Dead Time

by Stephen White

  Psychotherapy 101.

  Amy opened the sliding door. “Sorry. Mel, I left my bag in the car. I’m going to leave this door open while I’m gone. It’s getting hot in here.”

  She slid the screen shut.

  I thought I spotted Mel tightening her jaw. “My father says you know…something about what happened?”

  “At the Grand Canyon?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  I wanted to cut to the chase, hear what she had to say, pack my bag, and go back to Boulder. I wanted to say, “Okay, Mel, what the hell happened in the Grand Canyon?” But I was cognizant that Wallace considered his daughter fragile, and I forced myself to take the measured steps of a patient therapist. I said, “Was it a good trip?”

  “Life-changing, in good ways, until the end.”

  I said, “I know what was in the newspaper back then. That’s it.”

  I was being disingenuous. I not only knew what was in the news accounts, but I also knew what Sam had told me earlier that evening after his visit to Arizona—all that he had learned from his dinner with Ranger Ramona, from reading the search-and-rescue file she’d made available, and his interview with Nick Paulson in Las Vegas.

  “There’s more to it,” she said. “From our point of view.”

  “Our”? Not “my”? I waited. Waiting was my psychotherapeutic specialty, as well as my all-purpose conversational safety net.

  “Jack was there. My friend? The one I told you about this afternoon? He was with us.” She nodded her head once in a single long motion as she spoke. Her voice cracked a tiny bit as she said Jack’s name.

  I deflected yet another instinct—to provide comfort to Mel about Jack. From an information-gathering perspective, my compassion would be counterproductive.

  “You’ve remained friends?” I asked. I was consciously aware of not wanting to sound like her therapist father.

  “Jack’s my buddy. He is everybody’s buddy. That kind of guy. People like him. He can laugh at himself. He has a big heart. He’s funny.” She stopped speaking in a way that let me know she wasn’t done. I waited. “Jack was one of the reasons we went back down the canyon looking for Jaana. He couldn’t leave her alone down there. He knew something was wrong.”

  “Wrong?”

  “Wrong.”

  I hoped for more. I didn’t get it. “Was it just you and Jack who went back down?”

  “It was shortly after dawn. We were trying to get an early start to beat some of the heat. God, it was hot. Broke records the whole time we were there.

  “We knew that Jaana was missing from her camp—the guy she was with came by—but we started to hike out anyway. All of us. It was just beginning to get light—we were making good progress up the trail—when Jack and Jules and I decided to go back down to help find Jaana. A couple of others didn’t, went with Eric. It was a big deal. Us splitting up. We’d been tight.” As she was speaking she was looking past me.

  Jules was a new player to me. “You and Jack and…”

  “Jules. We’re the ones who went back down. Jules was…with Eric back then. Four of us—me and Kanyn and Jack, and one of Jack’s friends from high school, Lisa—were together, and we ended up sharing a cabin with Jules and her…boyfriend. Eric. The six of us spent almost all of our time together. It was a great week, mostly.” She smiled. I assumed at some memory. “It was like a hundred and twentysomething degrees. The heat didn’t bother Jack much, or Kanyn. Kanyn’s immune, I swear. The girl likes Palm Springs in August.”

  The “mostly” caught my attention. I prodded, gently, for clarification. “Everyone had a good time?”

  Come on, Mel, I was thinking. Help me out, here.

  “I had never been on…a trip like that before,” she said. “It was so…intense down there. The people, the place, the history. It was…transformative for me. Is that a word?”

  The emphasis she’d placed on the word “intense” gave me pause. I didn’t know what kind of intense Mel was talking about, but I was no longer convinced she was talking merely about the scenery or the ambient temperature. “Intense?” I said, still hoping she’d become more forthcoming.

  She smiled, glanced at me sideways, and quickly looked away. “Yeah,” she said. “Intense.”

  Mel was skilled at parrying the simple thrusts of conversation. I said, “Jack was the one who was most determined to look for Jaana?” I asked. “Or was it Jules? Or you?”

