Dead Time Read online

  Jules tightened her jaw before she recited her e-mail address.

  I acted like I knew what I was doing while I tried to recall the details of Merideth’s recent mobile-phone tutorial. I was pretty impressed with myself when I hit Send and the phone appeared to spring into action.

  Half a minute later, Jules’s laptop pinged. She leaned forward and opened the file. A media player popped open. “Excuse me,” she said. She stood and moved away from the computer. “Anyone need anything? I have…let’s see…water. Would anyone like some water? If I’d known we were having a party…”

  Eric said, “Alan, how did you get this?”

  I didn’t want to tell him that his fiancée had sent it to me. I thought that Merideth should be the one to reveal her role to him. But I didn’t want to lie. I said, “I don’t know who sent it originally.” That was a fact, even though it wasn’t the truth. I was still thinking the first version I had received had been from Mel.

  Jules stood in the doorway to the kitchen while we watched the enhanced version of the twenty-two-second clip. As the seconds passed, doubt vanished.

  The man was Eric. Clearly. I ached on Merideth’s behalf as soon as I recognized him.

  I didn’t know who the woman was until Jules said, “Well, that’s not Lisa.” Her voice carried the spice of something. Surprise? Relief? Both?

  “Lisa?” Eric sighed. “You thought Lisa and I were—Jules? Come on. Lisa?”

  Mel said, “That’s Jaana, Eric. You were with her. She was—”

  Eric stopped her. “Enough. You don’t know anything, Mel. Don’t embarrass yourself.”

  At the conclusion of the video, Eric put his elbows on top of the chair and locked his fingers behind his neck. In turn he looked hard at each of the women he’d been with on that camping trip in Arizona. He looked at Mel. He finally looked at Kanyn.

  Jules continued to stand in the kitchen doorway. He looked at her last. His eyes lingered.

  He said, “Did you know you were…gay? Back then?”

  Her expression remained tender. “Before I met Mel? No,” she said. “If I’d wanted to know, I might have known. But I wasn’t ready to know. I was still fighting it. I was in love with you, Eric.” Her smile was bittersweet. “I was.”

  Mel said, “I knew.” Whether she was claiming to have known that she was gay or claiming to have known that Jules was gay, I couldn’t tell. Either revelation could have waited. The delicate poignancy of Jules’s moment with Eric was fractured. That was probably Mel’s intent.

  Eric held his eyes on Jules. He pointed at the laptop. “You think that’s Jaana giving me head? Do you really think that?”

  Was he defensive? Or offended? I wasn’t sure.

  Jules was a litigator. She smelled a trap. “The first time I saw that clip a couple of weeks ago? I didn’t know who the woman was, but that’s something I was considering. Tonight? It is what it is, Eric. That’s not Lisa. You lied to us about Jaana. It was a long time ago.”

  Good answer, I thought.

  Mel didn’t have Jules’s gift for nuance, or for forgiveness. She was still young in so many ways. She said, “That’s what I think it is, Eric. It’s Jaana giving you a—”

  “Kanyn?” Eric said. “What do you think? Tell everyone what you think.”

  Eric’s tone had changed. He was challenging Kanyn. I was curious.

  Kanyn’s face remained buried in Amy’s bosom. Amy was caressing her friend’s back, touching her hair.

  “Kanyn?” Eric said again, still challenging her.

  “She’s had a tough day,” Amy said. “Maybe it’s not the best time to—”

  “Kanyn?” Eric said one more time.

  The room went quiet. Thirty seconds stretched into a minute.

  Kanyn lifted her head. She sat straight, pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs. Tears were running down her face, but her crying wasn’t audible.

  “It’s not sex,” she said. “On the video. Jaana’s not…” She shook her head. “That’s not sex.”

  Kanyn looked at the ceiling for a couple of seconds before she lowered her gaze to the floor. She said, “I told Jaana to go see Eric. I pointed him out to her…around sundown. She’d asked me for help. She was afraid…The guy she was with…He threatened to…The guy—the shirtless guy—was going to turn her in to Immigration if…She didn’t know what to do.” Kanyn glanced at Jules. “I thought it was a legal problem of some kind. I told her Eric was a lawyer—that he’d know what she should do. I told her to talk to Eric. That’s what’s on the video. Her talking to Eric.”

