Dead Time Read online

  The “so” was poignant.

  “I don’t think a messy person—Stevie was adamant that her sister’s a slob—would make her bed like that. With hospital corners? Or straighten things up. Put away the remote across the room.” I stepped forward and lifted the corner of the quilted bedcover. “See? And with the bedspread folded perfectly the way it is? That looks like it was done by a housekeeper, not by a slob.”

  Merideth said, “Are you suggesting she hasn’t been sleeping here?”

  “I don’t know what I’m suggesting. You wanted me to notice what doesn’t look right. This doesn’t look right.”

  “Where would she have been sleeping?”

  The important question, of course, was “With whom?” The “where” was relatively irrelevant.

  TWENTY

  A Town Car was waiting in front of the building when I stepped outside. The driver had iPod buds in his ears, his eyes were closed, and his lips were singing silently along to some private concert. I was guessing hip-hop. He startled and jumped out the door when he saw me standing on the sidewalk. He said, “Dr. Gregory?”

  Merideth was right behind me. I shook my head at her. She said, “The car is paid for, Alan. It will just go to waste if you don’t use it.”

  Old shit. I was angry that she’d ordered the car despite my protests. I stepped forward and gave the driver ten dollars and told him no thanks. Merideth spoke to him for a moment before he pulled away.

  “You don’t have to be a jerk. I was trying to be nice.” She walked away, down the block. She climbed into the driver’s side of a dark gray Lexus.

  I was being a jerk. My reaction to the car service was an end-of-the-marriage reflex that wouldn’t die. I passed her as I walked down the sidewalk toward the intersection, where I hoped I could get a cab. She was checking her eyes in the vanity mirror. She knew I was on the sidewalk beside her, but she wouldn’t acknowledge me. It all felt familiar.

  I hurt for her. The visit to Lisa’s rental hadn’t provided any new avenues that were likely to help Merideth find her surrogate, or her baby. And the likely possibility that Lisa was sexually active during the pregnancy provided a new level of worry and concern that Merideth hadn’t anticipated having to deal with.

  I got a cab right away. After a block the driver caught my eye in the mirror and confirmed the address. His accent suggested he was from the Middle East.

  I told him he had the address right. “Go by the park, please,” I said. “Maybe down Central Park West?”

  “I can go through on Eighty-sixth, you want. Then take Fifth. You cool enough? More air?” he asked.

  I was shocked. New York cabbies can endure a tremendous amount of heat if their dollars are buying the fuel for the air conditioners.

  “I’m cool,” I said. “Thanks.”

  In the steamy car my proclamation sounded especially silly. The driver and I both laughed. The evening of riding in cabs was a Merideth-inspired luxury. During my stay I’d been trying to limit myself to trains and feet. I hadn’t yet figured out the New York buses.

  The driver cut across Central Park by the reservoir. I watched the scenery go by while I pondered Merideth’s situation.

  Even though I thought her fears were premature and exaggerated, I understood Merideth’s concern about Lisa’s absence. In her shoes, I would have had the same fears. But I wasn’t ready to buy into her alarm.

  After witnessing Stevie’s practiced tantrum about her sister, my inclination toward alarm was even more tempered. Stevie’s description of an irresponsible streak in Lisa’s character rang true, and if it was, it might be a sufficient explanation for her sister’s relatively brief period of radio silence.

  When I’d taken molecular biology in college, the professor had started the first class in the darkened lecture hall under an immense projected photograph. The picture—a close-up of the provocative hollow created by the cleft between a woman’s uplifted breasts—was guaranteed to focus my attention, and that of all of my classmates. The professor allowed the image to dominate the room for a long interlude before she began her lecture.

  “We will spend the next few weeks talking about cleavage,” she said in a most professorial tone. “The other kind.”

  Where the other kind, the mitotic kind, of cleavage was concerned—as in so many things in life—Lauren and I had been among the fortunate few. When we chose to have a baby, we were able to get pregnant the way heterosexual couples have gotten pregnant for all but a few decades of the time humans have inhabited this planet.

