Best Intentions (25 page)

I
t is close to one a.m. when I finally crawl into bed and lay beside Sam. He shifts slightly to accommodate me but makes no move to touch me. We cannot comfort each other. At some point, I hope, we will both be able to understand and forgive. But not yet, not tonight.

“Any luck getting through?” he asks without lifting his head from the pillow. His voice is hoarse with exhaustion.

“No.”

I've been trying to reach Jack all evening, desperate to tell him that I was wrong, he was wrong, about everything. I need him to assure me that he hasn't done it, of course not, how could I ever think such a thing about him.

I suppose, too, on some level I believe that if I can just get through to him I can head off something that has already happened.

Jack never picks up his phone.

I pull the sheets tight to my chest, curl into the fetal position.

If only I had ripped the photos up, thrown them in David's face, or gone to Sam first. If only I hadn't called Jack. But no matter how much I replay it, I cannot change what I have done. It will be with me forever.

I can tell by Sam's uneven breath he isn't sleeping, not even close.

I turn on my side, pull the pillow beneath me.

All I see is Deirdre. How she must have looked when they found her.

And before. In the moments before.

Grief, sharp and fierce, has taken its place in my heart, my head. I can't believe I am never going to talk to Deirdre, never going to see her again. I go over our last breakfast. It was just so ordinary, it was just us. It is unimaginable to me that that was the last time I am ever going to see her. I cannot picture my life without her.

I shut my eyes, feel contractions of the deepest sorrow.

I don't notice the crying coming from outside our door until it escalates, a stepladder of pain.

Sam turns to me. “It's Claire.”

“I'll go.”

I hurry down the hallway to her. When Claire was two, three, she suffered from night terrors. I would find her wide-eyed, sweaty, barely able to see me. No amount of comfort would calm her, pull her back into the world. Only when she had thoroughly worn herself out would recognition gradually begin to dawn in her eyes, only then could she be soothed. It hasn't happened in years.

Claire's forehead is hot and damp when I touch it, smoothing the hair from her face. She'd been gnawing one strand in her sleep, working it over until it is a wet snarl, and I gently free it from her mouth. She wakes enough to see me but not to speak. I lie down and curl my body tightly around hers. I'm the Cheerio and you are the spoon, she used to say. I let her cry now, her narrow back and ribs trembling with grief. I don't tell her it will be okay, I just stroke her head, kiss the back of her neck, feel once more that most unambiguous of loves.

Her body finally stills but I do not get up. I lie motionless in her single bed, staring at the filmy white curtains she has tied back with colorful ribbons and scarves, while she melts into sleep.

Both girls peppered us with questions when we told them what had happened, increasingly suspicious and frustrated when all we could reply was, We don't know. We just don't know. Claire grew fe
rociously angry, taking what had happened to Deirdre as an act of violence propagated against her personally. She became inconsolable, locked herself in her room. Phoebe clung more than I can remember her ever doing, her innate bravery crushed. For the first time she sensed that danger that can creep through any door, there is no guarding against it.

I wonder if they will ever feel truly safe again and the sadness that they might not, that it is one of the things lost last night, falls atop all the other sadnesses ratcheting through my heart.

As I lie there, bits and pieces of my conversation with Sam float back to me; I pick through them, choose one, turn it over and over, trying to assimilate it and form a new mosaic of who we were, who we are.

There was a time when we were happy, purely happy, there must have been.

The relief we had at finding each other, reclaiming each other again after that early separation, the night I told Sam I was pregnant with Claire, and two years later with Phoebe, those times of course. But it is the smaller, incremental moments that return to me, the instances when recognition and desire take you by surprise, the evening we made love on the kitchen floor after a dinner party if only to put off cleaning up, our first parent-teacher conference, when the nursery school director spent forty minutes deconstructing the way Claire held scissors and our suppressed laughter burst out in torrents on the street until tears were streaming down both of our faces. We were on the same side once, completely on the same side, I'm sure of it.

We chose the world we live in, I know that. We wanted it—we were young and confident of our ability to take what was good and challenging and worthwhile in it and not fall prey to the prejudices, the greed and poisonous envy. We thought we were better, stronger, surer than that. And maybe we were.

