The River in Winter, Page 5

  But no. Surely the man in my dream had been Tom. Again the tears came. Eliot drew closer. I could smell his cologne, or maybe it was his shampoo-something spicy, a whiff of cloves or patchouli. I thought he might literally offer me a shoulder to cry on, but he made no move to touch me.

  "It must have been Tom," I said.

  "Tom?"

  "In the dream."

  There was a tap on the door, so soft that I didn't hear it. Only when Eliot held up a finger to signal that I should wait, only when he spun on the stool to open the door, did I know that there had been a knock.

  A whisper, Jonquil's voice: "I'm sorry." She hung back out of sight.

  I blotted my face with the bib. Again, I stood. "I can't believe this happened," I said. "I won't take up any more of your-."

  Jonquil leaned into the room. "No, no, really, don't be-. I mean, it's-. It's just-. You've been in here quite a while. The next two patients are here, and we need-."

  God, how long had I been wailing and sobbing? Twenty minutes? Thirty? Forty?

  Eliot touched my arm. "Let's go to my office." His eyes were brown-so commonplace a color, so unremarkable that I might never have bothered to notice them. But now he gave me a look so filled with tenderness and empathy that I found myself staring into them-staring at the tiny, pale gray rings that marked the boundaries between irises and pupils. "I have a gap between patients. I have a couple of hours free on Monday mornings, so I have some time, if you want to talk," he said.

  I remembered the bearish man I'd seen leaving Eliot's office, and found myself picturing the fellow's Doc Marten boots, the yellow stitching around the soles. I stared thoughtlessly at the floor, as if the boots might appear there.

  Eliot touched my elbow. He said, "I think it would do you good to have someone to talk to."

  As I passed Jonquil in the narrow hallway, she leaned in to whisper, "Did the boat sink?"

  God, she was tall. Even stooped over as she was-an adolescent habit to compensate for her Amazonian height, I'd be willing to bet-I had to lift my head to look at her face. She had a smear of kohl below her right eye.

  I shook my head. "It was destroyed in a fire."

  She stepped back. Her mouth snapped shut, as if she'd been struck dumb. I touched my forehead, thinking to hide behind my hand, thinking my face must be a puffy, reddened mess. But then she put her hand on my forearm. "Oh, my God, that's awful. Was it insured?"

  * * *

  Dr. Bell's office looked like exactly what it was-an old storefront in a strip mall, uneasily converted to a dental office-but Eliot's office was something much finer. Halogen lamps washed the sesame-colored walls in clear, diamond-bright light. His desk was honey oak, possibly an antique, immaculately polished, the size of Liechtenstein. White bookcases filled one wall. Books lined half of the shelves, arranged by height and color. Texts concerning the treatment of mental illness wouldn't have surprised me. DSM-III wouldn't have surprised me. That every book was about baseball-that surprised me. Memorabilia crowded the remaining shelves: baseballs in acrylic cubes, an autographed bat in an ebony cradle, programs and tickets, baseball cards gilt-framed like sacred icons.

  Eliot waved me toward an armchair upholstered in mahogany leather. He sat in its mate. "You were telling me about someone named Tom," he said. "You thought it was Tom in your dream. Who's Tom?"

  I stared at the baseball bat in its cradle. The pale wood shimmered in the halogen light.

  "Your lover," Eliot said. It wasn't a question. Maybe Dr. Bell had said something.

  "For five years," I said. "We met in college."

  "And something happened."

  Thoughts tumbled, rose, crumbled, collapsed. It was a simple enough thing to say: Tom died. Alcohol poisoning. A stupid accident.

  But no. First there was the dry gray morning I spent searching for him.

  No. Before that. The baseball game. He'd gone to a Twins game with his friends, the drinking buddies that had become his entire social circle. I hadn't been invited. I hadn't wanted to be invited, but even so, I'd stewed about it all night.

  In the early dawn I'd rolled over in bed and had found that Tom was not there. He was not in the house. His car was not parked out front, or on the side, or on any nearby street. I drove around in the Chevette, searching for his car. It was not in the Rainbow Foods parking lot. It was not in the Montgomery Ward parking lot. It was not in the Target parking lot.

