Dead Time

by Stephen White

I felt a compelling need to see his eyes. He wasn’t giving me a chance. I waited a few moments before I asked, “How are you sleeping?”

  He knew what I was asking. From the day I brought him home to Spanish Hills from Tel Aviv, Jonas had grown progressively anxious as bedtime neared. It could take him hours to fall asleep.

  “Okay,” he said. “The same, maybe.”

  “Still trouble falling asleep?”

  He looked up at me and nodded.

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  I’d already made a judgment that, despite Kim’s cooking, Jonas’s appetite hadn’t improved. He was as thin as I’d ever seen him.

  The fact that he seemed to be getting along well with his cousins was, in contrast, a great piece of news, the first real sign that the initial bruises from his trauma might be beginning to change colors.

  “I want to be clear. You’re telling me that you don’t want to come to the city anymore?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you want me to go back home, Jonas? To Boulder?”

  He kicked the rock again. I realized at that moment that my stepson appeared to be left-footed. I’d had no idea. He was right-handed. I had so much catching up to do.

  Including some reading on mixed dominance.

  “I think so,” he said finally. “Yeah. You can go back to Colorado.”

  It was a gutsy move for the kid in so many ways. Since his mother’s death I had been his security blanket, and he was sending me away. He was either oblivious to my feelings about his decision, which was good, or confident enough in my relationship with him that he felt he could risk my reaction, which was better. I hoped it was the latter.

  I tried to make my next words tender. “If I do go to Boulder, I’ll come back out and get you whenever you want. And I’ll be here for sure when your visit is over. We can fly back to Colorado together,” I said. I wanted Jonas to understand that he could change the day-to-day rules of our relationship if he needed to, but that any short-term evolution he threw at me wouldn’t change my commitment to him.

  “Maybe…I was, you know…” He kicked the rock and skipped quickly ahead to catch up with it. I lengthened my stride a little so I could keep up. He went on. “Maybe I can…I was just thinking…I could fly back…by myself. I’m old enough, I think. Aunt Kim will make sure I get on the right plane.” He swung his leg extra hard and whacked the stone a good fifty feet down the lane.

  No skipping that time. He ran after it in full sprint.

  The kid had speed. Who knew? You could have used a calendar to time his mother in the hundred-meter dash. Peter, Jonas’s birth father, had been nimble. Jonas must have gotten his dad’s quickness.

  “Maybe you can,” I said to his back. “Should we wait and see…how you feel about it a couple more days? There’s no hurry.”

  He pulled to a stop when he reached the stone, turned toward me, bit his lower lip, and looked at my eyes. “Yeah. Let’s.” He waited for me to reach him.

  I said, “You like your cousins, don’t you?”

  He smiled and nodded.

  I got chills. Hey, Adrienne. Maybe they aren’t dweebs. Who’d have thunk it?

  On the train back into the city later that night I considered many things. I wondered whether I should have acquiesced to Marty’s insistence that Jonas make an extended visit east that first summer, so soon after his mother’s death. I wondered whether Jonas’s newfound attachment to his mother’s extended family was artificial or real. I wondered, too, whether, despite Jonas’s wishes, I should stay in the city.

  Just in case things turned to shit.

  And of course I wondered whether Marty would be calling me in some number of days to once again suggest that he and I talk. The next time would be to tell me that Jonas had decided not to return to Boulder at all.

  If the last thing happened—if Marty tried to hijack my son—I would have to answer to Adrienne. She would be sitting in her heavenly perch witnessing what was happening down on earth. She wouldn’t be pleased. I imagined that she would display her dissatisfaction by crossing over to the celestial dark side. She would track down whoever up there was in charge of the launching and targeting of meteorites, and she would order one with sharp edges sent my way.

  I give you one thing to do, Bubela. One thing—look after my kid. And what do you do? After three months, you lose him to my schmuck brother. Oy.

