Identity Thief (15 page)

Inside the file were some extremely bad attempts at poetry that—to make matters worse—were insipidly upbeat. To give one example: “The things I thought were hardest/Turned out to be the easiest/Once I believed in myself.” You read something like that, and it’s all you can do to keep from puking. To say the least, Linda was totally out of touch with her true nature. She believed in herself about as much as John Wilkes Booth believed in Abraham Lincoln. If her insecurities were specks of dust, they could’ve filled the Empire State Building.

I regret to say that there also was a file called “My Jesse.” In an annoying schoolgirl tone, Linda documented every last secretion of sweat gland that transpired between us.

“The stallion force of his love, love, love,” she redundantly wrote, “filled my love spot with pure rapture.”

My online photo from my old professorship was pasted into a creepy pink heart. Fortunately, she seemed to think that the more florid her writing was, the better it was. Oftentimes, the actual facts of a given encounter were obscured.

“I gave him the flower of my love,” she wrote on the day she told me she was pregnant. “Our love garden will blossom a thousandfold.”

Finally, though, I read an untitled document dated the day of her fall.

Jesse, My True, True Love,

You are the love of my life. You have broken my heart into millions and trillions and zillions of tiny pieces. I carry our love secret in my body. I cannot let a child come into this world of nothing but misery. So with all the joy in the world, I do us all a favor. Someday you will realize how much you love me, which is more than there are clouds in the sky on the cloudiest day of the year. I am nothing more than a cloud now. A rainy, rainy cloud. When you are inside me, I feel nothing but your cruelty. I become your cruelty. Nothing but your cruelty and your great, great love.

I die proclaiming my eternal love,

Your Linda

I could only hope that in her final moments of craziness, she either forgot to print out this suicide note or that the printed copy simply was lost forever. Gone with the wind, as they say. I wondered if I should delete the entire private file. I knew little about computer technology, though I’d heard about deleted files being retrieved by experts.

It was good-natured Marty who solved my dilemma. He knocked on the door—though this was his own house—and asked if I wanted to take the computer with me.

“That might be a good idea,” I said. “It will take me a while to go through all the files.”

I felt so relieved that I let myself think my problems were over. Once I had the computer, I could always say it was stolen or someone dropped it in my swimming pool.

“Can I interest you in a beer, Doc?” Marty was in a more casual mood, no doubt due to the beer he was drinking himself.

“I never drink and drive.”

“Good for you, Doc.” He patted my shoulder as I took my leave.

I drove around the corner and immediately opened the laptop to give it a password, in case I decided to hang on to it for a while. The password was a random set of characters that I quickly memorized. I drove to my office and put the computer in my safe. Then I decided the hell with it and got the computer back out. I erased all the files, drove to a town dump, ran over the computer with my car a few times, and buried the broken mess into a big pile of garbage. No one but the scavenger birds would find it.

No sooner had I gotten back home than Marty called me with the joyful news that Linda had come out of her coma.

“Gee, that’s great,” I managed to say. “What a miracle.”

“I didn’t know you doctor types believed in miracles,” Marty said. It seemed an ill-timed moment for a debate between reason and faith, so I simply ignored him.

“As Linda’s psychologist, I’d like to go to the hospital right away to see her.”

“That’s fine. Mother and I are getting Linnie all gussied up.”

“Great, maybe we’ll all be there together.”

I gave Esther a quick peck on the lips and drove as fast as I could to the hospital. I almost fell on my knees in gratitude to God when I got to Linda’s room first. This gave me a chance to try to stop her from saying all kinds of things I didn’t want her to say, though admittedly I had no idea how I’d go about it. The doctor told me she was still quite disoriented and weak. I reassured him when I told him I was her shrink.

“Oh, by the way,” said the doctor cheerfully, “she has no feeling from the neck down. It may be permanent.”

I stopped in my tracks. “She’s paralyzed? Why are you smiling?”

“Oh, was I?” the doctor said. “I’m sorry. I haven’t slept in forty-eight hours.”

