A Circle of Wives (15 page)

25
Helen

MY PREVIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH THE
detective had been over the phone. The woman had a low, melodious, and mature-sounding voice. So I am surprised to find this young person—barely in her twenties, it seems—waiting among my patients on Wednesday morning. She is dressed casually in jeans and a button-down blue shirt. She’d be a little overheated in our LA midsummer, but I remind myself she comes from Northern California. Her red cowboy boots are stenciled with stars and moons. I can see multiple piercings up the sides of both ears, and detect the remnants of a nose piercing, almost grown in. Today she’s wearing just a single pair of conservative stud earrings of blue glass that match her shirt.

“How can I help you?” I ask as I gesture her into my office.

She seems more nervous than I am, drops her notebook, then when she bends to pick it up, tampons and a recorder fall out of her purse.

She laughs, a bit shamefaced. “So much for appearing the seasoned professional,” she says when she’s collected her possessions. I like her immediately.

I tell her again that although she’s flown in from San Francisco, I have very little time. It was hard enough finding this half hour. When she says that she might need more, perhaps tomorrow, depending on how this goes, I shake my head firmly. She also says I can have my lawyer present—a suggestion I disregard.

She removes a stuffed lion and a plush brown bear from one of the chairs in my office, and sits down, turns on the recorder. “First of all, I’d like you to again give me a complete statement of where you were and what you were doing on Friday afternoon and early evening, May 10, 2013,” she says. She places the recorder on the chair next to her, but then, like one of my patients, sees something interesting on the floor and pounces. It’s my office mascot, a stuffed replica of a huge horny toad, so realistic in color and expression that everyone—adults as well as children—is drawn uneasily to it. The only thing not authentic is its size. It’s as large as a basketball, and nearly as round. She places the thing on her lap and strokes it, appears delighted with its softness.

“As I told you before, I was home alone. Not feeling well. I’d even canceled my afternoon appointments to go home early,” I say, while she makes the toad hop and trill and laughs to herself. She’s quite charming, really. Certainly not coplike. I bring up my calendar. “Yes, I saw my last patient of the day at 11:45.” The detective nods, I know she’s already verified this with my admin assistant. “I then drove back to my condo. Spent the rest of the day and night in bed.”

“Can anyone verify that you were home at that time?” the detective asks.

“No,” I say. “I live alone.” I stop for a moment before continuing. “I suppose another resident might have seen me enter the building. But if you’re asking if I can prove I was home that evening the answer is no.”

I hate canceling appointments. I can’t remember the last time I’ve done such a thing. I remember that afternoon and evening. But I don’t share all of it. I’d been nauseated and vomited until my stomach was empty. Then I continued with the dry heaves well into the night. Not pleasant.

“Thank you, that’s helpful,” says the girl. She has finally abandoned the toad, it is back on the floor. She is writing in her notebook. She looks up and smiles, and it is a genuine smile. “I’ll need to follow up on this,” she says, almost apologetically. The criminal element in Palo Alto must have an easy time of it. “But I’m afraid that until I do some investigating, you’re still on the hook.”

“What kind of hook am I on?” I ask. “Just curious.”

She hesitates. “As you’ve probably gathered from the media reports, we’re not completely satisfied about John’s . . . your husband’s death,” she says.

“And I’m naturally one of the suspects,” I say.

“Naturally,” the girl agrees. I’m amused to see that she blushes when she says this.

“And what motive would I have?” I ask. I’m curious to hear what she comes up with. Probably something banal, like jealousy. But she surprises me.

“That’s what we’d have to determine,” the girl says. “Your husband was a complex man. He probably died for complex reasons. When we understand why he died, we’ll have a good handle on who did it.”

I am impressed by this. I try to look serious despite the fact that this girl, this
woman
in a position of authority, is again playing with the toad, pressing down on its cloth eyelids to make them close over its ominous black plastic eyes. She catches me watching her and blushes again. She puts down the toad firmly, at a distance, as if trying to avoid temptation.

“Do you mind if I ask you some more questions?” she asks. “I’d like you to fill in some pieces of the puzzle.”

“Not at all,” I say, with what I hope indicates my respect and willingness despite my suspicions that the interview is being modeled on those she’s seen on television. “Although at most I have twenty minutes left today. I may be able to squeeze you in tomorrow if you’re not finished.”

She nods, picks up the recorder and points it toward me. “What was the state of your relationship with John Taylor?” she asks in a slightly louder voice, I assume for the benefit of the recording.

“Very amicable. Very . . . harmonious,” I say. The latter word is not quite appropriate, but I want to communicate the solidity of my relationship with John. I feel surprisingly calm talking about him. I’ve been avoiding the subject, worried about flailing emotionally in public. But I feel grounded and logical speaking on the subject today—that could be because of the hospital setting, the fact that in no time I will have to go back to reviewing charts and lab results of dying children. I’ve put myself in self-protective mode.

“When was the last time you saw John Taylor?”

“Two weeks prior to his death,” I say. It had been a bittersweet visit, or perhaps I’m only remembering it that way because of all that has happened since. I’ll never know, now. My most precious memories, corrupted by events beyond my control.

“He flew in Friday morning, so we had dinner at La Scala, our local Italian restaurant near our—my—condo. Then went home to bed,” I say.

“Were you intimate that night?” the detective asks, and looks away, not making eye contact.

“Is this really something you have to know?” I ask, and when she nods, I tell her “Yes, in fact we were.” Then shut my mouth. No one need know what went on between John and me in private. I am not being sentimental when I say I don’t believe I’ll ever see the like of those nights again.

She goes to speak, then hesitates. “Did he . . . did he act differently in any way? Say anything unusual?”

