Switchback

by Matthew Klein

  Timothy tried. He ate a bowl of leftover pasta from the previous Thursday. He poured himself a glass of Dalmore twenty-one-year-old Scotch, neat. He watched TV. After a few hours of staring at the television, not paying attention to the programs, he poured himself another glass of Dalmore and headed upstairs.

  It was ten o’clock. He undressed down to his underwear and then lay on the bed, over the blankets, and turned off the nightstand light. The August moonlight glowed through the window. Timothy felt dizzy, and the bed rocked as if on a dark ocean. Timothy turned his head, burying one eye in his pillow, to look at Katherine’s spot on the bed. In the gloaming, with the half-moonlight, the vision beside him shifted. First the space was empty, just a dark indentation in the bed. Then, as he stared, the space grew darker, and he could imagine someone there, in the shadows. He could imagine her there, suddenly in the darkness, sleeping beside him, with her arm thrown across her forehead, her mouth open, asleep. He wished it, wished he could make it happen, make her appear through sheer force of will. He reached his arm toward the shape in the darkness – and touched nothing but cold bedspread.

  What have I done? he wondered. What have I done? But the Dalmore was merciful, and sleep came.

  13

  Timothy woke and shaved. He put on chinos and a blue pinpoint shirt, then padded down to the kitchen. The sun was bright in the backyard; he could see the day gathering in the sky, hot and sticky, real summer, unforgiving.

  Timothy tried again to make coffee. This time he adjusted the ratio of beans to water, tried one tablespoon per cup of water. He flipped on the coffee maker.

  The doorbell rang. It was Detective Neiderhoffer. ‘No news,’ Neiderhoffer said, right away.

  Timothy led him into the kitchen. ‘I have some coffee brewing.’

  ‘That sounds great.’ Neiderhoffer sat at the kitchen table and removed a notepad from his jacket pocket, flipped through the pages.

  Timothy sat down in the chair across from him.

  Neiderhoffer said, ‘I got in touch with Dr. Charles at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation this morning. You were right. He was your wife’s doctor.’

  Timothy nodded.

  ‘When your wife called you yesterday, she told you she was very sick, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘According to Dr. Charles, your wife hasn’t seen him in the last year. Her last appointment was, let’s see.’ He flipped through his notepad. ‘June 1998. And she was in perfect health.’ He looked up at Timothy. ‘Which is odd, if she was really sick.’

  ‘Yes,’ Timothy said. He tried to remember the last time Katherine had mentioned anything to him about a doctor appointment, about her health. He remembered almost nothing – he vaguely recalled a few gynecologist appointments, a check-up at the optometrist. She never said anything about being seriously ill.

  ‘Of course that doesn’t mean anything,’ Neiderhoffer said. ‘She may have switched doctors and not told you about it. I mean, I guess you two had secrets from each other, right?’

  Timothy stared at Neiderhoffer. Neiderhoffer looked at him benignly. He stroked his caterpillar mustache. Was Neiderhoffer testing him? What was he getting at?

  Then, from the detective’s pocket came an electronic jingle: Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture in tinny computer tones. Neiderhoffer pulled out his cell phone. He looked at the caller ID, held up one finger at Timothy, as if to say, ‘This is the call we’ve been waiting for.’

  He flipped the phone open and said: ‘Neiderhoffer.’

  Neiderhoffer nodded. He listened to the voice at the other end of the line. Timothy saw the corners of his mouth tighten, and Neiderhoffer closed his eyes. Timothy felt his stomach drop.

  ‘Okay,’ Neiderhoffer said. ‘I’m there now.’ He nodded. ‘Right. Okay.’

  He snapped the phone closed, placed it gently on the table.

  ‘That was Sergeant Billings from the Big Sur Police. I have some bad news, Mr. Van Bender. They found the Lexus. It was on Mule Canyon Road, near Wells. The car was parked on the ridge, overlooking some rocks. Just like what you told us to look for, near the ocean.’ He stroked his mustache. ‘They found a woman’s clothes, folded neatly, on the cliff. It matches the outfit you said your wife was wearing. She must have undressed before she, um …’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘Before she what?’