I took a deep breath before entering her room. “Hello, Linda,” I said quietly, for want of knowing what else to say. She was still connected to a monitor that was keeping her alive. Every beep communicated heart activity.

Linda weakly turned her head to face me; she wore a surprisingly earnest expression. “Why can’t anyone . . . let me die? Everyone is . . . awful.” Her voice was a raspy whisper. “I want to die . . . more than ever. It’s . . . It’s not even about . . . you and me. It never . . . was. I know that now. Now that I can’t move, I guess I really never could.” Failed suicide attempts have a way of sobering people up. Linda obviously still wanted to die, yet she was plainspoken and didn’t seem at all delusional.

“You have a baby girl, Linda. Your husband loves you. The paralysis may not be permanent. But even if it is, you can still have a life.” Whatever I expected from this conversation, the possibility of being an encouraging therapist never even occurred to me.

“I . . . never had . . . a life. I never will. That’s what I wanted from you. A
life
. I know now it’s not to be.” Her voice got a little stronger and so did the expression in her eyes. “I . . . I apologize, Jesse. I never should have put you through this. Not with a baby I don’t want. I told myself . . . I wanted it . . . But I can’t give it life. Birth, but not life. I’m . . . I’m too dead. On the inside. Not being able . . . to move my body . . . is not the worst of it. That’s not what makes me so . . . dead.”

“Linda, you can get better. You won’t always feel this way. Get a divorce, if you want. Hell, let Marty raise the kid if you can’t. Go to college. Run for president. But
live
, damn it.”

With some effort, she took a deep, parched swallow. “Please . . . let me die.” With her eyes, she gestured to the monitor. “I don’t deserve favors. But please, do this one. You’re the only one who can.”

I was so unaccustomed to crying that it took me a second or two to realize that’s what I was doing. “Linda, I can’t do that.” I should have gotten a doctor to give her a shot, but I couldn’t leave her. The beeping monitor seemed to be mocking me.

Linda was crying, too. “Oh,
please
,” she begged. “My daughter . . . is better without me. Everyone is. Especially me. Don’t make me have to see my daughter.” She was breathing heavily, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “Please,” she kept repeating. “You’re smart, you can get away with it. Marty will be here any minute.”

At first, I emphatically said no, I couldn’t do it. Then I’d look at her and look at the monitor. “I don’t
think
I can do it,” I heard myself say. I found myself reaching out to touch the monitor switch—only to back down again. I did this four times in a row. Then I asked her again to give life another chance.

Now she was really crying hard. “Jesse, if anything between us has ever meant anything, please, please, please, give me my right to die.”

Well, what can I say? You weren’t me in that moment. It got to where it felt like the only sensible thing to do, like turning on a flashlight in the dark.

I took no chances. With one eye to the glass partition, I wrapped my hand in a Kleenex. I rapidly turned her main monitor off and on and off and on, over and over again, too quickly for a code red to start but jarring her enough to weaken her heartbeat down to nothing. I stared ahead at the monitor, unable to look at Linda, who never made another sound. Finally, with the machine on, there was a loud code red alert. I called out for help, knowing full well it was too late. On my way out of the room, I could hear the doctors pronounce her dead. I went into the men’s room, splashed my face with water, and rubbed my red eyes.

“Crybaby,” I said to my image in the mirror. I stuck around to answer a few questions and that was that. The machine was on when her heart stopped, and my fingerprints were not on it. The same doctor I talked to before shrugged and told me that coma patients sometimes briefly woke up before dying.

“I’m curious,” he said. “Was she lucid?”

“Stick your curiosity up your lucid ass,” I replied.

I knew I should stay for Marty and his mother and baby daughter.

When they arrived shortly thereafter, the doctor pulled them aside. Marty put his hand to his mouth and called out, “Oh my God,” but he did not cry. His mother, holding the baby, turned to look at me. I wasn’t sure why she did this. I gave her my most sympathetic expression.

“I wanted to be here when you heard,” I said quietly, as Marty approached me.

“Thanks, Doc.” He gave me another of his awful hugs. I felt I had to hug him back under the circumstances.

“Let us be alone now,” his mother said. “You’ve done enough.”

