by Susan Conant
Obsessive procrastination! So, when I told Holly that my own narrative was private, she said that no one was asking for my life narrative and that all she wanted was an account of events that occurred when I was present and she was not. Holly, I might note, is less psychologically minded than she likes to imagine, as is evident in her near obliviousness to the connections those events have to disturbing revelations about my family of origin, most notably my parents; the hormonal fluctuations I was experiencing; and the crisis in my relationship with Quinn induced by his passive-aggressive mother’s having spilled the news that I did not know the real name of the man who had fathered the child I was carrying.
When I explained my understandably conflicted state to Holly, she said that I should pretend that I’d been orphaned at birth and had recently availed myself of the services of a sperm donor; or that I should do anything else necessary to recover from what was plainly a simple case of writer’s block.
To begin. When Holly set off with Rowdy, leaving me at Pignola’s, her parting words were, “This isn’t your kind of thing at all,” a statement that I naturally took as an insult, as if my passion or métier were what? Shopping? Dream interpretation? Well, since I am a clinical psychologist, my métier does occasionally involve a certain amount of dream interpretation, but I nonetheless felt undervalued and dismissed. In addition, I was so worried about Holly’s overconfidence that I even considered chasing after her to take her up on her dangerous attitude, which bordered on brinksmanship, but I knew from experience that if I challenged her, she’d say, “Relax! Dog is on my side. I’m perfectly safe.”
As proof that Holly was ridiculously sure of herself and sure of Rowdy, let me point out that her phone was in her purse on the floor of Zara’s car. Now, I’ll be the first to say that Rowdy is a wonderful dog, but he has his limits, one of which is that as a substitute for a cell phone, he is utterly useless.
So, making sure that my own cell phone was in my purse, I set out after Holly with the intention of maintaining my distance and, if necessary, calling the police, at least if my cell phone’s battery was charged. I was not dressed for outdoor adventure. Contrary to what Holly likes to imagine, I do own a few outdoorsy outfits, the wardrobe being all that remains of a relationship I once had with a birding enthusiast who shared his ornithological passion with me and his sexual passion with others as well. I ditched him and two unflattering hats, but I kept the binoculars and an assortment of rather attractive khaki pants and jackets as well as a pair of Italian hiking shoes, which I was not wearing now, when I needed them. I was not, thankfully, wearing pumps, but my cute sandals had little wedge heels. (I see no reason to permit pregnancy to turn me into a frump, and flat heels are so unredeemably dowdy.) My trench coat was one I’d chosen more for style than for comfort in the rain, and raining it was.
I started out not all that long after Holly left, but I walked so much more slowly than she did that she and Rowdy were out of sight. I remembered where she had told Zara to turn, and when I got there, I walked as casually as possible through a largely empty parking lot, which ended in a row of tennis courts. Holly and Rowdy were nowhere to be seen, which I thought was a good place to be—nowhere to be seen—so I walked around the tennis courts, and when I caught sight of a gazebo or pavilion, a roofed structure open on all sides, I took shelter in it and sat quietly on a park bench to watch and listen.
Listening is something I am ill-equipped to do, thanks to my hearing loss and in spite of my unobtrusive and absurdly expensive hearing aids, which are supposed to give me more or less normal hearing but do not. Let me amend that. As a therapist, I listen exceptionally well. What I have a hard time with is hearing.
Sitting quietly on the sheltered bench, I had the leisure to sort matters out. It’s one thing to realize that one’s family of origin is dysfunctional in a general sense, but it’s quite another to discover that one’s father is engaged in adolescent acting-out by having a sordid affair with his sister-in-law. I also pondered the implications of that liaison for Zara, whose supposedly biochemical disorder and whose successful adaptation to it had obvious psychological meaning. The unfaithful mother? And the service dog, the dog, the traditional symbol of—what else?—fidelity!
Then there was the entire matter of Quinn, whose name change, reflecting as it did the rejection of one personal identity and the selection of another, bothered me not at all, but whose deception and—let’s call it what it is—whose sneakiness rankled in the present and boded ill for the future.