“No,” I say. “But if I’m not mistaken, his mood was tinged with melancholy. Mine was, too.” I remember now that was the week the Meekle boy finally died. “I had lost a patient the morning he arrived. That might account for my associations.”

“I’m sorry,” says the detective, and she sounds like she means it.

“It had been coming for a while,” I say. But these things tend to depress me despite my best efforts. I always analyze cases for anything I could have done differently, anything that might have changed the outcome. It’s a sobering habit, but it keeps me honest. In the Meekle case, however, the poor child wasn’t diagnosed until he was stage 4 and metastatic. Just sixteen. His father was one of the what-won’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger types and had forced his son to keep playing football despite the dreadful pain he was having in his legs, didn’t take him to a doctor until after the season was over. “I could just kill some of these parents,” I say, and then, “Oh, don’t take me literally. Only an expression.”

“And the rest of that visit?” she asks.

“We had a quiet, if short, weekend,” I tell her. “Typically, John would come down on a Wednesday or Thursday. He taught a seminar that met every third Friday for a full day, and he’d stay until Sunday night. This time we only had Saturday together. He came in Friday to teach his class, and flew back to San Francisco Sunday morning. That was the last time I saw him.”

I remember, although I don’t tell her this, the sense of anticipation, mournful anticipation, that had been building all weekend. I had a feeling he had come down specifically to see me, his seminar notwithstanding, and that he had something important to say, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do so. By Sunday morning we were both somber, the mood having taken a decided downturn for no reason I could put my finger on.

The detective is watching me. She’s sharp, this one. I see her making a mark in her notebook.

“Saturday we went to the Getty. Not for the art, which is wretched, but to wander around the buildings, have coffee in the café,” I say. “That night we stayed in. I cooked a chicken curry, we each had our journals to read, and we did what doctors like us rarely do—nothing.”

She nods but doesn’t say anything.

“I’m not being much help to your investigation,” I say, breaking the silence. Then, “I don’t believe John was murdered. Maybe I don’t want to believe it. He deserved a better end.”

What do I want to believe? I wonder. That I wasn’t such a dupe. All of us, dupes. Each woman thinking we had a man when we only had a piece of him. If that. The most mortifying part is that having just a part of him suited me fine. I suppose I’m easily pleased.

“You said, before, in our first telephone interview, that you hadn’t anticipated such intense emotion—I believe the word was
ecstasy
—when you got married,” the detective says. I cringe. Did I really say that? I must have been in a state. “Can you explain that further?” she asks.

“You have to understand, I said that right after the . . . incident,” I say. Then more firmly, “Right after John died, I wasn’t completely sane. Not completely myself.”

“What would you say now?”

I think, but all I can come up with is, “Our relationship was cordial.”

The young detective looks disappointed.

“Would John have described your relationship that way?” She seems to be hoping for something, and I’m afraid I disappoint her again when I say. “It was mutually satisfying.” This is even worse than
cordial,
but I let it stand.

“How do you reconcile your experience with the fact that Dr. Taylor had two other wives?” she asks.

It takes me much longer to answer this one. I frankly don’t have the words. When the silence grows too long, I tell her the truth. “I can’t,” I say. “I’ll never be able to.”

It’s my turn to reach down and pick up the toad. The trilling sounds in the quiet room until I hold it firmly to my chest with both arms like I teach my youngest children.
When you hold it to your heart it stops its crying
.

The detective hesitates, then says, almost shyly, “So the hurt. It’s bad?”

I stall for a few beats. How much of myself to reveal? The detective isn’t looking at me; she is giving me some privacy. “Almost terminal,” I say, finally, echoing words I’d spoken to a mother and father only two hours earlier. I put the toad down and the minute it is released from my arms it shrills its high wail. The children adore this; they think it signifies the power of their love. Only I know it doesn’t feed on love but pain.

26
Helen

IT
’
S ABOUT TO STORM OUTSIDE
, the wind blowing so hard against the sliding doors to the living room that I fear the glass is going to crack. The palm trees edging the property whip back and forth on their slender trunks. The clouds have yet to break, however—there’s not a drop of moisture in the air. A dry despair to the landscape.

I’ve never thought of myself as an insomniac despite the fact that I rarely get more than four or five hours of sleep. I stay up late and wake early. Rather, I tell myself I don’t need much sleep. I’ve simply got too many things to do to waste precious time unconscious. When John was with me, we’d go to bed together, then, after he was safely snoring—he was a terrible snorer—I’d quietly leave the bedroom to read my journals or do paperwork. Whatever my marriage did to me, it didn’t change my sense of urgency that there is work to be done, data to absorb, knowledge to acquire.

But since John’s death I’ve been ghosting at night in a different kind of way. Not able to sleep even three hours, yet not being productive with the extra time, either. The urgency
not to waste a moment
completely dissipated. There are still sick children’s charts to review, journal articles to read and write, as many emails to sort through, prioritize, and answer. Only now I am realizing that all these years I’ve worked my way into exhaustion out of fear. Fear of the void that only sleep or work can fill and which stretches out in front of me now. The nighttime has turned into a deep empty vessel that I must fill drop by drop.

I sit in the armchair, John’s favorite, the one he would drag onto the balcony. The curtains are open. Light from the window illuminates the palm trees and their contortions in the wind. Beyond them, inky blackness.

I stand, and walk to the kitchen to make myself a cup of hot water—I don’t even bother steeping a tea bag in it, my inability to taste grows worse in times of stress. I sip it as I move to my office, sit down at my laptop, open a patient’s file, then leave it there. I go back to the armchair, calculating probabilities, couching the odds, wondering whether to get dressed and make a trip to the twenty-four-hour Rite Aid on Mulholland. Back to the kitchen for another cup of hot water. Then to the bathroom for the twentieth time this evening, staring at the white stick lying on the counter, at the pink plus sign displayed at one end of it.