Nevertheless, it feels as if the city itself has wedged its way between us like a blade, separating us from each other, from our truest selves.

I try to remember when exactly the fumes of my money anxiety seeped out and infiltrated Sam, mushrooming beyond anything I meant, a funhouse mirror of my own worst impulses and insecurities. I try to remember when the distance grew so great between us that we were both too scared to try to traverse it with words, terrified of what we might hear. Or say. Instead we fell victim to guesswork, the most dangerous proposition of all when it comes to love.

I will at some point forgive Sam for that fumbling misguided night with Deirdre, I will believe his claim that it was not consummated, though I will always wonder if Deirdre thought of it every time she saw me. It is the not-knowing, the being left on the outskirts of my own history that will be hardest to forgive. I realize that we all have different versions of our lives, I just thought ours were closer.

Claire's soft breath brushes up against my neck as I lay there trying to make sense of it all.

It is near dawn when I crawl back to my own bed.

Sam opens his eyes slightly. “Are you okay?” he asks quietly, touching me now, gently, tentatively, with his fingertips.

I shake my head no but it is too dark for him to see.

I
n the morning, while Sam fixes the girls breakfast, I call Merdale and leave a message informing them that I will not be in. Though I don't say it, I know I will never go back there. If Favata has the missing hospital records he can do with them what he will.

There are three missed calls from David Forrester and one e-mail from him on my BlackBerry asking me to please get in touch, but I have no intention of ever speaking to him again.

We consider keeping Claire and Phoebe home from school but decide instead that it is important to maintain routine. If nothing else, there is the hope that their classes will distract them from their own imaginations and distress. It is impossible not to hold them just a bit longer before they walk out the door, though, not to want to pull them back.

“Call,” I remind them as they disengage.

Claire pulls out her cell phone to prove that she has it.

They are standing by the open door, ready to leave, when I remember. “Honey, do you know that cell phone you found in the coat closet?”

“Yes.”

“It wasn't mine. Or Daddy's. Do you have any idea where it came from?”

She shakes her head.

“You're sure?”

Phoebe looks over anxiously at her sister being grilled before speaking up in a quivery voice. “It was mine.”

“What?”

“You wouldn't let me have one, so one of the kids in school got it for me.”

I stare at her incredulously. Every time I underestimate the sophistication of the world she inhabits, the awe-inspiring navigational skills of its children, I am dead wrong.

“I'm sorry,” Phoebe says. “I don't see what the big deal is.”

Sam and I look at each other and let them go.

When Claire calls thirty-five minutes later to say they got to school safely she hands the phone to Phoebe. “I love you, Mommy,” she whispers so that she is not overheard, embarrassed. “I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the phone.”

“I love you, too. More than anything in the universe.”

At five minutes to ten, Sam and I walk into the large white brick precinct house on Twenty-first Street and ask to see Detective Callahan. “He's expecting us,” Sam tells the uniformed officer stationed at the front desk.

He motions to us to step to the side while we wait for him. I glance nervously around at the “Wanted” posters with their sketches of androidal faces rendered in black and white and the sign on the far door that reads “No Guns Past This Point.”

Callahan appears a couple of minutes later. “Thank you for coming.” He is only slightly less formal in a tie and shirtsleeves, as if we have come to his home this time, which of course we have. He stands perfectly erect, his posture disciplined against the tall man's temptation to stoop.

“Of course,” Sam replies. “Anything we can do to help.”

We follow Callahan up a narrow staircase to the detectives' department on the second floor. He leads us through the maze of old-fashioned mismatched desks past a holding cell where a post-drunken young man is clutching the bars, staring silently out at us. There is a low-level hum of ringing phones and conversations,
a fax machine spitting out paper and the clacking of computer keyboards. “Have you spoken to Jack?” I ask as I step around an overflowing wastebasket.

“We haven't been able to locate him yet. There's been no movement on his cards and he still hasn't used his phone. We've been trying to reach his wife as well to see if he's made contact but we haven't gotten through to her.”

“They're separated.”

“So you've said. Anyway, we've tried her home and the university where she works, but no one seems to know where she is.”

