by Dan Deweese
“In the five minutes since we talked? No.”
“Since who talked? You and Miranda, or you and Sandra?”
“Me and Sandra. She must really be nervous.”
“Yes, I think so. But did Miranda say how long it was going to be? Everyone is dressed, and the photographer is getting a bit antsy is all.”
“She didn’t say. She just said she would be back soon.”
So it was just as I had expected: I was on the outside. “Didn’t you tell me you weren’t sure if she would be coming by or not, and that you would call me if she was?”
“I’m sorry. I was asked not to say anything.”
“It doesn’t seem fair,” I said. “I knew you first, after all.”
“I don’t think that applies here, darling. Keeping track of who has known whom the longest seems beside the point.”
I heard the sentence, but it didn’t register as meaning anything—my mind could not make it fit the situation. It sounded as if Gina was arguing that expecting to be able to trust people you’ve known for years was childish. “I can’t think of what other point there would be,” I said, which, though it sounded like I was disagreeing with her, was actually just me reporting my immediate mental state.
“Do you want me to call you when we’re on our way?” she asked.
“On your way where?”
“To the hotel. Sandra asked me to drive Miranda over.”
“Right,” I said. “Yes, that sounds fine.”
When I closed the phone and handed it back to Sandra, she appeared genuinely confused. “Why did you do that?” she said.
It is always the same between her and me. It’s not that I doubt her confusion—Sandra only playacts in the direction of certainty, never the opposite—but that I cannot comprehend how she could possibly be confused or, often, almost offended by my responses. “Because you’ve talked to Gina more than once today,” I said. “The two of you have been trading information.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong is that you know where Miranda is, but you’re pretending you don’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on,” I said. “You told me you hadn’t heard anything from anyone, but your name was on Gina’s cell phone multiple times, and I just saw her name on yours. You said you didn’t know where Miranda was last night, but it only took me a couple minutes to get Gina to tell me Miranda stayed with her, so I’m sure Gina had already told you the same thing. You’ve known where Miranda was last night, and you know where she is right now, and yet you’ve told me none of it. So I want you to tell me what’s going on. You told me you wanted me to find her, but now it seems like you’re keeping me away from her on purpose.”
“You are completely paranoid. This is a bizarre theory that only makes sense in your mind. I never commanded you to find Miranda.”
“You’re only denying this to try and embarrass me, so that I won’t recognize what’s obvious. Miranda is upset, and she’s not sure she wants to go through with getting married. You’re convinced I want to be some kind of hero today, and you think I’ll jump in and try and convince Miranda not to get married, so you’re keeping me away from her. You want to talk her into just going through with things, because you can’t stand the social embarrassment of something going wrong. Right? You can just tell me if I’m right.”
Her lips pressed into the angry line I knew well. Any confusion she had felt was gone. “You are not right,” she said. “You have dreamed this up in your head.”
“Then where is Miranda? And don’t lie again and tell me you don’t know anything, and then send me running off so you can laugh as soon as I’m gone. I told you earlier I felt like everyone knew something I didn’t, and you said I was being paranoid. But did I dream up the fact that Gina just told me you asked her not to tell me where Miranda was?”
“Enough!” Sandra said, raising her hands as if she wanted to grab me by the neck. “Enough! You always have to press everyone, on every little thing! You can’t ever just let something go! So fine, I’ll tell you what’s going on, if it will stop you from running on like this.”
“So where is she?”
“On her way to the gallery, I guess. Though she was supposed to be there by now. She is supposed to be on her way here by now.”
“I’ve figured that much out myself. I’m asking where she has been today.”
“When I told you earlier that I didn’t know where she was, I actually didn’t know where she was. There is no big conspiracy.”
“So then why aren’t you answering my question? And I don’t want a minute-by-minute analysis of when you were lying and when you were telling the truth today. I don’t care about that. I care about what’s going on with her.”
“She doesn’t want to tell you that.”
“Doesn’t want to tell me what?”