  Mel said, “That’s talking? She shouldn’t talk with her mouth full.”

  Kanyn ignored Mel. She looked at Eric. She said, “You always—always—seemed to know what to do, Eric. Jaana didn’t want to go back to…her family. Where she lived, where she was from. She said she…couldn’t. She’d been…abused when she was younger. By her family. If she told you that, I was sure”—she swiped at her streaming tears with her fingers—“you would help her.”

  Mel queued up the clip again. Started it. I’m sure she was trying to make a point. The point eluded me.

  “Did she tell you, Eric? About Estonia? Her family?” Kanyn asked when the clip was done. “What they did to her?”

  Eric’s eyes turned moist. “She was begging for my help,” Eric said. His voice was a hair above a whisper. “At the end, anyway—that’s what you all just saw. At the end she went down on her knees…. She was begging for my help.”

  The room grew silent to accommodate his lowered voice. Everyone had been expecting the worst. They just hadn’t been sufficiently imaginative about guessing what the worst might be.

  Eric went on. “I told her I couldn’t help. I had a new job starting in a few days. I offered to get her the name of someone in Las Vegas who did immigration law. That’s when she started begging.”

  Jules lifted her fingers in front of her mouth. She started to cry quietly.

  Eric said, “Jaana wanted to climb out with us. All of us, the next morning. She thought she had to get away from him right then. She said she would get him drunk and he would sleep through us leaving. She wanted me to take her to California. To be her lawyer. To help her get her visa problem straightened out.

  “I told her that wasn’t possible.” He let his eyes wander among the group. “I didn’t think her situation was all that desperate. Lots of people overstay student visas. Things get worked out. She was pretty hysterical. I didn’t get it. I thought she was overreacting. I didn’t want to get involved.”

  Kanyn said, “She’d didn’t have any money. Her car was dead. Her job in the cafeteria was ending on Labor Day.” The tears, from some pressured spring deep in Kanyn’s marrow, continued to flow down her cheeks. “The shirtless guy lived in Vegas. She wouldn’t go there. She was afraid of him. She was sure he would turn her in if she didn’t do what he wanted.

  “I thought Eric would know what to do. When she wasn’t around the next morning, I thought Eric had helped her, had taken care of her problem. That’s why I went back up to the rim with him and Lisa. I thought it was okay. Eric didn’t say anything, so I didn’t say anything. I thought it was a secret. I was confused.”

  FIFTY

  “You have kind eyes,” Jaana said to Kanyn. “I choose you because…you have kind eyes.”

  The Grand Canyon floor was in shadows, the rim world still in sunlight. It was late afternoon.

  The Eastern European inflection in Jaana’s words was pronounced.

  Kanyn asked, “Choose me for what?”

  “I am Jaana. We met before?”

  “Yes. I’m Kanyn.”

  “It is so hot, yes?”

  “I don’t mind,” Kanyn said. “I like it.”

  Kanyn was on a final solo stroll before the day’s light disappeared on her last night in the canyon. Jaana had come up on her from behind.

  “Where’s your friend?” Kanyn asked. “He’s cute.”

  “Bl
isters,” she said. Bliss-tares. “Big ones.” She made her thumbs and index fingers into orbs the size of robins’ eggs.

  “Ouch. Sorry,” Kanyn said.

  Jaana stepped in front of Kanyn, blocking her path.

  “Can you help? Please? I’m sorry.”

  “With the blisters? We have some stuff. Come by the cabins later. At the ranch? I’ll give it to you.”

  “No, please. Can you help me? I need help. Nicholas, he is, uh, he is making me—No, no, he is going to…I don’t know how to say. Visa. I broke my visa. If I—He will…”

  Kanyn leaned her head onto Amy’s shoulder. She said, “It’s funny, but at first, I thought Jaana was talking about a credit-card problem. That kind of Visa.” Amy stroked Kanyn’s hair. “But that was only part of it. That’s not all she was dealing with. Jaana was pregnant. She didn’t want to get an abortion. Shirtless Guy wanted her to. She needed to get away from him, or…”

  Jules and Mel each looked at Eric.

