Dry Ice Page 18

  Colorado Springs was the reddest of cities in this purple-pink state. If his political leanings shaded toward the blue, and I was suspecting that Tharon’s did, the Springs would not feel like a welcoming political bosom. Complicating things even more was the fact that Thibodeaux was a psychiatrist. If he desired to practice his specialty in Pueblo, his options were limited to the state hospital. Few small towns close to Pueblo have the population base and the help-seeking culture necessary to support a solo practitioner in psychiatry. There are no large towns close to Pueblo.

  “I am stuck,” he said. “I adore my children.”

  I sat back and I waited. Truth was, I was feeling pretty stuck myself. But I suspected that Thibodeaux knew that already.

  Often in my career I’d been in the position of trying to find a way to twist reality so that I could share clinical information with someone I thought needed to hear it but to whom I had no right to tell it. My own experiences wrestling with that dilemma had convinced me that prodding Thibodeaux to overcome whatever ethical constraints he was feeling wasn’t likely to be salutary. He needed to hurdle the moral and ethical barricades on his own. I thought he could do it.

  He had tracked me down, after all, and we were sitting more than a hundred miles away from his reluctant home, beneath an eight-foot levee of 151.8-pound burlap sacks of green free-trade organic coffee beans. Those facts convinced me that Dr. Thibodeaux had arrived in Denver with the momentum to clear the obstacles.

  “We have a patient in common,” he said, finally.

  “I wondered about that,” I said, relieved to have finally reached the starting line. “Not one of my proudest clinical moments.” I added the qualifier hoping that my contrition would add a little grease to the ethical skids on which Thibodeaux was—I was praying—beginning to slip. And I added it because it was true. If Thibodeaux had bothered to look at any of the early court records that accompanied McClelland’s admission to the state hospital he would have noted my silence regarding the misguided recommendations to the court from so many years before.

  He would know that Michael McClelland was a clinical ghost from my early career, and he could probably guess McClelland’s ghost was one that I was desperately seeking a chance to banish. He might not have known that I was in Denver figuratively on my knees praying that Thibodeaux was willing to be my exorcist.

  My fantasy was that Tharon was about to tell me he knew all about his patient’s fixation on red bandannas. And all about his plans for retribution on my wife. And on me. On my family.

  “When you get access to the hospital records, and you will—fortunately or unfortunately—you’ll get everything I’m about to tell you,” he said. “So although I’m jumping the gun a little, I’m not really breaking the rules. That’s my rationalization.”

  Why will I get access to Michael’s hospital records? I wondered. I couldn’t think of a single reason that I would be in a position to ever see them, but I wasn’t going to tell Tharon that. Rationalize away, I thought. Go for it.

  “I’ve been in your shoes,” he said. I noted with some clinical envy that his voice, like Bill Clinton’s, conveyed empathy the way a wheelbarrow transports dirt. “That’s part of it, too. The reason I decided to talk with you.”

  “My shoes?” I asked.

  “With a patient, I mean. During my residency at Charity. I don’t want anyone else to have to go through what I did.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said. I was curious about what had happened during Tharon’s residency. But I didn’t ask—the story sounded like a digression waiting to happen.

  He went on. “If it helps any with your feelings, or with the legal side of things for that matter, she was always gamey about her meds. From day one. It’s all documented in the chart. Not just by me. Nursing notes, too. Not occasionally gamey. Always gamey. I don’t think we ever kept her at adequate levels. Diagnostically I always thought we were dealing with a pure unipolar, but that was a minority opinion. The staff thought she was bipolar and that the manic episodes were infrequent.”

  Thibodeaux had spoken a paragraph packed with clinical jargon. But I’d only heard two three-letter words. I had to go back and replay the sequence of sentences in my head to process anything more than the pair of words that kept floating in front of my eyes like holograms.

  She. He’d said “she.” Her. He’d said “her.”

  Son of a bitch. I felt the blood pour out of my face all at once like it was bathwater falling over the edge of a tub.

