by Jamie Mason
I smirked in spite of myself. “What were you looking for in my house?”
“We weren’t looking for anything. I promise, there was never any video surveillance in your home. I never sent any guys rifling through your stuff either. I respected your mother way too much to take my orders past their minimum, whatever the trouble was between her and Paul. I thought he was being kind of ridiculous about the whole thing anyway.
“I meant it when I said I hadn’t looked in the medicine chest. We just needed to know what she said, just in case. That’s all. Pain and the narcotics they prescribe for it can be a real problem. It makes the higher-ups paranoid. That’s why Paul wanted to have her in an approved facility—to avoid all that. But he also wanted her there to get the nice-guy points for sparing everyone the hassle of the recordings.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what I meant about the agency hospitals,” he said, as if my disorientation meant something to him that it didn’t mean to me. “It doesn’t matter what anyone says in those places. The staff is cleared for just about everything. She wouldn’t go, as you well know, so they sent me in, but I kept the taps to the bare minimum. And it was only at the very end, anyway. Even so, I’m sorry. But there was never any video. We weren’t watching you.”
“Wait, what?” My outrage caught up with my train of thought and his disparate one. He thought I was asking about when he had been here with my mother three years earlier. “No video surveillance. No video? You kept the taps to a minimum? You had audio. You left microphones. You were listening in while my mother was dying.”
“She knew, Dee. What are we even talking about?”
“I didn’t know! It’s my house! And you told her that you were leaving microphones in my house and she was fine with that?”
“We didn’t talk about it. We wouldn’t have had to. It didn’t seem to be a problem at all until that last day. . . . There was nothing to wonder about until she turned up the music.”
“Oh my God. I am so stupid.” I was stunned and then not. She had asked to have the music turned up loud in the last minutes of her life. She asked me twice to dial it up until violins rang off the walls and tore the last of the air she breathed to gilded shreds. I had thought she’d wanted to drown out something—pain, fear, memories. And all that may have been true, but only as a secondary goal. She had been shutting the door on Paul, to die without his supervision, to leave him first of all before she left the rest of us. The last control she had wrested from him had been the volume knob on the stereo, and she’d used my hand to do it. Did she know they would wonder? Did she offer up my privacy to their curiosity on purpose?
“You checking in on me isn’t routine at all, is it? You don’t keep tabs on every former employee’s kids and cousins and goddamned dog walkers. That would be ridiculous. You son of a bitch. You guys have been worried for three years about what she said to me in that last hour as she died.”
“We haven’t been worried. The follow-up is exactly like I said it was. It’s casual and we just check in from time to time.”
“Well, have you figured it out yet, you asshole?”
“Okay, hang on a minute. Calm down. Figured out what?”
“Do not tell me to calm down. Have you figured out what she said to me? If you wanted to know, you could have probably just guessed. She said what she always said—she said nothing. That last hour was for us. About us. And she hardly said a word at all. She never betrayed her position. As if she ever would. Are you satisfied? Paul had her muzzled perfectly. Even in pain and even loaded to the gills on morphine. Congratulations, Paul! If you’re still listening in on my phone calls . . .”
“Dee, it’s not like that. We’re not—”
“Well, now you know. Although I guess you figured out how harmless and dense I am after meeting me in person the other day. God, I’m so embarrassing. Is that it, then? Since everyone’s convinced I’m safe and clueless, you just snuck in and packed up today?”
“What? Today? What are you talking about? I told you the truth. You haven’t been under any detailed surveillance since—”
“Do not mention truth. Please. I’ll tell you the truth: if you ever bug my house again—”
Apparently, I’d reached the end of his patience. “If we ever bug your house again, you’ll never know it. So just live your life, Dee. I made a mistake in talking to you, but you’ve always known how important your mother was. You’ve known that and you’ve known what Paul is. None of this should be that big of a surprise. Most particularly because it’s not that important in the grand scheme of things. I was telling you the truth.” Then his tone softened. “Look, I’m sorry I’ve upset you like this. I really am. I wish she had told you that we were there. It would have been better coming from her. But in the end, none of it matters. Everything is fine.”
“You have no right to tell me what matters.”
“Okay.”
Silence weighed down the line.
“So, you’re not going to even do me the courtesy of admitting that you were in my house today?”
“I don’t think you’ll believe me no matter what I say, but I wasn’t there. I think I’ve made you jumpy, and I’m very sorry for that. We weren’t there and we’re not there, if you take my meaning.”
Maddeningly, that he had regained his composure only spotlighted my own impotence. I could rail at him, or I could tear into Paul through him, or at the whole stupid system by hurling insults at the both of them, and that was about it.
Resignation was the new black, whereas avoidance had been the new black before that. Was there ever just black?
Not at my mother’s big show. And it was always and forevermore my mother’s show. But what choice did she have? For her to die in any kind of peace, she had needed my help. And I had, as unwitting accomplice or unsuspecting red herring, been there for her.
21
As it turned out, it wasn’t something that Patrick mumbled in his sleep that gave him away. When he said it, he said it out loud, conversationally, although he wasn’t speaking to me and didn’t realize I had heard him.