She shook her head, as if changing her mind about having the conversation. “You should really talk to her about this. On any day other than today. This is—”
“Just tell me, Sandra!” I shouted, loud enough for my voice to carry out into the atrium’s open middle. The sound of my voice echoing back at me surprised and upset me, though. The walkway that surrounded the void was hexagonal, and the sonic ricochets of my voice sounded hollow and empty in that space. “We’re her parents, for Christ’s sake,” I said, under better control of myself. “Tell me what is going on with our daughter.”
Sandra searched my eyes, but unlike Gina, it wasn’t in order to guess at something. The aptitudes I had or didn’t have, the faculties I did or did not possess: she knew. She only watched me that way—silently, with an almost dreadful patience—when she found herself in the position of the cat standing over the exhausted mouse, waiting to see if the little creature might thrash, or be made to thrash, once more. But finally she sighed, and seemed finished. “Our daughter is pregnant,” she said. “She’s pregnant, and she doesn’t want to tell you. And she didn’t want me to tell you. She doesn’t want you to know.”
The door to Sandra’s room opened then, the percussive snap of the latch ringing out like a gunshot. One of Miranda’s bridesmaids stood there in her pale green dress, silent and barefoot. I hadn’t been able to keep track of all Miranda’s friends in those years—she never brought any of them along when visiting me, which meant that to me, these girls were just names Miranda occasionally referred to. I hadn’t the slightest idea who this girl studying us was. “Are you guys okay?” she asked.
“We’re fine, Jennifer,” Sandra said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
The girl actually glared at me as she closed the door.
“Why wouldn’t she want me to know?” I said.
“Because you’ll be disappointed,” Sandra said. “She’s supposed to tour the world now with Grant, or whatever it was you said in your big speech last night. You’ve spent the last ten years talking about how beautiful and smart she is, and how she’s going to find out what she wants to do in life, and it will be great, and she’ll do all sorts of big, huge, amazing things. But she’s not going to be flying around and changing the world now. She’s going to have a baby. And I doubt that you’ve ever listed being a mother among all of those wonderful and amazing things she might do. You’re her knight in shining armor, and she thinks she’s let you down.”
Sandra was looking at me as if I’d put some awful weight on Miranda’s shoulders, and I knew I had. I was confused. I had done something wrong, it seemed. But I could not fathom what. “Grant knows?”
“Of course.”
“And Gina?”
“Yes.”
I wondered if my trembling was visible. It was difficult to speak. “Does Alan know?”
“Of course,” Sandra said. “And he’s been great about it. Very supportive.”
Alan was not Miranda’s father. And yet he knew everything. I thought of Sandra and Alan and Miranda working through things, sharing their thoughts and feelings with each other�
��around the dinner table? in the living room?—and never telling me any of it. A wave of shame engulfed me. What was so wrong with me that these people did not trust me with their thoughts and feelings? And now they had decided, for some reason, to lock me out of my own life. I looked at Sandra, baffled. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She spoke softly. “It wasn’t just about you. She kept it from everyone for a while. She said she thought she might not keep it, so she didn’t want to tell anyone. But then she told Grant, and he was happy about it. And they decided this is something they want. They want to do this.”
What was there to say? Everything had happened without me. These discussions of love and marriage and children—of life—had occurred in other rooms, with other people. And now everything was taken care of. Gina would deliver Miranda to the hotel, Sandra would receive her in the room behind the door across the hall, the bridesmaids and the stylist would attend to her, and everything would proceed. Not only did my presence no longer seem necessary, but it seemed maybe it had never been necessary at all. Sandra claimed she had never asked me to find our daughter, and it was all a misunderstanding. Or, to be exact, it was all my misunderstanding. Everyone else seemed to understand things perfectly.
I don’t remember what I said to Sandra before I walked away. And I was too stunned, standing there in the glass elevator like a little figurine on display, to think very clearly about anything at all. In all honesty, I probably said nothing. Walking away without saying good-bye is the kind of thing people tell me I often do when my mind is elsewhere.
I REMEMBER RETURNING TO the present after I stepped out of the elevator, though. Because as I tried to head through the lobby, a young man stepped directly in front of me, blocking my path. I did not, at first, even recognize him as he said, “I’m sorry I had to do this, but I’m going to have to ask that you not leave the hotel right now. There are some people on their way who want to talk to you.”
