Kill Me (19 page)

THIRTY-SEVEN

True to my word, I did finally disclose to Dr. Gregory the ways that Adam had hurt me.

After I decided I would go there with him it took me a while to cover the necessary ground. First I had to tell him about Adam’s relationship with his uncle, then about me getting diagnosed, and about Connie’s death. Only then could I tell him about what had started all the hurt. I filled in that blank with a session-long tale about Adam’s momentous second visit to our home, and the revelation that he’d shared with me about his stepfather’s death.

I concluded with an admission to my therapist that he had been exactly right, that Adam had made me vulnerable.

I shared stories with him about the joy I felt during the college trips with Adam, and about the remarkable process of getting to know my son over that time period. I acknowledged the heartache of being forced to stay out of his reach.

My therapist listened patiently, but I could tell that he recognized that I was dealing with prelude, and he was waiting for the crucial part of my story. The part when Adam twisted the knife.

So here goes with that part.

Brown University in Rhode Island is as close to the academic environment a brilliant, homeschooled, self-directed, eclectically minded kid is accustomed to as any new college student is likely to find. Brown’s undergraduate college is without curricular requirements, a place that actually encourages its students to taste freely from the academic bounty the university makes available. Brown allows a student to choose from a menu of majors, or to cobble one together on his or her own from bits and pieces of academic passion. My son had chosen his college well. If Adam was going to thrive in any organized academic setting, I’d come to concur with his decision that it would be the one provided at Brown.

Given his idiosyncratic and prodigious intellectual gifts and his unorthodox approach to learning, however, I wasn’t certain that Adam was really going to thrive in any organized academic setting. Thea, Bella, and I each had our fingers crossed that the experiment in formal higher education would work out.

Adam, too, had his doubts. His final words to Bella before she drove away from his dorm?

“Don’t be disappointed if this doesn’t go too well.”

She promised she wouldn’t be.

Five minutes later, when Bella told us about it on her cell phone, Thea and I promised we wouldn’t be disappointed, either.

We were all lying.

The first month of school seemed to fly by. Thea and I had taken advantage of Berkeley’s late birthday and decided to postpone the onset of her kindergarten adventure for another year, so we — Thea, Cal, Haven, and I — were all together as that autumn began. A long Indian summer interlude dominated Colorado’s weather as we split our time between Denver and Ridgway.

Although my contact with my son continued to be more sporadic than I would have liked during those weeks, I communicated with him just enough — mostly by e-mail — to satisfy myself that his adjustment to being in college fell someplace on the scale between “okay” and “fine.”

But all hell broke loose sometime in October.

When exactly? That was hard to pinpoint because Bella had kept the early signs of the developing crisis to herself. The first time Thea and I heard that something might be up was after Adam had been absent from his scheduled classes for four days. And by that time, his roommate was also reporting that Adam hadn’t slept in his dorm room for six nights.

The roommate actually thought it was six, but since he’d been gone on a road trip with the lacrosse team for some off-season something at the front end of the time period in question, he admitted that it could actually have been as long as seven or eight nights that Adam had been AWOL from Brown.

Shit.

“He’s on one of his adventures,” Bella explained on the phone during her we-may-have-a-situation-but-I’m-not-really-that-worried-but-I-thought-you-should-know call. “He’s always done this. Always.”

It was clear that Bella, bless her heart, was far from exasperated about the situation, and hadn’t actually crossed the line that distinguished “concerned” from “worried.” She labeled her state of mind as “puzzled.”

“He’s already away from home, Bella. Why does he have to run at all?” I asked her.

“He’s not running — he didn’t run. Adam’s exploring. Something out there caught his eye, maybe something he was studying at school. He decided to take a closer look at it himself. It’s what he does; it’s how he learns. When he was thirteen he was reading about how salmon spawn, so he took off for a river in Washington State to see it for himself. That’s who our son is. He’s an experiential learner.”

The kid had been out of contact with anyone for more than a week. “Experiential learner” wasn’t enough of an explanation for me.

God help us.

But Bella had also said “our son,” and hearing those words made it hard for me to recover any traction for my frustration with her.

Thea was oddly quiet about the whole affair as it developed. At first I applauded the prudence reflected by her silence, and I admired her ability to keep some distance from the battle that I feared was about to be joined between Bella and me over what to do next about Adam’s absence.

Then I had an epiphany about what was really going on with Thea. I thought about my conclusion for most of a day, trying to reject it, trying to convince myself I was wrong. But the more I thought about it the more right it felt.

It also felt terrible.