  Eric said, “She didn’t tell me that.” With his denial, everyone looked at him, even Kanyn. “She didn’t. I didn’t know she was pregnant. I swear. What she told me—she made it sound like a visa problem. That’s all.”

  Kanyn said, “She didn’t want me to tell anyone. If she ended up having to have the abortion, she didn’t want anyone to know. She was ashamed.”

  The irony slapped me. Jaana was shamed by the prospect of ending a pregnancy. Eric was shamed by the prospect of people discovering how far he was willing to go to ensure one.

  “Was it Shirtless Guy’s baby?” Jules asked.

  Kanyn said, “She thought so. She wasn’t certain.”

  Mel said, “My God. She was pregnant when she disappeared. That’s horrible.”

  Mel was jumping to the end of the story, looking for tragic conclusions. Everyone else, I thought, was still turning pages, looking for motivations that might make sense of the tragic conclusions.

  When Jaana told him she was pregnant, the shirtless man insisted she have an abortion. He would pay. Jaana had initially agreed, made plans to go to a clinic with a girlfriend from Estonia. But she changed her mind. She told him on the hike down she would keep the baby.

  He didn’t say anything for an hour after that.

  The heat was relentless. Shade, where the temperature was a mere one hundred and eight, felt like a bad joke.

  Just before they reached the river he said, “You either get the abortion or I’ll turn you in to Immigration. They’ll send you back to Estonia. The baby will stay here.”

  Kanyn said, “She asked me if I’d ever had an abortion. What it was like. Did I know? She wondered if it would hurt. Would she forget?”

  Oh shit, I thought. Here it comes. Years of doing therapy had taught me what the monumental looks like in the instant before it explodes from unremarkable clouds.

  Jules drew in a breath and held it. She sensed something incoming too.

  Kanyn said, “I was young. Fourteen.” She tried to take a deep breath. The air seemed to catch in her throat. She coughed. “Four…teen.”

  Amy stroked Kanyn’s hair. She felt what was coming too. She said, “You were so young. Too young.”

  “The baby I aborted was my daughter, or my son.” Kanyn pressed her lips together tight, as though that would be sufficient to keep the next words inside. It didn’t work. She barely opened her mouth to say, “The baby was also my sister, or my brother.” Her face contorted into agony. “Okay? Okay?”

  Amy said, “It’s okay. It is okay.”

  It wasn’t okay.

  FIFTY-ONE

  It had been a long night.

  Kanyn whispered something to Amy. Amy took her hand. They went off by themselves to talk. I decided to allow myself the luxurious pretense that Kanyn would be safe until morning.

  Mel rooted around in the kitchen until she discovered a half-full thirtysomething-year-old bottle of Wild Turkey stashed in a dark corner of the pantry. The price on the red tag on the top of the quart bottle read $5.79. Mel and Eric and Jules started downing whiskey shots in juice glasses that memorialized Looney Tunes characters. After the second round Mel mused aloud about selling the glasses on eBay.

  The Tweety Bird/Wild Turkey combo was sufficient cause for me to leave, but I eventually manufactured the energy to get up because I didn’t want to listen to them argue the unarguable any longer. There was no point in debating what had happened. Thanks to Jack’s old boyfriend and the infinite reach of YouTube, we had the video. We had Jack’s story, and we had Kanyn’s.

  The rest, to me, was rationalization.

  Eric had his reason for keeping quiet. Mel and Jules had theirs.

  Kanyn’s demons were the most compelling.

  The unknown parts of the story—the fiasco earlier that evening at the duplex, the whereabouts of Jack and Lisa, the elusive truth about what ultimately happened to Jaana—would all keep until morning. When I left the room, Jules and Eric had just begun to discuss going to the police for help in finding Jack and Lisa. They also seemed to recognize they had to come clean with the authorities about what had happened that last night in the Grand Canyon. Those moves were long overdue.

  The reconfiguration of the old barn into a dwelling had left the house with three almost identical bedrooms on the main floor and two larger ones upstairs, in what had been the hayloft. Like everything else in the home, the bedrooms appeared to have been unused for decades. Without saying good night, or anything else, to anyone in the group congregated below the hayloft door, I stood and wandered down the solitary hallway. The midcentury modern touches were absent from the bedrooms. Each bed I found was neatly made with a pastel knotty-chenille bedspread that screamed “grandma.” I did a quick survey of my options and picked the room farthest from the Grand Canyon group.