  “I wanted…So did Jules. But I’m not…Jack is a stronger person than me. Doesn’t care so much what people think. I tried to get people interested in what was going on with Jaana, tried to get everybody to agree to do it together—it’s what I do—but people don’t always take me seriously. Jack and Jules, they just did it. Said they were going back down. Turned around, hiked back down.”

  “But Kanyn continued up to the rim.”

  “That surprised me. She feels bad about it still. She’s not sure why she did it. It’s not like her. She has a big heart. She can seem flaky, but she has a big heart.”

  I said, “No luck when you got back to the river?”

  “Nothing. Somebody found a bracelet—a woven thing—that Jaana had been wearing. But that’s it. After a few hours the rangers took over. The three of us hiked out at the end of the day. It was miserable on the climb up. Unbelievably hot. Jack kept our spirits up. Jules was okay. I was a wimp.”

  “You’ve all stayed friends?”

  “With Jules and Jack? Yeah, absolutely. Jack lives in San Diego…He’s in the Chargers’ public relations office. We go down to San Diego sometimes. He gets us seats for the games. We—my boyfriend and I—are going down for the home opener in a few weeks. Jack is so…”

  She opened her eyes as wide as she could open them, trying to evaporate her tears before they could flee down her cheeks. A solitary escapee meandered from her left eye and tracked toward her ear.

  “I haven’t decided if I’m going to tell you…any more about what happened,” she said. “At the canyon. Not now.”

  I gave her a chance to continue. She didn’t. I wasn’t surprised. But I was getting frustrated. “I hope I can get you to change your mind.” I was thinking, You could have told me all this before I flew out here. Your father said you wanted to talk with me.

  “Nothing makes any of us look like…heroes.”

  “Is that important? Being heroes?”

  She snorted, shook her head. My question had been a therapist thing to say. Mel wasn’t about to fall for it.

  I took the bat off my shoulder and swung again. “Going back down to help search for her? In that heat? That sounds altruistic.”

  “All of us—every one of us who went back down to help search for Jaana—lied about not seeing her the night before. We lied to the guy she was with. We lied to each other. We ended up lying to the rangers who interviewed us. When the guy Jaana was with came to our cabin looking for her in the morning as we were getting ready to climb out, we all denied seeing her anytime after dark.”

  “You did see her?”

  “Some of us saw her, most of us. Maybe all of us. Not all together. But we saw her. I didn’t find out about all the others that morning, but it’s come out since.”

  She stopped herself.

  “So Jack saw her that night?”

  “Yes, definitely.”

  “And Kanyn?”

  “I can’t say.”

  Can’t, or won’t? “And—what did you say that Eric’s girlfriend’s name is—Jules? She saw Jaana too?”

  “Jules was with me…when we saw her. It was a dark night. The canyon was in moonshadow. We weren’t sure what we were seeing at the time. But we saw the same thing. Later, Jack convinced us it was Jaana.”

  “But at the time you didn’t know you saw her?”

  “We saw someone. We could have said something about it, but we didn’t. Okay?”

  I’d sensed a hitch in Mel’s delivery of the information about what she and Jules saw. “What did you and Jules see?”


  “We weren’t sure. That’s why…we didn’t say anything. At the time we thought the woman we saw might be…someone else. Lisa. From a distance, Lisa looks like Jaana. Especially in the dark. We thought it might have been Lisa.”

  “Are you certain now?”

  She hesitated before she said, “Certain? No.”

  “Tell me a little about Jules,” I said.

  “No,” she said again, without hesitation.

  “Maybe later?”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  She attached just the tiniest bit of levity to the last pronouncement, just enough that I couldn’t easily list it in the column marked “overt hostility.”

  Ten more minutes of this, I said to myself. Then I’m out of here.

  “Eric and Lisa continued up to the rim,” I said. “Did either—”

  “And Kanyn.”

  “And Kanyn. Did Eric or Lisa see Jaana the night before?”

  “One did. I know that for sure. Maybe the other one did too. Lisa…keeps strange hours at night.”

  I decided to postpone following up on the issue of Lisa’s sleeping behavior. I said, “But you know one did? Either Eric or Lisa. Did you see that person…with Jaana?”

