Time Release

by Martin J. Smith

  “Yeah, well, the feeling’s mutual,” Melissa said. “So?”

  Brenna sipped her coffee. “What did he tell you?”

  “Nothing. For the longest time he said you were just his lawyer. Then I asked him what was going on one night after you dropped him off out front and you guys kissed good-bye. He got all nervous and told me you were seeing each other, but that was it.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “He asked if it bothered me once. Like, what am I supposed to say?”

  “No offense, but sometimes your father can be a real asshole.”

  Christensen thought Brenna looked right at him when she said it.

  “No offense taken,” Melissa said.

  “You need to talk to him about this, Melissa. But for the record, we weren’t having an affair. The day your mom died, he was just another guy in trouble who needed a lawyer. We’d never met before then, but we had mutual friends. He never told you how the whole thing unfolded with your mom?”

  “Swear to God.”

  “It’s an amazing story. A love story.” Brenna stood up, and Christensen tensed. She went to the coffeemaker on the kitchen counter and refilled her cup, then sat back down. Smelled like Starbucks Gold Coast.

  “What I remember most vividly was the way he talked about your mother’s face.”

  “Her face?”

  “That night he called me, when the police were questioning him downtown—they were still talking about murder charges then. We talked a lot about your mom. Not at first. Like you said, at first he gave this little robot speech, no emotion at all, about what he’d done and why he’d done it. But then, all of a sudden he broke through to something deeper, something raw. I still don’t know why. But he started talking about her face.”

  Christensen closed his eyes. Tight. He remembered the conversation like it was yesterday, one of the few times his professional detachment had failed. He didn’t know why he’d opened up to Brenna, either, but that night she was the sympathetic stranger, and more than any other time in his life he’d needed to talk.

  “He said when your mom smiled, the outside corners of her eyes dipped as the corners of her mouth went up. The lines of her face rearranged themselves so smoothly, he said it was like watching good animation, the way it changed her whole character. And he talked about how the years had changed those lines as they got older, made her face more and more interesting. He said he imagined holding that face in his hands when they were eighty, feeling the loose skin, the softness, kissing her, talking about you and Annie and how good life had been. That’s how he expected things to go.”

  Melissa’s hand snaked into view, picked up a paper napkin and disappeared.

  “God, it was so painful to hear, to watch him struggle with that,” Brenna said. “I’ve never heard his voice the same way since, so damaged. Never seen him cry again, either. I could tell it was something he’d never talked about before. And all I could think of was how much courage it must have taken him to end the life of someone he loved so much.”

  “It was so unbelievable, seeing her in the coma,” Melissa said. She blew her nose. “No expression at all. Face like wax.”

  “He talked about that, too. As soon as he accepted what the doctors were telling him, that she wasn’t coming back, that she could never smile again, or write stories, or hold her daughters, he made his choice. I don’t think he ever had a second thought about the moral rightness of what he was going to do—he wouldn’t let God do that to her was what he told me—but I think it took him months to screw up the courage.”

  “We used to go to church,” Melissa said. “We don’t anymore.”

  “He had to blame somebody. The drunk who hit her died in the crash.”

  Christensen counted a dozen faucet drips before anyone spoke again. He brushed a tear from his cheek. How could he have been so stupid, to share with a then-stranger what his child had most needed to hear? He wanted to push open the door, embrace Melissa, beg her forgiveness. But he couldn’t.

  “That conversation changed me,” Brenna said. “I’d never understood love before, never had someone look me in the eye and explain it so clearly.”

  “You fell in love with my dad that night?”

  Brenna let the steam rising from her cup wash over her face. “I don’t know. I’m not sure people with as many scars as me fall in love. But sometimes we stumble onto it in the strangest places, at the strangest times. It’s not something I would have predicted, and I know for sure your dad wasn’t ready. Isn’t ready. So I’ve just let him know how I feel and tried to give him space to grieve. We’re both single parents. Right now it’s more of a convenient partnership.”