I’d taken Haven from Thea’s breast, changed her, and returned her to her crib before I’d read Cal her nighttime stories and tucked her into bed. After the girls were settled, I sat down next to my wife on the love seat beneath the window in our Denver bedroom. Thea was stretched out reading a book, and had to make room for me. Her accommodation was reluctant.

“Hey,” I said.

She put her finger on a spot near the bottom of the left page, turned to me, and smiled. The smile was halfhearted at best. It said “I love you” but it also said “This had better be good. I’m enjoying the silence, and my book.”

I smiled back. I wanted the smile to shout “I love you, too.” In a calm tone, a conversational, nonconfrontational tone, I said, “You told Bella, didn’t you?”

She made the mistake of responding too quickly.

“Told her what? What on earth do you mean?” she said, turning her attention back to the book as though she couldn’t bear to be parted any longer from the story she was reading.

My wife was a terrible liar. When she tried to prevaricate she almost always ended up forcing false assurance into her words like a woman who hadn’t seen single-digit sizing for a while squeezing herself into a size eight.

“About the aneurysm.”

I never called it “my aneurysm,” always “the aneurysm.” As part of the campaign to maintain my own optimistic charade, I needed to treat the damn weakness as an interloper, not a resident.

As parasite, not partner. I had to regard it as nothing integral to me. If it were integral, it couldn’t be vanquished. I wouldn’t allow it to become integral.

Thea made a dismissive face that was almost comical. From her expression it appeared that she thought that I’d begun speaking in tongues and she wanted to make it clear to me that it wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t decipher my babble.

I pretended not to notice her feigned disbelief. It was easier that way. “When?” I asked. “When did you tell her?”

She closed her book and placed it on her lap. She’d lost her place. She took a quick look at me — I think she wanted to judge whether or not I was angry — then she turned away from me and nodded two or three times into the darkness beyond the western windows. “End of September, maybe. She was in Ohio. I was up in Ridgway. It was a pretty day. We were talking on the phone. And we were both cooking. She was making bread. I was making cupcakes for Berk and her friends.”

“Damn it,” I said, without any passion, and without any real anger. I already knew in my heart that Thea had talked with Bella about the aneurysm, and long before I confronted her I’d already spilled all the passion I could muster about it. The “damn it” was a simple recognition on my part about how complicated things were going to be with my son from that moment forward.

Thea said my name then. She said it as a plea.

I sighed. “Bella told Adam,” I said. “That’s why he split.” It all seemed so obvious to me.

“Why would she tell him?” Thea asked.

Thea wasn’t being curious; she was being defensive. It was obvious to her, too, how these dominos had tumbled.

“Because Bella is Bella,” I said.

“Maybe not,” Thea said. It wasn’t an argument; it was another layer of defense. She knew it and I knew it. “Maybe you’re … wrong about her. You’ve always been hard on Bella. She said she wouldn’t tell him. She promised me that she wouldn’t.”

“Thea? We’re talking Bella. She can’t keep things from Adam. She can’t tolerate any boundaries between them. We both know that. Come on.”

Thea didn’t want it to be true. “Why would she tell him?”

“It’s her way of being a good parent. It always has been. She uses license as a substitute for responsibility, and she uses honesty as a substitute for judgment. That’s Bella. It’s who she is.”

Thea thought about my words for a while before she decided not to argue with my conclusion. Instead, she decided to throw herself on the mercy of the court. It was a wise decision; the court was feeling merciful.

“No,” Thea said protectively. “It’s me. I screwed up. Bella’s so nice. She is. After we got the news about the aneurysm bulging more, I needed to talk. It’s been so hard to keep everything quiet. She’s so far away … I thought it would be safe to …”

So it’s my fault?
I almost said.
This all happened because I wanted to keep my illness a secret?
I didn’t, but I came close. Instead I said, “Where Adam is concerned Bella is like the mother without borders. Her judgment sucks. That’s why we weren’t going to tell her, remember? We talked about Bella specifically.”

I realized at that moment that the entire I-don’t-have-an-aneurysm ruse had been concocted to protect Adam. Or, more to the point, had been concocted to protect me from Adam’s feelings.

“I screwed up. I’m sorry,” Thea said.

I kissed her. “It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have put you in this position.”

She touched me on the face. I was grateful for the caress.

“Adam thinks I’m going to die. That I’m going to leave him. It’s his greatest fear about me. The aneurysm will be a huge thing between us. A mountain range. An ocean. I don’t know how to mitigate this, the fact that he knows about it. I don’t know how to erase it. I need to try to figure out what to do next.”

