But I didn’t.
Sometimes a photographic memory is not such a good thing. Sometimes I’ll remember something someone said to me word for word, and I’ll wish to hell I didn’t.
‘Like there was just this tiny little bit of fire in my hand, and then it was really fast. Everything burned really fast.’
That’s what Ben had told me about his ‘dream’.
This tiny little bit of fire. In my hand. Now, how had I forgotten that so completely? I can remember anything I want. Then I realized. It was so obvious. It has to be something I want.
‘Can I see him?’ I asked. Or, anyway, somebody asked. Must have been me. Michelevsky didn’t. And there was nobody else who could have.
‘We’re taking him over to the county jail this afternoon. You’ll want to call and get visiting hours from them.’
The hospital building was a long rectangle. Long on one side, short on the other. When I got off the elevator and looked down the hall, it looked like it stretched to infinity. Like I could walk all day and never get there. When I finally reached the end of the hall, following the room numbers, I turned left, the only way I could turn, and the hall ahead of me was very short. At the end of it was a sort of informal waiting area, a corner with two couches and two lamps.
And Nazir.
He was standing, pacing, talking to someone on his cell phone.
He looked up and saw me. I forced myself to keep walking. Two steps later, he reared back and hurled the phone, which whizzed by my ear, so close I could feel the displaced air of it. If I hadn’t ducked to my right, it would have hit me, as I’m sure he intended. I heard it shatter against the wall behind me, and someone, maybe a nurse, say, ‘Hey!’
I never turned around.
I just kept walking.
‘You have a nerve,’ he said. He spoke to me quietly. With a measured calm. It was unsettling. I remember wishing he would just yell. I had no idea how soon I would get my wish. ‘You have a nerve to show up here. After what you did. After what your brother did. First you ruin her reputation in this town. Then your brother tries to kill her. And you think she will want to see you? And you think I will let you go in there and see her? Think again, my friend.’
‘Ben would never do anything to hurt Anat.’
‘He already did!’ Nazir roared. Roared. There was no other way to describe such an outburst. Nazir had found his inner lion. ‘And I hold you responsible! He is no more than a child! He has a mind like a four-year-old! You are responsible for all that he does! You should have kept your brother on a leash!’
At no point did he temper his volume.
I stood and took it in the face, blinking, as if being hit by a hurricane. Which wasn’t much of an exaggeration.
By the time he finished his diatribe, three white-uniformed employees – a nurse and two orderlies – had arrived to try to tell him he couldn’t make so much noise in a hospital. But when they saw the look on his face, they stopped cold. They did not attempt to approach him. Nor did I blame them.
I heard the nurse say, ‘Call security.’
Nazir heard her, too.
‘Yes, call security,’ he said, ‘and have this man escorted out. He is not family. And he may not see my daughter.’
‘I am her fiancé!’ I shouted. I tried for the lion roar. I tried to be strong like Nazir. But I fell well short. I just didn’t have his capacity for rage.
‘You are not! You are not her fiancé! You are only her fiancé if you ask me for her hand in marriage and I say you are her fiancé!’
I wondered if Anat could hear us from wherever she was. I listened for her in the brief silence, but heard nothing. And Nazir wasn’t done.
‘I brought Anat here to be safe. People say, go to a small American town. You will be safe in a small American town. They just forgot to tell me that a small American town is only safe if you are a small American.’
He looked right into my eyes as he bit off those last two words.
I opened my mouth to speak, and was tapped on the shoulder by security.
‘Come with me, sir,’ a youngish man said. Not much older than me.
‘I’m not the one causing the trouble. I just want to see her.’
‘He’s family, sir. You’re not family.’
He put one hand on my arm. As if he was about to eject me. Physically escort me out. I shook him off. Violently. So violently that he reached for his nightstick. Placed one hand on it.
I raised both hands in a gesture of peace.
‘I’m not looking for a fight,’ I said.
His hand relaxed to his side again.
‘Sir,’ he said. More firmly this time. ‘Come with me, please.’
I looked past Nazir. Thought briefly about making a run for it. But what good would that do? They’d catch me before I could even find her room.
‘I just want to see her. I just want to know she’s OK.’
‘She is not OK!’ Nazir roared. ‘She is hurt! She is burned!’
‘Sir!’ the security guard said, this time to Nazir. ‘You need to keep your voice down.’
‘Why should she want to see you again?’ he asked, only about a notch lower. ‘What has come to her from knowing you, except trouble? She will never want to see you. Not after what has happened.’
Humiliatingly, I had to put almost all of my energy into fighting back tears. I couldn’t say much of anything without running the risk of crying.
‘This is not over,’ I said, clamping down hard on my own frazzled emotions.
‘This is over,’ he said.
But more quietly. And to my back. Because the guard was already escorting me toward the elevator.
I sat for a time in my car, wrestling with myself over what he’d said. My mind tumbling over and over itself, trying to know whether to believe it. Or whether it was a lie. Had she told him she never wanted to see me again? Would she decide that? Could she?