  We had sex.

  Over the years we’d been aware of many friends who had not been so lucky on the other-kind-of-cleavage front. Getting haploids to do their things—a solitary sperm piercing the membrane of a healthy egg—and getting the resulting zygote to survive long enough to begin the process of cleavage is not always as uncomplicated as boy meets girl. The list of couples we knew whose reproductive efforts were successful only after determined intervention from medical specialists was a long one—probably longer than we suspected. Some of our frustrated friends had ultimately chosen to go the in vitro route.

  We knew other couples who had eventually decided to adopt, either locally or abroad. One couple we knew had given up and come to terms with being childless.

  Whether it was due to age at marriage or environmental pollution or lifestyle or some esoteric factor that physicians had not yet considered, it was apparent that modern reproduction had become thorny in ways that science struggled to understand.

  I was a clinician with a practice made up of a preponderance of women of childbearing age. I’d treated dozens of women over the years who fell into one of the above categories of procreative frustration. I’d done my best to help many women struggle with the emotional fallout of infertility. But other than the eval I’d done four or five years before at the request of an agency, I’d given remarkably little thought to the psychology behind the whole concept of surrogacy. It had never been on my personal radar.

  Perhaps it was naïve of me, but I didn’t consider surrogacy particularly controversial, at least not from a medical-ethical standpoint. It seemed to me that the decision to enter into a surrogacy arrangement involved consenting adults engaging in—after a healthy dollop of scientific intervention—the completely natural act of growing a baby inside a willing womb.

  The psychological issues were much more complex.

  The ethical minefield that Merideth had alluded to when we’d talked in Strawberry Fields—the question of what to do about all those excess fertilized eggs that are an inevitable by-product of the in vitro process—was one of those divisive debates that thus far in my life hadn’t slapped me in the face and demanded that I take a personal stand.

  Are the fertilized eggs really just surplus biological material? Or are they children? Or are they, as some had begun arguing, tiny stem-cell factories waiting to be exploited for the greater good by science and medicine?

  Once the creating couple, the parents, determined that it had no further use for the embryos, how should they be disposed of? Down the drain? Donation to science? Adoption by less fortunate couples?

  I reached no conclusions before I had the driver drop me near Times Square.

  I wasn’t ready to go back to Ottavia’s. I needed to renew my urban contact high before I hiked back to the sublet across town.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I absorbed a good-size fix of whatever it was that Times Square had to offer before I returned to the apartment. I had to convince myself to check in with Merideth and ask what she thought about the night’s developments. I came within a whisker of deciding that I didn’t really have to make the call.

  “It could have been worse, I guess,” was Merideth’s appraisal of the errand to Morningside Heights. “Lisa wasn’t dead in the bathtub. But it could’ve been better, too. I hate, hate, hate the fact that Lisa might have a boyfriend. STDs, Alan? Come on, I don’t have enough to worry about? And HIV? I do not even want to think about it.”


  “You don’t know she’s seeing anyone,” I said. “She hasn’t been out of touch for long, and it was just a thought I had when—”

  “You were right. You were absolutely right. No one has been sleeping in that bed in her apartment. She has to be sleeping somewhere.”

  I said, “It’s not the sleeping part that worries you.”

  “Damn right, it isn’t.”

  I tried to point out the encouraging news. “Stevie’s impressions of her sister suggest that Lisa being out of touch for a few days might not be that big a deal. I found her to be believable. Some sibling issues, sure. But believable. That’s good, right?”

  “Lisa being gone is a big deal for me.”

  “I know it is, Meri. I’m just trying to allow some room for optimism. There are lots of benign explanations. She may be simply flaky. She may be having trouble with her phone. She may have…gone to Atlantic City, or maybe she met someone with a place at the beach and she’s getting away from the heat.”