  “That’s the part I’m not sure I’m going to tell you.”

  That, and the part about Jules, I thought.

  FORTY-ONE

  Reading between the lines is part of what therapists do. I like to think I’m better at it than most people, but most of the time I’m objective enough to admit that being better at it than most didn’t make me good.

  The dots that needed connecting were becoming more obvious to me while Mel talked, like stars appearing in the night sky as layers of clouds cleared. I could draw lines between the dots, but the clarity of a constellation eluded me. I said, “You saw Eric with either Lisa or Jaana the night before? That’s what you’re saying?”

  I intentionally left a couple of things out of my conclusion. One was that the mysterious Jules likely saw whatever Mel saw that night. And the second was that whomever the two women saw with Jaana after dark had to be considered a possible witness—or worse—to whatever ultimately happened to her.

  I wasn’t at all clear where Jack fit into the equation. Mel said he’d seen Jaana too. And that he’d helped clarify what she and Jules had seen.

  “I didn’t say that,” Mel said, in reply to my question.

  I was on familiar ground. I was lost.

  It was apparent that Mel was choosing her words with the care of a White House spokesperson. She was interested in appearing cooperative; she wasn’t interested in being illuminating. “I didn’t say that” wasn’t exactly a denial of what I had proposed.

  As she circled the narrative wagons, Mel pulled the throw tighter around her. It wasn’t that cold on the balcony. I was nearing a conclusion that whatever Mel had seen that night in the Grand Canyon was part of what had left her so uncomfortable upon her return to California. What had she seen? I didn’t have a clue.

  When I find myself lost in a psychotherapy session, it is because I find myself out in the lead. Aware of that tendency, I tried to allow Mel to step back in front of the story where she belonged. I had no business guiding this expedition.

  I got quiet. We kept eye contact. Mel was my match. Or my better.

  “So Jack knows what you and Jules saw?” I said finally. As I asked that innocuous question, I recognized that our conversation had devolved into a game of twenty questions. It’s not an effective interviewing technique. If I hoped to learn anything useful from this meeting, I had to find some way to get Mel talking freely.

  My self-imposed deadline was five minutes away.

  She shook her head in reply to my question in a manner that I couldn’t interpret. I had no way to know if the headshake was the simple answer to my question or whether it was an indication of her refusal to tell me what I wanted to know.

  “Mel, do you know what Jack saw that night?”

  She nodded. “You too,” she said. She punctuated the thought with a girlish giggle. “The world does.”

  Me too? The world does? Huh? What does that mean?

  On a busy therapy day—one with eight, nine, ten patients—I could count on having at least one moment during the course of the day when a patient would say something that feels like a complete non sequitur. As though I’d somehow missed an essential segue. That was how I felt after hearing Mel’s “You too”—“the world does.”

  Too many facts, not enough context. “I didn’t get that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t repeat it.

  I said, “I’m getting the impression that what actually happened that night in the canyon is different than I might be thinking. Is that what you’re telling me, Mel?”

  It was a hanging curve. Mel hit it out of the park. She said, “And what exactly do you think happened in the canyon, Alan?”

  I chuckled at her reply. She joined in. She knew I had begun reaching. She was also feeling increasingly confident that she was up to the task of hitting my best pitches. Wallace had trained her well. Probably inadvertently, but still…

  She said, “Your turn to tell me something. How does your wife know about all of this? What’s her connection to the trip? My father told me that Merideth knows somebody who was down there. Is she—”

  “Merideth’s my ex-wife, Mel. We were divorced a long time ago, when you were still in Boulder. Probably when you were still in junior high, hanging out on the Pearl Street Mall.” Saying that made me feel old. “And yes—she knows someone who was on the trip. She’s engaged to a guy who was down there. At the canyon, at the river. Part of this…thing. I don’t know where he fits in.

  “Merideth has become involved and asked for my help because…They’ve been—Mel, will you agree to keep this next part to yourself? Merideth doesn’t want it to become public. It’s important to her. You’ll understand why when I tell you what it is.”

