Until Death

by Alicia Rasley

  Almost bitterly, he replied, “Because it’s too easy. If I agree with you, it’ll be because it absolves me. And that’s enough to make it a suspect position for me.”

  Exasperated, I said, “If he committed suicide. Just veer from that, and you’ll be all right.”

  “So I just deny what I saw, and I won’t think I screwed up, and someone died for it?”

  He’d given up on ambiguity and subtlety and maybe and could have. The controlled savagery in his voice made me really look at him. He looked like a man who had been up all night—and I guess he had, if he’d pulled a shift at the hospital. He also looked like a man who felt guilty.

  And there was nothing else for me to say. I’d gotten what I needed from him—his promise not to tell the insurance company anything damaging. So I rose and headed for the door before I gave in to the desire to force him to change his mind.

  Chapter Nine

  I WENT HOME, retreated to the porch, and just sat there. I was wasting time. I should be planning my campaign to destroy Mr. Peterson’s theory, or Mr. Peterson, for that matter. But for now, I put Mr. Peterson out of my mind. I stared through the fine mesh screen at the river flowing by. I concentrated on nothing. Whiteness. Blackness. Nothingness.

  I should take up meditation, I thought. Then I could think of nothing. Now I thought of . . . something. Anything. Everything.

  But the sun was warm on my bare arms, and a bee was buzzing in mad melody just outside the screen, so at least I could find some calm, if not serenity.

  Eventually, I went inside to get a pen and paper. I sat down at the iron table and drafted a letter of complaint, to be sent when and if Mr. Peterson contested the claim. By the fourth draft, I’d cut out most of the adjectives and adverbs, though I left in “scurrilous” and “outrageous.” I was hesitating over “vile” when I heard a car pull up in the driveway, and I rose to see a dark blue Jaguar convertible with a man at the wheel.

  A sudden breeze plastered my drafts against the screen. I peeled them off as I watched the driver emerge. Tall. Tan. In track shorts and an old IU t-shirt. Mike Warren. I’d just seen him in a suit and tie an hour ago, so this was a shock. Unbidden, the words came to my mind, but thankfully not to my lips: I hardly recognize you without your clothes.

  He saw me scrabbling at the paper on the screen and came around to the porch. “Hi.”

  “Hi.” Well, so much for small talk.

  What do you want, I almost demanded, but my hour sweating over the letter had taught me a lot about tone-moderation. “Did you forget to tell me something?” Like that he was going to testify in my behalf after all?

  Not likely. “No. I was heading for the Y to work out and passed your street. I thought maybe I’d better check in to see how you were doing.”

  I opened the screen door and let him in. “In other words, you got worried that I’d do something crazed and irrational. Like take out a hit on the insurance adjustor.”

  “Or on me.” Agreeably, he took a seat but refused iced tea. He glanced at the papers I clutched in my hand. “Another list? I remember you used to bring lists with you to sessions.”

  “Oh, yeah. Top ten signs that a midlife man has gone bonkers.”

  “Top ten reasons why Wanda’s a money-grubbing bitch.”

  I didn’t want to smile. So I didn’t. “No, this is a letter to the insurance company. I’ll send it if the adjustor contests the claim.” Carelessly, I added, “I’ll sue for treble damages. And when I win, I’ll give you a ride in my Rolls. I mean, Tommy’s Rolls.”

  “Somehow I think that wouldn’t be the car of choice for a teenaged boy.”

  “You think I’m going to give him a choice?”

  He smiled, just for a moment. It was sheer idiocy to banter with this man. I said, “So you skipped out on work. Oh, that’s right. Doctors never work on Wednesdays.”

  “I worked all night,” he said mildly.

  “Do they really need a shrink in an emergency room?”

  “I’m the attending for several psychiatric wards, so yes. And anyway, I’m doing another residency. In emergency medicine.”