It was young John. “With security,” he probably would have liked me to add. I was baffled as to how he had tracked me down—I knew I hadn’t told him what hotel the reception was at. Was a person able to look up wedding reception bookings? It seemed like the kind of thing that should be private, and yet it’s not rare for me to find out that things I think should be private are not at all. And then I thought: My credit card statements. That son of a bitch saw it on my statements. And now he’s come running to ruin everything. “I’ve already told you I don’t have time for this. I have to go.”
He shook his head like a scolding parent. “No, you’ll need to wait a few minutes. You’ll get to move on with your day in a little bit.”
It had been no more than five seconds, but already I found him insufferable. “You’re not my supervisor,” I said. “What are you going to do, tackle me?”
“I don’t need to be your supervisor. And I don’t need to tackle you, because I’ve called the police, and they’re coming here to meet us. They’re the people you’ll need to speak to.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, but even as I turned to look out the glass lobby doors, I noticed a squad car in the first row of spots in front of the hotel, and a second car—unmarked, but with the plates and exotic antennae of a law enforcement vehicle—pulling slowly past the sliding doors and to a stop a bit farther along the drive’s curb. Two uniformed officers emerged from the squad car and began to make their way toward the hotel entrance, while a third figure, in plainclothes, stepped out of the unmarked car.
John regarded me with the coolly satisfied gaze of a television cop who has trapped and conquered his quarry in time for the last commercial break. And I imagine that is exactly who he thought he was. “You are completely insane,” I told him.
“Nope. I’m doing my job,” he said.
The lobby doors slid open, and here came two uniformed police officers, along with a much older gentleman in a shirt and tie. I could see that the men in uniform were Martinez and O’Brien, the same two who had visited the branch that morning. “Officers,” John called, raising his arm like a student who knows the answer, “we’re over here.”
O’Brien said something to the others before heading toward the lobby’s front desk, and Martinez and the plainclothes officer headed in our direction. When they reached us, it was the older man who shook John’s hand first. “So you’re the fellow who called us? With the security team?”
“Yes,” John said proudly. “I felt like this was something we should take care of as soon as possible.”
The older man nodded, though with the raised eyebrows of someone who has yet to be convinced. “And you’re the branch manager?” he said, turning to me.
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m Detective Lou Buccholz,” he said. “You may not remember me, but I handled a case that involved you a long time ago. A robbery maybe twenty-five years ago.”
He was lying. He had to be lying. “I remember a detective named Buckle,” I said. “But he was an older man.”
He laughed. “My name is Buccholz. And I can assure you it was me, because I just looked at the report on the way over here.”
“But you had gray hair, didn’t you? You can’t still be working for the police department.”
“I went gray pretty early, so you’re probably right that I was gray even then.”
“How early?” I asked, incredulous. “How old were you?”
“Let’s see,” he said, rubbing his chin. “If that robbery was twenty-five years ago, I would have been thirty-nine.”
“I could have sworn you were older.”
He seemed amused, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that he should have been some kind of wizened ancient. He moved with perfect confidence as he pulled a pack of chewing gum from his shirt pocket, though, and his hands didn’t tremble in any discernible way as he teased a stick of gum from the pack. And if it was true he was sixty-four, then his face was probably even less wrinkled than those of other men his age. When he looked at me, his eyes were clear and alert as he said, “But how old are you?”
“Now? Forty-nine.”
He shook his head. “Forty-nine. Such an old man. Certainly one foot’s in the grave already.”
He laughed, and I managed to smile. Though it was also true that I hadn’t the slightest idea where I would be taken next, or what kind of interrogation I was going to be subjected to there.
I’M SURE IT WAS a Sycora Park Suites energy-saving policy to leave the lights in the ballroom at their weakest setting when the place wasn’t in use. The effect, however, was that as soon as I stepped into the room—Detective Buccholz had suggested I wait there for him while he consulted with the other officers—I felt as if I were either half conscious or under water. The profusion of tables that stretched off into the room’s dim distance, each of them immaculately set and immaculately unattended, seemed tremendous, and the row of tables along the back wall, ready to hold the evening’s buffet of dinner selections, looked impossibly long. Had we truly agreed to host this many souls? Would we really be providing this much food and drink? No wonder I’m broke, I thought. And why had I never noticed the unwavering beigeness of the place? The soft light, the silence, the muted tones—the space did not feel celebratory so much as funereal. It was as if I had stumbled into a wake at which I was the only attendee. And there was no body.