  She shrugged. “Goes both ways. You don’t tell my parents anything unless I tell you it’s okay?”

  It was territory that I anticipated visiting with Mel during our conversation. “Fair,” I said.

  She seemed surprised at my easy abdication about keeping her confidence. She’d expected a fight. I had already decided that the best I could do with Wallace and Cassandra would be to share my conclusions about their daughter’s well-being. I didn’t need to betray confidences to do that.

  “My friends and I didn’t hang out on the Mall. We hung out on The Hill.” The Hill was the student neighborhood close to the university in Boulder. Things happened on The Hill that most parents of junior high school students wouldn’t want their progeny exposed to on a daily basis. “That…made my parents crazy, especially my dad,” she said. “So who is Merideth’s fiancé? Eric or Nick? I know it’s not Jack. It’s Eric, isn’t it?”

  I said, “Yes. It’s Eric.”

  “Figures.” She shook her head. “It’s funny. Jack was sure that Nick was in the closet. I never found out if he was right or not.” Her next question: “There’s something I don’t get, Alan. Why are you helping your ex-wife? That’s kind of…weird, isn’t it?”

  Good question. “I suppose it is. Eric is still friends with someone from back then, and—”

  “Lisa. She’s the only one who would still be talking to him. Eric was the biggest asshole about not going back down to help. He didn’t slow down while he was climbing out, didn’t even consider it might be the right thing to do. He just kept marching up the trail. Lisa went along like she was leashed to him. She’d been throwing herself at him all week.” Mel shrugged, shook her head. “There were times when we were all together down at the cabins that I thought Jules was going to kill her. All the attention Lisa was paying to Eric was…”

  “Attention?”

  “She was all over him.”

  Shit. I’d just officially heard something from Mel that I didn’t want to have to tell Merideth: Lisa had once been romantically, or
at least sexually, interested in Eric. I assumed that for Merideth it would be a disconcerting piece of news about the woman she had chosen to be the couple’s surrogate. I recalled, of course, that both “sex” and “Lisa” had been part of a recent conversation I’d had with Merideth.

  I asked Mel, “You mentioned Lisa had odd sleeping patterns…on the trip? Does she have problems sleeping?”

  Mel narrowed her eyes. “How do you know that? Did Eric tell you?”

  “I’ve never spoken to Eric. Lisa has been staying in an apartment hotel recently in Manhattan. I went there with Merideth. It looked to me like Lisa hadn’t used the bed. It’s an…anomaly, that’s all.”

  Mel rolled her eyes. I winced. I’d apparently just managed to sound like her father. In an attempt to recover I said, “I don’t like pieces that don’t fit.”

  “Lisa can’t sleep in beds. Don’t ask me—something from her childhood. I don’t know. The cabins in the canyon have bunks. She never slept in hers. She slept on the floor the whole time, I think.”

  Lisa can’t sleep in beds.

  I recalled the unused bed in Morningside Heights. The clutter by the sofa in the living room. Mel was providing an alternative explanation to the one Merideth and I had jumped to: that Lisa had been sleeping, or screwing, somewhere else.

  I could tell that Mel’s patience with the conversation was diminishing. I decided to try to lower the temperature a little. I said, “Jules and Eric were a couple?”

  “When the trip started. By the time we’d been down there for a day I really think Lisa was…” She didn’t finish the sentence. “No,” she said to emphasize her change of heart about completing the thought about Lisa. She tightened her hands into fists. “No. Sorry.”

  Rather than try to scale the wall she completed with the brick of the final no, I instead replied to her earlier question. I said, “Okay. Back to my story and why I’m helping Merideth. As you guessed, the woman from your trip who is involved with Merideth and Eric is Lisa. Lisa—this is the confidential part—has agreed to help them have a baby. Merideth has a long history of fertility problems—miscarriages—and Lisa agreed to act as their surrogate. She apparently did it once before, for a relative. Eric knew about that. They all came to an arrangement. Did an in vitro procedure. As of a few weeks ago Lisa became pregnant with Eric and Merideth’s baby.”