When we reach the far end of the room, Callahan slows to a stop and a woman wearing a double-breasted navy wool pants suit, her deep-red hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, appears beside him. She is just shy of pretty, her strong jaw and broad shoulders closer to handsome, though she is lucky with her hair, the type of red that is burnished and smooth rather than frizzed, a source of pride rather than a lifelong bane.

“This is Detective Gibbs,” he informs us. “She's helping out with the case.”

Gibbs smiles reassuringly at us. She is in her midthirties, with pale milky skin and nails bitten down to raw stubs. “I'm sorry about your friend,” she says as she shakes both of our hands.

Before we know exactly how it happens, it is so subtly accomplished, so balletic and rehearsed, Sam and I are separated.

Gibbs talks softly as she guides me into a small interrogation room, as I once did to ease the children in doctors' offices, dentists' chairs.

“Can I get you some coffee?” she asks as she closes the door behind us.

The floor, the walls, the chairs are all variant shades of industrial gray. There is a small two-way mirror on the far wall with a shade pulled crookedly up above it. The cabinets and shelves that line one side are filled with papers and office supplies, a utilitarian element in a space meant to intimidate, to cause discomfort.

“I'm fine, thanks.”

We sit down across the narrow rectangular metal table from each other.

“I understand you and Deirdre were roommates in college,” she begins, her elbows on the table, both hands playing with a thin silver chain necklace, sliding its charm back and forth like a seesaw until there is an irritated red skein left on her skin.

“Yes.”

“This must be incredibly painful for you.” She shakes her head. “I lost touch with my college roommate. We were best friends and then who knows what happened. Now we see each other once a year and pretend we're closer than we are.”

I nod without speaking. I am waiting for the rhythm, the parameters to be established. I am not sure whose side she is on, or even if there are sides. I haven't slept in two days and my skin is tingling. The artificial light has taken on a strange neon-tinged blurriness. I don't trust myself, I don't trust her.

“Still,” Gibbs continues, “even the memory of that connection is stronger than most of the connections I have now. I don't know why that is. Maybe there are just too many things later on, jobs, relationships, responsibilities, everything becomes diluted.” She leans forward. “But from what I understand you two remained close?”

“Yes.”

“I'm impressed. How'd you do it?”

It strikes me as a curious question, as if she expects me to reveal the secret formula to a complicated magic trick. “We were best friends,” I reply, a reductive catchall for more than twenty years of our intertwined lives, too simplistic and yet true.

“How often did you see each other?”

“We had breakfast almost every week. We talked.”

“I envy you, having someone like that in your life. That kind of continuity is so rare these days. Anyway, we printed out the pictures you gave Detective Callahan to show to Deirdre's neighbors,” Gibbs says, pulling them from the leather binder she has brought in with her. “You never know what someone might have seen. It's a small
building, just six lofts.” She takes the first one out: the four of us at Jack's birthday dinner.

“We also got these photographs from your friend Forrester.” She uncovers David's pictures of Deirdre and Sam. She studies the top one before passing it to me, Deirdre and Sam on the street, touching, close. “Deirdre was a beautiful woman,” she observes.

I can feel tears forming in my eyes and try to will them away. “She is. Was.”

She turns slowly to the next photograph until all three are splayed before us.

I regard them with different eyes now, the words that I had imagined Deirdre and Sam saying, the purpose of their touch altered, though the closeness, the proximity cannot be. No matter what I know to be true, the images form a disturbing geometry that is hard to explain away.

“Deirdre and your husband look so, what would you say, intimate?” Gibbs remarks.

I shift uncomfortably in my seat. “It's not what it seems,” I insist. “I told Detective Callahan that. Sam borrowed money from Deirdre, that's what they were meeting about.”

Gibbs picks up the photo of Sam and Deirdre in a café, their heads almost touching. “It's easy to see how you might have misinterpreted them. I know how I'd feel if someone showed me pictures like this of my husband. I understand you saw these for the first time the evening Deirdre died?”

“Yes. I've explained all this to Detective Callahan.”

“That was when, about six, seven p.m.?”

“I guess.”

“Your husband and your best friend. The two people you were closest to. Do you know when the pictures were taken?”

“Within the last couple of weeks.”