The only exchange he and I had was well before that, earlier in the day as we were both ready to leave for work. It was Monday morning and I had scurried faster than usual to get out of the airless cabinet that our house had become over the way-too-long weekend. Staying out of each other’s way had become a game of dodging each other’s shadow and trying to look comfortable while veering around nothing to keep from being in the same room at the same time.
There is a point, pre-olive-branch, when orbiting the same space becomes simply too awkward to go on without communication. You can either start leaving notes for one another, which is more thought than you’d like to give to every little detail of the day, or you start talking. Someone has to say something eventually. It seemed to annoy Patrick that this time, the task fell to him.
His voice broke the glassy silence, startling me, as he spit out his announcement suddenly in a postargument monotone into the quiet of the kitchen. “I’ll take your car today.”
“Why?”
“The inspection is due. It expires today. You didn’t take it in.”
“I never saw the notice.”
Patrick only shrugged.
“It’s okay, Pat.” I bumped my tone into the peacemaking range. “I can do it. You don’t have to drive it all the way out there for me. That’s a hassle. I’ll take it in.”
“I said I’d do it,” he snapped. “I’ll take it in now. I’ve got to be over that way later this morning anyway. We can switch back at lunchtime if it bothers you so much to drive mine.”
“It doesn’t bother me. I just didn’t want to send you out of your way.”
“Whatever. It needs to be done today and I’m going that way anyway.” He knocked back the last of his coffee. “I need your keys.” His own keys hit the counter in an irritable jangle, and he answered my question when it still was only a look on my face. “I don’t know where the spar
es are.”
I pulled the keys from my purse and set them into his aggressively outstretched hand as gently as I could, aiming for kind without scraping as low as timid. “Okay, thanks,” I said, mostly to an empty room. He was already halfway out the door.
I was in Patrick’s car and two turns away from my office when I realized he had my work ID. It was on its lanyard in the cup holder where I left it most days.
I could have got into the building without my ID, but it would have meant that I’d have to talk to Victor at the security desk. And I never talked to Victor if I could help it. I took the stairs at the side entrance every morning and every evening, and both to and from lunch, all the way to the seventh floor to swipe the bar code on my card to get into our office suite. I told everyone it was for the exercise. While it was certainly good for my heart rate and calf muscles, it was even better for my productivity. Any run-in with Victor meant a goodly amount of time spent shaking off the chill of his boldly roaming stare. If I had to go in without my ID, he’d take a sloth’s pace in coding my temporary pass card and ask me where I’d been hiding, saying it hiiiidin’ with a sidelong leer.
“You keep smilin’, pretty lady,” he’d say. Smiiiiiiiiilin’. And on his greasy command, I, like an idiot, would paste a smile on my face that didn’t fit and walk stiffly to the elevators, willing away the sway that I was sure his nasty stare was trying to collect.
On its own, my not wanting to bask in Victor’s slimy aura would probably not have been enough to tempt me into being late on purpose. But as it was, Jordy was out of the office for two weeks. While he wasn’t a tyrant, he was on the obsessive side when it came to counting heads. If he noticed any of us chickens missing as the clock ticked over to 8:30, he was sure we had died in a fiery commuting disaster instead of maybe oversleeping or running low on gas. Our trespasses on his fussiness sometimes went noted on our performance appraisals, so it wasn’t worth it. But Jordy was in Puerto Rico, hopefully taking the edge off, and no one else in the place would care if I took the stairs half an hour later than usual.
The idea of going back to Patrick was also a gift to my dissatisfaction with the way the morning had played out. With the entire weekend if I was honest. I’d had an opportunity to cut the stalemate short before he left with my keys and my car, and I’d let it slip away. Patrick was doing me a favor. That had to be a good sign. Given even another two minutes with him in the kitchen, I felt sure I could have got him to smile or at least look me in the eye.
So I swung through the drive-through for two overpriced dessert-for-breakfast coffees and sped off to fetch my ID and salvage a step forward in our long road back to peace.
• • •
The queue of cars showed that I was hardly the only person to have left off having my state inspection until the last minutes of the month. It wasn’t like me to lose track of those things, and I would have sworn I never saw the notice. I did, in fact, swear to it later. My car sat third in line for the service bay, and Patrick was out of the driver’s seat, turned away from me, leaning against the wall of the shop while smoking and talking on the phone. Smoking? We’d quit together over four years earlier. Both of my parents had been smokers, and they’d both died of cancer. Once I was finally able to quit, with nicotine patches and lots of yoga, I had been appalled that I ever took up the habit in the first place.
It was so jarring to see Patrick with a cigarette in his hand that time wavered and I could feel, just for an instant, my slightly younger self, cigarette in my own hand, watching my husband, warm and there, right where he should be, and me with him, contented, and completely clueless as to what he was thinking. Why had I never wondered? You should always wonder.
With the arrival of all the curiosity I’d never had about Patrick’s internal gears, and every bit of the sidecar unease it ignited, I stopped at the edge of being able to hear his side of the conversation.
“One fourteen Reeves Road.”
. . .
