Killer (25 page)

I look away, lost in myself. The deep feeling I was sharing with Nicki only a moment ago dissolves into something else—different feelings. Pain. Regret. I was completely focused on this lovely, brilliant, vibrant woman just seconds ago, and now it’s gone. Just…gone.

Did something in me die along with Sara? When you have ached for one, how can you ache for another? Smarter people than me have lost their way in this tangle of thorns. I have no guide, no map, because there is none.

Nicki gives my hand a little squeeze, bringing me back to her, to this booth, to this moment.

“We’re both exhausted,” she says. “We’ve been through a hell of a lot these last few weeks. Last few years, for that matter.”

She squeezes my hand tighter and waits until I turn to her and meet her steady gaze.

“Why don’t you do us all a favor and join the living,” she says.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

The wake-up call from the front desk rings at seven-thirty a.m. I have a nine o’clock appointment with a specialist in Beverly Hills who is going to rebuild my wrist and hand. I dress and think about calling Nicki but decide to let her sleep. Her plans are to have breakfast in bed, then lie around the pool all day. After that we will head back to the airport for an eleven p.m. flight back home.

The lobby of the hand specialist’s office is white, with a black slate floor and a soaring ceiling peaked by a massive domed skylight webbed with ribbons of shredded copper. The lobby is dominated by an enormous sculpture of what is obviously intended to be a penis.

I give my name to the receptionist, whose physical beauty seems so perfect it’s almost inhuman. I turn from the desk and go sit in a molded plastic pink neo-revival bullshit incredibly uncomfortable copy of an Eames chair and stare at the bronze penis, which is about the size of an adult tiger shark.
I guess I could see it in a urologist’s office, but…

I look around and notice I am the only male patient waiting in the lobby, and then the sculpture makes a little more sense. I pick up a brochure and learn that hands are the new frontier in cosmetic surgery. Apparently people are lining up in Los Angeles to have surgery to make their hands look younger. I wonder if my hand will wind up looking younger. Will they have to do the other one too, just for symmetry?

I am called by a nurse—another young woman who looks like she just leapt from the cover of
Glamour.
My wrist and hand are x-rayed and examined by the movie-star-handsome Beverly Hills surgeon, who has discarded the traditional white coat for a pinstriped Savile Row suit. His hands are so youthful and perfectly manicured that I actually feel shame when he looks at my mangled wrist and hand. He tells me I will need one “procedure,” which means surgery, and after physical therapy I will be good as new. Typing won’t be a problem, although I will need a specially designed ergonomic keyboard.

“But will I ever play the violin?” I ask.

* * *

The hotel car takes me back to the Bonaventure and I find Nicki out at the pool, sunning herself. I pause for a few seconds, just to look at her. She is lying on her stomach on a chaise, the straps open on the top of her bright yellow bikini to avoid tan lines. After all the tailored suits, after the jeans and sweaters and the fitted leather jacket, she is now another revelation entirely—delicate shoulders, narrow waist, the gentle arc of her naked back, her legs toned and tanned. I could stand here for the rest of the afternoon, cataloguing her fine qualities, but I go to her and I am disappointed when she fastens the straps on her top and slips into her hotel bathrobe.

We order lunch at a table near the pool, under a bright yellow umbrella. We talk about my doctor visit, about cosmetic surgery and Los Angeles, and about the last time I was here, when I fled the interview with Marsh. We talk about her plans for the afternoon, which include a massage and a nap. She asks me what I’m going to do and I tell her I have no plans.

“You said you were going to get Sara’s things when you were here before,” she says as she nibbles on a cold shrimp.

“Yes,” I say.

“But you never did,” she says.

“No, they’re still here.”

