American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

  “What?” Irv asks.

  “Don’t talk to me. I’m thinking.”

  Forget the pauses and the noise. Forget the technical end. What about the human side? Why would Marcus confess twice? I did this. I did this. It sounds to Sigrid like a man speaking to himself, not to someone else. Not so much a confession but a self-realization. A statement about causality, the way a child might connect one happening with another.

  I did this: But how?

  I did this: But why?

  I did this: And I’m sorry.

  He says it in English, not Norwegian.

  Why English?

  Because he’s saying it to Lydia. He was having an epiphany about the consequences of his unintended actions. He is coming to see himself as complicit. And that is not the mental journey of someone who has thrown another person out a window.

  All this might be wishful thinking, but it is a worthwhile thought in any case.

  In her jail cell, as Irv types away on his computer, Sigrid removes Marcus’s final letter from its envelope and reads it again:

  Dear pappa,

  It happened again. You told me the first time that I didn’t understand. That I misunderstood everything. Well, I’m a grown man now and it happened a second time and this time I understand it all too well. And more than that. It has forced me to see it all with a line of sight unobstructed by the years and the events and the decisions in between. What I now understand is that it was my fault. It was also yours but you, I forgive.

  Your son,

  Marcus.

  What had Marcus done again? Failed a relationship? He certainly never pushed anyone out a window before.

  “Can I use your phone?” Sigrid asks Irv.

  Maybe her father will know.

  “Dial nine to get an outside line,” he says without turning away from an academic paper of Lydia’s he’s been reading. “It’s a local call?”

  “Norway.”

  Irv looks up.

  “No. You cannot call Norway on our phone. You think I have that kind of power? Budget? Friends in high places? Use Skype like normal people.”

  Sigrid calls her father after lunch, during Norway’s bright and early evening. He answers on the third ring.

  She explains her question about Marcus. About the word “again.” Her father is not helpful.

  “I really don’t know. I’m sorry. It didn’t make any sense to me either. What are you planning to do next?”

  Sigrid tells him that she is—for the moment—trying to take the very approach she has asked Irv to take but admits that being patient and waiting for Marcus to show up is not easy. The entire plan is based on soft information anyway. He might not be there at all. He could be in Vegas.

  In Norwegian, and therefore incomprehensible to Irv, who is sitting across from her, she describes the files on the hard drive. She asks about depression and whether he might have it. “I’m looking to link the word with Marcus in a way he would have found meaningful.”

  “Depression?” repeats her father. “He never mentioned medication. In his letters he always ties up his views in philosophy. He’s a private person, your brother. And after everything you explained about Lydia,” his voice trails off. “It sounds like sadness. Don’t you think there are legitimate reasons for being sad?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Me too. If sadness is normal, it makes no sense to me to treat it with drugs as though the brain is broken. Sadness is normal. Even if it’s permanent.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” Sigrid says.

  “I’m just thinking about your mother.”

  “I know.”

  “The problem with arguing ideas with your children,” says her father, “is that you start wondering what the conversation is really about. Your child can talk about Kierkegaard but as a parent you start thinking, ‘This kid needs a hug and a nap.’ The older I get the more I suspect this is true for everyone. It is astonishing the things we think about to keep ourselves from thinking about things.”

  “I’ve been going through his files on depression,” says Sigrid. “There are hundreds of them. I can’t read them all. I read English well but very, very slowly.”

  “Maybe you need help.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  By midafternoon Sigrid admits to having Marcus’s hard drive and has Melinda reading through three hundred files on depression. The assignment is affecting Melinda’s mood but not in a way that Sigrid had anticipated. Rather than weighing her down—by the sheer tonnage of material, not to mention the nature of the subject matter—it has instead seemed to fill Melinda with purpose and exuberance. This makes Melinda chatty.

  “First of all,” she says, coming to sit by Sigrid at her new desk with a yellow legal pad, “America is mental. I did not know how mental we are. The National Institute of Mental Health says—and I’m quoting here—‘mental health disorders are common throughout the United States.’ How common? About twenty percent of all people. So one in five. One in five!” she repeats. “And that’s conservative. One in five drivers. One in five people who owns a gun, who votes, who raises children. One in five. And . . . check this. One in twenty has a serious mental health problem—serious as in Coocooville—and that number is conservative. And . . . this is interesting . . . almost thirty percent of people didn’t complete the interview during their massive survey and the main reason was that they refused to participate! I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that more nutters chose not to participate than healthy people, so this thing is already conservative in its findings. And in kids? Over twenty percent of children, either currently or at some point during their life—I don’t get that part, because they wouldn’t be children anymore but . . . OK—have had a seriously debilitating mental disorder. Oh, and ten percent have personality disorders! One in ten. Women, apparently, are far more likely to have mental health problems than men—which doesn’t make any sense to me because men are obviously more insane, judging by their behavior—and one in four women is given drugs for a mental health condition, but only fifteen percent of men. And—check this out—almost thirty percent of women are using antidepressants. And women are using twice as many anti-anxiety medications as men, but that one does make sense to me because they’re probably married to unmedicated men, which is why they’re freaking out. What’s happening right now is that drug use is going up and up and up.”