  I decided that fifteen minutes of alone time was a lot for a hypo-manic puppy. Despite the quiet, I had a nagging concern that the Havanese wasn’t merely napping someplace she didn’t belong—like on my pillow—but that she was up to something nefarious. I walked down the hall to the bedroom.

  The dog, it turned out, had not been sleeping. She had been quite busy.

  Shredding. As far as I could tell, she had sliced up much of the June issue of The Atlantic. It had been on my side of the bed. While the dog had been on Lauren’s side of the bed, she had been even more industrious. She had completely destroyed the blueprints of the floor plans for Jonas’s remodeled room in the basement, as well as the glossy covers, front and back, of three design magazines that Lauren had been using for inspiration for the transformation.

  I have had dogs for most of my life. I had never seen anything that even approximated the quality of the destructive work this ten-pound bundle of silky white and black hair had accomplished in less than a quarter hour of determined razoring. She hadn’t ripped the papers apart, leaving big chunks here and there—something Emily used to do during her destructive puppy phase. Nor had the puppy taken the magazines or documents in her mouth and shaken them as though she were trying to throttle a chipmunk, leaving the paper in crumpled, saliva-drenched clumps.

  She had methodically shredded them into small pieces as though she were intent on mimicking the work of a crosscut shredder. The bits that remained, less than a centimeter square, were not strewn about. She’d left them approximately where she’d shredded them. The activity was not about random destruction; it seemed to be about enjoyment of the shredding.

  I stood at the foot of the bed in awe of her work.

  She was proud of it too. Her tail, curled above her ass like a long mink apostrophe, was flying to and fro. Her little butt danced back and forth in counterpoint.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  His Ex

  Stevie refused to help me search for her sister.

  Eric, too, remained unconvinced that Lisa’s absence constituted a crisis. “She needs a little time. She’ll be in touch,” he told me. “Don’t worry so much.”

  “But—” I’d say, before he’d interrupt me right back.

  “She doesn’t want our baby. She can have one of her own whenever she wants.”

  Then where the hell is she?

  Besides being a teacher, Eric was a policy consultant. He counseled big businesses and famous politicians and governments of all stripes. He rarely told me what he told any of them. But me? For me he usually counseled patience. At face value, in these circumstances, it was a reasonable position. But when I pressed the fact that Lisa was carrying our child in her womb, her failure to stay in touch with us for even a few days seemed like the most unreasonable act imaginable.

  Being patient did not seem reasonable. Barely even possible.

  I tried to counter my natural impulse, which was to demand that Eric see things from my perspective, instead endeavoring with all my might to allow him to enjoy the prime spot at the front of our nascent family’s very short line. He was reminding me every day—twice some days—that he was this close to getting the position he coveted in advance of the next campaign. Patience, patience.

  For Eric, going public with the fact that we had hired a surrogate who had disappeared with our rapidly growing embryo in her womb might change the political and institutional perception of him in ways that he could not anticipate, and certainly ways that he could not control. He had been manufacturing a carefully crafted image. From his point of v
iew, any controversial behavior in his personal life could only bring him the exact wrong kind of attention.

  That would be notoriety.

  Prominent people in politics and in big corporations don’t embrace consultants who are forced to check baggage. People hire consultants who travel light. The smaller the carry-on, in fact, the better.

  Eric was presenting position papers, returning phone calls to important people no one could know he was talking with, doing late-night meetings in hotels where other important people were staying. He was lining up support. Mostly, from my perspective, he was gone. Traveling. Unspoken between us was the reality that he didn’t need the distraction of participating in an unnecessary search for his child’s surrogate mother.

  Eric had many colleagues and many friends—some were as religious as him, though many were not—who maintained that the only acceptable way to bear children was the way that couples had borne offspring through the millennia. One man, one woman, one marriage, and a fruitful copulation.

  One womb. Only one womb.

