by Susan Conant
"She didn't actually tell you?"
"She probably didn't remember."
"But how could anyone forget . . . ?"
"Sometimes the only survival option is to pretend it didn't happen," Rita said. "And to some extent, it works for a while. The defenses people use always represent the best they can do at the time. How is anyone supposed to anticipate the long-term consequences? Is a child supposed to stop and realize that pretense distorts all relationships, relationships with oneself and with other people? You wanted one answer? That's it. Anatomy doesn't matter, but relationships do. That's the only thing that matters, the quality of relationships. One answer."
26
Kevin's Budweiser sat untouched in my refrigerator for a couple of weeks, but I threw out his plastic-wrapped hamburger when it turned brownish purple and grew a sheen of slime, and I tossed the white-and-blue-spotted sandwich buns into the yard for the birds and squirrels. He made me go to the Central Square Station twice. When he finally stopped in at my house, he insisted on talking in the living room, not the kitchen, even though the living room radiator is always turned off unless I'm expecting company, and after it's turned on, it usually takes at least an hour to heat the room. "Let me get this straight," he said for maybe the tenth time. We were sitting on opposite ends of the couch. Until I can afford the pair of soft chairs that are going to flank the fireplace, the only place to sit, besides on the couch, is the floor. I don't like junk, and junk is what the old chairs were. The floor would've been even colder than the couch. Also, neither of us wanted to be one down. "I am freezing," I said.
"Get a sweater."
"This is stupid. Can't we just forget that this is an official visit and hang out in the kitchen where it's warm?"
"So he ran up the stairs ahead of you."
"Yes."
"He entered the kitchen first. You attempted to enter, but the dog barked at you. You stopped."
"Yes."
"And since when was it that you suddenly got so afraid of dogs?"
"Kevin, she meant business. She wasn't barking. She was growling, and her whole posture was something I didn't want to fool around with. And remember? I already had one bite. I didn't need another." I displayed my hand. The bandage was off, and the stitches were out, but the scars showed.
"And how was it that that happened?"
"She just bit me. That's all. It was my own fault. She isn't vicious. I was careless."
"Okay. So he enters the kitchen. How far behind him are you?"
"Not far."
"Let's try it again. When you get there, is the door open?"
"Ajar. I've already told you that."
"And how many minutes ahead of you is he?"
"Seconds. I don't know. I got there a few seconds after he did. Ten seconds, okay?"
"And when you opened the door, did you see him?"
"I didn't look. I'm telling you, I looked at the dog."
"Christ."
"Well, I wasn't stopping to admire her."
"And how long was it you stood looking at the dog?"
"I have no idea."
"An hour."
"Of course not. A few seconds. I have no idea. Then I must've looked up. I called to Joel and Kelly to get Tuck. But I didn't see anyone because he must've been kneeling down beside her. She was on the opposite side of that kitchen island, on the opposite side from where I was. And he was, too."
"And when you left the kitchen before, the knife was on a cutting board."
"No, it was not. It was in her hand. She was peeling and slicing oranges. This was a boring conversation the first time we had it, and it isn't getting more interesting. If you'd just spit out what you're after, I'd tell you if I knew, and we could go into the kitchen and warm up."
Kevin's frankness is one of his winning qualities. "To tell you the God's honest truth, I'm not a hundred percent sure."
"Fine, then I'll tell you. You want to know if he had time to stab her. He did not. Furthermore, she left a suicide note. If she made any noise, we didn't hear it because his office suite is totally soundproof, just like every other therapy office. Ask Rita. What more do you want?"
He put one hand in the other, spread his elbows, and flexed his shoulder muscles. "I hate discrepancies. They eat at me."
"I don't see any."
"Here we have an attractive woman with a successful husband." Elaine wouldn't have let him get away with that. "He makes a lot of money. They live in a nice house in a nice neighborhood. Two new cars. No bills. She's got hobbies. Dogs. Cooking. And all of a sudden, she has a brainstorm. She picks up a knife and does herself in because she's infertile, quote unquote."
"That can be terrible for people. It's easy for other people to dismiss it and say they should adopt, but some couples have a terrible time about it. It can make people very depressed, especially if they blame themselves."
"She's infertile, right? The body shows no evidence of semen. That's what's missing from the picture. You know? Like those games in kids' magazines. And now, boys and girls, see if you can find what's missing from this picture. And what's missing is sperm."
"You must've read some very strange magazines when you were a kid."