At that point, I heard or thought maybe I heard shouts or cries or some such, although it was impossible for me to identify the sounds accurately and, contrary to the claims of hearing-aid manufacturers, completely impossible for me to tell which direction the sounds came from. Although I couldn’t be certain, it seemed to me that I’d recognize Holly’s voice, as I did not, but I couldn’t be sure.
Just in case I needed to summon help, I removed my cell phone from my purse and checked to see whether the battery was charged. With regard to the cell phone, I want to point out in my own defense that I am not a complete Luddite. I know how to use my computer to send and receive e-mail, and I occasionally look things up by using Google. My limited use of the cell phone is my choice. I prefer to reserve the cell phone for emergencies, not that they actually occur, and I more or less know how to use the cell phone to place calls.
Answering calls is not a problem because almost no one has the number. Quinn does. Holly and Steve do, as does Holly’s cousin Leah, who helps me with technological challenges. In fact, I give out the cell number so seldom that I can never remember what it is, but I do know how to interpret the little picture of the battery to see whether the phone is dead or alive, and when I looked, the battery picture was half dark and half light, so I felt confident about dialing 911 if I needed to.
For good reason, I had much less confidence in my hearing aids than I did in the cell phone. The aids had fresh batteries, but the miserable devices dislike humidity, and even in dry weather, they are a poor substitute for good ears and consequently left me no choice except to take a wild guess about where the possibly imaginary noise was coming from and to move close enough to it to see what was going on.
Once I’d retraced my steps for only a short distance, the shouting was so loud that even I could hear it and could tell that its source was the heavily wooded area to my right, a hillside that dropped downward and was filled with trees, fallen logs, and miscellaneous bushes and vines. More to the point, plainly visible were a piece of broken furniture, clearly the desk where Zara was supposed to have left the ransom; and two people engaged in a shouting match, the first a sandy-haired, pinheaded, weirdly proportioned man I’d never seen before and the second a dark-haired woman I was shocked to recognize as Cathy Brown, my cousin John’s ex-wife.
Since the man held the white plastic bag that Zara was supposed to deliver, I assumed that he was the dognapper. It required no assumptions to realize that Cathy was trying to get her greedy hands on the bag. The two of them were like a pair of children squabbling over a toy that one had and the other wanted. Oddly enough, although the man was by far the larger and stronger of the two, instead of using physical means to retain possession of the bag, he initially used a verbal weapon: a threat. I can’t remember his exact wording, but the gist was that he’d tell her employers that she was stealing pain medication meant for the geriatric patients for whom she was responsible. John had once told me that Cathy had done exactly that at the nursing home where she worked when they were married.
Maybe for once he’d been telling the truth.
At that point, the confrontation didn’t alarm me. Because I see couples as well as individuals in my practice, I’m used to arguments. My main reaction was relief that the noise I’d heard had come from these horrible people and not from Holly, who, I suspected, was somewhere in the vicinity. Unless she’d returned to Pignola’s? If so, I’d probably have seen her when I’d been sitting on the park bench,
especially because Rowdy was with her. He’s hard to miss. So, it was because of Rowdy that I decided to look for Holly and, as a result, made the mistake of stepping down into the sodden mess of thick bushes and vegetable junk, and, ridiculously, hiding behind a tree trunk to gaze around.
The quarreling people were preoccupied with each other, so I wasn’t especially concerned that they’d notice me. I was, however, worried that if Rowdy saw me, he’d greet me in his usual fashion by wooing and even howling so loudly that no one could ignore him.
From my new vantage point, I still couldn’t see Holly or Rowdy, but I had a clear view of the couple, whose conflict suddenly turned violent when Cathy reached out and made a serious effort to snatch the bag; and, presumably because his previous verbal threat had been useless, the man pushed her hard enough to throw her off balance.
Regressing before my eyes, Cathy spat in his face.
Holly has instructed me to devote particular attention to reporting the details of what followed. But first, I have to remark that Cathy’s act of oral aggression, which may seem foolish, stupid, or risky, was entirely in keeping with her primitive narcissism; and that her narcissistic character disorder blinded her to the probable consequences of her aggression and, in brief, made her feel invulnerable, as subsequent events proved that she was not.
