Fifteen Minutes to Live

by Phoef Sutton

  When she woke up he told her his parents were out of town at his Uncle Tod’s funeral. She accepted the explanation with her usual complacent gratitude. There was no sign of her earlier desperation. Such self-awareness was evidently rare – for her sake, Carl hoped it was very rare.

  The doorbell rang and he threw on his bathrobe and ran down to answer it. Kit was on one doorstep, looking oddly childlike in the dusk. Carl asked if he’d found anything out about her.

  “Yeah.” Kit’s voice was hesitant and uncertain.

  “What did you find out?”

  It took him a moment to answer.

  “She’s dead.”

  FOUR

  She had loved to sail, a preoccupation Carl had always found annoying. Southern Californians were, by birthright, obliged to love the ocean and the beach, but Carl was uncomfortable there. Hot sun tightened and pricked at his skin, lying in it made as much sense to him as voluntary relaxing in a swarm of mosquitoes. Sand was useful as a tool for planning wood; letting it actually touch one’s skin and collect in sensitive crevices as a form of recreation seemed contrary to the most rudimentary concepts of proper hygiene. And sailing, combining all these irritations with hard physical labor and rope burns, was a trial Carl found hard to endure.

  But Jesse loved it and for her sake, and for the sight of her in a skimpy two-piece bathing suit, he had been willing to put up with it. And she was beautiful on a boat. Not because of the swimming suit, after all he’d seen her naked and nothing could compete with the wonder of that. The beauty came from all the clichés of the sea. The wind in her hair, the sunlight reflected in her eyes, the sweat glistening on her body smelling of cedar and milk. At times he caught sight of her on the deck and he was filled with a love for her that he could not understand. It had nothing to do with lust or friendship and it made him feel unspeakably sad because he was too stupid to know what to do with this feeling. He would know when he was older, he had told himself. He was older and had not felt it since.

  So it was worth the sunburn and the bloodied palms and the pulled muscles and the constant refrain of her father snapping “Not that rope,” at him whenever he was given a task, and her little brother laughing joyously at all his mistakes, just to see her in her glory. She was a sea creature then, and he was a poor landlocked mammal condemned to strain for glimpses of her through the surf.

  She’d drowned three months ago.

  She’d gone sailing with her husband (husband, Carl squirmed when Kit used the word) and brother-in-law and had fallen overboard in a sudden gale. The husband had searched desperately for days with the help of the Coast Guard, but it was no use. The search was called off. The body was never recovered.

  Carl and Kit looked at the body sleeping peacefully in Carl’s bed.

  “She doesn’t look like a ghost,” Carl said, after they had returned quietly to the living room.

  “Have you ever seen one?” Kit asked, opening a bottled water.

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “She’s not a ghost, Kit.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’m not an idiot.”

  Kit shrugged and took a long swig from the bottle. “So what happened?”

  “Obviously she made it to shore somehow. Someone rescued her. The accident must have injured her brain in some way so that she can’t recall what happened. Or anything else.”

  “Okay,” said Kit, in the same studied, critical tone he used when they were coming up with stories for their show, “where has she been for the last three months?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When you found her, was she filthy, dirty, did she reek of the streets?”

  “No.”

  “So someone’s been taking care of her.”

  “Yes.”

  “But not telling her husband or the authorities?”

  “Maybe they didn’t know who she was.”

  Kit considered that, silently.

  “Tell me about the husband,” Carl said, uncomfortably.

  “He’s an investment banker, pretty well off. Lives in San Marino. His name is Martin Ackerman.”

  Carl picked up the phone book and started leafing through it.

  “What are you doing?” Kit asked.

  “Well, we have to let him know.”

  “Over the phone? Kit looked dubious. “It’s going to be a shock, don’t you think?”

  “Well, I don’t know if I can break it to him gradually. I could start telling him ‘you’re wife’s a little less dead than you thought,’ and then work up from there.”

  “Well, you can’t just blurt it out. There ought to be something you can do to prepare him.”

