegant old Victorian house with six bedrooms and four full baths, as well as a living room, a study, a music room, and an enormous, tin-paneled kitchen attached to an equally preposterous dining room, with a chandelier the size of a kettledrum chained to the ceiling. In addition, there’s a charming, fully furnished attic apartment (from its front windows you can see the Mississippi), a large basement, and a splendid wraparound porch decorated with ornate gingerbread woodwork. The carriage house sits at the top of a circular driveway to the right of the main house, and overlooks a stone garden, complete with a gazebo—and, unfortunately, a hideous, eight-and-a-half foot statue of some obscure Russian saint that Arthur’s mother bought at an auction.

  I turn away from the bedroom and head up the next flight of stairs and Alex follows me. The third floor has three guest rooms (one of which Arthur used as an office) and a bathroom; Alex eyes the dusty cardboard boxes and scattered paper in the dismantled office with curiosity but I pass by without pausing and ascend the final set of stairs.

  I stop in the hallway that connects the various rooms of the attic apartment. I’m panting a little from the climb. “Well, this is it.”

  He steps past me and looks around, perplexed. “Where’s the door?”

  “There is no door, I’m afraid.”

  The only thing separating the attic from the rest of the house is a waist-high banister that runs the length of the hallway. He walks down the hall and peers in at each room—kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom—then comes back and stands next to me. The wallpaper behind him is white with small clusters of purple grapes; one of the grape clusters hangs directly above his head, like mistletoe.

  He fingers his jeans and stares over the banister at the staircase. “It’s nice, but I was hoping there’d be more privacy. I thought there’d be a door.”

  I sigh. “You needn’t worry. No one uses the third floor anymore, so it serves as a buffer between the main house and the apartment. I stay on the first two floors, and as you’ve noticed, this house is rather large. You’d have all the privacy you need.”

  He meets my eyes for an instant, then looks away and bites his lip. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I can live in a place without a door.” He drops his head and curls his long toes in the carpet.

  I glare at his scalp and take another sip of wine. “Suit yourself. Give me a moment to rest, and I’ll show you out.” I wander into the kitchen and sit at the table, dipping my neck to keep from banging my head on the slanted ceiling.

  All the rooms up here are a bit misshapen, molded to fit the contour of the roof. The floor in the kitchen is covered with a yellow and gold linoleum, and the cherrywood baseboard running alongside it is dark and polished. Over the stove there’s a skylight looking out on the bricks of the house’s main chimney, and to the left of the refrigerator is a larger window that opens to the south, thirty or forty feet above the carriage house and the driveway. Each room of the attic has at least two windows, so even though the place is small, there’s plenty of light and air, and it doesn’t feel claustrophobic at all. I’ve always loved this apartment. It’s a cozy space, warm and clean and quiet, and this boy is a fool for not wanting it.

  Alex sticks his head in the doorway and watches me with an anxious expression, as if he thinks I’m preparing to have a stroke.

  I point at a picture on the wall, above a small table with an old-fashioned black rotary phone on it. “That’s my son Paul. He used to be quite handsome, don’t you think?” I swirl the remaining swallow of wine around in my glass. “Now he’s got a dreadful beard and a potbelly, and he lumbers about town like a disreputable buffalo. It’s ghastly how he’s let himself go.”

  He steps in for a closer look. The photo is a black-and-white shot of Paul standing on the front porch with his arm around one of his first girlfriends. Alex studies it for a minute as I study him. He’s very thin and the veins in his hands and feet show through his skin.

  He clears his throat. “Your son’s still in Bolton? Does he live with you and your husband?”

  “Dear God, no. I live alone these days. Arthur and I are separated, and Paul rents a room with an alcoholic clarinetist in one of those seedy little faculty bungalows near the Conservatory. He and his roommate drink single malt scotch and play duets every night until they pass out or throw up, then they get up the next morning and go breathe toxic fumes on their students. It’s all very bohemian.”

  His head bobs up and down to show that he’s listening, but he keeps his attention on the photograph. “So he teaches at Carson? What does he play?”

  “Paul? He’s a cellist. A good one, too, but no one outside of Illinois has ever heard of him because he refuses to leave Bolton, even to tour.” I rub my nose to fend off a sneeze. “He has a neurotic aversion to traveling. When he was a little boy we literally had to drag him to the car every time we left town for vacation. I thought he’d outgrow it,
but he’s just gotten worse.”

  He taps the picture frame with his knuckle. “How long ago was this taken?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Years ago. Paul was in high school, I believe.” I play with my lower lip. “I forget the girl’s name. Boobsy, maybe, or Blobsy or Barfy or something like that. Her father was one of Arthur’s friends, and I thought she was rather adorable. But she only lasted about a week.”

  I gulp the rest of the wine. “That may be Paul’s all-time record. He’s had terrible luck with women. They never stick around for long after they’ve had sex with him.” I rest my hand on my chin. “The hair on his back frightens them.”

  Alex makes a sound that might be a laugh and I look up at the ceiling. It needs fresh paint; the eggshell-white Arthur and I both liked so much is already beginning to flake. Our first and only tenant last year (a philosophy grad student with the unfortunate name of Carmella Croyson) was overly fond of humidity and basically flooded the place with steam all winter long. The paint apparently couldn’t stand up to that sort of drenching.

  I frown at it and drop my eyes to Alex again. “Where does a child of mine get all that hair, I wonder? Arthur’s not exceptionally hirsute, and the men on my side of the family are as bald as potatoes. I must have had an affair with a gorilla before he was born, but you’d think I’d remember something like that, wouldn’t you?” I pick lint from the breast of my sweater. “Be a dear and remind me to leave my brandy flask at home the next time I visit the zoo.”

  He turns around to face me, grinning.

  “What?” I demand.

  “Nothing.”

  I raise my eyebrows, irritated, and he shrugs. “You’re kind of funny, that’s all.”

  “Oh.” I look away. “It’s just the wine. It makes my tongue say the oddest things.” I wet my finger and run it around the rim of the crystal glass, making it hum an E-flat. “Arthur hates my sense of humor. He didn’t always, but he says I’ve gotten mean in the last few years. I prefer to think of it as being honest.”