Holly would like to know who said what. For a few seconds, no one said anything. The only sound I heard was thunder, soon followed by hard rain. Then, almost as if he were imitating the storm, the man rumbled inarticulately and lumbered toward Cathy, who shouted, “Don’t get rough with me, Gil.”
Confirming my sense of a psychosexual undercurrent in the relationship, the man, Gil, said, “You like it rough, Cathy.”
“Rough is all you’re good for, you bastard,” she told hm. “Is that the real reason you killed Frankie? Because you’re good for nothing much in bed, but Little Frankie, who wasn’t so little—”
Just as Freud would have predicted, the insult to his manhood, especially in the context of sibling rivalry, inflamed Gil. In what I feel justified in interpreting as an act of sado-sexual symbolism, he whipped around behind her, dropped the plastic bag, and wrapped both hands around her neck. She writhed briefly and went limp.
Because of my profession, I hear about all kinds of sexual fantasies and acts, and especially because of the immediately preceding insult, I thought that I was seeing foreplay or perhaps a sadomasochistic substitute for sex itself. In other words, perhaps defensively, I was slow to recognize the reality of violence, violence that I’d never witnessed before and hope never to witness again, and once I finally understood that Gil was strangling Cathy, I was frozen with fear and hideously, horribly reminded of Holly’s parting words to me, a statement that I now saw as damningly and shamefully true: this was, indeed, not my kind of thing at all.
In my cowardice, I half expected Holly to stride out of the woods with Rowdy by her side and order Gil to let go of Cathy; and when Holly didn’t appear, I tried to imagine what a brave person would advise an unarmed and yellow-bellied person like me to do in this situation. Holly, predictably, would advise me to conjure up the image of an immense dog of some protective breed, but since I’d have no idea how to manage such a daunting creature, the imagined advice was useless.
I was then visited by common sense based on self-knowledge: whereas I was not a physically courageous person, my years of experiencing and practicing psychotherapy had conferred on me a certain amount of wisdom; and the wise course now was to slip quietly away and call the police. No sooner had I formed that excellent plan than something all but impossible happened, something so entirely unexpected that when the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony rang out, it took me a split second to recognize this electronic rendition of the Ode to Joy as the ringing of my cell phone.
Although I managed to find the wretched gadget in my purse, I had no idea how to silence it and, worse, realized that I couldn’t dial 911 while the phone was still ringing, as it was when that dreadful man dropped Cathy and began to clamber uphill toward me. As he did, I noticed somewhat incidentally that in his earlobes were my diamond earrings, my beautiful earrings, my purloined earrings, my wedding gift from Quinn.
But I was too frightened even to be angry; and although I could have sworn that I was suffering from laryngeal paralysis, I heard myself scream. Heartened by the sound, I found my voice and screamed again, this time voluntarily, and shouted for help.
chapter thirty-seven
Rowdy and I made it to the top of the slope in time to see Gil Sorensen slam into Rita, knock her to the ground, and deliver a hard kick to her middle that could’ve been meant to kill her unborn baby. As my whole body flushed with rage, my left hand tightened around Rowdy’s strong, thin leather lead, and I envisioned myself plunging downhill, overpowering the man, wrapping the lead around his neck, jerking hard, and twisting the life out of him. I might equally well have imagined myself sprouting wings, flying down, and dropping a noose over his head. He was far too big for me to overpower, and I wouldn’t even have the advantage of surprise. Did I expect him to cooperate by holding still while I draped the lead around his neck and choked him to death?
If you can’t overpower a big dog and don’t want to use force, what do you do? Outfox him, that’s what. I rid myself of the encumbering poncho, caught Rowdy’s eye, and grinned. Keeping Rowdy’s lead loose, I went leaping and stomping and sliding down the slope while hollering and whooping a sort of rebel yell as voiced by the bloodthirsty offspring of a Scottish Highlander and a psychotic banshee: Yee-ah-hooooo!