  “But, I mean, you guys sleep together. Right?”

  Brenna walked to the sink and poured out the rest of her coffee. “Life’s complicated,” she said. “He’d die if he thought you knew.”

  “He knows I know. I’ve been pretty rough.”

  “I’m meeting a client in seven hours,” Brenna said. “Not that the conversation wasn’t nice, but I’m going to bed.” She paused. “Look, I know I came into your dad’s life at an awkward time. We spent so much time sorting out the legal stuff after your mom died, then we started seeing each other, it probably seemed like I was trying to take her place. I can’t do that. I wouldn’t even try.”

  Melissa was up as well. She was still in the clothes she wore to school, carrying her backpack. He’d asked her to come straight here from school, but she’d obviously come in late. Brenna must have been waiting up for her. Christensen stepped to the hinged side of the swinging door, hoping they’d leave the kitchen through the front-hall door instead. He held his breath. The kitchen light went out and Melissa headed up the stairs to the spare bedroom. Brenna followed her into the hall, but stopped in the living room, at the sofa bed. She started to tuck in the kids, then stopped. She picked up “Love You Forever” from the coffee table, looked around the room, and set it back down. She checked the front door, then disappeared down the hall toward her workroom.

  Christensen’s head pounded. His blunder hit home. He’d moved the book. He’d covered the kids. She must be wondering. An eternity passed. Down the hall, the distant sound of a door opening, then closing. What was she doing?

  The front-hall light clicked on. Footsteps. The sliding door to the hall closet opened and closed. The hall bathroom light, with its rattling fan, clicked on. The overhead kitchen light. Christensen suddenly realized she was searching the downstairs, room by room. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He waited for the blaze of light from the dining room chandelier, shielded his eyes when it finally came. Brenna was standing in the broad dining room entryway holding a cordless phone to her ear with one hand, a gun in the other. His hands went up, spaghetti-Western style, purely by instinct.

  “You shit,” she said, lowering both hands.

  Christensen started breathing again. “A gun?”

  “I figured it was you. Burglars don’t tuck little kids into bed. But why take chances?”

  Christensen dropped his hands. They were shaking. His voice was unsteady. “I’m sorry.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why’d you come?”

  How to explain? “I’m pretty sure Ron Corbett knows where I live, and he apparently pulled some stuff with Downing in 1986 that’s got me worried.”

  “You talking to somebody down there?” Melissa called from the top of the stairs.

  “Just checking CNN,” Brenna said. “Good night.”

  They waited until the spare-bedroom door closed.

  “I’ll leave,” he said.

  Brenna clicked on the gun’s safety. Defense attorneys keep rough company, but he still couldn’t reconcile the image. She kept a gun?

  “We could tell her you c
ame in later,” she said. “Or you could tell her the truth. Your choice.”

  “I’ll just leave. She doesn’t have to know I was eavesdropping.”

  “How brave of you.”

  He cleared his throat. “She hates me enough as it is. What about you?”

  “I should have shot first.”

  They stared across the room. He had no defense. Excuses would seem pathetic. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

  He swallowed hard and fought back tears. She moved away as he passed into the living room, heading for the front door. Thank God Annie was still asleep, he thought.

  “It’s not over,” he said, turning back.

  “No,” Brenna said, “but I have a lot to think about. This kind of stinks, snooping on a private conversation. I’m not sure how I feel about it.”

  Christensen nodded. “I meant the Primenyl stuff. I still need your help. Can the girls stay here a while?”

  Brenna nodded. “You, I should throw to the wolves. But if it’s getting that weird, I guess you can stay, too.”

  Chapter 31

  “The Aquazoo or something?”

  Sonny held the photograph closer to his eyes. It was the first of ten in the folder Christensen had shoved across the desk moments before, the folder he’d assembled that morning with countless reservations. Before handing it over, he’d memorized the order. The first picture was of a man seated on a plastic chair, staring through a thick window at a passing fish. He’d found it, like half of the others, in a box of Molly’s old black-and-white prints. The rest he culled from magazines and books, all but one.

