Duma Key (3 page)

Ilse wanted us all to go out to dinner, but Lin had to meet someone at the Public Library before it closed, and I said I didn't feel much like hobbling anywhere; I thought I'd read a few chapters of the latest John Sandford and then go to bed. They kissed me—all friends again—and then left.

Two minutes later, Ilse came back. “I told Linnie I forgot my keys,” she said.

“I take it you didn't,” I said.

“No. Daddy, would you ever hurt Mom? I mean, now? On purpose?”

I shook my head, but that wasn't good enough for her. I could tell by the way she just stood there, looking me in the eye. “No,” I said. “Never. I'd—”

“You'd what, Daddy?”

“I was going to say I'd cut my own arm off first, but all at once that seemed like a really bad idea. I'd never do it, Illy. Leave it at that.”

“Then why is she still afraid of you?”

“I think . . . because I'm maimed.”

She hurled herself into my arms so hard she almost knocked us both onto the sofa. “Oh, Daddy, I'm so sorry. All of this is just so
sucky
.”

I stroked her hair a little. “I know, but remember this—it's as bad as it's going to get.” That wasn't the truth, but if I was careful, Ilse would never know it had been an outright lie.

A horn honked from the driveway.

“Go on,” I said, and kissed her wet cheek. “Your sister's impatient.”

She wrinkled her nose. “So what else is new? You're not overdoing the pain meds, are you?”

“No.”

“Call if you need me, Daddy. I'll catch the very next plane.”

She would, too. Which was why I wouldn't.

“You bet.” I put a kiss on her other cheek. “Give that to your sister.”

She nodded and went out. I sat down on the couch and closed my eyes. Behind them, the clocks were striking and striking and striking.

v

My next visitor was Dr. Kamen, the psychologist who gave me Reba. I didn't invite him. I had Kathi, my rehabilitation dominatrix, to thank for that.

Although surely no more than forty, Kamen walked like a much older man and wheezed even when he sat, peering at the world through enormous horn-rimmed spectacles and over an enormous pear of a belly. He was a very tall, very black black man, with features carved so large they seemed unreal. His great staring eyeballs, ship's figurehead of a nose, and totemic lips were awe-inspiring. Xander Kamen looked like a minor god in a suit from Men's Warehouse. He also looked like a prime candidate for a fatal heart attack or stroke before his fiftieth birthday.

He refused my offer of refreshment, said he couldn't stay, then put his briefcase aside on the couch as if to contradict that. He sank full fathom five beside the couch's armrest (and going deeper all the time—I feared for the thing's springs), looking at me and wheezing benignly.

“What brings you out this way?” I asked him.

“Oh, Kathi tells me you're planning to bump yourself off,” he said. It was the tone he might have used to say
Kathi tells me
you're having a lawn party and there are fresh Krispy Kremes on offer
. “Any truth to that rumor?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Once, when I was ten and growing up in Eau Claire, I took a comic book from a drugstore spin-around, put it down the front of my jeans, then dropped my tee-shirt over it. As I was strolling out the door, feeling jacked up and very clever, a clerk grabbed me by the arm. She lifted my shirt with her other hand and exposed my ill-gotten treasure. “How did
that
get there?” she asked me. Not in the forty years since that day had I been so completely stuck for an answer to a simple question.

Finally—long after such a response could have any weight—I said, “That's ridiculous. I don't know where she could have gotten such an idea.”

“No?”

“No. Sure you don't want a Coke?”

“Thanks, but I'll pass.”

I got up and got a Coke from the kitchen fridge. I tucked the bottle firmly between my stump and my chest-wall—possible but painful, I don't know what you may have seen in the movies, but broken ribs hurt for a long time—and spun off the cap with my left hand. I'm a southpaw. Caught a break there,
muchacho,
as Wireman says.

“I'm surprised you'd take her seriously in any case,” I said as I came back in. “Kathi's a hell of a physical therapist, but a headshrinker she's not.” I paused before sitting down. “Neither are you, actually. In the technical sense.”