  Neiderhoffer answered a different question. ‘They found some blood on the rocks below. Of course we’ll test it. Make sure it’s hers.’

  Timothy stared into the backyard, past the tall bunches of grass and gnarled apricot trees. The sun was bright, the sky perfectly blue and cloudless.

  ‘Mr. Van Bender, they didn’t find the body. They may never find it. If your wife jumped, and it was low tide, she could have been carried out to sea. We’re going to keep looking – we’ve already called the Coast Guard …’ He waited for Timothy to react. In vain. Then: ‘Mr. Van Bender?’

  Timothy closed his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Until we find the body, we can’t label it a suicide. Legally speaking, this is still a missing persons case. But, I need to be frank with you, now. It’s not likely that your wife is alive.’

  Timothy folded his arms and put his head down on the table. He tried to stay perfectly still, to lose himself in the darkness of his shirt sleeves and the quiet of the moment. What had he done? he thought again. He had ruined everything. And then a thought came to him with strange, sudden lucidity: How odd that I feel self-pity, and not sadness. What is wrong with me? I am the most awful person that I know.

  14

  Palo Alto Daily News, August 19, 1999

  Palo Alto Resident Missing, Apparent Suicide

  Palo Alto police reported that Palo Alto resident Katherine Van Bender, of Waverly Drive, is still missing. Mrs. Van Bender’s car was found in Wells, near Big Sur, ninety miles south of Palo Alto. Although her body has not been located, the case is being treated as a suicide, said Detective Alexander Neiderhoffer, because Mrs. Van Bender reported she was depressed, and there is physical evidence that Mrs. Van Bender jumped to her death into the ocean near her car. The Coast Guard has been assisting in the search for the body, so far unsuccessfully.

  Katherine Van Bender was 43. She is survived by her husband, Timothy Van Bender, who owns Osiris Capital Management in Palo Alto, and by her mother, Faith Sutter, 66, of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The family has scheduled a memorial service for Saturday at 11.00 a.m. at Alta Mesa Memorial Park on Arestradero Drive in Palo Alto. They request that donations to Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital, in the name of Katherine Van Bender, be sent in lieu of flowers.

  15

  Katherine’s mother, Faith Sutter, flew to SFO on Thursday morning. Timothy waited for her downstairs at the baggage carousel.

  She appeared in a line of arriving passengers, between an Armani-clad businessman straightening his tie and spraying aerosol breath mint, and a Sikh in a sky-blue turban. Timothy walked to her. He opened his arms and pulled her toward him.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Faith.’

  She started to cry into his shoulder.

  She pulled back from him and looked into his face. She was a handsome woman, with dyed blonde hair, clear blue eyes and Katherine’s thin aquiline nose. Her skin hung loosely from her neck, wrinkled and soft. She looked at Timothy for a long moment and was about to say something, but stopped. Instead, she shook her head. Then she hugged him again. They held each other in the middle of the baggage claim area, as the rest of the passengers filed past them and continued their lives.

  The journey to the house in Palo Alto took about one hour and fifteen minutes, during which time Timothy realized that she hated him.

  He had not been aware of it before. They had seen each other infrequently, twice a year, at Christmas and during an occasional summer visit. Katherine and Timothy often asked her to come, and offered to pay for her travel, but Faith still worked as a second-grade teacher in Cambridge, making travel during the school year difficult. In the summ
er she preferred to stay in her own house, she said, tending to her tomatoes.

  When she did visit, relations with Timothy were cordial, if perhaps cool. He tried to keep his distance from her, and he used his wife as a buffer, ostensibly to let Katherine spend time with her mother without Timothy’s meddling. But over the years Faith seemed more and more distant to Timothy. He suspected, but never was sure, that Katherine confided in her mother, revealing her own unhappiness and pointing to Timothy as its cause.

  Now, back at the house, Timothy helped Faith from the car and led her up the slate path into the house. At the foot of the stairs he gently tried to take her suitcase from her hand. She pulled it away from him. ‘I’ll take it,’ she snapped.

  ‘Let me help,’ he offered.

  ‘You’ve done quite enough already.’

