He sounds relieved. “That would be much appreciated.” He adds, “Sorry to spoil your vacation.”
I hang up and turn around on the road, thinking, It was already going downhill.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Rhames is covering his butt, plain and simple. Sometimes a homicide can be manipulated to look like a suicide, even a hanging. Maggie had a child, for one thing — what if that child was threatened? It’s an incredible longshot and a scenario I’m sure in my gut isn’t so. But for a thorough guy like Rhames to get the word from the decedent’s therapist that she was depressed and batted around the suicide idea from time to time? It could help him close out a case.
Paul questions me and Joni seems to pout, but Michael is genuinely concerned. “That’s a terrible situation. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.” I look at the three of them, my husband in his grass-stained white socks, my daughter and her fiancé still in their bathing suits, wrapped in beach towels. “We’ll celebrate when I get back, all right? I’m so sorry.”
Paul looks at his watch. “When do you think that will be?”
“Well, it’s what — two o’clock now? By the time I drive down there, go to the station, give my statement and all of that, it will be too late to drive back. I’ll get up and come back early in the morning.”
I already thought about this. I could come back tonight, and under different conditions, I probably would. But Rhames’s conscience and close-out rate isn’t the only reason I’m going. The tragic situation provides me an opportunity — to look through my notes on Tom Bishop and make a couple more calls. Maybe even talk to the Bleekers.
Paul glances at the kids. “I guess we’ll have to survive without you for a little while.” He comes forward and gives me a hug, busses my cheek. “Love you, honey.”
Joni is next, throwing her arms around my neck. She’s like a cold fish, goosebumps on her skin. For a moment, she hangs some of her weight on me, and I’m transported back to her early childhood. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “We should be celebrating tonight. But we will as soon as I get back.”
Joni lets go and Michael gives me a pursed-lip smile. I move closer and pat his arm. “Lucky for you, my daughter can cook.”
“Michael is actually great in the kitchen,” Joni says. “He’ll probably be the one cooking tonight.” She stares at him with pure adoration.
Michael is an enigma. There’s no discerning deceit in his sea glass–colored eyes. But something about their sheen, the way his skin frames them beneath the heavy eyebrows, it’s like they’re designed to be provocative.
I just can’t register his intent, and I’m usually pretty good at reading people.
How much is he aware of? How much is intentional? Does he know what I’m planning to do right now?
Give it a rest. He can’t read your mind.
“All right, here I go.”
I’ve changed clothes and packed a small bag. My phone in hand, bag in the other, I walk to the Range Rover. Once inside it, I’m backing out and waving as I do. The three of them have come to the doorway to see me off.
When I turn around and begin trundling down the dirt driveway, I’m almost relieved to be away from them.
Why? Because I feel guilty. Because I was raised to believe that even a small untruth — whether by omission or a little white lie — dirties the soul. At least, an unclear conscience can be a troubling thing.
That doesn’t mean anyone should expect themselves to be perfect. Part of the trick is to forgive ourselves the transgressions, especially when they’re truly meant to serve a greater good. The problem is, for some people, such transgressions are not always for a nobler cause. They’re a means to avoid something or hide something.
And sometimes — oftentimes, really — the transgressions that get buried stay buried. And lost. That’s what therapy — the talking cure — is about. Waking up those memories, digging through the past to ferret out the unclean moments.
Not to get too grandiose about it, but it’s a lot like religious confession. The patient is the sinner, seeking forgiveness.
Only, if you don’t know your sins or you’re in denial of them, it’s hard for the cleansing to work. Impossible, really.
So therapy frequently begins with that examination of one’s past. It’s how it began with me, anyway. Like many therapists, I started out as a patient, wrestling with my own troubled soul. My father, before his untimely death, had grown up an only child. By his teens, he was drinking and smoking and falling in with the wrong crowd. His father had died young too, in the war, to leave my father and his mother in a crowded apartment complex in Yonkers. Roy started drinking in his teens and was a problem drinker by twenty, though he managed to get a decent job and marry my mother, Eloise — a much more sheltered person, but also an only child.
Eloise never learned how to stand up for herself. Roy’s descent into drinking and health problems took its toll on her and on me. By the time I was ready to start dating, I’d already decided men were scary and unpredictable, and I wasn’t safe around them.
I met Paul at the New School in Manhattan. He was so easygoing and unassuming I thought it had to be an act. For the first six months that we dated, I was on pins and needles, waiting for the fa?ade to drop and Paul to pick up a bottle — to start talking with his fists.
But he never did.
Paul’s easiness didn’t convince me of what it should have — that not all men are horrible. Instead, the incongruence had a different effect. Paul made my father seem worse than he already was. The more men I encountered who were less afflicted and temperamental, the more they seemed like anomalies.
I didn’t know where to put that. I didn’t know how to deal with it, so I rejected Paul. One night, a time I’ll never forget, he stood outside my apartment in the pouring rain. Just like in the movies. And he pleaded with me, water running down his thin face, his eyelids fluttering. He begged me to reconsider. Whatever he’d done wrong, he said, he’d fix it.
His behavior turned something in me cold and furious. Seeing him like that, I suddenly judged him as weak. As pathetic. I didn’t want anything to do with a man like that. I needed someone strong, like my father. And to show my own strength, I lashed out. I hit Paul. The one and only time I’d hit another adult human being.
Shocked, bewildered, Paul stumbled back. Blood from the corner of his mouth mixed with rainwater and coursed down his jaw and dripped. He touched the blood, looked at it, looked at me, and left.
That night, alone in my apartment with the rain slamming down, I contemplated my life’s worth. What had I done? I was becoming my father. Violent and obsessed with vigilance.
Somewhere near the end of my purgatory, I got a phone call. It was my mother. My father had suffered a major heart attack in the night and died.