Spiral

lit departure lounge, Nancy and I watched the airline’s gate agent put down his microphone. The flight seemed only about half-full, so the boarding process had gone quickly.
    A little too quickly for me.
    Nancy said, ”You’ll call me about the decision on your apartment, right?”
    Around the time we’d met, I started renting a condominium in Boston’s neighborhood of Back Bay from a doctor leaving for a residency in Chicago. The doctor had called me the prior week, saying she was going to extend another year and asking if I wanted to stay on as a tenant. Nancy was the first woman I’d cared anything about since my wife, Beth, had died young from brain cancer. Nancy and I had been through a lot, and we’d finally begun talking about living together. She was renting the top floor of a three-decker from a Boston Police family named Lynch, several generations of whom lived on the first two floors. But Nancy wasn’t sure the older Mrs. Lynch would swing for a ”living-in-sin” arrangement in her house, and I wasn’t sure the doctor’s one-bedroom condo would be big enough for us and Nancy’s cat. Her pet went by ”Renfield,” after the madman in Dracula who ate small mammals, but he’d—
    ”John?”
    ”Sorry.”
    ”I really worry when you zone out on me like that.”
    ”I’ll call you about the condo.”
    Nancy slipped both her hands up under my arms, her palms firmly planted on my shoulder blades as we hugged each other. ”The Lynches will feed Renfield, but he might like you to come play with him once or twice.”
    ”I’ll stop at the pet store first, pick up a couple of canaries.”
    The gate agent looked at us rather pointedly as he reached for his microphone again. ”.All passengers should now be... ”
    I put my lips close to Nancy’s right ear. ”I’m going to miss you, kid.”
    ”What, you aren’t already?”
    Kissing the lobe above her earring, I got a whiff of her shampoo and perfume, but even more a scent that was so specifically, definably Nancy that I thought I could find her by sense of smell the way a momma dog can identify one of her puppies in the dark.
    Turning to go, Nancy said over her shoulder, ”Call me at my hotel.
    ”I will.”
    ”But don’t forget about the time-zone difference.”
    ”I won’t.”
    A last smile just before the gate agent closed the jetway door behind her.
    I turned and began walking back toward the main terminal, an emptiness welling up inside me. Nancy and I had been together most of the holiday season. Just before Christmas, we attended the Chorus Pro Musica concert at the Old South Church on Boylston Street. We celebrated New Year’s Eve by going to three First Night events: medieval carols at the First Lutheran on Marlborough, a saxophone tribute to Duke Ellington at the First Baptist on Commonwealth, and a salsa show at the Church of the Covenant on Newbury.
    Nancy had called it ”a very yuppie-scum evening.”
    Reaching her Civic in the Logan parking garage, I realized there was another reason for my emptiness. Because of Nancy’s trial duties as a prosecutor, usually she was the one staying in Boston while I traveled somewhere. It was a different feeling, her leaving me behind.
    A feeling I’d had years ago, with someone else I loved.
    Shaking that off, I turned the key in the ignition.

    When I got home, the little window in my telephone tape machine was glowing a red ”1,” meaning I had a message. Playing it, I heard George-Ann Izzo’s voice tell me that our job for the next day had been cancelled, but that the client had called her only ”a few minutes ago.” Then the machine’s atonal voice recited the time George-Ann had called me. Four-ten, or a good fifteen minutes before Nancy and I had left her apartment for the airport.
    In other words, if I’d just checked my messages by remote from Southie—or even from the gate at Logan itself—I could have gotten a ticket on that half-empty flight and spent the long weekend with Nancy in San Fran’.
    Picking up the phone, I tried her hotel out there. The desk clerk I drew told me he indeed had a reservation for a ”Ms. Meagher, assuming that’s ‘Nancy Eugenia,’ sir.” I laughed silently that she’d use her middle name for the hotel when she never did usually, then realized that proba- « bly the District Attorney’s office would have made the reservation for her. The desk clerk also said Ms. Meagher hadn’t checked in yet, which didn’t surprise me, since I