Kamen cupped an enormous hand behind an ear that looked roughly the size of a desk drawer. “Do I hear . . . a ratcheting noise? I believe I do!”

“What are you talking about?”

“It's the charmingly medieval sound a person's defenses make when they go up.” He tried an ironic wink, but the size of the man's face made irony impossible; he could only manage burlesque. Still, I took the point. “As for Kathi Green, you're right, what does she know? All she does is work with paraplegics, quadriplegics, accident-related amps like you, and people recovering from traumatic head injuries—again, like you. For fifteen years Kathi's done this work, she's had the opportunity to watch a thousand maimed patients reflect on how not even a single second of time can ever be called back, so how could she
possibly
recognize the signs of pre-suicidal depression?”

I sat in the lumpy easy chair across from the couch and stared at him sullenly. Here was trouble. And Kathi Green was more.

He leaned forward . . . although, given his girth, a few inches was all he could manage. “You have to wait,” he said.

I gaped at him.

He nodded. “You're surprised. Yes. But I'm not a Christian, let alone a Catholic, and on the subject of suicide my mind is open. Yet I'm a believer in responsibilities, I know that you are, too, and I tell you this: if you kill yourself now . . . even six months from now . . . your wife and daughters will know. No matter how cleverly you do it, they'll know.”

“I don't—”

He raised his hand. “And the company that insures
your life—for a very large sum, I'm sure—they'll know, too. They may not be able to prove it . . . but they'll try very hard. The rumors they start will hurt your girls, no matter how well-armored against such things you may think they are.”

Melinda was well-armored. Ilse, however, was a different story. When Melinda was mad at her, she called Illy a case of arrested development, but I didn't think that was true. I thought Illy was just tender.

“And in the end, they may prove it.” Kamen shrugged his enormous shoulders. “How much of a death-duty that might entail I couldn't guess, but I'm sure it would erase a great deal of your life's treasure.”

I wasn't thinking about the money. I was thinking about a team of insurance investigators sniffing around whatever I set up. And all at once I began to laugh.

Kamen sat with his huge dark brown hands on his doorstop knees, looking at me with his little
I've-seen-everything
smile. Except on his face nothing was little. He let my laughter run its course and then asked me what was so funny.

“You're telling me I'm too rich to kill myself,” I said.

“I'm telling you not now, Edgar, and that's all I'm telling you. I'm also going to make a suggestion that goes against a good deal of my own practical experience. But I have a very strong intuition in your case—the same sort of intuition that caused me to give you the doll. I propose you try a geographical.”

“Beg pardon?”

“It's a form of recovery often attempted by late-stage alcoholics. They hope that a change of location will give them a fresh start. Turn things around.”

I felt a flicker of something. I won't say it was hope, but it was something.

“It rarely works,” Kamen said. “The old-timers in Alcoholics Anonymous, who have an answer for everything—it's their curse as well as their blessing, although very few ever realize it—like to say, ‘Put an asshole on a plane in Boston, an asshole gets off in Seattle.' ”

“So where does that leave me?” I asked.

“Right now it leaves you in suburban St. Paul. What I'm suggesting is that you pick someplace far from here and go there. You're in a unique position to do so, given your financial situation and marital status.”

“For how long?”

“At least a year.” He looked at me inscrutably. His large face was made for such an expression; etched on King Tut's tomb, I believe it might have made even Howard Carter consider. “And if you do anything at the end of that year, Edgar, for God's sake—no, for your
daughters'
sake—make it look good.”

He had nearly disappeared into the old sofa; now he began to struggle up again. I stepped forward to help him and he waved me away. He made it to his feet at last, wheezing more loudly than ever, and took up his briefcase. He looked down at me from his height of six and a half feet, those staring eyeballs with their yellowish corneas made even larger by his glasses, which had very thick lenses.

“Edgar, does anything make you happy?”