  Thibodeaux wasn’t in Denver to spill the beans about his work with Michael McClelland. Thibodeaux was in town to talk with me about Nicole Cruz.

  Kol Cruz, not Michael McClelland, was the patient we’d shared. Which meant that Kol—Nicole—had been an inpatient in the forensic unit at the state hospital.

  That fact told me two troubling things. First, since mentally healthy people don’t tend to spend much time on the wards at facilities like the one in Pueblo, Kol Cruz had apparently been much sicker than I’d recognized. And second, Kol had been at the state hospital at the same time as Michael McClelland.

  What did that mean? A lot, I was sure. What exactly? I didn’t know.

  Tharon watched my stunned reaction to what I’m sure he thought were benign revelations about his patient’s reluctance to take her meds and about the esoteric diagnostic dilemma she had presented to the clinical staff. I could tell by the look of concern on his face that he was about to inquire about my cataplexy.

  I blurted out a question. “Did Nicole know Michael McClelland?”

  My question wasn’t one that Thibodeaux expected to hear. I watched the blood leave his face. Same way that it had happened to me a few seconds earlier—all at once, over the dam spillway.

  He regained his composure quickly. He lifted his cup, cradled it in both hands, sat back, and said, “How do you know…Michael McClelland?”

  Holy shit, I was thinking. What the hell is going on?

  THIRTY-TWO

  KIRSTEN LORD lived in a small stone cottage off 4th Street in the warren of lanes of old Boulder that is crammed into the rise of land just north and west of downtown. The neighborhood is charming and convenient. Close to shopping. Close to dining. Close to hiking trails. Close to parks. The Rockies loom only a few blocks away, proximate enough to cast their shadows over the neighborhood by mid-afternoon in the winter months.

  Most parcels are small on the narrow lanes and some of the houses tiny by contemporary standards. Although a few of its siblings had been remodeled and rebuilt to reflect McMansion sensibilities, Boulder style, Kirsten’s was one of the remaining Lilliputian homes. If she had been willing to give up those other perks—view, convenience, ambience—she could have quintupled the size of her cramped home by moving to one of the dozens of faux-Victorian or suburban chic developments recently constructed a few miles to the east or north of town.

  “Amy went to a friend’s house,” she said when she opened the front door.

  I’d called Kirsten from my car a half mile before I’d reached the exit that I normally would have used to turn off to my house in Spanish Hills. I was on my way into Boulder from Kaladi and my meeting with Thibodeaux. I asked her if I could visit briefly to discuss some new information I’d learned regarding the person who’d killed herself in Peter’s barn. Kirsten had hesitated for a second before she agreed, finally adding on an inhale, “Amy’s home, and this place is pretty small, if you know what I mean.”

  I guessed that she meant that she didn’t want her Sunday interrupted. Although I was still reeling from what I’d learned during my discussion with Thibodeaux, I knew that I could wait until the next day to discuss the news with my lawyers. My situation wasn’t an emergency. Not in any legal sense.

  “That’s all right,” I said. I’ve always felt that natural impediments are a great way to resolve ambivalence. Shall I take the elevator or the stairs? If the elevator is out of service, ambivalence tends to dissipate. />
  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Come on by. We may need to walk over to the office, or maybe we can grab something to eat on the Mall. You like the Kitchen? I’m a regular. It’s quiet in the afternoon. We could get a glass of wine upstairs.”

  I said it didn’t matter to me where we met. She gave me her address.

  Kirsten’s cottage had a new copper-roofed porch over the north-facing entrance. The metal had just begun its evolution toward verdigris. That’s where I was standing when she offered the “Amy went to a friend’s house” information.

  I said, “I appreciate you letting me interrupt your weekend.”

  She was wearing faded blue jeans and a thin sweater that was the muted gold of the sky just before the sun cracks the dawn horizon. Her hair was in a ponytail, her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. Despite the cool spring day her feet were bare.