“Why would he run, though?”

“To sort things out? I don’t know. I don’t know my own son well enough to answer that question.”

That admission took the breath away from her. From me, too.

“Well, he’s wrong about you. You won’t die. We’ll just have to find him and tell him that,” Thea said when she recovered, endeavoring to sound defiant. “We’ll show him the numbers, the odds, explain all that you’re doing to maximize your chances, let him talk to the doctors — whatever he wants. He’s smart; he’ll see.”

“It’s growing, baby. It could blow. We both know that.”

“But it might not. Right? Right? Hope. Determination. Right? And there’s always surgery.”

Denial,
I thought. It’s contagious.

“We don’t even know where he is, Thea. Makes it kind of hard to convince him of anything, right?”

“We’ll find him.”

“Of course we will,” I said. “Of course we will.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

I’d hired three detectives to look for my son. I didn’t tell Bella I was doing it.

I didn’t even tell Thea.

I didn’t ask for anyone’s permission.

I had to connect with him. Even if it was only to say good-bye.

In early November I phoned one of the detectives. My call found him in Wisconsin; he was following a soft lead that had taken him to Milwaukee from Illinois. A girl in Chicago thought a photo of Adam resembled a guy she’d met at a party at a frat at Northwestern who said he was going to Milwaukee.

“Milwaukee?” I asked. “You hopeful?”

“Honestly? No. People tell me things, I check them out. Most of the time they’re unreliable. I still don’t have any data records — credit card, nothing — that tell me where your son is. He’s not using the phone you gave him. It’s not even turned on. Until I get lucky or I get a hard clue, I’m following rumors. You want me to stop, I’ll stop. You want me to keep going, I’ll keep going. It’s your money. I got nothing but time and good intentions.”

I wasn’t sure how competent the guy was, but he was honest, and I liked him for that.

“Keep going,” I said.

THIRTY-NINE

I wouldn’t have gone East on pretend business if Adam hadn’t stayed missing.

But he did stay missing, and I did go East.

Thea had begged me not to go on the trip. She’d had to rush me to St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction earlier that week after I’d suffered worsening symptoms. The doctors had hospitalized me overnight to rehydrate me after some prolonged vomiting. They ultimately decided that the bulge in my brain wasn’t bleeding, yet. It was just getting fatter.

I’d only been back in Ridgway from the hospital for an hour before Lizzie called again on my
Ob-la-di
phone.

She said, “We’ve just had a teleconference. With your new symptoms, the client-derived parameters have been exceeded.”

I tried to swallow. Failed. My throat was so dry that I couldn’t talk.

She hung up.

The target was officially on my chest.

A bull’s-eye.

I was fair game.

Adam had been gone from Brown for almost a month.

I’d scheduled some meetings in New York to maintain appearances. To my dismay, the meetings — in lower Manhattan, in the absent shadows of the void of the World Trade Center — took up most of the afternoon. It was the kind of mindless financial foreplay that Adam would have walked out of, the kind of meeting that if I had any guts I would have walked out of. The suits ran out of ideas long before they ran out of words, so I was ready for them to shut their mouths long before they finally shut their briefcases. I hustled out of the building and slunk down into the subway with about a million other people and stuffed myself into a crowded car on the Lexington Avenue line heading to Midtown. I could have taken a cab or arranged for a Town Car or limo to go uptown, but despite my whining I liked the crush of life in the tunnels below the city, especially during rush hour.

When I made it back to the hotel on 57th it was just before six and Mary was waiting for me in the second-floor lounge, the same one where I’d met the funny man for my final tutorial on Death Angel rules and regs. Mary was drinking sparkling water; she never touched alcohol when she was on call to fly.

“Good day?” I asked, happy to see her round face.

“Pretty good,” she said. From her vantage, any day she spent away from her family wasn’t eligible for a more exalted status. She never sugarcoated that fact. She loved to fly; she didn’t love the fact that flying often meant spending the night somewhere away from her daughter.

“You rescued me from being a cop before I ever got to be a detective. Now sometimes I get to play one on TV. It’s kind of fun.” She reached into her purse and pushed some handwritten notes across the table. “You shouldn’t have too much trouble with any of this. The woman is a true creature of habit.”

“Thanks. You don’t think she knew you were there? On her?”

“In this city? I don’t see how.” She paused and gave me a querulous look. “She’s not a pro, is she?”