  “Melinda?” Sigrid says while Melinda is drawing breath.

  “Yeah?”

  “How are you choosing what to read?”

  “I’m reading everything.”

  “There’s a lot to read.”

  “I read wicked fast. I remember most things, too,” she says before she sticks a Bic pen into her mouth and starts chewing on the end of its blue cap.

  “You remember those girls in high school who liked to highlight the entire book?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They had trouble separating what was important and what was simply interesting. We don’t want to be like them.”

  “Can I ask you something?” Melinda says.

  “All right.”

  “How’d’ya give me the slip back at Target?”

  “You haven’t figured it out yet?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it. I can’t figure it out.”

  “That’s a lot to admit,” Sigrid says.

  “Irv knows.”

  “I believe it.”

  “Look, you win, OK? Just tell me.”

  “Think it through in pieces. I went down the hallway. What’s at the end of the hallway?”

  “The bathrooms.”

  “Say it again.”

  “The bathrooms.”

  “One more time.”

  “The bathrooms.”

  “And where did you go?”

  “To the bathrooms.”

  “No. You didn’t.”

  Melinda stops chewing on the pen tap which has become warm and malleable. “I went into the women’s bat
hroom.”

  “Right.”

  “But you weren’t in there.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Because you’d gone into the men’s bathroom.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And when you heard me talking to myself and opening the stalls you just walked right out the front door without a care in the world.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m an idiot.”

  “No, you’re not. A woman did that to my partner and me once. Only she didn’t come out at all because he was at the end of the hall, waiting. She just stayed there until we left entirely. Neither one of us even thought to look in the men’s room. What I learned from that failure is how hard it is to see the world in a new way and break our own habits. In this case, it really was a two-person job. Alone, you had to check one bathroom first because there was no other way. Only natural you’d check the women’s. As soon as that happened, I won.”

  “I get it,” Melinda says. “I gotta start changing my perspective on some things.”

  “And sometimes we need to ask for help. Oh, and that reminds me. This eyewitness of yours. Chuck. He says he saw Marcus and Lydia on the corner of the street by the building. How is it he happened to be there?”

  “I don’t know. I mean . . . his story checked out. What he says he saw lines up with the emergency call, so we figured we’re good.”

  “Logically you are. Legally you’re not. The two are only vaguely related. You need to find out what he was doing on that corner and why. I’m going to be too busy with other things, but you need to stay on that, OK?”

  “Are there a lot of senior women cops in Norway?” Melinda asks.

  “Yes.”

  “That must be something.”

  “I haven’t given it much thought,” Sigrid says.

  “I can’t even imagine that,” Melinda muses.

  “Melinda,” Sigrid says, returning her to the files, “have you noticed anything that might seem relevant to Marcus and his interest in depression?”

  “I’ve found kind of the opposite, actually.”

  “You’ve noticed things irrelevant to Marcus?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Like what?”

  “Mostly this is about depression in black women.”

  The D Word

  Dr. Lydia Jones’s best friend was Gloria Dillane. Irv said she’d been on his to-interview list but he hadn’t swung around to seeing her yet on account of it seeming unimportant compared to Chuck’s eyewitness testimony, the 9-1-1 call, and there being no suspects other than Marcus.

  Sigrid, however, wants to go see her immediately after reading Marcus’s queries into depression. Irv is unconvinced. They sit at his desk in the main police room sipping Nescafé from chipped mugs.

  “We know Lydia died from a fall,” Sigrid says. “We know Marcus was there, and I believe he felt . . . What’s the word? It’s not ‘responsible.’ It starts with a ‘c.’”

  “Complicit.”

  “Less than that.”

  “Culpable.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Which comes from the Latin meaning ‘fault’ or ‘blame.’ We keep going back there you’ll notice,” Irv says.

  “Only because you picked the word. Yes, something obviously happened up there on the building. He could have pushed her but what I think is that he failed to stop her from jumping. Maybe the experience of losing Jeffrey was instrumental in her death in ways we don’t fully understand. Lydia had deep reasons to be depressed. And maybe she was prone to it, or else on medication. Maybe she was in therapy. All this would matter. Her best friend would know. The reason you thought she was unimportant is because you weren’t thinking like Charles Peirce.”

  “You’re a little annoying.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not saying it’s impossible,” Irv says.

  “Great. Let’s go.”

  “It won’t change anything that I have to deal with.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “That’s because you don’t have enough information to make sense of the situation yet. You just got here. I’ve been here the whole time.”

  “I’ll wait in the car,” she says.