  If those circumstances, those biomechanics, and those natural limitations didn’t serve to bless the couple with a baby, so be it. Adoption was the only permissible alternative. Any intervention that required the borrowing—or, God forbid, the perceived renting—of another woman’s womb would be frowned upon.

  Eric didn’t want to be public with our conception plan because he didn’t want to become the public face of surrogacy. If I gave him the podium, he would argue to me that we couldn’t afford for him to become the public face of surrogacy.

  I suspected that his wish that I not dig around in whatever had happened in the Grand Canyon was because of similar concerns. Public scrutiny of the facts of what happened in the Grand Canyon that day might bring Eric notoriety. He did not want notoriety.

  If things had gone well, this would have been my second trimester, the quiet time during my pregnancy. His perspective was that now that we were using a surrogate, the whole thing should have been even quieter. The subtext? Take care of this, Merideth.

  That was the way I feared Eric looked at it. My fault, anatomically. My problem, administratively.

  He promised me he needed only a week or so to wrap things up with the people he needed to impress. Then the position would be his.

  I didn’t tell him that I had gone ahead and hired Sam. I figured the fight we would have about it would be a distraction for him.

  He kept telling me he didn’t need distractions.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Her Ex

  I’d been back in Boulder for less than a day when Wallace got in touch with me again. The screen on my cell phone read POTEET.

  His call distracted me from the intensity with which I was missing my family. And Adrienne.

  During the first few weeks after her funeral, Jonas’s grief at his mother’s death was palpable. I’d tried to set aside my own sadness. But with my wife and daughter in Europe, and Jonas in New York, the eastern rim of the Boulder Valley had a huge hole where Adrienne’s beating heart had been. I felt her absence from Spanish Hills like an increase in atmospheric pressure. Nothing was as light as it had been. The sky seemed smaller.

  “Hi, Wallace,” I said. I’d had no idea how long Wallace’s deliberations were going to take. I was convinced that he and Cassandra would reach a decision that it wouldn’t be in Cara’s best interest to talk with me about the Grand Canyon thing.

  I expected Wallace and I would talk vaguely about the power of old wounds. I would accept Wallace’s determination with neither argument nor disappointment. Merideth, with whatever help Sam could provide, would muddle through her dilemma and solve the old Grand Canyon mystery on her own. Or she wouldn’t.

  “Listen,” he said in a voice that cut off the small talk the way a sharp knife takes the top off a banana. “I need a favor. A big…favor.”

  I moved to let him off the hook. “There’s not even a need to ask. If you don’t want me to bother Cara about this…consider it done. I wouldn’t even think of—”

  “Give me a second here. The favor is that we want you to talk with her.”

  “What?”

  “I’m concerned about my daughter. I wasn’t even certain I was going to tell Cara that you wanted to talk with her about the Grand Canyon…experience. Maybe I should have trusted my instincts—she didn’t react well when I brought it up. Regardless, the bottom line is that she won’t talk to us about this. After a lot of back and forth, she agreed that she would talk to you.”

  Me? “Why?”

  With strained levity he said, “I threatened to come out and stalk her if she didn’t.”

  “What kind of concerned are you, Wallace?”

  He pondered the question for a decent interval before he said, “About her well-being, Alan. Her withdrawal from us, from the family, truly worries me.”

  I was surprised. “Any history I should know about?”

  “You didn’t know her well when she was younger, but she’s always been a high-strung kid, Alan. She didn’t get the same mellow gene that her brother and sister have. Cara saw Frannie Rein for a while in high school—being fourteen wasn’t easy for her. Frannie helped. But then Cara seemed to have a setback after the episode in the Grand Canyon. Withdrawal, depression. Drama.”

  Frannie Rein was a local psychiatrist. Frannie was good, an especially sensitive therapist with adolescents. But the fact that Wallace and Cassandra had chosen a psychiatrist—and not a psychologist or a social worker—for their daughter’s therapy raised another question in my mind. I asked it aloud: “Was she on meds when she was seeing Frannie?”