  She’d painted her toenails the red of Valentine hearts. I didn’t miss the fact that I had noticed that her feet were bare. It meant that my eyes were down. I forced myself to bring my gaze up to meet hers. I thought she looked pretty, and soft, and much younger than she did in her going-to-court clothes. I hoped I didn’t look as pitiful as I was feeling, but I suspected that I did.

  She pulled the door open wide. “Don’t be silly. Since Amy’s gone we don’t have to go out. We can talk here,” she said. “Come in, come in.”

  The cottage was recently renovated. Years before, Kirsten had entered the Witness Security Program with abundant financial assets from her marriage. She had apparently invested a serious chunk of those assets in the purchase and reconstruction of this little house. I felt as though I’d just crossed the threshold into the front room of an overpriced suite at a mountain resort. The colors in the room were from gemstones thrown in rich soil. Most of the plebian artifacts of the home’s humble origins had been replaced by modern flourishes and expensive finishes. The floor was bamboo, the furniture covered with down cushions in soft chenilles. The effect was charming.

  Kirsten’s home was a cocoon, a place for retreating, not for transitioning. It was the antithesis of my new waiting room, but I thought Diane would approve.

  “Nice,” I said, taking in the single large room that was visible from the entryway.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It was a lot of work. The place hadn’t been touched in seventy years when I bought it. We took down walls. The original floor was still in the kitchen. Layers and layers of wallpaper everywhere. Eight layers in the bedroom, if you can believe it. And the bathroom? It was cold enough to age meat in there in January. I put in a new boiler and radiant heat. I even heated the floors. Can you feel them? Take off your shoes.” She crossed her arms, gripping her biceps. “I get cold in the mountains. Remember, I’m a Southern girl.”

  I kicked off my shoes. She led me to a loveseat and we sat side by side facing a small fire that was burning in the river-rock fireplace. Horses or donkeys had probably carted the round stones up the hill from nearby Boulder Creek a century before.

  “I made tea,” she said. “Green? Is that okay?” She had also put out some iced cookies that shared a small platter with an array of dried apples and apricots.

  I took the tea from her and cradled it. After my sojourn at Kaladi I didn’t need any more caffeine, but the weight and the warmth of the mug felt good in my hands.

  “It’s cozy here,” I said. “Thanks.”

  The tea tray was resting on a table fashioned from an old wooden hibachi. She put her bare feet up on the edge. A few inches from her painted toes sat a clear glass bowl brimming with Dum Dums. The little lollipops brought back memories. During her time in my care Kirsten had been addicted.

  “My mother used to say that cozy is Southern for ‘small,’” she said.

  I kept my stockinged feet on the warm floor. “It’s lovely. Small can be good.”

  Her feet were slender. I noticed that I’d noticed. I also noted that it was not because I’d been looking down.

  She took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and said, “It’s enough for Amy and me. We each have our own rooms and…bathrooms.” She smiled. “That’s important for girls. The contractor removed dump trucks full of rocks and dirt from below the house so I could have a tiny basement with an office. I can walk to work in minutes. I ride my bike to Ideal for groceries. I can be on the Mount Sanitas trail like that.” She snapped her fingers. “There are lots of restaurants. Bookstores. The library. I love all of it.”

  The psychologist in me heard the distortion in the sounds as the faint echoes of her words bounced around the room. I recognized that this darling West Boulder cottage wasn’t merely a comforting cocoon for my ex-patient and current lawyer, it was also a bit of an emotional abdication, or at least an acknowledgment of circumstances that felt immutable. By renovating this sturdy, intimate house, Kirsten was admitting to herself—in a form as concrete as the mortar between the heavy rocks in the walls—that she no longer had overt hopes that her small family would be getting any larger.

  “Amy’s getting older,” she said. “Growing up. You’ll know soon enough what that means.”

  “What?” I could guess, but making assumptions had been proving dangerous.

  “She’s gone more than she’s here. Friends. School things, sports things. She plays club soccer. You know about club soccer?”

  Lauren and I had some friends with kids who played club ball. All I knew is that they traveled a lot on weekends to towns most Coloradans don’t visit. Some parents were happier about it than others. “Amy’s a keeper, right?” I said.