He didn't even smile. "She was ovulating. A woman commits suicide because she's infertile. What's wrong with this picture? She's ovulating, and there's no trace of seminal fluid."
"She didn't necessarily know she was ovulating. Maybe she thought she wasn't, and they were waiting until she was. People do that."
"You know, Holly, there's something about that guy I just don't like."
"He has a lot of self-control. He's grieving for his wife. He's probably blaming himself, angry at her and a lot of other stuff. Suicide is very hard on the survivors. He can't exactly be at his best right now."
Kevin shook his big head. "Didn't like him before. Took one look, and something didn't ring right."
"I didn't know you knew him before."
"Your friend Elaine Walsh wrote him a couple of letters."
I don't know why I ever thought the police wouldn't know to examine a hard drive. Of course they'd have seen those letters.
"Oh," I said casually.
"About Donna Zalewski."
"Really?"
"But it didn't pan out. It seems they had some kind of dispute about money."
"Money?"
"What they call third-party payments. She had insurance, Blue Cross, and Walsh thought Baker was bilking her and the insurance company."
"How was that?"
"Baker told me all about it. Double-billing, they call it. These guys have to register with Blue Cross." (Rita, for instance, is a guy who's a Blue Cross provider, but Kevin would have resented my charging him with sexism.) He continued: "And they have to sign something that says they'll only charge so much. And maybe then they get greedy and decide it's not enough, so they get their patients to pay a little extra something on the side. Or maybe they don't want to wait for the insurance company to pay up, and they make the patients pay on the spot, and then when they get the insurance check, maybe they hold on to it awhile and collect the interest."
"Did Joel Baker do that?"
"Naw. Like I told you, it didn't pan out. One of the guys went through it all with him. One of the ID numbers on a form had a couple of digits reversed, and Blue Cross held up the payment, and then paid up slow. They verified the whole thing. It didn't pan out."
The autopsy finding still bothers Kevin, but it doesn't bother anyone else I know because autopsy reports are confidential medical records. But two points he made worried me a little. Rita reassured me about the first one. She said that mix-ups with insurance payments happen all the time and that insurance companies always take a long time to pay. Joel Baker had been slightly lucky to have that explanation available, but only slightly.
Kevin's persistent questions about whether Joel had had time to murder Kelly bothered me because, of course, I never had any definite, concrete proof that Kelly, not Joel, h
ad murdered Donna and Elaine. When Joel told me that he'd been willing to disappear and start over somewhere else, I believed him, and I believed that Kelly hadn't been willing to leave. She knew who Dr. Arsenault was, and she could have gone to him just as I'd done. Joel could have, too, but I believed that he genuinely despised Arsenault and wouldn't have gone to him under any circumstances. It would have been hard for Joel, easy for Kelly to doctor their own cottage cheese and substitute it for Elaine's. I also trusted Rita's good opinion of Joel. I trusted my own.
Then one day when I pulled the Bronco into my driveway, Joel was right there on Appleton Street, walking Nip and Tuck. He'd taken over the task since Kelly's death, I'd noticed. I'd seen him with the dogs quite a few times, but I'd always been in the car or far away, and I hadn't spoken to him. Kelly had always kept Tuck, the bitch, on lead, but she usually hadn't leashed Nip, who didn't stray far enough to worry her. Joel had them both leashed. If they missed Kelly, their grief wasn't marring their appearance, and although Joel probably didn't do the marathon dog-walking Kelly had done, the Ridgebacks still looked sleek, muscular, and fit.
The dogs didn't growl at me when I got out of the car. In fact, they brightened up and headed toward me. Joel followed. I let Nip and Tuck sniff my hands before I patted them. Joel looked just as he had when Kelly was alive, as if he'd just had a shave and haircut. He wore a camel's-hair coat that didn't show wheaten Ridgeback hair, and on his hands were heavy, masculine brown leather gloves. I told him that he and the dogs were looking good, and I sat on the back steps to be at dog level while I ran my mittens over the Ridgebacks' glossy coats.
While Joel was explaining that he hadn't been showing the dogs, Tuck was whipping her tail back and forth and smiling at me, but Nip lost interest and began to nose at the lid of the milk box. Then he nosed it open. I speak dog, of course. I understood. The day Kelly stood at Elaine's door and opened the milk box, identical to mine and every other Pleasant Valley delivery box, Nip was her excuse in case anyone asked what she was doing there. If anyone asked, she was retrieving her dog. Joel kept both dogs on lead. Only Kelly let Nip wander. In nosing open the box, Nip was showing me what Kelly had done, or maybe even what he'd done for her. Kelly, he told me, Kelly, not Joel.