No. It wasn’t possible. Not after what we’d shared. All that emotion couldn’t disappear. She couldn’t just unfeel everything.
Then, for the second time in one day, I had a moment in which I regretted my photographic memory.
It was sudden. It hit me suddenly. The full text of the message I left on Kerry’s phone. Every word. But there were a few relevant sentences that went through my head a good three or four times. I just sat there, gripping and ungripping the steering wheel, pressing my back up against the seat, watching them go by in my brain.
I’d said, ‘I know what happened isn’t your fault. But I can’t get over it. I can’t get around it. I’m sorry. I can’t. It’s like all my post-traumatic stress is wrapped up with your voice and your name now.’
And then, so long as I was torturing myself, I also remembered what I’d said to the older man who had given me a ride through Illinois. The one who’d overheard my conversation with Kerry.
‘I just have this … aversion … to her. Since … you know. After what happened. It feels like one of those places you go to stop smoking, and every time you reach for a cigarette, they zap you with electricity. No. That’s not a good analogy. Because that’s a lot of little things. This is one big thing. It feels like when you eat a whole bunch of a certain kind of food and then get sick. And maybe the food didn’t even make you sick. Maybe you ate three plates of fettuccini Alfredo, and then got the stomach flu. And all night you’re up, throwing up fettuccini Alfredo. You’ll never eat it again. Guaranteed. It’s knee-jerk.’
So maybe it was possible. To unfeel. Just about anything.
I got out of the car and walked back toward the hospital entrance. But the guard was waiting just inside the first set of sliding doors. He shook his head at me.
So I drove back to the house.
What else could I do?
24 November 2001
I WAS LET into a room with about ten small wooden tables.
Ben was on the other side of one.
He sat curled over himself on a chair, arms locked around his
knees, rocking. Rocking.
The guard indicated the chair across from him, and I sat.
‘Hey, Buddy,’ I said.
A long silence. Maybe more than two minutes. I thought maybe Ben had gone fully mute. Maybe permanently.
Then a tiny, thin Ben voice. ‘You lied to me, Buddy.’
‘When did I lie?’
‘You said everything would be OK.’
‘I didn’t lie. I was wrong. I thought everything would be OK.’
‘Well, it’s not. So you lied.’
‘Look. Ben. I was going on the assumption that you didn’t do anything wrong. But if you threw the match that started that fire, there’s nothing I can do to help you.’
He raised his head as if to look at me. But, in typical Ben fashion, his gaze missed my face by about thirty degrees.
He didn’t answer.
‘Tell me what happened, Buddy.’
‘I did tell you.’
‘You told the police you threw the match. You didn’t tell me that.’
‘You were yelling at me. I couldn’t think.’
‘Who gave you matches?’
‘Mark.’
‘Mark gave you a book of matches?’
‘No. One.’
‘He just handed you one match?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did you light it on?’
‘What?’
‘How did you get the match to light?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘It got lighted somehow, Ben.’
‘It was already on fire when he gave it to me.’
I looked down at myself, vaguely noting that I’d gotten to my feet without any real awareness of it.
‘Mark handed you a lighted match?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did he tell you to throw it?’
‘I don’t remember if he said that.’
‘Ben. You have to try to remember. This is huge. This is really important.’
‘He was being weird. He kept saying everything would be OK if I did. The whole country. He said everything would be OK again. I could fix everything.’
A long, cold tingle started at the back of my neck and ran down my spine.
‘Did you tell the police all this?’
‘Maybe. I don’t remember.’
‘I have to go talk to them again.’
I spun on my heels and headed for the door, surprising the guard, who had to open it for me.
Behind me, I kept hearing Ben calling to me. Over and over.
‘No! Don’t leave me here! Take me with you, Buddy! I want to go home!’
Sometimes you have to close yourself up. Shut the portals into the places inside you that still know how to feel. Because there’s just nothing you can do.
I paced in front of Michelevsky’s cluttered desk. He kept indicating a chair. But I never sat in it.
‘How can you even consider charging Ben with a crime? He’s brain-damaged. He has the mind of a child. Mark handed him a lighted match and told him to throw it. He’s easily manipulated. He gets confused when you yell at him. He didn’t know what he was doing.’
‘So he says now. Jespers tells a different story. And Ben didn’t say any of that when we questioned him yesterday.’
‘He gets scared. He has trouble remembering details.’
‘Or he just wants to get out and go home.’
I stopped pacing.
‘Look. Based on what I know about my brother … I seriously don’t think he lies. I don’t think he has enough brain to think up a lie. He can’t even learn how to find his way from the bus stop to work. Two blocks. And you think he can figure out what to say to shift more of the legal blame on to Mark Jespers?’
‘He’ll be evaluated,’ Michelevsky said. As though that should be the end of things.
‘I’ve had a talk with a lawyer. You were never supposed to question him without a guardian present. He’s like a child.’
‘How was I supposed to know he was like a child?’
‘Everybody in town knows that about Ben.’
Michelevsky sat back, his chair squeaking. ‘I’m new around here.’