  I could tell that Kirsten was pleased that I remembered her daughter played goal. “You will soon. If it’s not soccer it’ll be something else. The activities take so much of the kids’ time. And then there’re her friends, and the phone, and IM. She used to be my best buddy. Sometimes I feel as though I’m getting a taste of what it will be like when…” She didn’t finish the sentence.

  …she goes to college?…gets married?

  I was digesting how different Kirsten felt to me from the woman who had been figuratively—and occasionally literally—standing toe-to-toe with Sam Purdy on my behalf over the recent past. And how different she felt from the woman who had stepped into my office so full of grief and terror after the murder of her husband.

  I was disarmed by it all, and realized that I was having a rare opportunity to recognize that what a therapist sees about a patient in his office has scant correlation with that person’s life the other twenty-three hours and fifteen minutes of any given day.

  I’d sought Kirsten out that afternoon for the comfort she could provide. I was under orders not to speak with Lauren or with Sam, and both were under orders not to speak with me about anything to do with Kol. Diane would have been willing to hear me out, but she was still recovering from her own traumas and I didn’t entertain burdening her with mine. Adrienne was in Israel.

  The list of people I could turn to for comfort should maybe have been longer, but it wasn’t. My instincts told me that legal comfort was better than no comfort at all. But Kirsten was vulnerable, too. Not as acutely as me, but in her own way perhaps nearly to the same degree. The awareness shouldn’t have surprised me—I’d been her psychotherapist, after all—but it did. My self-protective radar failed to recognize that the fact her vulnerability didn’t trouble me enough to back away might signify I was suffering a problem with my judgment.

  “Cozy will be back tonight,” she said.

  Was she making conversation? Or was she suggesting that I wait and share my fresh news about Cole’s suicide—I’d decided on the drive back to Boulder to try to goad myself to mentally replace the K with a C and to add the e—with Cozy instead of her? I wasn’t sure.

  She added, “I think he made an offer on that place in La Jolla.”

  “I hope he loans it out to clients,” I said. “I could use a month at the beach.”

  She laughed. “And associates,” she said. “Though I
wish he were buying in Sanibel, or on the Outer Banks somewhere.” She crinkled her nose. “In the South.”

  She had no way of knowing I was being ironic with my comment about the beach.

  Bimini was what I’d been thinking.

  Boulder sits at about 5,400 feet above sea level. The Continental Divide—up to another 9,000 feet higher yet—vaults skyward only twenty miles to the west. Geometry and astronomy dictate that the imposing Divide casts an especially early shadow on homes that sit closest to the foothills. I was visiting Kirsten during the time of day when sunset’s angles prevail and the afternoon’s rays leave long shadows in their wake.

  Where I lived far across the valley, I could watch the shadows’ tides. I could watch each night’s dark steal away the light and then see the reflection on the Flatirons as dawn’s glow burst and reclaimed the day.

  At Kirsten’s home, like at my office blocks away, I could feel the day ending.

  The difference was important.

  “You want a drink?” she asked after a long interlude when the only sounds were the muted explosions of gases escaping tiny caverns in the logs in the fireplace, and a dog barking somewhere in the neighborhood. “A real drink? A glass of wine?”

  Her question felt more complicated than it should have. I wasn’t sure why at first, but I didn’t have a quick reply ready. She filled the void—she stood up, stepped in the direction of the kitchen and said, “Well, I do.”

  I touched her hand as she moved past me. I stood too.

  The fingers of my right hand snaked up into her hair. My left hand pressed on her back, just above her ass. I felt her breath on my neck.

  There are moments in life when good and bad collide. A heroin addict described it to me. Just as the needle enters the vein, just before the plunger starts to descend on the syringe. I was there. I knew that moment.

  Stopping time—literally—might have allowed me the chance to sort out what I should do next. But stopping time was the province of gods and if I were any god at that moment I would have been the deity the Greeks called Chaos.