by Joe Derkacht
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I set down my charcoal stick and steadied myself by holding onto the edges of my drafting table. Everything was rushing back to me; I finally remembered what had triggered the seizure that put me in the hands of the doctor in black horn-rimmed glasses. Once again I was sitting in Kit’s attorney’s office. This time we were alone. Here was the man who had sent the photos of an abused wife to Shirley Icenogle. Here was the man who was demanding everything I owned in return for the dissolution of a fraudulent marriage. At this point, he just didn’t know precisely how fraudulent.
“You really shouldn’t have come without your attorney,” he said.
I nodded my head in agreement. It didn’t take a high school education, much less a GED, to figure out that the man who stutters and stammers doesn’t win too many arguments. Instead of attempting to say anything, I slowly scanned the room, taking in the impressive bookshelves displaying handsomely bound volumes, the wonderful stereo system softly playing background music, the massive but tasteful desk, the beautiful brass and crystal chandelier, the hardwood flooring and Persian rug...
He was putting my money to good use, even if everything was overdone. I guessed he didn’t realize the desk and high-backed chair dwarfed him, made him appear smaller and more distant than he really was. Because of it, the psychological strategy of providing flimsier, smaller chairs for his clients was flawed.
“Mister Raventhorst?” He said, pointedly glancing at his expensive wristwatch. “You wanted to tell me something?”
This time I shook my head. He had glanced more than once at the manila envelope I was holding, and now I leaned forward and slid it to him over the desktop.
From his frown it was easy to see he didn’t like it. Whether because he was afraid the desk’s high gloss finish would be marred or he simply didn’t like mysterious envelopes, I didn’t know.
“About the divorce?” He asked.
“You’re getting smarter,” I said.
One eyebrow went up, in restrained irritation. “You do realize,” he said, “I bill by the hour?”
I shrugged. Money, I supposed, was his answer to everything. He just didn’t know yet that I would be suing him for the return of every dime he’d taken from me for the privilege of representing Kit.
I think we stared unblinkingly at each other for a long while. I remembered him smiling coldly in my direction. I wasn’t going anywhere. He glanced at his telephone a few times. If he thought he could lift the receiver to call the police before I could vault over his desk and smash him in the face, he was wrong.
“All right, I’ll play your game,” he said, shrugging before finally picking up the envelope and sliding out the contents. I didn’t bother to tell him none of this was a game. He shuffled through the papers, taking far longer to read them than I thought necessary. By the time he looked up from them, I was wondering about all those law books on their shelves: did it really take that much knowledge to steal the shirt off the backs of a few poor suckers like me?
Neither eyebrow was raised this time. His complexion was ashen and his mouth twitched, pulling at his pencil-thin mustache. He started to say something but it all came out as an unintelligible stutter.
“I didn’t know,” he finally managed. I almost felt sorry for him. Maybe he had a conscience after all. Unable to meet my gaze, he again stared down at the papers in his hands.
In a way, we were in the same boat. Neither of us had known anything about Kit’s true background. Those papers said it all; Kit Raventhorst was not Kit Raventhorst, nor was she Kit Huffy, either, the name she went by before we married. She was a woman with a criminal history, who had a penchant for marrying without bothering to divorce any of her former husbands. Which made our marriage null and void. If she wanted money, she would have to get it by some other means, maybe from stamping out license plates in the State Pen.
“If this is true,” the lawyer muttered, looking up from the file and staring hard at me for a second, as if hoping I was attempting some sort of hoax. When I didn’t blink, he glanced at the papers again. He knew they were real enough. Blackie had supplied me with copies of official police reports.
Swearing softly, he slammed the papers down on his desk, swiveled his chair around and violently pulled open a file cabinet drawer. Reaching inside, he fished out a manila envelope. This one was much thinner than mine. He slid it in my direction.
“You’ll want to have a look at this.”
My sense of self-satisfied triumph died quickly. Inside was a single 8X10 glossy photo, nothing like the others sent to Shirley Icenogle; this one was of an infant girl. Her red hair and green eyes were just like mine. I had thought I was beyond feeling pain, but the sadness I saw in that face pierced my heart like nothing else had ever done before, shredding my defenses like they were less than tissue paper.
“You’ll want this, too,” the lawyer said, scribbling on a yellow Post-it note. He came around the desk to hand it over. Numbly, I read Kit’s name and Montana phone number, then jammed it into my pocket and blindly stumbled from his office and into the street. After that, I recalled nothing more until I woke up in the State Hospital, with the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nurse Jo staring down at me.
Thought of the woman the inmates referred to as Nurse Wretched jerked me back to the familiar surroundings of my home. Kit and I had a daughter! My teeth began to chatter as if I were freezing to death. I tried to stand but my knees buckled under my weight. Both my drafting table and stool spun away from me as if sucked away by a tornado. The oak flooring that should have been under my feet vanished as I fell, and fell, and fell, and kept falling into an all too familiar black vortex.