by John Verdon
Kyle was the product of his first marriage, his short-lived marriage to Karen—the memory of which still, twenty-two years after the divorce, made Gurney uneasy. Their incompatibility was obvious from the beginning to everyone who knew them, but a defiant determination (or emotional disability, as he saw it in the wee hours of sleepless nights) had driven them into that unfortunate union.
Kyle looked like his mother, had her manipulative instincts and material ambition—and, of course, the name she had insisted on giving him. Kyle. Gurney had never been able to get comfortable with that. Despite the young man’s intelligence and precocious success in the financial world, Kyle still sounded to him like a self-absorbed pretty boy in a soap opera. Moreover, Kyle’s existence was a constant reminder of the marriage, a reminder that there was some powerful part of himself that he failed to understand—the part that had wanted to marry Karen to begin with.
He closed his eyes, depressed by his blindness to his own motivations and by his negative reaction to his own son.
The phone rang. He picked it up, afraid it would be Kyle again, but it was Mellery.
“Davey?”
“Yes.”
“There was an envelope in the mailbox. My name and address are typed on it, but there’s no postage or postmark. Must have been delivered by hand. Shall I open it?”
“Does it feel like there’s anything in it other than paper?”
“Like what?”
“Anything at all, anything more than just a letter.”
“No. It feels perfectly flat, like nothing at all. No foreign objects in it, if that’s what you mean. Shall I open it?”
“Go ahead, but stop if you see anything other than paper.”
“Okay. Got it open. Just one sheet. Typed. Plain, no letterhead.” There were a few seconds of silence. “What? What the hell …?”
“What is it?”
“This is impossible. There’s no way …”
“Read it to me.”
Mellery read in an incredulous voice, “‘I am leaving this note for you in case you miss my call. If you don’t know yet who I am, just think of the number nineteen. Does it remind you of anyone? And remember, I’ll see you in November or, if not, in December.’”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. That’s what it says—‘just think of the number nineteen.’ How the hell could he do that? It’s not possible!”
“But that’s what it says?”
“Yes. But what I’m saying is … I don’t know what I’m saying … I mean … it isn’t possible …. Christ, Davey, what the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know. Not yet. But we’re going to find out.”
Something had clicked into place—not the solution, he was still far from that, but something inside him had moved. He was now committed 100 percent to the challenge. He looked up and saw Madeleine watching him from the den door with a poignant intensity, as though she could sense in the air the escalation of his commitment to the case. He could only guess at what she was feeling, but it looked something like a combination of awe and loneliness.
The intellectual challenge the new number mystery presented—and the surge of adrenaline it generated—kept Gurney awake well past midnight, although he’d been in bed since ten. He turned restlessly from side to side as his mind kept colliding with the problem, like a man in a dream who couldn’t find his key, circling a house, repeatedly trying each locked door and window.
Then he began retasting the nutmeg from the squash soup they’d had for dinner, and that added to the bad-dream feeling.
If you don’t know yet who I am, just think of the number nineteen. And that was the number Mellery thought of. The number he thought of before he opened the letter. Impossible. But it happened.
The nutmeg problem kept getting worse. Three times he got up for water, but the nutmeg refused to subside. And then the butter became a problem, too. Butter and nutmeg. Madeleine used a lot of both in her squash soup. He’d even mentioned it once to their therapist. Their former therapist. Actually, a therapist they’d seen only twice, back when they were wrestling over the issue of whether he should retire and thought (incorrectly, as it turned out) that a third party might bring a greater clarity to their deliberations. He tried to remember now how the soup issue had come up, what the context was, why he’d seen fit to mention something so picayune.
It was the session in which Madeleine had spoken about him as if he weren’t in the room. She’d started by talking about how he slept. She’d told the therapist that once he was asleep, he rarely awoke until morning. Ah, yes, that was it. That’s when he said that the only exception was on nights when she made squash soup and he kept tasting the butter and nutmeg. But she went on, ignoring his silly little interruption, addressing her comments to the therapist, as though they were adults discussing a child.
She said it didn’t surprise her that once Dave was asleep, he rarely woke till morning, because just being who he was seemed to involve such a strenuous daily effort. He was so devoid of common ease and comfort. He was such a good man, so decent, yet so full of guilt for being human. So tortured by his mistakes, imperfections. A peerless record of successes in his profession, obscured in his mind by a handful of failures. Always thinking. Thinking his way relentlessly through problems—one after another—like Sisyphus rolling the stone up the hill again, again, again. Grasping life as an awkward puzzle to be solved. But not everything in life was a puzzle, she’d said, looking at him, speaking at last to him instead of to the therapist. There were things to be embraced in other ways. Mysteries, not puzzles. Things to be loved, not deciphered.
Recalling her comments as he lay there in bed had a strange effect on him. He was wholly absorbed by the memory, both disturbed and exhausted by it. It finally faded, along with the tastes of butter and nutmeg, and he slipped into an uneasy sleep.