I wondered what she meant by “enough” and shivered a little. Fortunately, Marty interjected. “He’s done more than enough, Ma.”

“Call me if there’s anything I can do.” And with that, I left them alone.

What I did was probably wrong. Yet even if it was, it felt like the one selfless thing I had ever done. Not that I felt good. Far from it. I felt like I was burning up inside from guilt. And obviously I was afraid I might get caught.

Linda was only part of it. I knew perfectly well that what made me do it was not her cries for help but that fucking identity thief. If I couldn’t control that asshole, at least I could control Linda. It was a relief to have her secrets rest with her death, and it was cathartic to feel that
something
was completely up to me. Maybe I was rationalizing, but I told myself that the identity thief made me do it, like a child blaming something on the devil.

Even the one selfless thing I ever did was also totally selfish.

Back at my home, Esther immediately asked, “Is everything okay?”

“I suppose.” I kissed her hard and held her like I might never let go.

“Well, whatever it was, I wish it happened more often.”

“Esther, let’s sit down and talk.”

She shrugged. “Okay.” We walked to the patio table by the swimming pool. It was a lovely night, filled with fragrance from the gardens Esther installed.

“Look, I’ve been thinking. If we have to change our names, we might as well get something good out of it. So maybe we should start over again someplace else.”

“But we just got done doing that.”

“Not really, if you think about it. We left because of—well, because of my stupidity. But this time, we’ll be in charge. We have to believe that we are or else we’ll completely fall apart.”

Esther thought about it. “Well, I do have only one job to finish up. And I did always love it more back home where Sabrina is.”

I only wanted to get the hell away from anything to do with Linda Goldstein. Yet the more I thought of it, it made good sense to move back where we came from, since the identity thief was almost certainly back there someplace. I’d catch him myself, if I had to move into my bank with a sleeping bag. And if anyone became suspicious about my behavior in light of Linda’s death, I’d tell them the truth: we changed our names because my lawyer said to, and we’d moved because my wife wanted to be closer to our beautiful daughter.

“Great. We’ll change our names and move by the end of month, back across the country. Back home, where we belong.”

The next day—after a sleepless night—I saw my two male patients. The first one was the guy who was full of himself. He told me that he should’ve won first prize at a karaoke contest the night before but that someone else got more applause because everyone felt sorry for her.

“Can I sing for you, Doc?” he asked. “It would validate me.”

“Sure.” I smiled encouragingly. I had to endure his thin, mediocre voice as he crooned, “This Guy’s in Love with You.”

Next came that morbid male patient. I always dreaded seeing him, though of course I couldn’t give the slightest indication of this.

“You know what really gets me?” he asked.

“No,” I replied pleasantly.

“When people say really nasty things, but afterward they say they didn’t mean it.”

“Why does that bother you?”

He became agitated, twisting his fingers and breathing hard. “It makes no sense. Why would someone say something cruel and then supposedly not mean it? If you ask me, anger is when people are alive. They’re honest and raw. It’s the polite bullshit afterward that’s the lie. ‘I didn’t mean it!’ Like hell you didn’t mean it. You
did
mean it. What you don’t mean is your apology.”

I didn’t like hearing all this, but I had no choice. “Do you ever say things you don’t mean?”

He slammed his fist on the table. “Of course I do. It’s all the nice bullshit I tell people because I have to. That’s what drives me crazy.”

“That’s very interesting.”

He sat in silence before finally saying, apropos of whatever went on in his head, “Is it normal to think about killing people?”

Patients confide all sorts of nutty things, but I couldn’t help feeling this was some sort of cosmic retribution. “Why do you ask that?” I replied evenly.

“Sometimes I’m afraid I’m going to end up killing someone. Or it’s more like I know I will. The
anger
, you know? It gets to be too much. I stay awake all night, listening to Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ and thinking about killing my parents. It feels like the only way out. The only way I’ll ever stop being angry.”

I shrugged. “I think everyone has at least one moment in life thinking about killing someone. In fact, I wouldn’t believe people who told me they never did.”

“You’re saying I’m normal?”