“No, Reeves.”
. . .
“Reeves. With a v as in Victor.”
. . .
Victor. I shuddered. Where you been hiiiiiiidin’? And what was that about 114 Reeves Road? I went there twice a month, to a little hole-in-the-wall spa for a facial and a massage. My next one was—
“Saturday. Yeah, this Saturday. She goes in early. Like eight o’clock. The entrance is in the back. Off the street.”
. . .
“No, I understand. Not that there are any guarantees in life anyway. I know. Whatever.”
. . .
“I understand. And, yes, I’m sure.”
. . .
“I know.”
. . .
“It is sad, but just one fucking thing needs to be easy with her. I’m done. I’m not putting myself through all that. This needs to be over. Now. I’m sorry, but this is how it has to be.”
. . .
“I understand.”
. . .
“I’ve got it for a few hours. I’ll take care of it.”
. . .
“Yeah, I know what to do. I won’t go all the way through it. And then I’ll get you a copy of the keys you need.”
. . .
“If you say so. Plan Bs are your thing, not mine.”
. . .
“No, no. I understand. I appreciate your, you know, flexibility.”
. . .
“Then I’ll just wait to hear from you until after, then. Okay?”
. . .
“Oh right, or from them. Hmmm. Yeah, hadn’t really thought of that. Okay.”
. . .
“I understand.”
. . .
“Keep me posted.”
. . .
“G’bye.”
On autopilot, I stepped back under the screening wing of the brick wall, then ducked through the door of the service station before Patrick could turn and see me. I left the full coffee cups on the counter in front of the bewildered cashier and clipped right through the service bay and out the back door.
There was no helping it. I noted that it was Monday. File that little episode under Monday. Whatever the hell it was.
Back in Patrick’s car and pointed, more or less, in the direction of my office, I barely saw the road as it spooled out around the turns and over the hills.
I’m going to be served divorce papers on Saturday morning. I’ll be in yoga pants with no makeup on and I’ll have to stand there and have some stranger tell me that it’s not going to work out for me and Patrick and I’ll have to nod my head and sign my name and then what? I’d snagged this conclusion out of the roar in my head and kept twisting it this way and that to fill in the blank spot, like a puzzle piece that has almost all the right notches.
But my own voice wasn’t the only one I heard in my mind. Plucky, it doesn’t fit.
“Nothing fits,” I said out loud.
It will.
• • •
I had to see my old shadow in the blue sedan twice that day before I called my brother. If it had been only the once on my lunch break, spying the round-headed silhouette behind the wheel of the car tucked in like a dull sapphire between a pair of minivans, it might have been written off as a coincidence. It’s not that big of a town. It could maybe even have been a different car with only a similar guy behind the wheel. Except I knew that it wasn’t. Five points for me.
It wasn’t Brian Menary, either, and it never had been. Private detective? Perhaps. That could make sense. If he had permission from Patrick, and soon a set of keys, his being in our house whenever he wanted wouldn’t be breaking and entering. If blue-sedan man was a private investigator, I had a strong candidate for who had been through my stuff and who might be back for another look.
The second time I saw the car in under four hours, it put a pain low in my side, while a choking anger bloomed hot in my throat. Simon answered his phone before I’d had a chance to clear my voice.
“This is Vess,” he said in his professional m
onotone.
“Simon, do you have a minute?”
“Dee? Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Can I ask you to do something with no strings attached? I mean no strings on my end and no further poking around on yours.”
“What’s going on?”
“Probably nothing. And definitely nothing if I don’t get a promise out of you,” I said.
“What do you need?”
“A tag number run. I want to know who owns a car. But I don’t want to know anything more than that. And then I need you to leave it alone. If you can’t guarantee that, I’ll understand.”
I had a long wait. I could hear his office humming in drawer-banging, phone-ringing industry in the background while he checked his conscience.
“What is it? Is Patrick messing around for real?”
“Probably.” It was a convenient likelihood. I guessed that he’d started up a new game of flirtation with someone, as far as I could tell by his behavior, in the weeks after the Angela fiasco. In the intervals between his spells of cranky preoccupation, he had that moody flush, the waxing and waning cheerfulness that signposted guilty excitement. Once I realized that it might not have been the thought of me that had steered him clear of the stripper, I only pried listlessly into looking for a possible real girlfriend. I didn’t have the heart for the hunt. Before today, I specifically didn’t want to find out anything more about Patrick. In fact, I would have drunk a potion or maybe agreed to a targeted head injury to know less about him, but I wasn’t acquainted with any witch doctors or surgically precise thugs.
After the birth-control saga and the electrocuted embarrassment of the tandem-texted butterfly photo, I had no appetite for dealing with whatever I might find, so instead, I let myself get distracted over Brian Menary and remembered that Pat’s ego had taken a hammering. I had given it a pass, albeit perhaps one with an expiration date.
But now I was being followed, and Patrick had inserted unknown plans into my itinerary for the coming weekend. I had my own wrung-out concerns to wrangle. For my purposes, his track record of wandering-eye syndrome would smooth the way to news I did want at the moment, news that my brother could get for me.