  The name of the drug would have told me important things about Frannie’s diagnosis.

  Wallace said, “No.”

  Considering the circumstances and the nature of the favor he was asking, his reply was not only too cryptic but also too parsimonious for my taste. “What about now?”

  “Not that I know of. But…that doesn’t mean she isn’t. She’s not a kid anymore. She’s an adult.” After a moment, he added, “They grow up.”

  The last words were wistful, but I also heard them as a caution from Wallace to a friend with younger children. I said, “And Cara agreed to talk with me, knowing that I…wanted to ask her about whatever happened at the Grand Canyon?”

  “She asked me what you knew. How you knew. Whom you’ve talked to. I think it’s only because you already know something that she agreed to talk with you at all.”

  “What did you tell her I knew, Wallace?”

  “That I didn’t think you knew much. My gut says she’s afraid you already know something she doesn’t want anyone to know. Whatever happened down there is a big secret, Alan.”

  Ten minutes later I had agreed to talk to Cara, if she indeed proved as willing a participant as her father thought she would be. A big part of the protracted conversation with Wallace involved a topic that was unavoidable for psychotherapists in complicated help-giving situations that involved family members or close friends.

  Would I be talking to Cara as a psychologist or as a concerned family friend?

  Although Wallace knew that the question would ultimately be resolved by Cara, and by me, he made it quite clear that he was asking for my involvement as a family friend. The distinction was crucial. If I were functioning as a family friend, I would be free to share my impressions with Wallace and Cassandra. Were I involved as a therapist—even if only long enough to convince Cara to find another therapist, one without a conflict of interest—my discussions with her would be confidential.

  Since I had no way of knowing what Cara had in mind, the only commitment I made to Wallace was that I would contact Cara as a concerned friend. Anything that happened subsequently would be at her request, and by mutual agreement.

  The last few minutes of the phone conversation with Wallace had to do with the “big” part of the “big, big favor.”

  He wanted me to go to L.A. to talk with his daughter. “She won’t leave work.
She can’t. She has to be on the set every day.”

  “Weekend?” I asked.

  “She won’t come here,” he said. “Not right now. She’s made that clear.”

  “She won’t?” I said, hoping to learn more.

  “I know I’m asking a lot. You can probably tell from my voice that this feels urgent, Alan. Will you be able to get away from New York for a couple of days? Cassandra and I will pay for everything, of course.” He wasn’t trying to feign any nonchalance about the gravity of the situation. He wanted me to go talk to his daughter immediately. While I was fumbling to formulate a reply, he asked, “How soon are you and Jonas coming back to Boulder?”

  “I’m in Boulder right now,” I said. I then offered a capsule explanation of the recent progression of events with Jonas in New York.

  “Risky,” Wallace said, “for both of you.” He had immediately recognized the psychological vulnerabilities that were implicit in the recent choices Jonas and I had made in regard to White Plains and Uncle Marty.

  “Yeah, it is risky. I didn’t feel the other options were any more attractive.”

  After about five seconds of dead air, he said, “You can make time, then? To go to California?”

  I could hear the desperation in his voice. Wallace, too, was selecting his stores from a limited pantry.

  We both knew I wouldn’t turn him down.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Sam had never been to the Grand Canyon. After discussing what Merideth wanted, and reading the file she’d accumulated, he had told her that the Grand Canyon was where he wanted to begin his inquiry.

  Merideth had offered to fly him to Vegas or Flagstaff and rent him a car for the comparatively short drive to the nearby Visitor’s Center, but Sam was a man enamored of long road trips. He wanted to make the drive in his ancient Jeep Cherokee.

  We were having a beer at what had become our regular fair-weather spot in Boulder—the roof of the West End Tavern, not too far from his North Boulder house and not too far from my office downtown. New construction had spoiled the view from the roof, but we still gravitated up there.