She looks at me for a moment but doesn’t say anything. Then she puts down her shrimp and says, “After my fiancé Michael died, I kept his things—pictures, gifts we’d given each other and stuff—kept them out, all over my apartment, everywhere. And little by little I took them down and put them away over the years, until they were all put away. But I left the engagement ring he gave me in my everyday jewelry drawer. It’s still there. I see it every morning. I didn’t know why I left it in there at the time, but I just couldn’t bring myself to stick it in a box somewhere I’d never see it. And now I think I did it because it doesn’t hurt so much anymore to see things that remind me of him. It’s part of the past, that’s all. It doesn’t make it any less meaningful to me, it’s just a little reminder of something in my life that will always be with me, and it’s a comfort to always have it nearby, but in the back of the drawer.”

* * *

Nicki heads off for her massage and I go back to my room for a nap, but I don’t sleep. At four o’clock I finally get up and sit on the edge of the bed and look out the window at the San Gabriel mountains. After a long time I pick up the phone and call the storage place where Sara’s things are, and once again I arrange for some boxes to be placed there for me. Then I call the front desk to have a hotel car take me there and wait while I box up her things.

Two hours later I am riding in the back of the hotel’s Town Car as we pull into the parking lot at the storage space. I tell the driver I will need an hour to pack up everything and he goes off to get a bite to eat.

I walk down the row of doors, to the storage unit I have been paying for for five years. I put my key in the lock and turn it and enter the little room, which has a musty, mildewy smell, and I reach for the light switch and flip it on and the single, bare light bulb in the ceiling illuminates my past.

The room is about the size of an average bedroom, the floor is concrete, the walls cinderblock. The bare bulb overhead, caged in steel, casts a dim yellow light over the boxes and items scattered haphazardly around the space. I stand at the doorway and take it all in. Some of Sara’s things are already boxed up, some are stacked sloppily—a pile of clothes in one corner, a pile of books in the other. The stack of corrugated boxes I ordered is leaning next to the door, flattened, with a plastic strap around them. I find the box-cutter the manager left for me, as well as a thick roll of brown packing tape in a plastic dispenser.

I pick up the box cutter and slice open the plastic band around the boxes. I build the first box, bending and folding the stiff cardboard, then leaving the top open. I turn to Sara’s things and, finally, pick a place to start. I begin with her clothes piled in the corner, folding each item carefully, then placing it in the box. I fill the first box, then close it and tape it up, then build the next box and look around the room for what to pack next: more clothes, some papers, files, magazines, and I look at the massive wooden trunk that she bought at a junk store before we met.

I kneel at the huge, oak trunk—
her hope chest,
I had called it, teasing her. I open the heavy lid and see the bright red wool scarf she wore when it was cold, and in the corner is the shoebox with her jewelry and photographs. I pick up the shoebox and tape it shut without looking at it—I don’t want to look at the photos. But I fumble with the tape roller and the box falls from my hands and the contents spill out and I see the pictures:
Sara and me at Santa Monica pier, the two of us at dinner, at a New Year’s eve party—
and I can smell her scent now, coming from the clothes inside the chest, and my heart hurts and my eyes burn and I start to cry.

Don’t do this
, I think, and I collect the photographs and put them back in the box but it doesn’t stop my crying and the tears fall over the pictures and the clothes and the jewelry and I don’t fight it because I don’t remember crying over her, although I’m sure I did when I was drinking. But this is the first time I have cried over her when I was sober and it hurts and I let it hurt and I sit in the corner behind the enormous hope chest and let the tears come and they don’t stop for a long time.

Finally I wipe my face on my shoulder and I sit up straight and I begin to sort the things from the hope chest into the box I have put together and as I do I notice a small packet of letters at the bottom of the chest. There are a dozen or so. Five of them are from me—love letters I quickly put aside. There are two letters from her mother, four from her best friend Susan, who had moved to London, and one envelope with a return address I don’t recognize.
Dr. Evelyn Stillman, M.D.

Sara’s doctor was a woman whose last name was Frank. I remember this because Sara and I had begun to try and have a child a year or so before we planned to marry. Sara was an only child, like me, and we both wanted to start a family right away—possibly a large one if we had the means. And I remember Dr. Frank because Sara hadn’t gotten pregnant after months of trying. And, after visiting a clinic to eliminate myself as the cause, I finally persuaded Sara to see Dr. Frank in her in her Pasadena office for fertility treatments.