  Irv drives and Melinda rides shotgun, forcing Sigrid into the back seat. Irv says there’s a New York State regulation that prevents civilians from riding in the front, though Sigrid is reasonably certain Irv just made that up. She doesn’t mind, though. It’s a tactic she’s used often with her own staff. The younger ones always think that the senior officers know absolutely everything. But the senior officers know that no one knows absolutely everything because the rules keep changing without notice. What the senior ones do know, however, is what it was like to be young and look up to the seasoned veterans. So they use that particular insight to simply make shit up that the younger ones are likely to believe. And it works every time.

  Sigrid taps on the bulletproof glass as they drive to Ms. Dillane’s house. Melinda unlocks it and slides open the glass.

  “What’s this for?” Sigrid asks, tapping the glass, feigning ignorance.

  “Our protection.”

  “From what?” she probes.

  “The crazies in the back seat. You don’t have this in Norway?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Same reason we don’t have anything we don’t have: we don’t need it.”

  “Why don’t you need it?”

  “I suppose because there have been fewer than fifty Norwegian officers killed since 1945. None in a police car as far as I know.”

  “Wow.”

  Sigrid sits back. “People aren’t walking around with guns all over the place to scare the police.”

  “There are no guns?”

  “We actually do have many guns. There’s a lot of hunting in Norway. But there’s almost no gun violence.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “On a fundamental level,” says Sigrid, “I think it’s because we don’t want to shoot each other.”

  “That could be our problem right there,” says Melinda.

  Gloria Dillane lives twenty minutes from campus on a suburban back road lined with old growth trees and sensible cars. As the police cruiser ambles down the road with Irv squinting to find the numbers (“They’re on the mailboxes, Sheriff,” says Melinda), a flurry of bicycles slip into their wake and the kids pump their two-strokes as fast as their sprockets allow trying to keep up with the car.

  Sigrid sees Irv glance at the pursuers through the rearview before activating the lights for a second. The kids all whoop. He turns it off before parking on the street outside Ms. Dillane’s house. It is painted a dark gray with white trimming along its gable roof. Care has been applied to the small lawn out front. Ferns and purple astilbe line the short driveway. To Sigrid, it exudes middle-income tranquility. Gloria and her husband probably bought into the neighborhood before it became unaffordable for teachers and professors and now use the equity for steady improvements to keep up the value. This tranquility, though, may only be an illusion. If Gloria was indeed close to Lydia and her family, it must be hell in there.

  Gloria herself opens the door before Sheriff Irv knocks. She is slight, and her blond hair falls limply to her shoulders. She wears mascara and it turns her eyes deeper and sadder rather than larger and more intense. Irv removes his hat and extends his hand to Gloria. She receives it without any look of interest or curiosity in her face.

  “I’m Sheriff Irving Wylie. This is Deputy Melinda Powell. And . . . this is Sigrid Odegard, who is Marcus’s sister. Marcus is missing and she’s helping us find him.”

  “Ødegård,” Sigrid says. She shakes Gloria’s hand. Her grip is weak and dry.

  “Come in,” she says.

  The house—much like Melinda’s—is awash in colors. Here, though, the quality of the furniture is finer, the sense of permanence runs deeper, and the home shows a precarious balance between aesthetic prefere
nce and the utilitarian solutions imposed by the management of children.

  The shoe sizes speak of two boys and a little girl. The silence says they are out.

  Gloria leads them into the living room to the right of the hall, decorated for entertaining guests rather than everyday use. It looks the way most living rooms do on American TV shows featuring affluent white people. There is a sofa facing two armchairs across a low and wide coffee table with books not intended for reading. There is a flatscreen television mounted above the fireplace. There are plants poorly suited for this climate.

  In Oslo, most homes have modern sectionals pressed against the walls, opening up the space for wandering. The furniture here is similar to the kind Scandinavians used to make: heavy and wooden and built for the ages. Now everything in Scandinavia is modular and treated as modern art, though much of it is designed to be cheap and disposable.

  Gloria extends her arm toward the guest seats after settling into her wingback chair. Sigrid positions herself next to Melinda on the sofa.

  “Thanks for meeting with us, Professor Dillane,” says the sheriff.

  “I gave a statement last month to Officer Cory . . . I forget his name,” Gloria says. “He was on campus.”

  “Yes,” says Melinda. “We know. We wanted to talk with you.”

  “How are you?” asks Irv, whose phone buzzes before Gloria can answer. He glances at it and dismisses the call.

  “Terrible. And no one will tell me what happened. I spoke with Lydia’s parents but they’ve withdrawn and won’t discuss it. I tried speaking with Reverend Green and . . . it doesn’t make sense.”

  “What doesn’t?” Melinda asks.

  “After Jeffrey was killed, the black community rallied behind the Simmonses. And so did many of us—many of us . . . whites,” she says and stops talking. Sigrid watches her face as it expresses a mental journey she is taking alone. On finding a path, she returns to the conversation: “The faculty. The students. The black community in the city and in Jeffrey’s neighborhood. Everyone came out to support Jeffrey’s parents and also Lydia’s parents. Lydia was . . . destroyed . . . but she was as active as she could be. Reverend Fred Green . . . at First Baptist? You know him?”