  I wondered at his motivation for going into ER work. Probably someone had told him he looked like George Clooney and he’d be dashing in scrubs. “At your age?”

  “It’s either that or buy a dive boat and head for Tahiti.”

  I guess it wasn’t so strange. After all, I’d recently changed jobs too. My career switch had been, well, externally motivated, seeing as how I’d been cut loose from the family business. But I didn’t regret it, except when I got to the bottom line. “If you worked all night, maybe you should go home and get some sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep during the day”

  Was this avatar of mental health admitting to insomnia? Maybe he felt that guilty about Don. “You’re here for a reason.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I feel as though every time we talk, something is left unsettled.”

  “That’s true.” I got mad again, thinking about it. “I thought that was what you were aiming for, keeping me in the dark. And don’t tell me about confidentiality. It’s just you and me. And there’s nothing I can do with the information, if you refuse to help me.”

  The cat came out through the open door and stood for a moment surveying us. I could have used a little kitty comfort right then, and she must have sensed that, because she stalked past me under the table and wound seductively around Mike’s bare legs. He reached down automatically and scratched the fickle tart under her chin. “What is it you want to know?”

  I’d been ready for him to argue with me. I had no answer to capitulation. “You mean you’ll tell me? What about patient confidentiality?”

  “I won’t go into anything I think is confidential.”

  “There’s a line?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Only it’s flexible, depending on circumstances.” He sounded cynical. Detached. “But tell me what you want to know, and I’ll tell you what feels right to tell you.”

  “Okay.” I thought about that card from Don. “At the funeral. You implied that Don was trying to, well, win a place back in my affections. Even now it seems sort of like a big jump.”

  “I do that all the time. Psychiatrists are like pole-vaulters.”

  “But you’d just seen him. You were trying to let me know something. Like maybe he still loved me, and you thought that might comfort me. Did he tell you that?”

  He took his time. I guess he had to filter his thoughts first through the confidentiality screen. “He said he wanted to start coming in again, had a few bugs to work out. That’s what he called it, debugging—everyone in this town speaks software now—he thought maybe he was heading off in the wrong direction and needed some help getting back on track.”

  That sounded like Don. He always spoke in metaphors. Or I guess they were clichés. I almost told him about the card Don sent me, but stopped myself. I could be confidential too. “So did he bring up Wanda and the prenup agreement?”

  “Yeah. Said maybe she was more concerned with the money than he’d realized before.”

  “Well, duhhh.”

  It wasn’t the most eloquent of responses, but he had teenagers too, and he did that reluctant grin thing that was actually kind of charming. Like he’d never smile, except that I was making him. Encouraged, I started to tell him about the silver box, the copy of a Verizon bill, and Don’s wedding ring, but at the last second kept my mouth shut.

  He said, “I guess it was a major revelation, but he came at it from the side. He blamed her.”

  “Don always did have a problem with that personal responsibility thing.”

  “I didn’t handle it right. I thought, the hell with it, I’d cut through the bullshit. So I said he should think about his own mistakes and quit blaming everyone else.” He shrugged and
looked away. “That sort of thing works with some men. They feel comfortable being attacked, as long as the hierarchy is clear. So he hung his head and admitted I was right.”

  “Good.”

  “That’s what I thought. I thought it was helping him break through the denial. But it hit him hard, too. Maybe too hard. He collapsed. Lost all the structure. It was like I’d pulled the scaffolding away, and he became passive. Submissive, almost.”

  “That happens when you lose your denial. I remember feeling that way when I finally let go of the dream he’d come back. I just gave up. But it’s necessary, right? Accepting reality?”

  “Sure. But you know how it goes. The hour was up, and I had another client coming in, so I gave him the prescription, and we made another appointment for the next week. But I shouldn’t have waited for then. He needed building back up.”

  “Come on. You didn’t tear him down. He messed up his life, and you just pointed it out.”