I considered the surface of this question (the only part that seemed safe) and said, “I used to sketch.” It had actually been a little more than just sketching, but that was long ago. Since then, other things had
intervened. Marriage, a career. Both of which were now going or gone.

“When?”

“As a kid.”

I thought of telling him I'd once dreamed of art school—had even bought the occasional book of reproductions when I could afford to—and then didn't. In the last thirty years, my contribution to the world of art had consisted of little more than doodles while taking telephone calls, and it had probably been ten years since I'd bought the sort of picture-book that belongs on a coffee table where it can impress your friends.

“Since then?”

I considered lying—didn't want to seem like a complete fixated drudge—but stuck to the truth. One-armed men should tell the truth whenever possible. Wireman doesn't say that; I do. “No.”

“Take it up again,” Kamen advised. “You need hedges.”

“Hedges,” I said, bemused.

“Yes, Edgar.” He looked surprised and a little disappointed, as if I had failed to understand a very simple concept. “Hedges against the night.”

vi

A week or so later, Tom Riley came to see me again. By then the leaves had started to turn color, and I remember the clerks putting up Halloween posters in the Wal-Mart where I bought my first sketchpads since college . . . hell, maybe since high school.

What I remember most clearly about that visit is how embarrassed and ill-at-ease Tom seemed.

I offered him a beer and he took me up on it. When I came back from the kitchen, he was looking at a pen-and-ink I'd done—three palm trees silhouetted against an expanse of water, a bit of screened-in porch jutting into the left foreground. “This is pretty good,” he said. “You do this?”

“Nah, the elves. They come in the night. Cobble my shoes, draw the occasional picture.”

He laughed too hard and set the picture back down on the desk. “Don't look much like Minnesota, dere,” he said, doing a Swedish accent.

“I copied it out of a book,” I said. I had actually used a photograph from a Realtor's brochure. It had been taken from the so-called “Florida room” of Salmon Point, the place I had just leased for a year. I had never been in Florida, not even on vacation, but that picture had called to something deep in me, and for the first time since the accident, I felt actual anticipation. It was thin, but it was there. “What can I do for you, Tom? If it's about the business—”

“Actually, Pam asked me to come out.” He ducked his head. “I didn't much want to, but I didn't feel I could say no. Old times' sake, you know.”

“Sure.” Tom went back to the days when The Freemantle Company had been nothing but three pickup trucks, a Caterpillar D9, and a lot of big dreams. “So talk to me. I'm not going to bite you.”

“She's got herself a lawyer. She's going ahead with this divorce business.”

“I never thought she wouldn't.” It was the truth. I still didn't remember choking her, but I remembered the look in her eyes when she told me I had. And there was this: once Pam started down a road, she rarely turned around.

“She wants to know if you're going to be using Bozie.”

I had to smile at that. William Bozeman III was a dapper, manicured, bow-tie-wearing sixty-five, wheeldog of the Minneapolis law-firm my company used, and if he knew Tom and I had been calling him Bozie for the last twenty years, he would probably have suffered an embolism.

“I hadn't thought about it. What's the deal, Tom? What exactly does she want?”

He drank off half his beer, then put the glass on a bookshelf beside my half-assed sketch. His cheeks had flushed a dull brick red. “She said she hopes it doesn't have to be mean. She said, ‘I don't want to be rich, and I don't want a fight. I just want him to be fair to me and the girls, the way he always was, will you tell him that?' So I am.” He shrugged.

I got up, went to the big window between the living room and the porch, and looked out at the lake. Soon I would be able to go out into my very own “Florida room,” whatever that was, and look out at the Gulf of Mexico. I wondered if it would be any better, any different, than looking out at Lake Phalen. I thought I would settle for different, at least to begin with. Different would be a start. When I turned back, Tom Riley didn't look himself at all. At first I thought he was sick to his stomach, and then I realized he was struggling not to cry.

“Tom, what's the matter?” I asked.

He tried to speak and produced only a watery croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Boss, I can't get used to seeing you this way, with just the one arm. I'm so sorry.”