Jamison studies the top picture. “I love her necklace,” she says, almost to herself. She looks up at me, touching her own necklace. “Do you know where she got it?”

“It was a present from Jack.”

“If I had something like that I'd never take it off,” she ruminates.

“I don't think she did.”

Gibbs leans back. “So. What did you do?” she asks. “When you saw the pictures?”

“I called Jack. I shouldn't have. I know that. I'd give anything to take back what I said, anything.” Guilt pushes my voice up an octave, rushes it.

“Which was what, exactly?”

“That I thought Deirdre and Sam were having an affair.”

“How did he respond?”

“He was furious.”

“Did he threaten her?”

“No, not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

“He was upset.”

The room is overheated, the air stale. I can feel my skin grow damp beneath my wool sweater.

“Do you remember his exact words?” Gibbs asks.

“He called her a bitch. He said she wasn't going to get away with it,” I admit.

“That certainly sounds threatening to me. Can you give me a sense of their relationship? Was there any history of violence?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Did Jack tell you where he was when you spoke to him?”

“No.”

“And you have no idea where he went after that?”

“No.”

She stacks the photos up neatly, aligning the corners just so. “What did you do after talking to Jack?”

“I walked. I just walked for miles. I was trying to clear my head.”

“I see. Here's the thing, Lisa. May I call you that?”

I nod.

“One of Deirdre's neighbors claims she saw a woman who looks like you outside of her building last night around eight o'clock.”

“I did go there. I was going to talk to her. But in the end I couldn't do it. I wasn't ready. I wish I had.”

“Why?”

“Because she would have explained. She would have made me understand how wrong I was. She would have told me the truth.”

“So you didn't see her?”

“No.”

“And you didn't see Jack or anyone else going in?”

“No.”

“How long were you there for?”

“I don't know.”

“Then what?”

“I had a glass of wine at Bar Jamón.”

“What time was that?”

“I don't know. I was upset. Watching the clock wasn't my first priority. I suppose around nine thirty or ten.”

“What time did you get to your apartment?”

“I guess around eleven or twelve.”

“And your husband was already asleep?”

“Yes. Am I a suspect?” I ask incredulously.

“We're just trying to piece this all together,” Gibbs assures me.

“Don't you think if I knew anything, if I saw anything, I would tell you?” Outrage pierces through the exhaustion. “I loved Deirdre.”

“No one is accusing anyone of anything,” Gibbs says evenly. “But sometimes people don't know what they've seen. Obviously, it is crucial that we find Jack Handel.”

“All right.” I lean back, only slightly mollified.

“Let's back up for just a minute. What made you decide to have Sam followed to begin with?”

“I didn't know about it. Talk to David Forrester. He can tell you.”

“Yes, we have spoken with him and will continue to. I understand Monday night wasn't the first time you two had been together?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I demand.

“I'm just trying to understand,” Gibbs replies evenly. “Even if you had no idea that Forrester was having your husband followed, you did confide in him there were problems in your marriage.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“I'm asking you,” Gibbs says.

“I may have.”

“In fact, you told him you thought your husband was having an affair.”

I don't answer.

“Where was Sam last night?”

“Working late. He had to meet with a source for a story.”

“Does he do that often?”

“He's a journalist. It's part of his job.”

“Of course. Did he happen to tell you the name of this source?”

“No. He keeps his sources confidential. If he didn't, no one would trust him enough to talk to him.”

Gibbs looks at me as if that is the most naïve thing she has ever heard. This doesn't seem like the time to launch into a constitutional argument, though.

“We've been going through Deirdre's e-mails looking for leads. You're right, your husband did borrow money from her. It seems that she was quite annoyed with him for not paying her back. In fact, she was threatening to tell you this weekend if he didn't. Their last exchanges were rather heated.”

“Can I see them?”

“I'm sorry. No. They are part of an ongoing investigation. What time did you say he got home last night?”

“I didn't. He was already asleep when I got back,” I reply indignantly.

“I see. By the way,” Gibbs says, “the medical examiner has told us Deirdre had sex in the hours before she died. What I'm having trouble figuring out is, if Jack was so furious with her, as you say, so sure he had been betrayed, why would she have had sex with him?”