  Timothy took a step back. He had expected to play the role of comforting son-in-law to the old woman. He was not expecting fury. ‘Faith,’ he began. ‘What’s—’

  ‘She talked to me, you know,’ Faith said. ‘She told me all about you.’

  Timothy was dumbfounded. What had Katherine told her?

  ‘Faith, I loved your daughter. She was my wife, and I loved her more than anyone else in the world, whatever else you might think.’

  She shook her head. ‘You’ve always said the right words, Timothy, for as long as I’ve known you. But it’s what’s in your heart that matters.’ She lifted her suitcase, turned, and headed up the stairs. After three steps she stopped and looked down at him. ‘Everyone gets what they deserve. Remember that.’

  Until they found her body they could not issue a death certificate, even if suicide was the presumptive cause. But, as Neiderhoffer gently suggested, they might never find the body – given the tides and the surf and the rocks near Big Sur – and so, even without a final cause of death, the family had every right to hold a memorial service to honor Katherine, and to bring closure to the tragedy.

  Ann Beatty, Katherine’s friend from down the street, offered to arrange the memorial service on Timothy’s behalf. He gave her a few phone numbers, the friends he could think of off-hand, and she said she would take it from there. She called these friends, and together they assembled a further list of people to contact. By the time the Friday service was held, more than a hundred people had been called, and Timothy was surprised by the number of friends and acquaintances that turned out.

  They held the ceremony at Alta Mesa Memorial, a pretty cemetery near Foothill Park. They gathered in the indoor chapel, a studiedly non-denominational room, with pews facing the front, where Ann had placed a large photograph of Katherine on an easel, and two massive flower arrangements – sprays of white gladiolas, daisies, and carnations – on either side. The photograph, grainy from being over-enlarged, showed Katherine smiling, squinting into the sun. Timothy remembered taking the picture ten years earlier, during happier days, as they vacationed in the San Juan Islands. They were riding the ferry from Bellingham to Orcas Island. Katherine was leaning over the iron railing, her elbows supporting her body, looking into the sea. She was younger then: there was none of the sadness in her eyes that Timothy remembered. Now, enlarged and sepia-toned, ten years too young, the photograph made her look otherworldly, a ghost, frozen in time.

  During the ceremony Timothy sat alone in the front pew. Sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows, filtered by abstract shapes that could have been birds, or flowers, or perhaps nothing at all. Reverend Clark, the Rector at All Saints, spoke first. He described Katherine as a vibrant woman, a loving wife, and a woman of great faith. He said that she would be missed by all the people who came in contact with her love. He said that surely the members of All Saints, and other friends of the Van Benders, would stand beside Timothy and support him during his hour of need.

  Then Reverend Clark said, ‘I’ve been told that Timothy Van Bender would like to say a few words about his wife.’

  Timothy stood up. He had not prepared a eulogy, but he knew the words would come to him, as they always did. He nodded, walked to the front of the room, and stood beside Katherine’s photograph.

  He began quietly. ‘First, thank you all for coming. It still hasn’t sunk in, that she’s gone. I feel like I’m in a dream, and that I’m going to wake up soon. But I guess I won’t.’

  Timothy looked around the room. Faith Sutter sat immediately in front of him, in a wide-brimmed black lace hat pulled down over her eyes, her lips clenched. Next to her sat Ann Beatty, dressed in a black suit. In the next row he saw members of the Circus Club: the indicted Mike Stanton and young Wife #2, the Greenhills, even the club General Manager, Gary Currie. He saw Frank Arnheim, his attorney, a pudgy bald man with a bullet head, a double-chin, and a shiny pate. In the back row, among other faces he didn’t recognize, Timothy saw one he did: Detective Neiderhoffer. Neiderhoffer wore a surprisingly good suit, dark and well-tailored, with a handkerchief in his pocket. Near him, Timothy saw the Kid and Tricia Fountain. She wore a tight black dress. Tricia nodded at Timothy. Was it a gesture of agreement? Of complicity?