  “Yeah. Well, I did it for the wrong reason. I was tired of him. I hadn’t seen him in more than a year, but as soon as he showed up, I remembered how tiresome it was, dealing with him and his trite little midlife crisis. I mean, his wife was healthy, and mine was dying, and sometimes I wanted to tell him what an idiot he was, throwing it all away for some bottle blonde named Wanda.”

  “Did you really think that?” It made me feel a lot better about him. Not quite a knight in shining armor, but maybe he was holding himself in tight check to keep from throttling Don.

  “Yeah, I really thought that. Not that I didn’t also think he was blowing a great deal—some hot young turnover and a nice, loyal wife, too.”

  A nice loyal wife. So much for the shining armor. He might as well hang a sign on me that said doormat. “So his mistake was in divorcing me, you mean. If he’d just kept screwing her on the side, you would have approved?”

  “Is that a trick question?”

  “Yep. And you already blew it.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” He looked grim again. “I gave in to my irritation at him, and overstepped my therapeutic boundaries. He didn’t have anything to do with my wife dying.”

  “Oh, come on. You had a wider perspective. You gave him a reality check.”

  “He couldn’t deal with the reality.”

  “He could deal with anything. I know it. Don was a forward-thinker. If a deal went bad, he’d brood, but as soon as he had some new obsession, he would be fine.”

  “That was the younger Don. When he thought something wasn’t working out, he moved on. That’s what he did in business, and that’s what he did with your marriage.”

  I opened my mouth to protest. But he was right. Don did just leave me behind, like a non-producing building.

  Mike said grimly, “The man I saw last week was seeing, for the first time, the destruction. And he didn’t have a new plan. He said he’d really blown it. He’d lost everything.”

  “But he hadn’t. In a day or two, he’d have realized that well, he still had the prenuptial agreement, and he still had the money, and he still probably had Wanda if he wanted her.”

  “But he’d lost you.”

  “Me? Big deal.” Now, understand, I did think it was a big deal. I’d spent a long time trying to persuade Don that he’d be lost without me. But Don never believed that. “Besides, he wouldn’t think he’d lost me, since last he’d heard, I was begging him to come back.”

  “Nope. The last he heard, you were mixing it up with some Olympic gold medalist who worshiped the ground you walked on.”

  For a moment, I goggled at him. Not a pretty sight, I’m sure, and so pretty soon I sucked my eyes back into their sockets. “You don’t mean Vince.”

  “I don’t know his name. Some young neighbor of yours. Track star. Kissed your hand.”

  “Vince.” I collapsed into my chair, halfway between laughter and horror. “Vince’s not—”

  “Not a gold medalist? Yeah, I figured that was an exaggeration. I thought I’d probably have heard if there was some gold medalist here in town.”

  Loyalty made me point out, “He did almost make the Olympic team, only his knee blew out. But he doesn’t worship me. Not that way. I just used him. You know. To irk Don.”

  “Well, you succeeded. He said you’d found his replacement already.”

  If that hadn’t been so ridiculous, I’d have been annoyed. “Vince’s a friend. And even if he were more than that, well, my waiting a year to ‘replace’ Don sure beats his record. I mean, he started auditioning my replacement back when we were planning our second honeymoon.”

  “Right. We all know it. He done you wrong. The point is, you were his foundation. I’m not saying he should have counted on that, only that he did. And when he came to see me, that bothered him the most—that you weren’t still waiting for him to come to his senses and come home.”

  The memory of that afternoon visit came back: Don’s face, belligerently pathetic. His reluctance to leave. My impatience. And it was all a mistake. Vince wasn’t my lover. There was still a space for Don.

  I felt sick. “I don’t know what the truth is. I wanted to make him jealous. I admit it. I pretended Vince was my new squeeze. I made a fuss about him being younger. All that. But—”

  “But you don’t want to think that your little make-believe caused him to break?”