  Carl sat down on the couch, deflated by the thought of it. How do you prepare someone for a resurrection?

  FIVE

  It didn’t look like her house.

  A low-slung ranch house, all roof and hedges, hiding its face from the world, it had no trace of her openness, no sign of her welcoming smile. Well, maybe she’d changed since he’d known her. Then he thought of her waiting around the corner in the car with Kit and knew she hadn’t changed at all.

  They’d decided Carl should go in first and try to pave the way, so Kit had insisted they keep the car out of sight, just in case Ackerman might glance out his front window and see his dead wife in the back seat of a BMW.

  He rang the bell, hoping a maid would answer so he’d have a few more seconds to figure out what he was going to say. A tall man in his forties opened the door. He wasn’t the maid.

  “Hello, are you Martin Ackerman?” Carl asked.

  He nodded. Carl realized he’d have to come up with another sentence.

  “I’m an old friend of your wife’s. I was very shocked to hear about her death.” That much was true. “Could we talk for a second?”

  Ackerman looked at his visitor. Carl tried to figure out if it was sorrow or resentment or just boredom that lay behind his eyes. He nodded again and moved to let Carl pass.

  There was no trace of her inside the house, either. It was a man’s space, with heavy dark upholstered furniture and dark green fabric on the walls. Leaded windows diffused what little light could slip past the shrubs and roof. It was a room that guaranteed security from skin cancer.

  What illumination there was came from three standing lamps, covered with thick shades. Carl made it to a chair without stubbing his toe and considered this a small victory. He tried to tell from Ackerman’s expression whether he was expected to sit or not, but either it was too dim to make out or Ackerman had no expression. Carl sat down anyway.

  “Somethin’ to drink?”

  Carl turned in surprise to see a maid next to him. She was in her late thirties, adorable, Hispanic, and almost completely round. He exchanged a few words with her in his hard won Spanish that always seemed to amuse native speakers so much. She laughed and went to get the coffee, leaving Carl alone with the problem at hand.

  “Of course,” Carl said, hating the way he started. “I hadn’t seen your wife for many years, and then the other night…” the other night what? He backed off, tried another tack. “The other night I heard she’d died and, well like I said, it came as a great shock.”

  Ackerman agreed that it was a great shock.

  Carl agreed with his agreement.

  “You didn’t tell me your name,” Ackerman said. His voice betrayed no trace of interest. His face, topped by prematurely gray hair, showed no emotion. Was this the numbness of grief or a businessman’s poker face?

  Carl told him his name. Ackerman looked at him with a hint of surprise. “You knew her in high school, didn’t you? Jessica… mentioned you.”

  Carl nodded, his face flushed with heat as he wondered what she might have said. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Then you know Jeffrey?”

  “I did.”

  Ackerman took a letter from a desk by the window and handed it to Carl. “This came tod
ay.”

  Carl looked at the envelope. The postmark was Peruvian. He opened the letter and skimmed it. Jeff was working there with a Catholic relief fund. Carl remembered Kit’s question about what Jeff might be doing now – he could have guessed for a long time and never come up with this. The note was filled with misspellings and bad grammar – evidently Jeff’s scholastic skills had not improved.

  To call it a letter was an exaggeration. It was a note, undated and written in haste to inform Jesse and Martin that someone named Father Vincent needed help in the interior and Jeffrey had volunteered. Since the countryside was “a little less developed than here in Ayacucho” (Carl shuddered at the thought) he was going to be “sort of out of touch for a while. Can’t say how long really.” “Jesse,” he went on, “I know things are rough. Hope they aren’t really as bad as Martin seems to think, but remember that the Lord is there for you. I know your rolling your eyes at that one, but you must believe it. I pray for you. Love, Jeffrey.”

  Carl checked the postmark before handing it back to Ackerman. It was dated two weeks ago. Two weeks after Jesse’s ‘death.’ “He doesn’t know?” Carl asked.