  Each time I widened the circle, I doubled back to the house to see if he'd come home. There was no sign of him. The Chevette's fuel gauge listed toward empty, but I couldn't bear the thought of stopping the car. If I walked into the house, and he wasn't there, then I would know for certain that something was terribly wrong. As long as I kept driving, then he must be driving too, somewhere between Minneapolis and Saint Paul, on his way home to our bed.

  "He died," I said. At last, there it was, the simple declarative sentence that had eluded me all morning.

  "I'm sorry for your loss," Eliot said.

  I looked at him. His brown eyes gleamed, not exactly brimming with tears, but certainly showing deep, true sympathy.

  "You're the first person to say that," I told him. "Somehow, everyone seems to know what happened, but no one mentions it. I feel like I'm not allowed to talk about it."

  "You can talk about it now, if you want."

  Eliot's office was overheated. My skin felt itchy and dry. It occurred to me that I'd left my jacket in Dr. Bell's office. The prospect of going back for it made me feel heavy, enervated. I felt as if I hadn't slept in a month. Maybe I hadn't.

  Eliot touched my knee. For some reason, the black curve of dirt under his thumbnail troubled me.

  "What happened?"

  "That's one of the hardest things. He was my lover, my best friend, but I don't really know what happened. Not for sure."

  "Tell me what you do know."

  I said, "He and his friends-these fucking club friends he was hanging out with all the time-they went to a baseball game, a Twins game."

  "When was this?"

  "September seventh."

  He nodded. "The Twins beat the Mariners, four to two."

  I looked at him, blinking. If there was an appropriate reply, I couldn't think of it.

  "I'm a Mariners fan. My hometown. Seattle. I was at that game."

  I leaned forward. "You were there? Where? Maybe you saw them. I'm pretty sure they were sucking down beer for seven innings, making a lot of ruckus."

  "I don't think I noticed them. Sorry."

  I sank back. "They must have gone somewhere else after that. I don't know what they did or where they went, but you can't drink enough near-beer to overdose. You just can't."

  "And you're sure it was alcohol poisoning?"

  "That's what the nurse told me at the hospital."

  "So you were called to the hospital?"

  "No one called me," I told Eliot. "I didn't know what happened till the morning, when I saw he wasn't back." I described how I'd gone looking, how I'd driven in spirals around the Cities, looking for his car, or for some sign of him.

  First, I'd stopped at Fairview. I'd slowed for the left turn into the parking lot, stopped at the gate. I'd looked up at the hospital-the big rectangular block of red brick, the tidy grid of little black windows. Taking a ticket meant rolling down the car window; I couldn't do that. I didn't know why, but I couldn't do it.

  I went around the block. I followed Riverside to Cedar. I drove around downtown. I drove by Hennepin County Medical Center. An ambulance and a taxi sat nose to nose in the curved emergency room driveway. Behind the taxi there was a blue minivan, a Lumina. Tom's parents drove a Lumina.

  I drove to the parking ramp across the street. I rolled down the window this time, took the ticket. I parked. I trudged down the concrete stairs to the street. I crossed against the light.

  Even before I got into the waiting room, even before I saw Tom's parents talking to the ER doctor, a man in mouthwash-blue scrubs, I knew that T
om was there. Somewhere in the curtain-walled spaces behind the registration desk, he was there.

  * * *

  "His parents never thought to call." No, that was too charitable. "They refused to call." They actively shunned me when I stumbled into the emergency room, blinking and bewildered as if I'd emerged from a cave into full sunlight. When they saw me, they turned their backs, stared at the vertical blinds, studied the leaves of a potted palm, looked at the aquarium between the waiting room and the corridor, watched a lionfish swim through a forest of plaster coral-anything to give the appearance that they had not seen me at all.

  Fucking vipers, I thought. And then I said it aloud. I spat the words, feeling heat blossom in my cheeks. My ears burned like lanterns. "Motherfucking vipers," I said.

  Eliot nodded gravely. For a moment I half-expected some words of reproach, an admonishment to clean up my potty mouth. But no, of course that was ridiculous; he said, "But someone finally talked to you?"

  "There was a nurse." A tiny black woman, no higher than my shoulder, with a buzzed scalp and one gold hoop earring. She would have looked like a diminutive African pirate, if pirates wore mauve scrubs. "She figured out who I was, and even though she shouldn't have, she pulled me aside. She said a cab driver brought him in. A group of teenagers, it seemed like to him, poured Tom into the back of the cab, and halfway to Saint Paul he passed out and the driver couldn't wake him. That was all she could tell me."