But this is a doctor I’ve never heard of, with a Santa Monica address. I open the letter and read the letterhead.
Dr. Evelyn Stillman, M.D., Obstetrics and Gynecology.

The letter is handwritten, and brief.

Dear Sara,

Please return my calls right away. I know how painful and upsetting your last visit was, but you must understand, there IS hope—even for stage four patients. But only if you begin aggressive treatment immediately. As I mentioned, there is no way to know how long you have had the condition, since routine PAP tests do not detect it. I know you feel hopeless, but you have to fight, and start right away. I have given your information to Dr. Linman, the oncologist at Cedars we spoke about. He is an expert at treating ovarian cancer, and his patients have a higher survival rate than almost any other doctor in the state. I urge you to see him right away, and to begin counseling as well, Sara. Please don’t give up, I beg you. You do have a chance, but only if you fight!

Evelyn

The letter is dated three weeks before Sara’s suicide.

* * *

I sit back against the concrete wall of the storage room and stare at nothing. Numb, spent from crying and now this...

An answer. But an answer birthing new questions. Sara was outspoken and independent, but she could be passive about certain things. She hated doctors and she could be feckless about her health. She smoked too much. She wouldn’t complain if she was sick or in pain. She had a reluctance to talk about herself, or to admit she was having a problem. At first I mistook this for stoicism, but I came to realize it was fear. Of the unknown, the unfamiliar, or appearing weak or incapacitated or sick… In times she was troubled, she turned her attention to others—to her students, to me, to her friends.

Some puzzle pieces came together. The visits to her doctor, supposedly for fertility treatments, were probably visits to Stillman that she kept hidden from me. Even if she had survived the cancer, she wouldn’t have been able to have children. She had gone off her antidepressants around the time of Dr. Stillman’s letter. She must have simply given up.

But the missing pieces. How could she have kept this from me? How could she go on planning a wedding, a life with me, and maintained a contented demeanor when she must have been terrified? No matter how tough and stoic she liked to appear, how? Was she afraid I would abandon her, as her father had? Was I so absorbed in my struggle to build a career that she found me unreachable? Was she protecting me? And why no note? The letter I hold in my hand is the closest thing to an explanation that she left behind. Is that why she kept it?
Why didn’t she fight? Why did she do it?

Why?

I sit with this question. I have lived with it for years, but in a more abstract form. I will have to live with this new form of it now, and it will never go away.

But now, as I sit here holding this terrible letter, feeling nothing; numb, spent, I think of Nicki’s words. Now, even though this question will always be there, someday, maybe, I can put it in the back of the drawer.

* * *

I sit against the rough cinderblock wall for a time, then get up and fold the letter into my back pocket and return to my packing. I move away from the trunk, to a pile of books, and I notice three banker’s boxes along the wall next to them. I don’t recognize the boxes so I pull the first one out from against the wall and look at it. I don’t remember it but that doesn’t mean anything. I was mad with grief and booze when I put her things in here. I lift the box and I’m surprised at its weight. I slice open the packing tape on the box with the box cutter and lift the lid and find several layers of plastic wrap across the top.

What the hell…?

I slice open the plastic wrap and then, suddenly, I know what I will find—

I rip open the plastic and there is Beverly Grace’s head, rotted, smelling of death, her hands in front of her face in a praying position.

I knew what it was before I saw it.

I stand alone in the dim little room, stunned, nauseated, my mind reeling, the dingy gray walls spinning around me—

I look at the other two boxes and I know what they contain.

Did I put them here?

No, that’s impossible…

I rip open the next box, tearing through the corrugated cardboard and plastic wrap and find the head of Sharon Belton—her dark brown almond eyes open and shriveled and staring at nothing, covered with a milky, mildewed film. I hold the head in my hands and then drop it into the box and move to the next box, choking and retching and desperate to remember, but memories don’t always obey—