“What? God, no. No. Just a business … associate. She’s too secretive for my taste, that’s all. She knows plenty about me, and I prefer a level playing field.” I sat back on the chair. “Who am I kidding? I don’t like a level playing field. I like home-field advantage.”

“That’s true, you do,” Mary said. I could tell that she didn’t believe the story I was telling her.

“You going to see your cousin tonight?” I asked.

Mary nodded. Her cousin was a FedEx delivery driver who lived in Brooklyn but worked out of a big facility in Greenwich Village near Hudson Street. “She’s window shopping and drooling — simultaneously, I’m sure — over on Fifth Avenue right now. We’re meeting up for dinner a little later at a Chinese place she likes by the bridge. Just need to give her a call.”

I reached into my jacket pocket and held out a pair of theater tickets. “On me. For the two of you. Enjoy.”

She looked at the precious tickets — fourth row, center — then back at me. There was wonder in her eyes. “How’d you get these? This has been sold out for like … ever.”

“It’s not important.” I didn’t want to admit that LaBelle had cashed in a favor with one of the investment bankers who had assisted with the sale of my company years before, and he’d gotten the seats for me. “There’s a seafood place not far from here, on 54th. It’s called Oceana. I think you’ll like it.” One of Mary’s few apparent weaknesses in life was good seafood. Especially shellfish. “You and your cousin have reservations for a nice pretheater dinner. They have terrific oysters. Get whatever you want; it’s all taken care of.”

She smiled. “Thanks, boss.”

“Thank you, Mary. Go on — you don’t have any time to waste on me — find your cousin, you have a curtain to make. I’ll try to give you a few hours’ notice before I’m ready to head home.”

“You don’t have any time to waste, either.”

Hearing those words, I’m sure I looked shocked. Did she know?

She gestured at the folded papers on the table. “Your lady’s due home soon. Trust me.” She stood and gathered her things. “You all right, boss?” she asked.

“Fine.”

Mary called “Good-bye” as she hustled from the hotel. I picked up the notes she’d left and started reading.

She’d never asked me why I really wanted her to follow Lizzie. She never even acted like she was curious.

I wondered, again, if she already knew.

If I had the time I might have walked uptown through the latest incarnation of Columbus Circle. But I didn’t have the time, so I had the hotel doorman whistle for a taxi. I finished reading Mary’s notes from the smooth plastic backseat of a New York cab.

I hadn’t spent a lot of time in Lizzie’s neighborhood over the years, but I’d been there before. An occasional symphony concert at Lincoln Center. A friend’s daughter’s violin recital at Juilliard. A restaurant visit or two with colleagues. Was I surprised that Lizzie lived nearby? No, not particularly. After our first encounter, but before the Papaya King lunch, I would have guessed she was an Upper East Side girl. But I assumed she would never have taken me to lunch near her home — too much risk of being recognized in her own neighborhood — so I’d ruled out the possibility she lived on the Upper East Side anywhere near the hot dog palace. The Upper West Side would have been among my top two or three alternative choices. I couldn’t visualize Lizzie as a loft-rat in Chelsea or the West Village or the Meatpacking District.

Mary’s notes provided me with Lizzie’s address and an apartment number she’d marked “likely, not definite.” Lizzie seemed like the type of woman to live in a quality building with a doorman. To get in to see her, I would be forced to either charm or bribe my way past the liveried gatekeeper, some street-smart guy who was immune to charm, and resistant to all but the most exorbitant of bribes. But I wasn’t planning to stop by her apartment, not during this visit. I wanted our first encounter, at least, to appear serendipitous.

“She has this thing for magazines,”
Mary wrote.
“I’ve now followed her home three times. All three times she’s stopped at a newsstand near the corner and picked up some magazines. Two or three each visit.”

I’d been curious whether she lived alone. Reading a pile of magazines every night, I was guessing she either lived by herself, or was feeling disaffected from whomever it was she was living with.

“There’s a deli right behind the newsstand. Two nights out of three, she went in and picked up something at the deli. I think fresh fruit, but I’m not sure.”

I checked my watch. It was 6:50.

“Times home: 6:55, 7:05, 7:25.”

Traffic around the park was no worse than usual for the hour, which meant it was awful.

I knew I might miss my chance to run into Lizzie outside her home.

I stuffed Mary’s notes into my pocket and sat back. I needed a moment to decide how to play this.

At my request, Mary had been waiting outside the Museum of Modern Art the day that I’d had the rendezvous with Lizzie that had ended with our business lunch at Papaya King. The only hint I’d been able to give Mary that would make it any easier for her to follow us that day was that I thought that there’d be a black Town Car with tinted windows parked at a curb nearby. In New York City, unfortunately, that was about as useful a clue for her as a suggestion to keep her eyes peeled for pigeon droppings.