Rowdy bounded ahead of me, and when we reached the startled Gil Sorensen, I raised my right arm and abruptly lowered it, and Rowdy did a flashy drop into a sphinxlike pose.
My effort to startle Gil Sorensen more than succeeded. He looked stunned. Before he had time to recover, I said, “The police are on the way. This is your only chance. Pick up that bag and get out of here. Don’t take your car. Just go.” I paused. “And walk. Don’t run.” On impulse, I added, “I can’t always control this dog.” The truth if it’s ever been spoken.
The last I saw of Gil Sorensen, he was heading down through the overgrown woods toward the river, the white plastic bag clutched to his chest.
Cathy’s body was motionless. Rita lay curled in a fetal position. Her eyes were open. She was breathing.
“Rita? Rita, he’s gone. It’s over.”
“Holly—”
“Are you bleeding?”
“I can’t tell. I just can’t tell.”
chapter thirty-eight
I’m tempted to skip ahead to the visit I paid to Enid Garabedian the next morning. Remember Enid? The woman who found Willie on the night of the robbery. Or didn’t find Willie. I want to explain, but I have to linger briefly in those ugly, weedy woods to give proper credit to the medical and law-enforcement people who arrived en masse, especially to the EMTs who tried but failed to restore Cathy Brown to life and who, I hope, take comfort in knowing that when they whisked Rita into their medical van and rocket-propelled her to the ER, they were treating not just one patient, but two.
Although Quinn shares my gratitude, he maintains that the real credit belongs to evolution, which has equipped women of our species with strong musculature that protects fetuses from external blows. MaryJo had a fit when her son spoke admiringly of evolution and wouldn’t stop crying until Quinn conceded that God deserved thanks, too. Rita blames herself for having rebelled against my warning about what wasn’t her kind of thing, but she feels indebted to me for having rescued her.
The creature most deserving of thanks, especially as expressed in the form of pats on the back, is, of course, Rowdy, whose formidable appearance and striking demeanor stunned Gil Sorensen even more than my war cry did; and who was solely responsible for detecting Izzy’s presence in the battered station wagon and for forcing me to find her.
Steve maintains that even without his ministrations, Izzy would probably have pulled throu
gh once she was hydrated and once the sedatives had worn off, but Zara insists that probably wouldn’t have been good enough for her and for Izzy, and that without Steve, Izzy would have died.
Died.
Almost the first thing Enid Garabedian said to me when I visited her the next morning was, “My little Frankie was never a good swimmer, so it’s no wonder he drowned, my beautiful little boy, but my Gil was a wonderful driver, so I’ll never believe that terrible car crash was his fault, and I don’t for one minute believe that my Gil stole that car, either. It’s terrible to say these awful things about someone who’s no longer here to defend himself.”
Attila the Hun?
I handed Enid a fresh tissue, squeezed her hand, and said that I was sorry about her losses. I truly did hate to see her heartbroken. My sympathy did not extend to Gil, who had, in fact, stolen a car, crashed it, and perished.
On the table with the gilded-ivy lamp and the photo of the Yorkie, the framed snapshot of the two little blond boys at the beach was now draped in a band of black lace, a ragged strip that looked like trim cut off a nightgown or petticoat. Enid wore a black caftan. Her beautiful violet eyes were bloodshot. Her face was blotchy and wet.
In spite of her grief, Enid had insisted on supplying me with a cup of delicious coffee and a plate of baklava and a piece of Armenian pastry.
“More coffee?” she asked.
“No thanks,” I said.
“You like the pastry? Nazook, it’s called.”
“It’s delicious.”
“I made it myself. You know, when Mr. G. first brought me home, his family was none too crazy to have him marrying a girl named Sorensen, and I was blonde then, like Gil and Frankie, but his mother took me under her wing—she knew I loved her boy—and she taught me about Armenian food, and took me to the shops, and I even learned a little Armenian. When Mr. G. passed, I could’ve gone back to my own church, but I didn’t. I still go to the Armenian church. They’ll be here, the ladies from the church. They’ll bring food. But if I do say so myself, I’m a better Armenian cook than most of them.”