  Ackerman slipped the letter back in its drawer. “We’ve tried to get in touch with him, but it’s not easy. Perhaps he’ll be happier for awhile, not knowing.” His tone was flat and seemed to require no reply.

  The maid, who Ackerman now identified as Mari, was with them again now, pouring the coffee in a happy bustling way, as if the room were sunny and filled with children. Carl wondered aloud if the American Embassy might be able to help locate Jeff and was surprised by her bitter laugh. Lima was her home, she told him, and she implied that Americans weren’t the best people to go to for help there.

  She bustled out the door and Carl and the room returned to its somber darkness. The wrong person owns this house, Carl thought. Give Mari a place like this and she could make something out of it. Jesse would hate this room, Carl thought, and he knew that that was the reason he wasn’t telling Ackerman about his wife out in the car. But keeping the truth back wasn’t an option, he reminded himself.

  “It’s a shame,” Carl said, “that they didn’t get a chance to see each other before…”

  “Oh, they saw each other. Or at least he saw her.”

  Carl looked up surprised.

  “Excuse me, but how much do you know about my wife’s death?”

  The abruptness of the question startled him. It was as if this were the first time Ackerman had actually spoken to him. “Almost nothing. I guess that’s why I’m here. I hope I’m not intruding.”

  “Of course not. It must be very painful knowing you’ll never be able to make your peace with her.”

  Carl looked away. She must have told him then, he thought, feeling himself blush. He took a sip of coffee to cover embarrassment and scalded his tongue.

  “Her death was a terrible tragedy, of course, but in a way it might have been something of, well, a kindness.” Ackerman took a breath, looking like someone who had told a story once too often. “She’d been very sick. Not physically…Well, no, it was physical, but…you see, I still don’t quite understand it. She began to behave strangely. To forget things. We didn’t take it seriously at first. It seemed like simple absent-mindedness. But then, one day we went shopping and I saw her pick out a scarf, then she came back and took another one, and another one. All the same scarf. I asked her why she wanted so many, and she didn’t know what I was talking about, didn’t remember taking even the first one. When I showed them all to her, she became hysterical. Things fell apart so fast after that. At first she’d have her bad times, but then she’d been fine again and we’d be so relieved, but then… In the end, her short-term memory completely disappeared. Do you know what that means? She couldn’t remember anything for more than fifteen minutes at a time.”

  “We thought it was premature senility, Alzheimer’s disease, we just didn’t know. The doctors wanted to run tests, even though there were no cures for any of the things it might have been. I suppose they just wanted to be able to put a label on it.”

  “They were certainly impressed with what they found. It’s not fair to say that they were pleased, but you couldn’t deny that they were at least exhilarated to be working with something a bit off the beaten track. It’s called Korsakov’s Syndrome. It destroys the part of the brain that remembers.”

  “At first she just couldn’t learn anything new. Then it started on her old memories, wiping them out, eating up more and more of her life. She forgot she lived in this house, wondered why we weren’t at our old place in Pasadena.”

  “Then she forgot me. One morning she looked at me and I knew she hadn’t the vaguest idea who I was. All our friends, the nurses, my family, they were all strangers to her. She was frightened of us, thought we were holding her prisoner. Wanted us to call her parents – she forgot they were dead.”

  “By the time she died, half her life was gone. She thought she was still a child living at home. Jeff came out here a week before she died. I thought he might be able to get through to her somehow, or at least be a familiar face for her. But she didn’t know who he was. Her brother was ten years old and this was a man. He only looked familiar enough to frighten her.”

  “There’s no cure?” Carl asked.

  “No, no, the damage is irreversible. The doctor tried to comfort me, he said memory isn’t all there is to life, he said I could still make her comfortable and happy. I can’t think of what he meant. Unless he meant comfortable like a dog or cat and I couldn’t think of her as a house pet. Can I get you anything? You look pale.”

  Carl tried to shrug him off.

  “I’m fine. It just must have been very painful for you.”