  “There’s no right answer, Sonny. Just tell me what comes to mind with each one.” Christensen turned on his desk lamp for more light, angled it toward the pictures in Sonny’s hands.

  “The Aquazoo. We went there on a school field trip once. Pretty funny picture, though.”

  Sonny had arrived on time, apparently eager to resume, unaware that the stakes had changed. Christensen needed a breakthrough, and he couldn’t let Sonny explore his mind’s dark caverns any longer without helping him focus the search.

  The second picture was of an immense woman hand-making pierogies. Molly had met her after photographing a High Mass in Polish Hill. The finished pierogies were stacked like bricks beside her, and her fingers were crimping the edges of yet another little dough bomb. A smiling priest stood behind her.

  “The fat lady’s cooking something. Not sure what. And there’s a preacher.”

  “Good,” Christensen said. Sonny was being too literal. “Again, you don’t have to stop with just describing what’s in the picture, Sonny. The point of the exercise is to let you explore a lot of different feelings. Anything else come to mind?”

  Sonny studied the print. “My grandfather was a preacher. That what you mean?”

  “Really?”

  “He died when I was four. Mom never talks about him, but I know that much, that he was a preacher. And he was a real son of a bitch, strict and everything. Smoked cigars and spit little bits of tobacco all the time.”

  “Funny the things you remember when you’re that young.”

  Sonny flipped up the third picture. The dancer. One of Molly’s strangest. They’d gone to see Les Ballets Trockadero at Heinz Hall. One of the male dancers, dressed as a ballerina in a parody of Swan Lake, had struck a regal pose. Head up. Smile fixed. Left arm raised gracefully above his head, exposing a full thatch of armpit hair. Sonny laughed out loud. Christensen laughed, too, thinking about the picture, one of the most sexually confusing images he had ever seen.

  “Twisted,” Sonny said. “I’m not a fudge-pounder, by the way. You could have just asked.”

  The kid was bright, no question. “What? And waste all this expensive psychological training?”

  Even as they joked, Christensen could hear the edge creeping into his voice. Four more pictures and Sonny would find the one image that was there for a reason. Could he tell? Could he sense the anticipation, the purpose? Did Sonny know how uncomfortable this ambush made him, how contrary it felt to everything Christensen believed about the safest and most reliable ways to recover repressed memories?

  Sonny flipped to the fourth photograph. A tenement family—two girls, two boys—sleeping on a fire escape on a hot summer night in the Hill District. That one he got from a back copy of Pittsburgh Magazine, the one with the story on “Unseen Pittsburgh.”

  “They’re not dead?”

  “You tell me. What’s happening in the picture?”

  “They’re just sleeping, I think. Looks like outside. You can see parked cars underneath them. Not sure where they are, but they look like they’re sleeping.”

  “What else?”

  “They don’t have much money. They’re black.”

  “Do you think their race is significant?”

  “No. They’re just black.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Picture five. A Pulitzer Prize–winning image of police taking an abusive father into custody as his bruised wife and ten-year-old daughter cower in a corner of the family’s small living room.

  “Home sweet home,” Sonny said. A pained smile. “You know about my dad.”

  “Knew that one might be painful for you, but I thought it might be a basis for discussion. What did you think when you first saw it?”

  Sonny stared at the picture. “How little the kid looks.”

  “Little?”

  “And how sad the mom looks. He must have been hitting her, but somebody called the cops.”

  “Do you think they could have handled the situation differently? The mom and daughter, I mean.”

  Sonny grinned. “Name Lorena Bobbitt ring a bell?”

  Christensen marveled at Sonny’s grasp of his own emotions. He was bitter, had every right to be, but somehow maintained an objective distance. It was like he’d watched his entire life on TV rather than experienced it firsthand. Christensen swallowed hard, knowing he was about to put that objectivity to a severe test.