Toward morning he was half awakened by Madeleine getting out of bed. She blew her nose gently, quietly. For a second he wondered if she’d been crying, but it was a hazy thought, easily supplanted by the more likely explanation that she was suffering from one of her autumn allergies. He was dimly aware of her going to the closet and putting on her terry-cloth robe. A little while later, he heard or imagined—he wasn’t sure which—her footsteps on the basement stairs. Sometime after that she passed the bedroom door soundlessly. In the first touch of dawn light stretching across the bedroom into the hallway, she appeared, specterlike, to be carrying something, a box of some kind.
His eyes were still heavy with exhaustion, and he dozed for another hour.
Chapter 15
Dichotomies
When he got up, it was not because he felt rested, or even fully awake, but because getting up seemed preferable to sinking back into a dream that had left him without any recollection of its details yet with a distinct feeling of claustrophobia. It was like one of the hangovers he’d experienced in his college days.
He forced himself into the shower, which slightly improved his mood, then dressed and went out to the kitchen. He was relieved to see that Madeleine had made enough coffee for both of them. She was sitting at the breakfast table, looking out thoughtfully through the French doors and holding her large spherical cup—with steam rising from it—in both hands as if to warm them. He poured a cup of coffee for himself and sat across the table from her.
“Morning,” he said.
She smiled a vague little smile in reply.
He followed her gaze out across the garden to the wooded hillside at the far edge of the pasture. An angry wind was stripping the trees of their few remaining leaves. High winds usually made Madeleine nervous—ever since a massive oak came crashing down across the road in front of her car the day they moved to Walnut Crossing—but this morning she seemed too preoccupied to notice.
After a minute or two, she turned toward him, and her expression sharpened as though something about his attire or demeanor had just struck her.
“Where are you going?”
she asked.
He hesitated. “To Peony. To the institute.”
“Why?”
“Why?” His voice was raspy with irritation. “Because Mellery is still refusing to report his problem to the local police, and I want to push him a little harder in that direction.”
“You could do that on the phone.”
“Not as well as I can face-to-face. Plus, I want to pick up copies of all the written messages and a copy of his recording of last night’s phone call.”
“Isn’t that what FedEx is for?”
He stared at her. “What’s the problem with me going to the institute?”
“The problem isn’t where you’re going, it’s why you’re going.”
“To persuade him to go to the police? To pick up the messages?”
“You honestly believe that’s why you’re driving all the way to Peony?”
“Why the hell else?”
She gave him a long, almost pitying look before answering. “You’re going,” she said softly, “because you’ve grabbed onto this thing and you can’t let go. You’re going because you can’t stay away.” Then she closed her eyes slowly. It was like the fade-out at the end of a movie.
He didn’t know what to say. Every so often Madeleine would end an argument just this way—by saying or doing something that seemed to leapfrog over his train of thought and render him silent.
This time he thought he knew the reason for the effect on him, or at least part of the reason. In her tone he’d heard an echo of her speech to the therapist, the speech he’d so vividly recollected a few hours earlier. He found the coincidence unsettling. It was as though Madeleine present and Madeleine past were ganging up on him, one whispering in each ear.
He was quiet for a long time.
She eventually took the coffee cups to the sink and washed them. Then, rather than laying them in the dish drainer as she usually did, she dried them and put them back in the cabinet above the sideboard.
Continuing to look into the cabinet, as though she’d forgotten why she was standing there, she asked, “What time are you going?”
He shrugged and looked around the room as though a clue to the right answer might be on one of the walls. As he did so, his gaze was attracted by an object resting on the coffee table in front of the fireplace at the far end of the room. It was a cardboard box, of the size and shape one might get at a liquor store. But what really caught his eye and held it was the white ribbon encircling the box and fastened on the top with a simple white bow.
Dear God. That’s what she’d brought up from the basement.
Although the box seemed smaller than he remembered it from so many years ago and the cardboard a darker brown, the ribbon was unmistakable, unforgettable. The Hindus had definitely gotten it right: white, not black, was the natural color for mourning.
He felt a tugging emptiness in his lungs, as though gravity were dragging his breath, his soul, down into the earth. Danny. Danny’s drawings. My little Danny boy. He swallowed and looked away, looked away from such immense loss. He felt too weak to move. He looked out through the French doors, coughed, cleared his throat, tried to replace stirred memories with immediate sensations, tried to redirect his mind by saying something, hearing his own voice, breaking the dreadful silence.
“I don’t imagine I’ll be late,” he said. It took all his strength, all his will, to push himself up out of his chair. “I should be home in time for dinner,” he added meaninglessly, hardly knowing what he was saying.
Madeleine watched him with a wan smile, not really a smile in the normal sense of the word, said nothing.
“Better go,” he said. “Need to be on time for this thing.”
Blindly, almost staggering, he kissed her on the cheek and went out to the car, forgetting his jacket.
The landscape was different that morning, more like winter, with virtually all of autumn’s color gone from the trees. But he sensed this only dimly. He was driving automatically, almost unseeingly, consumed by the image of the box, his recollection of its contents, the significance of its presence on the table.