  “Oh yes,” he agreed, quickly. “It’s horrible to say, but her death was a comfort to me. If I had to think of her living for another thirty or forty years among strangers who won’t let her call her mother…Well, as I said, it may have been as kindness.” He smiled a quick smile and started for the door. “I hope I was some help.”

  “Jeff …in his letter didn’t seem aware of how bad off she was, but if he’d seen her…”

  “Jeff is one of those people who believe that if you ignore a problem, it will go away. Only he uses the word ‘pray’ in place of ignore.”

  Carl tried to laugh. “I don’t know if relief work in Peru is ignoring problems.”

  “Well, that depends on which problems he’s ignoring, doesn’t it?”

  Ackerman opened the door. He was clearly being dismissed. Now was the time to tell him.

  “But what happened on the boat? How did she die?”

  Ackerman didn’t want to keep talking, but he did. “It was the day after Jeffrey left. My brother Martin and Jessica were very close. They used to go sailing together, she always loved it. So he thought it might make her ‘happy and comfortable,’” he spit the words, derisively, “to go for a sail. He was wrong. She forgot she’d ever known how to sail. She was terrified. We were caught in a squall, she became disoriented and panicked. Neither of us saw her go over, but when we looked around she was gone. We tried to find her. We couldn’t.”

  There was no grief in his voice, just weary discomfort. Perhaps he’d lost his energy to mourn.

  Carl had to speak now. “Look, I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just going to…It didn’t happen like that.”

  Carl meant to go on, he meant to say that she hadn’t drowned, that someone had picked her up or she’d somehow made it to shore. But there was a startled look and then a stillness in Ackerman’s eyes that made him stop.

  “What?” Ackerman asked.

  “After she was in the water. She didn’t just go down like that…”

  Even then Carl was going to go on, to stop this clumsy hemming and hawing and spit it out. But Ackerman stood and walked to the door and very quietly shut them in.

  “How do you know that?” he whispered when he turned back. His look sent a cold chill through Carl and he knew they w
ere talking about two different things.

  “I know,” Carl said.

  He circled the couch, keeping his eyes locked to Carl’s as he moved. “You were on the other boat?” Carl didn’t shake his head. He didn’t nod. He didn’t do anything but try his best not to faint. Ackerman laughed. “You don’t know anything. Get out of here.”

  Carl spoke without thinking. “I know she didn’t drown like you said.”

  He regarded Carl in silence for a moment. “Well, you’re certainly living up to her descriptions of you.” Carl didn’t even blush at that. He just kept focused on Ackerman, the way a dancer focuses on a spot when twirling, to keep from kneeling over. Ackerman pulled a checkbook from a table by the window. “What do you want? Money?”

  Carl didn’t answer.

  “Come on. I know you’re making it all up, but I don’t want you causing trouble. How much do you want? I’m in a giving mood.”

  Carl weighed his answer. “Twenty thousand.”

  Ackerman laughed and threw the checkbook back in its drawer. “Get out of here.”

  “I know someone who saw everything that happened on that boat,” Carl said, and he wasn’t even lying.

  Ackerman stared at him for a long while, then he took the checkbook out, scribbled on it, tore out the check and handed it to Carl. It was made out to cash for twenty thousand dollars. “Get the hell out of here.”

  Carl’s hand was shaking as he took the check and walked slowly out of the room. He passed Mari but never focused on her. He was surprised he could make it to the door. His hand was cold with sweat when he turned the doorknob. Ackerman stopped him then, with a whisper.

  “Don’t come looking for more.”

  Carl nodded and was out the door in the bright sunshine, blinding after the darkness of that room. He crossed the lawn, stumbled on the curb, feeling Ackerman’s eyes on his back, clutching the wet check in his hand.

  He rounded the corner, walking into the hissing sprinklers of a corner house, the coldness of the water hitting him with a shock. He fell to his knees and spit. He tore the check to pieces and threw them down the sewer. He sat on the green lawn and let the fake rain fall on him as he played the conversation back in his mind.