  I wanted to get a little sleep and go home. My job was done. Even though I hadn’t found Lisa, I’d solved some of Merideth’s Grand Canyon riddle. I had the keys to Wallace’s concerns about his daughter. When I was less mentally exhausted, I would ponder what to do with what I had learned.

  Would I tell Merideth the truth about Eric? Would I tell Wallace anything at all?

  Before I flicked off the light, I glanced at the decades-old clock beside the bed. It slapped me with the news that it was a few minutes before five a.m. I judged it unlikely that the clock had earned anyone’s attention after random power outages or during the past few decades of annual changeovers to daylight saving time and back. I checked my phone for confirmation of the hour before I believed what I was seeing. The cell screen let me know it was actually twenty-two minutes before five in Colorado.

  In California, it was an hour earlier. Twenty to four, give or take. For some reason, that news cheered me. I wouldn’t get a night’s sleep—not even close—but at least I might get a decent nap before morning.

  I stripped off my filthy clothes, pulled back the musty sheets, and fell into bed. I said a silent prayer for sleep. My prayer was not addressed to any particular god—whichever one was on call that night for inconsequential requests, like mine, was fine.

  In the transitional minutes before my mind yielded to my exhaustion and headed toward REM, I did two familiar things. The first was to try to clear my thoughts about what I had just learned. Recent experience with insomnia had taught me that cogitating on the day’s conundrums usually served only to postpone or prohibit my rest.

  It was on nights that I was unsuccessful in warding off the temptations of smoldering rumination that I had fallen into the unfortunate habit of trying to douse the incipient flames with vodka.

  As a strategy, that had proven to be about as prudent as it sounds.

  The other familiar thing I did after my head hit the lumpy, Bee Gees–era polyester pillow was to allow my conscious mind to wander across open items on my life agenda. The scan was a closing-the-day’s-books exercise for me.

  I will be picking up Jonas in three days…Lauren and Grace will be coming home from Holland in four. Maybe I ca
n find a flight from the Burbank airport into Denver the next day and avoid the drive back to LAX. No…won’t work. All my shit is still at Merideth’s condo. I wonder if Hector will let me in.

  It will be good to see the dogs.

  I need to call Sam, catch him up, see if he learns anything from the Good Hands guy. And Merideth and Wallace. Oh yes.

  The dream started in the middle of a blind narrative, as my dreams tend to do. The part where I picked up the thread felt like a near suburb of reality. The line of demarcation was invisible to me.

  Lauren put a hand on my shoulder for a moment to let me know she was there. I felt the movement of another body on the mattress and the coolness of her flesh as she pressed up behind me, her knees bent against mine, the firm front of her thighs caressing the soft backs of my legs, her pliant chest mashed to my back, her hair tickling my neck and my shoulders. I wiggled my ass against her abdomen in greeting. Her closeness was comfort. I returned to sleep. Or I never left it.

  I woke again when she reached over my naked hip and rested her hand flat below my navel. Her fingers spread, her pinky exploring the upper border of my pubic hair.

  I stirred.

  She lifted her leg over me at the same moment that I reached behind me, over her, and found the curve of her ass to be a good fit for my open hand. Her ass felt…

  “Thought you’d never wake up,” she said.

  …Different.

  There was an unfamiliar melody in the words.

  Dreams have their own rules. I’ve pondered the question plenty, for both personal and professional reasons, over the years. But I’ve never discovered the rules of dreams. I have never even come close.

  My patients would ask me frequently what a particular dream might mean. I never shared the confidence that many of my colleagues professed about the interpretation of dreams. I always told my patients that all the sages who think they know the rules of dreams are either wishful or they are full of hubris. Dreams are poetry about your life, I would tell them. You are the author, but the poems your unconscious writes at night are in a language you don’t speak and in a dimension you can’t visit when you’re awake. Interpret slumber poetry any way you like—you will discover marvelous things about how your waking mind assesses the primitive concoctions your sleeping mind constructs.