The door opened and I turned, expecting to see a representative of the law. But it was not the law. It was Catherine. “What are you doing here?” I said.
“I saw John in the lobby,” she said. “So I knew something was up. Are you all right? You have a strange look on your face.”
“It’s nothing. Nonsense.”
It was a lie. I actually had been thinking about how Miranda and I had, only a few years before, attended a funeral together in a room not unlike the one in which I sat. My mother’s husband, Eddie, had called one afternoon to tell me Carrie had tripped over a wooden planter box and, falling backward, hit her head against the surface of their concret
e patio. She didn’t lose consciousness, he said in amazement—he seemed still in shock himself as he spoke to me—but sat there with her hands on her head, complaining of pain throughout her skull that was so bad she didn’t even want to open her eyes. When she hadn’t been able to stand up, though, Eddie had called an ambulance. Carrie continued trading lucid conversation with him as they waited for the paramedics, he told me, and also as they rode in the back of the ambulance on the way to the hospital. By the time they made it there, though, he said, she had begun to fade. “She must have passed out while they were wheeling her inside,” he said, “and they rushed her off into some room and then came back to tell me she had a cracked skull and her brain was bleeding, or there was bleeding on her brain—however they say it. And then not much later they said she wasn’t doing well. No, they actually said she wasn’t ‘responding well.’ And then I guess her body started shutting down, just kind of one system after another, and they couldn’t do anything about it. And by the time I saw her again, she was already gone.” I had for some reason thought Eddie was telling me a story of events that had occurred a day or two before. It wasn’t until he was finished that I realized this had all happened within the last hour and a half, and that my mother had died only minutes before Eddie had called.
I told Miranda she had no obligation to attend the funeral of a grandmother who had visited her in person no more than once every four or five years, and who, because she lived thousands of miles away in the Florida Panhandle, may as well as have been on the moon, as far as I was concerned. But Miranda said she wanted to go, and so together we made the long trip to the small town my mother had called home for thirty years, and which I had never before bothered to visit. When we arrived at Carrie and Eddie’s address, however, I was surprised by the appearance of the man who met us. I remembered Eddie as tall and gruff, but the man I shook hands with was at least two inches shorter than me, and seemed almost shy. Carrie had married Eddie when I was sixteen, after dating him for only six months, and I recalled him as someone who often told stories about the construction work he did for a living, though eventually I decided he probably liked that line of work because it allowed him to quit any job at any point, disappear for an indefinite period of time—hunting or fishing, supposedly—and then come back and either join up with a new job, or sometimes just rejoin the one he’d left. He was in his mid-sixties by the time of Carrie’s death, though. The few times over the years that she had come to visit me, Eddie had stayed behind, so I hadn’t seen him in person since he and Carrie had moved to Florida while I was in college. The only words I had traded with him in that quarter century had been the minimal pleasantries required to fill the interval between Eddie picking up the phone and his handing it to Carrie—never more than a minute or two of chitchat, rarely about anything other than the weather. Over the years, of course, I recognized that Carrie’s decision to take a stab at marital happiness made perfect sense. She had been only thirty-three at the time she married Eddie—still young, and at what is now a perfectly normal age for a first marriage. And neither have I ever questioned my own decision to use college as an escape route from the dusty, barren town Carrie and I were stuck in. I found a university in the Pacific Northwest whose application packet featured photos of lush greenery and aesthetically pleasing mists—imagery I associated with tropical islands, really—and headed there with no intention of returning. And when Carrie told me a couple years later that she and Eddie were moving to Florida for what seemed to me an odd job opportunity—he was going to fix motorcycles in a shop where she could cover the reception desk, a situation that ended up lasting no more than six months for either of them—it bothered me not at all. Carrie and I went in different directions, probably for reasons no more substantial than that boys move away, and women remarry. We were both young, and went off to become new people. The place we had lived, the way we had lived: neither of us wanted that. It was just circumstance. I’ve always considered our escape from it a tremendous success for both of us.