  “No!” I fought for some control. Some perspective. “It wasn’t make-believe. Okay, I admit Vince was make-believe. That was just being immature. But I guess maybe I had let Don go. I wanted him to leave. Once I was done trying to make him regret what he’d done, he should have just gone back to her and appreciated the contrast. I closed the door behind him and went out for my walk and came home and fed my kid, and forgot about Don. I’ve lived without him loving me for two years. I’ve adjusted. I couldn’t go on pining after him forever.” I remembered Don’s disappointed expression, my sense that he wanted something more from me, my impatience with his unending complication. “Do you think he realized that?”

  It was no use asking Mike Warren a question. That was his job. “If he would have asked to come back that afternoon, what would you have said?”

  “I would have said that I don’t mess around with married men.”

  “Say he offered to divorce Wanda and remarry you.”

  This time I didn’t have a snappy answer. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “Maybe. It would fill the empty space. When he left, it was like a neutron bomb. The house and the furniture were still there. Everything was the same, but he was gone. And I guess, if he filled the empty space—we’d be home again. It would make Tommy so happy. And if Don needed me . . .”

  “But you wouldn’t do it because you needed him.”

  “No. I didn’t. I don’t. Not anymore. That’s the way it should work, isn’t it? You pick up the pieces and go on? That’s what you told me to do. Am I wrong to have done that?”

  “No. It’s the only healthy thing you could have done.”

  “But you think that maybe he finally realized he’d lost me and that pushed him over the edge?” It wasn’t just guilt that put the skepticism in my voice. It was plain old self-knowledge. “Look, I’m not, and I’ve never been, the sort of woman men go crazy over. Take my word for it. I’m the practical choice, maybe. A good fallback position. I mean, when Don and I decided to get married, his dad told him that he could do a lot worse. That’s the kind of attitude I generate. Not despair. Not . . . not suicide. No one’s ever even been driven to drink over me.”

  “Okay. If you say so.”

  Gallantry wasn’t his strong suit, that was clear. I said, “It’s not my fault. It’s not your fault either, damn it. We didn’t kill him. He didn’t kill himself, either.”

  My fierceness had no effect on him. I should have just let it go, let him go on thinking that he’d been a therapeutic
failure, that my little playacting with Vince had been enough to drive Don crazy, that Don had done the unthinkable. What harm would Mike’s delusion do?

  He said grimly, “Maybe that’s where I screwed up last week. I called his bluff.”

  I suppose I ought to have heard the despair in his voice, understood that he questioned his professional abilities. But all I heard was more of the same, that Don’s death was deliberate. And I wasn’t going to accept that, no matter how much Mike wanted to beat himself up about it. “But there’s the will. If Don planned to commit suicide because Wanda was a gold-digging tramp, and he loved me all along, wouldn’t he have revised the will that left her everything?”

  Mike hadn’t considered that, I could tell, and vindication shivered through me as he absorbed it. But as always, he had an answer for that. “That would make sense. But depressed people aren’t usually sensible. They’re in pain, and they want to stop the pain immediately.”

  “No way. Don never forgot about the bottom line. Trust me. I’ve been through this with him. When he decided to divorce me, he set up a separate company to start building assets for Wanda. Made her treasurer. Gave her shares. He didn’t waste any time.”

  “Was he depressed then?”

  I had to admit he was given then to unexplained laughter and flights of romantic fancy. “But I don’t care. He would check it through his lawyers. Hey, wait a minute.” I grabbed the cellphone from my pocket and dialed.

  When he came on the line, the attorney Al Morgan sounded wary. “Meggie, there’s nothing I can do about the will.”

  “This isn’t about the will. It’s about the Will Bowie sale lawsuit.” I let a hint of hysteria enter my voice. “Am I in trouble? Do I need to get counsel?”

  Now he sounded relieved. “I don’t handle Don’s business affairs, just the personal ones.”

  “But Don told me he’d made an appointment to talk to you this week.” I glanced over at Mike, who only shook his head over this slight emendation of reality.