  "It must have been very difficult, sharing your life with him, but then having everyone act as if none of that existed."

  My head sagged back against the chair. I lacked the strength even to nod.

  Eliot said, "This was two months ago, and you haven't been able to talk to anyone about it in all that time? It's no wonder you had a breakdown this morning. The wonder is that it didn't happen sooner."

  "Maybe you're right."

  "You have a right to grieve, Jonah. This is a big loss. You can't let anyone take that away from you because they're uncomfortable talking about it."

  "Or maybe no one knows, and they're all wondering why I suddenly stopped mentioning him."

  "I'm sure at least some of your friends know. And what about your parents?"

  "My mother knows. But I don't get to talk to her that much. The time difference-she lives in San Francisco-plus she sleeps in the day and works all night."

  And Christa knew, of course. The game had been on a Monday night. Most of Tuesday I'd spent at HCMC in fruitless longing and profound invisibility. I had called Christa that night, had told her all of it-all that I knew-and we'd cried together over the phone. On Wednesday I went back to work, and her doe-eyed "How are you doing?" seemed to require something breezy-"Holding up," and then-in answer to the stern, quizzical expression she adopted, rather self-consciously, I thought-"Better today." Neither of us had mentioned Tom since.

  "I'm not even really sure he died at all. Maybe he recovered in the hospital and just never came back." Maybe he'd gone to Thailand, as he'd been planning to do. Or maybe he'd gone hitchhiking in Europe. Or maybe he was living with his parents in Roseville, bagging groceries at Cub Foods.

  "That sounds like wishful thinking," Eliot said. "The way things happened, you never got to say good-bye. It's all open-ended. Ordinarily there's a funeral, there's a burial. You see with your own eyes that the person is gone. You didn't get any of that."

  "No closure," I said.

  Eliot's face puckered, as if he'd sucked a lemon. He was silent a moment, as if considering something, but he said only, "Yes."

  Perhaps I'd overstepped, using a therapy word before he could utter it himself. Or perhaps he disapproved of it, considered it pop-psych jargon.

  He said, "You and Tom weren't married. It wasn't possible for you to marry, but for whatever it's worth, he chose to live with you, possibly to spend his life with you, and even if his parents aren't obligated to accept that or approve of it, they could at least recognize it."

  I wasn't so sure that Tom and I had been headed toward a life together. So many fights, so many frigid silences, so many evenings apart: I knew it would all have come flying apart sooner or later. Before I could give voice to any of this, Eliot went on.

  "I think before you can move on, before you can even grieve properly, you need to say good-bye, or at least establish for certain that he's-that he's gone."

  "There was no funeral, no obituary."

  Leaning back in his chair, he crossed his legs, ankle over knee. The cuff of one trouser leg rode up, showing his slumped beige sock, a couple of inches of shin, and a few long, wiry black hairs. In olden days a glimpse of stocking, I thought.

  "He must be buried somewhere. I think you need to confront his parents."

  My chest tightened. Before that Tuesday in the hospital, I'd met Tom's parents only once, years ago, when Tom and I had just begun dating. We hadn't even slept together yet. As far as his parents knew, we were friends, and both straight. Even so, the way they'd looked at me, I might have been some kind of predator or parasite infecting their son, corrupting his very blood and marrow.

  "I didn't think therapists gave advice," I said to Eliot.

  He laughed. "I'm not a therapist, first of all. I'm a counselor. And, secondly, I think of myself as a kind of coach, more so than a traditional counselor. And lastly, I'm afraid I've got another client coming in about fifteen minutes, so I was thinking it might not be a bad idea to cut to the chase, so to speak."

  I nearly leapt out of my chair. "I'm so sorry. I can't even begin to say how sorry I am for derailing your day like this."

  Eliot rose as well, so that we stood a few inches apart, between the two leather chairs. In the prickly weather of the office, he was an island of greater heat. I thought of Spike, the heat of our bodies in the chill of the boathouse, thought of the way he'd wrapped his hands around my throat. It had felt threatening, but oddly intimate. He had dared me-had forced me, really-to trust him even before I knew him, and I had.