* * *
According to Rita, the rumors about Joel Baker, the ones Sheila Moss had been quietly passing along, have disappeared, and he's getting more referrals than ever. Everyone agrees that he's wonderful with women clients because he's so sympathetic. People say that the source of his strength with couples is his almost uncanny grasp of the viewpoints of both husband and wife. In fact, I ran into Sheila Moss at the Fishmonger the other day. She told me that she wasn't on Prozac anymore, but that she'd felt terrific ever since she and Ben had started seeing Joel Baker. Rita was upset when I told her that. She was more surprised that he'd ignored the boundary between friends and clients than that he'd crossed the boundary between women and men.
People understand that Kelly's suicide has left Joel wary of involvements with women, but practically everyone hopes he'll at least begin to test out some kind of new relationship soon. Rita told me that a few people have been wondering aloud whether he's finally going to come out of the closet.
And my own mind is unmuddled. Rita made everything clear. Freud thought that anatomy is destiny, she said, but he was wrong. Then I understood. The breed of dog doesn't matter. Most goldens retrieve. And obey. Malamutes pull. And obey themselves. But suppose I get the one Alaskan malamute that acts like a golden. He has no interest in pulling a sled and keeps taking things in his mouth and dropping them in front of me. If I insist on harnessing him and making him pull because I'm ashamed of the way he really is, all I do is ruin our relationship. And if I tint his coat yellow-red and try to pass him off as a golden, he senses that I'm ashamed of him, and I let deceit ruin our relationship with each other and with everyone else.
But suppose I say to him, "Well, you are a strange malamute, aren't you? But so what?" His difference is a big plus if I don't fight it and don't try to pretend it isn't there. He gets his C.D. in three straight shows with three perfect scores, then his C.D.X., then his U.D., and eventually, he's that contradiction in terms, an Obedience Trial Champion Alaskan malamute. We're proud of ourselves and each other, and everyone wants to know the secret of our success. The secret is that we didn't create one.
When I explained it to Steve, he said, "Did Rita really say that?"
"That's what she meant," I said, although the literal truth is that she accused me of trivializing things. She was wrong. Dogs are incapable of sustained pretense, and their superhuman incapacity is not trivial.
"Of course," I added, "dogs don't have any choice about what breed they look like, but what if they did? If Joel feels like a man, acts like a man, and all but is a man, why should he pretend to be a woman? That would be deceitful. And was he supposed to have his wife arrested for murder? Was he supposed to betray her like that?"
"Holly, for God's sake," Steve said. "Okay, so breed doesn't matter all that much. What counts is the right dog for the right person. But bitches are bitches, and dogs are dogs. You've been in Cambridge too long. Why don't you go home to Maine for a week or two?"
"I can't. Kimi starts with the beginners this Thursday. Remember Kimi? She's the bitch who lifts her leg."
"That's perfectly normal, especially for a malamute. It's a matter of dominance. It isn't a function of gender."
"Anatomy isn't destiny, you see? What counts is the quality of relationships."
"Go home to Maine. Then come back. We'll work on a quality relationship. Come back and marry me."
I can't possibly get married. The only things I know how to cook right are liver treats and homemade dog biscuits, and I won't waste nine months producing one furless creature doomed to run away from home. Married couples always take their conflicts out on their dogs. My house is too small for Steve's dogs and mine, and with four dogs living here, how could I get another one? And Rowdy would hate living over the clinic. Kimi would undo all the progress Steve has made with Lady. Suppose I brought home an Akita, and Steve objected? Of course, Rowdy and Kimi would protest, but that's different. I'm the alpha wolf in our pack. And, as things are now, Steve is the alpha in his pack. If we merged packs, one of us would lose because a wolf pack never has two alphas. That's what's wrong with marriage.
I'll never get married. When I want to bring home an Akita, I will. If I ever finish mourning Vinnie, I'll get another golden retriever. I'll always have Alaskan malamutes, of course. In my lifetime, I'll have dozens of them. And after I merge with the great celestial pack, I'll come back every now and then. I won't stay long, and I won't pretend to be someone I'm not. If you ever go to an AKC obedience trial and see an Alaskan malamute earning a perfect score, in Utility B, you'll know who's there, too, heeling precisely, perfectly at home with herself, home at last.