  Merideth replied, “You’re telling me you think she likes slots, or she’s hanging at the Jersey Shore, or that she forgot to charge her cell battery and hasn’t figured out that it’s dead?”

  “I’m just saying that whatever is happening may not be…awful.”

  She exhaled. “Thank you,” she said. I heard a tiny laugh. “So where was this Pollyannaish side of you when we were married?”

  I wasn’t about to go there. “You never told me who it is you want me to get in touch with in Boulder.”

  She hesitated before she said, “Sam?”

  “No, besides Sam. You said something about an old friend of ours from when we were together. Someone who has a daughter.”

  “Eric doesn’t want me to do it. He doesn’t want me poking around in…what happened. If I do ask you to call Sam, you’ll have to be real discreet.”

  “I’m more than happy not to do it at all. That will be totally discreet.” I waited a couple of beats for her to give me the name of our old friend. I wanted to go to bed. “Okay, you’ll tell me when you’re ready. I need to get some sleep.”

  “Wait. Jesus H.—I’m ambivalent. Okay? Something bad happened during a camping trip in the Grand Canyon a few years ago, before Eric and I met. He won’t talk about it.”

  So? I still wanted to go to bed. “What kind of bad?”

  “Eric was there with a girlfriend. They met some other people and hung out together…doing whatever people do in places like that. What do I know about…camping, right?”

  She knew nothing about camping. Cared even less. She could laugh at herself about it. That was new. And nice. I waited.

  “Lisa was part of the other group. That’s how she and Eric met. He hasn’t told me much. But a girl…disappeared the last night they were down at the bottom. Is that what they call it? The bottom of the canyon? That doesn’t sound right. Do you know, Alan? Come on, I don’t want to sound like an idiot.”

  “I’ve heard it called the ‘floor.’ The canyon floor.”

  “Okay, the floor. I’ll call it that. Lots of bad feelings developed about what happened after the girl disappeared. Friendships ended. It was a big deal. Lisa’s the only one in the whole group that Eric’s still in touch with.”

  “The girl who disappeared? Was that his girlfriend? Or part of the group they met?” I asked.

  “A stranger. He had met her only once. She’d come down with a guy the afternoon before Eric’s group climbed up. He barely knew her.”

  “I don’t get the significance. But go on.”

  “We don’t talk about this. It’s sensitive for Eric.”

  I was exhausted. The conversation wasn’t helping. Bad habits with my ex-wife kept surfacing like a beach ball I was trying to hold underwater. “Merideth, I know you. I know the way your mind works. I know you’ve already looked into this.” She’d ordered a research assistant to put a file together. “Tell me what you found in your search.”

  She swallowed a sigh, displeased that I had that insight into her. “The girl disappeared in the middle of the night, the night before Eric’s group left. She was with a guy she didn’t know too well. The two of them were camping—real camping, in a tent. The guy said she got up to go use the bathroom. Or…go to the bathroom. There may have been an actual bathroom, or she may have been going to squat someplace. I don’t know about those things. The guy she was with fell back asleep. When he woke up the next morning, she wasn’t there. A search was started a few hours later. The Park Service got involved later on. Somebody found a bracelet that might have been hers. The next afternoon a flash flood hit the canyon, washed away any hope of finding more clues.”

  It was an interesting story, but the relevance continued to elude me. “What does all this it have to do with Eric and Lisa?”

  “What to do next got contentious among the group. They were on the way out—you know, about to begin climbing—when they heard the girl was missing. Some of them wanted to stay and help get a search going. Eric wanted…to climb out right away. It was really hot. Dangerously hot—some big heat wave had hit Arizona. He had to get back to work, or something. I don’t know. He couldn’t wait, didn’t see why he should. Felt she would show up any minute. He and Lisa and one other girl climbed out. That they didn’t stay to help became a big deal for the others.”

  “Sounds like a difficult situation for everyone,” I said, even though I was still unsure about the relevance. “What’s the Boulder connection?”