Why? Why now, after all these years? To what purpose? What was she thinking? He had driven through Dillweed, driven past Abelard’s without even noticing. He felt sick to his stomach. He had to focus on something else, had to get a grip.
Focus on where you’re going, why you’re going there. He tried to force his mind in the direction of the messages, the poems, the number nineteen. Mellery thinking of the number nineteen. Then finding it in the letter. How could that have been done? This was the second time Arybdis or Charybdis—or whatever his name was—had performed this impossible feat. There were certain differences between the two instances, but the second was as baffling as the first.
The image of the box on the coffee table pressed relentlessly against the edges of his concentration—and then the contents of the box, as he remembered them being packed away so long ago. Danny’s crayon scribbles. Oh, God. The sheet of little orange things that Madeleine had insisted were marigolds. And that funny little drawing that might have been a green balloon or maybe a tree, maybe a lollipop. Oh, Jesus.
Before he knew it, he was pulling in to the neatly graveled parking area at the institute, the drive hardly registering in his consciousness. He looked around at his surroundings, trying to center himself, trying to wrestle his mind into the same location as his body.
Gradually he relaxed, felt almost drowsy, the emptiness that so often followed intense emotion. He looked at his watch. Somehow he’d arrived exactly on time. Apparently that part of him operated without conscious intervention, like his autonomic nervous system. Wondering if the chill had driven the role players indoors, he locked the car and took the winding path to the house. The front door, as on his previous visit, was opened by Mellery before he knocked.
Gurney stepped in out of the wind. “Any new developments?”
Mellery shook his head and closed the heavy antique door, but not before half a dozen dead leaves skittered over the threshold.
“Come back to the den,” he said. “There’s coffee, juice …”
“Coffee would be fine,” said Gurney.
Again they chose the wing chairs by the fire. On the low table between them was a large manila envelope. Gesturing toward it, Mellery said, “Xeroxes of the written messages and a recording of the call. It’s all there for you.”
Gurney took the envelope and placed it on his lap.
Mellery eyed him expectantly.
“You should go to the police,” said Gurney.
“We’ve been through that already.”
“We need to go through it again.”
Mellery closed his eyes and massaged his forehead as though it ached. When he opened his eyes, he appeared to have made a decision.
“Come to my lecture this morning. It’s the only way you’ll understand.” He spoke quickly, as if to forestall objection. “What goes on here is very subtle, very fragile. We teach our guests about conscience, peace, clarity. Earning their trust is critical. We’re exposing them to something that can change their lives. But it’s like skywriting. In a calm sky, it’s legible. A few gusts and it’s all gibberish. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Just come to the lecture,” pleaded Mellery.
It was exactly 10:00 A.M. when Gurney followed him into a large room on the ground floor of the main building. It resembled the sitting room of an expensive country inn. A dozen armchairs and half a dozen sofas were oriented in the general direction of a grand fireplace. Most of the twenty attendees were already seated. A few lingered at a sideboard on which stood a silver coffee urn and a tray of croissants.
Mellery walked casually to a spot in front of the fireplace and faced his audience. Those at the sideboard hurried to their seats, and all fell expectantly silent. Mellery motioned Gurney to an armchair by the fireplace.
“This is David,” announced Mellery with a smile in Gurney’
s direction. “He wants to know more about what we do, so I’ve invited him to sit in on our morning meeting.”
Several voices offered pleasant greetings, and all the faces offered smiles, most of which looked genuine. He caught the eye of the birdlike woman who’d accosted him obscenely the day before. She looked demure, even blushed a little.
“The roles that dominate our lives,” Mellery began without preamble, “are the ones we’re unaware of. The needs that drive us most relentlessly are the ones we’re least conscious of. To be happy and free, we must see the roles we play for what they are, and bring our hidden needs into the light of day.”
He was speaking calmly and straightforwardly and had the complete attention of his audience.
“The first stumbling block in our search will be the assumption that we already know ourselves, that we understand our own motives, that we know why we feel the way we do about our circumstances and the people around us. In order to make progress, we will need to be more open-minded. To find out the truth about myself, I must stop insisting that I already know it. I’ll never remove the boulder from my path if I fail to see it for what it is.”
Just as Gurney was thinking that this last observation was expanding the envelope of New Age fog, Mellery’s voice rose sharply.
“You know what that boulder is? That boulder is your image of yourself, who you think you are. The person you think you are is keeping the person you really are locked up without light or food or friends. The person you think you are has been trying to murder the person you really are for as long as you both have lived.”
Mellery paused, seemingly overtaken by some desperate emotion. He stared at his audience, and they seemed hardly to breathe. When he resumed speaking, his voice had dropped to a conversational volume but was still full of feeling.
“The person I think I am is terrified of the person I really am, terrified of what others would think of that person. What would they do to me if they knew the person I really was? Better to be safe! Better to hide the real person, starve the real person, bury the real person!”