  I stared at the braided veins and muscles of Eliot's hands, imagined them grasping my neck in the same way. I longed to kiss him, to fold myself into his arms.

  As if he could read my thoughts, Eliot stepped back. He motioned toward my chair. "I'm the one who should apologize. I wasn't trying to rush you out of here. I shouldn't have mentioned the time."

  Neither of us moved.

  "Jonah," he said. "Please. Ten more minutes."

  I sat. He perched on the edge of the chair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. He said, "I hope it's been helpful to talk out some of things you've had to keep bottled up, but I feel there's a lot more ground to cover. I hope you'll come back and talk some more."

  Of course, he was right. There was more, much more. We were archaeologists just beginning a big dig, still surveying the site, with all the shattered pottery and rusted weapons yet buried in the ancient loam. I knew now what had driven that woman-the barefoot woman in the pink peignoir-to scratch at the muddy turf alongside the Perkins. Clawing at the earth would be so much simpler than what Eliot and I had just been through, and what lay ahead.

  "If you're hesitating because of cost-."

  I started to shake my head, but stopped. "I-. It's true, I can't really afford a lot of-."

  He waved the subject away as if waving away a gnat. "There are programs I can look into. Assistance programs. Leave that with me."

  "I suppose the more important thing is-. That is to say, I-. I guess I never thought I'd be crazy enough to need therapy." Once uttered, this immediately seemed ill-advised, an ignorant and insulting thing to say to a therapist-or a counselor or coach or whatever he called himself.

  But Eliot laughed. "By rights I should give you a lecture about the word 'crazy,' but I'll spare you. So you'll come back later this week? Next time will be just an hour, I promise."

  We arranged a meeting for Wednesday afternoon. He walked me to the door, and as he opened it, he handed me a business card. He pointed at the phone number. "If you need to tal
k before Wednesday, call me," he said.

  * * *

  Clouds had gathered. Streetlights glowed pink in the grim, half-hearted light of noon. Out on the street, snowflakes eddied in the beams of passing headlights. The wind blew, stiff and icy. I had no choice: I had to fetch my jacket from Dr. Bell's office.

  Every door in the building squeaked; there was no way to sneak in. Jonquil sat at the receptionist desk. She looked up when I entered. She gave a tenderhearted smile. "How are you?"

  "Embarrassed," I said. My jacket lay across the back of the chair, where I'd left it. I picked it up.

  "Don't be. We all have our days."

  I put on my jacket. I pretended to be utterly absorbed in the process of zipping it. "Well. Good-bye, Jonquil."

  "Take care of yourself," she said, and stared at me intently, as if by telekinesis or sheer force of will she could make me treat myself kindly and with love.

  * * *

  4 - Onslaught

  When I got home, the phone was ringing. Martin, my boss. "Christa tells me you're ill. Why do you want to be sick, Jonah?"

  Martin believed in neither accident nor coincidence. Incident and destiny alike, he believed, were ordained by conscious or subconscious intention.

  "I don't know," I said. "I guess I'm just weak."

  He cleared his throat. Not the answer he'd expected. "How long-? Will you be back-? When-?"

  "I'm teasing, Martin. It was just a dentist's appointment."

  "Ah. The importance of good dental hygiene can scarcely be overrated."

  "Agreed."

  "However, I'm calling because there's this meeting with Thorstensen, and-."

  Of course. The meeting with Thorstensen. Two appointments in one day, completely forgotten. Somewhere on my desk at work lay a Day Runner, but it wasn't much help if I never looked at it. I took the portable phone into the bedroom, where the alarm clock's red numbers shimmered in the half-light: twelve-thirty-two. Easy enough to get to the office by one o'clock, if not for the death of my car. Damn, I'd have to take the bus again. How long would that take?

  "I'm sorry, Martin. I'll be there as soon as I can."

  "Good enough," he said. "We'll start without you." He hung up as he always did, after a tense pause and a clearing of the throat.

  Halfway to my car I had my keys in my hand, although barely forty seconds before, on the phone with Martin, I'd been chafing at the prospect of riding the bus twice in one day. I stopped, twirled the key ring on my finger. Apparently, conscious or subconscious intention had dictated that my brain go smooth as a pebble, that my memory wipe itself clean on a minute-by-minute basis. I put the keys in my pocket, then pulled them out again. What the hell, why not give it another try?