  “One of the girls in the group was from Boulder. She was going to college in L.A. at the time. Occidental? You know it? It’s near Pasadena. She was with Lisa. They were both part of the group that Eric and his girlfriend met at the…on the floor.

  “Back when we were considering Lisa as a surrogate, and he was telling me how he met her, Eric mentioned that one of the other girls on that trip was from Colorado. When he said the girl’s last name, I connected the dots. Realized then that I thought she might be someone you and I knew. Or at least we knew her parents.” She paused. “I probably met the girl back then, Alan. I didn’t used to pay much attention to people’s kids. I’m not proud of it, but it’s true.”

  I was surprised that Merideth recognized the shallowness of the social water where she had waded much of the time we were married. I said, “Eric doesn’t know what you know? He doesn’t know about your Boulder connection to Lisa?”

  “I never told him. This whole chapter of his life is off-limits.”

  She said the words definitively. It was her way of telling me not to ask her why she was keeping the information from Eric. I silently reminded myself none of it was my business. I asked, “Is Lisa still in touch with the girl from Boulder?” And can we give her a name, Meri?

  “Eric doesn’t know. He says that he and Lisa have never talked about the Grand Canyon. About what happened down there. The missing girl. What happened since. Nothing. It’s some big taboo.”

  She didn’t sound like she believed him. I added that impression to the ever-enlarging it’s-none-of-my-business register. “What did happen down there?” I asked. “The missing girl, did they find her?”

  “I told you all I know,” Merideth said. “She disappeared overnight. They did a search. That flash flood hit. Came. Whatever flash floods do.”

  “She hasn’t shown up anywhere?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “She may be dead. She may not be.”

  I chewed on the sparse details for a moment before I said, “Why don’t you call the people we know in Boulder yourself? Why do you want me to do it?”

  “They were your friends. Mental-health types.”

  Merideth had always divided our friends into subspecies. Mine were the mental-health types; hers were the TV-news people. I always thought the groupings sounded like competing clans of antagonists in some celluloid science-fiction fable I wouldn’t want to sit through.

  “Anyway,” she said, “if I call and tell the girl that I’m
Eric’s fiancé, she’ll assume I’m on his side. You might be able to come off as more neutral.”

  My neutrality didn’t sound like a particularly desirable trait. It felt more like she was comparing me to Switzerland in 1941. She was also undervaluing her ability to seduce information from reluctant people. Merideth was a pro at it.

  “There are sides in all this?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Those who climbed out early—Eric and Lisa and that other girl—are on one side, and those who stayed to help with the search are the other. His old girlfriend is part of the group that stayed.” She sighed. “It’s a long shot, Alan. I doubt the girl knows anything about Lisa. Maybe I should just forget it. But it’s all I have.”

  “Meri, it’s late. It’s up to you. Are you going to tell me who she is or not?”

  “The girl’s name is Carmel. Like the town. Car-mel…Poteet,” Merideth said. She had no doubt I would remember the family. Poteet is one of those surnames that is tough to forget.

  I said, “Carmel is Wallace and Cassandra’s middle kid. I haven’t seen her in…well, years.” I had no picture in my head of Carmel after age fourteen, or fifteen at the most. I remembered her most clearly as a preteen—a small, fun kid who was about half the size of her older brother, Mason.

  Her father, Wallace Poteet, PhD, was among the first wave of psychotherapists to stake a private-practice claim in Boulder in the late sixties and begin mining the rich vein that was the town’s insatiable appetite for mental-health services. He was also one of the only sources of referrals I had, besides my partner Diane Estevez, during my first year or so in private practice. It’s safe to say were it not for Wallace’s faith in me, and the work he sent my way, it was possible that my practice would not have survived its infancy.

  Wallace was a mentor, a benefactor, and a friend. I owed him.

  “I don’t know where she is—if she’s in L.A. or Colorado or…Do you still see them? Her parents, the Poteets?” Merideth said.