  The sixth picture was a cipher. A color weather service photograph of a tornado bearing down on a small town as two residents in the foreground calmly record the scene on their camcorder.

  “Dumb shits,” was Sonny’s only comment.

  The seventh picture. Christensen steeled himself.

  “A gun,” Sonny said. “Looks like a .38.”

  Christensen studied Sonny’s face for a reaction. He seemed to absorb the details of the black-and-white glossy. At first glance, it could have been a gun manufacturer’s promotional close-up. The gun was propped neatly at an angle that highlighted its details against a distinctive diamond-pattern backdrop. Nothing in the frame would have suggested the grisly context to anyone except Sonny Corbett, who, Christensen hoped, might recognize the background as the shirt his brother was wearing when Sonny found his body a decade earlier. The gun had come to rest, improbably, on David’s shoulder, the back-spray of gore invisible against the dark shirt. The coroner’s photographer had underexposed it, and Christensen thought its ambiguity was a plus when he found it among the more graphic suicide-scene shots in Sonny’s file.

  Sonny flipped to the next photograph.

  “This one—” He smiled as he held up the eighth picture, one of Molly’s shots, the one she called “Coitus Interruptus.” A fat man had been forced to evacuate a Liberty Avenue massage parlor after a water main break. He was wrapped in a small towel, dancing beneath the parlor’s “Magic Fingers” neon sign. Before Sonny could finish, the picture slipped from his hand and fell to the floor. He tried to pick it up, and when he finally did, it fell again.

  “Shit,” he said.

  It fell again, then the whole stack of pictures fell from Sonny’s lap onto the floor when he bent to get it. Something was wrong. Christensen circled his desk to hel
p and found Sonny on his knees, sitting back on his heels and staring at the photograph that had landed face up on top. The gun. Sonny was suddenly pale, his hands limp and apparently useless.

  Christensen touched his shoulder. “What is it?”

  “Nothing. My hands. It comes and goes.” He pressed them between his knees, palms together.

  “I’ll get these,” Christensen said, sweeping the pictures into a pile. “Can I get you some water? You need a break?”

  “I’m fine,” Sonny said. “You know what, though. I just remembered I’m supposed to work tonight. What time is it?”

  Christensen checked the clock on the bookshelf behind Sonny. “Quarter after seven. I thought you were working days.”

  “I am, or was,” Sonny said. He stood up and started pacing. “Oh shit. Dumb me. There’s this new department head who screwed around with the chem department work schedules, and I was supposed to fill in for someone. Can we finish this next time?”

  No eye contact whatsoever. Flexing his fingers as he talked. Sonny was upset, but probably didn’t know why. If he did, he wasn’t letting on.

  “You’ll still be able to come at least two nights a week?”

  “I’ll check the schedule and let you know,” Sonny said, hooking one arm through the strap on his backpack and moving toward the door. “Sorry about this.”

  The office door was slightly ajar, and Sonny pried it open with his foot as he wriggled the pack up to his shoulder. “Later. I’ll call.”

  He disappeared through the outer door and his footsteps faded down the carpeted corridor. Took the stairs instead of the elevator. Christensen started to panic. Should he follow? If Sonny had recognized the picture from the suicide scene, even subconsciously, Christensen had forced the young man to confront what probably was one of his most painful memories, one he had repressed for ten years. What a clumsy, ham-fisted thing to have done. He should have paid more attention to his reservations.

  From the window, he watched Sonny jog across a parking lot covered by an inch of fresh snow. Distance was comforting. If Sonny hadn’t been wearing only a cotton shirt, Christensen might have pretended he was just another student headed for a night class instead of an emotional time bomb. Maybe he really was late for work. Maybe his hands hadn’t gone numb when he saw the coroner’s picture. Maybe Christensen hadn’t just crushed Sonny’s only defense and shoved him one step closer to the edge.