Although I didn’t realize it, Tricia, too, was hospitalized at Sibley while I recuperated from my infection. She’d overdosed on Valium and, upon learning her husband died, was thought to be at risk of suicide. She was the woman I would have become if not for Anne Elise’s gummy smile: someone who’d spend the rest of her life alone and unloved. Her bed, so I am told, was exactly a floor beneath mine. Had a hole been drilled into my floor, I could’ve looked down and waved at her or induced Anne Elise to smile down upon her, but Tricia would’ve been in no condition to acknowledge me. Doctors sedated her. Nurses sat with her twenty-four hours a day for two weeks. Lois Belcher, had she not been fired, would’ve made an excellent sitting partner for Tricia.
Despite my suspicions, Detective Adderly didn’t believe Tricia kidnapped Anne Elise. Since he’d taken on the case, Adderly grew a mustache, which he kept neatly trimmed. Along with the mustache, he developed a habit of running his index finger over his mustache while he talked. Although paramedics found Anne Elise in Tricia’s house, no definitive evidence existed as to how she got there. Adderly interviewed Tricia several times and concluded she was incapable of doing something like kidnapping. “A woman like that’s not mentally tough enough to pull off a crime.” Who did he think kidnapped Anne Elise? “James. I think James kidnapped the baby in order to give her to his wife. That’s what she says happened, anyways. She had no idea what he was going to do before he showed up at her door with the baby. You really didn’t know him well, did you?”
Jimmy was not Tricia’s only sorrow.
A couple of weeks later, while Belinda strolled the hallways with Anne Elise, a young man with a sheepskin coat and wire-rimmed glasses knocked on my hospital door. I stiffened, for only policemen and security officers felt compelled to knock on my door before entering; everyone else came and went as they pleased. I’d answered enough questions about Jimmy and enough questions about Tully. The last batch of policemen assured me that, having assembled sufficient evidence to secure a conviction against Tully, they wouldn’t bother me with further interrogations. This guy at my door seemed about my age, early twenties, but in the aftermath of what happened to Jimmy, I felt as if I’d aged twenty years. I wasn’t a girl anymore but a woman who had to figure out how she’d feed and clothe and shelter a baby. I was twenty-four years old, going on forty.
“Can I come in?” the young man asked.
“Do I have a choice?”
“Yes, ma’am. This is America. You have every choice in the world to tell me you don’t want to see me.”
I laughed, which the man took as an invitation to step inside. He unbuttoned his sheepskin coat, tossed it over the back of a chair. He wore blue chinos and a cable-knit night-gray cashmere sweater with a blue insignia stitched right over where I presumed his heart would be. He stepped closer. The insignia was of a man on horseback swinging a polo mallet. It was the kind of sweater Jimmy would wear on his leisure hours. The floor to my room was wet from having been mopped, and as the man walked across the room, I saw the impression of his penny loafers in the drying floor.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“What are you sorry about?”
He sat down on the recliner and told me what Tricia was going through. Without her knowing it, her father stole all her money, sold her house and car, and saddled her with hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes. I already learned Jimmy died in debt, but to have one’s father steal from you struck me as just deserts for Tricia. She was able to keep some of her possessions, but she’d never again afford the lifestyle to which she’d become accustomed.
“There’s more,” the man said, raising his glance to meet my eyes.
The previous morning, Tricia’s father’s body had washed ashore on a Caribbean island. He’d gotten mixed up with drug lords. Or rather, drug lords got involved with him after he started messing around with their women. I couldn’t imagine it. They shot him thirteen times in the chest, a dozen more times than necessary to kill him, and hurled his body off a yacht anchored in an exclusive sun-drenched cove where wealthy scuba diving tourists explored coral reefs and sunken fishing trawlers.
“How do you know this?” I was shocked, not only by the circumstances of Jack Riggs’s death but also how this man had apparently already learned everything there was to know about it. “Why are you telling me all this?”
Without blinking, he said, “Everyone has the right to know the truth.”
I stared at him, incredulous. Only someone brought up in privileged surroundings and pampered on a diet of anodyne bromides could spout off such weasel shit. He was hiding something but lacked the responsibility or the moral courage to man up to it. I wasn’t a little girl anymore who’d rush into whatever lies and illusions spread out before her. I asked that he leave my room. He was courteous. He got up from the recliner, walked out the door, and retreated into whatever moneyed world would welcome a young man with a polo player insignia stitched to his cashmere sweater.
He never even told me his name.
Jimmy’s memorial service, when it finally happened weeks later, was held in an underused chapel not far from where he lived with Tricia. Though rosy light shone through the enormous stained glass windows behind the pulpit, the interior of the granite chapel was cold. Few people showed up to pay their respects, and those who did kept their winter coats and hats on. An aging minister, assisted with a black rubber-tipped cane, hobbled to the pulpit and asked that we bow our heads. Owing to my fear of how Tricia would react, I left Anne Elise with Belinda. The minister read a psalm about the Lord being our shepherd.
I loved Jimmy. I kept imagining him as he must have been, bravely seeing to Anne Elise’s safety in his dying moments. I craved to see his smile, craved to hear him sing another of those Sinatra-era songs he loved so much. Outside of Lois Belcher, who sat alone in another pew, her hands bundled in wool mittens, I guessed none of the other eight people in this chapel knew of Jimmy’s relationship with me, and it pained me to realize I couldn’t express my grief to everyone as freely as Tricia. But Tricia wasn’t in attendance.
The minister admitted not having known Jimmy very well. Like many in his particular aging Episcopal congregation, Jimmy wasn’t a religious man. He didn’t attend Sunday services, but the minister knew Jimmy enough to say with confidence that optimism was his defining trait. Jimmy was insanely optimistic about his personal prospects and the prospects of those he loved. “Did that not indicate a fundamental—perhaps even subconscious—trust in Providence’s guiding hand?
“I’m told that Jimmy’s favorite song was ‘Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive.’ It’s an old Johnny Mercer/Harold Arlen composition. Does anyone here know it?”
My hand shot into the air. The minister squinted at me. Mine was the only hand raised.
The minister, standing behind the pulpit, started singing the song. He was probably old enough to be a boy when the song was first recorded. His black cassock swayed as he sang. Here and there, people sniggered, a miserly thing to do given the circumstances, but they couldn’t help themselves. The minister’s weak voice warbled, echoing throughout the cavernous chapel. It was strangely pathetic hearing the song this way when I’d only known it before through Jimmy’s rich, warm baritone.
“Jimmy Wainsborough had the consoling grace to realize that however bad he or any of us might have screwed up in the past, we need not give up our faith in what the future holds for us.”