Just as I was about to call him out as a liar, which he may or may not have been, he said, ‘You knew. Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you say you wanted to be present?’
‘You said I couldn’t be.’
‘And you never said your brother was mentally incompetent.’
I sighed, and sat down hard on a wooden bench. He was right. It was my fault. Why hadn’t I insisted? Stubborn, pig-headed refusal to accept that Ben could have been a suspect. I knew he wasn’t involved, and expected everyone else to know it, too.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘he’ll be evaluated. Meaning …’
‘There’ll probably be a competency hearing.’
‘And if … I mean, when he’s found incompetent?’
‘Probably he’ll be transferred to the state hospital.’
‘For how long?’
‘That could go a lot of different ways. Worst case … for him … until they decide he’s not a danger to himself or others.’
I’m not sure how long I stood there, taking that in. Wrapping my brain around this entirely new set of future obstacles on the obstacle course that was now my life.
‘But … Ben’s never going to change. He’s always going to be just like this.’
‘True,’ Michelevsky said.
And that appeared to be the dead end of … well, many things. The least of which being that conversation.
Part 6
Someplace Cheery
10 December 2001
I PARKED MY mom’s old Buick half a block from the automotive shop and walked. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe to make it harder for Chris Kerricker to see me coming. Not that he shouldn’t have damn well known to expect me by then.
He was working inside the service bay, his head under the hood of a BMW.
I walked around to where he could see me, and his face fell.
‘I had no idea Kansans drove BMWs,’ I said.
He straightened up and hurled the wrench he’d been holding, bouncing it off the far wall of the shop. I remember thinking it must be a bad sign when people regularly hurl whatever they’re holding in their hand when they see you coming. Especially if it’s something of value, something they’re going to need again.
At least he didn’t throw the wrench at my head.
I still think it might be a sign that it’s time to reexamine your life.
‘I can’t take much more of you,’ he said.
‘I can think of a way to solve that.’
‘Fuck you.’
Oscar, long-time owner of Oscar’s Automotive, stuck his head out of the office and into the service bay, his eyes narrow. He took me in, then looked at Chris. He must have known by then that my daily visits weren’t happy ones. But he never asked. Maybe he didn’t want to know. Maybe good mechanics are hard to find in a town the size of Nowhere-ville.
‘What just happened?’
‘Sorry, Oscar. Dropped a wrench.’
My guess is that Oscar had been around this business long enough to know the sound of a wrench slipping out of a hand and falling to the concrete floor, without force. If so, he chose not to pursue it.
His face disappeared again.
Looking back, I can’t help noting the significance of a thing dropped as opposed to a thing thrown. How they are two very different animals. I didn’t know enough to note it at the time.
‘I wasn’t there, man,’ Chris said. ‘I wasn’t there, I wasn’t there, I wasn’t there. How many times do I have to keep telling you I wasn’t there?’
‘Maybe until you can make it morph into the truth?’
‘I’m busy here. This is my livelihood. If you don’t mind.’
‘My brother Ben used to have a livelihood. Did I mention that? He loved his job. You know. The one he can’t go to now. Because he’s locked up in the state hospital. Doing time that rig
htly belongs to you and Mark.’
‘Mark is doing plenty of time!’ he snapped.
‘Mark could get out in as little as twenty months.’
‘That’s a lot of time!’
‘For nearly killing a woman?’
‘We didn’t know she was up there, man!’
Then silence. Embarrassed on his part, triumphant on mine.
Sounds like a key moment, right? Like I’d just cracked the case. But the truth is, Chris often committed little slips like that. If I pressed him hard enough. Then he’d look me in the eye, defiantly, and say he’d never said it, that it was his word against mine, that he’d deny it to the grave. Then I’d go back to Nowhere-ville’s finest, who would pull him in for questioning. Again. His father would call the family attorney to go in with him. Again. And somehow he would get his story straight. With them.
Again.
If I could get another round of questioning out of this one, that would make four full rounds. But I think everyone was getting tired of going over this same old territory. Except me.
‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ he said. ‘I’m just saying none of us could possibly have known. Whether we were there or not, we didn’t know. That doesn’t mean that every single person who didn’t know was there.’
‘But you were.’
‘How do you know I was?’ he shouted. It wasn’t hard to make Chris lose his temper. I did it almost every day. ‘How the hell would you know?’ Then he lowered his voice to a tense whisper. ‘Even if you did see my car drive away from your house that night, which I have my doubts about, it doesn’t mean shit. I could’ve caught up with Ben later and brought him home. If you’d really seen me, and seeing me really proved I was there, I’d be in jail right now.’
Oscar stuck his head out again. ‘I got customers in here,’ he said.
‘Sorry, Oscar.’
We waited for him to disappear again. But he lingered. As though a little extra staring might be just what the problem needed. Then he shook his head and withdrew it.
‘You’re gonna lose me my job, man. Right, I know, we lost Ben his. I know everything you’re gonna say before you say it, man. Why don’t you give it up? I’m not volunteering to go to jail. I got a life. In case you hadn’t noticed.’
When You Were Older (retail) Page 23