But Mary had arrived early, reconnoitered the area, and had picked the right Town Car, guessing correctly that it would be one that was parked illegally around the corner at the end of the block where traffic entered the one-way, not parked around the corner where traffic exited the street. To follow Lizzie’s car, any vehicle already on 54th would be forced to backtrack all the way around the block.

In New York City, that kind of delay would mean a failed surveillance.

Mary’s cousin from Jersey drove an old, lovingly restored BMW motorcycle that had belonged to her brother, who had been killed by an IED outside of Fallujah fourteen months after the end of major combat operations in Iraq. With Mary perched on the back of the bike, the two cousins had had no trouble sticking to the Town Car while Lizzie was frisking me as we were making our way through Central Park in the direction of Papaya King.

The cousins had hung out at a window table in a deli down the block while Lizzie and I enjoyed our dogs and fries. Later, Mary followed us on foot for our brief post-meal stroll, and then she and her cousin had remounted the two-wheeled Beemer and stayed close to Lizzie for the rest of that day, eventually tailing the Town Car to an office building in the four hundred block of Park Avenue, where Lizzie had spent the rest of that afternoon. Later on they trailed her to her apparent home on the Upper West Side near Lincoln Center.

That was the first time that Mary had noted the stops Lizzie had made for magazines and for something at the Korean deli.

The taxi dropped me at 67th and Broadway. My watch said it was a few minutes after seven. I realized I may have already missed Lizzie’s return home.

I quickly spotted the sidewalk news kiosk Mary had mentioned, and not far behind it, the Korean deli. Lizzie’s building, a Depression-era high-rise of dirty blond brick, filled the middle of the block. What the building lacked in architectural character — sadly, it paled beside its neighbors — it made up for in glass. Some of the large windows in the upper units undoubtedly afforded great views of the Hudson, and of the sunset.

I hoped she had one of those apartments and one of those views.

A waist-high wall of mini-crates of first-of-the-season Moroccan clementines marked the leading edge of an abundant fruit and veggie display that stretched from outside the door of the deli toward a decent-looking buffet of cooked food inside. I bought a
Newsday
from the newsstand guy — from our brief encounter, I thought it was likely he was deaf — and picked up a small bottle of Poland Spring from the young Korean woman manning the cash register in the deli before I strolled back out to the sidewalk. Assuming Lizzie might arrive by cab, as I had, I found a spot near a bus stop down the block beyond the entrance to her building. I held the tabloid at an awkward angle so that it obscured most of my face while I waited for taxis to pull to the curb delivering passengers.

Lizzie would have no reason to pay attention to me. I was a guy reading the paper, waiting for a bus. One of a hundred thousand people doing the same thing that evening in New York City.

I should have considered the likelihood that she’d arrive by subway, but I didn’t, so I was almost totally ambushed when she walked right toward me from the general direction of the Lincoln Center station at 66th and Broadway.

Her hair was shorter than it had been at Papaya King and she’d added some alluring highlights. Even in the fading light she wore tinted lenses over her eyes. But she was firmly in Manhattan pedestrian mode; she had someplace to be, she wasn’t browsing, and she wasn’t making eye contact with strangers.

When a New Yorker has a destination in mind, she doesn’t walk as much as she marches.

When Lizzie made it to the stretch of sidewalk behind the newsstand and then past the deli, her motion seemed to still for a split second with her eyes pointed in my direction. I feared for a moment that she had made me. I felt a stunning sense of relief when she pirouetted and retraced her steps to return to the newsstand. It took her less than a minute to pick out and pay for a couple of magazines. She stuck them into her shoulder bag and stepped immediately toward the deli.

I made my move.

I followed her in the door, walked directly to the front counter, picked up a package of M&Ms and got in line to pay. Lizzie was behind me — her back to mine — standing at the display of fresh fruit on the other side of the narrow store, no more than ten feet away.

The line in front of me moved too quickly. My hasty plan called for Lizzie to fall in behind me in line while I paid and spoke my line. When my turn came at the register, I went to plan B, said, “Forgot something, sorry,” and stepped away from the counter. I pretended to be confused about my choice of breath mints while I waited for Lizzie to finish selecting her fruit — she was either picky or indecisive — and get into the line. When, in my peripheral vision, I saw her turn to join the queue, I quickly stepped to the end of the line. A moment later she fell in behind me, so close that I could smell her.