  Timothy continued. ‘I love my wife. We were married for twenty years. That’s a long time. I miss her already. I’m so terribly, terribly sad that she’s gone.’ He turned to the photograph. ‘I love you, Katherine. I wish I could have you back.’

  From the audience, Timothy heard a woman cry, but he didn’t want to look into the crowd to see who it was. He was on the verge of breaking down himself, and decided to end his eulogy there. He held up his hand, nodded, swallowed, and returned to his seat. Before sitting, he glanced at the back row. Neiderhoffer stared at him. It was a friendly enough stare – with an open, sympathetic face – but it made Timothy feel uneasy, so that he looked down quickly, took his seat, and, for the rest of the morning, refused to look at Neiderhoffer again.

  After the ceremony, when he returned to the house, a crowd followed him so he would not be alone: Faith Sutter, smoldering with sadness and anger; Anne Beatty from down the street; the Greenhills from the club; Reverend Clark, glancing at his watch to see how much longer he had to stay to make a decent showing; even the Kid, who looked like a wide-eyed doe, as if death was a new and shocking experience.

  Cars filled the driveway and the street, and the house buzzed with voices and activity and women expertly preparing food, keeping the quiet of death at bay. So when he walked through the house, interrupted by people offering condolences and shaking his hand and hugging him, Timothy hardly noticed that the window in the den was open, and that the slatted Levolor blinds were swaying in the wind.

  He passed the window and noticed too that the screen was askew, as if it had been replaced sloppily, and somewhere in the back of his mind he thought it was strange, because he never left the windows open.

  But other than that, the house was fine. Nothing was missing. There were no muddy footprints or ransacked bureaus. And so he thought nothing more of it, and decided that he had been forgetful, and in his rush to the memorial service, he had not properly locked the house.

  16

  Life returned to normal. Or at least, as normal as life can be after your wife throws herself from a rocky precipice.

  Timothy returned to work after spending five days at home popping valiums and watching daytime TV. The Kid had done well, running the office, telling investors what had happened to Timothy, handholding them and answering their questions. Their condolences, no doubt sincere enough, were tinged with ice and steel: would this tragedy adversely affect Timothy Van Bender and Osiris LP? Would it change the strategy? Would it alter Osiris’ returns? These people had not become rich by allowing themselves to brood. The Kid reassured them that Timothy’s absence would be brief and that when he returned to the helm of Osiris, he would continue doing what he did best, making money on their behalf. That was all they wanted to hear.

  What the Kid did not tell them was that, with or without Timothy Van Bender, Osiris was facing imminent ruin. The yen, which had so agreeably started moving down the momen
t that Osiris went short, had, almost on the day of Katherine’s death, reversed and began moving upward with alarming speed.

  The three-million-dollar paper profit that Timothy had already counted on to make back his first loss had slowly dwindled, first to two million, and then one. On the day of Timothy’s return to the office, the huge yen trade was back in the red, and the twenty-four-million-dollar loss had, somehow, preposterously, grown to twenty-five million dollars.

  This was what the Kid explained to Timothy as he greeted him at the elevator on Wednesday morning, his first day back to work. First, that the yen had risen past seventy-five; second, that all the other funds that had shorted the yen were now buying to cover their positions, further increasing the speed of the yen’s ascent; that Osiris’ loss had grown to twenty-five million; and, finally, that Pinky Dewer had called several times, asking for his money. After all this, the Kid said: ‘Welcome back. You look good. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Like shit,’ Timothy said. He pushed open the glass doors leading to the Osiris offices. Tricia was there, at the front desk. Timothy had not spoken to her since the night he fled her apartment – the night Katherine disappeared.

  ‘Hi, Timothy,’ she said. ‘Welcome back.’

  ‘Thank you, Tricia.’ He nodded. ‘I’m glad to see you.’

  But the Kid was right behind him, staring at them, trying to figure out what it all meant. Timothy wasn’t sure what he would say to Tricia, anyway, even if the Kid were not gawking. It seemed beside the point to tell her that their affair, however abortive, was over. Somehow, being a sudden widower made cheating less fun.

  So he said, ‘Thanks for standing by me during this time.’

  That seemed sufficiently vague, even conspiratorial – maybe just what she needed.